Hey everybody, Satan’s Satyrs have a new album out, entitled ‘Die Screaming’. That's not the one I’m reviewing here. Instead today, I want to talk about their debut, ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’, which was recorded back in 2011, and got a UK release last year on Bad Omen Records.

I’ll confess that when I saw the band’s name and the cover artwork pop up on record shop update emails, I did an “oh-for-gods-sake” eyeroll and moved on. I mean, theoretically it’s the kind of stuff I love forever without question, but I dunno… hitching a ride on all this exploitation/biker movie imagery just seems so *obvious* in this day and age, and I guess I’ve just been burned too many times by all these second-rate, shlock horror-themed bands. (Anyone want an Acid Witch CD? – you pay the postage.) I mean, maybe it was campy surf music, maybe it was sloppy metal, but if they’re gonna put so little imagination into their visual presentation, so little weirdness or mystery, I really just don’t care. NEXT!

Bad move on my part. Because as it turns out, ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’ represents an absolute riot in the middle of a fire-storm of total, heartfelt rock n’ roll of a rare and beautiful kind. The sort of record that rocks so hard, when you put it on you start to worry that maybe it’s speeding up your heartrate and making you short of breath. Like it’s all just a bit too much, like maybe you’re too old and unfit to safely stand in the presence of this level of rocking-ness? It’s been a while since music made me feel like that (at least not in a good way), but the A side of this thing is like being forced to ride a rollercoaster against your will, and that’s usually an immediate sign of quality when it comes to rock music, right?

The album title and cover art, which I initially took to be the work of cynical grown ups taking the path of least resistance, takes on an entirely new complexion when you reconsider it as the home recorded debut of a nineteen year old kid from the town of Herdnon, Virginia, who, according to this interview with The Quietus, tracked all the instruments himself and then mixed the whole damn thing at home on headphones, because ‘if you want something done right..’ etc. His oft-repeated twin inspirations: Electric Wizard and Black Flag. His available resources: a ferocious, perfectionist talent, insane reserves of teenage energy and (one assumes) a head full of raging, twisted hormones.

The result: ‘Wild Beyond Belief!’. Forty something minutes of pure heavy metal nirvana. If you’re listening on the computer, you’ll probably have to turn it up real loud because it’s really badly recorded with loads of compression and stuff, but WHY WOULDN’T YOU HAVE TURNED IT UP REAL LOUD ANYWAY, FERCHRISSAKE? What kind of a loser are you… ahem.

Anyway. Wow, just wow. This shit sounds like… well… I dunno. Imagine Motorhead or High On Fire or a band like that, if, instead of seasoned professionals, they were just a bunch of delinquent teenagers living in the middle of nowhere making lo-fi punk. And imagine that they drank a bunch of beer one day, and got really psyched up talking about horror movies and stuff, then scampered into the practice room to record a tape solely for the purpose of sending it to the guy from Electric Wizard, in the hope that he’d really like it and invite them to tour with them. So they filled it with MASSIVE RIFFS, and growly, strangulated tough guy vocals, and motorbike noise, shouting about Satan, and sickly, wah-wah covered lead overdubs, laughing and shredding all the way until they collapsed in exhaustion. Well yeah, that’s kinda what this sounds like. And in case you haven’t got the point yet, it sounds AMAZING.

Often, when it gets too ‘professional’ and serious, metal just loses me. When it’s all technical, and ‘conceptual’, and endlessly pummelling; boring and headache-y. I much prefer it when it’s like this, stuck in its most “primitive” stage of development - a raging cacophony of teenage lunacy, bluntly filtered through the most obvious and stupid signifiers of ‘rebellion’ that come to hand.

Even with the all horror movie stuff, I mean… there’s a *very fine line* between bands who seem to pick up on this sort of thing just for a shtick, so they have a readymade fanbase and don’t have to think too hard about their lyrics and artwork, and those who really *get it* - those who sound like they understand the mad, intoxicating power of these movies and really want to try to capture it in their music. The sort of people who, if they could, would probably inject the pure, distilled essence of Werewolves on Wheels straight into their veins. You can probably guess which side of that line I feel that Satan’s Satyrs come down on, in spite of this album’s amateurish cover art. His Satanic Majesty Jus Osborn obviously agreed, as he has now actually drafted Satyrs main man Clayton Burgess in to play bass in Electric Wizard, no less! When the aforementioned Quietus interview was conducted, Mr. Burgess was happily hanging out in Dorset, enjoying “..movie marathons at the ‘Wizard house”. High five dude - that’s what I call a result.

