1. Real busy weekend on either side of hearing the news of Chuck Berry’s passing late on Saturday night. We were organising/playing a rare gig on Sunday night, so if he’d been considerate enough to give us another 24 hours’ notice, maybe we could have fitted in a cover. Well, no matter – probably a million feckless guitarists out there right now practicing their rusty little finger / fourth fret business in time for next weekend.

2. Chuck Berry – ala The Beatles – is one of those guys so ubiquitous that younger music fans are almost inevitably going to dismiss and kick against their influence… until they eventually grow up and realise who’s really the boss. Sifting through the “roots of rock n’ roll” biz, it’s all too easy to fixate on the more cultish, wilder figures, whose reputations can still be seen as in need of defence (Bo Diddley, Link Wray, Howlin’ Wolf, Carl Perkins), whilst writing off Big Chuck as a cynical middle-aged pervert who scrubbed up r’n’b to make it palatable to white teenagers, and proceeded to milk them for the rest of his/their lives with his sickly High School Prom/Ice Cream Soda kitsch crap.

Then, once you’re broadly familiar with the sound & expectations of American r’n’b/r’n’r cira the late ‘50s, you’ll unexpectedly hear one of his tunes when you’re out somewhere, and think….. holy shit. CHUCK BERRY – yes.

It is a process we’ve all been through. If you’ve not reached the final stage yet, don’t worry, it will come.

3. Just last week, we were listening to this random Chess Records archival comp whilst cooking dinner. It’s got some blues, some r’n’b, quite a lot of doo-wop. It’s all good, all worth hearing. The, towards the end of side # 2, Chuck Berry comes on (Let it Rock), and fuck “worth hearing”, it’s PARTY TIME. The impact of that sound – cutting through the competition like a knife through butter – remains absolutely hair-raising to this day, and, as much as we may dig his contemporaries, it is HIS vision of rock n’ roll – with the REALLY LOUD rhythm guitar, the relentless driving-down-the-highway 4/4 beat, the slurred, conversational vocals and of course the short, sharp solos – that has come down to us over the years through punk, garage and ‘60s beat pop, whilst alternative models (the pianos and saxophones, stuttering, Diddley-ish beats, extravagant vocalisin’) have all fallen by the wayside, applicable to post-’65 recordings only as quaint period touches.


4. Hearing ol’ Zimmerframe trotted out declaring him “the Shakespeare of rock n’ roll” yet again is profoundly unhelpful re: gaining an appreciation of Chuck Berry’s song-writing, which – though absolutely brilliant – tends toward the kind of no nonsense, rock n’ roll shit-talking that crumbles to dust as soon as you start throwing big, poetical claims at it.

As mentioned above, I’ve never really been into the whole High School and Cadillacs “celebration of capitalist American teenhood” shtick that people like Greil Marcus probably bang on about (indeed, it is this aspect of Chuck’s rock n’ roll hits that I like the least), but if you can get beyond that, his gift for casually brilliant lyrics regularly blows my mind.

As well as being a total, dancefloor-filling rave up, I think Brown-Eyed Handsome Man ranks as one of the slyest, funniest, most imaginative songs recorded by anyone in the late ‘50s – and that’s just the bits of it I can understand. For, in one of its final verses, it also provides a perfect examples of Berry’s inspired use of numbers, place names, obscure bits of slang to create stanzas that are pretty much meaningless to the vast majority of his listeners through different times across different continents, but that nonetheless just sound impossibly cool, hitting the rhythm of the song just dead-on, creating that “I don’t quite know what he’s going on about, but I love it” feeling that echoes through so much of the best rock n’ roll. I mean, “two, three the count, with nobody over / hit a high flyer into the stands / round the thirty he was headin’ for home / it was a brown-eyed handsome man, that won the game” – wow. I don’t know a damn thing about baseball (which this is presumably about), but it just sounds amazing – like the live-wire patter of some betting shop hustler immortalised forever on the beat.

5. Whilst we’re talking lyrics, I never been able to get over “..he could play the guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell” either. Absolute genius, especially when one pauses to reflect that a-ringin’ a bell isn’t quite as easy as it’s cracked up to be.

