Another year, another untouchable masterpiece from Bong. Same old, same old, but if you’re waiting for my enthusiasm for this band to fade with time, seems you’re in for a long wait. I probably don’t need to tell you that they sound all better now that I’ve actually got SPEAKERS.

Following the tongue-in-cheek apotheosis of last year’s ‘Stoner Rock’, the aesthetic hand brake turn the band perform here is something of a stroke of genius, as the bulbous, mutant mushroom-filled sci-fi dreamscapes depicted on the former album’s artwork are replaced with a twelve inch square detail from J.M.W Turner’s ‘Thompson’s Aeolian Harp’ - gentle, rolling plains stretching out like some visionary recreation of the Thames beneath the band’s sigil-like logo. That it is my favourite album cover of 2015 almost goes without saying. (Fuck all these ‘portraits’ egotistically clogging up the fronts of contemporary LPs, you’ve got to love a band that’s into landscapes.)

Correspondingly, this time around Bong take their source texts not from Lovecraft or Dunsany, but from a few brief stanzas that I take to be of the band’s own composition; simple statements of cosmic positivity of a stripe rare in these dark days, and of course, they have to musical weight needed to back them up.

As I’m sure the Bong would appreciate given the previous fun & games they’ve had with genre signifiers and expectations, ‘We Were..’ expands their sonic palette to the extent that, by the end of side # 2, using the term ‘doom’ as a shorthand for this music seems utterly ridiculous. Indeed, ‘We Are..’ must be Bong’s least conventionally ‘heavy’ set to date, rivalled only by 2013’s ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ or their off-beat 2009 debut ‘Bethamoora’.

As I’m sure I must have opined previously in these pages, Bong’s ‘metal’ ancestry becomes distant indeed when they’re in this mood, setting sail instead for the realms of what I personally prefer to term ‘pure psychedelia’ – the same kind of non-denominational, maximalist ‘head music’ that served to take such prior explorers as Alice Coltrane, The Boredoms or Parson Sound well beyond the radar of their respective source genres.

On the A side here, ‘Time Regained’ does at least ground us with a familiar distorted rumble of sub-bass, decaying notes flat and placid as the gentle waters depicted by Turner, as a glacial locked groove rhythm from drummer Mike Smith keeps nerves soothed and clocks slowly ticking beneath. By the time Dave Terry’s magisterial proclamations enter at the half-way mark, sounding more assured and less potentially comical than at any point in the band’s prior catalogue, we been lifted to a mighty, head-nodding plateau of cascading, eternal echoes, room reverberating like a giant delay pedal, leaving us perfectly placed to chew over his words; “Friends, do not fear for the future / We are, we were, and we will have been / We are giants in time / Astride the ages”. Heavy in the ‘60s sense of the word. I think I hear Michael Moorcock knocking out there somewhere, if I could only but reach the door handle…

Suitably revived, we move on to the flip, where ‘Find Your Own Gods’ opens with an equally stark pronouncement from our narrator; “Find your own gods / not in dreary chapels and dismal shrines / but under the stones and streams / in faint mist on familiar hills / through soft morning light / behind the shadow of trees.”

For the track that follows, Bong dispense entirely with their conventional walls of amp roar, leaving the way open instead for a sprawling, open-skied jaunt down-river, conjured largely from phased string warble, crystalline synth drone, eerie cymbal swish and frail, woody, echoing tones wracked judiciously from Ben Freeth’s augmented Shahi Baaja set-up, before the drums eventually enter once again, like a bosun’s yelled instruction, pointing the way, ever forward, like the pulse that might have echoed through an alternative version of ‘Aguirre: The Wrath of God’ in which Kinski’s fevered quest really did lead him to a lost city of gold....

Another year. Another tax return. Another optician’s appointment. Another pay freeze. Another Bong LP. Life in the eternal now’s not so bad.

Listen and buy from Ritual Productions.

Labels: best of 2015, Bong

I know it is obscenely late to still be harping on about the events of 2014 (I mean, all music that happened before 31st December DIES on January 5the each year, every music-blog reader/writer knows that), but January was such a slog I literally haven’t had a chance to finish the few meagre paragraphs that comprise this post, that I was meaning to post just after completing the ‘records of the year’ run-down last month.

Before getting my shit together to move on to some actual 2015 listening then (to be honest, I usually find myself just listening to compilations and old records for the first grim few months of each year these days), time to finally close the bloody curtain on ’14 with some quick round-ups of other music stuff that pleased me during the year.

1. Live.

Amid a pretty wide variety of truly great live music I witnessed last year, the couple that stand out most strongly in my mind (not including the gig I attended in Japan, various performances by friends’ bands, my band’s own little tour etc), were, perhaps significantly, those relating to the Southern US garage-punk scene – a keen remember that those guys, collectively speaking, can still be untouchable in terms of live rock n’ roll, even they’ve arguably been slacking off a little on the “making awesome records” front in recent years.

#1 gig of 2014 then, to my surprise as much as anyone’s, was Jack Oblivian playing backed up by Memphis band The Sheiks, in a spacious and sparsely-attended Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club on an inauspicious Sunday night. What can I tell you – the group were, as the phrase goes, ‘cooking’, all ragged and good-humoured after a grueling European tour, and when they finished their allotted set and no curfew was called, they continued cooking, eventually playing for something like two hours, as the remaining attendees, last train home long abandoned, danced on past midnight. And when I say ‘danced’, I don’t mean “moshed” or "threw themselves about like drunken monkeys", I mean the people were actually dancing, to live rock n’ roll played by a well-lubricated band with a bag full of half-remembered r’n’b covers and very little idea what they’re gonna do next. If only that could happen every weekend. A really special evening.

