Obsessive Velvet Underground fans may recall ‘The Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes’ – an extraordinarily ragged live bootleg distinguished by the fact that the accidental genius responsible for taping a series of Boston concerts placed their recording device on top of the guitar amps, resulting in hours and hours of churning Sterl n’ Lou strummage, hanging disembodied in space, almost entirely disconnected from the soothing context usually provided by songs, vocals, drums, and Doug Yule’s smiling face.

The results proved a bit too much even for me to be perfectly honest, but the person or persons behind mysterious Parisian outfit Hôpital De La Conception apparently deemed these absurd recordings the ne plus ultra of rock n’ roll’s grand mission, subsequently recording and releasing ‘The Electric Rockin' Chair’, in which two lonely electric guitars hold down the musical equivalent of a dead-eyed stare for just over half an hour without blinking.

Evoking an enervated, teeth-grinding, urban-subway-sound, the clean-toned rhythm guitar clings maniacally to a single chord – pure white heat, with ABSOLUTELY NO syncopation, slack or string-bends allowed in the building (Hôpital De La Conception SPITS upon your stupid ‘blues’).

Lead line over the top meanwhile gets busy with some hideously malformed practice amp wah-wah pedal shit, later reining it in in favour of finger-slicing, overdriven high end explorations, hitting that same peak of ‘Run Run Run’-at-the-Gymnasium nirvana again and again and again, then circling back ‘round for more. Occasionally, a man mutters slurred, potentially saucy, off-mic exclamations in French. Sounds like he’s enjoying himself.

From whence did this music emerge? From the austere bedroom of some finely tailored, smack-smoking gallic super-snob who wears shades 24/7 and will insist to the point of death that this is THE ONLY TRUE, LEGITIMATE ROCK N’ ROLL MUSIC? From a couple of bored music students casually marking out an intriguing historical dead-end? From some former garage band dude gone wa-ay off-piste in pursuit of room-clearing devilry? Who knows. Beyond the clues provided by this tape’s intriguing, headless cover shot, perhaps we will never know.

For most of the human race, this music will prove about as appealing as dental torture, but for those of us who’ve already had our palettes thoroughly scoured by the merciless wire-wool of The V.U., Rallizes, Black Time and Jim Shepard, there’s a fine, evil draught to enjoy here, worth drinking to the dregs. I’m not really sure why, but then, I’m not sure why I stuck my finger in the socket of that light-fitting when I was eight years old either, and a few decades later here we all are.

Listen & download via Opaque Dynamo bandcamp.

2019 vinyl pressing on Cardinal Fuzz / Feeding Tube already LONG SOLD OUT by this point, but hey, it exists.

Labels: album reviews, France, Hôpital De La Conception, tapes

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

Blood Patrol – demo tape

Don’t push me too hard on the hows and whys, but recently I have been spending a lot of time listening to a demo by a band called Blood Patrol, operating out of somewhere in Germany.

I’ll be honest with you – I’ve not really made much of an effort to keep up with recent developments in the world of metal. In fact I am pretty much ignorant of everything that has transpired in the genre since I gave up reading ‘Terrorizer’ four or five years ago. I pick up new records by bands I already know I like, and one or two other things people have recommended to me, but aside from that…

I’m sure that there are dozens, probably hundreds, of incredible, innovative, awe-inspiring metal bands around whose work I’ve entirely missed out on. I daresay you could throw a brick on Camden high street and hit a more innovative, awe-inspiring metal band than Blood Patrol. Hell, most of the members of Blood Patrol are probably in a more innovative, awe-inspiring band than Blood Patrol.

But those other bands are not Blood Patrol.

I should probably say that in capitals. BLOOD PATROL!

What’s special about Blood Patrol?

Nothing.

So why, of all the metal bands in all the world, am I listening to Blood Patrol?

Because, dude – Blood Patrol RULES.

Metal logic. Best logic.

Listening to these demos – rejoicing in the muffled gut-thump of the practice room > portastudio > cassette > mp3 translation process – makes me want to learn to drive, get my licence, and buy a car. This is solely so that I could drive around aimlessly and give people lifts. And as they sit in the passenger seat, I’ll jam this tape in the stereo. I’ll start drinking fizzy drinks again, so that I can slurp from a big drive-thru cup as I say “yeah man, this is Blood Patrol” and start bashing out blast-beats on the steering wheel.

Hopefully it’ll be a long drive, so that I can cherish their expression of cautious relief in the moment of silence when the tape comes to an end… before I instinctively reach over and put it on again. I reckon I could spin it at least six times during an average slog across London.

Looking around me, I see indie records, psychedelic records, garage-punk records, whatever else. I listen to the sound of Blood Patrol from my computer speakers, and I think, fuck man, I’ve been wasting my life. I could have been listening to stuff that sounds like Blood Patrol. Why would anyone want to listen to music that doesn’t sound like this?

