No, it is, of course, grown up work and responsibilities which have kept me away. I would dearly have loved to have been able to spend 2021 casually ruminating in (virtual) print on the oddities and virtues of the many, many dusty old LPs I have acquired, and spinning off ill-thought-out treatises from the assorted books on music and pop culture I’ve read whilst sitting on the bog. But guess what? I’m a grown up now, so I don’t have time. Moving thoughts from my head onto an MS Word doc is permanently next thing on the list; the thing which is never reached.

Charlie Watts was so clearly, so obviously, the best Rolling Stone that anyone who has failed to recognise the fact by this point should give up and go home. The least arseholish of their number by a country mile, the near sixty years he spent excelling at a repetitious task for which he never even pretended to show any enthusiasm stands as a shining inspiration to all of us lower echelon wage slaves.

Seriously though - he was great. All of the golden era Stones stuff walks a fine line between the sublime and the ridiculous, and nine times out of ten, I believe, it was Charlie’s measured/dispassionate presence which stopped the others from tumbling headfirst into the abyss of wankerdom. God bless him, and I hope that one day his drawings of hotel beds will be exhibited, assuming they haven’t been already.

And, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Fuck, man. “What a character” scarcely does that old boy justice. His entire life and work is just… off the scale. We’d need to call in the profs and invent a new scale to even get a glimpse of it. 

So many garbled anecdotes could be related pertaining to his nigh-on supernatural shamanic weirdness, but at the end of the day, it’s the records that count, and, though my interest in dub/reggae has never progressed much beyond the dabbler/dilettante stage (given the number of second hand discs in the genre clogging up this corner of the world, I’d need to invest in a reinforced floor should I begin to cultivate a taste for them), at least a few Perry productions remain close to my heart. His perfectly harmonised moo-cows on The Congos’ Children Crying; the disorientating left channel cut-offs on the harrowing, low-down funkery of Woman’s Dub; the fuzzy esoteric pronouncements of Baffling Smoke Signal, which used to fascinate and perplex me when I recorded it off Peel as a youngster; scattered talismans of high level genius. RIP my good man - even this clueless, herb-decrying winehead salutes you.  

Wolfen; Mountain Movers; Heavy Sentence; Brandee Younger (major label alert!); Dope Purple; Potion; The Paradox; Bobby Lee; Smote; Emma-Jean Thackray; this Wicked Lady cover by the otherwise fairly absurd Salem’s Pot; Haig Fras; The Heartwood Institute; Obey Cobra; Ruby Rushton; Birds of Maya; Mienakunaru; Yerba Mansa Trio.

You’re welcome.

Labels: apologies, deathblog, I like, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, The Rolling Stones

Many months late and countless dollars short (trying to meet crazy, self-imposed horror movie reviewing deadlines will do that to you), here is a quick run-down of new-ish things (some drifting back a year or five, but as I say, my ears, like my posts here, are OFTEN LATE) which have won my attention and to some extent admiration during the latter half of 2019.


Shooting Guns.


A discovery via the ever-reliable Terminal Escape blog, this Saskatoon-based instrumental heavy psych combo seem to have been toiling away in relative obscurity for quite a while now. I’m not entirely sure how best to frame the smeary, slo-mo space-rock grooves found on their ‘Street Rock’ tape (2014), but despite the apparent simplicity of the band’s approach (guitar, bass n’ drums banging it out, with occasional dubbed out echo noise and samples thrown in for the pure heck of it), their sound feels thoroughly hypnotic and entirely unique within its field – enveloping, like flying slowly into a big, dark cloud.

I’ve not yet had a chance to wade into the group’s wider oeuvre, but this murky ol’ tape rip alone seems liable to find me head-nodding my way toward a blissful coma for many months to come; the opening ‘Feelings (Dub)’ in particular is an absolute monster, blown-out bass gradually becoming pure mist as the sky caves in and vision narrows… keep it coming.


 


Infinity Forms of Yellow Remember.



And if all that seems a bit too weird for you meanwhile, say hello to this cumbersomely named Cardiff six-piece, whose recent double LP on the Cardinal Fuzz label delivers eighty minutes or so of comfortably ungrounded space-rock, doled out the way the blind idiot god at the centre of the cosmos intended, helmets respectfully doffed to Hawkwind and The Heads; which is not to say that they fail to to establish their own niche within this closely-guarded sub-genre, but I suspect they’re well aware that their chosen idiom comes with a certain set of expectations, and basically they aim to please.

To be honest, the reedy, reverbed vocals and hippy-drippy, ‘random gnarly phrase generator’ type lyrics here do sometimes get a bit too close to the Primal Scream Zone for my taste (it’s sort of the psyche-rock equivalent of the “dog piss zone” when you’re out picking blackberries), but such suspicions are quickly annulled by a sturdy, ‘Space Ritual’-worthy rhythm section and some superb, noise-spiralin’ grue from the guitarist, who’s got a wah-wah pedal and is heroically unafraid to use it (seriously, this guy must have the most muscular left ankle in South Wales on the basis of his foot work here).

As the album ploughs on and the track times get ever longer, Infinity Forms.. settle comfortably into their predominantly long-form business, with the full-on rock band sections buffered by long stretches of analogue electronic bliss-out, which are very enjoyable if yr in the mood. Closer ‘Sun God Grave Goods’ (cor blimey) is the best of the bunch I think, opening with a can’t fail combo of electric tamboura and harmonica, before momentarily recalling one of Bong’s more recent, distortion-free jams, as a massive, gong-like crash cymbal heralds the entrance of the rhythm section for a further expanse of delightful ‘Star Gate’ type ceremonial, head-nodding ambience. (Not sure that the extended acoustic outro and field recordings of soggy footsteps add a great deal, but hey, they’ve got four sides to fill and they’re stretching out – I can dig it.)

As mentioned, these guys aren’t exactly re-invented the afterburner here, but if you’re planning on firing up the ol’ interstellar freighter to an excursion to some distant moon-pyramids any time in the near future, you could do worse than jam this one in the eight-track, especially now that Blown Out are permanently on ice.


Sarah Davachi.



I tried listening to some stuff from young U.S.-based composer and PhD student Sarah Davachi a while back and couldn’t really get into it, but her recently repressed 2018 disc Let Night Come On Bells End The Day really hit the spot (and as a result, hit my wallet).

Regular readers will recall that I’m always in the market for a good drone or two, and this humble LP boasts five of the buggers – three reasonably lengthy, two short – which represents admirable value, I’m sure you’d agree.

The sounds herein seem to have been sourced entirely from keys of all varieties (organ, synths and piano), although the woozy, uncertainly pitched tones conjured during the opening minutes of the first side’s exuberantly blissful ‘Mordents’ sound uncannily like strings in places (that’ll be the Mellotron, I’m assuming).

Natural instrument tones seem to dominate here, insofar as they can with synths involved, and there are no obvious treatments or effects in evidence, yet the resonance and range Davachi wrings from her gear, aided by a few consummate overdubs adding over/undertones, is profoundly effective.

The feel here is nuanced, timeless, eternally resonant – like mainlining the form and contents of a small yet beautiful Alpine chapel through your ears. Emotionally speaking, we run the gamut here from ‘Buhrstone’, which flirts with indulgent, melodic melancholia, not a million miles away perhaps from one of The Dirty Three’s piano-led tracks, to the twelve austere minutes of ‘Hours in the Evening’, as cold and affectless as the ancient, clammy stone wall of that aforementioned chapel.