Nearly as good were Tennessee band Natural Child, playing at the functional but always slightly dispiriting Shacklewell Arms. To keep it brief, going to this gig wasn’t my call, and I found myself feeling rather suspicious of the crowd, suspicious of the support acts, suspicious of the general vibe, suspicious of what I knew of the headliners via some quick googling. Then Natural Child walked on-stage and within ten seconds I was comfortable as a baby with a fresh bottle. What a fucking great band. If you follow my path of googling, you may find yourself unconvinced by copious weed-championing, dirty joke lyrics, some of the worst record covers of all time and a new album that sounds a little bit too much like The Eagles for comfort, but believe me – see ’em live and it will all make sense. These guys play like they were born with rock n’ roll in their bones – zero pretense, a warm, welcoming groove and a wicked good sense of humour too. Heroes to a man. (Intermittent testament to this greatness can found on their ‘1971’ LP from a couple of years back.)

Third best night out of the year was Shonen Knife, playing a short notice end-of-tour set at Café Oto. I’ve seen Shonen Knife quite a few times over the years, but this was by far the best. With the small venue, party atmos and fans-only crowd, the band seemed really comfortable, and happy to play whatever songs they felt like playing, dragging out some deep cuts and album tracks rather than relying on the same old fan favourites. The current line-up play magnificently, belting it out with the kind of world-beating, hyper-efficient positivity that does the stereotypical view of their country proud, and being able to stand right in front of them as they did so was a joy. The unusually varied set-list made for a great showcase of the strength & breadth of Naoko’s song-writing over the years, and anyone who has (perhaps understandably) written them off as a novelty cakes n’ kittens twee band really needs to check their head and hope they one day catch a set as good as this one.

Fourth best gig of the year was finally seeing Bong, playing at… what’s the name of that goth/metal pub, on a side street by Camden station..? I’ve forgotten. Seemed like a thoroughly decent place to watch bands and drink beer, anyway. I had taken some out some money with the expectation of buying a pile of obscure merch from the band, but as said merch was not forthcoming, there was only one solution: a quadruple whisky to sip as I stood front of the stage watching the band set up, and things went just swimmingly. Having built these guys up to the level of galaxy-bestriding gods in my mind, it was quite humbling to just see some young-ish, soft-spoken blokes from Newcastle quietly setting up their not-quite-as-elaborate-as-you-might-expect gear, but when they finally began…. the even-more-colossally-world-destroying-than-you-might-imagine maelstrom did the business. (Said business being an out-of-body noise-worshipping nirvana that no mere blended whisky could account for.)

Fifth and sixth best gigs of the year were the Static Shock events I wrote about here, with particular reference to the mighty Rakta (sorry – channelling Mary Anne Hobbs a bit there), and coming in at seven is the Makoto Kawabata & J. Francois Pauvros set I wrote about here. Catching Pelt in St Pancras Old Church a few months back made for an oft-challenging but ultimately rewarding number eight, pushing perennial number # 1 live act Chain & The Gang into a shocking NINTH place, even in view of them playing on the same bill as Comet Gain. Tenth? I dunno, my memory is all out at this point, but I’ve probably forgotten at least a few great things, so if you went to something unspeakably awesome and saw me there standing watching it, maybe write it in this space: _________________.



2. Comps & Reissues.

Here is a list of my eleven favourite reissues and compilations of old music from 2014. Really top year for this kinda stuff, and sadly I didn’t have the times or funds to check out even a fraction of the releases I would have liked to. I wish I’d found the time to write about all of the records below, because they are awesome, but those I did manage to squeeze out some words on are duly linked.




3. Old Records.



So, that’s it – END. 2014 is ovah! Look out for more scintillating, red hot coverage of 2015’s verdant musical marshland here whenever I can be bothered.

Labels: best of 2014, Bong, Jack Oblivian, live reviews, Natural Child, Pointless Lists Week, Shonen Knife

Well, you all knew it was coming, and the fact remains: if you’d told me five years ago that I’d spend much of 2014 engrossed in a record named ‘Stoner Rock’ by a band named ‘Bong’, I’d frankly have been a little concerned. The Newcastle group’s sly humour vis-à-vis their chosen nomenclature is easy to miss alongside the venerable seriousness with which they approach their music itself, so, before we move on, I will fall back on the words of bassist/intoner Dave Terry, as quoted in this album’s press release:

“It is a tongue-in-cheek dig at our usual classification as stoner rock and what the term has come to represent. The idea is to create our own definition of ‘stoner rock’ by creating an album so utterly stoned and repetitive to be a million miles away from the usual definition. Those who know Bong already will get both the humour and the philosophical redefinition… those who don’t know us will either get it when they listen or will never understand Bong at all.”

So there ya go. 2011’s incredible ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ and 2012’s sublime ‘Mana Yood Sushai’ may have been mammoth enough achievements for Bong, or so you’d think, but, fittingly given it’s emblematic title and scale (two tracks spread across over 70 minutes), ‘Stoner Rock’ sees the band striving for a whole new peak of sonic magnitude, seemingly setting out with a deliberate intent to make this one the ultimate, definitive Bong statement.

