Populating A Pyramid Paradise On Mars

The pitch-black dirges that NY malcontents Pop. 1280 have delivered in the past few years have held me in thrall ever since I heard the dire yet droll drawl of 'Get Into The Grid'. We disappear down another rabbit hole altogether on new cut 'Pyramids On Mars', off new album Paradise (pre-order it through Sacred Bones here). It is a viscous attack on the world around us, an existential space-odyssey-in-the-gutter spear through the brain, fear and mental anguish and compromise drip-fed and invasive. Chris Bug's throttled groan and nihilistic moans evokes basement-strung goth puritans of the 80s, the murky production pierced by archaic synth shudders and a guitar death knell, a funereal march into eternity. Not as immediate as other releases, but 'Pyramids On Mars' overflows with intensity and eye-rolling unease. These imps of perversion aren't intent on infecting you with their horrors; they are now eyeing the skies.

Opening Up The Milkk

Sydney instru-mentalists Milkk have blown me away with new EP Open Signals Cast. Why? Because I haven't seen them play bar a show in Sydney in some bar in Surrey Hills in late 2013, and their fare was intoxicating in a more homogeneous, nebulous way - there was a warmth in their oddness that I embraced. That has been dissolved over the past couple years, replaced with a serrated fecundity that is just as intoxicating, just a far more jagged a pill to swallow. Take double edged bookends ' - 'Dadadada' and 'Hear The Toad' - the former a Don Caballero-shadowing sense of deconstructed turbulence, the latter a rambunctious and euphoric rouser that ebbs and flows in intensity to a tetchy frisson imbued with American Football-esque parallels of warm meditations. There are elements of the contemplative mists permeating from 'Garden of Earthly Delights', a beautiful elegiac meander that frees up the freneticism, and is all the more breathtaking because of it. Out through No Safe Place (Beast & Flood, Solid Effort), Open Signals Cast is bloody great. Too much Milkk is never enough. Get it here.

Big Ups = Down Capitalism

A few acidic tastes of guitar noise to fill the Xmas stockings, starting with NYC upstarts Big Ups and their new song 'Capitalized'. Starting with guttural, propulsive bassline and a mosquito-buzz guitar bend, before the drums, demonics and distortion demolish the stage, the song sees Joe Galarraga ripping his vocal chords and consumerist histrionics apart with barbed grenades aimed on at our continued downward spiral into material brand-slathered rectitude. There are moments of uneasy ease, but this is spit-flecked chaos in all its errant glory. The boys are releasing new LP Before A Million Universes next year through Exploding In Sound Records (how the fuck do they keep doing it?!) and have announced a Euro tour for March and April 2016, playing the Lexington to boot. Bring it on.

Capra Informis

I'm late to this rocketship (what's new this year???). Goat offshoot Capra Informis launched Womb Of The Wild, a four track EP that strips some of the esoteric "world music" ephemera that colours so much of the Swedish psych coven's aesthetic, and has taken a dronier approach to the spaced-out mantra. It is more about finding a spectral groove and entrenching in it rather than offering anything truly evolutionary or propulsive. 'I Darkness, You Fire' has the rattling of bamboo sabres, the sonorous whine of hyperspeed horizons imbued with pastel shades, the glottal thrum of a tantric trance, the rhythmic patter of percussion ushering in a new school of thinking (that is, clear the mind and not to think at all). The title track has an angularity to it due to the rumbling riff, yet it somehow becomes the snake eating its own tail, a White Hills obvious monstrosity that still becomes the garish background foundations for the chants, djembe and hand percussion to take the fore. it's a feverish loop that sets controls inexorably to the dying sun. 'Cold and High' goes for the subterranean cult vibe, submerged in crimson pointed hoods and blazing torch fire, the rattling of broken shells heralding a fertility rite that is as unnerving as it is euphoric. Ending with 'Enter Thaumiel', a pagan lilt made more apocryphal by the sighs and whispers rushing and flowing through the eaves as the organ reaches a funereal slowdance "high" that is taken out of Celtic wonderland by the staccato drums.

