Clouds #1

I freakin' love clouds!

Happenings....

The Black Book Of The Universe has a release date of 4/6/10. We are really excited. It's nearly a year to the day that we were freezing our arses off in the Penrose State Forest shooting the album cover and other snaps.

Since my last post we've had some great live reviews from our Vasco Era tour (and some erm, not so good ones). I've attached one of the good ones, and one of the bad ones. Yin and Yang and all that!

So what's on the cards? I'm doing a little acoustic show on the 18th of May at Cafe Lounge. Rores is helping out on percussion and Pabs on 2nd guitar. Gonna sneak in a few cheeky covers i think.

The next step is sorting out hoo-ha surrounding the release, and crossing my fingers that people will dig it!

xox

LIVE REVIEW/SPECTRUM/30/4/10 by Doubtfulsounds, www.fasterlouder.com.au

Simon Carter has been hard at work over the last year recording, mixing and a preparing to release his debut solo album The Black Book Of The Universe. On the back of a support tour with The Vasco Era he played a set with his band that seemed to rock and roll with its own surging momentum. The band was exceptionally tight and seemed a great deal more relaxed than previous gigs when they were still finding their feet live.

Carter’s solo songs swung from classic pop to almost Pink Floyd guitar sounds and progressions. By the nature of his songwriting the songs stood out from pretty much everything that is happening on the local Sydney scene. Absent are distortion drenched garage rockisms or electro infused sounds and in their place is a deluge of melody and clever arrangements. Songs like Symbio brought to mind a strange jam session between Tears For Fears and Style Council, it is a fantastic classic sounding pop song that demands radio play.

The approach that Carter has taken with his songs is a bold one. In lesser hands the slow solos, twin keyboards and dramatic song structures would fall flat but on stage the band is so locked in and Carter sings and plays with such conviction that it all works. In The Wilderness I Wept rose and fell, rocked and swayed like Suede with a pulsing bass and some atmospherics that accelerated into the chorus with swagger and an urgency. It was controlled yet felt like that moment when a rollercoaster drops. Bombast never sounded so good.

Eschewing current trends Carter has a batch of timeless songs that don’t regress to slavish retro-isms. He showed that he can deliver them live with a killer band and fittingly included a sugar rush version of White Light/White Heat that was more akin to Bowie’s version than The Velvet Underground’s. Like Bowie did so successfully, Carter showed he is in his own way attempting to put some credibility back into artful and creative pop music.

LIVE REVIEW/INPRESS/CORNER HOTEL/10/4/10

Ex The Cops frontman Simon Carter introduces his band as The Salesmen. What this sextet's spruiking, we're not buying. A pair of keyboardists bookend the stage and my plus one enquires "What's their demographic?". Much is made of mid-song dynamic shifts and there's an improv quality to song structures. "This song is about losing your fucking marbles," intros Carter, but this band look like they would be the least likely individuals to run amok. Time Crawls."