Before we get going here, I should take some time to address the fact that a number of records on this list actually came out in 2018. I know - ancient, right? A couple of them I even picked up when they were repressed by the label after a period of unavailability, which I suppose technically makes them reissues, even. At the end of the day though, WHO F-ING CARES? When the gap between recording and release dates can stretch into years, does it really matter? This is a list of reasonably contemporary music that I discovered and played a lot in 2019, the existence of which made me happy and in some sense… reassured?

Reassured about what, I’m not really sure, but I’ll leave the the-end-is-nigh drum beating for another day (it’s getting pretty mainstream now anyway, so perhaps my work on that score is done). Suffice to say, if you and yours are lucky enough to inhabit lands not currently on fire, under water or under heavy bombardment – happy new year! In previous years, I’d have added something about not being under the yoke of some pea-brained tyrant, but we can’t expect miracles, I suppose.

And, finally, I’d like to close things off with a reminder that last year saw the death of a number a people whose work meant a great deal to me, both in the realm of music and beyond. Roky Erickson, David Berman, Dick Dale, Larry Cohen – gone but not forgotten. Please take a few minutes to click on those links and remember them at their best.

Now let’s get on with it.

1. Grey Hairs – Health & Social Care LP
(Gringo)





Essential rock music for dark times. Back in October, I said:

“At the risk of repeating myself from past reviews, Grey Hairs make proper modern rock music, reclaiming that horribly loaded phrase from a place of the map which finds it bracketed between moustache-twiddling sub-genre re-enactment societies and shit that sounds like The Foo Fighters. In doing so, they stare down cold the expected bandwagon of influences, they address the world in which we live with honesty and insight, they conduct their band business with integrity, and, they rock, in a manner both profound and disconcertingly literal.

If you find yourself sick of a life full of dodgy cabling and dented speaker cabs, crowded dark rooms full of pints and germs, please listen to ‘Health & Social Care’, and remind yourself what the point is.”


2. Psychedelic Speed Freaks – s/t LP
(Black Editions)




Whisper it please, but you know what - on reflection, I think I might actually enjoy this even more than the old High Rise records, if you can believe that. Back in June, I ventured to characterise it as;

“..one of the most exhilaratingly extreme rock albums of the modern era, sitting comfortably next to the MC5-meets-AMT carnage of Feral Ohms debut from a couple of years back, even as tracks like ‘Night Seer’ – my personal favourite here - dial things back to a sleek, pulsing urban beauty that nigh on defies description, recalling the exquisitely nuanced blare of Martin Weaver’s work in Wicked Lady, whilst closing track ‘Immaterialized’ finds Narita grinding the gears of a shining, ectoplasmic hog for an eternal run down the post-earth highway, ol’ Jasso’s voice breaking into a Lemmy-like croak as space-rock oblivion beckons. It’s a monster.

Fuzz guitar fanatics who value raw sound, inventive playing and sonic extremity over expensive, brightly coloured boxes and multi-tracked compression - or indeed, unrehabilitated rock fans who just want an excuse to grind their drunken heads into the ground like some kind of human corkscrew - both need to get on this immediately.”


3. Joshua Abrams & Natural Information Society – Mandatory Reality 2xLP 
(Eremite)




The very nicest sounds that the nicer half of our world has to offer. From November:

“Central to this music’s appeal is the fact that, rather than drifting off into abstraction, the tracks remain anchored around simple, almost child-like melodies – endlessly appealing harmonic phrases picked out on some string bass and glockenspiel-type things (practically none of the instruments my ears tell me are present on this record are actually listed on the credits), lending the music a feeling of warmth and accessibility that any open-eared, human listener should be able to appreciate.

If this can indeed be deemed a ‘drone’ record (and the proposition is questionable, though ‘In Memory’s Prism’ has tended to get played in the time and place I normally reserve for drone records), then it’s certainly not a “cold depths of interstellar space” type proposition – more of a “come on in, make yourself at home, would you like a cup of tea?” kind of deal, like walking into a stranger’s living room for the first time and immediately feeling so much at home that you feel you could spend your entire life there.”


4. Makaya McCraven – Universal Beings 2xLP
(International Anthem)




A good few dozen varieties of raw musical talent, thrown together by Mr McCraven like some mad cake mix, taking that ‘boom-bap’ nouveau-jazz sound to stereotype-defying heights of senseless beauty.

From July:

“Like many musicians within this milieu, 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 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 would find difficult to dismiss. […] a compelling and – dare I say – inspiring listen; an album I can easily imagine be fetishised 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.”


