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It Walks Like Love - Bobbysix.com
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Australian singer/songwriter Loene Carmen's fourth album is due for release in June. While it was re...Australian singer/songwriter Loene Carmen's fourth album is due for release in June. While it was recorded in Sydney under the watchful eye of producer Burke Reid (The Drones, Jack Ladder, Mess Hall), it sounds - as with her previous offering - like a slice of genuine Americana.
The first single to be plucked from it, garage-soul duet Oh Apollo!, is a playful paean to New York's Apollo Theatre and perhaps a nod to Carmen's admiration of the collaborations between Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan, with her breathy vocal juxtaposed by the deep grumble of Mess Hall's Jed Kurzel.
Plenty of other familiar characters turn up, including members of Holy Soul and The Scare. Tex Perkins also lends his voice, while Carmen also employed the talent that lies within her own family, with father Peter Head on piano and Bridezilla's Holiday Sidewinder (Carmen's fittingly talented daughter) adding some delicious vocals.
The frighteningly catchy chorus of Mimic The Rain sees Carmen at her poppiest. "If you want your garden to grow/You've got to mimic the rain," she tells us. By the second time you hear it, you'll be singing along as if you'd known it your whole life. You'd think such a delightful slice of pop would be the highlight of the record, but even better is to come with the thoughtful Gauloises Blue. As the song approaches its climax, rather than hollering her lungs out as many artists may have done, Carmen's voice barely raises above a gasped whisper. Then ooh and aahs accompany frenzied guitars and delicate piano to bring the song to a dizzying finish.
Sultry vocals and intelligent lyrics continue to intertwine with raw guitars throughout the ten tracks, and the quality never dips, even for the slightest second. It Walks Like Love is a truly outstanding record and, with it, Loene Carmen has not only created her finest piece of work to date, but also one of the albums of the year so far.
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It Walks Like Love - Artground
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Loene Carmen’s music has always carried a certain personal intimacy about it, whether it was the lo-...Loene Carmen’s music has always carried a certain personal intimacy about it, whether it was the lo-fi dreams of “Slight Delay” or soft chaos in her previous record “Rock n’ Roll Tears”. Regardless of the recordings in question, Carmen always manages to convince you that she could be your girlfriend – whispering her darkest and brightest secrets right into your ear.
Its late afternoon and her head is leaning on your shoulder with your one arm driving across the desert plains. This is the day you finally propose to her, you pull into the closest Motel 6 and bend down on one knee outside the neon light flashing “No Vacancy”. Why do you do this? – Because for her fourth record “It Walks Like Love” what she was whispering into your ear on that car ride are the best things she’s ever said. Picture this scene. Track one opens with dreamy country tremolo inside a quiet bar on the outskirts of the city. Those of you familiar with the wild antics of Sydney band The Scare will be shocked to discover Brock’s soft side which cements him as one of the countries finest guitarists - he twangs with country licks one second yet explodes in walls of air-guitar-worthy noise the next. “Oh Apollo” featuring Mess Hall front man Jed Kurzel is Carmen at her pop-finest. “Mimic The Rain” which follows is just as catchy especially with its should-be classic thumping bass line that kicks it off.
However, for this reviewer the highlight comes with track four, “Gauloises Blues”. Not only did I have to look up the dictionary meaning of what Gauloises meant but, I had to go and find my brain after it was blown out the window by Brock’s ending guitar solo. Alas, that’s only one fragment of the song’s genius. Carmen’s father Peter Head lays down some classic piano lines and certifies the song as a family collaboration long overdue. Speaking of family affairs, it’s truly that mighty vocal melody which has the likes of Tex Perkins and Loene’s daughter Holiday wooing and ahhing to heavenly delight that lines it up against “Nashville High” and “Don’t Let Her Slip Away” as one of her best. This is the kind of song that plays at either the opening or closing credits of a Loene Carmen retrospective documentary somewhere down the track when people finally realise what a national treasure she is.
“Another Man” is another unexpected gem and finds the listener in some sort of noisy whirlwind of a tape loop. Kinda like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz – It’s at this point we become aware that we certainly ain’t in Kansas anymore. We’ve entered the world of the songwriter and her lyrics are top notch which goes to show that Gareth Liddiard isn’t the only lyrical genius in Australia.
At the end of the day – what you have here is ten really fucking good songs with really fucking good musicians with really fucking good production by Burke Reid. It amazes me that it was apparently jammed out in a few days in the studio. I guess the old Palace Records by Will Oldham were done in similar time frames but never were they this polished and constructed.
