Image: Kristina Pederson

Welcome to the new music review where we connect you with some of the best new music spinning on Breakfast, The Daily and Drive programs.

ALBUMS:
Dominic Breen – Blue Volume (FEATURE ALBUM)
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Ada Lea – one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden
Ducks Ltd. – Modern Fiction
The Forresters – Something to Give
Hovvdy – True Love
Laughing Gear – Freak Lemons
The Shivas – Feels So Good // Feels So Bad
T. Wilds – Ten Songs

SINGLES:
Ajak Kwai – Arrows (feat. Allysha Joy)
Damon Albarn – Royal Morning Blue
Gina Birch – Feminist Song
Grace Cummings – Heaven
Marissa Nadler – If I Could Breathe (feat. Mary Lattimore)
Tex Perkins & The Fat Rubber Band – Place in the Sun

Montreal indie folk singer-songwriter Alexandra Levy (Ada Lea) returns with her second full-length one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden. A travelogue of sorts, the album’s title points directly to a travel/home tension that runs throughout much of the album. Levy’s protagonists battle pangs of longing as they stare at cold Canadian landscapes out the windows of moving cars and trains, or as they bump into old friends at parties on the other side of the world. Levy’s characters are usually too smart for their own good (e.g. check the witticism “a very Proustian this passage on time” on the chorus of ‘saltspring’), Levy never lets her obvious cleverness get in the way: one hand at its best is one of the smartest albums you’ll hear this year.

Dominic Breen sings like he has a rose between his teeth and a bottle of champagne in his fist. Just as in love with love as Mark Eitzel or Red House Painters, the songs on the Sydney singer-songwriter’s debut Blue Volume swoon with a melancholic romanticism that traces the cosmopolitan paths of unlucky lovers. This is Breen’s debut, but his songwriting is of such a high standard that he already sounds like a pro.

Melbourne punk band Laughing Gear’s debut album Freak Lemons opens with a blast of discordant synth and only escalate from there. Intensely political and intensely abrasive, the duo set anarchist and Marxist concerns over private property and class struggle to the sound of 16-bit keyboards, lo-fi drum machines, and distorted guitars, creating a sound that’s as a unique and thrilling in Australian punk rock.