I’ve been bewitched by the beguiling cerebral charm of Kansas-via-New York band Baby Birds Don’t Drink Milk before, especially 2013's Think Tone. The band are back with their fourth album, Burritos. For some reason, with a title like that I expect something much more in the vein of Wavves or Black Lips to pour out of the speakers – but the pastoral Animal Collective-meets-Akron/Family-meets-Fleet Foxes on a spectral bender aesthetics at play here are far more mesmeric. Opening track ‘Kid Margot’ floats in and around you, a percolating miasma of cavernous echo and flow. There is hazed acoustic strums, silken guitar washes, haunting-yet-inviting choral vocals, with lots of aural quirks flitting in the shadows, like insects pinging off the window on a tepid summer evening. This is somehow much lighter and freer than previous BBDDM releases, yet just as arresting in its joyous expanse.
Fire Talk are bringing out Burritos in March – you can pre-order it here.
Want something a little cracked and warped with your coffee and cigarettes this morning? London hard-to-define trio Alpha Maid follow up the excellent 'Body Chores' with 'Sublime', a seedy, heady slice of lurching electronic punk that manages to be abrasive, ambient and angular, all in a three minute surge of pent-up panic. Starting with a narcolept dub shudder, Leisha Thomas's vocals spear through the cerebellum, a tightrope, a speared drawl, both languid and louche, a stuttering robotic percussion interspersed with crunching guitars that go into overdrive in the final third. It's mental, anarchic, and spiked fun - yep, "you're gonna be a star".
I have revamped my record player - finally - and have broken it in with back to back John Carpenter - his Sacred Bones-released Lost Themes of last year, and his score for They Live, a clear-vinyl reissue put out by Death Waltz Records, one of my favourite labels. I don't own many of their records, because they are expensive, but it is the attention to detail in their tactile end products that make such prices more than reasonable. They have been stepping out of the horror score to do more contemporaneous works of late, such as the Blanck Mass' curated reimagining of the score to The Strange Color Of Your Body's Tears. I'm excited to see that another of their efforts is from an Aussie source - Miles Brown (The Night Terrors)'s debut solo album, Seance Fiction.
It is co-released by Australia's it Records. Brown's signature Theremin is still front and centre, as you would expect, but the songs here are more focused on scrolling through experimental synth badlands in all their garish, Gothic or gauche glories. Opener 'Space Cadet' is the best primer of this - starting like a crackling VHS score for the imagined early 70s precursor to Hardware, it morphs into a early-console dancefloor marauder. 'Electrics' sees Brown's vocals come to the fore, and with lyrics like "it’s just a case of unexpected electricity" the unpredictability of lightness continues. We see touchstones more mainstream than you might expect, with the likes of Depeche Mode and Ultravox colouring the edges. Don't worry, the dark flourishes that have always informed Brown's work is at play elsewhere. Closer 'Feeder' takes a more ruminative march into the netherworld. But Seance Fiction is Brown having "fun" in this synthmorphic realm. You can grab this album in ectoplasmic green !) here.
Happy New Year! Thought I would do the whole two birds/one stone thing on the first day of 2016 and talk about Vacant Valley and Bruit Direct Disques releases...
Let's start with Bruit. I posted about some previous releases the other week (The Frightening Lights and Wonderfuls), but the current release is the 1st LP from French all-girl outfit Badaboum. It's a hard one to describe without getting your ears dirty and diving right in. It's eerie - high-pitched, elongated, distorted vocals that play with and subvert several languages, mournful B-movie organ, percussion that goes from wind-chime irregularity to tropical punk insistence, deliberately swerving from any given holding pattern. Imagine if Trash Kit took a bunch of sweltering Quaaludes while holed up in an Alpine chalet against their will, listening to the B-52s while listening to a cassette language translator on a Walkman with the batteries dying, with dwindling food and water - and maybe Badaboum would be the result...maybe. The bizarre thing? The shifting veils of madness are hypnotic and ultimately a lot of fun. I'm getting my head around it - you should too.
Australian champions of the damaged sonic underworld, Vacant Valley, are priming for another large, eccentric year, so before we unveil their undertakings in the upcoming months, I thought I would shine a sickly light on three of last year’s releases that deserve further scrutiny (and you can get all three here).
