CD Expulsion - Flotsam And Jetsam of 2013

So here are a bunch of physicals in CD form that I have collated over the past few months that I thought I would yammer on about in the one post. 2013 is over - the Purge is nigh... Ill try to stretch it all into a superfluous narrative for you though...

I saw Chicago's motorik finest Cave in Brisbane the night I flew out to England. Literally - I got to Brisbane from Maryborough at 3pm, went home and packed, went out with my big-arse suitcase to the pub to have a "meeting" about the Sonic Masala label, watched Cave, spoke briefly to Cooper Crain from the band, then stepped out, hailed a cab and went to the airport, in the air for 2am. Maybe it was the nervous energy, maybe they are just that good - but Cave were transcendental in their trance-like rhythmic mantras, their jams tightly coiled, barely suppressed double helix's of Kraut instrumentation and manipulations. All on the back of their new record Threace, which is pretty damn amazing. I wanted to give it a bigger write-up, but I only received it a week before I flew out, which was madness, then, well, anyway, have a listen. It's out through Drag City and you can buy it from here.

I received Gilded Pleasures, the new EP from Californian psyched out weirdos The Growlers, at the same time as Cave's Threace, and it suffered a similar fate. It did soundtrack a spate of marking 3rd year creative writing students' final projects, which was suitably delirious. Its pretty long - 9 songs at just under half an hour - Weezer would call that an LP - and can be hit and miss, as is the wont of the extended play format. But when songs like 'Dogheart II' or the great delivery of 'Hiding Under Cover' floats through the speakers, all unabashedly sleazy and breezy, The Growlers really nail it. This would have made my top EPs of 2013 in retrospect. Hot news - The Growlers will be in Australia in March, playing Black Bear Lodge in Brisbane on March 5. See you there.

Mucky Sailor is a band from Leeds. They are a two piece obsessed with flamboyant silliness and fancy dress. They offer a suitably unhinged live show. They feature one of the drummers from Nope. Said drummer is a close friend of my brother-in-law. My sister gave me their album Early Lad back in July. I have wanted to interview the band for a while, but my slackness has won out there. I could have seen them play in December as they played the Shacklewell Arms which is literally down the road from where I was staying - but I drank at home and watched six episodes of Bob's Burgers instead. Get Early Lad here, and get to one of their shows (AKA don't be me). Fin.

(taken by Glen Schanau)

I missed new Melbourne "supergroup"Heads Of Charm play Brisbane in December by a matter of days. The trio (David Gagliardi - Laura; Sam Reid - Bone; Sam Whiting - Nikko) played a number of shows and by all reports fucking slayed. Totally bummed - I would have been at these shows (especially seeing as the Saturday gig was with both bands on Sonic Masala Records...) Typically irascible yet tongue-in-check balltearers from these guys. Come back soon, yeah?

Melbourne dreamers Beloved Elk released the EP Peace Offering onto the world in December, and its a regal gem. I managed to sneak a listen to this the day I left Australian shores, on a train from Maryborough to Brisbane. The train was waylaid because a truck drove into a bridge. A lot of people were pissed off. At first I was too, but then I put this on and all anxiety and anguish and frustration with the idiocy of the general populace bled away. Beautiful stuff.

Brisbane chamber experimentalists Nonsemble released Practical Mechanics in physical form through Lofly Records. A beguiling amalgam of Conservatory punctuality and pragmatism with underground playfulness and subversive zeal, the tracks here are at times hard to digest, with deliberate shifts in medium and rhythm coming on rather strong. But the point is that Nonsemble are attempting to traverse new frontiers, and when they successfully create their own soundscape (which happens frequently) it's a majestic experience.

The final official Sonic Masala show of the year featured Auckland's nihilists Girls Pissing On Girls Pissing and Melbourne's inimitable Orlando Furious. We also featured the welcome return of Adam Cadell (The Scrapes, Nikko). Playing alongside accomplished drummer Tony Irving, Adam put on a great improv set that set the tone for the rest of the evening. Irving himself is no stranger to great live sounds though, and one of the bands he has worked with is The Impossible. The free jazz/noise trio recorded a couple of songs as part of an Audiopollen show, the results of which are below. Excellent stuff.

