So what have I been up to in the past week?

Well on the weekend I went up to the Plan B sponsored gig/night at Le Pub in Newport and witnessed a performance by Load Records artistes The USAISAMONSTER. And as with every other Load band they were crazed and joyous and amazing and impossible to really get an angle on in print.

They look like just the freakiest guys imaginable... they’re like if Wayne and Garth were huge sci-fi and prog-rock geeks, and if they’d spent 18 hours a day for the past fifteen years locked in a dark basement with cheap drums and guitars and noise gadgets, obsessively writing and practising epic convoluted symphonies telling the stories of, well, god knows what..
Trout Mask Replica era Beefheart and Devo are useful touchstones in terms of attitude and general aesthetic freakery, and musically they mix spooky, droney druidic singing bits reminiscent of Oneida with total Lightning Bolt lunatic spazz-out party action. And I get the feeling they must seem totally at home here in the kind of mixed up scene that more conventionally cool bands must have nightmares about. A small gang of strange, lanky boys lollop around in front of the stage, doing slow spasmodic dances around a naked wrestling mannequin with the head of Ronald Reagan while the rest of the audience, a motley selection of local subcultural misfits, look on dumbfounded. After being informed they’ve got enough time left for ‘a short one’, the USAISAMONSTER launch into a totally straight-faced rendition of ‘Free Bird’ as if they’ve been waiting for this moment for decades. Crazy, crazy boys who’ve forever secured a place in my heart.

The support, Welsh post-rock stalwarts (“look ma! I’m a Welsh post-rock stalwart!”) Mountain Men Anonymous are also pretty great. They certainly didn’t sound like they practice 18 hours a day, but they sound like when they do play they know exactly where they’re going. And where they’re going is straight to the point – intense instrumental emotive rock without the bullshit. Essentially they resemble GS!YBE stripped down to a power trio and graced with that rare advantage in the post-rock world – a great drummer and a solid, forward-moving rhythm. Like your screeching apocalyptic guitar showdowns but can’t stick any of those arsey quiet bits? Well look no further.

The same day I finally picked up a copy of Mclusky’s ‘difficult’ new album, wherein they embrace the twin virtues of bile and awkwardness in a way that would make Mark E. Smith proud. Working on a review, but it’s an uphill struggle.

And then, REJOICE! Issue#0 of Plan B dropped through my letterbox this morning. Proving the extent to which this coven of cranky exiled music journos rule my life at the moment, I’ve spent most of the day engrossed in it, or merely just.. looking at it (aside from a short period when I felt inspired to strap on the guitar and blast through some tedious Velvets/Spacemen 3 “we don’t need to change chord, we’re on heroin” style action). And … hmm… it’s a bit like Careless Talk really, isn’t it? Not exactly the grand revolution in magazine format I’d been led to expect by preliminary gossip. More like going back to school after the summer holidays – a few new faces, a new coat of paint in the gym and a new biology teacher, but otherwise business as usual. Not that that’s a bad thing of course – lest we forget CTCL has single-handedly raised the bar for worthwhile paper & ink based musical discourse to previously unimaginable levels, and IF IT AIN’T BROKE DON’T FIX IT.

Obviously it’s full of amazing stuff, that almost goes without saying, and the new bits – film/comics/books coverage and mini trad-magazine style ‘items’ which aren’t shite – are very welcome indeed. Haven’t actually read most of it thus far, but the overall quality of the bits I have read is very high indeed.

Track it down and buy it for fucks sake, so they can persuade some suit-wearing squares to give them money to make more issues or however it is it works.