Never one to shy away from crucifying himself over music that sounds like pretty people should be having fun to it somewhere, FTSE’s back with a video for Blood On My Hands, a track off forthcoming full-length Joyless. It’s an <a href="https://www.khama.co.uk/">ethically</a>–<a href="https://sweetcavanagh.com/">sourced</a>, <a href="https://www.lukebather.com/about/">self-produced</a>, <a href="https://birdsong.london/">runway</a>–<a href="https://www.faiiint.com/faiiint/">struttin’</a> mashup of apathy & guilt, vibing on the half-realised complicity of your market-variety AirMax locavore. It also has some <a title="This brere's dad said it, so can I. " href="https://twitter.com/blanksy_h/status/461574690805665792">bare dench</a> ersatz horns in it, and what may or may not be some pretty people having fun. Watch below. 
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Joyless is out August 28th on <a title="13. " href="https://www.luckynumbermusic.com/artists/ftse/">Lucky Number</a>

Video: FTSE – Blood On My Hands

Our latest despatch, served straight from that rusty diving bell submerged in <a title="Y'know. Like, 'funny haha'. " href="https://twitter.com/gotmatagot">the more lightless environs of human consciousness,</a> concerns a band named Matagot. In particular, it concerns their songs Lidless and Teeth, which first surfaced from somewhere down there last month.
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This is the sound of exits slamming shut. We get a deadpan rendering of what should be guilty admissions, turned loose from guilt and into something far worse, some greyscale honesty that no longer feels peaks and troughs. Icy guitar clang and atonal cello bloom briefly, decay as fast as they came. They leave in their wake a waste of abyss-deep bass and two vocal lines battering against each other like lost moths at a dying lightbulb, keening “I think of all the things I used to wanna do, and I don’t wanna do them anymore/that’s how you know they really got to you, they are still winning even after the war.”
To elaborate, I go full <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1dnqKGuezo">Clay Davis</a> right here.
Lidless is, like so much of the best music, a broken mirror held up to the meanest, nastiest parts of us. It’s fear, anger, ambition and lack thereof, and where in other hands this could be cloying or overwrought, Lidless keeps to its cards-held-close principles. Even after the song swells maliciously back from chilly blackness like some cold-blooded ocean-floor nightmare, it uses twisted noise and percussive blows, rather than the more obvious heat of six-string distortion, to hammer itself home. And hammer it does. Hard.
If after Lidless you feel exactly that – the track being the aural equivalent of having your eyelids forcibly removed – second track Teeth offers a little respite, the sour sentiment of dismissal masked in part by sunny tuneage. “Open your mouth and go,” comes another demoniac harmony, the freezing brush-off, “‘cause I’m tired of living slow.” But it’s backed by chirpy organ and bitcrushed bounce, the bass here approximating a teeny-tiny disco. ‘Teeth’ is deadly-as-fuck pop music of the highest calibre.
Forging weird noise into wonderful hooks is nothing new, no, and neither is the notion that songs can be more bright and brilliant than the sum of their stark parts. But Matagot (who, I should probably mention, comprise <a href="https://www.facebook.com/gotmatagot">four people from South East London</a> and sing by their own admission about ‘girls, bodies and things that make them angry’) are one of many sweet spots between the two, a great shivering scream bouncing off the shadowy walls of life’s basement. Here’s hoping the light never comes back on.

Introducing: Matagot

Introducing: Baby In Vain

Introducing: Christ Reflection

New: Healing Powers – Weirdos at Work

Introducing: Eugene Quell

No retrogressive bullshit. No rosy tints. <a title="Proud." href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SMwRWsj80g">No nostalgia, no sentiment</a>.
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Because it would be too fucking easy to react with surprise at a band’s <a title="No promo." href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=a+thousand+pasts+no+future&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&gws_rd=cr&ei=jVuzUoWjIY7B7AajwYGQAQ#q=a+thousand+pasts+no+future+badlands&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official">relative absence from Google</a>, and upon listening to their frayed and distant rendering of heartland rock (and its references to its own heritage), remark how much lovelier things were before our uncouth and entitled children started growing obese off their own attention spans, when real music was made by real people with real instruments. But no, no, no, no, no. This may be indebted to a thousand pasts, but those pasts are not the Brucey that our fathers and uncles love, the easy anthems that provide brief escape from a hatchback between a new build and a retail park. People forget that Born in the U.S.A. wasn’t born from simple love of country, that the album’s first side ends with I’m On Fire. Nor is this the kitsch, the <a title="Don't get me wrong..." href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_bQiIZXC9I">sailor tats</a> and leather jackets of any two-bit greaser-throwback act. These eight tracks are shot through instead with Oberst (in their torched howl), The Smiths or The Cure (in their greyscale guitar jangle and rainslicked yearning) and all the scrap and spite and wiry sinew of everything punk rock since <a title="The best advice that I've gotten was from good old Johnny Rotten. He said "God Save The Queen." He said, "no future for you, no future for me."" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaHhxRGYjFA">year zero</a>. They don’t stand tall and pump their fists and proclaim ‘No Surrender’. They scream ‘I’m going down’ over and over and over and over.
I have no idea who this band are, but these Badlands will treat you good.

Introducing: Badlands

Video: Vincent Vocoder Voice – MeMeMeMeMeMeMeNow

I like full-lengths. I wrote a bit about why <a title="That Vincent Vocoder Voice tune still kills. " href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/22859-i-am-gonna-make-it-through-this-year-if-it-kills-me-our-picks-of-2k13/" target="_blank">here</a>, but that’s not too important just yet. Friendzone, or Oakland residents James Laurence and Dylan Reznick, have floated somewhere in my general consciousness since earlier this year, when I fell in love with a couple of cuts that they’d produced – the Gigi Masin-sampling <a title="n. 'a word usually used at the end of a sentence to express agreement and/or excitement. similar to the word Amen.'" href="https://soundcloud.com/friendzone/02-chuch-produced-by" target="_blank">Chuch</a>, for Main Attrakionz, and their stuttering, chiming backdrop for Deniro Farrar’s contrastingly gritty rhymes on <a title="We all hope we make it with those rhymes, man. " href="https://denirofarrar.bandcamp.com/album/the-patriarch" target="_blank">Back/Forth/Back</a>. Hunting around for further collected sustenance wasn’t easy, scattered as it was across a disparate series of mixtapes and EPs, so – and here’s the connect – news of a Friendzone full-length called DX (which ‘dropped’, as I believe popular parlance has it, yesterday) came pretty sweet to me.
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Delineating the hip-hop instrumental is often as hazy a business as the tones contained therein, but where artists in a vaguely similar ballpark – say, Clams Casino or Blue Sky Black Death – opt for a classy meld of the organic and synthesised, DX is unabashedly clad in digital dayglo, a glorious neon mess of anime electro-vomit, churned up from electronica and hip-hop over the last couple of decades.  It’s referential, if not reverential, of Aphex Twin (they’ve called a song RETAILXTAL, the cheeky scamps), could be said to filter Burial through Kanye (the former’s ubiquitous cut-up vox warped a la West’s autotuned chipmunk soul), and comes up something like if Baths’ Cerulean were a euphoric trap record. So, yeah, tough to pigeonhole, though far as I can tell ALL MY LIFE+ (and to a lesser extent, ANOTHER JAM FOR THE AGES~!) is basically a cover of <a title="Those chords are just some of the best things ever, aren't they?" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdQY7BusJNU" target="_blank">Time After Time</a>, which is to my mind one of the greatest songs ever. So that should help.
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Despite Friendzone’s obvious penchant for the pretty, their ultra-modern (even trashy) electronic medium means that DX‘s many moments of sparkling beauty always come off surprising. The limpid piano on LUV YOU MORE THAN ANYTHING, for example, which cascades glittering in and out of those sliced, bent, bodiless voices, or the following 8AM, which sounds like a last dance for its titular time, slow swells mimicking the wistful horn lines of some forgotten Midwest emo troupe. As a consequence, Friendzone maintain across the length of DX the stoned, glowing gorgeousness that had me so enthralled by those first two cuts. And I’m pretty happy about it.
Friendzone have put DX in its entirety up on <a title="Oh...ain't that...FRIENDLY" href="https://friendzone.bandcamp.com" target="_blank">bandcamp</a>, for a name your price download.

New: Friendzone – DX

Nails. Let’s think about nails for a moment.
They are an easily obtainable hardware sundry. They are excellent at holding resistant materials together.
They are also metallic, sharp, and a reet bastard when brought forcibly into contact with our soft, fleshy frames.
On Nails, blistering third track from their forthcoming New Sky EP, the pesky little buggers are just about everywhere for Toronto’s Neon Windbreaker, in (maybe, though I can’t discount the possibility of mondegreens here, so wilfully caked in distortion is the band’s unhinged vocal attack,) their heads/hair, skin, the shit that they live in, so forth. And if that’s the way they feel about things, Neon Windbreaker have chosen just about the most apt form of expression for their malaise; filth-crusted and deranged punk rock, constantly in the red and constantly in danger of falling to bits. First time I heard the band reign in Nails‘ seasick verses to the whip-tight, breakneck groove at the song’s core, I think I did a little smile, because it all sounded a bit Bleach and a lot like they knew exactly what they were doing. It was just a little one, mind.
But nasty as New Sky‘s seven-and-a-bit white-knuckle minutes are, Neon Windbreaker know the value of a good hook (much like countrymen Metz, whose misanthropic, alien amp-howls EP opener Jamesbud takes some cues from), even if the thing’s <a title="I love you, Moe. Never stop believin'. " href="https://imgur.com/r/TheSimpsons/xOwLRl9">rusty and dull</a>. New Sky (the longest thing on there, at two minutes and change,) does its best to wrest Mudhoney’s sputtering torch from the grunge titans’ crenellated, grasping fingers, a sludge-sodden soundtrack to that terrifying chase-dream where you just can’t get away fast enough, but this time there’s someone who sounds a lot like Mark Arm groaning “there’s a wall inside my head” over and over and over until the nightmare structure starts to rear up for us, too. It’s great.
And y’know what else is great? No-budget music videos that look like they’ve been filmed on a phone velcro’d sideways to the forehead of an excited Labrador (he calms down later though, sits in the dark watching cars. It’s weird). “So now what ya gonna do?!” yelp the ‘breaker at the close of New Sky‘s parting shot Pink Suit, superheated shards of disembodied guitar twisting and congealing back into iron-hard assault.
The only viable course of action is repeat, repeat, repeat.
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New Sky is out on October 28th via <a title="ARE YOU. ARE YOU NOW. " href="https://wearebusybodies.bigcartel.com/">We Are Busy Bodies</a>. The ‘breaker (yep, I’m going with this) play <a title="Hi Meatballs." href="https://birthdaysdalston.com/">Birthdays</a> in Dalston the following day. Miss ’em there, they’re at <a title="...also in Dalston. " href="https://www.shacklewellarms.com/location/">The Shacklewell</a> on November 1st. They have <a title="Older songs right now. " href="https://soundcloud.com/neon-windbreaker">some</a> <a title="I know what I do and it all points to you." href="https://www.facebook.com/NeonWindbreaker">Internet</a> <a title="(stifled laughter)" href="https://ragstock.com/shop/product-category/recycled/90s-jackets/">presence</a>.

Introducing: Neon Windbreaker

We had a cute little idea at CitR Towers (that’s not really a thing, though would that it were) a few weeks back that, like the real music websites, we’d each do a little list of our favourite songs and albums of the year thus far. You people like lists, right?
The team being the dedicated, enthused, and writerly bunch that they are, the response was overwhelming. We had lists coming out our fucking pores, man, and what’s more, writeups, thousands of words of passionate and percolating prose dedicated to the music we love, because really, what else is there? 
Due to the incredibly restrictive space constraints visited upon us by the Internet, though (I’m sure you’ll understand), we can only feature one here, and we decided it should be Rob’s, since he took the trouble to travel back in time and commune with his perennially whingy sixteen-year-old self, who seems to think that fourteen was a lifetime ago, and pretends to like Islay malt. Anywho, the kid gave his typically emotional take on Rob’s favourites this year, and the results are below. 
We’ve also managed to shoehorn in some album and song lists from webgod <a href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/author/Andrew/">Andy</a>, SEO cowboy <a href="https://en.gravatar.com/samgoldencouk">Golden</a>, and…er…’comedy’ writer <a href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/author/drwillynickle/">Callum Booth</a>. So y’know, enjoy, and keep your powder dry. 
– CitR, 2k13
Rob
The virtue of the full-length has been extolled by so many before me, and with such eloquence, that I needn’t really bother telling you about how wonderful albums are. Scribes bulge tumescent with pearly liquid joy at things like narrative arcs, track sequencing, sustained production tropes, bands’ record-to-record evolutions. And why not? These things are the marks of true craftsmen, surely, and talent and imagination and hard bloody work are things wonderful to behold in our arts.
So I won’t tell you about how wonderful albums are.
I love long players because I relish the thought of some fidgety snapback amoeba having a panic attack at the notion of sitting through more than one song. I crow and praise myself for my patience and taste and effort. For listening to albums is a skill, a hard-fought war, like being able to drink a bottle of Laphroaig without throwing up.
I love albums because I have neither the time nor the patience nor the mental capacity to catalogue endless songs by endless bands, but I come over all sweaty at the thought of letting a track tumble through my memory’s colander into black forgetfulness. Longer collections of songs (by fewer bands) help appease the angry amateur librarian knocking around my skull.
I love albums because growing up has me running scared, and physical media with its art and liner notes and tangible product is the closest I can come to fourteen again, listening to the same CDs over and over with booklets spread out on the Aztec-print bedsheets my mum chose. Maps to my heart, or some shit.
2013 has not yet graced me with an album that I love. There are some honourable mentions. It would be dishonest in the extreme for me to ignore the clout of Trouble Will Find Me, which I had to stop listening to a couple of weeks back after I woke up with a crusty nose and a throbbing brow and little memory of the previous evening. My phone’s outbox was full of the lyrics to Demons, my inbox with concerned enquiries as to my mental health. It was a dick move, sure (as is telling you about it on the Internet), but I have this one vivid snapshot of myself swaying under the lights of Vauxhall station, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIWmRbHDhGw">Sea of Love</a> on full in my ears, torching a smoke and feeling something more powerful than happiness beat its black wings at my centre. There is no light without the other. And so it is that Anything In Return has been a significant milestone in my discovery that I can gambol <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlD-2Dx5868">weightless in effervescent funk</a> just as well as wallow in my ego’s more oft-produced cloying sludge. Nostalchic‘s exemplary (if unoriginal, but that’s never bothered me) <a href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/music/20306-video-lapalux-without-you/">marriage of machinist glitch to burning soul</a> has left me feeling more debonair on nighttime London Overground services than I have any cause to. Ghost On Ghost perhaps I like for all the right reasons, the impartial academic ones as well as the visceral and emotional ones, a happy example of a longstanding favourite refusing to stagnate and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfJNzA0Z7xw">delivering the tunes</a> into the bargain. Obsidian sounds as <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZG5jw36S6o">black and glistening</a> as its namesake and as excellent as anything else I’ve heard this year, though I’ve only listened to it three or four times as yet. I haven’t heard 2013’s offerings from Foals or Frightened Rabbit, The Wonder Years, Waxahatchee or Crash of Rhinos, but I can bet that any one of them would make a list like this with ease. Roll on December.
So though it flies in the face of everything I thought I knew about myself, my heart belongs to the songs that I have heard so far in 2013. My stars, but there have been some blinders, some real poke-your-eyes-out-good shit.
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Kids, by the most excellently-named Diarrhea Planet, sounds like Fang Island doing Titus Andronicus, sterling tumbledown bar-rock with a stupid widdly solo and a cigarette hanging from its lip. I knew that All These Things, by Irish wunderkind Mmoths, was good before I listened to it walking home through Camberwell in spring sunlight, one golden 9am, spangled off my tits. But shit man, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkrTL62CLCA">that song</a> led me by the hand through the fabric of reality and didn’t feel even a little scared. In May, Brighton grunge-savants Love Among the Mannequins delivered their<a href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/music/21747-new-love-among-the-mannequins-joseph-cassel-or-john-michael-ernahue-or-god-d-16/"> finest slice of unflinchingly forward-thinking rock music</a> to date in Joseph Cassell or John Michael Ernahue or God, D16. A careening, explosive (seriously, it’s an overused descriptor, but I never heard guitars sound more like bombs) paean to fuck knows what, which managed the admirable feat of making me feel ten feet tall without resorting to sentimental booby-trappage. I kind of <a href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/music/21928-new-ftse-tidal-wave-ft-saint-saviour/"> have to love FTSE whether I want to or not</a>, but luckily Tidal Wave, first cut from the FTSE1 EP, hits the perfect pitch between sexy and miserable. It’s got a hopelessly glum funk bassline and some surprise horns and this unreally powerful middle eight that sounds like Kanye’s samples would if he’d spent his adolescence indoors with minimal human contact, then grown up to find that he still didn’t feel any better.
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My ash-grey and desiccated heart belongs, though, to this. It’s called The Unbearable Heaviness of Having, by one Vincent Vocoder Voice. Whether it’s serious or sarcastic or somewhere between the two, it doesn’t matter. This is a song wholly and gorgeously at odds with all the inconsequential minutiae of middle-class modern living, the myriad nothings that gather and swarm like Valium-loaded hornets to benumb at every possible juncture – “There’s no gunshots” for the song’s narrator, nothing that extreme, “no enemies, no bomb-shelter ends.” He’ll just sit flicking through his iPhone ’til he chokes on his friends.
Crucially, all this grey depiction of anaemic and infinite comfort is never framed as a complaint. What you choose to make of it is your business.
But I know how it felt, being told “so suffer little children, see if I care, suck a Samaritan’s receiver if you don’t think it’s fair,” over awkward, clanking basslines and needling guitar chime, like Modest Mouse at their best, or something from Saddle Creek’s golden age.
I know how it felt being asked whether or not “we’re just sucking in fibre and blowing out shit”, as does the distant, wheedling hook that snakes through the song and bursts out full force at its close.
It felt like a hand closing tight around the back of my neck, and pressing my face hard against the reflective surface of the medicine cabinet.
It felt like music.
By Rob Hollamby, aged 16 and 3/4
Andy
Albums
My Bloody Valentine – mbv 
Field Rotation – Fatalist: The Repetition of History 
Pantha du Prince & the Bell Laboratory – Elements of Light 
Jon Hopkins – Immunity 
Eleanor Friedberger – Personal Record
Songs
My Bloody Valentine – In Another Way 
Jon Hopkins – Open Eye Signal 
Factory Floor – Fall Back 
Young Summer – Pretty Boy 
Hookworms – Away / Towards
Sam
Albums
Young Fathers – Tape Two 
My Bloody Valentine – mbv 
Born Ruffians – Birthmarks 
Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of The City 
John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts
Songs
Born Ruffians – Needle 
Lorde – Tennis Courts 
James Blake – Retrograde 
Jim Guthrie – Don’t Be Torn 
.CULT – Masked
Callum
Albums
Wavves – Afraid Of Heights 
Le1f – Fly Zone 
Run The Jewels – Run The Jewels 
Waxahatchee – Cerulean Salt 
Kilo Kish – K+
Songs
“I’ll put a song list together too.”

I Am Gonna Make It Through This Year If It Kills Me: Our picks of 2k13

I’m a loyal fucker, for my sins, and I’ve been listening to bands with Owen Brinley in for the last ten years. One of them got by on a premise of homegrown talent, a leavening of their knob-rock riffage by elfin vocals, and approximately two <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt852YODm4I">good</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok_yKPoPPxo">tunes</a>. The other was Grammatics, and they were ruddy ace most of the time, as would you be if you were English and wrote <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCljNqQiIok">weird rock songs</a> that sounded like Cursive’s fey and flowery little cousins.
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So here’s the new double A-side from Department M, on which Brinley eschews guitars and flings his penchant for moody theatrics ever further into the blacklight. I was sceptical, sure – the thrusting disco rhythms of first cut The Second Prize vamp dangerously close to Muse territory, and no one needs that. It’s saved, though, by a number of factors, Brinley’s voice not least among ‘em, drawling out some deliciously obscure, vaguely threatening nonsense through a fug of Laudanum. It also has a number of searing, lopsided bass breaks, a clattering beat constructed partially from sounds of handguns being cocked, and ends in huge, icy sheets of synth.
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Really, though, the brilliance lies in Absentia, which pitches its keys lower and wonkier, its groove less inviting. There’s little opportunity for hip-swinging here, just bitcrushed beats and the clang of metal on metal before the whole thing explodes widescreen, goes end-credits on us with Brinley shivering “I’m breathing out and breathing in” like it’s all he can remind himself to do to stay conscious.
The Second Prize/Absentia is up for preorder on <a href="https://www.banquetrecords.com/PURE294S;jsessionid=4300580075AB4CADC4FA8742C2AAD848">7” vinyl</a> as part of the <a href="https://www.toopure.com/articles/155/department-m-the-second-prize">Too Pure Singles Club</a>.

New: Department M – The Second Prize/Absentia

“Brilliant. I want to take a screenshot.”
Ed Sanderson, who plays keyboards (and some violin) in Phoria, is referring to the frozen visage filling his computer screen, held momentarily inert in the arms of a shoddy broadband connection. I can see a smaller reproduction of the face in the bottom right-hand corner of my own screen. Its owner hasn’t shaved or cut its hair in some time (around five months, at a guess), accentuating the quizzical, crescent-moon leer of its lopsided mouth. The green glass of a cheap French stubby is visible in one blurred hand.
The face is supposed to be mine, but I’m not going with that. I’m calling this half-cut backwoods freakshow ‘Dean’, after a case of mistaken identity once visited upon me in Fulham, by a man whose own name I have now forgotten. I’ve also decided that I do not like Skype interviews, which feel as much like a conversation with oneself (or indeed, one’s very own Dean) as they do with the interviewee.
Or –viewees, as the case may be. For aside from Ed, I’m presented with excellently-haired Phoria bassist Tim Douglas, and guitarist Jeb Hardwick, whose tin of Fosters puts me at something approaching ease. Ostensibly, I’m here to talk to this three-fifths of the Brighton-based soundscapeers ahead of their appearance at <a title="You're not coming? What does that even mean?" href="https://www.facebook.com/events/503640323024237/512891345432468/?comment_id=512914968763439&notif_t=like" target="_blank">CitR Live #002</a> in Peckham on Thursday 30th May, but Dean doesn’t always want to talk about Phoria. It takes me until halfway through a conversation about San Franciscan beatsmith Tycho (who the three also enjoy, as it happens) to knock the fucker on the head and start talking about what I’m supposed to be talking about.
Somewhere amongst Dean’s nervy tumble of phonemes, Tim mentions that Phoria are “trying to get some new songs on the go, which hopefully might be ready for Crack in the Road.” Phoria’s <a title="STAININ' MY WHOLE TOWN RED" href="https://soundcloud.com/phoriamusic/sets/bloodworks-ep">sublime EP</a> Bloodworks only made its way public on April 29th, so with new songs already on the way, I ask how long the EP has been in the pipeline. That’s me in bold.
How long has Bloodworks been in the pipeline, then?
Tim: There was a whole other EP ready before Bloodworks, but we didn’t release anything and just kept working. So we ended up having this release being the most recent songs. So two years? Three years?
Jeb: We had lots of songs, like the actual song Bloodworks, which didn’t make it onto the EP in the end – there was pretty much a completely different collection of songs up until the last six months or so, and then we just wrote a whole batch of new ones and didn’t want to release the old ones anymore.
What’s the writing process like with Phoria?
Ed: Trewin, our singer, he’s very much into music production, and he’s got a little studio in his bedroom – basically most of the core ideas come from him on his own jamming, making beats, basically getting the little ball of a song together, then we take it into the rehearsal room, to flesh it out for a five-piece and try and add as much as we can. It works quite well that way, and we all have our specific tasks.
So it kind of goes collaborative after Trewin starting everything?
(The three nod, in perfect unison.)
J: Yeah, usually, sometimes it’s
Jeb is not allowed to finish his sentence.  “You guys probably didn’t see that,” interrupts Dean in gleeful, Partridgean tones, “but that was an amazing synchronised nod!”
Everyone laughs. Oh, how we laugh.
“We’ve been practicing,” volunteers Ed. Thanks, Ed.
“You can’t see it,” says Jeb, “but we’ve got little cue cards.”
I’ve been listening to Bloodworks a lot over the past few weeks. On headphones, through speakers, skiving at work, sweeping lentils from the kitchen floor, cooking chillies. And on that basis, I still haven’t managed to file Phoria under and sort of overarching heading. On the one hand, you’ve got the campy, synthesised strut of Posture, which opens the record with a sinister bounce, and eventually a full-on, womping Amen break. All well and good, but the song’s immediately followed by <a title="I've forgotten which Lovedrug song it sounds like. Answers on a postcard. " href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdZsAtDuPfQ" target="_blank">Red</a>, a frozen, near-beatless expanse of sound, that sees Trewin channelling lost American heroes Lovedrug over the sorts of reverberant, glacial piano chords that words like ‘aching’ were first coined for. With this kind of rampant genre-hopping in mind, do the band have a shared vision for their sound?
J: There’s a few bands that we’re all passionate about, bands like Mew that most of us share, bands like Sigur Ros. I think we’ve got a lot of time for that kind of thing. But apart from the core few we do have quite different tastes, Trewin’s into a lot of…er…experimental electronica.
E: I like classical music really. I’m kind of like a machine, I get told to run through a bunch of chords, like the number cruncher…
J: “Find the magic chord.”
E:…the bitch.
How about you, Tim?
T: I’m sorry, what?
What…ah…what sort of…
T: Oh, there’s the big crossover. I like a lot of glitch, electro, then into ‘70s prog. That’s where I come from.
E: That diversity in terms of where we all come from, our individual passions and our shared passions, probably helps the music never stay in the same bracket.
T: There’s something unique that’s shared between all the different genres we like individually. The strangeness, the inability to categorise – people say that we’re quite difficult to categorise, and I think that where we offshoot into different genres of music, that music still shares the same…uncategorisability.
We’re all pleased with this new word. Dean ventures that Tim is doing my job for me. Ed pokes fun at Tim for having done a Philosophy degree – Ed and Jeb met him at university in Southampton, and I steer talk to the drummer Seryn, who’s over half a decade younger than his bandmates, wanting to know how that dynamic plays out.
J: It’s great. He’s got so much enthusiasm and so much innocence about him and it keeps us going, I think, just having someone like that who’s so up for it all the time. And seeing everything with fresh eyes, almost like you’re seeing it…through him. We get to pretend to be teenagers again.
T: It’s like getting a second wind.
What do you do when you’re not making music? Do you have jobs?
J:…not any more.
E: I do. I teach music to kids at Sussex Academy of music. And privately as well. Just to keep myself fed.
I guess when you get to your mid-twenties and you’re in a band it feels quite difficult to sustain yourself.
J: It’s getting to the point where we’ve got to start making some money really really soon. Because it’s not fun eating rice every day.
T: I did run a shop for six months. At Brighton University, the SU shop.
Dean: I’ve been there. I’ve bought things from that shop.
T: The bad displays? That was me.
D: You did a fantastic job, seriously. It was like…modern art.
T: I had to leave that, because it was awful. The customers, mainly.
Desperately trying to claw back my interview from the twisting clutches of my own runaway psyche, I decide that it’s probably a good idea to talk about the band some more. So I ask what’s on the horizon for Phoria, in terms of releases and touring.
“We’re lucky to have a pretty big back catalogue of material that’s just waiting,” says Ed, “but we’re writing constantly. We’ve always got a load of songs, it’s just finding the time to get back to them.”
“We’re only planning to get a new collection of songs out by the end of the year,” Tim continues, “hopefully. The way it’s shaping up, it’s quite big and more electronic sounding, but we’re playing around with kind of…I guess, faster tunes? Keeping slow ones in there, mixing a couple in there with, er, bangers. That’s what we’re working on at the minute, and there’s a couple we’re really excited about. We’re just trying to string them all together.”
“We’ve just got a bunch of new equipment as well, so it’s taking a bit of time to make some new sounds with the new stuff,” explains Ed. “I upgraded my Nord, it’s amazing. Tim’s got a new synth which is ridiculous.”
“That’s about the only description for it,” Tim agrees. “Oh, it’s yellow. That’s another.”
“That’s kind of more important than the sound, right? The fact that it’s yellow?”
Guess who.
“We don’t even turn it on,” Tim smiles. “It just stands there.”
“Really, you needn’t bother playing,” imparts Dean, conspiratorially, “just wheel the synth out into the middle of the stage and walk off. And just let it…just emit vibes. And it can never ask for money off you, because it’s a fuckin’ synth. So…”
This last syllable is echoey and hollow, hooted down the neck of a beer bottle raised to parched lips. There is a brief conference among the trio, sat on a bed somewhere in Hollingdean.
“Can we go on tour?” Ed asks.
“You’re in,” deadpans Jeb, pointing Kitchener-style at the screen.
“Hooray!” crows Dean.
“You were asking about touring,” says Ed, righting our course for the second time in ten minutes. “We’re sort of trying to get a European tour going. We’ve got this Croatian gig at Soundwave. So that’s in the pipeline, possibly, and beyond that we’ve got gigs –“
“Don’t talk about that one yet,” reminds Tim, gently. “We’re working on UK dates as well. There might be a couple of other things in the pipeline but we don’t want to say just yet.”
That’s fair enough. And here’s where I’d leave things on a nice cliffhanger, with links to Phoria’s <a title="Eu-" href="https://www.phoriamusic.com/p_about.html" target="_blank">website</a>, their <a title="Dys-" href="https://www.facebook.com/phoriamusic?ref=ts&fref=ts" target="_blank">Facebook</a>, their <a title="https://twitter.com/phoria" href="Ana-" target="_blank">Twitter</a>, their <a title="https://soundcloud.com/phoriamusic" href="Exo-" target="_blank">Soundcloud</a>, so that you, dear reader, can keep thoroughly abreast of what they’re planning next. Unfortunately, though, my dear sweet Dean has the last word.
“I respect your confidentiality,” he says. “To a degree.”
Phoria are playing CitR Live #002 at the Bussey Building in Peckham at 22.15 TONIGHT.

Interview: Phoria

“Why’s everyone here so fucking happy?”
Slow down a minute. That can’t be right.
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It took me at least four listens to get round to the sentiment of Tidal Wave, latest cut from <a title="Mumblr." href="https://f-t-s-e.tumblr.com/">UK beatsmith</a> FTSE, because all its weapons-grade sadness (and make no mistake, sadness it is, misery of the highest fucking calibre) is dressed up in the kind of groove and slinking glimmer that was only hinted at on the downcast bedroom sketches of <a title="Self-promotion is sexy." href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/19450-introducing-ftse/">his debut</a> BEGIN. There’s the glowing Rhodes that opens the song, the attention to drum sound, the man himself prefacing his gloomy, beaten tirade with a cheeky little stab at melisma. It’s a tactic he then reappropriates on keys for a banging middle eight, like someone’s trapped a choir of furies in a jam jar. There’s the surprise brass swells, and <a title="She's not named after Jesus. " href="https://saintsaviour.co.uk/">Saint Saviour</a>‘s star turns in the second verse and chorus (move over, ’cause she’s stealin’ the moment). Tidal Wave smashes right into that maddening middle ground between hunger and restraint, and it’s gonna bust open whatever self-perpetuating pressure cabin you’ve trapped yourself in.
The FTSE I EP, from which Tidal Wave is lifted, is out July 1st on <a title="Look, there's his neck again. " href="https://www.luckynumbermusic.com/">Lucky Number</a>.

New: FTSE – Tidal Wave (ft Saint Saviour)

First off, in the interests of a new, humble, and wholly transparent blogosphere, big up Rob Leedham and his ever-more-humourous <a title="I abhor improper referencing. " href="https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4146408-dis-does-singles-13-05-13--swim-deep-these-new-puritans-the-national">DiS Does Singles</a> column for turning me onto Bristol miserablist Oliver Wilde. If I hadn’t been suitably piqued by a description of Flutter as sounding like the product of Kurt Vile forming a Doves tribute band, I wouldn’t have spent all today drifting in and out of a vague, pseudomedicated haze, Wilde’s tracks on repeat in my headphones, ignoring my colleagues and my workload.
It was one of the best workdays in recent memory.
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Let’s leave the term ‘folktronica’ outside, because it’s fucking horrible. Let’s try and keep Linkous out of this too, because it’s not fair on either party. At the bottom of it all, Wilde is using a well-worn synthesis of vinyl-froth loopery and downbeat acoustics to create some of the most sweetly defeated songs I’ve had the pleasure of hearing in a long time.
Nothing’s heavy-handed here – there’s <a title="...sorry." href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwphLD3TWRA">no hamfisted balladry, no jarring rash of glitch</a>, just a gentle swing, a take on beats more akin to <a title="One day I'll stop linking to Koreless. One day. " href="https://soundcloud.com/koreless">Koreless</a> than any of the more obvious reference points. When those ungainly, jagged scratches of guitar start to stab like busted sirens across the end of Curve (Good Grief), and then everything falls away and the song ends as it began, those mournful, chopped up voices fading into silence, I’m not sure how to feel.
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You can watch the <a title="For all your video-based needs, or something. No, not those ones. " href="https://www.laurenorme.com/">Lauren Orme</a>-directed video for Pinch <a title="With poison in your mouth you talk too loud. " href="https://vimeo.com/62603843">here</a>. Man’s also on <a title="Here he is. " href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Oliver-Wilde/304445432985648?fref=ts">Facebook</a>. Keep on givin’ up.

