As the Vernal Equinox stomps on by and the signifiers of ‘Spring’ seem to come and go on an hourly basis, I realise that we’re about one quarter of the way through the year already, and, contrary to impression you might have acquired from reading this blog recently, I’ve not spent the past three months wholly occupied by esoteric soundtrack reissues, random second-hand vinyl and weird old acid rock shit either.

In fact there have been a spiriting number of NEW THINGS that have attracted my attention, and here to prove the point is a quick run-down of them, thus clearing the deck of all this stuff that deserves your attention / support, but that I haven’t quite had the time or impetus to write a full-length-blog post on.

 
Habibi – self-titled LP (Burger)

A really solid LP of catchy, non-clichéd guitar-pop from these Brooklynites, delivered in deliberate, straight-faced fashion and sitting a good notch or two up from the swamp of sloppy, indeterminate, indiefied gack that the majority of young people’s guitar music has devolved into over the past few years. To various extents, Habibi recall assorted alumni of the 2009-11 golden years – Grass Widow, Yellow Fever, Fungi Girls, Vivian Girls - but never for quite long enough for me to really get a bead on ‘em. Even within these tightly patrolled waters, they’ve managed to stake out their own little corner, which they inhabit with confidence and panache, groovy and self-sufficient mermaids just daring the music industry to come and bother them. Exactly the kind of quietly perfect, unremarkably remarkable band that could have grown up out of New Zealand 1982 or, well, North America 2010, and you’ll want to get on this quick if you miss those halcyon days.

‘Detroit Baby’ is the best neo-girl group tune you’re liable to hear this year, and it’s not the best song here by any means. I really like it when they go all-out on the reverb and twang and throw in some longer instrumental passages (‘Persepolis’, ‘Sweetest Talk’). There’s a slower, indie-er number at one point that’s kind of a bummer, and a few songs towards the end that don’t appeal to me much, but you can’t have everything. I just did the maths and this is 80% gold. Check it out.

(Listen on Soundcloud & buy from Burger.)



Sapphire Slows – Allegoria LP (Not Not Fun)

I very much liked Sapphire Slows’ ‘True Breath’ EP from a little while back, and now the first proper full length from this mysterious Tokyo dweller proves an absolute joy, fully delivering on the promise of those earlier tracks, as Ms Slows (if I may) barely puts a foot wrong from beginning to end, drawing heavily from the foundations laid by former label-mates Peaking Lights (nothing wrong with that!), but also often investing her ragged, homemade dub-pop with an absolutely luminous dose of hyper-melodic pop optimism, like the gigantic vocal chorus / breakdown bit of some cheesy, long-forgotten house anthem distantly reflected back to us in dreams, through veils of glass-fronted, urbanite dreamland.... just a lovely, lovely, undemanding little trip. A fucking HAPPY album, if you can believe such a thing legitimately existing in 2014, this one’s still making me contentedly smile n’ nod after a ton of repeat spins. Perfect comfort music.

(Listen on Soundcloud, buy via Boomkat.)





The Love Triangle – Clever Clever LP (Static Shock)

Some certifiable Good Punk here, from a trio led, somewhat inevitably, by the bloke who used to sing in The Shitty Limits. Fully energised approach reminds me slightly of my still-beloved Royal Headache, but with a more downbeat, British feel always in evidence. They probably won’t much thank me for invoking The Jam alongside Eater, Buzzcocks and The Lurkers, but that’s where my thoughts keep heading here – well-composed, content-packed songs blasted through fast and sloppy and angry and smirking and don’t-give-me-that-shit-mate-let’s-just-get-it-recorded. Spirited, that’s the word.

As the eye-rolling reference-points thrown out above might suggest, this resembles the compressed residue of all the good ’77 UK punk bands and none of the shit ones, whilst also somehow ducking the accompanying nostalgia bear-trap - and as such I like it a lot.

(Listen & buy from Static Shock.)





Irkallian Oracle – Grave Ekstasis tape/LP (Nuclear War Now!)

It was Neil Kulkarni’s (consistently wonderful) blog that hipped me to this one (none more KVLT!), and of course he sings the praises of Irkallian Oracle a lot more eloquently than I could attempt to, so instead I’ll just give in to this record’s function as a hyperbole magnet and just say: holy fucking shit. This is the most purely devastating, world-swallowing thing I’ve heard from the realm of black metal in years. The sort of music that’s so overwhelming it just… make.. all… words.. stop, like the stuttering, ellipsis-filled end of a Lovecraft story, as ill-judged metaphors flail hopelessly, aware of their inability to ever really capture the totality of.. this.. goddamn… thing. The bone-shattering, practice room brutality of ‘80s Napalm Death, the gravesoil-caked pagan tape-hiss of the most funereal BM, the cosmic/hypnotic maximalist wipeout of The Boredoms or Oneida in their prime – all of these things are here, sublimated into something new and staggering.

