BBQ and King Khan have released another garage rock gem. Invisible Girl is a rock n roll soul party record - all handclaps, doo wop backing vocals, 12 bar chords and familiar melodies. And quite unbelievably filthy lyrics.
Big Ripper is a monstrous record. It’s the album Godzilla has in his headphones as he’s trashing Manhattan. It’s what King Kong hears in his head as he’s beating his chest at the top of the Empire State building.
Musically, it’s an exhilirating riff stew with drums the sound of wrecking balls demolishing houses. Everything is distorted - every sound is so far in the red the dials are practically bleeding.
They know how to put on a show. ‘Course they do. They’ve been doing it for what seems like decades. In fact, some may argue, they’ve been doing the same show for the past ten years. Now, although that’s sort of true, each time they have new songs and new tricks. And even though you know all this and have seen them before, it’s still a thrill when they emerge from inside a giant screen, Wayne Coyne does his giant space bubble thing, and the band open with Race for the Prize, in a riot of cannon-fired ticker tape, streamers and balloons. So much that you almost don’t notice how good that song is. Then it’s on with the show as the balloons continue to bounce around the venue, old classics tumble out, the green lasers and the big gong make their appearance, and there’s a lot of fun going down.
In the end the main difference is the scale. Camera Obscura put on a good show, but it’s hard not to compare this gig with the previous time I’ve seen the Glasgow band this year. That was back in March at The Lexington when they played their first gig after recording their latest album My Maudlin Career. It was billed as a warm-up for SXSW and Traceyanne Campbell admitted to being a bit nervous, but there were only a few minor glitches, and in a cracking little venue with a partisan crowd, the gig was a blast.
Mystery Roar were a bit too sexy for me.
Max Tundra had more enthusiasm during that one performance than I’ve ever had in my entire life.
Deastro played 4 or 5 new songs. Then shit broke. Then they played 4 or 5 old songs. Then 1 more new song about falling in love with a vampire. And it was all awesome.
Nice Nice are currently giving away downloads of their new EP, before its physical release on 26 November.
It’s a fantastic single. The A-side ‘One Hit’ sounds like a kind of amped up electro psych Black Sabbath- all crunchy guitars, Ozzy style harmonies and sound explosions. When it really kicks off, it’s the aural equivalent of someone chucking a lit cigar into a fireworks factory.
B-side ‘Ark drum’ is a more sedate affair, with a mellow tribal feel. Sounds like Sting is in there somewhere playing the panpipes.
Photo by Amy Brammall
Maybeshewill are a three-piece instrumental trio from the Midlands, who swell when playing live to accomodate their ‘rock-ensemble’ sound. They’re currently re-releasing an amalgamation of their sold-out debut album, and four tracks from their first EP - aptly called ‘Not For Want Of Trying +4’. No messing around here.
There is something quite frightening about Converge. Obviously, the music itself has an element of terror, everyone who heard Fault and Fracture for the first time (particularly accompanied by its incredibly sinister video) certainly would have felt that fear. But what is really quite mind boggling is the fact that here are a band, now fast approaching their 20th year as a creative collective, (or at least between the reluctant hero figure of vocalist & lyricist Jacob Bannon and guitarist-come-producer Kurt Ballou) who make loud, uncompromising music. And yet, they’re more relevant now than they perhaps have ever been.
The best songs on Julian Casablancas’ solo debut are the ones in which he sounds just like himself but not much at all like the Strokes, forcing us to reckon with the notion that the two things are not as synonymous as we’d previously thought. This is a bit like playing dress-up, and for the most part, Casablancas has sense enough to only indulge in drag that flatters his features. I’m not sure what exactly you call a song like “4 Chords of the Apocalypse” — Rec room balladry?
Pulled Apart by Fucking Horses - what bands should be like. When I heard the initial announcement that Future of the Left were to support Biffy Clyro on their current tour, I was more than pleased. When PABH replaced them, it was probably the only band that I’d have been happy with taking up the mantle.
The Brunettes- Paper Dolls
8 /10
There’s always an air of innocence and a dash of danger with The Brunettes, and the play off between Heather and Jonathan remains a powerful, playful force on Paper Dolls. The album’s biggest point of difference is its modern bent. Instantly more avant-guarde and experimental than previous more straight forward twee pop efforts, the band’s seventh release grabs effortlessly with opener ‘In Colours’
Having been at Kings Cross’ Scala just two days previous for what may have been the most fun gig of the year (Dananananaykroyd), it was a strange feeling to be returning knowing that the bands of the evening were of a considerably more depressing nature. I knew it would be a strange contrast, but it would be worth it; though melancholic, the Twilight Sad’s use of layer and texture has always stood out, making them markedly unique in what they do. Admittedly this has caused problems the previous times I’ve seen them, with the sound-man struggling to get them sounding just right. Hopefully tonight’s gig won’t end up falling to the same problems.
Julian Casablancas- Phrazes For The Young
8/10
Marrying sunny melodies with despondent lyrics, The Strokes’ lead singer and mastermind Julian Casablancas has shed his gritty punk rock demeanour for more eclectic experimentalism with his debut solo LP. Perhaps it was a determined move to ensure his detractors had a harder job pigeonholing him, harder than they’d have to try with Strokes guitarist Albert Hammond Jr.’s sedate pop efforts or drummer Fabrizio Morretti’s joyous reggae-influenced pop jams. At first listen to the few Phrazes tracks leaked early, Casablancas’ output cried Ratatat to me. But the warped multi-tracked synthy guitar lines did more than just amble on aimlessly as Ratatat’s songs often can.
If you’re looking for the right record for your Halloween Party this weekend, you should look no further than Pure Evil.
10 perfect hillbilly garage rock classics, infused with eerie David Lynchian atmosphere and scary vibes. It’s a record that makes you want to dance, clap your hands, shake your hips and check under your bed for dwarves who talk backwards.
‘Does It Offend You, Yeah?’ - with their equally long 2008 debut LP - ‘You Have No Idea What You’re Getting Yourself Into’ - rolled into a surprisingly small venue in Glasgow this evening with their intriguing brand of ‘dance-punk’
‘I left my heart in Glasgow!’ was the cry of singer Ben Kowalewicz as he wrapped up the band’s headline show at the Barras - ‘the second best venue in the world’ - every bit as sweaty as the impassioned fans who chanted every word to every song back.
It seems like far too long since we last engaged in some Smith worship so let’s put that to rights. I was actually supposed to be going to this gig but as luck would have it found myself in Peterborough on that day so it was impossible. That sort of thing always seems to happen when The Fall visit my neck of the woods. They played in my home town of York last year on the only day for months I wasn’t in the City. Still at least there always seems to be someone ready to record the proceedings and share with the rest of us. Credit for this one goes to Mr/Mrs Foxyducker for whom, if I had my way a knighthood would be just around the corner.
What makes some places become hubs of creativity and art, instead of others? Portland, Oregon is one place that crops up again and again when you take a foray into the world of music that sits below the surface of the mainstream – be it mainstream rock, dance or that of the talentless talent show genre.
‘Portugal. The Man’ are yet another group to base themselves in that very American city, and so when the album dropped through my letterbox with its colourful, puzzle-like cardboard artwork that fits together in some intricate fashion, I wasn’t too surprised.
You’re going to fall in love with this EP. Following on from The Drums’ debut hit single (critical hit anyway), Summertime! mixes 80s Factory indie with a distinctly Beach Boys sound. Whoever would have thought that would make such a good combination? Actually, The Raveonettes gave us clues about this with their first couple of records.
There’s a quote in a bathroom of in an infamous venue in Glasgow that sets out all the awful things about the music industry, finishing with "…and then there’s the bad bits."
..a rather apt description. I was all set to give a review and photos of Green Day’s first return to Scotland after the American Idiot Tour in February 2005, when the usual industry follies got in the way. Along with most of the rest of the press, the guestlist was screwed, meaning that I ended up ejected unceremoniously after 12 and a half minutes. So henceforth this is my own self-indulgent rambling of those minutes instead.. and probably a photo-gallery to follow.
Fresh Legs are an art pop band from Portsmouth who by all accounts set alight the Red Bull stage at this year’s Bestival with their twisty riffs and gold spandex. They’ve just released a new EP - Julian - and it’s a delight.
Radio Over Moscow- Battletech
7/10
This album doesn’t sound like any of the bands mentioned in the press release, well Gary Numan perhaps but definitely not Nirvana, The Beatles, Primal Scream or The Smashing Pumpkins. Radio Over Moscow is the solo assignment of Aucklander Dan Satherley (KittyHawk, Vetox, Luna Spark) and Battletech is his first solo release. Bringing ’90s pop-punk into the twenty-first century, Battletech covers common ground with just a subtle pinch of unfamiliarity; synthesisers and drum machines. Imagine if Blink 182 went electro or Placebo ditched the dark make-up, Radio Over Moscow brings the two together in a mechanical blender, adding slices of metallic sounding synths and sci-fi rhythms. Sprouting multiple seeds of futuristic punk, alien grunge, contorted new-wave and geographically nondescript Brit-pop, Battletech provides a moderately eclectic genre fix and is well structured, allowing the songs to merge together without sounding disjointed. Opener ‘The Purpose Of Man’ is an electro sherbet hit echoing The Faint and flows directly into ‘Anti-human Nous’ which utilises similar synth techniques but puts a vocoder effect on the vocals.
An artist with the name of ‘White Noise Supremacists’, based in Berlin – and a solo female one at that? Surely worth checking out purely on that basis alone.
After seeing the following on her Myspace page:
Alright, alright I am obviously against censorship of any kind so I will no longer screen comments. Just don’t be a flaming douche but most importantly don’t just post to plug your shit. Do I come over to your house and spraypaint "THE WHITE NOISE SUPREMACISTS- ON TOUR NOW!!!" on your livingroom wall? No. I don’t. So don’t do it here. If you leave a comment that’s oh so clever, or your pic/name looks interesting, well, people will click on your profile and check you out. I know. I do it all the time. Oh and no huge obnoxious images either. Respeck mah house. If anyone violates these commandments I vow that one day soon I will be found bathing gleefully in a fountain of your blood. Don’t test me. Really. Now…as you were.
I’m convinced even more.
What we know about Justin Vernon: he’s a fantastic songwriter with a soulful voice, which has slowly but surely found widespread acclaim with Bon Iver. We also found out from the Blood Bank EP earlier this year that he’s not afraid to experiment. Still, I don’t think anyone could predict this one. Well, it kind of depends on your prior knowledge of Collections of Colonies of Bees, with whom this is an every day experience. But what is quite exciting about this is the new life that Vernon literally breathes into this band, which gives it enough distinction from the two bands that form this one, but also makes for quite a thrilling, pleasing listen.
Chickenhawk, pic by Danny North. Now that’s the kind of expression you want from a lead guitarist.
Chickenhawk rule the roost on the latest in Dance To The Radio’s excellent 4x12 series. Kicking off the a-side, this Leeds 4 piece excite the metal tastebuds with a fat riff sandwich of a tune. It’s feisty, it’s shreddy but clichés are avoided. There some Lightning Bolt style sonic wizardry at the start of tune, giving way to a meaty stomp, before the Andy Falkous style vocals. It’s fucking great.
Maths are a band I have adored for years now, I have followed them as they slowly progressed into the band they are now. Last year they released a much acclaimed split EP with Throats which brought them to the public’s attention, they even gained a feature in NME putting them firmly in the “bands to watch out for” section for anyone who likes decent music. However after the release of the EP, a tour and a bunch of spread out dates over the country the band seemed to disappear into the woodwork, apparently determined to finish university/ other boring life stuff. After a few months of inactivity the band announced they were writing for their first full-length, something which had me jumping over the moon. The band opted to go the full DIY route and record it all themselves which only attracts me more to the record.
Having been around since 2005 in various musical genres, and released two EPs, Columbus’ Six Gallery have finally gotten it together to record their debut full-length: ‘Breakthroughs in Modern Art’, after nine months in the making. The LP managed to survive various equipment malfunctions, and even the theft of various hard-drives, on which it was both stored and backed up.
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By the time Nirvana had come to fame, the Pixies had already come and gone. They never really did get all that much recognition at the time, but retrospectively they’ve become somewhat of a must-have for anyone with an ear for alternative music.
Tonight saw them return to Glasgow after 18 years – their last trip in 1991, where the stage collapsed after only a few songs.
Wyldman, in no uncertain terms, implores us to go and see The Farrs.
Modern Fever – the debut EP offering from one-man-band Jonnythefirth is a five track, distorted western-riffed beastie.
You should know who The Jesus Lizard are but in case you don’t here’s what they are: They are a band from (mainly) the 90s who play abrasive, chugging, murderous, scathing music with bass and drums that stomp, pound and throb, a guitar that slices and stabs and vocals that upset and disturb. They released all of their really good stuff on Touch and Go between ‘89 and ’94 and now it’s all available again, all remastered and posh on thick vinyl with inlays and posters.
This is a review of a music festival, but it may not be be much like the other reviews you read in newspapers or other, cooler music sites. These are mainly about the bands, as the writer flits from performance to performance, trying to cram as many short reviews of different acts without being too overcrowded. Usually, if it’s a good review, they’ll also try to convey some of the atmosphere of the festival. In times past, I’ve tried to do that too. Indeed, the first year I attended End of the Road Festival, I tried to cram in as many shows as possible, and write about them at length, accompanied by photos. If that’s what you’re expecting, sorry.
The truth is, festivals are a very different experience as a parent. I’m not complaining though. Rather, I’ve embraced this status (this is the third year) as the way things are now and that’s cool. So while the pre-festival forum chatter was about band clashes, not much of that was relevant to me. My clashes were more about which bands clashed with Growl Junior’s meals, naps, bedtime and other family activities. Therefore much-anticipated sets from Dirty Projectors, Okkervil River, Steve Earle and Neko Case, were far less seen than heard. Thankfully the main stage sounstystem is good enough, and the lovely fairy light-lit woods are close enough so that I heard most of these sets loud and clear as I read bedtime stories to the girl in the little woodland library. We actually got to see some of Dirty Projectors - crucially Stillness is the Move, so I got to watch my favourite song of the year, the female members of the band bustin’ R’n’B moves as the Growl family looked on, eating sheep’s milk ice cream. I was even given a brief moment of fatherly pride as the little ‘un leapt around to said song, before we carted her off to bed.
¡Cañaceros! is a brilliant DIY pop punk record from Bonus Eventus, due out at the end of November on Dinosaurs in Vietnam. Packed with joy de vivre - it’s the kind of album that makes you happy to be alive. It’s also the kind of album that makes you want to pour some absyinthe on your cornflakes and start the party early, so booze soaked are the lyrics. They fit the tunes perfectly though, telling one long story of drunkeness, partying and fun times. That might give the impression that the words are pretty dumb - they’re not at all. There’s some wry wit chucked in, and the band have one eye on the consequences of their excesses. Thankfully, they’re too young to worry about that now and don’t ruin things with melancholy twists and hangovers.
God’s Little Eskimos
Born of Mute, Dischord and Fierce Panda influences, and featuring suitably esoteric and feisty label mates to match, Art Scare’s #1 compilation confirms all that’s good about the home grown ethos.
The independent scene is often characterised by its guitars, so tracks from Dr. Nut, Venus Bogardus or Langur don’t disappoint, recalling influences of Pixies or early Sonic Youth. But there’s plenty more on offer here.
Home recording carries on becoming ever more popular all the time, with the more creative and experimental of musicians able to put together sounds in their bedrooms on their laptop – in amongst the chaos and busy-ness of the rest of their life. The great myth that music would die out if we stopped paying for CDs is further being exposed as a result, but does it mean a shift in the way that we’ll view music differently as a result? I hope so.