Introducing: Oliver Wilde

I came to this backwards.
My first encounter with Grandfather Birds was secondhand, by way of side project <a title=""...five young adult males who sound like they exist on a diet of booze, blunts and raw beef."" href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/12744-introducing-natelys-whores-kid-sister/">Nately’s Whore’s Kid Sister</a>, whose astounding EP Ribs is somehow as angelic and soaring as it is weighed down by filth and sludge. Listening to Things Beneath The Water and Spithope, which Grandfather Birds have very kindly put up for free download, that first facet of the Nately’s sound starts to make a lot more sense.
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While Spithope does a fine job of swelling from a condensed history of British indie rock to a cathedral-sized coda, it’s Things Beneath The Water that’s the real joy here, a crystalline six-string ping-pong that flickers its way into one of the most addictive, expansive, wide-eyed hooks I’ve heard this year. Grandfather Birds have kindly put the two tracks up for free download on <a title="But pay or I'll eat you." href="https://grandfatherbirds.bandcamp.com/">bandcamp</a>, so y’know, go there.

New & MPFree: Grandfather Birds – Things Beneath The Water/Spithope

It’s a tough call. But I don’t care if Best Ever’s bonkers twiddle-rock still splits my face in half on every listen. Or indeed that Gallop is probably the most exuberant song about aging that I’ve ever had the pleasure of hearing, makes humanity’s debilitating fear of ever-encroaching time sound like something to celebrate. Because the best thing about Everything Touching is still <a title="Like Ronseal." href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YauB3cPgI_Y">the way that it ends</a>.
Murmurations, the song that closes <a href="https://wearetallships.co.uk/">Brighton-via-Cornwall bros</a> Tall Ships‘ first full-length, is nine and a quarter minutes of slow-building arpeggios and percussive clatters, looped over a four-to-the-floor beat somewhere around 130bpm. A house beat. The whole thing ascends teasingly skyward until the 6-minute mark, whereupon it bursts everywhere in a glorious Technicolor splatter. There’s probably a choir in there. It’s one of the best approximations of actual dance music I’ve ever heard a band with guitars make.
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So that album track Phosphorescence has been given a groovealicious redux by Deafkid –<a href="https://www.deafkidband.com/"> the duo partly responsible</a> for the production on Peanut Butter and Melancholy Jam – makes perfect sense to me. The chaply-monikered Christopher Lockington and Florian Sauvaire (for it is they) haven’t opted for the <a title="For example, the Field's frankly incomprehensible take on One Armed Scissor" href="https://stereogum.com/1306522/at-the-drive-in-one-armed-scissor-the-field-remix/mp3s/">total immersion approach</a> – at the outset, they’re content to keep vocal lines front and centre, over a sparkling loop not exactly 12 parsecs from Tall Ships’ usual modus operandi. But from a minute in, Phosphorescence is reimagined as something slinking and soulful, driven by warm keys, a techy beat. The once-robust coda of <a title="Kind of the aural equivalent of a happy Labrador puppy." href="https://soundcloud.com/tallships/phosphorescence">the lolloping, bloopy original</a> goes woozy on the back of some ket-addled synths, voices echoing mournfully through a tunnel of clicks and claps. It’s pretty great.
Tall Ships are playing at Concord 2 on May 18th (that’s next Saturday), as part of the Rock Sound showcase at <a href="https://mamacolive.com/thegreatescape/">The Great Escape</a>. If anyone wants to buy me a ticket, that’d be swell.

New: Tall Ships – Phosphorescence (Deafkid remix)

If you’ve been following these dispatches from rock’n’roll limbo over the past few years (ahahahahahaahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…cough) you might remember <a href="”">a post from the back end of 2011</a> which concerned itself, in a roundabout way, with Love Among The Mannequins’ debut full-length Radial Images. The post purported to be a record review, but really, it was just a series of flippant encyclopaedia entries that I cobbled together for want of something clever to write. For Radial Images was (and is) a record that went out of its way to play around with its lineage, and it felt proper to follow suit. Love Among’s approach to rock music – academic formalism crazily fractured by oblique wordplay and wiry, wild-eyed post-hardcore – doesn’t lend itself to trad documentation, as t’were.
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We’re in much the same stacks here; within the first sixty seconds of new cut Joseph Cassel or John Michael Ernahue or God, D-16, frontman Alex Petersen has gruffly invoked St Francis, Lao Tzu, Plato and Nietzsche. Buchner, Flaubert and Freud follow. Not that all this namedropping is impressive in itself, unless you’re the sort of purulent cretin who attributes their inflated sense of self-worth to a vague knowledge of philosophical figureheads. This is no vainglorious revenge-of-the-bookworms scenario (as Petersen sings: “invert him, if you can/your peeling Schmerzensmann”). But the marriage of these references to thorny riff and tanglefooted rhythm are <a href="https://loveamongthemannequins.co.uk/">where the magic lies</a>. Joseph Cassel is four minutes of four rawthroated friends yelling at each other in a room loaded with noise, men drunk on the richness of history and the power of distortion and the infinite possibility of language. It’s a song where the textbook faves sit alongside lines as free and twisting as “Peeled open Eden with a sweet tooth to core the apple of the mot juste,” alongside some broken hip-shaking and guitars that arc back and forth like a Jacob’s Ladder, alongside a bonafide hook forged from the unlikely words “the mirror is a <a href="“https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misericorde_%28weapon%29">misericorde</a>.” Plus, when you hear the name of time’s favourite coked-up, cigar-chewing motherlover being roared super-loud over the fiercest swing this side of Hot Snakes, it’s difficult not to smile. And that’s the crux of the brilliance of Love Among The Mannequins: you might not know what Petersen’s on about when he yells out “My true mouth has a billion teeth! I’m a rainbow in a human sheath!” But by the time Joseph Cassel or John Michael Ernahue or God, D-16 is over, you’ll sure as shit know what it means to you.
Joseph Cassel or John Michael Ernahue or God, D-16 can be found on <a href="https://sonicanhedonic.bandcamp.com/">SARC Samp1er</a>, the first release by the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SonicAnhedonic">Sonic Anhedonic Recording Company</a> (run by the Mannequins lot, no less). It’s also packing the <a href="https://thelunchtimesardineclub.bandcamp.com/">vaguely threatening sea-haze jangle</a> of Lunchtime Sardine Club’s Rumours, and <a href="https://stalkchalk.bandcamp.com/">Steven Andrew Robert Stride</a>’s singularly desperate take on folk as Chalk, amongst further offerings. They’re putting on <a href="”">a show in Brighton</a> on the 27th, which you should totally go to.

New: Love Among The Mannequins – Joseph Cassel or John Michael Ernahue or God, D-16

Frances Quinlan sounds like she’s always almost about collapse.
It doesn’t matter what she’s yelling, whether it’s the <a title="I'm too good at this now. " href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Hop-Along-the-band/303587787250?fref=ts">obsessive-destructive</a> “nobody deserves you the way that I do”, or <a title="I'll bet. " href="https://hopalong.bandcamp.com/track/diamond-mine" target="_blank">bottomlessly sad</a> like “there are some parents whose children long for divorce”, or <a title="I think. " href="https://hopalong.bandcamp.com/track/no-good-al-joad" target="_blank">getting hopeful</a> with “you are my favourite because you’re a long shot”. It doesn’t matter whether she’s chucking out <a title="Genuinely hilarious. " href="https://hopalong.bandcamp.com/track/kids-on-the-boardwalk" target="_blank">playground taunts</a> like “my mom says your mom’s a lesbian” over a pure pop piano stomp, or turning <a title="I don't ever want to know what this means. " href="https://hopalong.bandcamp.com/track/laments" target="_blank">the nonsensical</a> “the mattress-maker’s making his livin’ by the minute” into the most necessary sentence you’ve ever heard while guitars go napalm and someone approximates a kid hammering at a keyboard. It doesn’t matter if she’s just barely breathing about <a title="It will. " href="https://hopalong.bandcamp.com/track/trouble-found-me" target="_blank">trouble finding her sleeping</a> and her subsequent journey downstairs, unspecified dread lurking just at the edge of everything. Frances Quinlan has a way of making everything sound like it’s the last thing she’ll ever sing.
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With Mark Quinlan and Tyler Long, Frances Quinlan sings and plays guitar in a band from Philadelphia called Hop Along, whose debut full-length Get Disowned is one of the most wonderful, peculiar, addictive, lopsided, explosive collections of songs in an unspecified subgenre of rock music that I have heard in a long, long, long time.
Get Disowned is out now via <a title="Terrifying. " href="https://bsmrocks.bigcartel.com/product/hop-along-get-disowned-lp">Big Scary Monsters</a>. Hop Along play the <a title="Laters." href="https://www.facebook.com/events/103290126522634/?fref=ts" target="_blank">Old Blue Last</a> tonight with The Sidekicks, Muncie Girls and Plaids.

Introducing: Hop Along

New: Koreless – Sun

Video: Post War Glamour Girls – Jazz Funerals

Jesus, small mercies. I feel like I’ve been hollowed out and filled with badger dung. My skin is the papery consistency of dead petals. It might shatter if a breeze finds it. What I need is riffs. Big, heavy ones. Ones that slap you about a bit until you forget why you were even feeling all that delicate in the first place. The Sun Never Sets On The British Empire, the debut full-length out today from Brummie guitar-botherers Bovine, is doing pretty sweet on that front.
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Picking your way over this gnarly terrain, you’ll find warped, twisted versions of the landmarks you were expecting. Vocalist Marcus VVulfgang (yeah?) can sound a bit like John Garcia, he can sound a bit like Josh Homme, he can sound a bit like a phlegmy Chris Cornell when he feels like it, all honey-mellowed and smoky allure. The delay-soaked guitars on opener Barium or the title track, or the phaser that opens I Will Make You Real (before it decides to stove your head in) all point to plugging in, sparking up and zoning out. Stoner rock, n’est-ce pas?
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Almost. The filthy bar-sludge of Thank Fuck I Ain’t You (early contender for song title of the year, if that’s a thing) or The Battle Of The Sinkhole groove along at much the expected rate, but the well’s tainted with spikes of dissonance that you’d more likely find in hardcore than Kyuss. Then something like Heroes Are What? happens and it’s kind of like the way Up In Them Guts pins you up by the throat against all the hopeless graffiti on a peeling toilet wall before whispering a beautiful secret in your ear and spitting whiskey in your eyes. It’s character forming and nastily life-affirming. It sounds nothing like Up In Them Guts. But this is stoner rock blasted forward by rocket fuel, the laziness and bloat that too often hangs around the genre given a damn good hiding by wild-eyed punk fury.
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Don’t sleep for two nights, eat a slice of waxy pizza for breakfast, torch your last Camel and listen to Bovine. If it doesn’t work, you’re not doing it right.
Buy it off <a href="https://fda-rekotz.com/gx/index.php?cat=c32_PRE-SALE-PRE-SALE.html&XTCsid=3fcea02d47dfc39f708b78b3938e87c5" target="_blank">FDA Rekotz</a>. Listen on <a href="https://bovine.bandcamp.com/album/the-sun-never-sets-on-the-british-empire" target="_blank">bandcamp</a>. Like on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/bovinemusic?ref=ts&fref=ts" target="_blank">Facebook</a>.

New: Bovine – The Sun Never Sets On The British Empire

When I got back from work I emptied my flatmate’s wastepaper bin, and mixed in half a cup of white vinegar with three litres of warm water. Dumped in a tablespoon of baking soda, watched it bubble and subside. I took it through with three new j-cloths, lay down on the floor behind my bed, and started to clean mould off the sodden walls of my £600pcm room. Some paint came off. I thought about the deposit that I still owe my flatmate.
I didn’t think that there was rock music for this.
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<a title="(: Drums)" href="https://toucheamore.com/">Elliot Babin</a>, who plays everything except bass on Dad Punchers’ <a title="Dadcamp." href="https://dadpunchers.bandcamp.com/">self-titled</a>, might once have reached the same conclusion, and similar ones concerning outbreaks of food poisoning that close down local malls, or the weird comfort in taking the same menial job each year for the few weeks you’re home at Christmas. Late last year he brought us a record rammed with these things, a short, sad, occasionally funny record of surging midtempo punk run through with heavy memory, the inexorable nostalgia that stings sweet for a while until it turns to lead in your chest and starts to weigh you down. Opener Tire Swing rocks like its namesake, a crumbling sway that looks at that childhood structure and feels nauseous, because there’s no going back to the first time we felt alive.
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Of course, it’s Dirty Dishes & The Mold that’s my favourite, not least because it’s an anthem for mould-beset and distanced sons everywhere, but also because of the paintstripping octaves at its centre. Bug Flipper carries the phrase that gets right to the heart of the songs on Dad Punchers, Babin singing “I’m fucking powerless, but that’s OK” in his throaty, adenoidal honk. It’s a voice that speaks of allergies and disappointment, a voice that makes perfect sense over the clangy fuzz and whip-tight, grumbling basslines from Matt Ebert (of the unstoppable <a title="Already there. " href="https://bsmrocks.bandcamp.com/album/of-all-things-i-will-soon-grow-tired">Joyce Manor</a>), and the whole lot flies like a bastard in the face of the little things that snowball until you’re running and running and can’t stop running, even when there’s nothing behind you any more.
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If I’d heard Rom Com’s rock-bottom jangle five years ago I might have fallen off my stool, sat in a uni bar licking a fresh set of wounds and formulating a horrible song to a similar end. And so half a decade on and listening to Dad Punchers I come to believe, in one of those impermanent epiphanies that so afflict the conflicted, that I don’t give a crap how Arnold felt about Empedocles On Etna; that the poem was worthless as art because it only served to embellish melancholy. Listening to Dad Punchers, this seems to me like a fine manifesto for music. Then I start to think that aren’t I getting a little too old for that, aren’t I getting a little too old for guitars at all, but listening to Dad Punchers and scrubbing at the wall I think I will always come back around to the same two letter answer.
(You can watch the video for Tire Swing <a title="I wish I could skate. " href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOX65Tc4Bhw">here</a>. Buy Dad Punchers from <a title="Someone put it out over here. Please." href="https://deathwishinc.com/estore/category/SEALEGS.html">Sea Legs/Deathwish</a>. Featured artwork by <a title="Sleep enthusiast. " href="https://positivnegativ.tumblr.com/">Anne/Positivnegativ/All Is Spirals</a>.)

Introducing: Dad Punchers

This album has felt like a ghost for ages. Something that died that people ask us about from time to time. So fuck it. Here it is. Stick it in your ear pipes nice and loud and think about what you were doing six or seven years ago. This is what we were.
OK, then.
Summer 2006 didn’t have a chance. Spent ‘05’s tearing around an empty boarding house and hoovering up the irresponsible quantities of bud commensurate with the start of a gap year, my safety net the fait accompli that I wasn’t going back to school in the autumn. That was the summer I first heard The Fool Looks At the Finger That Points To The Sky, a blurring tangle of wiry guitars with all the kinesis of a rocket launch that made me reassess the way I approached my instrument. Someone in The Little Explorer mentioned that they listened to bands like American Football. I’d never heard of American Football. Weird name. When I met Veeno in September and we started our own band, it was one of the first albums he lent me. But summer ‘06, nah, it was slate-grey and hot and the air was made of inescapable steaming pressure, and I knew my blessed days sleeping until practice were ending.
I went to university for three years and got a job and quit the band and quit the job and got another job. The Little Explorer surfaced in fits and starts. First the jawdropping dextra-core of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbJQ01Oz4QY">Chair Legs</a>, a loving marriage of tech and soul that I’ve rarely found an equal to, then the more subdued but no less excellent Spares and the news that The Little Explorer had split. I cottoned on to <a href="https://crashofrhinos.bandcamp.com/">Crash of Rhinos</a> and where they’d come from at the start of last year, which brings us up to yesterday, when The Little Explorer’s never-before-seen second full-length Siderali went up on <a href="https://thelittleexplorer.bandcamp.com/album/siderali">bandcamp</a> as a pay-what-you-like download, in celebration of the completion of the second Crash of Rhinos full-length (aside: YES).
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Crash of Rhinos have since grown up, too; there’s none of the delay-drenched, post-rocky crescendos of 35 Summers on their 2011 post-hardcore revivalist banger Distal, and far fewer of the sandpaper-scrape yells that punctuated the sonic middle ground of their earlier outfit. But the Explorer never felt textbook. Lampshades For Neo-Tokyo comes on all screams, before you realise that the guitars are smashing out something jubilant and grinning for all their distortion. This is noise as joy and defiance, affirmed beyond all doubt by the song’s coda, which builds from softvoice and swelling-heart chords to the musical equivalent of fireflies whirling in timelapse. Likewise, the foot-on-monitor float and drop in Glued is prefaced by gnarly bends and punk battery, and then succeeded by the Midwestern version of a power riff, glittering arpeggios from Telecasters (switched to middle, I’ll bet) glancing off goodness knows how many glockenspiels, a clatter of rimshots, the sound of youthful abandon and sun on your parents’ house and everything beautiful about coming home.
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The free download credits for Siderali (and the <a href="https://thelittleexplorer.bandcamp.com/album/the-little-explorer">self-titled debut</a>) have since run dry, but ‘til there’s more you can pick the record up for a paltry quid (or indeed more, which would be good of you).

New: The Little Explorer – Siderali

Why is the night sad?
It’s earlier this year and I’m reeling from one thing and another and I see this line from <a title="They use the word 'bro' with far too great a level of impunity, but they're alright." href="https://musicalmathematics.co.uk/">a math-rock zine</a>, and it reads ‘late night sounds from a familiar face’, and I think before I follow <a title="Manvamp. " href="https://ftse.bandcamp.com/">the link</a> that I know who it will be. Hunch is right. FTSE is Sam Manville, a Caucasian male based halfway up England who makes rickety, lonesome beats, some of which he collected together at the start of 2013 and called BEGIN.
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Let me tell you why I love LIES. Bumps and clicks lag over a field recording, indistinct cafe chat, cutlery biting plate and glass set on table. That synth line moans out, wrenched from a song we knew as kids and now stripped of all melodrama, set to stumbling scrapes from the sweaty cores of small clubs rammed with indifferent young adults who’ve heard it all before. It’s childhood smashing into a half-lived present, nostalgic and confused and nervous. SHADAHS goes one better, Manville shivering out a scared comedown whisper over glowing Gold Panda pads and an insistent kick that works its way up to rave speed (almost), the furthest emotional point from someone who once spat <a title="It could be worse. " href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YREocBCLxYo">‘I don’t like dance music and I don’t think I ever will’</a> with such conviction, over breakneck hardcore that pulled in five directions at once.
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It’s that new fragility that’s so startling on BEGIN. The synth swoops on BUTTA FLIE are M83 with his sampler smashed and limbs pulled off, some weird horror-movie kid jeering ghostlike over the top. Where CNT HLP MSLF comes on at first like bellicose dancehall, its fierce grind soon falls away and Manville’s adrift in a sea of lonely phosphorescence and unanswered questions. For Y IZ, a quivering acoustic rustles underneath keys that twinkle like malfunctioning Christmas lights, the static-soaked beat hitting late, everything riddled with imperfection and raggedness, and that much more human for these things. And somewhere a girl asks:
Why is the night so sad?

Introducing: FTSE

It’s cold and the stars are out over Summerstown, and I’m hanging out the skylight from my waist, dialing into this duo from Brighton, Bermuda Ern. Remember <a title="SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE SHAKE THE CLOUDS OUT" href="https://soundcloud.com/autolux-1">Autolux</a>? Greg Edwards, guitarist from Failure? The incomparable Carla Azar on drums, she of Ednaswap, the band who wrote that tune Torn that we all know? Anyway, Autolux sent up this twisting, hyperdriven groove. They had a bass sound like stars imploding. They called themselves pop music.
The task at hand. I guess Bermuda Ern’s Big Deal sounds to me like Autolux’s outtaspace swing tethered to the wretched earth, or something. This is rock music pared down to its smallest logical point, intuitive and odd and addicting. Toby Hayes knows as well as the best how to throw that old instrument around, laying a bed of toasty overdrive and weird, defeated lounge chords as foil for his fractured croon and for Oliver Newton, a man who draws his beats in tight and close before chucking them clattering outwards again. Far’s I can tell, they’re recording an album in February, which is something I’m looking forward to listening to. They’ve also written <a title="This Is The Way To Rule" href="https://bermudaern.bandcamp.com/track/that-one-song-acoustic-demo">a song about Ten Grand</a>. I hope it’s not the first.
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<a title="It's the safest place to be. " href="https://www.bermudaern.co.uk/">When this bird goes down, hide in the bathroom.</a>

Introducing – Bermuda Ern

“Are you drinking whisky in honour of PAWS?” asks Ruth, a Scottish girl I have just met.
“No,” I say, “I just like whiskey.”
I pass Ben his shot. I know what’s about to happen.
“What is it?” asks Ruth.
There’s a second in which I think about lying. I discard this option. Ben would know.
“It’s Jack Daniel’s.”
“THAT’S NOT WHISKY!!!”
I neck the whiskey and shut up.
My pal and I are actually sinking the burning, amber tots of Tennessee’s sickliest because I had to spend over ten quid to use my card at the bar, and two souring pints at nine pounds whatever didn’t cut the mustard for the uninterested, heavy-lidded boozejockey who poured us the devil’s nectar. Raising a glass to PAWS would not have been unfounded ceremony, though. We miss the first three songs from the Scots trio, but pick our way to the front of a half-full Heaven for Homecoming, whose central refrain, “I’ve turned my woes into sing-alongs”, acts as party line for the band’s debut Cokefloat!, a record defiantly sugar and spright despite its grounding in the brutal realities of loss. And sing along the crowd do, especially the tousle-haired man-mountain next to me who really loves PAWS (really), but cares not a whit for deodorant, or where his spit lands, for that matter. Tonight Bainz frees itself from its downcast, dirgey lineage (it sounds a lot like Rooster by Alice In Chains on record) and slathers on the overdrive, while Philip’s roaring the heart-hefting sentiments on Bloodline is as terrifying in person as when augmented by Cokefloat!’s omnipresent fuzz. Set closer Poor Old Christopher Robin is a sad-but-pulling-my-socks-up lament that I can never decide if I like or not. No one’s doubting its authenticity for a nanosecond, but with a lyric sheet that dishes out self-help in dull platitudes, it’s tough to find catharsis in. Watching, though, I clock bassist Matt Scott staring fixedly at his fret hand. He’s grinning like it’s Christmas, and for a moment in my head the whole show is the bassist and the fucking incredible time he’s quietly having playing songs in front of people. The two things together (Taylor’s teenage truisms; Scott’s smile) are PAWS’ essence, cute, grungy pop that makes fun of being sad because to do anything else would be an insult, and to hell with what you think of it.
Flash-forward to post-bourbon. Ben is happy and incredulous at the amount of people crammed into Heaven to see Japandroids, and I start to free associate on their direct line to the zeitgeist, the relevance that has them headlining to a sold-out 600 plus-capacity venue 4700 miles away from their hometown. I start to think that it’s something to do with the chorus-drenched overdrive of Brian King’s guitar, which somehow marries all that inexplicable shoegaze necrophilia to music’s recent reappropriation of grunge and/or “lo-fi”, using the union to rough up the sort of tones abundant in last year’s cultural smash Drive, a revisionist 80s presented as the present. After all, I reason, what’s Wet Hair if not exactly that? Boys of Summer from the other side, the sunshine-drunk titular characters chasing constant highs and etched in plasma-heated distortion, rather than Don Henley’s maudlin douche getting all blurry-eyed over wet synths?
I don’t really believe any of this rotten jism my mind is spewing out. And if it’s worth believing, worth thinking about, if there’s an iota of truth or benefit in that kind of analysis, I don’t give two crusty white dog turds. Because Japandroids, and especially Japandroids live, aren’t about thinking. They’re about L I V I N G.
Sometimes, though, we have to pretend to be adults, standing round the edges, observing sensibly, because really, that’s the best way to properly take it all in, isn’t it? And it’s so very unbecoming to fling yourself around like you’re nine years younger than you are. These are my work shoes. I might get them dirty. Still, doesn’t stop Ben and I serenading each other to a frenetic The Boys Are Leaving Town, or Woody beating out David Prowse’s fierce rhythms on my shoulders, or any of us from going WHOA OH OH OH OH OH at the appropriate moment. Ben notes his surprise at King’s onstage presence, having expected a shy and fringey introvert. As it is, we get a stage-straddling thirty-at-a-push Boss acolyte in skinny jeans, a man in his element up there, a man who wrenches thunder from his Telecaster in exactly the way he sings about on the fiendish, addictive Adrenaline Nightshift. By Fire’s Highway there’s kindling beginning to catch at the bottom of my belly, and I feel chained and restive, a kid in the backseat. Something will have to give.
In To Hell With Good Intentions (a righteous surprise, the second time in 6 months I’ve seen it played by a band that isn’t McLusky) Ben makes a b-line for the bar, and the fizzing and sparkling in my gut increases exponentially with every staccato, jackhammer blast from King’s guitar, every twisted playground jibe that we yell back at him. We are a little back from the agitated mass that’s gathered front and centre, and when the levee breaks against the song’s inexorable battering, King yelling “WE’RE ALL GOING STRAIGHT TO HELL!”, a leash snaps in me also, and seemingly without moving I am dragged into the dripping morass of hot bodies that churns in front of the stage. Heart Sweats is about as close to smooth, louche fuck music as I can allow myself to like, blood beating through me as King moans in pre-coitus and we all roar the letters XOXOX. Younger Us is Japandroids’ absolute core, that naked new skin rush, youth’s last incendiary fuck you in the face of a settled and comfortable and anodyne future. I pitch, I yaw, I am surprised by my own resilience. Sometime around Rockers East Vancouver I slow in the maelstrom, think of pushing back to the edges, think “I’m supposed to be thinking about this and observing and writing it all down”, but then it’s The Nights Of Wine And Roses and I am more glad to be a 25-year-old man in a pit in a club on Villiers Street than I’ve ever been to be anything anywhere, because there is absolutely no fucking excuse for ignoring shivering, ecstatic, glorious L I F E when it’s being handed to you like this, by two friends who know that they have everything to live for but precious little time in which to wait for it.
I have to stop, because I’m soaking wet and my shoulder’s fucked and I feel like I’m going to blow chunks. Woody and Ben chuckle at me as I stumble towards them, and I rest through Wet Hair, Ben feeding me the beer he has brought through from the bar. At first I don’t want it, but my stomach begins to settle and I get it down. By the time Evil’s Sway is over I am restored, floating easily on prickling swells of that soaking distortion, and about thirty seconds into The House That Heaven Built my near-empty cup is spinning in a high, wide arc through the air behind me and I have plunged myself into the melee again. This time Ben follows, still smothered in his parka and a grin that dares the world to even try and give a fuck about the morning. In true Japandroids style, The House That Heaven Built turns the breakup song on its head, eschewing standard self-doubt and venom for limitless positivity, and we’re launched about in the rough sea of limbs and joints, boys, girls, all losing their shit, all smiling. At intervals Ben and I are thrown back together to scream the song’s vocal call and response in each other’s faces, one of us playing King, the other Prowse, escapism in action. For Continuous Thunder there’s a circle of at least five of us, arm in arm and slowly rotating like a human carousel, singing to each other and no-one in particular, alive in the knowledge that conditional love is beautiful because of its fragility, not in spite of it. There’s some spiel and incident before For the Love of Ivy, the Gun Club cover that I don’t love on record, and all of rock music’s white-hot, elemental fury proceeds to erupt in front of us. The big ol’ Fred Durst-looking motherfucker King got up onstage has jumped off and we’ve caught him, Phillip Taylor has jumped off and we’ve caught him too. King throws his frame around like a ragdoll in a typhoon, strobes smash violent lightning across the scene, Prowse’s drums are the galeforce beating of wind against building. Weird, unrelated vignettes play out at each impossibly bright flash. One flickering moment and the duo might have broken into Thunderstruck. The next, King’s foot is atop Prowse’s bass drum and it’s Today, one of the first riffs I ever learned to play. I fall over, because fuck it, might as well.
Japandroids are about L I V I N G.
About Ben looking around at me and smiling when the Phillip harps on about his lungs always wheezing in Poor Old Christopher Robin, because he’s seen the hateful clamp tighten around my own airways enough times to make it a part of me and a part of the two of us.
About hefting Jonny onto the stage before For the Love of Ivy, only for him to blow it and be sent back down to the crowd by King, but not before finding his missing shoes and playing the lead role in a story he’ll tell on Monday and forever.
About swinging around like children on a trampoline, in a room heaving with strangers and noise and knowing like you’ve never known before that you’ll stick together forever, stay sick together, be crazy forever.