For a long time now, many metal bands of a more forward-thinking variety seem to have been lost in bombast, endlessly trying to recreate that uncomfortable, tummy-churning Surround Sound OOF that comes from watching a giant monster lay waste to a city in some epic 3D folly. Irkallian Oracle are no exception, but where most contenders just end up creating the sonic equivalent of a Michael Bay Transformers headache, these guys actually walk the walk, conjuring the sound of the stars aligning as Cthulhu himself breaks the waves. And they do it themselves on fucking TAPES. None of this bloody drivel really does it justice, but… just… [speechless].

(Listen and buy from Nuclear War Now!)



Slum of Legs – demo tape (Tuff Enuff)

Definitely one of the most interesting/exciting bands I’ve caught live so far this year (not that that’s saying much, I’ve only been leaving New Cross Gate about once a month), this Brighton six piece are one of those bands that seem to function as a kind of volatile, open-ended brain-trust rather than as a pre-planned “this is what we’re gonna do” type venture, with each member seemingly bringing in a quite different approach & set of influences, mixing it all up into a pleasantly dissonant brew that could head off in any number of directions at any moment. From a basis in artfully self-taught Raincoatsy guitar/viola skree and Mo Tucker thud drumming, we are apt to experience unsignposted diversions into anguished punk yelling, atmospheric soundscaping and totally-out-of-leftfield burbling analogue synth business, never quite cohering into a verifiable ‘THAT’S THEIR SOUND’ sound, but then why should it? I mean, who wants to go around listening to bands that “cohere” all day long, y’know what I mean? And since I already seem to be digging myself into a hole re: the whole only-comparing-women-to-other-women trap, might as well go whole hog and also throw in passing reference to ‘80s feminist oddballs like Androids of Mu and The Fates, whilst concluding that they also often end up sounding a bit like a far rougher, gnarlier version of token Flying Nun lady-band Look Blue, Go Purple… and that can only be a good thing, right?

(As a ‘Big Sigh’ type aside, this is the problem after so many years of intensive music-listening: however hard a new white-ish, guitar-ish group might try to do something a bit different, it is now scientifically impossible for me to hear them without going “oh yeah, that’s pretty cool, but you know it basically sounds a bit like [insert obscure old bands A, B, C and D here], right?” It’s a dreadful affliction that makes me feel like one of those hand gesturing, arsehole celebrity wine-tasters whom we all used to laugh at before middle class consensus rendered them normal - please make it stop.)

Anyway, despite the fact that it has been distributed and sold for money by a third party label, it’s worth noting that the three tracks on this Slum of Legs 'demo tape' do function VERY MUCH as a demo (yes, it’s that same semantic query I had with previous Tuff Enuff releases). Giving only a fleeting, muffled impression of the kind of rampant creativity this unit is capable of, this is a real chunk of old fashioned “wow, I can’t wait to hear what they’ll come up with next” type demo tape excitement, exactly the kind of thing you could imagine John Peel tearing up his schedule for and jamming straight on the airwaves, back in ye olde halcyon pre-internet days. The best thing you will be able to buy for 50p (!) in the whole of the rest of your life, in other words.

(Listen and buy from Tuff Enuff.)

Labels: Habibi, Irkallian Oracle, Sapphire Slows, Slum of Legs, The Love Triangle

New Stuff Round Up:
Jan/Feb 2012

Reluctant as I am to tip the balance away from ‘substantive piece of writing’ type posts to the more contemporary ‘faux-insider tip-off & youtube link’ approach to music bloggage, needs must when I can’t be bothered to write anything, and I want to get all this down in html before one of the groups mentioned below ‘takes off’, and everyone’s like “hey, have you hears so-and-so yet?”, and I’m like “yeah man, I heard them like DECADES ago… but I forgot to tell anybody”, and nobody believes me.

(I don’t actually have conversations like that with anyone, by the way.)

So without further ado, here’s a bunch of stuff that’s grabbed my attention, either in person or via the sickly light of a laptop screen, since the start of this year.

Grey Hairs.

New outfit from a bunch of Nottingham veterans whose ‘ex/currently-of’ list would probably make a really nice free-form poem, playing a great example of the kind of non-denominational heavy music I’m really into at present. It sounds as if they take as their inspiration a lot of bands who favoured very little bullshit, and cut the bullshit level yet further. Hell yeah, etc. Look forward to catching them live at some point in the future.