At this point in my life, music like this performs an important function, keeping me calm and grounded, and creating an appropriate atmosphere in my quarters during that all-important lead up to bed time. It’s therapeutic in a sense, I suppose. As such, I’m always thrilled to discover a great new practitioner whose work I can keep close to the turntable, so thanks for this one Sarah – it’s out here in the world, doing great work.


Kamaal Williams.



Once again, I’m severely late to the party when it comes to digging into London / the globe’s rewarding new funk/electronica-informed jazz scene, and in this case in particular I have NO excuse, given that a friend dropped me a link to Kamaal Williams’ 2018 LP The Return in an email over a year ago - but hey, at least I picked up on the repress, so hopefully I’m getting at least a little bit closer to getting a handle on all this exciting shit which appears to have been going on literally just down the road from my f-ing house for a number of years now.

Formerly one half of duo Yussef Kamaal (with drummer Yussef Dayes), Williams fills all available space here on keys, and also produces under the auspices of his sharply-monikered alter-ego Henry Wu. Spare some applause too though for Pete Martin and Joshua McKenzie, who do flat out fantastic work on bass and drums, pulling back from the downtempo/hip-hop inspired grooves often favoured by this scene and instead laying down some sinuous, quick-silver playing which delivers all the muscle of yr ‘70s fusion favourites with none of the off-putting show-boating (well, ok, maybe just a little bit, here and there).

Williams likewise seems to be daring us to start pulling comparisons to Herbie and Stevie out of the hat at some points here, but unlike the old masters, he seems deeply concerned with texture more-so than technique, seemingly ripping his organ and synth through a chain of effects that would make a guitar shop employee blush, building up deep, tidal washes of wah, tremolo and delay which keep the music sensuous, multi-layered and engrossing, bringing a disorientating psychedelic swirl to proceedings, whilst his tightly wound, hand-brake-turn interplay with Brown and McKenzie adds a sense of swaggering danger, undercutting any accusations of mere dinner-jazz noodling; you can almost feel the cold eyes of Miles overseeing this shit when things get way out there on the second half of stunning opening cut ‘Salaam’.

This is, I’ll freely admit, probably the most totally-fucking-Gilles-Peterson thing currently lurking in my record collection, but the older I get and the wider I listen, the more I’d inclined to suspect that the old boy has actually been holding the keys to the castle all along, and to start regretting the rube-ish years I’ve spent projecting sneers and roll-eyes in his general direction.


Aggressive Perfector.



And on completely the other end of the spectrum meanwhile… FUCK YEAH! Infernal Hails! It’s been a long wait since Manchester’s Aggressive Perfector unleashed (because music in this vein can never simply be ‘released’) their accurately named ‘Satan’s Heavy Metal’ EP in 2016, but they’re finally back this month with their debut LP, ‘Havoc at the Midnight Hour’, and the consciously grotesque, Lucio Fulci-inspired cover painting certainly bodes well.

Well, I mean, I say that, but in fact I’ve started to suspect that contemporary metal bands’ devotion to awesome, eye-catching album covers and OTT retro aesthetics can often be inversely proportional to the actual quality of their music. Aggressive Perfector however provide a glorious exception to this embryonic rule, continuing to attack their admirably non-denominational Awesome Old School Metal (does that merit an acronym..?) with punkoid energy and an infectious love of and dedication to their chosen craft which should get them over the spiked railings erected by even the most discerning of self-appointed NWOBHM gatekeepers.

Higher recording fidelity and more ambitious song structures have for-better-or-for-worse diluted the Venom/Motorhead booze n’ fags vibe which defined Perfector’s first EP, but guess what – the tighter studio playing and clearer, more compressed production showcased here actually suits them pretty well, with the band’s core essence retaining enough piss n’ vinegar to immediately give ‘em a sharp, serrated edge over the legions of festival-clogging, mid-table outfits whose broadly unexceptional work fills out the reviews pages of Metal Hammer each month.

Re-reading the paras above, they sound a bit dry, so I’ll give it to you straight – I *love* this shit, and it’s been on my earphones for the double-speed trudge to work every morning since the weather turned cold and the band put the record up for download (perfect timing guys). If the mid-tempo, chug-riffing churn of opener ‘Onwards to the Cemetery’ – complete with soaring, Mercyful Fate leads and flaming torch-waving chorus – doesn’t serve as an effective refresher course on the reasons why metal is awesome, you’re probably in the wrong classroom, you non-metal loser, and the full-on thrash of ‘Chains of Black Wrath’, ‘Devil’s Bastard’ and ‘Vengeful One’ repeatedly hammer home the same core message with a relentless singularity of purpose.

Beginning with one of vocalist/guitarist Dan Holocausto (I kid you not)’s several attempts to top Tom Araya’s legendary falsetto-to-growl scream from ‘Angel of Death’, the latter track in particular is an absolute banger, correcting a discrepancy which blights much 80s metal production, in that the mix allows us to hear the raw buzz of the bass strings as they’re subjected to what I take to be the thrashing of a lifetime.

To recap, then: METAL. If you like it, you’ll like this.


The Vacant Lots.



I realise I’m pretty behind the times on this one, but since when did Anton Newcombe cease to be a fucking maniac and become a reliable architect of top drawer retrogressive guitar music? He is not in this band, but he produced their ‘Exit’ EP, and, in stark contrast to much of the older material available on their bandcamp page, opening track ‘Bells’ verifiably rules.

The vocalist here is going for that Peter Perret / Nikki Sudden frail, drugged up insouciance kind of thing, but basically ends up sounding almost exactly like the bloke from The Psychedelic Furs instead, which seems in some ways like an even better result. The backing track meanwhile takes a boilerplate JAMC/Shop Assistants rhythm track, adds one of those lovely, permanently ascending chord progressions and lets it all pound along for five and a half minutes without variation, whilst the production layers guitars on top of guitars on top of guitars on top of guitars on top of guitars (and indeed, some bells, way off in the background somewhere). It’s not clever and it’s certainly not new – just more of that old ‘boys with haircuts lined up on stage like shooting gallery ducks, glumly strumming away’ type shit really – but it is BIG, and as such it does the business.

Disappointingly, the rest of the material on the EP is basically pretty unremarkable – second song is ok, but it’s really just more tenth gen Mary Chain cast-offs and, god help us all, some cod-Suicide electro poetry jamming towards the end; real try-hard, eternal support band shit. But that one song, man. I sure hope you’ve got a few more like that in you, boys. Make your mothers proud!

Astonishingly, Wikipedia informs me that this EP reached number 9 in the UK singles chart in June, and whilst I’m not sure exactly what that signifies these days (plus, do they let EPs in now - WTF?), it at least suggests I’m not alone in my strange infatuation with this number. Mainstream-a-go-go!


Soga.



Feels like we definitely need a bit of a palette-cleanser after all that, and, though I’ve been feeling pretty disconnected from contemporary punk music recently, if it sounds like anything in 2019-20, I believe it should probably sound like this. Hyper-energised, unadorned practice room blasters from this all-female Mexican trio, who, weirdly but wonderfully, sound as if they could have leaped straight through a time-warp from the late ‘70s, when this stuff was still exciting and new and not buffered by four decades-worth of back patch scenester posery and contrived micro-genre suspicion.

