Hits From The Box #101 - Banking On Shitty Weather

It's a long weekend here in London - and wouldn't you know it? It's been miserable weather. I can't complain too much - Im happy to be cooking, watching Teen Wolf and reading (currently rereading Chuck Palahniuk's Survivor and last month's Sight & Sound while eating Minstrels). So there isn't much excuse but to do a Hits From The Box...

I want to kick off with a band that isn't actually new to this website, or even a release that is that new. Coming from Belgrade is the shoegaze rock of Vvhile, a two-piece that swing between the rollicking garage blast of Japandroids and more languid fare. They released an album at the tail end of last year, More (on clear burst orange vinyl - very tasty) and I have only managed to grab one. A seriously great band/sound/album - Ill try to get them over to London to play a show sometime this year I think. Definitely deserved of your time - currently loving the songs that bookend the album, 'Nobody Knows' and 'New Gaze' (which even has a slight Women vibe to it - obviously a huge plus from my point of view). Seriously great, get More here.

Glasgow dudes Spinning Coin are heading around the UK this month, pushing their eponymous debut release, this four track cassette EP which is pretty rad. This kind of grubby yet wearily euphoric guitar pop has always been strong in this place, but it is the weird parallels that bewitch - I couldn't help but think of Blur covering The Bee Gees' 'To Love Somebody' after binge-listening to George Best when I heard 'Albany' for the first time. Elsewhere the scrappy scuzz that Rory Attwell (Warm Brains) dips his toes in came to the fore on 'Late Late Late' and the quirky Unicorns filtered into elements of 'Hanging Gown' before the shadows descended, and GVSB's Eli Janney stepped forward to sing on the mid-tempo bruisers from ...Trail Of Dead's Source Tags & Codes session, only to flicker back into whimsy... You can tell by these strange referential connections that I'm making that there is a heady melting point of touchstones, yet all are unintentional and ultimately mere signifiers on what is an extremely promising debut. They are playing at Power Lunches on Saturday May 16 alongside Warm Brains; elsewhere they have shows around the countryside with Twerps, Sex Hands, Joey Fourr, Slowcoaches and Joanna Gruesome - all stellar shows I think you'll agree.

Talking of reference points, Montreal's Notta Comet can't help but avoid the Parquet Courts comparisons on their Success With Houseplants album, but these guys are plenty more weird than those guys. The trio are intent on offering layers upon layers of dissonance and off-kilter rhythms, spouting literate yet skewed diatribes (with the occasional Count from Sesame Street vocalics), and showing off moments of shining harmony amidst the boarish chaos. There are elements of bands like Menomena in here too, where the frenetic, jittery ADHD shifts are more akin to jazz riffs and shattering of aesthetics, a deliberate meshing of sight, sound, membrane and madness, than something unplanned and rushed. And does 'Wino Threat' remind anyone else of a sandblasted Doors on speed (I'm guessing it'll be a resounding no, but what the hey?) On a side note, I am their 500th like on Facebook - what do I win???

I came across this split between Chicagoans Bike Cops and Roach Beach due to the former sending me their EP back in October last year - and I missed the boat. SO I was looking for it and found this newbie instead. It's a great taster for both bands - Roach Beach offer a blasted rock pacer with added Men campfire blues in 'Weekend Home' before finding their inner blazed cowboys with 'Ursula'. Then it's Bike Cops' turn, and they find a brooding lurker on 'Animal', echoing out of the shadows, before the 60s comes careening around Deadman's Curve for 'I Got Away'. A hell of a lot of fun.

Back before the term Modern Warfare became synonymous with first person shooter war Armageddon games, was a LA punk outfit back at the turn of the 80s. Ut Records has reissued their Delivered 7" and it more than stands up - it is hard to believe that this was coming out in 1980 at all, let alone out of Los Angeles at that time. The seeming mortar and pestle smearing of glam, goth and slamming rock means that you can at times feel The Cramps, at others Adam & the Ants, at others again The Urinals or even Dead Kennedys... I have no idea what became of these dudes but this 7" is enough to jump right on this bandwagon once again.

We head to France now and the errant lads Dividers. They have just released Fourwalls Farewell through Casbah Records and Beast Records a couple of weeks ago. Starting off with a countrified swagger in 'Fuck The World', the album blasts through the cerebral vortex with 'Empty Rooms' and 'Never Wanna See You Again', goes into a Soundtrack Of Our Lives amble on 'Hambourg', gets all pastoral psych pop on 'XXX'... Dividers are a fidgety band on paper, but the languid grooves that underpin either their Wild West saunter or their garage sneer keeps everything on an even keel.

And let's finish off with Brisbane band The Bear Hunt. Linda their drummer won the one-off pedal we raffled off at last year's Sonic Masala Fest, and I finally caught them play at the Pre-Pre SM Fest show at Trainspotters back in March. The four-piece aim to release their debut album TBH later this year, and 'Lost Reality' is the first cut from it. Raw grunge from the heaving tropics.



Happy Sunday everyone!