Two years ago Brand New, to the surprise of almost everyone, released something short of a masterpiece in ‘The Devil & God are Raging Inside Me’. Unfortunately however, this was released to a wave of indifference from fans either wishing a return to their angsty, melodramatic roots or people remembering said roots and not bothering to give the record a chance.
This has to be one of the more bizarre things that I’ve come across in a while.
Music for Men falls back on the familiar a little too often, and the tone and subject matter for most of Gossip’s songs doesn’t exactly change from their last album. A few of these songs are shameless retreads. Ditto uses rain as a metaphor for impending break up, (ie. "Soon it’s gonna rain"), a few too many times. A few of these songs are overwrought (even by Gossip standards), and a few are just not that fun. So that leaves approximately three songs that would make my personal playlist. Lucky that they’re pretty amazing.
Pic by Jeff McMullin
If Wilco had been jamming Husker Du with Bob Mould instead of No Age at the recent ATP show, it would probably have sounded a lot like We Are Bound.
With this name, and the punk-style cartoon bomb on the front of the CD cover of this DIY release, I was fully expecting a thrashy, predictable ripoff of ‘The Exploited’. As someone who spent their musical introductions listening to that sort of stuff, it was going to take a lot to impress me if this was the case.
However, I have to say I was genuinely surprised. And when the trumpets came in on ‘Mysterons’, I was almost bowled over in shock.
We Show Up on RadaR, just on the left apparently
Here’s another gem from Hello Thor Records, who had the fantastic sense earlier this year to release a 7inch by excellent Velvet Underground / Langhorne Slim crossover band Fists.
We Show up on RadaR is an altogether gentler beast, but just as compelling. On new single ‘Mountain Top’, Speak and Spell vocals give way to a casiotone psychey sunshine pop nugget. Like the Lovely Eggs, it’s just the right side of twee - managing to incorporate the sound made by those shimmery bell things and the lyrics ‘we’re riding our bikes’ without making you feel like you’ve overdosed on spangles.
Honestly, I wasn’t expecting all the moshing and crowd surfing. I’d hopped in a cab seconds after seeing Wild Beasts for a third time in one week and headed to Market Hotel to see Seattle’s finest purveyors of bent surf garage. On record, The Intelligence are genuinely weird, like they try and make normal music and this is what comes out. It’s not dissimilar to what Sic Alps or Thee Oh Sees do, but there’s a sinister edge, kind of like in a David Lynch movie. Slightly uncomfortable. But live, Lars Finberg and the rest of The Intelligence are here to rock. Market Hotel didn’t seem that crowded to me, but when the second song kicked in it was a like a mosh magnet, everyone who was still there rushed towards the stage and collectively lost their shit. In particular, Golden Triangle’s OJ (the band had just played) was a crowd surfing dynamo, despite there not being quite enough crowd to hold him. No matter how many times he got dropped, OJ kept getting back up there. "Let’s see how many people get hurt on this one," a perplexed Finberg joked during the encore. The guy might have bruises all over his body now, but Friday night that little dude was all smiles.
Finberg kept asking the crowd if we could he his vocals — we could I thought they sounded great — but judging by that I don’t think they could hear anything. Sometimes you just move forward via instinct and muscle memory.
No Age- ‘Losing Feeling’ EP After just over a year since their last release, the two piece LA mongers of noisy rock and experimental shoe-gaze named No Age are back with a neat four track EP. The title track begins with a gentle, reverby guitar tickling its way into view before the rolling, stumbling drums burst onto the scene. The song trickles along like this for a while- swaying back and forth between sombre, hazy vocals and the uplifting guitar flourishes- before finally rocketing forward into a dizzying pinnacle of fast and fuzzy guitar.
Another band with ‘horse’ in the title, the trio come from Surrey, and hope to one day organise a tour with other equine-related bands. Can I suggest Rapider Than Horsepower for the bill?
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French For Cartridge’s recently released double A-side 7"/download EP with Oooh! and Picture Negative is a bizarre mix of piano, dreamy guitar twiddlings and almost sounds like Mary Poppins on an acid trip.
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What on earth is this double A side about? King Charles seems to be an odd character, and people keep going on about his hair for some reason. I get the impression that he’s a bit of a wild arty type, which is good, but I’d never heard of him before this - so he could be a guy in a suit for all I know.
This is one heavy album. Even if the word ‘heavy’ didn’t feature heavily in many of the song titles, I’d still be drawing that conclusion. Sure, it’s the kind of indie punk rock you’d expect from a band that’s played shows with Sonic Youth and Ex Models, but it’s wrapped in a thick coating of METAL and it’s all the more chewy for it.
If Queens of the Stone Age were cooler, less annoyingly precise and more punk rock then they’d probably sound like ‘The Brotherhood. There are monsterous riffs, gnarly solos, metal fuzz, sing along choruses. And then there’s PIL style atonal tunery and Misfits mosh parts
Photo: Charlie Ingham
Offset Festival: 2 days in Essex, plenty of bands to see from the unusual No Bra to the headliners The Horrors and everything in-between - Offset has to be the coolest festival this summer. It actually felt that this weekend was the last weekend of summer. Let’s get one thing out of the way first, there was no mud, no rain, no wellies, no rain coats. Although in true indie-kid style, Barbour Jackets seem to be making a comeback, but only if you couple them with retro ray-bans.
There were way too many bands for me to get round, 170-ish over the weekend, ranging from the good, (Hatcham Social), the bad (No Bra), and the ugly (I’m not saying who). This festival really does feel like you can find some new music just by wandering into a tent to see what’s happening. When I say tent I mean the big white ones with the music blaring out, not the small eurohike ones on the adjacent camp site you fall into at the end of the first day after too much cider (no comment).
So Saturday was all about The Slits. There were of course some bands playing from the off that I should have seen due to the name alone, but didn’t; What would Jesus Drive?, Lekiddo - Lord of the Lobsters!, Sex is Disgusting. I feel bad that I missed them. Err, well, maybe not.
Offset suggests that this festival "joins the dots between exciting new bands and the artists who influenced them" and you really do get a sense of things to come. A band that oozes energy and excitement are Dananananaykroyd. It’s difficult to label this band; they have two singers, two drummers, two guitarists and one bass player. It’s jump around like a maniac, scream at the top of your voice, crowd surf, craziness - which after a morning of watching people singing at their feet was just what the crowd needed. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing angry about this band, in fact it’s more pop than hardcore, even the singer Calum Gunn asked the security man if he was allowed to crowd surf. The guy said no, but Calum went for it anyway. At least he asked. This band loved the crowd and the crowd loved them back. Ahh bless. Calum even went as far as to go and hug as many of them as he could at the end of the set.
‘Taken By Trees’ is the solo project of Swedish ‘Victoria Bergsman’, formerly of the Concretes; ‘East of Eden’ being the second release under the guise.
In order to avoid the clinical studio environment, and avoid losing the ‘playfulness’ of the music, she wanted to record outside, and somewhere far away from home. Pakistan became the destination, which brought with it its own difficulties. The Swedish Government advising her and her sole companion and sound engineer Andreas Söderström from the outset not to travel unless they had very good reason, as they couldn’t guaruntee their safety.
The Rural Alberta Advantage- Hometowns
5/10
Re-released in 2009 via Saddle Creek Records after being originally self-released in 2008, The Rural Alberta Advantages’ indie rock debut refuses to let the curtains be drawn on a sound that’s been travelled by many before them.
I’m amazing, and lovely. Or so say the three bright eyed young girls who bounded up to me, with stickers to remind me later on. Not really normal festival behaviour, but at Greenbelt, it’s commonplace. “Everyone’s nice” apparently, and despite this seeming an outlandish notion, it appears to be true.
Baddies must be sick of hearing the obvious parallels being drawn between themselves and Futureheads, QOTSA, Talking Heads and to throw my hat in there, Bad Religion, with their post-punk, hardcore sensibilities. However instead of sounding like a nondescript band ripping-off others to compensate for a lack of imagination, they have produced an album that whilst familiar, is both exciting and refreshing.
China Meiville’s writing is often described by critics as ‘genre defying’. This is because it’s really fucking odd. In China’s own words, it’s ‘weird fiction’ and that description is spot on.
His latest novel - The City and The City - is about two different nation states that co-exist in the same physical space, but are completely distinct. The inhabitants of one city, Ul Qoma, are taught from an early age to ‘unsee’ inhabitants of the other city, Beszel, even if they are standing right next to them. To break the rules, is to invoke a mysterious and fearful power - Breach - who whisk you away, never to be heard of again.
I knew this would happen.
I had the chance to go and see ‘Dinosaur Pile Up’ a number of times this summer whilst doing the festival rounds, and every time I did, I managed to find an excuse - whether it be that it was raining, or that I needed to fill up my bottle of Whisky, or that the damn T Break stage was just so far away from the press tent, and now I get a hold of their latest offering "The Most Powerful E.P. In The Universe" (released August 17th) and it’s really good.
The music I sit best with is not music that is usually done very well by ‘local bands’. Infact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘Local Bands Suck’, and even have a t-shirt to that effect. ‘Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea’ are a band local to Brighton, only formed in the Spring of 2009, but already having released their DIY Debut EP - "an honest attempt to transmit something interesting and engaging from our tiny minds and through our clumsy fingers to the tape." to which I have a mixed bag of reactions.
The New Up – Better Off (released 18th August 2009)
Released last week, the five-track EP is the second in a ‘series’ of three. ‘Broken Machine’ is the precursor to this one, and
“..is a preliminary analysis that attempts to diagnose the problems of modern society while drawing from personal experience. The second in the series [Ed: ‘Better Off’], is a step toward resolution that addresses the question of how to overcome these shortcomings.”
.. err. Right.
Towards the end of last summer Ryan Bennett (Megaheroes, Buttsimpson) and Daif Kent (Golden Axe) spent three or four days in Ryan’s bedroom recording themselves jamming on bass, drums and a waveform generator. They’ve just turned the recordings into a short EP called Shit Happens and Ryan has hand made a few copies to distribute to people “who might need to hear it.”
In Daif’s words,”For this album we crammed into Ryan’s bedroom, as it was in Howick at the time (he now lives in Wellington). It was tiny, and so hot that Ryan’s sticks kept flying out of his hands from all the sweat. Then there was always the threat of being eaten alive by the 5ft Rottweiler in the hallway. We jammed and when we had a riff and pattern or two we would make it into a song. It was super spontaneous.”
To coincide with the 35ht anniversary of the electro classic Autobahn all eight Kraftwerk albums are released in various formats, most notably as eight disc box set named 12345678 The Catalogue. Kraftwerk have upgraded their Kling Klang masters with the latest studio technology. The box set will be distributed in two versions, with English-language vocal tracks for international distribution and another (Der Katalog) with German-language vocal tracks. All albums will also be released on heavyweight vinyl and as digital downloads. Note: due to licensing restrictions in the USA, only five of the eight albums will be released as separate CD editions: Autobahn, Radio-Activity, Trans Europe Express, The Man Machine and Tour De France.
German electro pioneersKraftwerk are considered as a major iflunece on dance muisc since theri first release in the Sevtnies, with Autobahn, The Model and Radioactivity as the best known tracks. Th 2003 Tour de France saw them back climbing the charts.
A husband and wife duo releasing an EP? It always seems a bizarre concept to me to be involved in a band with someone you’re that close to, but must make for an interesting in-group dynamic. The Andreottis are the ‘Grizzly Owls’, and have just recently released this four track EP off their own backs, and it makes for some pleasant listening.
This album hasn’t exactly set the heather on fire - to use a Scottish expression. It’s not really had the internet ablaze either. Infact, there’s been a bit of an apathy about the whole thing. ‘Ready For The Weekend’ came out on August 17th, but with more of a whisper than a shout, which is disappointing concerning the mass hysteria surrounding Calvin Harris when he first emerged doe-faced from Dumfries in 2007; hailed as some sort of underground saviour of the rockpopdance world. Where’s the Calvin that brazenly told festival-goers at Live at Loch Lomond 2007 that he was “at least playing our own fucking tunes, unlike some [insert expletive] that just make money playing other people’s records”? I paraphrase, but you get the idea – instead nowadays we have nice shots of him in tie-less suits in other people’s music videos, trying to appear the epitome of cool, or as the next Mr. Ronson
This album is inspiring. If you’re a ‘musician’ of any description, it’s easy to get lost in the whole system of the music industry and all the fancy recording equipment you can sink years worth of money into, and feel dis-heartened that your recording will never really sound *that* technically perfect, when really all you should be doing is writing the songs. When will we learn to go “oh fuck it…” and put sounds together on whatever we can get a hold of, instead of worrying about all that crap?
Well, Merrill Garbus has done precisely that. Recording ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’ using a voice-recorder and some shareware mixing software, and having it released on 4AD no-less, she’s shown that if you’ve got something worth being heard, then it doesn’t matter what you use to get there. Infact, the album used to be available from the tuneyards.com site for a donation before that… a route that a lot of good bands in the indie scene are adopting as time goes on. Interesting.
The opening track ‘For You’ reminds me straight away of the sort of sound that Sufjan Stevens has on tracks like ‘Seven Swans’, but less precious and fragile.
The last Lollapalooza of the this decade is in the books and despite, what on paper, looked like a less than impressive lineup, it turned out another weekend of exciting and memorable moments just as in years past. Every year going at Lolla, one is expected to battle oppressive heat, but on Friday this year, Mother Nature decided to throw in a little something extra - a rain storm that only seemed to pick up steam throughout the day. The showers fizzled out by nightfall, ushering in the heat and wind for the rest of the weekend.
Due to a lack of veteran artists in the middle of the lineup, this year’s festival allowed many relative newcomers to strut their stuff in front of large amounts of festival goers. Miike Snow brought their debut album to life at the Vitamin Water stage while wearing Phantom of the Opera-esque masks for the first third of their set. Despite being a new band, they worked the crowd with the confidence of a group with much more experience. They worked through much of their album only to jam out and turn it into an electro-dance party by each song’s end - the advantage of having two fantastic producers in the band. Passion Pit and Lykke Li were thrown on the small Citi stage, only to draw impressive crowds and put together equally impressive sets, with Passion Pit’s set having one of the more energetic crowds during the entire festival. Dan Deacon and Of Montreal were the only other bands that I saw that were able to rile up their crowds in a similar frenzy…
Elizabeth & The Catapult are a trio from Brooklyn. Fronted by singer-songwriter Elizabeth Abby Ziman, the band offers a selection of jazzy pop-tunes that will go down with the cognoscenti that hang out in the small venues and cafe’s, sharing a love for lyrics that tell stories about soul searching. Guitarist Pete Lalish and drummer Danny Molad hold back most of the time, not getting in the way of the vocals and the lush string arrangements.
Elisabeth Ziman is fighting her demons with a smile, overcoming Apathy, and sitting Right Next To You when she sings. Hit The Wall is cheerfull song about having 500 resons to be depressed, but soldiering on against all odds. The sole cover, the Leonard Cohen song Everybody Knows starts as a surprisingly percussive interpretation before going into in all-out strings pop song. The trio keep the Greenwich Village music spirit alive, finding a middle way between Joni Mitchell and Suzanne Vega.
New Sonic Cathedral signings Yeti Lane have a 7" out in October called ‘Lonesome George’, incredibly named after the last surviving Pinta Island tortoise. Its reminisent of the first The Whitest Boy Alive album, mixed with early 90s US slacker indie and a touch of always fashionable kraut rock. Having made up three-quarters of Cyann & Ben, their self titled album bodes well for fans of freaky space rock and good pop tunes alike.
