Cold Crepes Work In Summer

The sun is getting long in the tooth around this time in Melbourne, but over here in London the light hangs around later and later, so that even taking a late-night leak feels festive. Summer is knocking on the door, so it's not a bad idea to crack out Cold Summers, the new EP from Crepes. The title track that opens up proceedings has that ebullient eloquence that Statesiders Real Estate hold in thrall, while 'Ain't Horrible' goes into its shell a little - which turns out to be a cavernous pop chamber, floating easy on synthetic smoke and bleary grins. The slight chug to 'Stages Of Fear' is underpinned by a cheeky garage pop malaise with enough of the 60s pastoral psych embellishments to throw a Mac DeMarco level of knowing devilishness into the mix. My current favourite here is the aptly titled 'Moon Dancer', the dappled drift seemingly perfect for drifting off into a kaleidoscopic netherworld of garish dreams (which also befits the album cover). The Beatles comparisons need to be sized up on closer, 'Size Of Your Town' - a piano-led number that saunters unhurried down the nostalgic twilight of memories. For a five-piece that look like they would be up to no good (and they probably still are), there is a great degree of tempered nuance to Cold Summers that surprises and delights. I expect Ill be sparked up, chilled out, and cranking this one a bit over the next few months...

Revelling In Lehmann's Body

I was just saying to a friend of mine the other day that I missed Lehmann B Smith. The Melbourne multi-instrumentalist is a criminally underrated composer of pop ingenuity - his Girlfriends and Roominations records are stunning (and his contribution to the still-dormant Sonic Masala compilation is breathtaking - I hope to get it out into your ears soon...) Plus Lehmann is one of the loveliest, and funniest, guys I have ever met - and I've only met him a handful of times. He hasn't been quiet either - his work doing cameos with the likes of The Ocean Party and especially Totally Mild has seen him around the traps. But it's the fact that his solo stuff is finally about to hit the spotlight (hopefully, probably not, but it bloody well should) through new record Thank God For My Body out through Special Award next month. "Time' has a honky hoariness to it, like Lennon channelled through other Smiths who also are no longer with us; while 'No Such Thing As A View' is so heartrendingly beautiful that the eyes mist even without the family visuals of the film clip below. Pre-order the album here. I cannot wait to hear this - a truly talented treasure.

This Chook Race Took Its Sweet, Sweet Time...

I know this has been out for a while, but About Time, Chook Race’s debut LP, has been haunting me. It’s been my go-to album this week at work, whether it be marking, filing, reporting, hating (there is a large degree of hatred at my day job…), and there is something about these jaunty, jangly, jagged gems that has burrowed under my skin. ‘Dentist’ is the opening salvo, and it honestly feels dated in the right kind of way – like stumbling across a shoebox of those Kodak photos that had curved edges (do you remember those? Or am I making them up? Whatever…) filled with snaps of your parents in their authentic punk regalia, in some sunny, drenched-in-freedom backstreet of your birth town that never existed in your memory of your childhood. The familiarity continues all the way through the album. Now I must admit that I always liked About Time (I reviewed it for an Australian magazine some months ago), but the pleasantries barely extended beyond that surreptitious admission of acknowledgement - ‘like’. But other nuances seep through the second, third or (in my current case) thirty-fifth listen, that imbues the trio’s no-frills laidback approach with a heady dose of gravitas.

‘Always On Time’ feels like Electrelane as a further stripped back beach band, eschewing frenetic metronomic spikes of aggression for a sepia-tinged narcoleptic speed; ‘Cleve’ bleeds out of the Eddy Current Suppression Ring rabbithole, a twitching yet laconic blast that features angelic lyrics for only twenty seconds of its running time. ‘Outbound’’s bassline fits into that ECSR tone too – it reminds me of the summers I have in my mind, forever drinking in the temporal twilight of a forever setting sun over my favourite beer garden, back porch, or beach, my schooner neverending. ‘Relax’ could slip into the laconic slipstream of a thousand other dolewave-affiliated acts yet still has its own wily charm; closer ‘Tables Turned’ is a hangover dancing under the rusted and lopsided Hills Hoist charmer, with a delightful fade-out that doesn’t exist on albums all that much anymore.