5. The Bevis Frond – We’re Your Friends, Man 2xLP
(Fire)




You’ve gotta love someone who sticks to their story, and god knows, The Bevis Frond’s Nick Saloman has certainly done that – ‘We’re Your Friends Man’ could have come out immediately after fan favourites like 1990’s ‘Any Gas Faster’ or 1991’s ‘New River Head’ and no one would have batted an eyelid. The same mixture of elements that has sent me on a heavy duty trawl through the Frond back catalogue in recent years – disarmingly direct, pretention-free song-writing, sturdy DIY rock arrangements spiked with trace elements of folk and psychedelia and gargantuan quantities of unashamed, Hendrix-via-Mascis lead guitar heroism – can be found here in spades, the formula unchanged and undimmed by the passage of time.

Like most Frond releases, this is a pretty mammoth venture – twenty full length songs stretching over eighty plus minutes – and whilst there are, as always, some iffy moments here and there, it’s a tribute to the strength of Saloman’s writing that at least two thirds of these numbers demand repeat listens, his capacity for twisting his own experiences and insecurities into compelling new shapes lending the material a great deal more mileage than this kind of relentless introspection would normally achieve.

The playing from the currently full band line-up meanwhile is, needless to say, exceptional, keeping energy levels high throughout, and the fact that a group who’ve been doggedly plugging away across the decades can still hide Greatest Hits-worthy nuggets like Theft, And Relax… or the title track deep within the double digits of their umpteenth album’s track-list is nothing short of remarkable.


6. Aggressive Perfector – Havoc at the Midnight Hour LP
(Dying Victims)




I’m not sure I if I can put this much more clearly than I did in my brief write-up at the start of December, but – HEAVY FUCKING METAL. If you like it, you’ll like this.


7. Kamaal Williams – The Return LP
(Black Focus)




From that same December post:

“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’.”


8. Sarah Davachi - Let Night Come On Bells End The Day LP
(Recital)




And yet again, from December:

“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, 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.”


9. Comet Gain - Fireraisers Forever! LP
(Tapete)





This wouldn’t be a 2010s Stereo Sanctity best-of list without the great Mike Vest getting his oar in, and, following the less than amicable demise of Blown Out (about which we remain VERY SAD), Mike’s best shot at deep space nirvana in 2019 came via this postal collaboration with Australia-based drummer Andrew Panagopoulos.

Expanding on the template laid down by earlier releases under the Dodge Meteor name, this must stand as Vest’s most unashamedly Rockist project to date, as he brings chunky, full-on stoner-rock tone to the party, leaning heavily into the riffs as if waiting for some Dave Wyndorf type dude to step up to the mic – but, thankfully, that never happens, allowing Vest & Panagopoulos to instead stretch out and get gnarly.

The eight minute ‘Alien Shit’ in particular is a magnificent cut, a synapse-melting showcase of ultra-fried soloing that finds Vest embodying the album’s title about as completely as is humanly possible, revealing the influence of both Hendrix and Munehiro Narita upon his playing, in yet another absolutely flattening display of unashamed rock n’ roll extremity. In a happier world, they’d hand out sporting-style statuettes for this kind of achievement, and poor old Mike would need to invest in a sturdier set of shelves to keep them all on, in rare moments when he kills the volume and glides back to terra firma.


11. Venom Prison – Samsara LP
(Prosthetic)




From July:

“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 death metal 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.”


12. Taras Bulba – One LP
(Riot Season)




Though I was initially sad to hear that Fred Laird had disbanded his long-running outfit Earthling Society earlier this year, after sampling this initial collection of recordings from Laird’s new project with Earthling Society drummer Jon Blacow, the decision begins to make a lot of sense. To some extent I think, Taras Bulba follows on directly from the foundations laid by last year’s fairly astounding MO: The Demon album, vis-à-vis Laird’s apparent desire to move away from the more traditionally rooted British heavy psych/space rock of Earthling Soc’s prior releases, and to instead throw his stylistic net wide, embracing weird and exotic new sonic climes in a predominantly instrumental context.

And, sure enough, this ‘One’ goes all over the place, with otherly tuned and/or otherly constructed string tones predominating on the early tracks, alongside chimes, tabla-like percussion, eerie, looped samples and tape fragments whose mantra-like Middle Eastern atmos recalls Sun City Girls’ “ethno-forgery” approach, before paranoid, sawing strings, sinister/whimsical Czech movie soundtrack chimes and florid late night sax guide us through the spy-haunted neon midnight of, uh, ‘Neon Midnight’, ‘The YO-YO Man’ inaugurates a gleaming, chrome-bumpered ‘Ege Bamyasi’-ish nightmare funk jam, and ‘Rising Lazarus Blues’, the record’s sole vocal cut, returns us briefly to the more (relatively) familiar terrain of a particularly discombobulated under-the-apple-tree psych-folk phantasia, hitting a very particular sweet spot that I think was last tickled way back when by Dead Meadow’s ‘Feathers’ album, or the work of nutty Italian Barrett-devotees Jennifer Gentle.

