Baseball

Not the American sport, the Australian band. If you are waking up in Melbourne right now, or just stumbling home from Pony, I hope you managed to catch BASEBALL launching their much anticipated "official" debut album at the Northcote Social Club.

I say official because bandleader 'Thick Passage', aka Cameron Potts (ex-ninety nine) released a fab solo album many years ago while playing in Sandro. It came out through Warm Cola records under the name Baseball and it was a collection of mainly strange piano ballads and lullabies, with whispery falsetto vocals conjuring images from travels through Egypt. Baseball then put out a largely forgotten record, Gods and Stars, Priests and Kings which attempted, at times successfully, to meld hiphop and punk aesthetics with Cam's middle eastern influenced vocals and violin playing... and then they did a Tokyo tour EP a couple of years ago which cemented the current lineup of Ben Butcher (rock photographer and ex Jihad Against America), Monika Fikerle (ex Sea Scouts, Love of Diagrams) and Evelyn Morris (Pikelet, True Radical Miracle).

Tunes from the new album Animal Kingdom are up on myspace, and its on sale at the usual places through Stomp. The official Baseball site is here and they are on tour at the moment taking in Adelaide, Fremantle, Perth and finally Sydney on the 4th of April.