6. Though Berry’s trademark style coalesced in pretty quick fashion, some of the early ‘hits’ where he goes a bit off-message are just raw as hell and stand out a mile. Come On is one of my favourites. It’s just punk as fuck – the backing so minimal, the sentiment so furious, and it’s less than two minutes long too; “..some STUPID JERK tryin’ to reach another number – COME ON!” – a band could’ve played this pretty much identically in The Masque or CBGBs twenty years later and fitted in just fine. (It was also the last single he put out before being sent to prison in 1961, which may explain both its uncharacteristic sense of impotent rage, and the fact it sounds as if it was recorded in one take in an unlit basement.)

And on the other side of the coin, you’ve got Memphis, Tennessee – for all that Berry worked up the image of a perma-grinning Teflon showman, this is just so plaintive, so fragile it’s near heart-breaking – “Marie is only six years old, information please” – who else was singing stuff like this, especially in the form of what is ostensibly an upbeat dancing record..?

I find it very interesting that both of these songs sound so primitive and un-self-conscious – sort of like half-formed, embryonic takes on his slicker rock n’ roll style - despite the fact that they were actually recorded towards the end of his initial, pre-prison golden era, after ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Roll Over Beethoven’ etc. Listen to all these songs in succession, and the chronological order of their release dates just feels wrong, as if his style was actually regressing into something more primal as debauchery and legal troubles took their toll… but I dunno.

7. Which brings me neatly onto the inevitable note that, once you look beyond the hits, Chuck Berry recorded loaded of really weird stuff; have you checked out all those wonky Hawaiian numbers? Or Crying Steel? Down Bound Train? That one’s spooky as hell – amazing track. Much in the vein of earlier black crossover stars like Louis Armstrong, one suspects that, beneath the safe “iconic” image he played up for his white audience, there was a really strange dude struggling to be heard.

8. Whilst “don’t speak ill of the dead” conventions allow us to some extent to gloss over Chuck Berry’s chequered history of sexual impropriety and statutory rape and instead concentrate on his music, it is my duty to at least note such matters and suggest that they do not exactly reflect well on our man, in spite of the charm and force of personality that comes through in his songs. Anyway, moving on…

9. Though some may see it as a late period (1964 for godssake!) rehash of his earlier successes, Promised Land is one of my all-time favourite cuts too. Kind of a knowingly concocted “best ever Chuck Berry song”, it never fails to get me going, and proves that Chuck can literally sing the phone-book and make it sound exciting: “Los Angeles, give me Norfolk, Virginia, Tidewater four ten-oh-nine” – again, practically meaningless lyrics to anyone not living in the Southern USA in the mid-20th century, but just check out how well they roll off the tongue. Maybe there’s something in that preposterous Shakespeare quote after all?

10. As I reflected in these pages a few years back whilst reviewing this brilliantly shonky Chuck Berry live album, I have nothing but admiration for the fact, after recording pretty much all the material that made his name prior to 1960, Chuck Berry spent literally the next fifty years living what I think must on some level be the ultimate revenge fantasy of every unfairly treated black American entertainment figure – putting in zero effort as he turns up five minutes before stage-time, probably after knocking back a fair bit of complimentary booze, shouts the name of the first song to the local pick up band he’d probably not even bothered to speak to before the how, and proceeds to grind through a set of gloriously cacophonous, half-assed crap – all for an audience of white folks who paid $100 per head to see him, and, hilariously, kept on doing so right to the end. Every time I listen to the aforementioned album, I had just hear his laughter as he pockets the cheque and jumps back in his Caddy, and it makes the shambling, pub band din within sounds all the sweeter.

Labels: Chuck Berry, deathblog

In a sense, perhaps it’s just as well that 2016 has seen me dragging out my “best of year” list through to the arse-end of the following March, because, in an all-time first, my # 1 spot belongs to a release that didn’t actually arrive on my doorstep until February.

I’ve been enjoying the mp3 version of ‘The Great Celestial Purge’ since I initially put my money down in September, so it definitely still qualifies as a 2016 release, but, given that (to my mind at least) this is vinyl music in excelsis, I’m really happy that my own tardiness has allowed me some to time to take it in on wax through the nice speakers before writing this review.

Mention of the box set’s late arrival is absolutely, totally not a complaint by the way. For a band who are still relatively little known, putting out a release on this scale is an example of Thinking Big that I really appreciate, and for the small label like Golden Lab to back them up on it is admirable. Producing a quadruple LP set of exacting audio quality and high aesthetic standards must have been pretty a pretty daunting task, and I’m extremely glad that they took their time and put in the necessary effort to deliver the goods, in the form of an end product that I suspect I will be keeping close at hand through many years to come. Well done everybody!