For a fairly modest and low key initial release under a new band name, this LP covers one hell of a lot of ground, displaying a vivid and powerful sonic imagination and no small amount of skill and ingenuity, suggesting that the sky’s the limit for Laird and Blacow now that they’ve (for the most part) put aside the fuzzboxes and left the trad rock band format far behind.


13. Lower Slaughter – Some Things Take Work LP 
(Box)




I’ll confess, when I first picked up Lower Slaughter’s second LP upon its release early in 2019, it struck me as a pretty grizzly exemplar of Difficult Second Album Syndrome… not that there’s anything ‘wrong’ with it as such, you understand, but by nixing the easy Rock Pleasure Principle wins of their earlier work in order to undertake some brittle and punishing explorations of break-ups, bad relationships and self-esteem struggles, the band delivered a record which initially felt forbidding and unrewarding – the opening dirge of ‘Gas’ in particular is, appropriately enough, hard work - particularly for those of us who are (happily) unable to relate directly to its lyrical themes at this point in our lives.

Returning to it for a few weeks prolonged exposure later in the year however, expectations duly adjusted, it’s really grown on me. Aside from anything else, the band’s unique, rhythmically engaged riffage still whips, snaps and churns the way it should (the title track is very much what we in the biz are obliged to call a ‘total banger’), the recording/mixing (courtesy of Wayne Adams of Big Lad/Pet Brick/Melting Hand etc) is top notch, and Sinead Young’s voice remains an absolute force of nature.

During the album’s closing stretch on side # 2 meanwhile, the band hit a real purple patch, pushing their sound in some pretty powerful new directions. First, the agreeably energised ‘The Measure of a Man’ wrong-foots us with its startling talk of attacking airships and wolves in the forest (dunno what all that’s about, but it’s, uh, kind of awesome?), before ‘A Portrait of the Father’ hits hard – a pitch black outpouring a familial angst whose brooding, down tempo musical backing cuts straight to the bone, abetted by judicious use of some dubbed out vocal effects - and closer ‘The Body’ delivers a KO with one of the most stunning tracks the band have recorded to date, it’s colossal, neck-sliding riff and doom-heavy rhythmic heft combining with Young’s fearsome delivery for some real force-the-air-from-yr-lungs catharsis; exhilarating stuff.

Still not sure this one will ever get as much play from me as ‘What Big Eyes’ a few years back, but it’s a brave and strong step forward for the band – a convincing dead-eyed stare at an uncertain future, and those last few songs; man, that’s some good shit.


14. Headroom – New Heaven 12” 
(EverNever)



Wherein the rarefied spirit of 90s/’00s Proper Psyche settles over the town of New Haven, CT like a lime green cloud, and sleepy, patchouli-scented ectoplasm pulses through the myriad cables of Kryssi Battalene’s guitar set-up.

From February:

“For all the excess inherent in this kind of guitar-playing, there’s an admirable avoidance of bombast here, a sort of laidback, accidental feel, and a warm, analogue distance to the recordings, which feels very appealing to me, coming as it does at a point in time when all forms of heavy music seem to be constantly upping the ante in terms of volume, compression and general mind-buggering immensitude. As with the Mountain Movers albums, it feels a bit old fashioned in that regard. In a good way, I mean. It’s just a nice record to hang with, if you like psychedelic guitar music. No expectation, no pretence. Just enjoy the sounds, cos they’re pretty sweet.” 


15. Pye Corner Audio – Hollow Earth LP 
(Ghost Box)




Also from February:

“In a sense, Pye Corner Audio strikes me as the hauntological electronica equivalent of, say, a mid-table thrash metal band, or a jazz group who play at local pubs on a Sunday afternoon, or something like that. By which I mean, this music doesn’t send me off on ecstatic reveries or leave me slack-jawed with instant revelation or anything, but it’s solid. It’s there when you need it, it ticks the boxes and does what it does. It’s reliable, like that super-strong wood glue from B&Q.

Listening to the woozy, out-of-sync synth line that opens this LP, you might be inclined to think, well, we already have one Boards of Canada, how badly do we need another? But, as things crack on and Jenkins gets stuck into his trademark MO – essentially stripping the BoC idiom back to its strongest core elements, replacing their somewhat dated breaks-based drum programming with some throbbing 4/4 mutant techno and adding a heavy dose of John Carpenter style dystopian sci-fi dread – I think you’ll be hard-pressed not to give him the nod.”