‘Wild Beyond Belief!’ isn’t a perfect record. As mentioned, the murky recording quality will prove troublesome for some, and it’s a very front-loaded album too. Whilst each track on the first half is an absolute ripper, momentum and quality control tends to slip *slightly* through parts of the B-side. It still rules though… actually, forget this stupid, nit-picking paragraph – on reflection, every cut here except maybe the self-titled last one is just completely fantastic, and even that one’s *pretty good*. Actually, who am I kidding, it’s BRILLIANT. Fuck this ‘critical balance’ business, this IS a perfect album. There, I said it. Chances are you’ll know within the first five seconds of the first track whether you’re IN or OUT, and if the former, after that it’s all just gravy. If you still want to hear the spirit of white, suburban delinquent rock music alive and well in the 21st century, refined right down to its stupidest, most degraded, most invigorating form, well… this is it, right here. Bang your greasy locks and gorge yourself ‘til your brain is gone.

Listen on Youtube.

Buy from Bad Omen.

Visit Satan’s Satyrs on Bandcamp.

Also, check out their 'Lucifer Lives' EP - Venom-tastic!

Labels: album reviews, METAL, Satan's Satyrs

As far as my own peculiar interests go, the Finder Keepers label has been absolutely on fire over the past few years, both with a swathe of choice reissues and, more importantly, first-time-ever excavations of impossibly cultish film music that has never previously seen the light of day anywhere except within the reels of the films that contain it (and sometimes not even there).

Best not even get me started on FK’s current series of releases concentrating on my favourite ever Italian film composer Bruno Nicolai, or their single-handed attempt to salvage the reputation of Polish synth maestro Andrzej Korzyński (maybe those will be the subject of future posts here?), but for the moment, let’s simply say that if someone had told me back in the distant past of, say, 2011, that I would be soon able to obtain an almost complete collection of the music composed for French director Jean Rollin’s wonderful surrealist vampire movies, all pressed on vinyl and delivered to my door for fairly reasonable prices from a UK address, I would have dismissed their suggestion as the fanciful delusion of a disordered mind – the kind of impossible, acquisitive fantasy that someone like me would quite literally dream about. I mean, what kind of record label would possibly engage in such a foolish quest? From the Herculean task of tracking down the composers, the rights and the tapes, to eventually dealing with the fact that probably only a few hundred obsessives worldwide would actually have any interest in buying the results of your labours, the whole thing just sounds like madness. But now, somehow, it has ACTUALLY HAPPENED, and we have those bearded dream-weavers lurking somewhere in the general direction of Manchester to thank for it.

As such, it is high time I got around to discussing some of these records, even though it’s sort of verging onto the aesthetic territory covered by my other blog, and as it happens, 2014 has brought forth one of the most interesting releases yet in the Rollin series – namely, a whole LP of the music recorded by avant-jazz auteur Francois Tusques for Rollin’s astounding 1968 debut feature, ‘Le Viol de Vampire’.

You will of course have noted that the name on this LP, ‘La Reine Des Vampires’, is different from the name of the film in which bits of the music appeared, so in brief, and trying not to veer too much into Other Blog territory, the sequence of events goes a bit like this: ‘Le Viol de Vampire’, as it eventually appeared in 1968, was actually a combination of two films, the first a stand-alone short made under the ‘Le Viol..’ title, and the second a mass of additional footage that Rollin shot when the producer Sam Selsky asked him to expand it to feature length, in spite of the fact that he’d ended the first half by killing off most of the characters. So, whilst ‘Le Viol..’ (the first half of the finished film) was scored with a few well-chosen pieces of library music (including the rather lovely ‘Profoundeurs’ by Roger Roger, which Finder Keepers also put out as one side of a 7” on their Kreep imprint), the second half, entitled ‘Les Femmes Vampires, had a little bit more money behind it and thus featured specially commissioned music from Tusques. The working title of this second act though was apparently ‘La Reine Des Vampires’, and Tusques seems to prefer that name (or perhaps wants to use it to differentiate his music from its use in the film?), so et voila, the title of this LP. To further confuse matters, Rollin also reused some of the music, without Tusques’ permission, in his second film, ‘Le Vampire Nue’ (1970), but… well let’s not get too bogged down in all that, eh, since we’re here to discuss the music itself?

