Loud And Quiet 26 – The Pains of Being Pure at Heart by LoudAndQuiet

LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 26 / THE ALTERNATIVE MUSIC TABLOID

THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART +

PANDA BEAR

YOUNG LEGIONNAIRE TROGONS

KEEP SHELLY IN ATHENS CULTS + RECORD STORE DAY 2011

WHERE THEY BELONG

CONTENTS AP RI L 2011

09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . STYLE WARS

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IN A BATTLE OF LOOKS, GOTH BEATS THE CRAP OUT OF INDIE EVERY TIME

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10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SI NG LES / BOOKS

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COVER PHOTOGRAPHY PAVLA KOPECNA

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14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LE FT O V E RS

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STREET FIGHTING MAN: FIFTY YEARS OF YOUTH PROTEST

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13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TH E P RE V I E W

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THE LATEST 7” RELEASES AND PAGE-TURNERS. FEATURING WEIRD DREAMS AND KRISTIN HERSH

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CONTACT INFO@LOUDANDQUIET.COM

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METRONOMY’S JOE MOUNT ASKS GOLD PANDA WHICH NEW POP STAR HE’D MOST LIKE TO SHOOT

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EDITOR - STUART STUBBS SUB EDITOR - ALEX WILSHIRE ART DIRECTOR - LEE BELCHER FILM EDITOR - IAN ROEBUCK

C U LT S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6

ADVERTISING ADVERTISE@LOUDANDQUIET.COM

THE CALIFORNIAN SUNSHINE DUO IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO GOOGLE

TROGONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

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ACTING THEIR AGE LIKE YOU NEVER THOUGHT A LONDON BAND THIS CONNECTED WOULD

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K E E P S H E L LY I N AT H E N S . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9 “MUSIC IS A POTION,” SAYS 2011’S ANSWER TO ‘MOON SAFARI’-ERA AIR

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R E C O R D S T O R E D AY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 0 ELEVEN REASONS TO CAMP OUTSIDE YOUR LOCAL INDIE RECORD STORE ON APRIL 15TH

YOU NG LEG ION NAI RE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 POLITICAL NEW GRUNGE INSPIRED BY ‘THE HOLY BIBLE’ AND SORRY STATE OF THINGS

PAN DA B EAR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 LATE NIGHT PILLOW TALK WITH NOAH LENNOX ABOUT ANIMAL COLLECTIVE AND NEW ALBUM ‘TOMBOY’

LOUD AND QUIET PO BOX 67915 LONDON NW1W 8TH

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CONTRIBUTORS BART PETTMAN, CHRIS WATKEYS, DEAN DRISCOLL, DANIEL DYLAN WRAY, DANNY CANTER, DK GOLDSTIEN, DEAN DRISCOLL, ELEANOR DUNK, ELINOR JONES, EDGAR SMITH, FRANKIE NAZARDO, HOLLY LUCAS, JANINE BULLMAN, LEE BULLMAN, KATE PARKIN, KELDA HOLE, GABRIEL GREEN, LEON DIAPER, LUKE WINKIE, MANDY DRAKE, MARTIN CORDINER, MATTHIAS SCHERER, NATHAN WESTLEY, OWEN RICHARDS, PAVLA KOPECNA, POLLY RAPPAPORT, PHIL DIXON PHIL SHARP, REEF YOUNIS, SAM LITTLE, SAM WALTON, SIMON LEAK, SIMON GRAY,TIM COCHRANE, TOM GOODWYN, TOM PINNOCK THIS MONTH L&Q LOVES KATE PRICE, KEONG WOO, LISA DURRANT, MATT HUGHES, ROBERT HASTY AND ALL AT LIGNE ROSET 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 2011 LOUD AND QUIET.

T H E P A I N S O F B E I N G P U R E AT H E A R T . . . . . . . . 3 0 THE EFFORTLESS MAKING OF AN EQUALLY EFFORTLESS SOUNDING SUMMER ALBUM

36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ALBUMS FILMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46

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A LOOK AT THE FORTHCOMING CINEMA RELEASES AND WHAT IAN ROEBUCK MADE OF HOWL

Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige in Submarine

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42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LI V E PARTY W OLF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

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You’d think because I smell like chips I’d have gone right off the taste of ’em, but I haven’t

Anyway, let’s get on with it! I have a list of instructions here. You do em and I’ll give you a free ﬁsh supper, plus any canned drink other than Lucozade. Deal?

GET THE LOOK / DATE MY FRIEND / THE PERSISTENT WORLD OF IAN BEALE

Christ, Ian, you’re so persistent. But yeah, Deal!

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GoOutWith MyFriend.com Chuck

45, looking for a bitchin’ bitch Area: Totally Children: On it Diet: Bring it Employment: Winning

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Ok, I’m in! What’s next?

One minute... I’m just doing something

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Denise has this to say about Chuck: Chuck doesn’t speak like normal people. He says things like, “Bring it!” a lot, and, “It’s on!”, but mainly he says, “WINNING!”, which means... well... fuck knows. He’ll just says it, like, “The bus came along today just as I reached the bus stop, it was winning!” or “I thought we didn’t have any eggs left but we do. How winning is that!?” ‘Winning’ basically means ‘good’, I think, and if you like your fellas wilder than Ken Dodd’s pubes you could be ‘winning’ with Chuck. And, what’s more, he’s completely able to beat the shit out of any woman you want him to. Even yourself!!! Chuck responded by saying: Errr, winning?

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

RECENT LIVE SHOWS REVIEWED, FROM THE STREETS TO GLASSER AND GOLD PANDA

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THE MONTH’S MOST IMPORTANT LPS, INCLUDING RELEASES FROM MOON DUO AND METRONOMY

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To dedicate your April issue to spring is cheap, isn’t it? But after another endless winter it’s hard not to get overexcited at the sight of the sun; harder still when New York’s The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are constantly filling your ears with the kind of late ’80s, breathy shoegaze tailored for John Hughes’ teen flicks, where the summers are everlasting and weekend detention is the place to be. The band’s new album, ‘Belong’, is a lot better than their last, and their last was pretty good.

CONTRI B UTORS 01

R E E F Y OUNI S

PAV L A K OP E C N A

I A N R OE BUC K

WRITER

PHOTOGRAPHER

WRITER & FILM BOFFIN

Reef wanted to be an explorer, but he’s not one. He’s been a music writer since – as he remembers it – he was “armed with House of Pain’s debut album, a photographic memory of the Almost Famous and High Fidelity scripts and a Super Furry Animals hoodie from my ﬁrst gig.” Since then, the Welshman’s words have appeared in Logo (RIP), The Fly, Artocker, TimeOut London, TimeOut Dubai, Backlash [which Reef edits], Notion and Clash, and he’s written for the BBC, “all with a varying degree of success and/or ill will.” For this month’s issue, Reef spoke with Animal Collective’s Panda Bear at three o’clock in the morning.

Pavla’s been shooting ever since she got a cheap Russian camera for her seventh birthday and took a lot of pictures of her family in the park... minus their heads. She fell in with the seedy crowd of music and fashion around London in the early noughties and has been shooting indie bands and models ever since, including Lily Allen, La Roux and Jarvis Cocker. Pavla is also responsible for this month’s cover feature. “The shoot with the Pains was super fun,” she says. “This really is a band that has a sense of humour and they didn’t mind throwing their balls around. That’s decorative balls made from felt, I should add...”

Without Ian, Loud And Quiet would be without its film page, because none of us know the talkies quite like him, even if he does have an unhealthy appetite for films that make people cry. When he’s not torturing his mind in darkened cinemas he can be found interviewing bands for us too – really new bands, like Keep Shelly In Athens, who you’ll find on page 19. And when he’s not doing THAT, he’s one half of club promoting duo Dirty Bingo, who’ve been hosting parties around London for as long as they can remember. It leaves half an hour of ‘me time’ a week, which Ian has decided to fill by starting a record label. Ian hates sleep.

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BEGINNING AP RI L 2011

AMERICAN BOY / TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE BY LUKE WINKIE: OUR MAN IN BAR AK ’S BACK YARD

ST YLE WARS IN AN INDIE VS GOTH BATTLE OF LOOKS, GOTH WINS EVERY TIME, SAYS STUART STUBBS

TAKING ON AMERICA’S NEW HIP-HOP PHENOMENON, BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE WILL

Ever had someone ask you, “how would you describe your look?” Ever had to say, “erm, I dunno really, erm, ‘indie’, I guess.” I have. It was about 60 seconds before I realised that I mustn’t have a look at all, not if that was the best I could do.‘Tramp’ is more definite, and hobos are no doubt more supportive of each other’s clothes than the ‘indie’ crowd is too. “Luverly Nike Air. Where d’ya get it?” “Found it on a curb.” “Shame there’s only one, but well done you!” Indie is a surly scene; competitive and threatened; the only genre egotistical enough to lament the passing of another awards season where the best wins. Indie cares more than it lets on, and although it’ll never admit it, it’s because indie has become the norm; the ‘indie look’ – my indie look – has become the beige of the high street. Indie is jeans that taper a bit, flat hair and canvas shoes, but little else. Goth. Now that’s a look – dedicated and alienating; all five-inch soles and trench coats come the height of summer. The extremity of goths relinquishes them from the snootiness that follows indie around. It unites where safe ‘ol indie turns like minds against each other. Walk into an indie pub the spit of Julian Casablancas and everyone else will think you’re a try-hard wanker, all the while envying how your hair sticks up in just the right places; enter a goth club like Marylyn Manson’s twin and you’re a hero. The same goes for old school, cheekspierced-and-DMs-polished punks, and the metal crowd, and anyone who doesn’t have to “erm” when asked to describe their look. It’s relative of course, and I’m being more than a little sweeping in my statements. Plenty of Strokes fans bath in the comfort of seeing someone wearing a dirtier pair of Cons than theirs; many goths are spiteful pricks, I’m sure. And if you go to Southend-on-Sea, hair that’s any longer than a grade two crop will still receive “it’s Vernon Kay!” hur hurs a plenty, even if he did cut his hair back when June Sarpong was the first lady of youth television. You’d be the rockstar of the town; considered a try-hard wanker for totally different reasons. You just can’t win with the indie look anymore. Goths are feared by pensioners and harangued by wide boys, but they’re self-celebrated within their own crypts and backrooms. They’re outsiders who at least have each other to say, “Well, I think you look good.” Indie’s too proud and jealous for that, while the wider world can hardly be arsed to turn their heads anymore.

I feel a little guilty dedicating this column to more commentary on Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All’s meteoric rise – after all, the youngsters have been fairly ubiquitous on this side of the Atlantic, gracing everything from Gorilla vs. Bear to a 5-page spread in Spin magazine. We’re headed towards critical mass, but they still deserve to be talked about, if only to shine a curious light on how savagely the American press have attached itself to such an explicitly counter-cultural rap collective. I mean, let’s be honest, anyone who doesn’t find “fuck a mask/I want this ho’ to know it’s me” at least a little troubling is either psychotic, incredibly misogynistic or willing to give artistic credence enough space to allow for bitingly uncomfortable rape-talk. Watching journalists cheer on hooks like “KILL PEOPLE/BURN SHIT/FUCK SCHOOL” seems rather incongruous to the usual bitten-tongue cringes the world has come to expect. In fact, their incredibly anarchic wordplay has become just a part of the Odd Future mythos. That Columbine/Adventure Time drop on ‘Yonkers’ has become one of Tyler The Creator’s most quoted lines, like he’s some sort of impish champion for riffing on one of the darkest school shootings in memory. But most tastemakers have been perfectly willing to forget all of that dark imagery, because strangely, Odd Future is an entity that indie-ist scenesters have all the reason to get behind. They’re young, uncensored, aggressively DIY, and they like Ariel Pink. It’s the closest us suburbanized, EuropeanAmerican liberals have come to identifying with a rap collective since Wu-Tang Clan (another group famous for its dorky-ass disciples). The number of white hands in the air at their recent New York gig made it all the more clear. This is music mainly listened to by middle class white folk, looking for something both independent and thoughtprovoking, and Odd Future is definitely both those things. However, there is one thing about Odd Future that isn’t devilishly discussed or written about behind concealed smiles. It’s the F word. No, not that one – I’m talking about ‘faggot’, which absolutely covers every song the group has produced thus far. Elitist white America wrings their hands when Tyler mutters, “go ahead admit it faggot this shit is tighter than butt rape,” but not during, “keep that bitch locked up in my storage, rape her and record it.” Whether it’s because homophobia is closer to home or we have selective hearing is up for debate, but it certainly represents the internal dilemma Americans (me included) are having right now. The critical future of these kids is most definitely odd.