A lot of words here, yes - because Capra Informis evokes them. This feels like a testing of the waters - nothing tentative here, more a signal of intent. The incantations to come will be all the more plane-shifting, no matter what throne you kneel at. There will be no sacrificial Goat - that band is very much in control of its own domain - but Capra Informis is an able acolyte in every respect. Get Womb of the Wild through Rocket Recordings here.

Motorik Rehumanises Maserati

I was on my way to see Maserati last week until an emergency pulled me away - and another great gig was missed. I have been listening to Rehumanizer (out now through Temporary Residence on amazing Exploding Sun vinyl now - see below and buy here) incessantly over the past month. I have been becoming more and more obsessed with electronic music that either makes method out of nihilistic noisy madness, or creates a motorik mantra fitting of a retro-futurist dystopia. Rehumanizer is definitely of the latter. Insistent on molding classic rock riffs into a cyclical barrel roll, blown up to resemble cyber colossi, substance and style intrinsically interwoven. The 21st century hard rock amalgam of Trans Am and Goblin (with 'Living Cell' sounding almost 'Great Southern Land' era Icehouse?!), Rehumanizer is both a throwback and a pitch forward, synthetically confronting yet organically immersive.

Leafing Through The Daylight Library

There is an easy flowing metaphysical ambiance that permeates Daylight Versions, the new album from London dreamscapers The Leaf Library. The album is bookended by two long shoegaze excursions – the elastic, fuzz-fuelled languor of the excellent  ‘Asleep Between Stations’ and the cathartic yet contained maelstrom of ‘Evening Gathers’ – but in between are concise reimaginings of magisterial grace ('Slow Spring') and hushed, filmic ululations a la the most contemplative of Yo La Tengo's breathy moments ('Acre'). My favourite track is 'Pushing/Swimming', embodying the naturalistic percolating eloquence of Stereolab, the tapping, burbling permutations of stuttering instrumentation and a calmness aided and abetted by the hushed, sonorous vocals. It seems strange to call this Daylight Versions, as the sounds on offer occupy the gloaming, a time that is neither light or dark, nor is in between - it merely is. Patience is rewarded tenfold here. Grab the LP on white vinyl from Where It's At Is Where You Are Records (wiaiwya) here - hopefully we will see them on a show soon.

Natural Hive

The next four posts are for bands who I sadly missed their shows here in London in the past few weeks due to various powers that be. One of the launchships for excellent Bristol label Howling Owl Records, The Naturals have just released a great debut album in Hive. The Naturals exude a syncopated, synthetic menace that isn’t far removed from the black liquid-coated honeycomb on their cover art. Outside of the percolating, sinuous melodies that wind and entwine, a sleek boa constrictor of seductive tension, the mechanised, synthesised vocals are so manipulated and compartmentalised as to become the most unnatural element at play here (excuse the pun). The core of dub throbs within, the rhythms deep-rooted and insidious. You can find allegiances to all kinds of artists and genres – while the synthetic instrumentation and kinetic drums coalesce in a Battles-worrying intro on ‘Cold People’ or ‘Cauldron’, the experimentation is far more alkaline, feral, clean yet decayed. It plays in oppositions, crafting dark mournful metal whispers around a dystopian disco core. But like most hive-minded creations, Hive is very much a sum of its parts – a breathing behemoth, quivering in its own fetid field, giving birth to its own idiosyncratic spawn. I personally could have done without the closer, funnily enough called ‘Sum’, due to its wafting psychedelic flourishes that flirted too far out of their own crude force field and more akin to something Primal Scream would create in a particularly febrile fugue state, and especially as the penultimate track, ‘It’s Teeth’, is fuelled with a futurist minimalism/maximalism that a cyborg My Disco might morph into in a garish steampunk alternate future. But in all Hive is a hypnotic gem with so many facets winking and twitching in the tectonic shadows that you will forever be getting lost in its acrid slipstreams. Buy Hive here.

