NYC noise units (with added banjo!?!?) Show Me The Body have just released this manic video for their track 'Body War', a display of body slamming and manipulation that is a sight to behold. Add that to the band's killer crunch and you have a brilliant music video, one that I cannot stop watching. These guys are one of the most exciting acts on the planet right now, and they are going to prove that to UK audiences starting this weekend. Get down to their show at DIY Space Feb 9 - it promises to shatter and rebuild your will to live.
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.
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.
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 Hivehere.
Not a bad weekend London. Spent Saturday wandering around the joint, drinking in Spitalfields/Shoreditch/on the Thames; spent Sunday lapping up the intermittent sun and vintage sparkle in Crystal Palace. Now at home enjoying copious Doom Bars and fajitas while watching The Iannucci programs, listening to music and revelling in wearing shorts without climate recriminations. Work may be shit, and I still may not get enough time (or definitely money) in the day to focus on Sonic Masala, but when London embraces you it's a mighty fine thing.
Let's get into some new music - and because I have the buzz on, let's look at eight acts out of the inbox!
Kicking off with Boston's Vundabar, yet another amazing off-kilter guitar rock band from Massachusetts (how aren't these guys on Exploding In Sound?). Their record Gawk is something to get excited about - a bubbling, fidgeting, spasming gem, playing like Menomena with a Pile complex (don't we all these days?). Math rock twitches, tropical vocals that belie inherent personal anxieties and anachronisms, melodies destined to burrow into your brain - Gawk has it all. Pick it up here.
With bands like Gazar Strips, Nite Fields and Bat Nouveau, Brisbane has had its fair share of great Gothic post-punk acts over the last few years. Now add Nature Trails. The four-piece manage to traverse time, space, geography - a Matt Beringer croon here, a Simon Gallup bassline there, cold yet entrancing 80s Berlin monochrome wasteland everywhere. Their six EP In Glass is glistening with ethereal yet pervasive promise, and their current strong work ethic will see the four-piece continue to rise.
Staying Down Under we check out the demos of Sydney trio Draining Pool. Barking Out casts a three-sided die of alternate possibility - 'I'm So Low' starts off like a narcoleptic Stephen Malkmus murmur before hiccoughing into a washed out fuzz dream; 'Intelligence' tingles with urgency, an off-key radio transmission that bleeds into the mainstream like a emaciated Antipodean Gaslight Radio relic; and 'Barking Out' takes its time in building its wonky indie patois, taking in a Krautrock hue and hemming it all in with the effect of a broken foyer speaker dribbling forth muzak from another world. These are early days, but Draining Pool really evoke something special. The band play with SM faves Spirit Bunny and Matt Banham this Saturday in Sydney before venturing to the Queensland capital for fellow Sydneysiders Beast & Flood's album launch at the Bearded Lady (alongside SM cronies Ghost Notes and great upstarts Low Season).
Excellent French distro label Beko Disques have been promoting a lot of Aussie stuff recently (expect to hear more news about these releases soon...and maybe a few SM related things too...). The main release that I have been listening to the past week though has been from Ukrainian band Blagodat, whose two-track taster is incredible. Taking sinuous post-punk lurkers into a lustrous yet brooding soundscape, Blagodat rattle the cages with gravity and grandeur. As you can see I am loving this kind of sound right now...
The Rauch-Sasseen sisters (Anna, Erin and Katie) make up the centrifugal force of Brooklyn's Hey Anna, whose soon-to-drop album Run Koko is a golden miasma of indie whimsy that manages to offer effervescence through prisms of light melodies and bombastic instrumental bluster. From the propulsive drive and 'Spirit In The Sky' echoes of 'Don't Talk Stop' to the cascading shimmer and shadow of 'Island and the smart punchiness of 'Move Your Body', Hey Anna manage to marry melody with muscle and in the process are crafting some of the most infectious pop of 2015 while maintaining a high degree of integrity. Heavyweight lightness maybe?
Back to Australia now with Kit Convict & Thee Terrible Two, a rough and ready, ramshackle garage rock band that revel as much in adulation of idols The Easybeats as they do with modern garage contemporaries and injecting it all with a strong serum of The Cramps' rusted ridiculousness, the trio's album Watch Your Skull is a breakneck blast of seventeen songs, all delivered with a railyard punch and spat with vim and vigour, 70s Brit punk laid over rattle-and-chains primitivism. It's roughshod, raw, nascent and nihilistic - and a hell of a lot of fun.
Synth punk nihilists Ho99o9 are following in the scum-lined footstops of GG Allin and Death Grips on their EP Horrors of 1999. MC Ride and Zach Hill have blown a hole in the fabric of what to expect of punk and these grotbags stutter out of the same diseased amniotic fluid. These guys are about to be huge. Their VHS horror video below is also incredibly brilliant. I'm in awe of this scabrous descent - the Death Grips comparisons may be inevitable, but Ho99o9 are carving their own nightmare, one inch of flesh at a time.
And to glide into the Sunday summer sunset we have Florida's Sea Cycles who have presented a suite of subterranean dreams in the form of debut album Ground & Air. The band revels in creating intricately unspooling and intense instrumentals interspersed with Lindsey Slante's undulating, soaring-on-the-airstreams vocals. Imagine Explosions In The Sky and The Album Leaf jamming in a secluded woodland clearing - Sea Cycles is the heady, hypnotic result.