Forget your Hail Mary’s and your Our Father’s. If you’ve neglected buying any of Carmen’s three brilliant solo albums thus far, fear not. By picking up “It Walks Like Love” all will be forgiven. Amen
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Rock N Roll Tears - Vice
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Generally speaking, music reviewers have brains, personalities and genitals about the size of peanut...Generally speaking, music reviewers have brains, personalities and genitals about the size of peanuts and to compensate for their shortcomings they tend to over-adjectivise about most music they come across. This is why here at VICE we have scores—so we don’t have to use lame-o lines like “spectral temptress” or “iconoclastic songstress”. Loene Carmen seems to attract a lot of these empty adjectives—probably cause most of these ‘writers’ can’t quite figure out how a womanly woman with a sad & sexy voice can also sound like she could beat a thousand rock ’n’ roll dudes and pimply faced reviewers in an arm-wrestle. So what do they do? Put her on a pedestal and call her “heavenly voiced”. Dudes: Jesus was a man, Loene Carmen is a woman and this album is just great.' VICE 8/10
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Rock N Roll Tears - yourflesh.com
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Gestating too far away from the crushing tedium associated with the fiscally concerned music industr...Gestating too far away from the crushing tedium associated with the fiscally concerned music industry, Australia has produced a string of genuinely great bands, not just AC/DC but a dirty smear of great legendary snarlin’ punk bands from the Saints and the Birthday Party through the Scientists, the Beasts of Bourbon, Lubricated Goat, the Moodists, and many others. With nothing to do but fester, bands grew on non-sun-and-surf related entertainment, spewing out dick-damaged hymns that were anathema to the mainstream. Dirty and sneering Australian rock music blossomed in its own rotten mess. Like Seattle grunge, Australian rockers never drew a simple line between genres, and bands like the Beasts could record country styled records one minute, cock rock damage the next.
Which brings us to Loene Carmen.
It’s a commonplace in reviews of Loene Carmen to mention her place in the pantheon of Australian rock royalty, sure she grew-up within rock—her father was no slouch when it came to music and Bon Scott was a family friend—meanwhile her teenage daughter fronts one of Sydney's hippest combos, Bridezilla. Cult ex-pat Australian depressives the Devastations recorded a brokenhearted love song about a failed relationship with Loene, although they’d never actually met her. Meanwhile her touring band has included various members of the Bad Seeds and Dirty Three, amongst others. For this—her third album—she has used Sydney musicians from The Holy Soul and The Mess Hall.
Decamping to a rural barn in 2006, these twelve songs were recorded over a long hot weekend, creating an intimate, laid back atmosphere and producing an album loosely drawn from dirty country music, garage rock, and pop, moving deftly between and melding styles. Sung predominantly in breathy tones, some of these songs re-work and celebrate rock and roll iconography in its purist form, for example “Oh Yeah” with its driving bass and the anthemic—and partly autobiographical—Rock’N’Roll Tears with its drunken’ braggadocio and celebration of everything that makes rock and roll entertaining; late nights, sex, brawling and bawling, “And a bed full of rock ’n’ roll tears.”
Other numbers—such as “Nashville High” and “Don’t Let Her Slip Away” play lazy fucked-up once-but-no-longer country rock sounding as if Kim Fowley was a teenage girl who spent too long listening to late night radio and dreamt of hitting the road.
The best songs here are the slower, smoky, country tinged numbers songs “Wild Wind,” “Dirt & Air” and the fantastically titled “He Calls Me Flames,” which draw on classic country iconography with sparkles of southern light evoked by distorted guitar. There’s an evocative sense of yearning in these slower songs that capture the need, desire and escape offered by music.
Then there is the pseudo-innocence of the album’s final track “The Bee.” A downbeat, bar closing, end of the night acoustic number that sees Loene in her best sugar-kitten style sex murmur telling a simple story of a love on a summer afternoon. “We made a home among the leaves / and we made sacred ground” she sings, capturing the nature of sunlight, youth and love, which like the momentary stillness of the insect of the title, can only be fleeting.
The nearest comparison would be to Tex Perkins’ solo work, but for Carmen music evokes the promise of something special—the longing that Tom Wait’s described in The Heart of Saturday Night—rather than greasy hard living. The album package is partly designed like a school exercise book, and there’s a sense of youthful dreams here. Of course it’s not the possibility of rock and roll that matters, in the end it’s the failure, because at 5:00 AM the sun is still going to rise and you still have to walk home. Carmen’s songs are familiar with the inevitability of dawn, but are still hoping that there’s time for one last dance. [Shock]
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Rock N Roll Tears Launch - Mess&Noise
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Some bands sound exactly like their name, others seem to live up to their artwork perfectly, but Loe...Some bands sound exactly like their name, others seem to live up to their artwork perfectly, but Loene Carmen is perhaps the first artist I’ve seen who sounds just like her merchandise stand. Rather than the standard black T-shirts and albums sitting on a table, her temporary shop consists of an antique suitcase packed with vintage knickers and small bottles of “genuine cheap French vodka”. It’s a perfect encapsulation of her gauzy, tear-soaked blues noir. Tonight’s set begins with the scuzzy rock & attitude of ‘My Friends Call Me Foxy’, a killer single, but not the best showcase for her intoxicating voice.
There’s plenty of time for that though – ‘Nashville High’ in particular is a shimmering wonder. Deliciously dark, sexy and dead cool, it’s exactly the kind of thing that has seen her earn admiring nods from a who’s who of Australian underground rock icons. Her band includes Jed Kurzel of The Mess Hall and Holy Soul’s Sam Worrad, but her smoky vocals alone are more than enough to entertain everyone from the middle-aged record collector types to the ballroom-dancing teenagers down the front. There's an encore of course, with the great ‘The Bee’ featuring. Then, sadly, it’s over, but those small flasks of official Loene Carmen vodka, each guaranteed to contain a tear of joy, look mighty inviting.