Portal To Future Ruins

German noise manipulator Baldruin (AKA Johannes Schebler) manages to create tense, terse, monochrome dystopias by the flick of a switch, the lick of white noise, the stutter of a tapped snare. So the title of his latest release Portal makes a lot of sense - a suite of otherworldly soundscapes that feels both futuristic and primordial, feral and pristine. Even the naturalistic sound of splashing water, an effect that permeates many lo-fi experimental outliers, comes through on an subdued operatic piece ironically called 'Deus Ex Machina'. The sonic mirror that Schelber holds up in Portal never reflects the expected - landscapes are refracted, vistas are distorted, hallucinations waver in and out of clarity, focus and a rooted reality. The lyrics from 'No Escape' come from the poem Night Shift by Sylvia Plath, an artist who made perverse and torn emotion from brutal, provocative imagery. Portal is a fidgety, ethereal gate to distorted parallels - come along for the ride.

Pick a clear vinyl version of Portal here.

A Friday Night Cover Up - Loving Psychedelic Grace

I'm about to drift off to a fuzz-induced sleep - Friday night rock'n'roll - but I thought I would leave off with a pretty ace cover. I mentioned the excellent Grace Vonderkuhn earlier this year - and she has just released this wicked, lysergic psych cover of the Psychedelic Furs' 'Love My Way'. Dive in and drop out - I am, over and over again. Seriously loving this girl. Good night.

Can't See The Bleakness For The Froth

Not exactly a new album, but LA fun buzzards Froth released a warped yet sunny album this year in the form of Bleak. It certainly anything but - a record that has its eyes on the horizon with toes encrusted in sand rather than glued to the tops of their Converse. A powerful series of songs here that swing into garage psych drawl ('On My Chest') and Raveonettes black-tinged surf (the excellent 'Turn It Off'), with a constant sense of letting go, both in relief and desperation - the yin and yang of sonic freedom. And while many enjoyed the fruits of Froth's labours during the summer months, I will be using Bleak to help rise above the bleakness of another European winter. Grab Bleak (if you're lucky) here.

Bastard Boys Are Giggling Through Their Teeth

NY crooked losers loose in the Big Apple Giggly Boys have launched their debut album Bastards Of Young, and it is great - weird, beguiling, cracked. I was a big fan of their EP . (the cover my fiancee claims looks like me - she's on fire tonight, gloves are off), and the album veers into Spray Paint territory on opener 'The Hall', a track seemingly equally indebted to Ranaldo's Sonic Youth left-field takes on straighter rock. 'Crazy From The Heat' continues the cavernous production and Mike Zorman's moaned, quasi-barked and clipped vocals, yet there is a coldness here that evokes Scandi goth punk (the juxtaposition is in the name...) 'Butter Banquet' is more diseased, a (C)ramped sense of humour infiltrating these darker riffs and claustrophobic rolls, albeit with some slowed art-rock interludes and a glammed up lead back to the fever. 'Weird Lie' and 'Tiny Taste' again take a Ranaldo hue, but also evoke mid-career Blank Realm (possibly in the Daniel Spencer-esque vocal delivery). You can tell that I haven't made any Protomartyr references here, although you can hear echoes in 'Midnight Ones' or the similarly-named 'Darker Shade Of Pale'. Maybe because Bastards Of Young is so kaleidoscopic in sonic range that the references are spread far and wide. 'Country Lee' is something I wish Brisbane band-in-hiatus Nova Scotia had written. Now I doubt that Giggly Boys are into those guys - but the connections to Australian and American bands that flirt with mainstream composition before dragging them on wider, weirder slipstreams is clear. The throwback closer 'Whatever' is great too. Let's hope that these Bastards Of Young never get old - this is great stuff.

Grab the record through This Ain't Heaven Recordings here. If you are in New York tonight, head to The Gateway where Giggly Boys play alongside another new SM fave, Frog.

