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

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

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

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

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

From February 2012:

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

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

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



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

From January 2012:

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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


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

From June:

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

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

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

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

From October:

“Though not quite a concept album (god forbid), there is definitely a strong, overarching theme connecting the songs on ‘Bubblegum Graveyard’, as the record sets out kind of a rough story arc, gleefully exploring a worst case scenario of the assorted perils that could befall unprepared youngsters immersed in the tumultuous world of mid-‘60s American pop culture (21st century retrospective fantasy edition). As the path of that mad decade lurches on blindly, our protagonists find themselves navigating dangerous and uncertain terrain, as the suburban enclave of Archie Comics, candy bars and bubblegum pop slides without warning into a Blue Cheer-soundtracked world of drug-induced revelations, vagrant living and armed robbery, leading inevitably towards the sinister orbit of “The Fried Stranger”, staying one step ahead of the law with his guitar and tape-deck.

The yin/yang of California ‘60s, and the hyper-accelerated learning curve of kids who wanted to make it through the perils of that decade in one piece, has of course been grist to the mill of imaginative songwriters ever since Arthur Lee gave us his view from the front-lines, and Apache Dropout are happy to play merry hell with the pulpier end of that aesthetic legacy, which has rarely sounded as comprehensively creepy as it does here, with “Quaaludes ‘68”s central chant of “this is my life / how do I work it?” sounding all the more plaintive amid the slurred tales of ghosts, blood and drugs that surround it.

[…]
Far more interesting than a mere retro invocation of period clichés, Apache Dropout’s central technique of crafting songs *about* their chosen era of obsession strikes me as an area of vast & vibrant possibility, allowing ‘Bubblegum Graveyard’ to emerge as a real keeper - a record that fascinates more and transports further with each repeated play. As the lyrical details and odd sonic detritus of these songs work their way into your mind, initial reservations about the quality of the recording & performances seem increasingly irrelevant, as the band’s particular headspace starts to feel like an entirely natural and rewarding place to be. Not just a fun, twisted rock record, ‘Bubblegum Graveyard’ is a whole widescreen innocence & experience tale, framed in imagery dredged from the darkest corners of 20th century American mythology… and how many 30 minute garage rock albums do you get the chance to write sentence like that about?”

Labels: Apache Dropout, best of 2012, Mount Carmel, Nu Sensae, The Liminanas, The Necks

One of the best live performances I saw this year was London trio The Choo Choo Trains, in a crowded room full of chattering bodies not paying a great deal of attention. Playing in slow, quiet and determined fashion, the band pretty much ignored their audience and surroundings, building a solid, self-contained universe around themselves amid the chaos, running through a series of skeletal, minor key pop ballads and sad, strange guitar instrumentals, reluctantly allowing us a glimpse into a private world that seemed very special indeed.

From a know-it-all music fan POV, the band possess a kind of wallflower otherness that very much aligns them with Dolly Mixture or The Marine Girls, with a persistent sense of melancholy that seems to come entirely from the latter. But there is nothing deliberately referential going on here. Absolutely none of the contrived scene boosterism or ill-advised C86 nostalgia that so often blights this sort of thing. The world of The Choo Choo Trains seems wholly self-created and self-sustaining. Not precious or arch or garish or ironic, just… simple, and modest, and different. And good, more to the point.

I don’t want to push the naivety angle over-much here, but, rather than carefully composed (ie, boring) album, this lengthy ‘complete recordings’ style tape release is a format that seems to suit this band very well. It has the feel of an unedited collection of things they came up with during a long, long, unhurried practice session, quietly discovering the joy of making music together. And if it could perhaps be argued that, conventionally speaking, we don’t really need to hear a repetitious five minute organ instrumental with snatches of foreign language spoken word (‘Rockabilly Blue’) or an awkwardly executed bit of high school prom night incidental music (‘Something About Dancing’), they all form part of the overall spell being cast, and I’m glad that they are here.

Though the atmosphere remains remarkably consistent across the tape, variety is plentiful. Ramshackle indie-pop bangers (‘Hilma’, ‘Dreaming’), subdued, carefully crafted twangy guitar instrumentals (‘Peppermint Gardener’), hesitant recreations of Buddy Holly-esque heartbroken ‘50s pop (‘Lonely’, ‘(all I Ever Think About is) Rabbits’), eccentric Jonathan Richman style hymns to the everyday (‘Rocket Bicycle’) – all are present and correct.

Touching & inspiring, this is music made with no audience in mind, no real purpose beyond its creators’ own satisfaction. The feeling it conveys reminds me very of such holy documents as Epic Soundtracks’ ‘Debris’ or The Clean’s early EPs – a reassuring flame, and a timely reminder of why I do all this stuff in the first place.

Labels: best of 2012, Getatchew Mekuria, Mi Ami, Motion Sickness of Time Travel, Six Organs of Admittance, The Choo Choo Trains, The Ex

I suppose it makes sense that as the whole Ghostbox thing starts to get a little long in the tooth, the label should begin to expand its aesthetic remit slightly, welcoming in a slightly younger generation on music-makers for whom newly-excavated shadows of the ‘80s form the primary source material, as the hallowed ‘70s fall deeper into the semi-remembered past. Hence: Martin Jenkins, whose work here thankfully rises above his somewhat twee recording moniker, building a familiarly Ghostbox-y nest of retro-spook comforts from… well, you can guess where he’s going be going with this, right?