Live Review: Japandroids (Heaven, London, 28/10/12)

OK, let’s experiment then. Climb into the Delorean with me on this one. February 7th, 2011. We get two point five minutes of pounding skins and bass growl, guitars seethe and crackle like a jet engine heating up. After liftoff the post-rock casing falls away and we’re left with something else, something that swings and jags like Jumpin’ Jack Flash given years alone in its bedroom and forcefed guitar tone, something that keeps building speed like a, haha, like a rolling stone, not just cold rock but limbs and sweat and mains power that keeps threatening to fall over itself and take us with it.
“Need a real album to save my soul/it’s been another dead year for rock ’n’ roll”
So sang Conrad Keely on Pure Radio Cosplay, first song proper from last year’s sprawling space-odyssey Tao of the Dead, a record comprising eleven songs in D, and one 16-minute F-tuned songtipede, five cuts rammed together and sewn into one. Rock ‘n’ roll Jim, but not as we knew it. …And You Will Know Us by the Trail Of Dead, the band Keely heads up with co-pilot Jason Reece, have returned one year, seven months and a couple of weeks later with Lost Songs, a record that clocks in (CD version, minus bonus tracks) at around 46 minutes, longest song 5 minutes 02, constituent parts drums (crashing), guitars (screaming), voices (yelling). All of which begs the question…is 2012 another dead year for rock ‘n’ roll?
(09/01/12 – At the Drive-In reform)
It feels borderline offensive to suggest that a band as singular and established as Trail of Dead might trade off the treasures of another. But Open Doors, the first track on Lost Songs, sounds like Keely and co. have taken cues from that other Texan post-hardcore band, the one that split itself down the middle in 2001 and sutured itself back together for <a href="https://cdn.abovethelaw.com/uploads/2012/01/scrooge-mcduck.jpg" target="_blank">the fans</a> in January this year. Specifically, cues from Arcarsenal, for Open Doors too begins with cardiac-monitor guitar blips glowing in a chasm of yawning bass, drums that rumble like mecha advancing through distant jungle. But Trail of Dead are the rolling thunder to At the Drive-In’s forked lightning, and the snaking groove that Open Doors slithers in on soon gets smashed to bits by a wall of chords that favours all-out bludgeoning over tricky rhythmic slashes. As opening statements go, it’s loud, it’s blunt, it’s heavy. It’s rock music, but Trail Of Dead can do better.
(24/01/12 – Cloud Nothings release Attack On Memory)
On January 24th, Dylan Baldi, Joe Boyer, Jayson Gerycz and the impeccably-named TJ Duke released an amped-up, hacked-off redux of their nasal bedroom-jangle called Attack On Memory, an album that apparently made emo <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16158-attack-on-memory/" target="_blank">valid critical currency</a> again, where its <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15010-there-are-rules/">musical forbears’</a> recent output got thrown to the dogs as <a href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15697-closer-to-closed/" target="_blank">irrelevant</a>. Attack On Memory was just about strong and scrappy enough to fight off Can’t-See-What-The-Fuss-Is-About naysaying, and after Open Doors early concession of points, Lost Songs soon starts to throw its weight around. Pinhole Cameras is near-perfect Trail Of Dead, Relative Ways doped to the gills and pushed to breaking point, careening around crazy-eyed somewhere on the edge of mania before dropping out into a kaleidoscopic tunnel of shapeshifting guitars. That Keely’s voice is fractured by fuzz and his words largely indescipherable only heightens the thrill. For Opera Obscura, the lithe elasticity of Jamie Miller’s everywhere-at-once drum assault comes on like Jawbox’s Zach Barocas, octalimbed, pounding out the rhythm to the pissed swarm of bees Keely and Reece wring out of their six-strings.
Months pass. April sees the release of Electric Picture Palace, debut and swansong of Trail Of Dead acolytes <a href="https://brew.bandcamp.com/album/holy-state-electric-picture-palace" target="_blank">Holy State</a>. In August, <a href="https://wooderson.bandcamp.com/" target="_blank">Wooderson</a> put out Let The Man Speak, which supplemented the Texans’ influence with a steady diet of Fugazi.
(29/05/12 – Japandroids release Celebration Rock)
You’ll have read that Lost Songs is a rock record. And you’ll have heard it in the two songs we got before its release, Up To Infinity and album highlight Catatonic, which reimagines distortion as a great big hoofing amphetamine rush, racking it out into one of the most howling, fantastic songs to grace 2012. This is what Japandroids did for every cut on Celebration Rock, 2012’s defining loud record, everything aching and brilliant about guitars and drums and friends and youth and booze committed to tape and handed down to us on snow-white 180g vinyl. But Trail Of Dead have swapped out the ecstatic, air-punching joy of King and Prowse for a poke around America’s rotten mouth. Catatonic is named for the nation’s youth, who according to Keely <a href="https://www.gigguide.tw/article-117" target="_blank">“don’t seem to care. They have a very limited outlook on what’s going on, and that concerns me.”</a> It’s ‘fuck you’ over ‘fuck yeah’, but the shivering, prickling self-immolation that the guitars spark around the edges of the heart hits the same, rock ‘n’ roll eclipsing reason. Unfortunately for Trail of Dead (if not the rest of us), their message ends up redacted in delivery.
(21/02/12 – Pussy Riot in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour)
Righteous indignation at the state of current affairs is something Trail Of Dead haven’t been shy about expressing with regard to Lost Songs. The band dedicated Up To Infinity to Pussy Riot on its release, with a statement that “the music (on Lost Songs) was inspired by the apathy to real world events that has plagued the independent music scene now for over a decade.” The flimsiness of the statement aside, all the upright anger aligns neatly with Lost Songs’ highly directional sonic blast, but the record’s voices are so distorted that Trail Of Dead are going to have to rely on their public reading the lyric sheet to connect with what they’re trying to say. Does this matter? I’m a champion of distortion, not a political commentator, but Propagandhi launched another tightly-controlled burst of polemical punk-metal ordnance on September 4th in the form of Failed States, which concerned itself acerbically, entertainingly and above all effectively with ‘<a href="https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/mar/18/iraq-massacre-emos-killing-gay" target="_blank">emos in Iraq</a>/<a href="https://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/aceh-punks-arrested-for-re-education/484549" target="_blank">punks in Aceh</a>’, celebrity escape to space, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caster_Semenya#Gender_test" target="_blank">Caster Simenya</a>, and the evil, sweaty cycles of the sex trade. Failed States demands that its listeners do their best to effect a change, and it does this by presenting the horrific and the unbearably close side by side, always with brutal clarity. Lost Songs works as a rock record, and Up To Infinity works as a supercharged, overdriven blast into musical hyperspace, but I’m not sure they work as a call to arms.
(20/08/12 Bloc Party release Four)
It hasn’t all been wine and roses. In August, Bloc Party went rockist on us with the dull, clumsy Four, which tried to convince the world of the band’s validity and togetherness with the old ‘instruments + earnestness = unsinkable’ formula. It’s often tough to hear and engage with what Keely and Reece are yelling about on Lost Songs, but shit, better that than  soundtracking (badly) one of my generation’s more wanton flare-ups with some <a href="https://www.songmeanings.net/songs/view/3530822107859438502/?specific_com=73016163250" target="_blank">fuckwit sloganeering</a> and a riff that P.O.D. threw out in 2001 for being too gauche. On the same day that Pussy Riot did their best to stick it to Putin, Omaha’s Cursive put out a <a href="https://drownedinsound.com/releases/16819/reviews/4144502" target="_blank">generally</a> <a href="https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2012/02/cursive-i-am-gemini.html" target="_blank">lauded</a> slice of ham-fisted, schlocky bollocks that seemed to do well on the basis that it was heavier and more ‘complex’ than its predecessor, not to mention that it didn’t bother us with all those girly feelings that Tim Kasher let bleed out on previous records. For all the fierce noise, Lost Songs is careful not to degrade into chest-beating or masturbation. Flower Card Games reeks of patchouli and Nag Champas and still seethes with discontent, and I long to be supine on my bedroom floor, getting boxed and watching smoke curl up to the horrible plastic chandelier instead of sandwiched between a train wall and a man in a pink shirt with Union Jack cufflinks who’s wearing far too much cologne and reading the sports pages of The Metro. Awestruck refracts the record’s guitars through a glassy post-rock prism, and they come out the other side flickering like Chinese lanterns, airborne. The real payoff, though, comes at Lost Songs’ close, with Time and Again. To hear Keely come back to earth human after a record’s worth of mighty discontent, on the lines “I know too well the strain of losing something you tried to save”, over a sweet, resigned strum and shuffle is a suckerpunch that’ll knock you sideways before you exhale.      
(22/10/12 …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead release Lost Songs)
Rock’n’roll hasn’t died, and it won’t in my lifetime, certain as my lifetime will end. If you’re not satisfied with The Stones and Springsteen still doing their thing at however the fuck old they are, read the end of year lists when they start bubbling up like a poisoned rash across the internet. Cloud Nothings, Japandroids, <a href="https://thequietus.com/articles/10472-metz-review" target="_blank">METZ</a> and The Men will be in a helluva lot of them. Smells like Critic-Oriented Rock? Propagandhi and <a href="https://open.spotify.com/album/36ISXFaX1E98V1ARHesB6C" target="_blank">mewithoutYou</a> shone in (and outclassed) the less-trendy Punknews big leagues over the ocean. Dig a little deeper and there’s Wooderson and Holy State, to say nothing of <a href="https://easterbanduk.bandcamp.com/">Easter</a>, <a href="https://valesband.bandcamp.com/">Vales</a> and <a href="https://brew.bandcamp.com/album/blacklisters-blklstrs">Blacklisters</a>, on our own shores. Until there’s not one kid in their bedroom thrashing at a Yamaha Pacifica through a secondhand Boss DS-1 and a Laney LX12, rock’n’roll hasn’t rattled its last. And when it does, we will know it, at least in part, by the Trail of Dead.

Review: …And You Will Know Us by the Trail Of Dead – Lost Songs

“…the lyrics are blind baggage, and they emerge only in snatches…such a style seems to link up with an older tradition – the tradition of the American artist to put his story in disguise, to tell his tale from the shadows, probably because that is where he usually finds it. Those who mean to seduce do not announce their intention through megaphones.” – Greil Marcus (on The Band, Mystery Train)
Apparently, the record that was to become Total Loss was scrapped, in <a title="To Nick Levine, The Guardian, Friday 14th September 2012" href="https://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/sep/14/how-to-dress-well-tom-krell">creator Tom Krell’s words</a>, because it was guilty of ‘drilling down into melancholy’, and over his worries at being deemed ‘a miserable fuck’. When I Was In Trouble’s blasted waste doesn’t do a thing to corroborate his implications, that the Total Loss presented to us on Monday is any less weighed-down by sadness. The song’s death-knell piano over the whispering rush of lonely trains, its layers and layers of gently fuzzing static worrying one ear and then the other, leave it sounding more like Mike Hadreas’ beaten vignettes than any of How To Dress Well’s more commonly quoted kindred spirits. And like Put Your Back N 2 It earlier this year, Krell’s sophomore effort will most likely turn off a certain sect of the acolytes inducted by the deafening intimacy of his first, which you can explain away however you like (I’m going with <a title="SHOEHORN" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_Mechanical_Reproduction">Benjamin</a>). Total Loss does not sound like a man in his bedroom, for the most part, and without the shock factor inherent in an incredible closeness used to present a musical style that’s most often spoonfed to us as slick and untouchable, maybe an element of ‘charm’, or whatever, gets lost. Fact is, though, that Total Loss destroys its predecessor. Krell opts for complete emotional immersion, though not always in the manner you’d expect from a record called Total Loss.
You’ve heard the ratchety beats and crystalline keys of <a title="Here's the Koreless remix, all freezing stars and limitless black expanse..." href="https://soundcloud.com/koreless/htdw-cold-nites-koreless-remix">Cold Nites</a>. Since Love Remains last year, Krell has proved himself adept at using omission and opacity to heighten effect, and that we can hear hardly a damn word beneath the reverb matters not a bit. That pleading falsetto cuts right through the skin without heed to the restraints of language, and as the song cuts out, the end credits to a story unhappy and unresolved, Krell breathes a single ‘I pray for myself again’. Neither admission nor confession, just a simple statement in the face of loss. It’s devastating. I’m convinced that line could floor a bear in a bulletproof vest at ten paces. On the other hand, Struggle goes for all-out sonic assault, reappropriating When I Was In Trouble’s desolation and whipping it up into a desperate panic. Once more, Krell’s words are often buried, but his voice is a tremulant choir of furies over disjointed, cyclonic 2-step, ‘you were there for me when I was in trouble’ this time a last ditch attempt at explaining the wretched mandala of feelings that swirls at one’s centre with the permanent departure of a loved one.
But Krell is true to his intentions. He’s not going to be that miserable fuck, and rather than always beating us over the head with just how bottomlessly sad the events that presaged Total Loss were, he seduces, oh yes, like the ‘crooner’ <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=tom+krell+crooner&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a">he’s so often billed as</a>. Running Back frames an unbearable need for warmth with slinking clicks and gasps, some candlelit cocktail bar acoustics, before & It Was U segues in with the semblance of confidence, Krell’s voice further forward than it’s ever been, but there’s loss here too. ‘Any time you need me I will come back’ could be a simple admission of loyalty and kindness in another context, but here it’s that same inexorable suck into the orbit of another body. Likewise, Krell’s most brutal questioning – ‘how many people did he kill?’ – isn’t backed by the sorts of boiling synth stabs that run through Struggle, but the lambent melancholy of How Many? and its underwater Rhodes.  And if he wants to reimagine <a title="Say 'baby, I love you.'" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQgd6MccwZc">R&B’s lyrical tropes</a> over a Reichian piano loop, as on Say My Name Or Say Whatever, well, he can do that too.
All the sonic repositioning, the disconnect between Krell’s more hospitable sounds and Total Loss’ weighty subject matter, suggests an effort to keep listeners at arm’s length, make them work for emotional payoff, and avoid the problems that can leave music stale or repulsive. Oversharing, ‘look-at-me’, self-importance. Despite best intentions, this too often has an effect quite contrary to the seduction ol’ Marcus recongised, instead bringing about apathy, boredom and an irreconcilable distance. To be unmoved by music is unforgiveable. But the mist here is pink, permeated by the liquor from Krell’s beating heart, and Total Loss hurts and delights in ways I’m still figuring out. Like total loss, Total Loss doesn’t always make sense, but it sees out the grief process in full, and as he testifies on the new bloom of Ocean Floor for Everything, Tom Krell has his future.

Review: How To Dress Well – Total Loss

Strung out loosely along the Surrey/Hampshire border there’re all these sleepy towns where not a huge amount ever seems to happen. One course of action is to hunker down in leafy Farnham with a bunch of cold stubbies, tell yourself isn’t-it-lovely-and-besides-it’s-not-Aldershot and live vicariously through other people’s noise. Unhappy with or unaware of this option, Hold Your Horse Is decided make the noise themselves.
It’d be remiss of anyone writing about Hold Your Horse Is not to mention the very obvious parallels that can be drawn between their debut full length Frimley (a town also home to a big feck-off business park) and the output of another rock’n’roll three piece from nearby Aldershot (you know the one, split up after album three, song named after the bloke from Nightmare On…yeah, them). There’s a lot of odd, gnarly, stretchy chords and rhythms that sound like they started life on an anvil and Robin Pearson’s voice is all friendly and righteous one minute BUT THEN GOES REALLY LOUD AND MAKES YOU WANT TO SHIT YOURSELF the next.
That said it’d also be remiss to write Hold Your Horse Is off as no-rate copyists. That riff on the joyriding one minute twenty-two second scorch of Title Track, for example, well, that could blister paint. Everything’s So Mundane plays out like the anglesome, end-of-tether aftermath of that night you got bored and did some pills just because, all disgusted lip-curl and wanting to unzip yourself from your skin and fly off somewhere better. And there’s a song called Like Crisps Under Bison, which is the best song name you’ve heard this year and has the bridge and the chorus to back it up. Srsly.
You can listen to Frimley in its entirety below, and you can also buy it from <a title="Stubbies have made an evangelist of me. " href="https://holdyourhorseis.bandcamp.com/album/frimley-lp">bandcamp</a>. Hold Your Horse Is also have a <a title="No no, you hold YOUR horse, Iz. That wasn't very good, was it?" href="https://www.hyhi.co.uk/">real website</a>, which is nice.
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New: Hold Your Horse Is – Frimley

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“Shoegazing was originally a slag-off term. My partner, who was the guitarist in Moose, claims that it was originally leveled at his band. Apparently the journo was referring to the bank of effects pedals he had strewn across the stage that he had to keep staring at in order to operate. And then it just became a generic term for all those bands that had a big, sweeping, effects-laden sound, but all stood resolutely still on stage.” – Miki Berenyi, Lush
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“…emocore must be the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. But just in case you are wondering, I read in my Thrasher the other day that in fact, what my band along with other bands in this city are playing is emocore. I’m thinking Emo Phillips, the comedian. Emocore? Emotional hardcore? As if hardcore wasn’t emotional to begin with. Anyway, it’s caca. I hate to say it but you can only hold your silence for so long about this stupid shit.”  – Ian MacKaye, Embrace
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Shoehorning together two of the more disdained genre delineators is never going to meet with approval (wasn’t ‘grindie’ just rank?), and so it is for Sweden’s Sore Eyelids – as their label <a title="Also fasaden.bigcartel.com" href="https://www.serenerecords.net/">Serene</a> note of the band’s sound, “someone said ‘shoegaze-emo’, we’re not sure we know what that means ”. “Haha,” you say, “those precious connoisseurs, those tricky artistes, of course they know what it means. We know what shoegaze is, we know what emo is. Let’s draw our conclusions analogous to maths – x+y=z – and forgive these little spurts of petulance.”
Based on the Swedish trio’s <a title="'Shoemo'?" href="https://soreeyelids.bandcamp.com/album/sore-eyelids">self-titled full-length</a> that came out in July, here’s what I think ‘shoegaze-emo’ is.
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It’s an addictive, bouncing-off-the-walls distorto-thrash best exemplified by opener I Wish I Could Believin’er, a hyperactivity that could even hack the half-pipe but then corkscrews off into fiddly, dextrous tendrils of notes as once grew in Chicago or Champaign, IL. It’s super-bright, lancing basslines and everunforgiving self-observation (and laceration) as typified by Can’t Breathe’s “I’m no good and I will mess things up, just like always”, smothered to the point of burial in a flame-licked wreckage of guitar fallen through a great wide yawning space, massive and hot and crashing. It’s these inexorable movements of noise, as on Carpi 2007 or Depending On that cut like glaciers in time lapse. It’s channelling 365 days of nothing into four minutes and calling it 365 Days of Nothing.
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It’s a bit more than two words and a hyphen can quite manage.
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Introducing: Sore Eyelids

By the time I first heard In On The Kill Taker I was fifteen years old, and it had been around for nearly a decade. In the eyes of the people who document that sort of thing, D.C.’s buzz had largely burned out, and writing about bands in baseball caps or masks or face paint dominated rock press. It was not, I would venture, that ideal a time to be nursing an always-growing addiction to music with loud guitars in. Maybe I wasn’t looking hard enough in 2002, but things seemed to get better with the passing of years, and today there’s fierce life running up England’s spine. At the most southerly point of my interest we have Derby’s life-affirming (I do not use the term lightly) <a title="YOU'RE A FRIEND THAT WE'VE NOT MET YET SON" href="https://www.crashofrhinos.co.uk/">Crash of Rhinos</a> and guitarist/lungsman Biff’s <a title="Who wouldn't?" href="https://timetravelopps.co.uk/">Time Travel Opportunists</a> imprint. To the north, there’s Leeds’ <a title="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/16466-video-blacklisters-trick-fuck/" href="https://www.brewrecords.net/">Brew Records</a>, plus Matty Wall and James Lyall bolstering the city’s live scene with their tireless work as <a title="Hey man!" href="https://www.dirtyotter.blogspot.co.uk/">Dirty Otter</a>. And bursting from between the two in a melee of sweat and elbows is Let The Man Speak, debut full-length from Sheffield’s Wooderson. That’s what I love about these rock ‘n’ roll bands, man. I keep getting older, they stay the same age.
I referenced Fugazi in the first line of this review. Perhaps you think that’s unfair, drawing parallels between a comparatively young band’s first full-length and one of the monoliths of the vague sphere of music that the young band’s first full-length occupies. But the influence of the D.C. titans, not to mention a hefty complement of the usual scene suspects, is tough to ignore on Let The Man Speak.  Sam Lenthall’s serpentine rasp in the choruses of Janet Bruce could almost be Guy Picciotto. Mint Condition’s primal rhythmic trickiness and billowing jetstreams of scratchy distortion owe a clear debt to early …Trail of Dead. And the jarring chords at the centre of Sparrow may or may not have been nicked from Sonic Youth’s Sugar Kane. To the same end, when you’re making wild, tattered guitar music that’s all hips and knuckles and you start yelping ‘cut it!’ in a song’s chorus, as Wooderson do for Buffalo Jump, you’re going to back anyone drawing comparisons into a corner that they won’t be able to fight their way out of.
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So you’d best have the goods to fend off the gainsayers, and on that front, presenting Wooderson as a band held down and unable to move for the weight of their influences is unfair, even if those influences are inescapably present. So Buffalo Jump might have a touch of the Rolodex Propagandas about it, but it’s one of Let The Man Speak’s finest moments, its taut, tense rumble exploding into slashes of whitehot guitar that could cut through steel. Where he sounds undeniably similar to his spiritual predecessor when singing on Janet Bruce, Lenthall’s broad, spoken Yorkshire in the song’s verses reveals a band unwilling to compromise their integrity or better, entirely incredulous at the idea that they might sing any differently to how their voices actually sound.  Elsewhere, guitarist Loic’s breathy sneer on the weaving Too Many Questions is more lascivious than music of this kind normally has any business being, a wolf’s keening hunger still unsatisfied by the false release of the song’s chorus, while Sleepwalking’s rickety riffola breaks down into fierce arpeggios by way of a mad-eyed, ranting sermon from other guitarist Ash Morton.
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Refreshingly, Wooderson are transparent in their reverence for their forebears – our first point of contact was my tweeting ‘Wooderson: sound like Fugazi and named after one of the greatest movie characters of all time. Winner.’ To which the reply came ‘You got our number’. There are no claims to be reinventing guitar music here, meaning that Let The Man Speak’s 33 minutes play out as they should do, nine lean and purposeful shards broken away from something older and bigger, but not always better. Let’s have a forward thinking year. Let’s let the man speak.
Let The Man Speak is out now on <a title="You want me to pick you up a couple?" href="https://www.bombedout.com/">Bombed Out Records</a>. You can stream and buy it via the Wooderson <a title=""Say man, you got a flute?"" href="https://wooderson.bandcamp.com/">bandcamp</a>.

Review: Wooderson – Let the Man Speak

Praise be to John Darnielle for never keeping his acolytes waiting. Cry For Judas is the lead single from The Mountain Goats‘ upcoming full-length Transcendental Youth, which is set to drop on October 2nd, just 18 months after last year’s devastating All Eternals Deck.
Cry For Judas, like Darnielle’s very best, neatly sidesteps mawkishness and dullardry despite its treatment of the resolutely downbeat, its pivotal lines (“some things you do just to see how bad they’ll make you feel”, or “I’m still here, but all is lost.”) delivered with all the unstable, grinning conviction of a madman, over perversely sunny horn stabs and a drunken bassline that wrenches you into a lurching jig and won’t let go no matter how much you plead. But you won’t plead. You’ll enjoy it.
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New: The Mountain Goats – Cry For Judas

When I was growing up I lived next door to my best friend. We spoke to each other in rudimentary code by knocking on the walls. One autumn we had a week off school, and I woke up early every day to go round his house after our parents had gone to work, and we’d eat cereal and play Age of Empires. In the afternoons we’d hang around the sleepy town, and as the October light faded into evening we took skateboards to the army barracks and made run after run down a steep, newly-tarmac’d path. The last of the late sun split branches growing bare, as their leaves danced around our wheels in swirling flurries. Once we watched from the attic window as fireworks smashed a kaleidoscope across the night. That week I discovered The Get Up Kids’ Something To Write Home About, Hot Rod Circuit’s Sorry About Tomorrow. Heartache and optimism made sense next to each other.
Had it been written, I would have listened to Donald Domesky‘s crashing Telecasters and soul-hefting horn section on repeat. As it is, I’m making up for it now.
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Ships is out now via <a title="I AM FINE I AM FINE I AM FINE I AM FINE I JUST NEED ELEVEN DOLLARS..." href="https://www.topshelfrecords.bigcartel.com/product/prawn-ships-vinyl-lp">Topshelf</a>. You can pay what you like for the rest of Prawn‘s back catalogue on <a title="Prawn porn unltd. " href="https://prawnnj.bandcamp.com/">bandcamp</a>, ’cause they’re cool like that.

Video: Prawn – Donald Domesky

Working in shadowy monochrome, four men pitch and sway reservedly to the abrasive rush spun by their hands and throats. The song is called Cornea, and the four men, who are from Sweden and play instruments together under the name Suis La Lune, don’t throw themselves around with the abandon we might expect from music this embattled. The lack of visual stimulation is at first something of a non-sequitur, but makes more sense as it unfolds. This is craftsmanship we’re watching, rather than a spectacle in bombast.
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Much the same as this Riala, Suis La Lune’s first full length since 2006’s Quiet, Pull the Strings!, doesn’t always occupy the blasted musical and emotional landscape synonymous with a red-raw vocal scrape and the guileless passion in lines like ‘the first time I held your hand, I shook like a leaf’. Yes, Suis La Lune’s two guitars can be writhing bolts of plasma, cutting songs from blocks of static. Sparks shower off, and instead of falling and expiring, rise glowing as flames to the sky. The first band to carve that comparison into my cortex were from El Paso – make of that what you will. But there is a hope and beauty to Riala that was present in that second wave of the dirty word, doe-eyed Romeos picking their way from the belly of the States and into a lesser circle of obscurity. The driving bass and rickety hats that propel the chiming Midwestern midsection of Stop Motion, the dextrous, interlocked arpeggios that open In Confidence, these are exemplary exercises in genre. The rolling piano at the close of Wishes and Hopes, or the dabs of brass that accompany this and Remorse are surprising in their context but never extraneous.
I think what I’m trying to say is that Riala is the most beautiful piece of ‘heavy’ music that I have heard so far this year. <a title="...a locality situated in Norrtälje Municipality, Stockholm County, Sweden with 215 inhabitants in 2010." href="https://topshelfrecords.bandcamp.com/album/riala">You should hear it too</a>.

Video: Suis La Lune – Cornea

Across this great green planet there are young people. Young people in flannel shirts and earthy tones. They have beards, if they can grow them, and sometimes if they can’t. Books are their friends. They have felt the bloody, beating pump shatter behind their ribs, but they try not to dwell on it too much any more.
They complain bitterly and with volcanic, rising bile (but only when someone’s interested) that ’emo’ shouldn’t have to mean a limp, kohl-eyed and overdramatic rendering of third-hand goth tropes, or the peacockish preening of hairdressers’ lackeys in skintight trousers to watered-down grindcore. (Ian Mackaye’s denunciation of the term has lead to its acceptance and even reverence. <a title="'Rape!', they cried, 'rape, murder, hellish misappropriation!'" href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm">The more meaningless the latter seems to be under a monopoly, the more omnipotent it becomes.</a>) The non-genre’s Midwestern variants (American Football in particular) are adored, pedestal-placed touchstones in their gentle, unassuming sparkle and chime.
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These young people like Dinosaur Jr. for J’s lopsided six-string slash-and-burn, rather than the roughness of the recordings or any sort of interest in tone. They know that his laconic mumble isn’t because he’s chilled out, it’s because he’s already given up. They wish Bethany Consentino had been singing about them on Crazy for You, but of course, they’d never have had the cojones to give her the snub. Jesse Lacey is a hero hungover from adolescence who has lost none of his downcast allure.
These young people once found comfort in their own ineffectiveness, a warm and sickish burn like the whiskey they forced down to make themselves feel harder at the perimeters. Now, they kind of laugh about it.
Pity Sex write songs for those guys.
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Introducing: Pity Sex

That whole Drive thing that happened last year, a lot of people thought that was really great, didn’t they? I (and what I’m presuming is a significant portion of the film’s fanbase) can’t pretend to have been sentient in the ‘80s, but in the five year cultural hangover that the decade visited on my parents, I grew up with much of its music, movies and often distressing clothing choices. The world’s hard-on for Gosling aside, I think that this could be why a proportion of us who weren’t actually all that alive in the 1980s liked Drive so much. Instead of back to the future, the film took us forward to the past, the present day or near future coloured in ‘80s tones and backed by a shining redux of Italo disco. It’s the adult parts of our childhood redelivered to our adulthood. This also, I think, accounts for my staunch defence and genuine enjoyment of Bon Iver’s divisive Beth/Rest. It’s why I’m so constantly entranced by Chromatics’ Kill for Love where my attention span normally tires shy of an hour. It’s why I think that M83’s fourth album was a definite artistic peak.
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Θptick (also born arse-end of the ‘80s) has always counted Anthony Gonzalez high among his influences, and on the Surrey/Hampshire-based producer’s latest offering Gatekeeper the Brat Pack soundtrack leanings of M83’s Saturdays=Youth are brought more to the fore than ever before. Gatekeeper begins with hazy, blissful vibes and stuttering beats that drift toward comparisons with modern-minded contemporaries like Boards of Canada or Tycho, but soon breaks into kaleidoscopic Moog burbles and a set of strings that could be reprising Rod Stewart’s Do You Think I’m Sexy? (but, y’know, good) before a squelching, refracted wah throws itself around like sunlight off a set of wayfarers.
Shading like this works as the gatekeeper of a half-felt, fuzzy nostalgia for a time when music was my dad’s compilation tapes through car speakers in the front passenger seat of an ever-breaking Alfa Romeo somewhere at the start of the nineties. It’s laying his records, especially <a title="Who's gonna drive you home tonight?" href="https://eil.com/shop/moreinfo.asp?catalogid=295972">this one</a>, out on the lounge floor and reading the track listing and being slowly enveloped by that great blue American sky and the impossible neon sunset tones of the compilation’s title. No, Drive and M83 and Kill for Love and Beth/Rest and Gatekeeper don’t sound just like Glenn Frey, Mr Mister, Huey Lewis or The Cars, but the tidal synth washes and glittering reverb are the bellows on the embers of that time in the passenger seat.  And the glow rises and starts to swallow me up again.

New: Θptick – Gatekeeper

You all already know what Japandroids sound like. That Celebration Rock looks near identical to 2009’s storming Post-Nothing, hell, that it’s called Celebration Rock, is beyond apt. With the title of their debut proper, Brian King and David Prowse had coined a term by which the songs contained therein could be delineated, rock music blasted out by a duo so close to breaking in two as to be free from the foibles of genre and terminology, but savvy to those foibles all the same.  In the end, Post-Nothing marked Japandroids’ making rather than breaking, and so its title took on new weight. Post-Nothing could have been pre-nothing.
Celebration Rock, then, is the logical successor, still manic in its flaring distortion and punk-paced pounding, and twice as vital for having powered through. In naming their second album as they have, King and Prowse have once more caught the figurative bullet for the writer. Rock music this defibrillating, this alive, can leap sparking from the hands of even the most eloquent, but Japandroids have coined the catch-all term for us. Celebration Rock is celebration rock, in all its happy gratitude, its broken joy, its skyward-reaching sadness and its glass-sharp, fuzzy fucking volume.
It’s characteristic of getting older that we also get slower, get more comfortable, find gentler joy in the subtle and quiet and challenging, while this instant gratification that’s so wondrously accessible in adolescence starts to bore or even grate. We spend our time getting sentimental about when things meant something, when every feeling was amplified to unbearable volume in a deluge of hormones, before we were old enough to afford or maybe even legally buy the booze that’s got us so maudlin. Japandroids do this too. You know what I’m talking about. Remember that night you were already in bed, said ‘fuck it’ and got up to drink with me instead? Japandroids do. Younger Us has been doing the rounds since 2010, but rather than give rise to any accusations of laziness (Celebration Rock is 8 songs and 36 minutes long), King and Prowse’s edge-of-seat paean to the fire of youth is Celebration Rock’s very essence distilled into three and a half boiling minutes. With this startling collection of songs, Japandroids have given us more than music to listen to. They’ve given us eight bombs to blow apart our harder hearts, give us that naked new skin rush. With Celebration Rock, Japandroids have given us ‘younger us’.
On opener Nights of Wine and Roses, the duo provide (perhaps by way of manifesto) a brotherly reconciliation of our more destructive adolescent habits with our steadily advancing adulthood, and shit me, it’s great to hear someone singing “Long lit up tonight, and still drinking. Don’t we have anything to live for? Well of course we do, but until it comes true, we’re drinking” and then repeating the same sentiment re: smoking. It’s this extrapolating of romance from the ordinary that Japandroids are so adept at. Adrenaline Nightshift is an anthem for every hospital janitor with headphones in, lending their tinny noise to hushed wards, held up by guitars and drums and maybe caffeine but really guitars and drums. The House That Heaven Built, the record’s second (if you count Younger Us) single and penultimate track, is Celebration Rock’s absolute high. We’re all familiar with that chorus refrain by now – “When they love you, and they will,” sings King “tell them all they will love in my shadow, and if they try to slow you down, tell them all to go to hell.” It’s a moment utterly for each individual listener, whichever side of the lines we place ourselves on, just like when we were thirteen and every song we heard was about us. When King’s left-ear guitar harmony comes in at 2.43, my skin is an arcing network of electric pores and there is a wetness at my edges that threatens to spill and engulf every commuter on the platform around me who ever smiled at a distorted guitar turned up way too loud.
There’s not a whole hell of a lot that could follow this. Like all kinds of ecstasy, Celebration Rock is bound to a mortality that is as much its lifeforce as its inevitable death. The heat and ferocity at which this record burns could leave a scar in any darkness, the memory enough to keep us warm, helping us to know that we don’t always need to take the route that makes the most sense. Continuous Thunder, Celebration Rock’s last and only slowdance, brings us down gently, a softer but insistent beating thrum that tells of love against obstacles – or maybe love because of obstacles – and works as aide memoire for the last half hour. There is a light that never goes out. Stay positive. The cold pissing rain might have flooded that fire, but we will still sing out loud ‘yeah yeah yeah’, like continuous thunder.

Review: Japandroids – Celebration Rock

We were all sat on the floor because Emily and the Woods had been playing until then, and I was half-cut and more besides and it was good to sit there with each other and watch the slow hands of the tall kid with the E335 as he touched the strings. They had finished and we had sat on the floor again because it had been that much better than standing in the close, damp heat.
The drummer had a five-panel cap that looked like he lived in it and a wide smile the whole time, which was a happy thing to see. A skinny guy kept bringing the band water and beers whenever they signaled to him which I didn’t think was so cool but the drummer’s grin and his nods to the kid with the drinks made it seem OK. The people sat in front of us had moved so that there was three metres of empty floor between us and the stage, and I felt bad about sitting because behind us the crowd were stood and there were rubbery MacBook basslines like the elastic rebound of trampolines and glittering streams of guitar woven about us in the warm air.
I stared at the guitarist’s hands as I had done with the band before and most bands I’ve ever seen and I watched his feet too as they tapped out the secret sequence on his pedalboard that sent gentle waves of glowing notes up into the twilit space between our heads and the bar ceiling. The singer had that good, good Swedish voice that I have been a sucker for since Karl Larsson, a way around the letters ‘R’ and ‘L’. He sang lines like “I wanna run but I cannot do it/I don’t know if it’s the drugs or your body moving”, and in their last song he walked across the empty floor and sat opposite us and sang for a time. Then he shook James’ hand, unfolded his legs from beneath himself, and returned to the stage.
The band were called Simian Ghost from Sweden and this is the song Wolf Girl from the record Youth which came out earlier this year.
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Introducing: Simian Ghost

And so here’s a video from everyone’s favourite male parent Dad Rocks!, or moustache virtuoso and all-round good egg Snævar Njáll Albertsson. Weapons (and much of Snævar’s output as Dad Rocks!) <a title="Of course it was intentional, you smug arsehole. " href="https://dadrocks.tumblr.com/">fosters</a> a sound that’s instantly familiar in its mellifluous acoustic fingerpickery – something like a wildly grinning Owen backed by the Mystic Valley Band – but Albertsson neatly avoids falling in line with the legions of lumpen indie-folk by virtue of his bizarre, oddly affecting lyrical nous. Let’s take the last song on his debut full-length, Mount Modern. It’s called Pants. Albertsson plays vulnerable at first, cooing the knocks to one’s self-worth that fatherhood can present – “And then you’re covered in shit/And you don’t think that you are fit/to be raising a kid” – before qualifying this with “that gets to suck on all the tits”.  That’s kind of how Dad Rocks!, er, rolls. 
The video for Weapons plays out as a cheerfully observed, self-effacing snippet of the vagaries of indie-rock fandom. I have been this video’s protagonist so many times that I’m not sure whether to laugh (I did), cry (I haven’t…yet), or further perpetuate the stereotype by sitting on my floor listening to headphones surrounded by my records (I’m working on it). My favourite bits are the 2 seconds that Jeniferever’s Choose A Bright Morning makes it into shot, Snævar trying to pass himself off as less enthusiastic than someone else, and every shot where the nerdy protagonist throws his arms into the air in utter, arcing-heart joy at experiencing Dad Rocks! related material. So, yeah, the whole video.
This Friday (so 25th May 2012), Dad Rocks! are headlining a <a title="Want to meet Rob Hollamby, legendary writer for shit hot music blog Crack in the Road? Go to this show, find the guy with a beard and brown hair who looks like he's given up on his dreams and is rockin' the 9-5, punch him in the nads, then buy him a Jameson. He'll thank you, in time. " href="https://www.facebook.com/events/153777654752570/">warmup show</a> for <a title="My head is not my friend, in fact I want him out of here. " href="https://www.brainloverecords.com/festival/">Brainlove Festival</a> at the Gallery Café in Bethnal Green. Mount Modern is available to stream in its entirety (and buy) on the Dad Rocks! <a title="radcamp." href="https://dadrocks.bandcamp.com/">bandcamp</a>. Also available there is the fine t-shirt featured in the video below, with the strapline ‘1 nice t-shirt for your body’. How can you refuse?
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Video: Dad Rocks! – Weapons

Fantasy Rainbow, or Manchester native Oliver Catt, has some of the best record titles ever. Fact. Most recent effort No Hope. Not Ever was prefaced by festive single It’s Christmas and I Fucking Hate Myself. You see where I’m going with this.
With Girls having topped a bunch of ‘…of the Year’ lists in 2011, and everyone suddenly remembering how fuckin’ rad Dinosaur Jr. were before frantically scouring eBay for a ‘Hi, How Are You?’ t-shirt, self-effacing slack isn’t exactly having a tough time of it right now, but few do it with Catt’s awkward charm and tunefulness. He closed his Great Escape set at the Loft last Saturday with the resigned, Weezer-tinged title track to No Hope, the video for which is chock-full of appropriate imagery – a lone couple slowdancing in a desolate hall, Catt’s unenthused visage – and is available for your viewing pleasure below. Disengaged has rarely sounded this gorgeous.
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<a title="He" href="https://www.fantasyrainbow.co.uk/">He</a> <a title="really" href="https://fantasyrainbow.bandcamp.com/">has</a> <a title="does," href="https://twitter.com/#!/FNTSYRNBW">all</a> <a title="you" href="https://www.facebook.com/fntsyrnbw">the</a> <a title="know." href="https://soundcloud.com/fantasyrainbow">sites</a>.

