One Last Batch of Singles Before the Year-End, Part # 3


Dean McPhee – Brown Bear 12” (Hood Faire)

Yorkshire-based Guitarist Dean McPhee impressed on his side of a split single I wrote up earlier this year, and here he makes good that promise with an absolutely splendid 12” on the newly established Hood Faire label. “Sky Burial”, the first of three tracks here, is a beautifully lyrical, unashamedly melodic bit of electric guitaring, sounding not unlike something that might have come about if old Hank Marvin himself had taken Eric Burden’s lead and gone flat-out weird in the late sixties, got into some finger-picking and sat stoned atop a Monument Valley outcrop at midnight, cradling his Stratocaster and waiting for the true spirit of the Apache to take him. “Stoney Ground” is a rather thornier affair, but still meticulous in its construction, spinning slowly into the void without a note out of place.

It is of course the fate of any solo guitarist to be erroneously compared to John Fahey at some point, and as such let’s get it out of the way by remarking that Mr McPhee’s stuff reminds me quite a lot of Fahey’s late period electric album “Hitomi”, particularly in the way in which he utilises delay and echo, taking the time to work the effects into his compositions rather than just whacking them on and hoping for the best, with moments of slowed tempo and dramatic pauses allowing the shimmering decay to live a rich life of its own beneath the next batch of notes. This aspect of things particularly comes to the fore on the B side “Brown Bear”, where compositional playing surrenders to ambient drift, as McPhee hits up his final notes with some extra long sustain and begins coaxing startling cello-like textures from his axe, to beautiful Windy & Carl-like effect – bloody lovely.

It’s also worth mentioning how much the *sound* of this record contributes to its overall appeal – that McPhee knows how to get that dead-on perfect Valve amp tone to make the geeks happy goes without saying, but the recording here is pin-drop perfect too, and pressed onto heavyweight vinyl at 45rpm it sounds absolutely gorgeous on my cheap-ass speakers – warm, fuzzy, enveloping and vast – perfect Sunday night comfort music for guitar-fanciers everywhere. Nothing groundbreaking I guess, but a record that deserves to be treasured and soaked in over the years purely on its own aesthetic merits, regardless of external trends, just like some old geezer rejoicing in his Strings For Pleasure collection and not seeing any damn reason why he shouldn’t.

http://www.myspace.com/deanmcphee
http://www.hoodfaire.co.uk/

Not Cool – Wonderful Beasts (Sleep All Day)

Either living up to their name all too well, or entirely failing to, depending on which way you look at it, Not Cool display a full set of the elements that young folk in indie bands in this country have been kicking around as default for a decade now. Post-punk / faux-disco informed rhythms marshalled by a “hey guys, I’ve been TAKING LESSONS” style drummer? Stabbing, trebley guitars that occasionally lurch into jerky post-core/post-good twiddle for a few bars? Vocals by a yelping oik having an anxiety attack? Why, step right this way sir.

Given the potential for loathsomeness in these raw ingredients, it is to Not Cool’s considerable credit that they manage to overcome the negatives and emerge with a record that’s pretty compelling. “Wonderful Beasts” on the A side kicks off with a riff-heavy section that’s meaty enough to suggest that they at least inhabit the same universe as heavyweight champs like Bilge Pump and Lords, even if they’re evidently not in the same league, as is clearly shown when the chorus speeds up into something that sounds like what I’d imagine the Arctic Monkeys probably sound like. All crescendo all the time = yawn, y’know? “The Bell Curve” meanwhile shows intriguing hints of (GROAN) originality, consisting as it does of a series of short, melodic phrases that cycle around each other so repetitiously it almost turns into some piece of Rhys Chatham-esque guitar-clang minimalism. It’s kinda awesome actually, if you can ignore the singer’s mewling.