On to the music then, and, for the uninitiated, Manchester-based Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura are basically what back in the bad old days we used to term a “jam band”, perhaps cut through with hints of what in even worse days we called a “post-rock band”, but with enough shining talent and eminent good taste to ditch the negative connotations of both these pigeonholes.

Generally foregrounding the lyrical, clean-toned exploratory playing of nominal band leader Nick Mitchell, yr average Desmadrados cut features anything up to four or five electric guitars circling around each other, with delicately applied but defiantly weird effects turning one or two of them into pure atmos and smoke, as a loose, improvised groove takes hold, quite possibly featuring bass tone so warm you could hold your hands against it on a winter morn, and minimal, unobtrusive percussion grounding the tempo.

Working in an area of music that often overflows with ego, technical bluster and obscurantism, there’s something just so straight up, and… I dunno, inclusive?.. about the way Desmarcados do business, it’s just a wonderful thing.

I mean, what can I tell you: I’ve always loved the sound of electric guitars and their accoutrements, and I love all the things they can be made to do in the right hands. These guys, to my way of thinking, are very much the right hands, and ‘The Great Celestial Purge’ finds them doing all the lovely things they do on their guitars for literally hours on end, and I love it.

The Grateful Dead (in full-on ‘Live/Dead’ mode, not the country stuff, obviously) are an inescapable reference point here, but, if you’ve ever found yourself unwilling to struggle through endless minutes of baroque sing-songy bits and grunty Pig-Pennery to reach the transcendent ‘peak moments’ on a ‘Dead set, you’ll be offering praises to your dark gods the moment you cue up ‘Defixiones’ on the first side of ‘The Great Celestial Purge’ and find Desmadrados taking us straight to that peak moment from the outset and just letting it build and build across the entirety of the next twenty minutes, endless, nameless fragments of ungraspable melody cascading ever onward into an gilt-edged spider web of dreams. Or something. It was a random online play of this track that convinced me I needed to drop the best part of a month’s disposable income on these records, and I do not regret my decision in the slightest.

Another potential touchstone in the canon of non-embarrassing jam band shit is that of Swedish communal funsters Träd Gräs Och Stenar, whose spirit can perhaps be felt ever so slightly on the equally edifying side B jam, ‘Hogback Shingles’; a more subdued piece that sees the bass gradually taking the lead as flurries of exquisitely reverbed slide guitar detritus drift hither and yon through the mix, this one creates a dense field of valve amp detritus, melting like a snowdrift hit with a shaft of sun, and is perfect just before bed-time.

Completing the triumvirate of influences of course, we need to throw in a mention of electric-era Miles Davis and the wealth of cosmic fusion excursions that followed in his wake – a unbeatable blueprint for the production of long-form, improvised music that Desmadrados fall back on throughout this set, whether consciously or otherwise. And although the general vibe here is too chilled to engage with the live-wire tension and supressed aggression of Miles’s best dawn-of-the’70s sides, the relatively agitated ‘Red-Eared Sliders’ and the grimier abstraction of ‘Iluvia Radioactiva’ do at least hint at the possibility of darker currents within their work, reminding us of ‘The Great Celestial Purge’s loose concept as a memorial for assorted musicians lost during 2016.

The main thing I think Desmadrados take from Miles though is an inherent understanding of one of the key lessons of ‘Bitches Brew’ et al – namely, that the ‘slow-build’ is for suckers. Perhaps in fact, this is the key to what makes the music of Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura so much more mercurial and intoxicating than that of the majority of practitioners of the unpalatable genres I name-checked in the opening paragraphs of this post. Instead of treading water, holding back the pay-off, counting off the minutes just for the hell of it, each one of the cuts here sees the band zeroing straight in on what they want to do, establishing their M.O. for the piece, then building upon it, twisting it, demolishing it, rebuilding it, in a suitably ecstatic fug of group-mind creation, revelling endlessly in the gleaming, multi-faceted detail they can bounce off the walls of their magnificently appointed comfort zone. It’s a sweet place to be.