And do they succeed? Well… kind of. To bring in a totally out-of-leftfield comparison for no other reason than that I feel like it, you could say that if ‘..Ancient Space’ and ‘Mana Yood..’ collectively formed Bong’s ‘Electric Warrior’, then ‘Stoner Rock’ represents their equivalent of ‘The Slider’; pushing beyond their previous triumphs to create a record that is bigger, bolder and more ambitious in every sense, to the extent that it eventually finds itself staggering just over the edge into excess and exhaustion. Like ‘The Slider’, ‘Stoner Rock’ might not be the one that history will record as everyone’s favourite, but also like ‘The Slider’, that doesn’t stop it from being a bloody magnificent listen.

As far as uncompromising, glacially-paced drone-metal goes, I’ve always appreciated the way that Bong are a pretty listener-friendly proposition. By that, I mean that on most of their previous recordings, they like to get straight to the point and hit you with the good stuff (a result, one supposes, of their parallel antecedents in psychedelia and space-rock). The monumentally drawn out opening to ‘Polaris’ however signals a rather different ambition for this particular outing: ten solid minutes of distantly rumbling, Sunn 0)))-esque sub-bass drift, with percussion entirely absent and variation limited to near inaudible trickles of more crystalline overtones from Benjamin Freeth’s amplified Shahi Baaja. As the monolithic amp walls pulse and growl, Terry’s grandiose recitations from the Lovecraft story of same name almost dares you to either lose consciousness of the outside world entirely, to else call it out for the preposterous nonsense it is.

All this is mere build-up of course, atmos-building meditational stasis, bringing us gradually to the moment when the first, hesitant bits of hi-hat and kick drum filter in, falteringly gaining ground over the next ten minutes, as the guitars gain more mid/high-end and the drone twists into baleful, raga-like webs until finally, at about the 18 minute mark, the kick and snare start to coalesce, the beat gradually takes shape and, finally, we’re away! Think of a massive, vertical take-off Chris Foss spaceship; it’s already floating god knows how high up in the void, and now it is ready to MOVE FORWARD, commencing an epic, diesel-fuelled grind that spreads across a further 18 minutes of ‘Polaris’ and continues throughout the duration of disc 2,‘Out of the Aeons’, which forms perhaps the single greatest, most monumental stretch of slo-mo cosmic devotion that Bong have yet laid down (no small boast, that), the journey eventually taking us…. where?

Hopefully not to the Bong equivalents of ‘Tanx’ and ‘Bolan’s Zip Gun’, but hopefully you take my point. Wherever we end up, there’s no turning back at this stage. As a soundtrack to watching the solar system and milky way receding in the rear screens as your rusty craft sets forth towards glittering unknown vistas of Weird Tales pulp splendour, ‘Stoner Rock’ remains unequalled.

Listen and buy via Bandcamp, or get the vinyl from Ritual Productions.


(In other Bong news, it’s worth noting that 2014 also proved a great year for reissues of their work. New editions of early sets ‘Idle Days on the Yann’ (on Blackest Rainbow Records) and ‘Bethamoora’ (on Visual Volume) both provide a wonderful glimpse at the more overtly psychedelic side of the band, and the new vinyl edition of ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ on Ritual Productions is absolutely IMMENSE – all are recommended about as highly as it is possible to recommend anything. With the sheer amount of vinyl I end up buying off these guys each year, I’m probably putting their kids through college, but what can I say? The quality never slips an inch. One of the best bands on earth, no question.)

Labels: best of 2014, Bong

Labels: Bong

One of those groups who succeed in perfecting their chosen musical idiom so completely, and do so in such gargantuan style, that just about everyone else treading similar ground starts to seem surplus to requirements, I remain incredibly happy to have discovered the music of Bong a couple of years ago.

In fact, I love Bong to such an extent that a twelve month stretch without a new LP from them currently seems like a trying prospect indeed. To fill the aching void until their next magnum opus then, 2013 instead brought forth this live disc, recorded in St Mary’s Old Church, Stoke Newington, in 2011.

As you might expect, the sound captured here bears little trace of the cleaner, more purely psychedelic direction the band were pulling in on last year’s ‘Mana Yood Sushai’, with the necessarily muffled roar of live recorded doom metal and the unmistakable reverb of a big church building combining to make for a rather muddy, undifferentiated roar of a record. If Bong’s recent studio albums have sought to take us to celestial dreamlands or the depth of space, this one drags us right back into the bowels of the earth – a sodden, mud-choked, grave soil rumble, built around a cacophonous sub-bass drone and wah-blasted amplifier skree that recalls Sunn 0))) at their prime.

The opium-den overtones of Benjamin Freeth’s Shahi Baaja (that’s the sitar kinda thing to the likes of us) hang heavy as ever in the air, with additional formless blare from Mike Vest (here abetted by second guitarist Pete Ryde) and introductory incantations from bassist/vocalist Dave Terry meaning that by the time Mike Smith’s drums crash in about a third of the way through each side-long movement, the atmosphere is already treacle-thick and pitch black, and by the time you’re shaking your gory locks to his ball & chain dragging pulse beat, there’s no way out - you’re in for the duration.