Illustration by Roger Catalano

GOTH. NOW THAT’S A LOOK - DEDICATED AND ALIENATING

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BEGINNING SINGLES & EPS / BOOKS 01 BY JA NIN E & L EE B U L L M A N

(SLEEP ALL DAY) OUT NOW

BIG DE A L TA L K

S T E A L ING S HE E P T HE MOUN TA IN D OG S

(MOSHI MOSHI) OUT APR 4

(RED DEER CLUB) OUT NOW

Big Deal. It’s what teenagers used to say before “bothered” was invented, and by that tenuous reasoning, this London based, boy/ girl duo should sound as out of date as a mobile phone with buttons. The reason they don’t is because their debut single is lush, lo-ﬁ and minimal like only the home-schooled bedroom bands of the last 12-months are. They’re achingly now. They also trade in a frighteningly evocative brand of guitars-only, adolescent pop that is completely immune to aging. “All I wanna do is talk/But seeing you fucks me up,” goes the understated but brilliantly simple hook that every beating heart can relate to. It’s a case of cutting the crap with Big Deal; saying in twelve words what others would take three and a half minutes to. And that there are no drums or bass (just duel vocals and two tones of guitar fuzz) only makes the whole thing wonderfully yearn more, and feel less fashionably DIY than it deﬁnitely is.

Folk is meant to be a derivative genre; a mono paced old-timer that’s beautiful before it’s boring, which is its inevitable end. Stealing Sheep are a folk trio from Liverpool, and this four-track EP suggests otherwise. It has folk down as a multi-faceted being that can be twee and skippy one minute (the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit of the dippy, fun title track) and stormy and hurt the next (the bewitching ‘Your Saddest Song’). ‘Noah’s Days’ – the best track here – is then more Warpaint than it is Mountain Man (a fellow all girl threesome that Stealing Sheep are big fans of). It builds to detached, psych guitars loops and Bat For Lashes drums. Even the cute, dreamy ‘Pass Through You’ (a gentle meander through yellowing long grass) is full of plenty of odd little noises to prevent it from being a prairie trudge. Perhaps folk’s bad press has been at the hands of those less willing to explore all corners of the genre at once. Here, Stealing Sheep do.

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UNDE R T HE P IE R B Y S A L E N A GODDE N (NASTY LITTLE PRESS)

Contemporary poetry rarely garners a mention, let alone a review, and there is good reason for this – most of it is utter shite. With her latest collection however, literary legend and Soho landmark Salena Godden bucks the trend and more than earns her place here by writing her heart out from the point where poetry, rock’n’roll and drunken genius meet. Unpretentious, honest, direct and darkly romantic, Under The Pier exposes facets of the British seaside town that they don’t mention in the guidebooks, as well as covering chance meetings with Patti Smith in Paris and nocturnal fumblings in secluded graveyards, all rendered with the precision and humour that mark Godden’s many, and highly recommended, live appearances.

PA R A D OX IC A L UNDR E S S ING B Y K R IS T IN HE R S H (ATLANTIC)

Founder of 80s art-rock indie stalwarts Throwing Muses, singer/songwriter Kristin Hersh offers a new spin on the rock memoir by concentrating on the events that unfolded over a single year when she was just eighteen. By then, Hersh had already been performing for four years, grown up on a hippie commune, lived in a car and taken tea with Allen Ginsberg. She had a busy year, clocking up a nervous breakdown, signing a record deal, giving birth to her first child, being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, forging a firm friendship with old Hollywood royalty and attempting suicide. These events are rendered with the benefit of hindsight from a calmer, more stable place and the result is a heartwarming and brave book.

Single and EP reviews by DK Goldstein / Stuart Stubbs

W IE R D DR E A MS H Y P N A GO GIC L UL L A B Y

Since we interviewed the Weird trio last year, they’ve recorded with Rory Brattwell again, gained an extra guitarist (James Wignall from Cheatahs) and lost some of their charm. They’re still making beautiful, hazy pop music, but their new EP, ‘Hypnagogic Lullaby’, lacks the excitement and pace that their self-titled debut had. The energy of old tracks such as ‘Where’d I Go Wrong’ and ‘Hurt So Bad’ has mellowed in ‘Hypnagogic Lullaby’’s opener, ‘A Month Full of Lullaby’, and the title track, which are both tame slow-burners that feel like they’re building to an impressive climax, but stop short of one. However, the guitar sounds solid and a little less lo-fi; the riffs in ‘A Month…’ have benefited hugely by having dual axe-men, giving the numerous layers a velvety rich retro sound. The band’s harmonies have also become more fluent, leaning seriously towards The Shins, especially on the closing ‘Michael’, which – in its fuzzed-out, Stone Roses kind of dream-like splurge of jangly riffs – is the spit of ‘Phantom Limb’. Meanwhile, ‘Faceless’ sports a striking bass line that wedges firmly among the atmospheric, almost echoing vocals of frontman Doran. It’s a sincere and melodically pleasing effort, but we’ll probably stick to EP 1 for now.

BEGINNING PREVIEW

IT ’S A SHIT BUSINESS: SIMON GR AY WAS IN A BAND ONCE

Photography: Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 1967. Courtesy Flash Projects

G A F F E R TA P E Gaffer tape. Anyone who’s ever even considered being in a band will attest to the fact that it truly can be the fork in the divining rod of destiny. Many a time throughout my brief (and often highly suspect) musical career, the sheer presence of gaffer tape – or lack thereof – made for a real make-orbreak moment. Whether it be the securing of want-a-way setlists, or masking the warwounds of your beat-up old amps, rule number one: Never leave home without Gaffer tape. Having conceptualised the ‘band dream’ on prefect duty with Andrew ‘Quinn’ Clarke, we rehearsed every lunch time in our school’s Music Room 2, playing ‘A Town Called Malice’ and ‘London Calling’, until we recruited Quinn’s highly esteemed friend Nathan on bass (well, he had one), and “Drugs Darren” on drums. It was after three months of intensive rehearsal (and allowing Nathan his one creative input – our name: Plaster Scene. Perhaps you can see why he never got another creative call-up), that we played our first gig at a sweatbox of a little indie pub called The Fiddler’s Elbow. After what seemed like years of fraught nerves and wasted Marlboro Lights, the first chords rang out. We’d done it. We were a band, playing a show! I became hyper-excited and scissor-kicked my way violently round the stage through each and every number. And that’s when it happened. In all of the gymnastics of my stage antics, my guitar strap had broken, and “CLUNK”… my instrument hit the floor. This was after the fourth song, so I had to spend the rest of the gig perched on the edge of the drum-riser. Now, where was that sodding gaffer tape? I thought my new (enforced) stage look added a Peter Buck-style aloofness, but a local journalist who was reviewing the gig disagreed – she labelled me “less than exuberant” and ended the review with the words “Oh dear”. So I took the next logical step – I got drunk and went and found her and we had a massive row in a packed pub. Nothing got resolved, but I did buy 200 Camel Lights from her Egyptian boyfriend later that night. He was deported soon after. Rule Number 1: Never Leave Home Without Gaffer Tape.

STREE T FIGHTING MAN AN EXHIBITION THAT CHARTS A HALF CENTURY OF YOUTH PROTESTS It’s an ugly truth that violent conﬂict never strays far from social and political change. Even the ‘peaceful’ student protests of late last year had their fair share of scraps. Kids throwing rocks; policemen dragging a disabled lad from his wheelchair… twice; that kinda thing. But while the brutality remains, the soundtrack appears to have been dialled down to Bruno Mars. The classic protest songs of the ’60s have all been written, as have their gnarly, antagonistic cousins of the punk movement that went nose to ﬁst with the National Front and Thatcher. Our Clash come in the form of Take That

“THIS IS NOT SIMPLY AN EXHIBITION PRESENTING ROLLING STONES RIOTS”

ﬂamboyantly performing at The Brit Awards as their dancers strip off riot gear couture and discard missile shields in the name of Che Barlow and his revolutionaries, Mark, Jason and Howard; our Dylan is Justin Bieber. Street Fighting Man: Fifty Years of Youth Protest is an exhibition that documents the decades when activism and popular music were properly shacked up together. It celebrates not the throwing of ﬁsts but the importance of rock’n’roll in galvanising a generation to overthrow old

prejudices and promote new liberalism. It’s a collection of photographs that span from 1968 (the year the hippy dream went bad and the streets of Paris went ‘boom’) to the poll tax riots of 1990. ’68 was also the year that Mick Jagger wrote ‘Street Fighting Man’, having attended an anti-war demonstration outside London’s U.S. embassy. “This exhibition is absolutely about making connections between music and society, from the 1960s through to the present day,” says curator Christabel Armsden. “Whether it was the idealism of the 1960s, or the anarchism of the 1970s, music has always provided a mouthpiece for radicalism. It has always been engaged with transforming society. The Clash and The Sex Pistols for instance, very much offered a generation a voice and a focus for rebellion.” It’s not only rock-n-roll-as-rebellion that this exhibition charts though. As well as the extensive coverage of a riot at a Rolling Stones concert in Zurich in 1967 [above], and a collection of punk photography by one-time Clash manager Caroline Coon, it revisits CND marches, inner city demos and civil unrest in Ireland, all of which reassure us that activism doesn’t really need a soundtrack… thank God. Christabel says: “The economic cuts of today are very much reminiscent of those that spawned the social unrest of the 70s and the 60s. This is not simply an exhibition presenting Rolling Stone concert riots; we are instead tracing the wider sociological context of street protest. This coincides with today’s new wave of national demonstrations, involving both union activism and student protest against government economic policy.” ............... Street Fighting Man: Fifty Years of Youth Protest runs from April 28 - June 4 2011 at Flash Projects, Saville Row, London. www.ﬂash-projects.co.uk

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BEGINNING LEFT OVERS

JOE MOU NT

GOLD PAN DA

LAST MONTH CLOUT! POSED 10 QUESTIONS TO METRONOMY’S JOE MOUNT. HE LEFT THESE QUERIES BEHIND FOR GOLD PANDA.

As far as I know, your extended family are very encouraging when it comes to music. Some even say your uncle invented UK garage. Are your close family musical? My uncle used to work for [UK garage label] Locked On, yeah, but no, my family aren’t musical. My mum plays piano, but it’s just me, although I cheat at music. They do like my tunes though. Even my uncle who likes jazz likes my tunes. Well, he actually likes Steely Dan the most, so that’s respectable. My parents aren’t musical either, but they are very encouraging of my interest in music. I sometimes feel a bit upset that I don’t really have any other real ‘specialist’ knowledge, though. You, however, do – Japan and Japanese culture. Do you find that with two real passions you don’t have the time to develop either of them in a way or to an extent that you would like to? Well, my parents are so encouraging of my music because I couldn’t find anything else that made me happy, like, within having a career and being successful at something. Japanese does make me happy, but learning it, rather than doing it in a job. So while I do have a specialist Mastermind subject, I’m not able to use it to the best of my abilities, because it’s very specific. BUT if I combine the two I end up doing quite well because I’m able to go to Japan and work with Japanese

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artists, which I guess not many people have a chance to do. But yeah, the two passions do clash. Like, I’m really rusty on my Japanese now because I’ve fallen out of that way of naturally using it. Music is taking over, but because Gold Panda is going so well I really need to push myself to do that, and I can come back to Japanese. If ‘music’ were a horse race this year, who would you have a little punt on? I’d have a little punt on Actress still doing well. I reckon he’s going to get more and more respected in an underground way, like these people who still get paid a ridiculous amount to DJ off of four decks, like Jeff Mills. Yeah, Actress has got a lot of life in him.

“A GIRL MIGHT LIKE TO SNOG GOLD PANDA, BUT NOT DERWIN”

…and who would you likely put down and shoot because they are fucking lame? Who’s that British Lady Gaga who’s just come out? Jessie J! Yeah, shoot her in the face! Or shoot her somewhere that doesn’t kill her so you have to shoot her again. See, I’m being a bit mean here, because I don’t know her, and I’ve never heard her music, but as soon as I saw her being marketed as the British Lady Gaga… I get the impression that we both grew up listening to a lot of the same acts. I would imagine you listened to stuff on Planet Mu and Skam, perhaps you loved the

ﬁrst Manitoba record like I did, perhaps you went through a phase of being in complete awe of Aphex Twin... like I did... I might be wrong. Anyway, look at us now! What happened? From one seed grew two quite different trees. Yeah, I was into those acts, but I also had a hip hop phase before that, which, I think, is why our music is quite different… and I’m not a fucking genius. Also, you’ve come from an angle where you’re interested in vocals, I think, and vocals are a big thing in a track. A HYPOTHETICAL QUESTION. Some crazed politician decides that 100% of all music played on UK radio stations MUST be from UK artists. How do you think a days listening would go down with you? I mean, that would make us all xenophobes and social hermits, but would it mean that we’d have some amazing pop stars who would otherwise be overlooked? Or would it make things worse as we scramble around for the musical dregs of the country? The whole idea is very dangerous, because we’d just have our own versions of Kanye and Arcade Fire and Pendulum and Foo Fighters, and that would be terrible, but in terms of the radio only playing British music at the moment… yeah… that’d be ok. I don’t think I’d notice for a while. You’d get Tinie Tempah, Sugababes, Spice Girls. After a few days you’d think, hang on, where’s Rhianna singing about umbrellas? So yeah, I’d be alright with it. Finally, a question I have always wanted to be asked. You have travelled the world, eaten all kinds of wonderful local delicacies; you have played in front of adoring crowds and met some of your biggest heroes. You have realised your dreams. But, have you ever used your position as Gold Panda to snog a girl? No. And there are a couple of reasons for this, other than having a girlfriend now. The main reason is because me and Gold Panda are different, and although the girl might like to snog Gold Panda, I don’t think she’d like to snog Derwin. And, if you’re talking about at shows, and these people are your fans, you don’t really want to go around the world banging them all and pissing them off.

