35. Circle Pit – Bruise Constellation (Siltbreeze)

Male/female guitar/drums duo from New South Wales, making optimum use of two people and base-line recording tech to heft a sleazoid, faux-biker rock sound toward the heavens. Royal Trux must of course be heavily implicated in the absurd aesthetic sins being wrought here, but Neil & Jennifer’s Rolling Stones fetish and bloody-minded slop is exchanged here for a sleeker, tidier outer shell of dense overdubs, and a record collection birthed from the detritus of lost grunger millionaires rather than ‘70s cokehead millionaires.

In all seriousness, the “I’m a bad-ass dude from the 90s / where’s the heroin?” vocals on opening track “Wave Machine” nearly put me off this thing for good, but once one gets a hold of Circle Pit’s particular groove and learns accepts their affectations for what they are, it is hard not to emerge from side # 2 feeling like you’ve had a pretty good time. Specifically, the kind of good time factored around the inherent lizard brain pleasure of hearing queasy Chrome/Meat Puppets guitar spew lapping endlessly across the bones of minimal first-time-on-drums thud as both participants make snarling faces and laugh at themselves in the mirror. More relaxed stretches where they reign in the FX and cut down on the shtick have a nice, hazy feel to them too, reminiscent of Sam Jayne’s perpetually underrated Love As Laughter.

Indie-kids be warned: I think this music is probably really bad for you. I know it’s on a cool label and they have great cover designs, but prolonged exposure will likely make you eat worse, dress worse, and it will lower the defences which keep you safe from the lost legions who are still out there somewhere plying this kind of junkie-dress up pantomime rock with less guile and humour than Circle Pit. But what can you say, it feels good: like eating crisps.

Between these guys and Purling Hiss, am I sensing a sort of grass-roots revival of unapologetic stoner mong gaining momentum within the underground-ish music spectrum at the moment? Could “Make Your Own Monster Magnet” be the sound to be seen with in ’11? Wishful thinking maybe, but OH MAN, I sure do hope so! A good time to buy shares in whoever it is makes those cheap wah-wah pedals that are always turning up on ebay, perhaps?

Mp3> Wave Machine



34. The Sceptres – discography tape (Suplex tapes)

Impeccably cool of presentation and musical vocabulary, The Spectres are the instant hit of the random stuff I’ve found to spend my pocket money on in London’s record shops this year. Urgent, nerve-rattled, spiked year zero punk that’s smart and exciting without getting irritating or post-y or letting the pace drop for a second – cor, yes please! Some of these guys are/were in pop-hardcore crew The Shitty Limits, whose dedication to speed and concision can be heard throughout. Front-woman Bryony meanwhile brings some slighty more complex melodies and weirdly constructed material to the table, and her fantastic shriekin’, rantin’ vocals make my heart beat a bit faster, claiming kinship of a long and noble pantheon of characterful British girl yellers that runs from Ari Up and Poly Styrene through Huggy Bear to the likes of Shrag, Help She Can’t Swim and Betty & The Werewolves.

You could maybe throw some vague period reference points in The Sceptres’ direction (X Ray Spex, “Pink Flag”, Peel Session-era Slits, pre-album ATV), but none of them really do this sound justice. Everything on this tape may scream ’77-‘79, but there weren’t actually *any* UK punk bands that sounded quite like this. Which is a shame cos they really bloody well should’ve been. At least we’ve got The Sceptres now, to make up for the past’s deficiencies.

Sound quality on this tape (compiled as an omnibus of assorted 7” releases, I think) is predictably shitty - muffled and mangled and warped by the long neglected tape player on my crappy mini-hifi - which is frustrating, making me hope for my own sake that this new vogue for tapes dies fast, regardless of how pretty and homemade and wilfully anachronistic they look. At the same time though, it occurs to me that this one performs the function of a classic demo tape perfectly – hearing these fuckin’ awesome songs all scuffed up and distant makes me itchy and desperate to hear more of them, at closer range. If I was some record label mogul or venue-booker (or John Peel) back in the era when demo tapes existed, I’d have these guys on the phone pronto, asking how fast they could get down here to play this music for me properly.

Mp3> Holes (from ‘Primal Slobs Go Wild’ EP)



33. Black Time – More Songs about Motorcycles and Death 12” EP (Wrench Records)

This 12” represents my first initiation into the world of cultish London-based group Black Time, and what I hear is strange and loud and disturbing and wrong in all the right ways. It makes me go all shivery and glance around anxiously. I like it.

There is a strong aesthetic consistency running through this record that I really appreciate, from name and cover art to song titles, and to the sound of the music itself. If I tell you that the opening cut is entitled “Fast Motorbike In The Kitchen”, we could end the review there really – that one phrase provides an exact summation of what Black Time sound like, where they are heading, the unnerving effect they intend to convey.

After a few years during which many, many new bands have faced accusations of using low fidelity recording to disguise a lack of ideas/talent, Black Time put the shit-fi veil to more aggressive and old fashioned use, pulling a thick fug of room noise and tape hiss across the details of their work like a black curtain, using it to build distance and mystery, as deliberately as some kvlt black metal outfit might. Not that this is all grim and alienated and po-faced, mind you. On the contrary, it’s honest and immediate and loads of fun – like a fast motorbike in the kitchen. And, somehow, after generations of sub-sub-Mary Chain/Raveonettes humbug has bored us senseless with motorbikes and chains and leather and car crashes, there is a maniacal, engine room determination here that makes it all work anew.

