It feels a bit weird to be living in Vancouver but continuing to write about Australian bands…the plight of someone with two hometowns.

Anyway, on November 7, Australia’s Bridezilla will be releasing their debut record appropriately titled The First Dance. As I mentioned when I saw them at Sydney’s leg of the ATP Festival back in January, Bridezilla are an incredibly impressive band. And what’s scary is that they are all still so young.

The first track available from the new record is called Beaches and you can check it out below. There is no doubt in my mind that you are going to be hearing a lot from this band over the next year.

Download
Bridezilla – Beaches

You can also check out a live video of the band over at Baeble Music as well as follow them on Twitter and on their (rather well done) blog.

I’ve been meaning to post The Middle East’s video for Blood since it landed in my inbox a few weeks ago. But I delayed and now I just look like I’m posting it because the band just got plugged on Pitchfork. OH WELL. Here is the brilliant little video that has a high replay value. This song was amazing when I saw them supporting Doves a couple months back.

And thanks to Pitchfork, you can download a track from the band’s EP.

Download
The Middle East – The Darkest Side

Hopefully this is just the beginning of more big things for Townsville’s finest.

The Manic Street Preachers: the reason Amanda and I (at my request) chucked in our jobs two weeks earlier than planned to move back to Vancouver. Expectations, therefore, were pretty high. Thankfully, every moment of the Manics first gig in Vancouver in a decade (to the day!) made the sacrifice worth it. I honestly never thought I’d see them live again.

Journal For Plague Lovers has just been released here in North America (and is ostensibly the reason for the tour) yet the band played little from the record, preferring it to stand on its own as a “piece of art” to (mis)quote Nicky Wire. The four songs from JFPL, however, work just fine with the rest of the Manics live repertoire. Peeled Apples was all ominous bass and guitar while the shimmery pop of Jackie Collins Existential Question Time gave voice to a crowd screaming out “Oh Mommy, what’s a Sex Pistol?” Thank you, Richey Edwards.

So in lieu of heaps of new material, what we North Americans are getting on this tour is a mix of stuff from nearly every record with a focus on The Hits. And can you blame them? After a decade away I imagine the band themselves were wondering what the response would be in the comparatively small venues of the US and Canada.

Well, the response at the Commodore last night was huge. The gig was not sold out but every one that did turn up seemed to be a massive fan and people were belting out all the words to even the most loquacious songs on offer including opener Motorcycle Emptiness. Um yeah. Epic opener much?

And while the longtime, hardcore Manics fan inside would have loved a more obscure song here or there (like Take The Skinheads Bowling which was played in Seattle the night before), I certainly cannot really find fault in a setlist that looks like this.

Setlist
Motorcycle Emptiness
No Surface All Feeling
Peeled Apples
Your Love Alone Is Not Enough
La Tristessa Durera (Scream To A Sigh)
Jackie Collins Existential Question Time
Let Robeson Sing
Faster
Everything Must Go
This Joke Sport Severed
From Despair To Where
If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next
This Is Yesterday (acoustic)
The Everlasting (acoustic)
Send Away The Tigers
You Stole The Sun From My Heart
All Or Nothing –> Motown Junk
Me And Stephen Hawking
Little Baby Nothing
You Love Us
A Design For Life

No Surface All Feeling? Yes please. An absolutely raging Faster? Sure, why not. The band themselves seemed pretty thrilled with the energy from the crowd (not something generally associated with Vancouver audiences) and I must say that bouncing along to A Design For Life while everyone screamed out every word was a pretty amazing live experience.

The quieter moments were just as memorable though. Midway through the set, James played two songs on his own on acoustic guitar, This Is Yesterday and The Everlasting. This Is Yesterday was particularly beautiful and poignant last night.

So, an enthusiastic response from the crowd. A sold out merch table. Please, please, please don’t make us wait another decade.

The gig also gave me a chance to hang out with three friends who all also happen to be massive Manics fans. Great to see you all again. And Quinn, they checked our tickets on the Canada Line on the way home.

Guttersnipe also has a review up.