Photography by Phil Sharp / Gabriel Green

Hello Derwin, I haven’t seen you for a while, so ﬁrst off, how are you and what are doing at the moment? I’ve been doing lots of touring – around the world – remixing and moving to another country [to Germany’s Hamburg]. And I’ve been trying to write new tunes but it’s hard to ﬁnd the time, because every time you do a show you pack the studio up, take it somewhere, and when you come back you think, oh God, I’ve got to unpack it all again. But I’ve got the ‘Marriages’ remix EP coming out, and Ghostly are releasing an album of all the old stuff, which actually came out in Japan a couple of years back, but they’re re-releasing it digitally, with ‘Quitter’s Raga’ and ‘Back Home’ on it. And hopefully I’ll have two more EPs of new stuff out this year.

CULTS THE SUNSHINE BAND WITH A MURDEROUS COMPERE PHOTOGRAPHER -

Jim Jones had a band named after him and so did Charles Manson. The exploits of Anton Newcombe and Brian Warner, respectively, have tended towards the eccentric aesthetic of both those terrifying cult leaders, if not to the same grisly extent. So you’d expect Cults, the Californian two-piece of Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin, to be ploughing a similarly deranged furrow of dark music for dark people. Erm, wrong. One listen to ‘Go Outside’, the song that brought Cults to the attention of Gorilla vs. Bear and Pitchfork this time last year, and you’ll know that West Coast sunshine is embedded in the bones of this couple, who met while studying ﬁlm in New York. Xylophones sparkle, a girlish voice cries out for you to get up and live your life. Except – just who is that grainy voice in the background, warning you that living is treacherous? Oh yeah, it’s Jim Jones: the cult leader responsible for the mass suicide of 900 people in Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978. “We just casually chucked it on the front of ‘Go

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LEON DIAPER

WRITER -

CHAL RAVENS

Outside’ one day,” say the band, “and then we ended up writing the lyrics. He says death is not a fearful thing, it’s living that’s treacherous, and sometimes everyone feels that way.” Cults are in London playing one of their ﬁrst UK shows. In the back room at The Lexington, Angel, Madeline and Brian (real name Ryan) are brimming over with the eloquence of young Californians who know their Antonioni from their elbow. Though Cults got together little more than a year ago, they’re preparing for a big U.S. tour before their debut album comes out on In The Name Of in May. It’s a rapid ascent that can damage a band’s evolution. “It’s hard adjusting to…” admits Madeline. “…But for a year of playing shows we’re conﬁdent enough,” says Brian. “It’s just better stepping up – better to take risks.” For a while the pair tried to avoid the Internet hypemill with a name that’s impossible to Google and no

MySpace page, but their reticence only fed the insatiable hunger of indie blogs, perversely creating even more buzz around a band who have released just three songs. “When all that happened we had a bunch of songs we could have put out,” explains Brian.“But we realised instead of letting it eat itself, we should just take a break, become a band, play shows and focus on touring.” Unsure of what Cults was even going to be, they ignored the press and focused on putting a group together, which now includes Madeline’s brother (lying on the sofa next to us) as well as old friends and even Madeline’s mum as manager. “We were ﬁlm school students,” says Brian, “not musicians, so we think about our band as more of an art project. When we write songs we’re thinking more cinematically about them than like, y’know, jamming them out. And we try to translate that visually too rather than just being the dudes in the band that show up in the ﬂannels and rock out.” He laughs, saying that they

“JIM JONES SAYS THAT DEATH IS NOT A FEARFUL THING, IT’S LIVING THAT’S TREACHEROUS, AND SOMETIMES EVERYONE FEELS THAT WAY”

are so steeped in ﬁlm they’re afraid to make a video. Last year a glossy promo for ‘Go Outside’, featuring James Franco’s brother and Julia Roberts’ niece, popped up on MTV though, as part of a creative project run by the music channel. Verdict? “Off the record?” asks Brian. “It’s exactly what we expected it would be,” Madeline says. For an MTV production with celebrities in it, you mean? “Exactly!” But treating Cults as a simple artistic outlet gives the songs a breezy, vivacious quality that more singleminded musicians might struggle to create. Light and dark elements freely interweave as Madeline sings about wanting to live life, not “stay inside and sleep the light away.” ‘Go Outside’ is about “battling against yourself, being lazy, being a procrastinator, and the fear of growing up,”

says Brian. “Madeline and I would be graduating from college now – that’s the mindset we were in while making the record, like, if this doesn’t work out we’re going back to school!” You could always join a cult, of course.What’ll it be? “I guess I’d be a Scientologist, ‘cos that’d mean I had a lot of money,” laughs Madeline. Brian opts for Heaven’s Gate, “just ‘cos it’s a San Diego cult. My friend was neighbours with them.” “And they ate all the food that was my favourite,” notes Madeline. “They had like, vanilla pudding, Doritos...” So you’d join on the basis of the menu? “Yeah!” “I wouldn’t wanna be in any cult that actually murdered someone,” assures Brian. “They were just kinda peaceful freaks that went over the edge.” They both laugh, long black hair falling into their eyes, y’know, like Brian Warner’s.

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TROGONS ACTING THEIR AGE PHOTOGRAPHER -

The working parts of various defunct and dormant bands make up the Frankenstein’s monster that is Trogons – a darkly psychedelic quartet that pet their inner nerd and write theatrical sci-ﬁ garage. “I want the songs to come across like a comic book with a serious message,” says singing bassist Gemma Fleet, also of punk band KASMs. “‘Contina’ [the band’s debut single, released on April 25th] is a comic book story about a woman that breaks through the ice and she has a massive stave, and she comes up and has a look around and she sees that the world is really shit – she’s come to save it but she decides that she should destroy it herself so she slams her stave into the centre of the earth and the whole planet implodes, and she laughs her head off and ﬂies off into the universe.” “We’re quite geeky, y’know?” says guitarist Andrew Doig – a member of Spin Spin The Dogs and once of The Human Race. “We like Star Trek.” “Oh yeah,” says Gemma. “I’ve got a couple of songs about Star Trek episodes. And I want to write a song about Battlestar Galactica.” “No,” says Andrew, “that’s too far.” In the dimly lit cellar of an east London pub, where stories of planet-impoding space birds should be shared, the other members of Trogons (drummer Dean Hinks – also from Spin Spin The Dog – and newest member Philip Johnson, of Kindness and others) laugh at the deadpan toing and throwing. Until recently they had a member of twee poppers Betty And The Werewolves in their midst also – Helen Short may or may not rejoin

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OWEN RICHARDS

WRITER -

the group, although Gemma hopes she does.“I’ve always been in bands where it’s either balanced or there’s been more women than men,” she says, “but this is the band I’ve always wanted to be in. Since I was, like, ﬁfteen I’ve wanted to do a band like The Doors…” “But we don’t sound like The Doors,” says Andrew. Gemma: “Well, no, but it’s an interpretation because we’ve got an organ.” “I want it to be a psych band,” says Andrew, “but I’m not sure if anyone else thinks it sounds like that.” We do. Although when you think psych, you think America, and, ultimately, you think of that sunny corner of the States around northern California. Trogons certainly don’t sound like that.Their songs – in case you hadn’t noticed – aren’t dreamy and zen. They don’t go on forever either.They’re pretty concise in their gloomy weirdness, propelled by the continual wooz of a keyboard. Due to Gemma’s sharp vocals, you can see why they’ve been tagged ‘gothic’ too, although the repeated comparison to Siouxsie and The Banshees deﬁnitely has more to do with the singer’s hair colour than the band’s music. “I suppose all comparisons are lazy,” says Philip. “People have to write something and they only have so many words, so they’re never going to get it completely right.” Andrew: “In terms of comparisons to other bands, if we’re talking about the immediate kinda things that people talk about, I’d say that we don’t want to be associated with… how do I put this?” Andrew looks at a

STUART STUBBS

puzzled looking Gemma. “Well, I don’t want to name bands because I don’t dislike the bands, I just dislike the movement… the Bermuda shorts stuff,” he says, “the dude stuff! Some of it I think is quite good, some of it I think is terrible, but I don’t want to have anything to do with that. It seems to be that people start these shoegazey bands now and they’ve instantly got three seven inches coming out and they’re everywhere. It’s a formula. If anyone does that now it’s going to be quite successful. I’d rather everyone hated us and we didn’t do anything than take that route.” Between them, Trogons know – or have been in – what seems like every band in east London. ‘Contina’ is coming out on new label X-Ray, co-founded by another member of KASMs, Scott Walker; it and its b-sides were recorded by Rory Brattwell, and the band also have a cassette tape EP out on Suplex Cassettes, the label of Matt Flag from Fair Ohs. If they ever did fancy pulling on some Bermuda shorts they could make extra light work of hype-heavy dude punk. “But, if anything, our band is about trying to act our age,” says Andrew, “because we’re all nearly thirty, y’know? So my personal goal is to try to appear my age, because I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of bands who seem to be quite concerned with being young. I’d rather be quite old. But I do mean that though,” he says to his band, “I’m not just saying it for the interview. I might not have ever said that before, but I just want us to act our age, y’know? Because we could pretend we’re, like, twenty, because people do that shit!”

KEEP S HELLY IN ATHENS MUSIC IS A POTION WRITER -

IAN ROEBUCK

“Who is Shelly… that’s funny,” giggles Sarah, “there is no Shelly. It’s a game with words because here in Greece there is a suburb called Kypseli.” The Greek pun slowly dawns on us as silence hovers over our chat.This isn’t the first time it happens – our disjointed conversation is peppered with misheard comments and I beg your pardons. What we are left with though, is a highly enjoyable exercise in patience, with occasional sparks of delight. These tend to occur when we can actually hear each other. Sarah is the 21-year-old singer of Keep Shelly in Athens, and her and her enigmatic producer, known only as RPR are, rather predictably, in Athens, Greece. Having spent their life in the bustling city, the sudden overseas attention that’s recently come their way has come as a pleasant surprise. “It’s really strange to release a record in a different country,” says Sarah,“but we are ecstatic. Here in Greece we aren’t so well known, so this is just really weird.” An appearance in the Hype Machine’s top ten most blogged about artists confirmed the band to be as hot as a coach trip to the Acropolis, and with the EP ‘Hauntin’ Me’ currently out on UK imprint Transparent (a label with Yuck and Porcelain Raft on its roster), there’s enough PR power here to motor the band anywhere. This breathless rise is all because of the duo’s breathless music. Evocative, downbeat and awash with Balearic influences, Sarah and RPR manage to transport you to the wooded Hill of the Nymphs, looking back down over Athens to cover your eyes from the midday sun.

“Our music is quite urban,” says Sarah, “very Athens. When you live in a City you feel that rhythm and our rhythm is about the need to go somewhere else. We are dreaming of another world,” she says; a cute contradiction to their name that somehow makes sense. Drawing from their immediate surroundings seems vital for Sarah. It’s clear from the KSIA blog that their natural environment inspires – beautiful, vaporous images from around the city are everywhere; a steady eye that sits alongside their ambient dream-pop. Redolent and suggestive, ‘Hauntin’ Me’ evokes Athens in chime and sprit but Jamie Harley’s striking video manages to add another layer. He’s already done promos for How to DressWell, Prizes and Memoryhouse, and now KSIA’s sumptuous sound has been transported onto the screen with panache. The bands immediate reaction was one of surprise. “He was inspired by our music and that was a real honour,” Sarah gushes. “The colours he used were the colours in my head when I was writing the lyrics!” And those colours are deep violets and velvety blues. With everything falling into place so quickly for the band, Sarah and RPR (“it’s a nickname” is the only explanation we get) are going to need a band to actually play the songs though, right? “Today we booked our first show in Athens, for May,” says Sarah. “We’re so excited to confirm now, to finally get a guitar and drums is great. For me it’s the first time I would have performed in this way.” A local show is probably for the best when bedding

in and working out how to get your mid-‘90s, downbeat electronica in the live arena, but Sarah’s no stranger to the stage. She tells me: “I’m finishing my school as an actress this year. It’s a big part of me. I’m really interested in cinema, but I also love the stage and I just enjoy being a part of performance.” Dramatic performance and musical performance must be decidedly different, though. “Ummm maybe yes, maybe no, we are working on it,” she laughs. “I love performing very much and I love the combination of the two.” Influenced by art, acting, the weather and their home city, it’s a wonder that KSIA have time to be inspired by music at all, but sound does enter into their varied palette and there’s two bands they seem to be constantly compared to – St Etienne and ‘Moon Safari’-era Air. “We are actually influenced by them, though” admits Sarah. “Its right what people have been saying.” Finding out what Sarah and RPR are currently listening to is more of a feat. Suddenly they come over all shy. “I like listening to stuff like Toro Y Moi, Fleet Foxes and Still Corners,” Sarah eventually says, and considering KSIA’s slow, honeyed piano tones and crackling electronics it’s no great revelation that they’re into a mix of folk and chillwave, to wash down the art, theatre and ancient ruins of home. “Music isn’t just a single thing,” reasons Sarah. “It’s a potion, it’s all this and it’s all that.There isn’t a recipe for real music.”

