25. Vivian Girls – Share The Joy (In The Red)

Poor Vivian Girls – they were in a real ‘damned if you do..’ situation with this one. Momentary hype bubble irreparably broken, I suspect a lot of people had the knives out regardless – to curse ‘em out as no ideas/no talent timewasters if they delivered more of the same, to mock their pretensions if they tried something a bit different, or hey, why not a bit or both? The fact that ‘Share The Joy’ is a pretty good record got lost in the shuffle as the band were being shown the door.

It’s not perfect, it’s got a few duds, but in terms of sound and songwriting I think album # 3 is a real progression for the group, with a handful of tracks that are flat-out brilliant. A significant departure from the Shangri-Las-via-Husker Du hardcore of ‘Everything Goes Wrong’, ‘Share The Joy’ has more of a mid-fi denim desert rock kinda feel to it – less of the distortion and compression, more of the beautifully straight-up, band-in-a-room kinda chiming slow-burn, verging at times into the shallow end of grizzled Crazy Horse sprawl. It works pretty well. The Neil comparison is particularly pertinent on ‘The Other Girls’, an ambitious six and a half minutes of opening track, expanding the band’s default mope to persuasively epic scope, carrying forward the kind of dead-eyed melancholy that’s been at the heart of all their music thus far into a few minutes of instinctive, emotionally resonant soloing – honest, rough-edged, heart-string tugging rock music. Nothing wrong w/ that. Much like the Girls At Dawn album last year, there’s not much to say to try to sell this to some hypothetical tastemaker, but it’s the kind of thing that always works for me, and I think it’s a killer track.

‘Other Girls’ establishes the pattern of downbeat melodicism and cool, clean-toned guitarwork that flows through all of ‘Share the Joy’s best moments – ‘Heard You Say’, ‘Trying To Pretend’ and re-recorded singles cut ‘Lake House’ - all securing the band a comfortable new foothold in the realm of a kinda (god, it’s killing me having to type this) punk-informed Americana, culminating in my personal favourite track here, the full-on wronged woman vengeance ode of ‘Sixteen Ways’. By contrast, the self-conscious girl group pastiches of ‘Take It As It Comes’ and ‘Dance (If You Wanna)’ fall pretty flat, seeming like unhelpful anachronisms within the band’s new musical narrative, but say whatcha like: Vivian Girls have made three records in four years, each of them emotionally and sonically distinct, all of them poignant, exciting and broadly successful. Chances are that’s more than you’ve done.

Sixteen Ways



24. Blood Patrol – Demo Tape (self released)

From last month:

“Listening to these demos – rejoicing in the muffled gut-thump of the practice room > portastudio > cassette > mp3 translation process – makes me want to learn to drive, get my licence, and buy a car. This is solely so that I could drive around aimlessly and give people lifts. And as they sit in the passenger seat, I’ll jam this tape in the stereo. I’ll start drinking fizzy drinks again, so that I can slurp from a big drive-thru cup as I say “yeah man, this is Blood Patrol” and start bashing out blast-beats on the steering wheel.

Hopefully it’ll be a long drive, so that I can cherish their expression of cautious relief in the moment of silence when the tape comes to an end… before I instinctively reach over and put it on again. I reckon I could spin it at least six times during an average slog across London.

Looking around me, I see indie records, psychedelic records, garage-punk records, whatever else. I listen to the sound of Blood Patrol from my computer speakers, and I think, fuck man, I’ve been wasting my life. I could have been listening to stuff that sounds like Blood Patrol. Why would anyone want to listen to music that doesn’t sound like this?

A metal review demands sub-genres, so what ‘THIS’ is is…. well I guess it’s kind of a hardcore/thrash crossover thing, with land speed record H/C drumming (not actually blast-beats, despite what I said earlier), low end Entombed/Bolt Thrower guitar chug, deranged ‘Reign in Blood’ whammy bar carnage and grave-soil gargling BM vocals. Perfection, in other words.

Completely devoid of the pretension and dry technicality that dooms much contemporary metal to the ‘not right now thanks’ pile, this tape is about as far as you can get from the pristine, multi-tracked headache factory of a studio death metal album. But at the same time, it doesn’t retreat back to the mysterioso trashcan-holocaust guff of yr average kvlt BM release either. Basically this just sounds like we always wanted metal so sound, before things got all silly – a functional low fidelity recording of some guys in a room, rocking it out with energy of a teenage punk band and the chops of stadium beserkers. It’s just plain fucking FUN. They’re singing about blood and thunder and destruction and zombie bloodbaths and rampaging through the dark night on galloping stallions and tearing monsters’ throats out, and they’re having the time of their lives. It’s exhilarating! It’s rock music! It’s METAL! It’s BLOOD PATROL. It… well, it rules.”