Bass and drums are basic but righteous, but the guitarist by contrast has some real Robert Quine / East Bay Ray type shit going on. We’re talking SHREDDING here folks, with shrieking nah-nah-na-nah-nah type anti-melodies every which way, and it’s never been so welcome. Vocals meanwhile are strained, way in the red and don't give a fuck about your spit-guard, continuing to make me ponder why Spanish (or Portuguese) language punk sounds about a thousand times more crucial than the anglophone variety these days. Ten songs in marginally more minutes and all of them fucking brilliant, in short. (Well, personally I prefer the ones in ‘punk rock’ tempo to the flat-out hardcore efforts, but that’s just me.)

Quite why the entire post-MRR community didn’t fall to their knees and hail Soga as the new queens of the waking universe when this demo first appeared on tape in 2018 I can’t possibly imagine, but…. maybe they did and I didn’t even notice? It’s so hard to keep track these days. Regardless - hitting my own knees right NOW, because to all intents and purposes, this is THE BEST.

Labels: Aggressive Perfector, I like, Infinity Forms of Yellow Remember, Kamaal Williams, Sarah Davachi, Shooting Guns, Soga, The Vacant Lots

By and large, the past three months of my music listening have been characterised by a wealth of glimmering, phantastical discoveries slouching their way down the Bandcamp / second hand LP highway -- combined with a chronic lack of the time, space and technology necessary to fully engage with them.

Nonetheless, these things, so many things, all demand at least a brief shout-out here, if I’m to hold my head high vis-à-vis dragging out this dinosaur blog’s lifespan. Trying to compress stuff that’s basically beyond words into a reader-friendly para when you’ve basically only had a chance to stick it on once or twice whilst dojng admin is never much fun, so hold on to yr hats, but bandcamp links are easy, so they at least should help to clarify what I’m haphazardly going on about.

As luck would have it, many of the ‘new’ discoveries highlighted below aren’t really all that new, in terms of release date, but god knows, if the idea of listening to a record from 2017 beings you out in a rash, I can’t help.


Les Filles De Illighadad.



I discovered Les Filles De Illighadad via a recommendation link on the bandcamp page of much-lauded Tuareg guitar hero Mdou Moctar, whose work I had decided to investigate after reading that he had starred in the first ever Tuareg language feature film(!), a Saharan version of ‘Purple Rain’ (!!) [it’s for real – DVD and soundtrack are both available here].

Moctar’s music is perfectly good – indeed, it seems to have been blowing minds left, right and centre - but it didn’t really do it for me. I found it a bit too… bombastic and ego-driven I suppose? Maybe a bit too heavy on the cliché Western pop-rock moves? (I know, I know – what did I expect.) Clicking straight through to the calming, communal exuberance of Les Filles De Illighadad though proved the perfect corrective to these (wholly subjective) deficiencies, very much providing a ‘yin’ to Moctar’s ‘yang’ when it comes to the strategies which proponents of North African electric guitar music may find themselves employing as their music gains ever more traction amongst moneyed first world rubes such as myself.

Rather than awkwardly hacking it up into in my own words, it will probably be best if I simply cut and paste a few paragraphs from the notes accompanying Les Filles most recent album, ‘Eghass Malan’ (2017), which I think gives us the gist here pretty well:

“In the past years, certain genres of Tuareg music have become popular in the West. International acts of “desert blues” like Tinariwen, Bombino, and Mdou Moctar have become synonymous with the name “Tuareg.” But guitar music is a recent creation. In the 1970s young Tuareg men living in exile in Libya and Algeria discovered the guitar. Lacking any female vocalists to perform tende, they began to play the guitar to mimic this sound, replacing water drums with plastic jerrycans and substituting a guitar drone for the vocal call and response. The exiled eventually traveled home and brought the guitar music with them. In time, this new guitar sound came to eclipse the tende, especially in the urban centers. If tende is a music that has always been sung by woman, the Tuareg guitar was its gendered counterpart, and Tuareg guitar music is a male dominated scene.

Fatou Seidi Ghali, lead vocalist and performer of Les Filles is one of the only Tuareg female guitarists in Niger. Sneaking away with her older brother's guitar, she taught herself to play. While Fatou's role as the first female Tuareg guitarist is groundbreaking, it is just as interesting for her musical direction. In a place where gender norms have created two divergent musics, Fatou and Les Filles are reasserting the role of tende in Tuareg guitar. In lieu of the djembe or the drum kit, so popular in contemporary Tuareg rock bands, Les Filles de Illighadad incorporate the traditional drum and the pounding calabash, half buried in water. The forgotten inspiration of Tuareg guitar, they are reclaiming its importance in the genre and reclaiming the music of tende.”

Got all that? Good. In practice, those of us tuning into Les Filles De Illighadad whilst lacking the necessary background to appreciate the finer subtleties of their place within Tuareg musical culture can expect to hear the following: complex, intuitive circular melodies, elegantly picked out on the buzz-free strings of a Fender Stratocaster (or off-brand equivalent); gentle acoustic strumming supported by the propulsive, rhythmic web of hand clapping and the unique forms of percussion outlined above; unison female voices delivering happy-yet-world weary call and response type tunes that could be as old as the dawn of time for all I know, interspersed with joyous, animalistic cries that make it sound as if some big, brightly plumed flightless birds have rocked up to join the party. It’s absolutely brilliant!

The second song, ‘Inssegh Inssegh’, with guitar-work that almost recalls Junior Kimbrough, stands out as a particular favourite. If you don’t like this… well, I don’t know what to say.


Woven Skull.



A trio hailing from somewhere in the vicinity of County Leitrim and/or Cork, Woven Skull seem to be keeping the spirit of the early ’00s kneelcore/proper psyche/new-weird-whatever CD-R scene alive, wringing out a sound that sometimes resembles a more slightly more rock-orientated take on the hive mind cacophony of Vibracathedral Orchestra… but, equally, sometimes doesn’t. To say I approve would be something of an understatement.

‘Exile of Warren Street’, the opening cut on their self-titled record from last year, mixes buzzing, insectoid fuzz guitar strum-drone with shrieking bowed strings and clamorous, collapsed kit drumming, suggesting an alternative history in which the EPI-era Velvets had kept Angus Maclise on board and swung behind Cale’s avant/minimalist impulses rather than Reed’s songwriting, but then further complicates matters by bringing in a hulking great, quasi-Arabic doom riff. Crazy, man!

On subsequent tracks, the group push the furthest reaches of the sound available to them within their guitar / mandola / drums trio set-up, sometimes delivering ecstatic webs of picked string-drone that wouldn’t sound out of place on a James Blackshaw record, whilst delving elsewhere into full-on Sun City Girls ethno-forgery territory, like a ritual wedding dance devised by a tribe of post-apocalyptic cyborgs.

Much of the time, the band emphasise dense, knotty and rather punishing textures, full of stabbing high-end and seething, granular chaos hoovered straight off the forest floor – and speaking of which, I myself am basically floored by the extent to which Woven Skull have managed to conjure up such a unique and powerful sound for themselves; out of time, out of place, and touching gossamer-light on their (presumably voluminous) sphere of influence as much by accident-of-coincidental-greatness as by design.

Given how many of my personal sonic fetishes Woven Skull touch upon, I’m horrified to discover that they’ve actually been playing together since 2008. I’m not sure how I’ve managed to ignore their existence for so long (I fear I may have been confusing their name with that of garage-pop also-rans Woven Bones), but if for some reason, they feel inclined to cross the water to our exhausted br*xit netherworld at some point in the near future, they are liable to find me glowering in the front row, making up for lost time.


Makaya McCraven.



I confess it’s taken me a while to get my head around the recent explosion of interest in smooth/soulful jazz. I mean, it’s just been so… unexpected, y’know? Well, actually, perhaps not. I mean, all these young people with their music schools scholarships, their inclusive politics, good manners and vast quantities of marijuana…. I guess we should all have seen this one coming, right?