And verily, it is music that is well worth discussing, functioning very well as a standalone release that often sounds entirely unlike anything intended to score a horror film. Though far from a household name (unless you live in a REALLY hip household, I suppose), Francois Tusques was and is quite a big figure in the sphere of European jazz and free improv, with a CV that includes oft-mentioned collaborations with such luminaries as Don Cherry and Archie Shepp, suggesting that our man was a regular on the welcoming committees whenever America’s finest undertook one of their “fuck this, I’m going to Europe” relocation plans during the ‘60s and ‘70s. Tusques recently played a solo piano gig at London’s Café Oto, priced at £15 a ticket on the door, so for those in the know, he’s far from an unknown, that’s what I’m sayin’. And, outside of ‘the know’ as I may be in this particular instance, I can only assume that the music on this LP represents an important addition of his legacy, irrespective of its cinematic connections.

As far removed as much of it may be from anyone’s idea of a ‘horror score’ however, neither is ‘Le Reine Des Vampires’ a feast of the kind of honking, free jazz blowouts that the big names on Tusques’ resume might lead one to expect. As to what it IS, with these possibilities removed, well… I’m not sure where you might best file it really, but it certainly makes for engaging listening.

At a blind-taste-test guess, you could maybe say that it most closely resembles the kind of high-minded Free Improv that European jazz would involve into during the ‘70s and ‘80s, but it is slightly more “lyrical” and conventionally musical, less technique-heavy, than much of that music tends to be, despite the presence of a great deal of abrasive, skittering and clattering hoo-hah. In part it even occasionally reminds me of the bass and string playing on some of Albert Ayler’s recordings, if you can imagine such a thing existing in isolation from both sax and drums.

In the main then, this is largely string-based music, alternately doleful and impatiently energised, that seems to distantly grasp at the ghosts of melody and composition, but otherwise has broken away entirely from notions of classical scoring, leaving a weight of absence and uncertainty in its wake – like some insane string quartet in an darkened theatre, fumbling blindly into the unknown.

The origin of this unusual feeling lies in the unconventional methods Tusques used to put this music together, as outlined in the sleevenotes to the FK release. Apparently, his first step was to record a series of piano themes he had composed for the film. He then played these themes back to his musicians - Barney Wilen (tenor sax), Eddie Gaumont (violin), Jean-François Jenny-Clark & Bernard Guerin (basses) - via headphones, and had them improvise over the top whilst the tapes rolled. He then presented these recordings to Rollin (and by extension, to the world) WITHOUT the initial piano tracks, lending the remaining music a unique sense of emptiness and uncertainty, with the central structure around which the other musicians were building rendered invisible.

As a result, I suppose you could even question Tusques’ authorship of this record, given that neither his compositions nor his playing eventually appear on it, but maybe that’s a dilemma best left to music theory students with a lot of time on their hands; the ‘Le Reine Des Vampires’ pieces very much feel like music driven by a sort of unseen guiding hand, and in this capacity I’m more than happy to give Tusques his due.

The complete lack of drums or percussion, usually an essential inclusion on even the most far-out examples of jazz and improv from this period, further emphasizes the music’s sense of absence and otherness, leaving brief patches of silence scattered throughout. The overall impression is that of a figure dancing with an invisible partner (a Rollin-esque image if ever there was one), rising and falling with a strange, mad kind of theatricality at the whim of an invisible, unheard beat.

Deep cello-like tones and mournful, muted horn reminds me a bit of Mile Davis’s classic soundtrack to Louis Malle’s ‘Ascenseur Pour l'Échafaud’, and in particular, I wouldn’t be surprised if Miles in this mode was a big reference point for Wilen on the sax, as he repeatedly launches into these conventionally beautiful passages of moody reflection that are largely responsible for lending the music it’s more ‘lyrical’/melodic flavour. By contrast, Gaumont on the violin keeps knocking out these snatches of sorta jagged, Eastern European flavoured almost folk-ish kind of themes that add a great uneasiness to proceedings, meaning that, if I had to guess what kind of a horror movie this music belonged to, I’d probably be more apt to imagine some ‘Repulsion’-esque Polanski sort of business.