In chronological order, we have Melbourne solo artist Squirrel Pancake (AKA Jen Tait of Go Genre Everything amongst other acts). She has taken a fuzz-fucked approach to askew song structures, giving semblances of convention before blasting it with overzealous strumming, flailing distortion that is shaking under its own dereliction, and capsizing the ship with bolts of guitar shredding in the more literal sense. Every song seems to have been edited to frustrate – the long songs far too long, the shorter tracks dissipating before they really dig in. In some ways this is the charm – a fever dream that traces over and eradicates the skeleton, a double-vision of perceived and actual happenstance. Deconstruction as destruction. ‘Wigs & Ruffles’ sits best with me – this is no-wave meltdown, 80s Gordon/Moore style – but the rest sits precariously in that nether region between art and artifice. It stays on the right track almost by sheer will – Squirrel Pancake maintains an obtuse animosity that manages to perturb, staving off the apathy enough to be something worthwhile, even if it’s in your dreams/nightmares.
Brisbane has had some garrulous member in the VV stable (Per Purpose, Psy Ants, Cured Pink), and Bad Intentions now joins them. Everybody’s Doing It showcases the warping talents of Nicola Morton (Club Sound Witches, ) and Rebecca Hlodich. The cassette is made up of recordings from two performances at the sadly now defunct Real Bad Music space (which Morton co-ran), one of the last bastions of outlier music left in Brisbane, back in 2013, and it is two sides of a sonically fractious coin. ‘She’s Onto It’ is a metallic industrial lullaby, distorted lyrics coming through a distorted Dynamike (so it sounds), astral projection into the very outer limits, that invariably starts to fray and unravel, spluttering to many false stops before sifting the corrosive layers away, leaving low-level murmuring (from the crowd) to slowly replace the space. ‘Don’t Take It Personally’ is even less constructed in some ways (a misnomer as both sets seem to be largely improvised), guitar and drumming so out of sync (not just with each other but what equates to actually playing) that what starts out like two musically-base children strapping into instruments at Allen’s Music for an eighteen minute flurry of hands and feet, making noise because, becomes a little more – almost an epiphany just before it fully forms, a realisation dawning – the Moorooka Mile equivalent of the monolith scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps? It’s something that doesn’t hang as well as the first half, but posits that the physical experience would have been far more rewarding.
Finally we have Kompact Development. It seems Adelaide bands don’t like their C’s (another band from this crowd is Kash Konverters). The outlet for Freya Adele (from the aforementioned band as well as Theta and Botox) is both the most abrasive and cohesive of the three releases, an industrial Commodore-64 space battle within the blood. What? ‘Harr’ opens up and stretches for over twenty minutes, spraying a trancelike sonic adhesive over you, captivating in its stuttering remnants of a synthesised kosmiche march, tape-coiled bleeps and Cold-War computer code rolling forth in two-dimensional industrial theatricality. It manages to sound like the beats are the only constant, traversing time, space and variable technologies, warped and manipulated wherever it lands before scurrying through another wormhole to another time/head space. I actually thought this was brilliant – and seeing as the month has been top-loaded with (admittedly excellent) guitar pop for me, such a jolt of decomposing electricity was a pleasant shock. The other three, much more digestible yet still cold and anarchic tracks follow in its stead – ‘Cole’ is a robotic Goth Wave shudder, crudely executed, the vocals called spectrally forth with deadpan ice; ‘Diet’ is a metallic, eye-popping nightmare, a hyper-industrial fever with Pazuzu appearing in blocked, excruciating increments; ‘Nore’ a dot-matrix-and-internet-dial-up annihilation of nerve endings.
After the bruised brood of the opening gambit of 'Dorothy' from Bostonians Kal Marks' upcoming record Life Is Alright, Everybody Dies, you could be excused that the fire might have tempered. 'Mankind' throws that idea onto said fire and incites an inferno. The premise is about helping your fellow man - it's surprising how hard it is for people to get along, so you may as well get royally fucked off about it. Nothing like death-gripping the world into acquiescence. Why can't we just get along? Get furious to get happy; join forces to raze the rabble and rise into a New (and friendlier) World Order. I'll get behind it.
Nothing like a bit of humanitarianism with your post-hardcore. Florida band Frameworks are releasing a new 7” EP, Time Spent, in three different versions – clear with black smoke, white, and translucent gold. The clear/black smoke variation will have a $1 from each donated to the UN Refugee Agency to help with the crisis in Syria. The music itself is as typically asymmetrical as always, offering a melodic thrum before an explosion of razor-edged noise. There is a further industrial element underscoring Framework’s aesthetics though, a sign that Time Spent has been time spent expanding and reframing. ‘Time Spent’ spools out violently with moments of sepulchral calm – Nothing or a Jason Reece-led …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead comes to mind here. Frameworks are priming an album for later in the year – this is the perfect precursor. You can grab it here.
