Adelaide Rocks

South Australia's capital has been supplying the rest of the country — and the world — with incredible sounds for decades now, and we begin this representative collection with a taste of the city's rock roots. Jimmy Barnes had taken over the lead vocalist spot in Fraternity from future AC/DC frontman Bon Scott — the latter performs "Seasons of Change" — before finding his place on the burgeoning pub rock scene, then hitting a solo high point with "Working Class Man" in 1985. The rock of Adelaide is hard and heavy, in Next Steps.

Here, we chip through to Adelaide’s hard core, where kCavemen reside, grinding out bizarro hard rock like “Spongebob” from 2010’s Gondwanaland, and where Double Dragon has constructed its lair out of prime metal: check out “Inflictor” from 2006’s Scars of Fire. Elsewhere on the spectrum we find country songstress Beccy Cole, saluting servicemen on “Poster Girl (Wrong Side of the World),” and Australian Idol winner Guy Sebastian (“Hold On I’m Coming”). Local underground heroes put their heads above Adelaide’s parapets, in Deep Cuts.

Now, it's time to investigate Adelaide's current, scintillating muso crop in more detail, and we recommend you pay special heed to "Raining in Gotham" by Subsketch (aka Drew Norley), the 2006 Hilltop Hoods Initiative winner whose influence is now spreading beyond the city that nurtured him, thanks to the superb Cheaper Than Therapy concept release. Born from a plethora of local bands (including Blow Up Betty), Dead Popes of the Vatican kick out a bunch of jams with the self-explanatory "I Want My Rock N' Roll Loud."

The city's live scene is thriving, its roll-call of rock legends is heavyweight (Masters Apprentices, Jimmy Barnes), and its university offers electronic music as a course option — what's not to like about Adelaide, the South Australian muse-driven metropolis that gave us pub rockers the Angels (1978's "Take a Long Line"), hip-hop heroes the Hilltop Hoods ("The Nosebleed Section"), the psychedelic funk-rock of Wolf & Cub ("This Mess"), and the molten metalcore of (the now-disbanded) I Killed the Prom Queen ("Say Goodbye")? From the mellow tunes of Fruit to the hell-spawned lava flows of Universum and the addictive spark-spitting pop of Lovers Electric, our aural tour of Addy covers all the bases . . . so hop on and enjoy the ride.