LoudAndQuiet Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 16 / 100 percent thick
Loud, experimental noise worth swearing about PLUS Beaty Heart Divorce tUnE-yArDs Double Dagger Prize Pets Chickenhawk Pipes SXSW Unofficiated
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Someone said that once, and it stuck. Just like that time someone said, “Noel Edmunds is a creep.” Both statements are therefore as true as the gospel (please, no titters), which means that Loud And Quiet putting on a bit of weight has left us with an extra handsome silhouette this month. Over the four extra pages slipped into this issue you’ll find Leeds’ shredders Chickenhawk and Male Bonding, Woods and DIY documenters Yellow Fever, all of varying shapes and sizes in support of our ever-ongoing ‘As Long As You’re Handsome We Don’t Care About Your Weight’ campaign. And now that we have shamed the gossip mags and the red tops by being so open minded in our forward-thinking policies towards chubbers, all that’s left to do is introduce what else is in this month’s paper. To start, how does a portion of possessed Glasgow metal in the shape of Divorce [page 14] sound? A slice of sonic abusers Fuck Buttons [page 28] and a Baltimore delicacy of post-hardcore dudes Double Dagger [page 14]? It sounds good because reading Loud And Quiet can increase your fibre intake and lower your chance of heart disease*. And there’s plenty here to pick at too, like surviving SXSW on zero pounds, celebrating the life of a truly maverick manager and the month’s film releases.
Eat up and stay thin
*Please note that Loud And Quiet should be consumed along with a balanced diet of food high in fibre and low in fat.
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05 | 10 LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 16 / 100 PERCENT THICK
Loud, experimental noise worth swearing about PLUS BEATY HEART DIVORCE tUnE-yArDs DOUBLE DAGGER PRIZE PETS CHICKENHAWK PIPES SXSW UNOFFICIATED
Photography by GABRIEL GREEN
07 .................. . Lawless / Sex / Business 08 .................. . Turgid / Tv / Tat 12 .................. . Brian / Ferry / Pets 15 .................. . Heroin / Guns / Dorks 17 .................. . I / Shat / Myself 18 .................. .Weird / Gnome / Flattery 20 .................. . Awesome / Death / Metal 23 .................. . SXSW / For / Free 24 .................. . Horse / Dinosaur / Zombie 33 .................. . Brutal / Apocalyptic / Planet 36 .................. . Prince / Of / Fears 39 .................. . Rubbish / Dirty / Love 42 .................. . Playboy / Bunny / Party 44 .................. . Dead / People / Dancing 50 .................. . Touch / My / Box 04
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Contact
info@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet 2 Loveridge Mews Kilburn London NW6 2DP Stuart Stubbs Alex Wilshire Art Director Lee Belcher film editor Dean Driscoll Editor
Sub Editor
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advertise@loudandquiet.com Contributors
Bart Pettman, Chris Watkeys, Daniel Dylan-Wray, Danny Canter DK. Goldstien, Dean Driscoll Eleanor Dunk, Elinor Jones Edgar Smith, Frankie Nazardo, Holly Lucas, Janine Bullman, Kate Parkin, Kelda Hole, Gabriel Green, Lisa Wright Mandy Drake, Martin Cordiner Matthias Scherer, Mike Burnell Nathan Westley, Owen Richards Polly Rappaport, Phil Dixon, Phil Sharp Reef Younis, Sam Little, Sian Rowe Sam Walton, Simon Leak,Tim Cochrane Tom Goodwyn,Tom Pinnock This Month L&Q Loves
Chris Tipton, Lucy Hurst, Rich Walker, Posy Dixon,Will Lawrence The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opini ons of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2010 © Loud And Quiet.
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Malcolm Mclaren If only more bands were as cavalier as this manager… Wr i t e r : S t u a r t s t u bb s
Short of that time we asked, ‘Has everyone forgotten that Michael Jackson was as mad as a box of paedophiles?’, soon after the great one moon walked to the Pearly Gates, we’ve never published a tribute in Loud And Quiet before. But the sad passing of Malcolm Mclaren, who had long battled with cancer and died April 8th, has not only churned up how important The Sex Pistols were once again, but how instrumental Mclaren was in changing guitar music forever. The Pistols were his snotty creation – much like Leona Lewis is Simon Cowell’s – and they simply wouldn’t have existed with him. Band ‘Manager’ has always been a title that’s sat uncomfortably in the antiestablishment world of alternative music. If you like to manage things you should surely be in a bank or behind a desk somewhere, not in the lawless business of rock’n’roll. Bands shouldn’t want to be managed and no one should want to manage them. They are needed though, and in today’s free market were every other person
is in a band, the face next to them probably belongs to a manager in charge of checking Myspace pages and wotnot. Before this new breed of cyber managing there seemed to be two types of folk in charge of bands – the anonymous, get-things-done sort, like Marcus Russell who managed to control/tolerate Oasis for so many years, and the less frequently seen flamboyant ideas men and women who become stars on their own right due to their key role in a band’s success. Mclaren was definitely closer to the latter, far smaller group, inhabited by such influential figures as Brian Epstein (who famously made The Beatles wear suits) and Elvis’ overly obsessive cowboy boss Colonel Tom Parker. But he never fully belonged there, because he was never really a manager. He didn’t find and coax The Sex Pistols; he orchestrated their formation and built an image that became more important than the music itself. An ex-art school student, he was an artist and Johnny Rotten was his art, and although tongue-in-cheek, the Simon Cowell comparison, on
that level, stands up. John Lydon was even famously auditioned in front of a jukebox, singing along to Alice Cooper, just like glam-goth week on X Factor. Unlike Cowell, Epstein, Parker and every other manager/ marketing guru before or since, Mclaren shunned and dodged the well-trodden path to success. He thought the worse thing The Sex Pistols could do would be to learn how to play well (having been suitably impressed by how good the New York Dolls were at being bad – a group he also managed) and in 2007 documentary Never Mind The Sex Pistols: An Alternative History he even admitted that he never wanted the band to make or release a record, reasoning, “I didn’t want the band to be part of some commercial exercise, which I saw the making of records as. I didn’t see the point of fitting in and I didn’t want the group to fit in.” The fact that he was the band’s manager – the breadwinner – didn’t matter in the slightest. He wanted “every live gig to border on anarchy”, vetoed the
band smiling in photographs and signed them to EMI because it amused him that it was the home of Cliff Richard, The Beatles and British pop music. He was a manager who was unmanageable himself (perhaps the secret to the profession). His agenda was consistently as stubborn and petulant as the punk rock movement itself became, perhaps signified best by his insisting that ‘Anarchy In The UK’ be distributed in a plain black, unmarked back – “I don’t want anyone to find it,” he told the disgruntled creatives at EMI, “I want someone to find it.” And, as we know from The Sex Pistols’ legacy, he was rarely wrong, even if his methods were a little barbaric and a lot rude. Few bands have ever held such strong ideals as those of Malcolm Mclaren, and from The Sex Pistol’s inception to their characteristically messy demise, he had a laugh at the expense of the music industry while changing how image, art and music could exist together. He was less a manager and more the ultimate punk, because punk was his invention.
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Books
By Daniel Dylan-Wray
Apathy For The Devil By Nick Kent (Faber & Faber) Tales of Drugs & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll ---------------------
Music Television How the box in the corner can ruin your favourite songs Wr i t e r : I A N ROE B UCK
When the Big Pink wrote ‘Velvet’ I’m pretty sure they weren’t imagining its ebullient highs sound-tracking Jeremy Clarkson’s bobbing fat head, but that’s the culture we live in today. Switch on your idiot box and Lauren Laverne’s personal playlist is force fed down our necks. Each show scrabbles to be Skins, every run of ads distil 6music in a concentrated slap of the hard sell. Hey, if it leaves the airwaves just switch to Channel 4. No bad thing perhaps – it’s nice to hear Sigur Ros melt the speakers for the 1,314th time as yet another budding flower majestically blossoms – but it’s got its downsides. I blame selfobsessed Apple (iThis, iThat, when are we going to talk about me!?), Sony Bravia’s bouncing sodding balls, Jack White (Coca Cola, seriously) and all those discerning TV producers out there. Yeah, you’ve got good taste, we get it! As enjoyable as it is to hear a familiar friend amongst the turgid tat, Counter Culture won’t thrive if thrust into the mainstream and TV is the medium with the most mass appeal. Labels need more consideration
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before turning over the latest sensation for commercial exploit, if not for the fans, for longevity, credibility or plain old rock’n’roll values. How many Grizzly Bear aficionados would have beamed after hearing ‘Two Weeks’ strum out on the latest Volkswagen ad? And can you imagine regulars to ‘Coles Corner’ advocating working class hero Richard Hawley “Melting Together” for Haagen-Dazs? Extortionate strawberry cheesecake desserts are hardly synonymous with steel-stained Sheffield. I’m all for hearing a great tune whilst plodding through the products but there’s got to be a line drawn. I’m sure the bands themselves don’t seriously want to be advertising pet food or washing detergent. Sure, a few cases seem to work – James Murphy making 45:33 with Nike springs to mind – but that’s a rare sign of artist control. Of course, it all boils down to the moolar, as everything does, and with the music industry evidently crumbling it’s no surprise labels are scrabbling to give away the hottest bands to the highest
bidder. Where does that leave an audience? In an age where attention spans are minimal and a band’s shelf life is over before the album leaves your speakers – cool one minute, cruising for cash the next, then chucked on top of the Ting Tings. Next it’ll be Male Bonding in Eastenders and These New Puritans cutting up Cash in the Attic. Certainly the days where a spine tingling TV moment accompanied by a musical gem make for small screen gold are rare to say the least, and it’s been like that since bands have been ‘cool’ (read: acceptable commodities as opposed to alternative, anti-establishment artists), which’ll be around the time Arctic Monkeys arrived then. E4 are more likely to kill a crush than create one. Please remember that Jeremy, Richard and the other one. Remember that BBC and ITV sport with the World Cup round the corner. Remember that iPod, Coca-Cola or basically anyone who advertises on screen. Make your own bloody song, or pilfer from pop’s ‘you never liked this anyway’ shelf. Kaiser Chiefs are on the right.
Apathy For The Devil is a murky and twisted look back through Nick Kent’s eyes on the seventies - a decade riddled in glamour, excess, money, fame, fortune, decay and ultimately death. It chronicles Kent; a young London based journalist and his meteoric rise to almost superstardom within the music world, and his subsequent descent into a homeless junkie a few years later. It’s a familiar tale from that particular decade – the list of stars dead or depleted as a result of excess from that decade is endless. However, here we see it from the helm, from the cockpit before the plane goes down. Kent managed to get his way into an awful lot of situations with an awful lot of very interesting people and bands during this period. For those who have read his previous book, The Dark Stuff, you will know that Kent can spin a yarn - on anecdotal pieces alone it ranks very highly and is a consistently fascinating plunge into a decade that reached such ridiculous heights of pomposity and overblown excess it is almost unbelievable when in contrast to our overpopulated and cynical generation. Its tales deal equally in the splendid and the sordid, drug tales feature as regularly as the musical ones (until Heroin takes over the latter part of the decade). Imagine spending a decade inside a washing machine, half of which you are relishing the dizzy heights; the second half you are screaming to get out but your body won’t let you – that’s Kent’s decade. He clearly still harbours a lot of resentment to people he encountered during this time, and more than once his spitefulness and defensive nature becomes a tad irksome, but when you spent a decade being whipped by bike chains (by Sid vicious), attacked with knifes, being sacked by the NME, only to descend into the life of a sewer rat, maybe his umbrage is somewhat justified. An endlessly entertaining memoir, that is a vital reflection on an even more vital decade.
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01 Small Black Small Black (Jagjaguwar) Out April 26
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Brooklyn’s Small Black sound like a band that started in an attic one summer. And that’s because they did. Their fizzing tape music is covered in a layer of loft dust that makes it crackle like grit on a record as it reaches for evening sunlight. It’s wholly American (all filmic kisses on beaches that are without gravel and broken glass) and for that reason it’s a much welcome slice of Casio-haze-pop escapism. In truth, you’ll be hard pushed to find a summery climate and stretch of shoreline as idyllic as the opening ‘Despicable Dogs’ anywhere on the planet. Yeah, it’s as dreamy and lo-fi as Brooklyn’s pulse has been for these past 12 months, but its delicate, meandering keyboards
and almost-too-emotional-tospeak vocals make it infinitely more touching than your typically assertive garage band. It’s all down to the electronics with Small Black. ‘Bad Lover’’s spluttering drum machine sits atop a wall of organ static that makes the band sound like The Radio Dept., ‘Lady In Wires’ is full of Balearic samples and rhythms, and even the raining, shrill guitar riffs of ‘Weird Machines’ sound like they could be dripping from some electronic instrument or other. ‘Despicable Dogs’ is certainly ‘the looker’, but just as your ugly newborn can one day become your favourite (this happens!), ‘King Of Animals’ is the EP’s dark horse… or, y’know, Technicolor sunshine horse.
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Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti
The Hundred In The Hands
Wild Palms Deep Dive
Celestial Bodies Vanity / Waste Your Time
Round and Round
Dressed In Dresden
(4AD) Out Apr 26
(Warp) Out Now
(One Little Indian) Out May 17 -----
(Home. Under. Ground) Out Now -----
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Ariel Pink’s debut single for 4AD lasts over five minutes because that’s how long it takes to shoehorn in this many different sounds. As the godfather of avant-garde LA pop, he’s learnt that standing still is eventually tantamount to going backwards, so ‘Round And Round’ is constantly on the move, from its initial short pump of AM radio soul to Kings of Convenience easy listening, to a Bowie, Ziggy-esque breakdown, to brief spoken word. It travels on, always making sure that Ariel Pink remains ahead of the dreamy crowd.
The Hundred In The Hands are a duo (of course) from New York (duh!) that sound - here at least - exactly like forgotten Manchester twosome Modernaire. Which is a good thing. ‘Dressed In Dresden’ is filled with the kind of electronic indie swag that’s been doing the rounds since Bloc Party’s ‘Banquet’ (in fact, its guitar jabs and bass rumble seem to have been lifted straight off of that release), and an angelic female vocal that once again pulls off that neat trick of making ‘credible pop’, this time without the uncredible ginger quiff.
Post punk 4-piece Wild Palms have always been weary of the ‘East London’ band tag/smear. Despite playing angular Gang of Four-esque indie, they’ve tried to put not so much as a finger in that pigeonhole for fear of it getting stuck. It’s a wise move, even if touting Can and Neu! as chief influences isn’t (kraut is far from out right now). The band have successfully avoided the ties of a small, elitist scene, but not by sounding like Can and Neu!. ‘Deep Dive’ is the sort of epic, noir pop rock that opens for Editors and overshadows the rest of the gig. It’s quite simply the best song that White Lies never wrote.
Ferry Gouw cut his teeth with nearly-made-it projectionbummers Semifinalists. His creativity (which the film maker/ artist/musician has in abundance) now spews from a performance name of Celestial Bodies, and this double ‘A’ side is both his and new imprint Home. Under. Ground’s first. Little separates the tracks, perhaps explaining why one hasn’t been muscled onto a side inferiorly marked ‘B’, with ‘Vanity’ lurching to skeletal drums and sparse 80s synths and ‘Waste Your Time’ matching the gloom with a wash of static and deep moans. Somehow it doesn’t even matter that he can’t sing.
