SINGLES ROUND-UP: 2010 Thus Far, Part # 2.

Brilliant Colors – Never Mine b/w Kissing’s Easy (Slumberland)

New wax from Brilliant Colors is always welcome round here, and hopefully always will be, but arriving off the back of their brilliant LP last year, this little outing can’t help but seem, well… slight. Dialling back both the punk rock propulsion and brutalist fuzz guitar that made the album such a blast, these two brief tunes see the band regressing back towards the homemade, Beat Happening-y vibes of their early EPs. Not that there’s *anything* wrong with that of course, and they still hold it together nicely enough, but with most of the energy, charm and killer tunes that set them apart (and make this kinda shamble-core a good time generally) also somewhat lacking, this four and a half minute artefact that can’t help but seem rather half-arsed in view of what’s gone before. GREAT band, no doubt (I’m going to see ‘em in June, with Thee Oh Sees!), so I guess you might want to grab this if you’re a completist re: Brilliant Colors or Slumberland or cool pop groups in general, but for anyone whose primary interest lies in listening to the damn thing: get the album instead if you’ve not already; this is strictly leftovers.

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

Lil Daggers – King Corps EP
(Livid Records)

Taking up the consideration of unguessable sociological/aesthetic shifts from my Flight review in the previous post, it’s worth noting that something very different is seeping into the water at the other end of the garage-verse from the shimmery, dislocated bliss-out we’ve recently come to accept as standard. Back down South, ideologically speaking if not always geographically, we can find an increasing number of groups swinging their lassos and taking the wild leap back toward authentically swampy roots rock drama, hanging onto some particularly fateful Dylan-via-The Gun Club axis of bluster, rattle n’ twang, and generating better results than you’d care to expect. Not that I’d want to get mixed up the journalistic dead-end of after-the-fact, thousand-miles-removed scene-building you understand, but sometimes you just gotta. Strange Boys, Demon’s Claws, The Mantles, Bridport Daggers… and now here’s Miami’s Lil Daggers, fitting right in.

Lunging around with a cataclysmic, red-eyed sound meant to be heard at a deafening whack in darkened, sweatbox clubs, Lil Daggers churn and weave in rabid Birthday Party fashion around a powerhouse drummer, duelling electric organs, frenzied string-bending guitar and bludgeoning low-end, howling through the requisite phone-line vocal filter about how they “hear the end is near”, in search of a constant, bloody climax.

For all that they’re covering distantly familiar territory here, this is still a pulverisingly BIG music, rich in an undeniable power n’ drama that belies the unimaginative band name, if you can only take a deep breath, say YES to the outlaw clichés, and let yourself get swept up in it. A lot of people were lurking about in this stubble-and-duster coats terrain back in the ‘80s, and god knows, a lot of people sucked at it. But this is 2010 buster, and if you still happen to be making movies about tough guys trudging ‘round the desert pointing guns at each other, get these dudes on the blower (probably the same one they do the vocals through) and they’ll be able to knock you up a real kick ass soundtrack full of holy fury and catharsis for you whilst Nick Cave and Warren Ellis are still lazing about in bed scratching their beards, wondering what the hullabaloo downstairs is all about.

http://www.myspace.com/lildaggers
http://www.lividrecords.com/

Octagon Control / Doctor Scientist – split 7”
(FDH Records)

My fault, this one. I took a chance on it just cos I like the cover photo, and think ‘Doctor Scientist’ is a really funny name for a band. The shop label said something about it being ‘synth-punk’, and I thought I could go for a bit of that good old retro-futurist fun right now – I’ve been catching up on a lot of vintage synth-heavy stuff recently in fact, and really enjoying it, so prob’ly about time I checked out what all these ‘cold wave’ kids are up to.

Oh dear – getting home and putting it on was like having to explain to an enthusiastic interview candidate that he’s applied for the wrong job.

“Uh, ok guys, I think we’ve got a misunderstanding here – see maybe it’s just me being a closed minded dumb-ass, but when I read ‘synth-punk’ and see a b&w photo of a girl with a goofy pre-Neuromancer VR headset, I kinda presuppose something that sounds a bit like The Screamers or Suicide or Gary Numan, y’know? That’s fair enough, isn’t it? You on the other hand, Octagon Control and Doctor Scientist, kinda sound more like bush league early ‘00s emo/metalcore bands who added a keyboard player for a bit of variety. I wish you well in your future quest for an audience who cares, but… well you see my problem, right? I’m sorry.”

Now I just feel all awkward.

http://www.fdhmusic.com/
http://www.myspace.com/doctorscientistband
http://www.myspace.com/octagoncontrol

Plasto Beton – 7” EP (SDZ Records)

Aah, now when I take a chance on some ‘synth-punk’ record in this day and age, THIS is more the kinda fucked up shit I have in mind. Not that these guys sound remotely like The Screamers or Suicide or Gary Numan or anything, but…

Well let me put it this way for you: French punk/indie/whatever type music has always seemed like pretty mysterious and fragmentary territory to those of us who’ve rarely gone out of our way to investigate, but you knew, didn’t you, that out there somewhere there’d be a whole gang of sick French fucks who worship Mark E. Smith and Throbbing Gristle and Pere Ubu, making horrible sub-underground type sounds infused with the grand perversity and defiance of their countrymen? Just stands to reason doesn’t it? And isn’t it a fine thing to think about of an evening?

