No updates for two weeks? It just won’t do will it! In my defence, I’ve been on holiday, and here are some thoughts on some of the new things I listened to whilst on holiday;

Given the breathless excitement, crazed excess and general mind-boggling derangement we’ve routinely come to expect from Japanese bands over the years, I was pleasantly surprised to stick on Nagisa Ni Te’s ‘Dream Sounds’ (Jagjaguwar) and hear what sounds to these ears like a bunch of mild-mannered Japanese guys kicking back with some gentle variations on Neil Young’s ‘Down by the River’, only with Crazy Horse’s fuzzy analogue haze kicked out in favour of a shimmering, crystalline guitar sound and some beautifully articulated male/female vocals. Subsequent songs manage to recall in turn; A more laidback Shop Assistants? Maybe Galaxie 500 without the solos or the Joy Division influence? Or early Fairport Convention relocated to urban Tokyo? Perhaps a touch of Mazzy Star, only better? Conventionality can definitely exert it’s own kind of beauty sometimes, and at the moment Nagisa Ni Te’s dreamy, epic indie rock makes me feel nice inside in a way that, say, eight hours of Kawabata Makoto duelling with a giant psychedelic walrus at the centre of the galaxy probably wouldn’t.

Last week did bring forth one historic event, in that I received my first unsolicited promo CD that’s actually worth listening to! Oh wondrous world in which we live! It’s by the excellently named The Gays, and it’s a single called ‘Fire to Feed’ on Pinprick Records. The A-side is a fine stab at home-made cock-rock minimalism, featuring a shrieked vocal that’s Eighties Matchbox.. nutty rather than Darkness shitty and percussion that sounds like it’s being played on a leather jacket by one of those robots that builds cars. The B-side is the real treat though – a joyously mentalist remix by somebody called Waster that daringly mixes irresistible floor-filling techno with distinctly floor-emptying mutations of the aforementioned vocal. If I had a disco, I’d be sure to play this frequently, just to keep ‘em on their toes. The whole thing has a certain wild-eyed hedonistic kind of vibe to it too, which I like.

Speaking of which, Simply Saucer’s ‘Cyborgs Revisited’ (Sonic Unyon) is a thing of utter magnificence – the sound of a gang of freewheelin’ Velvet Underground / Stooges worshipping science fiction freaks getting seriously out-there back in mid-‘70s Canada. Choppy guitar riffs, howling feedback and utterly bugged out synthesiser noises lead the assault, and slurred lyrics about robots, nazis, aliens, drugs and weird sex seal the deal. “Here’s some heavy metaloid music,” the singer announces at the start of live track ‘Illegal Bodies’, “It’s a song of the future… unless you have a metal body they’re not gonna allow you to walk the streets… no kidding.” The band then proceeds to launch into the most dementedly reductive noise jam attempted on American soil since ‘Sister Ray’. “We’ll be back with you in just a few minutes!” they threaten after things grind to a halt around the ten minute mark. There is no discernible applause. Basically, in geek rock terms these guys couldn’t have been any cooler if they’d built their own girlfriends out of ectoplasm. Which is exactly the kind of thing I can imagine them doing in their spare time. Terminally obscure during their lifetime, this reissue will hopefully help to gain Simply Saucer the reputation they richly deserve as part of the heroic lineage of outsider psychedelic punk bands that runs from the 13th Floor Elevators, the Fugs and the Monks through to the Electric Eels, the Butthole Surfers and early Flaming Lips.

I’m afraid The Mae Shi’s ‘Terrorbird’ (5 Rue Christine) is way too excitable is make an impression on my current lethargic state of mind. Featuring 33 tracks in half an hour, many of them with names like ‘Heironymous Bosch is a Dead Man’ and ‘Takoma the Dolphin is Awol’, and multiple re-hackings of the same twisted hunks of noise by different band members, I fear full appreciation of this disc will require a level of energy that would make Melt Banana look like the Grateful Dead. Why do so many American young people seem to want to communicate with the world entirely through the medium of super-accelerated prog-rock doodles and desperate high-pitched shrieking? It’s like listening to an album made by over-educated punk rock smurfs. As usual, I blame video games, prescription drugs and the 1980s.