The sound on these rehearsal videos pleases me greatly.





Sapphire Slows.

Latest in the seemingly endless line of precocious bedroom savants discovered by the Not Not Fun label, Sapphire Slows’ bandcamp page informs us that “born in 1989, she started her solo project in Tokyo, spring 2011. Tracks are all recorded in her bedroom, simply with one lap top and some keyboards.” So there ya go. One of the central threads running through NNF’s releases in recent years seems to be an attempt to combine obsolete forms of commercial dance music with an aura of psychedelic witchiness under strict DIY circumstances, and that’s a concept Sapphire Slows absolutely *nails* across the six tracks on her debut EP/12” on the label, mixing up comforting, analogue-y fragments of house and techno with breathy, ultra-verbed vocalisms amid a nest-load of other magpie borrowings, all coming together to form one of the flat out bestest things NNF have put out to date. Solid goodness that’s up there with Peaking Lights and Blues Control in the modern day pantheon of this sorta thing, it’s rarely been off my digital un-turntable in the past month or so.




Loveover.

New band featuring Ayako from Bracelettes – only a guitar/drums duo, but I was lucky enough to catch their first gig last month, and can report that the need for further instrumentation was pretty much annihilated by means of running the guitar through guitar and bass rigs simultaneously. Pretty gnarly. Fast, riff-based punk rock with a great melodic sensibility, touching on Wipers/Milk Music territory in places – I was well impressed.

Here’s their demo:




Heroin in Tahiti.

You know it’s the future now, right, so we should probably get used to groups calling themselves things like ‘Heroin in Tahiti’. I mean, I’m fine with that. Nothing weird and obscurely offensive going on there at all, no sir (whistles to self and looks the other way).

Anyway, I can’t possibly try to beat the blurb of this Italian duo’s label Boring Machines, who claim that – hold on to your hats for this one guys – “inspired by the classic Italian “spaghetti sound” turned into a depressed and paranoid version of the typical twang-surf of Morricone’s scores, “Death Surf” is an hypothetical soundtrack of an old mondo-movie gone bad. The album drags the oppressive heat and bad habits of the Mediterranean to the radioactive beaches of Polynesia, discovering non-existent tribes, invented costumes, misplaced traditions and colonial exoticisms. Think of drinking a frozen Daiquiri on a solitary beach while watching a poorly tuned TV broadcasting loops of “If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death”, while Mururoa tests are happening at the horizon.”

So that saves me the effort of hammering out some guff along broadly similar lines, at least. On a more prosaic level though, I would like to highlight the way that their silly, made-up genre tag of ‘droneabilly’ takes on worryingly literal form when the entire guitar line from The Cramps ‘TV Set’ can be heard rattling away behind the cough syrup haze of ‘Death Surf’ – a truly odd affectation that is replicated in some form on most of their tracks. Curious stuff – I like it.




Young Romance.

Token indie-pop type inclusion for this month, I caught this London-based, M/F guitar/stand-up drums duo the other week and they were bloody terrific. I’d make some iffy suggestion about them fitting nicely into what may be turning into a whole tidal wave of icy, floppy-haired, Gretsch-wielding winter jangle type stuff alongside Veronica Falls et al, but… why would I even countenance such a snidey, NME-like dribble of a thought just for the sake of something to say? Fuck it, I dunno, let’s just cautiously say I think these lot are good and leave it at that.




Divorced.

Not to be confused with the Scottish group Divorce, Divorced with a D are another bunch of Australians making no nonsense punkoid rock music that is powerful and fun, somewhat akin to Eddy Current Suppression Ring if they were angry, uncouth teenagers rather than grown up, responsible men, but also drawing on a tradition of solid rhythmic pound that takes them all the way back to Radio Birdman and The Saints. Hopefully I’m not just comparing ozzie to ozzie here to perpetrate some sorta unfounded cliché – like many current Australian bands (see the faultlessly self-aware top ten from Brisbane group Slug Guts alongside Comet Gain’s one here), these guys seem to be consciously embracing their country’s rich heritage, managing the surprising feat of making guitar/bass/drums/singer music that you could instantly pinpoint on a world map. Or at least, I think that’s what they’re doing. Whatever they’re doing, it’s great, and can be easily enjoyed without the benefit of a brain – a consideration I always appreciate.

Labels: Divorced, Grey Hairs, Heroin in Tahiti, Loveover, Sapphire Slows, Young Romance