Labels: Aggressive Perfector, best of 2019, Grey Hairs, Headroom, Joshua Abrams, Kamaal Williams, Lower Slaughter, Makaya McCraven, Oblivion Reptilian, PSF, Sarah Davachi, Taras Bulba, The Bevis Frond, Venom Prison

  Note, 8/2/19: If you are reading this post, please also read this one re: Skullflower review below. Thanks.


1. Heron Oblivion – Live at The Chapel LP (self-released)

With 18+ months of hindsight, Heron Oblivion’s debut LP from early last year is one of the few albums from recent years that has really stuck with me, that feels better and better each time a track pops up on my earphones, and that I could still happily listen to every day. “It’s a real keeper” is I think the pat phrase I’m looking for.

Handed to me by a surly postman mere days before I decamped to a location several hundreds miles away from my record player for xmas, this live album, comprising much of the same material plus a few extra bits, is liable to prove an equally perennial pleasure on the basis of my first few spins, placing a somewhat different emphasis on the band’s work together. On the one hand, the extreme quiet/loud dynamic that stood out on the (beautifully mixed) studio recordings proves impossible to recreate in a live setting (‘Oriar’s explosive impact is slightly muted as a result). But, on the other hand, Van Harmonson and Saufley’s fuzz/wah-blasted guitar duelling is if anything even more intricately interwoven and hair-raisingly unhinged that in the studio set, and, perhaps more importantly, Meg Baird’s folk-derived songs and vocals – which I initially found a tad too prissy and precious on the album – really come into their own here, her delivery slightly more gutsy and forceful, as presumably necessitated by the need to compete with the band’s racket and the crowd’s whooping and hollering whilst out on the road (a test I perhaps wish more contemporary folk could be put to before its creators hit the studio).

Follow the link below and play through ‘Sudden Lament’ and ‘Untitled’ to hear a few relatively concise examples of this incredible band at their fire-breathing peak. Then, after buying (as you inevitably will), file under “really quite unbelievably good”, and keep both vinyl and mp3s close at hand for 2018 – I reckon they’ll be needed.

(Stream & download via bandcamp here. Best check with yr local dealers for the LP.)

2. Lower Slaughter – What Big Eyes LP (Box)

Stunningly good debut album of legitimately exciting, non-retro 21st century rock music right here. For tightness, groove, heaviosity and invention, Lower Slaughter’s trio of instrumentalists can offer a Top Trumps challenge to any other UK unit I’m currently aware of, whilst the vision and delivery of Sinead Young’s vocals is fierce indeed, shifting from witch trials and beyond-the-grave curses to earth-quaking broadsides against Tory austerity and relationship-based dissatisfaction, without dialling back the intensity one jot. “Fucking brilliant,” I’d offer up for the sticker on the front of the hopefully necessary repress.

(Stream/buy from Box Records here.)


 



3. Feral Ohms – s/t LP (Silver Current)

Sometimes, you just need a good, stupid, shred-filled rock n’ roll blast – and they don’t come much better than this one.

One of the very few things I actually bothered to review this year, my further thoughts (plus listen/purchase links) can be found here.










4. Skullflower - The Black Iron That Fell From The Sky, To Dwell Within (Bear It or Be It) LP (Nashazphone)

Other times however, total obliteration is what’s needed, and it’s rarely been dispensed in such sublimely beautific form as Matthew Bower & Samantha Davies conjure here. Headphones, a hardwood floor and whisky are what’s needed for full immersion here. Sadly, I believe the boat has left the harbour with regard to getting a copy of this LP, which is not currently available anywhere in electronic form, but much of the rest of Skullflower’s recent, voluminous, output can be sampled via their bandcamp.









5. Vibracathedral Orchestra – Live at Total Inertia 10”  
(Vanity Case)

Similarly, I feel it was merely good timing that led me to notice Norman Records were exclusively(?) selling copies of this 10” and asked them to sling one with another order I had awaiting dispatch, but I’m glad I made the effort, because this live set, recorded at some sort of do in Leeds, is the best thing VCO have put out since resuming activities a couple of years back. Performed by a six piece line up that sees stalwarts Neil Campbell and Mick Flower augmented by a bunch of blokes whose individual work I am less familiar with (Bridget Hayden seemingly AWOL on this occasion), Side A here is a chaotic, saxophone-skronking mess of Ayler-guesting-w/-Sun-Ra type stuff (nice if yr in the mood), building by the time Side B kicks in into a superb example of the kind of insectoid sonic mind-meld that made me such a VCO fan in the first place, individual instruments and noise-making strategies rendered near invisible as the sound is decanted into a heady, ecstatic totality.