There’s been so many bloody great albums released this year that it makes me fearful for the future, and a possible drought. Along with Future of the Left’s ‘Travels With Myself And Another’, this has made that little bit of difference to the usual monotonous trudge of modern day living.
It’s not only me either. As soon as I’d popped the CD into my laptop and started listening, with iTunes silently scrobbling away to Last FM as I did so, I was receiving messages from people practically foaming at the mouth to get their mits on these tracks. (disclaimer: If there has been a leak of this yet, it wasn’t me!)
The Big Pink are a band who make me feel as if I know them already from somewhere, or else should. It’s partly why I opted to get a hold of a copy of their debut album (and was surprised that it was only a debut) – especially given that they signed to 4AD – label of Future of the Left – early 2009. After I’ve discovered the amount of hype that’s been building up around them from the likes of the NME, it’s not surprising.
The Lovvers album is a sonic assault. It’s not lo fi exactly - that suggests a kind of slap dash, no care attitude that Lovvers clearly don’t have. It’s just… very loud. It’s so far in the red it could be my bank account. It sounds like the band burst their speakers and the studio engineer’s ear drums with the first guitar chord. They turned everything up anyway, they got drunk. They played their songs and had the time of their lives.
Without the veil of atmosphere and showmanship which marks Lovvers gigs as raucous, electric events, they have lost their greatest asset and on their album ‘OCD Go Go Go Girls’ they are a significantly diminished prospect.
Occasionally something drops into the artrocker.com inbox that I end up clicking with instantly. The latest offering from the Experimental Dental School is just one such thing. ‘Forest Field’ sees them reduced from a trio to a ‘2 piece skronk’ outfit (whatever the hell that is), but reduced is probably the wrong word; I’d never have guessed that there was only the two of them from listening – probably just as well, as for various reasons I have a passionate hatred of two pieces.
PENS- Hey Friend What You Doing?
8/10
Charmingly ramshackle and wonderfully youthful, London trio PENS create sweet scuzz thrash punk with a psychedelic twist. Opener ‘Horsies’ will have your head spinning with its repetitive keyboard riff and elliptical vocals. Swathed in even more noise, ‘I Sing Just For You’ is a coyly sweet ode once you get used to the distortion, there are beautiful sounds growing underneath. This is a noise band with energy and enthusiasm to match clever song writing. Still with that ever-cool edge, songs like ‘1-2’ reek of after school boredom, knocking out super speedy rhythms with super gritty sounds produced from a dumpster drum kit, munted toy keyboard, guitar and £1 mic.
The noise can almost feel like too much at times, but the songs are fast and endearing. Instant classic ‘High In The Cinema’ is the clincher, it’s track four and by now you know whether you love them or hate them. If you’re in the former camp you’ll revel in the apocalyptic bliss, the swerving rhythms, the high of the chorus and the comedown of the verse.
There’s a lot of loose but tuneful indie pop punk flying around at the moment. And this, I think, is a very good thing. I’m a sucker for songs with a thrown together feel - more joie de vivre than careful musicianship - and I can’t resist a pop hook.
Yeah I know by Darlings is therefore, right up my street. It’s ramshackle, it’s joyous and the songs stick in your head like a William Tell practice shot.
Official Secrets Act. Belladrum Festival, Beauly, Inverness, Scotland - 7th & 8th of August 200
Photos Stephen McLeod
This festival I decided to have the proper punter-experience instead of feeling obliged to work. That meant that if I would rather sit in the campsite drinking whisky than go to take photos of some band, then so be it. It turned out to be a more genuine time than I’d have liked, with my tent being raided – my cameras and iPod falling victim to the charmers. Well, so I thought. Turns out my iPod was actually left behind. Whether they looked at it in disgust wondering why there was buttons above the wheel (remember the 3rd gens anyone?) or at the likes of Health and the Paper Chase in the library; therefore rejecting it is a mystery. Just as well though – that model might only cost twenty quid off of eBay to replace, but it’s the emotional value that counts damnit.
Belladrum is set outside Inverness, and is billed as being family-friendly. Lots of local teenagers use it as their stepping-stone up into the big bad world of ‘real festivals’ down in the central belt, which means you can have a really good camping experience or a really rubbish one depending on where you end up. Of course, if you realise that any troublemakers are only about 5ft tall and speak in some obtuse tcheuchter dialect, then any disturbances can be quelled quite quickly whilst the CCTV cameras aren’t watching. (coincidentally, they weren’t recording at all whilst my tent was being robbed!)
However, theft not-withstanding, I’ve always had a good time at the ‘Tartan Heart’ – the atmosphere is friendly and jovial, and we’ve always had plenty of people around to chat with. Infact, you’re seen as a bit of an oddity if you hole yourself away on your own. It’s healthy!
Victorian English Gentlemens Club, with support from We Are The Physics and Ex Wives
Glasgow King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut – 5th August 2009
Every so often a gig comes along where both the support bands really fit with the headliners. There’s nothing worse than going along for a metal act and having a pop-punk band support for example. Luckily tonight, not only were the bands all extremely complimentary of each other, but they were all connected in some way, with the Ex Wives drummer sporting a We Are The Physics t-shirt, and WATP/Victorian English Gentlemens Club label-buddies on ThisIsFakeDIY.
It’s here. We’re one of the first to get a hold of a copy of Health’s eagerly anticipated second ‘proper’ album (forgetting the remix LP for now) – in all of its glory. The limited-to-500-copies clear vinyl that I hold in my hand is so early infact, that the download link provided doesn’t even work yet. A quick Google will find scores of people trying to get their grubby digital paws on something.. anything to do with ‘Get Color’ that it feels like a special privilege to wrap back the plastic.
After getting over the dodgy Americanised spelling of the name, as well as my turntable going schitzo halfway through side A - refusing to stop spinning, or moving the tone-arm back and forth from its resting position, I finally managed to feast my ears on the latest ‘noise-rock’ offering.
Or so I thought anyway. Health don’t really fit that tag – not when you throw them in with the likes of Abe Vigoda or the Paper Chase or any of the other more ‘traditional’ band set-ups (bearing in mind how different this lot are already). If you imagine a duck throwing a microphone at a metal wall, you get some sort of idea of what you might expect from what we’ve heard from Health already; drums and guitar parts flying in from nowhere and dropping dead at your feet all over the place.
Close to Home is the best British roots record I’ve heard in a long long time. It’s a glorious recreation of the classic ragged country blues and bluegrass sounds from across the water but at the same time, it’s firmly British. Sam’s from Yorkshire, he’s proud of it and he’s steeped this record in the county that he loves.
I have a theory that you can tell how interesting a band are likely to be by where they call ‘home’ – where they practice and create the music that they’re likely to inflict on the world later on. For indie/garage rockers (and I mean this in the purest sense of the word, not some neo Arctic Monkeys chart-indie pish), one would instantly get a picture of some city record shop’s attic, High-Fidelity stylee[sic], with bits of broken furniture and empty beer bottles mixed in with different guitar pedals and obscure bits of musical equipment. In You Already Know’s (lovingly shortened to YAK) case, this is actually true. Nestled up a dodgy staircase in Glasgow’s Avalanche Records, they’ve set up shop and got to work creating and recording a debut album – ‘Stop Whispering’.
So in case you didn’t know, Arctic Monkeys’ third album leaked earlier this week and although I haven’t downloaded it I know from the 30 seconds I’ve heard of ‘Crying Lighting’ that I’d probably gain greater pleasure sticking a cheese grater up my arse and bopping down a hill on a space hopper than hearing the rest of the album. Don’t get me wrong, I used to be as keen as any other young 16 year old boy to jump to the defence of Alex Turner and his pals, but they’ve let me down. "But they’ve gone in a darker direction" wail the fanboys with their cocks firmly still up Turner’s arse. Since when has the definition of ‘darker’ been slowing your songs down to a mind-numbingly boring tempo and singing lyrics so metaphorically shit that he may as well be fapping into the microphone?
Three years is far too long to wait for something new from a band as good as The Victorian English Gentlemens Club. (The lack of apostrophe is intentional, for you grammar nazis out there). ‘Watching The Burglars’ is the second single from the band’s album ‘Love On An Oil Rig’, which is out on This Is Fake DIY Records on the 7th of September – the single appearing on the 10th of August - just after the band’s UK tour – dates of which are below. Support in Scotland coming from artrocking label-chums We Are The Physics.
A Casa Verde is the debut solo album from The Wedding Present’s American bassist and confirmed Anglophile Terry de Castro. The twelve songs contained on the record are all cover versions, each one originally written and performed by a friend or previous musical collaborator. Released via frontman of The Wedding Present David Gedge’s label Scopitones, it is an album that is irretrievably in thrall to its influences yet subtly reworks and reinvents the source material.
Whether a vanity project or a way for an artist to recognise and pay dues to their influences collections of cover versions are an intriguing yet not always successful concept. An obvious antecedent to A Casa Verde would be David Bowie’s Pin Ups, a collection of songs by his late 60s contemporaries many of whom he had shared stages or played in studios with.
With the grouchy growl of an adolescent Lemmy and the pompous piano jilts of the Dresden Dolls nursed with the overblown pretension of hair metal the likes of Slayer, proudly eccentric Auckland duo The Murder Chord has certainly caused some murmurs for their shit-stirring new take on rock and roll. While the piano scales and flair can grate and the stuttery rants nigh on fake or staged, The Murder Chord seems to revel in shock rock style.
Truly interesting is the staggered reggae of third song ‘Ska Trance’ – a dubious, creeping song that lurks with David Hine (from Missing Teeth)’s unabashed Kiwi spit and wallowing organ sound with Ryan Sikes (from Real, Real Sick)’ subtley choppy drums gradually increasing the tension until it eventually devolves into a rubbery mess. ‘Fresh Zombies’ conspires Hine’s Motörhead-esque throaty growl with almost cabaret piano lines, making for a less-harrowing, more befuddling track. ‘Night Sweats’s pop sensibility brings back the strength of their song writing in more of a pop format.
The Vivians – New Single Release – Just Two Girls/Glasshouses
Too Pure – Monday 17th August 2009
Finally a band that look and act like a band should! The first time encounter I had with The Vivians was backstage at the miniscule Dunstaffnage Festival, near Oban in 2007. Piling out of a beaten-up van wearing black leathers and over-sized shades, and proceeding to kick football about – against fences, catering tents, small children and animals.. etc.
One other occasion saw singer Damon DeVille (surely that can’t be a real surname?!) scrambling up the Belladrum Festival stage scaffolding, and pulling over the pit-barrier (ontop of myself no less) The resulting stage-invasion led the band to apologise with a cheeky grin to the security for the chaos that erupted. It’s as if two fingers had cleverly and clearly been given to the rest of the music wankery that had graced the stage previously, but getting away with it by being polite at the same time.
Katie Sutherland of Pearl and the Puppets. Photos Stephen McLeod
For those of you not familiar with the movie which inspired this festival in the Scottish borders (apparently it’s not the borders according to the locals, but to a Glaswegian, it’s definitely at the border), the gist is this:
Police inspector goes to visit disappearance in strange community, ends up being burned in a giant wicker man as part of some strange pagan ritual.
Random Acts Of Kindness is the funky debut EP just released by Brighton quartet Flash Bang Band. When this dropped in my inbox to review, I did the cursory check of the Myspace page – the word ‘pop’ didn’t fill me with anticipation, it has to be said. Then again, what actually is ‘pop’ anymore? It gets banded around a lot for things I would never consider being such a thing. I guess my head is still stuck in the days of the Spice Girls and East 17, where ‘pop’ was always considered to be a dirty word. So dirty, infact, that I still can’t bring myself to type it without inverted commas.
Big Bear
Proceeding chronologically with the recent shows I’ve been to (also saw Benny Nelson & Brandon Terzakis last night at Weirdo, review soon), here’s a recap of what happened at the highly honorable Outside The Lines Studio, which, in case you don’t know, is a gallery/studio space for adult artists with developmental disabilities. The place is a big warehouse that is overrun with art everywhere. Sculptures in every corner, paintings on every empty wall. Awesome, right? Even more awesome is the artists get %85 of all sales. That is fucking outrageous. In a really really good way.
Anyway, Glenn Jones (of Cul De Sac) started things off (replacing World Map). Apparently I saw him at Brainwaves last November and I didn’t remember until he started his set. I was more than happy to see him again. This guy plays the most amazing guitar. It sounds like he’s got 4 or 5 guitars all going at once. I have no idea how he does it but it’s wonderful. Simultaneously dusty and clean, with a slight Americana sound. So good. I especially love when he plays the banjo. Because, well, I love the banjo.
I’m getting more and more excited about the new Fall album by thye day. The new songs seem to sound better with every gig. Songs like "Cowboy George, Bury & Funnel Of Love have already become live favorites and this gig gave a storming debut to "Sloppy Floor" which is simply magnificent. This will be the last Fall gig until October by which time the new album will hopefully be just about here.
Listening to this song on repeat — I know, how appropriate! — and trying to come up with some way to write about it, I realized that the best way to describe it was probably the cheapest, i.e., this sounds like Merry Post Pavvy era Animal Collective attempting to write their own Gary Glitter song. It’s got the simple repetitive hooks, but its stomp and momentum is muted and washed out with quasi-Beach Boys vocalizing and hazy synthesizer washes. The more I hear this song, the more I focus on the oscillating synth tone at the center of the piece, and its odd chilling effect on the arrangement. The composition is dynamic, but that hum makes everything seem frozen and out of time, much in the way a strobe light can make any movement seem slow and choppy.
There were a few things missing from the Super Furry Animals gig at Somerset House on Saturday. The first and most obvious one for me was Mrs Growl. This was notable, because in all the many, many times I’ve seen the Super Furries in the past 12 years, the constant factor was the woman who is now my wife. She had already seen them several times before we met, and as we bonded over a shared love of music, SFA were one of the bands we loved (and still love) the most. A combination of other social engagements and illness meant I went on my own. It felt odd.
There is quirky, there is eccentric and there is completely full-on psychotic. Tonight we get a gradual progression through all three states and it isn’t a particularly comfortable journey.
Things start amiably enough with Lulu And The Lampshades, who tonight are two girls and a guy.There is an effigy of their fourth member, absent in Uganda, and lovingly fashioned out of a mop, a Hawaiian shirt and what appears to be a photograph of a sheep wearing sunglasses. Even more unusually, the missing member has picked the set list and phoned in her contributions via a series of recorded messages.
The band that are actually present pluck their way through a series of pleasant if undistinguished songs via the medium of drums, guitar and ukulele and their cheerful attitude goes a long way to cover up any deficiencies.
Another from the school of love-them-or-hate-them lo-fi, the crusty punk duo of Crocodiles proved themselves with their dirty-sounding but perfectly succinct ‘Neon Jesus’/ ‘Neon Autobahn’ 7”. Now with the long playing Summer of Hate they expand on their almost droney-noise/pop with nine lo-fi pop/punk songs in the vein of a dodgier Talking Heads or sewer-dwelling Beach Boys.
Allow me to forge a fair warning:
The Antlers’ Hospice
is not an easy record to sit through. With the right focus, in the right mindset, this album is as powerful on the soul as climbing a mountain is on the body. This album will crush you if you don’t know what to expect.
Hospice is at once the simplest and most immense album of the year.
Its music is made of small melodies, tiny vocal ranges and repeated, winking guitar lines. It is basic piano, slow-rolling drums.
But the numbers on the lock form the correct code: the combination of those simple sounds works, and through their collective, unified operation comes music that surprises, that soothes and washes over you like a mother bathing her child. It’s music that smacks you on the side of the head, but then embraces you and apologizes in tears for being so cruel.