Introducing: Fantasy Rainbow

In the first of a few posts concerning ‘bands what I saw at The Great Escape last weekend’, here’s Repent and Rebuild from Midlands-based, non-religious noisemongers †HYMNS†, lifted from last year’s debut Cardinal Sins/Contrary Virtues. Hymns have grown from a duo into a four-piece since their inception, and based on the state of my ears (not to mention my armpits) after their set at the Pav Tav last friday, they’re making an even more unholy racket into the bargain, howling real or imagined crises of faith over Pixies-informed guitar attack. At the base of it, it’s just really nice to see the irrepressible Sam Manville throwing himself and his guitar around a stage again.
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You can find Cardinal Sins/Contrary Virtues over at the Big Scary Monsters <a title="I wanted to link to the Function one..." href="https://bsmrocks.bandcamp.com/album/cardinal-sins-contrary-virtues">bandcamp</a> for a paltry 5 quid. Say <a title="Bible" href="https://hymns.bandcamp.com/">three</a> <a title="Scapula." href="https://www.facebook.com/prayforhymns">Hail</a> <a title="Hymn book. " href="https://prayforhymns.tumblr.com/">Marys</a>. Amen.

Introducing – †HYMNS†

Toby Hayes has never made a secret of his disdain for the attendant baggage of the ‘singer-songwriter’ tag. He’s dubbed his output as Shoes and Socks Off ‘stubbed toe blues’, the self-effacing implications of which are obvious, and his own bio once noted that ‘it started as a joke’. That Shoes and Socks Off has grown beyond just Hayes and his guitar since its inception is evidence of his affirmative action on removing the project from the domain of the wet and self-obsessed, and with Miles of Mad Water, his fifth full-length under the Shoes banner, he’s put even more distance between the two.
Miles of Mad Water often plays out as homage to Hayes’ influences, which have never been as obvious as here. The tubey overdrive and stuttering movement of his guitar on opener And No One’s Seen Him Since are unabashedly Radiohead-informed, to say nothing of the warm, organic glitch that underpins the song. It’s a reference point that’s inescapable on much of Miles of Mad Water –<a title="He's quite shameless, you know. " href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/15950-new-shoes-and-socks-off-tork-sport/"> Tork Sport</a>, the record’s first single, grooves along on a bassline straight out of The Eraser while the treated keys and four-to-the-floor that appear teasingly at its close sound like a grin and a nod to the pared-down house of that record’s title track. But No, Hayes’ first foray proper into instrumental (even danceable) electronica, progresses further down this route, tipping the cap to Radiohead compadre Kieran Hebden in the process.
Besides the easy similarities between Hayes’ and Radiohead’s chord progressions and cut up lyrics, there’s an emotional drift present on Miles of Mad Water, and throughout the SASO canon, that’s comparable to the Oxford band. Just as Yorke et al shrunk away from the roaring guitars and open-book autophobia of Creep, Hayes has always done his best to throw curveballs (and grenades) our way. His second release, Hand-Reared Suburban Piglet comprised the same track listing as his first, From the Muddy Banks of Melitzer, re-recorded as electronic and amplified numbers rather than in the lone-man-with-acoustic format of its predecessor. Robin Hood Waiter Champion, SASO’s fourth, saw Hayes jettisoning processed beats, the record instead thumbing its way up from acoustic beginnings to an ear-shattering denouement, all embellished with some of Hayes’ most telling lyrics to date. The sentiment was echoed, loudly, by the project’s first full-band live shows, which started around the time of Robin Hood’s release.
Continuing in the tradition of flouting tradition, Miles of Mad Water is not the best place to look for the abstract bloodletting of Hayes the intronaut. The Doppler Effect, hidden away in the middle of the record, is the only true representation of SASO’s earlier resigned hush, a monologue on dismemberment and fierce possessiveness that’s probably about neither. Elsewhere, Made and Numb Nums filter busted acoustics through a murky, rippling sea of studio trickery (the cooler-than-hell trem solo on the former is a particular highlight), going some way to aligning Hayes’ admiration for Autolux’s stratospherics with his back catalogue. Lockjaw actually sounds cheerful, its burbling fuzz and declaration that “I’m still figuring it out” recalling Eels, while All Mouth sees Hayes experimenting with string arrangements to majestic effect, a kind of major key reworking of John Darnielle’s Dilaudid. Quitely’s Batman revisits a different side of Miles’ chief influence, pushing the piano-pounding that closed All I Need to its logical, jubilant extreme, the swell coloured with sunny imagery – “it’s late, but it’s light,” sings Hayes, “let’s stay out.”
If removing Shoes and Socks Off from the singer-songwriter sphere was Toby Hayes’ intent on Miles of Mad Water, he couldn’t have done a much finer job. It would have been easy to accomplish this by stuffing the record full of But Nos, but Miles of Mad Water doesn’t dismiss its forerunners. Rather, it’s both honest and modest in its treatment of the bands that have informed it, and it recognises the traditional guitar-and-voice pairing as a trope to be fucked with, but a trope that’s worthwhile nonetheless. The result is Hayes’ most upbeat, intricate, and surprising release to date. Hats off to ya.

Review: Shoes and Socks Off – Miles of Mad Water

Oh, but it’s turning out to be a year for the weighty shit. Hot on the heels of all my hyperbole about <a title="I'd love to see the two in a fight. " href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/16431-video-holy-mountain-gunner/">Holy Mountain</a> comes BLKLSTRS, the debut from Leeds-based noisewranglers Blacklisters. Amid the wreckage of weapons-grade guitar fallout and Billy Mason-Wood’s deranged ranting, basslines jerk like severed electrical cables, birthing a cacophonous groove that doesn’t so much rattle your bones as grind them into a fine powder, and rack them up in lines on whatever filthy bar Blacklisters happen to be drinking at. If you want references, the Jesus Lizard comparison that’s being chucked around like a live grenade is a decent starting point for pinpointing the quartet’s unhinged yowl, which is also coloured with shades of Ten Grand’s inexplicable addictiveness, and some of the apocalyptic bombast of These Arms Are Snakes. Basically, BLKLSTRS fucking destroys.
Anyway, here’s the video for first single Trick Fuck, which is sort of like a cheap and nasty version of Soundgarden’s Black Hole Sun in terms of fucked up imagery, all exaggerated grins and overwide eyes (ping-pong balls, in this case), served up with plenty of jet-black, treacly lashings of the titular ‘Trick Fuck lager booze’. Apparently, it’s a song about ‘handsome, stupid men’, and it makes using your bony bird arms to throw the black muck past your crooked teeth and into your potbelly feel OK. <a title="Wow, a .co.uk. That's dedication to the cause. " href="https://www.blacklisters.co.uk/">Drink up</a>.
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Video: Blacklisters – Trick Fuck

In honour of the release of the Earth Measures mini-album, which is out today on <a title="Tear-your-throat-out good" href="https://shop.chemikal.co.uk/acatalog/CHEM173.html">Chemikal Underground</a>, here’s the video for Gunner, by hirsute Glaswegians Holy Mountain. Busting out the blocks with the kind of lower-than-hell riffery you’d expect from a song by a band with the same name as a Sleep record, Gunner alone absolutely fucking destroys anything else I’ve heard in the heavy stakes this year. Shitting your pants never felt so good.
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Begin your ascent <a title="Praise be. " href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Holy-Mountain/328120915411">here</a>.

Video: Holy Mountain – Gunner

On Thursday the 29th of March 2012 I wake up with my alarm at six a.m. and swing my legs over the side of the bed. I tamp the roof of my mouth with my tongue, a sponge a few minutes off drying. There is the astringent cocktail of blood and medicated mouthwash. I jam my tongue as hard as the muscle will go into the bulging, fleshy, ragged space behind my back top left molar, and feel the new tooth’s shard up there, tasting the gum’s blood fresher now. Sometimes it seems to have grown, sometimes to have retreated; sometimes there seems a complex series of blubbery craters that I cannot get the measure of with the end of my tongue.
***
“I work for British Gas,” says Joe. So he’s that bastard.
Spring Offensive have a selection of day jobs worthy of the tone of their most recent single Worry, Fill My Heart, which plays out like the cold pit of your twentysomething stomach to warm chords and Pelham’s rattling drums. I ask Pelham what he does to pay the bills. “I work for British Gas,” he says. Do they all work in public services? “Yeah, I… I work for British Gas as well,” admits Theo. “I work for a school,” says Matt, but doesn’t volunteer in what capacity he is employed. Still, education’s a public sector. Lucas is the only one to buck the trend, with what sounds like a dream job. “I work in a second-hand bookshop,” he says, “it’s quite fun. And when we need books for various things…” Yeah? “Yeah, like in our videos and photo shoots…” Oh yeah, the video for Worry, and in fact the photo at the head of this article, features the band wantonly destroying precious literature. “And when we need gas and water…” suggests Pelham. “I can bypass your electric meter at home for you,” chips in Joe cheerily. Makin’ connections. My life is sorted as of now.
***
The sun is coming up earlier everyday, and when I leave the house to a cool ghost town, the bins still charged with the energy of their emptying, there is a gentle light in the pale sky that swells quiet over the disparate roofs of the houses of my street, and the ornate shipshaped weathervane that marks its end. Halfway down, a girl cuts in across me from the alley to my right. She stares ahead in a deadset way that lets me know that she sees me but does not want to undertake the task of eye contact. Somewhere past the first set of traffic lights she is a good distance ahead of me and others have filtered in from sidestreets as she did, on that long and straight stretch down to the junction of the teeming bypass. They place themselves between us, a small and scattered exodus in the early haze.
***
So far this year, Spring Offensive have released two videos, the first for <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFyjSi3Oqms&feature=relmfu">Carrier</a>, a glowing, hypochondriac swell of a song that grows and burns like a fever, and the second for Carrier’s A-side, the nervy call-and-response of the aforementioned <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt-zNr538_g">Worry, Fill My Heart</a>. Both videos are markedly different in concept, just as the two songs differ in tone. I ask first about Carrier’s distinct plotline, and the absence of the band. “We worked with some guys called Nicky Davidson and Bob Self,” explains Matt. “We’d seen some of the kind of things they’d done before, which were very story-based, and we wanted a kind of short film for that music video – we knew that for Worry we were going to do something with us in so we didn’t really feel like we needed to be in Carrier.” What was the process like? “We all worked on it with them it just seemed to kind of come from it,” says Matt “We didn’t just want to tell the story in the song, we wanted to have a story that worked alongside it. The actual video was all them. We just made tea. And cooked.”
“The two songs are about similar things,” explains Lucas, “but they’re sort of opposites, and the videos work as opposites as well.”
“We wanted something with us in it for Worry,” says Matt, “but one of the problems with music videos is that you don’t want to just make imagery really heavy-handed, and as you have a line about a clock, show a clock. Runaway, Dave Adams is just fantastic, we worked with him on (earlier single) A Stutter and a Start, and he kind of brings ideas to life really.” Lucas and Pelham have an exchange about the green tea in a can that the noodle bar sells. I forget what I was saying and Matt, ever-focused, reroutes my train of thought. “The Worry, Fill My Heart video,” he says, “we’ve had quite a good reaction from people. We spoke to hearing and non-hearing people who knew sign language, and we were on a deaf blog called Limping Chicken…” This brings me back to the point I had intended to make, the debate which sprang up on <a href="https://limpingchicken.com/2012/03/26/debate-music-video-by-spring-offensive-featuring-sign-language-arty-or-offensive/">Limping Chicken</a> regarding the video. “It wasn’t intentional,” explains Matt, “it wasn’t designed for a deaf audience to follow as such. Word order doesn’t necessarily translate well, so we kind of took it and changed it a bit, and it really was about using it because we find it beautiful.” Faultless in motive, then, and to someone not au fait with BSL the band’s intentions are achieved. “I hope that’s not exploitation, and if people see it in an offensive way…” Matt trails off.  I try to reassure him. That Charlie Swinburne seems to be aiming for a put-down in saying ‘as long as the band are comfortable with making the funniest deaf film since Text, Batteries and Earwax, I don’t have a problem’ actually adds an element of pathos. Perhaps the signing in the video is off, making it ‘hilarious’ for Swinburne and some other BSL-savvy viewers, but his reaction highlights the breakdown of communication that’s brought to the fore in Worry, Fill My Heart, the fact that you’re working a dead-end job and your problems are incommunicable to those around you.
***
On the second connecting train I am alone in the corner of the carriage with my back wedged against the wall when an older man with an appalled, duckish face and a horseshoe of grey wool skirting his bald dome gets on, Brompton ready folded, and sits across from me. I take no more notice until I hear an electric buzz and look over to see that he has produced a battery-powered razor and is making passes up and down his hairless neck’s hanging folds. Another gent in the bay of seats, somewhere in that strange age I cannot place, stares right at me. I cannot read his expression and my eyes jump away as soon as they meet his, the same poles on two magnets pushed together. He wears blue jeans and well-maintained tan brogues. The scant fuzz that crowns his pate has been swept across in an impression of a younger man’s. It is 7.32 a.m. when we pull out, and I am carried through suburbia toward a 16-floor, 53.34m high-rise in the London borough of Merton. I have jacked it all in for a desk and five a day. So far I fucking love it, the sleep and the safety, the vitamins and minerals, the weekends with my girlfriend. So far I fucking love it, the paycheck and the routine, I’ve started going swimming, and I’m close to quitting smoking.
***
At the time of writing, it’s the first day of a UK tour for Spring Offensive, and judging by the chorus of affirmatives that greet my asking whether they’re looking forward to it, they’re really…ah…looking forward to it. “The last tour we did was in October, and we’ve just done one off gigs since then,” says Matt, “we went to Germany, Switzerland, but we didn’t really do a UK stretch. Last time we did back to back dates in the UK was 2010.” How did the band find touring on the continent? “Europe’s just full of people who seem to be much, well, I wouldn’t say more interested,” grins Theo, “they’re just very willing to come and listen, and pay attention. It’s pretty nice.” The horrible thing about touring in the UK, of course, is that the music scene’s so oversaturated. “A UK indie band touring the UK is not really very exciting,” agrees Lucas, “but in Germany it feels like people really get into it.”
More than anything, the band seem to relish touring as an opportunity to travel and experience the wider world. “It’s nice,” as Theo says, “to have a reason to go to Sheffield.” Lucas, too, finds extracurricular joy in touring, distinct from the obvious pleasure of playing your music to new audiences. “I’d never heard of Mainz before,” he says, “and I learned that that’s where they had the first printing press (Johannes Gutenberg lived and died there, history fans), and the world’s oldest bible (the imaginatively named Gutenberg bible…yup).” It’s not all educational fun and games though. “We didn’t get to see it, it was really busy”, says Matt. What did you do instead? “We went to buy a steering wheel lock.” You went to buy a steering wheel lock instead of going to see the world’s oldest bible? “On the way to a gig the key broke, and we couldn’t take the steering wheel lock off”, he explains. How did you get it off? “I managed to pick it.” What with?! “My penknife.” Oh.
Thankfully, Lucas has kept his mind on the subject at hand. “We’ve decided to play in a few people’s houses, mostly, instead of at venues.” Oh yeah, Chris was saying on the phone that you like to fuck around with the gig format… “If we can, we feel we should.” And so they have been. At the time of publishing, the band have spent the last week playing several shows per day in people’s houses. Have they taken this stance because they got sick of playing for promoters the whole time? “Oxford has loads of venues,” says Matt, “but we’ve played most of them, so that’s just kind of old hat. We played the Ashmolean, and modern art Oxford, and every community centre that will have us, we’re going to be playing in a church soon, so living rooms was another way of doing it. We opened it up to anyone who wanted us to play.”
***
I clock out, and after a tangle of train rides and drinks and a hurried meal I’m sat half-cut on a curb outside The Barley Mow with Stu. I take deep gulps of the cool, copper-coloured beer in my glass and scrawl half-formed questions into my notebook. Stu is talking about something to do with the both of us and I apologise to him for not paying attention. The evening is warm and rose-shaded and full of young Londoners milling around in sunglasses and smiling through their fringes and enjoying the easy, rising Spring. My phone buzzes in my pocket, so Stu and I follow its instructions, heading around the corner to the front of the Electricity Showrooms. Here Chris, Spring Offensive’s endlessly helpful manager, is waiting on the pavement with Lucas, the band’s tall, thatch-headed frontman. More or less one by one, the rest of Spring Offensive (guitarists Matt and Theo, bassist Joe and drummer Pelham) join us on the curb, and introductions are made. I am breathless with gratitude, to whom I’m not sure, that the band are friendly. We notice a military cargo truck or personnel carrier parked on the curb opposite, and Chris goes over to find out whether we can conduct the interview in the back of the vehicle.
***
“There goes the military cargo truck,” notes Lucas, as the thick-wheeled juggernaut rolls past, rattling the windows of the noodle bar. I wish we were in the back of there so bad, I say.  “Yeah, but they don’t have green tea in cans,” says Pelham. I mumble that they might, but we are talking about bands from Oxford. Spring Offensive’s connection with, and love for, their hometown’s music scene and the bands and individuals that make it up is obvious. “Do you know <a href="https://www.facebook.com/gunningfortamar">Gunning for Tamar</a>? <a href="https://theoldgrindingyoung.virb.com/">The Old Grinding Young</a> are a brilliant new band,” offers Lucas. “<a href="https://www.facebook.com/jonquilband">Jonquil</a>?” asks Matt, and yeah, I know Jonquil, I haven’t listened to them since Lions though. “<a href="https://deerchicago.get-ctrl.com/#/">Deer Chicago</a> are another great band as well,” says Lucas. “And a lovely young man called <a href="https://iwaseatenbyabear.tumblr.com/">Adam Barnes</a>,” adds Theo “who’s run away to America, but I think he might be coming back.”
While we’re on the subject of Oxford, I ask Spring Offensive what they think of Blessing Force, the Oxford-based musical collective helmed by alumni of Youthmovies and members of Foals, among others. Straight off, the band are expressive of a wholesome (and what’s becoming characteristic) gratitude to their geographical forbears. “They’ve been really kind to us,” says Matt, “Andrew (Mears) has been really kind to us.” So you don’t hold any truck with the elitist image that’s been presented by the press, then? “When the whole thing kicked off it got some bad press,” admits Theo. Lucas offers a considered view on the subject; “People in Oxford can be very protective of their scene,” he says. “It’s not a very healthy way of doing things, and some parties can get quite bitter if other people are getting press and not ‘sharing it out’.” Does this have anything to do with the amount of Oxford bands that have gone supernova in the past? “It’s just great to have people in a town, your town, which is after all quite a small town, who are making interesting music,” says Lucas, destroying all hypothetical accusations of incestuousness or elitism. Matt, too, is keen to dismiss any finger-pointing as unnecessary. “I think people felt threatened by it,” he says. “Because Blessing Force are so creative, whether it’s good or bad is kind of irrelevant really. They were always putting stuff out, and I think there’s quite a lot of envy from people, especially as it kind of came out of nowhere.” He considers his hometown and it’s reactions to Blessing Force, and offers that “Oxford’s…almost like a fusty scholar sometimes. It’s producing really, really good things and it has a great music scene and it’s really vibrant and I think people were a bit taken aback, especially by that article. But, um, it all simmered down afterwards.” What article he’s referring to, I’m not entirely sure, but <a href="https://www.nme.com/blog/index.php?blog=10&title=oxford_s_blessing_force_scene_hear_the_b&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1">I can make my own conclusions</a>.
“I have just thought of another Oxford band actually,” says Lucas, “but it’s probably too late.” Ooh. “Wild Swim.” They did a remix of Worry, didn’t they? “They’re very good. I think they’re going to be very popular very soon.”
***
I turn the Voice Memo function on my phone off, hoping that it’s picked us up over the noise of the noodle place. We say our goodbyes and thankyous until later in the evening, and Stu and I depart to spend dead time as we often do. I am gutsore and weaving by the time I find my head between the Electricity Showrooms’ lit-up dancefloor and its mirrored ceiling. Everyone in the room is smiling, and I flashback to <a href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/9750-live-review-spring-offensive-the-ashmolean-oxford-050811-2/">the first time I saw this band</a> in the basement of Oxford’s Ashmolean. Halfway through the set the band make a foray into the middle of the crowd, who hush and let a gorgeous, unplugged Carrier fall gentle around us. Spring Offensive return to their drumkit and microphones, and the last song that they play that night is 52 Miles. I think about how I will get home and what time I will go to sleep and what time I will be at my desk the next morning.
“I’ve got what I need, but it’s not what I want,” sings Matt, “with these shifts that I work, it’s the best that I’ve got.”

Interview: Spring Offensive

Last October, Brighton’s from the alpine, swim got their <a title="Like an ambulance-chasing lawyer" href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/music/12093-introducing-from-the-alpine-swim/">first ever exposé</a> on these hallowed pages, documenting their enticing juxtaposition of smoky, folky bedroom aesthetics with something that sounded like it might be post-hardcore if someone plugged it in. After nearly <a title="Rumblings" href="https://fromthealpineswim.tumblr.com/">five months of radio silence</a>, they posted <a title="Now a paramedic" href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/15526-new-from-the-alpine-swim-so-little-thingsand-other-short-stories/">three instrumental tracks</a> to their <a href="https://soundcloud.com/fromthealpineswim">Soundcloud</a>. For an hour. And in what’s becoming a rock’n’roll version of the Dance of a Thousand Veils, they’ve just this week released <a href="https://fromthealpineswim.bandcamp.com/">a three-track EP</a> onto their unsuspecting public (which may or may not be just me at this point, but here’s hoping for the latter), which, finally, has them electrified, singing, and with drums all at the same time. We can pin them down now, right?
Wrong. Duh.
Sharks has grown from its busted acoustic beginnings into a razoredged rush of guitars as toothy as its title suggests. When it closes its jaws, it doesn’t let go – this is one of the most addictive guitar songs I’ve heard this year, pitched perfectly at a single chorus which switches up to double speed halfway through, and hefts your heart along with it. I guess we’re only human, after all betrays a reverence for Thrice (which may be a good thing, considering they’ll be going the way of the dodo soon), winding down from weighty swing into Volta-informed arpeggios, an unexpected accordion pining away underneath. The song’s metallic riffage and half-time stomp can feel a bit overbearing at first, especially since ftas’ delicacy and restraint was such a crucial factor in their appeal. But settling into ..after all’s groove comes on more quietly than its instrumentation, to the end that you’ll catch it surging through your head at unexpected moments.
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The song’s more masculine fistpumpery is offset to an extent by closer Dénouement, which swells from gentle chording to jagged guitar stabs, Blacking Out the Friction through a post-hardcore filter, before dropping back again, and putting vocalist Alex Heffernan in sharp focus. Dénouement’s first half sees him building on the hip-hop inflected, Jordan Dreyer school of delivery first hinted at in Sharks, while its two-and-a-half minute, reverb soaked coda has him gently crying bruised folk, channelling his inner Dallas Green. Boy got pipes.
While it may be the most upfront that from the alpine, swim have been so far, their untitled EP only goes some way toward detangling the knotted Christmas lights of their ‘sound’. There’s a further EP slated for release soon, and I’m still eager for another fix.

Review: from the alpine, swim – Untitled EP

‘Pop’.
It’s the sound a bubble makes when it bursts. It’s an interchangeable term for any effervescent, sugary soft drink. And it’s a word that music writers love, just fucking love, to use. A <a title=""Maps and Atlases have gone and made a pop record."" href="https://www.sputnikmusic.com/review/37507/Maps-%26-Atlases-Perch-Patchwork/">whole</a> <a title=""Perch Patchwork goes pop!"" href="https://www.loveshackbaby.net/2010/05/maps-atlases-perch-patchwork/">bunch</a> <a title=""they write pop songs with a magnificent aptitude for texture and a distinctive blend of both the intricate and organic."" href="https://www.barsuk.com/shop/bark102">of</a> <a title=""bubbly power-pop"" href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/14389-perch-patchwork/">them</a> certainly thought it was the right thing to dub the sounds of Chicago’s Maps & Atlases around the time of their debut full-length Perch Patchwork. A record that yes, was probably more broadly ‘pop’ than the lightspeed noodling of Every Place is a House, but still started with two and a quarter minutes of wordless voice/guitar/drum interplay, arcing about all over the place in oddly timed harmony.
It’s in these sorts of situations that those three letters start to appear, for me, as a loaded term. The implications of its use by those music writers who concern themselves with the vague sphere of ‘alternative’ (another horrible term, but if I extrapolate all of these we’ll not get anywhere) music are twofold. Firstly, the pop descriptor neatly sidesteps any accusations of rockism, that most undesirable of ideologies, that might be thrown our poor writer’s way. Secondly, it implies (because of the attendant baggage of the word, which exists whether you agree with it or not) that said writer finds the music they are applying the term to light, easy, even insubstantial. And the thought of some smug fucker somewhere in the world, some person who considers themselves such a connoisseur that Maps & Atlases are as saccharine and soluble to them as the Fair Trade Demerara in their ristretto, just really grinds my gears.
So yeah, ‘pop’ got kind of stuck in my craw when thinking about Maps & Atlases, and so with a kind of masochistic glee I began to forage around the flutters and blips of Old and Gray, the opening gambit on Maps’ sophomore effort Beware and Be Grateful. It’s a song seemingly without hooks or even prominent melodies, let alone choruses. You’d have to be a proper twat to call Old and Gray ‘pop’.
For a little over six minutes I was just about as smug a fucker as those figments of my imagination that I’d been demonizing. Until forty-eight seconds into Fever, and the advent of a hopelessly endearing chorus that cribs unabashed off the likes of U2 (who once released an album called Pop, after all) or Simple Minds. Priggishly, I wanted to chalk it up as an anomaly. It’s not. The following Winter is probably the catchiest thing the band have ever written, David Davison’s odd, frog-in-throat voice and guitar acrobatics notwithstanding. And so it continues. The influence of Paul Simon (particularly the quintuple-platinum, chart-topping Graceland) is all over Beware and Be Grateful, in the African rhythms, use of vocal harmony, and the band’s wrangling of slanted – but yeah, pop – hooks. Besides which, tell me Vampires doesn’t sound like My Sharona. You won’t be able to. The song’s dismissive of semantics, Davison insisting that “I don’t know what the context is, of what you’re trying to say”, and its playful grind begs the jettison of academic notions and the ushering in of enjoyment. So that’s what I did. And as such, Beware and Be Grateful is now, for me, the best thing that Maps & Atlases have never done.
Aside from all that balls-out tunesmithery, Beware and Be Grateful’s key strength is its intimacy, arguably a new string to the Maps bow. Many of Beware’s lyrical themes are signified by it’s title – it’s a record about caution, learning, and coming to terms with new developments, and it’s a welcome influx of emotional warmth into the sound of a band whose musicianship can be so formidable as to be alienating. It turns Remote and Dark Years from a being little more than a brief marriage of the record’s Graceland influence to Police-y palm muting into the most majestic, moving song that Maps & Atlases have ever written. It stops the lengthy, Can-gone-tropical groove of Silver Self from becoming monotonous. And it means that Old and Gray, whilst still musically minimal and weird, becomes a startlingly close snapshot of the aftermath of a relationship, whereupon its hidden hooks begin to shyly reveal themselves.
As Davison notes on the effortless, timpaniphone Old Ash, the crudest terms are all encompassing. I still can’t quite bring myself to say that Beware and Be Grateful is a pop album. Rather, it’s an album containing ten pieces of music, some of which are the very closest to pop that a band like Maps & Atlases are likely to get, their ‘new breed in the making’, if you like. Whatever you choose to call it, it’s their finest and most accessible collection of songs to date. And so to close, a pithy little epithet from a favourite ‘pop’ act of mine:
“Just because you’re paranoid/don’t mean they’re not after you.”

Review: Maps & Atlases – Beware and Be Grateful

It’s been nearly two years since Shoes and Socks Off, aka one Toby Hayes, released a full-length record. And so it’s very, very (very) pleasing to announce that on May 14th, Miles Of Mad Water will be available via both <a title="YOU BUY IT" href="https://bsmrocks.com/main.html">Big Scary Monsters</a> and <a title="Him out of Mimas and Dad Rocks! " href="https://fatherfigurerecords.bigcartel.com/product/shoes-and-socks-off-miles-of-mad-water-pre-order">Father Figure Records. </a>
Lead single Tork Sport brings Hayes’ oft-professed (but not so often easily heard) Radiohead influences to the fore, its skittering beats and gorgeous swells overlaid by the man’s characteristic oblique/tender lyrical tradeoffs. The track’s an obvious departure from 2010’s six-string-centric (and fecking badass) Robin Hood Waiter Champion, but Hayes has never been one to toe the line, and what the rest of the record’s going to be like is just freakin’ killing me.
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<a title="Get your rocks off, honey" href="https://shoesandsocksoff.tumblr.com/">Put your hands together for the positive recluse. </a>

New: Shoes and Socks Off – Tork Sport

Did you ever come to at a desk halfway through your twenties, eyes blurring from too many <a title="." href="https://springoffensive.co.uk/">computer screens</a> and coffees, and think ‘How on earth did I get here?’ Ever stared at your twisting feet on the kitchen floor and felt an inch tall because you’re asking your parents for a few quid to see you right until the end of the month, or just until some vague and fuzzy future point? <a title=".." href="https://www.facebook.com/springoffensive">Is your guitar dusty</a> from leaning for weeks or months against your basement or bedroom or garage wall, connected to more pedals than you could ever afford when you actually still played the thing?
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Worry, Fill My Heart is the two warring halves of your young adulthood. Because you know that <a title="..." href="https://twitter.com/#!/springoffensive">sitting at that desk</a> is a privilege, that it keeps you in records and beers and train tickets and the approval of your family. But you know that you knew at sixteen that you were going to be so much bigger than this and that there was nothing that could have stopped you then and all that’s really stopping you now is your own grey comfort. Propelled by a typically rangy percussive shuffle, those scrambling bumps and clicks that have become synonymous with this Oxford quintet, Worry, Fill My Heart questions that comfort and finds, surprise surprise, no concrete answers. Spring Offensive are one of those rare bands that don’t need to turn their guitars up, or even play them all that much, to take your head off, the elastic relationship between the two Telecasters playing out as a paean to the band’s professed influences, Death Cab for Cutie’s gorgeous, burst-heart open chords, and the interlocking grooves of Wild Beasts’ Smother. That the song cuts out where many of a similar breed might burst into triumph or fury is both devastating and apt.
I never thought that I would end up in a job like this. I’m an impulsive man so so so…maybe tomorrow I’ll go ahead and quit.
Maybe not.

Video: Spring Offensive – Worry, Fill My Heart

You may remember me <a title="Yeah, pretty head ain't it? Mmmm...you like that? Yeah? YEAH?!" href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/12093-introducing-from-the-alpine-swim/">raving my pretty little head of</a>f about this mercurial Brighton-based duo back in October of last year. from the alpine, swim have been somewhat quiet on the communications front since then, the <a title="There's a facebook as well. Find it yourself you lazy sod. " href="https://fromthealpineswim.tumblr.com/">odd social media update</a> our only portal into their otherwise hazy world. Until this evening, which has found two electrified, rhythm’d-up and wholly new tracks being uploaded to the band’s <a title="Pssst...they're here. " href="https://soundcloud.com/fromthealpineswim">Soundcloud</a>. Both So Little Things and And Other Short Stories temper their post-hardcore stylings with electronic beats and some by turns soulful and carnivalesque organ stabs. There are shades of La Dispute, Alexisonfire (pre-shite) and even Cursive in here, but still, what the finished product might sound like is enticingly obscured. Dripfeeding bastards.
<a title="Wait, did I do this already?" href="https://soundcloud.com/fromthealpineswim">Get ’em while they’re hot</a>. Oh yeah, you’ve only got ten minutes. Minus my writing time. So, ahhh…
Image (c) Joel Wilson

New: from the alpine, swim – So Little Things/And Other Short Stories

“Slow jams from the UK’s largest land mammal”. The inexplicable juxtaposition of Tintin’s head, R. Kelly’s body and the nose of a big fish. Clipped beats, glowy synth rushes, some SERIOUS fucking string swells, and the kind of vocals that make you go all gooey in the belly. Even if they are singing about Tintin’s head, R. Kelly’s body and the nose of a big fish.
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Sightings <a title="Ssssssssss" href="https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Exmoor-Emperor/212755408764800">here</a> <a title="sssshhhh" href="https://twitter.com/#!/exmooremperor">here</a> <a title="hhhhhhhhhhh" href="https://www.dental-records.co.uk/label/artists/">here</a> and <a title="hhhhHHHHHHH!!!" href="https://www.exmooremperor.com/">here</a>.