Brooklyn's Big Ups keep amping the excitement factor for their incoming record Before A Million Universes. New off the ranks is 'National Parks', sonically feeling like a brooding Slint bender that explodes in a punk howl fury. The anger rises, the power multiplies, the noise amplifies. Their voice only grows louder, more disenchanted with what the have's are handing down to us, constantly blindsided by expectation and reality, but refusing to lie down and take this confusing fucked-up world in a cage of confusion. Can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this one. You can pre-order Before A Million Universes from Tough Love/Exploding In Soundhere.
Florida swamp punks Gino & the Goons brought out a rad 7” last year that was a slurred party started, thumping forth like troglodyte and liquor meltdown buzz. The new 7” (out through Slovenly Records now) isn’t as likely to light up rather than pound through the wall. ‘Check This Out’ has the gloves off, brows furrowed in an inebriated storm, damaged and threatening to imploded, darkness infiltrating even as the drunken moans evoke a bottle-in-the-hand choral sway around a junkyard fire. The B-side, as with their last release, is a cover – this one of Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers’ ‘Let Go’, and the 70s paced punk rock is breakneck fun. As always Gino et al brings along fellow goons to smash things up – in this case Memphis loose cannons NOTS and New Orleans punk tyro Buck Biloxi, along with Sarah No Mas (Pelican Pow Wow Records). You get what you expect with Check This Out/Let Go – you would be a fool not to indulge.
Texas gods Explosions In The Sky are releasing a new album! The Wilderness is the follow-up to 2011’s Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (although they have been involved in soundtracks for the films Lone Survivor, Prince Avalanche and Manglehorn). Having received a ticket to see them play at Royal Albert Hall in April for Christmas, this news is spiking my excitement exponentially. That said, it looks like some EITS preconceptions may have to be left at the door. The first track from it, ‘Disintegration Anxiety’, is a much more tetchy, synthetically-washed beast than anything the four-piece have put together before. Words such as “ambitious” and “aggressive” have been bandied about on press releases, and there is a ominous foreboding that permeates this song. Still, the trademark shimmering orchestration and guitar interplay is, as would be expected, central to the piece. When I listened to it the first time, I enjoyed it but wasn’t transcended the way I usually am when I listen to these guys. I have listened to this song in excess of eighteen times today – and it’s a kneejerk reaction, an impulsive need to hit replay. There is definitely something lurking underneath the surface here that has latched on and won’t let me go – bodes very well for the rest of the album – a hypnotic narcotic to add to the rest of this amazing band’s history. Pre-order The Wildernesshere (with limited edition red and maroon etched vinyl - always looking out for you...)
I spoke rather warmly about Gun Outfit’s new LP Dream All Over yesterday. The second album that has been smashed the past month (the others being Pete Astor’s Spilt Milk and the debut album from Chorusgirl) is Thought Rock Fish Scale from Nova Scotians Nap Eyes. The followup to last year’s Whine of the Mystics, this record is even more laidback and rustic than Gun Outfit’s offering, but just as rapt in verbose spurts of wry cynicism and astral derring-do. It is so pared back and relaxed that every track has been recorded live to tape, with no overdubs discernible in the mix.
Take ‘Stargazer’, for example – a relatively simplistic bassline, a cyclical guitar riff, with a light marching drumbeat keeping everything on its track – and the space behind it all as deafening as a wall-of-noise amp-breaker. It shuffles amiably along, even as Nigel Chapman sings lyrics like ‘I venomously crown myself serpent king of my sins’ and ‘I looked myself in the mirror and wondered where could my dream have gone wrong?’ The sometimes-cryptic, sometime-plaintive storytelling is as much a drawcard as the pastoral pluck of the instrumentation, a wonderfully crystalline distillation of juxtaposed thoughts and sounds. There will be a lot of Flying Nun related acts that can be put side by side to Nap Eyes in this regard. There seems to be a lot of self-doubt and concerns about mortality here – but there is no pity and loathing, either.