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RECORD STORE DAY ‘ D AV ID ’ S T O W N ’ F UC K E D UP (MATADOR)

ELEVEN REASONS TO WAKE UP EARLY ON APRIL 16TH

By the time Record Store Day comes around, ‘David’s Town’ may well go under a different name, but while its title is still TBC its content isn’t. An eleven-track twelve-inch, it features brand new material from the Canadian hardcore punks and acts as an introduction to the band’s third studio album, ‘David Comes To Life’, which is due for release later this spring. The long player proper is based on a play set in late ’70s England, which has been written by the band themselves. ‘David’s Town’’s job is to set the scene of this forthcoming tale and we’re told does so with the help of guest vocalists and by sounding “very un-Fucked Up”, making it Record Store Day’s most intriguing release.

‘ I ’M S O C ON V OL U T E D ’ B Y VA R IOU S A R T IS T S (AGITATED)

WRITERS -

DANNY CANTER / HENRY CHURCH

In 2010, while distributing the May issue of Loud And Quiet, we completely underestimated a relatively new holiday called Record Store Day. The independent music outlets of the country had nightclub-like queues outside them. At Rough Trade East, in Shoreditch, London, it was one-in-one-out. We had to surrender our latest edition to a bouncer at the door. Blur were largely to blame. They’d used the annual celebration of indie stores (which has taken place on the third Saturday of April since 2007) to release ‘Fool’s Day’ – their first single in seven years. Bat For Lashes fuelled the clamor too, releasing a hundred copies of the previously unknown ‘Howl’ on 7-inch vinyl. LCD Soundsystem got involved. And Gorillaz. And many, many more. London’s Puregroove Records threw a party that went on into the night and spilled out into the street. Record Store Day – which had been founded by six Americans as a retaliation to the impersonal nature of the digital revolution – had landed in the UK, and rather spectacularly. “It was kind of a wild success out of the gate, four years ago,” says co-founder Eric Levin, “but 2010 was a huge tipping point. When we first proposed the idea, it was simply for the US market, not by design, mind you; we were just not thinking outside the US. The rest of the world took notice immediately, the UK most significantly, and some celebrations took place overseas

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even that first year, in 2007.” Levin, who owns Criminal Records in Atlanta, Georgia, says that, “Rough Trade was instrumental in taking up the mantle across the pond and should be commended,” but as we elbowed our way through more and more shop doorways, it was clear last year that all the great independent stores of the country were doing their bit to celebrate physical music retail as a unique experience. The only difficulty seemed to be hearing about these super limited releases before the day itself, by which time ‘Fool’s Day’ was yours for just three hundred quid on Ebay. This year, more of a noise is being made about special Record Store Day releases prior to April 16th, perhaps because even more limited records are being planned by labels indie and otherwise. A full list is going to be published on the official Record Store Day website, but those announced so far already reads like a minefield of the great, (Grinderman’s ‘Evil’, Fucked Up’s ‘David’s Town’), the ghastly (Debbie Harry and friends sing Franz Ferdinand’s ‘Tonight’, Green Day covering Husker Du’s ‘Don’t Wanna Know if You’re Lonely’) and the completely pointless (Mastadon’s ‘Live at The Aragon’, The Rolling Stones’‘Brown Sugar’).To make some kind of sense of it all, we’ve put together a list of reasons to camp outside your local record store on the eve of April 16th.

‘I’m So Convoluted’ is an Anglo-Yankee, 4-way split of underground space psych featuring the highly stoned Mugstar and Wooden Shjips-supporting Rituals From The Heads & The Big Naturals from the UK and Carlton Melton and Koolaid from the US. And while there’s a good chance that if you’re into this kind of drone rock you might struggle to make it out of the house at any point this year, you’re going to have to to get one of the 250 copies of this cosmic 12”.

SPLIT 7” B Y DE E R HOOF / X IU X IU (POLYVINYL)

Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Deerhoof Drummer Greg Saunier have decided to celebrate Record Store Day by covering each other’s songs for this limited split release. The former will take on ‘Almost Everyone, Almost Always’ from the recent ‘Deerhoof Vs Evil’ album (a dreamy, semi sad track that’ll no doubt become starkly harrowing in Stewart’s hands), while Saunier will try his luck with something from ‘Dear God, I Hate Myself’. Not the cheeriest release of the day then, but it’s sure to be the one of the more emotive.

‘ E ND BL O OD ’ B Y Y E A S AY E R

‘ E T E R N A L Y OU T H ’ B Y R OL O T OM A S S I

‘ V OR WÄ R T S ’ B Y VA R IOU S A R T IS T S

(MUTE)

(HOLY ROAR)

(MUTE)

Limited to two hundred copies, ‘End Blood’ is a 7” that is exciting due to the sum of its parts (two unreleased tracks called ‘Swallowing the Decibels’ and ‘Phoenix Wind’) and that it’s a deﬁnite farewell to the band’s 2010 album ‘Odd Blood’, which can only mean that Yeasayer will soon start working on their third album, if they haven’t already. This parting shot, then, is one for the super fans and true collectors.

Two days after Record Store day you’ll still be able to buy ‘Eternal Youth’ on CD, released via Rolo Tomassi’s own new imprint, Destination Moon. But if you want this 36-track (!) compilation of early cassette recordings, original demos and split 7” releases on triple vinyl you’ll have to ﬁght for it on April 16th. Hardcore shred label Holy Roar are responsible for pressing this collector’s edition of noise onto vinyl, and by featuring tracks like ‘Apocalypso 2009’, which was once kept company on a limited disc by tracks from The Bronx and Fucked Up, it’ll make a night on the cold pavement outside your local store well worth it.

It means ‘forward’, and it’s quite a clever title for an orange 12” record made up of exclusive unreleased songs by bands on the Mute label. Even the old tracks – like Can’s ‘Millionspiel (Edit)’ from 1970 – haven’t been widely heard until now, giving the whole 10-track compilation (which also features Liars, S.C.U.M. and Moby) a progressive, new feel, which you’re not going to get from a repressing of ‘Just Like Honey’.

‘ F R A N T IC R OM A N T IC ’ / ‘ S H A K E ( T O GE T HE R T ONIGH T ) ’ B Y T HE S C IE N T I S T S

‘ E V IL’ B Y GR INDE R M A N

(AGITATED)

Re-issues are a big part of Record Store Day, but none (not even that copy of The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’ that you don’t need) are more vital than this forgotten post-punk pomp from 1979. The Scientists were from Perth, Australia, but they sounded more like the New Yorkers of the time. ‘Frantic Romantic’, then, is a new wave lust song that will shame your entire Ramones collection, while ‘Shake (Together Tonight)’ is Blondie’s ‘One Way or Another’ meets ‘Teenage Kicks’, only better.

(MUTE)

Essentially the same songs three times over, ‘Evil’ is a 12” that is a little more inspiring than it looks on paper. That the repeated track is from the band’s 2010 album ‘Grinderman 2’ – rather than a new, unheard blues monster – fuels the naysaying, but wait! As well as ‘First Evil’ – a Nick Cave/ Warren Ellis early demo of the track – there’s a remix on here by production team Silver Alert that features lead vocals by The National’s Matt Berninger, and, even more impressively, a re-working from dystopian kruat disco trio Factory Floor too, which will probably take up the whole of side two. There’s only 750 copies available worldwide, mind you, so don’t expect them to be on shelves for long.

SPLIT 7” B Y M AT T HE W C . H . T ONG / W E T PA IN T (RECORDS RECORDS RECORDS)

Ahead of new album ‘Woe’ (released May 2nd), London’s answer to Pavement and Pixies, Wet Paint, will lift ‘Dead Night’ off of that record for this limited (there’s 250 in total) split 7” with Bloc Party drummer Matt Tong. ‘Present and Correct’ is Tongs’ offering, which isn’t commercially bassy like Kele’s solo stuff, nor the type of disco pop pifﬂe that Russell Lissack pushed under his Pin Me Down banner. It’s crooning, charming electro folk, like that Connan Mockasin producing Patrick Wolf.

‘ UNDE R C O V E R OF D A R K NE S S ’ B Y T HE S T R OK E S

‘ T OMBO Y ’ B Y PA ND A BE A R

(ROUGH TRADE)

(PAW TRACKS)

The Strokes may be one lazy, rich band, and with ‘Under Cover of Darkness’ already having been given away for free this seven-inch certainly seems to be as needed as a re-issue of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Fire’, which is also coming on Record Store Day. But this band have always had a knack for delivering when in comes to vinyl b-sides, like when ‘You Only Live Once’ was backed with a cover of Mavin Gaye’s ‘Mercy Mercy Me’, featuring Eddie Vedder and Josh Homme. For that reason, it’s still probably worth keeping an eye out for.

You’ll be able to buy Noah Lennox’s fourth album without day job Animal Collective ﬁve days before Record Store Day, but if you can bear (mind the pun) to wait you can get a special clear vinyl LP edition of it, plus a free T-shirt. Claw blimey. Enough!

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YOUNG LEGION THE NEW POLITICAL VOICE OF RECESSION-ERA GRUNGE

During a crisis, there are two routes for artists to take. One involves making something that people can use as an escape mechanism in the vein of the ‘bread and circuses’ school of thought. This, to an extent, is what artists such as The Vaccines and even James Blake are doing.With their intensely personal music, listeners can drown out the clamor of the harsh economic reality we live in. This is an important way of coping with the conflicting demands of the state, the job market and the education system, as well as finding respite from one’s own personal issues.The other approach is to meet these contradictions head on, to reference and to address them directly. While it’s fair to say that Young Legionnaire have chosen the latter route, it’s also important to mention they still do things their own way. The three-piece was formed a bit more than two years ago, when guitarist and singer Paul Mullen found himself at a loose end after engagements with cult posthardcore outfit Yourcodenameis:Milo and indie rockers The Automatic had run their course. Mullen had, three years previously, overseen the ‘Print is Dead’ project (where twelve musicians were invited to his Newcastle studio to write, record and mix a song in one day) and had struck up a rapport with Bloc Party bassist Gordon Moakes, with whom he wrote ‘Wait a Minute’. When the two collaborated on another track (for a tribute record to the underground rock band Cable), the idea of making music together was “cemented.” Moakes muses: “I probably stayed in touch more with Justin and Adam (Mullen’s YCNI:M bandmates), but I did have Paul in mind to harness his skills at some point.” Towards the back end of 2009, the two wrote some songs together and, after a first few shows in early 2010, roped in permanent drummer Dean Pearson to replace Will Bowerman, (formerly of I Was A Cub Scout, now of hardcore math rockers Brontide). Mullen remembers: “He was already drumming for La Roux at the time, and we were looking at the charts and La Roux just kept going up and up. So we could tell it would take priority over this band.” So here’s a thought – the way Young Legionnaire’s members have moved around in between bands mirrors the way people move in and out of jobs a lot more frequently these days. So, is there no such thing as a band for life anymore? “That’s an interesting idea”, says Moakes. “I mean, right now (with Bloc Party on a break) the opportunity