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Reviews by D. Canter, M. Drake
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Prize Pets For all their comparisons, this blurted garage punk is Nottingham’s freshest sound Photographer: OWEN R I CHAR DS Writer: POLLY R APPAPORT
When last I saw Nottingham foursome Prize Pets, they were nego tiating the tiny, scout hutlike stage of the Stag’s Head in Dalston, their singer lurching about in the audience, mainly with his back to us, sounding like Mark E. Smith fronting Pere Ubu, and looking like a Gap advert, until a fellow Prize Pet chucked a multi-coloured blanket at him, which he wore as a cape for a bit (“It was a crocheted throw,” clarifies the singer, George). It was both refreshing and bewildering, watching an understated bunch of noisemakers rocking random home furnishings and seriously awesome facial hair (see guitarist Dan’s beard), spewing feedback and ragged hooks without the slightest hint of pretentiousness or self-consciousness. That sort of uncomplicated, unassuming performance is a rare occurrence here in London – perhaps it’s Nottingham’s distinct lack of cutthroat competition. “No one in Nottingham really cares about being better than other Midlands cities,” says other guitarist James “whereas in Leicester and Derby they’ve got a real competitive, anti-Nottingham sort of attitude.” So what’s going on in Nottingham that gets the rest of the Midlands so worked up? “There’s the local music scene that has ambitions to make a Nottingham band famous and only ever put Nottingham bands on, as if they’re the best bands in the world, but then, we promote shows in Nottingham [under the name New Weird Nottingham] and we aren’t really part of that local scene; there are loads of great bands from outside Nottingham – British bands – and we bring them to Nottingham.” There’s also Liars Club, which has been going for seven years and has a similar, open-minded approach to booking bands. None of the members of Prize Pets are locals, born and bred, but come from a peculiar mix of backgrounds. “When I was sixteen I played in a band called the
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Shadows,” drummer Joe announces nonchalantly. “Cliff Richard and the Shadows,” which is apparently one of those casual facts he drops into a conversation and, just as casually, doesn’t choose to expand on. “Yeah, there you go.” Dan and James are even more evasive: George: “You guys do stuff together, don’t you.” Dan and James, in unison: “Yeah.” “A few years ago, I was in a hardcore punk power-violence band called Kamikaze,” offers George in his calm, smooth, decidedly not hardcore-deathspew voice. “We released some seven inch stuff, it was kind of short lived – That was with some friends [Mike and Shaun] who are in Lovvers now.” “We always find it strange when people say that we’re ex members of Kamikaze or The Snails because probably no one knows about those bands,” says George, explaining that it’s likely that the only people who would have heard of these ex bands would be friends and people from Nottingham, and even then, the translation is essentially, ‘Ex members of a band you maaaaybe saw three years ago. Once. Along with the ten other people who were there.’ Regardless of how involved Prize Pets are in the local scene, they say these references, albeit vague, are a good way of letting friends know that they’ve started a new band, even if previous ventures have had little-to-no influence on their current sound. In a peculiar twist, however, there are undeniable similarities between the punked out fuzz rock of Lovvers and Prize Pets’ scuzzy, postpunk garage. Joe puts it down to the “Guitar twangy, reverby… thing,” not sounding particularly convinced. “Some of our newer songs sound like their older songs,” George concedes “and we’ve both had the Flipper reference.” His theory is that they have been friends for ages and have simi-
lar tastes, coming from the same place, musically, but any suggestions that Lovvers’ music has influenced Prize Pets’ sound are gently dismissed. ‘Guitar twangy, reverby thing’ aside, they all agree that it’s hard to put a finger on what kind of sound their band makes. “We don’t think that we’re doing something new,” says George frankly, though it’s highly unlikely anyone who listened to them would think so anyway, not if that particular person had ever heard of The Fall. “Yeah, we get compared to The Fall a lot, which we find really strange… We get the Fall thing all the time,” George frowns. From an outsider’s point of view, it’s not a strange comparison at all; the jerky, double-jointed guitar riffs, sneer/mutter vocal rants and pistol shot drum beats all seem cut from the right brand of post-punk cloth, although the similarity does seem a bit odd when Joe admits that he’s not particularly familiar with The Fall. “It went quiet for a bit,” George continues. “We thought it had gone away, that maybe we’d ditched that but it keeps coming back.” They say they’ve also been compared to California punk band Flipper, which certainly ticks the boxes for feedback and gnarled vocals, though Prize Pets’ sound lacks that punky knuckle-dragging weight, being a two-guitar, nil-bass outfit. There have been a few Cramps references as well, most likely referring to the band’s retro, somewhat surfy vibe, as well as a hint of the deranged in the lyrical delivery. Then there’s the B52’s – “But not ‘Love Shack’ B52’s,” they hasten to add – which, again, is surely a reference stemming from the quirky speak/sing aspect and twisted vintage sound. “I get some weird frontman ones,” says George “like Brian Ferry,” he laughs. “I was hoping that meant early Roxy Music Brian Ferry…” “Another review said you
sounded like Ian Curtis,” Dan points out. “A demented Ian Curtis,” he corrects himself. Prize Pets’ overall sound was described as ‘shambolic lo-fi’ by one publication. “That was probably just a bad show,” they laugh. “Or, no, it was that guy who hates us!” All four start trying to recall quotes from the review. “We were too studied in something… or too amateur…” “You’d think he’d give us a bit of a break, it was only our third or fourth show,” comments George. The band only started practicing in June and had a gig lined up before they’d even rehearsed properly. The result was a ten-minute set, which was mostly them warming up – “It took us about three songs to warm up and we only had four.” Prize Pets could have spent the first six months just practicing but they reason that they would have been completely sick of their songs by the time it came to performing them. Instead, they tend to play songs live before they’re even finished. “We’re quite eager, aren’t we?” says George, while James acknowledges that songs have a habit of changing every time they are played. He admits that this might not necessarily be the right way to go about things, but no one in the band seems particularly concerned about that – “We’ve played every song we’ve ever made up,” says James. And yet they say they’ve had the crowd calling for one in particular – well, one person was calling for it anyway – and someone’s already covered one of their tracks: a Casio electro version, which the band find both flattering and perplexing. It sounds like, whether they identify with the local Nottingham scene or not, Prize Pets are very much a part of it, not as natives, but as a group of musicians hoping to improve it, open it up and have fun while they’re at it. They admit that it’s hard work, playing and promoting in such a small, self-contained scene but, “It’s better than Derby and Leicester, anyway.”
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divorce ...and we thought metal belonged in biker bars and Camden chambers Photographer: LEON D I APER Writer: S I AN ROWE
“Some metal bands like Mastadon, so they sound like Mastadon,” says Andy, explaining how Divorce formed without any one style of music in mind “but being a copycat is pointless. We just wanted to make a noise.” The Glasgow five-piece – Andy (Browntown) [drums] is joined by Sinead Youth [vocals], Hillary Van Scoy [guitar and vocals], VSO [bass] and Vickie MacDonald [guitar] – have been doing things their own way since 2008. They mix ferocious vocals discovered by accident on their sixth practice, with the scathing sound of Jesus Lizard, Shellac or Drive Like Jehu. “Yeah, we all bring our own tastes to the group,” adds bassist VSO. “Man, I just wanted to be Fleetwood Mac.” Fast forward a couple of hours and they’re being just that, slamming their way through a high energy, suped-up version of ‘The Chain’. The London crowd - arguably the band’s home away from home - go crazy. There’s a dedicated circle pit getting sweaty and pogoing while a few onlookers dance on chairs. Stuffed onto the venue’s boxlike stage (we’re at The Stag’s Head, Dalston… again!), Divorce don’t care that the lights have broken, half the sound has cut and somebody has started waving candles. After all, they’ve seen it all before, especially since starting 2010 with a sold out show at their home city’s famous Optimo club night. “Argh, that Optimo show was weird,” laughs Sinead. “We were surrounded by loads of crazy electronic and bass shit and there were loads of people just off their face on pills, walking by and going, ‘what the fuck is this?’.” Just hearing them speak – they cut each other off, jump on the end of sentences, dissolve into laughter as they recall weirder and weirder moments – makes it easy to imagine. “They were asking us questions while we were playing!” Sinead continues. “And there were these bemused and eckied punters everywhere. The
security guards lined up along the front because folk were losing their shit. Then a bit of the roof fell in and there was a total moshpit.” It turns out even the DJ’s aren’t safe when Divorce decide to let loose. “Ha Ha, yeah, a couple of people got given time-outs and they had to go and stand in the corner because it’s a council run building and all ‘Health and Safety’. One guy, Johnny Wilkes, got thrown out of his own night for moshing too hard.” The show was played alongside dance-dub producer Hudson Mohawke, dancefloor creep The Niallist and one-man freak band Drums of Death, known to his friends as Colin. “He played just before us,” they explain “so there was this guy wearing skull make-up just jumping around in the crowd. From my vantage point it was freaking me out,” remembers Sinead. “It was really scary.” They were scared? Divorce, for all their sweetness in person, get vicious on stage. “Well, we were kind of expecting it to fall on deaf ears,” reasons Andy. They’re more likely to be the ones doing the deafening. The band are a core part of the country’s increasingly diverse and very noisy music community, having released tracks with warehouse-based tape label Club Milk and Scotland’s independent Optimo Records earlier this year. But the latter label has announced they’ll be stopping operation this summer, marking the end of an era in Glaswegian DIY. The band, who say that all change is positive, see it as the next logical step. “For ages in Glasgow it was a little bit shit and everyone was being boring at gigs,” explains VSO “but in the last four years or so there have been new DIY promoters, kids putting on parties, cool collectives and other stuff like that. You’ll see folk that turn up to most gigs. We’ve got a really good support network.” And like that Optimo Hogmany,
Divorce pride themselves on playing shows with bands of any genre. The “kids putting on parties” aren’t just hammering guitars – Ultimate Thrush’s calculated hardcore, Kode9’s dark dub and Mohawke’s glittering production slot in alongside Chemikal Underground, Rock Action and, of course, the city’s two indie pop giants. “The biggest bands in Glasgow are still Belle and Sebastian and Franz Ferdinand,” says Andy “so there were a lot of bands trying to follow their lead. But that died a death after a while and now there are a lot of people doing what they want. It’s refreshing…” Sinead interrupts. “You’ll play with your friends’ bands but you’ll sound different and nobody will care as long as you’re good,” she says. “As long as you’re not a fanny!” concludes Andy. Perhaps geographical location isn’t important to Divorce anyway. They’ve found kindred spirits in LA zoot-horn enthusiasts HEALTH and London’s Comanechi, with whom they’ll soon release a split record with via Merok. They jokingly created their own genre, ‘Nae Wave’, to escape any strict labelling, even if the near all-female line up has them thrown in with the riot grrls and their punk rock ethos has had them lazily labelled as just that. “It’s nice to get out of that thing where there is a bill of four bands that are all sounding exactly the same. I like to go to a show and hear something I didn’t expect to,” says Sinead, explaining why she thinks the shift towards more liberal booking policies at venues is helping a band like Divorce find an audience. “But there is definitely a common thread,” adds Andy. “Artistically they’re all really independently minded and stick to their guns. We might not sound like these people musically but definitely ethically, you know...” But why do they think that
is? If their lineage isn’t geographic, and isn’t stylistic, what is it? Are they really about just breaking stuff? “No!” says Andy. “When I start talking to my sisters about what I’m doing or why we’re doing it, I feel like I have to do back-story and backstory and back-story, and it almost gets to the point where you have to start at the start of music itself to try and explain to get to the point that we’re making. You can see their eyes glazing over and a faint smile of disinterest...” Guitarist Hillary has an idea. “We’re from a lineage of...bands who try to please themselves,” she says “who don’t want to make ‘accepted’ things. And I think it’s good that we’re not setting down any kind of stones in history. It’s just up for grabs whatever happens.” What’s happening sounds pretty exciting. They’ve been making friends and winning fans quickly, evident in the number of shows they get asked to play. Next month they’ll visit Belgium to play a festival curated by San Francisco-born Deerhoof who fell in love with their music after playing with them in Edinburgh last December. Nathan Howdeshell, of The Gossip wanders over to berate them (“He’s got the Heroin!” they say “Put that in!”), a friend since meeting when his band were in London. After the tour they’ll record a full length record at a friends analogue studio, The Green Door. It’s Do it Yourself music on a grander scale than just posting zines and tapes. “Aye, everyone has a friend who can sort stuff out for them now,” says VSO. “I guess it’s because everybody is hooking up a bit more because of ‘social networking’,” adds Sinead. So they’re iAlbini? Fleetwood Mac 2.0? “Or, we’re just noisy dorks,” says Andy. “But it’s cool to be a music dork.... isn’t it? Or are we completely unacceptable?”
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beat y heart With three drummers out of four members, it’s BEATY Heart for a reason Photographer: HOLLY LUCAS Writer: I AN ROEBUCK
Bands sound like they look. A bit like dogs having similar chops to their owners, it’s an unexplained phenomenon but it actually works – none more so than Beaty Heart as watching the four friends bounding through the streets of Soho is tantamount to a collage of sound, all calypso beats and crazy tribal trousers. “It’s a bit lazy to say tribal in relation to our sound but it’s a word that keeps cropping up,” says Tom, one of the three drummers in the band, although with that many people banging away it’s easy to see why the word ‘tribal’ yields easy association. The tight-knit group all seem to belong in the same gang too, “the three of us kind of bonded over drumming, we were all drummers in a few bands before so it’s us and a semi guitarist,” says James pointing at Josh. “Yeah, more like a third of a guitarist,” laughs Josh. So their clothes and sound conjure up an African sensibility but have any of them actually been to the continent? “I lived in South Africa for almost 5 years,” says Josh. “I went travelling around mostly the southern part, well only the southern part. So, Mozambique,
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Namibia, Botswana; these trousers are from Mozambique.” He points out his gaudy slacks with considerable pride. “I went back over Christmas and loved it, there’s a definite buzz about the place; lots of people are worrying about the World Cup though.” A competition that brings the world together in an entertaining mess, it’s got to be a pleasurable thing for Beaty Heart. “We could watch it in 3D and stock up on those glasses,” says Charlie, his towering frame coupling up nicely with plenty of charisma. “I like that Soccer City place in Johannesburg too, it looks like a spaceship”. It’s an unhinged point of view that’s part and parcel of the band, and it slides in well with a sound somewhat detached from reality. Its not just tribal beats that thud through each track – ghostly samples and uplifting melodies pepper the music as well. “We are into Caribbean rhythms too and they add to the samples we use, there is much more than one part and the live drums just add something, it’d be boring with just samples.” Boring they aint. Blessed with an innate, contagious sense of fun, they all have artistic
tendencies that spill into more than just music. Camberwell Crypt inspired the band to curate a night called Cola. “The Crypt’s been used for jazz for years so its kind of new for the people of Camberwell to do this,” explains Charlie. “They go passed the church but don’t realise there’s this underground world, it’s lovely.” But why Cola? “I’m quite into my fonts and type,” he continues “and Cola just really stood out. Doing the flyer was fun and we all thought it was great for the night.” “A bit vaginal” adds Tom, and if you’ve seen the artwork then maybe you’ll know why. So are the band obsessed with an all singing and dancing American institution like Cola? Their first track up on Myspace was named the same thing. “Nah,” they say. “We were going to call it afri-cola after a German drink that sounds nice. We think as a word its aesthetically pleasing but also got a good ring to it. It’s a fruity track”. Awash with visual influences involving mostly fruit; the guys are also inspired by unlikely musical sources. All four have similar taste and admire such bands as Gang Gang Dance and
Brooklyn based New Yoga, but it’s the older records in their collection where the interest lies. “I listen to a lot of gospel,” says Tom. “I kind of like the idea behind it and I’d like to bring that across into our music.” “The togetherness,” adds Charlie by way of explanation. This isn’t perhaps as surprising as it sounds, a Beaty Heart gig can be a spiritual moment. “Yeah, perhaps, that kind of music was born out of recession and that’s what we’ve just been going through,” reasons Josh. Tom: “It’s more how a lot of the early gospel from the first half of the century sounds really twisted and alien.” Their ability to bond a crowd through balls to the wall fun is a poorly kept secret. Having played some much talked about gigs around Goldsmiths (where they all reside during daylight), and some wild house parties South East London way, a bigger stage awaits. “We played at a house party in New Cross where we gave our drums out to the crowd, handed them all to everyone and they played them for about half an hour,” laughs Josh. “Until the police turned up.”