Anyway, the weather’s getting warmer, summer solstice has come and gone, and I’m finally feeling it; finally managing to overcome that instinctive distrust borne of a lifetime of being told that legitimate music must be aggressively idiosyncratic and disdainful of formal technique, and that anything ‘new’ that won’t upset attendees at a hypothetical dinner party should treated with extreme suspicion. And, I’m happy to report that this remarkable double album bearing the name of Chicago-based drummer Makaya McCraven has proved a great help in this regard. (Another thing that has helped: this video.)

A uniquely ambitious venture, ‘Universal Beings’ feels almost like a kind of a primer for this ascendant scene. Each of its four LP sides was recorded in a different city (New York, Chicago, London, Los Angeles), and each features a different group of players, with McCraven the sole constant.

Like many musicians within this mileau, McCraven plays as if he is as much influenced by hip-hop and electronica as ‘classic’ jazz, but his smoked-out, head-nodding 4/4 style, occasionally diverging into patterns of skittering, Ninja Tune-y rim-shots and weird double-time experiments, remains well-judged, never degenerating into cheese, and always serving to enhance, rather than detract from, the fine work of his collaborators. And, make no mistake, accessibility should not be confused here with any lack of depth or legitimacy in the performances showcased herein, which, I would contend, often hit a level that even the most hardline free improv/extended technique partisans will find difficult to dismiss.

The New York side, in particular, is absolutely sublime, recalling the blissed out vistas of the kind of early ‘70s session that Don Cherry or Alice Coltrane might have slipped right into, with Brandee Younger (harp), Tomeka Reid (cello) and Dezron Douglas (bass) all delivering contributions which deserve to be (very melodiously) hymned from the rooftops. Elsewhere, the Chicago side a little more fiery, with tenor player Shabaka Hutchins (appearing courtesy of Verve Records, I’ll have you know) blurting out the kind of proudly dissonant, clustered chords that will forever put me in mind of late-period Coltrane (John, that is). [I grasp at these old timey comparisons simply because it’s my natural instinct as an old timey guy, you understand, not because the players here necessarily stand up and demand them.]

The London side meanwhile dives straight into deep Gilles Peterson territory, with McCraven knocking out a rhythm that seems to be drawing on some kinda local grime/trap influence, but the session soon settles down into a hypnotic, sizzling kinda headspace, with Ashley Henry (electric piano) really clicking into place. Recorded at the home of that hot young hipster, Tortoise’s Jeff Parker, meanwhile, the L.A. side features a slightly larger ensemble, with Parker himself contributing some fragmented – but not overbearing – shards of disembodied fuzz guitar to proceedings, but it’s still just as much of a compelling and – dare I say – inspiring listen as the rest of this monumental document; an album I can easily imagine be fetishized in years to come as the sound of a very particular, and I’d venture, very positive, set of cultural time & place circumstances crystalising – temporarily, at least - into something really special.

Word to the wise: if any of this appeals to you, get on this soon, because vinyl copies are now sold out from most UK retailers, and this one of those albums that *really* benefits from the format, so pay what you have to, and happy hunting. I apologise for the fact that I was too dumb-headed to tell you about back when stock was fresh and new about nine months ago.


Venom Prison.



And, at completely the other end of the musical spectrum meanwhile – hold the presses folks! Here’s our new lead: Welsh metal band fronted by Russo-German antifa / feminist activist play unbelievably intense tech-grind / battle-ready DM addressing frightening, taboo-skirting subjects of real life concern. As you might imagine, the results are impossible to fuck with, but more surprisingly, they are also super fun to listen to and don’t give me a headache! Whole world rejoices! Story at eleven.

That’s all the info I have to report at present, but this interview should help fill in some of the gaps. For now, I’ll merely say that, whilst I usually find the more technical side of contemporary metal a huge turn off, the members of Venom Prison channel their post-human level virtuosity into such a raw, cathartic head-rush of sound that my usual gripes about muscle-nerd precision and faceless production find themselves righteously flattened.

Crucially, there is a tasty core of real Rock Pleasure Principle stuff retained here. Those riff break-downs and soaring lead lines are totally “sick”, as I believe the kids are saying - as much Arch Enemy as Meshuggah - and, combined with the flesh-shredding rage Larissa Stupar is putting across here (channelling pure Lee Dorrian era Napalm Death, in spirit if not in actual sonic resemblance)… well, this is just too much awesome for me to get my head around right now. My vision’s blurring – send help!


Tropical Nightmare.



There are, I would suggest, few people in the quote-unquote “civilised” world who currently have as much reason to be irked as Brazilians living in the UK. The three members of Tropical Nightmare do indeed seem to fall within this category, but it would be misleading to tie current geo-political anguish onto the four songs which comprise their ‘III’ EP, given that it was recorded in the summer of 2016, before the situation over here became quite so tragi-comically dire, and before their home country turned around and delivered an election result that the world needs like a shotgun wound to the thigh.

Nonetheless, it is this sort of thing which came to mind when I eventually hit ‘play’ on their bandcamp after seeing them performing live a few times, and being very impressed by the experience. Given that this is ominous, pedal-damaged mid-tempo punk with a heavy, distorted bass in the forefront, I suppose a Killing Joke comparison is probably warranted, but I enjoy these guys a lot more than that grisly lot; theirs is a serrated, nuanced and fiercely unpredictable take on noise-punk – a welcome touch of Big Black/Shellac in the mix maybe? - bolstered by the kind of vein-popping, impassioned delivery which adds further weight to the argument that, for some strange, indefinable reason, contemporary Portuguese and Spanish language punk tends to knock seven shades out of the Anglophone competition.

It doesn’t look as if Tropical Nightmare have released anything since this tape came out in January ‘18, but they’re still active (as of a few months back anyway), still gigging occasionally in London – so please, click the link above and show ‘em some love, and perhaps they’ll get back in the studio / dig out the old eight track [delete as applicable] before long.

Labels: I like, Les Filles de Illighadad, Makaya McCraven, Tropical Nightmare, Venom Prison, Woven Skull

Apparently this Bo Gritz lot live in the same half a city as I do, and presumably must have frequented some of the same places at some point. Perhaps some of them have played in some other bands that I may or may not have seen at some point, but I don’t think I’m familiar with any of them, as far as I’m aware. This is hardly surprising - I know very few people around town these days, and have a poor memory besides. Perhaps I’d recognise one or more of them if I saw a photo? Or perhaps not.

Well, never mind. Point is: of all the endless, minute variations of bad-tempered, hopeless noise-rock that exist in the world right now, Bo Gritz - on the basis of this cassette release at least - play one of the few that I actually want to listen to.

Which is to say: the guitar sometimes sounds like a demonically possessed analogue radio that’s come to life and started attacking people, the bass is content to lurk shadily in the background, a hooligan under a tree in a nocturnal park, whilst the drums thud away in exhausted, groovelessly utilitarian fashion, rather like Simon King of Hawkwind reaching his own personal dead-end after X hours of LSD fuelled battery. None of the players display any flash whatsoever. No time-changes, no ‘look-we're-tight’ turn-around bits, no twiddly riffs - it’s just pure ug. Simple, beautiful idiot-rock, laced with a bit of Messthetics bend n’ scrape.