Video: Exmoor Emperor – Marlinspike (Live at Dental Records)

Let it never be said that Cursive don’t know how to put on a spectacle. As most followers of Omaha’s troubled sons will be aware of by now, seventh full-length I Am Gemini is perhaps their most ambitious release yet, particularly in terms of narrative, detailing the story of Cassius and Pollock, twins separated at birth, one good, one evil. And from the moment that the vinyl (happily available with ease this side of the pond via Big Scary Monsters – but they’re limited to 500, so snap ‘em up quick) is freed from its cardboard postal trappings, it’s obvious that the spectacle is mirrored in the record’s presentation, being as it is a gorgeous picture disc, gilded in all the fiery splendour of the album’s artwork.
It’s pleasing to note that I Am Gemini represents a marked step forward from 2009’s Mama, I’m Swollen, which proved the ultimate example of frontman Tim Kasher’s tendencies toward self-indulgent misery. Lacking the youth and fresh wounds of Domestica, Mama… reimagined Cursive as The Good Life mark II, slightly more rocking granted, but nevertheless resulting in one of the most unimaginative releases in the Cursive canon. For Gemini, instrumentation has been pared back to Domestica levels, with the exception of the odd crooked keyboard, and without a battery of horns or even that lone cello to rely on for colour, Cursive have had to rethink the personnel-heavy attack of their recent history. Matt Maginn is, as ever, the base coat behind Kasher and Ted Stevens’ duelling distorted caterwauls, locking in songs like Warmer, Warmer, whose sarcastic bounce is exemplary Cursive, and Drunken Birds, which sets the benchmark for Kasher’s lyrical nous, weaving a perverse story as unsettling as any of his various Pinocchial retellings.
Mirroring its distinct story arc, I Am Gemini is shot through with the kind of musical devices that add to a record’s charm, and Cursive’s attention to detail is a joy to behold. It’s there in the way Double Dead blends seamlessly into Gemini, or pounding, proggish album centrepiece Twin Dragon/Hello Skeleton, the second half of which reprises snippets of the first, skilfully working them into its differing tempo and structure. The craftsmanship is a pleasure to experience, and particularly impressive considering the band’s limited instrumentation – without the extensive arrangements of Happy Hollow to flesh things out, the musicality presented by Cursive on Gemini could have fallen flat.
On the other hand.
Without the extensive arrangements of Happy Hollow to flesh things out, the musicality presented by Cursive on Gemini falls a little flat. For some reason, the band’s distortion seems to have been dialled back, which considering the sub-metal guitar antics of album centrepiece Twin Dragon/Hello Skeleton or A Birthday Bash is an odd decision, leaving songs that could really rage lacking punch. There’s little of the bizarre, hookridden fistpumpery that’s populated Cursive records from Domestica onward, the band having largely traded it in for more the more oblique realms of riffage and time signature-worship that’s musically impressive (if not emotionally engaging) at best, and downright gimmicky at worst.
Conceptually, the record presents us with a difficult attitude adjustment to make, as well. On Gemini, Kasher certainly isn’t wallowing in self-indulgent misery, a point his detractors are so fond of making, but to that end, he’s certainly one of rock music’s most literate and unembarrassing proponents of all things heart-on-sleeve– there’s little arguing with the eloquent emotional heft of, say, Mama, I’m Swollen’s wanton bloodletting. Here, however, Kasher’s dropped the vulnerability and taken up shock value, and there’s hammy acting all over the shop – in the denouement of The Cat and Mouse, where his wild-eyed yells of ‘kill the demon/kill the doppelganger’ border on the ridiculous, or the final lines of Sun and Moon. The song is a particular sting in I Am Gemini’s figurative tail, a reminder that Cursive can write a blinding single, and it’s a reminder that does crop up, albeit briefly, throughout the record. It’s there at the spine-chilling close of Wowowow, blasted out by Kasher and instantly reprised by the record’s ‘Siamese twins’. Ultimately, though, there’s little more to I Am Gemini than rock-complex musicianship and a lukewarm story arc, ending up ‘splattered on the orphanage ceiling’.
Rounding out a record that’s dualities, dichotomies and juxtapositions the whole way through, I Am Gemini’s physical form (in its first format from Big Scary Monsters, at least) mirrors its superficial flashiness, and ultimate lack of substance. We’re presented with a lovingly etched picture disc, ‘hand-numbered’ (by whom, exactly? In Kasher’s blood? Does it even matter?), and what it’s easy to assume is the record’s sleeve. It’s not a sleeve, rather a single piece of card bearing the record’s artwork, and without inclusion of the extensive lyric sheet either. Let it never be said that Cursive don’t know how to put on a spectacle. I Am Gemini is certainly that, but not a great deal more.

Review: Cursive – I Am Gemini

Because I just haven’t quite done enough posts about Oxford downbeatsmiths Spring Offensive, here’s their latest video, for the song Carrier. In the wake of the song, any sort of précis or admission of admiration and belief seems to come across as reductive or mawkish respectively, and besides, fellow Oxford act <a title="Because who doesn't love a bit of metal on a Wednesday?" href="https://www.facebook.com/aethara#!/aethara?sk=info">Aethara</a> seem to have summed it up pretty well already. As they’ve noted, ‘Ok, so this isn’t metal! BUT… these guys are AWESOME!‘
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Carrier is the b-side to forthcoming single Worry, Fill My Heart. Spring Offensive are dab hands at <a title="I" href="https://www.facebook.com/?ref=tn_tnmn#!/springoffensive">social networking</a>, <a title="believe" href="https://springoffensive.tumblr.com/">blogging</a>, and indeed <a title="in this goddamn band." href="https://springoffensive.co.uk/">the lost art of actually having a real website</a>.
Update: We’ve just been sent the dates for their forthcoming UK tour-
MARCH 
16 The End, Birmingham 
29 Electricity Showrooms, London 
30 The Green Door Store, Brighton 
31 Secret Location, Oxford
APRIL 
01 The Castle Hotel, Manchester 
02 SOYO, Sheffield 
03 The Head of Steam, Newcastle 
04 The Shipping Forecast, Liverpool 
05 Gwdihw, Cardiff 
10 Schon Schön, Mainz 
11 MUZ, Nurnberg 
12 Häll, Heidelberg 
13 Parterre, Basel

Video: Spring Offensive – Carrier

It might be wishful thinking, but it sounds like the haze that’s covered one hell of a lot of musical releases over the last few years might be lifting. Underneath that cloying pall we can find the likes of London/Brighton quartet Novella, three girls and one boy making a stargazing grungy racket, exemplified by the likes of Don’t Believe Ayn Rand, lead track from their forthcoming EP. …Ayn Rand showcases a distinct step forward from the band’s previous releases, sharpening their fidgety beats and roiling distortion, and adding a hook so big it has its own gravitational pull. It’s effortlessly cool, but it’s still kind of approachable.
Novella are due to release their eponymous EP via <a title="BURNING SKULL RECORDS" href="https://italianbeachbabes.bigcartel.com/product/ibb018-novella-ep">Italian Beach Babes</a> on March 19th. You can find the dates for their March tour with Veronica Falls below. You can also keep track of them on their <a title="Nah jus' kiddin' man, s'Tumblr innit?!" href="https://www.novellaband.com/">website</a>.
<object width="100%" height="81" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F36797456&" /><embed width="100%" height="81" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F36797456&" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object><a href="https://soundcloud.com/novellanovella/dont-believe-ayn-rand">Don’t Believe Ayn Rand</a> by <a href="https://soundcloud.com/novellanovella">Novella.</a>
– 8th March – 
W Veronica Falls 
Leaf 
Liverpool
– 9th March – 
W Veronica Falls 
Deaf Institute 
Manchester
– 10th March – 
W Veronica Falls 
Stereo 
Glasgow
– 11th March – 
W Veronica Falls 
Stereo 
York
– 13th March – 
W Veronica Falls 
Haunt 
Brighton
– 14th March – 
W Veronica Falls 
Scala 
London

Introducing: Novella

After seven-odd years of hard graft and a musical evolution unparalleled by the majority of their peers, Cats and Cats and Cats, one of the South’s most skewed ‘guitar music’ outfits, have decided to call it a day, as of the end of this month. The band state that “the reasons behind the break up are entirely amicable, for years the band has been our main priority but at some point other things were bound to get in the way and all of the band members have big plans that have edged their way into contention“, and have issued a fuller statement, and a promise for more, on their <a title="Food bowl. " href="https://www.catsandcatsandcats.com/">website</a>.
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Meanwhile, for anyone with a burning desire to catch the quartet before they gracefully bow out, some good news, especially if you’re on the continent. The band are playing a final show at the Bull and Gate in Kentish Town this Friday, and are embarking on two-week European tour afterwards. Dates are as follows.
10 Feb Bull and Gate, London 
11 Feb Centre Culture Libertaire, Lille 
13 Feb AZ, Menden 
14 Feb K4, Nurenberg 
15 Feb Chapeau Rouge, Prague 
16 Feb Schokoladen, Berlin 
17 Feb Swamp, Freiburg 
18 Feb Hafen 2, Offenbach 
19 Feb Art Gallery, Porrentruy 
20 Feb TBA, Italy 
21 Feb Rocket club, Milan 
22 Feb TBC, Genova 
23 Feb La Parenthese Nyon, Switzerland 
24 Feb D:qliq, Luxembourg
There’s more on the band’s invasion of Europe on <a title="Litter tray." href="https://www.facebook.com/events/166948433414766/">Facebook</a>, or you can head over to <a title="Catnip." href="https://www.functionrecords.com/gigs.html?utm_source=Function+Records+List&utm_campaign=db1b582461-Cats_Shield_Your_Eyes_Maybeshewill2_8_2012&utm_medium=email">Function Records</a> to appease any of your immediate media-purchasing needs.

News: Cats & Cats & Cats split

Never judge a book by its cover. It’s an idiom whose lesson is hammered into us as children, a symbolic rendering of liberal values. You don’t base things on surface judgment because it’s not accurate, it’s not fair, and it’s not a very nice thing to do. Sometimes, though, it’s not like this at all. The platitude ceases to embody equality of potential, and takes on an air of caution. You don’t base your judgment on surface qualities because, well, you might get it wrong, and one day your presupposition could come back to bite you in the arse.
The notion can become particularly galling with the benefit of hindsight. Most of us, I think, are guilty of feeling a little put out after taking in a ‘book’ (literal or figurative), only to discover that in fact, its cover sums it up rather well. I only mention all of this, because the amount of ‘literature’ that I’ve dredged up regarding Clarity, the first release proper from Cornish hardcore quartet Veils, which references the record’s front cover, is quite substantial. It’s seemingly an astoundingly clever connection to make, linking that monochrome stag and wintry landscape to the band’s music, rather than damned obvious, and even a little reductive. Often, the writing that follows these comparisons comes across as little more than regurgitated PR, positive, but again reductive.
This (by which I mean the combination of holier-than-thou ire at shitty writing with something purporting to be a record review) is rather unfair to Veils, because the five songs that comprise Clarity are each possessed of their own worth, as is the EP as a whole. Opener Standing Alone (Isolation), seemingly widely agreed to be the embodiment of that front cover in sound, welds lonely atmospherics onto bursting heart hardcore of the highest order. It’s lean, it’s powerful, and it’s followed by the breakneck charge of Caves (Anxiety), which, whilst by and large an exemplary exercise within its chosen boundaries, highlights one of the traps that Veils occasionally fall into, again typical within those boundaries. Chlo Edwards’ frankly terrifying voice has a tendency to drop from a roar to a defeated yelp at the end of pivotal lines – it’s a powerful trope when used sparingly, but here it seems characteristic rather than a device. Similarly, Stallions (Adrenaline) recalls Italian screamo merchants Raein at their best, and even Refused in its opening beats, and comparisons like these can rarely be a bad thing. But it does fall into some of the pitfalls of its genre, Edwards yelling the stock-posi ‘every change leads to a leap of faith’, followed (briefly, granted) by the kind of chug that could bore your average discerning hardcore fan at a hundred paces.
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I’m just saying that we shouldn’t lose sight of the ground here. It’s very easy to invest too much in homegrown talent when it’s at this early, exciting stage, especially when the band release on a label like Tangled Talk, and when they run with the eminent scene heavyweights that they have – Crocus, Pariso, and so on. Luckily, Clarity’s content falls squarely beyond merely solid, and yes, it is exciting to wonder where Veils might go next. Should they continue to push forward, as the skyward-looking, slow-mo screamo of Surrender (Clarity) suggests that they might, with Clarity’s merits as a springboard, it’s anyone’s guess as to where Veils might end up.

Review: Veils – Clarity

Because there’s nothing quite like clocking a Dinosaur Jr. reference at a party where you don’t know anyone, and then spending the next half hour chewing drunken ears off about Built to Spill and listening to an iPod routed through an old guitar amp, I present to you Poledo, brainchild of teenaged Oxfordshirean Evan Clements. On his Jesus Christ demo (self-confessedly recorded with the guitar and Macbook that his parents bought him), Clements frequents those same fuzzy, indistinct avenues that Lou Barlow explored in his Poledo, with some of the overdriven mayhem that constituted the record preceding it. Where Death Of A Friend and I Want To Be A Metalhead exhibit all the exuberance and distorted squeal you’d expect from an adolescent Dino fan, it’s on final track All You Do that Clements starts to really show his potential, channeling Broken Social Scene into Garageband, and adding fidgety beats and brass stabs to his sonic melange. There’s talk of a ‘proper’ EP in the next few months, and outside the confines of his bedroom, who knows what Clements might be capable of?
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You can listen to the Jesus Christ EP <a href="https://poledo.bandcamp.com/">here</a>, and/or follow Evan on <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/evansuckss">Twitter</a>.

Introducing: Poledo

There was this soft and glorious era, sometime in the early noughties, when coloured leaves leapt and danced in flurries on breezy gusts across our Converse’d feet. Real responsibility was in short supply, but hormones did a great job at filling the space. Taking Back Sunday were still incredible. Minus the Bear were the height of sophistication in rock music. Things meant a lot.
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There was a boom, and there was a bust, like anything else. And now that the dust has long settled, it’s about time to go tomb raidin’. Turns out the man for the job is one Martin Ruffin, helmsman of twiddly, floaty, pop-punk three piece Souvenir (as well as one fifth of South Coast noise bastards <a title="Beaver. " href="https://www.facebook.com/thejcq#!/thejcq?sk=info">The James Cleaver Quintet</a>, and the sole force behind the breathtaking <a title="Disco." href="https://www.myspace.com/quietinlieu">In Lieu</a>), whose debut release Notes From Underground exhibits all of the virtues and none of the vices associated with their particular musical pathway. Songs like Shades of Hades and Quiz Kid Donnie Smith pump their figurative fists with all the energy and conviction of sweepy-haired adolescents, but temper their abandon with a healthy dose of tech born from experience and hard work. Likewise, closer Troy is possessed of a beauty and complexity wholly at odds with traditional preconceptions of punk rock.
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We all have our time in hell. But it can still sound like a whole bunch of goddamn fun. Please <a title="Purevolume?!" href="https://yoursouvenir.bandcamp.com/album/notes-from-underground">visit the Gift Shop</a> on <a title="Myface." href="https://www.facebook.com/yoursouvenir">your way out</a>.

Introducing: Souvenir

In the second shock announcement of the past 48 hours, seminal hardcore punk band Refused this morning announced their reformation for appearances at Indio, CA’s Coachella in April (alongside the newly reformed At the Drive-In), and Way Out West festival in Gothenburg in August. A statement on the band’s website reveals an unexpected humility from the band who released the revered, genre-defining The Shape of Punk to Come, stating
“We’ve sort of looked down from our high horses and made fun of people who’ve just wanted to share the psychopathic intensity that we would deliver on a nightly basis in our post-pubescent prime. A reunion has just seemed irrelevant to us.”
It seems that this time round, Refused are focused purely on playing their music for the pleasure of their fans, rather than flexing their intellectual or artistic muscle, the final lines of the statement reading
“We never did “The shape of punk to come” justice back when it came out, too tangled up in petty internal bickering to really focus on the job. And suddenly there’s this possibility to do it like it was intended. We wanna do it over, do it right. For the people who’ve kept the music alive through the years, but also for our own sakes. 
We feel that you deserve it and we hope the feeling is mutual.
See you in the pit.”
It’s a refreshing standpoint from a band whose standing, attitudes, and output, whilst invigorating for listeners and vital to their impact, have often resulted in the kind of useless hierarchies and elitism that they could have set about destroying. Refused ain’t fuckin’ dead, and on these terms, it’s a pleasure to see them back.
The full statement can be found on <a title="NEW ART FOR THE REAL PEOPLE" href="https://officialrefused.com.preview.binero.se/">Refused’s website</a>.

News: Refused reform for festival appearances

And so to another year, complete with the same retrodden stock phrases about the industry having shut down for a while, the weather being grim, and the best tunes around being those which take us away from the damp and cloud and back-to-work malaise. January scribblings about music would be utterly lost without them.
Thank goodness for the kind people at <a title="They're nice. " href="https://cooperativemusic.com/">Cooperative Music</a>, then, who have supplied us with this, the latest pop powerhouse from 20 year old Tacoma, WA native Brad Oberhofer. It’s called Gotta Go, it’s out via <a title="nah, I'd never heard of 'em either. " href="https://whiteiris.tv/oberhofer">Black Iris</a> on January 12th, and its bittersweet, skyscraper-sized hooks will have you singing from your seat on the train or at your desk or running for shelter from one of the freak gales that are enjoying a bit of a vogue at the moment. Expect a full-length from Brad and his band sometime this year.
<object width="100%" height="81" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F28687488" /><embed width="100%" height="81" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F28687488" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/cooperativemusic/oberhofer-gotta-go">Oberhofer – Gotta Go</a> by <a href="https://soundcloud.com/cooperativemusic">Cooperative Music</a>

New: Oberhofer – Gotta Go

Louisville, KY’s King’s Daughters And Sons carry the yoke of the past heavy across their collective backs. A cursory read of their press release from Chemikal Underground, the label on which their debut If Then Not When is released, makes the band’s involvement with history well known. It details the members’ previous outfits, Louisville cult darlings The Shipping News and Rachel’s among them, the band’s roots sunk deep into Kentucky soil. The bio also names King’s Daughters And Sons, in that hyperbolic way that only press releases can, as “part William Faulkner, part Led Zeppelin”, which sets the watermark even higher than the troupe’s own separate previous merits. They’re on the back foot before they’ve started – despite their base similarity, lines like ‘in the kitchen, whiskeydrunk’ can’t really elevate a guitar band, even one possessed of the history and gravitas of King’s Sons And Daughters, to the standing of a literary monolith. Even the band’s name brings with it all the baggage of generations, the blossom and decay of bloodlines, the expectation of behaviour engrained in royal descent.
With If Then Not When, King’s Sons And Daughters have drawn on the past – that of themselves and others – and crafted an apt soundtrack for all the chronic weight. The record looks to post-rock for its drama, slowcore for severity, and country’s rich heritage of yarnspinning and morose twang.  The band think nothing of presenting a gripping 8 minute narrative based around the explosion of a still and the deaths of two betrothed, as on The Anniversary, and setting it to martial snares and tense arpeggios, which build to a typically crashing peak. Equally, they’ll spin out the barest of spidery folk whispers, as on Lorelei, for the same amount of time, and not vary the volume once.
It’s here that the members’ past experience, their revered Louisville lineage, is so evident. For such lengthy songs, not a single note is wasted, and no post-rock pitfalls are unhappily happened upon. Glacial opener Sleeping Colony remains as taut and alive as powerlines after rain throughout its seven minutes, and for all its worthiness, If Then Not When is more often than not a genuine delight to listen to, rather than the kind of hard work that dense and expansive records can sometimes be. It’s easy to take immediate joy from playful excursions like the cowboyish affectations of A Storm Kept Them Away, or Dead Letter Office’s swaggering Will Oldham-meets-Low jangle, and where the band’s tendency toward the epic is clear, there’s a plain humanity at work here too. Volunteer pits soft voice against Rachel Grimes’ gentle piano swell, a spare beat, icy electrics. When Joe Manning and Michael Heineman break out from their hushed trappings and into full-throated yelps, it’s to a gut-punch that can so often be faked in this kind of setting. But it hits here.
The ever-quotable Faulkner once noted that “the past is never dead. In fact, it’s not even past”. The meaning loaded in the line has been debated to varying conclusion, and here too, it’s applicable in a variety of ways. For King’s Daughters And Sons and If Then Not When, the past may still be present, in both senses of the word, but it’s proven malleable in such capable hands.

Review: King’s Daughters And Sons – If Then Not When

If there’s one way for a band to endear themselves to an obsessive bookworm before said bookworm has even heard a note from them, it’s by naming themselves after a relatively minor character in some work of literature or other. And while this particular bookworm had heard Fix My Corrections, penultimate track from Nately’s Whore’s Kid Sister‘s latest EP Ribs, before he registered their name, his noting the Catch-22 related moniker about halfway through the song certainly didn’t do any harm to his estimations of the band.
<object width="100%" height="81" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F28165184" /><embed width="100%" height="81" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F28165184" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/nwkidsister/fix-my-corrections">04 Fix my corrections</a> by <a href="https://soundcloud.com/nwkidsister">NWKidSister</a>
Fix My Corrections‘ greyedout clank and bottomfeeding rumble had already spoken for themselves, however, and the worm was hooked. So. Just who the fuck are Nately’s Whore’s Kid Sister?
As it turns out, they’re Jim, John, Matt, Stuart and Michael from Newcastle Upon Tyne, five young adult males who sound like they exist on a diet of booze, blunts and raw beef. To call Ribs heavyweight would be an understatement, but at risk of sounding like pretty much every toilet band ever’s press release, there’s a second head to this chipped ol’ battleaxe. Just Below the Ribs, which opens proceedings, encapsulates neatly the appeal of Nately’s. It’s those doomy moments on Soundgarden’s Superunknown, played by Red Sparowes fans on Telecasters, stretched out over seven minutes and sung by Seraphim. It’s lovely, but it’s horrible. Something like Edmund Burke’s notion of the Sublime, if I’ve remembered my schoolin’ right.
Elsewhere, Babies and Regards, Bison forego their predecessor’s warped beauty for deadweighted and snarling disgust, whilst Man outside Cumberland Arms, Byker, 11/07/11 is nothing short of utterly terrifying. I don’t know which one of Nately’s had the stones to risk making the field recording that runs through the song like poisoned blood, but he’s a bigger man than I.
If you’re from the band’s presumably grim northern climes, you should probably make yer way over to The Tyne Bar on the twelfth night of December, for a four pound night of festive cheer entitled <a title="Yeah man, fuck that shit man. Yeah man. " href="https://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=197864416962330">Fuck Christmas</a>. Like all young and aspiring darlings of doom, Nately’s are consummate advocates of that social networking thang. You can find them <a title="Mancamp" href="https://nwkidsister.bandcamp.com/">here</a>, <a title="Grumblr" href="https://nwks.tumblr.com/">here</a>, <a title="Disgracebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/nwkidsister">here</a> and <a title="Wouldn't hurt a flyspace" href="https://www.myspace.com/natelyswhoreskidsister">here</a>. 
Ribs is up for digital release on Christmas Day. We can only hope that somehow, it’ll make its way into a cathedral.

Introducing: Nately’s Whore’s Kid Sister

The logic ran thus: if you’re going to have the bare-faced audacity to write yet ANOTHER review of yet ANOTHER record by yet ANOTHER band with drums and electric guitars, you’d at least better make sure you’re doing something interesting.
À la recherche du temps perdu (Eng. In Search of Lost Time, prev. Remembrance of Things Past) – Most famous work of French novelist Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust. Nearly 1.5 millions word in length. Not often referenced in rock songs. 

Amateurs – n. 1 pl. of amateur, or a person who engages in pursuit of a pastime rather than a profession. 2 Previous moniker of Brighton-based guitar band Love Among The Mannequins. 

angular – adj. 1 a having sharp angles or corners b (of a person) awkward in manner 2 stock phrase in music criticism, often used to describe post-hardcore bands.
Brahma – First God in the Hindu trimurti. Responsible for creation. Has four heads and four arms.
Crooked Mountain, Crooked Sea – Four piece post-punk (ref needed) band from Brighton. Releases include <a href="https://crookedmountaincrookedsea.bandcamp.com/album/i-watched-it-from-the-roadside">I Watched It From The Roadside</a> (2010) and <a href="https://crookedmountaincrookedsea.bandcamp.com/album/whats-there-to-write-about">What’s There To Write About?</a> (2011). Member Steven Andrew Robert Stride also plays in Brighton-based Love Among The Mannequins, but was not involved in the recording of their debut album Radial Images.
Distortion – n. 1 the act of distorting 2 the quality or state of being distorted; a product of distorting; as a a lack of proportionality in an image resulting from defects in the optical system b falsified reproduction of an audio or video signal caused by change in the wave form of the original signal. Distortion is mostly unwanted but can be desirable, as with the distortion of electric guitars.
Function Records – Independent record label based in London, UK. <a href="https://www.functionrecords.com/">Recent releases include</a> Radial Images, debut album by Brighton-based guitar band Love Among The Mannequins. 
Love Among the Mannequins – 1 A line from The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), an experimental novel by British writer J.G. Ballard, specifically the story The Summer Cannibals, originally published in New Worlds #186 (1969) 2 Brighton-based guitar band, comprising Alexander Ross Petersen, Jonathan Stephen Baker, Steven Andrew Robert Stride, and Tobias James Dylan Hayes. Influences include Autolux, Drive Like Jehu and Pavement.
Mephistopheles – a demon with origins in German folklore. First appeared in literature in the Faust chapbooks (c.16), first dramatised by Marlowe’s The Tragicall History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, and brought further recognition by German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s famous reading of the legend. Not to be confused with Mr. Mistoffelees, a feline character in T. S. Eliot‘s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s stage adaptation, the musical Cats. 

O You Broken Eyes – ‘Brittle, symphonic, wine-soaked folk’ septet based in Brighton. Guitarist Alexander Ross Petersen and drummer Jonathan Stephen Baker also play in Brighton-based Love Among The Mannequins. See also: Crowns On The Rats Orchestra 

Radial Images – 1 poss. Radial Patterns, patterns that appear to radiate from a central point, e.g. spokes 2 Idea ruminated on by Russian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorovic Fyodorov. A radial image contains the essence of a human’s being, their personality etc., and survives after their death. 3 debut full-length record by Brighton-based guitar band Love Among The Mannequins, released on independent UK record label Function Records on 07/11/2011 

George Robert Price – American population geneticist. Developed a mathematical theory of Altriusm. Friend to the homeless. Committed suicide on January 6, 1975, using a pair of nail scissors to cut his carotid artery. Thought that entropy could outmaneuver empathy. 

Shiva – Third god in the Hindu trimurti. Responsible for destruction. Blue face and throat. 

Shoes and Socks Off – <a href="https://www.bsmrocks.com/band_shoes.html">‘Tobias Hayes, son, brother, uncle, dude and boo-hoo merchant, has been playing stubbed-toe blues under the name ‘Shoes and Socks Off’ since 2007. It started off as a joke.’</a> Toby also plays in Brighton-based Love Among The Mannequins. 

That crazy Petersburg Shuffle (Oh My) – Hot new dance step currently causing a stir in The Russian Federation and England’s South Coast. Appropriated from interpretation of the dreams of Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov, protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky‘s Crime and Punishment, specifically the dream in which Raskolnikov witnesses a mare beaten to death by an angry mob. Dancers will crowd around a central point and mimic the beating of Raskolnikov’s horse. Sometimes the mare is represented by another dancer (or dancers), sometimes it is simply imagined. Often performed to the music of Brighton-based guitar band Love Among The Mannequins. See also: That Petersburg Tango (Oh Me).
Vishnu – Second god in the Hindu trimurti. Responsible for the preservation and protection of the universe. Blue skin and four arms. Always represented carrying the Conch, the Chakra, the Lotus Flower, and the Mace. 

Wordplay – n. use of words to witty effect 

<a href="https://loveamongthemannequins.tumblr.com/">I wonder what this cryptic allegory could possibly mean?</a>

Review: Love Among The Mannequins – Radial Images

For 10 years now, Mike Kinsella has been doing the rounds as Owen, every grown-up emo kid’s favourite acoustic troubadour. His releases since that time have softly plumbed the depths of post-teenage heartbreak, regarding interpersonal relationships with a self-deprecating and wry eye, and set their conclusions to some unabashedly lovely music, dextrous open-tuned acoustics, distant overdriven caterwaul, and a host of backing instruments which sound far more lonely than their many layers would have you believe.
So it seems fair to suggest that Ghost Town, Kinsella’s sixth full-length release as Owen, was probably never going to take too many massive detours. But rather than putting weight behind hypothetical accusations of laziness or lack of adventurousness, this is rather a strength – Kinsella’s perfectly capable of writing what’s essentially the same record over and over again, whilst each time presenting something as engaging as its predecessor. Despite their overall softness, it’s rare to switch off to an Owen record. And yes, Ghost Town is much the same, in terms of both content and quality.
This isn’t to say that Ghost Town is a note for note copy of what’s come before it, of course. At ten tracks and just over forty minutes, the record doesn’t display Kinsella’s penchant for the strung-out that was particularly evident on his debut, say. Rather, it presents a much more focused set of songs that find their emotional mark just as well in their brevity.
And while finding the emotional mark has never been a problem for Kinsella, his minor and downbeat tendencies do seem much more evident on Ghost Town than 2009’s New Leaves. The titles of both releases are somewhat indicative of their content – where New Leaves concerned itself with growth and change, Ghost Town is much more lonesome. Armoire is a case in point, a neat summary of the record’s (and Kinsella’s) strengths, creating a tangible nostalgia from a central image of bedroom furniture, the basic physical representation of that most intimate of rooms. It’s all set to instrumentation that Kinsella has utterly mastered, updating the more rambling blueprint of Red House Painters before him, marrying crisp acoustic and growling electric in an apt soundtrack for his sharp-edged sentimentalilty. As the man sings ‘somehow while I was gone, this house I’d left for dead had lingered on’, on returning home after a period of absence, it’s hard to not feel a tug in your stomach, a pull back to the spaces you’ve occupied before that haven’t quite done with you yet.
The overcast mood is present throughout Ghost Town, and whilst we’ve all heard it before, Kinsella’s using the word ‘fuck’ (twice! Twice in two songs!) still comes across doubly shocking for the softness of his tone. In An Animal, the disgust in his ‘fuck that’ is more than evident, and the song itself is one of the most outright depressing, sonically and lyrically, that Kinsella has ever layed down. There’s little swoon here, and even at the song’s sparkling close, the man’s admission that he’s ‘an animal with clothes on’ is, whilst typically charming, simply the summing up of a life of perceived sin.
There’s gentle optimism, too, a sentimentality that’s more forward-looking, and of course Kinsella’s characteristic wit. Opener Too Many Moons sees the songwriter imagining himself, in bursts of playful secondary school French, as an errant cat, where O, Evelyn proclaims ‘all that I need to know is that I’ll know you when you’re older’ with a healthy dose of platonic love. Songs like these, and Mother’s Milk Breath (which comes directly after tales of angrily punching walls and dropkicking old ladies in No Language), with its mantra of ‘one foot falls in front of the other’, fence in the album’s rather darker heart. It has the effect of setting both sides of in stark contrast, a sea of shadow and a ring of light, and both play out all the more effective for it.
With Ghost Town, Mike Kinsella has for the sixth time produced a record of outstanding quality, whether it’s considered inside or outside the context of his back catalogue. In a year of sub par releases by well established artists (and long-time personal faves), it’s pleasing to note that Mike Kinsella has yet to put a foot wrong – Ghost Town is much less empty than its title would have you believe.