Back to the Cave show, and one of the supports was Ghost Notes (currently on a brief hiatus - expect them back midway through the year). Before becoming the excellent Ghost Notes some of the members were in a band called Buildings Melt. I only got my hands on their only album We're All Going To Be Dirt In The Ground that night - and its a fantastic instrumental release. The live nature of the recordings showcases some of the earliest works for Cam Smith of Incremental Studios, and it works well to create a warm, all-inclusive suite of sounds. I think Ill be returning to this quite a bit over the next few weeks as I try to crack on with my writing...

Sydney based, artist run label Feral Media continue to put out quality releases, including some seasonal EP compilations. I'm including Spring because I was sent a physical copy that I only got around to playing recently, and it features this killer track from Nimble Animal.

Finally, I was walking along the Thames back in July and this guy was busking, playing pretty rad songs from the banks, all through a little amp. It was stripped and laconic, and at first I thought it was Brisbane's debonair troubadour misanthrope James X Boyd (it wasn't, but its a thought mate...), but turns out it was Flame Proof Moth. I threw down some change and he got off his deckchair and gave me a CD. This is that CD. It's one of my favourite memories of that trip - and another reminder of how amazing music can be when wielded by people with creativity, energy and cheek (plus he's supported Jeffrey Lewis and Kevin Eldon - pretty bloody excellent I reckon).

Hozac Takes Me To First Base On An Epicycle

Back in July I was sitting in a governmental café, waiting for the outcome of a court case and a lift to Byron Bay. That’s the start for a good story right there. Instead, I spent two hours listening to Hozac-sanctioned garage rock gems, specifically the new album from Shocked Minds.

Today I sit on a train weaving its way from Maryborough West to Brisbane, where I will drop off assessment pieces to a local university, pack a bag, have one final meeting about a special, exciting event that I am about to embark upon, then see mates in Ghost Notes and Cobwebbs support Chicago legends Cave (you can still gettickets here) before I wing my way to the UK. We have reached Nambour, where we have sat for an hour after a truck somehow ran into a bridge. I don’t know how to soundtrack the amount of emotions that are bolting around in my heart, my chest, my ever overactive brain. So now, much like that surprisingly balmy winter’s morning, rather than attempt to sum it up, it’s time to counter the apprehension and anticipation with some bludgeoning Hozac heaven.

First Base! No, I haven’t had a pepped-up virile lady sit next to me on the train – she’s four rows down, chugging mini red wines at 12.45pm – it’s the power-punk buzz of an album from the same-named Toronto sugarpunks. Its effervescent crack, hard to stay angry (or any other emotion other than giddy deliriousness) when this stuff is coursing through your brain like mainlined sugar. It has elements of a Superchunk/Thermals hybrid that loved Del Shannon and 80s made, 60s set high school romantic comedies a little too much and couldn’t make it out of their own basement, yet had more than enough money to build a good studio-slash-bunker so that they never had to leave. Song titles include ‘I’m All Alone Again’, ‘Get A Taste Of Your Love Again’, ‘She’s Boy Crazy’ and ‘That’s My Girlfriend’, seemingly attesting to such notions – but then tracks like ‘I Broke My Mind’ give a clearer notion to these crackpots’ machinations. Crazy yet gloriously infectious. The organ is what really sells this – a wailing call of the warm and fuzzies.

Then we have the excellent Epicycle, a late 70s punk act that Hozac are thankfully shining a light on once more. These clean cut snots from Chicago were healthily instilled in the brotherhood of punk's true pioneers, but their relative obscurity is a goddamn shame. This retrospective, You’re Not Gonna Get It, beautifully exemplifies the juxtaposition of Epicycle’s raw-edged pop with their propensity for scabrous wit and sweaty abandon. So it swings from Ramones aping, Kinks aping, The Who aping… Yet rather than remain an adept and chameleonic tribute band, Epicycle transcend due to their excellent songwriting chops and their insistent mining of insidious hooks. Seriously, I wish these guys could play at my wedding, if I ever get married of course. Perfect soundtrack to what I see as a tumultuous, scary yet life-affirming event. Or the soundtrack to a train ride with a bunch of tweakers. Plus they have the song ‘Radical Attitude’ with the line “I’m the guy that you shot down/I’m the guy with the long hair and a radical attitude/I'm the nigger white honky Jew all wrapped up in one.”

So we have the pop fizz with the sardonic fuzz. My day is infinitely better. How about yours?

A Hozac Triptych Of Seven Inches

I’m kinda getting 7” (and revisionist garage rock) happy this week, and here are three more, all from the Hozac world, that have been taking turns at spiriting me away from the real world, into one filled with attitude, mayhem and hedonistic fun.

