Loud And Quiet 22 – Gold Panda

LoudAndQuiet Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 22 / 100 percent HOME GROWN

G r i n de r man Visions of Tr e es Old For est An i ka

An afternoon with

Te e ng i r l Fantasy Please J u ffag e Th e War e house Proj ect

And how do you explain this!?

When people ask us, “what type of music do you feature, then?” we used to um and arrr and fumble, before eventually saying, “Indie kind of stuff, really.” And then we’d run off to avoid being pressed on the matter. Then, for a time, it was “um, arrr, fumble, guitar music mostly,” which if anything is even more vague. Now it’s, “Um, arrr, fumble…” and what? God knows!

New alternative music is rapidly expanding and experimenting, and it’s ruining our handy sound bites.

For this issue, the answer is a little simpler though. Kinda. Once you discredit the gnarly sex blues of Grinderman, the heroin pop of Anika, the ever-jamming Please and the sludge grunge of Old Forests, we feature electronic music. Matter of factly.

We feature the ambient, impossibly personal Gold Panda [page 26], new Leeds tape manipulator Juffage [page 22], euphoric RnB duo Visions of Trees [page 32] and Ohio’s Teengirl Fantasy [page 14] – two students who’ve sound-tracked our early morning finishes since they released debut album ‘7AM’ last month. We even feature and celebrate the annual, fleeting home of dance music, The Warehouse Project [page 24].

And as for all that gnarly, jamming, heroin-pop, sludge grunge blues – it’s easily explained, just not by us.

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LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 22 / 100 PERCENT HOME GROWN

G R I N DE R MAN VISIONS OF TR E ES OLD FOR EST AN I KA

AN AFTERNOON WITH

TE E NG I R L FANTASY PLEASE J U FFAG E TH E WAR E HOUSE PROJ ECT

Photography by Gabriel Green

07 ...................(farm) boys in the band 08 ...................every little hurts 10 ...................eps and singles 12 ...................dodgy sounding pop 14 ...................hackers, pirates and thieves 16 ...................party on! Excellent!

17 ...................nonchalant night doggers 18 ...................crisis? what crisis?

22 ...................cassette tape obsession 24 ...................the cream of manchester 26 ...................essex home boy 32 ...................destiny’s child vs slayer 36 ...................Playing the fool 42 ...................no fun 50 ...................get the look

Contact

info@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet 2 Loveridge Mews Kilburn London NW6 2DP Stuart Stubbs Alex Wilshire Art Director Lee Belcher film editor Ian Roebuck 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 Cockram,Tom Goodwyn, This Month L&Q Loves

Keong Woo, Sarah Lowe, Sophie Williams, Will Laurence, 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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From farm boys to boy band Daniel Dylan Wray finds the evolution of Kings of Leon plain offensive

I’m not ashamed to admit it, I used to fucking love Kings of Leon, and pretty much everyone I knew did, even if they won’t admit that now. I was seventeen when their debut album came out, and it being the first year I could drive, it was an integral part of that summer and subsequently my adolescence. It felt fresh, raw, edgy and damn right good; granted, this was to the ears of a naive seventeen year old, but, this accompanied by their mysterious background and downright weirdness (like a horror show Brady Bunch crawling out from their barn and being brought up on rock’n’roll, moonshine and little else) meant they had everything that was enticing about a young new band to a young new man. I mean, their album was called ‘Youth & Young Manhood’!

Now fast forward a few years – past albums two and three that, regardless of personal taste, undeniably showed genuine progression, musically – and

then, fuck me, what went wrong?

As their popularity and bank accounts have grown, so too it would seem has their sense of self-importance and self-worth (highlighted in one single night when Caleb moaned that he was cold to a Reading Festival crowd who weren’t cheering loud enough).

This band used to be weird.

Genuinely weird! I remember watching the NME awards years ago as they grunted their way through interviews looking either completely unwilling, unable to speak, or just really stoned. They seemed to not care about such things; publicity, it seemed, was a downside to being in a band – a necessary evil that allowed them to do what they loved for a living. Then things went so sour. The wretched ‘Sex On Fire’ was the catalyst, transforming them from parameter, semi-commercial guitar band to fully-fledged radio-friendly unit shifters.

They went from stoic, morbid and

frigid performers to being in a video wearing vests and standing in front of flames as they pouted for close-ups.

It seems that with this meteoric rise came the arrival of their ego’s and boy did they come big, throwing any sense of ‘what’s best musically?’ out the window and replacing it with ‘how can we become even bigger?’. Their popularity continues to soar and their musical integrity continues to plummet, perhaps making it not too surprising that the band have been adopted by the Oasis crowd now that the Gallaghers aren’t talking.

Most damning, though, is the band’s refusal to take a break; to go a year without releasing a record; to step out of the spotlight and practice the old absence makes the heart grow fonder trick, even if time can also make for a better album.

It’s as if they fear being instantly forgotten and no longer being considered current

or relevant, or perhaps rich.

The band’s new album is out this month, which means they will have been doing the album release/promo/touring shtick for maybe three years straight, and it’s hard to believe that the motive for that is creativity.

They’ll no doubt be back at all the summer’s festivals again next year, being decidedly unweird and dodging what they once were, which incidentally was an interesting, publicly evasive and promising young band. The U2 comparisons suddenly become pertinent as a result. Remember the young Martin Hannett produced, post-punk U2? Me neither, but they did once exist, and as wholly believable rumours circulate that the other band members have had to try and intervene with Caleb’s personal music writing sessions now that he’s worked out if he writes the songs on the album by himself he gets all the royalties and money, you have to think that not even Bono is that ruthless.

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Books

By Janine & Lee Bullman

Becoming Jimi Hendrix

By Steven Roby & Brad Schreiber (De Capo) It turns out, for once, we’ve not heard it all before ---------------------

EVERY LITTLE HURTS Tesco exclusively stocking albums is helping no one, says Stuart Stubbs

In the great Tamagotchi rush of 1994 I seem to remember that if you didn’t live near a Toys “R” Us (and let’s face it, nobody does) your only chance of getting your hands on one of the pixelated palm pals was to join the overnight queue at Tesco.

Then, in the kind of bloody bum-rush not seen since the historic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles drought of ’88 (yeah, I lived through that shit too!) you’d realise that your store wasn’t one with a toy aisle, so you’d limp home, curse your boring, real-life friends for not fitting in your record bag and maybe try a branch further afield the following week. The word is Basildon are getting a load in. That would never happen today, and not because an entire remedial class of arse fluff can tell you that Tamagotchi’s are totally shit. It wouldn’t happen because Tesco now sells EVERYTHING. And this month – having already decided that the next logical step from flogging carrots is obviously car insurance, bank accounts, mobile phones and furniture – the supermarket giant is going Simon Cowell.

On November 1st, Irish girl aloud Nadine Coyle will release her debut solo single, admittedly not via Tesco Records (although give it a year) but through her own label, Black Pen, which, yes, does open a can of worms regarding mainstream

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pop acts ‘going DIY’, but let’s not get into that now. No, Nadine’s ‘Insatiable’, and her succeeding album of the same name (released a week later) is her baby, released on her imprint, because, as she rightly puts it, “I think we have learned that the traditional model for selling an album isn’t the only way of doing things. To be able to create an album where you are in complete control of your own work is a once-in-alifetime opportunity for an artist.”

So Nadine Coyle, one fifth of the most justly successful British girl groups since Sporty, Baby and the others, is bravely shunning the music machine that made her to get some records pressed herself in a bid for autocratic control.

Brilliant! Only, the thing is, if you want ‘Insatiable’ you’ll have to buy it with your processed meat balls (and garden furniture, of course) because the savvy singer has signed a big fat deal that means it’ll only be stocked in Tesco.

The deal itself is hardly something we can righteously blame Coyle for accepting. Nor can we claim that Black Pen Records was ever likely to be her mad dash for indie credibility, which has now damaged the DIY ethos shared by micro labels run by non-pop stars. (It’s quite safe to say that Black Pen is possibly a

rouse for this whole arrangement; a front not unlike the mob’s ‘laundrettes’, which is no doubt backed by a major label). But we can surely moan about a conglomerate’s endless muscle flexing.

The greengrocers were first to feel Tesco’s wrath, then almost every other corner of the retail market was mined with varying success, and now, as X Factor culture hurtles onward, it’s music that’s for the squeeze, having already been largely affected by the fact that we’ve been able to buy CDs in supermarkets for years, as long as they’re in the top ten.

What the exclusively clause in Nadine Coyle’s deal does do is save the Internet’s blushes a little, not that the web has ever apologised for revolutionising music distribution. It has, however, always been considered the lesser way to buy music, with ‘real music fans’ opting for a trip to a musty record store for their Gaga album…the vinyl edition. But now there’s surely an even more inferior recordshopping experience, which involves purchasing Nadine Coyle’s debut album in a shopof-all-trades. You’ll probably slip a Mars Bar in your basket too, in a failed attempt to hide your embarrassment, like in the great porno revelation of 1997.

Not because of what you’re buying, but how you’re buying it.

Published to coincide with the 40th anniversary of Hendrix’ demise in a West London hotel, Becoming Jimi Hendrix sets itself apart from the other three hundred and twenty Hendrix bios weighing down the shelves in Waterstones by daring to tell us something we didn’t already know.

The book concentrates on Hendrix’s early years, learning licks from BB King, refusing to deal dope for Harlem hoodlums and getting busted for his part in a Nashville civil rights demo.

Sensitive and engaging, it offers genuine insight into the back story of the man with the guitar who changed it all forever. Recommended.

Wish You Were Here.

England on Sea Travis Elborough (Sceptre) Deckchairs and donkeys are Elborough’s new rock’n’roll --------------------The keen-eyed amongst you may recall us banging on approvingly a year or so back about Mr. Elborough’s last book, The Long Player Goodbye, in which he provided a fascinating potted history of the LP record and our love affair with it.

The bespectacled author has this time elected to set his sights on the English seaside town, exploring its roots, impact and future, and what they tell of us as a nation.

Wish You Were Here is a charming book, ideally read whilst eating chips and wistfully watching the tide go out from a car in the rain.

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s i n g les & E Ps

01 Let’s Wrestle / Young Governor Crushing Nerves / Old Hat (Tough Love) Out Oct 18

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When you’re a confessed kleptomaniac trying to ‘go straight’ one imagines it’s all a matter of keeping your tealeafing tendrils busy. Ben Cook has managed to stay off the rob by shredding about with Fucked Up and playing dank garage rock he calls “cave pop” as one half of The Bitters. Rather impressively he also manages to make time for second side project Young Governor - his only solo effort and most skeletal, no-fi affair by some distance. ‘Old Hat’, then, is unsurprisingly fuzzy as fuck, but it also puffs out a certain glam rock pomp of walkie-talkie effected vocals and a simple ‘Satisfaction’-esque back beat that prevents it from simply being another DIY garage track

du jour that’ll be consumed but rarely savoured.

Let’s Wrestle are the only band that Cook wished to share a split 7” with, and nothing supports such insistence quite like ‘Crushing Nerves’. An underdog’s comfort blanket, it’s the kind of clumpy, nearly sung punk song that people will find solace in having watched The Inbetweeners and been spooked by how closely it resembles their own existence. “I really think it’s time I cleaned my life up/ Have you seen how bad I messed it up?”, asks singer WPG before rhyming “crushing nerves” with labelling himself “a perve”. But as self-deprecating as Let’s Wrestle remain, their ability to write perfect punk melodies is better than ever.

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Comanechi / Divorce

Becoming Real

Flats

Split 10”

Spectre EP

Flats EP 2

No Joy No Summer

(Merok) Out now -----

(Moshi Moshi) Out Nov 15 -----

(Sweat Shop/Loog) Out Oct 25 -----

(Sex Beat) Out Now -----

Grunge pop duo Comanechi and Glasgow noise pests Divorce have long been kindred spirits in search of abrasive, sexual, sometimes horrifying sonic messes. Here Comanechi throw ‘Let It Bloom’ into the ring (a stretching, sludgy psych number more akin to their filthy ‘Mesmerising Fingers’ than the playful pop of early single ‘Naked’), which is then devoured

by Divorce’s ‘Amuse Bouche’ (a frightening barrage of barked vocals, static metal guitars and a shit load of cymbal crashes) before the bands buddy up for an endless cover of Sonic Youth’s ‘Death Valley 69’. And yeah, that’s some scary shit too.

UK grime began treading water long before Dizzy went Bonkers; every bass wobble the same, every vocal phrase too similar to the one before. Having teamed up with Trim for his debut EP, Becoming Real is offering UK hip hop a new angle (much like the recently formed Dels/Joe Goddard partnership is), and it’s all down to the production. On both ‘Like Me’ and ‘Showdown in Chinatown’, Trim raps with a refreshing, mellow modesty, but it’s Toby Ridler’s trundling, muffled beats and minimalist, squealing electronics that suggest it really is possible for grime to be inventive and successful without being wacky.

Let’s not pretend that London punks Flats are “actually quite melodic”. They’re not! They’re aggressive and loud and snotty and unimpressed, which are just four reasons to like them in a list of hundreds. Naturally, they’ve named their second EP after themselves again - because that’s what their heroes of 1976 would do - and have returned to familiar ground where volume and speed take preference over the clarity of singer Dan Devine’s shouted vocals. It’s safe to say that he’s fucked off about something though, which may or may not help make this band’s simplicity as compelling as it indeed is.

It’s amazing how far the chords of ‘Wild Thing’ will go. You don’t even need to change their order, as proved here by girl duo No Joy. ‘No Summer’ sounds less like The Troggs and more like the shoe-gazing Trailer Trash Tracys though...until it’s having a schizophrenic turn. On two occasions the weightless, detached vocals shut up as the pair sprint off in the direction of a short, instrumental blast, only to drop straight back into a crunchy 60s groove. Without these fleeting dynamics, this single could be too awash with hiss to make an impression; with them, ‘No Summer’, I think I love you.

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Reviews by S. Little / S. Stubbs

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Anika Dirtying sweet songs of the sixties and putting politics back into music with the help of Beak> P h o t o g r a p h e r : L e o n d i a p e r W r i t e r : p o lly r a ppa p o r t “I sound a bit dodgy today, I’ve got a bad cold,” admits Anika “and the German accent comes in once in a while, along with the Cardiff and whatever else is mixed in there. I’m a bit homeless. I have been for years.” Born in England and brought up by a German mother – “There’s something going round that I was born in Berlin but that’s absolute bollocks, I was born in Chertsey.” – Anika visited Germany frequently as a child and still spends time there, though she’s also lived in Wales, the US, and all over England. “That’s why my accent is all over the place,” she explains. “It goes a bit Home Counties then a bit London, Birmingham, then the German comes in.”

At the moment all I’m hearing is slightly Brummified Surrey, but having listened to Anika’s debut album all weekend, a German accent was exactly what I was expecting – specifically of the deep, smoky, Nico-esque variety. Was the singing accent a choice?

“I don’t know, sometimes I just can’t pronounce words,” she laughs “and when I sing I have a sort of German speech impediment. I can’t help it; it’s not intentional at all. I over pronounced my words on the record because I didn’t want to sound American, and I ended up sounding really German.”

Don’t you just hate it when that happens? While it might seem peculiar to be analysing the way a singer pronounces things, it’s a key factor in the draw of the record. The precise, elegant articulation and measured emotion of Anika’s voice is utterly captivating, especially as it slices its way through a minefield of screaming guitars, hip hop beats, acid synths and passing clouds of reverb that sound like they’ve been beamed down from outer space.

The album is a collaboration between Anika and Bristol trio

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Beak>, and contains both original compositions and a strangely well-suited assortment of cover versions, including songs by Yoko Ono and Bob Dylan.

“I really like 60’s music,” says Anika. “I’ve always liked garage rock. It was me, Billy [Fuller, Fuzz Against Junk] and Geoff [Barrow, Portishead] who picked the songs. We wanted to find really sickly sweet songs and mess with them as much as we could.” Which they certainly did; their take on Brenda Lee’s ‘End Of The World’ is a sort of slow motion ode to the apocalypse, while Ray Davies’ ‘I Go To Sleep’ sounds like a nightmarish carnival ride. “Even the love songs have turned into stalker songs,” she says evenly, and there are plenty of politically motivated songs in there as well, such as ‘Masters Of War’, which might have seemed an obvious, almost lazy political choice, but for the unfortunately timeless message of protest and outrage, which, again, Anika’s voice conveys stunningly with its dignified anger and frankness, backed only by a minimal beat and its own hollow echoes.