There are vocals in there too I suppose – potentially snarled down the same drain-pipe that used to belong to Jim Shepard or The Heads, more recently liberated from City Yelps – whilst the four track tape recording keeps that nasty treble in check and helps to bake the band’s potentially upsetting, bulbous aggro down into a warm and nourishing aural porridge.

Wherever you are in the world and whatever you’re up to, chances are there is rain and cold and aggravation and petty bullshit on the horizon before long. This is the sound of walking straight into it... and subsequently standing on the street like an angry chump, refusing to admit that you went the wrong way and ballsed everything up. (Hey, it happens.)

If you do tapes, well you can no longer do this one because it’s sold out. Stream and download from here.

Labels: Bo Gritz, EP reviews, I like, tapes

Royal Headache.

Given the modicum of worldwide attention they’ve accumulated, Sydney’s Royal Headache were already lurking somewhere on my ‘to listen’ list, but it was a welcome nudge from Ruan of Popical Island last month that pushed me into actually doing said listening, and I have subsequently listened to their self-titled album (released variously by XVIII Records, R.I.P. Society and What’s Yr Rupture?) a great deal.

As is the case with Melbourne compatriots Eddy Current.., Royal Headache are a great and refreshing band whose appeal is so straightforward, it’s difficult for writer-types to pen a description that doesn’t make them sound shitty. I mean, left to my own devices, I'd probably describe them as something like “no nonsense, high energy guitar pop with catchy tunes and a great singer”, but then that quote might get inadvertently picked up by someone looking for copy and printed on a sticker in a record shop (hey, don’t laugh, it’s happened), and then no one would want to listen to Royal Headache ever again, and they'd have no option but to split up in disgrace. And I wouldn’t want that to happen. With great power, etc. So, zeroing in a bit, let’s instead say that this is sort of a happy collision between yr lo-fi ozzie punk and yr Exploding Hearts/Big Star/GBV power-pop, and see where that gets us.

As is often the case with these “just the same old stuff done well” type deals, I find myself recalling Billy Childish’s watertight formula for making a good record – ‘good song, good sound, good performance’. As I get older, I find myself becoming increasingly strident in my demand that song-based rock bands fulfil these basic criteria, and increasingly quick to dismiss them when they don’t. So… hopefully it will carry some kind of weight if I simply state that Royal Headache hit their marks better than any example of this kinda music I’ve heard in a long while.

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. As a yardstick of general good-ness, just consider the fact that they throw in about three instrumental cuts on this album, all purely of the “this is just like one of our regular songs, but we forgot to do the vocals” variety. Y’know - no solos or instro hooks or anything, just chords and bass and drums… and you won’t feel like skipping through any of them. How did they manage that?

If anything, the instrumentals just act as necessary buffers between the chest-beating rama-lama of the vocal songs, which are…. pretty damn good, on the whole. Maybe not quite world class song-writing prowess or anything, but the energy and soul of the performance gets them straight to the bullseye more often than not. There’s a few punk stompers (‘Psychotic Episode’ is a winner), and the joyously self-explanatory ‘Girls’ (destined to instigate 80 seconds of carnage at your next barbeque), but mainly they sing about love, like ye olde bands used to – being in it, not being in it, having it, not having it – y’know, the whole thing. Now I’ll admit that currently I might be more inclined toward the enjoyment of songs about, I dunno, bulldozers or ghosts or military history or something, but with the oomph of singer + band behind the material, the old “love, love, love” thing works out nicely for Royal Headache, and it’s a great time, right words hitting the right chord changes just like they need to.

So in conclusion, that’s Royal Headache folks. All round quality. If you need stuff like this in your life right now, you won’t find much better. Our vendors are waiting.

Labels: Australia, I like, Royal Headache

I like King Tuff.

Hey guys, why didn’t anyone tell me about King Tuff before… ?

I mean, don’t kid me, I know you’ve all been digging his stuff for years, sniggering behind my back – ‘oh, check it out, that guy’s never even HEARD of King Tuff, can ya believe it’, and so forth. Well no more.

His royal tuffness finally came to my attention a couple of months back, when a few online sinkholes I frequent posted up reports that he had a new LP on the horizon, an announcement that seemingly prompted Second Coming level excitement. Curious, I thought. From the fragmentary descriptions therein, this King Tuff fellow seemed to be right up my street, so before you know it I was clicking my way through his 2008 album ‘King Tuff Was Dead’, wondering how I could ever show my face in public again, have remained ignorant of the legitimate monarch of a certain, specific corner of electric guitar-based party music for so long.

So as to save you from a similar fate, let’s take a deep breath and reluctantly do the old ‘attempting to describe the music’ thing.

Evidently a man who has devoted a great deal of time contemplating the mysteries of T. Rex, King Tuff takes all the cool bits of that era of glam rock – the bad-ass shuffling/strutting rhythms, minimal fuss/maximum rock recording aesthetic and strange quasi-psychedelic glimmer - and weds them to a kind of endearing ‘Swell Guy’ persona, like a kind of beer-quaffing, hair-freak Buddy Holly, pulling off all the iconic rock moves you could hope for, with an earnest, slightly off-message romanticism that’s wholly individual.

The lazy will likely have deemed this ‘power-pop’, but I don’t wanna go there again, cos this has little in common with the leadfooted vacuum of 95% of those who would self-identify as ‘power-pop’. Shit this effortlessly cool just doesn’t need these tired genre tags. Awesome is its genre.

The recorded sound on ‘Was Dead’ is, appropriately, awesome – like the kind of ‘home-recording’ that transpires when you decide that the Visconti T. Rex albums are technically ‘home recordings’ and work from there. That the songs are inspired and the playing killer is also a given. This guy knows how to write a good song, how to keep it bubbling along with the kind of little nuances that reward repeat listens, and the kind of contented grooviness that stops you ever needing to check yr watch as the 3:30 mark comes and goes.

He knows how to capture the fuzzy, happy glow of infatuation and lustful anticipation really nicely, and I like the way he has of mixing up universal 'rock song' type imagery with weird, personal details that keep the whole thing specific and earth-bound (check out the bit about him driving in his Chevrolet in ‘Sun Medallion’ or “eating pizza all fucking night” in ‘Animal’).

And boy, the dude has got some LICKS too – I mean, I hate to get any more ‘Bill & Ted’ on you that I am already when writing about this sort of thing, but there is only word for the guitar-work on this record, and the word is *sweet*. Not showy or overcooked, but just *sweet*. I mean, just check out the clip below – the strumming stuff’s all fine, but just look at him go come solo time – whoop. There’s a guy whose bedroom years were not wasted.



Saying that King Tuff sounds like the natural next stage on the evolutionary ladder from party-punk greats like Mean Jeans and Personal & The Pizzas is disingenuous, because the last thing I ever want that stuff to do is EVOLVE… or at least, I didn’t think I did, until I heard King Tuff amping up the happy spirit of that aesthetic to shimmering new heights with all these real cosmic/romantic burners, singing a song called ‘Lady’ (as every great rock band should, just to prove their worth), and really makin’ it, like if some ‘70s behemoths like Dust swapped their ug for maracas and a gigantic heat-haze grin… you could almost call it ‘psychedelic’, only that would be silly. Oh wait, I already did a few paragraphs ago. Anyway, real A+ moment is after the solo when he sings “hanging out on the corner… with your girlfriends / you call my name from the window / NO NO NO!” Beautiful.



And that’s only, like, my third or fourth favourite song on the record. ‘Stone Fox’ does the same trick even better (STONE FOX! That’s the song rock bands should have to write after they’ve passed the ‘Lady’ challenge), and this one’s gotta be my #1 fave:



It’s pretty rare these days that I find a record that I find myself listening to compulsively, and that continues to make me happy across a period of several months, but ‘..Was Dead’ is it and does so.