pipes Named after the scariest shit you’ll ever see (Youtube it!) Photographer: k elda ho le Writer: D K . Go ldstei n
The warehouse we find Pipes in is what you’d imagine every Dalston dwelling to look like; it is the epitome of kitsch. While we wait for the hob kettle to whistle we take in the mismatched clutter, and although everything is ostentatious alone, slung together it forms a magpie’s paradise. To look at the trio of unassuming mid-twenty-year-olds you’d never have placed them in this setting. “We’re from Dalston but we’re not lo-fi wankers. We can actually play,” Chris, the drummer of the troupe, enthuses. “I think the basics of being in a band have been forgotten,” explains Luke [vocals/bass]. “Playing live to people and being quite tight, even though it’s punky. We pretend we don’t give a shit but actually we do, and we purposefully try to write songs that have little hooks in them because I think it makes for a more pleasing experience.” Stemming from Chesterfield (Chris), Coventry (Luke) and Guildford (Tom, guitar) the boys met via a Drowned in Sound ad and a couple of girls. “I’d answered a few [ads] before over the years,” Tom starts, enlightening us. “I was playing with this Australian guy called Dan who’s a bit macho but it
didn’t work out. He used to just smoke weed and pound weights.” Then, Chris explains, they needed a bass player, which is when Luke came into the mix. “I was originally gonna live with Luke,” he says “and two girls but the girls couldn’t get their shit together, so we thought ‘fuck it’, and went to live elsewhere.” It wasn’t until a year later that the two were back in touch. Luke tells us that he never intended to sing, but when they were jamming out their first song, ‘Juried Art Show’, they realized it didn’t sound quite right. “It needed a bit of vocals,” says Luke. “It is always the music, though,” Chris interjects. “We start off writing the music, we’re not really a lyrics band.” In ‘Juried…’ a layer of minimalist grime is taken from Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster, which makes the eerie drone of vocals a lot scuzzier before they morph into a screaming cacophony. Another track, ‘Mosquito’, carries a murmur of David Byrne with languid bass lines (think ‘Psycho Killer’), while singleworthy track, ‘How I Killed Your Mother’ smarts of Gang of Four funk-riffs. For want of a better word, they ‘twang’, and not in
the sullied, deadpan, uninspired monotony of the good-for-nothing indie band way - this is a razor-sharp kind of twang. Despite recording these and more tracks with ex-Test-Icicle, Rory Atwell, and having been together for almost a year, the boys still haven’t released anything, but they promise a split cassette with London foursome Colours is in the pipeline. Among common influences such as Shellac, Melvins and Refused, Luke informs us that he also has a soft spot for David Icke. “My brother introduced me to him about two years ago,” he utters. “He’s an ex-Coventry City goal keeper and must have had a ball to the head really hard because he wrote all these books about politics being ruled by reptilian Jews and went around the world campaigning for ‘the truth’.” His interest branches from a curiosity of people who dedicate their lives to a passion like the paranormal, and extends to their track, ‘David Icke’s Childhood Kite’. “It doesn’t really reference him, it’s just stuff that rhymes with that. But I think the point is, if you ever read any of David Icke’s stuff, the fact that he had a childhood kite shows how far
removed from flying that kite people can get.” And as for the name? Chris can make light of that one. “I want that DVD back,” he says immediately, pointing accusingly at Luke, who starts laughing before Chris begins. “It’s from a film called Ghostwatch, which is my favourite TV programme ever. It’s got Craig Charles, Michael Parkinson and Sarah Green investigating a haunted house and the ghost in it is called Pipes. It starts off quite dodgy, but half way through something happens and you think, ‘fucking hell, that’s absolutely terrifying’. There’s this scene where the camera pans round and the ghost is stood in front of it but when the camera whips round again it’s not there. I watched it at uni, so I was about 22 and I shat myself, and I consider myself quite a macho…” Laughter drowns him out as he sits looking surprised in his thick specs and Christmas jumper. “Obviously, looking at me, I’m not,” he concludes “but this really terrified me. It turns out – and this isn’t going to ruin anything – that the ghost turns out to be a child molester who has his eyes gouged out by cats. So yeah, Pipes, that’s where Pipes is from.”
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GIVING US (Balti) MORE Writer: STUART STU B B S
If Baltimore is the world’s commune for post-hardcore activity, and electro cartoon nut Dan Deacon the local Messiah, Double Dagger are the city’s most exuberant punks who play with the urgency of At The Drive-In and intelligence of Mission of Burma
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In the late 70s/early 80s, New York was a one-stop-shop, first for US punk, and then for new wave. On the other side of the country hardcore was inspired by and then disgusted by the east coast. LA – and then DC – was (and to an extent still is) the Promised Land for aggressive, uncompromising, vigilantly un-commercial DIY rock. For today’s post-hardcore crowd, Baltimore, Maryland, is the Mecca – a tightly knit creative community like few others, centred by Technicolor’d, experimental gnome Dan Deacon and his Wham City arts collective. From the bonkers, kiddy babble of Ponytail to the desperately emotional organ sounds of Future Islands, the city houses every clever and passionate strand of modern American DIY, and in Double Dagger the scene has found post-hardcore’s most urgent, least nostalgic (their new EP, ‘Masks’, starts with a song called ‘Imitation is the Most Boring Form of Flattery’) party band. “How to say this without sounding like a jerk,” ponders singer (read: ranter) Nolen Strais. “Errr…there’s just way too many bands whose whole thing is ripping off the past and being a carbon copy of it.With Double Dagger we definitely have our influences; we take them and try to do
something new with it, but meanwhile a lot of contemporary bands are just mimics. It’s brainless and ultimately heartless.” “It’s one thing to do something within a style or genre,” adds Bruce Willen [bass] “but there’s so many musicians – or artists, even; it’s not limited just to music – who are a pastiche of someone from 4 years ago or 10 years ago. ‘Hey, we’ve got the clothes.We’re even gonna dress the same as these guys!’,” he mocks. “It’s weird!” It’s certainly weird enough for Nolen to take a swipe at around ‘Imitation…’’s halfway point – “And look at you, you’ve even got the clothes,” he half speaks with no uncertain amount of disgust. In their 8-year-long career, it’s quite possibly Double Dagger’s best track yet, perhaps because it so neatly sums up their ethos of originality (it also features the defiant opening line, This is an address to the unhealthy state of the union. And: We’re stuck in a cycle of regurgitation/All the ideas of another generation. AND: We discovered the best way to mass affection is to repeat the best parts of your record collection). Nolen’s clever rhymes that carry his astute dislikes are a result of him listening to hip hop as a source of inspiration; Lil’Wayne and a handful of others being the only new music he listens
to, which is unsurprising considering how the band feel about rock’n’roll copyists of today. Double Dagger are forever being compared to past hardcore and punk bands though, and not unfairly.The At The DriveIn nod is particularly appropriate, considering the band’s abrasive delivery, and likening them to those found on Dischord Records’ impressive roster is not far from the truth either. “It’s somewhat irritating,” says drummer Denny Bowen who joined the band in 2004 “but it doesn’t really change what we do. As much as people say we sound like a band like Fugazi, none of us actively listen to them, but we take it as a compliment because they’re a band that receives a lot of reverence and good praise, y’know? But what we’re making happen is truly original. I feel it is.” They make a lot of noise for a band without a guitarist. Bruce swapped his sixstring instrument for four after his and Nolen’s previous band split and made way for Double Dagger.They were a heavy metal band called League of Death… obviously. “We weren’t evil or talented enough for heavy metal…” says Bruce. “So we mainly fell down a lot, broke
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Double Dagger’s latest record, ‘Masks’, comes with Three differently illustrated covers.
equipment and ran at the audience,” adds Nolen. “And slapped my ass,” says Denny to titters. He clearly went to a particularly friendly League of Death show. Bruce: “It was a dark and evil band but that wasn’t even the music we were listening to. Double Dagger was a move to playing music that we actually liked, and it seemed that it wasn’t necessary to have a guitar. It made writing songs a challenge. Like, ‘how do we make this pop-punk or whatever and do something that isn’t just a bass-line but the essence of the melody?’” Like Minor Threat (DD comparison 103), they make music that is surprisingly melodic when you consider how loud they play and that Nolen pretty much talks the verses and shouts the chorus parts. On 2009’s ‘More’ LP (the band’s third full album) their ability to be aggressively rallying and positively melodious is best shown through ‘The Lie/The Truth’; a song on which the band dust off the quiet/loud/quiet Pixies formula and sing about the mundanity of small town life in the States. Like the delicate instrumental that closes ‘Masks’ (‘Song For 5’), it shows that the band are capable of expressing emotions beyond frustration and anger. “I guess it is a different side,” blushes Bruce “the non-aggressive side of Double Dagger.We’re sensitive guys too,” he laughs. “On our early stuff, I was angry and complaining,” says Nolen. “And that’s what every punk band does, but doing that over and over just gets boring and stale, and as I’m getting older I’ve started looking at things in a more complexed and nuanced way. I think there’s still a good bit of frustration at the root of the lyrical themes but I consciously have tried to not wallow in that anger.” “‘Masks’ is full of façades,” explains Bruce. “Like, ‘Imitation is the Most Boring
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Form of Flattery’ is about putting up this fake façade and then on ‘Pillow Talk’ there’s this theme of being too scared to say what you’re really feeling, and etc etc, and there’s a lot of that in Nolen’s lyrics.”
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he more you listen to Double Dagger – and the further you delve into their lives – the more you realise that they’re full of contradictions.They’re from the ashes of a metal band that slapped bums; they’re angry but poignant; a blur of urgent noise but full of moments of clarity.Their Myspace address is /doubledaggersucks, which isn’t true. Even their name is a ying-yang affair. It’s no League of Death, but ‘Double Dagger’ would still make an awesome looking trucker’s tattoo if written in the right curly, jagged, black font. It still sounds tough.The thing is, the band is actually named after the symbol that marks a third literary footnote (the first, school leavers, being an asterix [*], the second a dagger [†], and the third finally being the double dagger [‡], which you’ll find on the band’s T-shirts), and punctuation is not tough. “That is definitely intentional,” admits Bruce. “It’s just a funny juxtaposition that
you have this tough sounding name but it’s actually this footnote – this obscure, typographic, literary, dictionary reference.” “Yeah, it’s tongue-in-cheek,” nods Nolen. “Like, the band from the outset we considered to be this minor element, this footnote.” But 8 years, 3 albums and 7 single/EPs on it’s not. Surely Double Dagger don’t equate to a footnote these days – and a third footnote at that. “Hell no!” yells Denny to more bursts of laughter. “We definitely never thought that we’d have a record out on a well known indie label,” muses Bruce of the band signing to Chicago’s trustworthy Thrill Jockey imprint (Mi Ami, High Places). “And we never thought we would be going on tour in Europe.We never had big plans.We just wanted to have fun.” True to the band’s quiet/loud pulse, Bruce and Nolen hold down day jobs you’d not expect two Baltimore punks to. Bussing tables, working in a garage, menial admin or grave digging all seem like suitable moneyspinners for angry, creative hardcore types. Ian McKaye worked in a cinema booth for five years and hated every second of it, rather fittingly. Bruce and Nolen own their own graphic design company called Post
“We weren’t evil enough for the world of heavy metal so we mainly broke a lot of equipment ”
Typography and have been commissioned by the New York Times before now, along with other high profile clients. It’s just another opposing side to Double Dagger – the band that make and play heart-pounding, noisy, righteous punk by night and draw in an office, sometimes for mainstream America, by day. “I’m unsensible enough for all three of us,” laughs Denny in reassurance. “I don’t think it’s weird,” says Nolen “it’s more surreal. A couple of years ago we spoke at an event that was supposed to inspire students to go into the field of design and illustration. And that evening we got invited to this dinner party with these big named celebrities in the design field, but the band had a show that night so instead of being at the dinner we played a show in an underground punk bar.” Double Dagger’s hardcore attitude has never been in doubt, and if anything Post Typography solidifies it. Choosing a basement show with your band over work is easy when it means missing four dollars an hour flipping burgers, but Bruce and Nolen have – in true Baltimore style – artistic, selfmade careers going on, and yet more often than not they still opt for straining their voices from within the sixth row (Nolen avoids the stage as if it’s cursed) and thrashing out agitated guitar-less punk. In the recently released ‘Masks’ – a 5track EP that they see as a continuation of last year’s ruthlessly quick ‘More’ – Double Dagger have neither courted nor run away from those Dischord Records comparisons, which still, thankfully, stand up. But they have given us an opportunity to catch our breath on songs like the lyrically sparse ‘Sleeping With The TV On’ and ‘Song For 5’, and in those moments it is not hard to see that, in the world of post-hardcore, they’re as original as they wish to be.
SXSW unofficiated
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Jonas stein does his vampire bat thing
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Girls aloud enjoy some ‘down time’
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fucked up’s pink eyes and his famed bunny impression
Photographer: P oon eh Gh ana
The idea that you need to buy a ticket to enjoy all the year’s biggest new music showcase has to offer is a myth that Posy Dixon is all too happy to dispell 01
If you can depend on the music industry for one thing, it’s an insatiable enthusiasm for any kind of expensable get together, especially one that warrants a healthy dose of travel, networking, and drinking on the company card. Austin’s SXSW is definitely up there in the heavy weight league of work-meetspleasure annual industry obligations. Half conference/ half festival, what started as a show-case for emerging talent has morphed into a minotaur of live music that pillages the town of Austin, Texas, at the end of every March, bringing over 1900 bands from 55 countries together for a four day music marathon. Like most festivals, tickets are on sale, which in this case gain you access to a plethora of official ‘showcases’ hosted by labels, promoters and media
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groups where you can catch a glimpse of all the official SXSW bands, from Hole and Megadeath to the ‘next big thing’ (Surfer Blood, Surfer Blood, sodding Surfer Blood). Predictably these tickets cost a small fortune, so tend only to be purchased by those wielding a company credit card. Luckily for us mortal Switch card holders, the whole ticketing idea slightly backfired, as with so many bands, boozers and backlines in one city, it didn’t take people long to take matters into their own hands and start putting on ‘unofficial shows’ in every bar, car park and back yard within sniffing distance of downtown Austin. Today SXSW exists in a chaotic state of glory; an unruly land of the free. The four day program of music sprawls across the city,
seemingly uncoordinated or controlled by any higher body, yet coming together to create one almighty multi-genre, multivenue, mostly free festival. So, after 4 sweaty Tex Mex, beery Austin days here’s the lowdown of the highlights of SXSW unofficial style – all of the below provided for your pleasure for absolutely zero pounds. ‘think outside the box’ settings One of the things that SXSW is famous for is its eclectic assortment of venues. Lack of space and desire to stand out from the masses has forced promoters to resourceful measures when selecting potential gig locations, the results of which fluctuate between awesome and abysmal. Topping the blissful venue stakes is the French Legislation
Museum, an Austin Historical landmark building, erected by some cocky French dude in the 1840s on 22 acres of lavish landscaped gardens. Within these tranquil settings the unofficial Garden Party and Lawn Party rescue souls from the chaos and filth of Downtown, this year treating a sun-basking crowd to sets from The xx, First Aid Kit, Woods and Thurston Moore. Another legendary spot (on the opposite end of the chillout scale) is the Lamar Foot Bridge, a narrow pedestrian bridge that spans Lake Lady Bird, where three years ago some bright cookie decided to launch a gorilla late night show at 3am. Fucked Up and No Age graced the inaugural event in 2008 and since then at least one bridge show has kicked off each year. Unannounced, spread only by the late night rumour mill, the
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music is pretty much unfathomable as a mass of kids crawl, climb, crowd surf and riot over the bridge till sunrise. After a few false calls Thee Oh Sees were this years suspended headliners, throwing down a 50-minute set to a deranged crowd as the bridge bounced up and down in time to the stomping garage rock. comically shit locations The other result of resourcefulness and the DIY vibe is the mass of entirely inappropriate and ill-equipped spaces commandeered for the festival. Pretty much any plot of solid ground passes for a venue, if a backline (of sorts) and some power can be harnessed. This years top DIY venues included a lopsided, threelegged ex-army issue tent popped on the side of the freeway outside a fried chicken shop, the wind swept parking lot of an Ethiopian restaurant and the back garden of a quiet family pizza parlour on the outskirts of town. We watch Lovvers utilising an array of upside-down plant pots for drum stands, local rising stars Bad Sports play ‘sans microphone’ to a handful of tweakers in some dive bar on the wrong side of the tracks, and an array of cut power supplies, broken mics and near electrocutions. These shows sure cut the wheat from the chaff and it’s in these conditions we see some of the best performances of the week, Audacity and Bad Sports being two of the finest. bands ‘getting creative’ Over SXSW most bands will play anywhere between three and twenty shows. Their solo ‘official showcase’ (attended by the industry folk, swigging bloody marys and wiggling wands of destiny) will be the one that
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‘matters’, whereas the four, five, six or sixteen other shows they play serve only to spread seed, blaster reputation and keep everyone present entertained. Let loose from the repetition of tour, ticket sales, venues and promoters, many bands unleash some of the loosest shows they will play all year, trying out new material, experimenting with ill-rehearsed covers and breaking down the crowd/band barrier whenever possible. The pressure is low and the atmosphere is party – and you get a real feeling that as much fun is being had on stage as off. Day one we watch Fucked Up play on the porch outside Beerland in the centre of town. Spilling onto the street they draw a huge crowd of both fans and passers by, reduced to covers as a few of the key players struggle to navigate their instruments due to the amount of weed consumed that evening. The sound is primitive and the band are in pieces, but
no one cares as the sun is shining and people are jumping around in the street which is pretty much what SXSW is all about. Similar enactments are seen at Mohawk, where Jonas Stein climbs the scaffolds during Turbo Fruit’s set, finishing a song dangling like a bat from the rafters. Later Ty Seagall’s entire band join Jeff the Brotherhood on stage. Three to a drum kit they beat the shit out of their gear before throwing it into the crowd, who kindly pass it towards the open back door. Load-out done the easy way. guilty pleasure Cease the moment; the sheer size of SXSW and general confused/ drunk/exhausted state that the majority of attendees spend their week in creates the perfect guise for nipping off to watch one of those bands you’ve always wanted to see but have been too embarrassed, proud or skint to buy a ticket to go to. SXSW unofficial - your chance to see all that shit for free.