I know that rock/pop music is supposed to be all about innovation and confrontation and the wild energy of youth and so on, so perhaps I’m about to make myself sound like a worthless, irredeemable old white man, but fuck it. The music on this set is beautifully played and beautifully recorded, and it proves extremely edifying and relaxing whenever I get a chance to put a side or two of it on as I sit on my bed and read my book of an evening (perhaps with an occasional snifter of single malt to complete the idyllic picture). There is an awful lot of music to enjoy across these four discs, and I am looking forward to letting it continue to sink in for quite some time to come. Who knows, maybe I can bend the rules to have it qualify as #1 for 2017 too? If this what middle age feels like, bring it on.

‘The Great Celestial Purge’ can be heard and acquired in either physical or digital form direct from Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura's bandcamp page.

Labels: best of 2016, Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura

Right, more Vestage (Vestism?) here, with what, for me, was Mike V’s best release of 2016, the third LP from his more noise-orientated three-piece, Haikai No Ku.

Far more of a studio project than Blown Out (they’ve never played live to my knowledge, which is unsurprising given the sheer density of guitar/noise tracks stacked up on their recordings), Haikai trades that unit’s head-nodding groove for an exultation of grim, cyclopean excess, and, for those who picked up on their previous LP (Ultra-High Dimensionality) the recipe here is not much changed, with the full-spectrum saturation of Vest’s Matthew Bower-esque guitar/FX conjurations sprawling across the baleful, stentorian lock-step of the rhythm section.

In fact, it’s easy to picture Jerome Smith (bass) and Sam Booth (drums) taking an early bus home from the studio whilst Vest works long into the night on these cuts, crafting an apocalyptic, city-levelling sound that mirrors (in feel, if not necessarily content) the likes of band-era Skullflower (natch), Fushitsusha and other extremist rock/noise outfits through the ages. (I’d also like to imagine the studio engineer staggering from the building after dawn, bleeding from every facial orifice, but don’t want to get too carried away with such fantasies.)

Opening track ‘Saltes of Human Dust’ – it’s title taken from the alchemical quotation that opens H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ (what is it with people from Newcastle?) – is, appropriately, an absolute monster, Vest’s queasy, scooped guitar tones suggesting a sickly green hue, even as the high end white noise torment that gradually envelops the low/mids drives things toward pure black on the synaesthesia scale, a terrifying conjuration of electric obliteration that at one point features a sound almost exactly like a biological electric guitar letting out a strangulated shriek. ‘Temple Factory’, which follows, is if anything even more relentless, the lumbering, two note doom riff presided over by the rhythm section propelling the accompanying FX white-out toward ‘Akira’-level visions of rubble n’ twisted steel demolition.

After the transitional ghostly tumult of ‘Blind Summit’, side # 2 is a somewhat less sadistic experience, reigning in the euphoric overload of the A side for ‘In the Garden of Eclipse’s somnambulant, depressive drift of decaying chords and amp debris, bass and drums treading water in a manner reminiscent of Vest’s comrades in Bong. And, in closing, ‘Sea of Blood’ picks us up again with an almost Rallizes-like bass-line and laser-blast lava-monster guitar, shaking up a monolithic, head-nodding grind before a disappointingly early fade – a brief palette cleanser preparing us for whatever the hell comes next…

I’m not sure at what point in my life I began using the word ‘sadistic’ in a positive context with regard to the critical assessment of recorded music, but, sometimes (and with increasing frequency in my case it seems), we all need an absolute noise-wall white-out - and when that time comes, it’s a god-send (though who knows which god) to have one as pungent and hypnogogic as this to fall back on.

Available to stream and download direct from Mike Vest via bandcamp; the LP still on sale from Box Records.

Labels: best of 2016, Haikai No Ku

And so it came to pass that Ethan Miller and Noel Von Harmonson (ex-Comets On Fire), Meg Baird (ex-Espers, solo folksiness) and Charlie Saufley (of some outfit called Assemble Head in Sunburst Sound) got together at some point in the waning years of the Obama administration. Rather than merely reminiscing about the fun they had back at Arthurfest in 2004 or whatever though [how sad that such things are now a distant, historical moment, gone for good], they took it upon themselves to form an absolutely stupendous folk-rock/heavy psyche cross-over band under the improbable name of ‘Heron Oblivion’, and verily, people over thirty who like rock music did rejoice.

At least nine months late to the party, it now comes time for me to craft a written assessment of their debut LP, and to generally celebrate the existence of what is probably the best thing pressed up by the Sub-Pop label since before the birth of some kids who are now starting bands (or at least doing whatever ghastly things it is kids do nowadays in lieu of starting bands).