If “Cycles” suffers somewhat from sounding more like The Fall than is strictly healthy for a band that is not The Fall, other cuts do much to win me back, with “The Living Dead” paying oblique tribute to my all time fave weirdo-biker film “Psychomania” (sounds like they’re recording with a TV playing one of the movie’s bike chase scenes on in the background), whilst “Mallory Park” stalks into being like a vampire hunter bumbling ‘round Highgate cemetery before exploding into a beserk volley of maxed out noise (here comes the vampire!). “Harley Davidson” even has a touch of that propulsive, wistful, hopeless quality to it, some hint of an early Comet Gain track lost in its clang and clatter, like sitting in a bare room in 1972, staring at a black & white picture tacked to the wall, of guys in shade, riding motorbikes - no longer in the kitchen. (Allegedly it's a cover of the Serge Gainsbourg/Brigitte Bardot tune, but I've yet to clock the similarity.)

Yeah, I like this. For music that goes out of it’s way to present itself as a buncha barely there, off-the-cuff bullshit, Black Time has real staying power.

Mp3> Fast Motorbike in the Kitchen



32. Umberto – Prophecy of the Black Widow (Not Not Fun)

The caravan of contemporary outfits paying tribute to the cool sounds found emanating from ‘70s/’80s horror movies rumbles on across the icy wilderness, with one the strongest and most shameless entries in this peculiar sub-genre to date, courtesy of one Matt Hill, recording on this occasion as “Umberto”.

Making the hermetic Carpenter worship of Zombi and, er, Zombie Zombie seem positively subtle in comparison, Hill really goes for the cup here, throwing in every fuckin’ thing he can think of that signifies this particular style, assembling an appropriately garish, bombastic, over-powering tribute to the work of Fabio Frizzi, Francesco De Masi, Goblin and anyone else who dared wave a synthesizer in the general direction of Lucio Fulci or Dario Argento between ’75 and ’85.

Opener "Temple Room” is particularly breathtaking – an eight minute pulveriser that lets ominous ring-mod squelch and synth-string spine-tinglers build up for a few minutes, before using electric guitar thunder-chords in even-more-ominous triplets as a bridge to a headlong rush into pulsing, Black Devil Disco Club-esque space disco euphroia. It’s like Mike Armstrong’s theme to “House of the Devil” amped up to apocalyptic scale, and if it doesn’t tick all yr horror-synth-core boxes, I dunno what will. Even the ol’ “sampled monk choir” gets a look in toward the end.

Subsequent tracks follow suit, each one taking one of those sky-scraping, inexplicably heroic Frizzi melodies by the scruff of the neck and feeding it through enough synth patches, eerie phasing effects and slopping wet compression to send any remaining competitors in the VHS-big-box-overdriven-mono-sound-retrogasm stakes crying home to mummy. Utter nonsense clearly, but within this specialised terrain, it totally does the business.

I’m sure you already know perfectly well whether or not you need music like this in your life. If you do, you’ll fuckin’ eat this up. If you don’t, you will probably never be in a position in which you contemplate listening to or owning it for more than a split second. I belong to the former category, and in terms of pure enjoyment I’d probably have rated this one higher, only the purely ridiculous, crowd-pleasing kitsch aspect of the whole venture makes it difficult to process from any purely sonic/objective point of view.

Mp3> Temple Room



31. Haunted Houses – The Invisible War of the Mind tape (Bathetic tapes)

I listened to a download of this tape *a lot* towards the start of this year, and liked it a great deal. Recalling my impressions of it and trying to write an outline for this write-up, I found myself thinking “that damned thing can’t possibly be as good as I remember it being, this description I’ve just written sounds terrible”. So I dug it out of iTunes and put it on again. It’s still great. Although self-indulgent and pointless on paper, there is some huge, indefinable weight behind this music that leaves me spellbound. It really gets under my skin, and I don’t know why. Thus this is very difficult review to write.

So let’s get this straight: Haunted Houses is one guy. He plays what sounds like an acoustic guitar going through a distortion pedal and other effects, massively overdriven and recorded straight to a boombox or laptop mic. There are miscellaneous heavy fucked bits of organ and whatnot, and the occasional thump of a distant drum machine or stomped boot on the floor. He howls and snarls and laments inconsolably, hammering away at vaguely-formed, dirge-like songs, often in 3 / 4 time or thereabouts. Every now and then, there is a moment where he sounds VERY much like the late Jim Shepard, and indeed, this album as a whole has a feel to it that reminds me of my favourite Shepard work, Vertical Slit’s “Twisted Steel and the Tits of Angels”.

Like that record, “Invisible War of the Mind” seems to mark out a space in which recording fidelity as we conventionally understand it is pushed to such extremes that the form of the music within collapses in on itself, destroying recognition of such fripperies as instruments, chords, song construction, yet letting the strange, dark emotional intent of the songs shine through unmistakably, daring you to recognise it, to hold it’s hand amidst the freezing, blackened murk of the near-disintegrated sound world.

For all that though, Haunted Houses is not Vertical Slit. It is something different. For one thing, this guy is a lot more plaintive than Shepard’s poker-faced desolation. He sounds real needy, almost… innocent?... at times; like some dorm-room shoegazer who’s just been dumped for the first real time and is letting his ‘true voice’ right out on tape. He’s wringing his hands tonight, but he’s still got some hope things might be better tomorrow. Fat fucking chance I know, but don’t tell him that, he might stop making music like this. It’s really something. (I hope he doesn’t read this.)

Mp3> Beach

(You can download “The Invisible War of the Mind” for free from the Haunted Houses myspace.)

Labels: best of 2010, Black Time, Circle Pit, Haunted Houses, The Sceptres, Umberto