A metal review demands sub-genres, so what ‘THIS’ is is…. well I guess it’s kind of a hardcore/thrash crossover thing, with land speed record H/C drumming (not actually blast-beats, despite what I said earlier), low end Entombed/Bolt Thrower guitar chug, deranged ‘Reign in Blood’ whammy bar carnage and grave-soil gargling BM vocals. Perfection, in other words.

Completely devoid of the pretension and dry technicality that dooms much contemporary metal to the ‘not right now thanks’ pile, this tape is about as far as you can get from the pristine, multi-tracked headache factory of a studio death metal album. But at the same time, it doesn’t retreat back to the mysterioso trashcan-holocaust guff of yr average kvlt BM release either. Basically this just sounds like we always wanted metal so sound, before things got all silly – a functional low fidelity recording of some guys in a room, rocking it out with energy of a teenage punk band and the chops of stadium beserkers. It’s just plain fucking FUN. They’re singing about blood and thunder and destruction and zombie bloodbaths and rampaging through the dark night on galloping stallions and tearing monsters’ throats out, and they’re having the time of their lives. It’s exhilarating! It’s rock music! It’s METAL! It’s BLOOD PATROL. It… well, it rules.

Here they are doing ‘Unhallowed & Old’ and their self-titled song:




We ride at dawn for Blood Patrol’s myspace page!

Labels: Blood Patrol, METAL, tapes

Lisa Bouvier & Allt Ar Musik – Indian Ar Dod CS
Horowitz – The Knitwear Generation CS
(Fika Tapes)

Two items here from a new London-based / Scandicentric micro-label, both of them zipping effortlessly past my twee-defences and making me smile and get all ‘yay-for-handcrafted-objects-and-DIY-culture’ and so on, however much of a filthy anachronism starting a tape label in 2011 may be.

To address the Lisa Bouvier / Allt Ar Musik one first, if someone described the music herein to me before I heard it, my cynical grown-up self would hiss like a wounded snake and go hide in the airing cupboard until it was over. So it’s a good job that I saw Lisa B. play a real nice solo set prior to purchase, giving me the courage to press play and roll with whatever transpired. And what transpired is TOTALLY AWESOME, whisking me back to the innocent days before I had really clocked the existence of any “indie-pop scene”, when I would still meet any manifestation of polite, well-dressed kids ‘doing it for themselves’ with a hearty thumbs up and when I would still welcome the presence in my life of records on which white people play poorly recorded trumpets.

So let’s put the question right out there: how does the idea of mannered, bedroom-fi Swedish language covers of Mary Lou Lord’s “His Indie World” and Sebadoh’s “Gimme Indie Rock” grab you? Not so good? Well take a second look, because only an inveterate grouch would deny that these particular ones are a ton o’ fun. There’s a really great feeling of after-school four-track fun about these recordings that bypasses any/all reservations, and indeed sleevenotes from Lisa B. reveal how these are quite old recordings, dating from when she and the dude who is ‘Allt Ar Musik’ teamed up at college and just started goofing around with some music, expressing their joy at the joint discovery of the kind of up-with-people DIY/indie culture that us British or American kids are drenched in from an early age and basically sick of by the time we crawl into our mid/late ‘20s.

Cover art depicting the two of them sitting happily on some bedroom floor surrounded by cheap equipment is emblematic of the whole affair. Oh, to be a youngster again, to sit on that floor; drink tea, giggle, make songs. Good times.

Horowitz are a band who I’d imagine would be apt to share these wistful sentiments of badges-n’-Converse nostalgia, and whilst I’ve probably run out of original things to say about them by this point, their bleary-eyed fuzz-pop remains a thing of grandeur on this here Fika tape. In fact, it sounds better than ever busting out of a tape. Well, not really ‘better’ as such because my tape player turns everything into underwater sludge, but… aesthetically correct? Yes, definitely. I could describe Horowitz’s three songs here and tell you what they sound like, how they fit into the band’s oeuvre and such, but really all I want to say is goddamnit, there’s something about everything Horowitz record that just hits me right here y’know? Their home-taped drum machines and bubblegum Boyracer fuzz, their drifty, elegiac melodies and the big bearhug of lonely/star-gazing indie-boy emotion that goes into each one of their songs… it just makes me want to salute and wipe a tear from my eye, y’know? “This is why we fight”, all that kinda stuff (god help us if there’s a war).

Much as I shake my fist at the retro-tape craze (largely on the practical grounds that the tapedeck on my mini hi-fi grinds away so painfully I might as well have dropped it in a fishtank on the night John Peel died and left it there ‘til last summer), there’s no denying that these Fika tapes are real lovely pieces of work – brightly-coloured cassettes in hand-folded cardboard packets, each stuffed to bursting with a download card, a ramblin’ photocopied insert, a fruit teabag and a recipe for cake. The whole lovin’ package! Horowitz give us a recipe for beer-cake, and all is right with the world.

Each tape limited to 100, so if any of this sounds like the kind of culture you might feel a connection to, check ‘em out.

http://fikarecordings.com/
http://www.myspace.com/horowitzband
http://lisabouvier.se/

Labels: Horowitz, Lisa Bouvier, singles reviews, tapes