Another day, another essential vinyl release. New label Faux Discx has started up a split 7" series called CMYK.
The series will feature 8 artists – 2 per release and will involve interlinking artwork. Each release is limited to 300 hand-numbered copies only and all the songs are exclusive to the release.
If I were you, I’d get ordering the whole series now. Need convincing? Take a look at the first release, CYAN.
It has been quite some time since the good siblings of The Fiery Furnaces gave us a fully accessible record. Now I’m not saying that Widow City or Bitter Tea or Rehearsing My Choir are bad records at all, I’m just saying that they aren’t very easy to get into. Once you do you can totally fall in love with all the nuanced sounds and quirky lyrics Eleanor and Matthew Friedberger put into them, but it takes a good deal of effort to get to that point. Prior to those records The Fiery Furnaces were making weird, but accessible indie rock records like EP and Blueberry Boat and I’m Going Away is closer to being in those veins then anything they’ve done in a while.
Do not go to Siren Fest hungover! This should be a rule that’s written on the post because it is a pretty awful feeling to stand in the sun on one of the warmest days of the year when you were drinking till 4am the previous night. Yeah, sometimes my decision making is not what it’s supposed to be at this point in my life, but I did my best to battle the hangover and my sudden aversion to the sun to see a few of the bands I had really wanted to see.
First on the list was Micachu & the Shapes, a band that wowed us when we saw them at Pianos and have woven their spell on us with their terrific debut album Jewellery. It’s a bit weird seeing this three piece band on an outdoor stage in the middle of the day, not because their music is out of place it actually fits pretty well in the Coney Island sun, but they are such tiny, pale people that it almost seemed they have never seen the sun and almost disappear on a large stage. Micah Levi did her best to keep us entertained by it kind of drifted by instead of taking us over in the expansive space.
Without a doubt, this was the most pleasant weather the Siren Festival has ever seen. Maybe a weird thing to say up front, but here’s a festival that has a reputation for being held on the most miserably hot, humid day of the year, where you wish someone would squeegee you every half hour. So with temperatures in the mid-80s and low humidity, I’d almost say it was pleasant. For Sire it was close to perfect.
And so was the lineup, even if it was almost entirely white dudes with guitars. At least they were good ones. I got there just in time to see Micachu & the Shapes who were good but maybe not ready for such a big stage just yet. (Her tiny guitar looked even more minuscule here.) They were much better when I saw them at Death by Audio in March. Their album, produced by cut-and-paste master Matthew Herbert is kind of hard to replicate live, but they do a pretty good job of it thanks to an array of kitchen-sink percussion.
Who: The Raveonettes vs. Monotonix
Times: 6:00pm vs. 6:30pm
Hometown: New York, NY vs. Tel Aviv, Israel
Thoughts: Truth be told I have never really listened to either of these bands nor have I seen them live. What I can tell you about them is that I know Monotonix have a reputation for a truly insane show and I’ve never heard anything, good or bad, about The Raveonettes and their stage show. I trust word of mouth if a lot of people say a band has a crazy live show they usually have a crazy live show. In other words I’m going with…
Rating: 9/10
That’s right, 9. Save yourself five minutes and just click now the link below to purchase yourself a copy of the best album of the year so far. www.4ad.com
The Britannia is becoming one of the best places for free live music in London. In addition to it being a good bar, having a critically acclaimed menu, and one of London’s best beer gardens (that’s a proper beer garden, rather than a beer patio like most london pubs) backing onto Victoria Park, there’s been a rich run of recent events to draw people to this recently refurbised Victorian boozer. There’s their monthly film screenings in collaboration with the BFI, but what’s really got my interest in the place is their run of Wednesday evening gigs put on by the fine people at The Local.
Jay Reatard might have an eery resemblance to Meatloaf on the Watch Me Fall album cover, but you won’t find him making 12 minute rock operas with ambiguous meanings any time soon.
It was a good day when Joseph Scott sent me through his You Keep Me Hidden EP. It references a history of experimental/shoegaze from MBV through to Banjo Or Freakout with dense layers of noise and buried vocals. You can catch him live at Catch on 1st August alongside previous PS highlights Internet Forever.
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It’s easy to criticise giants, and T in the Park is definitely a giant - the first batch of 40,000 ‘early-bird’ tickets in 2008 selling out in just over an hour; definitely not, as one of my previous English employers described it: “some crappy hut in a field to keep the Scots happy.”
It seems like a year doesn’t go by where there are choruses heard of “the lineup for T’s Shiite this year” – Usually from people who haven’t managed to get any of the sought-after tickets, and who use the lineup as an excuse to avoid paying the inflated tout prices after the fact.
The truth is that T in the Park gets a bit of a bum rap for their headline acts. It’s not difficult to see why, when the majority of this year’s main-stage Acts – the Killers, Snow Patrol and Kings of Leon have all filled major slots on the very same stage in previous years. It’s an easy target, and one which is repeated so frequently that it’s worth giving a bit of a defence to. Those that complain about the larger acts consider themselves to be ‘good’ music fans – enough to reject the mainstream, yet who lack the insight or knowledge to see the other side of what T has to offer on its smaller stages, or during the day. There’s plenty for an Artrocker to see at the fest, provided that they’re willing to get up a bit earlier or seek it out a bit harder.
Dumfries boy Calvin Harris was one of the first on the Saturday mainstage, as the sunshine began to burst out from behind the clouds that had been looming overhead. I’ve seen a lot of Calvin around festivals and gigs, and sadly it wasn’t all that interesting. Maybe it was the lack of lights, or the lack of drive that was there in the early performances – at the cusp of success that came with ‘Acceptable in the eighties’, but the crowd ended up being far more interesting to look at than what was on stage.
Does Lady Gaga count as an artrocker? Either way, I have an unashamed liking for the New York oddity. It might just be ‘pop rubbish’, but at least it’s interesting pop rubbish. I hope she sticks around for a while. There was a definite irony in opening with paparazzi, with the scrum of photographers that was in the photo-pit. Done on purpose perhaps?
Last night ranks as my second worst festival camping experience ever. Admittedly, it wasn’t because of the T campsite, but more to do with an assortment of circumstances that culminated in me sharing my friend’s ‘tent’, which turned out to be a kid’s pink tipi. In my day they were called wendy houses. The rain came down in torrents, and I woke up in a pool of water, along with all my remaining clothes for the weekend. Brilliant.
The rain cleared up in the end, and the sun returned to the final day. Aside from going to see Lily Allen, which because, let’s face it.. You would, there was plenty on that I actually wanted to go see, and not just for the sake of watching. Big festivals always seem to distract you to the bigger names that you would never pay to see for yourself, but that you may as well check out out of curiousity.
I find it difficult to get excited about The Dead Weather - and I’m a big fan of Jack White. I think he’s one of the true musical geniuses of his generation - a creative force of nature. But I’ve always found The Kills to be a bit flat, and Alison Mosshart’s voice to be a bit lacking in charisma.
By the time I walked on to the wharf known as Pier 54 last night Flosstradamus was already in full flow and the pier was stuffed to the gills with kids dancing and partying the beautiful summer evening away. The sun was setting behind New Jersey and everything was glowing a little bit of orange. As the kids danced to Flosstradamus Pier 54 literally shook, you could feel it and I was a bit concerned that a lot of people would be swimming back to the Isle of Manhattan.
Lately I’ve been making my own hours and listening to mostly Big Star and Steely Dan. Anyone who’s spent any time around me in the last month or two can attest to this. Wake up late, make some strong coffee, cook up some fresh eggs and relax with Pretzel Logic or Radio City. Sounds like a fine time, right?
Well it took Japandroids to knock me out of this funk (no pun intended). I missed them earlier this year when pitchfork doled out the best new music and it wasn’t until Polyvinyl signed them and their record came across my desk that I figured I should listen. And I haven’t regretted it, and it hasn’t left my stereo since. As we enjoy what is one of those most mild and beautiful LA summers in recent memory it’s hard not to get 100% behind a line like "I don’t wanna worry about dying, I just want to worry about the sunshine girls." This works for me. I can understand it and the whole thing makes sense.
It’s probably difficult to watch a Handsome Furs show without feeling a bit of envy for Dan Boeckner and Alexei Perry: They are clearly doing their favorite thing with their favorite person, throwing themselves fully into the moment and enjoying every second of it. Boeckner’s body language is loose and relaxed, contrasting with the nervous energy in his voice. Perry is restless and spazzy, kicking and falling dramatically through the set, and being about 400% more physical than her task as a keyboard player and drum machine operator requires. The songs and the performances are intense, but in watching the show, your mind doesn’t go to a dark and desperate place. Instead, you just marvel at this couple’s wonderful chemistry, laugh at their banter, and smile when they display a deep gratitude for the very fact that you showed up to see them play in a city with a myriad entertainment options. Not everyone gets to live the dream like these two, but it’s pretty obvious that they deserve it.
This is a sweet limited edition silk screened split 7” for all the family. On one side, Jeff The Brother Hood’s chugging guitar lines and monotone rhythmic vocals of ‘Mind Ride’ channels the highway of rock that’s referenced in so many crass and overrated rock and roll songs. Proceeding through a tidal tunnel of psychedelia, cracking sticks and even a gong-like interlude sound, ‘Mind Ride’ is more like vintage Queens of the Stoneage or Kyuss, all stoner-rock rant with almost Eastern-tendencies.
I’m pretty sure Amazing Baby do not want you to think too much while listening to this song. If they did, they probably would’ve at least spell-checked the word the singer is spelling out in the chorus. But really, why bother when the hook is so catchy and every other line is entirely inscrutable? It’s all surface and sensation, and that doesn’t have to be a problem. It’s sexy without being skeevy; it’s somehow rather smart about being very, very dumb. The song is like a very attractive person who could say anything at all, and you’d just nod along, smiling just to have their attention in the moment.
This was the UK Premiere of the ATP film, where they’d promised an ‘extra special Scottish band’ was going to be performing after the film, which I already knew was going to be Mogwai, but I came to see the film so that didn’t put me off. Anyway, they played and I was there so I’ll do the review.
Sometime in the last twelve months, Girls got good. They were good last July when I saw them at both Market Hotel and Glasslands, but but there was a ramshackle vibe that felt like they weren’t sure whether they were really ready to leave the bedroom. But at Mercury lounge they are really good.
When I saw The Skull Defekts play at PA’s Lounge last year, they changed me. I didn’t realize it at the time, of course. But as the days and weeks progressed, I knew there was something missing in my life. That was because most of the material they played live hadn’t been released yet. But I needed to hear to this music again. There was a certain je ne sais quoi that could only be achieved when listening to "Waving" or "Six Sixes" or any other song off of The Temple.
RSL Album Buyer’s Guide - 2009 Volume I
Welcome! You have just found one of the most exhaustive and well-considered lists of quality, new music available in 2009. We don’t promise to have everything that’s out there but what is comes in one easy-to-digest package!
The forthcoming 5-track self-released CD marks the beginning of a sparkling new phase in the multi-faceted existence of London’s Lupen Crook & The Murderbirds. Presented in a limited-edition canvas sleeve designed and hand-painted by Lupen Crook himself, The Lost Belongings EP embodies the revitalised DIY spirit of a band now free of contractual obligations. Shunning both the musical mainstream and the frequently shallow ephemera of trend-driven ‘scenes’, this is a group of artists hungry to get back to their creative roots.
The Eternal is the sound of Sonic Youth changing. Shaking up their recording and rehearsing style as well as their label, their sound is revitalised and freshened up. Resulting are some strong, catchy and slightly strange songs that will stand the test of time, just like their forbearers. ‘Sacred Trickster’ is a situationist play on anti-capitalists and activists’ weird ploys to wreak havoc in bourgeoisie society. Kim Gordon sounds tough and scaly as she rails against The Man. ‘Anti-Orgasm’ is a thrilling escapade into classic SY riff-rock territory, jamming together newly formed bass lines, Thurston and Kim’s trademark dual vocals trading off in the ultimate power rock marriage. Purportedly about confused political structures and a model/activist from ‘60s Berlin, this song sounds more straight ahead than its confused lyrical content.
Kinit Her up first with an odd mixture of growling, extremely high pitched vocals and staid metal riffs which you’d assume were a joke if they didn’t look so serious about it. I wouldn’t recommend it.
I’d come to see Burial Hex who was apparently going to perform a set especially adapted for the idiosyncrasies of Cafe Oto, which turned out to mean he played Oto’s grand piano for a bit before continuing on as normal, smashing bits of metal into each other and manipulating distorted loops with effects pedals. The piano was accomplished and morose in the extreme and accompanied by some chanting and growling vocals, with very quiet, soft, noise under it all. It was all satisfyingly gloomy. The perfect intro to the crushing noise that made up the rest of the set, like something irascible was lurking there and spurred to erupt. Very angry, almost frightening, and utterly engrossing.
The Gossip - Music For Men
2/10
There’s no doubting Beth Ditto’s voice has a certain sting but let’s be honest, the reason The Gossip is popular is not because of their music. It’s because people are fascinated by the band’s obese lead singer, who has been painted by many in the entertainment media as some kind of freak. She’s posed naked for both Love and NME magazines and that’s just the start; she put herself in the spotlight and it worked once, but it’s doubtful it will work this time around. Beth Ditto’s weight is old news, now it’s time to let the music do the talking. Shamefully they can’t rely on their music, for without a new gimmick The Gossip has nothing to prove they’re worthy of the hype. Their attempts to revive the mid 2000s new rave scene are pitiful; trying the same old tricks without anything remotely progressive.
I’m happy to report that The Zookeepers are back with a completely brilliant new LP.
Red Horse is a band that has gained a mysterious cult appeal, at least in the Boston area. The duo of Eli Keszler and Steve Pyne rarely do live performances and they’ve been around for years before they finally released their self titled debut just a few months ago. There have been plenty of people (not so) patiently waiting this record. Well, if you had any expectations of this album, I assure you now that they have been surpassed. Red Horse is brilliant.
White Denim Fits (Full Time Hobby)
Where am I and what in God’s name is happening? These are the thoughts that swim wildly around your mind by the time Fits has reached its third song, ‘Say What You Want’. The song starts with a riff that’s dirtier than sewer rat on crack before a stomping drum beat catches up and pulsates the song forwards in some sort of crazed voodoo groove. That’s all well and good. But when the song breaks down into a sweet, bluesy arpeggio before giving way to a fidgety sitar pinnacle with the drums sounding like they’re collapsing around you, you start to wonder how the fuck is this so enjoyable?
This is typical of White Denim’s second album and with this wide eyed, almost freakish, sense of enjoyment, it’s also probably time to realise that attempting to analyse the chaos is pointless and just getting swept up in the beautiful racket is far more enjoyable.
I’ll be honest, this is my cousin’s band and that’s why I went to see them. I knew they liked Kings of Leon a lot so I wasn’t expecting it to be my bag, and it wasn’t really my bag, but it was a good bag nonetheless. A bag that a lot of people would love, I’m sure.
I went to this because the Prurient set I saw a couple of years ago was fucking incredible. This show tonight was a load of shit. I mean it was laughable. He was playing with Cold Cave. I don’t know who Cold Cave are but I can tell you one thing, they look like gestapo hipsters. Actually, two things, they sound like shit New Order. Prurient sticks some noise behind it all but it’s no use. It’s beyond help. I go outside to smoke.
Two lovely girls, one heavy gig. Industrial and brutal drums over pyschadelic synths, it’s the soundtrack to an outer space mining colony. I’m biased, because my girlfriend is one of the two girls, but they are dead good and everyone should check them out. Just don’t hit on the tall one.
