Young, Free, With Singles, Part # 1.

Yes, more singles. People keep making ‘em, I keep buying ‘em, I play them all over the space of a spare Saturday, and, after a fashion, you have to read about them. That’s the way it works. I bought all of these before Christmas, so let’s assume they’re all ’08, unless it turns out they’re actually from ’07 or ’06 or 1994 or something, as records in the ‘new releases’ racks of our capital’s noble, embattled independent record shops are often apt to be.

Also, seeing how this is becoming an increasingly regular feature, it strikes me that I really should have some snazzy title for these posts. Unfortunately though, Doug Mosurock already resides over ‘Still Single’, and Plan B hold the current lease on ‘Singles Club’, leaving me to make do with the rather clunky ‘Young, Free, With Singles’. So, a contest: if you can come up with a better bit of singles-related wordplay I might use for a title, send it in to the usual address, and the winner gets, uh, I dunno…. some singles. Either that or I could take you out to dinner and attempt to lay the foundations for a meaningful relationship, whichever you’d prefer (go for the singles).

Acid Mothers Temple & The Cosmic Inferno / White Hills – Brainstorm / Be Yourself (Trensmat Records)

This forms one part of a trilogy of tributes to Hawkwind from Ireland's Trensmat records, all expressed within that most un-Hawkwindlike of formats, the split 7”. It does at least play at 33 though, so calm down, you’ve still got time to skin up. As you might well expect from AMT paying tribute to the Hawklords, their take on ‘Brainstorm’ kicks straight into a demented orgy of ring modulated oscillator carnage, stereo-panning wah-wah hyper-shred, senseless, garbled chanting and extensive exploration of that good ol’ ‘falling down a spiralling time tunnel’ sound effect. The inbuilt limitations of the Cosmic Inferno’s trio line-up keeps thing vaguely under control with a steady motorik churn, but largely this is just another identikit blast of the kind of beyond-gratuitous multiple overdubbed cartoon psychedelic splatter Kawabata could knock out in his sleep, and god knows, probably does.

White Hills – a band I’ve always meant to check out but have never quite got around to – are the clear winners here then, slicing up ‘Be Yourself’ into a monstrously heavy bass groove, martial drum riff and some distinct and vicious psyche-overload guitar, the whole trio compressed down to a single, floor-shaking entity, like some mud splattered behemoth beating its morbid way through a swamp of speaker fuzz, until it’s buried by the rise of the obligatory oscillations, fades out, and, brilliantly, re-emerges as the full realisation of Hawkwind’s hypnotic, glam stomp of a two chord chorus/mantra – BE YOURSELF, indeed. Absolute ‘storming the gates of heaven’ material all things considered, and I wish Trensmat could have shelled out to have this one end on the locked groove the song is just crying out for; that would have been beautiful. Anyway, my guess is, if you’ve enjoyed reading this review, you’ll probably enjoy the record, so let’s call it a day and move on to our next item of business…

http://www.trensmat.com/
http://www.acidmothers.com/
http://www.myspace.com/whitehills

The Bridport Dagger – Spanish One / Magpie’s Nest (Death Records)

I saw these guys dealing with the unenviable task of opening up the bill at about 8ish for the soon-to-be-legendary Vivian Girls / Pains Of Being Pure At Heart / Betty & The Werewolves line up before xmas, and thought they made a good enough job of it to take a chance on this proudly self-released single, and… well, it’s pretty good.
Dancing over the borders of a whole mess of potentially troublesome musical territory – rockabilly, swamp-rock, ‘80s indie gloom – the Bridports miraculously get out alive, managing to sidestep any obvious cliché or aesthetic shtick and emerging with a razorsharp guitar/guitar/drums sound that’s intimately familiar yet difficult to really pin down with easy reference points. Dreamy/sinister ‘Wicked Game’ reverb guitar gives way to a frantic staccato boogie on ‘Spanish One’, backing up some understated, early Nick Cave woe-is-me type hollering, and all over in under 2 minutes – a great slice of cinematic urgency. ‘Cinematic’ in music crit terminology is usually taken to mean vast, expansive, landscapes, blah; but this stuff is ‘cinematic’ more like a thirty second jump cut scene where some guy gets stabbed and thrown off a train. ‘Magpie’s Nest’ is just as short, even more train-like, and even better, adding a great, clean-toned rockabilly lead line that could momentarily pass for ‘80s jangle-pop, for a brighter, sharper take on the kind of menacing choogle practiced by The Scientists. Man, it’s great. These Bridport Daggers strike me as some seriously smart cats in fact, clearly blessed with the know-how, ideas and understanding of musical history necessary to take a bunch of their favourite hackneyed comfort-sounds and twist them back into something hard, fast, and somewhat exhilarating. Oh, and some of the singer’s vocal inflections keep reminding me of the early take of ‘Venus In Furs’ with John Cale singing, which is a nice bonus, because I like being reminded of that – all dark n’ odious, but keeping it just the right side of ludicrous. A band worth investigating.

http://www.myspace.com/thebridportdagger

The Corey Orbison – Your Name Is Poison (Everard Records)