In short then: ‘Heron Oblivion’ sounds like a masterfully wrought combination of ‘Unhalfbricking’ era Fairport, ‘Everybody Knows..’ era Crazy Horse and a whatever-era-you-like motherlode of PSF-style amp-melting Japanese psyche…. and I probably don’t need to tell you that such a combination pretty much represents pure fucking zen perfection to your correspondent.

All the more so when, as here, the aforementioned antecedents are wrangled with such mellifluous ease as to allow the band to sublimate them into Their Own Style pretty much from the word go, dismissing potential buzzkill re: retro posturing or inter-generational plagiarism for the banal snarking it is, wiping such concerns from their desk with an authoritative sweep of sweet, sweet, indisputably rocking music whose spirit of communal interplay (if not necessarily its core ingredients) place it firmly within the Eternal Now.

One thing that should probably be highlighted here is the recording / production on this LP, which I think is absolutely fantastic. The quieter passages are hear-a-pin-drop glacial, with careful attention paid to dynamics and beautiful, unobtrusive reverb shimmering as if it were taped in a flooded concert hall; as soon as the guitarists hit their fuzzboxes though (which, praise be, they do pretty much constantly), the sound roars in maxed out and compressed like a jet fighter afterburner, the nuance of every string bend, amp shriek and wah-squelch captured in exultantly hair-raising fashion. The result is a fusion of genteel drift and no bullshit heaviosity wherein the two modes seem to be working in unison rather than in conflict – a rare and delicate balance that here works splendidly.

Another thing I should mention is how surprised I was when I checked in with some of this album’s press a few months after acquiring and listening to it, and discovered that Ethan Miller *isn’t* one of those guitarists. Instead, he remains way back in the mix on bass (which is near inaudible at some points) whilst Van Harmonson and Saufley let the sparks fly up front, one or both of them doing such an uncanny impression of Miller’s trademark wang-bar pummelling style from back in the Comets days that… well, I don’t know what to think, really. I guess great guitar players just think alike within the apparently blessed orbit of this band and their circle. Jeez, I dunno.

I just love this record, basically. It does all the things I like – simple as. The only thing that stops me in fact from sending Heron Oblivion to #1 with a bullet, tippexing their name onto the back of my jacket and hitchhiking across the Atlantic to see them play is a somewhat… I’m not quite sure how to put this.... a somewhat overly chilled, self-satisfied feeling hanging over the whole project?

I mean, Baird’s songs are flawlessly pleasant listening, with somewhat of an epic sweep to them, but I’m not sure they’d really make much of an impression without the electric pyrotechnics that surround them here, and, in contrast to my oft-stated belief that good bands should always at least pretend that they are kicking against some undefeatable opposition, Heron Oblivion sound like an easy-going group of professional musicians getting together to do the nice stuff that they do, safe in the knowledge that they are doing it well and that the results are headed for worldwide distribution on a nice label.

Which I realise is a spurious complaint that could reasonably be aimed at least half of the groups I write about here, but, listening to their records shouldn’t make us feel it, if you know what I mean – especially given that circumstances across the globe make it increasingly clear that this laidback/entitled approach to the creation of culture is one that – even for these guys – is increasingly looking like a luxury soon to be consigned to the past.

Never mind all that though - that this album is great is all you need to know in the first instance.

This LP is available in various iterations direct from Heron Oblivion’s bandcamp page, or no doubt from your local vendor of Sub-Pop product.

Labels: best of 2016, Heron Oblivion

As per the City Yelps write-up below, it is difficult to come up with anything new to say about Blown Out at this juncture, given that they seem determined to stick to a schedule of releasing a new LP every six months, all of them basically interchangeable, but each slightly more awesome than the last.

For my money, they’d already pretty much perfected their style back on ‘Jet Black Hallucinations’ in early 2015, but still the jams keep coming, as endless as the expanse of deep space en route to some nameless planet of space-rock dreams, with each release further tweaking the engine; John-Michael Hedley & Matt Baty’s liquid / telepathic rhythm playing becomes slightly more insistent and hypnotic each go round, as Mike Vest’s delay slathered guitar textures in turn become more detailed, more abstract, more exultantly otherworldly.