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presents itself to do this full-time. But a lot of our favourite bands were comprised of people who moved around and played in other bands. The classic case for me is Sebadoh and Dinosaur Jr. Sebadoh came out of Dinosaur Jr, but to me, they were the better band. “This is the second band I’ve ever been in, so this is a big deal, you know? Before, I didn’t even know if I could play in another band. But as you get older, that changes. As my old boss would say: there is more than one way to batter a fish.” Despite its title, the band’s debut album, ‘Crisis Works’, isn’t a protest record that wears its anticorporation sentiments on its sleeves. The sound is dominated by thick, gnarly guitars inspired by bands like Future of the Left (whose producer, Rich Jackson, oversaw the album’s recording), but the main sonic influence is 90s rock and grunge bands like the Smashing Pumpkins, Mudhoney and The Jesus Lizard. There are riffs as big as anything on Soundgarden’s masterpiece ‘Superunknown’, but there are spaces in between the drum fills and the slightly distorted vocals that draw the listener in. One of these moments is a recorded quote at the end of the catchy post-hardcore song ‘Youth Salute’. This, Moakes says, was inspired by another great record of the 90s: “It’s a reference to ‘The Holy Bible’ by the Manic Street Preachers, which is, collectively, one of our favourite records and has a lot of spoken bits on it. In the end I went with an interview with Anne Sexton [American poet and writer who killed herself in 1974], who I love. She wrote about sex and death, and in that interview she was saying that death was the one thing she couldn’t explain.” ‘The Holy Bible’ also inspired the bigger idea behind the record, says Moakes: “I always liked the idea of referencing what’s happening around you rather than being in a bubble outside of it all. In a general sense, the record is about being aware that the world is going wrong, without really knowing why or what you can do about it.” And the title – does that hint at a conspiracy theory that there is someone benefiting from everything that’s happening? “It’s very easy to turn it into a conspiracy theory, but that’s too specific,” replies Moakes. “I read a book called ‘The Shock Doctrine’ by Naomi Klein, and that set my brain alight about a few things. It’s about how, in times of crisis, there’s a system that comes in and lets certain

people take advantage of times like these. And that’s definitely how the world is right now. Obviously there are many people who aren’t benefiting from the crisis at all, but there is a minority who are…” “…Raking it in, yeah,” Mullen chips in. “On the record, I’ve taken observations about these things to the extreme,” he continues.“Relationship breakdowns are a big topic as well – I mean, if you look at the coalition government, you can hardly even call that a relationship. The crisis is definitely not working for the Lib Dems.” We talk a bit about the Barnsley by-election that took place that day, and how Nick Clegg, despite seeming like a “stand-up guy” (Moakes) has dug himself into a hole he can’t get out of. “I’m really into quantum mechanics at the moment,” says Moakes, excited by the topic,“and I’ve learned that, on a subatomic level, things don’t happen in a scientifically describable way. When you analyse them, you see that they’re not actually doing what it looks like they’re dong, you know? That, to me, is like the Lib Dems – you look at what they’re trying to achieve, and you see that they’re not actually getting anything done.” The lyrics on ‘Crisis Works’ aren’t overtly political, however, and – on a couple of songs – barely audible over the thundering drums and guitars: the vocal is just one of four equally weighted instruments. Mullen says he usually starts singing nonsense to get the melody right, and then builds lines out of words that fit the mood of the song. “With ‘Blood Dance’, it was just a conversation other people were having,” he remembers. “The electricity in my building went down, and there were these two guys outside trying to fix it. They were using a terminology that I found quite interesting, so I picked out random words and sentences and put them together, like a Dadaist poem.” Since Young Legionnaire have seemingly found a set-up that combines political theories with a sound that, despite its retro feel, goes against the lo-fi aesthetic prevalent at the moment, it would be a shame if this was just another temporary side project. “Well, this band came about precisely because we’re not musicians exclusive to one thing,” says Moakes,“and there’s some vague stirring in the Bloc Party area – probably later in the year we’ll work on some actual songs. We’ll take it as it comes, I guess.” Something tells us that, once the time comes, Young Legionnaire will not be a project either of them wants to drop.

PHOTOGRAPHER -

SUZIE BLAKE

WRITER -

MATTHIAS SCHERER

NAIRE

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arbled. Babbling. Disorientated: at 3am on a Friday morning, it’s a state that most of Britain’s young adults have narcissistically inﬂicted upon themselves over the course of the evening prior. I’m all of the above but decidedly sober, sat prodding through the matrix of international and US state dialling codes, smug in the knowledge my head won’t feel like it’s been sat on by a Sumo wrestler in the morning. The reason for my increasingly sleep-deprived state is Noah Lennox, aka Panda Bear – one part of 2010’s critical darlings Animal Collective. Having decamped from his home in Portugal, he’s back in the familiar surroundings of Baltimore for three months, working on new Animal Collective material and taking the chance to catch up with his “American family.” “Things are pretty good,” Noah starts,“sort of intense and hectic but I feel like there’s so many good things in my life. I always feel bad about complaining. I’m in Baltimore for three months to work and spend some time with my family over here. I don’t get to see them too often.” It’s a scenario much in keeping with Animal Collective’s geographically disparate make up. Where most bands have the option of cramming into a rehearsal space at relatively short notice, Panda Bear, Avey Tare, Deakin and Geologist have always taken more of a nonconformist approach that spans the globe and needs planning, with a bit more than an Oyster card to arrange. “I play in another band called Animal Collective and we’re starting to write new songs, and line those up for a couple of shows in a month or so. Ever since January 1st, we’ve been cracking away at that.” After the success and acclaim ‘Merriweather Post Pavilion’ generated early last year, it’s tellingly selfeffacing that Noah still feels the need to give his, and Animal Collective’s work, introductory context, even in light of their healthy back catalogues. In a year that’s also seen Dave Portner (Avey Tare) continue Animal Collective’s rich vein of solo output, with Noah’s ‘Tomboy’, his fourth LP as Panda Bear available in the coming weeks, the group’s on-going success becomes more of a logistical miracle with every release. “For the past seven years since I moved away, we’ve always sent each other demos and stuff and talked about what we’re thinking about doing, the instruments we’re playing and the vibe and mood of a song or album. There’s a lot of necessary talk and preparation before we actually get together to work on something. This past year, it feels like something we’ve planned for a little bit but it’s been a while since we’ve all been in the same city to make songs from zero. “We’re lucky to still be kind of growing in terms of getting our music out to people after doing a couple of albums. I feel lucky people still care, and people have stuck with us and we have the potential to get new fans with every record. But with a band like ours too, because

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BE AST MUSIC REEF YOUNIS IS PANDA-EYED FOR PANDA BEAR AS HE SPEAKS WITH THE ANIMAL COLLECTIVE STAR AT AN UNGODLY HOUR

of the fact we’re interested and excited by changing things all the time and doing different stuff and introducing different sounds, you’re bound to lose fans too. Everything’s been a steady kind of climb. I guess I can only really gauge by the size of shows. “Six months down the line I’d like to feel really good about the Animal Collective songs because three months is a really long time for us to work on a group of songs and we’re being super picky about the songs we’re choosing. We’re going on a couple of tours so if we can look back on the summer and feel like we delivered on the ambition and the amount of time we spent on the songs, I’d be happy.” With that growing success, it’s put Animal Collective and its members’ solo work increasingly under the microscope. On a basic level, the band’s follow up to ‘Merriweather…’ will unforgivingly be held up against its predecessor, and Avey Tare’s and Panda Bear’s albums have, and will be, similarly diminished or empowered by that association. But it’s an external pressure Noah’s ultimately unconcerned by. “If people hate it I’ll be super-bummed but I’ll probably get over it. It’s a weird thing. If someone really likes it, it’s a bit of a mind warper and could be disruptive. I try not to read too much into anything like that, positive or negative, especially as I don’t know the person writing it. It’s hard to fathom that and to gauge a stranger’s opinion. “Like if I was writing about food, for example, I’m not a culinary expert, so I might be like,‘this is lame’ but there might be steps I need to go through to appreciate it, or a certain amount of time has to pass…I mean, I really don’t like asparagus. “I don’t make music for a specific person or a certain group of people. I’d hope you wouldn’t need to listen to specific records to feel good about the music I make. The universal element is that you don’t need to have studied music to enjoy the emotional thrust of something. It doesn’t matter how you package it because hopefully people are going to feel where you’re coming from.” To an outsider, balancing the demands of his band responsibilities with his own creative impulses would seemingly represent Noah’s biggest challenge. Either marrying the two and blurring the creative divide or having the conviction to keep the processes separate and focused, brings with it a level of intensity and management many don’t have to contend with. It’s evident, though, that he’s found a ritual that accommodates both and, vitally, has allowed them to flourish. “For me, it’s all part of the same creative wave. One thing bleeds into the next, and things I learn or figure out for myself pass through onto the next. Even before the four of us all really played music together, we were all making and playing music on our own. It’s something we’ve always done and it’s just a fun natural thing to do and that’s why we continue to do it. “I think there’s a buffer with three other people.

Everyone balances each other out in terms of how you support each other, share the excitement but it also goes the other way too if it doesn’t sound good. It’s a shared thing so you don’t get to have too much self-doubt. “Personally, making music is a habitual thing for me, whether I’m at home and working on my own stuff or if I’m with the band. I’m always inclined to make music but I feel like a separation makes it easier to focus on one thing at a time. When I’m with the band, I can do that, when I’m at home, I don’t want to say anything else is a distraction but there’s nothing else there.” The making of ‘Tomboy’ presented Noah with its own set of challenges and demands, and became a daily test of his self-conviction. It’s a recurring theme through the conversation with Noah’s insistence on experimentation and self-compromise, he feels, eking the best out of him. “I feel like with this solo record, I went through a lot of weird mental stuff. With solo stuff, there’s no buffer zone there and it was just this weird thing that played out in my head. It was pretty much on a daily basis, I just sort of had to push it out and remember that I was working on it and was excited about it and didn’t want it to become detrimental to the process. It was like having a little fly buzzing around…I just needed to swat it. “If you’re a creative person, it definitely helps to have that self-confidence to see you through the weirder times when you’re second guessing yourself…especially when you get close to something you’re making, it’s hard to be fully objective about it. “I’ve never felt weighted down by the [album making] process, and there are hard times with it but I’m always excited having finished. I think it’s natural to look forward, though, and there always comes a point where you look to change. Like three years ago it was all guitars, now it’s all samplers, so it’s healthy to think, why don’t I try that? “It’s not quite a release but it’s a liberating feeling and there’s also a feeling of accomplishment because three years ago you set out to do this thing and to be at the end of it and feel like I did my job – I get a lot of satisfaction from that.” It’s abundantly clear that comfort and complacence have no place in Noah’s musical make up. Although considered and softly-spoken, Noah’s keen to impress that the force behind his and Animal Collective’s rigorously varied music is one of the few common denominators that permeates throughout: restlessness. “I feel like when I’m about to do something, I want to force myself into a place that I’m not comfortable with or have a strong understanding of, like the last album, and ‘Merriweather…’ aswell. I was using these two samplers, and after two records of using them and playing live, I felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again. There were specific boundaries, at least in terms of the way I had to make the songs – I had to use two or three pieces of sound and you’re not going to

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Animal Collective L-R: Panda Bear, Geologist, Avey Tare, Deakin

get a lot of chord changes in there – and a lot of the songs were based on one, maybe two chords. “With the ‘Person Pitch’ songs, I got into mixing those sounds together to make bigger sounds, so before I get into what I want to do or song titles, I knew I wanted to change my gear set up and I knew I didn’t want to use the samplers. That was the easiest way to make sure I wasn’t going to go the same way, for myself. “I can’t say I’ve ever felt comfortable but there’s definitely bands I love who do the same things well, so I’m not going to hate on that, but I get restless about it and we’ll call each other out and say, ‘you’ve used that sound before,’ or, ‘that guitar line has the same sound as something else.’ We’re all uptight about that. It’s the challenge of doing something new and forcing yourself to a new a place, even though it can be painful and annoying, it’s more rewarding on the other end.Whether we get there or not, we’re always trying to get to that place.” And rightly so, because ‘Tomboy’ has been some time coming. Rumoured for release late last autumn, the LP never quite materialised.Released on Animal Collective’s own Paw Tracks label, its delay was for decidedly innocuous reasons, but the end result was the right one. “My initial target was to be done by September but I missed that by a long shot. How it went down, well, it was early on in the process, and I don’t think I’d recorded anything, and I said to someone I was hoping to be done by September and that just became it. Around July, I definitely knew I wasn’t going to make it but I didn’t want to rush it out. I wasn’t going on vacation or nothing, I was just plodding away at it and finished the recording early November and set about on the final process of mixing it which took about two months.” So having taken the decision to make sure the album was given the right release, Noah’s considered in his expectations for ‘Tomboy’ and is buoyed by his own progress and improvement.

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“It’s sort of hard to define. I sort of have a target for myself and it’s more of a feeling, really.The bare minimum I wanted was to feel as though I was improving and that I’d taken it a step further. In terms of how it’s received, I have no control over that whatsoever so I just stick to personal goals. “I haven’t listened to it in a little while but the last couple of times I listened to it; there was always a different favourite song. I would say ‘Tomboy’, the title track stands out for me because it was one of the first ones I did and it feels like a real odd song for me and unlike any song I’ve ever done. “I didn’t have a grand theme, lyrically, I just picked and chose, and it was only when I stepped back and looked at them again that I realised that four or five of the tracks had a common theme of something that was two opposing things at the same time, or something that had an inner conflict. That’s why the Tomboy became this image for all the songs on the album; just that feeling of not being in the right place at the right time and thinking about my life and those experiences that had those qualities and I felt that.