Softcore Pjaro

Ruined Smile Records continues to open up the channels between Australia and small, hitherto unknown bands from around the world. One of their most recent releases has been Soft Core, the three track EP from Sheffield melodic malcontents Pjaro. The EP is bookended by two raucous numbers: 'Passed Out, Covered In Drugs' a jumped up racket, at times feeling like two different bands playing at once before the lyrics "When you look in the mirror/Do you smile?" comes out, akin to a hundred beer swilling post-hardcore heathens venting their spleen; and 'Goodnight Sweet Prince', a brooding math permutation that explodes in wanton fury, the deep dissonance a brilliantly welcome, cleansing release. But it is the eight minute middle track 'Car2003' that really got me - the hum of a poor recording of a pub conversation that fades into a slowly coalescing anthem, an instrumental behemoth of calibrated emotional manipulation until the rhythms take is into a euphoric canter a la American Football at their most ebullient. Great stuff.

PREMIERE - Yaws' Candy Will Undo U

Back in April Sonic Masala put on its first show north of the Equator, jamming in Power Lunches in Dalston, London, for what was a spectacular night of noise. Kicked off with the light, sepulchral guitar-looped meditations of TOOMS, things were cranked into a frenzy by one-man disco doomsayer mnttab and white noise nihilists Giant Swan. In there too though was the first set of Yaws (AKA Dom Stephens), who managed to entrance the audience with his set, with the tiny space in pitch black outside of the white static of a flickering television screen, starting off with undulating rhythms and pulses before building to a darkly euphoric tantric release - ear bleeding voodoo disco.

Today we are lucky enough to premiere Yaws' first release, a two-track cassette through English/Italian hybrid label WorkinKlassNoize. The A side, 'Undo U', is a seven minute static crawl through the inert temporality of relationships both organic and synthetic - there is a mewling vocal underneath the scored beats that feels alien yet also mundane. The repetition that Yaws showed was his centrifugal foundation is evident here too, and while not as darkly affecting as 'The Seventh Continent', it's a sordid slice of cyberstatic sluicing around the veins.



Then there is the B-side, 'Candy'. Stephens has stated that these tracks look at the hyper-intense nature of contemporary life, highlighting the role of sex in mainstream culture. Yes, the echoed taps, drips and distant manipulated moans that crawl out the back end of 'Undo U' show shadows of this, but the pent-up grind of 'Candy' is more emblematic of the simultaneous coarse/silken desire of hardbodies. The repetition here is more muted yet more feverish, a heat inherent in the roiling rhythms that quickens the heartbeat and holds the mind in delirious sway. The sexual build up of tension and pulse rate is a dangerously alluring amalgam, one that bottoms out in a drone that swallows you whole.



The cassette will be available June 12. Yaws is playing Thursday week (May 22) at Hackney Picturehouse, alongside Simon Frank and Elephant House - will be killer.

Vintage Angie

One of my favourite albums of the past couple of years, coming out at the tail end of 2013, was Turning, the debut solo offering from Circle Pit/Southern Comfort/Ruined Fortune/Straight Arrows firebrand Angie Bermuda (as Angie). She is bringing out her second record, Free Agent, soon (through Rice Is Nice), and first cut from it 'Out of Age' is a fuzzbox blast of atonal wildness within a harmonic frame. Angie has always played the metronomic guitar between garage abandon and Branca-era deconstructed destruction, yet here she somehow manages to do both here, with her vocal delivery monotone and deadpan. A great opening salvo - can't wait to hear this one (it's not out til September though, so play the hell out of this in the meantime).

