I’m sorry for disappearing over the past few months. I hate these lapses in posting, but what can you do? In this case, a combination of brain shutdown resulting from excessive summer hear, unprecedented busy-ness in my day-job and a resulting delay in fulfilling other writing / communicating obligations has been largely to blame.

I’m back at the wheel now however, with a pile of new posts approaching varying degrees of completion, so please do try to stay tuned.

Prior to that however, I’ve got a few more quick recs to throw in prior to this coming Friday’s bandcamp revenue-free day, all pulled this time from the murky depths of the U.K. underground.

You all know the drill by now I’m sure, so I’ll resist the urge to engage in further hand-wringing re: DIY music’s current life support condition (rock n’ roll can never die, but by damn it’s getting pretty close), and just get on with it. 

 

Anthroprophh.

The defiantly old school photocopied / tinted cover gracing this new EP from Paul Allen’s Anthroprophh project looks as if it could easily have belonged to a 7” put out by Rocket Recordings and/or The Heads when they were first revving up back in the late ‘90s - so it’s entirely fitting therefore that the music within pretty much sounds like one too.

The three songs herein find Allen’s strained, rather desperate voice holding forth against the blights of age, impoverished touring and, on ‘Six Six Sigma’, “a truly awful corporate training company”, apparently. Despite the somewhat, uh, mature nature of this subject matter though, the churning, discontented mid-fi murk of these recordings could have seeped up from a darkened Bristolian basement at any point over the past thirty summers, and is all the better for it, proffering an anxious and assaultive brand of acid-damaged space-punk grue which continues to feel exhilaratingly beyond the pale of mainstream acceptability, irrespective of the calendar year.

Allen’s defiantly Out There guitar-work is of course a consistent highlight, abetting technically accomplished Groundhogs-esque shred with some truly unhinged pedal-board demolition work, spurting malfunctioning dot matrix laser goo all over ‘Six Six Sigma’, and doing a pretty good impression of a garden gate being abused by a variety of power tools on… well, all three tracks really, now that I come to think of it.

To be honest, I think Anthroprophh’s music works best in small doses (2018’s epic ‘Omegaville’, great tho it was, proved pretty punishing when trying to get through it in a single sitting), so an EP is just right, and this is some of my favourite stuff from the band to date. Blinding.

One aspect of this release which certainly does not carry over from the ‘90s of course is the eye-watering £10 price-point, and whilst I recognise that this is more a reflection of the punishing manufacturing/postage costs which have made the 7” format pretty much moribund in recent years than it is a record label cash-grab, I’ll still probably need to console myself with the download in this instance, meanwhile recalling the time back in Ye Olden Days when I bought a Heads single for a quid from their merch table because one of the band members had just spilled beer all over it. It’s still a bit sticky, all these years later... but then so’s the music, so it’s all good. 

 

   Dream Division.

Early 20th century popular novelist Dennis Wheatley was an extraordinarily tedious, arch-conservative blowhard who should by rights have been long forgotten by this point in time. And yet, somehow, his series of black magic thrillers, filtered through Hammer’s barn-storming 1968 film adaptation of ‘The Devil Rides Out’, continue to resonate with (some of) us as the epitome of a very particular aesthetic – that perennially dusty, almost pathetically English, ‘skulls and candles’ second hand bookshop take on dabbling with the Forces of Darkness which never ceases to appeal.

All of this is well understood by Tom Mcdowell, aka Dream Division, who has dusted off his favourite keyboards and recorded a painstakingly composed scene-by-scene soundtrack to Wheatley’s aforementioned novel – an undertaking which, like its literary inspiration, proves a hell of a lot more enjoyable than it really has any right to be.

Side-stepping to by now well-worn palette of woozy retro synth sounds popularised by the Ghost Box / Boards of Canada axis, Dream Division’s work here has more of an authentically un-cool, teenage bedroom circa 1979 kind of feel to it which fits the subject matter pretty well, variously putting me in mind of Ivor Slaney’s early doors electronic horror soundtracks, The Alan Parsons Project’s ‘Tales of Mystery & Imagination’ album, the DeWolfe library’s Astral Sounds / Kaleidoscope LP, Mike Armstrong’s theme from 2009’s ‘House of the Devil’ and (inevitably) John Carpenter’s score for ‘The Fog’.