Anika studied journalism in Cardiff, which is when the political side of her really began to emerge. “I had some pretty interesting lecturers, they were proper lefties, and I just started getting into politics,” she explains. “Plus, having a German mother who’s a bit of a crazy Buddhist, I was brought up to have an open mind, to say the least. At uni, I started to help out with the Innocence Project, reviewing cases of people who are facing life imprisonment or who are on Death Row.” It’s unsurprising, then, that the songs Anika writes tend to address political issues, if not quite as overtly as a Dylan track. “There’s a few that are quite political but people might not realise,” she says. “Like, ‘No One’s There’ is about the

recession, which I don’t admit often, but it’s about when the recession first set in and it was a big moral panic, people blamed it for everything that was going wrong, but there was nothing really there, it was all in their minds.”

A political thread seems to run throughout the entire record, its very subtext is subversive, as much in the reworking of gritty 70’s rock tracks as in the deconstruction of saccharine 60’s goo. She’s talked about the common interest amongst her bandmates of messing with music, but the whole piece seems a bit too heavy for an off the cuff song-mangling session.

“I was at a really low point at the time,” she explains. “I wanted to mess with these songs, and I was also working as a promoter at the time, for about three or four venues in Cardiff, and I was really bored with the way the music industry was. I mean, there were good bands out there, but they were different, and I wouldn’t book them, not because I didn’t like them, but because I knew they wouldn’t pull a crowd. I hated that, I hated that I couldn’t book bands that weren’t ‘normal’ and so, with my own music, I just decided to mess with everyone as much as I could.”

She wasn’t interested in putting out a ‘straight up indie’ record, and was particularly happy to end up working with Beak> because of the range of influences – and instruments – that came into the mix. The music is based on a foundation of drums, bass and guitar, but there are other elements, referred to vaguely as “all the other weird shit”, which contribute quite significantly to the harsh, yet ethereal quality of the songs.

Apparently there’s enough “other weird shit” involved to require an extra pair of hands on stage for the live performances.

It’s tough to imagine how the album will translate live, but

after a few practices with the new set up, Anika is optimistic.

“I just feel sorry for the person who ends up standing directly opposite me during the show because I’ll probably be giving them really bad evils the whole time.”

And what does she expect it will be like playing the album to a live audience?

“I think some people don’t quite know what to make of the record – it’s quite different to what’s out at the moment. It would have been easy to make a straightforward indie tune and just slot it right in there, but instead we’re saying, ‘this is what’s going on now’ and we’re standing on the wall doing our own thing.” Anika is aware that there will be plenty of people who hate the record as well as those who like it, but that doesn’t bother her – as with most art, it’s indifference that would be most worrying.

Fortunately, she has a feeling she’s made a proper ‘Marmite record’. Even as they were recording it, she says they would stop and listen back, and realise whatever they’d just laid down didn’t really work with any other music being made at the moment. It was afterwards, when Anika went back to Berlin, that she realised her music had been very well received in Germany. “It’s very different to England there,” she explains. “In Berlin people don’t always try to understand stuff, and the English seem to have to put things in a box in order to understand them, so I think the record has confused them a bit, taken them out of their comfort zone. Maybe that was the intention.”

It seems that, with this record, Anika has found the perfect balance of politics and music, all wrapped up in the perfect excuse to visit more countries and make some more trouble. Maybe she’ll even pick up a few extra accents along the way.

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teengirl fantasy Pirate sympathisers P h o t o g r a p h e r : A n n a G o n i c k / e r e z av i s s a r W r i t e r : SA M WA LTON

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It’s 2010. The original Napster file-sharing scandal began a decade ago, and while that site got shut down quicker than a rave outside a police station, the illegal download battle continues to rage, simply changing location each time someone official-looking turns up waving legal papers. In the intervening decade, musicians and record labels have tried every trick in the book to get fans to continue paying for music, largely in vain. Everyone has an opinion on it, from Metallica’s big fuck you to anyone who nicked their albums, to Radiohead’s honesty box.

Here’s a new one though: “Our best anti-piracy device is to give a lot of our music away for free.” It’s the idea of college student and electronica nerd Nick Weiss. The logic is impeccable, although as a strategy it does seem worryingly

akin to legalising heroin, only to announce that arrests for dealing heroin have miraculously plummeted overnight.

Weiss presents his tactic as part of a broader conversation about whether he and his college buddy Logan Takahashi regret naming their musical project Teengirl Fantasy. Over a digitally distorted Skype line from Oberlin College, Ohio, where they are both in the final years of their degree (Logan studies electronic music; Nick film), they explain why it’s not the most forgiving of monikers.

“We were hanging out on the porch of one of the co-ops, talking about boy bands for some reason, and our friend Vivian suggested a good boy band name would be Teengirl Fantasy,” begins Logan, a rueful tone cutting through his voice. “And at the time,” Nick interrupts, “we thought it was the most

genius thing we’d ever heard, but it was also, like, 3am, and we were also, like, sitting on a swing,” he says, adding the last detail as if it’s the final piece in the puzzle. “And now, when we have to tell customs people at an airport or something what our band name is, we get this bizarre look, like ‘what are you really doing?’”

“But the thing is,” Weiss continues, “it came up with a lot of porn on Google...” “...except we’re now the top hit on Google,” points out Takahashi, still rueful. “...and people are afraid to search for us,” Weiss carries on. “And it’s impossible to find our music on Limewire among all the porn. But we have more antipiracy devices than that...”

The music in question is a hazy hybrid of pretty much all dance music from the dawn of disco – their reimagining of

Rose Royce’s 1978 classic ‘Love Don’t Live Here Anymore’ is breathtaking – to the present day, filtered through cannabis smoke and the attention-deficit brains of two 21-year-old liberal arts students. Yes, you can dance to it – and both Weiss and Takahashi talk enthusiastically about playing live – but in truth the music is more impressionist than hedonist, full of foggy memories of dancefloors rather than the dancefloors themselves. As their debut album, ‘7AM’, progresses, there is a feeling of not exactly being there but being thereabouts, like walking past a music festival dance tent, hearing the throb but also the clatter and clutter of everything else around.

Aggressively DIY – they have refused to use laptops in their live set-up after a terrible experience with one in their first gig, surrounding themselves instead with single-purpose gizmos and small keyboards – their aesthetic is the antithesis of most electronic music: precision is eschewed for texture and feeling, recordings are done live, and songs are written through jamming.

“Something that I think both of us are into is texture,” explains Logan. “I got into electronic music because of texture, and both of us think about it when we’re writing, how the texture affects that music and soundworld. Usually we’ll write a song pretty quickly and then play it out live, see how it develops and see what things feel right. That’s been our song-writing process, trying to keep it as free as possible. At the beginning, we didn’t establish any stylistic rules or talk about anything. We just did whatever.”

But despite the broadbrush technique, “whatever” actually turns out to be largely indebted

to the dubbier end of early 90s house – the Future Sound of London, 808 State, the Orb. Combined with the hazy, windswept production, the overall vibe is vaguely nostalgic. However, Logan isn’t sure: “For me it’s not about feeling nostalgic about a certain time, or being like, ‘oh I wish it was the 90s’. It’s more just being able to pick and choose, and have access to so many different reference points.

There’s a difference between reappropriating things from the past and longing for the past. I don’t know if I personally long for the past, but I definitely think it’s cool to go back and put it together in any way that I want.”

Perhaps a more pertinent reason why Takahashi doesn’t long for that specific past, for old memories of parties in deserted out-of-town industrial estates and woodland clearings in 1989, is because he was barely born then. The memories that he and Weiss are exploring with Teengirl Fantasy are not their own – but that in itself can be useful for avoiding an undue deference to the source.

“I think that gives us a bit more licence to experiment,” he explains. “Because we’re more disconnected from it, we have more freedom.”

Nick agrees: “It’s more just about picking up on the sound from older records and the feeling that they give people, and then utilising them as snippets to form a bigger piece.

Although we love that material, we’re not afraid of doing something totally bizarre with it, and that’s because we only know about it – we weren’t making this music when the original people were – we have a totally different connection to it because we’re so young.”

There then follows lots of bluster about jazz, the model

numbers of specific vintage synths and extolling the virtues of bell tones, until the conversation swings around to talk of the Internet. “I had a fansite on Geocities,” Nick remembers. “I updated it all the time with crazy glittery exploding firework graphics, but now it’s gone. That was a devastating thing. Yahoo was really not cool about closing Geocities, but that’s the future of the Internet, and it’s bleak – the way that Apple and other companies have made it all about paying for content again, killing the free stuff.

“We have a lot in common with all the hackers and pirates out there. Like, we sample plenty of music, don’t clear the rights, don’t really care who knows it, and it just makes for interesting art. I can respect people who don’t really care about ownership on the Internet.”

The inevitable question, then, is do Weiss and Takahashi care if people pay for the Teengirl Fantasty album? There’s a pregnant pause, and the digital crackle of the Skype line appears to grow louder. In a dorm room in Ohio, two college students are torn. Then the pair answer simultaneously, in contradiction. “Yes,” says Logan; “nah”, says Nick. They both laugh.

“Do I want people to buy the album?” asks Nick. “Not especially. I definitely don’t care if people download the album for free. I think that they should want the vinyl because it looks beautiful and it’s cool to have a physical object of something. But I download for free all the time, but I also pay for songs and music by people that I know or by people I respect a lot. I think...,” he pauses. “I dunno.”

He trails off, and Logan, this time, doesn’t pipe up.

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old forest Sludge rock inspired by two dudes with a cable show produced in their basement.

Yes, those two dudes!

P h o t o g r a p h e r : NANCY T H ORN B ER W r i t e r : IAN ROE B U CK

“Party on!” That’s the parting shot as Tom, Matt and Luke wind their way alongside Wimbledon Common, and having spent a pleasant hour discussing the virtues of loud guitars, Dinosaur Junior and band practice, we’re feeling inclined to do so.

Despite the dialogue these guys aren’t Thatcher-baiting, Pop-Tart-munching children of the 80’s. At just sixteen years old the Blair babies should be lusting after Stifler’s Mum not Cassandra Wong, but Old Forest seem to have struck gold with Waynes World.

“I first saw it on BBC3. You don’t really know what the fuck is going on but you watch these guys being idiots and it pretty much reflects what we’re like,” explains Tom in a drawl reminiscent of Garth at his most stoned. Old beyond their years, the three met at school and instantly bonded over their dislike of music class – “Honestly, GCSE Music was the hardest fucking thing I’ve done in my life,” claims Tom as the rest let out an impish classroom chuckle. “I used to remember our teacher saying there is no intelligence in punk, it’s just

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two chords.”

Now in sixth form, Old Forest write sludge rock, steep and steady with a sound you’d expect from three thirty somethings.

That’s not to say the band aren’t fresh – they’re lush and dripping with all the vibrancy you’d expect from three youngsters still learning their instruments – but the surprising maturity can be traced to the root of their influences: more 90’s iconography and culture.

“We’ve all really liked the big bands from that era like Nivarna for a long time,” explains Luke “and we just like loud riffs and stuff, and then you dig deeper and you find bands like Built to Spill and Hum. I only got into Built to Spill when they supported Dinosaur Junior at Shepherds Bush Empire but since then we are all really into it.” Weezer get plenty of mentions this afternoon too, even if they are “getting shitter and shitter”.

“Although we saw them play at Reading and their cover of ‘Teenage Dirtbag’ was like whoooooah,” defends Tom. Somewhere out there Bill and Ted are gushing.

These three would cope just

fine on their own but a welcome sway comes in the form of Joe from Dignan Porch, Luke’s older brother and laid back mentor.

“He got us into some cool bands and obviously being sixteen it’s kind of hard to get gigs,” says Luke. “Joe’s friendly with promoters and stuff so he can get us help. If he listened to rubbish music I probably would have done too so yeah I owe him a bit.”

And he also had a hand in Old Forest’s debut recording – a heavyweight tune called ‘Moe’, which features a beefed up beast of a distorted riff.

“Yeah, he recorded it in my attic on his 8 track,” says Luke. “We tried to do another one but we couldn’t get the timings right, it’s pretty cool to have him around.

“We made up ‘Moe’ about 5 minutes before playing the Old Blue Last in London – everything just came together. All our songs are pretty similar; just turn it up really loud and put loads of distortion on it.”

And I’m guessing you had to come up with a name pretty quickly then?

“Yeah, and we just like The Simpsons,” Tom dryly notes.

“We have another song called ‘Millhouse’ too,” continues Luke. “It’s not been recorded yet but we always play it at our gigs. If we were to put out a release it would be ‘Moe and Millhouse’.”

For a band named after foliage these boys seem partial to a spot of indoor activity, particularly if the telly’s involved. It’s a wonder they ever get out to gigs, and being sixteen (with or without help from a big brother) it must be hard to convince promoters and venue owners to take a punt on them too?

“Yeah some places are really cool but when we played at the Stags Head we were soundchecking and the landlord came out and started pointing at Matt going awwww he’s so cute and Matt was just blowing out his bass really loud! It can be a bit annoying if we aren’t going to drink and we’re just there for the music,” Luke stresses before Matt – until now silent and shy – sums up their predicament simply enough. “It doesn’t really bother us,” he says. “If beautiful women want to call us cute then that’s fine with us.” Schwing!

please You won’t be able to believe your ears P h o t o g r a p h e r : TO M COCKRA M W r i t e r : DANIE L DY L AN W RAY

Please are a three piece consisting of Michael (guitars and vocals) Rowland (also guitars) and Keeby (drums), together now for four whole years. They play a smorgasbord of sonic ventures, all varying in tone, tempo and genre. The songs are misleading, mysterious and manic, and there is an apparent restlessness to their music that you’d expect to find in them as people, but nothing could be further from the truth – they have every quirk and oddity carefully constructed and mapped out.

“You are aware that everyone who ever writes an introductory article on you will called it ‘Please(d) to meet you’, don’t you?” I suggest halfway through our interview. So where did that name come from?

“Well for the first year and a half that we played we didn’t have a name as we hated everything we came up with, but we wanted something that would be impossible to Google,” comes one reply – a response I soon find to aptly represent and define the band’s playful, elusive and uncompromising outlook. As far as I can gather, they’re unaffected by anything other

than what they are doing themselves, musically.

After deeming it impossible to find a quiet place to conduct an interview anywhere in Manchester’s Islington Mill [the band are playing here tonight with Future Islands and Peephole], the four of us have headed outside and are huddled into their car, the windows steamed up and the vehicle rocking and jolting as if we’re nonchalant doggers of the night.

Currently, two thirds of the band live in London, while Keeby recently moved to Leeds “to get out of London.”

Ah! Well, at least the band can now make an impact on Leeds as they already have down south.

“I think we’ve only played one show there,” they laugh “but we are supporting Yummy Fur when they play the Brudenell.”

Fittingly, the kind of spontaneity and impulsiveness that leads to moving halfway up the country can be found all over Please’s songs. They’re almost recorded jams, which isn’t to say they appear lackadaisical or directionless.

“None of it’s really improvised, actually,” explains Michael. “What we do is kind of

the opposite of improvising, in fact. The stuff we have recorded and the stuff we play live is planned for months and months.

And we cut down a lot as well, so now we have a selection of about six or seven songs we stick to and play.”

“The songs are collectively dissected,” adds Rowland “usually until there is nothing left, then we start again! We’re not very productive and not very fast. We’ve got to play a song for a very long time before it feels right. I think we play together a lot better now, because we’ve been playing for so long - it feels a bit more comfortable. Some songs we’ve been playing for three years and only just now do they feel natural when we play them.”

So while they undoubtedly emit a degree of manic flair, they are in actual fact precision penned songs, sternly edited. And that means (not unlike LA noise experimenters HEALTH) that your average Please song boasts a clinical, meticulous spirit that still feels full of life and vigour, whether you’re seeing them play live or listening to them at home.