Predictable maybe, but random taste tests from this one almost inevitably give me an image of skeletons, bones picked clean, rising from the grave; the earth throwing up its dead; Bruegel’s ‘The Triumph of Death’, and all that. And isn’t the spirit what metal, particularly doom, is all about really? Whoever that harried graphic design assistant was who struck that painting on the front of that old ‘Sabbath best-of, they were on to something. Arise! Arise! Wipe clean the surface, and return to the soil. Good times. When the rain is unceasing and even candle-light begins to seem too bright this winter, I know I’ve got just the record to reach for.

Listen and buy from MIE.

Labels: best of 2013, Bong

Well this is a nice surprise. Beyond continuing to listen to their old records a lot, I’ve remained largely unfamiliar with the recent doings of the group known as Pelt, but would have guessed that the untimely death of founding member Jack Rose a few years back might have put the kibosh on their activities for good. Not so as it turns out, and here Mike Gangloff and Patrick Best return with two new members, and one of their strongest and most satisfying records since, well… ever? For yes, extraordinary as some of their turn of the century magnum opuses remain, I’d say this one finds a happy space in the ‘career highlights’ sidebar for sure.

Essentially, Pelt’s methodology remains unchanged. Taking on the sonic ideal of LaMonte Young’s Eastern-derived minimalism and disconnecting it from the constraints of both an urban art world context and ‘official’/academic modernism, they instead drive us far, far out of town and, with the distracting background chatter of civilisation duly extinguished, direct our attention instead toward the grand expanse of the American landscape and its primeval history; that natural world which remains oddly under-hymned in contemporary US culture, even as the human aspects of rural life are flattened into direst cliché.

The central presence of stuff like Tibetan prayer bowls, Indian stringed instruments and so on in the band’s arsenal of course serves to draw a direct connection to the Eastern classical traditions that gave initially gave composers like Young a kick up the arse, but in the hands of these men their presence has never seemed gimmicky, or in any way incompatible with the notion of making music that is North American to its very core. Instead, the organic and uncontrived feel of the recordings that emerge seems to evoke a whole world of alternate possibilities, sometimes sounding like the music that might have resulted if explorers from the Indian sub-continent had somehow trekked their way across pre-colonial Georgia, tamburas in hand.

So that’s Pelt for Beginners dealt with, but returning specifically to ‘Effigy’, I won’t do these pieces a disservice by trying to describe them. Instead I’ll simply take the bait and outline the two thematic concerns that the band seem to be addressing herein. The first, as rendered on the rather beguiling cover art, is a contemplation of the mysterious animal-shaped burial mounds that dot the landscape of rural Wisconsin. The second is a requiem for their fallen comrade, as is clearly signalled by the screeching, knotty dissonance of ‘Of Jack’s Darbari’, which opens the record, and, more poignantly, by the brief, somnambulant mist of ‘The Doctor’s Nightcap’, which closes proceedings an hour or so later. The implicit connection between these two themes speaks for itself rather beautifully, and in between: mountains and stars, caverns and lake-beds, ancient dust and newly-birthed forests, and all the stuff you’d expect.

Ok, so it’s a late 2011 release I think, but I was playing this one throughout the first half of ’12, and I liked it a lot.

From February 2012:

"‘Grenzenlos’ is seven songs, all loosely themed around travel and places, and all extremely good. Building on an unapologetically rough bedrock of OD channel guitar, stand-up drumming and this-is-my-speaking-voice-what’s-the-problem-w/-that vocals, Humousexual could be said to kinda split the difference between classic pop-punk, Messthetics amateurism and C86 bounce, but really I think their chief characteristic is more that of making music entirely devoid of affectation. A rare occurrence in rock/pop music, not necessarily always a good thing, but in this case, both disarming and… what’s the word..? ‘Refreshing’, maybe? Ugh, no – makes them sound like mouthwash or something, but I can’t think of an alternative right now – you get what I mean.

There’s a Billy Bragg-esque ‘blokes singing songs about stuff that matters to them’ sorta feel to what Humousexual do, but with the earnestness and miscellaneous twattery that blights most such contemporary ‘folk songs for modern times’ singer-songwriter type ventures cannily avoided – partly through keeping the pace fast and the punk grit foregrounded, but mostly just by being funny and elegantly constructed and generous of spirit and righteous of intent and just, well, good, y’know.

It’s hard to express the extent to which I’ve grown to love the songs on this CD over the past couple of months. Playing them all several times over during a long, cold walk down the Old Kent Road in December, I wanted to clutch them to my heart in some weird gesture of brotherhood, to do *something* to try to express my solidarity with these two voices in my headphones, who seem very much to be rising above the confusion and isolation and cultural disintegration of these dark days, cutting the crap and pressing forward (politically/aesthetically/morally/musically) in the RIGHT direction.”



Another late 2011 release (in fact I think I initially picked up on it via someone’s ‘best of year’ list at the end of last year..), but still feels like a 2012 album to me. In fact, fuck it, until some other bands this good turn up, it feels like a 2013 and a 2014 album too. I hear that Shoppers have already split up, which is a colossal shame, but they certainly made their mark. Beyond all the micro-trends and reheated misanthropy and ebay 7” scrabbling and ‘ask a punk’ elitism that characterise contemporary punk rock, this feels like the future right here, roaring on past. Did you catch a glimpse?