Jerking Beef Is Tragic

I'm loving Tragic, the debut long player from Sydney amiable slack jaws Beef Jerk. Coming from a wide cross-section of the city's DIY aesthetic (members come from bands such as Bad Guys, Housewives, Adults, Day Ravies, Snotty Babies and more), this four-piece/sometime-five-piece have punched out fifteen laconic ramblers that takes some of the token tropes of the much-maligned dole wave subset (droll, monotone vocals about underemployed middle-class malaise, drinking booze and specific city signifiers) and leaves it in the sun to warp in weird and wonderful ways. This isn't so much about being laconic as being smart-arses - song titles like 'Stay At Home Dads', 'Jerking Off' and 'The Last Chiko Roll', the latter with its references to the idiotic current PM and the iconic battered roll of cabbage, corn and glutinous gunk, make it clear that these boys just want to write songs that make them laugh, but that aren't novelty value either (their affinity with contemporary literate soothsayer Nathan Roche becomes evident here). There are melancholic meanders through maudlin sunsets ('Cotton'), jumbled jaunts through the detritus of humanity in the backstreets of the NSW capital ('Rhythm Infection', 'Aisle Ten'), and cantankerous canters through the jumbled thoughts of tetchy urban sages, sorting through the bowel-trails at the bottom of the public toilets for divinity ('Reissue', 'French Dish'). Beef Jerk always feel like they aren't trying, but rather than it being an affectation it's  because it seems honestly beyond them to do so - yet their unctuous delivery and style belies an extremely likable band with an interesting, amusing and epochal Australian voice, something that can't be said about many bands of this ilk really. Two thumbs up (especially when smashing tinnies on the bus).

Grab Tragic here. They supported Twerps on Friday night, but have a bunch of shows combing up and down the east coast in June/July (although none in Queensland - YET) - see below:

Friday June 12 – Grace Darling, Melbourne VIC (w/ Chook Race, Black Vacation, Gentlemane)

Monday June 15 – Northcote Social Club, Melbourne VIC

Saturday June 27 – Hermann's Bar, Sydney NSW (w/ Unity Floors)

Friday July 10 – Brighton Up Bar, Sydney NSW

Digging Up Stupid Stags

Amongst the first bands that I remember "discovering" at the start of this blog, LA five-piece StaG's debut album Rifle Meeker is one that I have found myself travelling back to, especially when one of its tracks (usually 'Whatapity' or 'Everything Is Plaster') cold-cocks me from out of the ether of the computer playlist. I thought it was a welcome diversion down the rabbit hole that Bradford Cox, Noah Lennox and Lockett Pundt have dug for themselves - read and listen here. Since then they disappeared off my radar for a bit, but the band have just released new EP Dig Up Stupid, a five song effort that has some pretty great elements in it, especially the excellent opener 'Even If It Hurts' (a song that plays on the frenetic guitar pop dismantlings of the likes of Krill, although not as roughshod and serrated - and is more anthemic). They are clearly more upbeat in their approach. It's always nice to be reminded of a small band that keep doing their thing, and the work ends up being this rewarding.

Copping A Bruising Death

Just a quick message about Leeds rabblerousers Bruising, who are playing at The Old Blue Last tonight (alongside the great Abattoir Blues). These guys may have formed less than a year ago, but their combustible slacker rock is riotous and infectious, a sugar death pill of overt gurning noisy fun. They have a bunch of tracks floating around on different formats (the latest, 'Think About Death' (which is my favourite so far, by a mile) on the new Family Portrait compilation out through Art Is Hard - get it on vinyl here. Hopefully will get these guys back to London in the summer for a Sonic Masala show - what do you think?

Bowing At The Altar Of A Scattered Purgatory On Sundays

Two-thirds of excellent Brisbane psych rock band Dreamtime have launched their own booking and touring platform, Altar of the Thirteenth Eye. Their first venture brings forth two equally brilliant acts from Asia, Taiwan's Scattered Purgatory and Japan's Sundays & Cybele, to Australian shores for a bunch of shows.