And I feel that is as much the key as anything else – Thought Rock Fish Scale is a colourful story about one man’s journey through life, spouting half-truth and misdemeanours with the cordial air of someone committed to the cause, albeit one that leads to inevitable impermanence, without a worry or care in the world. It takes til the second last song, ‘Roll It’, before things move above a rustic ramble, with closer ‘Trust’ blowing out the hazed introspection, a deliberate move to get up and walk out in the sunshine.
It too is out through Paradise of Bachelors (two smash hits there fellas) – get it here.
Dream All Over, Olympia-bred Gun Outfit’s 4th album, came out October last year, but I thought it was worth a revisit seeing as they tour the UK next month. I have had this album for months on the work computer, but only really embraced it over the Christmas break, the subtly rambling record becoming a staple of early morning hazed malaise (it was a gooood holiday). Which I didn’t expect. I expected to like it, but because of what Gun Outfit was – their last three records more burnished, burnt, bent out of shape, a delightful cacophonous mess of post-punk malapropisms (especially Possession Sound).
Dream All Over follows a rebirth not that dissimilar to The War On Drugs or The Men – although neither wasted garage psych or bristling hardcore, all three bands found their equilibrium in blues-inflected hues, finding space and hushed tones a freedom rather than stifling inertia. For the uninitiated – Dream All Over isn’t a gear change more than a total overhaul. There is the spectre of Low hovering over the sparse, balalaika-infused ‘Angelino’, sung with haunting elegy by Carrie Keith (her touches throughout the album are always stunning); the Yo La Tengo breeze blowing through ‘Blue Hour’ and ‘Legends Of My Own’; Neil Young in a cracked, silent bathysphere on ‘Came To Be’; a Jason Molina-meets-Conor Oberst-meets-Lee Ranaldo manicured desert shambolism in ‘In Orbit’. ‘Matters To A Head’ has a rustic, flannel-in-the-Appalachians undercurrent, imparted through both Dylan Sharp’s slightly more curled vocals and humble yet bruised lyrics.
There is a measured, assured elegance that permeates every track here – although nothing approaches fever pitch, the seams of warm pastoral riches more than makes up for it. I can imagine these songs scoring a night under the stars in the desert; driving into the sunset through the desert; the sun tipping its head as it pierces the desert horizon…
OK so I am leaning heavily on that well-worn “desert” descriptor. But it is so apt here, as is one description I read of it being “canyon-cult blues”. Again, the shift to LA seems to have had a profound effect on Gun Outfit. To be honest, the new direction fits like a glove. Dream All Over works best on the periphery of reality, of consciousness, in locales and dimensions that are slightly skewed and wild. This echoes with the ghosts of Laurel Canyon and the Mansons killing the Age of Aquarius, Neil Young steering the ship, the consummate folklore punk. Dream All Over sounds like a reimagining; Gun Outfit are on the beach, in the sun, burnishing with wry chagrin that belies a ramshackle energy. You really should get this record (out through Paradise of Bachelors here). Gun outfit play The Lexington Friday February 12 - see you there.
(NOTE - I wrote this weeks ago, while drinking White Russians).
I just put up my first Xmas tree. At 34. While listening to this.
The Red Cords kick us off with their breakneck garage punk. Vile Guy is six tracks of smashed out riffs, dirty red-lined vocals, and a drum racket that echoes from the annals of the booziest, spikiest punk history. Delivered with a snarl and a twinkle in the eye, Vile Guy leaves nothing left, everything expended and spent, sweat soaked and bludgeoned, cracked teeth gleaming from a maniacal smile.
Holy shit. Lyon's Herr Geisha & the Boobs are not what youexpect. Book Of Mutations is a one track album of brutal rock, taking the harder edges of Shellac, Slint and Sleep and smashing it against a brick wall, a Necronomicon of noise and nihilism, fraying the fabric of sanity. A mutation in every sense, the trio manage to shapeshift into garage rock mavens for a few minutes here, doom soothsayers for a few minutes there, always maintaining a tightly-coiled focus on manipulated menace. Big, brave, brutal, brilliant.
Operator is a krautrock-worshipping wunderkind four-piece from Brooklyn whose swirling EP Puzzletronics I is breathtaking in its sinuous dexterity and distorted force. Their insidious rhythms aren't built to lull and beguile - they are set to destroy. The effects that permeate these five tracks seem designed to tap into your core energies and send them haywire, a hypnotic maelstrom that connotes both chaos and cool assurance. Even when things get technicolour and weird, like Raincoats-esque closer 'EE UNSH', the band never let go. Dara Hirsch mutters on 'Requirements', "Whose side are you on at the end of the day?" I don't think I have a choice - Operator are in control.
