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MUSIC REVIEWS Darren Hayes Homosex Sometimes the cover of an gloom helps to tell the story. Darren Hayes called his first album in 11 years Homosexual. "I'm proudly lounging upon my version of a stairway to heaven,” the artist explains. “Emblazoned across me, in the brightest hot pink neon, is a word the 11-yearold me used to be terrified of. Now it's my word. Now it means whatever | want it to mean.” Homosexual is an album of defiance, liberation and celebration. “We've got to dance to remember them,” Hayes declares in All You Pretty Things, dedicated to the 49 people killed at the Pulse Nightclub in Florida in 2016: "Keep dancing the pain away.” Gloriously indulgent - 11 of the 14 tracks run for more than five minutes — Hayes is clearly no longer playing the game Long gone are the days when he worried about what record companies and radio programmers had to say. Like Daniel Johns, he's calling the shots on his career, crafting an album that manages to capture “teenage passion, middle-aged despair” with hypnotic beats and provocative lyrics about love, longing, sex and identity. Twenty-one years after Savage Garden split, Darren Hayes remains one of our most vital pop artists. Homosexual is a thrilling neo- nostalgic trip. And the title? “If you haven't worked it out yet,’ Hayes says, “I think it means something magical, amazing, unique and essential.” (Powdered Sugar/Ingrooves/Rocket) Jeff Jenkins The Beatles I Originally recorded in 1966, The Beatles’ seventh studio album Revolver has been re-released as a deluxe edition with 28 early takes and three home demos. The Super Deluxe CD and vinyl collections include a 100-page hardbound book featuring Paul McCartney's foreword, with rare and previously unreleased photos. Many consider Revolver to be the most innovative album The Beatles ever made, and it has been described by others as one of the best albums of all time. In 1966 The Beatles were at the peak of their creative powers, as evidenced by this list of songs which includes Eleanor Rigby, Here There and Everywhere, Taxman, Paperback Writer, Yellow Submarine, Tomorrow Never Knows, Got to Get You into My Life, and I'm Only Sleeping. (Apple Corps/USM) Billy Pinnell Freya Josephine Hollick I" ‘ve always found Freya's music difficult to catergorise. Vocally, she may be somewhere between Dolly Parton and Lucinda Williams. As a songwriter, her gift for exploring the extremities of the human condition knows no boundaries. And her arrangements, pedal steel, electric and acoustic guitars, strings, and honky-tonk piano are skilfully placed to accentuate the theme in each and every song - like The Real Word with its universal message ("Have you felt her sickened wind?") and the romantic What a Tender Thing ("And | will remember the sound of you breathing by my pillow’). And Tom Waits or Paul Simon would've been proud had their names been associated with the writing of Spend Your Christmas with Rita, the faded-star story of a woman in charge of her destiny. One of 2022's outstanding releases. (Heart of the Rat) Billy Pinnell = 4 Pa S e) = a = Anthony Callea Anyone for tenors? Apologies for the lame pun, but Anthony Callea has hit a winner with his eighth album, FORTYlove, which celebrates his 40th birthday (though, as he declares on the record, “age is just a number"). Eighteen years after we met him on Australian Idol, Callea’s voice still sounds fresh and powerful, capable of delivering a big ballad or a pulsating pop track. He co-wrote the 11 tracks here, and is not afraid to confront his failures and expose his vulnerability in a compelling collection that's all about honesty, trust, resilience and survival. “After all these years,’ he states in the standout track, “we are still here.” And the bonus track is a reimagined version of The Prayer, the fastest-selling single in Australian music history. Game, set, match. (Vox Records) Jeff Jenkins Slipknot visit stack.com.au Vera Blue Celia Pavey released her first Vera Blue album, Perennial, five years ago. It was critically acclaimed and aTop 10 hit. The future seemed bright. But then Pavey confronted a “quarterlife crisis’ dealing with depression, anxiety and writer's block. She digs deep to deliver her second album, managing to turn the turmoil into an intoxicating collection of electro folk. “There's beauty underneath it all” Pavey sings, providing us with a set of songs where we can “dance away the hurt" It's a tale of defiance — “Don't tell me I'm emotional, as if you've never lost control,” she snaps - and a story with no end: “| take every day as progress.” Ultimately, it's an album of acceptance. “It's all good, everybody cries,” she notes. Or, as she puts it in Fee! Better. “I hate it, | love it, I'm in it, so f-ck it.” (Island) Jeff Jenkins Slipknot are nguestionably the most extreme music act to crack the mainstream since the turn of the millennium. Lyrics inspired by nihilism, ferocious instrument-playing, and a reputation for anarchic live performances; these are the core components in the nine-piece machine that has dominated the world of heavy metal in recent decades On The End, So Far, the infamous masked troupe have traded in their indiscriminate brutality for a more nuanced approach to heaviness, one which relinquishes none of the music's weight or potency. Within this stellar tracklist you'll find prototypical ‘Slipknot’ in clamouring aural assaults like The Dying Song (Time to Sing) and The Chapeltown Rag, but there are also some unexpected gems which showcase the band experimenting in previously uncharted territory, including haunting album opener Adderall and groove-infused anthem Medicine for the Dead. The album is brought to a close with the aptly-titled Finale, drawing the curtain on another misanthropic masterpiece by the lowa behemoth Slipknot's seventh full-length release may not be the beginning, but it certainly does not signal the end. If the quality of this record is anything to go by, it may indeed be a while before there is a changing of the guard in heavy music. (Roadrunner/Warner) Alexander Burgess jbhificom.au JIB HI-FI
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