Top guilty pleasure shows of 2010 included Gwar at the MXTX stage (arse cheeks out, fake blood spurting out of nipples – yay alien metal, we love you) and Andrew WK (again lame, but ‘Party Hard’ just won’t wear thin). Perez Hilton’s (a serious guilty pleasure himself) annual ‘One Night in Austin’ party ticked many a box offloading Macy Gray, Estelle and fucking Snoop Dog onto a braying crowd of D listers. House parties... Ain’t no party like a SXSW house party… some advertised in the unofficial listings, others spread only by word of mouth. Hosts range from record labels with lavish rented ranches to sixteen-year old kids whose parents have unwittingly left town on the wrong weekend. Either way these masochists open up their homes to the masses, boasting one night line-ups that would fill an Upset The Rhythm rota for a month or two. In a two bedroom bungalow (complete with kegs, beige three piece suite and kids spewing in the hedgerow) we balance on a window ledge to watch Eternal Tapestry, Pocahaunted and Real Estate play to a living room at 2am. At the other end of the scale a few miles out of town, eco label Green Owl have rented a Texan Ranch, complete with sleeping barn and swimming pools. Each night their ecofriendly Castor Oil bus shuttles friends, strangers and stragglers alike from bars in town out to the Green Owl Ranch where the party goes through the night till the sun calls out for breakfast burritos. So there you have it, SXSW, party hard and party free. Save your pennies for a flight to Texas next year and join the ultimate freeloaders festival.
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chickenhawk Leeds shredders talk budget zombie videos, big tours and surviving one hell of a car crash Photographer: BART PETTM AN Writer: K ATE PARK I N
‘Chickenhawk’ is a word with a multitude of meanings, from American political insult to gay slander for men with a predilection for young men, yikes! Sat outside on the freezing cold steps of Leeds Art gallery, backed by the noise of night time traffic, the band try and make sense of it all. Surrounded by groups of chavs harassing a dog, it’s not the ideal interview venue, the band passing their one jumper round between them for warmth. Starting things off Rob explains: “There’s a running joke that I only listen to bands beginning with D. Like Dillinger Escape Plan, Danny Elfman (of Simpsons theme song fame), Dream Theatre.” The others laugh in the background as he struggles to keep a straight face. “You thought I was lying didn’t you?!” Chickenhawk have been together as a four piece for two years. Drummer Matt Reid joined after his former band Whores Whores Whores split. The bands name came from graffiti found in the basement of their old practice room. Singer/guitarist Paul Astick, bass player Ryan Clark and guitarist Robert Stephens formed the band in 2004 following a jamming session; Matt replaced Paul on the drums. The Leeds scene they inhabit is currently coming alive, with local bands like Pulled Apart By
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Horses, Dinosaur Pile Up and Castrovalva reaching varying degrees of success. A recent appearance on Mike Davies’ Punk Show has raised their profile, but Chickenhawk are keen to not let it go to their heads. Paul explains: “I don’t think you get played at the BBC and then you go and play a stadium. We’re gearing up for a lot of hard work. I think that you don’t want to be in a situation where your playing to the mainstream media and somehow it’s completely wrong.” Last year’s EP, ‘A or Not’, featuring the epic jarring riffs of ‘I Hate This, Do You Like It?’, garnered rave reviews, with Steve Lamacq describing it as containing “the Beechers brook of guitar solos.” Ryan comments: “Luckily I manage to pull it off every time, so it’s a good job!” “Yeah, he’s a riff jockey,” laughs Paul. “Riff jockey meets fret jockey!” Recently the band took the huge step of jacking in their day jobs to commit to the band full time. The catalyst happened several years ago when the band were involved in a car crash. Their trailer was hit by an oncoming lorry, tipping the car over. Luckily everyone escaped without serious injury, but it came pretty close. “My shoulder went through the window, cutting it all,”
explains Matt. “I’ve got a dirty great scar now, it looks like Zorro!” “It makes you look like a robot!” says Ryan. Matt: “We were on our way back to Leeds. Not the last day of the tour, but the last day of us having to be in that godforsaken fucking people carrier.” Ryan concludes: “It was a life-affirming thing basically. It made us sit up and ask why we were doing it.” Their videos are like mini feature films that see them battle zombies in ‘I Hate This…’ and journey to outer space in ‘NASA VS ESA’. All shot on a meagre budgets using local extras and gangs of friends, with help from friend and NME/ Spin photographer Danny North. We’re keen to see what they have in store next. “3D!” says Matt. “We’ll do it 3D.” “I though we were going to do 1D?” questions Ryan. Matt: “Yeah, with just a line down the screen. I had an idea the other day…” As we enter a discussion about the merits of the various dimensions, I mention primitive computer game Pong. “That’s a good idea actually,” agrees Matt. “Yeah, we’ll have that.” Ryan: “With our faces instead of the pong bats!”
Rob (trying to explain to perplexed looking Paul): “It’s like that first tennis game… There was no planning in the zombies one,” he adds. “We just turned up and shit happened.” While recording is still in the early stages, Paul says, “The new album is coming, it’s just not coming yet.” The band are about to embark on a mammoth touring schedule too, including a BBC introducing showcase at King Tuts and The Garage with Trash Talk and Cancer Bats. “I’m looking forward to Offset,” says Ryan. “We went last year and helped Kong out, and it was a really nice, niche little festival. Camden Crawl, Great Escape, it’s all going to be new experiences. We’ve never really been on the circuit like this before. We just can’t wait to get out there and play really.” Later they play a ‘face-off’ gig, sharing the stage with fellow Leeds hardcore band Kong. All bias aside, in this particular battle between fowl and primate Chickenhawk emerge triumphant. Debuting new songs like the old-school Metallica riffage of ‘Scorpieau’, and alongside the scatter gunfire of ‘Bottle Rocket’, they leave the audience a sweaty, bloody mess. Sacking off the day jobs already seems like the right idea.
tUnE-yArDs The story of a real indie triumph – from a ‘pay what you like’ release to a million future possibilities Writer: STUART STUB B S
It’s not a sticky keyboard that continues to spell tUnE-yArDs thus, with alternating capital letters and a seemingly needless hyphen in the middle; it’s out of respect for Merrill Garbus – a musical artist with ideas so original and charmingly delivered that most music fans will hold down the shift key whenever it’s asked of them. It’s the least we can do considering tUnE-yArDs’ debut album ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’ – a patchwork quilt of an experimental record that weaves together hip hop rhythms, African vocals, show-tune theatrics and ukulele folk in super lo-fi but meticulously planned out fashion. As if she were Micachu’s more worldly, older sister, Merrill can (and does) turn household objects into percussive instruments. She records them on an average Sony Dictaphone and loops saucepan clanks and the like through free audio software on her laptop where she also stores found sounds and budget field recordings. Things have changed for Merrill since she first selfreleased ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’, though. A LOT. Without the financial support of a label, the Oaklandbased musician who’s always been environmentally aware (“I’m quite anti-pieces-ofunnecessary-plastic-in-theworld,” she says) would sell recycled tape cassettes of her first album at live shows and distribute a digital version via the Internet. The price was “whatever you like”, à la Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows’. But Radiohead could afford that gamble a lot more than a brand new artist.
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“It’s hard to remember why I did that because so much has happened in the past year,” says Merrill. “It was a side project to me so I didn’t expect anything of it. I felt a great freedom in how I could carve out the stakes for tUnE-yArDs, and the music industry in general.” The album, sold this way, made around $1000. Hardly a small fortune, but certainly a success, and the beginning of a huge triumph for experimental, independent musicians everywhere. The oddly typed word was out and before long Portland’s Marriage Records (then home to Dirty Projectors and Lucky Dragons) offered to release ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’ on limited 12” vinyl. Merrill took tUnEyArDs on the road with Dirty Projectors before musician’s label 4AD took note and offered to release the album for a third and fourth time, first on limited CD and then again including two bonus tracks. Merrill, who once swore never to become a musician, is today no less enthusiastic about releasing her eccentric, clattering pop in creative ways than she is by the prospect of producing it, but you have to ask, with labels queuing up to invest in the next tUnE-yArDs album, are they going to be overly keen on the ‘pay what you like’ model? “Yeah, that’s a really hard question,” admits Merrill. “I think in my search for whoever will release the next album that will be a big question for me – how are record labels dealing with the future? Because, yes, at the very least I would like to discuss [the donation model]. It’s a question of now the
situation has really changed for me – how much control do I really have? But as a musician I’d like to be at the forefront of the way that music will be distributed in the future.” Merrill could, of course, make the album unfunded again and simply wait for the labels to come knocking. They certainly would do. “You’re asking questions that are plaguing me every day,” she laughs. “I think a lot of artists right now are saying to themselves, ‘what does a label do for me?’. I mean, 4AD is amazing in a lot of ways, including the fact that I’m talking to you right now – that would have been very hard for me to co-ordinate on my own – but I do think that many artists are just confused. New musicians are in the position of needing to get someone’s attention, but whose attention do we need to get now? Do we really need the big shot labels? Where would my album have gone if I’d kept it as donations? There are interesting experiments that I’d like to try one day, if only to inspire or inform other artists. It’s a real bundle of questions for me.” Way before such tricky thoughts arose Merrill was a puppeteer (a neat analogy for a solo musician pondering how she can remain in complete control). She began to make music initially for her marionette shows, written and performed on a ukulele that her mother gave her – the same instrument that idyllically strums over a lot of ‘BiRd-BrAiN’’s layered chaos. “I had a sincere resentment towards puppets for a long time,” she says now of a time that saw her
music become her main focus, the puppets first relegated to sitting on her feet while she played before being discarded altogether. tUnE-yArDs – with no small amount of inspiration from Merrill’s puppeteering/theatre studying past – is a project that feeds on creativity and connection, from the fact that it started during her previous band’s quiet time (“I soon realised that I needed to be creating when the band weren’t playing,” she says) to how she hopes her fans relate to her
work. “I feel like with that donation model the audience feels some kind of ownership over their part in the process,” she reasons. “Everyone can get music for free – it’s impossible to stop that – but this connects the idea that an independent musician can be literally supported by fans. That comes across clearly when you ask for donations because when it’s a CD that’s been manufactured and sold by someone other than the artist there’s a distance between them and the audience.”
There’s a personable touch to ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’, though, that transcends the format you buy it in or which faceless Amazon staffer puts it in the post. The angelic ‘For You’ ends with Merrill talking to a toddler about blueberries. Whether she knows the small boy as his mother, aunty or an overfriendly stranger is unclear, but it definitely feels like a glimpse into her everyday world. The wiry honky-tonk rhythms and African wails of ‘Hatari’ are unmistakeably inspired by Merrill’s time spent in Kenya as
a child (a personal and happy time, and one that she’s keen to share); and there’s a playful, lawlessness that naively tiptoes through the entire album, dancing the right side of twee and making the whole thing extremely lovable. A quick sit-down with Merrill is just as enjoyable as dissecting the loops and oldskool hip-hop references she contorts into a fresh style of acoustic pop. She’s clearly quite overwhelmed by where she currently finds herself (Glastonbury calls in June, and
her first tour with a full band that’ll make her live show even more of an unexpected carnival than it already is), perhaps because none of this was ever planned. And tUnE-yArDs probably couldn’t exist as it does if Merrill had been hoping to sign to 4AD and tour the world. It’s a solo project propelled by innocence and charm, and more than enough innovation that has us respecting Merrill’s wishes to type tUnE-yArDs over and over. We wouldn’t even waste our time with an explanation mark at the end of Hadouken.