Hits From The Box #58 - Back From The Grave

 

It has been a looooooong time since I pumped out one of these, hasn’t it? That’s part of the reason why my inbox got so bloated with unread emails. So I'm back on it, and have for your reading/viewing/listening pleasure six bands that I SHOULD have mentioned last year – better late than never I guess, as Lazarus was fond of saying.

 

Jehosaphat Blow. This dude contacted me a long time ago about his short, punchy, slightly nuts album Natural High For Low People months and months ago. Released by Chicago’s Cold Slice Cassettes (also featured the cool Super Minotaur cassette), it’s a simple affair – recorded on a 4-track in Blow’s then living room (he now resided in Prague, lucky devil) with the occasional backing vocal overdub scattered throughout, and the near-no-fi production actually does these songs a hell of a lot of service. He is a one man band – well, he DID just relocate to Prague, might be hard to convince others to do the same – but there are no drawbacks to this. You can, and should, still get your hands on this before he releases more stuff and takes over Europe, one drunken barhop at a time. 2013 is the year of the Jehosaphat.

 

Jehosaphat Blow - The Electric Light One Man Band

Jehosaphat Blow - Garagenese

 

There’s a minnow-tiny label in Dunedin, NZ, called Fishrider Records. They have some interesting young bands on there. None so more “interesting” than quirkfest Opposite Sex, who seem adamant to not only avoid adhering strictly to the guitar pop formula, but also to do it faux-shoddy, flippantly, with sly winks and cheap tricks abound. The sound they developed in splendid isolation is, they say, “an absurdist-logico mix of Euro pop, Beat poetry, and subterranean lo-fi adventuring." Not a bad summation really. With these kind of ad hoc insano tunes, some wont stick – some will grate – but some will grab you and never let go. You can grab their self-titled LP here.

Opposite Sex – La Rat

 

Nova Scotia trio Kestrels are pretty earnest fellas, and their second LP A Ghost History mirrors this. There are moments that makes me think of Ben Gibbard, if he fronted a Dinosaur Jr tribute band. All 90s college noise and shoegaze altruisms, Kestrels love what they do, and mean what they say. Furthermore, one of their main influences is Glaswegians Life Without Buildings. Now, they only released one album – Any Other City – but its one of the best art rock/pop records ever, with arguably my favourite song OF ALL TIME in ‘New Town’, so this has given Kestrels a hell of a lot of leeway. It helps that they are pretty damn good, too (and Tim Wheeler from Ash plays on one of the tracks. Say what you will, but 1977 is burnt into my childhood memories – I will forgive the plethora of misfires he has made since). It sounds huge, lush, and beautifully loud. You can get A Ghost History through Sonic Unyon Records here.

Kestrels – Drowning Girl
Kestrels – There All The Time Without You
Kestrels – The Past Rests

 

There might be a stronger focus on bands from “unfamiliar countries” this year (as in not from Australia/US/UK/Canada/France/Germany, my main focal points). I have a pretty amazing article in the wings from the Middle East. But before then, I have some bands coming out from Serbia. Vvhile got a bit of word-of-mouth last yeah, the noise-pop duo flailing about like a poppier Japandroids, an East European Wiper amalgam, and the 4-track EP Vvhile Is Vanity is pretty damn killer. ‘Vanity’ is their calling card, but the other three tracks here promise much is to follow. Grab Vvhile Is Vanity here, here, or here (they are on three labels in Macedonia (Napravi Zaedno), Germany (Twintoe) and their own (Jazz Chairs)), whilst it's about to be repressed amongst the three labels as well as distributed in the US through Dirt Cult Records. They have recently supported Bo Ningen, and will be the support for The Men in Belgrade next month. Expect more, and soon – they really are great.

Vvhile – Vanity
Vvhile – Vvorldending Curse

 

To more familiar terrain (Boston via Austin Texas, to be exact - Lira Mondal (vocals, guitar, and bass) plans to work as a chef in Cambridge whilst Caufield Schnug (Drums, guitar) pursues his film and visual studies PhD at Harvard University) and the little band that could, Silkies. Garage pop, and they don’t stop – these kids love L7, The Shangri-Las and some Segall, throw it in the melting pot, and a pretty killer concoction is formed. It’s the bite that gives Silkies a chance to climb up and be noticed, which you can hear on their first single ‘Like One’ (which they wrote and recorded a week after forming!) The Like One EP is out through Young Latitudes and also on cassette through Heart Throb Records. Nice.

Silkies – Like One

 

Finally we have Big Surr, a five-piece out of Nashville whose Baked + Bruised 7” is out on Infinity Cat. Whilst there is a bigger connection to beach/surf/garage/so on bands (they ARE called Big Surr, after all), there is much more akin to languid shoegaze flowing through their veins. Opener ‘Cosine Tangent’ was one of the songs of 2012, a slowburner with heft and warmth in equal measure. They love to have fun too, so this seesawing of genre staples has perplexed many; rest assured, Big Surr are five kids who love playing music, love mucking around, and who you may fall in love with. You can grab the 7” here.

 

Big Surr – Cosine Tangent

 

Happy Tuesday!