I’M ALMOST POSITIVE THAT I’LL GET LAMER AS I GO. I’M JUST HOPING I SEE THAT I FULLY SUCK AND RECOGNISE IT

“I think some of the other songs have some qualities of my older songs, but ‘Tomboy’ feels more aggressive and the form of it is really weird, but the way that the vocals, the guitar and the two drums are doing different things but working together at the same time I think embodies the spirit of the album; the sense that things can work against each other and with each other at the same time.” At face value, it’s a wonderfully reﬂective microcosm of Noah’s own life: two families, two countries and two musical personalities constantly revolving. He’s a man that should feel like the sun, imposing his own gravitational pull on everything around him. But as fans of both Animal Collective and Panda Bear will attest, the lure is much more natural; another relaxed balance Noah is happy to maintain in both his life and his music. Or at least attempt to. “At the end of this year I’m going to sit back and rest and relax at home but then after like two days, it might not be going into the studio and banging on the drums or the keys, but I’ll start thinking, it might be cool to do a song like that, or what that person just said would be a really good song lyric. Whether I want to or not, I just think like that. I’ll be 33 in July and I’ve been making songs since I was 14 or so, so you do something long enough, there’s a point of no return.” It’s a co-ordinate Noah’s creative zeal shows no sign of deviating from, and for a musician driven by an ingenious progression for much of his life; that vision shows no sign of failing him, or those around him, anytime soon. “It’s one thing to stop releasing music, I don’t think that’ll be difﬁcult, but it’s totally different to fully stop thinking about creating music. I think that’ll be impossible for me. I’m almost positive that I’ll get lamer as I go. I’m just hoping I see the point where I see that I fully suck and recognise it. Although I think at a certain point you just don’t care…I’m trying to keep a sharp eye on that.”

PAINLES 28

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CREATING NEW ALBUM ‘BELONG’ WAS A BREEZY AFFAIR FOR THE PAINS OF BEING PURE AT HEART, AND IT SHOWS. IT’S THE FIRST SUMMER ALBUM OF THE YEAR, AND QUITE POSSIBLY THE BEST PHOTOGRAPHER -

PAVLA KOPECNA

WRITER -

DK GOLDSTEIN

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ags of Haribo, scattered Kinder Eggs, chocolate fingers, a variety of biscuits, crisps, dips and fizzy drinks engorge the opposite end of the table we’re sat at with Kip Berman [vocals] and Peggy Wang [keyboards]; two fifths of New York City fuzz-pop outfit The Pains of Being Pure at Heart. The other three – bassist Alex Naidus, drummer Kurt Feldman and new guitarist Christoph Hochheim – are occupied with either trying to eat cereal out of a small plastic cup or playing with Kinder Egg toys. “We’re pretty into sweets,” declares Kip with a mouthful of Haribo. “Sorry if I’m making chewy candy sounds. Nom nom nom.” He smiles playfully, revealing the entire demeanour of the band, which is one of cheerful, unadulterated fun. Throughout our chat they joke around, digress on random tangents and put on silly voices because, despite being in a band that get to tour the world, they’re still just a bunch of kids (albeit with an age range of 25-31) who go gaga over music. “Yeah, we dork out,why not?”Kip says matter-of-factly.“Technically, I know that we’re a band, but for most of our lives we were just people who dorked out about music, so our perspective is still from an ‘Oh my God, we get to be backstage at this festival!’ point of view. There’s still that sense of awe.” Even when their paths cross with musicians they admire, Kip tells us that he still feels too shy to speak to them. “I met Jarvis Cocker briefly, he was signing autographs at Rough Trade,” he laughs before Peggy cuts in. “Wait, did you actually ask him to sign something though, or did you ask someone else?” He admits sheepishly that he asked someone else. “But he [Jarvis] did it and then he talked to me,” says Kip, proudly. “I couldn’t approach him, even though all you had to do was wait in the line and get to the front – I was still intimidated by that process, because, you know, he’s pretty God-like.” While recording their second album, ‘Belong’, the band also met James Iha – Smashing Pumpkins guitarist and a feted hero of theirs – at Stratosphere Sound, a studio he owns in New York. “We got to say hi to him,” Kip gushes, “and he let us borrow his guitar to record, so if it sounds better than it does normally it’s probably because it was his guitar playing itself.” ‘Belong’ isn’t a huge step away from their previous work. It is essentially a creation born from an intense love of ’90s indie such as Belle and Sebastian, Pavement, Weezer and The Vaselines (ok, ’80s too), but there’s an injection of grunge in the guitars. The chorus of the opening title track is completely absorbed in a resonating cloud of riffage that contrasts excitingly with Kip’s echoing sigh. Even the poppier tracks, like ‘Heart in Your Heartbreak’, which has floaty boy-girl harmonies, benefits from the Biffy Clyro-esque husk of a guitar line (think ‘Ideal Height’). Kip explains that, due to touring commitments, this was all down to the fact that ‘Belong’ wasn’t recorded in one sitting. “It was helpful because it gave us some perspective on things,” he begins, “and didn’t allow us to go down a

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one-thought black hole, which is easy when you’re in a studio all day and you don’t see the sunlight. It’s really easy to get distracted and think, ‘Maybe we should do all our songs on synthesiser’ and there can be weird moments where you lose sight of what’s fun about why you’re doing it in the first place – which is stepping on a fuzzpeddle for three and half minutes.” As well as at Stratosphere, the band laid down parts of the album in Kilburn, London with Mark ‘Flood’ Ellis (Depeche Mode, PJ Harvey) and Alan Moulder (Jesus and Mary Chain, Smashing Pumpkins).“I did the demos for a week and a half,” Kip clarifies,“then we had a lot of touring to do and we came back to New York at the end of June and did the tracking.Then we went on tour again and came to London at the end to do a couple more weeks.Then all the tracking was done and we listened to it under a rainbow disco ball at five in the morning with Flood and walked out into the street and were like,‘Holy shit we recorded a record, how did that happen?’ It was really surreal.” Recording began on ‘Belong’ in May last year, but Kip had already written 25 songs for it before their self-titled debut LP was released in February 2009. “It was a weird thing because we finished the first record in the summer of 2008,” he says, “and before that we didn’t really have any opportunities to tour, to go anywhere or do anything, so we just kept on writing songs. It was good that we did, because we had a lot of them written earlier and as time went on we wrote more – it’s nice to be able to choose the ones you feel strongest about, rather than just put them all on the record.We’ve never had that experience before, usually it’s just like, ‘Ok, we have 10 songs, we have a record, we’ve made it’.” But was it difficult for them to discard tracks? “It felt weird because there were songs that I really liked and really wanted to be on the record,” Peggy mutters from behind her messy, long black hair, which is dip-dyed green at the ends and sticking out slightly to the right, like she’s just got out of bed. “We released them in different contexts,” Kip justifies. “We came out with an EP in 2009 after the record and we also did a stand alone single last summer. I mean, there were times when we thought, ‘Oh, this is great’, and it wasn’t, but the basic songs that we really, really like ended up being on the record; like ‘Belong’ and ‘Strange’,‘Even in Dreams’,‘The Body’. But some stuff turned out better than we thought and other stuff wasn’t as good. Songs like ‘Anne with an E’ and ‘Girl with a Thousand Dreams’, I initially thought those weren’t right for the record, but then we recorded them and they just made sense with the other songs; offered a balance and dynamic. “Our first record came together from a bunch of singles and EPs – that idea of finding all the songs you know how to play and recording them – whereas this time, we got to think about the idea of what a record really is; pacing and a unity of spirit.The LP format is less and less important to how people view music [nowadays], except we grew up in a generation that really values that and holds records of coherent sets of songs to be really

SPECIAL THANKS TO ROBERT HASTY AND ALL AT LIGNE ROSET WESTEND WWW.LIGNE-ROSET-WESTEND.CO.UK

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“I THINK 99 PER CENT OF MY LIFE IS DICK JOKES AND I FIGURED FOR ONE PER CENT I’D LIKE TO NOT MAKE THAT MANY DICK JOKES”

important. But I love EPs a lot.” Peggy agrees and states that she loves how EPs are “no filler”, while Kip chatters enthusiastically away, happy to go on and on and on if you don’t stop him. When describing the themes of the record he gets flustered and you can tell that he’s verbally vomiting every thought that’s running through his head. “Well,” he starts,“I mean, the themes… there’s a lot of ambivalence and there’s not a clear… there’s a lot of ambivalence and a lack of… I don’t know if it’s moral direction or psychological clarity. Originally, three of the last five songs had the word ‘dream’ in the title and we had to take one out because we can’t have 60 per cent of side B having the word dream in it. But at the same time it sort of speaks on… you’re experiencing sensation very much. It’s an accidental thing.Things come out that you weren’t even aware were there and you can’t make sense of things until you wake up from them. But the writing process was very much not a state of being aware and understanding things. Now I can look back and be like, ‘Oh, that’s how that turned out’. I don’t know if that actually clarified things.” He laughs a stunted and awkward laugh, like a cartoon mule, at our complete and utter confusion. “Our whole album just doesn’t make any sense and I’ll make less sense of it by trying to explain it.You can tell me I’m just being contradictory and stupid and pretentious, it’s totally fine.” What he does make clear, however, is that he had a strong urge to send across a genuine reflection of their identity as a band.“We grew up in the suburbs of America and we had similar experiences even though we lived in different places,” he puts plainly. “The language is evocative rather than narrative based. The [songs aren’t] trying to reflect on past experience and make sense in the present. It’s an expressive, hyper descriptive, intuitive way to describe the present and trying to emotionally connect to something in the immediate moment. It wasn’t like we had to know seventeen other bands first to understand why the Smashing Pumpkins’ ‘Siamese Dreams’ sounded awesome – it was immediate in the best way that rock music can be. “When you write a first record you look back on a lot of experiences in your life and reflect upon them to create songs, but once those experiences have been put into song and made sense of, what do you have left? Just the life that you’ve lived since July 2008 when we finished the first record. It’s [‘Belong’] a sense of expressing the moments where you exist – you can’t go back time and time again to the same area. Well, you could if you’re obsessed and demented and just can’t get over it, man, and you’re still bummed out after high school,” he laughs. “On the first album there’s a lot of clever stuff, but it’s a way of being emotionally evasive, using humour to dodge culpability. I wanted ‘Belong’ to be more direct and naked in how it treats feelings, because I think 99 per cent of my life is dick jokes and I figured for one per cent I’d like to not make that many dick jokes.” The dick jokes he’s referring to are the “doing it” songs on the first album, namely ‘Young Adult Friction’, which is about sex in a library.“It was actually the library bathroom,” Kip reveals. “It would have been cool if all those lines made sense, but that’s what I was saying; it’s bullshit. It’s clever to say ‘Backs to the spines’ when it was

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more like, ‘Bent over a toilet’, but that doesn’t sound as poetic in an indie pop song. On one hand it’s like,‘Oh ho ho, look at what I did, ha ha, dick joke, ha ha, bad pun in the title,’ but on the other hand to me pop music should be meaningful on a level beyond dick jokes.”

oing back to the idea of the EP, Kip points out that their debut album was just an extended, extended play. “It was basically the same song 10 times,” he divulges, “but if you like something, just go with it. There’s something cool about that and it’s not a bad thing that there’s no change of pace, but this time we’re excited about shaping something that is a better, cohesive listening experience.

“And I agree with Peggy, EPs are good, there’s no heavy-handed pressure, like, ‘Oh, now it’s time to make…an album’,” he whispers in a serious tone.“There’s some kind of self-conscious act of self-aggrandisement that’s really dangerous to get into when you’re thinking about making an album, but EPs are fun and casual.” Here they branch off, discussing what they believe to be brilliant EPs, including all of the Belle and Sebastian ones, My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Sunny Sunday Smile’ and ‘Glider’,Voxtrot and just about any other indie/alt. band you can name, until we interrupt and Kip continues on track about the record.“It also has a weird ﬂexibility and whatever-ness, which makes music fun and spontaneous and often opens the door to other ideas. Because we were able to do the EP and try a bunch of stuff, we learnt things about ourselves – what we liked and didn’t like. I don’t know…I really do like EPs,” he ponders. “And LPs. I like singles too.”

