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Check Check

Music words for music nerds. 🎶

Welcome to Check Check - an Australian music page bringing you closer to the bands you love, bringing you new music you'll love, and taking you front row to the gigs and festivals that you love.

05/01/2026

A few minutes after midnight, Underworld walked out to the unmistakable three-chord progression of their biggest hit, “Born Slippy .NUXX”. It was a wonderful way to begin the year, friends hugging, couples kissing, and strangers nodding and smiling at one another. But it did make me wonder what they’d end with, given “Born Slippy” has been their set closer for decades.

I stopped thinking about the future as Hyde and Smith moved through various career highlights, including “Cowgirl”, which felt like an itchy tumble through fragrant rose bushes, and the transcendent “Dark & Long (Dark Train)”, a song that climbs and climbs but never runs out of oxygen.

Read the full review of Underworld's NYE set at Sidney Myer Music Bowl via the link in the comments.

24/12/2025

Featuring Robert Goodge on electric guitar and David Chesworth on Wurlitzer piano, Essendon Airport band's debut EP, Sonic Investigations (Of the Trivial), is a work of homespun and slyly complex minimalism.

The 7" came out in 1979 on Innocent Records, a label run by Chesworth and Philip Brophy of → ↑ → . Essendon Airport would later evolve into a five-piece band, and their rhythm-heavy 1982 LP Palimpsest was more aligned with the prevailing post-punk and no wave scenes. But Sonic Investigations (Of the Trivial) has never faded away.

More than a decade after its release, Chapter Music’s Guy Blackman found a copy of the EP in a record shop bargain bin for $8. He included track two, “How Low Can You Go…?”, on Chapter’s essential Australian post-punk retrospective, Can’t Stop It.

Essendon Airport have performed intermittently over the last decade, with Chesworth and Goodge joined onstage by their early-80s bandmates, percussionist Paul Fletcher and bassist Barbara Hogarth, plus pedal steel guitarist Graham Lee.

The fivesome recently re-recorded the songs from Sonic Investigations (Of the Trivial) to showcase the updated full-band arrangements. The recordings can be found on Essendon Airport’s new album MOR, which features one new piece of minimalism titled “Malibu”.

I spoke to Chesworth and Goodge about their formative influences, the scene at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre in the late 1970s, and how limitations informed the unique sound of Sonic Investigations (Of the Trivial).

Read it via the link in the comments

17/12/2025

Meredith 2025. Mostly trees. Some artists and people. Did anyone else notice the big pine tree to the left of the sound desk looked really unwell? Hoping it’s just slow to wake up from winter.
Most pics taken by , who likes trees. The not very good photos taken by me
Link in bio for my review

15/12/2025

Nobody can turn on an emotional dime faster than Perfume Genius' Mike Hadreas, or with more skill, and in the live setting, the sheer bravery of his music was made clear. It was all just so big, Hadreas slithering around on the floor, dragging chairs around the stage, striking poses on a giant, slowly rotating lazy susan.

The musicianship was unparalleled, with the vicious onslaught of “Describe” elevated even further by Hadreas’ band. Even in the insistent, simple rhythms of that song, the musicians found new ways to raise the stakes.

“My Body” became a raucous freakout, the world getting kicked down the stairs and clanging all the way to the bottom. A cover of Big Star’s “Kanga Roo” turned the anxious beauty of that song into something nigh on unbearable.

Read the review via the link in the comments.1

14/12/2025

Thanks in no small part to an excellent change of venue, ditching the exhausting and isolated Centennial Park, as well as uniformly great performances from Tool, Garbage, Weezer, Civic, James Reyne and more, Sydney’s Good Things Festival can be chalked up as a win.

Read the review via the link in the comments

11/12/2025

If Atarashii Gakko -新しい学校のリーダーズ- say jump, I’ll say how high.

Fewer than 48 hours after their midnight slot at Meredith, Atarashii Gakko!’s performance at the festival was already the stuff of legend.

So here we were at AG!’s debut Melbourne headline show. It was a Monday night, but the 5000-cap Festival Hall was buzzing. Two people standing in front of us were sharing a continental cucumber. A good omen, I thought.

An Atarashii Gakko! show is no doubt the product of endless rehearsals and constant refinement, but it doesn’t feel self-conscious. This allows the group’s hyper-fun energy to be transferred to the crowd.