Firing things up with a bit of whiplash energy that makes me feel all withered and prematurely old, Not Cool seem to be transcending their inbuilt limitations pretty well, making interestingly constructed songs that occasionally come on like a watered down Converge playing through practice amps. Their core sound is one I could easily live without (particularly the vocals and the dullards-do-disco syncopations), but if you can get over that then this is a very creditable debut in the sphere of, oh, I dunno, ‘modern British rock music’ or some such nonsense.

http://www.myspace.com/notcoolisaband
http://sleepalldayrecords.bigcartel.com/

Skipper – Cold Pizza N' Pop EP (Chocolate Covered Records)

Oh man, I am SO all over this EP, I’m surprised it hasn’t sought a restraining order yet. Sugar-rush garage punk-pop is Skipper’s deal, and just like, say, some beach party/horror movie where a caveman crashes a slumber party and Vincent Price does the boogaloo, you may roll your eyes and tut, but it’s going to take at least a few more centuries of cultural dislocation before you can convince ME this isn’t perfect entertainment.

Breaking it down, Skipper have a tough girl-rock rhythmic backbone and female “ba ba”s and “ooh ooh”s straight out of The Rondelles or The Breeders, huge, rollicking power-pop hits ala The Nerves/Paul Collins, raucous garage-punk energy, bubblegum melodicism, leery Johnny Thunders guitar thrills and a great central focus from their “I’m a loser baby and I don’t care, although, actually, now I come to think of it, I’m fucking DISTRAUGHT” frontman. Oh, what a truly fantastic bunch of stuff to cram into one band. “Sitting on my couch / playing my guitar / I’m so laaaazy” – YEAH!

Skipper are straight outta Minnesota, on the same label that brought us The Rantouls, and you should be aware that none of the tracks they’ve got up on their myspace really hint at the pure brilliance of this EP. It is to music criticism what takeaway pizza and ice cream is to gastronomy – a flat-out winner that renders the discipline pointless, in other words. “We just want to play sloppy rock and roll”, they say on their myspace, “and even if you think we're terrible at least we try.” Try? Aww, dudes, listen – you just made some of the BEST MUSIC EVER. Put your feet up for a bit. Then make some more, if that’s ok.

http://www.myspace.com/skipperband
http://www.chocolatecoveredrecords.com/pages/home

Spectrals – Leave Me Be b/w Suit Yourself (Captured Tracks)

Hmm. Spectrals! Mmm. Love the name, love the cover art, love the concept. The music…? Spectrals is one guy from Leeds. This is his first effort, probably picking up a lot of hip exposure straight off the bat thanks to Captured Tracks.

He starts off with “Be My Baby” drums – hell, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! He continues with a distant wash of slinky, ultra-reverbed, haunted guitar pop. The twangy guitar hooks and general swing of things is super-sweet, but the flat, faintly obnoxious vocals and too-cool-for-school posturing both speak of the Crystal Stilts, and that’s the kind of speech that leads to glowering stares and itchy trigger fingers on this weblog. Swings and roundabouts, I guess. There’s a lovely, handcrafted bunch of Joe Meekish bedroom jangle/shimmer to be found here though (dig the weird bass boom and ‘50s style guitar break on ‘Suit Yourself’), and enough good elements to command a fair few listens, but songwriting is strictly of the Strokes patented “will-this-do?” variety, and as such I don’t think I’m entirely sold at the moment. It’s growing on me ever so slowly though… give it time, I think this guy is going good places – see the promising numbers on the myspace for further evidence.

http://www.myspace.com/spectralspectral
http://www.myspace.com/capturedtracks

Woog Riots / Schwervon! Split 7” (Industry Decoy)

Occasional Peel favourites back in the day, Germany’s Woog Riots were an absolute hoot when I saw them live last month – a husband & wife duo executing cute guitar/keyboard/laptop electro-pop that could have been excruciating in the wrong hands, but was rendered holler-worthy by their boundless enthusiasm, good humour and endlessly catchy tunes. Several of their songs, and much of their between song banter, centred around their admiration for The Fall, an idea that I found quite odd, and one that made me fervently hope that these happy strangers in our dark and desperate land never meet their idols – the thought of Mark E. reducing them to piles of ash with one withering glare is too horrible to contemplate. But then, who knows -maybe hearty, no nonsense Europeans unafflicted by anglophone gloom are precisely the audience MES has in mind for his music? Maybe if I were to join them at a family picnic to breath in the fresh Bavarian air and get down to “Bingo Masters Breakout”, the whole scary mess would finally begin to make sense..?