Review: Owen – Ghost Town

It’s a plight generally confined to the fanboys, the critics, the librarians of popular music, but occasionally, something happens, and you start to want to reassess your tried and trusted pigeonholes with a conviction that wasn’t there before. I don’t think I’m ashamed of my use of those pigeonholes. My business is words more than anything else, and so I like having words to call things by, even if they do end up becoming misinterpreted, warped, loaded, and reviled, which is how this whole situation arose.
Pianos Become The Teeth, as evidenced first by last year’s storming debut full length Old Pride, make their music with loud guitars, abrasive in tone but melodic in output, leavened with a judicious uses of delay and reverb. They underpin this with tightly controlled explosions of spastic rhythm, and fling desperate screams over the top of it all. I’m sure you know which of your favourite new musical terms you would apply to this description.
I do not want to call The Lack Long After, Pianos’ sophomore effort, a hardcore record, because it’s not. I do not want to call it post-hardcore, an unwieldy and academic label that’s become so confused and overapplied that it’s lost most of its clout. I do not want to call the record screamo, because the term is ridiculous. ‘Real screamo’, doubly so. So I’ll settle, in my perverse desire for definition, for saying this. The Lack Long After is a fantastic record, a fantastic follow up to a fantastic debut that, if anything, exceeds its predecessor in quality. None of the above terms do it justice. This is not a lazy statement.
For all my dramatics, the last thing I want is to place an inordinate amount of hype on the Baltimoreans’ shoulders, or throw empty hyperbole around. The songs contained within The Lack Long After are not wildly musically original – every ‘for fans of’ tagline that invariably comes with a band’s press reads as accurate. It’s easy to hear the likes of Envy, Funeral Diner, and City of Caterpillar in Pianos’ sound. But whilst Pianos Become The Teeth aren’t the saviours of modern music, if such a thing can or needs to exist, they are producing music of exceptional quality within (and hell, without) the boundaries of their sound.
The Lack Long After is largely about the loss of vocalist Kyle Durfey’s father. It’s a tough subject to commit to tape, both from his point of view and ours, but Pianos’ music, furious and elegiac in equal measure, presents itself here as a particularly effective way to express those issues. Where a song like Shared Bodies carries itself with much of the threatening lumber of hardcore, it sits comfortably next to Such Confidence, which drifts in on plangent clean tones before cutting loose. The approach isn’t a new one, but it’s one that works perfectly in this context, and when Durfey sob-screams ‘if you could only read my mind’ at a lull in the opening I’ll Be Damned, it’s symptomatic of The Lack Long After as a whole. This is a man who’s put very little distance between his life and his recorded output and, without wanting to become fanciful, The Lack Long After seems at least a glimpse into that mind, both in sound and lyrical content. Certainly from that line onward, if not from the crashing guitars that open the record and make up the minutes preceding it, there’s very little ground between the listener and the band. It can be uncomfortable – sentiment moves slow and painful over the course of the record, from ‘I’ll Be Damned’, to ‘I’ll Get By’, encompassing some interesting middle ground (I think the clerical putdown in Such Confidence is my favourite) on the way, and at the close of The Lack Long After‘s weighty thirty nine minutes, the first signs of progression into healing are genuinely (and I mean genuinely) pleasing to note, carried on gentle, floating chords.
I still find myself without satisfactory nomenclature for the music contained on The Lack Long After, but I do know this. I know that Good Times is one of the best born from turmoil guitar songs that I’ve heard all year. I know that Durfey’s admission at the close of I’ll Get By, that ‘it’s a hell of a thing’, is as singular in intent and diverse in meaning and powerful in effect as one could wish for from a lone line. And I know that The Lack Long After represents a triumph for Pianos Become The Teeth, that they’ve expressed themselves near-perfectly in their personal trials, and that the dogged and unassuming quality of the record represents a triumph in music as a whole. Sometimes it’s easier to look like you’re pushing at boundaries than to exist at your level best within them, and with The Lack Long After, Pianos Become The Teeth have begun mastering the latter.
The Lack Long After is out now via <a title="BECAUSE I COULD LOVE AND DROWN IN YOUR GODDAMN SMILE LINES" href="https://www.topshelfrecords.bigcartel.com/product/pianos-become-the-teeth-the-lack-long-after-lp-2nd-pressing">Topshelf Records</a>

Review: Pianos Become The Teeth – The Lack Long After

You gotta love those hardworking chaps at <a title="Shove a tongue for Anakin " href="https://www.functionrecords.com/">Function Records</a>. They’ve already released material from the wondrously various likes of Juffage, ✝Hymns✝ and Shield Your Eyes this year, but far from resting on their laurels, they’re throwing more and more of the good stuff at us. Working up to the release of debut full-length Radial Images on Function, Brighton-based Love Among The Mannequins (featuring them out of <a title="Go To Smoking Lines" href="https://www.facebook.com/oyoubrokeneyes">O You Broken Eyes</a>, <a title="Cooze and Scrot Rot" href="https://shoesandsocksoff.tumblr.com/">Shoes and Socks Off</a> and <a title="Look at pouting, look at me" href="https://crookedmountaincrookedsea.bandcamp.com/">Crooked Mountain Crooked Sea</a>) have created the archive footage-based video for Alfred Garyevich Schnittke, as well as putting the song up for download.
As is probably par for the course for a band named after a line penned by J.G. Ballard, Schnittke manages to cram an impressive amount of references to the cultural greats of the last few centuries into its three and a quarter minutes. It can be snooty, silly, or ferociously forward-thinking, depending on which way you look at it, but whatever you decide, Alfred Garyevich Schnittke is a whole heckload of juddering, distorted, Pavement-flavoured fun. Can you think of another guitar band who can make the words ‘Beethoven’s Burton’s line’ sound so motherfuckin’ catchy? Nah. Didn’t think so.
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Radial Images is out Monday 17th November on Function Records. To download Alfred Garyevich Schnittke head over to the Function <a title="Guv's a young Mark Lanegan" href="https://functionrecords.bandcamp.com/track/alfred-garyevich-schnittke">bandcamp</a>. You can keep track of Love Among via their <a title="Doves have sprung for tans again. " href="https://loveamongthemannequins.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>.

Video & MPFree: Love Among The Mannequins – Alfred Garyevich Schnittke

Ah, this guy.
“I love it” shouts Replica, wildeyed with characteristic puppydog enthusiasm, “when something you’ve heard a thousand times can still sound so fresh in a different listening context.” We’re pushing our way through the doors at the back of Brixton’s O2 Academy, ducking out of Death From Above 1979, and sadly, it’s not Messrs Grainger and Keeler that Replica’s getting all excited about. Rather, it’s this month’s CitR-exclusive mix, specifically Spectrasoul‘s remix of the BTK track Things I Do, which wobbles in just shy of the seventeen minute mark. “I was listening to it,” he recalls, “and I knew that it alone was original and interesting enough to base a whole mix on.” By this time we’ve made it to one of the venue’s upstairs bars, and as when I spoke to Replica last month, we’ve broached the subject of genre. I’m probing the DJ as to why he’s tagged his offering this month as ‘Darkstep’, where the whole idea came from. Replica’s methods are refreshingly uncalculating. “I hear a track that inspires me,” so, that Spectrasoul remix, in this case, “and I hold on to it and use it as a cornerstone for the mix. I try and select other tracks that share the same qualities as that one track.” Being the noncreative party in this series of collaborations, I’m wary of stamping a label on anything for the sake of reductive journalism, but Replica is far more relaxed. “Genre tagging at a sub-genre level is quite fluid and subjective,” he muses, toeing a dark, sticky smudge on the floor “and it’s only after I’ve put it all together that it needs a name – I think darkstep is one of a few close approximations of what the overarching sound of this mix is.”
The difference in breaks between Replica’s two CitR mixes so far is immediately apparent, from the moment that Sunchase‘s Lapdance locks in off the roll of waves and some gorgeous, ethereal chiming. What prompted the decision to work with a selection of more traditional breaks? “I was apprehensive at first, because I know the stigma that comes with the more traditional D’n’B beat,” explains Replica, “so I was very careful with my selections. I tried to keep the beats minimal and the basslines as deep as possible.” Far from deriding drum’n’bass, though, Replica’s keen to point out that the ol’ dancefloor warhorse has life in it yet. “People find it so hard to let go of their preconceptions, that they just hear the Amen break and totally let go of the production. As soon as the beat kicks in with that ‘dug dug DAH dugga dugga dugga DAH'” – I take a step back to avoid getting soaked in overpriced Tuborg – “you can see people’s eyes rolling and they start switching off.” So why go with this school of production in particular, in bringing round those who can’t see past the Amen? “A lot of the production from last month’s mix seemed to be very appealing to a lot of people,” Replica shrugs, “and that same kind of production can be found in places in this mix.”
The difference beatwise aside, I’m glad that Replica has drawn parallels between his Darkstep and Autonomic mixes. I wouldn’t have presumed to make the comparison myself, but the thought that the two mixes are largely similar in tone certainly played on my mind. What would the man say in his defense, to anyone who might suggest he’s been lazy and delivered more of the same? “I was a long way down a completely different path before I switched to this one. I was going to do a trip hop mix, I will do that another time in the future.” Ah, c’mon, that’s a cop out isn’t it? Anyone could say that. Pushed, Replica elaborates. “I just felt, after the warm reception the last mix got, I should play to that strength.” he says, clearly a little humbled by the reaction from last time around. “This is still only the second mix in the series. But it’s not going to just be this kind of stuff…” The lines ‘come here baby, I love your company…’ batter their way past the bar’s closed swing doors, and both of us turn and look toward their source. Replica’s face breaks into a sunny grin, and he turns back to me, continuing. “I’m a massive dance music slut, I’ll fuck anything that moves” he says, before quickly adding “except Donk, that stuff’s fucking shit.”
Still, even with the knowledge that he could have opted for an entirely different style of mix, Replica’s eager to point out that whilst his second CitR outing has its similarities to his first, it’s only through offering a new perspective, whilst continuing to showcase the calibre of certain producers. “I had a few people asking me why we kept talking about D’n’B last month, when there was an apparent lack of it on the mix”, he says. “This month’s mix is, I guess, the sort of thing those artists were and are making outside those newer, um, ‘autonomic’, areas. If you think the two mixes sound the same – maybe these areas of music aren’t for you. The production is pure quality either way.” With the nous of a born showman, Replica smiles again, adding as an afterword, “But don’t worry, keep listening. There’s a veritable smorgasbord of totally different genres lined up for future mixes!”
Whatever parallels can be drawn between Replica’s two mixes so far for CitR, and whether those parallels are for better or worse, there’s an unmistakable sonic variety to this month’s. I was particularly taken by the astounding one-two punch of Phace‘s Cold Champagne, which is so surprisingly hectic I think I actually jumped the first time it came in, and Beastie Respond‘s Syncopy, which, following Phace’s mentalism, comes over all dubby and organic. ‘Brilliant,” Replica laughs, ‘that Phace track was a last minute addition – it’s a classic, I remembered about it in the shower on the morning that i recorded it!” What would he consider standout tracks, then? “The tracks that really stick out for me in particular are, I suppose, I Feel U (by Icicle) – despite being quite minimal, that snare kicks like a 12 gauge. Spadge by Chook as well, because of the insane wobble board bass effect. And the bassline in (8bits‘) So Good is nice and deep. Soulful.”
The final notes of Do It have crashed in past the black bar doors, and with both of us eager to get out of the Academy before the crowds swell and make movement impossible, I put one final question to Replica, asking him what his intention for this month’s mix was. He pauses for a moment, before answering. “You described this mix as being a lot more ‘danceable’, and certainly there are some ‘gunfinger'” – yes, he does the dance, his mouth twisted into a gurn – “moments, but I think if you manage to get up and actually dance to this…” He trail off, trying another tack. “I mean, I love Drum and Bass, but I went to a club recently, they were only playing stuff like this, and I left!” Ooh, you Philistine! The man’s quick to explain himself though, saying “I wouldn’t consider this music for dancing and having a great time to, it’s more of a vibing to on your earphones kind of thing. It’s a much more personal experience, not so communal.” Replica puts his empty plastic down on the bar, and looks around at the crowd, beginning to emerge from the Academy’s inner sanctum. We become as rats, and move to the street.
<object width="100%" height="81" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F26474737" /><embed width="100%" height="81" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F26474737" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/replica101/replica-darkstep-mix">Darkstep mix</a> by <a href="https://soundcloud.com/replica101">Replica101</a>
Tracklist:
00:00 – Sunchase – Lapdance Feat. Dissident 
04:30 – Triad – Last March 
05:37 – 8Bits – So Good 
07:30 – Icicle – I Feel U 
09:44 – SpectraSoul & D Bridge – Glimpse 
13:08 – Chook – You Are All You Have feat Claudine Muno 
14:38 – D Bridge – 5th Floor 
16:53 – BTK – Things I Do (Spectrasoul Remix) 
19:09 – Phace – Cold Champagne 
21:47 – Beastie Respond – Syncopy 
24:03 – Mode – Stepping Stones 
27:03 – Bulb – Default Settings 
29:19 – Survied & Bullet Time – Dejah Thoris 
31:57 – Cyantific – Empty Streets 
33:50 – S.P.Y – Go With The Flow 
36:05 – Triad – Last Gasp 
38:21 – Chook – Spadge 
40:37 – Alix Perez – Behind Time 
41:45 – >>DJ Fresh – Starfall>> 
43:37 – Commix – Belleview – D Bridge Belle-Reviewed Mix
Photo © Joe Gilder

Crack in the Replica 2 – Darkstep

Oxford quintet Spring Offensive have been off touring Europe for the last couple of weeks, and for anyone back home missing the band’s formidable live presence, the lovely people over at <a title="Want dedicated guitar music fandom? Head for Deutschland. " href="https://www.facebook.com/berlinsessions">Berlin Sessions</a> have filmed a special acoustic version of the mighty Every Coin, from 2010’s Pull Us Apart, in the back of a fast food joint. Who needs a drumkit when you’ve got a suitcase eh?
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Further tour dates, as well as a bunch of other useful stuff, can be found on <a title="It's new, I think." href="https://springoffensive.co.uk/index.html">the Spring Offensive website</a>. For all that breaking Spring Offensive news (including close shaves with the German narcotics division), head to the band’s <a title="Everyone likes these things, right?" href="https://springoffensive.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>.

Video: Spring Offensive – Every Coin (Berlin Sessions)

Ok, so I had my beef with lo-fi. And from the alpine, swim, an as-yet enigmatic pair of sound art students from Brighton, sound like they record into Garageband at best. But instead of betraying an irreverent or even lazy attitude to recording, the hiss and crackle weaves a bedroomy mystery through the duo’s cuts, all halfsmoked rollies and red wine from the bottle. Equally, while their three tracks so far nod to those newer waves of almost-folk, as well as a couple of the genres with the ubiquitous ‘post’ prefix, there’s a refreshing lack of solid reference points at this stage. They can gently and deftly pick their way around morose vocal husks, as apparent from swim, available below, and yell manically over furious strumming to equally striking effect. Apparently a debut EP is on its way in 2012, and what it might hold is anyone’s guess, but if the band’s output so far is anything to go by, odds are it could well be a right stunner.
You can keep up with from the alpine, swim via their <a href="https://fromthealpineswim.tumblr.com/">Tumblr</a>, or like ’em on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/fromthealpineswim?sk=info#!/fromthealpineswim">Facebook</a>.
<object width="100%" height="81" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F26369467" /><embed width="100%" height="81" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F26369467" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/fromthealpineswim/swim">swim</a> by <a href="https://soundcloud.com/fromthealpineswim">from the alpine, swim</a>

Introducing: from the alpine, swim

Neil Young comparisons flow thick and fast in the press surrounding Mat Gibson, which is a little unfair. Comparing the London-based, Canadian-born songwriter to one of the most highly regarded and recklessly diverse recording artists of the last half century certainly puts him under a lot of pressure to perform, especially when Gibson actually sounds very little like Young, in any of his incarnations.
With Jonah, lifted from Gibson’s latest mini-album Forest Fire, we’re instead treated to the kind of reverberant vocal phrasings more characteristic of the likes of My Morning Jacket, set to some stripped back, earthy twang and allegorical storytelling. Where Forest Fire‘s version of the song features rattling percussion, some distant electric howl and twinkling chimes, the Clubhouse Sessions version available below finds Gibson at his most bare, and the song’s central motif, ‘it’s time you called for help’, is all the more chilling for it.
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Forest Fire is out now on <a href="https://www.clubhouserecords.co.uk/releases/forest-fire/">Clubhouse Records</a>. Keep track of Mat <a href="https://www.matgibson.co.uk/">here</a>.

Video: Mat Gibson – Jonah

Stay sad. Stay scared. 
Stay in the Home You Love.
For your perusal: the yowls of ghosts of these gin-drunk sailors caroming round the wrecked carcasses of those rotten and rusted hulks that bore them once. And here a reveille to corral them, in the glitter of rain on third degree burns. The gathered and violent potential of so many loose lips. So don’t let’s talk about it.
Strike The Last Flare. We’ll never get out of here.
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Stay in the Home You Love is out on Monday 14th November via the ever-fantastic <a href="https://www.functionrecords.com">Function Records</a>. Keep track of Nitkowski <a href="https://www.nitkowski.net/">here</a>.

Video: Nitkowski – Strike The Last Flare

There’s one thing about my taste in artists, records and songs that has become abundantly clear to me, over the time I’ve spent nurturing and developing my casual obsession with music. I love nearly all things miserable. Earlier this year, at the release of long-standing favourite Death Cab for Cutie’s latest effort Codes and Keys, <a title="Ooh, Rob has a Tumblr you say? What's that? No I am not a 'fifteen-year-old girl'. Oh, piss off and give it a follow, will you?" href="https://robhollamby.tumblr.com/post/10767741923/death-cab-for-cutie-codes-and-keys">I bemoaned the Washington quartet’s newfound emotional distance</a>, where, say, All Eternals Deck by The Mountain Goats presented a 2011 release that <a title="Seriously. Contender for sad song of the year." href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azZDtf50pNQ">I could really get sad to</a>. However juvenile or self-indulgent or retrogressive it may seem, I am a semi-bashful devotee of those records that do well soundtracking lonesome, late night whiskey drinking and overflowing ashtrays. Ryan Adams, I think we can all agree, has proved himself a past master at making exactly those sorts of records.
You can probably see where this is going. That Ashes and Fire, Adams’ thirteenth studio album, and first since leaving The Cardinals in 2009, begins with the line ‘last time I was here it was raining, it’s not raining any more’, is particularly fitting. Adams has been keen to dismiss the idea that his songs should be taken as a literal extension of what he’s feeling at any given time, telling <a title="Am I allowed to do this? I am now. " href="https://drownedinsound.com/in_depth/4143701-i%E2%80%99m-always-in-a-good-place-when-i%E2%80%99m-working-on-music-dis-meets-ryan-adams">Drowned In Sound</a>‘s David Edwards simply “I’m always in a good place when I’m working on music”. So it’s not necessarily Adams’ marriage to Mandy Moore, or his positive decision to continue with music in the face of Ménière’s Disease, that have contributed to the more relaxed themes and sound present on Ashes and Fire, as one might have expected. But true or not, the notion certainly seems applicable.
The Cardinals must’ve had a hard time of it, rarely critically respected as anything more than Adams’ competent but relatively unremarkable backing band. That said, their mark on those albums they played on is indelible – it’s particularly clear that Ashes and Fire is not a Cardinals record, largely consisting as it does of strummed acoustics, gentle percussion, and nary a country thrashathon in sight. The lack of musical urgency on Ashes and Fire influenced my early judgment of the album – where a song like Save Me isn’t particularly cheerful in tone, it’s gentle, gospel-inflected sound certainly doesn’t elevate it to Meadowlake Street‘s miserable heights. With the customary vitriol I reserve for artists who dare to go even the slightest bit happier on me, I was perfectly ready to write off Ashes and Fire as unremarkable and await the next release that would pander to my ridiculous demands.
A reassessment of values was needed at this point. Obviously, dismissing an album as poor simply because it’s not as tearjerking as an artist’s previous output would be ridiculous, self-indulgent, and probably downright unhealthy as well. For a start, there are undeniably a scattering of those moments on Ashes and Fire that can light a sad-addict up inside, not least on Come Home, which is just as longing as it’s similarly-titled counterpart from Cold Roses, and the title track puts paid to any notions that Adams can’t do rollicking without the Cardinals. Similarly, both Do I Wait and Lucky Now are as good as anything that Adams has ever produced before, the former blooming from soft beginnings into something altogether more substantial, and the latter the closest he’s got to Pneumonia in years. So it’s a little unfortunate that the second half of the Ashes and Fire does have a tendency toward indistinctness. The aforementioned Save Me, Kindness, and the closing I Love You But I Don’t Know What To Say are all relatively lengthy, end-credits numbers that schmooze softly into each other with the minimum of effect, whatever the sentiment behind them.
Ashes and Fire is not Ryan Adams’ best record, emotional calibre notwithstanding. That said, it’s certainly not his worst either, and taking the record out of the context of a critical review for a moment, it’s delightful to hear the man sounding so settled, especially with his battle with Ménière’s Disease in mind. Trading in bourbon-soaked self-destruction for the kind of gentle jams that your parents could quite happily nod their heads to without getting too involved seems to me to have sapped much of the vitality from Adams’ music. But hell, maybe I’m just not ready to stop being a miserable fucker just yet.

Review: Ryan Adams – Ashes and Fire

In a tone befitting the end of an era, I’m going to get all sentimental for a moment. I can still remember the first time I really listened to This Town Needs Guns. It was probably nearly exactly four years ago. Walking home on a bright, brisk autumn day much like this one, I fished my phone out of my pocket to find a text from a friend, saying simply, ‘Listen to 26 is Dancier than 4 by This Town Needs Guns’. When I got in, I dutifully fired up the computer, pulled up MySpace, and did so.
I think that no sooner had the song’s last notes faded out (maybe for the third or fourth time), I dialled the individual who had set me on this path and unleashed a torrent of unintelligible gibberish down the line, the gist of which was that TTNG’s marriage of barefaced, unapologetic angst to ultra-melodic hypertapping, was, y’know, just my kind of thing. Suddenly a whole bunch of bands with Kinsella influences proudly on sleeves seemed to appear. Some of them were good. Some were bloody awful, and it all got a bit boring in the end. But I heard This Town Needs Guns before I heard the rest of ’em, and I don’t think they ever really got outdone.
Adventure, Stamina & Anger is the swansong of Guns’ frontman and sometime guitarist Stuart Smith, who’s departing on particularly happy terms for the realms of fatherhood. Listening to it alongside oldies like 26… it’s apparent how much more competent the Oxford-based four piece have become. Where I used to pine for the distorted chording that characterised Guns’ split with Cats & Cats & Cats, the mellifluous clusters of notes that populate Adventure wouldn’t make sense in that context, but thoroughly do in this one.
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This Town Needs Guns are continuing onward with Henry Tremain (him from <a title="They're not around any more. Shame." href="https://www.myspace.com/pennines">Pennines</a>) in place of Smith, and head into the studio to record their second full length next week. You can download Adventure, Stamina & Anger via the Guns <a title="I'm spent." href="https://thistownneedsguns.bandcamp.com/album/adventure-stamina-anger">bandcamp</a>, or head over to <a title="Hello, merch!" href="https://hellomerch.com/sh/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.browse&category_id=43&Itemid=2">hellomerch</a> to preorder a physical copy. Keep track of goings on in the This Town Needs Guns camp via their <a title="A real website, too." href="https://www.thistownneedsguns.co.uk/">website</a>.
Photograph courtesy of Oswaldo Guadarrama

New: This Town Needs Guns – Adventure, Stamina & Anger

The new project from Tom House, frontman of much-missed Brighton post-punk outfit Charlottefield, Sweet Williams take the chiming dissonance of their helmsman’s alma mater and drag it through a mile of molasses, before welding the whole sludgy mess together with a noisy, sputtering blowtorch. Vaguely threatening bluesy drone, and moments of surprising beauty, for today’s discerning young thing.
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Full length album Bliss is available for download over at Sweet Williams’ <a title="It's late and I'm alone and I can't think of much I'd rather be listening to." href="https://sweetwilliams.bandcamp.com/album/bliss">bandcamp</a> for a mere £5, or you can splash out on the vinyl from <a title="Don't think it's working yet, mind." href="https://www.endlessloverecords.com/menu.html">Endless Love</a>.

Introducing: Sweet Williams

Last time we covered Dad Rocks!, or Danish/Icelandic singer, guitarist, trumpeteer, father, and general all round good guy Snævar Njáll Albertsson, it was <a title="There's a really nice video there, too." href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/9829-video-dad-rocks-mount-modern/">in restless anticipation of the imminent release of his debut full length</a> Mount Modern. We have to wait until November 8th for that particular pleasure, but until then, it’s worth heading over to Dad Rocks!’ <a title="Macht schnell!" href="https://dadrocks.bandcamp.com/album/big-scary-covers">bandcamp</a>, and getting your hands on his Big Scary Covers EP, which features four lovingly-crafted covers of some of the best acts on British indie mainstay Big Scary Monsters, namely Kevin Devine, Tall Ships, the much-missed Colour, and Shoes and Socks Off. Snævar will be taking down these covers sooner rather than later, so get ’em while you can!
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The Dad Rocks! Tumblr can be found <a title="I'm following him. Yeah, tumblr's cool. " href="https://dadrocks.tumblr.com/">here</a>. Snævar also plays in the fantastically grin-inducing Mimas, who can be found <a title="Oh wow, another Tumblr. Getting right on that. " href="https://mimasband.tumblr.com/">here</a>. Mount Modern is up for preorder over at <a title="And other stuff, too." href="https://bsmrocks.com/shop/">the BSM website</a>. If you’re from the US, you can catch the release on <a title="I think we have readers in the US. Josh has certainly been repping bloody Boise enough. " href="https://papergardenrecords.com/bands/records/dad-rocks/">Paper Garden Records</a>. The man’s extensive, pan-continental tour schedule is listed below.
10.10.2011 – DE – Berlin – Schokoladen – (w/ Mimas) 
11.10.2011 – DE – Potsdam – Kuze – (w/ Mimas) 
13.10.2011 – IS – Iceland Airwaves 
14.10.2011 – IS – Iceland Airwaves 
15.10.2011 – IS – Iceland Airwaves 
16.10.2011 – IS – Iceland Airwaves
18.10.2011 – USA – NY – CMJ – Living Room (Paper Garden Showcase) 
19.10.2011 – USA – NY – CMJ – Angels & Kings 
20.10.2011 – USA – NY – CMJ – Meadow in Bushwick 
21.10.2011 – USA – Boston – PA’s Lounge 
23.10.2011 – USA – Philadelphia – TBA 
24.10.2011 – USA – Washington DC – TBA
01.11.2011 – The View, Folkestone, UK 
02.11.2011 – Tamesis Dock, London, UK 
03.11.2011 – The Caledonia, Liverpool, UK 
04.11.2011 – House-show, Newcastle 
05.11.2011 – Henry’s Cellar Bar, Edinburgh, UK 
06.11.2011 – 13th Note, Glasgow, UK 
07.11.2011 – Royal Parks Cellar, Leeds, UK 
08.11.2011 – The Castle, Manchester, UK 
09.11.2011 – The Frog and Fiddle, Cheltenham, UK 
10.11.2011 – Olive, Norwich, UK
18.11.2011 – DK – Århus – Musikcaféen (Release-gig!) 
19.11.2011 – DK – Ålborg – Studenterhus Ålborg 
24.11.2011 – DK – Copenhagen – Huset i Magstræde

MPFree: Dad Rocks! – Big Scary Covers

If there were ever a genre that probably didn’t merit revival, that Midwestern brand of emo that appeared in the late 90’s, as characterised by the likes of Mineral, Sunny Day Real Estate and the rest, would probably be a distinct frontrunner. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a sensitive young man with a side parting, but even as an emo enthusiast, it’s very easy to see why that particular area of music is derided so vehemently and often.
All that said, it seems that with When You Are Done Living On Borrowed Time, lifted from the forthcoming EP On Time Spent Waiting, or Placing the Weight of the World on the Shoulders of Those You Love the Most, Fenton, MI’s Empire! Empire (I Was A Lonely Estate), besides unashamedly displaying their pigeonhole’s fondness for unbridled verbosity, are crafting something quite wonderful out of those often overtly sappy emo sounds. At under three minutes, the track gives itself no room to drag on like some of the cuts from full length What It Takes To Move Forward were wont to do, and with the song’s mid-section actually coming off propulsive, Empire! Empire! put any preconceived worries firmly to rest. Laying mournful trumpet over their characteristic slide/arpeggio guitar interaction, and introducing some baritone vocal stylings into the mix has proved a fortuitous decision on the band’s part, to the point where hearing what they come out with next is a genuinely exciting prospect.
When You Are Done Living On Borrowed Time is available to stream below, via Empire! Empire!’s <a title="I have to go and get petrol with my sister, so I don't have time to think of anything fun to write here right now. Sorry. Direct complaints to rob@crackintheroad.com" href="https://empireempire.bandcamp.com/album/on-time-spent-waiting-or-placing-the-weight-of-the-world-on-the-shoulders-of-those-you-love-the-most">bandcamp</a>. On Time Spent Waiting, or Placing the Weight of the World on the Shoulders of Those You Love the Most is out as a digital release this month on <a title="They have other good things as well, so, y'know, have a buy." href="https://www.topshelfrecords.bigcartel.com/product/empire-empire-i-was-a-lonely-estate-on-time-spent-waiting-digital-ep">Topshelf Records</a>.
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New: Empire! Empire! (I Was A Lonely Estate) – When You Are Done Living On Borrowed Time

Call me impressionable, but I’m a real sucker for the whole <a title="Because writers just LOVE a scene to cling desperately to..." href="https://www.caughtinthecrossfire.com/music/la-dispute-interview/">Wave</a> thing that’s been going on the last few years. That it’s a fairly tongue-in-cheek term coined by La Dispute doesn’t really sap my faith in it at all – if anything, I think it offsets the earnestness of the bands under its umbrella (Defeater, Make Do And Mend, Pianos Become The Teeth and Touché Amoré included), reminding us that amongst all the explosive guitars, heart-on-sleeve lyricism and schizoid, razor-throated yelling, these are bands who really don’t mind too much about poking fun at themselves, creating something that feels more like a bunch of buddies enjoying themselves than an exclusive clique. And with that, The Wave (whether or not it had actually been named) has made listening to contemporary post-hardcore OK again, after years of largely boring, insubstantial efforts from genre newcomers, replacing teary-eyed sentimentality with intelligence and grit. This year has already seen stellar full-length releases from Defeater and Touché, and with another coming (hopefully) from Pianos in November, it’s up to La Dispute to fill the void between now and then.
Wildlife is presented as a collection of unpublished short stories, boundaried by four interjections from their author. The conceptual approach has been explored by Defeater as well, highlighting the tendency toward musical adventure that places the Wave bands so highly in my estimations. That said, Wildlife has learned (whether consciously or not) from the mistakes of all the overblown prog records that have come before it, and the album never engages with its format to the expense of its songs. Safer in the Forest – Love Song for Poor Michigan is a particular highlight, which comes across all Paint It Black (really) at first, but thanks to the progression of its intertwined arpeggios and a delightfully fidgety almost-Amen from drummer Brad Vander Lugt, it retains a masterful sense of pent-up nerve that only finds release when absolutely necessary. Similarly, album centrepiece King Park, Wildlife‘s longest cut at five seconds shy of seven minutes, does much better than its counterpart on Somewhere At The Bottom Of The River Between Vega And Altair, The Last Lost Continent , at building tension – there’s not a moment of overindulgence on the band’s part, or boredom on ours, at any point during the song’s progress. Jordan Dreyer proves that he’s as apt a storyteller as the record’s nameless author, recounting the shootings around which the song is centred with characteristic verve. As the band’s stuttering noise builds at the song’s close, Dreyer breathlessly repeating ‘can I still get into heaven if I kill myself?’, it’s utterly convincing, the desperate moral questioning of a scared young man who knows he’s on the brink of death, one way or another.
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Occasionally, Dreyer’s voice does stray just a little too close to Aaron Weiss’, on the quieter moments of a Poem in particular. The frontman’s vocals have long been the aspect of La Dispute that the majority of the band’s detractors cite as their primary issue, and certainly Dreyer forces his way into your ears with unprecedented changes in style, from wild-eyed, stream of consciousness slam poetry to brokendown sobbing to tonsil-rending screams. It’s understandable that this isn’t to everyone’s taste, but on a personal level, I’ve always enjoyed Dreyer’s take-no-prisoners style, and if anything, it works to much better effect on Wildlife than La Dispute’s debut, by virtue of the new release’s lyrics. On Somewhere… the songs were often focused around those ubiquitous relationship-based themes, with countless uses of ‘darling’, and tearfully resigned lines like ‘if I can’t love you as a lover, I will love you as a friend’. As such, the record’s songs were occasionally rendered a little too emotionally fraught by Dreyer’s delivery. However Wildlife‘s ambitious intentions are carried as much by the words that populate its tangled structure as the twisting sonic turbulence that’s built it. I See Everything details the terrifying decline of a seven year old with cancer, through the device of journal entries written by the writer’s teacher in 1980, which she later reads to her class. In the hands of a vocalist without Dreyer’s conviction and dramatic bent, the song could sound maudlin or trite. But frankly, I’m not sure there’s anyone else who could make a list of dates sound so damn vital – I’d never gotten goosebumps from the words ‘April twelve’ until now. Likewise, we’re viewing the issue at hand through so many fractured lenses – a boy dies of cancer, his last months are written about, then read out loud years later, then recounted with a personal spin by a fictional writer, then vocalised for us by La Dispute. It’s a stunningly multifaceted, literary take on post-hardcore that’s exemplary of the band and Wildlife as a whole.
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Happily, Wildlife easily hits the watermark set earlier this year by Parting The Sea Between Brightness and Me and Empty Days and Sleepless Nights. Debating which release is the best would be counterproductive in this situation, but in terms of its individual merit, Wildlife succeeds by building on the sounds exhibited on Somewhere At The Bottom…, and pitting them against a potentially restrictive structure, that in fact finds the band the perfect engineers for its evolution. Where it loses some of the more immediate thrills of La Dispute’s debut full length, Wildlife shows itself to be the assured creation of a band who are opening up avenues of experimentation in what had become a relatively desolate area of musical landscape.
Wildlife is out now on <a title="I'm a jobless writer, so I can't buy it. You totally should. No, what on earth's a 'hypocrite'?" href="https://nosleeprecs.com/release.php?id=84">No Sleep Records</a>. The Wave Tumblr can be found <a title="Props to them, for serious bands, they sure do know how to raise a smile" href="https://fuckyeahthewave.tumblr.com/">here</a>. King Park can be streamed below.
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Review: La Dispute – Wildlife