Over to Toronto now and Fresh Snow. They released their latest EP Won through Hand Drawn Dracula a few months ago, and while I love their instrumental take on dissonant melody and noise as movement (baring similarities to Canadian contemporaries Holy Fuck), I have been sucked in by their collaboration with Pink Eye AKA Daniel Abrahams from Fucked Up. The title alone drags me in - 'Don't Fuck A Gift Horse In The Mouth' - a slow-building motorik behemoth then bursts forth, mesmeric before the obligatory Pink Eye howl. The entire EP is breathtaking too, elegiac in places, loudly insistent in most others. Great stuff.
Now for some light jangle from Melbourne's Grandstands. 'Stranger (In A Sense)' is a precursor to their upcoming album coming out on Whalesmouth. Sundappled yacht amble from the 'burbs, the track oozes languid sun-drunk blase - no absolutes. They aren't even assertive in their song title! Relax and forget about it.
I used to live and work in a small country town in Australia called Roma. Weird. aren't from that Roma, but the infinitely cooler Italian namesake of Rome in Italy. Yet the name of their album, A Long Period of Blindness, taps into my experiences there - whether it be through inanity or long bouts of drinking to get through said inanity. This album is not inane, though - it's a monster of dark psych, showering shoegaze and pummelling rhythms that washes over you like a black tide. It is also eloquent - there is a delicateness that underscores the gloss and reverb that penetrates. There are obvious touchstones to Swervedriver and Slowdive in the likes of 'Infinite Decay' and the knowing 'Gaze' respectively, and as the sweeping ominous closer 'Swans' hits, the lyric 'Why do I drown?' is both poignant and heart-rending.
Human Ottoman is a Portland trio who specialise in making beautiful, chaotic noise - but not the way you might expect. There is a drumkit, a cello and a vibraphone, a bunch of effects - and that's it. Farang doesn't put that into perspective - the percussion sounds like a choir of cavemen mauling the monolith, basslines that thrum in the chest but cease to exist, the graceful strings that can shudder and be torn asunder at the drop of sanity. Penned as "polyrhythmic world-metal", the album manages to cross borders, join boundaries, blur cultural touchstones, to create something strange and intoxicating. Again I use the word chaos in a review - but that is what Farang is. Elegant, calibrated, and wondrous, sure - but chaos nonetheless. Like Tortoise and A Silver Mt Zion decided to band together to make a pop album, a free jazz album and a mainstream rock album, then gave up and threw clippings of all three efforts into one congealed mess. Fascinating stuff.
Hailing from Perth, Human Buoy floats into psych-pop view on a cloud of 'Oxygen'. Apparently there is a degree of "mouth drumming" on this track - whatever that is, the stoner equivalent of beatboxing? - and it's provided by none other than Ariel Pink. There is a degree of otherworldly outsider pop to this track that would appeal to the Prince of Parallel-Universe Pop. A lysergic sun bubble, yet with an effervescence of a bubble in sunkissed champagne than a globule within a lava lamp pyramid. There is even an 8-bit-esque flourish for a second around the 1:50 mark that made me think of Sonic The Hedgehog. Man, this oxygen is intoxicating... Human Buoy is bringing out an album, Animation Station, sometime this year - definitely one to keep an eye out for.
Not that you need to hear it from me - but Thee Oh Sees is still one of the most consistently breathtaking live acts on the planet. Not only carving a sweaty swathe across the globe at regular intervals, but John Dwyer and co are continually bringing out new material. Now 'Fortress' has been out since before Xmas, but I need to melt my face off to keep warm this Friday night, and knowing that pals Blank Realm and Kitchens Floor played with them in Brisbane last night (this afternoon for us UKens), the start of their Australian tour as over the course the month they traipse across the Great Southern Land doing show with mates White Lodge and Straight Arrows as well as UV Race, Terrible Truths, Power and Tyrannamen - so bummed! So I'm building a fortress with endless TOS records and beers - it should see me through, right? 'Fortress' will feature on a 7" out on Dwyer's Castle Face Records next month.