(At the time of writing, this disc is actually still in stock via Norman  – or, you can listen to somebody playing it on a ropey old Dansette and pointing their phone at the resulting racket here (stay vigilant for the bits where a cat walks across screen and/or meiows, and the exciting moment when the man turns the record over)).


6. Grey Hairs – Serious Business LP (Gringo)

Hopefully qualifying by this stage as mighty stalwarts of DIY UK rock radness, Nottingham’s finest have here made their Best Album to Date (in capitals). As I said in pretty much the exact same words back in May, I particularly enjoy the way they’ve here perfected their ability to meld heavy duty Melvins/Flag riff-grind with a keen pop sensibility and uniquely tormented sense of humour. Great recording too. In essence, everything I said about Lower Slaughter above can equally apply here (joint tour? Just a thought..), but for the fact that instead of witch trials and curses, frontman James continues to build his own inexplicably appealing aesthetic from the contemplation of eating meat, drunkenness, exhaustion and male inadequacy. It’s a lot more fun than it sounds.

(Stream/buy from Gringo here.)





7. Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – Feed The Rats LP (Rocket)

Having seen them twice this year, I can confirm that Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs are an exceptionally good live band – five high-ballin’ individuals pulling together into an ecstatic and inclusive juggernaut of rock action that not even the most skeptical punter could fail to find themselves caught up in to some extent.

Viewed in the warm tinnitus glow of their triumphant turn supporting (and very near upstaging) Acid Mothers Temple last October, the fact that they seem to have drummed up more interest from the increasingly myopic world of UK radio and magazines than every other group on this list combined is neither unexpected, nor undeserved. It’s fair to say that they’ve taken ‘Feed The Rats’ about as far into the realm of the “media” as it is possible to go with an album primarily comprising of two hefty, Sabbath-referencing psyche/doom epics addressing issues of mental illness, and I for one am happy to cheer their progress.

It’s also fair to say that initially I wasn’t entirely sold on this record, which, lacking the exultantly positive spirit of their live sets, plays out as an altogether darker, more tormented proposition. I do LOVE the perfect Motorhead/Hawkwind amalgam of the palette cleansing, rock n’ rolling middle track ‘Sweet Relief’ however, and my enjoyment both of it and of the aforementioned live sets now spills out across the longer cuts on either side of it, illuminating them with greater clarity, and allowing me to get with the programme. (In fact, how I failed to fully compute the true majesty of ‘Icon’ at an earlier date is a mystery. It’s middle stretch is Hawkwind-meets-Sabbath-fucking-tastic.)

Looking forward to whatever they do next, and I’ll leave you to insert your own cheer-leading “year of the pig” type comment here.

(Stream and buy via bandcamp.)


8. Endless Boogie – Vibe Killer LP (No Quarter)

I’ll be the first to admit that Endless Boogie’s peculiar MO – essentially mixing the ideals embodied by Canned Heat’s ‘Refried Hockey Boogie’ with the overbearing, obscurantist humour and alienated record collector weirdness of vocalist/lead guitarist Paul ‘Top Dollar’ Major – can be a bit of an acquired taste.

If relatively few make the effort however, those who do will find themselves regularly rewarded by strange, troubled masterworks such as this one, during which Major attempts to clear the room with pure Lynchian creep on the title cut before reminiscing in pain-staking detail about the time he went to see Kiss perform at a “kite flying contest” in 1974 (‘Back in 74’), instigating an unsettling suburban rewrite of ‘Sister Ray’ (‘High Drag, Hard Doin’), and… well god only knows what he’s going on about on the inchoate ‘Bishops at Large’ or the oddly hypnotic expanse of ‘Jefferson County’ (perhaps I’m not American enough to understand). Still, he certainly doesn’t make any less sense than Mark E. Smith has on any given LP side from the past 30 years, and, as the band keep on cooking as if Status Quo had rediscovered the joys of smoking weed and letting it all hang out before eventually taking on board some absurdly misplaced Chicago post-rock mannerisms, us initiates should consider ourselves more than satisfied.

(Stream/buy via bandcamp here.)


9. Midnight Mines – We Are The Primitives of a New Era tape/download 
(self-released)

Four more slabs of creeped out, Rallizified garden shed dub damage here from East London’s reclusive ‘Baron Saturday’ and ‘Private Sorrow’. This time around, they seem to be journeying out even further from their garage-punk background, inadvertently conjuring up a few spectres from my beloved early ‘00s ‘kneelcore’ scene, wherein 3” CDs briefly smoked out those bloody cassette tapes as both god and nature intended. I approve!

Hard to believe they haven’t yet sold a mere 50 tapes-worth of this, so for gods sake, follow this link and help ‘em out.