Scattered Purgatory is an ambient drone three piece that are ultimately interested in the swirling viscera left when sound is stripped of location and place, a discombobulated tonal salve against the scorched soul. Their last release, Lost Ethnography of the Miscanthus Ocean, is a serpentine temporal shift of wavering tension, as calming as it is unnerving. The looped guitars and synth, combined with the shimmering and clashing of gongs and cymbals in spaced out abbreviated bursts, takes on a tactile quality, a trance in amber.

Sundays & Cybele on the other hand are more traditional psych in the sense that we have the laidback grooves and sepia-tinted tones that combust into elongated liquefied-heat meltdowns at the blink of a third eye. Somehow displaced from the 70s acid trip hangover of the 60s, their album Gypsy House is a mystical blast.


Both bands have been put out by Tokyo label Guruguru Brain. Here are the list of shows, Australia - do not miss these guys in action, with some excellent support:

BRISBANE 

Thursday 21st May (SP only) 

Trainspotters

With FROWN and special guests 

SYDNEY 

Friday 29th May 

Presented by Octopus π

The Red Rattler Theatre 

with Broadcasting Transmitter and special guests 

MELBOURNE 

Saturday 30th May 

Presented by Psychedelic Coven

The Tote 

With Pearls and Power 

Sunday 31st May 

Presented by Psychedelic Coven 

The Public Bar

With Council of Elders

BRISBANE 

Thursday 4th June (S&C only) 

Beetle Bar

With Special guests 

More shows to be announced!

Double White Walls In Limbo

This year's Sonic Masala Fest was incredible, a real coup and a life achievement for me. So many things worked out right - the weather, the venue, the crowd, the bands. Although David Lynch's Q+A and the Oblivians shows took a few punters away, it was above all a killer day.

One of the best parts was hanging out with the three dudes from White Walls for the weekend. Their set was decidedly loud - as is their MO - yet I had forgotten just how smooth it all is, how easily it is to be cocooned within the intricacies inherent within the noise. Their self titled album has been a favourite of mine for some time now, and finally their follow up Afterthoughts In Limbo (which is mammoth as a double LP and is out on the band's brand spankin' new Pet Moth Records label) is just around the corner. Below are three tracks off it ('Crossing Roads' having been pushed into the ether last week as a biding time gesture while the vinyl orders take their time getting shipped), and their eloquent and devastating take on shoe gaze rock is as jaw dropping as ever. If you haven't put your order in to get a piece of Afterthoughts In Limbo, go here right now. And if you are in Melbourne May 30 and haven't got anything going - get to The Corner where White Walls and Hotel Wrecking City Traders support the gargantuan Japanese giants Boris.

Psalm Beach Is Nowhere In Particular

This record is a year old but I feel it warrants a mention because it has been my go-to for the past week. Victorian trio Psalm Beach have been plying their trade around the traps for a while now and have not garnered anywhere near the adulation they deserve. Their album of last year Nowhere In Particular is a perfect case in point, a circular black-and-white cast of tension, taking its time to build its slow yet ultimately devastating post punk delineations. There are some bands around at the moment that are delving into similar sine waves - Mere Women and Hoodlum Shouts are two in particular that come to mind - but Nothing In Particular is a glaring reminder that the name Psalm Beach should be murmured just as fervently. It came out not long after they headlined one of the Gazar Strips EP launch shows in Melbourne - I didn't realise how well this would come together. Anyway, if there is anything you do this month, on the anniversary of its creation, buy the 12" here - you deserve it.

Pale And Headless

Ever since the neanderthal lurk of Pale Heads crawls out of the gutter of the mind, this lethal band are on the up and up. They are on the cusp of launching their debut record Headless (out through Poison City Records - what AREN'T these guys responsible for lately?) - and with the conscious coupling of Nation Blue/Batpiss/Drones/Pairs seed, this is gonna be one beautifully ugly bastard child. Have a listen to 'Devotion' and 'Thomy Cut Off A Head' - its dirty, rusted arse pub rock n roll at its most backward. Goddamn fucking delicious.