Chicago's Running are one of my favourite bands, that I have never seen, because as far as I know they barely tour out of their hometown, let alone come near where I'm hanging out. Their scorched-earth noise brand of garage punk is abrasive, dark yet hilarious. Their album Vaguely Ethnic was one of my fave albums of 2013, and I've been eagerly awaiting their follow-up, Wake Up Applauding, for at least a year. It was meant to be out this week through Castle Face Records - but no word! Anyone help me here? Anyway, here are two tastes from it. It takes the modern garage rock mould and hurls it into the fire, stomping on its smoldering remains before popping the coals on their slathering tongues with maniacal glee. It's hard to explain exactly how Running are better than most other bands out there - in essence they have much of what makes Thee Oh Sees and their ilk a constant source of energetic enjoyment, and garage bands are legion - they just simply are.
A ridiculously long title, me marrying up the band's first three cuts from their album...ah well. It;s the first week of 2016, and already there's an Exploding In Sound roster album to look forward to. Brooklyn duo Washer are finally prepped to bring out their debut LP, Here Comes Washer, in the latter stages of this month (you can pre-order limited edition orange vinyl here). Like many of the excellent albums on EIS, Washer specialise in grunged out guitar rock that cracked, bent, cryptic, hilarious, garrulous, gritty. The instrumentation and Mike Quigley's vocal delivery immediately evokes Pile, EIS' flagship band (in my opinion anyway). the new one, 'Got Drunk And Ate The Sun', has been launched on Stereogum today, and the other two are below. Look at the plain, naive art weirdness of the cover art too - if you haven't taken in how this is already pushing to be a big album around these here parts, listen harder.
I tend to do these about once or twice a year - a catch-up of all the stuff that has come through the letterbox that I haven't been able to post about before now. So, what have we here?
We have been massive fans of the elusive and strange Texans demigods Quttinirpaaq. Yet somehow I missed commenting on their 3rd record, Dead September - although I think I might have been in Australia at the time when it arrived, and on return played it within hearing distance of my girlfriend who promptly stated she wanted to "chop her own hands off and beat herself to death with them" rather than listen anymore. I'm not sure how you could do that - but I think for Quttinirpaaq, that is a compliment. The album itself is white noise ephemera, either bleeding out of the speakers or blasting forth like a sledgehammer - but then static tsunami sometimes shifts to give you a troglodyte psych rock gem like 'Dead Birds'. A lot of people will be indifferent to violently retching - I think it is ominously brilliant.
Sydney's Scattered Order have been around for eons, sampling experimental electronic noise seemingly before anyone knew what it was or could be. Listening to so many weird Australian outlier artists over the past five years, it is clear that 99.9% of them are indebted to these cracked pioneers. So it is great to see them releasing a new record, Some Men Remember Music, later this month. Hypnotic, surreal, mind melting yet also oddly euphoric in an organic sense - Scattered Order have done it again. The outfit launch the record at Bar Open next month with help from SM faves Fraudband and Halt Ever (+ Italianz).
Oakland trio Love Moon brandish a sludged up version of rock and roll that's almost at odds with the majority of their brethren from the Bay Area. Clouded Bliss is like listening to Kyuss, Bleach-era Nirvana, Melvins...and ZZ Top on a mixtape that has melted on the dashboard of a discarded car shell. It's different in many ways, but there is an innate hardened familiarity here (the members have played together in bands before, so are tight despite the sliding distortion on display) that allows it to get its hooks in (still don't know where the name Love Moon fits in though...)
Liverpudlians Cavalier Song are releasing their new LP Blezard through God Unknown Records later this month, in preparation of a support slot with the excellent veterans of psych-stretched sonics Mugstar. I got a copy in the mail not too long ago - and WOW. The way that everything fits together, like a dystopian jigsaw, ratcheted up with piano-wire precision. Motorik suites for the paranoid - there is something almost Ballardian about the sweaty pulse that permeates some of these tracks, like a shadowed imprint of the base desires of man hiding just beneath the brittle, brutal surface. I am making Blezard sound like a punishing listen - it isn't. I have been blindsided to be honest - how such a prescient live-wire of a rock act, both effortlessly eloquent and chaotically kinetic, has escaped my attention until now. Pre-order it here.