Yes, cry out in delight or bury your head in your hands as you will, but I’m afraid he’s going to John Carpenter town, and there’s nothing you can do about it. As my Umberto review in the last post will have hopefully made clear, my own reaction to such things is still very much in the former category, so I’m good. To reduce ‘Sleep Games’ to the horribly reductive, “in-a-nutshell” style summary it seems to be crying out for, what’s essentially going on here is Carpenter/Howarth synth action put through a Boards of Canada filter. Obviously there’s more to be pulled out of it should you wish, but basically if that sounds like your idea of a fun time, you’ll probably enjoy it, and if not, well, never mind.

And so things progress exactly the way you might expect: simple, hard-hitting synth lines in the foreground, gradually contaminated and warped by that oh-so-familiar brand of comforting, ordered unease, seeding the clean, sharp angles of the neon & PVC riffs with mossy, overgrown beds of artfully corroded electronic texture, sounds that seem to have been planted by some benevolent library music father way back in the mists of time and left to breed and spread within the depths of some forgotten room-sized analogue instrument… ready for when an ambitious horror movie director finally powers it up again and sits at the keyboard to kick some minimalist ass.

Like those old Boards of Canada records, it’s hard to put your finger on Precisely what it is that makes Pye Corner Audio so compelling – there’s a kind of oblique, impersonal quality to the music, a recognition of the fact that he/they isn’t really doing anything that wouldn’t be wholly expected, given the place and time from which he is broadcasting, and yet, for whatever reason, it works, where so many other contenders breakdown, mired in cheese.

Several track titles (‘The Mirrorball Cracked’, ‘Underneath the Dancefloor’) seem to invoke the kind of ‘curdled rave nostalgia’ / haunted dancefloor aesthetic that so many electronic artists have hooked onto in recent years, but in actuality ‘Sleep Games’ bears very little resemblance to any kind of music people ever danced to – it’s lineage is lonely, bedroom-dwelling electro through and through, with even the zombified Detroit techno of ‘Into The Maze’ coming to us via several brick walls at the very least. The Precinct 13 pulse of ‘The Mirror Ball Cracked’ is unmistakable, with only distant, disembodied groans serving to remind us of the time & intent separating Jenkins from his master, whilst ‘The Black Mill Video Tape’ leads us on precisely the kind of Stone Tape-style ghost hunt the title would suggest, perhaps relocated to some mid-80s LA backlot zone, perhaps overseen by…. yes – ‘Prince of Darkness’! You’re one step ahead of me! And we could play this game throughout the album’s fifty minute duration, right until the distant sirens and ominous synth oboe on ‘Chlorine’ take us outside the city, closing on the more familiarly pastoral Ghostbox stylings of ‘Nature Reclaims The Town’.

Now that Ghostbox have caught up with the era of VHS and Snake Plisskin, who knows what delights await as the reconfigured nostalgia wagon rumbles on? Things are moving quickly, as advance guards in the states are already plundering the most lamentable forgotten corners of the ‘90s for inspiration, and a pertinent question for a few years down the line might be: what the hell do we do when it catches up with now?

Labels: best of 2012, Goat, Lantern, Peaking Lights, Pye Corner Audio, The Caretaker

Labels: best of 2012, Dinosaur Jr, G Green, Guided By Voices, Heavy Cream, Umberto

Well, it’s that time of year again and… how to put this. Whilst it would of course be completely fatuous of me to try to draw any wider conclusions about the state of music in 2012 based on my own small, idiosyncratic and probably fairly conservative sampling of it, the fact is that I’ve listened to a lot of music this year that has sucked.

More disappointing follow-up albums than usual. More ‘sorry-guys-this-is-just-not-happening’. more ‘don’t-get-it’. More ‘OK, FUCK THIS’. More reminders that music is hard.

We shouldn’t dwell on the negative though. Enthusiasm for these things always ebbs and flows, and is wholly subjective. I thought my own Buddy Bradley Phase (wherein aging hipsters adopt an attitude of jaded machismo and start habitually berating new music for not being as good as Alice Cooper and ZZ Top) had quietly come and gone a few years back, but turns out that was just a taster. Looks like we have much more fun in that vein yet to come.

All that said though, there HAVE still been a big pile of new records this year that have made me happy. Very few heart-pounding, life-changing discoveries, but that’s ok. I can probably do without them for a while. Just a lot of stuff that’s been really SOLID, y’know? Utilitarian music, that’s what I’m about at the moment. Stuff that does what it does in the way that I want it to do it, and gets me from A to B.

And as such, I’ve put together a TOP 25 of it, all album-ish length things released during 2012 (or in some cases the tail end of 2011) that I heartily recommend, topped off with a final five that I will love til my dying day and actually physically fight for and blah blah blah. So I guess life’s not so bad after all. Noise made by people marches on, and if I find myself just mooching about in a piss-soaked alleyway as the parade passes by, that’s my own business. I’ll jump back on board when I’m good and ready.

Before we begin though, here’s a super-quick run-down of numbers #26 to #30, of which one is flawed but not a total write-off, two are thoroughly decent but I can’t think of anything particularly pertinent to say about them, and the remaining two are dense and interesting records that I only recently picked up and haven’t quite got my head ‘round yet, so they might well increase in my affection as time goes on.

Labels: best of 2012, series intros