10. Blown Out – Superior Venus LP (Riot Season)

Ah, Blown Out. Always the same… always the same. Which is to say, exceptionally enjoyable. By this point, Mike Vest’s stoner/space-rock trio are ‘sticking to their story’ with a commitment to stylistic continuity that puts Motorhead or Dead Moon to shame.

Whilst I can’t in all honestly tell most of their records apart however, it nonetheless makes me extremely happy to continuing buying them and putting them on the shelf in order of release, keeping the latest close at hand for whenever the urge takes me. For, as those aforementioned bands understood, when your music can feed a particular appetite this satisfactorily, what’s to be gained by fucking with the formula? The hunger is always there, and I for one am always willing to be fed.

(Stream/buy via bandcamp)



POP QUIZ: Tell me the name of the individual who links THREE of the releases on the above list and win… I dunno, something? (HINT: for once it’s not Mike Vest.)

Esteemed runners-up:

11. The Bats – The Deep Set LP (Flying Nun) [link]
12. Mountain Movers – s/t LP (self-released?) [link]
13. Chain & The Gang – Experimental Music LP (Radical Elite) [link]
14. Leyland Kirby – We, So Tired of all the Darkness in Our Lives d/l (self-released) [link]
15. Aggressive Perfector – Satan’s Heavy Metal tape/d/l (self-released) [link]

Labels: best of 2017, Blown Out, Endless Boogie, Feral Ohms, Grey Hairs, Heron Oblivion, Lower Slaughter, Midnight Mines, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, Skullflower, Vibracathedral Orchestra

Given my by now expected tardiness when it comes to producing new content for this permanently-on-life-support blog, I found it frustrating that, whilst I was slowly ploughing through that best of 2016 list earlier this year, the first quarter of 2017 was simultaneously hitting me with a wealth of great new(ish) music – all of which helped cheer me somewhat whilst trudging through one of the most dire and baleful winters this ship-of-fools planet has experienced within living memory.

Though my burning need to tell you about all this was forced into hibernation as a result of other life commitments, I’ve FINALLY found a few minutes to bang something out for you before a big trip to Japan later this month puts things on hiatus again, so let’s get cracking.

As it happens, what follows is almost exclusively gnarly guitar stuff, and exclusively from within the night-haunted shores of the British Isles, so if that doesn’t sound like your cup of teeth, well… sorry. Things are looking pretty grim around here at the mo, so if you’re looking for something a bit more laidback and nuanced, might I recommend, say, Philadelphia in the 1970s? I mean, those guys seemed to know how to put their troubles in perspective and kick back in style. Here in 2017 however, the clock appears to be ticking, so we’ve got to take advantage of all this electricity and sweat-shop produced ‘gear’ and moan about it whilst we still can.



Grey Hairs’ 2nd LP ‘Serious Business’, out now on Gringo, is the band’s best recorded statement to date. At this point, they can pretty much be considered national standard bearers for the virtues of keeping it real and making excellent rock music on a sustainable/local level, and I hope I will remain in the spirit of the “shit, suddenly we’re middle aged” aesthetic they have been rocking since their inception if I state that the pleasures of this album largely arise from the opportunity to hear group with enough of a collective track record behind them to know how to do things right, just doing things right.

A big, ol’ reeking mess of a record in the best possible sense, the essence of ‘Serious Business’ is difficult to capture in a few glib sentences (an undoubted strength, although a bit of a pain in the arse when it comes to writing this sort of thing). Swinging from Melvins/Black Flag level heft on the one hand to a cannier, more sprightly approach that puts me in mind of the much missed Eddy Current Suppression Ring on the other, the ‘Hairs strong suit here is a solid & considered approach to song-writing that matches painstakingly hewn-from-cliff-face riffs with imaginatively tangled bits of guitar-work, appropriately bludgeoning/dramatic production decisions and vocalist James’s fairly unique approach to rock band front-person conventions.

This sees him mixing scale-climbing alt-rock emoting with a desperate/oddball sense of humour that helps make his tales of collapsing/self-pitying austerity-era masculinity not only palatable, but weirdly enjoyable. A shrieked “Sick! / Sick of feeling shit! / Sick of talking it!” aptly sets the scene on the self-titled opener, whilst ‘Man is a Kitchen’ – a definite highlight in all regards – appears to concern itself with the daily torment of cooking dinner (“Meat! Takes! TIME!”). [I realise that, in the context of a rock song, such talk of meat and ovens could be taken as a precursor to some kind of loathsomely ungainly double entendre, but I can’t be the only one who would rather take it at face value in this instance.]