“We don’t consciously have any conventional influences I don’t think,” says Michael.

“We’re all quite diverse in what we like, but it’s good that way.

When one of us tries to do something we all hate it and make it into something better.

We all like our own stuff and we have got some stuff we’re all into, but for it to work like that each song has to have the perfect middle ground for all of us, otherwise it gets put in the bin. As a band we’ve never sat down and said let’s do a garagetype tune or anything like that.

We don’t really talk about our music a lot really.”

But while it may have taken Please a while to reach a level of comfort and acceptance within their songs, luckily it doesn’t take quite as long for the listener. On record they demand repeated listens, and live they mandate your return, not in order to ‘get it’, but rather because there’s an infectious energy propelling that weird groove. And of the vast degree of what’s on offer, and the meticulous work put in to create the songs, it only seems fitting that we should put in some work too. But it’s never a chore.

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Feeling

Groovy

P h o t o g r a p h e r : D e i r d r e O ’ C a ll a gh a n W r i t e r : ED G AR S M IT H

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Grinderman have been tagged misogynistic, miserable, boozey and on the verge of a very noisy mid-life-crisis. In truth, the Bad Seeds side project couldn’t be happier or with more depth Ostentatious flatscreen, monstrous sofa, blonde wood everything, condiment-filled fridge, acoustic guitar on a stand in the corner and, placed beside it, a small oriental bowl filled with plectrums: cartoon fire on one side, Eric Clapton written on the other.

It’s the West London flat of a fifty-something Australian guy, dropped into every few evenings by him and someone who never gets called back. It belongs to my friend’s recently separated dad, of course, but you’d be forgiven for thinking I was describing a Grinderman-owned timeshare if you’ve read their press.They were cast almost without exception as a supergroup of fuck-hungry lotharios the first time round, ‘Band of alt. stars hit midlife crisis’ making for a good tag that wasn’t altogether implausible (anyone who saw ‘Peter Hook plays the songs of Joy Division’ this summer will have a sense of how long, drunk and painful the hour between 2 and 3am must be for certain musicians). For Grinderman, it doesn’t wash.

With the arrival of their second LP, writers have tweaked this and now Grinderman ‘are’ four happily married men, worth talking to thanks to four florid back-stories and two awesome records rather than any imminent meltdown.The current round of interviews tend towards a more rounded impression of the project but it’s rare to find one that elicits more than comfortable thoughts from its members, window-dressed with snappy repartees. Not that we’re making any promises.

Warren Ellis and Nick Cave stand outside the stage door of the Coronet Theatre in Elephant and Castle, where tonight they finish a three night run. So, what of being symbols for over-the-hill sexual frustration and psychological collapse?

Cave repeats the gist of a previous conversation to Ellis: “Well, he was talking to me about the fact that we have this reputation for being bourbon-guzzling maniacs sitting in the studio…”

Ellis: “Oh really? I don’t know where that would come from…”

Cave: “…and this doesn’t correlate with the fact that there’s a lot of subtlety in the music, is that alright?”

Ellis: “I think that’s just sloppy journalism, people who’ve created that idea, like we’re having a midlife crisis or something, are just lazy.”

“Crisis, what crisis?” laughs Cave. “That image is imposed upon us, that’s not anything to do with us.We’re trying to make original and interesting music, anything else is beyond our control.”

Earlier, in their dressing room on the top floor of the Coronet’s backstage labyrinth, and with half the band yet to arrive, I skip through another imposed image with Cave while bassist Martyn Casey read a paper.

One of Wire magazine’s verbose ambassadors for good taste gave ‘Grinderman 2’ a hammering in its September issue.The record was rubbish, she said, while flaggingup Cave for misogyny.

“Yeah, I guess Wire don’t really like their musicians to have any fun,” he says. “If you look like you’re having a good time you’re bound to get a bad review. It was exactly the same process [as the first album]: five days in the studio, improvising, ad-libbing lyrics and finding what came out. If what comes out is misogynistic, then I’m sorry about that but personally I don’t see that. I think I confront these aspects of ‘Male-ness’ – I don’t see anybody else out there really doing that – and of course, if you even step a toe into that arena, there’s gonna be women who leap on you for disturbing the waters.”

Jim Scalvunos (drums) and Warren Ellis (a whole load of shit) have appeared. Has anyone in the band read the review?

Cave: “No I haven’t” Ellis: “I have. Oh it was great.”

Scalvunos: “Heuhuhuh, we need more reviews like that.”

Ellis: “I thought it was great and what was even better was the responses.There was one guy that was like, ‘I’m gonna buy it now, I really like bad Doors covers bands’.

Another guy said, ‘Oh, I wasn’t really convinced by this project but now I’m gonna buy it’, so we made an extra two sales out of it.”

The charge of being musically vapid and gratuitously sexist is a strange one and not only because it’s 2010 and even retards know the difference between author and persona.

The thrust of the criticism was to say that while the first LP might’ve been enjoyably flippant, this one is a step too far. If anything, the second is less provocative than the first.

There are fewer of what Cave calls “in your face and borderline psychotic” lyrics and its dick-swinging rawk sound is counterbalanced throughout with quiet, reflective passages and patient build-ups that have lead to Bad Seeds comparisons. It manages to be less of a ‘statement’ than the debut and more a piece of music that can be appreciated for itself rather than its context.

That’s not to say that it’s radically different from ‘No Pussy Blues’ and friends. “Aspects of male-ness” are still fundamental and they’re still delivered with thumping garage rock that at least appears to revel in abandonment. Going by the cover art, the castration-fearing monkey has grown into a more sexually-assured prowling wolf, but the landscape we’re in is just as freaked-out and alienated by sex, desire, and death.

The sense of strung-out paranoia is most piercing in ‘Kitchenette’. Its lyrics are the most clearly written-on-the-fly and later, with a packed-out venue hanging on every www.loudandquiet.com

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word, it works particularly well. Like a vaudevillian post-punk Huie Rogers, Cave quasi-sermonises about hearing footsteps on the stairs while trying to get it on. ‘Evil’ too is a different song live, inhabiting fully the ear-bleaching space it aims at on record.This heaviness in Grinderman’s repertoire is responsible for both the polarised reviews and the number of younger people showing up at their gigs. Big guitar sounds in pop music also inevitably function as flailing sonic penis symbols and people are always describing Grinderman with lame phrases like ‘balls-out’ and ‘dick-swinging rawk’.

T

he Wednesday after the Coronet show I saw brilliant, dumb-ass grungers Mudhoney in Camden. Similarly the recipients of endless phallic descriptors, they provided a handy comparison to Grinderman’s noisy elements. Highlighted by their absence in Mudhoney’s set were the dimensions of sadness and humour that are present even as Grinderman pummel you with feedback; sitting iceberg-like beneath what’s immediately apparent.There’s also sense in that the album feels simultaneously new and old.Their sound might be grounded in the proto-punk of New York Dolls and earlier classic rock, blues and garage but ‘Palaces of Montezuma’ is a confluence of Bob Dylan and Primal Scream that works upon the same lyrical premise as The Magnetic Fields’ ‘Crazy for You, But Not that Crazy’.

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“People who’ve created the idea that we’re having a midlife crisis or something is sloppy journalism” The flourishes that start lead single ‘Heathen Child’ wouldn’t have been out-ofplace on The Horrors’ ‘Primary Colours’.

Where’s all this complexity come from?

“One trait shared by all the individuals in Grinderman is restless creativity,” explains Scalvunos. “We are constantly looking to do things differently, move on from what we’ve accomplished, question what’s assumed, try something new even if it invites failure.We wear the shame of our more regrettable musical experiments like badges of honour ‘10 minute flute solo? 70s electronic synth drums? Thought you’d never ask!’. Not that we feel any need to try things simply for the sake of novelty. It’s at the precipitous edge of the farthest boundaries of taste that one sometimes finds the most adventurous ideas.

There’s a collective imperative to evolve at any cost, but by the same token we certainly know who we are. I think the combination of restlessness, intelligent curiosity, ornery stubbornness and damn-the-torpedoes recklessness is how we manage to create new sounds that have a tangible and credible link to the past. It somehow all balances out.”

Scalvunos has a particularly interesting and amorphous frame of reference. He

edited ‘No’ magazine, played in Gynaecologists,Teenage Jesus (‘I’ll tell you something, he [James Chance] was an awful roommate, one of the worst roommates I’ve ever had’) and Sonic Youth before Bad Seeds and Grinderman. He continues to produce new bands; recently working with The Horrors and doing a pre-production session with Londoners S.C.U.M. “My ears are always open for something new,” he says, “and I’m far from oblivious to this ever-changing landscape filled with fresh faced bands; but my personal interest in all that is wholly from a production viewpoint.

Basically, there’s not enough time in the day to go endlessly rummaging through the proliferation of new bands on the Internet, especially if you’re an artist and you’re excited and determined to go about making your own music. Although we are a relatively new band, Grinderman are far more likely to draw on the past rather than delve into any up-and-comings.We’re already familiar with a vast breadth of music that inspires us and we’re constantly discovering fascinating new facets of artists we already know and love, so when we put on an album like ‘Bitches Brew’, it’s not a music history lesson – it’s

music we grew up with. It’s like an old friend: alive, vivid and vital.”

“Jim is deeply mired in modern music,” confirms Cave. “Me and Warren probably listen to a little less. Oh at home? I might listen to Spiritualized maybe? Or Neil Young, or Miles Davies. Let’s finish it in a bit, you’re not going to hear anything.”

He smacks the strings of his guitar. I should’ve mentioned that we’re now on the stage of an empty Coronet and the band are due to soundcheck. In recent press shots, they all look like puppeteers [eyes left], suited Lynchian spectres for whom music and audience are twin marionettes. In the flesh they’re a lot more personable; Cave surprises by wearing a light puffer jackettype-thing and Ellis looks like he’s hiding in a Berlin attic circa. 1943.

Later, the frontman reverts to the expected suit and his guitarist changes into a shirt that’s more seventies coke-fiend.The overwhelming vibe I get from all of them is that of a funny uncle you remember throwing you around the room when you were small; affectionately mocking, quick, unwilling to put up with any bullshit and quite weird.

After a perfunctory run-through of ‘Worm Tamer’ and ‘Heathen Child’, Ellis and Scalvunos wrangle with the soundman about whether or not the drums sound ‘flat’.

There’s a faintly tetchy edge to a couple of the comments. Do they manage to keep friendly with each other?

“Yes,” Casey explains back in the dressing room. “It would be impossible [if we weren’t friends], I don’t think any of us would do it, it’s part of playing the music.”

Do you go out together?

Casey and Cave both laugh.The latter has taken his shirt off to be examined by a doctor.

Casey: “We go out and have a meal together and stuff like that. It’s all part of the story.”

“Yeah, we read the newspaper together, we share each other’s cigarettes,” Cave deadpans.

Casey: “Perhaps one aspect of this group of musicians is that we all live in different cities and we’ve all got different side-projects and we get together and we find it stimulating.”

Doctor: “It doesn’t sound too bad.”

Cave: “No, it’s not that bad.”

Doctor: “It could just be an infection.”

“When we played in France they gave me an injection and it’s amazing,” says Cave.

“The effect on my voice. I had a really fun night.”

The doctor laughs.

Later we’re by the stage door again, while the band wait for their cars.

“Steroids have arrived!” cries Cave.

“What am I going to do, take all these at once?”

He reads the side effects as detailed on the box.

Ellis: “JFK was hooked on those man.”

Cave: “Was he? He had a lot of hair.”

Ellis: “Fuck man! He had too much.”

Casey: “I was going to go in that car.”

Ellis: “Well, I can drop him off in mine can’t I?’ Cave, indicating Casey as he walks away: “He’s got a medical condition, it’s terrible.”

Ellis: “He’s got too much hair.”

L&Q:What’s the technical name?

Ellis: “Hirsute.”

Cave: “Being Hirsute.”

Cave: “Hirsute-itis.”

Woops, looks like snappy repartee windowdressing.

juffage

Taking the great tape revival to a point of obsession P h o t o g r a p h e r : B ART P ETT M AN W r i t e r : KATE PARKIN

I first encountered him early this year, angrily flinging drums stools on a stage set that looked like Henry Miller’s living room. Random encounters at gigs and festivals since have only served to enflame my curiosity, as his random mix of beats and loops grows ever wider and more complex. Speaking to this one-man whirling dervish (he’s called Jeff T Smith when not Juffage) in his adopted town of Leeds, I’m eager to find out what makes him tick… and then explode. As soon as we can get the Brudenell’s dog in residence, Charlie, to stop barking that is. “That dog has the best life, don’t you think?” says Jeff. “He can do whatever the fuck he wants, he just wanders around like he owns the place. He totally does.”

Juffage’s ‘hyperactive and technically accomplished displays’ have earned him increasing notoriety in the town he now calls home. Originally from Ohio, via a stint in Chicago, he moved here last year to do a Masters Degree in Sound Production at Leeds University.

His passion for music started early on. “When I was about seven or eight I found this drum set in my Grandparents basement,” he says. “I played the shit out of that ‘til I was

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about thirteen. Before I could play I was making really crappy techno. Recording was the thing that really got me into music, the live stuff kind of developed after that.”

After the usual roundup of High School bands, his most serious outfit, Mammoths Melting Out Of The Ice, were in fact “so serious we just had to break up.” So he stuffed his mountain of gear into a station wagon and toured the States, before packing up and moving over here.

“I’m from Chicago,” he explains “so Leeds seems fucking tiny. I feel like I know everyone here, even though I’ve only been here for about a year now. People are talking about music here all the time, you just hear people walking around in the street talking about their band, so for that reason I feel like Leeds has a good barometer for weeding out the bullshit. If you’re a band from Leeds and you suck then you’re not going to get anywhere.”

The name Juffage was first scrawled onto his teenage techno mash-ups, now he has a different take on things. “If you’re a solo guy you can’t really break up with yourself. I’ve sort of come to terms with it, I’ve let myself become Juffage, I guess,” he shrugs.

Live, Jeff is a constant source of movement, wildly creating and deconstructing sounds, flitting between keys, drums, bass and loops. He says: “When you’re recording it’s always about tweaking reality to make you sound better than you really are. The good thing about playing live is if you drop the microphone and the loop has to go around one more time that just makes each show different.

As long as you get the idea across people don’t really care if you fuck up.”

Ultimately the songs speak for themselves. The darkly twisted ramblings of ‘Requiescat’ has the makings of a one-man God Speed You Black Emperor!, for example, but there’s one song that always seems to render the crowd speechless – ‘Good God Morning’.

It ends with him distributing tape machines around the crowd, surrounding them in waves of distortion, before suddenly bringing it all crashing down.

Tapes and recording have provided Jeff with a fascination that has gradually morphed and taken on a life of its own, y’see. Next month his obsession will take the shape of an installation at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, looping sounds around the walls

in a never-ending system of cassette players.

“I would go to charity shops in search of tape players but often the only one there would be the one that the staff were listening to, so whenever I was able to find them I would buy one, it took me forever. After that I just saw them fucking everywhere. And people knew that I used them in my shows, so they started giving them to me. I’ve accumulated about twelve of these things now, so I’d like to just do a show where I play the boom boxes. I could have a whole set where I have drones and backing vocals on all these machines.”

His influences range from Dub Reggae to Chopin, to the techniques of bands like Do Make Say Think, Lightning Bolt and fellow solo artist Dosh. “And I like that guy Ariel Pink,” he adds “who recorded everything on a four-track, pressing the button with his toe. Now he records with a band I don’t like it as much. I liked it when it sounded like one guy, up in his room, really late on lots of drugs, it sounded like he was capturing a specific time”.

That’s what really makes Juffage tick – specific times captured on tapes, and then played to people while he wrecks the place.

The recession isn’t all bad. Without it Manchester’s Warehouse Project would have gone the way of the Hacienda long before this, their fifth and best year yet. electronic music’s finest, it’s a welcome contrast from mirrored hallways and backlit bars.