A Million Farewells Is Never Enough For Tom & Katie

What do you make of a band called Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes? When one of the members is ex-Pairs and Pale Head Xiao Zhong, you know to expect something brilliant - but the earnest excellence on show on standalone LP A Million Farewells is likely to throw most listeners. A shoegaze album that is filled with more melodic rhythm and direction than most pretenders can pin down; a breakup album and band that have predictably broken up, but unpredictably created songs that overflow with warmth and buoyant emotion. A flailing chaotic unleashing of feeling and tension into a nebulous sonic cloud, an unleashing of wild feeling and abandon. So you can start with the heart-stopping euphoric caterwaul of 'Come Back Home' put alongside the soaring countrified 'Bird Is Flying' that explodes into something else in the final third, and the creeping muted noise of 'Sam's Knife', without it feeling anything more than complete. In fact 'My Life Is Over' is 'Come Back Home' distilled into a two minute format - in case the set list is cut in half? Either way, it shows the fluidity that these guys hold. But the truly stunning thing about this band and this album is the beauty that hovers ever-present throughout. This is mostly due to the beautifully arresting vocals of CeeQ - when she unleashes, it catches your breath in your throat, your chest swells. Yep, the waves of emotion cascade down, and as Tom and Katie fade away, you won't be afraid to shed a tear too. To put it simply, A Million Farewells is a stunning gem that has risen out of nowhere, like the truest of stunning forces of nature, and just as quickly disappears - but should be witnessed by all. When describing this to my fiancee, she said 'so it's like the Northern Lights for you, then?' You know what? That'll do.*

*Yes, I may have shed a tear at the sight of the Northern Lights. Enhanced though I may have been, I stand by it.

Big Brave Lords

Since Canadian doomed rockers Big Brave sent me a track of theirs a couple years ago, I have been in acolyte thrall. It wasn't long before other, keener eyes took note, and now we finally have their second record Au De La out through the gargantuan Southern Lord label. Its sinister and seductive, slow monolithic rock that perforates with sheer, measured downstrokes, and caresses with a vocal dexterity that coalesces between the watermarks of PJ Harvey, Chelsea Wolfe and Bjork. The silences are as deafening as the crushing noise. Whispers of Eastern temporal mantras; the conscious building of otherworldly weight, both felt and imagined, permeates other quarters. Every song is a measure of patience and reward - everything calibrated to an inch of its life. Yet the passion and fury that courses through every microsecond of Au De La is what makes this album so breathtaking. As calm as things can get, or chaotic (sometimes, like closer '(re)collection Part II', both exist), everything is torn from Big Brave's very being. Very brave indeed - this album is unrelenting, but in my opinion, one of the most devastatingly enthralling records committed to tape in 2015. GET THIS, NOW.

Wolf Eyes Is The Problem

Wolf Eyes never do what you expect them to. Even their nihilistic noise isn't something you can take for granted. Look at their latest record, I Am A Problem: Mind In Pieces. Firstly it's been put out through Jack White's Third Man Records, in what seems like an incongruous partnership. Secondly, the woozy narcogenic 'Catching The Rich Train' with its mournful sax drone and Nate Young's discombobulated vocals shows the industrial grind and white-noise blitzkrieg of the past has bled out into other realms, with the singular shift being an adherence to tone and melody. The outcome is still visceral, but in a more lurking, deceptively subliminal way - a grinding Giallo, a narcissistic horror symphony of sneers and syphilitic dreams. I know that bands like Liars have taken techno touchstones and pushed them to unnerving corners, but I Am A Problem is truly insidious. Although not unheard of - the trio's solo guises (especially Young's Regression work) all have infiltrated the Wolf Eyes aesthetic. There are moments where the atonal squall comes close to the surface, like 'Enemy Ladder', but in the main I Am A Problem is noxious brilliance. Grab it here.

VIDEO VACUUM - Sewers, The Steady As She Goes, Marville, Julia R Anderson, These Guy

Goddamn, if it hasn't been donkeys' since I did a Video Vacuum! So here is a quick one, highlighting some Brisbane acts that have put out some moving pics to go with the sounds of recent times...

Sewers have done their best to destroy 2015, what with the release of their second LP Weight on Homeless Records and US tour. 'Still Stinging' is the best example, aurally and visually, of what these boys represent, facials and all.