The unused and rejected themes on side two of the LP are particularly good in this regard, less tetchy and scratchy than those on the A, and more inclined toward extended work-outs of pure atmosphere. Church-like reverb and slight variations in volume are used by the musicians to send tones careening off through space, and, despite the sudden shocks, unsignposted left turns and collapses into nothingness that inevitably characterise this sort of improv, the music’s consistent abrasiveness after a while becomes quite comforting; for such a wild and avant project, it makes for surprisingly good ‘relaxing in the evening with a whisky’ type music. Muchly recommended, if this all sounds even remotely like your cup of… something a bit stronger than tea.

Listen & buy from Finders Keepers.

Labels: album reviews, Finders Keepers, Francois Tusques, soundtracks

I’d never been out to see any bands play in Japan before, so April 18th proved an exciting Friday night for me, regardless of how much of a same-old, same-old it may have proved for other attendees and participants.

Pointedly named after ‘60s London’s legendary psychedelic scene HQ, Tokyo’s UFO Club is a venue I have mixed feelings about. Perhaps you know The 100 Club, on Oxford Street in London? If so, you’ll know how the entrance lurks behind what looks like (and indeed is) the glass-doored foyer of a conventional office building, complete with lift, listing of offices occupying the different floors and so forth? Well The UFO Club has a similar set-up, common to many Tokyo bars/shops/miscellaneous places, only much, much smaller. Downstairs, and it really is a tiny bloody place, just a single square room, maximum capacity well under 100 I woulda thought, plus a bonus smoke-filled stairwell . Very much going for that ‘60s basement club vibe, we’re talking black on red psychedelic swirls on the walls, DJ in the corner blasting his Nuggets collection, smoky air drifting around with zero ventilation. I like it! I dunno why, but I always feel very much at home in these contrived ‘60s style basement joints… somehow they seem to have an appeal that goes beyond mere retro-ness, I hope. It’s like The Buffalo Bar in London; ostensibly, there’s nothing particularly good about it, but it just feels like a comfortable place to be; a suitable environment for music to happen. Just like the singer in some Brazilian Who covers band the DJ is probably rocking somewhere at this very moment, I can’t explain.

There are a few people milling about at The UFO club when we arrive early-ish. We meet an enthusiastic label owner / promoter guy who tells us excitedly of gigs and such that are going down. Nice one man, good to meet you! The DJ has brought some friends, and they’re having smoke, comparing records. In the seats on the other side of the room, several girls are decked out in their mod/punk finery, sitting silently and frowning, apparently alone. Well it must be difficult to interact when you’re wearing sunglasses in a darkened basement. Cue The Cramps! We don’t really get many of those absolutely determined, THIS-IS-MY-STYLE, I-AM-MAKING-THE-SCENE-TONIGHT type people (Fowley-Children?) back in the UK, so it’s kinda lovely to see, in a way.

The UFO Club serves beer in big cardboard cups, like you might get at an amusement park. And why not! I can get with that. Generic Japanese lager might not exactly be the best brew in the world, but nonetheless it has a certain kinda.. clean?.. feel to it that serves well for music venue drinking – it lacks that sorta nasty, greasy feel you get with your plastic pint at most of the UK’s shittier cattle-pen entertainment establishments. So that’s nice.

The absolute best thing about the UFO Club though is that it has a set of red velvet curtains in front of the stage, which are closed between acts, meaning that instead of going through the tedious ritual of watching groups setting up – scrutinising and pre-judging them before they’ve hit a note – you simply have a few anonymous amp clicks, tuning up noises and snare rolls to alert you to the fact that things are afoot, before the curtains part, and BAM, the visual and musical totality of the band hits you all in one go. A simple change to yr standard gig-going routine, but a very fun and effective one, I think.