Anyway, no matter. “People Working With Computers”, The Woog Riots track included here, isn’t about The Fall, and doesn’t sound even remotely like The Fall. It’s about people, working with computers, and it sounds exactly like you’d expect it to sound. “Some like dancing, some do not” it goes, “some have children, some do not / some are women, some are men”, then it goes “click click! click click!”, and everyone has a little dance. Fucking awesome! Seriously, you’ll get no bullshit from Woog Riots – just straight up great songs about stuff in the modern world, and how good it all is. Beat that, Mark!

And with their killer tunes and spousal cheer, Woog Riots make for a perfect team up with New York’s Schwervon! I may not have trumpeted the fact quite as often as I maybe should have done on this weblog, but let it be said here and now that I fucking love Schwervon! – every time I’ve seen them play over the years has been a certified good time, and every record I’ve got by them is great. Simple as that. They may have fallen off my radar a bit in the past year or two (I think I’ve missed at least one tour/album), but clearly they’ve still got the moves, as their song here, “Balloon”, is an absolute joy and one of their best distillations of perfect, hooky, hard-rocking guitar-pop to date. As ever, it’s so so brilliant to hear a band who are able to take such deceptively prosaic influences (Pixies, Yo La Tengo, Weezer etc.) and… y’know, actually be as good as them at it, rather than sucking by default. “Balloon” barely scrapes two minutes, but makes this disc worth its weight in gold.

And that weight is considerable by 7” standards, as this record is one of the first from new German label Industry Decay, who include a handy printed manifesto detailing their intention to produce a series of split singles manufactured to the very highest standards of pressing/packaging and to distribute them independently for reasonable rates, flying in the face of dull economic realities as they go. Perhaps not the most original scheme in the annals of DIY culture, but it’s a noble cause and this record is great, so why not drop ‘em a few quid at the address below.

http://www.myspace.com/woogriots
http://www.myspace.com/schwervon
http://www.myspace.com/decoyindustry

Labels: Dean McPhee, Not Cool, Schwervon, singles reviews, Skipper, Spectrals, Woog Riots

Advice.

I'm sorry for breaking my post-at-least-once-a-week rule again. Rest assured, I've got the final part of that singles round up ready to go for tomorrow or the day after though.

In the meantime, some advice for winners from Stripe Savage:

Labels: funnies, lameness, Stripe Savage

One Last Batch of Singles Before the Year-End, Part # 2


The Girls At Dawn –Never Enough b/w Every Night (Hozac)

There’s nothing much I can write at the moment to convey how much I love this single, and the song “Every Night” in particular, at the moment. Piss around all day at work, drag my carcass home, play Girls At Dawn single. Make dinner, piss about the house, play Girls At Dawn single several more times, go to bed. That’s how life’s been this week.

I should do a whole “I Like” post about them really; I could try and write something about the feeling of mystery/creepiness/distance that seems to be becoming ever more prominent in stuff I’m hearing from America at the moment, and how exciting it is when, in the right hand, this feeling can be conjured not by production tricks or effects but by… something intangible in the playing itself. I could do a self-deprecating bit about how Girls At Dawn seem so absurdly tailor-made to pander to all my odd likings and obsessions at this particular moment in time. I could even wax aimless for a bit about what a quietly brilliant and evocative name for a group Girls At Dawn is.

All that would be surplus to requirements though – there’s a delicate balance to this music that allows it to work outside of understanding, outside of cultural context, and I know if I start blundering around getting verbose, taking it apart with words, I’ll be in danger of destroying that.

Everything about Girls At Dawn here is SPARSE – they begin with that Raincoats/Marine Girls/Shaggs sense of daring open space, as the remnants of stern chords hang in the air for several breaths, challenging you to object before the song continues. The kind utilitarian approach to homemade rock music, where every note, every sound, is weighed for its usefulness, and excess baggage is stared down and forced out; it’s uptight, but also incredibly comforting, as chillingly beautiful vocal lines can rise bravely from the spaces between notes with no accompanying fanfare. This still being the notional realm of weirdo lo-fi art-punk, there’re no tedious intrusions of ‘perfection’ or perfect tonality here, with everything giving the appearance of a jolly, half-assed clatter. But every element that comprises Girls At Dawn’s self-produced songs is simple, perfect and devastating. A single “la la-la la-la-la la” fleetingly catches the essence of psychotronic British folk more purely than a whole troupe of crumhorn-wielding chancers, before the ‘Planet Caravan’ tremoloed backing vocal on the chorus just floors me once again, making me wish I could step through a gateway into the purple/pink psyche forest on the sleeve, to commune with the three witch-oaks and set out in search of Angel Blake and that spectre from the first ‘Sabbath album, as Girls At Dawn echo through the branches like a siren’s call…

I know, I know, I just did precisely what I said I wouldn’t do.