King Tuff’s new self-titled record is out at the end of the month through the venerable auspices of Sub-Pop, so you’ll probably be seeing it here and there if you read free music papers, frequent record shops and the like.

On the basis of the two pre-release tracks they’ve put up, it’s sounding like a winner.

Five years late, but I’m glad to be here, a humble subject in King Tuff’s dominion.

Labels: I like, King Tuff

6 for ’12:
Humousexual.

Another great band filtering into my consciousness late last year, (partly through the evangelism of Everard Records, partly via a great set I saw them play at Dalston venue Power Lunches), Humousexual are a London/Berlin duo who have seemingly been around for a few years, but, perhaps owing to the inherent problems of being a London/Berlin duo, have yet to make much of an impact on the wider world. This situation is hopefully soon to be rectified to a certain extent by the release of both a 7” EP on the aforementioned Everard, and a self-released mini-album type thing entitled ‘Grenzenlos’. Each copy of the latter is rendered unique thanks to cover art featuring locations torn straight off a collection of vintage postcards – a brilliant design decision that seems to perfectly exemplify the ethos of quality, self-sufficiency and personal connection captured in the band’s music.

‘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.

Recommended about as strongly as it’s possible to recommend anything, you can listen to and go shopping for both releases here.

Labels: Humousexual, I like

6 for ’12:
Shoppers.

One of several amazing records that hit me just slightly too late for them to be incorporated into the big 2011 run-down, Syracuse NY trio Shoppers initially came to my attention when somebody I follow on Tumblr rated their ‘Silver Year’ LP (Feeble Minds Records) as album-of-the-year. And not without reason - it’s a total monster.

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 – aforementioned Tumblr post and (where else?) Still Single – 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 go with 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.

You can put it a bit like this I guess: punk is an essentially static/retrogressive form – always worthwhile, usually powerful, but prone to accelerated levels of repetition and stagnation. 90% of the time, no problem. But, just like it’s good to break up a diet of fun/escapist movie-watching by throwing on something completely fucked and demanding every once in a while, punk is a genre that occasionally needs a spanner in the works, something to come at it from a different angle and wreak havoc in the cheap seats, (if you'll allow me a coupla mixed metaphors). Shoppers is that.

You can watch a whole set by them in the video above. Doesn’t quite capture the beserk guitar-tone and blood-curdling vocalisms found on the record, but you’ll get the idea.

Labels: I like, Shoppers

Milk Music.

(Photo by Matt Koroulis on Flickr)

The best new band I’ve discovered this year is Milk Music, from Olympia, WA.

You’ll notice I said “the best”, rather than “my favourite”. Partly just to aid tidy sentence construction, but partly because my belief that this is true extends beyond the usual veil of subjectivity.

Credit where it’s due dept, I picked up on them toward the start of the year following a superlative write-up on Doug Mosurock’s Still Single blog. Since then – via some questionably obtained mp3s - they’ve soundtracked more morning/evening journeys than anything else on record. They just hit that perfect headspace for preparing for another fucking day at work, I suppose. Like much good rock music, their sound speaks of facing up to the crap and ploughing through it. Then having a smoke as all lies in ruins before you. Not that I either smoke or reduce things to ruins on a daily basis, but y’know what I mean.

The essence of what Milk Music does can be dissembled into its constituent parts without much effort;

Propulsive drive and dead-eyed-stare quality comes straight from The Wipers.

Emotionally engaged, riff-heavy song-writing is pure early Dinosaur / late Huskers.

Monster guitar tone via Zeke/Black Flag.

Nothing new under the sun of course, but currently the particular way in which this group slam this stuff together feels like a revelation. Or a sobering punch in the tummy, at least. Milk Music are pretty young guys too (I think?), and ply their wares with the kind of gut level brutality that young guys traditionally should. That’s pretty crucial, I feel.

Ask the man on the street and he’d probably tell you it sounds like grunge. But as Sid Vicious famously put it in a rare moment of insight, “I’ve met the man on the street and he’s a cunt”. We all know where the good shit was at before the media came up with that label, and so do Milk Music. Hey guess what, it’s still there. Rock Music, I believe it’s called.

In fact, all you 80s/90s Proper Rock veterans, moaning about how the kids today just aren’t making music as uncompromisingly bad-ass as they did before you got old and the internet turned up and spoiled everything: get a clue and leap the generation gap – you have a new favourite band at last, and they probably hate websites just as much as you do.

Their six song 12” ‘Beyond Life’ is beyond good, and you can get in touch with the Perennial Death label to see whether they’ve still got a hard copy left to ship to where you live.

I enjoyed capitalising the phrase Rock Music earlier in this post, so let’s nail our flag to the mast and say that this is the Best American Rock Record in recent memory. The recording isn’t flashy, but it’s not murky either. It’s just right. The guitar is mixed at *the right level*, and long-term readers will know what that means. One day maybe I’ll speak to the bass player, and ask him how it feels having his tone entirely swallowed by his buddy’s low end. And assuming he doesn’t think I’m attempting a crude euphemism and punch me, we can hopefully at least come to an agreement that he’s always there in the background, doing good work.

Here’s a soundcloud of the 12”s title track;



And whilst you’re waiting for that to arrive in the post, you can enjoy the rougher but even louder session that they did for Brian Turner’s WFMU show, with a couple of tunes off the record and a whole bunch of other ones. ‘Thrashing in the Unknown’ in particular is a burnin’ monster, to utilise the same terminology employed by the band in the interview segment in reference to David Crosby’s ‘Almost Cut My Hair’.

Here it is, all free to stream/dl:

What else to say? I dunno. Milk Music have a shitty name, but they’re one hell of a band. As I get older, I’ve noticed my body is becoming less tolerant of the rigours of regularly attending what you Americans call ‘punk shows’, so you can take it as quite the compliment when I say that being stuck in an unventilated basement with a bunch of random maniacs, Milk Music, a cheap vocal PA and a set of full stacks is about the closest thing to paradise I can imagine right now. Oof.

Labels: I like, Milk Music

New Favourite Band.



Morgan & The Organ Donors.

From Olympia WA, presumably.

Thrown my way by afogofideas tumblr.

No more info at present, but hopefully won't stay that way for long.

Look! Here they are doing a quiet number:

Labels: I like, Morgan and the Organ Donors, videos

I Like The Mantles.

The Mantles self-titled LP on Siltbreeze was the record I “slept on” most heinously during 2009, it seems. I mean, I’m pretty sure I had a copy at the end of last year. I remember thinking it was good music for exercising to. I liked the drums a lot, but nothing special. Apparently it didn’t even find a spot on my end of year top # 50. An unforgivable oversight!

Twelve months and many listens later, I see the album for what it is - a startlingly powerful collection of fiery, elegant rock music, strong of playing and strong of song, with my current record-recordin’ hero Greg Ashley at the controls, making sure the whole thing sounds about as ineffable and exciting as such things get in the 21st century – mighty, chiming guitars ringing out across a storm-blackened sky, drum kit crashing through like the desperate hooves of a galloping stallion – all that jazz. I’d bloody love to own it on vinyl.

I guess maybe I thought the whole brooding tone of the record was a bit try-hard at first – all that stern-faced romantic stuff and galloping Triffids/Jacobites melodrama. It’s a tough aesthetic to go for first-time out, with precious few non-failures amid an appropriately bleak landscape of raincoated corpses. Staying focussed, staying low-key and keeping the amps up loud, never over-stepping the mark into pomp and never slackening the pace…. to everyone’s surprise, The Mantles don’t just ride it out but practically redefine it for all time. Whoa.

