I grew up in a working class suburb on a diet of Australian pub rock consumed at one of the toughest rock rooms in the country. Not a far cry from the love I now have for Australian country music artists. Don Walker & Guy McDonough songs and Australian country songs have so much in common.

I guess my passion for Australian country music was underway long before I started my beer guzzling bong gulping session at The Bridgeway Hotel. As a kid, I loved the family trips away, the smell of the native pines burning on the campfire and the long weekends on the banks of the Murray River so it must have been a natural thing to be drawn to songs about our places and landscapes.

Lights On The Hill, Galleries Of Pink Galahs, These Pines, Rain On A Tin Roof and Buffalo Bill are all amazing songs about the Australia that is behind the Great Divide… great picture painting by the artists. Don’t get me wrong though just like contemporary music it’s not all good in country music as there’s some absolute crap out there – you only need to take a walk down the main street of Tamworth in January to find it.

I hate to think how many 10 year old girls will be busking this year doing their best Taylor Swift or a crap version of Sweet Home Alabama blending in with the next busker singing “flipping burgers on the hill, looking like Faith Hill”. There is a lot of really bad music pulling the good music down. So get away from the main drag and right away from the crap talent contests and pull up at a table at the pub called The Pub and check out gigs by Bill Chambers and The Flood – They have plenty of special guests pop up on stage and are great shows. Also check out The Scully Room for good music – tip here is Harmony James and Lou Bradley shows – The breakthrough artists in country music right now! Also check out gigs by Huckleberry Sweedes and The Wildes and you won’t go wrong.

On October 2, Domino will release Lou Barlow’s new album, Goodnight Unknown. For those of us who need an intro, Lou is one of the weird but talented genii behind Sebadoh and Dinosaur Junior, plus his own career-redefining mostly acoustic record Emoh from four years back.

But as the brilliant new Goodnight Unknown shows, he’s not exactly burdened by history. Borrowing the live-band energy of Dinosaur Jr. and the stylistic reach of Sebadoh, Barlow has built on Emoh’s full production and written a set of immediate, melodic pop songs that Lou describes as, “a cross between my later work with Folk Implosion and my earlier work with Sebadoh to my ears, anyway.”

While we’re waiting for the October album to drop however, hit up www.loobiecore.com for, as he puts it: “xpect Long downloads (and mysterious links)” (his typos, ot ours) And indeed the tunes are long and mysteroius also.