Winter Bear is the new venture from ex-Cave Weddings songstress Erin Dorbin, and the two tracks here are imbued with enough summertime revelry and devil-may-care energy to fuel many a beachside moon party. ‘Jump In The Fire’ has the requisite punchy vocals and doo-wop backing vocals, but it’s Dorbin’s steely guitar riffs that infuse this with enough growl and bluster to supersede the cutesy exterior and be a true acolyte of 50s leather rock n roll. ‘Should I Leave’ flows on, more of the same, and it spins around and around, a youthful elixir that pushes aside the clouds and back the clock. Vintage pop tunes, shrink-wrapped and left in an attic, left until now, a true relic of then and now, if slightly warped from the sun and Dorbin’s overflowing charms.

But you can only by walking on sunshine for a certain amount of time before getting burnt and hurtling back to earth, and Cop City/Chill Pillars’ Gift Shop/Brand New Neighbor Blues has the requisite cement in the scorched punk rhythms to make that trip all the quicker. There is a primitive baseness to these two tracks (and indeed on the band’s debut eponymous LP) that disarms. The DEVO card is whipped out regularly when these guys find their feet, and it’s pretty warranted – the spaced out, deliciously warped compositions shouldn’t make sense – at all – yet inexorably draw you in. Before long you are splattered on terra firma, every bone, muscle and organ turned to jelly, yet you continue to hum these tunes through cracked teeth as you breathe your last.

  

Finally we are slammed with some squalling psych detritus from Chicago’s Verma. I know Hozac isn’t just a dirty, scuzzy garage den – they harbour the likes of The Band In Heaven and Human Eye in their midst - but it always blindsides me when something outside the mold crawls out of the darkness and into your ear. The assault is duly justified though – the uneasy motorik energy informing the swirling ‘Ragnaraak’ evokes the most ethereal yet dark machinations of the likeminded Cave, blistering the walls and scorching the floors with their fiery outro; whilst ‘Chrome’ ploughs through serrated tempests of noise to settle into a insidious groove that is pregnant with ill-tempered intent. The kaleidoscopic undulations are insistent, incessant, invasive and invigorating – you won’t be yourself when the needle stops, nor will you want to be.

 

You can pick all this slices of heaven up here.

Sole Corrections Make For Some Heavy Times

I just got a hold of Chicago reprobates Heavy Times' 3rd record Fix It Alone (out on the inimitable Hozac Records). The breakneck punk that permeates these eighteen tracks hits you like the Ebola virus, but rather than eradicating your immune system, these tracks fortify your soul, line your stomach and heal your liver - who needs diseases when Man's most dangerous predator is himself? Fix It Alone is a finely tuned beast, showcasing rambunctious yell-alongs ('Ouija Board', 'Kidnapped', 'Trouble Walker'), dark lurking sleaze ('Night Looks', 'In My Sleep'), champagne-edition ballbreaking knucklebusters ('Future Creeps', 'Daylight'), lairy sun-drenched good times ('American Love', 'River's Edge')... It's so infectious it should have its own visceral, wretch-inducing label slapped on the cover - for this album is surely more addictive than any other drug placed on this earth. Ramones, Wipers, Black Lips, MC5 - their ghosts (present and past) all knock on the door, desperate to join the Heavy Times party. Cooper Crain (Bitchin' Bajas/CAVE)'s production is excellent, elevating the album yo even loftier heights. Such unashamed punk shouldn't be this pristine - yet in another world Heavy Times would be on the panel of The X Factor. Drunken pop doyens with a sprinkling of barbed wire, Heavy Times are looking good, and with Fix It Alone, are dressed to kill.

Fix It Alone can be gleaned from here. Heavy Times are launching this at The Empty Bottle tonight alongside the excellent Oblivians - if you are in the area, there is nothing else you need to do but be at that show.

Heavy Times - River's Edge

Gnod On The Wire Past The 5th Sun

Salford's best exponents of dark, dank, dirty psych drone (and funniest bastard alive Stewart Lee's fave band) Gnod have two recent releases of note that are damned (and killer).


First of all, we have Chaudelande Volume 2 which came out a few months ago on Tamed Records. The followup to Chaudelande Volume 1 (strangely...), this three track release is one tripped out motorik trip into the netherworld and back, guaranteed to tear a fraction of your soul away in the process. The grooves inherent in this album are insane - I never expected Gnod to reach these heady heights. I personally love 'Man On The Wire' (why didn't this soundtrack some portion of Kill List? Or maybe The Wicker Tree - that film mightn't have been such a dire disappointment otherwise...) and 'Entrance', but 'Genocider' is beautifully unrelenting also. They are so on song here that it is scary. You must get this - seriously.