Peggy puts on a child-like accent and imitates Kip, saying, “‘I like everything! Do you like pizza? I like pizza.’” Which starts them off on another wild tangent of cute and scrummy things. “I like pizza, I also like hamburgers,” Kip double imitates Peggy. “I love dogs,” she proclaims. “And cats.” “They’re so cute.” “And alpacas.” “Alpacas are the best.” “They’re great.” “Pandas are really cute,” Peggy adds as Kip suddenly shifts straight back into earnest mode and talks about various mediums of music serving different purposes. “It’s easier for an album to be disappointing,” states Peggy and Kip agrees. “You have no expectation of the EP.” They then begin discussing the writing process, which was done in Kip’s “messy-ass room, which isn’t as messy-ass any more” and get lost on the topic of a new mop that Kip bought. But once they’ve exhausted all avenues of that, Kip describes the shift in writing. “There was a more immediate feeling in the songs we were writing after our first album,” he makes clear.“I don’t know why or how that was, but things started to come together in this way that was kind of cool and surprising. We didn’t have our first album out and all of a sudden we had all these songs and were like, ‘Wait, should we not put out our first record and make these songs our first record?’ There were elements of doubt, but I’m glad we took things one step at a time and didn’t second guess everything. “The other thing was, we had no expectation that we’d be able to tour after our first record, so the next summer we thought we’d start recording these songs. There was no sense that there’d be a year and a half period between those things, but I’m glad we waited. It was really fun to make the first record because we’d never made a record before, but this was so different that it felt like we were making music for the first time, it was just an exciting, giddy feeling. Like that feeling of real hyper excitement and hyper giddiness. You’re not in a manic-ness, but when you’re in the moment of creating something and actually making songs, if you love music, then it’s the coolest feeling. When we were making the record this summer it was the happiest time of my life.” “When we were in London recording, I felt like I was at summer camp,” adds Peggy. “It felt really intense – a completely different living experience compared to doing it the first time around,” (when they all had day jobs to fit recording between), “and I remember the last day we recorded felt like the last day of summer camp when you have to go home and leave all your friends. It was kind of bitter sweet.” Now Pains are established enough to leave the day jobs behind – although Peggy writes for the blog Buzz Feed whenever she’s home – but they had no idea this is what they’d be doing when they were younger. “Oh man, I wanted to be a bus driver,” enthuses Kip. “I was really into different coloured buses and driving them.” “Really? That’s bizarre,” counters Peggy, whose ambition was to be on The Real World. “Ok, the New York Real World had just aired and I was totally obsessed with it,” she says. “They were doing cast auditions and you had to write in and send a picture of yourself. I was 13 years old and I wrote in and I told them all the bands that I liked and then when I was eating dinner with my mum someone from MTV actually called me to tell me

that my letter was really cute but that you had to be 18.” She chuckles at the memory as Kip sighs a surprised, “Awww! That’s so cool that someone phoned.” You can tell that these guys have known each other for a long time, as they comfortably tease each other, but surely spending so much time with someone has got to take its toll eventually? “It’s totally gonna jinx us,” says Kip, “but the way we formed wasn’t because we’re good musicians, it was because we liked hanging out. I’m sure in ﬁve years we’ll all be suing each other, but we respect each other as people.We’re not like, ‘Fuck you Peggy. Fuck you and your stacking of candy things on the table. It’s so fucked up!’” He laughs and as we look round Peggy blinks innocently behind a little pile of Haribo gummy rings. “But also,” she adds, hesitating before putting the next Haribo ring in her mouth rather than on the pile, “we don’t have personal beef. It gets messy in bands if people are fucking each other.” “…in the library,” Kip jokes in a sleazy voice and they both erupt in giggles. “Every college that we play, we fuck each other in the library,” Peggy announces. “King’s College you’re

next!” Kip exclaims. “But no, we’re lucky. I think the lack of drugs and sex makes for arguments about who gets the wi-ﬁ password,” he grins. “I’m not responsible about my used gum,” confesses Peggy, regarding another argument. “I chronically chew gum and then I just stick it back in the package, but when other people want some and they reach for it, it’s just drooly globs of used gum.” We visibly wince with Kip. “These are dark times,” he deadpans. “Well, then I get annoyed,” Peggy defends herself, starting to get a little riled up, “and I’m like, ‘Don’t eat my gum!’ It’s my gum guard,” she declares.The fact that this quintet’s worst tiffs are over internet usage and chewing gum shows that they not only have the winning formula to make successful upbeat, yet dark and meaningful pop music, but a formula to happily sustain the hectic lifestyle. Of course, you can decide for yourself whether they’ve still got it when their new LP is released at the end of the month.There’s a good chance that it’ll become your album of the summer. “Maybe the summer’s here are kinda shitty, though?” Kip laughs.“It’s only 55°f [12°c] and raining.”

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Cold Cave Colourmusic Connan Mockasin Crystal Stilts Die! Die! Die! Explosions In The Sky Gyratory Systems Holy Ghost! Hunx & His Punx Katy B Low Mazes Metronomy Micachu & The Shapes Moon Duo Rival Schools Sarabeth Tucek South Central The Goldberg Sisters Timber Timbre tUnE-yArDs Vessels Vivan Girls Win Win Yelle

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Moon Duo Mazes (Souterain Transmission) By Polly Rappaport. In stores Apr 18

06/10

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If you’re a follower of psychedelic space rockers Wooden Shjips, the initial output from guitarist Ripley Johnson’s side project, Moon Duo, might have come as a slight shock to the system in all its dark minimalism – a stark contrast to the inebriated, multifaceted reverb haze the pre‘Dos’ Shjips are known for, save only for the heavy use of organ drone and the fact that, of the few lyrics that presented themselves in the early stages of both projects, none were even remotely intelligible. When ‘Dos’ did come along (and was cleaner and tighter, and focused much more around sharp guitars, neon synths and – oh yes – crystal clear vocals), it made Johnson’s work with Moon Duo even more of a musical question mark, as if one of this guy’s bands was rapidly evolving while the other was proving to be an exercise in regression.

Following two EPs of hazy, dense kraut noise, Johnson and his partner, Sanae Yamada, have sprung their ﬁrst LP on their unsuspecting public, and no, it is not a collection of tenminute black hole reverb weird-out. In fact, are you sitting down? This is, as far as these ears are concerned, as close to a full-on rock’n’roll record as either project has produced thus far. For the ﬁrst twenty seconds or so, this could very easily be an early Wooden Shjips record; coming on strong with those repetitive organ strains, acid-head rhythms and jangling beat, but then the vocals come in, and not only can you understand the words, but they also make sense (well, sort of).Then, of course, you are hit with one of Johnson’s utterly insane, spaceshot guitar solos and you think of Pink Floyd; you think of Led Zeppelin; you are not wondering whether you might need a Class A substance to get you through the next few songs. Ripley professes a fondness for the layered sounds of retro rock like that of the Rolling Stones, and in fact, the guitar riff on the title track has Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City’ plastered all

over it.There are references to all sorts of vintages – ‘When You Cut’ kicks off with a typically 80’s synthesized hand clap beat under organ blurts before buzzing guitar growls burst the bubblegum and ground the track in a far more gritty place. Both members of Moon Duo acknowledge that this is very much a record about ﬁnding themselves and discovering their sound, and, presumably, a fair deal of trial and error and comfort zone leaps have gone on to make ‘Mazes’ what it is – this is, after all, the ﬁrst record the pair have made together in a recording studio, unlike those home-produced EPs. And Johnson has also said that he comfortably keeps his two projects separate, so perhaps the sudden shift in Wooden Shjips’ coherency has nothing to do with this. But, then again, maybe he’s been a rock’n’roller all along. The point is, this “sound” that Moon Duo have found lacks the danger and sex of last year’s ‘Escape’ EP, which promised a great long player, rather than an ok one.

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Micachu & The Shapes

New Harmony

Timber Timbre

Colourmusic

Katy B

Creep on, Creepin’ on

On A Mission

(Full Time Hobby) By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Apr 18

(Memphis Industries) By Danny Canter In stores Apr 4

(Rinse) By DK Goldstein. In stores Apr 4

The nod to Dylan in the title is misleading; the phrasing of the title, however, is not.There is a creepy and sinister tone to the musicianship here that grumbles in the bowels like a volatile volcano waiting to erupt.This is brought to the surface by the peculiar warble of Taylor Kirk’s vocals that float between fragile humility and eerie elocution.The piano keys that strike are mournful and omnipresent; powerful in a manner that occasionally shares similarities to the bombastic effect used in some hip-hop.The production is precisely executed, but the result is inviting instead of distancing, and the world of which we enter is strange but undeniably beautiful, riddled with tangible oddities and wistful soundscapes. Once you’ve stepped in it’s difficult to find your way out, but considering the eerily intriguing qualities of this fourth album, it’s no bad thing.

Oh yes, very funny.You blurted out “cock”, didn’t you? Me too. But while Colourmusic’s debut album appears to have been named by The Bloodhound Gang, it’s one serious sonic adventure, dramatically focused and open to any anti-ambient inﬂuences that pass its black hole. It’s a noisy new rock record, but a controlled one also, made up of weightless psych vocals, blues guitar fuzz and a recurring seductive funk groove, which arrives with ‘Feels Good To Wear’.There are bits of Yeasayer playfulness in there too (especially on the happy clappy ‘We Shall Wish (Use Your Adult Voice)’) and a certain amount of Radiohead gloom. And while there really is no need for the Led Zep indulgence of a track like the ten-minute-long ‘The Little Death (in Five Parts)’, ‘My______is Pink’ is largely a thrillingly loud and experimental guitar record.guitar record.

Our favourite Peckham popstrel has finally, finally released her eagerly anticipated debut album that we’ve been dying to hear since we first felt the infectious bass lines of ‘Katy on a Mission’ pump through us across dance floors last summer. Album opener ‘Power on Me’ lives up to expectations with Katy’s delicate delivery flattering the chopped up, rough-edged beats.The singles are definitely the catchiest and most upbeat tracks on here, but between them ‘On A Mission’ flits flirtatiously between Destiny’s Child-esque ambient pop grooves, hard-garage and funky house, while Katy sings alluringly to a fictitious man. ‘Witches Brew’ is an especially enchanting track that has sci-fi blips burrowing deep into the part of your brain that tells your entire body to dance. It’s an enticing, modish and sultry LP that’ll no doubt make a galactic star of Miss B this year.

is Pink

Chopped & Screwed (Rough Trade) By Sam Walton. In stores Mar 21 It’s almost standard now for pop musicians of a more art-school bent to attempt a “classical” album. Accordingly, it was only a matter of time before precocious hooverbotherer Michachu came knocking, and ‘Chopped & Screwed’ is the product of her collaboration with the London Sinfonietta, presented in the shape of a live concert recording.While the involvement of contemporary classical musicians is a fair excuse for abandoning the structures of pop music there’s little excuse for the lack of invention and coherence that’s also evident here. For the most part, the suite strives for an intensity that it can’t quite muster, and rarely sustains it when it does. It’s as if both sides of the collaboration are over-reaching themselves: the recording is ﬂat, the playing awkward and nervous, and the result a bit drab.

Gyratory System (Angular) By Edgar Smith. In stores Apr 16 The brain behind Gyratory System is older than those behind the other records on this page – old enough to have worked as an established producer and in Downing Street before this project. Perhaps not coincidentally, this second LP harks back to a number of aging aesthetics; some of them pretty ancient.The clicks and clacks of vintage synthesizers call to mind a Rube Goldberg cartoon; the dehumanized trumpet cells, picked from the pockets of Terry Riley and Steve Reich, join a heap of other sounds deployed kaleidoscopically like the Jazz that lost its mind in the 60s; a lot of the record reminds me of ‘Oxygen pt. 5’ by Jean Michel Jarre. Despite this, ‘New Harmony’ sounds like nothing much else you’ll hear this year, from its sugartronic opening, through the marching mechanical bad-trip elves of ‘Pamplona’, to its epic, industrial close.

Metronomy The English Riviera (Because) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Apr 11

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Metronomy’s second album – ‘Nights Out’ – was by no means an instantly loveable record, but its minimal electro charm had you returning for more nonetheless, and before long it was the best album of 2008, without any doubt. ‘The English Riviera’ harbours a similar type of subtlety, not for those who want their pop ﬁxes quick, with the exception of single ‘She Wants’, which sounds like The Cure and is Joe Mount’s best track yet. It – along with another standout track called ‘The Bay’ (which features an almost Kylie Minogue-esque breathy vocal drop) – is a rare sighting of almost disco on this album, which is perhaps why they’re so immediately gratifying – they sound like we love Metronomy to sound. But while certain corners of ‘The English Riviera’ will forever be too twee to compete with Mount’s previous high standards (the weepy waltz of ‘Trouble’, particularly), there’s plenty to note on this electro soul record, especially when the synth and themes go dark, like on ‘Corinne’.

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Connan Mockasin

Die! Die! Die!

tUnE-yArDs

Hunx & His Punx

Vivian Girls

Forever Dolphin Love

Form

whokill

Too Young To Be In Love

Share The Joy

(Phantasy/Because) By Nathan Westley. In stores Mar 28

(Flying Nun) By Chris Watkeys. In stores Apr 4

(4AD) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Apr 18

(Hardly Art) By Nathan Westley. In stores Mar 28

(Polyvinyl) By Luke Winkie. In stores Apr 11

It’s instantly apparent from the title that this not going to be an album of bland, MOR, insipid ballads that get menopausal old dears excited. Instead, New Zealand’s electroharp-wielding troubadour Connan Mockasin leans favourably towards factoring together psychedelictinged abstract folk pop that has a rich natural eccentricity.Though this is a rebadged and slightly shortened version of his 2007 album ‘Please Turn Me Into The Snat’, with an extra disc of live tracks attached, it nevertheless serves as a good introduction to a newcomer looking for something that colourfully strides down routes other artists choose to plainly ignore. Like ‘...The Snate’, this album won’t help propel Connan Mockasin to mainstream success or even strengthen his hipster cache, but it will further establish him as an idiosyncratic eccentric.