Finally, I feel it is my duty to also share with you how laughingly bad the opening act, Nico Vega were. Just absolutely dreadful. They reminded me of Tenacious D. but without any self-awareness. Or they are the greatest actors ever making an absolutely hilarious mockumentary. Avoid at all costs.

If you follow me on Twitter or Tumblr you are probably sick of my “Goodbye” related posts by now but A Reminder deserves its own farewell. A line needs to be drawn and this post is it.

Tomorrow morning Amanda and I are moving to Vancouver. I’ve lived here in Sydney for just over four years now and A Reminder has been around nearly as long. When I started this blog it was simply a way for me to share the music I was into at a time when I didn’t know all that many people here in Australia.

Since then the blog has, somehow, become sort of “well known” in the Australian music community and it has given me so many opportunities to discover some amazing Australian bands. Even better, it allowed me to make some pretty great friends over the last four years.

So with this post I just want to say thank you. To anyone who read A Reminder, posted a comment, sent me an email, or said hello at a show. You really helped make a huge city a lot smaller for an outsider.

Thanks also the Australian music community as a whole. PR people, bloggers, writers, bands…some of you I only ever communicated with via email but you all helped shape this blog in different ways.

Maybe it’s the tyranny of distance but the Australian music scene is so incredibly vital. So thanks to all the bands that I’ve grown to love over the past four years. In particular, Dappled Cities, The Basics, Gotye, and The Drones. You all rock and or roll and I will miss your live shows a lot. Get your arses to Vancouver, please.

Finally, thanks to all the friends I’ve made through this silly little website. In particular, Jonny and Mike, Angus, Wayne, Joe, Geoff, Dan, Marc, Anna, Peter, Maria, and the Sandwich Club (RIP) crew. You all welcomed an (at times) lost Canadian and made me feel very much at home. Anytime you’re in Vancouver…

A Reminder will be continuing and, honestly, probably won’t be that much different. The live reviews will now obviously be Vancouver-based but other than that things are going to continue on as they were. Probably a little bit more Canadian but the Australian scene is so much a part of this blog that I will definitely continue to write about Australian artists (plus we may end up back here one day, who knows).

It’s been an amazing four years. When this blog started there were very, very few Australian music blogs. But now there are a lot really great blogs focusing on the music of this country. Sure, it’s a product of the Web 2.0 exposion of a few years ago. But I also think it speaks volumes about the amazing music being made in Australia at the moment. Being a part of this community is going to be one of the things I miss most about Australia.

A sincere thanks to you all. See you on the other side.

My life has been a bit flip-turned-upsidedown lately (more of which soonish) so A Reminder has been kinda dead. But I do want to make sure I mention that I am really, really enjoying the self-titled debut record from London’s The xx. It’s understated, confident, and not afraid to show its pop side while also sounding totally fresh. Very, very impressive.

Download
The xx – Crystalised

XX by The xx is out now in Australia.

There’s a scene in Wim Wenders’ 1987 film Der Himmel über Berlin (Wings Of Desire) which features a ramshackle Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds performing in a very arty warehouse-type venue. When I walked into the Oxford Art Factory last weekend I came across The Prayer Circle playing in the smaller room and I was immediately reminded of that scene in the film. This band grabbed me immediately.

At first I was taken with the cool indifference the band displayed on stage: while I was dying for them to tell me who they were, they just played one song after another. At the time it frustrated me but I also admired the fact that they were just letting their music do all the talking. And the music was fantastic. Equal parts shoegaze, spacerock, and 80s reverb, The Prayer Circle create big atmospheric pieces. Yet despite these influences the band also has a great pop sensibility a la The Cure.

I didn’t catch the entirety of either of their sets (out of necessity, not choice) but in the shortish period of time I saw them, they got me hooked. The Prayer Circle…keep an eye out for them around Sydney.

Below are a couple videos from an instore at Bravery Records.

More audio/video at TheirSpace.

Big thanks to The OAF and commenters for heeding my call and helping me identify who the hell this band was. Much obliged.