I would be lying if I said that I didn’t come into this show with certain expectations. However, these expectations were immediately thrown out of the window the moment Natalie walked onto stage. While petite in size, Natalie was a ravishing figure in her little black dress. Donning on red lips to match her sultry presentation, Natalie exhibited a wealth of emotions and knowledge on love and heartbreak. The Virginian native made Nashville her second home a couple of years ago. Nashville, being the muse for many country superstars, also became the place which imparted much wisdom to alt-country’s newest rising star...

Sydney garage punk duo Us The Band is at first glance just one of the many bands of that scene pumping out generic mosh-inducing punk rock, however their new EP But Where Do They Go is in fact, dynamite.

The relentless shortfast drumming and venomously tuneful lo-fi shrieking of Us The Band is spellbinding beyond the cheap colour of its reverb and repetitive hooks. The EP opens on a two-minute psych-rock instrumental banger (HelterMan) with the pace and attitude of The Cosmic Psychos or King Gizzard space-jamming.

It’s quite clear they mean business. It’s the result of years playing live: the knowing glances toward each other, the confident movement, the propulsion into the set proper. Carrie in particular struts, dances and hurls her herself around, banging her head for effect, all the while reeling off riffs.

At the end of the night a solid reputation is intact. In Sleater-Kinney we have a band that seemingly gets better with age. The real power in their story is the undeniable chemistry coming together, continuing to produce work, and undoubtedly getting better at it.

Cub Sport have come a helluva long way since they first started gracing Brisbane stages and getting in your head with clever pop melodies... This is ‘pop-with-a-brain.’ The concept may seem a little counter-intuitive, but it really does hold up under scrutiny here. Sure there are catchy hooks and smooth melodies, but they come with a healthy dose of self-awareness, showing the band have a much deeper understanding of the genre, beyond simply generating ear-worm singles. They've really come into their own with a well produced, mature sound that will likely be one of Australia’s best pop releases for the year.

...Doubling down on Man of Steel director Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen) and promising a future Justice League film right in the title. The story is very loosely based on Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (i.e. one scene from it) and, as shown in the trailers, features the Doomsday from one of the most famous Superman stories. Both of these stories have been cherry-picked for the past 25 years of Batman and Superman films, making it increasingly clear that these are the only comics the people involved have ever read.

...The Brooklyn duo’s vision remains ambitious and eccentric. New album XTreme Now is accompanied by origin stories of near-death experience, conceptual art and the defiance of time itself. Despite this, the songs represent Prince Rama at their most concise and pop-focussed.

This is apparent as soon as opening track Bahia kicks off, with a call-and-response vocal hook, fizzy synths and punctuations of cowbell. Even with the danceable, melodic thread that runs through the whole album, XTreme Now remains a musically diverse record.

Aunty Donna consists of Mark (Beardie), Zach (Big Eyes), and Brodean (Man-Beast). Originally from Melbourne, they started out as regulars on the community television stage, Channel 31, even boasting an annual Australia Day Special full of chaos and poor planning; not unlike their comedy. Their big break came thanks to the ABC Fresh Blood initiative, which allowed them airtime through iView. This brought traction to their YouTube channel, and since then they’ve boasted a whole range of successful, obscure sketches and even a few mini-series.

I always find it inspiring when weird bands whom drift between genres and play somewhat left field music get some attention. It’s a classic underdog story and it makes me happy to just hear about them making waves in their local scenes. What makes me even happier though, is that three whacky muso’s were discovered busking on a street corner in 1981. The weird and wacky songs they played to an unsuspecting audience have now become classics that I presume the whole world has (at least drunkenly) sang along to at least once.

Brisbane three piece The Goon Sax are flat out one of the greatest bands to ever name themselves after the disgusting bags of wine that have become some kind of a gross rite of passage for Australian youth all over this big red rock of ours. Despite the name, the jaunty, fresh faced trio appear mostly unaffected from the brain dulling effects of too much cheap booze and seem ready, willing and able to have a decent crack at taking over the world; one decrepit reviewer at a time.

I was adamant I had a pretty good idea of what Saskwatch sounded like before coming to this show. It was a mixture of Sharon Jones soul mixed with a touch of reggae and blues, now I’m not one to admit I’m wrong very often, so perhaps I wont. By the chorus of the first song of the night, I’ll Be Fine, I realised I had heard this song a fair few times and had not realised that it was by them. It’s super catchy and upbeat but also a lot rockier than I thought they were. This applied to a fair chunk of the set as they jumped through their highly upbeat songs with quite heavy guitar sounds.

...It’s an intimate and melancholy collection of songs, almost certainly more so than the first lot. Unsurprisingly, for a guy like Cam, you can throw a lot of genre tags at what he’s done here: acoustic folk, indie-rock, slowcore, alt-country, but if there’s a unifying factor it’d have to be the cloud of gloom that hangs over them all. Even the artists I’m reminded of when listening to Seven Days -Ben Salter in its ringing acoustic moments, or Low in its slow-burning rock- are renowned for their tremendous sadness.

...The album definitely feels like the product of its time, not old necessarily or even outdated, but in more of a 90's time-capsule way. There’s something preserved in it that feels like a slice of auditory idealism cut clean from the heyday of experimental noise rock. That said, most of the tracks sound more like songs than a lot of The Melvins’ output from that era. No doubt it’s partly due to Kunka’s sludgy but melodic bass playing, though it seems more like the collaboration simply worked to keep both sides balanced. There’s still plenty of abstraction and WTF in there though.

David Foster Wallace in a 1996 interview: “The only way I’m known at Illinois State is as a grammar Nazi. Any student whose deployment of a semicolon is not absolutely Mozart-esque knows that they are going to get a C.” Over the course of two hundred and fifty years Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, a precocious, pockmarked, provokable, prolific composer has become an abstract noun, synonymous with an exact combination of genius, clarity, elegance and playfulness. At the Queensland Symphony Orchestra Plays All Mozart, the first three of these were present but the fourth was sadly lacking; an impressive, yet phlegmatic performance resulted.