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PRESS FOR 'OVER THE STONES, UNDER THE STARS':
Long interview with Ned on Mess & Noise (Aus)
Cokemachineglow (Ca) track review of "All The Signs"
Ned takes a track by track tour of the album
Beat (Melbourne) gives "Come Clean" single of the week:
FOR FUTURE SUTURE:
Others:
"Over this last summer I saw Ned Collette open for Wheat at the Empty Bottle here in Chicago. It’s a fun venue but a lousy place to be an opening band, especially if you happen to be an unknown singer-songwriter opening for a marginal pop band on a weeknight. There were two dozen people in the place and most of them didn’t much care about the lanky Australian guy up onstage with the looping pedals. I was half-distracted by the bar chatter but mostly just blown away by Collette. I loved his debut, last year’s Jokes & Trials (still inexplicably unavailable in this country), and was expecting something light, sometimes funny, and vaguely lovesick along those lines. But what he was playing at the show were longer, wordier, and stranger numbers. The darkness and melancholy was palpable and startling.
The show reminded me quite a lot of seeing Joanna Newsom playing solo at McCarren Pool in Brooklyn a few months before Ys (2006) came out. Collette, who has toured with Newsom, has that same emotional intensity and incisive way with words. But where Newsom has the air of some eerie lost folk musician of the early ‘70s, Collette brings to mind nothing so much as the austerity and beauty of early Leonard Cohen. He can do wordy and mysterious (“Forty Children”), but he doesn’t shy away from bluntness when it’s called for (“Ned’s Dream”). He is anachronistic, possibly, but in the best ways.
What comes as a surprise about Future Suture, then, is not the sheer imposing genius of the lyrics and the general gloominess of the album, but how goddamn great this record is to listen to. Like Newsom he has upped the instrumental ante for his sophomore record; unlike her, he’s gone classic rock. Aaron Newell’s right about the Dungen-like air to some of this, even if to me it sounds more like Songs of Leonard Cohen (1967) if Cohen had actually liked all the parts that weren’t just vocals and guitar. But what’s most important is that Collette isn’t just layering shit on to expand his sound. The arrangements make internal and conceptual sense so that there’s nothing tacked-on or unnecessary about the horns on “Race,” those big, warm, fuzzy synth lines on the gorgeous “The Country With a Smile,” or the drums anywhere on this album. Every listen seems to bring out something new; every listen and I love this album more."
cokemachineglow.com - Best 50 album's of 2007: #15
"Diverse and inspired... Future Suture pushes Collette’s writing to unexpected territory, offering wonderful new vistas with each track" **** Rolling Stone
"A romantic and gothic shift away from pinky-plunky folk, to something with more attitude and a lot more sex appeal" **** Music Australia Guide
“In 10, 15 years time, people will still be talking about the impact ‘Future Suture’ had on their lives, musicians will be rattling off Ned’s name as freely as they do with Dylan, Lennon and Wilson” 9.5/10 Tsunami
"One of the most distinctive voices in Australia" Drum Media Sydney (live review)
"The chances of it being the best Australian album released this year are exceptionally high”
Inpress Magazine Melbourne
“Collette’s talent is one to be treasured and this record does it the justice it deserves” Drum Media Sydney
"If you have yet to discover Collette, Future Suture reveals the man as a poet and a musician worthy of your attention." RTR FM Perth
“There is life in this album, a vision that you could call beautiful” Drum Media Perth
“There’s a laconic simplicity to [Future Suture] that is almost certainly harder to achieve than it sounds.”
The Age (Melbourne) Magazine
"Future Suture is a thought provoking addition to a career that appears to have no limitations or forseeable end"
Beat Magazine Melbourne
FOR JOKES & TRIALS :
Others:
'Plays like all your favourite acoustic pauses burnt to one disc” Sunday Age, Melbourne
“Listening to Ned Collette is like falling in love” Drum (Perth)
“A voice that can break hearts at a hundred paces” Drum Sydney
“An album that is every bit intriguing as it is plainly beautiful” Big Issue
“Impressive and ever changing” Mess & Noise Magazine
"A gentle giant in the making" Beat Magazine, Melbourne