And I know, I know, what AM I talking about? You just listened to their myspace, and it’s just more scrappy, so-so, faux-naïve Brooklyn hipster music…

Well you didn’t really expect the enchanted village to still be there when you came back with the police did you? Jeez.

http://www.myspace.com/thegirlsatdawn
http://hozacrecords.com/

Horowitz – Supersnuggles EP (This Almighty POP)

Aah, god bless Horowitz, back again with yet more achingly beautiful home-recorded lovelorn fuzz-pop. Y’know, it’s perhaps an obvious observation, but it only just occurred to me – Horowitz are all about reflecting a deep, deep love of independent British music circa 1997, from the Helen Love tribute cover art to the Urusei Yatsura transatlantic vocalisms to the kinship with Boyracer to… well they must have a certain fondness for Dweeb, I’m sure. Needless to say, this is home territory for me, and it’s great to know they’re still out there, fighting the good fight, singing of their love for Winona Ryder over dizzy sherbert fizz guitar scuzz and melodies to die for. Track three here, ‘The Boy From Whatstandwell’, is a bit of a departure though, it being a Horowitz ballad, complete with 3/4 time, clean guitars and wistful – like, even more wistful than usual – lyrical concerns. It’s really nice, although maybe I’m just saying that because the sleevenotes, in which Pete or Ian or perhaps someone else entirely, relate an age old tale of teenage railway station kisses, made me shed a tear. “I wished they could last forever, but they never could, because I had the papers to deliver the next morning and needed an early night”. Amen, fellas.

http://www.myspace.com/horowitzband
http://www.thisalmightypop.com/

Invasion – Spells of Deception 10” (This Is Music)

I thought I’d take a chance on this one after reading about Invasion on The Quietus and thinking, good grief, THAT’S a band I need to hear! The basic recipe takes one Sleep/Wizard worshipping doom metal guitarist, adds a high energy drummer with a penchant for setting her kit on fire and a ball-busting female soul singer, and calls upon them to compress their combined essence into songs that frequently don’t even break the two minute mark, resulting, so one would hope, in flaming juggernauts of musical bombast the like of which the world has never before seen.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, “Spells of Deception”s title track is something of a disappointment, a classic example of what happens when some individually potent musicians get together and somehow emerge with results that seem far less than the sum of their parts. The trio crucially fails to gel here, with Marek Steven’s workable sludge riffage left growling in the corner in the face of Zel Caute’s sledgehammer dance-punk rhythm track (too much cowbell), whilst Chan Brown sounds equally lost, her pitch-perfect Aretha-isms sounding lonely in the otherwise empty high-end and searching for a tune to latch onto amid a complete lack of melodic counterpoint. Sounding like the kind of warmed over studio experiment that you can imagine the post-fame Gossip might have come up with before shaking their heads and going back to the drawingboard, it’s a bit of a dog’s dinner to be honest. Thankfully, the other track on the A-side here, “Behind The Black Gate” (alright!) shows the band really getting their shit together, with Steven and Caute locking into a filthy downtuned groove that’ll instantly win the heart of anyone who ever swung hair in the front row at a Winnebago Deal or Orange Goblin gig, and Brown stepping up to the plate as an appropriately mighty rock frontwoman, declaiming Ozzy-style over the song’s sinister middle section. I was hoping she’d utilise the pleasantly mental space-echo to mimic both the Robert Plant and Sandy Denny parts on Zep’s ‘Battle of Evermore’ at the same time, but sadly things lurch to an end that’s WAY too premature, lacking any conclusion or even a restatement of the awesome opening riff. Crucially, NO SOLOS seems to be another Invasion rule, as necessitated by the bare-bones line-up and Steven’s strict reliance on the bottom three guitar strings. Whether or not that counts in their favour, I’ll leave you to decide.