“I actually had an argument about this with our licensee about the bars,” Sacha smiles. “When you queue up at Store Street, you can see the police, the security, the medics – it’s all official and done by the book – but as soon as you walk through the doors, we want it to feel like an illegal rave.

They wanted to start making the bars look like nice bars, as opposed to the bars you could knock up in a few minutes, and we weren’t really having any of it. It just wouldn’t feel right.”

Establishing and stamping the project on the Manchester map hasn’t been without its tribulations. Issues with planning and excess sound threatened to curtail the night in its infancy, but with a bit of a penchant for sweet-talking, Sacha (and his business partners, Sam and Kirsty - pictured right) always found a way to keep the event alive.

“When we were given the license, environmental health and the police came down, checked everything out and they were fine with it. But no one picked up on the fact that the brewery had a corrugated roof, so the first night Public Enemy came down and started screaming down the microphones, and because Boddingtons is right next door to Strangeways prison, we had the prison governor on the phone telling us that as good a DJ as Richie Hawtin was, we couldn’t have this because the prisoners were literally raving.

“Of course by this time we’d booked all the artists, so we had to beg, borrow and steal from Manchester city council to let us stay there until January 1st. I was on my knees because otherwise we would have been in financial ruin.We still get letters from prisoners asking us if we can return.”

Moved on from their first, albeit brief, home at the brewery, the only alternative was to find a suitable venue that satisfied everyone’s demands, so where better than their current residency at Store Street Manchester’s largest ex air raid shelter. But even that move across town wasn’t without

In a climate that’s seen some of UK clubland’s biggest names and venues close their doors, the Warehouse Project, contrastingly, is in remarkably rude health.

Celebrating its fifth year since the old Boddingtons brewery tentatively opened its doors to remind Manchester’s revellers of the reckless hedonistic rave spirit, it’s a bit of a miracle that WHP ever got this far.

A resident, stalwart and share holder at the iconic Manchester club, Sankeys, Sacha LordMarchionne spent six years at the venue putting on nights that, despite the high calibre of DJs, “got a bit boring”. So, in 2006, Sacha sold up. A few drinks with two friends, and a consequent night out later, the rough blueprint of the Warehouse Project was born.

“I remember we spent our time driving around Manchester trying to find a space to do something special and we came across Boddingtons brewery,” he explains. “If you remember, Boddingtons had that ad line ‘the Cream of Manchester’ and all the guys that used to work there, we’re talking generations, they had all been kicked out, and the place was just lying there, dormant.

“So we organised to meet the owner and kind of sugar coated the fact we wanted to put on raves…you know, dropping words like ‘bands’ and ‘producers’ and ‘family events’. He came down as a customer on the first night and realised we’d pulled a fast one.”

Born from a desire and staunch belief in reviving the glory days of the dance scene, WHP stays refreshingly true to its roots. In a modern age of health, safety and political correctness, the entrance to its current Store Street car park venue is one of reassuring organisation – police, medics and security are all present and correct – but inside, it’s directly back to basics.

A world away from the stylised pandering and bling of the super-clubs, exposed, industrial brickwork and makeshift bars give WHP its rough and ready atmosphere but with a booming sound system cranked to bring decibel shattering noise, and an enduringly premier roster of

P h o t o g r a p h e r : M a n o x P h o t o g r a ph y W r i t e r : REE F YO U NIS

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its problems.

“Well, about 18 months ago there was a car park right next door to where we were situated and one night, they bulldozed it down, and Manchester council were set to build the largest skyscraper in the city. My take on it was that the first people there should have the right but that’s not English law and we needed a venue where the noise couldn’t escape. So we panicked a little and started looking for another home but then, low and behold, this wonderful word beginning with an R emerged, and the recession hit worldwide, and everything was doom and gloom except on Store Street.

The banks pulled all the funding for the project and they were fucked. Now it will never happen.

“It cost them £40 million pounds to lay the foundations and there’s nothing they can do now but in true Manchester style, I noticed there were 400 cars parked on the space and guys were charging £6 to park a day.What had happened was, two lads from Salford had got some bolt cutters and just set it up. I worked it out – they must have cleared about £40k before the police turfed them off it.”

Now settled and established, it’s the Warehouse Project ethos that has kept the night thriving as opposed to just surviving.

With clubs and venues seeing regular closures, it’s a demise WHP has avoided thus far thanks to its organisers’ ambitious, albeit condensed, approach to running the project.

“I think we’ve put ourselves on a pedestal a bit and we have this terrible fear of being knocked off it.We have a formula, and the main component is the fact we’re only here for three months of the year. If we were to operate like Matter, or other large clubs, 52 weeks a year, we’d be in a mess as well.

“We have that anticipation but between January and June, people couldn’t give a shit about us to be honest! I hate the term ‘pop up’, but for those three months, if you’re into techno, we have the four biggest DJs playing, if you’re into Drum’n’Bass, we have the biggest acts there too. I think that’s the reason why we work and are still here.When

we see people have had enough of the format, because it’s bound to happen, we’ll come back in a different one that will appeal.”

A quick scan of this year’s impending line up and it’s not difficult to see the current appeal – by the time you read this, the likes of BoysNoize, Fake Blood, Felix Da Housecat and Hudson Mohawke will have graced the 1s and 2s – and with the nights sold out and racked up until New Year’s day, it’s firmly in the ascendancy which makes Sacha’s modest reflection and driven outlook on the project’s fifth birthday milestone all the more endearing.

“We didn’t know what was going to happen at Boddingtons so no; we didn’t really expect to be around this long,” he admits. “Nothing like that had ever happened in Manchester before, and I suppose half the city didn’t think it would work, half the city was supporting us, and it was a case of dipping our toe in the water and seeing.We’re so nervous when tickets go on sale, when line-ups are announced, because we’re never going to be a project that drags its feet.When we see a decrease in ticket sales, we’ll stop.

“I remember the Hacienda the last few years, it was quite depressing. I’m not for one minute comparing us to the Hacienda, that was the centre of the universe and without it we wouldn’t be here but we’d rather bow out on a high.”

It’s an admirable stance and one that’s inspired the Warehouse Project to its current levels of success. Having been offered to take the night out of Manchester (the odd London show is as far out of the M postcode as they’ll go) WHP still fiercely retains its DIY spirit and Manchester roots, and shows no signs of changing. And why would they?

With the ghost of the Hacienda and the spirit of Tony Wilson watching over the city, Manchester’s never needed an excuse for a party, just a venue.

“In Manchester,” says Sacha “it’s all about the music and, I think to quote Wilson, on on the city: ‘We do things differently here!’”

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Photographer: gabriel green W r i t e r : s t u a r t s t ubb s

To find out what makes his highly personal debut album tick, we spend a day in Gold Panda’s family neighbourhood 26

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old Panda nods at a fellow passenger. “I feel like saying to him, ‘I’m in that copy of MOJO,’” he says.

But where would it stop? We’re on a rush hour train hurtling towards Essex and ninety percent of those around us are reading some magazine or other. Derwin is quite possibly in all of those too. He’s definitely in that girl’s Grazia. And if there’s a copy of DJ doing the commute he’s in there too, accompanied by a 9/10 mark for his debut album ‘Lucky Shiner’.

“That’s just stupid,” he grimaces. “Giving it a nine means that there’s nowhere to go.

The next album has to be ten now. A nine is like saying it’s Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’, and it’s not!”

The first thing you need to know about Gold Panda: he’s modest, sometimes to the point of severe self-deprecation.

“In Grazia I’m in Lauren Laverne’s column, so I’ve not been papped stumbling out of Somerfield with loads of bread or anything,” he grins. “It’s not like I’m in there in one of those ‘Get The Look’ sections, although, actually, I was once on ASOS.com like that.There was a picture of me looking a state in a pair of my ex girlfriend’s old jeans.

Yeah, ‘get the look’…of a balding, semisuccessful electronic artist who’s really depressed and looks homeless because he’s just been dumped.”

See!? And the second thing you need to know: he’s fucking funny.

‘Lucky Shiner’ is quickly pleasing just as many glossy mags as inky fanzines, though.

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The BBC’s prophecy is coming true – Gold Panda is eventually proving to be the ‘Sound of 2010’, but more on that frightening tip later, once we’ve reached Derwin’s family home in the suburbs of Chelmsford, Essex.

“I think we should go to my auntie’s house,” he says as our train rattles on with its cargo nose deep in Gold Panda reviews.

“That’s where my grandma will be. She is Lucky Shiner.” And that sums up why we are where we are. Derwin has named his debut album after his grandma (pictured on page 1) and produced a record inspired by his family and loved ones. Spending an afternoon bothering them seemed like a good way to get to the bottom of an instrumental ‘dance record’ that, although unlikely, is one of the most personal and poignant albums of the year.

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hat’s this? The Gold Panda crew?” says Derwin’s uncle, Mick, as he opens his front door to us and we suddenly become acutely aware that we’ve arrived unannounced and uninvited. Shoes are removed and left at the door as we’re welcomed in and introduced to Derwin’s grandma, Lucky Shiner, and his cousin Tilly, who, along with her twin sister Kat, has turned twenty one today, making our intrusion feel all the more heinous.We seem to be the only ones fussed though, as we

tentatively perch on sofas while Lucky Shiner and Derwin make a round of ginger teas and Mick – a music publisher – shows us a picture of Derwin aged 5 and happily discusses bands like The Horrors and Ipso Facto. Maybe it’s because my uncle only ever talks about carp fishing and planes, but I can instantly see why Derwin likes his family enough to include them in his music, even if he does later quip, “Mick hates me!”

Ginger teas drained, we duck into Mick’s decidedly un-Essex home office that’s festooned with wall-mounted guitars, posters, the odd gold disc and a framed Ziggy Stardust-era Bowie photo. “There’s not enough football stuff in here for it to be typically Essex, is there?” says Derwin, spinning on a wheely chair.

“I moved here when I was fifteen,” he says “and it was a really confusing time because all of my friends were black and were listening to reggae – or raga – on Choice FM and then I moved here and everyone was listening to Pulp, Oasis and Blur, and I’d never heard of them. I got into that stuff eventually but at first I was like, ‘Why am I not black? What’s going on?’ So I started off by being really rebellious and dressing like Tu Pac in a white bandana done up on the side. I wanted to get a nose ring; I’d wear big baggy jeans and shop down Carnaby Street before it was all brand shops.

I bought a big Charlotte Hornets jacket, even though I’d never even watched basketball. But you have to represent,” he laughs. “It was fucking ridiculous.”

Coincidently, Damon Albarn went through a similar displacement when moving from multi-cultural Mile End to a Thatcher-happy, white Colchester, also in Essex. He escaped the yuppies via Blur; Derwin escaped Blur via hip-hop.

“Essex has definitely influenced my music,” he notes “because through those guitar bands I got really pissed off and I started looking for other stuff, and I found an album called ‘Big Loada’ [by Chelmsford resident Squarepusher] a bit later, and that was the start of me sampling stuff and using electronics to make beats. I was always into hip-hop so it was all about making beats to rap to.”

And did you every rap yourself?

“Yeah, I was called Rumpelstiltskin, and the P was a question mark and the L was an explanation mark but then there were too many, so it was like, ‘is the I meant to be an explanation mark or just an I?’ I couldn’t

remember. And then I joined online forums where you rapped but you didn’t actually rap, you just wrote down standards and you’d have a battle rap and people would rate them to see who won. And then I realised that I wasn’t black and I was just being stupid.”

Derwin says that he was “terrible” at rapping, which, in Gold Panda’s world, might mean that he could have been the next Biggie Smalls.

“No, I was terrible,” he insists. “I realised

I couldn’t be a rapper but I then started again with a friend called Infinite Lives. I was doing it for a joke really, under the name Olivia Neutron Bomb, making beats on a GameBoy and a loop pedal. I got in touch with Stephen, who is Infinite Lives, and we started doing really experimental stuff where we’d make noise and he’d rap over the top, and then I’d do some stupid rap.We had a group called Kiss Akabusi. Our logo was Chris Akabusi in Kiss makeup.We never did anything with it but we did support Roots Manuva at Koko once, which was a laugh.

But I was only ever rapping as a joke, really.”

By the end of these Olivia Neutron Bomb/Rumplestiltskin/Kiss Akabusi days, Derwin still had his Tu Pac bandana but his rap dream was over. In pursuing sampling since first hearing ‘Big Loada’, though, he’d unwittingly laid the foundations for Gold Panda and the ambient, looping techno he produces today.The thing is, he then didn’t care too much for a career in music – not until the death of a close friend made him reconsider it.

“I think that’s why the album is so personal,” he says “because I lost a close friend who was doing techno under the name Subhead and he was always telling me to do music, and I was like, ‘Naaah’, and then he died. He had a stroke and that was it, he was gone. So I was thinking of dedicating a song to him... but he’s dead – he’s not going to know. So I thought how about making songs about people while they’re alive so I have something to show them that I care, and family has been the one constant thing in my life that’s quite stable. I’m very lucky in that sense.We all get drunk a couple of times a year where everyone will turn up and there’ll be dancing, a lot of drinking, maybe some drugs,” he whispers. “We’re all very close. But I dunno, with electronic music how much of that emotion can you put in there without lyrics, apart from naming the tracks?”

You’d be surprised. ‘Lucky Shiner’ being named after Derwin’s grandma is a sweet tribute, and track titles like the positively emo ‘I’m With You But I’m Lonely’ and the romantically-loaded ‘You’ (featured twice) play their part in conveying Gold Panda’s poignancy, but really it’s the music that smacks of counselling-session-honesty the most – the frying pan crackle of dusty equipment and the spliced, stammering keyboards that keep time just as well as the drum loops, yearning like wires and circuit boards shouldn’t.

“Yeah, I don’t know how I’ve done that,” he ponders. “I mean, ‘Same Dream China’ and ‘India Lately’, they’re about places I’ve

never been but I dream about. ‘You’ is originally about an ex girlfriend who I was with for ten years, but I fucked it up really by just being a depressed weird kinda guy. ‘I’m With You But I’m Lonely’ is about not being able to find anyone who was doing the same thing, musically, and being with someone who is amazing and who has totally supported you but not feeling totally fulfilled or knowing if you can offer them anything, and ‘Before We Talked’ and ‘After We Talked’ are about my friend who died.We went to buy this Yamaha organ that we got off Ebay for a quid, and then I made those tracks entirely from that organ, even the drums and stuff. So yeah, there’s a lot of personal themes in there.”

tickled, wispy acoustic guitar, a faint field recording of Derwin helping his grandma in the garden and nothing else. For the regular readers of ‘What’s Hot & What’s Not’ that’s still pretty weird, although Derwin says that he’s unable to judge anymore. “Within the electronic music that I listen to at the moment it’s quite cheesy and poppy,” he says.

“That’s how I see it. But then for MOJO magazine I guess it’s quite weird.” Either way, all of the album’s reviews have so far been

E

arlier at Liverpool Street train station, as we were jabbing the touch screen of a ticket machine, Derwin had said that ‘Lucky Shiner’ hadn’t turned out how he’d planned it to. “It’s ok,” he said “but it’s not what I wanted.”

“Last time we spoke it was really early on,” he remembers. (Our previous Gold Panda interview was in July of last year). “I knew at that time that I wanted to make an album, and that I didn’t just want to put these tracks on it that were out already. And I had a very clear idea of what I wanted but it did turn out differently, although I think the whole journey from the first idea of an album to the end is quite long. I don’t think I realised that at the time.

“It’s more pop and less weird than what I set out to do. I wanted to make a techno album with these long drawn out tracks that built on that ‘Back Home’ track I did, and were more minimal and repetitive but it didn’t work out like that. I just don’t think that I’m ready to do that yet, and it would have been a bit weird for people who were into what was coming out. ‘Quitter’s Raga’ went so well and ‘You’ came out and was so different. I think that if I’d done that it would have thrown a lot of people off, but maybe it would have gotten better reviews in a credible way, but it wouldn’t have been so well received because it’s more accessible now.”