Gnod - Man On The Wire


Then to make things interesting, along comes brilliantly destructive Irish label Trensmat (who have also put out sweet one-offs by the likes of White Hills, Evan Caminiti, Expo '70 and Cave) and and drops 5th Sun, a delectable slice of Gnodisms that works as a symmetrical trip into an exploding star. The flip side is '5th Dub', the closest these dark alchemists will ever get to being Massive Attack (and it's still solar systems in comparison). You can grab that one here.

Gnod - 5th Sun

One of the most underrated psych bands out there. Get on board.

Super Best Friends Do The Can Can With Megatron

It's a gloomy Friday in Brisbane - well it is a Sonic Masala show on tonight, and it has rained on every occasion, so it makes sense. So I needed music that would get me through. Fang Island's newie got the ball rolling - then I cam across London collective Super Best Friends Club. Seeing as I'm in a party mood, but don't have the requisite drugs available to get it going (working in a school has that issue...), their EP People We Forget This Is Love was my substitute. An ecstatic tribal drone explosion that sounds like members of Zen Zen Egui, Cave and Black Dice got together with Devendra Banhart and Alexander Ebert, then got tastefully fucked up and recorded the effluent that resulted. There are so many ideas floating about in here, its fair to say a few miss the mark. Nevertheless, its all done with so much gay abandon that its nigh on impossible to hold it against them.


You can get People We Forget This Is Love here. They also have two new tracks, 'Yes You Are!' and 'Universe Universe', here.

Super Best Friends Club - Sunshine, Super Megatron!

They Don't Know Unless You Tell Them

FSS put out a nice lil sampler a little while back, titled They Dont Know Unless You Tell Them. Its a true showcase of what FSS has to offer, namely noise, ambient noise, static white noise, noise (insert type here)core and noisy rock. Bruce FSS loves his noise, what can I tell you! And so does Sonic Masala, so you'd be right in guessing that we love this sampler, introducing us to sprawling static specialists A Story Of Rats, the dark ambience of Interbellum, and the industrial roar of Grief No Absolution. However, as Ive already thrown my full backing behind Dead Meat (see here), there are more structurally 'mainstream' (EXTREMELY loose use of that term here though...) bands on display also. So here were my highlights, in a brief synopsis a la the Tough Love sampler review from the weekend...

No Anchor - I had to start with these guys. From my hometown of Brisbane, Australia, this three piece are raw and powerful - and are getting noticed. Having played with other Brissy underground brilliance merchants Turnpike, Dick Nasty and Del Toro, as well as doom maestros Grey Daturas, this month they support The Boredoms in their only stand-alone concert Down Under - well done boys.

Dead Meat - monikered along with about a million other bands, most of which suck serious arse, these San Fran miscreants are well and truly on my radar - we're trying to get them over to the UK, to seriously destroy. They are also doing their biggest support slot to date, propping up Scream later this month.

Wrnlrd - one of the most eclectic and prolific bands in black metal, Wrnlrd have released eighth (I think...could be higher) LP Myrmidon, and all standard and no-so-standard implements are applied - including banjo and fiddle. Their influences include Bathory...and the Shangri-las. Weird, yet darkly wonderful.

A Story Of Rats - another eclectic dude, who comes from the 'northwest plateau of the United States'. Has created some nice crawling atmospherics. Worth a look.

Interbellum - a producer and engineer by trade, what is created here is some dark and haunting ambient chamber music brilliance - is capable of some great compositions.

Grief No Absolution - incredibly dark noise drone a la Sunn O)))) and Earth - yet to me has more substance (although LOVED Sunn O))))'s last LP, loved it!), unrelenting, delves into the darkest of winter months and drags you even deeper.

Caves - a dirty black metal band from NYC that create actual innovative soundscapes of darkness. Im not a black metal fan, and Caves wont turn me on this fact - but they gave it their best shot, Satan bless 'em.

And here are a couple of tracks to give you the idea of what to expect. Flingco Sound System are giving this away over at their site, so go get it!

No Anchor - Wolves Bite And Disappear

Grief No Absolution - Befalling The End Of One's Own Harpoon

Wrnlrd - Mephitic Celebrator