After a painstaking 2 years, Bloomington, Indiana’s Russian Recording releases an amazing compilation album ‘We Just Call It Roulette’.
This evening I went along to the Captain’s Rest in Glasgow’s West End to catch Dananananaykroyd and the Mae Shi (pronounced Ma-ee Shee) – performing as part of the Stag and Dagger festival; one of the plethora of such types which have emerged recently, where one ticket gives you access to a number of bands and venues across the city. The cynical amongst you may point out many flaws, including the idea that the whole concept might just be to allow promoters to charge more for bands that you want to see; with the premise that there’s more on offer. I think I’d rather just pay for a cheaper, single-gig ticket in order to see a band that I really like, instead of a few ones that I’m not too bothered about.
Thoughts: For all my bitching and complaining about the Wolf Parade side projects and their inability to match the heights reached on Apologies to the Queen Mary, I actually really enjoy Spencer Krug as a musician and most of what he does with Sunset Rubdown. Their latest album, Dragonslayer, is a return to form after the lackluster Random Spirit Lover. The songs here bristle with a renewed sense of energy and passion, the songwriting is crisp, and even Krug’s unique vocals are more focused then they have been in the past. Songs like the first single, "Idiot Heart", and "You Go Ahead (Trumpet Trumpet II)" are some of the finest pieces of music Krug has ever written, and the increased presence of Camilla Ingr’s backing vocals brings a greater range of depth to the entire album. It’s still not on par with Apologies…, but at this point I think I have to resign myself to realizing that that was one of those albums that will never been equalled. Spencer is a prolific songwriter so there are going to be down moments here and there, but so far Dragonslayer may just be his most complete effort to date.
Tip Toe Records are releasing an excellent limited edition CD compilation, with only 200 copies being pressed. It’s got a fetching brown cardboard sleeve and is jam packed with indie goodness. If there aren’t at least 200 tasteful people in the country willing to purchase a copy, then we should all give up now.
Having seen Future of the Left on a number of occasions, I was pleasantly surprised to see that this time there were support acts that could stand up to the challenge of their position on the bill. Instead of local indie bands with no power or grit, we had Livingston’s “Super Adventure Club” and touring support “Pulled Apart by Horses”; the latter fresh from crossing the country with Rolo Tomassi and Grammatics. Watching the four-piece from Leeds crashing through tracks like “I punched a line in the throat”, and “E=MC Hammer”, and stage-presence that made you question how the band could keep it going at every gig, I began to wonder if maybe Future of the Left had finally found a support which might outplay their ferocious live show.
My eyes open. Nothing. Last thing I remember I’d been in The Great Eastern off the North Lanes, Brighton and on the way to the floor, still clutching some Corn Whiskey (in the jar)and dimly remembering some kind of A Hawk And A Hacksaw accordian leanings. Now, the place is empty and in white light and on stage there’s a band that seem to be called The Burned Fuses, all dressed in white suits and Residents-style eye masks. Everyone else seems to be at the bar and strangely fixated on a bottle of Rum Elixir that has found itself embedded between the hairfolds of the bartender.
Recording with Mark Nevers has proved an inspired choice for The Dexateens. He’s produced the cream of the alt.country crop - Lambchop, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Calexico and the Silver Jews - but he’s a self confessed rocker at heart. "I mean, I love the Ramones!" he confessed in a recent interview, "I don’t quite know how I got into this hushed down world".
The hushed down world of The Dexateens is explored and captured expertly on Singlewide, but crucially by someone who understands that even in more plaintive mood, the Tuscaloosa Alabama five piece have the passion and fire of a true rock n roll band.
Mika Miko – We Be Xuxa
9/10
Hard, fast, lo-fi punk rock in the vein of Sleater Kinney, The Slits or The Ramones, LA’s Mika Miko have been lovingly described by some as “pony thrash”, possibly because of the girly element the four girls and one boy create with their punk aesthetics. They’ve been described in terms as creative as their music: “Imagine a high school dance where Red Cross, Black Flag, X-Ray Spex, The Slits and The Germs are all playing at with an updated flare of excitement and anxiousness.” Combining their love of noise/punk with their unstoppable youthful energy they create a captivating, hedonistic blend of spirited, funny and structured punk music. It’s a blast to listen to, the best thing I’ve heard in ages.
Fanfarlo are a band that have been kicking about on the fringe of the hype machine for a while and now, after a recording session stateside in Connecticut, their debut album Reservoir is finally unleashed.
The album starts with “I’m A Pilot” which is the perfect statement of intent. The song begins with loud, confident foot stomps and progresses into a piano-led anthem- combing gently soaring violins with woeful guitar slides.
The album continues with the emotive force of the opener, the array of instruments entwining and gliding around one another, soaring into climatic peaks and falling into delicate descends.
Throughout “Reservoir”, the collection of instruments consistently chops and changes in an array of different moods and styles. The mandolin of “The Walls Are Coming Down” provides a jaunty but melancholy ditty, while the trumpets on “Fire Escape” sound like horse riding hero trotting off into the sunset.
It’s often pretty remarkable stuff. On first listen though, one criticism easily thrown at “Reservoir” is that it wears its influences pretty obviously on its sleeve. This album often takes the style of grand, swooping songs which almost always seem to be sound tracking the end of the world or the resurrection of Martin Luther King. In other words; hello Arcade Fire.
The Mae Shi/ Abe Vigoda/ Tubelord @ Barden’s Boudoir 12/5/2009
Although from the outside Barden’s Boudoir looks like a crack den that even crack heads find too disgusting, inside this is a cosy little venue and perfect for such a stellar line up.
First on, and playing to a respectably sized crowd, are Kingston’s Tubelord. The trio shift seamlessly throughout the set from jerky, heavy guitar parts to soaring crescendos via soft, sweeping break downs laced with delicate vocal parts. They are interesting and evocative, proving that propping up the bill is not something they should be doing for much longer.
Next on are LA dwelling Mae Shi mates, Abe Vigoda. Taking “lo-fi” to a new extreme, they rocket about the stage, clearly having what must almost be the time of their lives. Around the room, though, members of the audience can be seen taking the occasional cheeky look at their watches and getting a quick pint before the main band. What should have been a barn storming set to challenge the headliners was, although by no means awful, something of a limp and stale effort.
It’s not very often that you get to put on your two favourite bands on the same night. So says Howard Monk, head honcho of ace London promoters The Local, who are putting on tonight’s highly promising show. They may not be my very favourite bands, but between them they were responsible for one of my top albums (Rook) and one of my most enjoyed songs (Dancing on My Grave) of last year. So good things are bound to follow.
Influenced by some of modern indie rock most texturized and delicate styles, Porter took a chance and used them to sculpt their second album. The result is a multilayered sound, which combines their original style with a blend of new experimental ones. Ranging from indie pop to experimental rock, which will more than please Radiohead and Sigur Ros fans.
All Tomorrow’s Parties again. An odd line-up all in all but that’s what you get when half the bands are chosen by the fans. Still, having Jesus Lizard, Sleep, Harvey Milk, Electric Wizard and DEVO all on the same bill makes me happy enough that they could flesh the rest of it out with utter crap and I’d still be more than up for it. It turns out they did pretty much fill the rest of it up with utter crap.
Tinted Windows - Tinted Windows
Tinted Windows is one of the oddest supergroups you’ll find. That’s James Iha, formerly of Smashing Pumpkins, on guitar, Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger on bass and 57-year-old Bun E. Carlos of Cheap Trick on drums. The singer? Taylor Hanson, the middle brother from Hanson. Not surprisingly, this is power pop (emphasis on the pop). Say what you will about Hanson, but the guy can sing a hook that’ll stick with you like a melted Blow Pop. While the mid-tempo stuff kinda sucks (“Dead Serious,” “Back with You”), zippier tracks like “Messing with My Head” and “Can’t Get a Read on You” are irresistible. As a whole, though, it’s too much. Power pop is always sugary. That’s part of the fun. But this is like pouring syrup on your Lucky Charms.
The Maccabees @ Camden Electric Ballroom, 05/05/2009
After the, perhaps slightly unexpected, brilliance of free download “No Kind Words” back in February and a handful of subsequent live dates dotted here and there, The Maccabees have finally released there second album, “Wall of Arms”, and return properly to the live setting a day later in their own glorious right.
Jeff the Brotherhood/ Screaming Females- Split 7″
5/10
This isn’t quite what I expected from Jeff the Brotherhood and Screaming Females. Both these tracks seem very conservative, are clean cut and have a pretty standard rock sound. Compared to their previous releases, both bands have dragged home the rope on their wild ways, stripping away all the noisy raucous aggression and replacing it with catchy modern rock guitar riffs and, dear I say it, some pretty plain singing.
Shige is aka DJ Scotch Egg and he plays tonight with Horacio Pollard and a couple of other guys, jamming with synths and guitars, Shige conducting by way of the mixing desk. It’s a cosmic happening you know, it swells and freaks out. I could hear it through my skin, like a spilt liquid narcotic. It’s hip, babe, and I can dig it with a space shovel..
The one-sheet for the American release of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo has been released, and I figured this would be the perfect opportunity for me to give it a mention. The poster seems to have a very Finding Nemo-esque look to it, which I have no problems with. Whatever works to put people in seats is fine with me. If you’ve taken a peak at some of the pages around the blog, you’ll notice plenty of random Studio Ghibli images scattered about. Miyazaki is a living legend, no question; as every release from the now 68-year-old film director should be celebrated to the fullest.
Eugene is a big fucker. Anyone who’s seen him on stage with Oxbow will attest to that. He is a hulking man, and not only that but he enjoys his size. He enjoys the theatrics of it all. He enjoys being imposing, appearing powerful. He doesn’t enjoy violence though, he’s just interested in it. Well that’s his official stance on the subject anyway.
Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna
8/10
Gang Gang Dance is surely one of the most unique and interesting bands in the world today. Shimmering like a semi-submerged sea snake stalking its prey, the Brooklyn quartet’s fourth album is best described in aloof metaphors. With a mind-bending amount of experimentation and total destruction of clichés and genres, Saint Dymphna proves that you can do almost anything and to hell what anyone else thinks of it! Gang Gang Dance is so far out of the mould that they’re up in space looking down on all of us with telescopes going “yeah, I’d rather stay up here”. Such an abstract sound and vision defies any preconceptions of both the band and their music, and this makes Saint Dymphna truly exciting to listen to as it gradually unfolds track by track. More a dance-oriented effort than their previous work, it shines with well-produced beauty and still reeks of their cult-favourite trademarks of tribal drumming, new wave synths and weirdo singing. Abstract electronic noise becomes a guitar dance track with Lizzie Bougatsos’ wonderfully unrestrained vocal taunts.
This was in Croydon. Fucking CROYDON. I’d never been to Croydon before and within minutes of getting off the train it became obvious why as I saw a two men trying to kill each other, one of them eventually picking up a length of I think corrugated iron - I mean like a large pointed shard of rusted fence - and chasing after the other one with it.
Every so often Skully’s and Jack Daniel’s team up to host a free show with a band that would usually play a venue larger than Skully’s. Past shows brought in Spoon, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and The Walkmen, but Monday’s show with the Black Keys was a whole other tier. The excitement for this show was more than I’ve seen for any concert in a long time, and the fans came out in droves. Skully himself called it the most popular show he’s ever done.
I kind of feel like this review doesn’t have to be much more than "This is a record where Comanches get high on peyote and sing songs." Because it’s pretty self explanatory and I’m pretty sure you’re gonna know whether or not you like it based on the title alone. But if you need more than that, I shall indulge you.
It was the Camden Crawl at the weekend. I wasn’t much interested in this year’s festival, but it’s the perfect time to mention a CD I found the other day when clearing out a bunch of old stuff. The free Camden Crawl compilation from 1997.
Things were different then. No big-name headliners. No cider sponsorship or BBC backing. No long queues to get into venues. Just a handful of scruffy Camden venues and a bunch of scruffy indie bands, and being 1997, some big beat outfits as well. It seems a bit sad looking back, but at the time it was pretty exciting. For me anyway.
These were headier times. I had only been in London for a month or so. I already knew all about Camden from the pages of the NME, as Britpop’s spiritual home, and I was desperate for a piece of the action. So there I was, on the streets with some friends, freshly-snapped on wristbands, all ready for the post-Britpop indie action.
I am way behind on these write ups, so much so that I can barely remember this gig other than I was supposed to be going to some terrible club to see someone but at the last minute got told not to bother because everyone was leaving and just to go to some other place and wait, at which point I got a sudden recollection that wasn’t there supposed to be some metal gig on at The Old Blah Blah so I went there instead because it was just around the corner and lo and behold there WAS a metal gig on and it was a blast.
Matt & Kim – Grand
8/10
There’s nothing like a really clear, punchy pop song, and that’s precisely what Matt & Kim dish up on their second Grand. Sounding like a fun white boy block party, you can practically hear the fun rebounding off the walls of old brick buildings, screeching echoes like cars veering away from dancing pedestrians, steaming grates in the road and exploding water pumps. Opener Daylight is a lot more fleshed out than you’d expect after their killer single Good Ol’ Fashioned Nightmare, which EMJ has thrashed many a time on the radio and at home. You can see how they’ll fit perfectly live with our own Little Pictures when they come here in mid May: both duos strive for that emphatic, lo-fi bombastic pop and both do it really rather well. But Matt & Kim have my vote. There’s something unabashedly grand about Matt’s unwavering, emotive exclamations over the top of Kim’s unfaltering, loud pitter-patter of drums and crashing cymbals. I Wanna is like a diary list of goals all miraculously achieved by the song’s one-minute-forty end.
The Datsuns are one of New Zealand’s finest rock bands. Their new album Head Stunts is continuation of their loud garage rock. The songs are all about messing with peoples minds, the album title is anagram the band’s name. Lyrically the band keeps growing, so it’s worth the effort to listen carefully to the vocals.
of Montreal @ Music Hall of Williamsburg 4/17/2009
The Past Is A Grotesque Animal / Nonpareil Of Favor / Gronlandic Edit / For Our Elegant Caste / She’s A Rejecter / I Was A Landscape In Your Dreams / Sink The Seine / Cato As A Pun / Labyrinthian Pomp / Beware Our Nubile Miscreants / The Wet Butcher’s Fist aka Coquet Coquet / Faberge Falls For Shuggie / October Is Eternal / Mingusings / An Eluardian Instance / Id Engager // Requiem For OMM2 / A Sentence Of Sorts In Kongsvinger / Moonage Daydream (with Janelle Monae)
The current version of the of Montreal concert spectacular: Fewer costume changes/much less nudity from Kevin; fewer musicians/more drum machine songs; brand new skits; greater emphasis on screens. There were three very large screens behind the band, and it had a somewhat immersive effect, akin to being up very close in a movie theater and losing your peripheral vision. This was particularly effective during “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal,” which felt a bit like being trapped with the band inside of an early 80s music video. I was also very fond of the inexplicable Christmas theme for “Nonpareil Of Favor.” Even with so much imagery, a lot of this is a blur in my memory — I mostly remember dancing and singing, and the enthusiasm of the girl I went with, who makes some of the best happy/wow faces anyone will ever see.
Another American artist I’ve discovered lately is Papercuts. The San Franciscan, known to his mates as Jason Quever has already released one album - Can’t Go Back - in 2007. This week sees his second long-player You Can Have What You Want hit the shops.