Looking around, I couldn’t spot a face that wasn’t wearing a beaming smile. If Atarashii Gakko! asked us to jump, we jumped; if they asked us to raise our hands, we raised our hands; if they asked us how we were, we screamed in delight.

Read the review via the link in the comments.

10/12/2025

Thirty-three years into its existence, Meredith Music Festival has no commercial sponsors, no curfew, and a strict no di****ad policy. The people who return year after year – and most people who come once, come again – act like custodians of the event.

Over the weekend, I heard plenty of suggestions for how to optimise the festival’s two-and-a-half-day duration. No music until 5pm on either day. A free massage on arrival. A second stage of decentred dance music. A whole weekend of interstitials. Birdwatching in Tom Mankeys. No Chet Fakers.

But the one-stage format and the wide variety of genres on the lineup are, I think, essential for producing the festival’s most ego-defeating moments.

Read our review of this year's Meredith via the link in the comments.

04/12/2025

Minimal techno and faux jazz producer Jeremy Dower speaks about background music, good and bad taste, and the aesthetic principles that underpin his creative practice.

“In some ways, music is more affective when the listener’s attention is focused elsewhere,” Jeremy said, “because this leaves the imagination to wander beyond the physical and quantitative, to be transported to other worlds of internal aesthetic experience, beyond the limitations of the quotidian and the physical.”

Read it via the link in the comments.

01/12/2025

Indie kids of all ages descended on Melbourne's Royal Botanic Gardens for a night of indie nostalgia courtesy of Franz Ferdinand.

Alex Kapranos was a charming and captivating frontperson, strutting and slinking around the stage when not holding forth on the mic.

Bouzouki in hand, he gave a shoutout to Melbourne’s Greek community ahead of the rebetiko-influenced “Black Eyelashes”, followed by a commanding performance of the indie disco staple “Michael”.

Read our review via the link in the comments.

27/11/2025

Dr Sure's Unusual Practice are sick to death of pigs.

“No good copper in a crooked system,” sings Dougal Shaw in the band's fiery new single, 'No Pigs'. “Got 10 year old kids locked up in your prison.”

“It’s nothing new for art to hold a mirror to society,” Shaw tells Check Check. “Sing ’10 year old kids locked up and your prison’ and you pretty quickly recognise the absurdity. Music can have a role in making that s**t plain as day, bringing people together.”

Listen to 'No Pigs' via the link in the comments.

26/11/2025

Maggie Tra is prolific.

The electronic music producer released her debut album, Kingdom of Her, just three years ago. Last month, Tra – an Australian-born, Khmer-Vietnamese DJ and producer – released her fourth album, Cyclo Theory, a record that combines techno, house and ambient music with traditional sounds of Southeast Asia.

The tracks are decorated with field recordings depicting the three years Tra spent living in the northern Vietnamese city of Hanoi: a salt coffee in a crowded café; a night on the dance floor at BirdCage; a ride home on the back of a Grab bike through Hanoi’s perpetual heavy traffic.

“The field recordings I use in my music are a way of showcasing and highlighting the spaces and the moods that I am in,” Tra told me recently.

Electronic production has played a central role in Tra’s journey of self-actualisation. Born in Sydney to a Cambodian mother and a Vietnam-born father, Tra moved to Hanoi eight years ago, initially on a whim. She ended up staying there for three years.

“It was an emotional time for me, seeing how a country that I neglected due to abandonment received me with very open arms,” Tra said.

Tra started DJing at a few clubs around the city. She was eventually drawn to production as a way of telling her story – a story she knew many people would relate to.

“I [understood] that I was not alone in my journey of discovering my roots and being an Asian diaspora who moves back to their parent’s home country,” she said

Learn more about the journey of personal and artistic growth that informed ’s new album, Cyclo Theory.

24/11/2025

Back in Australia with her new band The Attachment Theory, Sharon Van Etten was, in the best possible way, the same as she ever was.

She danced more than last time, sashaying around the stage and making long, unbroken stretches of eye contact with the audience. But this was no ultra-polished production.

The impromptu nature of the show stretched not just through her banter – almost immediately, she revealed that her gratitude for the audience had already brought her to tears – but through her vulnerable, honest vocal performance. That Van Etten scream, most notable when it tore “Seventeen” in two, sounded like uncontained life itself.

read our review via the link in the comments

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