An Ear To The South

July 21, 2013 — Leave a comment

During the month of September Mark Moldre will head south with his band in tow to give Canberra, Ballarat and Melbourne a taste of his new album An Ear To The Earth (Laughing Outlaw Records) after a successful tour that included shows in Byron, Gold Coast, Surfers, Newcastle, Sydney and the Central Coast. An Ear To The Earth has so far gained 4 star reviews, Best CD of the week in the Sydney Morning Herald whilst receiving airplay on JJJ, ABC, RRR and community radio across Australia. Jamie Hutchings – producer of An Ear To The Earth and one-time Bluebottle Kiss front man – will be special guest opener for all the shows (excluding Pure Pop Records) and will also join Mark’s set on electric guitar. Visit Upcoming Shows for more details. Our favourite blog of all things folk and Americana Post To Wire will be presenting the shows. Post to Wire also recently placed An Ear To The Earth in amongst their Mid Year Top Picks for 2013

To mark the occasion, this tour will also see the release of the 3^rd film clip to be lifted from the brand new Long Player – album track no. 2 “Nowhere At All”. Folk blog Timber And Steel give the new song the thumbs up here. The new clip was produced by Brett Curzon using archived footage.

Mark’s contribution on the Laughing Outlaw Springsteen compilation also gets a favourable mention in STACK magazine and Sydney Morning Herald reviews. You can listen to Mark’s version of Jesus Was An Only Son from Springsteen’s 2005 release Devils And Dust below. It was produced by Jamie Hutchings and recorded directly to cassette tape on a TASCAM PORTA 05.

News From The Road

July 6, 2013 — Leave a comment

As the first leg of our tour to launch An Ear To The Earth now nears it’s end and we begin preparing for our visit to the southern states of the East Coast I figured it was time for a short update. We’ve travelled a few thousand kilometres – playing shows from Sydney to Brisbane sharing the stage with Steve Kilbey and Martin Kennedy, Zach Miller, Talltails, Jep and Dep and labelmates Bambino Koresh. Tomorrow night (July 7) will see us play our last show for at least a couple of months at Lizottes on the Central Coast with Sydney troubadour Cam MacKellar. Whilst we take a touring break guitarist/producer Jamie Hutchings will continue mixing his brand new solo album (I’ve heard about half of it and you’re in for a guitar-noise/kraut rock/avant-garde treat) and double bassist Reuben Wills heads off overseas with his wife, pianist Sophie Hutchings, for her first tour of Japan.

During the tour we stopped in for a few radio chats at BayFM, 4ZZZ and FBi some of these interviews can now be streamed online – including a couple of songs live in the studio at FBi.

Chat at 4ZZZ : Folk Buddies

Chat and Live Performance at FBi : In The Pines

Along with interviews in Brisbane’s Time Off and Sydney’s Drum Media:

TIME OFF “His 2010 solo debut The Waiting Room earned serious plaudits, and after a lengthy gestation period his new follow-up, An Ear To The Earth, has already proved a more-than-worthy successor. Possessing a vastly different tone to it’s predecessor, the album’s folk-tinged indie stylings are characterised by watertight songwriting, deft imagery and imaginative arrangements, and it has a far coarser feel overall than his previous fare” Steve Bell

DRUM MEDIA “Stepping way out of his comfort zone, singer-songwriter Mark Moldre delivers an album Nick Cave would be proud of” Michael Smith

Yesterday, An Ear To The Earth featured in The Sydney Morning Herald as CD Of The Week with a positive review from Bernard Zuel:

“This is music to drink to. Not to get drunk to, but to have on while you’re gabbing with your mates, while you’re sitting watching your kids play in the shallows and maybe even while knitting in the lodge. There’s a loose, almost ramshackle element to it, as if you’ve popped around the back to find a pick-up band rattling through some old country/folk/blues numbers for fun. Imagine a less garrulous and noisy Tom Waits (for example the New orleans brass and clarinet in Everything I Need Is Here) a late-night Ryan Adams (the droopy eyed Dreamtime Blues) and a kind of Sydney Willie Nelson (I Don’t Know What’s Become Of Her) and you’ll have a sense of the relaxed but never actually soft atmosphere here.”

And finally I also had the pleasure of meeting Byron Bay artist Yazz Ward of Sherfay Art and we talked about the upcoming tour – and she drew the portrait below. You can read the interview here.

More gig dates will be announced real soon.