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In 2009 Fuck Buttons became the surprise alt. hit of the year thanks to a second album of white noise, throbbing electronics and unparalleled originality. You don’t have to like their brutal sonic rumble but to not respect it is almost as impossible as ignoring it. Photographer: gab r i el g r een Writer: R eef youn i s
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ust over my right shoulder a Raven ominously keeps watch, dead-eyed and unmoving. I try to avoid the giant teddy bear’s gaze - even if he looks the welcoming sort – manoeuvre myself around the chandeliers and candelabras liberally strewn on the floor, and tentatively set myself down on the treasure chest. There’s a giant loveheart mounted on the wall, a lovingly crafted miniature dolls house, a paint job to make John Squire green (red, blue, yellow, pink...) with envy and talk of dogs recreating iconic films courtesy of clever direction and coloured dog biscuits. Welcome to the creative bowels of East London. Nestled in a small studio in Bethnal Green – amidst the copious empty tea cups, biscuits and paint pots - there’s enough knick knacks, odds and ends and discarded toy paraphernalia to make you think you’d stumbled into a Hamley’s chopshop. Ben Power and Andrew Hung sit atop a white-sheeted throne, adjusting themselves accordingly as photographer Gabriel gets to
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work.They’re relaxed and talkative, sharing SXSW war stories and politely talking tea “as long as you’re having one.” On a lazy, balmy Bank Holiday Monday, the spectre of summer and sunshine seems more of a promise than a pipedream, and doesn’t seem too far from Ben and Andy’s minds. Recuperating for a few days before their European tour, the upcoming schedule veers on the relentless: Europe, the UK, the US and then headlong into the festival season. “We’re actually preparing to go on tour at the moment,” Ben starts “but we like to be busy anyway. Festival-wise we’re playing Primavera again this year, and that’s a great festival. Every year the line up’s always really good and it’s the kind of festival we want to hang around in. Other festivals we’re in and out like a flash.” “We definitely prefer it concentrated,” Andrew adds. “Once we’re in that mindset, we just want to continue.” 2009 was the year of the Fuck Button. They of the shock-tactics name and sonically monstrous sound, Ben and Andy took the abrasive energy of debut album ‘Street Horrrsing’ and cultivated it into the allengulfing panorama of ‘Tarot Sport’ that became a universal staple of all that was groundbreaking (and shaking) last year. Not that it’s always been a love-in for the band. Criticised by some for choosing an expletive-laden band name in a vain attempt to grab the spotlight, it’s not exactly a subtlety you can miss. But then neither is the music they make: it’s created to “push peoples’ buttons”, whichever way they react. “It was a really confusing thing to happen really,” Ben explains. “We weren’t playing this kind of music out because we thought it would generate that kind of reaction. It’s a strange concept to us because we just make music we really enjoy and we enjoy playing out live, so for someone to turn around and say, ‘This isn’t music, this isn’t acceptable to my ears’ is just a strange thing to us, really. I don’t really understand how someone has the right to say that.” “It’s not rational but I understand the behaviour,” Andrew giggles. “I think it was funny after about 5 minutes,” Ben continues. “It’s almost like going into an art gallery and tearing down a piece of art work because it’s something you don’t consider art!” “The way things are going it feels like people like us,” Andrew laughs “but I don’t expect everyone to like what we do.” From disparate beginnings, and ends of the music scale, the duo’s musical and visual output divides and conquers to the extent that you can’t help but have an opinion on the band. A surging amalgamation of techno, minimal, static-heavy shoegaze and crunching post-rock, it appeals and appals in equal measure. But, as Andrew points out, the general consensus seems to be a positive one from both sides of the fan/media split. “I feel like you can either take that stuff on or you don’t, which we aren’t willing to do,” Andrew states “we have each other for that, and that’s quite enough really! You either take on those criticisms but you have to take the negative and the positive.We’re
aware of the good things as well as all the detractors.” “It did surprise us,” Ben adds “and it’s gratifying to know that people outside our little bubble are interested in what we do, which is something we never really expected.There’s a wall between that and what we do creatively. I mean, everyone likes a compliment but between that and the music we make, the only two people who really matter when making music is us, initially.” Having found a home on the respected, muso-kudos of ATP through a mutual friend, Ben and Andrew are at ease with being on the label. Fans of the festival, initially, ATP’s stellar reputation proved to be a draw the band couldn’t resist, despite their industry virginity. “We were kinda new to the whole industry reputations.We knew these labels from a consumer point of view but not from how they worked as people.We were attracted to ATP because we were fans of the festival,” Andy says. “They have a very good understanding of what they want to get out of the experience.They like the juxtaposition of a really strange environment with good music, so in the UK it’s a Butlins but over in New York, it’s like a traditional, Jewish holiday home. I think it’s a festival that appeals to people who care about their music and that shows in the curators they choose.” “Andy actually put a show on,” adds Ben “and a friend of ours came to see us, and he was really interested in what we did. He was actually a close friend of [ATP Founder] Barry Hogan’s and suggested to Barry to come to a show, and he really liked it, and we decided to work with each other from there.” In the last few years where the majors have struggled with the onslaught of downloads and recession, it’s fallen to feted, independent labels to take the time, and
spend the money, investing in the bands they love. From Wichita to Rock Action;Warp to ATP, a common theme has always been freedom for the bands to push their own direction and it’s no different for Fuck Buttons. “With some of those labels that you mentioned, with ATP there’s no kind of outward creative.We can basically do what we want.We don’t have anyone telling us what direction we should be moving in or what our artwork can or can’t be,” Ben enthuses. “It’s very important that we do everything in house.We’re in a really great position to be in control of our visual aesthetic because I studied illustration, Andy studied fine art video making, so I do all the artwork for the records and Andy does all the videos. It’s nice we’re in control of the whole complex package as opposed to the position a lot of other bands are in.” “It’s all from us,” Andrew finishes. In the same way bands like Yeasayer take ownership for their artistic and musical output, and in a time where bands and artists continue to blur the traditional divide, Andrew and Ben are reluctant to put the onus on their art as a primary concern. “They’re not mutually exclusive,” Ben says “but the first thing, the first initial thing that’s important is that Andy I are making music we enjoy and we’d like to listen to in our spare time. Everything else, the artwork and the videos, track titles, tend to happen afterwards due to whatever mental imagery a song conjures up. “And that’s secondary really.We don’t have any kind of ideas of what mental imagery we want to conjure up in the writing process. It’s just a case of exploring the sounds with the equipment we have in front of us... It’s only after we’ve written the song and sit down and talk about the feelings the songs evoke that’s mainly where imagery and song titles come from afterwards.There
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are never really any pre-integrated ideas.” Combing the celestial with the violently combustible, their music is a volatile exploration of discovery and experimentation. Optimism sidles alongside ambition; beauty battles a sense of the impending, but throughout, somewhat gloriously, there’s a struggle for perfection and progression few bands capture with as much apocalyptic aplomb. It’s a sound born of the band’s evidently close dynamic. “It’s roleless,” Andrew states. “It’s exploratory by nature and it’s something we want to sustain by not having a formula.”
t times a brutal mix of styles and genres, there’s a cross over element few bands would dare broach for fear of failure. Guided by an unwavering, exploratory approach to making their music, they’re understandably keen to distance themselves, as many bands are, from branding themselves as anything. After all, how do you consistently classify the spontaneous? “A journalist probably would,” Ben smiles. “We don’t like to put any stamp... we do find it quite hard to describe our own music because we don’t necessarily hear or see it the way other people do...” “The only verbal dissection we engage with our music is the evocation of imagery it gives us,” Andrew picks up. “Apart from that we don’t talk about the aesthetic for instance...” “...or genres or sub genres a track might slip into,” closes Ben. Despite the cross over, there’s no obvious, easy access to Fuck Buttons. Potentially too noisy for conventional minimalists; too diluted for hardened techheads; too dancey for the post-rock purists; and too overtly, needlessly controversial for those blinded by the aesthetics, they’re a band who reward with every revisit. In line with the layered depth of Four Tet, Caribou and Aphex Twin, the hooks are there, and once they’re in, they sink deep. “I think that’s a really big compliment you’ve paid us, actually,” Andrew beams. “We strive to surprise ourselves and keep ourselves happy so I guess that’s possibly why the music doesn’t have any obvious trails.” “At the time we recorded ‘Street
Horrrsing’,” Ben begins “the sets we played were always evolving and morphing into something different. At the time of bringing out ‘Street Horrrsing’, that was the set we preferred to the play the most at that point. So it’s exactly how it is, really, it was just a snapshot of the time.” When there’s a constant pressure for evolution, or even revolution with concurrent albums, their crystallised, Polaroid approach is serving them well. Having sat on much of the material for their debut for five years and having created the basis of strong live set, ‘Tarot Sport’ gave the band a free license to expand with access to more equipment, and thus the opportunity to rigorously experiment. For a band buoyed - and driven by – progression, and constantly looking to diversify, it’s difficult to see how they would approach it any other way. “It’s a natural thing,” Andrew follows on. “We don’t have roles, we don’t have instrumentation that stays the same, and as people we’re evolving, so I don’t see how it could stay the same and be the same old shit...” “Again, I think ‘Tarot Sport’ is another snapshot because we’re not interested in staying in one particular place.We like to keep on the move. ‘Tarot Sport’ was a snapshot and the next one will be a snapshot,” he says. “And I think it’s the beauty of working in a pair,” Andrew continues. “The ideas can bounce off really quickly, whereas I speak to people who work by themselves and it takes a lot of time because they can only work ideas themselves.With Ben and I we can write songs and ideas come out all the time because we’re constantly reflecting each other’s. It’s always been an interesting process.” “We’d have to put a lot more thought into not progressing than we would otherwise...” Ben finishes. Fuck Button’s sound is one born of the band’s close dynamic and reactive way of working.You get the sense that although both Andrew and Ben have assigned roles, they aren’t defined at any point, and that for all the surging current a Fuck Buttons track generates, it comes down to the intimate, intrinsic power of two people who draw inspiration from discussion about their work. “It’s roleless,” Andrew states. “It’s exploratory by nature and it’s something we want to sustain by not having a formula.”
And it’s an ever-changing ethos that extends beyond the band. Having worked with Mogwai’s John Cummings on their debut, the band found a kindred spirit in legendary dance producer Andrew Weatherall to work on their second full length.This change in itself represented a new challenge as the band continued to push their own development. From working with a producer who knew exactly what he wanted – fewer ideas were thrown around in the recording sessions as a result – the band felt that they’d got the formula right: the production method for each album was perfect. So on the basis of a one track remix, Fuck Buttons and Weatherall became mutual fans and the layered power of ‘Tarot Sport’ was born. “That’s exactly how it happened,” confirms Ben. “He did a remix for ‘Sweet Love Planet Earth’ and on the basis of that, you just heard the attention to detail he paid, and all the individual components in the track and he brought out sounds we might not have realised were there and made them much more apparent. He just displayed a great understanding of what we did.” The result was an album rife with white, glorious noise and Fuck Buttons fastidiously building melody, layering harmony, and giving their music a pulsing, writhing, biological heartbeat. It carried a pressure and an impending sense of the unknown with flashes of optimism and anxiety. “Did you think there was anxiety all the way through?” Andrew asks. “I don’t think there was anxiety, really, there was a frustration but not an anxiety.” “I didn’t really get that either,” adds Ben “but there’s definitely a sense of striving.” Despite failed attempts at descriptive eloquence, ‘Tarot Sport’ still plays out as though you’ve stumbled into a black hole. It’s a vast, relentless album; swallowing everything within its gravitational pull, railroading with panoramic promise but ultimately heading towards implosion.With Andrew Weatherall at the production helm, his clinical, key-hole production proves to be the ideal foil for Fuck Buttons’ explosive, roaming intent. It’s an album that rightly straddled the 2009 hall of fame. It was an album that made a mockery of the dreaded ‘sophomore slump’ but when you’re working to capture snippets of Fuck Buttons’ existence, the expectation to deliver isn’t anything more than a personal
challenge. So with ‘Street Horrrsing’ representing the band’s beginnings, and ‘Tarot Sport’ carrying the weight of a band striving for something, by their own admittance, the next Fuck Buttons snapshot promises to be snatched. “We’ve started thinking about writing new material but we haven’t solidified a plan for record number three yet,” Ben starts “it’s going to be a case of whenever.There are a few tours and a few festivals so it will be a case of grabbing some moments. It’s not going to be a case of writing every day for the next year.” “I feel really ready to go on tour,” Andrew enthuses. “It’d be nice to get out the house. I like the way there’s blocks of time between writing and that’s going to help with the progress. I’m looking forward to the process.” A band without definition, perhaps, but certainly not one without direction.Where progression is a creative reflex and stagnation takes a conscious effort, you’d be forgiven for expecting a definitive end product; a staple to pin down every vibrant still of the Fuck Buttons narrative.They might claim to shirk anything linear and bury all trace and trail but a pattern’s developed and it’s arguably the simplest of them all.Whisper it, though, because in Fuck Buttons’ pioneering world of discovery you feel few things are “better”, they’re just different. “We always want to be different,” Andy states. “That’s really the only relationship we have between the albums.That’s the only constant.”
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Arabrot Chin Chin Eddy Current Suppression Ring Flying Lotus Foals Future Islands Ganglians Grum Harlem Jaguar Love Javelin jj John & Jehn Laser Crystal Male Bonding Mondkopf Rusko Silver Columns Surferblood The Futureheads The National Trash Talk Walls Woods Yellow Fever
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Archie Bronson Outfit Bitches Chapter Sweetheart Dam Mantle Danny & The Champions of the World Fenech Soler Ice, Sea, Dead People Joy Orbison Meursault Not Cool No Cars Nullifier Sian Alice Group Spider & The Flies The Twilight Sad
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Foals Total Life Forever (Warners) By Omarrr. In stores May 10
09/10
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“What were your fears when approaching this record?” came the question to Foals’ spokesman Yannis Philippakis recently. His reply: “That we were going to make a really awful record.Too prog, too stoned-out.” He’s right. It so easily could have been.Towards the end of the ‘Antidotes’ cycle they were a band exhausted, on their last legs, abando≠≠ning their biggest hits and pleading with their label (Transgressive, until Warner’s stopped funding the indie and kept their prize possession) to release them from the touring treadmill. Their thickening facial hair, shortening tempers and obsession with antiquated effects units all pointed towards ‘Total Life Forever’ potentially being their middle-finger, knee-jerk response - something which deliberately sounded like the minimal techno, drug-fed Kraut rock they adored so much. Breathe easy
though.Whether it was the suitcases of Moroccan weed or a healthy dose of home life, they’re still the experimental pop band they were on first discovery, albeit one reformed, knocked down and re-built. Of course, predecessor ‘Antidotes’ wasn’t a poor record. But as was well documented, after months spent in the pungent skunk smog of Dave Sitek’s Brooklyn studio, it wasn’t quite what they had in mind. Awarded the space they craved, the fivesome returned to base (Oxford) and quickly set up shop in a squat christened ‘The House Of Supreme Mathematics’ (it wouldn’t be Foals without some pretence, would it?).They then wrote until they took the rough components to Gothenburg, Sweden in Autumn 2009 to record with Luke Smith (previously of Clor).There the transformation took place. Gone are Jimmy Smith’s staccato riffs, the throbbing bass and the acute self-awareness. What’s left is a multi-storey pop album with oceans of depth. It opens with an immediate jewel ‘Blue Blood’ - a captivating and explosive
anthem. Following that, funk starlet and forthcoming single ‘Miami’; a track underpinned by Walter Gervers’ road-bumping bass pumping along like Sly & The Family Stone and Prince. By now you’ll have heard the devastatingly fragile ‘Spanish Sahara’ and Bloc Party-esque single ‘This Orient’ - both nestle perfectly in context. ‘Black Gold’ envelops out like an origami dove, slow-burner ‘After Glow’ erupts like Mars Volta playing the crust of Mt Fuji and ‘2 Trees’ pays homage to their defunct pals Youth Movies or, dare we say it, Radiohead. Musically they’re more robust, more refined. But it’s lyrically where the most significant change comes. Philippakis says he’s wearing “less masks” this time around.True, the cryptic selfdefence of last time - which now looks like selfprotection - has gone. If all this sounds like a completely different band to the one that spring-boarded with ‘Mathletics’ in 2006 - it is. Foals have proved themselves amorphous. And most excitingly? Their evolution has hardly begun.
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Flying Lotus
Future Islands
Ganglians
Chin Chin
Jaguar Love
Cosmosgramma
In Evening Air
Monster Head Room
Sound of the Westway
Hologram James
(Warp) By Reef Younis. In stores May 3
(Thrill Jockey) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores May17
(Souterrain Transmission) By Tom Goodwyn. In stores May 10
(Slumberland) By Polly Rappaport. In stores now
(Fat Possum) By Reef Younis. In stores Apr 26
Trip hop, syrupy beats, warbling sax and rapier pin-pricks of sound pepper from every direction on FlyLo’s third album. It’s what we’ve come to expect from the Californian, yet ‘Cosmogramma’ presents a marathon listening challenge (it’a 17-tracks long too). Similarly in-line with Squarepusher’s acute ingenuity, this effort, at times, is rendered a little narrow and specialised by FlyLo’s propensity for melding a world of different influences into threeminute bumpers. But from celestial interludes to static samples, gloomy atmospherics and hijacked frequencies, it’s an album alive and evolving from the moment you hit the dial. Like flicking through pirate radio stations, ‘Cosmo...’ dances between the extremes but when it levels out and you’re rewarded with blankets of warm, rolling melody, you can’t help but be seduced.
