Australian Music Is Bloody Great: The Native Cats

Where do you hear great new Australian music these days? Community radio is one crucial outlet and Amrap – the Australian Music Radio Airplay Project - offers Australian musicians a pathway to airplay from the hundreds of community stations to a weekly listenership of nearly 6,000,000 people. Go to amrap.org.au to get your music to thousands of presenters using the site each month to find new Australian music. If you haven’t got your music on Amrap, what are you waiting for? Community radio uses Amrap to source Australian music for airplay. You can discover all the great Australian music championed by community radio on the Community Radio Plus App, featuring the diverse range of community radio stations nationwide in one handy spot!

Amrap’s national radio show Australian Music Is Bloody Great features Australian artists presenting their favourite recent Australian music. Australian Music Is Bloody Great’s previous hosts range from Dune Rats to Sampa The Great to Phil Jameison.

We’re proud to team up with Amrap to bring you Australian Music Is Bloody Great as a Pilerats feature!
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This article originally appeared on amrap.org.au
Written by Cameron Menegoni

Hailing from Nipaluna/Hobart post-punk outfit The Native Cats have just released their fifth album, The Way On Is The Way Off. Keeping their trademark minimal approach front and centre, the two piece featuring bassist Julian Teakle and electronics operator and vocalist Chloe Alison Escott tackle issues surrounding identity crises in a raw and revealing fashion. Check Chloe's recent Australian music favourites below.

Party Dozen - Wake In Might

I’m going to start off with some mean instrumental rock. Have you heard that story about the song Rumble by Link Wray? Back in the 50s it was banned on a lot of US radio stations because people thought it was glorifying violence, even though there wasn’t a single word being spoken or sung in the whole track. Well, I’m listening to Party Dozen in 2024 and I kind of want to crack a pool cue in half and do whatever it takes to get out of here alive.

Porpoise Spit - Struck

Next up is a band with whom I had only recently the pleasure of becoming acquainted with. The band is Porpoise Spit and we met because guitarist and vocalist Mill O’Sullivan came up to me at a show and told me how much they loved The Native Cats. When someone in a band loves my band and says so to me, that makes me very curious to what their band is up to, and it turns out they’re fantastic. What I’m saying is we should all give each other flowers more often, figuratively speaking. A life in music can be a lonely life sometimes. We’re not all part of close-knit scenes, necessarily. We don’t all have a lot of direct contemporaries that we talk to and engage with all the time. We’ve got to make these connections where we can. Things can get fractured sometimes, we can all get a bit isolated. If we’re connected with each other and talking to each other, then good things come out of that. This is an absolutely devastating song of theirs called Struck.

RVG - Common Ground

Next up is RVG – or if we’re being formal – the Romy Vager Group. I have had the privilege of sharing the bill with Miss Romy Vager on a number of occasions now, both with our respective bands, and one beautiful night we performed in stripped back solo mode. She has in my opinion one of the most extraordinary voices in decades of Australian rock n’ roll. This is my favourite songs of hers and has one of those lyrics that I honestly wish I’d written. It’s one line: "Tears don’t do what they did before" There is a whole life, a whole world in that line.

June Jones - Bubblegum

This next song is by June Jones, who I first came to know when she was fronting an incredible guitar/violin/drums emotion punk band called Two Steps On The Water. They went on hiatus in 2018, and since then she has gone solo and in my eyes she has become a superstar. Going solo and becoming a star are not necessarily synonymous. Some people on their solo project retreat, withdraw, or being alone on stage makes them shy, but June Jones just immediately set about reaching for that bright light. Grabbing it in her own fantastically idiosyncratic way. She can step up on stage at a pub, treat it like a house party and make it feel like an arena.

Soft Covers - The Ballad Of Ricki Tarr

One of the many ways to my heart (songwriting-wise) is a song about an existing fictional character, I’m a sucker for that kind of thing. A song about a character that doesn’t get that much attention in the work that they’re from but stays in your mind, and this is an example of it. This is a song by a band called Soft Covers. It’s inspired by the John Le Carré novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, sung from the perspective of Ricki Tarr, who is a field agent for the British Secret Service. In the story he's crucial to the investigation being undertaken by the one and only George Smiley. I won’t try to summarise the plot but suffice to say by the end of it all George doesn’t have much to take comfort or consolation in, and Ricki Tarr has even less.

The Native Cats - Suplex

Lets finish off with a song by my band, The Native Cats, from our most recent album, The Way On Is The Way Off.