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Rock N Roll Tears - Citysearch
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Loene Carmen might just be a shining light to challenge the patriarchy of Australia's ghostly blues ...Loene Carmen might just be a shining light to challenge the patriarchy of Australia's ghostly blues fraternity. Thankfully, she's already been well accepted by those local heroes who do this eerie, heat-haze blue rock so well. .. Carmen has beguiled as many stars as musicians as fawning journalists. Her third album Rock N' Roll Tears is a hypnotic, drowsy requiem of resigned, haunted anguish. Helped along by Jed Kurzel of The Mess Hall, Sam Worrad of Holy Soul and Paul Dunn of Slow Hand, Loene's ragged, little-girl-lost vocals and the staggered mess of her compositions are intoxicating.
The stars singing her praises don't end there. Don Walker says Carmen is “like Marilyn Monroe singing the songs of Bob Dylan or Lou Reed in a Vegas casino”, and Tex Perkins hails her as “a natural...literally a born songwriter”. She road-tested the songs on Rock N' Roll Tears across the US with Jim White of The Dirty Three and through Europe with Warren Ellis, Mick Harvey and Beasts of Bourbon. This sort of itinerary and company would be hard for most men to keep up with, but Loene is one tough rock chick in blood red lipstick.
Across this, her third, album Carmen utilises her lascivious baby-doll voice and her bleeding, broken country instrumentation to evoke a noirish twilight. Far from the more concise performances of Australian blueswomen such as Mia Dyson, Carmen is messy. Her mascara is streaked with those rock'n'roll tears. Her gin bottle is drained. Her banged-up guitar is out of tune and she doesn't care.
Carmen finds herself and her equally roguish cohorts drunkenly blundering between dusty rooms where my-man-done-me-wrong country is propped up by wide-eyed, unhinged blues. Although her vocals are breathy entreaties, she sounds like she's as likely to break down in tears as she is to fly into a rage. And like many of her contemporaries, if her tone cracks out of tune, all the better to demonstrate her fragile emotional state.
This is a late-night album, to be shared with a bottle of whiskey or an ex who broke your heart or preferably both. You can't be held responsible the next morning for what you do that night. And it may not make things right. But sometimes you just have to wallow in it, and Loene Carmen is a perfect accomplice.
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Slight Delay - Plan B
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elveteen vocals bubble through a pool of Barbarellas matmos, backlit by Ry Cooder on mescaline, Tort...elveteen vocals bubble through a pool of Barbarellas matmos, backlit by Ry Cooder on mescaline, Tortoise-style keys and somnolent beats Loene Carmen inspires devotion from hardcore bikers to art-house boys. Slight Delay, her second solo album, cements the myth in cherry red lipstick. So bring it on, bring all the noise/Lock the doors and call the boys, coos the title track. Youve been warned. Move over, Hope Sandoval. Closing on the sedating Time To Go To Bed, Loene would have you believe this is the heady soundscape with which to drift into slumber. No way. This is the soundtrack for nights of sinful fucking. The kind you were always waiting for.. . (Natalie Apostolou)
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Rock N Roll Tears - Kingbobbysix/blogspot.com
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Loene Carmen is cool. In fact, Loene Carmen is so undeniably fucking cool that she could have been l...Loene Carmen is cool. In fact, Loene Carmen is so undeniably fucking cool that she could have been lifted straight out of a Tarantino movie, and on her third long-player, Rock ‘n’ Roll Tears , her familiarly breathy, sultry vocal sits perfectly atop a combination of dirty blues, rock and country, which bursts from the stereo like a bar-room brawl between The Velvet Underground , Mazzy Star and The Jesus and Mary Chain . And that, I think you will agree, is pretty fucking cool... Skillfully backed by Sam Worrad of Holy Soul , Jed Kurzel of the wonderful Mess Hall and Paul Dunn of Slow Hand , Loene Carmen has once again proved with the pleasingly lo-fi Rock ‘n’ Roll Tears that she is an intelligent, candid songwriter with a voice so seductive that you’d rip your own heart out and hand it to her if she asked you to. Irresistible stuff. (kingbobbysix)
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Rock N Roll Tears - Daily Telegraph
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‘There ain’t no lady like Loene Carmen, an artist who can deliver a sonic poison arrow with the swee...‘There ain’t no lady like Loene Carmen, an artist who can deliver a sonic poison arrow with the sweetness of Cupid’s bow. Carmen's brand of torch rock songs with bluesy and alt country flavours on her third album would no doubt see her hailed in Nashville or London as a singular talent, a female Nick Cave but with more to say. With some of the country's finest musicians on board, Carmen delivers unforgettable tunes such as the slow-burning build of Nashville High and the early Stones feel of Oh Yeah.’ Kathy McCabe, Daily Telegraph