If you have a pile of records marked ‘not to be listened to with the lights off ’ (and you should have), ‘In Evening Air’ belongs there, on top of Xiu Xiu and Former Ghosts.This Baltimore trio are less overtly gothic, operatic and self-harming than either of those gloomy New York outfits, and yet just as brilliantly harrowing in their waves of post punk synths and Samuel T Herring’s bi-polar vocal delivery, which flits from insular murmurs to himself (‘In Evening Air’) to gravely, deathly shrieks of worrying despair (‘Tin Man’). So caught up in his thoughts on ‘Long Flight’, Herring seems to play his part without listening to the rest of the band who forever build blocks of Casio static, creeking organ chimes and Joy Division bass parts around him. He’s almost too engrossed in ‘In Evening Air’ to care what else is going on and I know the feeling.
All the best children’s films and fairytales have a serious undercurrent of weirdness to them (just consider Alice in Wonderland, Hansel and Gretel, anything nonDisney basically) and Ganglians are a band that should be scoring them. Gloriously twisted, the Sacramento quartet have clearly spent many happy hours thumbing through the back catalogues of both the Beach Boys and LSD era Beatles. It doesn’t sound tired though – especially lead off single ‘Candy Girl’, which is at once ethereal and alarming. Although a little psychedelically cartoonish in patches, ‘Monster Head Room’ manages to keep its song lengths reined in too, only once passing six minutes and mostly creating lovely, lush, orchestral pop. It’s like all great fairy tales: cute and hopeful, but with a bruising undercurrent of darkness. It’s not far from being completely brilliant.
Originally released in 1985, this LP by Swiss post-punk trio Chin Chin should be filed in your record collection somewhere between Blondie and Vivian Girls. The timing for this reissue is apt, what with the current surge of girl groups boasting Shangri-La’s harmonies, filthy pop guitar hooks and sweet/sour punk ballads. ‘Room Of Sadness’ could easily be a missing track from ‘Everything Goes Wrong’, with its melancholy melody and part-listless/partpleading vocals, while ‘My Guy’’s sweet harmonies and addictively danceable punk beat has Dum Dum Girls written all over it. Like their current successors, Chin Chin’s songs walk the gauntlet of loneliness, rejection and love – even domestic violence – the harsh words wrapped in hazy three-part harmonies and petrol-drenched guitar.This is the glue that will hold your vinyl collection together.
Remember the wild, brash, glam rocket ride Jaguar Love took us on with ‘Take Me to the Sea’? Forget it.The snake-hipped spirit of TRex might have run a little rampant on their debut but any of the hardcore turbulence and pissy petulance has been diminished by a sickly, overriding glaze of bubblegum pop, cheap, synthetic electro and the teen-lite lyrics from a Year 11 leaving book. Johnny Witney’s androgynous vocal was the banshee call for something belligerent, if wholly combustible, once upon a time, but on ‘Hologram Jams’, it flits between white boy skit and whiny primetime talent show hopeful. The new electro direction is a laudable one – especially considering the duo’s hardcore past – but for all the style, it’s sadly all surface and no feeling. Something you could never have accused the duo of before.
Walls Walls (Kompakt) By Edgar Smith. In stores Apr 26
06/10
Banjo or Freakout (aka ‘drugged out rodent’ to Alessio Natalizia’s label staff) contributed ‘Mr. No’ to that ace No Pain in Pop compilation a while back. But if that seemed a bit frivolous, a bit (wince) ‘chill wave’,Walls – Natalizia’s new, duel-piloted project with Sam ‘Allez Allez’Willis - hit spots that lie a little deeper. Instrumental, bar some hints of vocal slurring, their debut is an admirably controlled series of highs and lows that betrays affection for laptop beats and effects pedals. It shares in the juddering bass and kaleidoscopic electronica of Panda Bear and Boards of Canada, and feels like London’s answer to the clued-up, blogorientated alterno-disco being made on the other side of the Atlantic. And yet it can’t help but come across a little half finished, a little demo-y.There’s potentially brilliant starting points from the opening, optimistic ‘Burnt Sienna’ onwards, but underdeveloped it lacks tunes and looks skinny next to Washed Out or Memory Tapes. www.loudandquiet.com
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Al bums 05/10
07/10
07/10
06/10
09/10
Javelin
Mondkopf
The Futureheads
Harlem
Silver Columns
No Mas
Galaxy if Nowhere
The Chaos
Hippies
Yes, And Dance
(Luaka Bop) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Apr 26
(Asphalt Duchess) By Kate Parkin. In stores May 10
(Nul Recordings) By Nathan Westley. In stores Apr 26
(Matador) By Chris Watkeys. In stores Apr 26
(Moshi Moshi) By Sam Walton. In stores May 24
If ‘No Mas’ was a tie, it’d be patterned like a piano. It might even play a tune. Jive Bunny, perhaps.What I’m saying is that Javelin’s debut album is wantingly zany, openly wacky. It’s The Go! Team on popping candy… at Disneyland. For all of its playful-toaggravating antics though, there is merit pinging about in this electronic toy box, making it hard to tell if ‘No Mas’ is good, vibrant fun or…well…a piano tie annoyance, desperate to be loved. ‘On It On It’ achieves the former feeling, courtesy of Metronomy pips and sullen vocals, while the flutes and skitty drums of ‘We Ah Wi’ is Big Chill easy listening, apathy-inducing enough to have you calling for the return of ‘Oh! Centra’’s chipmunk raps and Sonic The Hedgehog keys. And suddenly ‘No Mas’ doesn’t seem wacky at all – it’s a perfectly okay pitch at The Avalanches. It’s a blue tie.
French artist Mondkopf AKA Paul Régimbeau is almost too cool. Aligned with the Fluokids blog, his music is the kind you hear piped out in the back of fashion shows or self-conscious hipster hangouts – a kind of nouveau lift music. Despite that, ‘La Dame En Bleu’ has the feel of a funked up Four Tet, all big shades and attitude, while ‘Scream of Stars’’ ragged beats are defiantly dance floor ready.The handclap beats of ‘Lambs are Dancing’ would nestle quite comfortably on any Hot Chip album, even with its bizarre Gregorian monks trapped in the Chocolate Factory interlude. And the dramatically titled ‘Ave Maria’ has some of the orchestral flair that has incited Kevin Shields comparisons. French cool is undergoing a creative renaissance with labels like Ed Banger, Kitsuné and hip hop collective Institubes leading the way.Viva la Revolution!
Back when the UK’s music press was awash with high praise for angular guitar bands, the idea that The Futureheads, a band largely known for their reinterpretation of a Kate Bush song, would reach album number four would have had many in hysterics. Compounded as being a one trick pony that is happy to manoeuvre its way over the same obstacles time and time again,The Futureheads were never ones seen for reinvention and not surprisingly ‘The Chaos’ does not see an ushering in of a new period in the band’s life. Instead it’s a continuation in their ever reliable tradition of bashing out threeminute long, driven slabs of ear friendly, unchallenging, rigid guitar pop that has the capability to sound familiar yet identifiably new at the same time.The Futureheads continue to have the last laugh at those who ever doubted them.
‘Hippies’ is a record of two halves. The first half is like a row of eight gleaming silver hooks, brandished by a trio of grinning Texan hipsters eager to jam them into your frontal lobes. It’s jangly, three and fourchord stuff, each hit no longer than a couple of minutes, with nursery rhyme lyrics and pre-school melodies, lo-fi production and a distinctly sixties vibe. Some tracks jangle past without making much of an impression, some grab you by the hand and take you skipping merrily down the highway before vanishing as quickly as they arrived. Some are fuzzy, calamitous, joyous rackets that wedge themselves in your brain and don’t let go.The second half is largely just… dull, perhaps with the exception of ‘Faces’, which jitterbugs quite nicely. Hack away at this filler and you’d have a rough gem of an album - but it’d only be twenty minutes long.
Coming on like a Scottish answer to Hot Chip, Silver Columns’ have mined pretty much every genre of popular dance music over the last twenty years, added a spot of bedroom indie melancholy to the mix and called it new. So it is that ‘Columns’ throbs and bubbles with the sound of mid-90s minimal techno, ‘Brow Beaten’ recalls the high-camp sleekness of electroclash and ‘Warm Welcome’ has shades of two-step.The stroke of genius here its that every track is topped, often wonderfully incongruously, with low-profile vocal mutterings – a trick that adds warmth and genuine confessional soul. Indeed, ‘Heart Murmurs’ is a gorgeous little love song, not a dance record at all, regardless of how many arpeggiators are oscillating at its close. Understated, witty and curiously infectious, ‘Yes, and Dance’ is charming stuff indeed.
Eddy Current Suppression Ring Rush To Relax (Melodic) By Omarrr. In stores May 17
07/10
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ECSR’s ingeniously named front-bloke Brendan Suppression wears little black gym mitts when his band play live. It’s something to do with getting nervous. He needn’t worry though as the Melbourne, Australia pressing plant workers’ third full-length sonic adventure sounds as confident as they come. Like 2008’s ‘Primary Colours’, ‘Rush To Relax’ is the sound of four ill-fitting parts arrogantly, impatiently and brilliantly log-jammed together. At a very slim 59 seconds, ‘Walked Into A Corner’ nut-shells all that’s good about their lo-fi scuzz-rock mission. But here they have developed. Clocking in at 7 minutes, ‘Turning Out’ is almost as long as their debut album, while ‘Second Guessing’ showcases their new slow-tobuild dynamic, Brendan muttering to himself like Graham Coxon’s invisible demons. Despite the evolution it remains deliberately snotty, gloriously offkey and intentionally spat out. Chances are, they’re already onto the next one.
08/10
03/10
08/10
07/10
09/10
Lazer Crystal
Rusko
Trash Talk
JJ
The National
MCMLXXX
O.M.G!
Eyes and Nines
JJ No. 3
High Violet
(Thrill Jockey)
(Hassle)
By Matthias Scherer. In stores May 17
(Mad Accent) By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 10
By Matthias Scherer. In stores May 17
(Secretly Canadian) By Kate Parkin. In stores May 3
(Beggars) By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 10
From Chicago’s shit-hot Thrill Jockey label (Double Dagger, Pit Er Pat,Thank You) comes this Kinder Surprise egg of an electronic pop album.While there are echoes of ‘chillwave’s ethereal sound characteristics on ‘MCMLXXX’, this Illinois trio’s debut album is so much more than another blog fetish. It’s MSTRKRFT, not Mirror Mirror. It has the kraut-y cheek of Holy Fuck, the inevitable Kraftwerk references (‘Translation? We R Afraid 4 U’) the gloomy vocals and synth stabs of ‘Closer’era Joy Division and what sounds like a rubbish bin standing in as a tom (‘Lame Duck’).To say there is a lot to take in would be an understatement – sometimes it sounds like three robots playing Tetris over a drum machine bought at a vintage flea market – but so would be saying that there was quite a lot of fun to be had with this record.
How many times do you reckon you’ve heard the lyric “You make me feel so real” repeated mindlessly over a generic dance backdrop? Hundreds? Thousands, maybe? Well, on ‘Feel So Real’, here it is again one more time, in case you’re a fan. It comes courtesy of Chris Mercer, aka Rusko, producer of M.I.A., remixer of Little Boots and The Prodigy, and collaborator with the likes of Dirty Projectors’ Amber Coffman. ‘Hold On’, featuring Coffman, is a lone high point: anthemic, hypnotic and uplifting all at the same time. ‘Dial My Number’ meanwhile is reminiscent of big nineties chart tuneage, pleasant and unchallenging, and feeling rather like it should be accompanied by an underwhelming laser light display in a provincial disco. Most of the rest of ‘O.M.G!’, however, is uninspiring, unengaging, identikit dance bilge.
Watching Trash Talk tear the Barfly a new rectal orifice last year, you could not help but wonder how the Sacramento hardcore quartet could keep up this level of speed and aggression, both in the songs themselves and in their performance of them. ‘Eyes & Nines’ sees the former Albini protégées channel their rage, but don’t unfasten your seat belts just yet. Although opener ‘Vultures’ surprises with its groove and wahwah-pedal guitar licks, proceedings soon turn as violent/angry/ violently angry as we’ve come to expect from TT.The 4:30-epic (by their standards) works more as a Sabbath-invoking interlude than a song, and it’s tracks like ‘Explode’ (featuring Matt Caughthran of The Bronx), the exhilarating punk double whammy of ‘On a Fix’ and the title track that provide the meaty parts of this album. Slow down? Maybe next year.
Keeping absent from the limelight, jj eschew the frantic networking of their peers, deliberately turning themselves into self-made musical enigmas. Dueting in breathy vocals over cinematic soundscapes, Swedes Joakim and Elin are The xx with lilting Nordic accents. ‘And Now’ carries a shy charm that flutters doe eyed pools to melt the hardest hearts and even the hamfisted ‘ethnic’ percussion on ‘Let Go’ is easily forgiven when teamed with delicately plucking keyboards. Evoking echoing whispers crept through rain sodden forests, ‘Light’ is fragile but not too pretty and though they have odd crustyhippies-smoking-joss-sticks moments, the overall ethereal quality of the record stays intact. Like other offbeat mainstream types (Sia and Imogen Heap), jj could be destined to lie buried in the ‘Chillout’ bin, but are well worth digging out.
The National are masters of the soft touch; of slow-burning subtlety; of the gentle caress which hides a knockout blow. ‘High Violet’, their fifth album, sees the five-piece continue on the path that’s seen both the confidence and the quality of their songwriting swell. Singer Matt Berninger’s idiosyncratically deep vocals and the bands expansive arrangements, depthless imagination and musical restraint are all here in superb effect. Opener ‘Terrible Love’ is a slow-builder with a tumultuous climax; a huge, angry, cathartic release, while ‘Sorrow’ is simply heartbreaking. As with all National albums, there’s little in the way of instant gratification – no instant hit – but this band has a peerless ability to make music which seeps into your consciousness, slowly ferments and finally produces a musical wine of such intoxicating majesty you’re left dumbstruck.
Surfer Blood Astro Coast (Kanine) By Sam Walton. In stores May 24
03/10
Welcome to the next big thing, which is pretty much the same as the last big thing. Surfer Blood are a bunch of happy-go-lucky Floridian whippersnappers who refer to each other by initials and make a kind of shiny grunge lite half way between the crunchy power pop of Weezer and janglier side of the Pixies.This, their debut, is presumably targeted at people who enjoyed the last Killers album but wished it could have been just a little more bombastic and had a little less personality. Occasionally there are hints of pleasing nostalgia – ‘Twin Peaks’ wouldn’t sound out of place on a Brat Pack movie soundtrack, ‘Swim’ sure is catchy – but the majority of ‘Astro Coast’ is overly sheeny and lifeless. On the LP’s final track, the singer – JP – admits, with under-concealed pride, “a weakness for cocaine and liquor”. It’s a trait that often makes great rock stars, but seldom makes great rock music, and goes rather a long way to explaining the blandness on display here. www.loudandquiet.com
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Al bums 06/10
06/10
08/10
02/10
07/10
Arabrot
John & Jehn
Woods
Grum
Yellow Fever
The Brotherseed
Time For The Devil
At Echo Lake
Heartbeats
Yellow Fever
(Norway Rat) By Polly Rappaport. In stores May 15
(Naive) By Phil Burt. In stores April 26
(Woodsists) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores May 17
(Heartbeats) By Kate Parkin. In stores May 24
(Wild World) By Danny Canter. In stores now
Although technically album number three for Norwegian Black Metal outfit Arabrot (named after their local waste dump), this is their UK debut, and what an introduction it is. Produced by Steve Albini and mastered by Bob Weston, ‘The Brother Seed’ is light on the industrial doom front, opting for hair-tearing insanity. Singer Kjetil Nernes sounds like he swallows rusty bits of chainsaw for breakfast, washed down with a vat of paint stripper, his strangled deranged rants only just this side of intelligible.There are some proper head-bangers on here, the grinding guitar and rimshot drum torrents furnished liberally with manic shrieks and growls, but, on the whole, this record feels like a descent into dementia. It has a good thrash on its insanely loud way down though, and gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘throttle’.
The devil’s a bad egg right? Wrong. Or at least that’s what French duo John & Jehn claim with second album ‘Time For The Devil’, which is inspired by the idea that the Prince of Darkness is more a fueller of passions than a total prick.This bringing together of dark and light goes hand in hand with the band’s sound, as the gloomy, nu-grave bass is coupled with pop-driven melodies. Bass riffs and background chanting makes songs like the title track sound straight off The Lost Boys soundtrack, while the contrasting vocals of John and Jehn - he sounding like Phil Oakey, she a Josephine Olausson double - is reminiscent of 90s noir pop pioneers Shakespeare’s Sister (seriously!) particularly in the brooding ‘Oh My Love’. At times more camp than vamp (e.g. ‘London Town’) it proves Beelzebub isn’t totally rotten.
That’s ‘At Echo Lake’, not Echo Beach. Not Echo Waves. NOT Echo Cove! Woods share bills, labels and no doubt Facebook titfor-tat with Real Estate, Blank Dogs, Ganglians and countless other US surf-heads, but they’re more at home on banks than blankets (they are called Woods, after all).This is their fifth album, and sees the New Yorkers once again take their Neil Young/Shins inspired campfire folk into the tall grass.Things on the prairie remain as sweltering as they are on the coast though, and as upbeat on tracks like the country driving ‘Blood Dries Darker’.The following dusty porch song ‘Pick Up’ is then Woods reflecting on past days on tyre swings and in yellowing fields. It - along with many other slower, plainly acoustic numbers here - is beautifully touching. Mistake Woods as dumb, beery lo-fi at your peril.
Unlike the name suggests, Leeds dance act Grum are pure cheese. Citing Spandau Ballet and Human League, they plunder their 80s influences without any hint of irony. ‘Can’t Shake The Feeling’ blends all the worst bits of the 80s in one horrific legwarmer clad cocktail, like Eric Prydz’s ‘Call on Me’ on a comedown.The hooks are undeniably catchy, and tracks like ‘Runaway’ are likely to be a hit on the sticky Saturday night dancefloors. Covering David Bowies ‘Fashion’ with jerky synths, they claw back some semblance of credibility but unashamedly taking off Daft Punk’s dance cyborg sound and Pet Shop Boys bouncing synths, ‘Turn It Up’ is ‘West End Girls’ bathed in saccharine. Utterly lacking in originality they pilfer from others what they fail to create themselves. This is an album in need of a serious reality check.
With a hometown advantage, Yellow Fever’s SXSW victories were calm and comfortable, perhaps completely stealth-like. Their easiest comparison is to the clean clatter punk of The Raincoats or the nearly twee garage of Vivian Girls who are releasing this debut – even if Yellow Fever are far more louche than the former and anti-fuzz where Vivian Girls most certainly aren’t.What ‘Yellow Fever’ neatly demonstrates though is the mellow growth of such a lackadaisical group by showing in chronological order past singles and stabs at mastering the kind of ghostly surf riffs that can be played with a guitar on your lap.The opening ‘Rat Catcher’, for example, has one biscuit-tin drumbeat and almost as many guitar notes, while ‘Joe Brown’ is vastly more sophisticated, wave-catching pop. A proud documentation of lazy DIY.
Male Bonding Nothing Hurts (Sub Pop) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores May 10
09/10
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In the past few years, as a certain transistor radio sound has buzzed about indie like a US college station that can never be completely tuned into, Male Bonding have been the only British band to show any real sign of emulating the success and excitable appeal of No Age and Wavves et al. ‘Nothing Hurts’ is partly, but not wholly, an ode to blurred bar chords and washed out vocals from across the Atlantic. It travels at a speed of 13 songs per (half) hour, which makes it tricky to not get excited about, proudly mugging Nirvana one second (‘Paradise Vendors’ nabs from their ‘Molly’s Lips’ cover) and sounding like ‘Pop Scene’-era Blur the next (on ‘T.U.F.F.’, the album’s heaviest and best track). There’s a fair few nods to Brit Pop, in fact, the exantidote to Grunge. Here they’re perfect partners baggy, distant vocals with tumbling, sloppy drum fills; eccentric cowbells (on ‘Pumpkin’) interrupting thrashing angst; and Symposium-esque naivety (‘Weird Feelings’). ‘Nothing Hurts’ is the best of both worlds.
www.loudandquiet.com
00
Live
Cool and Sweet?
Chapter Sweetheart / Not Cool
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The Victoria, Mile End, London 03.04.2010 By DK. Goldstein Photography by Kelda Hole
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While a gaggle of girls change into ‘Playboy Bunny’ costumes beneath the ominous antlers of an unfortunate stag, we find ourselves frowning at the absurdity of the direction that this Cystic Fibrosis charity gig is taking. With the exception of a guy in a leopardprint vest and an asymmetrical haircut, no one is rocking out. It takes London quintet, Chapter Sweetheart no less than 15 minutes to settle into things and now that their erratic racket spins around the twee setting of dark-panelled walls and wooden floor lamps scattered about numerous Chesterfields, the audience seem stunned to the spot, desperately trying to figure out if they like it or not. Vocalist, Kevin looks suave and petite in a fitted black suit and tie as he bellows an array of noises; the odd audible word is slung among coos, groans and shouts. All in all, the five-piece have an air of immediacy, as though they all learnt to play their instruments in one frenzied session and are now hammering out the results
of their practice. There’s a drone of ’70s punk, mixing the haste of The Milkshakes with the pop sensibilities of Swell Maps. In ‘I Love Her…Me Too’ Kevin picks up the trumpet, and although he shows no skill in playing it, pounds the pistons until it sounds good overlaying the repetitive riffs and beat.They close proceedings with ‘Today the Truth’ – their catchiest and most brilliant tune with romantic French lyrics and pop hooks. There’s something of the Emperor’s New Clothes with this band.They may play well but tonight there’s no spark. However, for fear of being deemed hopelessly stupid we’ll all convince ourselves that there is. There’s no pretending, though, when it comes to the experimental noise-pop of South London favourites, Not Cool – they get a couple knocking hips in the second row as soon as they get on stage.With their start-stop themes they have an essence of Foals and early Bloc
Party, especially in single, ‘Wonderful Beasts’ in which the guitars sting with the same jagged edges. It’s got a disco-happy beat that gets the crowd going and the bass lines are delectable, nevertheless they rush this one out of the way at the beginning.They keep the engery up as they rollercoaster in and out of fast/slow tempos, building tracks up continually just when you think they’re going to dwindle out.Things mellow down for ‘Can’t Take You Anywhere’ with blurry, Biffy-heavy riffs interjected between singer Matt’s Lydon-esque snarls. But with a short set of seven songs, things quickly come to an end and to see things off they pull east London’s ‘it’ man, Rory Bratwell, from the crowd, to take a hold on guitar in ‘You Didn’t Do That In Soundcheck’. He puts a sharp tinge on it and fingers the high notes like his life depends on it while Matt takes to the floor, mic clutched in hand, jumping and twisting like a hare in a field, somewhat aptly for the time of year.
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Hunx & His Punx CAMP, Old Street, London 08.04.2010 By Polly Rappaport Photography by DK. Goldstein ▼
“I just found the man of my dreams,” coos Seth ‘Hunx’ Bogart, taking a swig of Red Stripe and handing it back to the man in question, who is probably old enough to be Seth’s dad. Seth is, to put it diplomatically, a bit of a flirt; the singer spends most of the set either bent over the drum kit, waggling his pert little arse, or working the front of the stage, where the many potential men of his dreams are gathered, lager cans at the ready. Hunx (and his Punkettes) open with ‘You Don’t Like Rock n Roll’, a burst of bubblegum pop by way of The Ramones, complete with handclaps between verses and lyrics like, “You like Morrisey, you like U2,
what the fuck is wrong with you, are you deaf or just plain dumb?”. Other songs brazenly stomp the line between sweet and skanky, sounding like The Crystals vs The Clash, lyrics courtesy of John Waters. By the time the band arrive at ‘Teardrops On My Telephone’, a track dripping with sugared golly-gosh naivety and driven by blissful, crunchy guitars, Hunx has stripped a leopard print mankini and leggings down to practically nothing, rubbing one extremely lucky punter’s face on his scantily clad crotch. It’s a shame: the songs are fun and clever… but in the context of a live performance, the music is somewhat lost, overshadowed as it is by Seth’s stage antics. I defy you to focus on the tunes when there’s a guy in an animal print thong and a fur pillbox hat, spanking himself with a tambourine and proffering pearls of wisdom such as, “If you wear contacts and you get cum in ‘em, they’re, like, ruined”.
bitches The Stag’s Head, Dalston, London 25.03.2010 By Stuart Stubbs ▼
Has anyone here ever pissed on a 14-year old girl?” asks Bitches frontman/bassist Blake. “Well R Kelly did!!!” he yells with you’renot-my-real-mum petulance. “And this song’s for him!” So there! ‘Can Not Love’ (“I wanna know what can I not love,” the duo yap in Kelly’s perverse direction) is then Bitches at their most brattish, their most basic and, most importantly, their most melodic (save, perhaps, the closing ‘Cholula’). Much like Comanechi’s two-pronged neogrunge, you can sing-a-long to this fuzzy racket, whether drunk (Blake clearly is), as aggressive as drummer Staz’s shouted co-vocals, or if you’re in the market for some new abrasive yet curiously dappy noise pop. Physically, Blake eclipses his band mate, standing directly in front of her (okay, in the Stag’s Head there is little place else he can stand) and nose to nose with the audience. Between songs he and Staz receive titters from the front row in exchange for on-mic mutters, but all of that is constantly bullied aside by bass feedback that wails like dog in pain – a sound that precedes most songs.There’s certainly times tonight that Bitches’ relentless pace goes beyond attention grabbing and into the realms – somewhat unfeasibly – of background noise (albeit it a very loud one), but for the most part their brash, reckless, confrontational sound is too cavalier to ignore.
Archie Bronson Outfit ULU, Holborn, London 03.04.2010 By Chris Watkeys ▼
The last time I saw Archie Bronson Outfit was at a folk festival, and to be fair they were the loud, buzzy shot in the arm I needed after sitting through band, after band, after whimsical songwriter of nonconfrontational folk.That these folk-punk-rock alchemists were even booked to play that festival is a pointer to the genre-crossing, pigeonhole-confounding nature of their music and new album
‘Coconut’ taking things a step further, throwing elements of electronica and dashes of psychedelia into the mix.Tonight, the live set-up features a keyboardist and saxophonist alongside the main trio, and while these additions dilute ABO’s clanging purity somewhat, their underlying menace and their serrated edge remain. ‘Wild Strawberries’ is like PiL on amphetamines, pure punky adrenaline flooding the stage, but it’s the ‘hits’ that really crank up the crowd; the strangled yelps and sharp hooks of ‘Cherry Lips’ generate a mosh pit and the faintly amusing sight of several long beards pogoing down the front, while singer Sam’s relentless metronomic head nod and wild staring eyes suffuse ‘Dart For My Sweetheart’ with an unhinged magnificence. Suffice to say, a live set by ABO is an unrelenting, chaotic, fiery, dangerous thing.
Meursault Bungalow & Bears, Sheffield 29.03.2010 By Kate Parkin ▼
Following the tremblingly fragile Elena Tonra (a solo singer who is so mousey she almost melts into the wallpaper), Edinburgh’s Meursault are stripped of their electronic backing tonight, down to their bare bones with just half their members presents who look a little lost with just a squeeze box and two guitars for company. On this grey Monday evening the audience too is looking a little thin and the band are visibly disappointed. Singer Neil Pennycook’s belting voice gains momentum though as the understated beauty of ‘The Dirt The Roots’ shines through. Mixing the catchy hooks of Grizzly Bear with a primal Celtic howl, the band lighten up the darkening room and gradually the crowd shuffle out of the shadows.With one last gasp of half shouted, stuttering sound, Pennycook stretches and bends his voice until it splinters under the strain. Capturing the bombastic flare of the current wave of Scottish bands with a final certainty he steers the boat back home and with their added electronic shimmer, Meursault could be so much more.
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Live ▼
Dan Mantle The Lock Tavern, Camden, London 09.04.2010 By Danny Canter ▼
Joy Orbison. Pic: EDWARD BISHOP
The Twilight Sad. Pic: BART PETTMAN
Sian Alice Group. Pic: PHIL DIXON
The only two people who move tonight are Tom Marshall and Calum Cunneen.The latter is the former’s stage hand whenever he takes the twitchy bedroom electronics of Dam Mantle on the road, and as the pair bob and frantically finger pads that are bordered by tangled wires it’s a wonder that people are going mad right now – there’s certainly pumping bass in there and even when things veer towards slowerburning atmospherics it’s not without a danceable pulse. But then, after the duo’s Friday night set in a hardly-designed-for-it, cramped pub room, one onlooker solves the riddle. “Is that it?” he says. “I could have watched that shit for hours.”That’s why, to the sound of jet-engine white noise colliding with dub-step beats, popcorn pips and computer sounds that resemble an excited R2D2 loosing it, we’re all stood agog.The noise of Dam Mantle – full of bizarre breaks and thicklylayered, joyous bells that easily rival his peers’, Gold Panda and Hudson Mohawke – is one, all-paralyzing, impressive sensory experience, but so too is the sight of Mashall and Cunneen focussed on recreating these original, playful inventions. It’s almost distracting as they drum their digits over variously coloured sample pads, triggering the individual elements that ping about so quickly it’s tough to tell whether bum notes are being conjured. Go see Dam Mantle while you can. Soon he’ll be on high stages where the music will be distraction enough.
Joy Orbison Blah Blah Blah at Digital, Brighton 01.04.2010 By Nathan Westley ▼
From breaching the mainstream broadsheet media (who are all too fond of playing safe, especially when it comes to club culture) to upsetting a handful of Americans over his choice of moniker, there is little denying that it has been a meretricious rise for Joy Orbison since he first unleashed ‘Hyph
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Mngo’ in the Autumn last year. Having been typecast as a mere dubstep artist and producer, tonight in a heaving nightclub he proves he is anything but the lead figure in a scene that has now become the choice soundtrack for wannabe-hip middle class dinner parties – to label him as so would be a disservice; Joy Orbison deserves to be known for far more than that. One minute skittering beats are being slowly introduced to slow ethereal ambience, only for a heavy, reverberating, spleensplitting low end bass line to come riding over the top and carry it all off into another direction. During the course of the set a cross selection of two-step, techno and a whole heap of other subgenres are touched upon, forced into a hardhitting concoction and then fired out of the speakers at a bone shuddering level. For once the praise is justified.
The Twilight Sad The Harley, Sheffield 27.03.2010 By Kate Parkin ▼
The Twilight Sad have long been painted as Scotland’s nearly men, playing second fiddle as the Frightened Rabbits and Biffy Clyros surge past.Their first tour since the departure of bass player Craig Orzel, the band look and sound like they may finally be step up to the next rung of the rock’n’roll ladder. Shivering guitars course down the spine as singer James Graham takes a brooding stance, resolutely avoiding the gaze of the crowd. ‘Reflections In The Television’ lays the distortion on thick over lumbering drums, while, thanks to its soaring choruses, ‘That Summer at Home’ is the kind of breathy, atmospheric folk that Celtic bands do best. Shaking his head until it becomes a blur, Graham battles unseen demons, collapsing broken on the stage. Casting a nervous sidelong glance, he belts out ‘Cold Days From The Birdhouse’ accompanied by only the slightest fluttering of drums. With painstaking deliberation he picks out every word and hurls it into the faces of the crowd, before charging headlong into a euphoric hum.This could be their last chance for ‘the big time’, but it’s their best one yet.