One of the surprise hits of last year was Dangerous & Dead, the debut album from one man goth-noir-Western monolith The Steady As She Goes. A surprise in that it's all one man, Tal Wallace, and that the cavernous, brooding intensity can be sustained in a live setting - easily becoming one of my favourite bands to take in. Now he is prepping to release follow-up Monoliths, and a perfect example of what to expect is 'No One Will Care When You Die'. Johnny Cash if he entered into a never-ending twilight palaver with Michael Gira, overseen by the Ulver chorus and reigning Cthulhu. The Man In Blackest Black. Dark as the limitless depths of your depraved soul - and far better for it.

Grunged-out duo Marville aren't messing around with 'Fickle', a track that oozes, crawls, gnaws and spits at you. Ash (Bottlecock) is now joined by Doug on the skins, and the bulk and heft is evident here. Just as the ink sprays on the canvas, 'Fickle' is an onslaught - one that isn't likely to wash out anytime soon. Break out the bleach.

Let's finish off with two of my favourite Brisbane artists, both of which come out of the very-shortlived band  Tabletop Lamps. First up is Julia R Anderson, whose evolution from a contemplative noise pop maven swimming in Yo La Tengo and Galaxie 500 waters to the art-pop contusions of 'In The Beginning' is nothing short of breathtaking. That performance in the clip, reminiscent of so many things (Ash's 'Girl On Mars' colour palette notwithstanding) is evidence of an artist growing in stature and confidence. Everything I have seen and heard her do has been exciting. Get behind this - in the year we see the further reaches of Julia Holter and Jenny Hval, Anderson deserves to be huge.

And let's end with some quirky yacht pop from These Guy AKA Joe Saxby (now joined by two pop weirdniks in crime). 'That Fucking Guy' is brilliant in every way - the hipster-baiting, the dork embracing, the air instruments and mic, the fly on the burger, and the visceral and violent about-turn in the last minute. Stupid genius is the best kind of genius.

Hits From The Box #119 - Zipped Tricks

I saw a kid throw a zipper at a teacher today. Their own zipper, at that. Not even the tag - the whole zipper. The kid now has to spend the rest of the day isolated, with a hole in the front of his trousers. One of the craziest things I have ever seen.

And on that note... Let's get some Hits from the Box on!

A straight up fit with such shenanigans is PWRBTTM, whose Ugly Cherries LP is a cheeky, sparkling noise pop bliss bomb of a record. The queer punk duo are electric, their brand of guitar rock imbuing their ebullient voice and poignant lyrics with the sonic chaos and buoyant catharsis of the likes of (re)surgent roustabouts Krill, LVL UP and Pile (all Exploding In Sound alumni - of course!). Father/Daughter Records had an uncanny knack of sniffing out some truly inventive gems, but PWR BTTM could very well be their jewel in the crown.

Sad Boy's Club, the new record by Sydney post-rockers Solkyri, actually came out back in April (on my dad's birthday no less), but I have only gotten around to listening to it the past month. From the cover art (sheep clustered together in snow with a rugged, paganesque wooden fence in the background) up, it is an energising, breathtaking experience. Opener 'Team Solar' plays somewhere between very early Explosions In The Sky or Summer-lite Mogwai and the freneticism of And So I Watch You From Afar - and it builds from there. There are plenty of bands floating around Australia that proudly vie for the mantle of the country's best post-rock act - such as The Sea Shall Not Have Them and sleepmakeswaves - yet I think on this evidence Solkyri are right up there.

Now for something completely different, we have Fingers In The Gloss, an album of sound compositions by London artist Lisa Busby (also of Rutger Hauser). A bold, defiant mind melt of a pop decomposition, the album espouses finding skewed liminal spaces to drag conventions across, leaving opaque smearings not dissimilar to art pop machinations but also playing well outside those parameters. An intriguing incremental experiment that feel deliberately confined, the idea being to soar within constraints of her own devising, Busby creates a persona that is at once entrancing and unnerving, a sensuous chimera that wavers just outside peripheral A/V reach, a VHS-and-fluorescence shadow. Definitely worthy tracking.

Hollow Blown Egg HD720p from Lisa Busby on Vimeo.