Unhallowed & Old



23. Kitchen’s Floor – Look Forward To Nothing (Siltbreeze)

“I AM IN A ROOOM!!!”, the main guy in Australia’s Kitchen’s Floor repeatedly screamed at the conclusion of his band’s primitive and unsettling first LP, and if the room in question was the one pictured on the cover of this second effort, I feel his pain. That curtain alone is the stuff of nightmares. Actually, that first record really grew on me between my placing it at, like, #40 or something in a previous year-end list and the emergence of ‘Look Forward To Nothing’ a couple of months back, and I’m pleased to report that it essentially delivers more of the same, chronic rage only exacerbated by the more conventional rock structures and a thicker, louder recording found herein.

Shamelessly sullen and antisocial, Kitchen’s Floor songs are like spiteful teenage tantrums in sonic form, compelling like picking scabs. Stripping garage-born adolescent rock back to its ugliest, most simplistic form, a typical composition sees the band picking out a single chord or a rudimentary riff, hammering it into the ground for seventy or eighty seconds alongside an infuriated, monotone complaint (“I HAVE TO DIE!!!”, “I’M ON MY OWN!!”), and calling it a day. Brilliant. I mean, what more y’dou need? Gets the fucking point across.

Whilst broadly accurate, I fear that such a summation fails to really reflect the fearsome level of craft and catharsis at work in Kitchen’s Floor. As innumerable one-shot garage-trash bands have proved over the years, recording a load of shitty sounding minute long rant songs isn’t difficult. Keeping people coming back to them though, keeping them feeling something whilst you rage and gurn, takes… a certain something extra. Skill and effort for two easy box ticks, sheer FORCE of discontent for another, topped off by… something else, too intangible for me to try to catch it in a word.

In this respect, Kitchen’s Floor bring an attack that reminds me of the earliest Dead C material (back when they still did songs), or the kind of balance that was in play when Nirvana recorded ‘Bleach’. Particularly startling is the way that some of the longer (relatively speaking) songs, through sheer weight of noise and repetition alongside some cannily-picked chord progressions, seem to acquire a more euphoric, positive character that raises them above the mire into clear, blue skies. Great when that happens, isn’t it?

After a decade in which 98% of studio time has been monopolised by boring indie bands with too much equipment aiming for that same ‘shoegaze’ sweetspot and failing, you’ve gotta ask yourself how these depressive backwoods fuck-ups manage to hit the bullseye just in passing and shrug it off so that they can yell some more about kidney infections and bedbugs. By being fucking good, that’s how.

Insects


22. Las Kellies – Kellies (Fire)

Hard to approach a record by a band who are ripping into another band’s trademark style – in this case, that of ESG – quite as relentlessly as Argentina’s Las Kellies are doing here, without one’s comments seeming like criticism. Hopefully though, long-term readers will realise where I stand on this one. Originality is overrated, and furthermore, I find it difficult to conceive of a world in which there are too many bands that sound like ESG. In fact, if there’s ever been a band whose style deserves to become a genre in its own right, ESG is the one. (And if for some reason you’re reading this and are unfamiliar with the works of ESG, well, best get on that right now. One of the best bands EVER, you guys.)

Acknowledging their chief inspiration with a faithful cover of ‘Erase You’ (“flowers from the garbage chute” becomes “flowers from the cornershop”, rather charmingly), Las Kellies have the whole thing down really – the monster bass, sharp-as-fuck drumming, the lack of any distraction from the central presence of the groove. All is present and correct. Perhaps they’re not quite as sparse as their precursors - more prominent guitar, faster tempos here and there maybe – but basically it’s a solid tribute, enlivened with some killer original material and a welcome touch of punk rock abandon.