Nonetheless, they’re a difficult band to write about in yr standard scene-setting/comparison terms, managing to create a music that skims across the surface of a whole gamut of vague underground rock notions without fully embracing any of them, a music with no distinguishing marks, no giveaway slip-ups, just a sound and songs that are familiar yet different, solid and GOOD - like finding a hand-carved wooden object inside a machine, serving it’s purpose perfectly in place of a mass-produced equivalent.

No, I don’t know where that metaphor came from either, but uh… let’s leave it in and move on.

This year’s follow-up EP, ‘Pink Information’ on Mexican Summer, sees The Mantles reversing the natural trajectory taken by a lot of groups, stepping back from the ‘dark, sweeping drama’ approach of their LP in favour of a scrappier, more elemental pop angle, somewhat reminiscent of The Clean’s early material – a pretty encouraging turn of events, I’m sure you’d agree.

Happily, the EP also finds the band’s songwriting (the LP’s weakest hand, relatively speaking) hitting a whole new level. I mean, what can I tell you – “Cascades” and “Situations” and just some of the most compulsively listenable songs I’ve heard this year, twisting and chugging, dead-pan and sweet and cool and… well, just perfect, really. Perfect in a way you never realised was ‘perfect’ until you heard it. There's a wildness here that there wasn't quite enough of on the LP; that bit just before the end of "Situations", where he exclaims "in the laboratory, the midnight hour..." before aborting the verse and ploughing straight back in a final chorus just blows my mind.

“Lily Never Married” is even better, sounding like one of those songs about unhappy family members and cloudy days that Ray Davies used to stick in the middle of mid-‘60s Kinks albums like morbid cries for help, catapulted back to our attention via a flawless Velvets groove and unbearably simple/poignant chord progression – a sad, humane song, using a few chords, a rhythm, a handful of repeated lyrics, to carry the quiet sorrow of an ordinary, wasted life into a place of real transcendence. "Now she's old / what can you say? / People just don't do / that anymore...". Fitting those magic notes and words together, like Ray or Lou Reed used to be able to do every now and again. Five minutes passes in the space of, ooh, two and a half, easy. It’s really, really great.

I don’t like the song “Summer Read” quite so much as I used to, since I clocked the title and realised the opening line isn’t “TREAT ME LIKE A SUBMARINE”, but it’s still pretty good.

After some reflection, I think The Mantles are one of the only American “indie-rock” bands – in the sense of being unaffiliated with the conventions and fandom of garage or pop or punk or noise or psych or whatever else – whose output I really care for at present.

I won’t give you a diatribe about what a hopeless quagmire of nothing all that stuff I shall irresponsibly generalise into the realm of beardy, pitchforky type “indie rock” has become (I refer you to Andrew Earles here for an update on that), but let’s stick to the positive and just say that The Mantles, somehow, are drawing a line straight back to the source, making music like the kind that taught us to love this stuff with all our hearts and souls way back when, before everything on Matador started to sound like the 21st century equivalent of Chicago XIV or whatever – songs that are ragged and noisy and pulse-quickening, but also elusive and grand and dazzlingly beautiful, the same way that Yo La Tengo or Dinosaur or Galaxie 500 used to sound, the first thousand times we heard them.

It makes me want to grab all those people who listen to all their favourite bands from the ‘80s and ‘90s and moan that everything’s gone to shit since people younger than them started releasing records and say LOOK! The Mantles are doin’ it! Right now! Not some weird, badly-recorded punk that you SIMPLY REFUSE to pay £6 for an import 7” of, but all that good shit that you love so much. And they’re not even a bunch of middle-aged guys from New Zealand either! Now get to it already.

Plenty o’ good tunes on their myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/mantles

Labels: I like, The Mantles

I Like Overnight Lows.

Overnight Lows are a three-piece band out of Jackson, Mississippi, rocking that ever-popular husband/wife/drummer configuration. Their album “City of Rotten Eyes” came out on Goner Records earlier this year, and it totally destroys.

That’s about all you need to know really, and this music makes me feel like being BRUTALLY CONCISE (some hope), but it’s the least I can do to at least try to use words to sell you on a record I’ve listened to all the way through about, say, five days out of every seven for the past couple of months.

Comparable in both form and execution to the spirit of that first Thermals album, crossbred with an accidental nod or three to the “world’s fastest strumming average” ideal of Reis & Froburg’s Hot Snakes, Overnight Lows play punk rock stripped of all fat, devoid of bullshit – twelve loud, memorable, breakneck-paced songs about being angry and hating stuff. Five of them make the two minute mark. Not a clunker in the bunch, and not a slow bit or room to catch a breath either. Best walking to work music ever.

Drummer Paul Artiques plays about as is humanly possible without lapsing into hardcore/metal double kick drum territory – hi-hat going like a metronome and heavy on the ride cymbal. He is a great drummer! Marsh and Daphne Nabors correspondingly lay into things with a crazed ferocity, rather akin to the spirit of a guy on super-charged two-stroke motorbike, randomly hurling dynamite and trying to overtake a train. Recording quality is pretty good, but with everything in the room mixed WAY UP, rough edges in the playing swallowed by the feedback… and by the next verse, which has probably finished before you’ve even clocked what the hell is going on.

Like most great punk rock, each song here begins as a monomaniacal tirade about some aspect of singer’s life that s/he feels is simply intolerable and, well, just sort of continues as one really. “You’re well read / big words stuck in your tiny head / you’re well read / can’t understand what you said”, shrieks Marsh Nabors at some scholarly antagonist in ‘So Well Read’. Wait dude, what's so bad about reading books? Nothing, obviously, but if you read books and you're a JERK, well - fair game. “When I kiss your lips / all I taste is lies / I know what I’ve gotta do, and that’s sad”, responds Daphne in ‘Static Scars’. After a few dozen listens, both singers’ lyrics stand out as genuinely excellent – direct, imaginative and dryly funny, however random and unprovoked the fury with which they’re spat out may seem.

It’s funny, I could spend all day listening to contemporary albums by bands of musclebound guys effortlessly playing ‘punk rock’ music of similar volume and velocity to this, but none of it would hit me like the Overnight Lows record. What we’ve got here I think is he sound of people who WEREN’T born to play music like this, straining themselves to the nth degree to keep up the pace and take the damage, sounding like they could fall apart any second – which is fantastic, and exhilarating, and yeah – punk rock.

Seeing as how they’ve got character and intelligence and no visible tattoos, the bastards’ll probably file them under ‘indie’. C’est la vie.

Oh yeah, also not to be confused with the other band of the same name, who seem to have monopolised web searches for ‘Overnight Lows’, and are pretty hopeless.

For the avoidance of doubt, I’m talking about these Overnight Lows;

http://www.myspace.com/theovernightlows

Labels: I like, Overnight Lows, punk rock

I Like Colleen Green.

Not that I want to dedicate this blog entirely to weird kids in America making drugged out Ramones music on Myspace or anything, but... well actually, I probably do, let's face it, and honestly, do you think there was a hope I wouldn't totally love Colleen Green?

You should download her EP, it's great.

She does goofy comics like this one too:



God bless.

Labels: Colleen Green, I like

I Like The Beets... I think?