Pale Heads have some killer shows in the next couple months. They are supporting Sun God Replica on Monday night at the Tote, Against Me! in June 7 - and the launch of the album the day before, June 6 at Gasometer, with support from Spinning Rooms, Slab Knackers (2 of Eddy Current Suppression Ring) and Steve Miller Band. Get in.

A Distant Fist Krilling

I haven’t been able to sit down and listen to Boston killers Krill's 3rd album A Distant Fist Unclenching since just before it came out back in February (through Steak Club in the UK/Europe - Exploding In Sound/Double Double Whammy had it out there in the US in time for Xmas last year). Not that listening to anything is hard per se, but with my sabbatical from the Sonic Masala website for a couple months I stayed clear of the emails and forgot to put this on the playlist. Now that I am back, I am free to wax lyrical about how great it is, a brooding, off-kilter rainbow-coloured gut punch. Starting with the schizophrenic 'Phantom' - a track that begins with a bustling gait before switching gears and direction two minutes out, wild frontman Jonah Furman's voice getting more unhinged in the higher octaves. It is understandable why there is mutual love for EIS stablemates Pile, what with their communal adherence to outre rhythms and suddenly serrated riffs, combined with lurid, at times gloriously indecipherable metaphors and euphemisms. There are elements of playfulness here that shines out from previous recordings - 'Torturer' is a great launchpad into this shift. It all hinges on the seven-minute 'Tiger' - that distant fist unclenches, the pain goes away, we breathe, we live on. There is a liquidity, an aural succour, to the flightiness and anxieties of the past. Furman may still find pain in internal torments, but Krill are learning to embrace the hurt.

Nth Wheel Shutdown

I was trying to hurriedly book a last minute show at Public Bar in Melbourne for tonight (unfortunately it is a no go - don't worry, more will be up soon though...). One of the bands had to pull out and I asked about ten different bands, but it didn't come to pass. One of the bands I asked was Nth Wheel - they couldn't do it because one of their members is overseas for the next few months (fair dues). But it was only then that I realised that they had released a cassette a couple of weeks ago - Shutter - and shit it is a corker. The titular song is six-and-a-half minutes of brooding repetition: the bassline is a constant drumming on the pulse, spiked by accompanying drums, sparked by dark downer riffs that slowly builds in intensity and temerity. Over the top of it all is the reverberated vocals that are so hard to decipher and define, yet its sneering, vitriolic monotone is enough to rattle the bones. There are about ten seconds total of actual noise as bloodletting violence - the rest an unrelenting exercise in ratcheted tension. In other words, one of the best songs of the year. Get it here for $1 - that is an order.

Total Babes In Their Heyday

I'm loving Heydays, the second LP from Ohio (and Cloud Nothings offshoot) Total Babes. It reeks of a slacker guitar pop vibe that Malkmus et al might have nodded nonchalantly to, if they infused their sound with a little more distortion and serration. It isn’t overtly serious though – come on, they are called Total Babes! – and it is this precipice between earnestness, aggression and flippancy that they teeter confidently on. The addition of Emeralds alum John Elliott on synth has infused tracks like 'Repeat Gold' and 'Can I Turn You On' with gravitas while opening up new, unexpected horizon. And Cloud Nothings’ frontman Dylan Baldi pops up on 'Circling', delivering a skronked-out sax throughline that helps to elevate an already nutso track (Elliott's space-invaders effects are most prevalent here also) to a delightful level of aggro intensity.