From January 2012:

“I don’t want to become the kind of blog that falls back on overblown macho clichés when considering heavy music, but if you’ll allow me some leeway just this once, this really is the kind of racket that hands you your ass and asks you to sign for it. Terrifyingly viscous, technically accomplished, riot grrl-informed punk rock, recorded in simple ‘room sound’ style, but with the guitar amp cranked to the level of pure noise, the drummer hammering through like a rhinoceros stampede – bloody great serpentine riffs, big landslide rhythms, tons of feedbacking skree, like the ballsiest heavy rock bluster taken on some sort of unheimlich futurist joyride.

Somehow, both the write-ups of Shoppers I’ve encountered so far have concentrated on the lyrics. God knows how loud they’re listening to pick all that up, cos all I’m getting through my earphones is the occasional phrase or two – sounds like fragments of phone conversations overheard on buses, half-hearted fridge-door lovenotes and late night arguments, yelled back in the faces of their proponents with a bitterness that seems to lay bare their craven insincerity. Heavy feelings to accompany heavy music.

Weirdly, the general vibe and production reminds me of nothing so much as Napalm Death’s ‘From Enslavement to Obliteration’ – the sound of a band looking to make things as dense and unapproachable as possible for their listeners, shedding fair-weather fans in seconds. January, February, my listening always falls back on this kinda thing, and ‘Silver Year’ is hitting the spot hard.”

(Psst – you can still get a copy cheap from here.)



It’s an odd process that kicks in each time I initially check out one of these doom/drone/long form psyche type bands. It’s a form I love, but 75% of the time, they lose me immediately. Their basic way of doing business – their groove, in essence – doesn’t connect with me. I just can’t hang with it, and staying the course as they pound it into the ground for XX minutes is unlikely to prove a happy experience. Sometimes things are a bit more interesting, and I’ll give ‘em the benefit of the doubt for a while, see if it grows on me. But then, occasionally, there’s one that just hits me straight between the eyes; that sees a a readybrek glow surround me as soon as the amp noise fades in and the first slow-mo cymbals crash; that has me exclaiming FUCK YES, taking the phone off the hook, lighting the candles, and settling in for a prolonged period of immersion.

Such was the case when I first heard Bong’s extraordinary ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ in 2011. I wouldn’t have thought it possible that they could summon up a more fully realised expression of their chosen sound, and yet here we are a year later, and ‘Mana-Yood-Sushai’ (title taken from the writings of Lord Dunsany, incidentally) does the job nicely.

With a far cleaner, sharper recorded sound than they’ve gone for previously, the two pieces here reveal a more delicate and diffuse side to the band that seems to cut the umbilical cord connecting them to the world of metal almost entirely, setting the controls instead for a wholly self-defined journey in amplified, devotional psychedelia. If the album initially lacks the unified cosmic roar of ‘..Ancient Space’, the upshot is that the contributions of the individual band members, and the inspired heights of their slow motion improvisational interplay, stand out far clearer than before.

Were I writing a longer review here, I’m sure I could bore you with a poorly composed paragraph praising the contribution of each of the band’s four members, before attempting to describe the way they bring it all together… but thankfully for us all, this is just a quick end of year run-down type entry.

So essentially, let’s just say that what we’re dealing with here is four people surrendering themselves to a higher, mightier whole, lost in their own individual sounds, but circling each other all the same, working together at an almost telepathic level in the creation and nourishment of a vast, pulsing, living GROOVE, its contours etched in the listeners’ mind deeper than Saturn’s rings.

I’ve often thought there’s some sort of bullshit thesis waiting to be written on the use of heavy rock as a spiritual/meditational practice. No doubt the members of Bong are sufficiently down to earth to would laugh off such a concept, but in their heart of hearts they must know what they’re doing here, as the roar from the amps hits the air like a thousand trappists giving it their all, and whoever writes that thesis really needs to check this shit out.


This doesn’t really feel like a big, #1 Album of the Year or anything. But as I think I said in my original write-up: good songs, good sound, good performance – sometimes that’s all it takes. I've listened to this one a hundred times, and I’m about to listen to it a few more.

From June:

“Aside from anything else, it’s great to hear a white, male vocalist who sounds like he’s really fucking committed to the idea of being the vocalist in a rock band, rather than just ‘the guy who happens to sing’, delivering these Motown and Big Star informed numbers the way they need to be delivered in punk scene context – big and bellowy, but without being a preening jerk about it or anything, like a detoxed Robert Pollard giving it his best Otis Redding moves.

And as to the band, well… given the style of music they’re aiming for, I could easily see Royal Headache turning into one of those groups who record a really disappointing, over-polished follow-up album with all their vital energy drained out into some gutter behind the studio, gathered up in plastic bags by some unscrupulous sound engineer, watered down and sold back piecemeal to lethargic teenage punk bands (because that’s the kind of thing they do in studios, kids). But for the moment, on this first record, Royal Headache are just fucking ON. Personally I might not have gone with that ultra-trebley Rickenbacker guitar sound, but that’s the dude’s choice and he does good work with it, high-end distortion spreading hither on yon across the to-my-ears-perfect 8-track tape level fidelity, all musicians audible even as everything bleeds everywhere for a big, warm, band-in-a-room sound, amp noise cleaving across into the cymbals on each chorus for authentically headache-y effect.

As I say, this kind of magic rarely lasts long these days, but to all intents and purposes this Royal Headache LP is some real ‘lightning in a bottle’ shit, capturing the rush of a great band just being a great band. And that’s something that’s hard to beat, regardless of where they head in future.”