As I’ve discovered, Quever is another man of many talents. As well as producing a fine album (I can’t speak for the previous one), he guests in friends’ bands (Vetiver, Beach House) and records others (Casiotone, Cass McCombs, and most recently Port O’Brien, as he revealed in my recent Seven Songs interview). Despite being a whizz in his studio, he’s let Beach House’s Alex Scally in on the action, helping with some of the arrangements on the new album. If you’re a fan of Scally’s band, you’re bound to like Papercuts, since they share a similar dreamy vibe. However, I prefer Quever’s work - there’s just something about the woozy drone of the vintage synths, his thin vocals, the heavy reverb, and the slow-burning tunes that have gradually caught up with me till I’ve realised just how good this album is.
New Jersey has never been known as a nurturer for local music scenes. The arm pit state is just too spread out to truly cultivate a sound and style and to run it into the ground, but that hasn’t stopped the state from producing some terrific music. Sinatra, Springsteen, Yo La Tengo, Ted Leo, and Titus Andronicus have all made it from the state to bigger audiences and the next Jersey natives poised to make the jump are definitely Screaming Females. After years of building a DIY sensibility, self releasing two albums, playing countless basements, this power trio have latched on to a label for their more mature, poppier third release
Power Move. Granted, the label isn’t a major or one of the bigger indie labels of the day, but the leap is definitely a big jump for a band that has done it all on their own up to now. Of course, it would all be for nothing if the music weren’t so damn good.
Kicking off with one of the finest punk songs of the year (last couple years, decade?), the immediate and fantastic "Bell",
Power Moveserves as an example of a band that play by no rules but their own. Despite being on a label, the band went out and made their record though they definitely changed things up a bit. Gone is most of the screaming from front woman Marissa Paternoster and almost all of the wild guitar solos that used to be landmarks of the Screaming Females sound. They have been replaced by more concise, inviting singing, and forcing the guitar to play nicely with the rhythm section and vocals. It makes a world of difference for this band, giving us a more mature sounding yet still kick ass record.
(photo cred : MOKB photog Dave Evans)
Friendly Fires, White Lies and The Soft Pack packed out Radio Radio and likely gave Indianapolis their only chance to see some or all of these bands in a club setting. Next time around, they’ll probably all be playing much larger venues at a much higher price. You can tell the plans surrounding these bands are already focused on that likelihood. Their crew brought in loads of extra/dramatic lighting that really highlighted certain songs and points during the show and took the whole show to that next level of grandeur.
Parts & Labor: Fucking euphoric epic power noise pop that warms the cockles of your heart and puts a smile on your face. They played "Wedding In A Wasteland" (my favorite off Receivers) which I hadn't heard live yet. They also played a new song that they're calling "Hurricane" which was awesome as shit. Easily my favorite band to see live (sorry Big Bear) and I now have the requisite day-after-bangover.
‘Come Monday Night’, an orchestrated pop song from the pen of Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch, is the first single release from the ‘God Help The Girl’ album, to be released by Rough Trade, on 22nd June 2009. It’s a bona fide pop classic that’d sound brilliant from a tinny transistor on a blistering hot day in Swinging London.
‘God Help The Girl’ is a project that sees an assortment of female singers backed by Belle & Sebastian. It’s a story set to music, which Murdoch has been working on intermittently for the last five years and his first new music since Belle and Sebastian’s seventh album, ‘The Life Pursuit’ in 2006.
"I was out for a run and I got this tune in my head,” says Stuart of the album. “It occurred to me that it wasn’t a Belle & Sebastian song. I could hear female voices and strings, I could hear the whole thing, but I just couldn’t envisage myself singing it with the group.”
The War On Drugs - Wagonwheel Blues
7/10
Philadelphia prog rockers The War On Drugs originally bonded over a shared love of Bob Dylan and it shows on this, their debut record. Perhaps not directly, but the bands channelling of 70s inspired classic rock sets them on a steady path of success.
There’s all sorts of weird stuff going on like flutes and Glockenspiels, disgusting, growling guitars and crazy ass drums, and, of course, a female singer.
It’s hard to tell how serious My Teenage Stride are as a band. Some of their songs seem like attempts at mimicing other bands (The Wedding Present, The Chills) and main man (and MTS’s only constant) Jedediah Smith is prone towards jokey stage banter, like introducing themselves as other bands in between every song. ("Thank you! We’re Megadeth.") I guess it doesn’t matter when the songs are as catchy as they are, and Smith’s sense of humor comes off more thoughtful than "ha ha" in his lyrics. Tonight’s show at Cameo is yet another iteration of MTS, as this band blows through band members like The Fall. The new group are tight enough, even when pulling out old chesnuts this lineup hasn’t really ever played.
This seems to have no affect on the band, as it is, as they’re currently putting out some of their best-ever material via a series of exclusive releases on Emusic. Much like the Wedding Present did in 1992, My Teenage Stride are putting out a "single" every month in 2009, though they are a bit behind. (We haven’t had one since February.) But if the rest of this year is as good as "Creep Academy" (which will be amongst my Singles of the Year), 2009 looks to be very good to them. Even if they didn’t play it tonight!
I believe that on a fundamental level, all forms of creative expression are communicative in nature, and that most of my interest in art and music comes out of my desire to understand and relate to other people. This is probably part of why I love James Rabbit so much — this notion of writing music to communicate what we cannot convey in everyday human interactions is foregrounded in the majority of Tyler Martin’s songs. At least half of the songs on his band’s new album Perfect Waves are concerned with not only expressing emotions and ideas in music, but in revealing his desire to communicate with total clarity, and for the songs to have utility in the lives of his listeners. (The opening song, for example, is “If You Can’t Talk About It, Sing About It!,” which may as well be the band’s mission statement.)
Writing about writing can often result in a tedious strain of postmodernism, but Martin is like a reverse Charlie Kaufman, using his self-awareness as a way of directly expressing his wish to fully overcome shyness and dysfunction, and his verbal prowess to plainly articulate his unambiguous love for his partners and friends, and his goodwill toward total strangers. Despite the anxieties at the core of Martin’s writing, James Rabbit make some of the most optimistic and ecstatic music you will ever hear.
Many Mansions
I’ve been going to so many noise shows lately that I forgot how many annoying drunk people there are at regular indie rock shows. Like there was this one girl who was doing a very convincing Courtney Love impression. She was maybe 3 drinks from passing out and at one point she sat down in the back of the club and dumped out her purse all over the floor, looking for god knows what. Maybe she was hungry and looking for the banana that fell from her purse but she was just too intoxicated to differentiate a banana from her cell phone.
I showed up after Magic Magic finished so I got nothin for ya on them.
I was wicked excited to see Many Mansions as I’ve been listening to his free Return To Source for a while and am in fucking love with it. Shane, Mr. Mansions himself, was joined by two others on stage. One was playing the bass and the other was manipulating a live projection feed from his laptop. For a crowd that likes to dance (see the Soft Circle part below), I’d say only about 20-30% of people were noticeable enjoying Many Mansions. At one point, Shane dropped down into the crowd and started hopping and dancing all through the club, possibly attempting to get everyone moving Conga Line style. By the end of the set, maybe half of the crowd was, at the very least, swaying a bit to the music. I think I’ll have to see Many Mansions again sometime with a crowd that’s more appreciative because that makes all the difference.
Super Furry Animals “Inaugural Trams”
I want to believe that this song exists because at least one member of the Super Furry Animals became obsessed with the word “trams,” and went out of his way to make sure that he could have the opportunity to say “trams” over and over in a song. Obviously, the sorta Krautrock vibe and campy German language interlude from Franz Ferdinand’s Nick McCarthy just came out of the tram concept — when we think of trains in music, it’s got to be a tribute to Deutschland, right? Of course! Still, I can imagine him being very cautious, and making sure that the song did not get too serious. It had to be bouncy and somewhat silly. It had to be something that perfectly captured the simple joy of saying the word “trams.” If this is the case, then they totally nailed it.
Depending on their subject matter, concept albums have the potential to alienate listeners. Even the term “concept album” sounds a bit pretentious. But the truly great ones transcend story-line, using the thematic material to communicate ideas, questions, truths, emotions—or all of the above—common to the human experience. In other words, you don’t need to be a deaf, dumb and blind pinball champion to appreciate the Who’s Tommy.
The Antlers’ new album, Hospice, uses a fractured relationship between a hospice worker and a young, terminally ill girl (Sylvia) to muse about mortality and all its repercussions—loss, loneliness, anger, empathy, guilt and the like. Singer/songwriter Peter Silberman, whose lyrical and compositional maturity belie his age (23), switches vantage points throughout the album, allowing glimpses into each character’s inner workings.
Complicating matters—in a good way, it turns out—is the patient’s condition. She apparently has cancer, but it’s her mental illness and the resulting nightmares and visions that make the relationship so antagonistic and heartbreaking. In the liner notes, Silberman explains (in character of the hospice worker, it seems) that “something makes her sting, and something makes her want to kill. It made her crawl under that house, and stick her head under the stove.”
Ah yes, but this is supposed to be a live review, right? The Antlers did, in fact, play Cafe Bourbon Street last Thursday as a three-piece, though few were there to see it. (Our Cat Philip, however, did not open the show, to my disappointment. Bourbon Street’s website is notoriously inaccurate. Get on the ball, Bobo!) The mostly empty bar lent the show a vibe that was more flat than intimate, and the band hasn’t completely figured out how to replicate Hospice live yet. The climaxes were even more powerful when heard at arm’s length, but the subtleties weren’t quite as subtle. And I missed the acoustic.
I felt kinda dumb as I was standing by the merch table waiting for the first band, Yume, to go on. Looking over everything, I saw signs indicating that Peter Broderick, the main reason I went to TT’s Monday night, was actually in Efterklang. Huh. Who knew?
So a band called Yume played first. Doing about 3 seconds of research before the show, I mistakenly thought that it was this Yume who was playing, which I wasn’t too excited about. But it was really this Yume who played and HOLY SHIT THEY WERE SO MUCH BETTER THAN THAT OTHER YUME. Among other things, they used a Nintendo DS (not that Korg game, though) and a tin can made into a microphone. They were like some awesome ambient drone version of The Postal Service or something. I don’t know. I was too hypnotized by what I was hearing to actually pay attention to it. Just know too keep an eye out for a Canadian band named Yume.
Peter Broderick put on one of the best and most charming shows I’m likely to see all year. I kinda have a thing for people that do everything themselves but Broderick went beyond the usual loop creation. Instead of sitting by his piano, guitar, violin, and microphone, ready to tap the pedal at perfect moment, he would get up and "activate the space." Stand on top of his stool, walk to the middle of the stage, go wandering through the audience, anything to create tension, to keep the audience wondering "Is he gonna make it back to the pedal in time so he doesn’t fuck the whole song up?" It didn’t always go super smoothly, an accidental banging of the keyboard, missing the cue to start the song, or recording the loop a second too long. But all of these things are what made the show infinitely better than listening to a studio recorded album. Of course, it helped that both Broderick and the audience had a good sense of humor about the whole thing, neither of them getting upset or annoyed by the undeniable delight everyone was experiencing.
Broderick played a nice long set, including an improvised beauty that incorporated random noises from a mini circuit board and a little Casio type keyboard melody he made up on the spot. He also used the crowd’s applause from the previous song he played and recorded himself asking us to say "Yeah!" It was definitely one of the highlights of the night. He ended his set shaking some toy bells and yelling nice and loud as he walked through the audience eventually laying on the ground for a minute. He went around the club and came back up on stage, still moaning, and as the band playing the Middle East Downstairs could be heard through the floor of TT’s, he said, "Man, that band is even louder than I am." He finished up after another verse or two of his jingling howl/chant and the crowd showed their appreciation with plenty of woots and cheers, probably more applause for an "opener" than I’ve heard in a long time.
There’s this Dutch band you probably won’t have heard of, but I recommend you check them out. This band is De Kift, a sprawling, organic collective of virtuoso musicians and art-punks who’ve been layering horns with insistent drums, plaintive strings and big call-and-answer vocal parts since before Zachary Condon was born. De Kift did everything from opera to reggae-pop, so for these purposes I’ll refer to one particular album: Vlaskoorts. It’s a series of poems delivered in (colloquial) Dutch and arranged in strange syncopated melodies to a percussive horn section: imagine Baudelaire’s “My sad heart slobbers at the poop” roared joyfully over experimental trumpets in a Scouse or Glaswegian dialect. There is something convincing and jubilant about the localised interpretation of the texts; swollen, triumphant, melancholic, it’s beyond cultural specificity.
Zach Condon releases the second part of his album under the moniker Realpeople: it’s called Holland (from Oaxaca to the Netherlands? A big leap). Despite the lush harmonies and mildly risqué titles, it’s made of gloopy, flat electro and is about as far from Vlaskoorts as it’s possible to get.
March Of The Zapotec, contrarily, sounds like Vlaskoorts in many ways, except that the shouty Dutch is replaced by nasal indie vocals singing in AmeriEnglish. It’s pleasant. But there’s something troublesome about Zach Condon – boy wonder, ethno-musicologist, champion of underdog world music – jetting into Oaxaca to order a bunch of funeral players into line (with the help of a translator versed in English, Spanish and Zapotec). De Kift achieved a similar sound from a small town in the Netherlands, with no discernible carbon footprint. The authenticity market – demographic Starbucks fairtrade – has an aspect of cultural imperialism to it (Time magazine’s colonial photographs of savages in their natural habitat, published as anthropological curiosities). I’m not suggesting Zach Condon is a cultural imperialist; simply that he’s a very accomplished songwriter and producer in the vein of Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeff Mangum (with the difference that Mangum was observing, rather than flying in, the aeroplane over the sea), and not, as hype would suggest, a Ry-Cooderish curator of unsung ‘world’ music.
This was a great show. But I have a feeling everyone else enjoyed it a lot more than I did. First of all, I had an excruciating headache that no amount of Excedrin would eliminate. And then there was the whole lineup changing thing. You see, it’s not very easy for me to get into Boston to see shows. I had to take Friday night off of work specifically to see this show at the Pierre Menard Gallery and I did it for Psychic Ills. Every other band playing the show is from Boston and I could see them pretty much whenever I felt like it. So the night was special because of Psychic Ills. They were "billed" (I use that term loosely) to go on second to last which was perfect because then I’d be able to catch the last train out of Boston at 12:10. But 3 things happened that made it impossible for me to watch the Psychic Ills’ set. 1: Late start, by like 45 minutes. Whatever. That’s better than Great Scott. 2: A last minute addition to the lineup (Manners). Usually I’m all for it but tonight I was in a bit of a rush so I didn’t really appreciate it. And 3: Psychic Ills were the last band to play. With all those things combined, there was absolutely no way I could get out of there by 11:30 and still see any of the Psychic Ills set. But enough whining because this show was still pretty awesome.
Rising from the doldrums that saw their previous album Let’s Get Out Of This Country fall into a dark black hole, Camera Obscura returns with their fourth studio album which is a much more chirpy affair. Lead singer Tracyanne Campbell’s voice is delightful, styled somewhere between a young Mama Cass or more recently, Swedish vocal siren Victoria Bergsman. With an essence of classical beauty, her voice has been waiting to be showcased in this fashion, something previous Camera Obscura records failed at. My Maudlin Career is the record that finally puts Campbell among music’s elite female vocalists. But while it’s easy to praise Campbell for her contribution, the band as a whole has created a more complex album. With dense orchestral arrangements scattered in a flower bed alongside simple pop instrumentation, the band has crossed the time barrier, bringing together elements of 1950s singer/songwriters, ’70s flower power and contemporary indie-folk music. No song displays this fusion better than opening track ‘French Navy’, a perfect pop song surrounded by big-beat drumming and a wonderful orchestral melody. ‘You Told A Lie’ is Campbell at her magnificent best; a bubblegum pop song with a catchy chorus that floats effortlessly along in a breeze. On ‘Swans’ Camera Obscura strips back the classical instruments in search of a more contemporary rock vibe, resulting in a sound similar to Swedish band The Concretes.