Focusing as much upon the dynamics of composition and performance as on the accumulation of spooky instrumental textures (though there are plenty of those here too), these recordings ooze precisely the right kind of atmosphere, and Mcdowell’s tritone heavy tunes are pretty bangin’. Halloween’s creeping up quicker than you think, so be prepared and stock up in advance – just for god’s sake, don’t step outside the circle.

   

Mummise Guns.

Initially the brain-child of Luminous Bodies bassist Tracy Bellaries (whose CV also includes stints in Part Chimp and, way back in the mists of time, Ikara Colt), the self-titled debut inexplicably named Mummise Guns sees her working with a misshapen super-group of UK psyche-noise talent (including personnel from Pigs x 7, Casual Nun, Ghold and Terminal Cheesecake), fleshing out basic riffs and song ideas into half a dozen shamelessly maximalist Motörhead-via-Melvins bad trip stompers, leavened with a touch of Grey Hairs’ quintessential chug/swing and cooked up in everything-but-the-kitchen-sink style by Pigs’ Sam Grant.

With three guitar raging, creeping and blaring through the mix around the central driveshaft of Bellaries’ bass and Cleaver’s drums, together with Ghold’s Alex Wilson going completely off his nut on tonsil-gargling/dying vampire vocals and more effects than you can shake a stick at on everything, it sounds as if all concerned are having an veritable whale of a time here, somehow emerging with a sound both ridiculously excessive and totally solid. The most riotous, undemandingly fun set of UK underground rock gear I’ve heard in an age, this comes hugely recommended.

Unfortunately, the Riot Season label’s ‘no downloads’ policy means this music is effectively unavailable to purchase at the time of writing, which is somewhat irksome, but you can at least stream it to your heart’s content and hope the numbers might push ‘em in the direction of a change of heart and/or a repress. (I’ve got eight quid and my finger on Paypal if you’ll send me the files Mr Riot Season – c’mon, let’s talk. : ) )

 

Taras Bulba.

Three Gates Dub, Taras Bulba’s reconstruction of tracks from their first LP ‘One’ into The Orb-visit-Black Ark dub epics, has proved to be one of my most played releases of the year oddly enough, but ‘Soul Weaver’, Fred Laird’s latest venture under his new recording name, proves a different kettle of fish entirely.

Effectively a solo album (drummer Jon Blacow’s contribution merely consists of a few unused backing tracks “cannibalised” for use in the new songs), ‘Soul Weaver’ sees Laird returning somewhat to the wistful, expansive Northern English psychedelia which informed Earthling Society’s exceptional ‘England Have My Bones’ LP a few years back, in feel, if not exactly in sound.

More than usually concerned with capturing the atmos of Laird’s coastal North-West home, ‘Soul Weaver’ finds him dialling back considerably on Earthling Soc’s raw fuzz, instead constructing dense layers of ultra-reverbed guitar and noise textures, laid atop ramshackle homemade rhythm tracks, faux-exotic string ragas and semi-buried, sand and mist choked melodies which seems to pull toward a kind of desolate, Romantic grandeur not a million miles away from Flying Saucer Attack’s noise-folk reveries, or even yr long coat-wearing Van Der Graaf/mid-70s Floyd type stuff.

An ambitious and heartfelt album to say the least, this one’s going to to need a good few listens before I can really get my bearings on it, but one thing’s for sure – Laird has a gift for tapping into the beauty of this strange island’s psychedelic heritage that few other currently active musicians can match, and this record seems to take him deeper into the heart of things than he’s ever ventured before, so…. what can we do but take a deep breath of sea air and follow at a safe distance?

Labels: Anthroprophh, Dream Division, Mummise Guns, Taras Bulba