Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever – Endless Rooms
As for so many musicians, 2020 was a time of stasis and uncertainty for Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever. The title of their third album, with its suggestion of maze-like entrapment, is the stuff of literal nightmares but also, one imagines, of the psychological effect of the world’s longest lockdown in Australia’s mismanaged pandemic. This record was born out of that time: singer and guitarist Tom Russo, one of three songwriters in the band, has admitted that a lot of his ideas “came from endlessly walking around the same streets of [Melbourne neighbourhood] West Brunswick”. Fran Keaney spent his weekends “building stuff on Garageband, writing without having any sense anybody would listen to it”. ORDER NOW: Miles Davis is on the cover of the latest issue of Uncut All of which makes the propulsive force and lungs-filling expansiveness of Endless Rooms even more striking. Enforced isolation meant the quintet wrote near complete songs separately and shared the demos around, rather than jamming them into existence together then building them up piece by piece, as they did with 2020’s Sideways To New Italy. Their debut, 2018’s Hope Downs, was characterised by its fusion of melancholic jangle-pop and mid-’80s US college rock. Just two… Read More →