Now we get to a couple Fuzz Club releases that have been languishing on the kitchen table for a few months... First up is Singapore Sling from Iceland. Their new album is called Psych Fuck - it is emblazoned on their cover art, thick black lettering on a blood-red background - and it says so much. 'Dive In' opens, a slithering dirge that pulls downwards into infinite despair - there is no fall, it's an inexorable march. 'Let It Roll, Let It Rise' is more psychedelic swamp through a grease-smeared monochrome-and-static lens. 'ÆJL' mines the White Hills, with a primordial Stooges whisper. 'Na Na Now' and 'The Underground' give some levity, taking a pastoral Spiritualised tangent into the ether, and it's needed - 'Try' lurks in the darkness, gnashing its acrid teeth amongst the desiccated bodies; 'Dying Alive' an industrialised cacophony uttered in a cavernous tomb, breaking forth into subterranean weirdness on the other side of the album. There are pauses and spaces here, it isn't as brutal, but it seems much more defeated ('Shithole Town' feels broken and resigned - like early Raveonettes with the gloss torn away). Psych Fuck is a wonderfully dark journey.
Swedish trio The Orange Revival brought out their 2nd LP on Fuzz Club, Futurecent. It is much more recognisably "psych rock" than the Singapore Sling release (that isn't a derogatory comment, for either side), caterwauling across narrow gaps in time and space, always pushing the distortion and sun-blasted wails. Again White Hills comes to mind, as does a more ramshackle, more hard-edged Spacemen 3. For some reason I am digging the more immediate offerings - such as 'Saturation' and 'Speed' - than the drawn-out jams that are usually my draw. But the ponderous yet spiky 'Carolyn' is great - so the long and the short of it is Futurecent is worth the pennies.
In keeping with the heavy guitars, Austria's Doomina released their self-titled album last year, a post-rock behemoth that treads the fine line between gossamer beauty and grinding brutality with finesse and grace. I have always been a fan of post-rock, despite the label offering diminishing returns and heated hate over the years - and this is why I keep faith. I have been putting this on while I get back into my writing - it is neither contemplative nor debilitating, yet shudders with a veracity all its own. Head over to Noise Appeal Records to get a copy, in either orange-black or grey-black marble vinyl (you can get plain purple too, but why would you?)
Peacock Affect is a young dude from Exeter in England who is pretty down about things. At least that is what his new EP, Image 27, seems to suggest. Literate hangdog navel-gazing has been the bread and butter of the UK troubadour for decades now, but this isn't Smiths-lite - these are slow-motion, mist-covered vision, ruminations, a self-made chrysalis of sonic isolation. This is the kind of lo-fi folk for the heavy-hearted that isn't designed to callously sell - it's designed to inspire. Image 27 certainly succeeds there.
I don't know much about Nude Tayne, other than they come from Florida, they are a five-piece, and they have crafted a bizarro math/psych/experimental rock self-titled album. Their songs are all really long too, especially for this type of act. It's like listening to At The Drive In channelling Deerhoof channelling Miles Davis spewing forth Primus (or if you lived in London and ever saw Mayors of Miyazaki - kinda like them, but longer, much longer!). There isn't really any reason to explain it other than that - it is spiked, brazen, offputting, outrageous and energising. Try it - an acquired taste, but one that I enjoyed (and would love to see performed live).
If you get high on GBV supply, then you will dig Graham Repulski. The Philly resident has pumped out a plethora of lo-to-no-fi releases over the years, and his latest LP is Success Racist (he has an EP, High On Mt. Misery, out later this year). Seeing as we released Hot Ones by Brisbane's own Pollardytes Dollar Bar last year, it goes without saying that this kind of barbed basement guitar pop would be right up my alley. Seventeen tracks, imperfectly fractured yet perfectly formed, all in under half an hour. Try 'I Shot An Arrow In The Air' for example - everything sounds out of sync, dissolving, disintegrating - yet a harmonised closure sees the song soar, a barbed pop gem hiding in plain sight. The varying fidelity helps to further augment the likability of these tracks too, rather than detracting from them - these are true crystallised songs, their production an indelible part of the charm. Each listen to Success Racist has me liking it more and more.
Time to whip out the Paris punk with Cheap Riot. Ballroom Portraits is a good album because it delivers louche garage rock with the right amount of swagger and anger - the latter something a lot of bands forget about in this day and age when image is paramount to impact. That said, my favourite track so far has to be 'Night Bus' - mainly because I catch a lot of them so it holds a degree of prescience - and the slower 'The Next Election'.
Bruit Direct Disques have distributed some great records over the past twelve or so months, including one of our favourites of 2015, Kitchens Floor's Battle Of Brisbane. The Frightening Lights are a Melbourne-based two-piece, with Elizabeth Downey's breathy vocals floating over Dan Hawkins' at times obtuse instrumentation. Downey's fascination with confessions and European folktales combine to create a slightly disturbing, almost post-apocalyptic literate fairytale. Sparse yet cluttered with eccentricities, it seems discombobulated yet it's anchored by the gauzy, smoky tendrils of the sonic world they have created. The Frightening Lights is a strange one, but incredibly beguiling.