Grazia accessible! And DJ accessible and MOJO accessible and Pitchfork accessible and so on. But ‘Lucky Shiner’ is hardly an obvious crossover hit like, say, Mumford & Sons are, or The xx even. It’s completely instrumental for a start, and features tracks like ‘Parents’, which is made up of a fingerwww.loudandquiet.com

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positive.

“Yeah, I’ve not had any bad ones yet,” he confirms “but I’m sure there will be, and that’s fine. I mean, if The Wire review it they’ll hate it, but that’s good because it means I can probably sell some records, because they slated the last Fuck Buttons and Four Tet albums, which I really liked.They said that Fuck Buttons was sell out pop rubbish, watered down for the mainstream, and that’s just ridiculous, but they give Album of The Month to some guy playing drums underwater in his dad’s bath or something.”

Surprisingly, considering how he’s a man not too good at taking compliments, Derwin seems at ease with all of this positive attention coming his way, or perhaps that’s ‘Lucky Shiner’’s ways, and perhaps that’s the point. As he said on the train, it’s not as if he’s in magazines being papped as a celebrity yet.

But that could happen.The album’s acclaim could quickly have the 3am Girls squawking after the man who made it, and Gold Panda has always found the ‘pop star’ bit of being a musician an unsettling evil.

“It’s not getting any easier,” he says “it’s getting harder! I find it very awkward when people say weird stuff like ‘I love you’ and ‘you’re a genius’ and ‘I’m obsessed with you’, like at a show or something. Having admirers is very difficult for a person who doesn’t like going out and seeing people. Like, I’ve got so many people I’m meant to go for a drink with, and the main reason is because I’m so busy I’m never in the country, which is probably a really good excuse instead of saying, ‘I don’t fancy it’ or, ‘I’m not well’ or, ‘I’m washing my hair that’s falling out’, but it’s very difficult to try to change into this

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person that’s now networking, because you do have to keep in touch with people, like people who’ve done remixes for you or whatever. It’s nice to appreciate people and make them feel appreciated.”

As far as he knows, Derwin has been recognised in the street just the once – an experience he dealt with by running away.

And two things particularly baffle him about fame – where the hell he fits in on the scale of recognisable faces, and why would anyone give a shit if they saw Gold Panda stumbling out of Somerfield with loads of bread? Or anywhere, doing anything, for that matter?

But the fact is that that young fan who shouted, “It’s Gold Panda!” at him, was, soon after Derwin legged it, most likely in the pub boasting, “You’ll never guess who I’ve just seen!?”

“See, that makes no sense to me,” says Derwin. “I can’t understand if I’m big or not big, or where I fit in to being recognisable or not. It’s not like I’m instantly recognisable like Lady Gaga or something. I’m quite generic. It’s not like I’m Bill Bailey!” he says, giving us a glimpse into his skewed and witty psyche where the biggest pop performer on the planet is just one notch above an ex-music quiz panel host in terms of notability. “Because it’s never like, ‘is that Bill Bailey?’” he reasons “it’s always, ‘that’s definitely Bill Bailey!’”

At this point Derwin’s auntie comes home to find her lovely house overrun by strange men drinking ginger tea, but before we start to feel awkward once again she’s introducing herself with a hugs and a kisses, saying a quick hello to her nephew and dashing off to the kitchen.

“Sorry, where were we?” says Derwin.

“I find it awkward when people say stuff like ‘I’m obsessed with you’” I think it was Bill Bailey being as recognisable as Lady Gaga.

“Oh yeah. Okay, Jordan! Someone like that is famous to me!”

Gold Panda informally entered the fame game when ‘Quitter’s Raga’ – his debut single of chopped up sitars, oriental stabs and snapping hand claps – went a bit viral and began earning him support slots with HEALTH and Simian Mobile Disco (Jas Shaw ended up producing ‘Lucky Shiner’).

We didn’t know about Seams, Dam Mantle or Becoming Real then; Derwin helped expose and inspire them, and a slew of bedroom loners into dissecting sounds and creating experimental electronic music.

Playing live was (and is) a necessary evil, says Derwin, hardly fit for “a person who doesn’t like going out and seeing people.” And then ducking in and out of venues as inconspicuously as possible was made all the more difficult as Gold Panda became a face of nearly every Ones To Watch list in January – most notably the BBC’s Sound of 2010 poll.

“I felt pretty annoyed by that,” explains Derwin, although not for the reason I expect “because it was me and Joy Orbison, and I’m sorry to say that I’m better than the rest, but we were the only two that stood out from a pretty bad bunch. But the reason why it really pissed me off was because it was like, now all of these people have to be number one to be considered successful.They did a round up of the previous year and it was Passion Pit and Little Boots, who were considered failures. I was like, ‘oh, I thought Passion Pit did quite well.’

“I think the whole thing is just a joke, but the most rewarding thing is that Joy Orbison, me and Two Door Cinema Club, or whatever, will outlive the poll and survive off of making music, and the rest will have just that. I mean, how big can Ellie Goulding be next time around?”

Gold Panda being confident? That’s not in keeping with the daily Twitter feeds of I’m rubbish! and, I can’t keep dressing in novelty tshirts from American service stations, I’m 30, and, Constantly sorry. He’s like the anti-50 cent.

“Fuck, he loves himself, doesn’t he?” exclaims Derwin. “It’s just wrong. I don’t understand how people can be so confident.

I guess he is a multi-millionaire, but people did want to kill him for being such a cunt.

He got shot like eight times.That was his promotional thing, being shot! But, yeah, the Twitter thing is just me trying to be honest on it, even if I do come across a little bit emo. It’s just a place to rant and be funny. I can’t take it seriously as a promotional tool.”

By the time we get back to London Derwin is already proving his point. Shiner family party in full effect, he posts, followed

by Uncle Bob’s brought the homegrown. As I say, I can see why Gold Panda likes his family enough to include them in his music. on it, even if I do come across a little bit emo. It’s just a place to rant and be funny. I can’t take it seriously as a promotional tool.”

By the time we get back to London Derwin is already proving his point. Shiner family party in full effect, he posts, followed

by Uncle Bob’s brought the homegrown. As I say, I can see why Gold Panda likes his family enough to include them in his music.

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visions of trees Making chilly RnB since before they formed…. almost P h o t o g r a p h e r : S o n i a m e l o t W r i t e r : s t u a r t s t ubb s

There’s this old huff that you may well have heard. It’s scoffed by those who refuse to believe that any good music has been made this side of 1990, and it goes something like, “God, there’s so many new bands these days, people will be getting records deals and fans before they’ve even bloody formed next!

HA HA HA HA!” Being a new music magazine, we hear this a lot.

It’s funny, y’see, because it’s impossible. But Visions of Trees still came close to proving otherwise. They booked their first show before they’d even met.

“We met on a Wednesday and did our first gig on the Friday,” says Joni, the man responsible for the duo’s RnB beats and crystalline electronics. “I’d booked the show weeks before but had not managed to sort something out. Luckily at the last minute I met Sara.” And luckily Sara was a trained vocalist. Better yet, she just so happened to be in the market for a new project that was “something a little different”, had a couple of spare days to practice, wasn’t some old bag or one of us sane folk who would have run a mile if asked to form a band that needed to play their first show in forty-eight hours.

“I don’t know why I didn’t do that,” she says with a smile as the duo wait to be photographed in an east London studio. “I was in a good place, apparently. I met Joni one day, we got

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together and wrote some lyrics the next day and then played the show the day after. I didn’t even think about it, and then afterwards I was like, ‘how did we do that!?’”

“If I’d not met Sara in time, I dunno, I would have probably put on a dress or something,” grins Joni.

And that’s where Visions of Trees testing the possibility of the new bands grumble ends. That first show, at The George Tavern, London, was a year ago now, and the fans that Joni and Sara have attracted since have been dully earned. A record deal of some sort practically feels overdue.

“We’re currently gearing up for our first proper release, actually,” says Joni. “But I don’t think we can say who it’s with just yet.”

In the meantime, a limited EP release on little known US label Royal Rhino Flying Recordings (“They got in touch and we put that out within three months of being together,” notes Sara), a handful of self-manufactured cassette tapes and a lot of remixing have kept the band at the forefront of blogging minds.

Especially the remixing. So far Joni has reworked tracks by Comanechi, Everything Everything, Memory Tapes, Teeth and a Slash song featuring Black Eyed Pea Fergie, as well as “a lot of more underground stuff.”

But Joni didn’t always know his way around sampling gear. He

grew up in Iceland where metal rules. Forming a punk band was almost inevitable. “But I wanted to leave that for a bit and explore something else,” he explains, and swapping shredding guitars for blinking synths seems to be the natural way of things these days. Crystal Castles’ Ethan Kath did it, and so did Derek Miller of Sleigh Bells, who Visions of Trees unknowingly share a fair amount of mythology with.

Like that New York duo, they were born out of one punk dude’s boredom of the scene he was in; both feature learned female singers who’ve been formally trained (Sara is a recent performing arts graduate); and both started with the same one prerequisite.

“All I knew is that I wanted to work with a female singer, but I had no idea what I wanted to do, really,” explains Joni, echoing what Miller told us back in May. “I just had a couple of tunes and a few ideas. Since Sara and I met though, we’ve always had a bit of a concept of what we want to do. We’ve got a vision and we’ve just been building on that since.”

Visions of Trees sound remarkably like the sum of their parts. Joni still listens to Slayer and Sepultura but also Destiny’s Child and commercial RnB with Sara, explaining why their sound, which has until now been mislabelled ‘chill wave’

(“because we toured with Memory Tapes,” figures Joni), has a knowing, glossy sheen. And while a track like ‘Kings’ has a kind of major label, velvet soul that Drake would love to robotically auto-gargle over, ‘Synchronized’ is cold and desolate like Joni’s Icelandic, childhood surroundings, and yet true to the band’s love for pop in its breathy vocal hook. ‘Cult of Cobras’ is icier still, ‘Empty’ belongs on Salem’s macabre debut album, ‘Sometimes It Kills’ sounds like two cavorting Terminators. On the band’s older, vocal-less tracks (Joni might not have had a band when he booked that first Visions of Trees show but he did have a Myspace page and a few instrumentals already worked out) hooks, when they come, do so in the form of twisted, demonic samples. From The George Tavern onwards, melodies have been the band’s central focus.

“That’s the biggest part of the tunes,” says Joni. “We purposely go for big melodies.

The music can be dark sometimes and euphoric other times, but the melodies will always be quite big.”

And that’s Visions of Trees: a duo brought together by necessity, fate and abandonment, who make the kind of icy, slick RnB pop that might just make 2011’s impending Ones To Watch lists an eerier, more fascinating place to be.

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re NOV vi 10 ews Al bums 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Avey Tare Blank Dogs Bo Ningen Brian Eno Cheap Time Chichenhawk Cloud Nothings Dustin Wong Former Ghosts Kelley Stoltz Kit Napoleon IIIrd Plug Sharon Van Etten Small Black Sufjan Stevens Surf City The Concretes The Demon’s Claws The Fresh & Onlys The Thermals Thread Pulls Twin Shadow Warpaint Weekend

Live 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Berlin Festival Blonde Redhead Cold in Berlin Dan Deacon Dum Dum Girls Flats Future Islands Grass Widow Islet Junip Mount Kimbie Peepholes PVT Rollapalooza Summer Camp The Devil Makes Three Wilder

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Al bums

Warpaint The Fool (Rough Trade)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Oct 25

10/10

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Looking like they do (hippy-but-not-madhippy, sultry and un-hideous), living where they live (LA), performing to film star fans and dating rock stars who’ve helped out behind the mixing desk before now,Warpaint are a cynic’s dream.

They were even co-founded by a Hollywood actress: bassist Jenny’s sister, Shannyn Sossamon.

To the untrusting, the idea that they can actually play as well is a ticked box too far, and last year’s hit-and-miss ‘Exquisite Corpse’ EP (produced by singer/guitarist Emily’s then boyfriend John Frusiante) hardly had the girls’ backs. If anything it supported the idea that their ‘girl group’ status, west coast zip code (this year’s Brooklyn seal of approval) and celebrity ties were what propelled Warpaint’s growing appeal, not their airy, psychish rock.

‘The Fool’ takes this notion of “if it sounds too good to be true, it usually is” and reminds us

that “usually” isn’t “always”. Because if Warpaint were four heffers from The Isle Of Man with a contacts list crowned by Bobby Davro, their debut album would be no less hypnotic, intricate and seductively brilliant.

Rather refreshingly, ‘The Fool’ refuses to even dabble in fashionable DIY aesthetics. It’s lush and competent, not scratchy and amateurish, because to record the band’s fourpart harmonies with humming no-fi techniques would be to do their breathy, folk vocals a severe injustice.The same goes for the elaborate layers of mathy, borderline-baggy arpeggios that flicker through ‘Warpaint’, gargle over the break-beats of ‘Bees’ and dance over ‘Composure’ – the album’s best chance of a ‘hit’, courtesy of a quickened pace that is relatively frantic compared to the record’s ongoing “prowl” setting. It does, however, still have a gloopy, minute-long introduction.

Warpaint don’t like to rush things, y’see, which is why ‘The Fool’ will be listened to by some and dismissed as a record void of hooks; a collection of songs that sometimes throb with

trippy menace (the opening ‘Set Your Arms Down’) and occasionally sound pretty enough (‘Shadows’) but are more hassle to ‘get’ than they’re worth. But that’d be the cynics talking again. Or the impatient at the very least.

It only takes two listens to realise that ‘Shadows’ isn’t pretty but beautiful, while ‘Baby’ – a five-minute ballad played on a single acoustic guitar – is ‘The Fool’’s most poignant moment as Emily orders/begs/warns a lover, “Don’t you call anybody else baby/’Cause I’m your baby still!”. And the more you listen to Warpaint’s precisely structured songs (the slow, meticulous dynamics of each one is the album’s unquestionable strength) the more you realise that ‘The Fool’ is brimming with hooks and memorable phrases, they’re just a little more sophisticated than most.They’re hidden, beneath a tangled mass of influences from The Cure (most notable in the album’s guitar parts) to Californian psych to straight-up folk to - on ‘Majesty’ - wobbly electronics.

Warpaint were a perfect album away from being the perfect band. Now they’re not.

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The Thermals

Dustin Wong

Sufjan Stevens

Twin Shadow

The Concretes

Personal Life

Infinite Love

The Age of Adz

Forget

WYWH

(Kill Rock Stars)

By Matthias Scherer. In stores Nov 1

(Thrill Jockey)

By Edgar Smith. In stores now

(Asthmatic Kitty)

By Nathan Westley. In stores now

(4AD)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Nov 15

(Something In Construction)

By Tom Goodwyn. In stores Nov 8

The logical story of the new Thermals album would be:The Portland band have “grown up”, shifted their focus from themes like death and religion to love, and adapted their sound to this new direction by slowing their breathless punk rock down a couple of knots. And ‘Personal Life’, their fifth LP, does sound calmer – the only problem is that there isn’t much in the way of emotional depth or grittiness. ‘I’m Gonna Change Your Life’ and ‘I Don’t Believe You’ are, maybe apart from ‘Power Lies’, the only concessions to the band’s older, crunchy and noisy sound.The rest of the record strolls around with a shrug – ‘Alone, A Fool’ is especially inconsequential – and it is left to Harris’ still captivating vocals to hold the listener’s attention. Have the band matured or just lost their magic touch? ‘Personal Life’ points to the latter.

In the (triple-gatefold) sleeve of Wong’s debut album, he explains how the record contains “2 versions, starting exactly the same for the first 20 min or so, then going in different directions and coming back together for the last bit”.The preamble to that details an escape from his shy, bedroommusician shell and explains how these twin pieces of instrumental guitar music are partly inspired by a mushrooms wig-out. “A construction reminiscent of 60s minimalists, part-inspired by a birthday drug experience” makes ‘Infinite Love’ sound interesting.

Sadly, it isn’t. Every instrument is irritatingly treble heavy, depriving the LP of any therapeutic ambient value it might’ve had. And, though it has its moments, the music itself lacks the structural integrity of its influences (presumably Steve Reich etc.) and gains nothing in terms of accessibility.