The Gypsy Caravan Hits The Road and Other Newsworthy Tidbits

June 15, 2013 — Leave a comment

I’ve been busy rehearsing with my band before we embark on testing the water and playing the new material from An Ear To The Earth at a venue that is (hopefully) somewhere near you. We’ll be taking the whole gypsy caravan on the road – Jamie Hutchings on guitar/percussion and his brother Scott on drums, Reuben Wills on double bass and Adam Lang on banjo and lapslide guitar. We’ll be heading north for starters playing dates in Byron, Surfers, Brisbane – then heading back down to play Sydney, Newcastle and the Central Coast. You can check all the dates here. And never fear Southern Australia – Melbourne, Canberra, Ballarat and South Coast dates are coming real soon.

Lot’s of tracks from the new album have been receiving radio play over the past few weeks. Special thanks to The Outpost Show on 2serFM, Roots N All on JJJ, The Inside Sleeve on the ABC, In The Pines on FBi, Folk Buddies on 4ZZZ, Between The Tracks on PBSFM for making An Ear To The Earth Essential Album of The Week.

And below you can check out a live performance of Where Will I Be? on ABC 702 Weekend Spotlight with host Simon Marnie.

And finally you can read through my attempt at taking the Citizenship Test with website Mess and Noise – who called An Ear To The Earth “quixotic and genre defying” – here. Along with positive posts from:

DOUBTFUL SOUNDS

NO DEPRESSION

REVERB MAGAZINE

See you at a show. Make sure you come up and say hi.

Best

Mark x

Where Will I Be?

June 4, 2013 — Leave a comment

Here’s the brand new clip – and the second single to be released from An Ear To The Earth. This clip was directed by an old chum – Scott Hutchings, who has previously created some brilliant clips under the YouTube moniker 6pixies7.

Where Will I Be? describes the joys of our eventual demise and imagined escape…of course there’s also dancing, grave digging cowboys, runaway coffins and the backdrop of the Australian landscape. A song about death, dirt, sin, redemption and bad weather.

Post To Wire: Six Strings

May 12, 2013 — Leave a comment

Six Strings on Post To Wire

Thanks to the wonderful folk/americana blog, Post To Wire, for having a chat with me this week for their regular Six Strings feature. (and for the 8/10 review) Want to hear me rambling about my parents 70’s dress sense, old Holdens (or was it a Valiant?), boom boxes, Marc Ribot, Neil Young, Dylan, touring with The Church and nostalgia filled tunes? Read the interview here.

A Mark Moldre Revue (or two)

April 19, 2013 — Leave a comment

STACK MAGAZINE

May Issue

An Ear To The Earth

★ ★ ★ ★

Opening with a rumbling tuba, Mark Moldre’s second album has you thinking he could be an Aussie version of Tom Waits. But he’s a sweeter singer. Produced by Bluebottle Kiss’s Jamie Hutchings, Moldre delivers vivid vignettes of the lost and lonesome. “You can know where you are and still be lost” he decrees in the downbeat standout, I Don’t Know What’s Become Of Her. He also sings “There are cliches all over the world, because they’re true.” But An Ear To The Earth is filled with delightful detours, switching from blues to roots to jazz. Very tasty indeed. Jeff Jenkins

Laughing Outlaw/Inertia

DRUM MEDIA

Mark Moldre

An Ear To The Earth

8 April, 2013

An Ear To The Earth is the follow-up to Mark Moldre’s debut solo album The Waiting Room, an accomplished set of folk-tinged indie rock songs that no doubt gave him the confidence and curiosity to dig deeper into his own songwriting and explore some of the more diverse corners of his musical influences that feature on this excellent album.

The impact of Moldre’s broader palette hits immediately on the opener Everything I Need, a stomping, clattering Tom Waits-ish jazz lurch with a glorious clarinet courtesy of Lee Hutchings. Beneath the old time exterior the song is an ode to a loved one, a declaration of contentment and one of the two most direct lyrical turns on the album. The other is Killer Anxiety, with its bright and uplifting calypso swing belying the song’s dark and honest subject matter concerning panic attacks.