Labels: best of 2012, Bong, Humousexual, Pelt, Royal Headache, Shoppers

THE FORTY-TWO BEST RECORDS OF 2011:
Part # 9


Fucking hell, FINALLY!

5. Bong – Beyond Ancient Space (Ritual Productions)

Yeah, I know – not much of a name is it? “Hey man, what shall we call our stoner doom band?” “How about… Bong!” Much like those indie bands who call themselves things like ‘Amplifier’ and ‘The Drums’, it doesn’t exactly fill one with hope regarding the imaginative breadth of the music within. I might have passed over this one, or else never noticed it at all, had some kind soul not recommended it to me one day. I’m very glad they did recommend it, and I would like to sincerely thanks them for the steer, because ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ is simply some of the best psychedelic music I’ve heard in years.

First track is a bit slow to get going, building up from silence with some ominous, Sunn 0)))-esque ritual incantation. Ho hum. Soon as the first roar of sub-bass hits and the drummer splutters into life though – whoa. All bets are off. Draw the curtains, lights off. Any fucker who dares phone or ring the doorbell in the next hour is gonna have to wait. This is gonna be epic.

Ostensibly still a doom metal album, ‘Beyond Ancient Space’ exists in similar proximity to its parent genre as Alice Coltrane’s ‘Journey In Satchidananda’ does to jazz – using its skeleton merely as a basecamp from which to take off into uncharted realms of pure, blissful, bottomless psychedelia.

You know that bit in ‘Phantasm’, where Mike gets pulled through the Tall Man’s dimensional gateway and sees that column of mindless, hooded dwarves trudging across an endless expanse of red-lit desert by the light of a hazy, dying sun? You don’t? Well let’s pretend you do, and let’s imagine if, instead of a horrifying vision of a life of emotionally-stunted, death-ruled interplanetary drudgery, that had actually been really cool and he’d decided to go with it and join their ranks. That’s kind of what listening to the 25 minutes of ‘Onward To Perdonaris’ is like – a churning maelstrom of distortion, like some eternal death march across burning sands, whilst a forboding Eastern-tuned sitar/tamboura type riff shimmers overhead, heavily-phased open strings chiming like the bell of some phantasmagorical galleon.

Bypassing the assaultive/headache-inducing compression favoured by groups like Electric Wizard, Bong instead concentrate on summoning the more dynamic, analogue-ish widescreen dronescape beloved of Earth and Sleep – potentially muffled at low volumes, but completely overwhelming when cranked at a half-decent system, a form of diffuse obliteration that works particularly well when middle track ‘Across The Timestream’ hoves into view on the desert horizon.

By this stage, the undertow of bass feedback – hard to tell from whose cabinets it originated – has grown so monolithic that it proceeds to swallow the guitarist and bassist altogether, solidifying into a sound that’s less like a three piece rock band, more like a duet between the drummer and the endless roar of herculean thrusters powering some derelict, unmanned freighter through the depths of deep space.

I should say a few words about the drummer actually. Often, the demands of doom metal –especially in as extreme a form as this – can impose substantial limitations and challenges upon humble keepers of the beat, driving them either toward lumpen repetition or distracting experimentalism. Not this guy though – he’s swinging like John Bonham played back at quarter speed, and it’s beautiful. Listen to those cymbals crash!

Believe it or not, I’m pretty picky when it comes to my space-rock transcendence, but Bong win the gold medal. If this don’t send you, you probably didn’t want to go in the first place.

Looking on Youtube, I learn that, hilariously, these songs have ‘radio edits’. This isn’t one of them;





4. The Bats – Free All The Monsters (Flying Nun)

A band who have spent the best part of three decades whittling away at their particular brand of timeless indie-rock to without feeling any particular need to expand their horizons, different eras in The Bats’ back catalogue can best be differentiated by slight tweaking of the overall production aesthetic, from the FX-laden shoegaze of ‘Coachmaster’ to the more rustic, folksy timbres of ‘Daddy’s Highway’, with assorted stops at scenic viewpoints in-between.

‘Free All The Monsters’ then sees them returning to their spiritual home on the rejuvenated Flying Nun label with an album that initially veers somewhat toward the thin, reverb-drenched sound of ‘classic’ ‘80s British indie, sometimes even approaching a fabricated jangle akin to The Smiths or something. Thankfully, this problem can be easily rectified through the immoderate application of volume and EQ, which, as with many albums from the actual ‘80s, allows the true grandeur of the music to take flight.

Pushed to an appropriately ear-hurty level, the tangled sustain of Robert Scott and Kaye Woodward’s guitars assume their proper majesty, as their voices (teamed up more frequently, and more persuasively, than on previous records) wrap themselves elegantly around the slow, wise-owl phrasing of the strongest set of songs the band has written in recent memory or… hell, let’s just take the leap and say, ever.

I mean, don’t get me wrong, I thought ‘The Guilty Office’ and ‘At The National Grid’ were plenty good, but almost every number here is a potential ‘greatest hits’ contender. Scott’s writing has retained a singularly high level of quality over the years, but he’s really upped the ante here, investing many of these songs with the kind of fiery, uncertain passion that usually tends to vanish from the work of settled/experienced rock bands as they glide through middle age. Correspondingly, the band seem to have been retooled to match their leader’s renewed vigour, letting rip with a kind of yearning, overdriven sprawl that pushes things a few steps further into the wilderness than was allowed within the contemplative, grown up homesteads of their last few records.