A lot can change in five years and although ‘Illinois’ opened Sufjan up to an appreciative audience, there is no guarantee that their initial affection will be rekindled with a flaccid reworking of his sole masterpiece. ‘The Age of Adz’, however, is a departure; a musical evolution, but one that has all the hallmarks of being a natural occurrence. Mixing the traditional with the tools of the present, Stevens has crafted an album that half stays true to his original blue print but one that also offers a series of collisions between drum machines beats and analogue synthesisers, peppered with the occasional choral or orchestrated flourish that helps form them into being abstract electronic pop songs, which are rich in vibrant pomposity and sound like a cross between a more majestic, inventive version of The Postal Service and a less animated Flaming Lips.

Twin Shadow’s (real name George Lewis Jr.) debut album is made up of wonky, disco-induced, twisted pop songs that at times evoke the stark and humble beauty of Arthur Russell and also the occasional fragmented beats of Talking Heads.

It’s an album that is equally sinister and seducing; it’s sleazy but charming, full of opposing dualities and as a result it’s an obliquely enchanting record. Co-produced

by Grizzly Bear’s Chris Taylor, it hums, glistens and radiates to merge a solidifying sonic mould that does nothing but elevate the songs to a level of stature that perhaps they may not have been able to climb without its aid. And while ‘Forget’ may arguably follow in the footsteps of Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, there is more than enough substance here for Lewis Jr. to stride ahead of his contemporaries and impressive label mates at 4AD.

The much admired but not widely known Concretes have adopted a disco feel for their sixth (!) album ‘WYWH’. Not the way Calvin Harris does disco, but more like how Jamie Liddell and Roisin Murphy do it, in a much more engaging manner.There’s a subtle build to most of the tracks, each one casually nagging away in your head until it creates a pulsating rhythm and foot-tapping refrain.

The standout ‘My Ways’ is one of the best examples of elegant dance pop you’ll ever hear, like something from ‘Debut’ era Bjork, it’s articulate and vivacious. Much like Metronomy or Ladytron, this is dance music that sounds better at home than on the dancefloor. And, as is the case with those artists, that’s far from a fault. It’s music to be appreciated; to be really listened to and loved. ‘WYWH’ is a lovely oxymoron – a cultured disco record.

PLUG PLUG (Upset The Rhythm)

By Polly Rappaport. In stores Nov 15

08/10

Drum’n’bass(’n’keyboard) duo PLUG are keeping true to their enigmatic form with their debut LP. Kicking off with some synth-infused rap, it transpires many of the songs on this record surprisingly lean towards the electronic.The slinky, slightly sicko ‘Sexy Coma’ (about getting off with comatose boys) is more familiar PLUG territory, though – featuring dirty bass, steady drums and poker-faced vocals – but then we’re back to another synth track – a dizzying tongue-in-cheek social commentary on being a Real Girl. It’s a smart, clean album, with plenty of dirty sentiments, employing the punky attitude of the Slits, the brazen, throaty vocals and tumbling drums of yester-PLUG, and a new reflective, melodic sensibility which is the perfect foil to their blunt, no bullshit lyrics.This is a record full of surprises – not to mention a cold wave version of The Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper’ mashed together with excerpts from The Fab Four’s ‘Ticket To Ride’, which is worth buying this record for alone. www.loudandquiet.com

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Al bums 01/10

07/10

08/10

06/10

06/10

Threads Pulls

Avey Tare

Brian Eno

Surf City

KIT

New Thoughts

Down There

Small Craft on a Milk Sea

Kudos

Invocation

(Osaka)

By Edgar Smith. In stores Nov 1

(Paw Tracks)

By Reef Younis. In stores Oct 25

(Warp)

By Sam Walton. In stores Nov 15

(Fire Records)

By Tom Goodwyn. In stores Nov 1

(Upset The Rhythm)

By Polly Rappaport. In stores now

A fairly subtle failure of otherwise good albums is to make the first track the best one, making the rest a succession of disappointments.

But that couldn’t be true for this because ‘How to Talk’ is plain awful. But wait! Bizarrely, it gets worse. My iTunes identified ‘New Thoughts’ as ‘alternative’, but surely only by virtue of it being truly strange. Much of it drifts lazily out of time and out of tune.

It sounds entirely unmixed.The (heavily quantised) drums are programmed with zero attention to what might sound interesting.

The lyrics make the abstractloving likes of Klaxons and These New Puritans sound intelligent and poetic. It’s a catalogue of cliché-ridden, worthless endeavours so alienating you feel like it could be an elaborate joke. If it’s not then who the fuck are Thread Pulls and why did anyone agree to put this out?

In his globe-spanning, Animal Collective day job, Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) plays a part in the psychedelic, spaced-out swirls of kaleidoscopic melodies that can never be understated, but when left to his own devices, he sucks out the colour and delves into the murk.His first proper solo effort, ‘Down There’ retains the insistent ambient buzz you’d expect but it creeps and creaks with a drone and groan. Perhaps inspired by the old church the album was recorded in, there’s a weight and atmosphere that hangs heavy, gliding between the spooky dramatics of Fever Ray to understated industrial beats. It even feels as though the album’s title is conveying a sense of apprehension; a warning of what lurks beyond, and while it never really delivers on the dark insinuation, like turning over a mossy stone, it’s a tentative, unexpected surprise.

Brian Eno on Warp should be a match made in heaven, and indeed the heavens are where much of ‘Small Craft On A Milk Sea’ lingers, beginning and ending with sections that evoke the record’s title with poetic ease.Thankfully, Eno’s first lyric-free record for seven years isn’t entirely smothered in celestial lube, and indeed its grubbier corners are its most remarkable. Elegantly sequenced into five three-song segments, each with distinct moods, the album is gratifyingly simple to navigate, making Eno’s diversions – first into tribal techno and then a swaggering kind of broken twostep – pleasingly digestible.That’s not to say that ‘Small Craft…’ isn’t a full-bodied, intense experience – it is, but it also has a lightness of touch, grace, and a substantial kind of beauty that, in its more mudflecked moments, roots it firmly in the real world.

The clue is very much in the name with New Zealanders Surf City.

Every single one of the tracks on this, their debut album, sounds like it should be coming out of a beaten up boom box while impossibly handsome dudes and dudettes lie around on the sand.

Early Pixies, vintage Clash and the Beach Boys (obviously) stalk every track with their twangy guitars and frenetic percussion.There’s more depth to Surf City than, say,The Drums and the Soundcarriers, but nothing that really moves the genre forward either. Sun and happiness squirt out of every lyric, particularly through opener ‘Crazy Rulers Of The World’, which sounds like the edited highlights of a long, stoned conversation set to ‘Blue Album’-era Weezer.You can’t say it’s bad, you can’t say it’s completely wonderful either.

‘Decent enough’ sounds about right.

KIT have one helluva résumé.

Their members play with bands such as XBXRX and the Raincoats, and they’ve split many a 7” with the likes of Deerhoof and Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore.

With a CV like that, how could the record be anything but excellent? And this is the thing…

It’s all so right. ‘Invocation’ is the embodiment of that infuriating phrase, ‘over qualified’. It’s an immaculate specimen of all that is post-punk noise-rock, right down to the riot grrrl vocals and grating Sonic Youth guitars.The problem is, the mid-way breakdowns and freak-outs don’t feel organic, or even justified, and the jerky startstop nature of many tracks feels formulaic rather than spontaneous.

Rarely is noise so well executed, and seldom does punk come with such impeccable references. It’s not that the album is boring, it’s just not that exciting.

Cloud Nothings Turning On (Wichita)

By Reef Younis. In stores Oct 25

08/10

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It’s extremely difficult to not be charmed by the current lo-fi resurgence. I mean, what’s not to like about the prospect of waves of kids wrestling their guitars in bedrooms and garages across the land, wailing into four tracks; their cheap Marshall amps fizzing and crackling under the impact of minds and voices trying to make sense of the world? It lends a warmth and youthful exuberance to what is, cynically, music dictated by budget but driven by precocious, restless spirit. Billed as a collection of tracks from nineteen-year-old Dylan Baldi’s earlier singles and EPs, ‘Turning On’ is much more than the precursor to next year’s proper full-length debut. From the barbed, understated beauty of ‘Hey Cool Kid’ to the raw and reckless ‘My Little Raygun’, casting a defiant flashback to the late Jay Reatard, it’s as carefree and reverbdrenched as you’d expect.That it’s this infectious and immediately likeable can only inspire. Anyone got a Fender going cheap?

07/10

07/10

07/10

08/10

07/10

Chickenhawk

Bo Ningen

Napoleon IIIrd

Former Ghosts

Cheap Time

Modern Bodies

Album title here please

Christiania

New Love

(Brew)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Nov 1

(Stolen)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Nov 8

(Brainlove)

By Nathan Westley. In stores Nov 8

(Upset The Rhythm)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Nov 8

Fantastic Explanations (And Similar Situations)

To those not au fait with thrashing hardcore metal, Chickenhawk only serve to intensify your comfort zone and highlight that it’s elsewhere. And ‘Modern Bodies’ refuses to ease you in gently, turning you over and sticking the opening ‘Scorpieau’ straight up your quivering rectum in a whirlwind of screams and screeching guitars that is undeniably penetrative and blistering in force. One doesn’t have to be a connoisseur of this genre to know that Chickenhawk have a firm hold on their sound and what they do within it. At times they resemble Future Of The Left, but everything is intensified, angrier and more rotten to the core.While it’s undoubtedly a sonic annihilation and molestation of the senses, it retains an underlying degree of accessibility that makes even the smoothest of ball sacks feel a bit more hairy.

Bo Ningen’s album opener, ‘4 Seconds’, sounds like Black Sabbath arriving at 130 mph, ripping off your ears and pouring an overdriven, squally maelstrom of noise directly into your brain. It’s a pointer for the record. ‘Koroshitai Kimochi’ feels something like being battered around the head by a robot wielding a Fender and shouting at you in a language you won’t ever understand.Then, all of a sudden, the band apply the brakes for the woozy, stripped psychedelia of ‘Gasmask Rabbit’.There are moments, especially during the eleven-minute epic of ‘Post Yokai’, where Bo Ningen borrow rather too heavily from Sabbath and the like, but for the most part this is inventive stuff. Sporadic muffled passages give the impression you’re sitting in the safety of a nuclear bunker while the band play overhead, which might not actually be such a bad idea.

In an era that prides itself on its tolerance of diversity; the male solo artist has always been expected to fit into a very narrow banding that defines what a successful solo star should be. James Mabbett, the oneman multi-instrumentalist that is fond of using ancient organs and arcane tape machines, and goes by the name Napoleon IIIrd, does not have the look of a traditional pop star that has been endlessly pimped and preened for large scale exposure.Yet what he does possess is an unnerving talent for being able to form the type of fully functioning pop song that lingers abstractly over a machine-like readiness and positions him several light years away from Justin Bieber.

And on more than one occasion, Mabbett’s second album proves the Leeds musician to be a true master of the type of outsider pop that’s created for bespectacled youths turned off by chart hits.

In 2008 there wasn’t a more emotionally raw album than Former Ghosts’ ‘Fleurs’. If its ambient electronics hadn’t been so masterfully pieced together it would have been too uncomfortable to get through as Freddy Rupert exorcised his personal demons in an attempt to fix his shattered heart. ‘New Love’ sees Rupert well over a year into recovery, and while he’s hardly all smiles and gushing about a new crush (‘New Orleans’ has him professing “It’s my fault/I fell in love in the first place” while audibly holding back the tears), there is a sense of optimism on tracks like the Zola Jesus-featured ‘Chin Up’ and the deeply warbled ‘And When You Kiss Me’. Also joined again by Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu, Rupert now teeters between harrowing and (thankfully) hopeful, but his masterful, lo-fi craft and courageous honesty is constant.

(In The Red)

By Laura Davies. In stores Oct 18 Tennessee threesome Cheap Time begin their second album sounding like a cross between The Rolling Stones and T-Rex, which is just the start of anglo-rock influences found here. Next we’ve got the comic-book-cheek of The Small Faces on ‘Everyone Knows’, followed by frontman Jeffrey Novak hissing, “I’ll make your mind up for you” on the Pistols-esque ‘I’d Rather Be Alone’. ‘Down The Tube’ comes courtesy of The Clash and there’s even a bit of Beatles psych in there somewhere, while ‘Showboat’ moves back across the Atlantic to sound like a scuzzed-up Strokes meets Pavement, not unlike the tempered down ‘Throwing It All Away’, which is about as melodic as Cheap Time get, even if it does still spit with definite sarcasm. Intimidating and riotous, it shouldn’t work as well as it definitely does.

Small Black New Chain (Jagjaguar)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Oct 25

08/10

To a warm wall of enveloping fuzz, Brooklyn fourpiece Small Black pitch-bend their way through ‘New Chain’, occasionally punctuating their Casio pop songs with ascending and descending bubbles of electronic sound that go “woooeeee” as they burst, and, at one point, on the brilliantly nostalgic ‘Search Party’, what may or may not be a Rick Astley sample.Vocally, things are so breathy that they could be drowned out by a modest sigh, although the chances are that you won’t be doing much of that, because you won’t be doing much of anything whilst listening to this. It’s a record destined to be called ‘hazy’, ‘dreamy’ and ‘ethereal’, but more than that it’s hazardously mind-encroaching. It should really come with a Don’t operate heavy machinery while listening sticker. Maybe, you’ll be able to manage a kettle or toaster during the opening 80s prom-closer ‘Camouflage’, but I wouldn’t risk it. Just sit very still, try to keep breathing and ignore those who say that chill wave is a gateway drug. www.loudandquiet.com

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Al bums 08/10

04/10

08/10

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07/10

Weekend

Kelley Stoltz

The Fresh & Onlys

Sharon Van Etten

The Demon’s Claws

Sports

To Dreamers

Play It Strange

Epic

The Defrosting Of

(SLR)

By Kate Parkin. In stores Nov 8

(Sub Pop)

By Luke Winkie. In stores now

(In The Red)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Oct 25

(Ba Da Bing)

By Sam Walton. In stores now

By Gordon Anderson. In stores Oct 18

Monosyllabic California band Weekend are far from dull, instantly assailing your ears with a barrage of distortion and buzz-saw feedback. Like Jesus and Mary Chain reborn for the iPad generation, this debut album is at once languid and vibrating with restless energy. Peering out from under crashing torrents of drums on ‘Youth Haunts’, the band’s vocals, whitewashed in gloom, seem to take a backseat, but ‘Age Class’ changes all that, striding forward, bound by mesmerising hooks. Creating sonic hallucinations, ‘Veil’ fades into distant radio transmissions that conjure half-dreamt images of a time spent feverishly listening for satanic messages in backwards bsides, while the closing untitled track flails and crashes through sound barriers one last time. For a band of few words they sum things up beautifully.

Kelley Stoltz is the kind of musician who will dub subtle Brian Wilson ‘la-la’ harmonies underneath songs that are already gleaming with sunshine. He’ll name a song ‘I Like, I Like’ and start almost every line with a throwaway, Hawaiian-shirted “I like I like I like I like I really like…” always followed by a corny Steve Miller-ism, “I really like the way that you kiss”. Stoltz’s eighth album is a little bewilderingly accepting and adopting of foppy 80s cheese, with plenty of adult contemporary saxes and Huey Lewis keys abound. It has a certain nostalgia-induced bafflement, but it’s not really built to last. And when he gets a little more futurethinking with his songwriting, like the crisp, downward strums of ‘I Remember,You Were Wild’ he sounds even more characterless.

The only thing ‘To Dreamers’ runs on is half remembered silliness.

The Fresh & Onlys are from California, and the opening song of their debut album is called ‘Summer Of Love’, but don’t break out the Beach Boys comparisons just yet – this opening volley, for a start, sounds like The Stone Roses playing a Doors song at the bottom of a swimming pool.Yes, it’s a record suffused with jangly melody, and it has a distinctly vintage sound in terms of both instrumentation and production, but there’s a lot more here.

Standout tune ‘Waterfall’ (not a Stone Roses reference) has an infectious bass hook and some classic, simple solos, while the cowboy pop of ‘Until The End Of Time’ recalls Calexico.The songs come thick and fast – sweet, simple hits of melody with rough edges; the first half of ‘Play It Strange’ hooks you in, while the second half hypnotises you with some woozy vibrations. Play it lots.