I actually was reminded of retired Brisbane band Nova Scotia when listening to segments of Heydays, especially tracks like 'We'll Come Around' and the title track. There is a irreverent racket imbued with an innate sense of melody and a sunny disposition that makes the album a blessing, just on the cusp of summer. Pre-order it here (out through Wichita Recordings later this month). Total Babes are supporting the brilliant Pile in London on the 10th and 11th of June (at the Lexington and Old Blue Last respectively) - cannot bloody wait.

Batpiss = Biomass = Spiritually Challenged

We made it very clear how highly we regarded Melbourne bastards Batpiss' first record Nuclear Winter - it was my number two record of the year in 2013. Since then the trio have stayed busy, organising the excellent backyard festival All Good In The Wood and touring Indonesia being major highlights. And soon the boys will be unloading album no 2, Biomass, onto the world (with help from Poison City Records). First cut is 'Spiritually Challenged', a bruising encounter that is as brutal, bilious and blackly hilarious as you would expect. Well I find these fuckers funny. I've never enjoyed being aurally abused as much as I have by Batpiss, and it's clear that the masochistic overtones have not dissipated.



The album is out June 26, and the boys will be out in force all over Australia to shove it in your earholes. You're welcome.

Wetting The Blanket

Melbourne miscreants Wet Blankets launch their debut LP Rise of Wet Blankets this on Friday downstairs at Grace Darling, with Cuntz and Bonniwells in support - shit, what a cracker. I haven't heard the album yet, but seeing as 'Fridge Too Far' is a goddamn blister-buster of a track, clocking in at 83 seconds and melting the walls without breaking a sweat (or getting any sleep, cos it's the middle of the night), I reckon it's going to be excellent. The record is out through Anti-Fade Records too, who have pushed both of the Living Eyes' excellent albums, so quality is assured.

Hits From The Box #101 - Banking On Shitty Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Happy Sunday everyone!

Novel Place In Space On A Fantastic Planet

Sarah Lipstate’s work under the Noveller moniker has been a masterclass in subtle delineations of guitar squall - . With her latest release Fantastic Planet (out through Fire Records), she has embraced her love of cinematic soundscapes and held an elliptical mirror up to the landscape of her native Austin, The LP is a journey through eclectic sonic terrain, blending rich waves of synth with soaring cinematic guitar lines, guiding the listener through Noveller's most diverse and compelling release to date.

Kicking off with the brooding behemoth 'Into The Dunes' (which is surprisingly less than five minutes long, such is the power of its desolate muscularity, playing like Slint and Earth collaborating on scoring a lurid, ominous, hallucinogenic arthouse Western), Fantastic Planet seems intent on transporting the listener from one lurid landscape to the next - 'No Unholy Mountain' as a lime-green-and-lilac alien moon dune, the crystalline cyber-synth effects undulating like an otherworldly Exorcist score; the surreptitious drone underpinning the sparkle of 'Rubicon', evoking glistening distortions of light-headed fantasy; the 8-bit hiccups and harmonising of 'Sisters', taking the listener into a synapse-frayed mainframe dream. The light majesty of 'Concrete Dreams' aims for the same heartfelt stars as fellow Texans Explosions In The Sky albeit with a sparser, more synthetic edge (the song's title fits well). 'Pulse Point', the longest song here at seven minutes, is most interesting when the myriad effects at Lipstate's disposal all intersect into a static-infused quagmire of pulsating dark light - its alienness makes it the most entrancing track here. 'In February' has some some of the Morricone-meets-science-fiction cadences; 'Growing' is underpinned by a beating heart, the throb ever present and domineering the oscillating-on-a-knife's-edge guitar - and when the beat disappears, the darkness truly seeps in.

Live, Lipstate is renowned for the amassed gear and equipment she has collated in order to replicate these looped and oscillating sounds in a live setting, and one imagines that such an experience can be quite awe-inspiring in itself. The beauty of Fantastic Planet is how identifying how each note, shimmer and shudder is created isn't as important as the apocryphal journeys that fluidly come into fruition - a silken opiate for the enlightened masses. Grab Fantastic Planet (in aqua vinyl) here.