Here is another Aussie release I missed first time around. I have spoken about Melbourne goth post-punkers Tangrams in the past. Here is a side project from Andrew Dalziell, Nausea. His four-track EP Siren is a shadow-dweller also, but one that is much more contemplative - the brooding is internalised, brought out by the occasional fuzzed blasts of guitar. The drum machine simplifies proceedings but also helps with the twilight noir vibes that emanate from within. Nausea sits somewhere between a stripped to the skeleton Sisters Of Mercy, a desperately destitute Crime and the City Solution, and a mascara'd David Lynch - yet faintly sparkling with hope that the positive forces of life - love, warmth, a lingering embrace - will win out. Haunting stuff, yet oddly uplifting.

Back over to Melbourne, Australia now, where they have General Men. The Drier Months is a great title for any number of bands' albums that seep out of the sweating inertia of Australian punk malcontents (think The Spinning Rooms, Deaf Wish or Cuntz), but these boys are the ones who claim it - and it is their thrashed, down-tuned, barely-conscious noise that owns it. There is a backyard bawl and broken drawl here that is reminiscent of Tom Lyngcoln (Nation Blue, Harmony, Pale Heads), an operatic waver arching over the feedback tsunamis that lick at the heels of  Jamie Hutchings (Bluebottle Kiss), a booze-and-sweat drenched laconicism emblematic of Tex Perkins in chest-thumping Beasts mode...a little Cosmics spitting on the edges too. These aren't general men. Neither are General Men. Watching these guys intently, as should you.

Finally we have the reptilian punk of APE!, a Philly trio who revel in the rebellion of full-tilt rock. Their album, Hunting With The Lord, is straight up shotgun rock blast to the face. This kind of unadulterated sonic assault is what we all need from time to time - a clearing out of the excesses of intricacy, replaced with the searing excesses of growled shouts, guitar solos, rumbling bass and pierced snare skins. They get more 70s stadium-embracing on tracks like 'Out Of The Fog', but for the full APE! effect, take a taste of 'Deep Tint' below.


Happy Tuesday everyone!

Rotting Pits

Sub Pop are making some major plays in the past eighteen months that have me reinvigorated in their utmost relevance as a label. I have always held faith of course, but with their signing of Mogwai and excellent new records from Deaf Wish, Metz, Pissed Jeans and Sleater-Kinney, their cache is bolstered. Add to this incoming desiccated salvo Neo from Seattle nihilists So Pitted. The name threw me, so when I heard 'Rot In Hell' I was punched in the face with the raw racket blasting forth. The trio manage to spew bile in tetanus-coated fury with a sense of banal diffidence that is almost offensive if it wasn't so dead-eyed brilliant. The band play out as if Pop. 1280 were electrocuted on-stage and zapped back into a parallel corduroy-and-flannel 90s cesspit, thankfully landing on and killing Green Jelly and taking their place. The orange-and-black cover art for the album (not due out until Feb next year) is stark and arresting - the colour coordination reminding me of SM band Cobwebbs, with a similar sense of gutter noise melding with slack-jawed indifference. Pre-order Neo (in white vinyl) here.

Can't Sleep With Deep Heat

Melbourne punks Deep Heat have put out some great releases over the past couple of years, especially their 10" EP New Design - it is still one of the most played pieces of vinyl I own. And their split with White Walls is so good, I bought a second one to put into the first Sonic Masala giveaway (I think the other pieces were a Dreamtime record, a Tym Guitars T-shirt and something else I can't remember...) So to hear that they have re-joined Poison City Records to launch their second record, Still Life. They have been quite of late, with members spread across taking part in The Stevens, Infinite Void and Shaking Hell. They are revitalised and ready to tear the air asunder. Listen to that frenetic bass that opens first track of the record, 'Sleep'. They have not lost any of the hedonistic rush of finding melody within raw angularity, the round-vowelled and clipped yet drawled delivery of Gus Lord meaning that lyrics are more insinuated than finely articulated, and Katie is so tight as the drumming rhythm that it's impossible to think of a better calibrated beast. 'Sleep' pitches into the past, echoing the darkness and desperation of blue-denim punk rock, whilst also propelling into the dank twilight of Melbourne's sweaty inner suburbs, a warm yet suffocating place, where insomnia is both a blessing and a curse. If this is the kind of nugget that callused minds churn out from being starved of rest and oxygen, keep them on the hamster wheel. I fucking love this song; I fucking love this band; and I can't wait until 2016 when I can fucking love this album.