Knowing south coast based DJ Replica is like having your very own breakbeat Sherpa. It’s been four years since my feet first started moving to processed beats out of enjoyment rather than necessity, after someone stuck on the Andy C side of a Drum&Bass Arena mix at a house party, but I’m still a distinct, if enthusiastic, novice in the world of dance music. So when Replica started sending me his own mixes as and when they began appearing, by way of introducing me to what I might be missing, I suggested that we share the love with the world, and Crack in the Replica (see what we did there?!) was born.
Why, then did this mix come into existence? “I’d love to tell you that my motivation was part of a higher calling to educate and expose you and the world to a largely misunderstood sub-culture,” says Replica, pint halfway to his lips, “but in truth, I just love to do it, I like to think people enjoy listening, and I had some time on my hands. Although,” he grins “if you want to believe the former, please do.”
The term ‘Autonomic Movement’, from which Replica’s first CitR-exclusive mix takes its name, first came to my attention after dBridge and Instra:mental collaborated on Fabriclive 50. Obviously, pigeonholes like this are most artists’ worst nightmare, but Replica is keen to set the record straight. “This type of sound has been creeping into the breakbeat scene for a couple of years now,” he says, “it’s not necessarily new. It’s been dripping through the cracks for some time.” Always critical of a holier-than-thou, first on the scene attitude, I press him for more, and he relents a little. “I do believe that Fabriclive album was a real yardstick in terms of how far the sound, if you like, has come.” Getting into the swing of things, he volunteers a little more reverence, noting “Fabriclive 50 helped confirm and announce the existence of the style. If we are seeing the birth of a new ‘genre’, then that was certainly the water breaking. That’s why a lot of people are naming the genre after that mix. But I can’t see the label sticking.” he adds cautiously, wanting to preserve some sense of artistry. “It shows how fresh it is, that it’s even lacking a name. We’re all on a journey of discovery, no one knows what’s coming next.”  Here, Replica returns to a healthy sense of humility, a glimpse into his love for the artists that he mixes, and his genuine excitement at the sound that they exhibit. “This is a bunch of collective talents who are no longer willing to be hemmed in by genre defining elements,” he theorises, “The more creative and forward-thinking members of whom are finding new and interesting ways of expressing themselves. The results,” he cocks an eyebrow sarcastically, and hams up his voice for the occasion, just managing to control a smile, “are what you hear on this collection.”
With that excitement in mind, I ask him what he thinks the sound and attitude that can loosely be grouped under the Autonomic umbrella means for breakbeat as a larger entity. “Honestly,” he replies, “I wouldn’t say it’s exciting at all for drum and bass. I think it will be greeted with the same passive acceptance that the dance community tacitly gives everything. And thank God.” I’m surprised at first, this coming from the man whose sense of forward-thinking, and joy at the prospect of evolution, is quite obvious. He goes on to clarify. “That doesn’t dishearten me at all. I think that sometimes, the best way to destroy something’s potential is to realise it.” I ask if he can explain further, so he presents an example. “Take dubstep as a case study. It exploded onto the music scene like a food fight in a cafeteria. When you consider its short journey from relative obscurity to obnoxiously brash commercialism, a considerable portion of its artistic credibility lived a fairly short life – the higher it flies, the harder it falls.” He pauses to drain the last of his beer, and studies the bottom of his empty glass. “I don’t wish the same fate on this music.”
For all the dramatics, and after I’ve bought him a fresh pint, Replica’s still upbeat. “I think that the sounds you’ll hear in the mix stand as a shining testament to the mostly overlooked and underrated ability of ‘dance’ producers.” He says. “It’s a common misconception that it’s all paint by numbers and admittedly, a lot of material you’d hear on Johnny Everyman’s iPod will be a more than a little guilty of that, which in any case is arguably a by-product of success rather than anything.” I watch his earlier enthusiasm begin to return, considered and sure, and it’s thoroughly infectious. “I’ve just always thought of the breakbeat family as containing the most talented producers – the calibre is so high.” Replica smiles warmly. “This music really allows them to showcase their talent, flex their creative muscles and give us some real groundbreaking and innovative stuff to digest.”
Does Replica think that the Movement has any sort of future? On this subject, the man waxes typically balanced. “It could be something ephemeral, or it could be a long and quiet existence” he notes, “I can certainly see it paving the way for new innovations, new influences and sounds – the thing that influences the people who influence the music scene as it is today. Certain aspects are right on point at the moment – the 80’s vibe in particular, we’re going to see a lot more of that I think.” At first I’m dubious. It feels like there’s been a strong tendency toward 80’s nostalgia in music for at least the last five or six years. But we’re not talking Calvin Harris‘ rose-tinted necrophilia here. It’s evident from Replica’s choice of opening track, Invisible Cities by Dutch producer Croms, that it’s an altogether more subtle take on the synths and decadent darkness of that era that he’s talking about.
Whether the term ‘Autonomic’ is a genuine and empowering emblem, a lazy pigeonhole, or just a bit of a laugh between producers, Replica’s love of the sounds that have come to be grouped with it is happily obvious. “Whether or not the whole thing has, or indeed should, have legs, doesn’t matter that much to me,” he says, “it will always stand as a remarkable demonstration of what could have been.”
<object width="100%" height="81" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F24049790" /><embed width="100%" height="81" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F24049790" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/replica101/autonomic-mix">Autonomic mix</a> by <a href="https://soundcloud.com/replica101">Replica101</a>
Tracklist:
00:00 : Croms – Invisible Cities 
06:02 : Instra:mental – End Credits 
09:25 : Stray – Pushed 
10:55 : D-Bridge – Love Hotel 
12:26 : Alix Perez – 1984 
15:04 : Mount Kimbie – Ode to Bear 
17:55 : Royalston – The Test 
20:44 : Alix Perez – Suffer In Silence feat. Zero T 
23:33 : Nuage – Missing You 
25:49 : Subreachers – Elysian Fields 
28:27 : Kharm – White Picket Fences 
30:20 : Riya – Seems Like 
33:43 : Lung – Relapse 
35:37 : Circa – Ida 
38:00 : Burial – Fostercare 
40:50 : Eleven8 – Colour Distance 
44:05 : Jamie Woon – Wayfaring Stranger (Burial Mix) 
48:06 : Scuba – You Got Me
Photo © Joe Gilder

Crack in the Replica 1 – Autonomic Movements

Much like their name, Into It. Over It. (or rather, Chicago native Evan Weiss and friends) are a band of two halves. Amongst the boyish excitement and rampant sentimentality of <a title="Crikey, I did let go a bit. Sorry about that." href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/10510-new-into-it-over-it-where-your-nights-often-end/">my last post concerning IIOI</a>, I mentioned Weiss’ fitting position on a bill between pop-punkers Grown Ups, and Shoes and Socks Off‘s skewed take on the singer/songwriter trope. In the case of Weiss’ last ‘album’ (that is, a release that wasn’t a split), 52 Weeks, this was evidenced by the literal division in the sound of its tracks. One minute he’d be right next to the mic, fingerpicking and shrouded in static, and the next rocking out with amps turned up loud and a full band’s worth of instruments behind him. On Proper, the first…er…proper IIOI album, that effective middle ground is still occupied, if a little more subtly.
Sonically, Proper is a pretty damn watertight release. Getting Ed Rose, longtime collaborator with The Get Up Kids, to man the desk for the album has proved an excellent choice. Every track on Proper sounds absolutely perfect, and considering that the homegrown acoustic textures which populated much of 52 Weeks have largely been replaced by Weiss’ occasionally techy, pop-punk leanings, it’s to Proper‘s benefit that everything has been polished up and pushed forward, where Weiss’ further forays into that style on the Twelve Towns songs sometimes lacked extra punch. Upbeat tracks like Discretion and Depressing People or An Evening With Ramsay Beyer exhibit the wealth of Rose’s experience, and indeed the instrumental prowess of Weiss and drummer/Castevet guitarist Nick Wakim, who lock in with each other at a particularly satisfying level of tightness.
A significant part of IIOI’s appeal on previous releases, bar the conceptual hijinks, is the sense of intimacy that Weiss is capable of creating. Whether through quiet instrumentation and bedroomesque recording, heavy use of first names and personal references, or engaging with his hometown’s neighbourhoods on the IIOI/KOJI split, Weiss has always concerned himself with the particularly personal. Similarly, the very process that begat 52 Weeks fostered a distinct sense of personality – each week’s events and feelings found themselves channeled intensely and specifically into a single song. On first glance, it can seem that much of this intimacy isn’t present on Proper, lost amid the shiny mix and loud guitars. Similarly, Weiss’ lyrics, whilst hardly buried in abstraction this time around, aren’t quite so self-referential as before. Originally, it seemed that this fresh distancing was to Proper‘s detriment, but it’s actually quite the opposite.
Firstly, it would be preposterous of me to suggest that there are no reflective moments on Proper. Where Your Nights Often End, the very track my last post concerned, has that intimacy in spades (and, as an aside, has simply failed to get old in any way at all in the month between first hearing it and Proper‘s release), and the same goes for a considerable number of the record’s cuts, the touching minute and a half snapshot of No Good Before Noon and Connecticut Steps‘ aching vulnerability among them. The midtempo Midnight: Carroll Street actively benefits from Rose’s more buoyant recording techniques, ending as it does in a fuzzy crescendo with Weiss yelling ‘you will find me’ beneath layers of warm overdrive, which is given a cinematic quality that wouldn’t have been as distinct before. The Frames That Used To Greet Me, which quietly lets itself out at the record’s close, provides Proper‘s first and final exhibition of that gentle acoustic sound that I was first introduced to Weiss with. At a hair over two minutes long, and after a record that’s louder (in a confined space, at least) than IIOI have ever done before, the song has far more effect than if it were placed on a record full of other songs like it.
This is, after all, IIOI’s debut ‘proper’. And rather than simply being a generic label and obvious signpost for the status of the record, the title carries just as much conceptual baggage as those of the IIOI records that came before it. It’s a normal-length set of songs from Weiss, released on a single record, recorded by a single producer with a long history of working with similar artists. Where 52 Weeks’ recording process and raison d’etre meant that it often came off self-referential and close, Proper does’t have any obligation, conceptual or otherwise, to be that way. Instead, it stands out as an exceptional set of adult pop-punk songs, which show their creator still successfully playing around with the boundaries of a genre that can often be facile and uninventive, while retaining its sense of emotional immediacy.
Proper is out now on <a title="YOU BUY IT" href="https://nosleeprecs.com/release.php?id=83">No Sleep Records</a>.

Review: Into It. Over It. – Proper

Shield Your Eyes are a truly exciting prospect for modern guitar music. Anyone who’s ever seen them ply their fractured (in pretty much every sense of the word) antics live will attest to that. Mainman Stef smashes out seemingly arbitrary lead lines on a busted-up mutant of a guitar, to fearsomely competent beats and skewed basslines. If a string breaks, well fuck it. They’ll blast on regardless. Somehow, amongst all the frantic noise, there’s buckets of lopsided melody – one listen to new track Larkspur, from forthcoming release Volume 4, and you’ll understand what I mean. Head over to the <a title="I'd usually put a witty remark here, but in all seriousness, awesome British record label with some awesome bands. Support 'em." href="www.functionrecords.com">Function Records</a> <a title="It looks like one link, but it's two?! WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING?! Aah. Equilibrium restored." href="https://functionrecords.bandcamp.com/track/larkspur">bandcamp</a> for a free download. Shield Your Eyes have two more dates on our shores before embarking on a European tour, so catch ’em while you can!
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08 Oct Triple Jump Alldayer Fighting Cocks 
18 Oct Volume 4 Launch night Ryans Bar London
European Tour
03 Nov K-Gruppe Room Karlsruhe Germany 
04 Nov Bej Roy Berlin Germany 
09 Nov Klub Bogota Ostrava Czech Republic 
10 Nov K2 Club Czech Republic 
11 Nov Boro Club Brno Czech Republic 
12 Nov Slavicin Czech Republic 
14 Nov Club Gromka Slovenia 
19 Nov Reil 78 Halle Germany 
23 Nov Paris France 
24 Nov Le Mans France 
25 Nov Cactus Asso Reims France 
26 Nov Luxembourg

New & MPFree: Shield Your Eyes – Larkspur

Thrice hold a particularly special place in my heart. Around the time The Artist in the Ambulance was released, I experienced something of an adolescent musical sea change, and that record was instrumental in steering me down the route I would take for the next few years. I ended my strict three year diet of ’90s grunge and, for better or worse, I devoured the loud guitars, raw-throated screaming, and general anguish (wait a minute…) of the burgeoning early noughties emo/post-hardcore scene. There were good bands, there were terrible bands, and there were Thrice. Whilst the majority of my favourite musical ensembles from that period have fallen by the wayside by dint of frankly poor recent output (Taking Back Sunday, Saves The Day, even the once-mighty Thursday…yeah, a lot of their names ended in ‘day’), Thrice have not only remained consistent in terms of quality, but they’ve struck determinedly out into the realms of invention and self-discovery. Vheissu completely ditched the metalcore influence present on its predecessors (which was immensely popular at the time, not to mention the fact that it became that way almost exactly around the time of release of Artist) for a moodier sound that practically eschewed hooks in favour of music boxes, Fender Rhodes and chain-gang chanting. Whilst The Alchemy Indexes were definitely patchy, even pretentious, it’s impossible to fault Thrice‘s sense of adventure, especially when they returned with an album as reigned in, focused and near-perfect as 2009’s Beggars.
So here we are, seven albums in, with the California quartet’s latest offering, Major/Minor. Early reports of the record’s sound piqued my interest for reasons that will by now be clear to you, with frontman Dustin Kensrue quoting in <a title="It's definitely well alternative" href="https://www.altpress.com/features/entry/in_the_studio_thrice/">AP</a> that the album ‘definitely has some elements of underground ‘90s grunge’. Whilst it’d be an outright lie to suggest that Thrice have quite adopted the filth and sleaze of, say, Mudhoney, Major/Minor certainly fits into the (correct or incorrect) grunge template of ‘band with loud guitars and heaps of earnestness’. Which could have described Thrice at any point, but yeah, the chords that open Blinded are a little like an out of context Dinosaur Jr., Cataracts bears a clear Soundgarden influence, and the thick leads on Treading Paper owe a debt to that well-documented Seattle sound.
Musically, Major/Minor is certainly consistent. There’s few of the dynamic shifts that populated Beggars, and instead the new record is characterised by, for the most part, relatively straightforward rock music. It’s all carried out with the band’s usual sonic excellence – they’ve spent a long time dialling in the perfect instrumental tones, to the point where I’m not sure there’s a better guitar sound in contemporary rock music than Teppei Teranishi‘s thick, tensile crunch, and the whole thing exudes the perfect balance of polish and grit. But here’s the kicker – Major/Minor, for all its energy, feels rather staid and unremarkable, much like the latter stages of the musical movement it’s taken influence from. There are a few distinct standouts – Call It In The Air in particular serves as a reminder of how Thrice can be brilliant, switching up deftly between beautiful and brutal, and closer Disarmed provides a welcome change of pace and a touching farewell. But really, Major/Minor seems to have revealed most of its secrets by the closing section of second track Promises – big, crashing chords, overlayed by bright, ringing arpeggios from Teranishi.
This would all practically be forgiveable, if it weren’t for the calibre of Major/Minor‘s lyrics. At times, they’re simply, vague, tautological and uninspiring – ‘if anything means anything, there must be something meant for us to be’ from the chorus of Treading Paper being an obvious example. But, perhaps inevitably, Dustin Kensrue seems to have finally strayed the wrong side of the didactic line. I have been listening to Thrice for eight years, and I’ve always been aware of, and perfectly comfortable with, Kensrue‘s moral leanings. Pitched right, as on The Weight from Beggars, his words depict a fierce and unwavering loyalty that’s often sadly (and at times, unforgivably) lacking in modern relationships. But on Promises, that song’s logical continuation, he reiterates the points he’s already made with so much fervour it becomes alienating. I’ll say it. I’m uncomfortable with evangelism, if not every facet of Christianity, and so by the time Kensrue roars ‘listen to me, though I speak of sober things’ on Listen Through Me, I can’t reconcile my own attitudes with Major/Minor any more. Perhaps it’s drastic, maybe this is just music, but that’s how I listen to records, especially records by Thrice.
Whether I’ve finally grown out of Thrice or whether Major/Minor really is a weaker release than its predecessors is difficult for me to say. The band’s seventh album is certainly a solid modern rock record. But using Thrice‘s past successes and daring as a watermark, it’s difficult to elevate Major/Minor above anything much better than unremarkable. In the presence of so much lyrical guilt-tripping, the whole experience can be plain uncomfortable.

Review: Thrice – Major/Minor

Two nights ago I walked into the Boileroom in Guildford, on my own, broke, and kind of grumpy. I couldn’t see anyone I knew, so I resignedly leaned against the back wall, as far away from anyone as the small venue would allow. Around then I noticed that there was actually a band standing around on stage, and that some kind of spoken word intro was playing over the PA. About half an hour later I found myself stood dazed, much closer to the stage, wondering what had just happened. I asked someone what the band were called. ‘Palm Reader‘, came the response.
As you’ll soon discover from War Between The Head And The Heart, Palm Reader are kind of at odds with the kind of thing we normally cover at CitR, but really, I have a massive soft spot for the rock’n’roll infused hardcore that the Woking-based five piece ply their trade in, if not the posturing that’s contributed to the downfall of that scene over the last decade or so. To make use of that tired old warhorse of rock writing, think Everytime I Die in a bar fight with Drowningman, or something. And see them live. For fuck’s sake, see them live. You can find the band both on <a href="https://wearepalmreader.tumblr.com/" title="What the fuck happened to myspace?">Tumblr</a> and <a href="https://www.facebook.com/palmreaderuk" title="No, seriously, what the fuck?! When I was a lad...">Facebook</a>.
<object width="100%" height="81" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F14064565" /><embed width="100%" height="81" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F14064565" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/palm-reader-uk/war-between-the-head-and-the">War Between The Head And The Heart</a> by <a href="https://soundcloud.com/palm-reader-uk">Palm Reader UK</a>

Introducing: Palm Reader

With their most recent full length The Wages of Fear, Tellison have produced my record of the year. Have I been writing long enough to do those things yet? Well, apparently I have now. And whilst it might seem a bit short sighted to have decided this already, someone is going to have to pull a bloody miracle out their arse to even think of making me reconsider. I just like The Wages of Fear that much. Edith, like the majority of the record’s twelve tracks, is a clever, expertly handled guitar pop song that takes in The Weakerthans and spits them propulsively out in a hail of unfinished novels and the disenchantment of young adulthood. Recontextualising those crises adherent to your early twenties with the life and times of an early 20th century author? Doing it all to a song that could have even the most flint-hearted bastard punching the air, at least in secret? A lucha libre themed video?! Yes fuckin’ please.
The Wages of Fear is out now on <a title="Ooh, he's been a bit cheeky there..." href="https://www.naimlabel.com/recording-the-wages-of-fear.aspx">Naim Edge</a> records, and Edith is due out October 10th. Tellison’s website can be found <a title="The Tellison website. Sorry, I'm tired." href="https://www.tellison.co.uk/">here</a>, and here’s their October tour dates for good measure, because you should probably go.
1st CAMBRIDGE @ Wish You Were Here Festival w/ Johnny Foreigner, John Vanderslcie 
8th CHELTENHAM @ Walk The Line Festival 
14th CREWE @ The Box 
15th SHEFFIELD @ The Harley 
16th NEWCASTLE @ The Cluny 
17th YORK @ Stereo 
18th DERBY @ The Vic Inn 
19th LEICESTER @ Firebug 
20th NORTHAMPTON @ Roadmender 
25th CARDIFF @ Undertone 
26th BATH @ Moles 
27th EXETER @ The Cavern 
28th SOUTHAMPTON @ The Joiners 
29th TUNBRIDGE WELLS @ The Forum
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Video: Tellison – Edith

I’m discovering that one of the main joys of this whole music blog malarkey is when awesome artists start finding their way to you, rather than vice-versa. I can imagine that it must get thoroughly tiresome when you start to get five hundred emails a day from delusional tryhards and their management, claiming to be the next whoever, but I’m not nearly at that stage yet, and luckily, London-based producer Inch-time has the tunes to back up the claims made in his press release. Born Stefan Panczak in Adelaide, Inch-time‘s latest album The Floating World deals in the kind of vaguely downbeat, organic electronica that makes the perfect companion for late-night contemplation, particularly on the longing, reverberant Of Times Past. Another personal favourite, Late Spring, lives up to its title, blooming into gorgeous melody just before its close, while Suspension dips dubby toes into sparkling waters, not far from the likes of The Cinematic Orchestra. Panczak draws from a myriad of sometimes unexpected influences over the album’s course, rendering The Floating World a diverse work that knows where it came from, but goes somewhere completely different.
The Floating World is out now on <a title="'Mystery Plays' were among the earliest formally developed plays in Medieval Europe. Who knew?" href="https://mysteryplaysrecords.com/releases/inch-time-the-floating-world-new-release">Mystery Plays Records</a>, and the video for album track Electric Blue is below, for your viewing pleasure. Featured image by Benji Davies and Jim Field at <a href="https://www.fraterfilms.com/fraterblog/?cat=23" title="And 'frater' is Latin for 'brother', in both the familial AND ecclesiastical senses. Wow. ">Frater</a>.
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Introducing: Inch-time

I’ve already mentioned that it’s been a good week for records. So far, I’ve covered Girls‘ overhyped but really rather good Father, Son, Holy Ghost, and Blitzen Trapper‘s American Goldwing, which left me pining for the West Coast with the intensity of a recovering addict. And now we have Covering Ground, the third full length LP from Chuck Ragan. You know him. He’s also often found sharing vocal and guitar duties with Chris Wollard in Gainesville gritmongers Hot Water Music. Yeah, that Chuck Ragan. 

And if you know Chuck Ragan, then you’ll know what to expect from Covering Ground. The record is fully populated with anthemic, boldly strummed acoustics, and of course Ragan‘s gravelly, much-beloved vocal tones. Opener Nothing Left to Prove even begins with the exact same chord as The Boat, which kicked off 2007’s Feast Or Famine. It’s evident from Nothing Left to Prove that Ragan has perhaps been listening to a bit more Springsteen than before, and it’s tempting to reimagine him in that kind of mould, an updated, niche version of the archetype, the dependable, solid, gruff singer/songwriter. Certainly, Covering Ground‘s songs are grizzled, bighearted and roadworn in the same way that The Boss can be at his best. Jon Gaunt‘s fiddle lends a country flavour to the proceedings in places, and songs like Nomad By Fate or Meet You In The Middle (featuring The Gaslight Anthem‘s Brian Fallon) can feel like drinking music for the kids of Hot Water Music‘s particular wave of punk rock, who’ve grown up a bit and aren’t really kids any more.
On the surface, it can seem easy to get the measure of Covering Ground. But Seems We’re Ok, around the halfway point, set me to thinkin’. With its searing harmonica, the track initially comes across all Springsteen again, slow-mo this time, and Ragan‘s rawhide rasp, usually tougher than the first ten Tom Waits impersonators you’d come across, starts to break apart at the edges. It lends a striking vulnerability to the song, and provides a reflective checkpoint. Whilst one might not immediately expect it from Ragan, with regards to his ursine stature, sandpaper larynx and the calibre of his day job, Seems We’re Ok highlights just how much of Covering Ground is coloured by themes of fallibility. Lyrics we’ve already heard, like ‘sometimes you reach for the bottle before the sky’, or ‘I shake when I walk, I spin when I’m down’ stop sounding romantic, and take on a distinctly moving, human bearing. Right As Rain sees Ragan‘s voice cracking again, and whilst elsewhere the song’s flamenco tones might comes across as contrived or schmaltzy, here they emphasise a very real tenderness. With the presupposed veneer of toughness removed, Covering Ground hits where it hurts much more often than had it simply been throwing musical haymakers left, right and centre, pumping its fists in the air and declaring constant empowerment, whether in positive or negative terms. It’s in this intimacy that the album’s, and Ragan‘s, principal strengths lie.
Much like the other releases that I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing this week, Covering Ground is a record entirely aware of its influences and position, and as such, its listeners will be too. This isn’t covering ground in the sense of musical invention, either in the context of music as a wider entity, or even really Ragan himself, but with regard to honesty, passion, and execution, Covering Ground spans miles in minutes, clearing that distance between Ragan and his listeners with ease. As the man sings in the closing Lost and Found, ‘there ain’t no wasted time covering our own ground’, and in the case of this record, he’s proved himself right.

Review: Chuck Ragan – Covering Ground

In following up last year’s Tezcatlipoca EP, Kingstonian quartet Tubelord are slated to release sophomore full length Romance via <a title="It's their website, obviously." href="https://hellopinkmist.tumblr.com/">Pink Mist</a> on 10/10/11, and the Kingstonian quartet have teamed up with one <a title="And this is his website. I'm getting really bored of spelling these out for you." href="https://www.seanroyparker.com/">Sean Roy Parker </a>(also instrumental in running the fantastic New Cross-based Clinic collective) to produce a video for the album track My First Castle. The song introduces some surprising influences to the mix (Talking Heads, anyone?) that may leave fans of debut full length Our First American Friends‘ heavily guitar-driven sound scratching their heads, but that’s Tubelord I guess, and frankly, the results speak for themselves. Tubelord‘s website can be found <a title="I'm not even going to dignify that with a response. " href="https://asktubelord.com/">here</a>.
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<a href="https://vimeo.com/29038278">Tubelord ≈ My First Castle</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/ahohwhy">Sean Roy Parker</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.

Video: Tubelord – My First Castle

It’s a good week for records. Yesterday I got to review the pop patchwork tour de force that is Girls‘ <a title="I'm not a preacherman" href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/11078-review-girls-father-son-holy-ghost/">Father, Son, Holy Ghost</a> (CitR didn’t like it quite as much as <a title="They do seem to think it's the best thing since sliced bread, though" href="https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/15811-father-son-holy-ghost/">Pitchfork</a>, mind), and today I’m taking a stab at this, the sixth LP from Portland, OR’s Blitzen Trapper. I have a confessed soft spot for Portland. Aside from being the city that has at one point or another been called home by personal faves Elliott Smith, The Shins, and Richmond Fontaine (whose latest album <a title="I wouldn't recommend it if you're feeling sad..." href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/music/10908-review-richmond-fontaine-the-high-country/">I reviewed only last week</a>), I recently got back from visiting the Oregon capital for the first time, on a roadtrip from Seattle to San Francisco. With regards to the quality of its <a title="Mirror Pond 'til I die" href="https://www.deschutesbrewery.com/locations/portland">beer</a>, the friendliness of its populace, and its <a title="Keep it that way, yo." href="https://www.keepportlandweird.com/">laid-back, leftfield ambience</a>, Portland has found itself at the top of my ‘favourite cities’ list. I didn’t know I had one until just now, but there you are.
With ‘Keep Portland Weird’ being the city’s unofficial slogan, Blitzen Trapper‘s back catalogue has played out as a distinct product of their hometown. Whilst being rooted in West Coast Americana, the band’s previous records have always showcased a melange of disparate influences, perhaps coming to a head on the six minute title track of last year’s Destroyer of the Void. So it’s a small, if not complete surprise to discover that American Goldwing, in keeping with the stock imagery of its title (it’s named after an ’80s motorcycle), is a twangy, fuzzy, down-home slice of relatively straightforward American pop-rock, indebted to the likes of Big Star, Cheap Trick and early Wilco. Frontman Eric Earley details the thinking behind the album’s sound on <a title="Ooh look, it's the Sub Pop website! With the bloke from Blitzen Trapper and everything!" href="https://www.subpop.com/releases/blitzen_trapper/full_lengths/american_goldwing">the Sub Pop website</a>, and of course what’s on offer here will not be unfamiliar to any Blitzen Trapper fan, but that’s just the thing. In its familiarity, American Goldwing certainly runs the risk of disappointing those Trapper devotees who expect some degree of adventurousness from the band.
Without the sonic melting pot that birthed their earlier works, Blitzen Trapper have been left the fairly difficult task of creating an Americana record that doesn’t fall into the many potholes so readily available to bands of that ilk, who can often sound staid or clichéd in a forward-thinking musical climate (which, for the purposes of this review, we’re in). Luckily, Might Find It Cheap swaggers assuredly out of the blocks with a sunny confidence that’s practically impossible to dislike, and from there, American Goldwing has me. Whilst retreading old ground, Blitzen Trapper are songwriters of a discerning calibre, and are still layering up instruments and switching between parts like old hands. It’s much more nuanced this time around, but it lends songs like Astronaut elegance one minute and pulsing barroom attitude the next. As a result of this skilful craftsmanship, the tracks of American Goldwing rarely fail to elicit the appropriate emotional response, whether its the roadworn, whiskey-warm nostalgia of Fletcher, Love The Way You Walk Away‘s gentle melancholy, or the stomping abandon that accompanies Your Crying Eyes. Street Fighting Sun even reprises the riffy psychedelia present on Trapper‘s earlier releases, for anyone really missing that facet of the band’s sound, but ultimately, if you’re prepared to accept American Goldwing as a more subtly shaded record, you won’t pine for it at all.  

Much like fellow Portland natives The Decemberists’ most recent effort, American Goldwing finds its creators revisiting more immediately familiar parts of their young continent’s musical history. As such, the record doesn’t quite strike out into the same realms of diversity that perhaps Blitzen Trapper fans have come to expect, but that said, American Goldwing is as strong a slice of modern Americana as anyone could wish for. It’s the sort of album I sure wish I’d had with me on that roadtrip, and as an accompaniment to cold beers with good friends on the last sunny days of this year, it’s pretty damn welcome.

Review: Blitzen Trapper – American Goldwing

I wasn’t there with Girls when their 2009 debut, the imaginatively named Album, hit the shelves. I wasn’t there when follow-up EP Broken Dreams Club dropped last year either. My first introduction to the San Franciscans was a scant few months ago, when Vomit first started doing the rounds on the internet. I was making a concerted effort to start listening to new music again, but in my curmudgeonly, flint-hearted way, I didn’t think I’d like another band with a pretty frontman, a much-touted back story, and a lone, plural noun for a name. It’s not very mature, but I’m just sort of like that. In any case, Vomit proved to me how very, very wrong I can be. Upon actually hearing the song’s scorching leads and soulful organ stabs, I was irrevocably won over, and made like Christopher Owens suggests on the track, letting Girls come into my heart.
As such, Father, Son, Holy Ghost was actually one of the first releases of the year that I was eagerly anticipating, certainly from a reviewing standpoint. By the time I got my hands on the record, I still hadn’t heard anything by the band bar Vomit, and so opener Honey Bunny came as a bit of a non-sequitur for me. I’m not really sure what I was expecting with Vomit as my only reference point, a song that is equal parts minor-key sorrow, soaring gospel, and serious guitar freakout over its six and a half minutes, but I don’t think that galloping surf-pop clocking in at less than three was quite what I’d been envisaging. It becomes clear over the course of the record, though, that this is what Father, Son, Holy Ghost is all about – it’s essentially a scrapbooking of some of the best parts of rock and pop from the last half-century, pasted in with Girls’ own homemade glue. Or something.
It’s not long before those whitehot fretboard antics resurface, first for Alex‘s slackerly melancholia, where they burn through the song’s grungy jangle, and then much more robustly on Die, which held one of the most genuinely lovely musical surprises of the year for me. Die is practically Deep Purple. I had thought that skilfully (even tastefully) reimagining the early years of heavy metal, whilst not unheard of (Mastodon, for example), was practically impossible in a pop context. Die has proved me wrong, evolving from a filthy groove into ringing psychedelia, and doing so quite beautifully. Elsewhere, My Ma presents the kind of gorgeous, stately heartbreak befitting the Elliott Smith tones in Owens‘ voice, where Saying I Love You is an obvious Beatles homage, and Love Like a River nods to soul. The breadth of styles and moods present on Father, Son, Holy Ghost prevent Girls from ever being too far in thrall to their obvious influences. Magic, the most jaunty thing I’ve heard since Queen, is immediately followed by the mountainous peaks and shadowy troughs of Forgiveness, a harrowing eight minute epic that opens with the lines ‘nothing’s gonna get any better’. It’s an approach that neatly sidesteps both plagiarism and boredom, retaining the emotional clout of the songwriting, which ranges from sun-drenched to Seattle, encompassing a lot of middle ground at the same time.
Father, Son, Holy Ghost is something like a musical patchwork quilt, if I’m allowed to go all flowery and metaphorical for a minute. The record is clearly not a groundbreakingly original work, which is not to its detriment, and like as not wasn’t its intention either. Similarly, its eleven tracks don’t seamlessly meld together all the band’s influences by any means – Girls can sometimes sound like they listen exclusively to one band one minute, and another the next. However, like my imaginary quilt, Father, Son, Holy Ghost has been artfully, skilfully and honestly put together, and has turned out a product that, whilst made up of what’s come before, is indelibly the work of its (re)creators.