‘Celestial Sphere’ (a download-only release initially offered on-line to raise money for the band’s European tour) offers a slight dip in fidelity, as befits its practice-room origins, but the playing is superb, as the primacy of the bass is temporarily pushed back in the mix, giving greater emphasis to the gossamer web of Vest’s overlapping decaying notes and endless fried solos, particularly when – as now seems de rigour for Blown Out sets – things crash out into swirling chaos towards the end.

As signalled by the title and Anthony Downie’s magnificent artwork however, ‘New Cruiser’ sees the afterburners roaring on full-power once more for what at the time of writing stands as the supreme expression of Blown Out’s single-minded M.O. If you’ve listened to any of their other records mentioned above, well, suffice to say, this is more of it, sounding bigger, gutsier and more confident than ever, with Hedley’s bass back to the fore, even as the groove slows down to malevolent crawl on second side; engine burn-out dissolving into an ugly maelstrom of neck-scraping noise. Never mind that though. Just ease back in the big chair in the control room, light up a company-issue relaxation stick, drop the needle on side # 1, watch the stars roll by… and what more is there to say, really?

Back on earth meanwhile, I’m already dreading the moment when I’ll have to think up something new to write about Blown Out after they drop their next, and no doubt even better, LP. (That’ll be ‘Superior Venus’ then, out at the end of March.)

Downloads of both of these releases are available direct from bandcamp; the vinyl run of 'New Cruisers' via Riot Season appears to be sold out.

Labels: best of 2016, Blown Out

Regular readers (assuming I still have any) will recall me waxing lyrical about City Yelps’ earlier releases (see here, and here), and as such, I’m happy to report that this LP is objectively brilliant, and probably the best thing they’ve done to date.

Beyond that, it is difficult to think of much else to say that wouldn’t end up repeating the content of my earlier reviews, given that the ‘Yelps (if I may) seem on course to become one of those bands who, much like Motorhead, keep on doing that thing that they do, and keep on doing it well, with such exuberance that we will never get sick of listening to them do it, allowing them to continue doing it for the remainder of our (or at least, their) lives.

Further pondering the otherwise spurious Motorhead comparison, one hopes that a similar ‘heritage’ position within the rock canon will follow in due course for City Yelps, and perhaps a similarly ‘iconic’ sartorial style and lifestyle-signifying merchandising range too - but for now, those of us with the good taste to be in on the ground floor can revel in eleven more examples of that Good Stuff that we by now expect and demand.

Recorded once again under the auspices of Mick Flower (Vibracathedral Orchestra, etc) in what I like to imagine is a tinfoil-walled psychedelic dungeon of never-ending reverb, I think this is the best-sounding City Yelps joint to date, achieving a level of gloriously over-saturated analogue cacophony that few song-based acts would even be prepared to contemplate, let alone willingly embrace.

At the same time, Sean’s vocals are also easier to discerning here, easing the burden of ear-strain for those of us primed to enjoy his acid/stoic observational barbs. Subjects broached druing the Half Hour possibly include: walking the streets in the early morning (‘We Like The Hours’), insipid music industry careerism (‘Music For Adverts’) and a characteristic celebration of the power of cheapness (‘11.99’). Or then again, possibly not. It’s still quite difficult to tell, to be honest. Much like Lemmy though, Sean’s grizzled tones are a unique gift and a statement in and of themselves, and whatever he’s on about at any given point, you can be assured he is correct about it.

Also impressive here are the band’s increasingly successful ventures into eccentric, Swell Maps-esque freak-out territory, as exemplified half-way through ‘Canyons’, when an extended ‘solo’ is executed in the form of what sounds like a recording of someone taking a baseball bat to the exterior of a glass-fronted building.

Whilst I sincerely hope that said destruction was not visited upon Mick’s premises, this angry emanation from the streets of Leeds – thematically mirrored in the shattering skree City Yelps produce more conventionally using their instruments – is nonetheless liable to gladden the heart of any Southerner who’s ever had the misfortune walk past a Foxtons estate agents on their way to some grim, employment-related assignation.

Such is the rare reassurance City Yelps offer us that circumstances still exist in which buying a cottage industry LP of indie guitar music can feel less like a Sealed Knot re-enactment of past struggles, and more like an experience that is vital, invigorating, defiant and other such words that are more normally applied to shampoo or community theatre. Take a dose of this on the morning trudge, and get that bloody life affirmed in a shower of bullshit-rejecting, window-breaking dreams.

LP and download options are both still available from Oddbox.

Labels: best of 2016, City Yelps