Even the more upbeat songs here – the lightweight jangle of ‘Simpletons’ and the disarmingly jaunty title cut - seem to be pushing back toward a comfort zone of grand, wistful despondence, an atmosphere in which a choice chord or cadence can transform lyrics that fall flat on paper - “And you know, I’ll take you with me / cos tomorrow’s a long, long time..” - into statements that move beyond the mere words into definitive, irreducible reflections on the nature of… something or other. And when the band really go with this mood and let rip on doleful epics like ‘Fingers of Dawn’ and ‘See Right Through Me’ (with it’s nod to Dylan’s implacable ‘I Shall Be Released’), the effect is stunning. You know those moments in songs like this, where they reach a big, Byronic climax at the end of a verse, and you’re like, ‘cue guitar solo!’, and the lead line crashes in just right and you’re like, yes? Well there’s a lot of that going on on the second half of this album.

Perhaps my favourite song is ‘On The Bank’, which blows things out to an almost Crazy Horse-like level of slow-burning grandeur, as Scott relates what appears to be the tale of a hazardous night-time sortie from some sort of seafaring vessel under hostile circumstances. Doubtless it’s all a big woolly emotional metaphor, but as is my want, I prefer to take these things literally. “treading water takes you down / and it’s good to have companions on the ground / though they may be more useful on the bank / to lend a hand.” Sound advice for any nautical disembarkation. Anyway, it’s a total epic, and I bloody love it.

Surely it can’t be just me who thinks that The Bats are better at making this kind of music than just about anyone else on earth? Can it really just be geographical distance and soft-spoken humbleness that’s denied them the chance to compete with the R.E.M.s and Teenage Fanclubs of this world? If you’re unfamiliar with their catalogue and am at all swayed by all my above nonsense, maybe 2012 might be a good year to investigation these propositions.





3. Peaking Lights – 936 (Not Not Fun / Domino)

Peaking Lights ‘Imaginary Falcons’ from 2010 was something real special – the primary achievement up to that point of the selected few (also see Blues Control and, uh… ) who were busy channelling the detritus of the past decade’s psyche/drone/noise hoo-hah into happy, harmonic, human realms. Now everybody with a pulse is doin’ that, and ‘936’ ably delivers on the next step of this music’s evolution so perfectly as to create its own self-sufficient universe, entirely ignorant of such pan-generic crit blather.

In an attempt to latch some space-filling blah onto this self-evidently wonderful music, writers have made much of Peaking Lights debt to dub, and indeed, whilst I’m not much of an expert on such things, stuff like Lee Perry’s sublime production work on ‘Heart of the Congos’ would seem to be as valid a reference point as any to work from here. Like Perry at his best, Idra Dunis and Aaron Coyes seem keen to apply experimental technique and DIY happenstance to the creation of music that is just, well…. irresistibly nice and comforting. As befits its rough production values and avant ancestry, each track here begins in slightly jarring fashion, pricking up our ears with a few seconds of rather harsh sounds and unheimlich rhythmic tics. Every time though, it takes only a few bars for us to fully internalise the song’s logic, for us to relax as we realise just how instinctively pleasing to human ears these sounds are. Peaking Lights is music to hang with. Music to be enveloped by. Music to render you happy and content in any situation. Homemade 21st century, post-everything lullabies.

Late last year, I wrote to a friend that ‘936’ is “..kind of electronic, kind of psychedelic, but with really good songs and beautiful melodies and cool bass lines too – like music cool parents would play to their babies to put them to sleep. I just play it all the time.”

And hopefully that’s about all you need to know really. It’s all I can think of to write, so it’d better be.





2. Milk Music – Beyond Living 12” (Perennial Death)

I shared some of my thoughts on Milk Music here, in August 2011.

I listened to mp3s of their 12” hundreds of times before that, and, now that I’ve finally got a physical copy, I’m gonna listen to it hundreds more.

Drawn on the subject of what my current favourite bands are, I recently found myself saying something of Milk Music along the lines of “they’re kind of a combination of everything that was great about rock music in the late ‘80s / early ‘90s”. I then almost immediately realised that this was a really fucking stupid and misleading thing to say, on any number of levels.

Because seriously, any of those acts that exists to pay professional homage to the Our Band Can Be Your Life ‘glory days’ of heritage indie-rock, playing to the same crowds who go to those abysmal ATP ‘play the album all the way through’ nights, can fuck right off. I mean, I know I’m usually pretty retrogressive in my music taste, but I’d like to think I’ve developed at least some sense of good taste along with it. Go! Leave me! Take me off your PR’s mailing list! You’re about as cool as someone playing aesthetically correct Grateful Dead-style hippie rock in 1982, and you know it. Get outta my face.

Milk Music are not like that. They are not cool because they sound like Dinosaur and The Wipers and Black Flag. They are cool because they are as good as them, at a time when pretty much nobody else is. End of.

“Political angst will never flow / in the dark where the real feelings grow” – like, what the hell does that even mean? I don’t know man, but he sounds like he means it! Remember when angry guys with loud guitars could pull that sorta thing and get away with it? DUCK, Milk Music coming through!

The sticker on the front of this 12” in Rough Trade said something like “as tipped by NME, Pitchfork etc…”, so I guess the moment has passed and they’ll be making concept albums about lightbulb factories by this time next year. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

Rock music in 2011, thy name was Milk Music.