On first, shortly after 7pm, Mule Team seem a bit out of place at The UFO Club, I think. A new-ish band comprising both members of fantastic blues-punk duo D/i/s/c/o /s (whose one recorded track to date was one of the absolute best things I heard last year) alongside a couple of guys whose past credits include the band Blotto (whose totally killer cuts you may recall finding on the flipside of that Hard Skin 7” I reviewed on here a few years back), Mule Team seem atypical within Tokyo’s garage/whatever scene, in that they are modest and easy-going, as well as being extremely good at what they do. Offering no Big Style, no ‘performance’ moves, no big headlines to make what themselves stand out, they’re just four likeable guys playing some fun, non-denominational rock n’ roll, with a solid groove and fair bit of fuzz and clatter. And lo and behold, it’s great.

The older I get I think, the more fed up I get of all these bands trying desperately to be a “one listen will BLOW YOUR MIND” type proposition. I’d far rather listen to some group like this, just quietly knocking out some good shit, any day of the week. Toes are tapping, and I’m just starting to think “y’know, these guys kinda remind me a bit of Creedence”, when right on cue they launch into a cover of ‘Bad Moon Rising’. Nice one! It feels good to be momentarily on the same wave length of these guys – they are A1 in my book. They seem very proud that their set was only 13 minutes long, but I could’ve listened to them wailing away all night.

(No recordings or web presence yet, but you can watch a video of Mule Team performing back in January here.)

Tellingly, the members of Mule Team swiftly disappear post-set to have a drink elsewhere, and the next time the curtains part, I can very much understand why. It would be an overstatement to say I ‘hated’ the redundantly named Vivian Boys – they were perfectly alright, really – but they do very much represent the polar opposite of everything I liked so much about Mule Team. A contrived and slightly toxic-seeming style-over-substance type outfit, the group’s Big Style moves seem somewhat confused (the guitar guy has Beatles haircut, a mod suit & tie outfit and a Charles Manson sticker on his guitar, the bass player is a leather-trousers rockabilly), and their music is a sloppy, one dimensional mess of distortion and repetitive shouting.

I hope I will never be one to bag on people for poor musicianship, especially given that I’ve put in some hours playing terrible, cack-handed bass in public myself, but I’m afraid it is impossible to move on here before we discuss the bass player, who… well, he needs discussing, let’s put it like that. Sometimes he does manage to perk himself up to what you might call a Sid Vicious level of proficiency, but for long sections of the band’s set, he acts like a man who has never even seen a picture of someone playing bass before, randomly running a finger up and down the fretboard completely out of time with the beat, whilst strumming across the strings like he’s playing a chord. Astonishing. Dude, I don’t mind that you’re mainly up there to pose, but please stop doing that, or at least turn your volume down - it makes an awful, stupid noise, and just makes your band seem ridiculous.

So that’s Vivian Boys. They play far, far longer than a band operating in this style really should, especially when appearing fourth on the bill, and the most memorable moment besides the bassist’s chronic Walk-the-Walk failure is a cover of the Velvets’ ‘There She Goes’, which they render in totally flat, identikit punk style, but… it’s a good tune, y’know? I know I shouldn’t be too harsh on these guys - after all it’s just a load of crappy old punk fun at the end of the day and people seem to enjoy it, but this sorta snotty, narcissistic, dress up attitude is really not very appealing to me right now.

With than in mind then, it’s just as well we choose this juncture to pop out and get some noodles, because when we return…. well, you know when you open the door to a room and just involuntarily exclaim, JESUS CHRIST, what is going ON in here? Well, an outfit called Young Parisians is apparently what was going on in this one. A “glam band” quite evidently, these fellows seem to have got together according to the logic that, hey, Roxy Music were a bunch of mismatched weirdos, and things seemed to work out ok for them, right? Bad move. In brief then: the singer is a large gentleman (as in, tall and kinda bulky, not fat) who very much wants to be Ziggy Stardust. He has home-made silver-plated cycling gloves, looking rather like the woman with the silver hand in ‘Repo Man’, which is quite sweet. The drummer looks pretty Roxy (quiff and Elvis shades matched with a fur coat (who the hell plays drums in a fur coat?!)), and the bassist looks like he could’ve been in Rocket From The Tombs or something. My favourite member is the rhythm guitarist, who is playing a 50% scale guitar, has a face that suggests a hard life poorly lived, and wears a small straw hat and scuffed red motorcycle leathers. I think I’d like to hear that guy’s band.