Clearly a band with a mighty potential for awesomeness, I hope Invasion manage to realise it. Personally, I’d like to hear them get longer, heavier, slower, weirder. You’re not gonna get any mainstream indie crossover appeal outta this stuff guys, so do the decent thing and Embrace The Doom. The B Side of this 10” is taken up by a remix of “Spell of Deception” by Optimo, to whom no offence, but we’ll skip over it just cos, well… when was the last time you heard a ‘remix’ of a track by a rock band that wasn’t a waste of plastic? (That’s not a rhetorical question – in my case it was Oneida’s “Caesar’s Column” 12” from back in aught three.)

http://www.myspace.com/invasion
http://www.thisismusicltd.com

Labels: Horowitz, Invasion, singles reviews, The Girls At Dawn

Slasher Risk.

Slasher Risk, from New York, are rapidly becoming my new avant/noise/improv/whatever crush band, combining some of the same elements that used to make Magik Markers and Charalambides so unmissable with plenty of the malevolent horror movie tension and sonic violence their name implies.

And like the reference points mentioned above, I suspect they're also the kind of band whose recordings are likely to capture only a mere shadow of what they're able to do live. Luckily though, we have the internet. So, until someone is foolhardy enough to bring Slasher Risk to your town/country/continent, I'd advise all unrepentant skronk fiends in the audience to dim the lights, put half an hour aside, curl up with a mug of cocoa, and put this on full screen:

Labels: I like, skronk, Slasher Risk, videos

One Last Batch of Singles Before the Year-End, Part # 1


Cyanide Pills – Suicide Bomber (Damaged Goods)

The second single from inexplicably ignored Leeds power-pop-punk upstarts Cyanide Pills is also the first of two a-sides on this batch of singles to take a queasily misguided shot at…. well I hesitate to say “contemporary relevance”, as that doesn’t seem quite what they had in mind for a song that begins with “my girlfriend she’s so fine / she lives in Palestine” and proceeds to a bridge of “that girl she’s dynamite!”. It’s just goofy, stupid fun of course – small beer next to the routine nastiness of KBD era punk. What’s a far greater sin is that it’s a slightly lesser tune that either of the songs on their excellent first single. B-side “Black Lightning” is better – it’s a great Chuck Berry derived car chase number about getting wasted and crashing your car into a train, if you can believe that! Utterly daft good fun on electric blue vinyl, and even at their worst these guys are still hitting way above par as regards making gleeful, catchy rampaging rock n’ roll. Make the other single a priority if for some ludicrous reason you’ve gotta choose between the two, but if you like this kinda thing (that being Adverts/Damned/Buzzcocks/Undertones amped up via The Exlpoding Hearts), do the decent thing and get both for chrissakes.

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

Drink Up Buttercup – Mr. Pie Eyes (More Than)

I bought this one blind for the cool artwork, low price and promising title. Lord, I wish I hadn’t. Sounds as if some recent graduates heard The Move, decided LET’S DO THAT (it worked for Elephant 6) and proceeded to rampage way across the line into the no man’s land of total quirkiness, with subtlety and good taste rendered forgotten, ancient tongues as they drown in a slobbering mess of clod-hopping nursery rhyme melodies, faux-operatic shrieking, charmless, convoluted thudding and ghastly sub-muso wank. Yes, they wrote a song called ‘Mr. Pie Eyes’, the chorus to which goes “this is the story of Mr. Pie Eyes, Mr. Pie Eyes, Mr. Pie Eyes”. Then it goes “yah yah yah-ya-yah yah yah yah, yah yah yah yah-ya-yah yah yah yah”. I don’t think they ever get around to the story, but never mind, it was probably a shit one anyway. You know what was great about all those whimsical old ‘60s bands? The fact they matched their eccentricities with ideas and talent and didn’t come across like obnoxious dickheads shoving half-formed juvenilia in our faces, more often than not. I should have known: much as I love patronising their shop of a weekend, Rough Trade are canny counters of pounds, and if they put a 7” on for £1.99, there’s probably a reason.