Cripes – HEAVY Huggy Bear vibes coming off this one, brainchild of the folks behind Bristol’s Local Kid label/promoter/collective type gang. And that’s Huggy Bear as they actually sounded too, not as revisionist riot grrl/indie-pop historians might like to remember them sounding. “File under No Wave Cissy Hardcore” says the label, and, whilst I’m sure they’ll make a happy addition to my No Wave Cissy Hardcore collection, I fear The Corey Orbison are verging more on “File Under Indescribable” to be honest. It may be thirty years since no wave, since Half Japanese and The Dead C, even a couple of years since Magik Markers brought the idea of improvising non-musicians rocking out to the indie masses, but it’s hard to overstate the extent to which this is STILL a genuinely brave and challenging record for it’s makers to put out. Recorded live-in-studio with hear-a-pin-drop clarity, The Corey Orbison refuse to hide behind scuzz, distortion or mysique, instead bringing the performers’ every strike, lunge, shriek and fumble to us loud and clear with the unassailable confidence of politically motivated free expression.

What results is certainly quite something, recalling nothing so much as Mars’s systematic dehumanisation of rock music on their section of ‘No New York’. Like those tracks, everything that happens on this disc is so utterly *wrong*, it becomes alien and disorientating. The girl’s voice is so high-pitched it doesn’t sound natural at either speed, so pure guesswork leads me to conclude 45. The drums are particularly wrecked also, random tom hits going off rather like a recording of a kid shooting a pellet gun, leaving only the bass to thump out rudimentary time. Guitar moves are pure Arto Lindsey/Teenage Jesus, but less showy and lacking in explicit violence, instead working out a free improv-inspired vocabulary of abstract scrape n’ clang. One side features no less than six songs, all arbitrarily exploding into being and collapsing back into silence in a matter of seconds, before they can be caught in even the swiftest butterfly net, whilst the other side is given over to a single freeform freakout that seems determined to outstay it’s welcome. Why? Because.

To characterise this record as formless however would be grossly misleading. There’s a solid structure behind everything here, with voluminous lyrics reproduced on the insert to back it up, and if the songs have a tendency to begin with a burst of unrepeatable shred, it’s not long before they crystallise into recognisably livid grrl-punk war-chants, directly in the tradition of early Sleater Kinney, God Is My Co-Pilot and yes, Huggy Bear. What we’ve got here is a fiery combo of ideological commitment, rage, refusal, stifled utopianism and a full spectrum frustration so inexpressible it can only be given voice be kicking music’s internal logic squarely in the head. But what we’ve also got here is, perhaps, some kinda huge sense of FUN…? I think I can just see it. As they put it on their myspace: “..our style of music is the short and the sharp and the stop and the start. make a mess. break a heart. stick the rules. punk rock is for the wimps.” This here punk rock wimp is uncertain whether to worship or run away.

http://www.myspace.com/coreyorbison
http://www.everardrecords.com

The Cute Lepers – Terminal Boredom (Damaged Goods)

Well if we take The Corey Orbison’s line on things, this is certainly one for the wimps. Thoroughly enjoyable but kinda generic trash-punk fun; the A-side does a good impression of a late perod Johnny/DeeDee led Ramones cut (think ‘Warthog’), with chunky production to match, great snotty vocals and a good Buzzcocks bounce to it. B-side ‘Any Danger Love’ goes for an authentically air-punching Bomp! Records ’79 power-pop sound – it’s a good little blaster with sweet female backing vox, but it never really breaks through the way it should, as the nonsensical chorus hook gets repeated ad-nauseum in place of any melodic development or hot rockin’. It’s cool, but I think it would work best as a 30 second theme for a crazy, dumbass TV show. Not a bad record by any means – it fact it’s sure to be graded as a pretty good one by people like me who can’t get enough this kinda thing – but given the heavy competition for scraps of awesome-ness in the garage, punk and power-pop sectors, Cute Lepers can’t help but come off as a tad unexceptional on the strength of these two numbers. That said, I’m sure they’d be great fun live, and I sure enjoyed the video for this single on their myspace.

http://www.myspace.com/thecutelepers
http://www.damagedgoods.co.uk

The Manhattan Love Suicides – Veronica / 10th Victim (Squirrel)

As much as I like them, The Manhattan Love Suicides' increasingly numerous records are in many ways much of a muchness, and as such, I primarily refer you to my thoughts on their previous single.

That said, I confess I’m not enjoying this one half as much as the ‘Clusterfuck’ EP. The sound is muddy (and not in a good way), and both sides are a tad sluggish and overlong, which is a shame, and detracts from the fact that ‘Veronica’ is easily one of the loveliest songs this band have ever written… if only they’d up the tempo a bit and give it some oomph, rather than subjecting it to their strung out shoegazer thang. ‘10th Victim’ meanwhile hooks up the ‘be my baby’ drum intro with a matching sludge guitar riff – a move so obvious and obviously good it’s a wonder it’s not been done more frequently – and proceeds to plough it into the ground for a few minutes with a nice, droning cyclical vocal. All very Spacemen 3, but stuck as it is somewhere that’s longer than a short song but too short to be a long song, it’s gnarly repetition thing doesn’t really go anywhere (and, more importantly, doesn’t give the impression of going anywhere).

http://www.myspace.com/themls

Labels: Acid Mothers Temple, singles reviews, The Bridport Daggers, The Corey Orbison, The Cute Lepers, The Manhattan Love Suicides, White Hills