I don’t wanna seem like I’m writing them off out of hand, but Young Parisians’ music is a bit of a turgid mess unfortunately, and I fear their main drawback is the lead guitarist, who seems to have spent twenty years locked in his bedroom learning to play Jimmy Page solos note for note, and now he’s out in the wild, he’s damn well going to make sure we feel every minute of it, regardless of the needs of whatever song his colleagues are trying to do something with. Their closing number has a passable ‘Rock n Roll Suicide’ kinda vibe to it, but all the bloody bombast and pastiche is making my teeth hurt.


After all that, it’s a happy moment when gig organisers The Fadeaways emerge from behind the curtains next. Still heavy on the pastiche, but this time round we’re looking at a no nonsense boilerplate retro-garage band of the kind that I often wish could be installed on every street corner, in locales where they are not present already. These guys have the matching striped t-shirts, the Vox guitars and about 148 songs that all sound like slightly rewritten Standells numbers played at double tempo. But within these strictly defined limitations, they know their shit and they OWN it, allowing no hint of so-called ‘originality’ to sully their dream. They play hard, with much capital letters ENTHUSIASM, and when the time comes for synchronised jumping, even the drummer leaps off his stool as if it were fitted with an ejector seat. Fun for all the family.

After such a brisk demonstration of cheery rock n’ roll professionalism, it’s a bit of a jarring tonal shift that brings us to tonight’s headliners, who are – who’da thought it? – a band from London! Billed as a kinda spin-off from considerably-better-than-the-name-would-suggest outfit Mean Bikini, whom I’ve seen a few times back home, it’s difficult to really know what to make of Bikini Bandits, such is the aesthetic disjuncture between the slick rock n’ roll fun that tonight’s Japanese bands have by-and-large been offering, and the ragged, cynical, post-punkoid mess these cats appear to be bringing to the table. Comprising three blokes and two ladies, their performance was an utter, ale-ravaged shambles that briefly made me feel a bit homesick.

Stretched across a dusty skeleton of early Fall, ‘Flies on Sherbet’ era Chilton and disjointed Prolapse grue, songs seem to ramble on to no very clear intent as instruments and vocal lines rise and fall in the mix apparently at random, and basically the group seem to be having a fairly dreadful time of things, ala Comet Gain on one of their blurrier evenings. A grim business and no mistake, but I kinda like it despite myself. God knows what the assembled crowd make of all this, but, if only my language skills were up to it, I felt a bit like turning to people and saying; “yeah guys, this is the way we roll back in London! We got fed up with GOOD bands - now we all listen to this kinda shit!” The whole thing is kinda perversely funny, really – a very obscure cross-cultural car crash for the ages.

Upon chatting to some of the band members afterwards – they all seem like very nice people, btw -certain facts were revealed that very much helped me to put Bikini Bandits’ somewhat mystifying performance into its proper context. To wit: 1. Following an apparent melt-down in the line-up of Mean Bikini, this new band was thrown together with only a few weeks’ notice in order to fulfil these pre-booked Japanese tour dates. Perhaps this was even their first public appearance? I’m not sure. 2. The band members had arrived at the airport only a few hours beforehand, visiting Japan for the first time, and were totally jet-lagged. 3. They were borrowing other bands’ equipment, and were largely unable to communicate with the soundman. 4. As you’ll appreciate, they REALLY, REALLY did not want to be headlining. 5. And as you might expect from British people faced with such trying circumstances, a substantial amount of drink had been taken.

Taking all of these issues into account, I think Bikini Bandits got through their set extremely well. In fact I think their conduct was positively heroic. I very much hope that the rest of their Japanese tour went well, and that, following such a baptism of fire for a new band, they’ve been able to keep on playing and fuse their musical vision into something of lasting substance – for the promise was definitely there, even on this crazy evening.

And so, I guess that brings us to the end of my first experience of live music in the Eastern hemisphere. Late night drinks at a peaceful, back-street izakaya with the wonderfully friendly and generous guys from Mule Team followed. A pretty strange night all in all, but one that I very much enjoyed. Here’s hoping for more such antics the next time I’m over in Tokyo.

Labels: Bikini Bandits, Japan, live reviews, Mule Team, The Fadeaways, Vivian Boys