Also from Bruit Direct and from Brisbane is SM faves Wonderfuls. No one I know does damaged despair and nascent self-flagellation like Bobby Vag, and on Only Shadows Now his downer confessionals float across the abyss in an almost ethereal manner - making this both a spiritual journey and a testament to tragedy and its tyranny on the soul. You cannot help but feel yourself drowning in the desolation, but in awe at the flayed emotions laid bare. Haunting, devastating, utterly brilliant.
The last two releases are cassettes from Inner Islands, the label that actively encourages aural euphoria and ecstasy through manipulated noise - an organic, natural synthesis. The first is Clouding Indefinitely by Portland's Ant'lrd. Rushing water, soaring sonorous synth, a distinct earthen feeling, being caught in the wilderness, enveloped by it, losing yourself in wild epiphany. 'Slow Hood' grinds away at you though - it's a drone, yet an approachable one, a distortion clearly guitar oriented (hence part of the warmth) but also somehow both aggressive and inviting. I don't know how to explain it, other than I wish it went forever, literally forever.
Freewheeling dudes Free Time hit back in the new year with a new track, 'Who Owns The Moon?'. The band, comprised of totally mild twerps harbouring terrible truths from a panel of judges, is like Scott & Charlene's Wedding in that ringleader Dion Nania models his band around where he is, hence the appearance of Martin Frawley, Zach Schneider and Joe Alexander on the track. Its typically slow-paced, almost deliberately torpid in its sluggish approach, eyelids at half mast, hazily contemplating the lunar behemoth and the meaning of life lived/not lived. If you dig the aforementioned bands, or to a degree compatriot Summer Flake (especially her latest EP), or even borderline childlike lyrical conundrums placed alongside more giddily plaintive emotion, then you will get on board these relaxed, clearly Antipodean guitar pop shuffles. 'Who Owns The Moon?' precedes an incoming album, In Search Of Free Time (aren't we all?), through Bedroom Suck Records.
Last year London's Sauna Youth brought out an excellent LP in the form of Distractions. Well, I am making assumptions - I still haven't gotten around to buying it yet. But their launch in Hackney last year was bloody great, as is this cut from it, 'The Bridge', which is being released as a clear 7" on the Upset The Rhythm label next week before they tour Europe. They are at their most sinewy, sharp-edged limits here, the sweat flying off frets and fringes, both erratic and meticulous, cantankerous and giddily polite. The double-edged punk that the four-piece always traverse is a hard one to pull off - think here of Metz with a Wedding Present hangover, or The Clean fed piecemeal into a shorting blender. Straddling the punk rock extremes - they are the bridge.
Buy The Bridgehere. See below their tour dates, kicking off in Brighton with Soft Walls:
27th January – Brighton, UK – Sticky Mike’s w/ Soft Walls, The Glugg
28th January – Rennes, France – Bar’Hic
29th January – Bordeaux, France – TBC
30th January – San Sebastian, Spain – Lurrazpiko Festa
31st January – Madrid, Spain – Wurlitzer Ballroom
1st February – Zaragoza, Spain – La Lata de Bombillas
2nd February – Barcelona, Spain – Heliogabal
3rd February – Toulouse, France – Le Rabelin
4th February – Antwerp, Belgium – Music City
5th February – Leiden, Holland – CAB03
6th February – Amsterdam, Holland – Pacific Parc
7th February – Rotterdam, Holland – TBC
13th February – London, UK – The Forge “The Bridge” 7” release party
Welcome to 2016. For a lot of people, it would have started with out-of-sync clatter and deafening noise, erratic out of focus images, coffee and acid reflux. Which is pretty much Metz' new film clip for 'Eraser'. The song will be out on 7" through Three One G Records (on mint green vinyl here) after they finish a delectable run of US shows - see below the video. Every show is with Bully and one special guest, while every show will be killer, I would literally kill to be at the Brooklyn/Big Ups gig. Now, where did I leave my brain...
Jan 9 – Boston, MA – The Sinclair *
Jan 11 – Washington, DC – Rock & Roll Hotel *
Jan 12 – Philadelphia, PA – First Unitarian Church *
Jan 13 – New York City, NY – Bowery Ballroom #
Jan 14 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg ^
