Cream Vinyl w/ 4 postcards
Jonnine Standish, one half of Australia's more influential bands of the 21st century HTRK, returns with her fourth album and first for the Manchester based Modern Love imprint, and shows she's spent some time observing and absorbing the outre sounds of the contemporary Swedish underground. Quite the international affair, then and Southside Girl is certainly evidence of the migration of ideas and value in artistic inquiry. Built from a range of field recordings and vignette-song, Standish memoririses her experiences of a childhood summer spent by the sea between the interstitial period of Boxing Day and New Year's Eve. She's captured that notion well, sound and song drifting by and overlapping in ways that make it unclear where one idea starts and another might end, lost in a haze of heat-kissed half-thought. Not quite dreamy, nor exactly conscious either, it reminds me a great deal of those first two Astrid Øster Mortensen LPs, where songs seemed to emerge from the ether, intimate and fragile, diaristic even, to the point perhaps where you might not have meant to hear them. That sense of incidentalism is key to a lot of the music we've heard from Discreet over the last few years, and Standish plugs into that same instinct well, sound as document as much as communication, recording the things others perhaps wouldn't think to be important or necessary. In terms of concept, it's a fair way removed from the previous Jonnine album, and as such is perhaps amongst the first evidence of the wider legacy of Discreet and its informing of underground pursuits.