http://www.myspace.com/drinkupbuttercupband
http://www.myspace.com/makemine

Fergus & Geronimo – Blind Muslim Girl b/w Powerful Lovin' (Tic Tac Totally)

Fergus & Geronimo’s huge-hearted, speaker-busting Sam Cooke-meets-Nobunny soul-punk is a beautiful thing that makes me very happy indeed, although I still know next to nothing about these guys, so seeing how they approach a tune entitled “Blind Muslim Girl” could prove a dealbreaker re: revealing their true intentions. As it turns out, it’s neither a bad taste goof nor some earnest politicising (god, how unthinkable would THAT be in this day n’ age?), just a straightforward, lightweight pop number in which F&G sing of their affection for a blind muslim girl. They want to take her hand and around the world, and they don’t care that she can’t see. If you can bring yourself to believe they’re playing it straight-faced, it’s all quite weird and sweet, with almost a Jad Fair sort of vibe. B-side “Powerful Lovin’” helps us believe they’re fighting the good fight by virtue of just being plain fucking fantastic – one of their best, most exultantly wrecked homages to ‘60s soul to date. And frankly, I could happily believe in flat earth theorists and guys who make a fuss about fluoride in the water if they were able to bust out tunes this mighty on their Vox organs and second hand drum kits of an evening. Fergus & Geronimo are ALRIGHT. What I wouldn’t give to be in Texas next month to see them play with Greg Ashley.

http://www.myspace.com/fergusgeronimo
http://www.myspace.com/tictactotally

Frankie Rose – Thee Only One (Slumberland)

Behold – the immaculately presented debut solo release from Ms Rose, former/current sticks-woman with Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls and Crystal Stilts (two out of three ain’t bad), and composer of one of the finest songs of recently years, ‘Where Do you Run To’. It’s funny how I still think Crystal Stilts are one of the most dreadful rock bands of the modern era, but here, backing up Frankie on her own songs, their personnel sound plain beautiful, shimmering like the ethereal Velvet Underground back alley sprites they wish they were. “Thee Only One” is a perfectly realised, reverb-heavy girl group stomper that probably sounds exactly the way you’d expect it to. That’s because it’s the way it SHOULD sound, and you’d be a fool to change the recipe at this stage. B-Side “Hollow Life” slows things down to a halt for an absolutely exquisite snapshot of a Bout de Souffle bedroom scene eternal now, vast faux-cathedral organ tones and distant guitar-drift making a bed for Frankie’s oh-so-delicate voice. Like “I’ll Be Your Mirror” medicated to the point of total bliss-out, it’s exactly the sound I want to hear last thing before I go to sleep, gently rising to a Cocteaus-y grandeur in, like, ninety seconds, then falling away to nothing. I see a tick next to “leave them wanting more” on a rose-scented to-do list. A flawless first record – I’m inclined to think that if Frankie Rose disappeared off the planet tomorrow, she’d have a healthy cult following twenty years from now, just on the basis of these three and a half minutes.

http://www.myspace.com/saintoftherose
http://www.slumberlandrecords.com

Labels: Cyanide Pills, Drink Up Buttercup, Fergus and Geronimo, Frankie Rose, singles reviews

Vivian Girls – Everything Goes Wrong
(In The Red)

So, ‘difficult second album’ time for the VGs, and, boy, they’ve really taken that ‘difficult second album’ conceit and gone to town with it.

One thing ‘Everything Goes Wrong’ definitely is NOT is the refining/reframing of the band’s pop song-writing sensibilities that would have seemed the natural next step for them, as suggested by all those tantalising pre-album singles cuts that threatened to win over doubters by amping up the three-part harmonies and the just-plain-beautiful melodies.

Another thing that ‘Everything Goes Wrong’ definitely is NOT is the potentially promising move toward a more strung out, ragged glory kinda sound, as trailed by the album artwork, and the profusion of four minute plus songs with names like ‘The Desert’ and 'Out For The Sun'.

Those were my best pre-listening guesses and expectations. But as becomes clear pretty quickly after actually dropping the needle on this one, my best guesses and expectations can fuck off. No outreach to a wider audience is to be found herein, and no pleasant developments for existing fans either. No pop, no style - they strictly roots. The roots in question here are punk, and as such ‘Everything Goes Wrong’ comes on like a total assault.