For an album whose seven tracks run to barely half an hour, ‘Epic’ is a misnomer of, well, impressive proportions. Indeed, the hotchpotch of genres on display here, from the urgent wail of ‘Peace Sign’ to the four-square country chug of ‘One Day’, suggests a more small town, homespun piece of work, and Van Etten’s inter-song giggles and selfdeprecations only augment that haphazard feel. Indeed, with its modest length and cavalier stylings, it’s a tribute to Van Etten’s songwriting that ‘Epic’ has such a well-defined arc. Split into three ten-minute sections, the record builds, slows for the beautifully ponderous centrepiece pairing of ‘DsharpG’ and ‘Don’t Do It’, before finally levelling out into the gorgeous harmonium-driven ‘Love More’. It’s a canny move, achieving a sense of fullness that outweighs its individual parts’ inconsistencies.

Partial to some speed-freak garage trash with tin-can 60s manboy vocals? Well, in between popping pills like sweets,The Demon’s Claws have given birth to twelve ugly ducklings, ready soaked in an oil slick of lo-fi production and with names like ‘Trip To The Clinic’ and ‘Fucked On Ketamine’ for you to adopt and cherish. Like the best moonshine-and-buggery Americana peddlers, this band are of course Canadian, but their tinny blues-punk clatter sounds closest to a wide-eyed Lovvers on the jittery, 90mph jive of ‘Last Time at the Pool’. Skirting the perils of psychobilly, but throwing in some queasy, lolloping country, splashes of cheap keyboards are the only sonic clue to this being recorded post-1973. So happily retrogressive it could be quaint, if it didn’t feel like waking from a drug-induced nightmare on a stranger’s couch.

Groovy and weird.

(In The Red)

Blank Dogs Land And Fixed (Captured Tracks)

By Danny Canter. In stores now

08/10

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www.loudandquiet.com

Last year Mike Sniper became the king of lo-fi garage by taking the woozy sub (sub) genre to its natural conclusion and producing the super murky ‘Under And Under’.Whereas his peers would shower themselves in reverb, Sniper tried to drown himself in the stuff, often making his vocals inaudible, plain weird and yet somehow mysteriously compelling. ‘Land And Fixed’, then, is the New Yorker coming up for air and has more in common with his more electronic ‘Phrases’ EP.There’s certainly still some water on Sniper’s lungs (he gargles lyrics rather than sings them) but there’s a newfound clarity to his vocals too, which gives Blank Dogs a welcome sense of humanity.Tracks like the synth-heavy ‘Collide’ are therefore allowed to sound like Xiu Xiu decedents, while ‘Another Language’ is not the only track to instrumentally borrow from New Order and, similarly, ‘Longlight’ is just one of a few odes to Joy Division. It’s less original than ‘Under And Under’, but it’s no less captivating.

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Live

Fun Spoilers

Berlin Festival 2010 Tempelhof Airport, Berlin, Germany 10-11.09.2010

By Reef Younis ▼

Photography by Reef Younis

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www.loudandquiet.com

Ok, it’s official – Germany does festival settings like nowhere else. Sure Benicassim has a beach and a mountain, Sonar has the Catalan culture of Barcelona and Exit has a fortified castle but do any of them have planes? No. Didn’t think so. Anyway, enough of the postcard stuff.

The first act to catch our attention are Blood Red Shoes, who are tight, taut and lively with Mary as foxy as ever and Jim’s rapier drumming and androgynous call and response vocal generating an early momentum that a colossally disappointing MIT and the atrocious calypso electro of Le Corps Mince de Françoise (a garage amalgamation of Eurotrash pop, cringing rapping and nervous banshee yelps, it’s a performance perilously close to being the weekend’s low point) spectacularly manage to dismantle.

Elsewhere a grown up Adam Green has dressed for a square dance but still looks and sounds like Ray Romano; LCD Soundsystem put in a requisitely flawless performance with a typically unshaven James Murphy still managing to rock the dirty white shirt look effortlessly, and Editors offer a headline gloss on the mainstage courtesy of a set brimming with their mordant, anthemic sing-a-longs.

Deep in an airport hangar, the black suspense is building. Stage lamps flicker, the ghost house dramatics are ramped up and you get that sick feeling just before the slasher film eye-candy gets her comeuppance.Then,

shrouded in ghost shadows and mist, a Fever Ray emerges from the murk, gangling and swaying, an apparition with a faceless message and a siren song, triangle-walking through sleepless nightmares. It’s simply hypnotic as Karin Andersson’s mystique teases the other side to shape-shifting and soothsaying proportions, gliding at an otherworldly pace.

Outside, though, it’s all going a bit wrong.

In the aftermath of the much publicised, tragically doomed Love Parade, over zealous security and organisers hit the panic button when the main stage crowd decide to disperse in the general direction of the hangars. And with Caribou, Erol Alkan and 2ManyDJs major draws, it’s an unenviable balls-up that sees the DeWaele brothers’ set canned and our continued attempts to see Dan Snaith and co. needlessly rebutted by a menace in a jumpsuit.

So where are these angry kids supposed to go? Why, to see Erol Alkan of course.

Channelling the animosity of the crowd into a brutal set insistently big on volume – to the point he’s involved in a turn up/turn down battle with a reluctant stage manager – Erol sets about smashing it. Now, the kids aren’t just dancing, they’re shunting the flimsy security barriers to breaking point, and go restlessly kicking and screaming into the early AM – a time where Berlin, and its festival, should just be getting started.

“This is the excuse that they’re making, is it

good enough for what you’re paying?” How about once more with some feeling, Stefan? It’s a telling sentiment from one half of the riled DeWaeles, clearly pissed that the plug was pulled on their headlining set last night. Instead, he’s suited and booted alongside brother David and the rest of Soulwax, attempting to invigorate the Berlin crowd at the respectable hour of 7pm.

On a night, and schedule, re-jigged to accommodate the neighbouring police precinct’s wishes, it should feel a little hollow.

But, undeterred, undiminished and unbeaten, Berlin ignites. It just happens to be much earlier than usual. Injecting a healthy sense of their Nite Sessions guise, Soulwax are all class and light the torch paper for Boysnoize’ jackhammer set.

Dispensing with the rolling, low-reverb techno of the last few months, tonight finds Alex Ridha in his element, destroying his home turf with all the power the 1s and 2s can muster.

At floor level, it’s angry and expectant, agitated by the previous night as fists, feet and minds flail and fail to a ground-shaking homecoming.

Hot Chip bring a much more placatory vibe as the unassuming festival closers, but even as the resident luggage cart mobile disco parties its way around Tempelhof ’s tarmac one last time - at the criminally early hour of 11pm - the exodus to Berlin’s underground is already well and truly underway.

▼

Blonde Redhead Shepherd’s Bush Empire, London 29.09.2010

By Edgar Smith Photography by Lee Goldup ▼

Alt. rockers Blonde Redhead tend to get a few dodgy looks and catty words from alt. fans and critics, cast-off as a pale imitation of Sonic Youth and other bands that really do know what they’re doing with fuck-off huge guitar squalls.Taking that view though, you could just as easily identify SY as a knock-off amalgam of Glenn Branca, Arto Lindsay and Patti Smith - the Pick Apart The Influences game never stops and for every pedant, there’s a few more who are ready to take things as they were intended. Nearly two thousand more in fact and tonight they’ve filed into Shepherds Bush Empire for one of Blonde Redhead’s (quite rare) visits to London.

A panel of photographers’ umbrella screens forms the background, at first delicately lit with faux-early electric lights, then beaten to a luminous pulp by incandescent flashes and pole-mounted lasers, the energy of which (perhaps deliberately) contrasts with and compensates for the band’s meditative stage presence.The set is heavy on new album ‘Penny Sparkle’, a big ol’ record and a neat crystallization of their previous excursions into electronica and dream-pop. For it, they roped-in 4AD favourite Alan Moulder and Fever Ray’s Subliminal Kid. One’s done a wonderful job of Depeche Mode-ing them by 20% and the other, well… they look and sound a bit like Fever Ray now.They might have just sent some free ammunition to the haters but, more than anything, Blonde Redhead are admirably longstanding and the strength of their back-catalogue gives them a charm and a cruising nonchalance with which they can ride over criticism.

WILDER The Jericho Tavern, Oxford 05.10.2010

By Tom Goodwyn ▼

Take one look at Wilder and you’re instantly transported back a decade to a time when The Strokes and The Libertines defined everything.

Dressed in ludicrously tight skinny jeans and beat up leather jackets, with asymmetric haircuts, you wonder whether they think it’s already time for a 2002 revival already. But, as the Bristol fourpiece take to the Jericho’s stage and start to play, those thoughts are quickly dispelled, because Wilder add an earnestness to what they do, playing as if compelled by some otherworldly force. Heavily influenced by the post-punk of Talking Heads and Roxy Music, they combine this with a love of newbies like Friendly Fires, which add a more rhythmic edge to their new disco. All this adds up to a sound that seems one minute like jaunty rock’n’roll and the next like chilling electronica.Take ‘California Rainbow’, which is initially led by a vocal piped entirely through a vocoder and a New Order-esque keyboard refrain, which then gives way to a hyperactive guitar riff and one almighty clattering of a chorus. It’s still pretty rough and raw, but Wilder have the makings of something good.

Mount Kimbie XOYO, Old Street, London 21.09.2010

By Sam Walton ▼

Much has been made about Mount Kimbie’s are-they-aren’tthey relationship with dubstep, and tonight’s show doesn’t unearth any new evidence, offering a blend of sped-up vocals and moody field recordings (very dubstep) alongside live instrumentation and moments of spiralling aural bliss (very not).

Not that it really matters: one opinion that is generally accepted about the Peckham duo is that ‘Crooks & Lovers’, their first album, is a fine piece of work.

Pleasingly, they draw largely from it tonight, but abandon the traditional idea of playing entire tracks for a more painterly, impressionistic approach, cutting

and splicing the record’s rich palette of sounds together to create a subtle and stubbornly idiosyncratic show. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a pair whose sound was developed in bedrooms rather than live venues, tonight’s stagecraft extends no further than mumbled thanks (between tracks) and politely nodding heads (during), but again it doesn’t really matter: Mount Kimbie is not a band you stand and watch, and one awkwardly diffident vocal aside, their performance offers no attempt at a visual focal point.

Instead, prodding at samplers or diligently stroking guitars, they opt to be quietly industrious, and the outcome is arresting, serpentine and pleasingly unclassifiable stuff.

Grass widow Old Blue Last, Shoreditch, London 30.09.2010

By Stuart Stubbs ▼

Between songs Grass Widow’s curly haired bassist and apparent spokesperson Hannah Lew talks of crayons and driving on the left, and kindly gives props to tonight’s supporting Trash Kit. God knows exactly what she’s saying – it’s all coyly whispered with a cutesy hush that the San Franciscan trio then slip into a steady flow of songs: a clattering brand of DIY punk-by-numbers inspired by The Raincoats and since mastered by Wetdog and La La Vasquez. Over their sweet, three-way coos, their pots’n’pans drums are joined by a crunchy guitar and spindly bass, which doesn’t sound too original because, well, it’s not.Their neat trick, however (other than the fact that they can actually sing), is to play in time while somehow making it sound like each member is half a second ahead of the other two. It gives their show a frantic, skitty, surf pace that’s best seen throughout ‘Uncertain Memory’ as it wearily yawns to life only to dash off to hippyish, group “aaahhhs”.To really notice this particular subtlety though, and the band’s underlining, witchy mystique, you have to have lived with debut album ‘Past Time’ for a while, and judging by the evergrowing murmurs that shun Grass Widow from their fourth song, there’s a good chance that tonight’s onlookers haven’t.

www.loudandquiet.com

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Live ▼

Future Islands CAMP, Old Street, London 29.09.2010

By Stuart Stubbs ▼

Flats. Pic: Bart Pettman

The Devil Makes Three. Pic: Annie Fichtner

Future Islands singer Samuel T. Herring resembles the banking crisis at its harrowing peak, and tonight it just so happens that he’s doing so in London’s city mile – meltdown HQ – in the basement hovel of C.A.M.P. A thirty something reseeding from life’s relentless strain, his white collar is unbuttoned, as if that of a struck off accountant who’s had it with niceties. But his attire merely accentuates Herring’s desperation as he wails to his band’s swirling, euphoric synths and post punk-iest of bass lines. It’s the singer’s fearless, dramatic honesty that really makes this a performance for the recession, and after an opening, new, nameless plodder, he beats his chest and croaks the kind of gravely, gruff croak that would come from a grizzly bear schooled at the Joe Cocker Singing Academy. It’s a horse delivery alright, but also one of crude, considered emotion and control, which is what makes the whole thing so compelling. It’s five songs in, around the arrival of ‘Tin Man’, that Future Islands start to sound their best, their shredded vocals dialled down to the better side of ‘hammy’ (we were veering into Future Islands Idol for a second there) and the remainder of the set largely coming for the bitter sweet ‘In Evening Air’ EP, plus old, dance jam ‘Pinocchio’. And while Herring clutches the air and moves for the lot of us, the lasting impression is you’ll never see a band put it all out there quite like this one.

PVT Junip. Pic: Aaron K.S. Jones

Cargo, Shoreditch, London 06.10.2010

By Reef Younis ▼

There are those who enjoy sound then are those who revel in it; the sonic thunder cracks and white noise swirls; the booming reverberations that either heralds the end of the world or the quick death of your quickly faltering ear drum.What PVT sacrificed in their renaming (formerly Pivot) they’ve left their ambitions, both

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live and on record, powerfully intact. In Cargo’s industrial bunker, there’s no cushion. No filter. No escape. Alive and bristling, they seek to laconically energise the air around you, Richard Pike’s imploring vocal emerging from the gut through breathless, clenched teeth. It’s a performance and music to unsettle and inspire, the crowd soaking up gnashing loops, unwinding in waves of towering electronica. Compact and condensed, in spaces as small as this the senses reach overload. Sweat drips, bodies buckle and sway and PVT coolly, persistently, forcefully cut swathes of unremitting euphoria, choosing their moments to unleash, picking up the pieces to build it back up all over again.

Working their way through much of the material from latest album ‘Church of No Magic’, where that needed a few, repeated listens to tap into their brooding atmospherics, live, PVT’s unrelenting intensity is utterly inescapable. And it’s an altar worth worshipping at.

Dum Dum Girls Queen’s Social, Sheffield 25.09.2010

By Daniel Dylan Wray ▼

The sultry black-clad Dum Dum Girls roll out onto the stage with a sense of reserved flair that borders on ambivalence, which should but doesn’t feel cocky.They open with a stripped back, penetrating version of Rolling Stones’ classic ‘Play With Fire’, their waltz-like rendition sitting somewhere between surf-tinged glamour rock and something you might hear in an early Tarantino flick. And things continue in good stead as they balance their reserved mid tempo swing numbers with the flat-out ball-busters to create a varied set within their own constraints.

Undoubtedly there is a feeling of saturation point with so many similar bands and sounds doing the rounds at the moment, and while there are moments that fail to differentiate them from the rest of the pack, for the most part Dum Dum Girls are successful in taking a very familiar format and making it their own by injecting a much missed 60s girl group aesthetic and attitude into their sound, hips sliding slowly from side to side in

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unison. Except these girls are more than just dancers; they know how to play their instruments, and a rousing and stirring encore seamlessly cements this fact.

Peepholes Old Blue Last, Shoreditch, London 02.10.2010

By Danny Canter ▼

In last month’s issue, facts we learnt about drum’n’organ duo Peepholes included how petrified synth player Nick can get when onstage and how drummer Kat’s biggest concern is her “drum mouth” (the uncontrollable contortions of any lips, tongue and teeth setup once sat behind a kit).

This evening, as they show up headliners Gentle Friendly (which is less a slight on that duo’s squealing, loopy set, and more a indication of just how good Peepholes are), Nick appears not too shit scared and it’s Kat’s drum hands that we’re all looking at, not her mouth.This is because – impressively, having taught herself to play on the kind of novelty Yamaha pad set your mum would never buy you from Argos – she’s a beastly drummer, all rumbling floor toms and tribal grooves that offset her effected, delayed vocals.