‘Rules’ is, Berlin based four piece, The Whitest Boy Alive’s second album since their debut ‘Dreams’ was released in 2006. This record sees their Royksopp-esque laid back electro develop into a much more individual style.
The expansion of their repertoire of sounds, which include an inticing range of synth sounds along with intricately delicate drum beats all kept together by subtle garage influenced bass line shows they’ve taken a more ambitious approach.
This relatively new group from England have caught my ear recently. I just picked up the Little Death album and can’t stop listening to it. Pete and the Pirates aren’t doing anything terribly new, but somehow use an exhausted formula, rearrange the ingredients in a way that sounds fun and raw, yet extremely polished. This is probably achieved with the help of producer Gareth Parton from the Go! Team. Relentless hand claps, strong chord progression and catchy hooks are Gareth’s strong points and this album is full of all of that. It has that power pop/rock with a slight punk edge feel and I find myself loving song after song on the entire album.
Ive always had a very soft spot in my heart for Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s First album, B.R.M.C, and have been waiting for something to come along to hit the same key as that.
Melvis reviews the upcoming Shooting From The Shadows E.P. from Dag För Dag, an American brother and sister duo residing in Stockholm.
The Veils – Sun Gangs
7/10
The press release projects that this is the first proper offering from The Veils, that their first two forays, Runaway Found and Nux Vomica, didn’t quite showcase their talent enough. Nux Vomica was a widely celebrated and mature achievement, but Sun Gangs sees the band swiftly assert their talent even further. The glossy lushness of Bernard Butler’s production never strays from its reputation of oft-overproduced overkill. This time, however, it seems to work (he produced Sit Down By The Fire, the rest of the album was produced by Graham Sutton). It seems that Finn Andrews has been listening to a lot of Leonard Cohen, with his moody dramatic sentiments shining through in the harrowing and heartbroken languor of his voice and his destructively emotive piano/guitar strum marriage. There could also be comparisons made to Jack White in Andrews’ erratic shouty vocals in Killed By The Boom, but in softer tracks such as The House She Lived In he shows a more subdued side.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs singer Karen O
photo by Kirstie Shanley
May I take this opportunity to introduce to you a band from New York that you only think you know of…
Funny thing about Bernard Sumner: he never whooped on record. Well, that’s a lie; he did once or twice, but the whoop wasn’t really part of New Order’s studio arsenal – whereas live, he peppered the air with the things, fistfuls of endearing/embarrassing firecrackers. But, for the main, his natural impulses were held in check, no doubt wisely so. A whoop misplaced can be dangerous.
Or powerful: two minutes into Telepathe’s ‘Chrome’s On It’, one or the other of Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais lets a very noticeable whoop fly. I can’t help but feel it points to why I like this record so very much. It doesn’t make the song; the song would be fine without it. But it’s a daft, awkward, Missy-ish exhalation of ebullience and the most tangible signal that Telepathe’s strange take on r’n’b is as much a slightly transgressive, fangirl tribute as it is an icy, Dave Sitek-helmed exploration of the genre as a 21st Century sonic artform. Probably you’ll figure that out from the preceding passage, where the duo po-facedly declare ”I can feel the real bang-bang, I can do the real thang-thang”. But the jive talkin’ is dispatched with forensic detachment, and although that accounts for much of the thrill, it takes that whoop to reassure you that this is all supposed to be, y’know, fun.
Dance Mother only sports three tracks that overtly subscribe to pop-r’n’b dynamics and vernacular – the other two being the heartbroken ‘In Your Line’ and heartbreaker ‘Lights Go Down’ – but they’re vital, offering colour and balance, allowing Gangnes and Livaudais to focus elsewhere upon abstract palettes of sepia and muted neon. Over the course of ‘I Can’t Stand It’, lasting a near-seven minutes, almost nothing happens (or at least, nothing changes), but that’s what makes it so magnificent: a grandiose cloud of clipped, synth strings, undulating and echoing without heading anyplace in any particular direction, a slow-shifting canvas onto which the frostily poised lyric “I can’t stand to watch this going down” is as projected, stylised and heartbreaking as a golden age Hollywood melodrama.
Bob Dylan- “Blonde on Blonde”
After causing something of a stir by what is now infamously know as his “going electric”, Dylan released two albums (“Bringing it All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited”) in 1965, but it is this album of 1966- with its increasingly surreal lyrics and often woozy mixture of blues, rock and melody- that is considered by many to be one of his finest pieces of work.
“Blonde on Blonde” starts with hilariously nonchalant “Rainy Day Women # 12 and 35”. The song is a lazy sounding little ditty which is filled with a giddy combination of harmonicas, trumpets, tinkling pianos, the sound of raucous laughter and, on top of it all, Dylan’s voice croaking out “Everyone must get stoned”.
However, for a lot of it, the rest of the album is much more downbeat and wistful. After suffering major backlash from both the press and his fans, “Blonde on Blonde” is a haunting, introspective glance in the mirror by a man trying to cope with massive burdens and expectations. In one of the albums highlights, “Visions of Johanna”, Dylan sings “Little boy lost/ He takes himself so seriously/ He brags of his misery”, revealing exactly the kind of fragile, yet creative, mind displayed laying itself out on the record.
One quick search at Hypem reveals that The Pains of Being Pure at Heart has already been featured by just about every other indie pop loving blogger. So feel free to move on, as the next few lines will contain absolutely nothing that hasn’t been said or written numerous times before. But since this is my blog, where else would be a more appropriate place to share my 5 cents on the smashing debut album by the NY quartet, than this? I have vowed to never use that “album of the year” description again, but the rest of the year’s releases will have a rough time trying to make a bigger impression on me than this one. Not often does it happen that I listen to a debut, where I have nothing negative to say.
Dan Auerbach kicks of his solo debut Keep It Hid with the slow Trouble Weighs a Ton and when the listener settles back to enjoy a gentle album he slap him in the face with the grumbling distorted I Want Some More . The guitarist/vocalist of The Black Keys covers new territory on this album.
There are so many great garage 7" singles out there right now… it’s borderline overwhelming. Luckily I am poor and can’t afford to keep up (though I wish I’d bought into the Hozac Singles Club) but I try to know what’s going on. The best thing I’ve heard recently, besides the Mayfair Set and France Has the Bomb, is "Red Light" from Olympia, WA’s The Vibrarians. It’s a great rave-up with a killer bassline. All three songs are good, actually. It’s out now on K Records as part of their International Pop Underground series:
Covering the history of Merge Records requires a lot of attention to be put on Superchunk and the various early musical projects of Superchunk’s front man Mac McCaughan. The band has been absolutely vital to the development of Merge and all the projects McCaughan dot the early history of the label as if it were his own, or right it was! Prior to the formation of Superchunk Mac multi-tasked by being in both Wwax and the Slushpuppies, two kicks ass late 80’s bands that floated way underground. The bands both released a few cassettes and singles on the early Merge label most of which kicked ass and definitely set the table for what came out of Chapel Hill next.
On their double 7",
Like It Or Not, Wwax showed off some serious musical chops even if it was accompanied by some tone deaf singing from its three members. In Wwax McCaughan shared the vocal duties with the other dudes in the band, drummer Brian Walsby and bassist Wayne Taylor, who kind of destroyed the sound whenever they opened their mouths. Okay, maybe that’s a bit harsh but listening to the singing on these 7-tunes is like listening to the cartoon cat in the alley.
It’s a curious name these four Canadian men have taken. If there was a definite article, or if the music were very different, you could maybe put it down to macho attention-seeking or glammy affectation. In fact, ‘women’ is simply the opposite of what they collectively are: an erasure of self that extends to the cover of their debut album, an old Felix Greene photograph of regimented, anonymous Chinese citizens.
This erasure continues in the suburban blandness of the song names and, significantly, the music itself. Probably you’d call it eclectic, but eclecticism often serves to define bands, marking them as dabblers, dilettantes or restless spirits. For Women, it’s a mask. Folk, noise, musique concrète and sun-dappled melody all inhabit this set, but origins are obscure and elements oddly unbalanced. Opener ‘Camera’ thumps and then flickers into life, an echoey hymnal set to choked hiccups of guitar, accelerating through dry, percussive booms, warm veils of fuzz and lonely old synths. It’s pretty – almost hummable – but it evaporates at the one minute mark into the heavily distorted, oddly nostalgic clangour of ‘Lawncare’, which, in turn, becomes lost in the blank throb of ‘Woodbine’.
cult, rare videos (free movie downloads available!) via www.cultrararevideos.com
This week’s Leaky Faucet from the excellent Pop Tarts Suck Toasted includes some choice tunes from the new Art Brut Rekkid.
Crystal Stilts’ Love is a Wave 7" is out March 31 on Slumberland. Catch the band next week at SXSW.
I’ve read a fair amount of band/artist biographies with varying amounts of interest(oddly enough, as much as I love the band Pulp, their 400-page biography by Mark Sturdy was one of the hardest to conquer). I stumbled upon Michael Bracewell’s 2008biography of Roxy Music, Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music, by accident while looking for other Michael Bracewell books. You see, I quite like Bracewell’s ideas and style; I’ve read both England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie and When Surface Was Depth: Death by Cappuccino and Other Reflections on Music and Culture in the 1990’s, which both gave me fascinating intertextual insights into popular culture from vastly different angles. The former probes various aspects of Englishness from arcadia to suburbia via John Betjeman, Lindsay Anderson films and The Cure while the latter discussed the atmosphere of the 90s, including a shift from irony to "authenticity" and the gentrification of the avant-garde, and explored topics from Britpop to Howard Devoto to the Millennium Dome to American pop group, Hanson. These earlier works point to Bracewell’s intelligent wit and extensive research, aspects which definitely infuse Re-Make/Re-Model. The key difference with Bracewell’s take on Roxy Music’s biography, or the band biography genre in general, is that he strictly focuses on the way the band came about; once the band gains a record deal and creates their self-titled first album, the book ends. By the way, this book is nearly 400 pages long. And I finished it in a few days. The difference between this book and that massive history of Pulp is the almost academic take on the ideas, art and socio-historical forces that shaped the band and their music. This book isn’t about a meticulous chronology of singles, albums and gigs, power struggles, band member departures, and outrageous gossip. This book isn’t about a band’s personal relationships as such; it’s more about the constellation of people and ideas that provided the perfect conditions to create such a unique band which took high and low art and married them with a camp aesthetic.
The book is divided into three main sections: Newcastle 1953-1968, Reading, Ipswich, Winchester 1964-1969, and London 1968-1972. In doing this, Bracewell can thoroughly discuss the milieus from which Bryan Ferry, Andy Mackay and Brian Eno emerged, parallel them, and then join them up in the final section. Of course there are plenty of interviews with the band members themselves, but there are equal amounts, if not more, interviews with people who had contact with the band members, and in effect, "made" Roxy Music as much as Ferry, Mackay and Eno. In the Newcastle section, you learn about the Richard Hamilton-influenced art school concepts that surrounded Ferry and his fellow students, including Rita Donagh, who eventually ended up teaching at Reading University where Andy Mackay was studying English and Music. Hamilton and his postmodern pastiche, Pop Art ideas and Duchampian aesthetics become clear foundations for Roxy Music’s borrowing from an eclectic, extensive palette for both their music and their image. But in addition to these high art philosophies, Ferry and his colleagues were equally exposed to Club A-Go-Go, a venue that held lunchtime dances for Newcastle’s working class, and the social significance of mod clothing at Marcus Price.
…At first I ignored the promo mail regarding young UK singer Polly Scattergood, but then I read this excellent write-up at Chromewaves and thought “what the heck”. And I do agree with the take that Nitrogen Pink is an intriguing first single from what one could suspect will be a fine debut album, as the other songs streaming at myspace do sound rather interesting. Though the best moments are the ones where the young lady abandons her quiet and natural (?) singer-songwriter background and instead follow a less obvious electronic pop path, as she seems to be quite a force in this field. Whether or not there’s anything about my fear of an album dominated by this high-pitched voice (as beautiful as it may be), could end up being a little too much, I will put to rest for now and instead wait for the release of the self-titled debut album. And it won’t last long as it will be out March 9 in her native UK and preordering is already possible from the HMV webshop (and several others as well I guess).
+ Nitrogen Pink
Over the course of the first two Vetiver records Andy Cabic set the groundwork for the style that this musical project will run over. It is different from his more popular work with Devendra Banhart, eschewing the freak part of folk altogether and focusing on the finger picking, sunny lyrics of straight ahead folk. On his third record under the Vetiver moniker, Cabic has finally allowed other elements into play allowing a bit more pop to enter the fray and throwing some light synths here and there to give the album a more layered feel then anything he’s done in the past. It’s these things that give Tight Knit a chance to make its way into your everyday life, adding elements of hooks and style without which it would be a pretty boring record overall. It still follows most of the folk coda though, most of the songs are very hushed and gently played, and you would be forgiven if you drifted off to sleepy land while listening. There are moments, like the lead single "Everyday" and the horns found on "Another Reason To Go" where things pick up a bit, but those moments are fleeting. Tight Knit is a steady sounding record, with some truly excellent musicianship, but it never rises to a level that grabs you and takes you deeper into the music and that’s where it suffers.
Obits - "Pine On"; Obits may be the new kid in the Sub Pop stable but they are certainly not new kids. The band consists of four members, all of whom have extensive histories in the music world. Now that they are together though they are bringing everything they do well together and amking some boot stomping, straight up rock classics. This tune should have people hanging from rafters when they hear it!
Grade: A
Polly Scattergood - "Nitrogen Pink"; It’s pretty easy to start any writing on Polly Scattergood by comparing her to either Bjork or Joanna Newsom, and to be fair she does sound quite a bit like those two artists, but she also incorporates a lot of other elements in creating a completely unique, far out sound. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying her new album lately and this tune is defintiely a stand out. Get to know her, you’ll be hearing a lot about her.
Grade: A-
As I discovered the weekend before last, one of the perks of being a member of the Edmonton Folk Music Festival, is that once a year you get to attend what is undoubtedly the most boring party in the city.
To be fair, the words "Member Appreciation Dinner" don’t really sound like fun at all, so it’s not exactly like they led me on. I wasn’t expecting to be the only person there under the age of thirty, but hey, you live and you learn. This year was the first (and probably the last!) one I attended. The best part of the evening was when they gave me free cds. (Also, the food was pretty good.) Yes, I know I’m a greedy little bitch.
So the Folk Fest tosses some random cds to members every year, and I finally got around to listening to the ones I snagged. (They don’t literally toss them; they actually hand them out very politely.)
I briefly mentioned the murky, lo-fi noise-pop of Toronto’s Little Girls a couple weeks ago, and the group has since made us aware of a couple of impending releases that you should know about. There’s a 7" coming soon on Captured Tracks (home of Blank Dogs and Dum Dum Girls), with a 12" called Thrills to follow on Mexican Summer (Ariel Pink, Marissa Nadler, etc). "What We Did", which will appear on the 12", is laced with a gloomy, almost sinister nostalgia that seems to haunt all of his/their work…
Check out the latest video from LIME HEADED DOG. Likely to please snooker, Liars and Good Shoes fans alike.
Dave reviews excellent debut from Artrocker.com's second favourite Brisbane 3 piece.
Download the latest album by The Zookeepers right now! It's free, and it's awesome.