1. Comet Gain – Howl of the Lonely Crowd (Fortuna Pop)

Well it was foregone conclusion really, wasn’t it. Having spent months earlier this year banging away about Comet Gain in preparation for their latest magnum opus, I could scarcely have made anything else No # 1 could I?

With all those unwise words already up in digital print, I guess I probably don’t need to restate the fact that every LP Comet Gain have released since 2000’s ‘Tigertown Pictures’ has had a huge amount to me, each one becoming a veritable cornerstone of my musical being. Over five years in the making (so to speak – I mean, I’m sure many of those years weren’t exactly spent ‘in the making’), and on first impression ‘Howl..’ certainly doesn’t disappoint. If anything, it’s perhaps the most ballsy and immediate record the band has ever made – a loud, lengthy and unapologetic restatement of all the thematic and musical concerns that CG and their fans have held dear through the intervening years.

Opener ‘Clang of the Concrete Swans’ certainly leaves little room for uncertainty, a stream of consciousness, state-of-the-nation-address of a song that thunders along like a 21st century update of one of those epic mid ‘60s Dylan tracks. Only, y’know, better, and more relevant, and with cool sounding guitars, and a beat and stuff. Recklessly veering between the teeth-grinding frustrations of poverty-stricken urban drudgery and curdled cries of adolescent rebellion, it’s an astonishing-bordering-on-ridiculous statement of intent; “oh, be young, be someone / be someone rebel, vicious, dumb”.

This is by far the most professionally produced album CG have ever done (not that it matters), as is exemplified on the track 2 & 3 double-header of potential singles ‘Weekend Dreams’ and ‘An Arcade From The Rain’, wrecking ball pop songs that cement the record’s default palette of monster guitar tone, monster bass tone and domineering New Order style keys.

(Initially ‘Weekend Dreams’ had me a bit non-plussed, because I was used to listening to the earlier version released on a split single with Hello Cuca (reviewed here). Basically, for the album cut they’ve taken a bit that turned up as a coda in the final choruses of the first draft (the whole “I’ve got a cheap desire to be..” thing) and turned almost the entire song into it, losing a lot of good material in the process. Still though, that’s their prerogative, and once I got used to it I love the spirited performance of the new one too.)

And incidentally, if you’re not already a Comet Gain fan but still took an active interest in that bracketed paragraph, chances are you’re the kind of person who probably should be a Comet Gain fan, as David Feck’s bottomless obsession with pop cult ephemera proves as rich a source of material here as it ever has done, his ever-growing gallery of until-recently unsung loser-heroes swelled with new recruits, from proto-beatnik junkie-thief Herbert Huncke to former Fall keyboard player Una Baines, ‘This Sporting Life’ protagonist Frankie Machine, Dixon Steele from Nicholas Ray’s ‘In a Lonely Place’ and the proprietors of Berlin industrial label SPK. Thee ecstatic library indeed.

In what I think might be its third recorded outing, ‘Herbert Huncke’ is finally nailed here, assuming the rattling VU pastiche New York subway sound type proportions it’s always been aiming for, muscular production, spirited ‘woo woos’ and a great noise guitar solo finally overcoming the incongruity of a mild-mannered English guy delivering lines like “you motherfucker / where is my bread”. The SPK track, ‘Working Circle Explosive’, is great too – a flaming clarion call of Baader Meinhof punker discontent, fuelled by sloganeering non-sequitur lyrics and some even more ferocious multi-layered fuzz.

At the heart of the record though, ‘The Ballad of Frankie Machine’ is simply an incredible track, encapsulating everything about this band that has meant so much to me. On this song, this one here, you can see… what exactly? Beyond all the back story and the shambolic live shows and cult following and all other nonsense, simply a band who can achieve something like this, who can play these tangled guitars and make them sound like a shadow falling back across the whole 20th century’s history of betrayals and heartbreaks, who can fuse the personal and the political into a sharp, bloody lump, who after many, many, many listens can still make my stomach twists in knots as Rachel sings “my best suit on, out with the boys tonight / don’t wake me up I might be dead..”.

The disparity between such intensity and the sloppy, melancholy acoustic numbers that have been a big part of CG’s repertoire at least since ‘City Fallen Leaves’ may irk some, but for those of us prepared to go the whole distance, there is beauty to be found even in these rambling, drunk-at-3am half-songs that scarcely any other band in history could get away with, as ‘After Midnight..’ and ‘Some Of Us Don’t Want To Be Saved’ are pulled back across the line by the sheer force of Feck’s need to communicate with us the totality of his whole whatever, the band’s epic, chiming swing driving the compositions forward as they take on the mantle of lovelorn grandeur of David’s beloved Go-Betweens; “It’s the small things that keep us alive / the coded souvenirs, left of the dial”. Stirs the blood, I tell ya. What’s that, wordcount? Another thousand words down the can? Worth every comma.

It’s hard to say how ‘Howl of the Lonely Crowd’ will fit into the pantheon quite yet. It’s taken a long time – years upon years of obsessive listening – for the previous LPs to reveal their true worth as they collide with life experience and coagulate into shiny, strange, twisted, inoperable lumps in my psyche. Maybe I’ll completely forget about this album by February. Maybe I’ll play it at least once a week until the day I die. Either way, for the moment it certainly sounds like a really fucking good album, and that’s a good start on the road to immortality.

Labels: best of 2011, Bong, Comet Gain, Milk Music, Peaking Lights, The Bats