Nick sings too but it certainly sounds like there’s more than a couple of people up there as a wash of static hangs on the air and Nick rapidly flicks analogue notes with his index and middle finger as if playing an old athletics game on some defunct consol. And by the time we reach the closing ‘Carnivore’ – a queasy, neverending, industrial jam that’s not done justice on the band’s new mini LP ‘Kingdom’ – we’ve learnt a lot more about Peepholes.

Namely that it’s the bands following them that should be scared.

Dan Deacon Fabric, Old Street, London 21.09.2010

By Sam Walton ▼

It’s no surprise that bootlegs of Dan Deacon’s live shows don’t do the rounds on the Internet in the manner enjoyed by other US

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musicians who rarely grace these shores. Indeed, listening to a Deacon performance from the comfort of your living room would nearly be as absurd as the show itself, given the audience participation involved and how multisensory his shows have become. At the heart of it, it’s still a gig – a musician, playing music (predominantly 1000bpm CAPSLOCK techno that sounds like toddlers licking batteries) to a crowd who enjoy his albums. But Deacon also brings an element of the wacky gameshow, casting himself as the madcap host: twice he organises his audience into a circle so the more exhibitionist crowd members can dance off against each other. He also, for a set piece finale that must be the oddest thing Fabric has ever witnessed, arranges a round of ‘Oranges and Lemons’ that snakes in and out of the entire building.

But while the whimsy may mask the questionable quality of the music, Deacon’s daftness charges the experience with an inescapable bonhomie, and for a genre typified by moody bearded types hunched over laptops, his show is stupidly uplifting – literally.

Cold in berlin Old Blue Last, Shoreditch, London 20.09.2010

By Chris Watkeys ▼

Cold In Berlin are a band with so many viciously jagged edges that handling their CDs is almost an occupational hazard.The fourpiece recently showcased their sound – a buzzy, acerbic noisemelody – in one of the standout sets on Offset festival’s main stage.

Tonight though, it’s a lateannouncement support slot in the rather less glamorous (and somewhat sparsely populated) environs of an East London boozer – yet the band attack the gig with all the unhinged power and intensity of a bunch of amphetamine-fuelled zealots.

There’s a manic energy in singer Maya’s eyes, and although the room isn’t exactly packed out the band fill the vacuum with an onthe-edge atmosphere of their own, dispensing fuzzed-up basslines and rifle shot drums, over which Maya’s frantic howl serrates the air.

Early on, the frontwoman takes the

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opportunity to move the mic stand from the stage to the middle of the floor, and start clambering over the furniture. “Nothing really does it for me these days,” she sings into the faces of the circled crowd, fixing their eyes as if the words are a challenge. Here’s a band that run on pure adrenaline, and create gallons of the stuff in anyone who witnesses them.They’ll do it for you.

Summer camp Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff 04.10.2010

By Gordon Anderson ▼

Summer Camp are playing below Frankie & the Heartstrings tonight, but as Cardiff ’s indie kids seem far less interested in the headliners, we’ll follow their lead and continue to ignore Frankie’s poppy indie-rock. Opening with the snaky guitar lines and DAT beats of ‘Was It Worth It?’, Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley play to a slideshow of 80’s American family photos; all tiny shorts, smiling albino children and at one point, two guys with arms around a still-black Michael Jackson. More than just a backdrop, the visuals are key to the band’s aesthetic – also taking that decade’s pop music and movies and re-imagining themselves in amongst it all. It works best with the brazen pop beats and dreamy synth haze of ‘Round The Moon’ and the playful vocal trade-offs on ‘Ghost Train’, but there is a problem.While it’s an enjoyable cut and paste job, and Liz ‘n’ Jez are genial hosts, trying to add depth to the inherently shallow cultural material they fill their scrapbook with is a tricky task. If they’re happy to be just a stylistic exercise, that’s fine, but until they can add some drama and passion they won’t be an experience to truly love.

Junip Brudenell Social Club, Leeds 10.10.2010

By Kate Parkin ▼

Backed by bongos and images of clouds, this could be the scene of a psychedelic happening.Tripping out on the loose hypnotic loops

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and fairy dust tinkles of ‘It’s Alright’, the crowd melt away into a blissful daze. Debuting new album ‘Fields’, Junip have been waiting a long time for this tour, the recent successes of lead singer José Gonzalez compounding the delay. Far from being a mere backing band though,Tobias Winterkorns understated turn on the Moog and Elias Arayas drums propel the mood, their subtle blend of light and shade adding to ‘Without You’’s emotional tremble.

Mixing the warm glow of John Martyn with the fiddly Hispanic guitars of Tito Puente, their swirling hippy jams are deflected in kaleidoscopic directions, and while many of the crowd are undoubtedly here for José, they all know the songs, from the melancholic swoon of ‘Always’ to traditional folk of ‘The Ghost of Tom Joad’ from the band’s 2005 Black Refuge EP. Junip have an air of quiet hopefulness, and it’s quickly catching. After this year’s wealth of surf rock and psychtinged bands it seems we’re not quite ready to say goodbye to the Summer of Love just yet.

The Devil Makes Three Emo’s, Austin, Texas 21.09.2010

By Luke Winkie ▼

The Devil Makes Three don’t really look like a bluegrass band.

Stand-up bassist Lucia Turino sports a charred, cult-ready, bull head tattoo across her chest, banjoist Cooper McBean (which is probably the best name for a banjo player of all time) has a beard that is quickly reaching Rasputin levels and frontman Pete Bernard rocks the Gaslight Anthem-ish Bostonian look complete with bowler hat pulled below his whitening hair and a monochrome button-up that you just know is covering up some past-life ink work.Watching them tinker with their instruments and PA for 20 minutes like a finely tuned prog band and then crank out some of the most old-timely music still being played in a rock club is all rather surreal. But all that prep really does amount to something – The Devil Makes Three live show is near mechanical as they inject a ridiculous amount of momentum into a genre that

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reached its creative peak nearly six decades ago. And the crowd responds tenfold, causing a nearly bewildered Bernard to announce, “this might be the best crowd we’ve ever had in Austin” as the band make a late-night Tuesday sound like a primetime Friday.The songs blend together eventually, but not nearly as soon as you might expect.

FLATS The Cockpit, Leeds 07.10.2010

By Kate Parkin ▼

Spitting out their angular punk in short, sharp bursts, Flats barely give the crowd chance to pause for breathe as they hurl themselves around through and in-between songs.With all their tunes clocking in under two minutes and brimming with bile, this is a young, wide-eyed Sex Pistols on a truckload of uppers. Songs like ‘Flats Waltz’ leave half the crowd bewildered and open-mouthed and the other half misty-eyed with nostalgia. Singer Dan Devine is visibly disheartened by the standoffish crowd, muttering “fucking ‘ell” under his breath before launching into another verbal onslaught. Backed by disjointed drumming and jarring guitars this is raw, nasty punk at its best, as Dan rails against a broken society and “cunts” like Paul Weller on the mod-bating ‘Rat Trap’.The kids down the front start to pay attention, sending a ripple of bobbing heads to the back, but by then it’s too late. After the briefest of sets it’s all over, with Flats abandoning the stage mid-chord, their guitars feeding back into the void. Far from chewing on the bloated corpses of their punk predecessors, they are reinventing things at lightening speed.The world had better back the fuck out of their way.

rollerpalooza Skate Central, Sheffield 08.10.2010

By Daniel Dylan Wray ▼

Bands, booze and blades; loads of fun but completely lethal – this is Rollerpalooza 2, a now annual

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meet of bands at a skate rink. After the opening Hey Sholay and Liars Beware, Male Bonding smatter us with their pop-laden numbers while Pulled Apart By Horses bring the chaos and ensuing cacophonic assault that follows, leaving No Age to find the middle ground between the two. Now a live trio, they have an added depth and dimension to them meaning that they no longer appear quite as limited as they once did at times.

They are still loud, brash and raucous though, and yet also determined and focused – their set that feels alive and energised but delivered with precision execution.

Sweat-soaked fans, many of whom are still on eight wheels at 2am, drop to the floor with increasing regularity as the crowd moves and the booze takes hold. Masses of collapsed bodies and flailing arms fill the rink throughout the night – a perfect soundtrack to the events of the night.

ISLET Venue, Location 27.09.2010

By Daniel Dylan Wray ▼

Islet play with an unsolicited sense of fury and intensity that screams from their sweat soaked faces.They contort and twist to become a massacred warped vision of demented demons running amuck as they scamper and clamber across the venue.They swap instruments with such frequency that it almost feels incestuous – like four members of arcade fire who got kicked out for being too weird.

Sonically, they conjure up comparisons to Liars at their most twisted and interesting.They are restless to the point of schizophrenic, both physically and musically. At times it’s bewildering and at other times it’s enthralling.

However, such is the visceral live experience that it almost becomes detrimental to their recorded output, as this is an energy and delivery that cannot be captured, unless you were to put them in a cage. Islet are undoubtedly one of the best live bands playing in Britain right now, I suggest catching them before they spontaneously combust or go insane trying. If your lucky enough you might just get to see it happen on stage.

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Cinema review

film

By IAN ROEBUCK

Buried Starring: Ryan Reynolds Robert Paterson, Samantha Mathis José Luis García Pérez Director: Rodrigo Cortés

7/10

Gareth Edwards’ Monsters

Cinema Preview Halloween will soon be upon us, which can only mean that it’s time, once again, for some frightening cinema -----Nights are drawing in.You can tell as people say the telly’s getting better and everyone’s wearing more clothes, and if you like belligerent sex terrorists (Sugar, Cowell) and this Shearling stuff that’s wrapped itself around East London then this is the winter for you.

If you’re partial to films that excite and terrify then you can’t go wrong with a bit of Hollywood ingenuity this time of year as well. However, with Halloween looming, the coffers are calling, sequels are dropping and remakes are trick and treating.We’ve got Saw 3D rearing its dismembered head like a fetid bobbing apple, Paranormal Activity 2 raiding another dislikeable couple’s privacy (they’ve got a baby and a dog this time) and the fantastic Let The Right One In being reimagined for an audience with no imagination. (In all fairness Let Me In looks intriguing, director Matt Reeves has Cloverfield in his canon and the cast includes the best thing about Kick Ass, Hit Girl herself Chloe Grace Moretz. ) More intrigue of a Cloverfield persuasion comes in the form of Monsters, a first time effort from director Gareth Edwards that caused a fever at FrightFest. It’s an intimate epic with the same genre-mangling thrills we saw in District 9. Made for just $15,000 this promising film looks to share Hollywood’s Godzilla values with a more naturalistic, human approach, and all from a Brit too. It’ll no doubt quench our thirst for home-grown movies with grand ambition, although still we are

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exposed to re-heated classics as if no lesson was learnt when Gus Van Sant bludgeoned Psycho. If that wasn’t enough Naomi Watts now wades in carrying a brand new version of Hitchcock’s The Birds for us all to squawk at. Martin Campbell looks to be directing fresh off his Green Lantern’s post-production duties, although whether it’s shot for shot, a la Van Sant, is anyone’s guess. Let’s just hope the Hollywood pecking order changes soon when it comes to gambling on fresh ideas and talent.

For full-whack, white-knuckle, no-expense-spared blockbusters though you may have to wait until 2011.

Super 8 has JJ Abrams at the helm, Spielberg pulling the strings and a teaser trailer released before the cast were fully announced. It’s a behemoth already with a year still to go. Secrecy surrounds production and only if you signed up to be a ‘Rocket Poppeteer’ do you become part of the viral campaign. Quite frankly though its more entertaining reading the hysteria laden IMDB message-boards.

What we do know is that Super 8 will be set in 1979 Ohio and pays homage to the Spielberg films of the same era, hopefully Close Encounters and not 1941.

Like his bearded mentor, JJ Abrams has cast an adolescent lead in Elle Fanning (currently in Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere) who will be ably supported by stalwarts like Noah Emmerich, although we still can’t look him in the eye after playing Marlon in The Truman Show. So probably Area 52 type excitement with a sentimental bent and a guaranteed shot of a grown up standing on a children’s toy. If you’re not patient enough for next summer there is always The Human Centipede 2.

Ryan Reynolds makes some questionable choices. His films hurtle from quirky, likeable affairs, like The Nines or Adventureland, to the appalling, like The Proposal or The Amityville Horror. Arguably this extends to his choice in girlfriends through the years, although you’d have to ask one of them if this makes it ironic.

Choosing to appear in Buried looks to be a more inspired moment for our man Van Wilder.

This taut, high concept film shreds every frame of its short running time into a dense, claustrophobic tale of one man’s struggle to survive.We wake up in the dark with Paul Conroy (Reynolds), a truck driver in Iraq whose been boxed up and buried alive, and we stay in the dark for the duration of the film. Keeping him company is a mobile phone, a Zippo and a pencil. As Conroy’s fears and foibles unravel before our eyes a well structured plot takes shape cleverly commenting on America’s presence in Iraq, red tape and our dependence on technology with equally entertaining and heartbreaking consequences.

Spanish Director Rodrigo Cortés squeezes and chokes the life out of his one location impressively but what really holds the film together is the dialogue – Chris Sparling’s words wheeze out of Reynolds with desperate realism and the supporting cast, although never seen, remain with us long after we leave that box.

This can proudly sit at the top of the recent budget-slashing, onelocation trend but, then, it’s not hard to beat Night Shamylan’s Devil. It’ll be interesting to see what Danny Boyle and James Franco can do with mountain scare story 127 Hours – maybe then we will see this burgeoning minigenre pushed to its limits.

How much you like Buried will depend on how much you care about Conroy’s plight and how much peril you can sit through before it becomes predictable. Of course the battery is going to run out and his pencil scribbling will become important but it’s the journey that counts and Reynolds and Cortés take us through it with commendable aplomb.

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party wolf Photo Casebook “Ex Factor: Pt 1”

) The thing is, I do really like you, PW. But I do think you could benefit from a singing partner

GET THE LOOK Hi funk bastards! So you wanna know how to look like a Space Cowboy, d’ya? Well, let’s start at the very top shall we – at the most important item of any style icon’s threadz:THE HAT! I’ve got a whole cupboard full of hats at home from beanies to that mad cow’s head I used to wear.These days I’m bang into my trilbies though. My girl loves ‘em cos she says they make me look like what’s-his-face Doherty from The Shambles. Zip up tops are a big part of a great funk look too, and don’t be put off by checking out the racks on the high streets – there’s some fly shit in Topman these days, H&M’s alright too (frighteningly cheap, ain’t it) but avoid River Island! I have since I ran into Dan from Top Loader and we had the same diamante Rolling Stones tees on. Basically, you don’t wanna look too much like everyone else. In the trouser depart, keep ‘em loose fellas (for some funk as fuck dancing) and shoe-wise, I always used to wear Adidas, but you can get really similar ones in Barratts for half the price (see above).They’ve only got two stripes instead of three but mum says they all come from the same factory. Safe!

( Hmmmm, Okaaay. I hear what you’re saying, Tweedy. I’ve got a mate who’d be perfect actually

Lonely hearts “It’s not weird, it’s a sexy Facebook”

GoOutWith MyFriend.com

I think it is, aye Fuck me! Is that Rod Stewart?

Craig

Area: Children: Diet: Employment:

to be continued...

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“

Suzy has this to say about Craig: Craigy and I are best friends these days, but there was a time when we dated, so I’m more than qualified to give you ladies the scoop on how sensual he is. Let’s just says he met me on Monday, took me for a drink on Tuesday and... well... y’know. Don’t you? Yeah you do. Sing it to yourself and you’ll remember it. We did IT. Loads! On Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and we the just chilled on Sunday because I couldn’t walk. Was a fun week though, and Craigy was the sweetest.

He’d sing to me and call me “baby” which I liked. But then it was Monday again and time for me to move on. Luv U Craigy!

Craig responded by saying: Yeah, she couldn’t walk! ;o)

“ “

“

Miami Nah Smooth grooves As above

Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious.

29, looking for babes

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