This Beets record is a strange one. Initially I thought it was garbage. Just a loada muffled, slovenly, unremarkable mumbling songs with nothing much going for them at all. But somehow it just keeps coming back at you, and sticking. Clearly an investigation is called for;

I think if you’re able to temporarily abandon all expectation that pop/rock music should be big and brash and lively, The Beets have stumbled across a very pleasant way of making music, and humbly presented it to us like a big, dopey dog returning a stick. There’s five Beets, but they don’t make much of a noise between them – just some simple strumming on acoustic (or acoustic-sounding) guitars, a thump from a snare drum and a bunch of guys with really weedy voices all singing along. In addition, they sound like they recorded their album by setting up a single microphone at the opposite end of an empty school gymnasium in which they happened to be practicing. So vast is the distance between recording apparatus and performers here, you’re forced to listen closely just to recognise the fact that there are songs happening. But when you do, the result is kinda pleasing. In fact, if you’re feeling zonked and tired out, the whole muted distantness of it works wonderfully. I had no idea I needed music that sounded like this until I heard it, and even then I thought it was shit the first three or four times round, but need it I do.

Once you get tuned into what they’re doing, I guess The Beets maybe sound a bit like The Fugs, only not annoying. Or a bit like The Moldy Peaches, only not annoying. Not being annoying is a big part of what The Beets do, and I appreciate that. Nothing in their music is shrill, or surprising, or grating. The flattened out sound stops any of it from becoming belligerent or demanding attention.

The Beets’ songs are short and have big, simple, pleasing chords and rhyming lyrics about god only knows what, with which they all sing along like a sloppy nerd choir. That’s the key to it I think: all singing along, and asking no questions. Not singing along in an ostentatiously enthusiastic revival tent manner though – quite the opposite. These are more like lethargic, stoned-ass work songs for weakling mid-twenties white guys who’ve just been staring at that Mac screen too damn long and need to get some sunshine.

The Beets sound like they don’t write songs, they just get together and start doing them – a cardigan-wearing chain-gang, singing their sorrows on the way to the photocopier. I know this sounds like just about the worst music ever, but bear with me here. I don’t understand it either. Once you get used to the fact that it sounds like it was recorded through a wall, by accident, I defy you to actively dislike this record. It really is kinda great.

NOTE: I wrote this in one sitting a couple of weeks ago, and have not subsequently listened to The Beets.

http://www.myspace.com/thebeetsbeat

John Darnielle seems rather overly keen on this video, featuring The Beets:

Labels: I like, The Beets

I Like The Spits.

The Spits aren’t new by any stretch of the imagination. Anecdotal evidence would tend to suggest they’ve been around for years, and they have a tangled discography fulla live EPs, split singles and the like to keep the wouldbe Spits fanatic busy for, ooh, hours. But for whatever reason, The Spits had flown beneath my radar until this January, when their ‘Vol. 4 / School’s Out!’ album effectively BECAME my radar.

Eight or nine weeks later, I’m still listening to it every single day – no kidding. Thankfully that doesn’t require much of an effort, because it’s only fifteen minutes long. Such conciseness of purpose immediately puts The Spits on my Christmas card list. Music aside though, I still don’t really know where The Spits are coming from, whether they’re polite book-smarts guys playing dumb or just a gang of big, angry lummoxes from the middle o’ nowhere, so the card might remain unsent pending an address. But whoever they are, they SPEAK RAMONES, and that means we’re talkin’.

The Spits have a human drummer who sounds like a drum machine and they have big, distorted Jerry Only type bass. They have toxic, monotone fuzz guitar and a vocalist who sounds like a surly drunk from a Lenny Bruce sketch. They have cheap wavo/Devo keyboards and Liquid Sky sci-fi/horror shenanigans to liven things up too, but that’s all gravy. I appreciate that they are probably working to whims of a relatively small audience who consider this sort of thing The Most Perfect Music Ever, but if that audience ever get together to start a formal organisation, I’m gonna try and run for treasurer or entertainments secretary, so the hell with ya if you think different.

During the brief run-time of ‘Vol. 4’, The Spits make their platform abundantly clear. The Spits like: parties, beer, aliens, petty crime. The Spits dislike: teachers, the police, girls who dump them, living in a van. And like The Ramones and The Misfits before them, they have a beautiful and persuasive sense of melody with which to sell us on these emotionally sound but sometimes ethically impractical proposals, for at least as long as those robot-drums keep thrumming away. Truly a band who speak for the heart & soul of the common man. Hallelujah!

So make sure to listen to “Tonight” and “Life Of Crime” on their myspace each day, and I hope that soon you’ll be onside as we join The Spits in pursuit of an all round better life for everyone.

http://www.myspace.com/thespits
http://www.thespits.com/index.html

Their live shows certainly look like... an experience:

Labels: I like, punk rock, The Spits

I Like Best Coast.

Ok, so it seems I’m late arriving at Best Coast. The premium towel-space is already taken, and the volleyball has long been in progress. But hey, the more the merrier, right? Bethany Cosentino has been out and about doing things as Best Coast for quite a while now, getting name-dropped in all the right place (and some of the wrong ones), but something – I don’t even remember what – always discouraged me from checking her/them out. Maybe it was cos they seem to get tied so neatly into that whole “deteriorated tapes going to the beach” jive that was/is doing the rounds? Maybe Pitchfork et al seemed to be sidling up a little too strong a little too soon? Maybe the fact I’m writing this crap which will mean zilch to anyone reading this in the archives in years to come is case in point? Anyway, forget all that, all that matters now is that I’m here, I’ve found a parking space, I’ve got Best Coast’s “Something In The Way” single on the stereo, and it’s a flat-out WINNER – brilliant in a way that needs no explanation or aesthetic pigeon-holing from anyone. The three songs here are fifty years-worth of yearning tough-girl pop refined to perfection, immaculate of melody, rough of execution, raw and sweet of feeling, sounding so compelling and naturalistic you won’t even clock the extent to which they're a pastiche of the greats ‘til you’re on your eighth listen.

Sure, it’s got that drowsy, just-got-outta-bed, faux-four track feel to it that’ll have everyone who still has the good grace to write something before posting the link reaching for those easy invocations of spliffs at the beach and sad, sexy ‘70s polaroids and leaving it at that. And yeah, why not, it’s a nice sound - but it’s the SONGS that are carrying this one. Maybe they’re not all special and unique, but you know what? Fuck ‘special & unique’ songs – these ones are happy just being GOOD, sewn from the same tri-chord cloth of happy/sad formalised joy and heartbreak as rest of their noble lineage. I’ll take “Something In The Way” over the other (‘special’, ‘unique’) songs that share that name any day, and “Wish He Was You” speaks for itself from the title on down – a song maybe a bit too lyrically near-the-knuckle for any girls to have sung back in the ‘60s, but dammit, it’s probably what they were thinking as they knocked out their nth ‘tears in the rain’ style number.

This is not music that’s new and overhyped and to be feared. This is music that’s been here forever. I know I’ve already referenced the ‘60s a bit, but you know what? Cut away all the drowsy, gauzy boombox shit (WE NEED NEW DESCRIBING WORDS), put Best Coast in the studio with some reformed hippie production guy, make her do twelve songs instead of three, put some colour-saturated photo of a flower on the front, sell the damn thing in Sam Goody for £12.99 and you’ve got yourself one hell of a good Juliana Hatfield record. It’s not music for jumping up and down and making a fuss to, but if you like to shimmy then it’s good enough shimmying music for you to shimmyyourself half to death, beach or no beach.

http://www.myspace.com/bestycoasty

Labels: Best Coast, I like