Review: Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost

Where <a title="A mong brother's" href="https://www.amongbrothers.co.uk/">Among Brothers</a>’ fantastic Homes EP gave itself room to meander in suitably epic fashion, new single Loved, released via digital download on September 26th, finds the Cardiff-based sextet expertly compressing their tricky Efterklang-influenced sounds into a more bite-sized package, clocking in at less than four minutes. Luckily, the widescreen nature of the band’s sound hasn’t suffered at all, as you’ll be able to tell from the video below. Directed by Danny Quanstrom (who’s also done <a title="The artwork for the single. Duh. " href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/data.tumblr.com/tumblr_lqbmm5Zetv1qamjhmo1_1280.jpg?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ6IHWSU3BX3X7X3Q&Expires=1315668502&Signature=h04fAcdxTPLxJLsycJ7akjbTH2Y%3D">the artwork for the single</a>, as well as Homes) and Steve Broadbank for <a href="https://www.thecliq.co.uk/">the Cliq</a>, it contains a duffel coat, a vintage bicycle, and large amounts of fireworks, all against the backdrop of some beautiful Hampshire countryside. You have been warned.
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<a href="https://vimeo.com/28613619">AMONG BROTHERS loved</a> from <a href="https://vimeo.com/user4878514">Danny Quanstrom</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.

Video: Among Brothers – Loved

I seem to have become something of an obsessive of the Oxford music scene recently. It all started unassumingly with those loveable pop tykes <a title="I dun a live review of 'em..." href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/10545-live-review-alphabet-backwards-upstairs-at-the-o2-oxford-200811/">Alphabet Backwards</a>, a band I really shouldn’t like but really kind of do, who in turn introduced me to the mighty <a title="I also did a live review of these guys. Told you I cared." href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/music/9750-live-review-spring-offensive-the-ashmolean-oxford-050811-2/">Spring Offensive</a>, easily one of my favourite musical discoveries of the year. And now I find myself sniffing around <a title="Grudle Bay Facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/#%21/group.php?gid=175689658588">Grudle Bay Riots</a>, or Abingdon-based duo Nathan Allsworth and Tom Hodges. The pair function as the linchpin of a fluid musical collective – occasionally they might be joined by Alphabet drummer Paul Davidson, <a title="They're also named after some riots...contentious?!" href="https://www.thewinchellriots.co.uk/">Winchell Riots</a> (oh look, another ace Oxford band…) sticksman James Pamphlion, drum machinist (and sibling) James Allsworth, or keyboardist Tom Dyson. In any case, new track Fool Around marries understated glitch to some gorgeous delay antics, by way of a soulful, chilled out vocal. I’m seriously looking forward to more output from these guys, and hopefully after hearing Fool Around, you will be too.
<object width="100%" height="81" classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="https://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="src" value="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F22245614" /><embed width="100%" height="81" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="https://player.soundcloud.com/player.swf?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F22245614" allowscriptaccess="always" /></object> <a href="https://soundcloud.com/grudlebayriots/fool-around-live-from-the">Fool Around- Live from the bedroom</a> by <a href="https://soundcloud.com/grudlebayriots">Grudle Bay</a>

Introducing: Grudle Bay Riots

I first came across Liverpool-based three piece <a href="https://www.sundrums.co.uk/">Sun Drums</a> back in summer 2009, at the Jailhouse in Hereford. They weren’t called Sun Drums then, they were called Bagheera, but on first listens of the Sun Drums EP, released on October 1st via <a href="https://www.everybodysstalking.com/">Everybody’s Stalking</a>, it appears that their general musical outlook has remained much the same. Which is definitely a good thing, because Bagheera were rad, and as it turns out, so are Sun Drums. Fans of the likes of Burial and Caribou will certainly find something to love among the EP’s five tracks, which do a fine job of melding William Bevan’s ghostly two-step with the more blissful, organic sounds that Dan Snaith is famous for, all served up with a distant, soulful falsetto and the occasional six-string. Expect a full review of Sun Drums closer to its release date, but in the meantime, you can stream and preorder the EP via the Everybody’s Stalking <a title="Everybody's Stalking Bandcamp" href="https://everybodysstalking.bandcamp.com/track/leaves-along-the-stream">bandcamp</a>, or listen to opening track Leaves Along The Stream here.
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Introducing: Sun Drums

If you thought that bass/drum two-pieces began and ended with DFA ’79, this latest take from Winchester based ‘intense death drone’ duo <a title="Run, WALK! Tumblr" href="https://runwalk.tumblr.com/">Run, WALK!</a> will leave you cowering in a corner, and enthusiastically revising your views. Watching this band grow and develop over the years has been an absolute pleasure, and as the grainy, monochrome video for the frankly terrifying Straight Lines proves, Run, WALK! continue to take absolutely no fucking prisoners.
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The video for Run, WALK!‘s Straight Lines debuted today on <a title="Wish we'd got there first. Bugger." href="https://www.thisisfakediy.co.uk/articles/videos/premiere-run-walk-straight-lines">DIY</a>. You can preorder the band’s split with New York punks <a title="Yessirs" href="https://topshelfrecords.com/tsr2/_pages/artist_sirs.php">Sirs</a> at <a title="Holy Phwoar!" href="https://holyroarrecords.tumblr.com/post/9832043750/co-release-between-holy-roar-and-topshelf">Holy Roar</a>.

Video: Run, WALK! – Straight Lines

Everyone has a favourite Richmond Fontaine album. Some prefer the band’s early, punk-inflected output, evident on records like Safety. For others, the devastating minimalism of The Fitzgerald is their favourite facet of the group. Yet others would rather listen to the stately alt-country of Post to Wire or Thirteen Cities. For me, 2009’s We Used To Think The Freeway Sounded Like A River holds the top spot. Where that release arguably saw Fontaine at their most consistent and accessible, The High Country takes Post to Wire‘s Postcard segments to their next logical extreme, telling over its seventeen tracks a series of unhappy and occasionally horrific events concerning frontman and novelist Willy Vlautin‘s typically unfortunate characters.
As a consequence, The High Country is never easy listening, or as enjoyable as a record like Freeway could be – it’s a work as difficult in its presentation as in its plotline. Musically, the record veers between those desperately lonely Fitzgerald acoustics, and the minor-key, grizzled country rock of songs like Post To Wire‘s Hallway or Freeway‘s 43, and contains no less than six instrumental mood pieces. The chirpier Mariachi and lounge influences present on Fontaine‘s two previous releases have been jettisoned, tracing the character shift from unhappy but urbane citydwellers to speed-crazed, isolated woodsmen and women. Where before there was often hope and redemption for many of Vlautin‘s characters, and without wanting to give away the record’s conclusion, here there appears to be none. The sense of claustrophobia created by the music and forest-bound storyline is intense and insurmountable at times, making The High Country in its entirety a genuinely painful experience.
That said, Richmond Fontaine as musicians are as skilful and considered on The High Country as they’ve ever been. More than ever before, the band have had to turn their hands to soundtracking a storyline so distinct, that playing regular songs as a regular unit simply wouldn’t create the correct atmosphere for the record. Drummer Sean Oldham in particular proves himself equally adept at shuffling minimalism on tracks like The Mechanic’s Life, where his scratchy beat provides the perfect backdrop for Dan Eccles‘ characteristic ringing trem, and foreboding pounding on the nervy howl of Lost in the Trees. Whilst Vlautin remains the band’s most obvious figurehead in terms of vision, the other members of Richmond Fontaine have once again proved themselves humble and adept at the kind of restrained, subtle musicianship that a record like The High Country requires. Actual parts aside, the record is also arranged beautifully, with motifs appearing and being reprised, and even a little nod to past efforts in the radio broadcast at the start of Driving Back to the Chainsaw Sea, all adding to the album’s cinematic ambience. Likewise, those instrumentals in this instance are indispensable to the record’s flow, where they would break the momentum of a more traditional set of songs.
Intellectualising the kind of desperately tragic, salt of the earth musicianship and lyricism present on albums like this one is a dangerous endeavour, but being a warm, well-fed graduate and not a homicidal logger, I’ll take a shot at it all the same. My mentioning the many and varied aspects of Richmond Fontaine‘s sound by way of an introduction wasn’t purely an exercise in self-indulgence and nostalgia – it’s a perfect example of the band’s constant evolution, which can be a difficult in a genre with as much deep-rooted tradition as country. There’s some sort of connection between The High Country‘s title, and the nature of the album itself. Over the course of their existence, Richmond Fontaine seem to have become practitioners of exactly what that moniker suggests – high country, which looks toward the sky from down in the dust, and this has never been more the case than on this release, if only in terms of the band’s vision, rather than the characters’. Whether this application of academia to The High Country detracts from its pronounced humanity, and indeed that of Richmond Fontaine as a band, I’m still not sure. But that said, it seems to ring true.
By dint of its content and concept, The High Country is a particularly harrowing listen, even for the most scar-hearted Fontaine devotee, and especially for fans of the band’s more hopeful or song-based records. But as far as The High Country‘s effect goes, the band have written and play the perfect set of musical vignettes for the album’s heartbreaking storyline. Despite some spoken word parts that veer a little too far into the realms of the corny, made-for-T.V. movie (which is arguably their intended effect anyway – those are, after all, the kind of movies you’d expect the record’s characters to watch), there is little chance of coming away from The High Country unscathed, whether you find yourself enjoying its spare musicianship and unconventional format or not. As a piece of genuinely moving art, if not just a collection of songs, The High Country is an unarguable triumph.

Review: Richmond Fontaine – The High Country

I feel spoiled. In <a title="My last post about Wilco" href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/9934-new-video-wilco-art-of-almost-studio-clip/">my last post about Wilco</a>, I was bubbling over with excitement at the notion of forthcoming album The Whole Love being released on September 26th, and getting all broody over a <a title="Ooh it gives me reet chills so it does" href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdTn0hXzVZU&feature=player_embedded">one and a half minute video</a>. Clearly, the band are aware of their fans’ enthusiasm, since they’ve announced via their newsletter that as ‘a reward for your labors, ours, and those of our forefathers/mothers’, they’re going to be streaming The Whole Love on <a title="Wilco's website. Recognise." href="https://wilcoworld.net/#!/home/">wilcoworld.net</a> for a 24 hour period as of 12 noon tomorrow, Central Time. So that’s what…6pm our time? It’ll definitely be worth…being there.
Sorry.<a href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/music/10835-news-wilco-stream-the-whole-love-in-its-entirety-tomorrow/attachment/wilco_2011pr1/" rel="attachment wp-att-10838"> 
</a>

News: Wilco stream The Whole Love in its entirety tomorrow

I’ve made no secret on CitR about <a title="I really don't much like lo-fi, y'know" href="https://admin.crackintheroad.com/music/10615-interview-jack-mazes-art-is-cheap/">my feelings toward the recent lo-fi boom</a>. And as such, Male Bonding frontman John Arthur Webb‘s proclamation on <a title="Male Bonding don't want to do lo-fi either." href="https://pitchfork.com/news/41842-male-bonding-talk-bigger-sounding-new-lp/">Pitchfork</a> that “It would suck to just fucking knock out lo-fi albums once a year” really endeared the Dalston trio to me. To that end, and indeed heightening my expectations, they’ve teamed up with producer John Agnello, who also manned the desk for the latest Cymbals Eat Guitars record (another sophomore effort, released on the same day as this one), and <a title="Cymbals Eat Guitars - Lenses Alien" href="https://api.crackintheroad.com/music/10613-review-cymbals-eat-guitars-lenses-alien/">I reckon he did a bloody good job</a>. Not to mention the fact that the man’s been involved in the production of some of my favourite artists of all time – Dinosaur Jr., The Lemonheads, Screaming Trees, The Hold Steady etc etc etc.
Agnello‘s hand in Endless Now‘s overall sound is apparent from approximately nine seconds into opener Tame The Sun. Compared to Year’s Not Long, which had the task of kickstarting debut Nothing Hurts, the band sound huge, which can be a difficult task for a three piece. Webb‘s vocals are still airy and detached in that My Bloody Valentine kinda way, but they certainly sound like they’re supposed to be like that, rather than like he’s yelling from somewhere from across the room, and fighting to be heard.
To be honest, that’s kind of all I have to say about Endless Now. Anyone familiar with Male Bonding will already know exactly what this record sounds like. Bones toys with the blueprint a little, stretching itself out over six minutes, and The Saddle, towards the end of the album, provides an effective and heartbreaking diversion, a song that’s as miserable in sound as it is in content. But for the most part, it’s the same clanging, fuzzy guitars, breakneck drums, and the odd bassline that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Blink-182 record. Like I say, Male Bonding’s decision to leave lo-fi behind has really worked wonders for them, in terms of product as well as ideology, but this decision is probably the most striking thing about their sophomore effort.
Endless Now, then, is essentially Nothing Hurts v2.0. It sounds bigger, sure, but there’s nothing here that will surprise, or by that token offend, an established Male Bonding fan, provided that they don’t take issue with the band’s decision to make a record that doesn’t sound a bit like it was recorded in a garage. Anyone looking for something to really get their teeth into had probably best look elsewhere. But perhaps by dint of its title, Endless Now absolves itself of having to be too substantial. It’s packed to bursting with eminently hummable melodies, and in its grafting of the current vogue for Creation Records onto a joyous pop-punk torso, it’s a frontrunner, comprising of twelve thrashy, tuneful tales of woe that don’t outstay their welcome and as such rarely cease to be enjoyable.

Review: Male Bonding – Endless Now

Now’s about the time people start to get worried. Sophomore efforts are notorious for being tricky beasts, and as an added obstacle this one, from Staten Island’s Cymbals Eat Guitars, has to follow up Why There Are Mountains, a debut that received rave reviews pretty much across the board on its release in 2009. Just to further complement the general sense of foreboding, they’ve called the damn thing Lenses Alien, the foreign (and by extension difficult) connotations of which are fairly plain to see.
However, at this point it’s probably worth remembering that the nine cuts of squalling noise found on …Mountains were hardly easy listening in the first place. And thankfully, opener Rifle Eyesight does a fine job of laying any sort of preconceived jitters to rest. It’s clear over the song’s eight and a half minutes that both the band and producer John Agnello have opted for a much more pronounced sense of light and shade this time around – the song ascends and dips through a varied series of peaks and troughs, from those angular Pavementisms that endeared Cymbals to their public the first time round, to the kind of widescreen jams that wouldn’t be out of place on a Built to Spill record. Agnello proves himself a skilled hand at giving the band room to breathe in the spacier moments, and reigning them in for the punchier ones, to the overall effect that the band sound far more in control of their twisting structures and spiralling noise than before.
In this sense, Rifle Eyesight serves as something of a microcosm for Lenses Alien as a whole. On occasion, Cymbals show that they are still more than capable of losing themselves in the storm that they spin, the furious distortion of Keep Me Waiting or the screaming that closes the record on Gary Condit being thrilling cases in point. On others, the quartet’s penchant for melody really comes into its own, Wavelengths in particular having more in common with a band like The Shins than any of …Mountains’ noisier reference points. This well-executed marriage of volume to leftfield tunefulness serves Lenses Alien particularly well, making it distinctly easier to take on board the wide range of emotion conveyed by the album’s ten cuts than if they were shrouded in fuzz.
As another happy by-product of Agnello‘s more considered production dynamic, it’s now entirely possible to immerse oneself fully in frontman Joseph D’Agostino‘s skillful wordplay. For the most part, syllables and phonemes come bursting around the man’s tongue and from his lips in ever more weird and wonderful variations – the opening of Plainclothes lets up on the verbosity slightly, foregoing D’Agostino‘s usual mile-a-minute streams of imagery, and details the story of a man who killed a state trooper, wittingly or unwittingly recalling archetypal American storyteller Bruce Springsteen. It only lasts 10 seconds though, until D’Agostino drawls ‘once your protons collide, everything, everything changes’, and we’re launched headfirst back into his surreal verbal realms. Similarly, he’s a master of combining these intense images with ones more invitingly homespun and recognisable – the skateboard that rolls on down the hill in Another Tunguska is all the more striking for it’s tangled lyrical surroundings.
With Lenses Alien, Cymbals Eat Guitars have produced a powerful, nuanced successor to a debut that garnered a strong critical following. It would have been very easy for the band to simply recreate Why There Are Mountains a second time around and just about get away with it. But instead, they’ve opted to aim higher, and in doing so they’ve hit that rare pitch between innovative melody and hair-raising noise, and created a record that’s both thought-provoking and visceral in equal measure.

Review: Cymbals Eat Guitars – Lenses Alien

On July 29th, Jack Cooper, who’s most likely to be found playing guitar and singing with joyous fuzz-pop four piece <a title="Mazes Site" href="https://mazesmazesmazes.com/">Mazes</a>, made a post on the band’s website, which read as follows:
‘Art is cheap… people make millions and trillions of pounds out of a brain cell firing successfully. it’s crazy. I’ll write you a song for £10… send me a song title and your email address and I’ll be in touch… a song title or anything, guitar part, drum beat…whatever. I’m feeling inspired. This project will last a week, so be quick
mazesmazesmazes@gmail.com
Jack Mazes x’
On the 22nd of August, Jack posted the first home-recorded song up on the project’s <a title="Art Is Cheap" href="https://artischeap.tumblr.com/page/2">Tumblr</a>, a capriciously upbeat elegy entitled When Sleater-Kinney Died, commissioned by blogger <a title="Bank Robber Music" href="https://bankrobbermusic.com/blog/2011/08/mo-money-mo-bloglems-an-lb-joint">Lauren Bernal</a>. Two more tracks followed that day, and four the next.
Usually I’m a fairly staunch detractor of the lo-fi aesthetic that’s been enjoying a revival for the last little while. In my bloody-minded way, this attitude is partially a reaction to the movement’s popularity – many bands whom I consider to really have very little talent for songwriting or musicianship are suddenly jumping on the bandwagon in droves (both a blessing and a curse of the movement is that it’s practically doable by anyone, regardless of talent or finance) and being lauded by critics for what can be taken as essentially lazy, half-arsed attempts at what I believe should be a considered and moving art form. Art becomes ‘cheap’ in the sense that it becomes an infinitely reproducible commodity, losing its aura along the way, as Walter Benjamin might have it.
I appreciate that in an age of postmodernity (if you subscribe to that school of thought), nothing can be original and we need to find ever different ways of helping music to evolve, and that placing the power of music in the hands of practically anyone can be an exciting prospect for musical evolution. And certainly, homespun recording techniques can create an intimacy and atmosphere that’s lost when you’re playing in solitude behind a glass window, and into a massive desk. I ‘get’ lo-fi on a conceptual level, if not always on a sonic one. But I’m similarly fairly confident that these thoughts don’t enter the heads of many of the artists embracing the techniques that mark out the lo-fi ‘scene’. Of course, Jack’s ear for pop hooks and his laconic, tuneful drawl lend themselves perfectly to the hiss and hum of home recording, making it relatively easy to take pleasure in Art Is Cheap‘s crackly, my-first-tape-deck cuts. But quite simply, if the record collection I’ve amassed over the years is anything to go by, I seem to prefer studio-produced recordings – ones with character, certainly, but nevertheless ones where instruments sound full and vocals clear.
However, Art Is Cheap has certainly had me revising my views on the lo-fi aesthetic, if not wholeheartedly embracing it. I’ve had to stop myself believing (imagining, perhaps) that there’s a whole bunch of bands and critics out there who are embracing lo-fi because it’s receiving a lot of attention, and start discovering the issues at the roots of the movement. The project’s forced me to think about what I’d want – or be able – to play, rather than what I’d want to hear. It’s an intoxicating thought, taking music from the listener and delivering it entirely into the hands of the artist. In removing music from the shackles of funding and major labels, art becomes ‘cheap’ in a positive sense – it doesn’t need money to be created.
In any case, last Thursday I sent poor Jack a hideously wordy email that purported to be an interview, but was mostly just a vehicle for me to expound my own half-baked theories on the issues that he’d introduced with Art Is Cheap, strewn about with a few questions here and there. Being the lovely fella that he is, he got back to me with what seemed a genuine interest and hunger for discussion, and over the course of a few days, we came up with what you see below…
CitR: You mention a number of ideas on the project’s Tumblr that started you thinking about ‘Art is Cheap’. Was there an actual time or event that you can pinpoint which led to the project actually happening, or was it literally just the amalgamation of those various ideas over time?
JC: Well originally my idea stemmed from what I personally enjoy the most from music, which is the initial spark of creativity that leads to a melody. That’s what gives me the biggest thrill. I tend to write songs on the move. I’ll just start humming a melody, singing it maybe and then I’ll elaborate on it in my head. To an extent it’s all downhill from there. Figuring out lyrics, working it out on guitar and then eventually recording it are all satisfying but it’s the acorn of an idea I enjoy the most. It’s crazy to think that the greatest pieces of music begin like this…the majority probably never get beyond this point, but then they get recorded, packaged and promoted, and they then have the capacity to earn millions and millions of pounds. I liked the idea that I could write something very quickly…the idea being suggested by someone else and then maybe the ‘commissioner’ and myself could be the only ones to hear it ever. My two ideal scenarios would be to write something for someone, we both listen to it once and then we both delete it. The other would be for a massively established act to ask for a song, record it and for me to lose all control.
CitR: There were a couple of points in the introduction that got me thinking as well. Firstly, you mention Steve Keene, who once said of his art,
‘I want buying my paintings to be like buying a CD: it’s cheap, it’s art and it changes your life, but the object has no status. Musicians create something for the moment, something with no boundaries and that kind of expansiveness is what I want to come across in my work.’
How do you interpret this? Are you a fan of Keene’s work and ideas? You’re a musician. How do you respond to the idea that you create something purely ‘for the moment’? It seems like kind of a reductive statement, pretty much at odds with the ‘expansiveness’ Keene mentions. His ideas are certainly a wonderful antidote to music/art snobbery, but I think there’s some kind of middle ground between that and not giving a fuck about music at all…
JC: Steve Keene isn’t the only person doing this but that quote in particular was an inspiration. Unfortunately I’m not as well known as him, so I maybe have two requests a day but I like to think if I had ten, I’d be able to push myself into writing ten songs. This interview is really the first time I’ve sat down and actually thought about why I’m doing this and when I’ve explained it to people in the past and I suppose in the answers I give now, a lot of my motives conflict. But yeah I get what you mean about the ‘expansiveness’ thing… it’s slightly contradictory, but that’s life. We’re all hypocrites.
CitR: Could you go into your statement about ‘Yesterday’ a little more? I’m not trying to court controversy at all, but is there anything you find inherently ridiculous about the song itself, or is it just the fact that it made so much money out of so little effort?
JC: Not at all. I love that song and love The Beatles. I can completely understand why someone wouldn’t like that song though; it’s schmaltzy maybe, definitely overplayed… I get why people don’t like Paul McCartney. My point was that he famously ‘dreamt’ that song and then on getting out of bed, he figured it out on the piano. It probably took him fifteen minutes, disregarding writing the lyrics and arranging it, which to be honest are pretty irrelevant. The song isn’t popular because of the lyrics or the strings etc…most songs aren’t. But for him to have earned millions and millions of pounds out of something so flippant; it’s ridiculous in the grand scheme of things. Someone could work in a factory for 40 years and not even scratch the surface…but again, I DO value art. Paul McCartney’s contributions to society are undoubtedly more significant than a factory worker… that’s not a nice thing to say. I’m coming across like an ill-informed sociology student so I’ll stop…but whatever, it’s interesting.
CitR: What’s your stance on downloading music? I have this bizarre, double-edged idea that, because I love playing music so much, it’d kind of feel like cheating to make enough money to live out of it, so I kind of support the whole thing, plus it increases exposure. I know being in a band is hard work, but in comparison to a regular job it is literally a dream come true. That said, as a fan rather than a musician, I think that it’s very important to support smaller bands and the record labels that they’re on, and therefore make an effort to buy their records, not to mention the fact that I love owning physical media… 
 
JC: Yeah I feel the same. I’m a hypocrite. I’d love to earn a good living out of making music but I think that has to be a by-product. I illegally download music and I’d never be angry with anyone for downloading ours. I think what is interesting is that it’s almost impossible now to make a career out of music, a financially rewarding career anyway. So in theory money will stop being a motivation. But again, it all has two sides. I like a lot of super-commercial music…
CitR: Can you sustain any sort of lifestyle from Mazes? Likewise, at my last count, you’ve made 100 quid from the project so far. Are you intending on using the money for anything in particular?
JC: Mazes wise, no, I don’t earn a living from it. Our record label’s fantastic and they have invested in us. We get to travel, to play our music to people and there’s certainly potential for us to earn a living in the future but at the moment no. Because we’re semi busy with the band, the truth is that it’s also very very difficult to hold down an actual paying job as well. It’s a balancing act. I don’t ever want to bum anyone out and when we got back from America last time, friends would say “You must’ve had a great time!”, and yes we did, but it certainly taints it a little when you’ve spent the 3 weeks in America not working, and wondering how you’re going to pay rent when you get back. I’m not moaning – I love being in this band, but it’s just pretty difficult sometimes.
£100…I’ve made more than that. A few people have paid a lot more than the £10 and then the majority have given a little extra. The songs on the blog are only 50% of the ones I’ve written… some people didn’t want theirs on the blog (which is completely in the spirit of it). As far as having a plan with the money…not really. I don’t have much of a job at the moment, so when I thank someone for paying me and tell them ‘you just bought me lunch and coffee’, I actually mean it.
CitR: One song that really got the ol’ cogs whirring was ‘Lick’, commissioned by the frozen yoghurt shop in Brighton of the same name. You write in the blurb above the song ‘Music to promote commerce. A tricky subject. One I’d always felt reasonably strongly about.’ Could you elaborate on that? Did the fact that Lick are a small independent company, whose product you’re a fan of anyway, ease the decision at all? Obviously you decided to record the song in the spirit of the project – but you also note that they paid you a lot more than the ten pound asking price…
JC: Well everyone knows that licensing songs to adverts or movie companies is one of the only ways a band can make big money nowadays. I don’t think anyone likes doing it – it cheapens the art. It probably goes against most band’s politics, but money talks. I did that song because it would go against my idea to refuse that. I can justify it by saying it was my artistic intention to write a song for whoever asked for one, and for it to be inspired by whatever they ask for. Ideally I’d like the intention to get really stretched…if McDonalds asked for a £10 song, would I do it? Yeah, probably ‘cos it’s so perverse…the EDL? Gary Glitter? Obviously not, but it’d be interesting
CitR: Have you had a particular favourite in the project so far? Why?
JC: I really enjoyed the one called ‘A Girl From Miami’… Annette sent me a recording of an autoharp and I figured something out over that. Had to stretch myself a little on that and it felt good. 
 
CitR: Is there any particular conclusion you’re hoping to draw from the project, or indeed hoping other people to draw?
JC: Not really…I mean I’ve intellectualized it myself, but really it’s just a fun thing to do.
All the songs from Art Is Cheap can be found <a href="https://artischeap.tumblr.com/" title="Art Is Cheap">here</a>, and you can follow both <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/jackmazes" title="Jack Twitter">Jack</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/M_A_Z_E_S" title="Mazes Twitter">Mazes</a> on Twitter.

Interview: Jack Mazes – Art Is Cheap

To be honest I’m still reeling from being given my first ever press pass (oh, shut up and let me enjoy the moment), but luckily I recovered my composure enough to see ‘Mafro-beat’ (yep) combo <a title="Nairobi facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/nairobitheband">Nairobi</a> cut the metaphorical ribbon of this BBC Introducing event, with a set of offbeat but defiantly major key guitar antics, complete with Kinsellaesque yelping and endearingly quirky lyrics. Coming across a little like Wantage’s answer to latterday Maps and Atlases, the four-piece’s set does contain some of the potholes that youthful math rock often falls prey to – nonlinear songs can feel like a collection of parts rather than a well structured piece. However, Nairobi have individuality and enthusiasm in spades and, as is also often the case with bands of their ilk, they don’t drown themselves in earnestness and self-importance.
The former of which is something <a title="CP facebook" href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Cooling-Pearls/175559275823972">The Cooling Pearls</a> possess a little too much of. As they take the stage, the septet present an enticing prospect, lugging a veritable cornucopia of instruments along with them. However, as their set trudges on, it becomes fairly clear that they’re not about to break out of their bog-standard, morose indie-folk and into something as interesting as their setup first suggested.
<a href="https://www.anchorandthewolf.com/">Anchor and the Wolf </a>also deal in folk-inflected indie pop, but thankfully go down easier than their predecessors. The four piece initially come on a little like Ellie Goulding fronting Múm, and from there cascading walls of guitar reminiscent of Bloc Party‘s Russell Lissack at his best provide a brightly coruscating backdrop for Zoe Mead‘s voice, which could lull you to sleep one second and rally masses the next. Their sound presents few challenges and is certainly nothing exciting, but it’s infinitely palatable and well executed, and with the musical climate as it is, their playing a BBC event is surely a sign of things to come.
They may have a massive guitar sound, but in their posturing efforts at darkness and depth, <a href="https://halfrabbits.co.uk/">The Half Rabbits</a> fall flat on their faces. The band trot out a set of swaggering, self-important, sub-Editors bollocks that apparently aims for Smashing Pumpkins (always a dangerous choice of influence anyway), but ends up somewhere in the vicinity of U2. Frontman Michael Weatherburn (billed on their website as the ‘main songwriter’, which only adds to the general air of pomposity) makes an attempt at humility between songs, remarking on how great the other bands playing are, before slickly remarking ‘hopefully we’re great too’, and by the time he drawls out a half-boiled line about being an ‘architect of the soul’, I’m a set of deaf ears. Sorry.
Local heroes <a href="https://www.myspace.com/alphabetbackwards">Alphabet Backwards</a> are always an act best experienced in the flesh, foregoing moodiness in favour of infectious, sunny guitar pop so effervescent it’s constantly in danger of bubbling over. Their thrilled reception by a packed out room is indicative of their status, and happily, tonight they prove that they’re worthy of the crowd’s adulation. Frontman James remains as engaging a presence as ever, and stage antics occasionally resemble a bouncing competition between members, which to be honest is fairly fitting. Newer cuts like Taller are greeted with the same enthusiasm as favourites Blink of an Eye and Plastic, and while the ridiculous synth line in Elton John really shouldn’t work, when set to the kind of leaping abandon that the four piece do so well, it makes perfect sense. Alphabet Backwards do a fine job of warming hearts and spreading grins, and with the summer nearly over, they’re needed more than ever.
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Live Review: Alphabet Backwards (Upstairs at the O2, Oxford, 20/08/11)

I first stumbled upon Evan Weiss last year when he was over here touring with the equally wonderful (but entirely different) <a title="Grown Ups myspace" href="https://www.myspace.com/ihategrownups">Grown Ups</a> and <a title="SASO Tumblr" href="https://shoesandsocksoff.tumblr.com/">Shoes and Socks Off</a>, between whom the Chicago-based songwriter occupied a sort of sonic middle ground, sharing the punk influence of the former and the songwriting nous of the latter. It’s a happy medium I always fall for, and for weeks afterward, the <a title="IIOI site" href="https://intoitoverit.com/">Into It. Over It.</a> record 52 Weeks soundtracked my journeys to and from work. As the album’s name suggests, it’s 52 tracks in length, recorded one a week by Weiss over the space of one year, and as such it’s a record you can really get your teeth into, containing little to no filler into the bargain. The conceptual nature of the thing said a lot to me – I was mired in a job that I hated, using no creative skills whatsoever, and this was a record that had forced itself into artistic productivity. 52 Weeks started me writing again, stopped me drinking so much, made me pick up a guitar when I got home, and generally helped pull back the curtain at the end of the tunnel.
I don’t have that job anymore, but obviously I was still incredibly excited to learn that Weiss has recorded his debut LP proper (his other IIOI releases are six 7″ splits containing over their course 12 songs about American towns). In a continuation of Weiss‘ tradition for fitting record titles, the release is called – yep – Proper. A fortnight ago, <a title="AP IIOI Proper" href="https://www.altpress.com/features/entry/exclusive_stream_into_it_over_its_proper/">AP</a>‘s streaming of the album’s title track showcased Into It. Over It.‘s more upbeat leanings, with its bold crunch and whoah whoah whoah’s, whilst <a href="https://soundcloud.com/filter-magazine/into-it-over-it-where-your">Where Your Nights Often End</a> (debuted yesterday on <a title="Filter Where Your Nights Often End" href="https://filtermagazine.com/index.php/media/entry/mp3_into_it._over_it._new_single_where_your_nights_often_end_filter_exclusi">Filter</a>) finds Weiss in downtempo mode, a headspace equal to the song’s title. Musically, it’s all gently overdriven arpeggios and bittersweet melody, and Evan‘s final admission that he’ll ‘never make the lines out’ carries the kind of quiet, considered, and adult resignation that I seem to spend most of my time looking for in modern music. Proper is out via <a title="No Sleep" href="https://nosleeprecs.com/">No Sleep</a> records on the 27th of September, and you can preorder it <a title="No Sleep Store" href="https://www.nosleepstore.com/artist/into-it-over-it">here</a>.

Crack in the Road

FTSEBlood On My Hands

Introducing: Matagot

Introducing: Baby In Vain

Introducing: Christ Reflection

Healing PowersWeirdos at Work

Introducing: Eugene Quell

Introducing: Badlands

Vincent Vocoder VoiceMeMeMeMeMeMeMeNow

FriendzoneDX

Introducing: Neon Windbreaker

I Am Gonna Make It Through This Year If It Kills Me: Our picks of 2k13

Department MThe Second Prize/Absentia

Interview: Phoria

FTSETidal Wave (ft Saint Saviour)

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New & MPFree: Grandfather BirdsThings Beneath The Water/Spithope

Tall ShipsPhosphorescence (Deafkid remix)

Love Among The MannequinsJoseph Cassel or John Michael Ernahue or God, D-16

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KorelessSun

Post War Glamour GirlsJazz Funerals

BovineThe Sun Never Sets On The British Empire

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The Little ExplorerSiderali

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How To Dress WellTotal Loss

Hold Your Horse IsFrimley

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WoodersonLet the Man Speak

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Suis La LuneCornea