Well duck you suckers, here they come – what seems to be more or less the same bunch of malcontents operating under such monikers as A.H. Kraken, The Anals, and now these guys, furiously mixing up dull-witted, ultra-repetitive caveman thud with chopped up Digital Hardcore noise-fuckery, random machine gun bursts, eerily detuned analogue synth tones and the kind of unhinged distortion pedal ranting that I daresay I wouldn’t be able to interpret even if I spoke French fluently.

It’s grotesque and upsetting and belligerent and wonderful, and I wouldn’t wish exposure to it on anyone who hadn’t specifically requested such in advance. Politicians take note: create a country characterised by strange and frustrating labour laws, new build suburban sprawl, mass unemployment, a rich but entropied cultural heritage and an uncommon reliance on nicotine, and sooner or later your youth will start making noises like this. Think on.

http://www.myspace.com/plastobeton
http://www.myspace.com/sdzrecords

Music and Dialogue from Sandy Harbutt’s Australian Motion Picture ‘Stone’ 7”
(Finders Keepers)

Seems pretty redundant to say “well this is a strange one”. Ever the pioneers, Finders Keepers throw caution to the wind and bring us a compressed burst of exactly what the title states, melted onto vinyl. I’ve been vaguely aware of Sandy Harbutt’s film ‘Stone’ for a while now re: it’s status as a landmark Australian exploitation/counter-culture artefact, and I enjoyed watching clips from it in the excellent Ozploitation documentary ‘Not Quite Hollywood’ last year. But if the evidence presented on this 7” is accurate, clearly I need to track down the complete movie ASAP, as ‘Stone’ sounds far-fucking-out!

Motorcycle engines roar through krautrock echo chambers; petrol tank explosions ricochet through slapback delay; morbid funk-rock blares; Australian bikies yell about worshipping Satan and initiating outsiders into the rites of their master. “Man, I love The Gravediggers – they are too cool”, says some guy in a pub, accompanied by strange, staccato musicbox jingles. “One night they came in here with The Orgasm; some of them had laid some really good acid on The Diggers, cos The Diggers used to travel with ‘em”… and so it goes on. “I guess we all just… CAME together”, says some drugged sounding girl. More echoed explosions. ‘Stone’, ladies and gentlemen – I can scarcely wait.

Quite what purpose this 7” serves is harder to quantify – would weirdo DJs drop this mid-set? Will people play it on their internet radio shows? Are cult movie fans gonna play this to their friends to convince them to watch the film? Or are malcontents like me just going to cackle over it in the privacy of their own homes? Overall the experience is similar to spending five minutes watching weirdo movie trailers on Youtube and then blinking and trying to bring yourself back to reality. And that’s something I like to find time for pretty much everyday, home broadband connections allowing, so HALLELUJAH, and thank you again Finders Keepers/B-Music – my life would be a far duller place without you.

http://www.finderskeepersrecords.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lloTd45PFPg

Yeh Deadlies – Magazine b/w Constitution Hill (Poltergeist / Fake Indie Label)

An absolute joy of a single from this Dublin group, prominently featuring Annie Tierney ex of Chicks on guitar and co-vox, so all you folks who helped make the post I did about Chicks a few years back this blog’s most popular item by a factor of about ten should clearly pay attention!

I very much enjoyed listening to Yeh Deadlies on myspace a while back, their predominantly gentle, folkie approach sounding rich and genuine and full of love, hitting the same sweet spots that the early Herman dune albums used to do for so well, and that 90% of modern ‘folk’ artistes manage to miss by a landslide. The best kind of folksie music, I think, is always the kind that sounds like it was made outside of consideration of any kind of music scene or industry, by some kinda generous and warm-hearted people who know each other well, just doing some songs with sounds and words that they like. It’s a difficult balance to maintain, but Yeh Deadlies seem to fit the bill perfectly.

So a single with a couple of examples of that on it would have been dead nice, no question, but imagine my surprise when ‘Magazine’ revs up with a punk drum beat, fizzy fuzz-tone guitar and a lead vocal from Annie herself, an absolutely beautiful nugget of super-optimistic, shambolic, sugar-rush, we-can-do-anything, distantly wistful, cardigan-wearin’ power-pop that bounces around like sitting on a freshly mown hillside with your friends on the last day of school in July, throwing chewing gum at passing cars… or something. Man, it’s almost as good as Chicks, or Mary Lou Lord, or pre-major label Kenickie, and only a *bit* more grown up. It’s so great I could cry.

The B-side, ‘Constitution Hill’ is really lovely too – more in the folksie sorta vein described above. I don’t have much to say about it; it’s about leaving a party prematurely and walking on a hill and feeling sad, and it’s approximately a hundred times better than every other song you’ve heard this year about walking on hills feeling sad. It makes me feel funny in my tummy, in the way these kinda songs are always meant to, but so rarely ever do.

Incidentally, the few real life Irish people I know are all apt to describe things as being ‘deadly’, in the same way we in this country would say ‘cool’ or ‘awesome’ or whathaveyou, so that’s presumably where these guys take their name from. I always find it really interesting, the way that slang like that does or doesn’t spread from place to place, the same way that some of the weird jokes and tricks and stuff that spread around the playground when you were at school seem to be universally recognised around the country, while others are meaningless to anyone who didn’t go to your specific school, and…. well anyway, who cares – please listen to this single, it’s really, really special.

http://www.myspace.com/yehdeadlies
http://www.myspace.com/poltergeistrecords
http://www.myspace.com/fakeindielabel

Labels: Brilliant Colors, Doctor Scientist, Finders Keepers, Lil Daggers, Octagon Control, Plasto Beton, singles reviews, Yeh Deadlies