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