Jamie Hutchings produced the album, and the two share a love of the dismantled and fragmented percussion that populates many of the songs. It gives them a wonderful organic, spacious and brittle feel, and they were very judicious in where they placed the ramshackle elements across the record. The other aspect of the record that stands out is Moldre’s voice; a maturing, world-weary instrument full of grain and character. He is now singing within the songs rather than pushing them along as he may have in the past, and it contributes to some beautiful and emotionally rich moments like the warm and dreamy Madeleine, the jazz croon ofLast Card and the delicate chaos of the closer O, Dreamtime Blues. An Ear To The Earth is exactly what you want from an artist – a record that shows they’re stretching themselves, expanding their art and reverentially experimenting with the great art of songwriting.

Chris Familton

http://themusic.com.au/reviews/album/2013/04/08/mark-moldre-an-ear-to-the-earth-chris-familton/

ALT MEDIA GROUP

★ ★ ★ ★

There is a clear and concerted shift from the mostly alt-folk of Mark Moldre’s first solo release, The Waiting Room, to the eclectic mix of sounds found on his second solo effort, An Ear To The Earth. Moldre, a gifted lyricist and melody-maker, manages to piece together different styles, both coherently and beautifully: from the swoony polka sounds and brass instrumentation onEverything I Need Is Here, to the romantic, flamenco-esque guitar work and smoky vocals on Madeleine, and then to a track like Killer Anxiety, whose upbeat pace is at odds with its serious subject matter. Each listen procures more and more appreciation for the varied and purposeful release that is An Ear To The Earth. Katie Davern

Want To Hear An Ear To The Earth?

April 7, 2013 — Leave a comment

The big news is that the release date of my brand new album An Ear To The Earth has crept up on us. It’s already been receiving spins on JJJ, ABC, 2SerFM, RRR and FBi. You can now grab a copy of the brand new 10 track long player at the Laughing Outlaw website…and if you’re so inclined you can snap up a signed copy. It’s worth grabbing a physical copy just to see the excellent art that graphic artist Brett Curzon designed for the booklet. He’s a genius without a doubt. The album was produced by my old friend and musical wizard Jamie Hutchings and recorded live straight to 1″ reel to reel tape over a six day period. It was mixed by Chris Colquhoun (an absolute master of the controls). We’re all super proud of the results. You can pick up the album here:

LAUGHING OUTLAW RECORDS STORE

But, if you’re one of those people who’ve given up buying CD’s you can download a copy on iTunes. Great news is the iTunes version is a bonus edition. It features 2 bonus tracks which were recorded during the Ear To The Earth sessions. One of them is a track that I found difficult to relegate to the sidelines of the album, but I’m really happy to be able to offer it to you now. Jamie and I co-wrote the song together – and recorded it together live, very sparingly – featuring only my vocal and acoustic guitar whilst Jamie played slide guitar in another room of the studio/guesthouse. It’s called Letters and I think for anyone who has purchased a copy of the album already – this is a track worth owning. The second bonus track is a revisit of an old Hitchcock’s Regret song called Small Town – from our first album Regretfulness – which originally came out way back in 2001. You can get the Bonus Edition of An Ear To The Earth here:

ITUNES BONUS EDITION

CDBABY

Love Mark

23 Laughing Outlaw Artists. Songs By Springsteen.

April 7, 2013 — Leave a comment

A couple of months back I recorded a cover of a Bruce Springsteen song called Jesus Was An Only Son from the album Devils And Dust – once again with Jamie Hutchings in the producers chair. As you can see in the pic below we were recording like it was 1984 – straight to a Tascam four track cassette recorder. The song was for a double album full of reinterpretations of Springsteen classics and it’s out now on Laughing Outlaw Records. The limited edition double CD also features extensive liner notes written by our illustrious label leader, Stuart Coupe, who has interviewed Springsteen on numerous occasions. You can purchase a copy of the 22 track release at Laughing Outlaw or on iTunes.

Killer Anxiety: The Clip

April 2, 2013 — Leave a comment

It’s Lord Of The Flies to a calypso soundtrack.

Food fights.

Red jelly.

Cheesy acting and more cowbell.

The Moldre News

March 12, 2013 — Leave a comment

The first review for Killer Anxiety is in. You can read it here on the Doubtful Sounds website.

The new single has also been featured on the latest whothehell.net mixtape alongside loads of great new Australian tracks – you can listen in here.

Robbie Buck’s wonderful show on ABC Radio National, The Inside Sleeve has also been featuring tracks from An Ear To The Earth. You can hear Robbie talking in detail about the new album here.

You can also hear the opening track, Nowhere At All, on the Roots N All show at Triple J for the next week streaming here.

An Ear To The Earth will be out on Laughing Outlaw Records on April 5.

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