Danny AND The Champions of the World North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford 08.04.2010 By Tom Goodwyn ▼
Danny and the Champions of the World - although terribly named and Reverend reminiscent - are a bona fide Oxford super group. In their line up they include the Bennett brothers (Robin and Joe) who organise and run Truck Festival, rising husband and wife singer/songwriters Trevor and Hannah Lou Moss and, on various occasions, Fionn Regan and Romeo Stoddart, the lead singer of the Magic Numbers. Held together by front man and lynchpin Danny Wilson, the band’s style is suited to a line up that’s never the same twice.Their music is freewheeling, Americana-esque and can seemingly never have too many instruments on any given song.Their sound encompasses all the great American songbooks, road weary and tender, at once in love with their surroundings as wanting to jump on the bus and get the hell out of town. ‘Restless Feet’ sounds like The Band with added slide guitar, ‘Henry The Van’ a lost Dylan track and ‘Follow The River’ like The Byrds brought up on Neutral Milk Hotel, flecks of Springsteen and The Drifters thrown in over the tops of the set, keeping the improvised aesthetic going.There’s no guarantee of who’ll be on stage alongside Danny Wilson, but the music will be top notch.
ICE, SEA, DEAD PEOPLE The Freebutt, Brighton 05.04.2010 By Nathan Westley ▼
The three members of Ice, Sea, Dead People may look like every other post-hardcore-adoring noise merchants when they first step onto the stage but several seconds later when the first notes of ‘Hence Elvis’ start to ring out at an ear splintering level it becomes instantly apparent to all that they are not mere pretenders.They’re an ear-shattering force intent on pummelling out a cacophony so
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powerful and twisted that it would give many secondary school music teachers brain haemorrhages.To ISDP, who formed in the unlikely town of Beford, the idea of melody has always been an alien thought and tonight their minds are intent on funnelling out a short, sharp, aggressive set that is a full speed collision of impeccably timed drumming, noisy discordant guitar pangs and driven, brutally sounding bass riffs – the key ingredients for songs that fiercely grab you by the throat, hold on for a couple of minutes and then let you go for ten seconds to allow you to get your breath back, only to once again grab hold and repeat the process over and over until the climax of the set. Noise is not always a bad thing.
Fenech Soler KCLSU, London 08.04.2010 By Edgar Smith ▼
I’d always thought Fenech Soler was pronounced with a kind of continental flair and that they were from somewhere in France or something, but as it turns out these Annie Mac-approved electro-pop types are from the midlands and it’s “Fenek Soluh”.This is deduced from one of their frontman’s heartfelt interjections – “Thanks very much, we’re…” – that come between (and sometimes in the middle of) each and every song. Usually it’s, “Thanks very much, cheers.”We get, “How we feelin’ tonight King’s College, are we good!!!?”, twice.They have glittery outfits, a light box with their name on it like this is going out live on T4 and the drummer salutes the crowd when they leave. But this is all simple the window-dressing for a set of superbly crafted punk funk-lite (think Friendly Fires as conceived by Simon Cowell) with lyrics of the ‘spies telling lies’ variety and though that might sound both dated and like your worst nightmare, there’s something very endearing about their bombastic, small town naivety. It’s miles away from more chic and definietly cool contemporaries like Is Tropical and Egyptian Hip Hop, but Fenech Soler have such a sincere desire to be huge you’d be one hard bastard to begrudge them every success.
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Sian alice group The Relentless Garage, Islington 08.04.2010 By Phil Dixon ▼
The beauty of Sian Alice Group is their uncanny ability to create a beguiling, mythical experience with their music.Their genredefying combination of intensity and fragility creates doom-laden dreamscapes to transport the listener through the looking glass to another world. But this is no Wonderland.This is the tulgey wood of Carroll’s Jabberwock – a dark, dangerous place devoid of colour with only singer Sian Ahern’s delicate siren song to pierce the murky gloom – deadly, treacherous, but irresistibly alluring.Tonight they transcend the hindrance of a poor PA to create a wholly different beast. Ahern’s gossamer-light vocals are all but drowned in the mire amid a dirge-singing bass and the ceaseless, intoxicating pounding of tribal drums, creating a mystical trance state that all on stage become lost in. It builds to an enthralling and frenzied climax in a cacophonous melee of clashing instruments and dervish-like flailing from the waifish, winsome vocalist. So compelling is it that the fever spreads to the audience – nodding, stamping, pogoing, justplain-moving to this uncontrollable urge like evangelical acolytes.You half expect folk to fall to the floor speaking in tongues. Like I said, they create an experience, and an undeniably haunting, graceful and spellbinding one at that.
Nullifier The Freebutt, Brighton 03.04.2010 By Nathan Westley ▼
Nullifier may be an amalgamation of several bands that have been churning away for the past few years, but there is little on show tonight that would suggest the members creativity is stifled by their other endeavours; more that it is their coming together that has seen the members break free and veer into previously uncharted territory. Like a woodlouse that scurries through the musical undergrowth, chewing away at
discarded Klaxons records, Cut Copy promos and misplaced Animal Collective vinyls, Nullifier consume from a broad pallet before fertilising it into easily digestible, well-structured bursts of colourful, ear-friendly, leftfield outsider pop. Strewn out across the stage they hammer away, their heads down while singer J-Mo wanders around and occasionally grabs hold of lighting rigs and engages the audience. Still infantile in age and with a mere six songs written, it may not be possible to form a safe long term opinion just yet but that doesn’t detract from the sense that there is a lot of potential present, and though Nullifier may have been born as a side project, there is every chance that this may soon become the primary focus.
Spider & The Flies The Russian, Dalston, London 26.03.2010 By Edgar Smith ▼
If The Horrors’ second LP was an unexpected right hook to the music snobs, Spider and The Flies’ debut was the whispered ‘I swear to God I’m going to knock your fucking teeth out’ they didn’t hear. A side-project of Rhys ‘Spider’ Webb and Tom Furse, it’s essentially a creative showcase for their love of vintage synths, mangled sounds and reconstructed dance music, and tonight is its live debut. Suitably for an event that once looked improbable (since day one they’ve been surrounded with an only-on-record kind of aura), it’s in the unlikely location of the Russian Bar basement on Kingsland Road, Dalston. For those who’ve not had the pleasure, this is a former brothel, unsettling mirrored walls and everything, but the drenched-in-red light and Hell’s waiting room vibe complements the music perfectly. The pair spin-out a fairly short set of interconnected, slow-building beatscapes in favour of playing individual tracks and it’s more amenable than it is on tape; the mind-crunching noise has been reigned-in and it’s more Kraftwerk than Add N to X. It’s promising to say the least. Let’s hope the day job gives them time to play again, perhaps in a venue that doesn’t make you want to join a church.
NO CARS The Victoria, Mile End, London 27.03.2010 By Ian Roebuck ▼
A sure sign of a decent gig is walking away thinking it’d be pretty cool to be part of the band and No Cars have this enchanting power in spades. From their cutsey J-Pop playfulness to their righteous awareness for all things positive (guitarist Haruna has a ‘I Heart Global Warming’ sticker on her Strat, with a line struck through the centre of the organ [they are called NO Cars], and you get the impression the band don’t curse or litter either), they’re hard not to like. Lending a hand tonight, in the absence of drummer Kyoko, is Bo Ningen’s Mon-chan who’s never looked so giddy behind the kit before. Presumably he too is mildly obsessed with chocolate biscuits, has an acutely comical theatrical bent and enjoys singing songs about tuna. And if not, he’s does a fine job of pretending otherwise to fit in with this charismatic lots. Funny, electric and original from the off, even the line-check is turned into a three minute blast of
vivacious energy; the set peppered with joyous songs and humorous asides. Opening the gig with a mime involving a tape recorder, masks and some sellotape (as well as food No Cars are also strangely drawn to stationery) it’s a good indicator of what’s to come. Each song has its own illustration propped up on a music stand, which Haruna and bassist Sachi whip off in time for the next shouty bit of excited, bare-boned, clattering noise. It’s potentially a pretentious detail and yet strangely endearing in their hands, the Ku Klux Klan drawing memorable for all the right reasons. A song involving chocolate follows a ditty dedicated to Oreo biscuits that finally leads to a punk trip about tinned fish, which the band apparently eat a lot of. Haruna and Sachi expertly seduce both the crowd and their instruments while Mon-chan sticks to the script of simple beats as jolly as the guitars in front of him. And just when you start to think that the Grade 1 playing has run its course, Haruna proves to be quite the master of the oboe. All of these unexpected twists and turns are clearly part of the refreshingly, endearingly bonkers world of No Cars.
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Cinema review
film By DEAN DRISCOLL
CLASH OF THE TITANS Starring: Liam Neeson Ralph Fiennes, Sam Worthington Jason Flemyng, Gemma Arterton Director: Louis Leterrier
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Chris Morris’ big screen debut, Four Lions
Cinema Preview Finally! Britain’s cleverest comic writer follows in the footsteps of Iannucci and Gervais -----British comedy’s in a decent run of form when it comes to making the leap from small screen to big screen: the transatlantic success of the Spaced and The Thick Of It teams, with Shaun of the Dead and In The Loop respectively, has proved that critical and commercial failures such as Mitchell & Webb’s Magicians and the reprehensible Lesbian Vampire Killers need not be too inhibiting for our best comedy writers.With Armando Iannucci and the rest of the In The Loop team even picking up an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, the received wisdom that mainstream American audiences don’t get British humour is just not relevant anymore, as confirmed by the continuing US success of Ricky Gervais, Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright and Russell Brand. Following Iannucci’s breakthrough into movies, we now find ourselves anticipating the overdue film debut of one of the UK’s most important comedy figures. Chris Morris tends to take his time when it comes to deciding on projects, so the news of Four Lions’ (released 7th May) development was, for most comedy fans, one of the most tantalising prospects in a very long time, arguably even more so than the movie bow of Malcolm Tucker. The first wave of excitement about Four Lions’ surfaced rumours that Morris was working on a new terrorist-themed episode of Brass Eye. Undertaking meticulous research, Morris spoke to terrorism experts, police, the secret service, imams and hundreds of Muslims, establishing the real stories behind the UK
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jihadists that the UK media were busy convincing us all were evil masterminds. Instead he uncovered stories about ordinary groups of misguided young men who had more in common with hapless ‘shoe bomber’ Richard Reid than Osama Bin Laden. As Morris put it, “terrorism is about ideology, but it’s also about berks”. In much the same way that Brass Eye’s notorious paedophile special deconstructed the media hysteria about child molesters, Four Lions will be uncovering some of the realities about UK jihadists that the media ignores – they’re not masterminds, they’re mostly just idiots.With a hilarious trailer, and some glowing reviews, Morris’ movie debut could well be on the way to the kind of success In The Loop enjoyed. As well respected and brilliant as Morris and Iannucci are it’s difficult to imagine either of them hosting a glitzy American awards ceremony in the way Ricky Gervais did in January, when he presented the Golden Globes. Gervais can do no wrong in the States at the moment, so it’s interesting that for his latest movie he’s teamed up with Stephen Merchant to make the pair’s first feature together, and set it in Reading. After helming his debut solo directorial effort in The Invention of Lying, Gervais has returned to something approaching his roots with Cemetery Junction (released 14th April): a 70s set bittersweet comedy concerning the lives of a group of young men dreaming of escape from going-nowhere jobs in the dreary Berkshire satellite town. After Extras rather wearying whining about fame and working in show business, it’ll be a huge pleasure if Gervais & Merchant can get back to what made The Office so brilliant by reflecting more of the everyday frustrations and humiliations which people so identified with in that groundbreaking series.
Reviews have been rather kind to this remake of the early-80s Greek mythology epic, despite being released in the same week as KickAss, a film that thoroughly underlines the flaws of big budget action movies by being so much better than 99% of them. However, with the original being no masterpiece but looked back on warmly thanks to the creature work by stop-motion legend Ray Harryhausen, perhaps it’s fair that the remake should also be leniently reviewed, taken on its own merits rather than judged on any artistic level? Unfortunately that’s an argument that falls flat when you’re presented with a film as halfhearted as this one. It might not be trying to be art, but then it doesn’t seem to be trying very much at all. The epitome of the movie’s problems is the 3D: filmed in 2D,Warners decided on a 3D release well into the post-production process as a reaction to Avatar’s astounding success. As a result, the rush-job conversion doesn’t have any of the finesse of movies that have been filmed specifically for the format – instead of the immersive effect of Avatar’s groundbreaking techniques, you have a basic twolayer effect which is rather like watching 2D cut-outs performing against a backdrop. Anyone paying more for Titans 3D would rightly feel cheated. The problems go further than that though, from the lacklustre performances from much of the cast – epitomised by most of them not even bothering to disguise their own accents – to the CGI. Whilst the scorpions and Kraken are impressive enough, neither of them ever feel like a genuine threat, and the awful CG Medusa just compounds the longing for Harryhausen’s creatures. Leterrier may have made a point of discarding the original’s annoying clockwork owl in an early in-joke moment, but the gesture turns out to be symbolic of the makers throwing away the earlier movie’s flawed charm. -----For more film reviews and news check out the blog at www.loudandquiet.com and follow @loudquietfilm on Twitter.
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I AM V 5 YEAR OF LOUD AND QUIET
party wolf Photo Casebook “Party on Robbie: Pt 3”
) Listen Gary, just let Robbie back in! He’s lost loads of weight. Fuck, he’s like you in many ways
MEMOIRS
Pull the other one Wolf boy - it plays ‘Back For Good’ (which I wrote). Me and Williams are nothing alike. That man ruined my life... C’mon Jason, let’s get outta here!
) Now hang on a minute...
We were going live to the nation in 30 seconds and Bruno Brookes couldn’t find the head to the costume. The studio was a scene of total chaos and Tony [Blackburn] was in a right panic about a custard pie stunt we’d rehearsed but just the one time. 20 seconds: Bruno is still headless and sweating like a sausage in the sun.Tony is crying. 15: “I’ll go on without it!” Bruno shouts at the costume department who by this time are sticking ping-pong balls to a pink pillowcase as a back up. 10... 9... 8: “There!” I yell. “It’s there, next to the gung tank!” 7:Tony is sick. 6: Bruno grabs the head and runs up the stairs of the set, which was in fact modeled on Dave Lee Travis’ summerhouse. 5... 4... 3: I pull on a particularly loud looking jumper and toss Tony a hanky. 2:Tony is sick again. 1:We’re on! Behind the scenes, House Party was nearly always this exciting, and yet we always found the Mr Blobby head;Tony always got hit by the custard pie at the right time. And then it was over, just like that. I mean, I knew I’d be alright, I’d been working on an idea called Touch My Box, and you know how well that turned out...
Lonely hearts “It’s not weird, it’s a sexy Facebook”
GoOutWith MyFriend.com I fancy you so much right now, Gary. Can I come with you and Jason?
Kerry
Area: Children: Diet: Employment:
Course you can love... and your ginger mate. Robbie’s a fat toad, mate. You’re better of without him. Just ask Jonathan Wilkes... once they let him out to be cont.
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Jenny has this to say about Kerry: Two words that spring to mind when I think of Kez? Joke and...er...ummm...Joke. Shit, that’s the same word twice, isn’t it? She loves joking though, which is why we’ve been friends for so long. Oh my god! There was this time that we were on a night bus home and Kez was battered because it was a Tuesday and this fit bloke got on who looked well like Dane Bowers and Kez said to him, “Oi love, don’t sit on that chair with your bum, sit on my face with it... instead!” HA! I literally pissed myself laughing. People on the bus hated us soooo much. But we didn’t care. It was a Tuesday!!! Kerry responded by saying: Oooh, bloody hell, he was so fit I dropped burger sause all down me!!!
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London Hate me Lard Good Question
Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious.
35, looking for a bloke