I’m talking a fair bit of shit myself here it seems, and could probably continue doing so for a while longer, so instead let’s cut to the chase here and just say that, in ‘Serious Business’, Grey Hairs have achieved the seemingly impossible by perfecting a form of all purpose, non-denominational “modern rock” that feels valid, exhilarating, non-embarrassing and GOOD. And they’re fucking great live too. Just have a listen, will you?



I somehow missed out on seeing Brighton’s Lower Slaughter back when they were playing with their former vocalist Max Levy (aka King of Cats), but I’ve been lucky enough to catch them twice this year with Sinead Young (ex-Divorce) on the mic, and I have found them to be bloody brilliant, bordering on hit-the-mosh-pit-if-there-was-one inspiring, on both occasions.

Like Grey Hairs, Lower Slaughter are an adaptable, non-retro-fixated modern rock unit that just works. I mean, what can you say? A wrecking ball rhythm section, a rad/inventive guitarist, a charismatic front person with a good set of pipes – it’s not exactly rocket science, is it? But rarely these days are the elements all in place just so. Go see them play, and witness some serious, original, yet exultantly rocking, rock music being made. It’s great.

Only one track featuring their new line-up out in the wild thus far, on a four way split 7”, but it’s a blinder, and they’ve got an LP on the way shortly, so I’m looking forward.

(The photo above is by Isobel Reddington by the way, shamelessly googled up and stolen from The Quietus to cover for the lack of any appropriate record covers.)



Another band sharing that split 7” with Lower Slaughter are Dublin’s Sissy, and I’ve got to admit that, whilst on paper they don’t sound much like a group that would pique my interest much these days, they absolutely “killed it” (as the kids may or may not be saying) when I saw them headlining a night at the DIY Space a few months back.

It’s difficult to really put yr finger on what separates them so definitively from every other ‘songwriter plus rhythm section’ pop-punk three piece in the world, but, after beginning proceedings with a concise “we’re from Ireland, but we don’t like the church”, Sissy played with a sheer… I dunno, ‘confidence’ is the only word I can think of, though it feels woefully insufficient… that is rare indeed, and worthy of celebration.

Lyrics on the band’s most recent EP (released in 2015 apparently… what the heck have they been doing since?!) are straight up feminist agit prop with a particular emphasis on the issues faced by women in the Republic of Ireland, aimed twist-the-knife style at any potential detractors and even getting down to the nitty gritty of such specifics as the lack of female sports coverage on TV at one point – pretty on-the-nose kinda fare, but, they sell it. The concerns are legit, the rage is real, the performance holds up.

Despite the clean guitar tone, watching Sissy put me in mind of what it might have been like to catch ‘Bleach’-era Nirvana, with a nice dose of first wave UK punk directness in the mix, and, at the risk of being hit with the comparing-female-bands-to-other-female-bands stick, a fair bit of first album-era Sleater Kinney too. (Oof, good luck shouldering those expectations guys!) Ignore at your peril, and so forth.



Speaking both of first wave UK punk directness, it actually took nods from as far away as Japan and the USA to point me in the direction of The Suburban Homes, an outfit based out of Crawley, West Sussex, who put out a splendid 12” entitled ‘..Are Bored’ late last year.

Sound here is somewhat akin to early Television Personalities if they’d turned away from their mod/psyche/cutie fixations and instead ploughed an ever-deepening furrow of punk rock indignation [as if to prove my point, a re-worked cover of ‘Part Time Punks’ is included with the download version], or Billy Childish’s Pop Rivets if they’d done, well, much the same.

To echo a notion that seems to apply to most of the bands I’m writing about in this post, it’s difficult to articulate quite what makes these songs so vital as they rattle through the familiar monotone, three chord Messthetics sweet-spots like an out of control mini-moke careering through a sink estate, but, heaven help us, they hit the spot.

The disgruntled Punk 101 sentiments of screeds like ‘Barbie & Ken’ and ‘iPhone Suicide’ should be any reasonable measure be considered hopelessly redundant – condemned to the realm of Mr Local Bloke, fourth on the bill at the Dog & Duck, who’s been listening to The Clash and decided he’s got a bone to pick – yet somehow here, they still ring true, caustic, disenfranchised and ready for trouble.

I think perhaps the key to it is that, in contrast to the vast majority of other punk rock bands, The Suburban Homes actually sound as if they’re coming from a place where the very act of making this music or expressing these opinions makes them genuine outcasts from the society around them – as lonely and embittered as a mohawked oik dodging rocks in some provincial bus queue back in ’78.

By adopting such a militant “back to basics” approach, The Suburban Homes dodge the retro bullet and instead succeed in dragging punk-as-genre back from the echo chamber of unreadable jacket patches and endless self-referential permutations of badly recorded caveman nonsense, and reminding us why it appealed in the first place.