Dave reviews the latest Kings of Leon album. Then falls asleep and has nightmares of being stuck in a world where such a tedious insomnia cure of a record gets to number one in charts all over the globe, with legions of rabid fans and critics eager to defend slights upon it, without actually realising that they don't enjoy listening to it. No, really.
Polly Rappaport was in London for the finale of Tokyo Police Club's European tour, but boy was she not impressed - read on for her furious damnation!
Sheffield's art punks Rolo Tomassi make the jump from cult EP to hotly tipped LP, and Daniel Ross gives us the low down...
Artrocker.com heads down to the party bloc in East London to catch a double bill of experimental pop music, featuring the wild abandon of Slow Club, and the abstract indie-dance of Micachu...
Mat Beal grabs a comfy chair, sticks on the cans and gives us the lowdown on this weeks singles - which include the highly anticipated return of Ladytron, and the not so anticipated return of the Dirty Sh*tty Things!
They may be on the tip of the national tongue, but can Glasvegas make their epic sound stretch across a whole record? Danny Revolver finds out as he reviews their muchos anticipated debut...
More European festival action now, as Lewis Hingston reports from The Netherlands biggest field party. Expect reports on the Flaming Lips, Simian Mobile Disco, The National and more...
The weekend's over, everyone has a furry tongue and we're not quite sure what time of day it is. But don't panic! Because here's the weekly singles review to bring you down to earth steadily, as penned by Rory Carroll...
Last week we sent Dave from iLiKETRAiNS over to Norway to review the Oya Festival. Well, that's not strictly true - we didn't buy his plane ticket or anything - but we did blag him a press pass. In return, he's presented us with this epic review...
The Norwegian festivities continue as Dave from iLiKETRAiNS reviews performances from Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Holy Fuck...
Peggy Sue - formerly of the Pirates but now of The Pictures - deliver the dramatic sea shanty goods in central London, with the odd Talking Heads cover thrown in for good measure. Polly Rappaport reviews...
Emily Kendrick witnesses Die! Die! Die! unleashing fire through their nostrils over an audience in East London, before taking leave of the stage - and their senses...
Emily Kendrick hustles her way into Artrocker London at the Buffalo Bar, where Model Horror are kicking up a panic stricken whirlwind of disco punk...
Rory Carroll returns to the fold to deliver his damning verdict on this week's singles. Who will suffer his wrath? His bile? And actually, his rather touching admiration? Find out here!
After a dodgy 2007, it seems that London's Field Day festival has finally recaptured that mad glint in it's eye. Emily Kendrick gets her waterproofs on to review Wild Beasts, Les Savy Fav and more...
More festie action now, and Amy Rich enjoys this smallish one so much, she wishes she wasn't publicising it with this review. Too late Amy! Read on for reports on Camera Obscura, Those Dancing Days and more...
Rory Carroll gets to grips with his inner hillbilly as he reviews the latest album from waltzing bumpkin types The Weight. But hang on - how many band members are there again?!
Ric Rawlins investigates the surf-punk of No Cars, who hark back to a time of innocent rock 'n roll - while screaming their heads off.
Emily Kendrick enjoys the high pitched vocals, jungle percussion and 1950s weirdness of Wild Beasts. But will her appreciation of high pitched vocals lead to an endorsement of "castrati"?
Yes yes, we know it came out yesterday. But hey! We've been busy with the XXL Jeans or whatever they're called. So now without further ado, Rory Carroll reviews the LP every lightsaber waving raver has been saving for...
We couldn't contain him any longer: Mat Beal is set loose from his tiger's cage and sent forth, drooling like a wilderbeast, to review this week's petrified singles. Click here to find out which are mauled and which are spared...
Krissie Nicolson brings us this review of Camp Bestival's year zero, which aimed to take the whole 'all ages' thing literally and create a festival experience for the kids. There's just one question on our lips though: will Chuck Berry do the duck walk?
Marianne Smedley is on a mission to rock - but what the blazes is all this chilling business about? Turns out Lenny Cohen has a few surprises in store for her, as she reviews this year's festival...
Some classic rock 'n roll from Brooklyn wins over the hearts of our guest editors, as they delve into the mysteries of this weeks singles. But who will they describe as "absolutely appalling"? Find out here!
Rick Smoulders dons his pirate hat and enters the mad world of the Secret Garden Party - where it's the creative chaos as opposed to the bands that's keeping everyone's minds cooly blown...
You know those kids at the back of the bus who play their phones really loudly and phlegm at old grannies? Well, those kids have made an indie record. And as Ric Rawlins reports, it's not wholly despicable!
Amy Rich gets an early look at the "lilting, beat-ridden" debut LP from Friendly Fires - which she recommends as a perfectly frenetic soundtrack to the summer...
Colin Greenwood brings us this review of White Denim's recent London show, where expectations are high for the group to go 'over the top'. But will our reporter be sold on their howlin' garage rock?
With rave-pop back on the catwalk again, it's a good time to welcome back Manda Rin - who led an endearingly kitsch version of the scene back in the late 90s with Bis. Amy Rich reviews her forthcoming LP...
When Mat Beal heard that the Pigeon Detectives were back, we had to herd him into the office with a cattle prod to review this weeks singles. So did he find salvation in the rest of the week's 7"s? Find out here...
Emily Kendrick brings us this entertaining flash through last week's Latitude festival, where The Breeders, The Black Lips and Interpol got the party started in Ye Olde English Countryside...
Like most people, Rory Carroll likes ice cream. But how will he handle the cult-like atmosphere of Ben and Jerry's sinister music festival? Will the pudding-barons be a scoop to far? Read on to find out!
With all the chaos of the last few weeks, we almost forgot that Artrocker club stars So So Modern were releasing this marvellous LP! How could we? Emily kendrick takes us through the New Zealand band's collection of trail blazing 7"s...
In the blue corner - CSS! Aided by mysterious voodoo dance techniques. In the red corner - Alphabeat! Bouncing all over the damn place like hyperactive children. It's gonna get mean, as Ric Rawlins referees the battle of the Pop Titans...
Time for more action from the stately home of rock 'n roll - as Sam Crawford reviews the synth happy anarchism of Late Of the Pier, and the almighty techno-crunch of Justice...
Taking their name from A Clockwork Orange, DeVotchKa literally translates as 'Young Girl' in the Anthony Burgess novel. Clearly not put off by the thought of droogs, Gareth Mytton headed down to London's ICA to review their mariachi-punk...
Despite being strip searched by anti terrorism police, our courageous reporter Mat Beal trooped onwards to review this year's Lovebox festival - where he encountered Operator Please, The Flaming Lips and more!
Polly Rappaport slips a tab of acid on her tongue and floats on down the stream to Wooden Shjips - San Francisco's answer to Dead Meadow. Warning: this review contains some strong strobe effects...
When Sonic Youth release something on their SYR label, you can bet it's gonna be pretty damn weird. Daniel Ross reviews the latest such episode: a live improvisation recorded at 2005's Roskilde Festival....
Gareth Mytton takes us for a drag race around this week's singles, which include the latest garage rock growler from Death Pop Records - and a multitude of other sins...
With their robotic post punk and sinister reflections of dystopia, Project: Komakino are on a mission to spread the doom this summer. Emily Kendrick reviews their forthcoming EP, and finds a band who are conceptually satisfying, if a touch too indebted to their heroes...
There's a bit of a debate raging about Let's Wrestle, and it goes like this: are they crap, or so crap they're actually genius? Ric Rawlins is firmly in the latter camp, as he reviews their single launch party...
You'd imagine that the Christian community would be pretty pissed off if you made your LP sleeves out of recycled Bibles. Yet that's the risk Mugison is clearly prepared to take, as he launches his Icelandic glam rock on the world. Gareth Mytton reviews...
Ric Rawlins finds Neon Neon in full conceptual swing at a nightclub in London, where the group arrive in a very swanky looking car from a certain 1980s movie...
Heather Till witnesses The Music's bizarre ability to transform calm rational people into a huge steaming quagmire of dancing bodies. Something tells us she's one of them too...
Artrocker has been eying up Maths Class for quite a while now, and as David Renshaw explains, the Brighton band's first EP more than lives up to our expectations. Prepare yourself for a party...
Polly Rappaport squeezes past the beer soaked crowds to get a good look at Derek Meins - the poet "possessed by an army of restless demons"...
Rory Carroll takes a trip through the secret history of Scotland's Biffy Clyro, whose early releases are charted here in all their speed-grunge glory...
Cryogenically frozen for a thousand years, Mat Beal wakes up in the year 2008 to discover a musical world gone insane. Can he recapture the past to save the future? Only one man knows: him! Step this way for his review of this week's singles...
Sam Crawford is the essence of the diplomatic critic as he delicately tells us why the new record from The Sugars is a little bit pants - despite it's diverse take on White Stripes style blues...
It's supergroup time in New York, as Nada Surf, Joan As A Policewoman, Guided By Voices and multiple others hop into the pot and stew their juices together. But you know what they say about too many cooks? Emily Kendrick reviews...
Tabby Kinder brings us this report from Brighton, where the sinister "death jazz" of Vile Imbeciles is infiltrating the minds of innocents...
Richard Davis brings us the first of his daily reports from Norway, where he's assaulted by girls in frilly underwear, the non-controversy of Jay-Z headlining, and the bizarre antics of Les Savy Fav. Stay tuned for part two!
Emily Kendrick gets her butt down to trendie central - London's Hoxton Square to be precise - to investigate The Dodos. And for once, she argues, the hype is not enough...
Emily Kendrick was at Times New Viking's recent London show, and she brings us this report of exploding drummers, melting monitors and "grot and roll" mayhem...
Sophie Hall gets to grips with the latest record from US hip-hop duo Atmosphere, and finds their music to be honest, original and - you guessed it! - atmospheric...
Legendary art-pranksters Sparks have set themselves a mission impossible: to play live every one of their multiple-decade spanning records. Are they nuts? Can it be done? Ian Atherton finds out...
Rumour has it that if Artrocker.com reviews an Artrocker Club Night, it'll be like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, and we'll all die in a paranormal nuclear overload. Still, we thought we'd try it anyway...
Matt Merritt tightens his skull shaped belt and attempts to get his head around the teenage angst of Fighting With Wire. Will be seduced into growing dope in his closet and hiding grot mags from his mum? Find out here!
Rob Hastings is back on the indie-pop warpath, as the Ting Tings become the latest object of his bemusement...
Beware the moon, my pretties! Sky Larkin are playing the Brixton Windmill - but their drummer is morphing into a strange beast. Don Blandford packs the silver bullets...
Upon submitting his review of the terrible twosome's debut LP, Rory Carroll wrote at the top of the email: "HEAVILY, HEAVILY RECOMMENDED!!" What possessed the man? Find out here...
Emily Kendrick heads down to a recent Artrocker All Ages show, where Good Shoes are road testing some new, fuzzier material. Fancy a sneak peak? Of course you do...
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After 27 years of trail blazing the Power Electronics genre, Whitehouse are finally calling it a day - and Dom Simpson brings us this report on their final tour...
Col Greenwood heads to the Forum to see if 60s garage rock legends The Sonics can still cut it.
Michelle Mannion is one of those people that "needs the gloom" as they say, and with this report from Editors' recent London gig, she explains why...
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And the Lord did say to DFA, go forth and produce obscure disco people from New York. And thus the Hercules and the Love Affair did receive the love of the DFA. And now Ric Rawlins deconstructs their debut album. Amen.
Back at work? Feeling like a pig shat in your head? Watching the clock and it’s only 11am? Fear not! Steven Belfrage is here like a journalistic can of Zolt Cola, counting us down with the week’s singles. Prepare yourself for old skool ravers, Dutch surf music and florescent riot girls!
Ok so we skipped night three - but c’mon, nobody’s perfect! We rejoin reportage of the Artrocker festival with a line up including Elle Milano and Mr. Psychoanalyst. All pretty fab I’m sure you agree - but what’s bugging headliners Johnny Foreigner? Lewis Hingston reports…
It’s the final countdown and Artrocker Festival 2008 moves up a venue size for some stellar performances from Bombay Bicycle Club, Good Shoes and The Lo Fi Culture Scene. Lewis Hingston brings us this report of a night bursting with all-age talent…
Festival season Artrocker-stylee continues, and this time Emily Kendrick heads on down to the Buffalo Bar to catch So So Modern, The Ghost Frequency and Maths Class. By the sounds of things, it’s been a pulse racing second night…
Cindy Suzuki reports from a South London boozer where The Piccadillys are squeezing the seriousness out of rock. But will their female fans link arms & do the ‘snake dance’? Read on!
It’s opening night and the Artrocker Festival is Back Ack Ack! With a lineup of Hatcham Social, The Damn Shames and Thomas Tantrum, you could say we’re off to a damn fine start too. Don Blandford witnesses the ‘tetris dance’ (words) and Sally Saveall mobs the celebrity liggers (photography).
Emily Kendrick delves into the dark alleys of of Soho to investigate a single launch party for One More Grain. And with the band themselves claiming to be "nearly as good as Foals", will they live up to their own hype? Read on…
Artrocker TV brings you this glimpse into the exciting world of soundchecks, as The Maccabees check one-two in Cambridge with mystery drummer. I think it’s my mate Gav, but I can’t be sure.
Bisexual Lizardmen are the cornerstone of every healthy rock scene, so we sent Andrea D'Allesandro down to keep watch on Chris Corner's latest slithery incarnation - and find out if there really is life on Maaaaaars...
The band behind 2005's 'Blood: The Natural Lubricant' EP are back! Richard S Jones introduces us to the sexuallly deraved and morally ambiguous world of Gay For Johnny Depp.
Achtung Artrockers! Blood Red Shoes have ‘done an Iggy’ and fled to Berlin, where they’re playing a bunch of intimate club nights. Don Blandord chews the German sausage (words) and Sally Saveall brings down the Wall (pictures).
Emily Kendrick boards the deck of the Bosun’s Locker Tour to check out Noah and the Whale, a shantie-pop outfit who’s dark imagery sets them apart from their twee contemporaries…
Coming soon to this very website, Artrocker TV in its own special section. For your viewing pleasure. In the meantime, we have a sneak preview, with Charlie chatting to The Black Lips on their recent jaunt around the Capital.
Gabrielle enjoys the Maccabees at the Astoria, with able support from Interpol. Or was it the other way round? Probably.
The Flamin' Groovies completely missed out on the hippy years and ploughed their furrow out of the garage and down the road from San Francisco to Europe...
In the music scene, and especially in the punk scene that we started out in, there tends to be an emphasis on personal politics. A lot of musicians tend to be vegetarian or vegan for example, and of...
THE INCONSOLABLES PICTURESHOW: OBJECTS OF OUR AFFECTION
1. ED (PICTURED BELOW)
- Heinrich, whom I love like a stuffed son.
- A melodica from a Prague junk shop. Smells a little, but goes like a...
Electro punkster, show girl Merrill Nisker aka Peaches promotes her latest album, I Feel Cream produced by Simian Mobile Disco’s James Ford. Peaches shared stage at KOKO on the 13th of December...
Peaches, Kap Bambino, Hanway Troof and Drums of Death were playing at KOKO on the 13th of December. Artrocker loves Kap Bambino so much, we made a dedicated photo gallery. Check out Peaches pictures...
New Artrocker photographer Paul Bridgewater send us some great photos of some of our top bands of the year played in London. Check out the gallery for pictures of The Raveonettes and Sharin Foo,...
Victor Frankowski got some great pictures of legendary proto-punkers New York Dolls at their recent London Forum gig. Read the review of the gig here.
One of the best loved bands, Vivian Girls were touring Japan in Autumn 2009. Lots of fun was had, including modeling of awesome headphones, filming interviews and playing music. Photographer Keita...
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