Held Aloft And Culled

Sydney dark distorted dreamers Cull have FINALLY have brought us their debut album, Aloft, and they are finishing up their East Coast tour tonight in Brisbane at the Foundry (alongside Sonic Masala band BARGE With An Antenna On It and two SM faves, Spirit Bunny and Blonde Tongues. The album is as anthemic, operatic, awash with gossamer sonics and quirky left-field shimmers and stutters - the magical flourish effect that floats over 'Magi Fuel', the bent faux-yacht warble that permeates 'Truth Bomb', the harped effect that flutters its fiery fingers over the tetchy spaces of 'The Quality Of Being Lifelike'... Cull are a different band, in that it is hard to really pin them down. They have elements of Radiohead's insidious experimentation, the bent pastoral psych of Tame Impala, the slowburn intellectual dreamscapes of Pink Floyd - but then it is none of these things either. The esoteric, shapeshifting nature of the songs on Aloft could come across as too obtuse - and on paper, I wouldn't normally subscribe. But these guys have that hidden apocryphal vial, that untenable talent that is fused in their DNA and no-one else's, that makes them unique and endlessly intriguing. And when they let go with the wall of sound, you know you have been hit - in the chest, in the brain, in the heart, in the psyche. (Plus they are lovely dudes, so that helps). Get Aloft here, get to the Foundry tonight, get Culled.

HMAS Scrap Rock Gods

Finishing off the week with not one but TWO Hobart-related posts, because. Homeless Records have not steered me wrong once, so when Richie sent me through the archival material of lost Tassies hMAS, as if I wasn’t going to dive headlong into the murky waters without testing the depths. Sure, Fear God Honour The King has enough aural debris, sonic outcroppings and shaggy rock to knock someone out, but these are the types of waters I regularly bathe in. Recorded in 1997 (!) and remixed by lazy sonuvabitch Mikey Young (and mastered by Ben Crothers), this bears much resemblance to the kind of fuzz-damaged literate silliness that Sonic Masala band Tape/Off spew out at irregular angles (‘Fungus’ sounds like the broken bridge between EP and album for the Brisbane slackdog millionaires), and is the unassuming cesspit that geographical brethren Treehouse sprouted from. Richie’s phrasing of hMAS as ‘pointless yet essential’ is a great way of describing the bent and blasted guitar rock here, as concerned with smashing things in some form of identifiable tempo and melody as they are at being noisily indecipherable – it’s the kind of cacophonous mess that is also bristling with hooks, tone deaf yet glistening with naïve-pop noise. The backwards oscillating loop that sounds like an stoner experiment takes up the first half of the appropriately titled ‘Absurd’ (the second half is a demo-esque punk blast of questionable quality, but what good punk isn’t?); the pig-fuck scrawl that permeates the pub-punk sweat-flecked ‘Bucket Boy’; the Devo-meets-addled-Jim-Carroll-with-added-space-wah ‘Friend Is Dead’ – it is all a bunch of friends fucking about. Maybe it wasn’t meant to be heard. Thank the Lord for Homeless that hMAS now has a home.

You can grab Fear God Honour The King here - be quick though because there are only 3 left! If you are lucky you can get versions of the other two releases – The Computer Tape, a experiment (hMAS to a tee) of their songs reconditioned to a Commodore Amiga 500, vocal melodies and all. A Kraftwerk-meets-Devo reimagined score of an Atari 8-bit version of Mad Max III: Beyond Thunderdome. Weird – and pretty amazing. Then there is 1996’s Goes Pop!, which was originally released for 25c with an added A4 zine, and has had some of the hiss and banter cut out. Lowest fidelity, the mud at the bottom of a creek beer, misplaced, waylaid, laced with memories. A remnant of what may have been, a holographic projection of fizzing, sparking, faux greatness. Get in.