Unless of course, they are actually just a bunch of urbane metropolitan elitos like myself, pulling this ‘provincial amateur punk’ shtick just to take the piss – which is always a possibility in these dark days.

Either way, my wife bought a copy of their record via bandcamp and the package arrived with “THE SUBURBAN HOMES HATE SOCIAL MEDIA” written on the back in biro, so - truly they are fighting the good fight.




I first saw Casual Nun supporting Bong a while back, and they were pretty good. In the past six months, they’ve released two separate LPs (both recorded on the same day), and they’ve evidently upped their game to the level of ‘pretty great’.

Of the two, Super Fancy Skeleton (hard copy released via Hominid Sounds) is the one I’ve spent most time with, and it finds the band expending on their palette of Heads-style rehearsal room riffola to incorporate distant groans of mechanised insectoid angst, “eastern-tinged”, the-Egyptian-gods-are-rising-to-eat-you style psyche-doom atmos, and even warped ancestral memories of Glitter Band stomp and Quo-ian boogie. It’s a pretty eclectic brew all things considered, with the album’s four tracks anchored only by the presence of a pair of guitarists who sound like they would rather die by the sword than dial down their fuzz. Nice one.

On first approach, Psychometric Testing by.. (Box) seems to venture even further afield, beginning, somewhat unexpectedly, with ninety seconds of punishing, pedal-warped hardcore before another mammoth doom plod gets underway, belying any “Bong on the cheap” accusations with a genuinely massive sound-mix, swallowing all light in the immediate vicinity, much in the way such things should. By the end, there’s what sounds like a whole cell full of unhappy prisoners wailing down a wind tunnel in the depths of the mix, as somewhat gives a distorted theremin a good seeing to in the foreground.

Raw electronic textures of the kind Hawkwind’s audio generators might have belched up get an outing on ‘Truth Machines’, before the track departs for stranger realms of malfunctioning/medicated improv freakout before eventually working its way round to a few minutes of the kind of head-nodding action Endless Boogie might sanction. Then some heavy duty effects plough in again and…. before too long, spoken word starts happening. Blimey. Let’s just say that, more so than its predecessor, this record is quite a trip – a rusty, soggy, dangerous, fungus encrusted, subterranean one, specifically speaking, but well worth taking nonetheless.




As long-term readers will be aware, when it comes to metal (as opposed to doom, for which I apply different criteria), I like it straight up, punk-spirited, unpretentious, beer-sodden and direct from the practice room. So when I saw that Manchester-based Aggressive Perfector had hand-drawn a scary demon on the cover of their debut EP and (anti)christened it ‘Satan’s Heavy Metal’, I figured I might be on to a winner, and verily, they did not disappoint.

Not much to say about this one, beyond the fact that it just fucking rips, with the opening ‘Infernal Raids’ standing out as one of the most kick ass metal songs I’ve heard in years. Though they prostrate themselves before all the expected altars (Slayer, Venom, Cryptic Slaughter, more Slayer, even a touch of Di’Anno-era Maiden perhaps?), Aggressive Perfector aren’t bogged down in nostalgia, and neither to they play like posers – this is a razor sharp, band-live-in-the-room mid-fi blast that as far as I’m concerned represents the spirit of heavy metal at its finest. I haven’t had this much fun since I discovered the Blood Patrol demo. All hail!




Last but certainly not least, I’ve recently found myself reconnecting with the contemporary output of Skullflower. Still comprising a duo of Matthew Bower and partner Samantha Davies, it transpires that the band (if we can indeed properly deem them such) have recently been unloading a prodigious quantities of new material via their bandcamp page, and simultaneously holding forth on their mystifying yet beguilingly poetical take on spirituality on their blog,whilst, admirably, cementing real world connections in such unfashionable locales as Russia and Egypt.

It is the latter that leads us to the release I would particularly like to highlight here, ‘The Black Iron That Fell From The Sky, To Dwell Within (Bear It or Be It)’, issued earlier this year on Cairo-based Nashazphone label – one of the few Skullflower releases to hit vinyl within living memory, and deservedly so, for it is an astonishing piece of work.

Very much the kind of deal wherein trying to break the music within down to verbal descriptors feels both reductive and somewhat sacrilegious, let’s just say that ‘The Black Iron..’ finds Skullflower expressing the more expansive and less punishing (relatively speaking) side of the nature. I spent some quality time with it a few weeks back, sitting between the speakers with a glass of scotch, and I’ve not been quite the same since. The first side in particular is… something else.

Labels: Aggressive Perfector, Casual Nun, Grey Hairs, Lower Slaughter, Sissy, Skullflower, The Suburban Homes