An unlikely but welcome release by British indie label Fire, this album is the first I’ve heard from Las Kellies, but checking their bandcamp, it seems they’ve been tearing it up in their native land for a few years, and that their full scale ESGification is a relatively recent phenomenon. Their previous full length, 2009’s ‘Kalimera’ boasts a more guitar-heavy post-punk sound - still rhythm-led and still really awesome, it’s perhaps more reminiscent of their ‘70s Brazilian sisters in As Mercenárias. It is this experience and punk-grounding I think that thus gives them the tools they need to strip down the engine and remerge as the best damn ersatz ESG party band going, absolutely kicking ass on instant < 2 minute hits like ‘Hit It Off’ and ‘Bling Bling’, before getting more “moody”, throwing the expected dub elements and creepy noises into the mix on ‘Adwentre’ and the frantic, ‘Chistelle’-like ‘Bife Dos’. Oh, and on a more personal note, hard to beat ‘Scotch Whisky’ as a party tune. One of my favourite musical styles enthusiastically employed in celebration of one of my favourite things.

How much fun is this album? Well, as I write this I’m sitting here alone with a runny dose and hacking cough in an unheated room in the middle of the Welsh countryside, and I’m still dancing. Righteous through and through, I would LOVE to see this band live. I would love to book them to play some all-night party, where they could play as long as they liked. Much oomph on the bass. Much Scotch Whisky. YEAH.

Prince in Blue



21. Grouper – AIA: Alien Observer / Dream Loss (Yellowelectric)

I was a bit late in gaining an appreciation of Liz Harris’s work as Grouper. That whole “Mazzy Star through a fogbank” thing on her ‘breakthrough’ record ‘Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill’ was ok, but it wasn’t really doing a lot for me. Retrospectively discovering her earlier album ‘Way They Crept’ though, I was pretty blown away. Dark, inscrutable, frightening and beautiful, I think it stands out as some kinda masterpiece amid the whole of the past decade’s worth of psyche/drone/ambient product.

Thus I was pleased to find that these two more-or-less self-released albums see Harris dodging the inevitable pull toward song-based forms that afflicts recording artists like her when they attain a certain degree of popularity, instead picking up the more prominent vocals and clearer fidelity from the ‘Dragging..’ era and transporting them to a far more abstract realm, earthy guitar tones entirely excised in favour of eighty minutes-worth of austere, celestial womb-drone – a vast, distant music that seems designed to evoke the idea of an incorporeal spirit dispatching lullabies across the currents of deep space, catching the ear of some doomed astronaut as he floats in limbo, the 2001 star-child looming over the non-existent horizon…

So pretty great, in other words.

Alien observer is the more accessible of the two discs here, its exquisite title track the closest thing AIA has to offer to a ‘hit’, tremolo-damaged keyboard sound deliberately evoking the signifiers of a long-lost space-age, like something that might have transpired had San Francisco’s famed Space Lady developed a knack for fully-realised original compositions and hit the studio with them. Elsewhere, the cosmic drone prevails, often tempered with a disarmingly classicist approach to melody that nags at our memory receptors, particularly on the incredible centrepiece track ‘Vapor Trails’, which opens with a slow series of phrases reminiscent some half-remembered Christmas hymn… you can almost feel the dust between the organist’s fingers in some lonely Midnight Mass, the warmth of the pillow yr heading back to afterwards, even as the song’s unearthly atmospherics pull you straight into deep space. Drawing us down again and again into an isolation tank of deep, retro-futurist comfort, lulling us into submission whilst pulling at the threads of memory that keep our minds together, ‘Alien Observer’ is a sublimely beautiful record, perhaps a perfect exemplar of Eno’s original conception of ambient music.

And if so, that’s a sentiment that could apply doubly so to ‘Dream Loss’, which plunges even further into the abstract, sounding like music trying to retreat as far into the distance as it possibly can without disappearing completely, like intergalactic signals at the very edge of radio contact range. In spite of such intriguingly earth-bound song titles as ‘Dragging the Streets’ and ‘I Saw a Ray’, this is music doing everything in its power to hide itself from view, to sink into the subconscious, to prevent our ears from despoiling its secrets with our half-assed notions of structure and meaning, even at times falling back in desperation on that most obvious sonic veil – the curtain of deteriorating guitar distortion. As ever with work that convincingly trades on the unknowable, Harris is surely aware that only an ever-increasing fascination can result, drawing us back regularly into the deeps of this sound, in search of alien relics, luminous gases and moonrocks, rewards perhaps even more tempting than the sun-bleached bones and tarnished jewels of ‘Way They Crept’.

Alien Observer [from ‘Alien Observer’]


Soul Eraser [from ‘Dream Loss’]

Labels: best of 2011, Blood Patrol, Grouper, Kitchens Floor, Las Kellies, The Vivian Girls