Well, maybe assault isn’t quite the right word – assault suggests an attack, whereas this album is all about defence, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Point is: I don’t suppose many people were expecting Vivian Girls to bounce back with an LP that’s as bleak and relentless and punishing as any grim-faced hardcore/noise band’s opus. I’m sure nobody asked them to make one. But they made it anyway – take it or leave it.

One more thing that ‘Everything Goes Wrong’ is NOT, contrary to what some reviewers still insist, is lo-fi. This record was made in a studio on a record label advance, and, y’know, I’m sure they had people around who knew where to put the microphones and stuff – fidelity-wise, it’s as loud and clear as you like. The fact it STILL sounds like a chaotic maelstrom of roar and clang, with buried vocals and excessive reverb and accidental open string skree, is simply a reflection of the kind of noise these girls want to make.

That the songs here sound like brooding playground chants, with flat, brutal, monotone choruses that are hammered home again and again like anxious, narcissistic curses and banishment rituals – I have no fun; I can’t get over you; this is the end; you don't even seem to care; don't turn around and miss me when I’m gone - that’s deliberate.

That Ali Koehler just won’t let up on that fucking ride cymbal at all, ever, beating it into your skull until you feel like jumping in front of a train – that’s deliberate too.

And that Cassie’s guitar sounds gigantic and screechy and wrong, dominating the mix like a whole room full of suffocating solid state Fender amps wheezing out their last trebley death rattles as they crawl over each others corpses, looking for a place to die..? – yeah, that’s how she wants it to sound.

The idea of self-defined, punk-birthed musicians paying tribute to the mechanised emotion of girl group pop is a fascinating one, and it won’t have escaped your notice that it’s become a pretty ubiquitous notion in pop culture over the past few years. Which is no bad thing, obviously – it’s easy and fun to tip a wink to the classics and vamp on some Spector-isms. But what sets the Vivian Girls apart, particularly on this LP, is that they approach this terrain with the spirit of total, deadly seriousness that’s necessary to give such angst-driven material life, recognising the Spector/Morton canon for the bloody heart of darkness it is, and responding in kind with an album that’s dead-eyed, blank-faced, introverted and drained of all the usual affectations and signifiers. It’s got its fingers in its ears, and it’s not listening, especially not to YOU. Tantrum music.

Like the classic NY girl group productions, ‘Everything Goes Wrong’ strikes me as an urban record – a barrier to block out the noise of the city, to create a safe space for internalised melodrama to thrive. This album is the sound of The Shangri-Las out on their own, beaten, rejected and building a wall; a wall the like of which those fucking producers couldn’t even imagine. Not an exotic, enticing wall to trap the listeners inside, but a razor-wire topped prison wall of senseless repetition and tinnitus-inducing distortion, compressed to fuck to keep the hurt inside and keep EVERYONE. ELSE. OUT. Just like some pissed off hardcore kid jamming a tape in his walkman circa 1985.

Inevitably there are moments where individual songs make an impression – “Can’t Get Over You” might as well have “STAND-OUT TRACK” written next to it in permanent marker and “Before I Start To Cry” plays the bittersweet closing credits tearjerker ok – but song-wise there’s nothing here to rival my beloved “Where Do You Run To” (which, er, it turns out was written by acrimoniously departed drummer Frankie Rose anyway – just as well I wasn’t fool enough to shout for it when I saw ‘em play). This is an album that works more as a total, unified sound thing than as a collection of songs. Like an early Husker Du record, it’s a wall-to-wall whiteout, burying triumph and disappointment alike beneath a uniform, tar-covered roar.

If you find yourself navigating rush hour public transport with your heart torn out at any point in the near future (I’ve not recently, glad to say), this is the album you’ll need. You might not like the sound of it much now, as you hang about at home chopping vegetables or making tea or whatever, and it’s probably freaking out the cat, but trust me: keep it on standby. This is ugly, gut-level pop, exhilarating, broken-hearted punk rock, and when the time comes you can crawl inside it like a cocoon. It won’t make you feel better, but it’ll make you not feel dead, and that’s a start. I like music like that.

Mp3> The End

Buy Links: Norman, In The Red

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Labels: album reviews, The Vivian Girls