Die! Die! Die! are best experienced live, and the smaller and sweatier the venue, the better; purveyors of high-bpm noise pop, to properly appreciate this band you need to be able to smell the sweat, feel the intensity and see upclose the furious passion in singer Andrew Wilson’s eyes. Sadly, the records have never truly captured this peculiar gigging genius. ‘Form’, their third LP, ﬁrst saw the light of day in the band’s native New Zealand last summer, and is only now getting a UK release. ‘Lil Ships’ is emo on amphetamines, the soundtrack to a stolen car being joy-ridden perilously close to a cliff edge, while album high point ‘Daze’, weirdly enough, welds hazy guitar lines to a baggy beat. ‘Form’ still isn’t a live show, but is still a great example of what three blokes can achieve with that older-than-the-hills combination of guitar, bass and drums.

When Merrill Garbus released debut album ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’ in 2009 – a skewed pop record of pots-n-pans-for-drums, found sounds, plink-plonking ukulele and vocal yodelling – how she signed her moniker’s name pointed to tUnE-yArDs’ quirkiness, but not to her brilliance in marrying acoustic folk music with world rhythms and a hip hop bounce. ‘W h o k i l l’ sees the Canadian extinguish her fears that making a second record in a studio with other people, rather than in her kitchen, alone, might mean losing some of that early magic. tUnEyArDs is still bonkers, and completely original. ‘Es-so’ may sound a little Beck thanks to its ﬂangy ukulele, but it’s no worse off for it, and it’s the only track here that can justly be compared to anything else you’ve heard before, except for ‘BiRd-BrAiNs’, that is. A playfully stunning follow up.

Considering the fact that band leader Hunx – a.k.a. Seth Bogart – was once of electro-punks Gravy Train!!!! and may now be typecast as a ﬂamboyant male that is unafraid to upset a few people when required, it should be safe to jump to the conclusion that what will be contained here will not necessarily toe the line.Yet this isn’t a fully balls out, low-brow testosterone fuelled record that is intent on strutting round in ripped denim, viciously spitting hepatitisridden phlegm into a few faces either. Instead some will describe it as a laissez-faire version of The Strokes, who have been wined and dined on the lyrics of Lou Reed and have bridled themselves with a penchant for girl and garage groups of the sixties and feels no shame for it.Though this record never reaches top gear, it is happy enough to cruise comfortably along... looking for sex.

Three records in and Vivian Girls’ blurry, sun-struck girly-pop jams still sound as fresh as they always did. ‘Share the Joy’ might actually be their most straightforward work to date, reigning in the songs back into chunky, blared-out ideas more than anything else. ‘Dance (If You Wanna)’ shouts “Dance, if you wanna” for a solid three minutes with clap-along drums and hightreble guitars colouring its primordial jaunt.The centrepiece ‘Take It As It Comes’ accelerates their penchant for Brill Building pop to its ultimate conclusion; a saga of winning over a high-school heartthrob with your brain rather than emotions, equipped with a swinging, easy chorus, punctuating hilariously canned line-readings. But mostly this is just another strong effort of acid-eaten poppunk from a group that’s stayed surprisingly prevalent in the years since inception.

Rival Schools Pedals

08/10

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‘Pedals’ is an album I’ve waited a third of my life for. It’s a ghost, a reﬂection of my teenage self and one that comes with baggage (some emotional), preconception and anticipation, expectation and – most importantly – justiﬁcation. After all the time and conjecture, Rival Schools are as instantly recognisable as ever, comforting in their post-punk embrace, reassuring in Walter Schreifels’ stretched, imploring voice. Opener ‘Wring It Out’ feels like an open letter; a purging of things past as a supplicant Walter sings, “I want to do the right thing/when the right thing counts”, and from this opening salvo ‘Pedals’ reintroduces the contemporary Rival Schools. Unashamedly appealing and radio friendly, tracks like ‘Big Waves’ and ‘A Part’ are as vibrant and anthemic as ever, but the angst and energy of ‘Shot After Shot’, ‘Choose Your Adventure’ and ‘Eyes Wide Open’ inject a familiar emotional grind and give ‘Pedals’ a vital balance.Turns out good things were coming our way.

Photography by Gabriel Green

(Atlantic) By Reef Younis. In stores now

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Yelle

The Goldberg Sisters

Win Win

South Central

Explosions In The Sky

Safari Disco Club

The Goldberg Sisters

Win Win

Society of the Spectacle

(V2) By Matthias Scherer. In stores Mar 28

(PIAS) By Stuart Stubbs In stores Apr 11

(Vice) By DK Goldstein. In stores now

(Eregore) By Reef Younis. In stores Apr 4

Take Care, Take Care, Take Care (Bella Union)

Hedonism has its place in electro pop, but the most hard-hitting songs are made by people who care more about human emotions than how to look cool brushing your teeth with Jack Daniels. La Roux and Robyn are masters of exposing their vulnerabilities over synthetic beats, and that’s what French band Yelle try to emulate with their second album. Singer Julie Bude’s sincerity is not in doubt – her lyrics (sample: “My heart doesn’t beat anymore when I see you”) are earnest and often poignant. It’s the music that’s the letdown. ‘C’est Pas Une Vie’’s melody is nice enough but forgettable, ‘Le Grand Saut’ is playful, but in a joyless, grating way, and ‘S’eteint le Soleil’ features an ill advised, cheap-sounding WubWub-Dubstep-breakdown.The highlight is the slick disco pop of ‘Que Veux-Tu’ that could have had us onto a winner.

Adam Goldberg is a Hollywood actor that you know – you just might not know that he’s called Adam Goldberg. He was in Saving Private Ryan but wasn’t Tom Hanks; in Entourage but wasn’t in the entourage; in Friends but wasn’t a friend. For his second album (his ﬁrst was under the name LANDy) he’s obviously landed the lead role, and seems to be playing the part of early-70s, paranoid-era John Lennon as he presents slightly psychedelic, often sad acoustic pop.The piano waltz of ‘The Difference Between’ is a particularly strong point in case (“Today is a ﬁne example of clinical depression,” is starts), while ‘The Heart Grows Fonder’ is a twin of ‘#9 Dream’.There’s even a song about Goldberg’s mum on here, called ‘Mother Please’. And like a bulk of Lennon’s solo work, it’s nice enough but rarely truly dazzling.

The Win Win collaborative is formed of Alex ‘XXXChange’ Epton, Chris Devlin and producer Ghostdad, who have smashed together as many instruments, soundbytes and beats as possible to create a full-throttle dance record. Throughout, it’s varied by guest vocals from some of the most exciting singers of the moment, including Hot Chip’s Alexis Taylor (whose airy voice on ‘Interleave’ is paired with sonorous buzzing layers of synths), Andrew WK (on the slick,Talking Heads-tinted ‘Pop A Gumball’) and Gang Gang Dance’s quirky soprano Lizzie Bougatsos (the relatively minimal ‘Releaserpm’ was the first single released from the record). Speedy one minute and lethargic the next, sad then jubilant, seizure-inducing and completely soothing, ‘Win Win’ is a constantly evolving, successful first offering that’ll definitely hold your attention.

South Central’s aptitude for a boisterous remix has gathered some friends over the last few years, but ‘Society of the Spectacle’ is a telling example of the pitfalls between stamping your authority elsewhere and creating something entirely in your own image: it’s difficult to excel at both. An album of fits and starts, ‘Bionic’ attempts to be an Underworld-meets-acid house monster that gets nowhere near the euphoria it promised, and ‘The Moth’ reverts to remix-type – a sped-up, mangled version of Joy Division’s ‘She’s Lost Control’. But the videogame crash of the album’s title track is a bona fide 8bit highlight, ‘The One’ is slick and stylised, and ‘The Fourth Way’ dispenses with the identikit vocals entirely, meandering off on a journey of gentle, broken dubstep and the metallic sounds of Optimus Prime’s dying breath.The highlights are worth remembering.

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Apr 18 How do you like to post-rock? Do you use it as a grandiose yet wordless soundtrack whilst reading a book? Do you pump it through headphones to add a ﬁlmic quality to a walk through the park? Or do you simply turn it up loud, and immerse yourself in its earbleeding, mind-blasting majesty? On this, their sixth album, the usual Explosions In The Sky’s motifs are all present and correct: huge, pounding drums, crashing waves of squally guitar, and delicately constructed passages of quiet restraint. But from the beautifully fragile opening of ‘Be Comfortable, Creature’ to the intriguing layers of ‘Let Me Back In’, this music is far above the usual quiet/loud formula of the genre. For ‘Explosions’, this is essentially more of the same, but when that ‘same’ is as consistently good as this, the band stand tall as masters of their craft.

Cold Cave Cherish The Light Years (Matador) By Edgar Smith. In stores Apr 4

04/10

Second albums are famously tricky and Cold Cave are precisely the kind of hyped (if hot-and-cold) band that you’d expect to find in creative paralysis after their first LP.What makes ‘Cherish the Light Years’ such an unpleasant experience though, is that it sounds as easy as Wesley Eisold and chums amping the sound of a minor breakdown. Nothing Charlie Sheen worthy, just garden variety self-doubt and lots of it.What belongs in painfully revealing Facebook updates is, here, shotthrough the prism of Eisold’s mortifying lack of perspective into an album’s worth of indistinct emotional mass.What was theatrical, camp and enjoyable on the first LP is laughably pompous. They’ve ‘opened up’ sound-wise too, meaning that any vestiges of chic European minimalism have evaporated. Instead, we get a scattershot assemblage of Depeche Mode, Crystal Castles’ bubblegum glitch, Kraftwerk and 80s indie pop, all sung in a low-oscillating emo wail that rips off Paul Haig and Edwyn Collins.

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Vessels

Mazes

Sarabeth Tucek

Holy Ghost!

Low

Helioscope

A Thousand Heys

Get Well Soon

Holy Ghost

C’mon

(Cuckundoo) By Kate Parkin. In stores Mar 21

(Fat Cat) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Apr 11

(Sonic Cathedral) By Sam Walton. In stores Apr 4

(DFA) By Tom Goodwyn. In stores Apr 11

(Sub Pop) By Luke Winkie. In stores Apr 11

Adding melting electro loops to their usual swelling soundscapes, Leeds sonic powerhouses Vessels are back as a leaner, meaner, instrumentally assaulting machine. ‘Helioscope’ is the band’s second album, and it’s not for those enamoured with stadium-friendly choruses, namely because there aren’t really any choruses at all, even if the building Biffy Clyroesque guitars constantly promise otherwise. Largely, the instruments do the talking, ﬂooding your ears with heady drumbeats, like on ‘Later Than You Think’ and the opening post-rock-dance track ‘Monoform’ that smacks of Holy Fuck. Occasionally creating an added delicacy, the melancholy swoon of guest singer Stuart Warwick is then the perfect foil for their sometimes heavy-handed sound.This could be Vessels breakthrough album and it’s their most exciting to date.

A couple of years back, at the genesis of the recent garage revival, bands like Male Bonding flew from the Big Bang sounding super grungy and extra agitated; manic even. In vein, everyone tried to keep up. Not Mazes though.They grooved out of the fires of new DIY to ‘Bowie Knives’ – a track that’s made this, their debut album, and sounds happier that ever in its mid-tempo, louche skin. It’s a song matched by the Beatles-toting ‘Surf & Turf ’ in terms of assured confidence, in a genre where many feel that speed will get them noticed.This, and the band’s southern yankie, country-like vocals (even if singer Jack is from Manchester) matched with the British musical influences of The Kinks and The Small Faces, is what makes ‘A Thousand Heys’ such a smart garage pop record. It’s a lesson in patience and not following the crowd you’re in.

To name an album loosely based around your father’s death ‘Get Well Soon’ requires a certain appreciation of irony, if not outand-out sarcasm. However, the title of the second album from NYC’s Sarabeth Tucek is pretty much the only part of the package that doesn’t play things wonderfully and affectingly straight. Raw, heart-on-sleeve records can often seem trite, but ‘Get Well Soon’ avoids mawkishness with a reﬁnement in performance and intimacy of recording that lifts it above feel-my-pain whine.Tucek’s rich, weary voice, somewhere in the triangle created by Nico, Beth Gibbons and Joni Mitchell, holds everything together: on ‘Things Left Behind’, the elegant ballad that forms the centrepiece of the LP, the cracks and creaks on her low notes are beautiful – it lends the track and album an impressive classiness and conﬁdence.

Holy Ghost! – or Nick Millhiser and Alex Frankel, to use their real names – have been a name you will have seen attached to many single remixes over the last ﬁve years, with reworkings of tracks by Cut Copy, Moby and MGMT adding to their substantial, meddling cannon. For their debut album, they’ve not strayed from the dance ﬂoor, and what we have here is one long blast of slick, icy synths, which glide along incredibly smoothly.The tracks – most of which pass the six minute mark – are surprisingly instantaneous, and with the duo choosing to drop their catchy grooves early on in the mix, they sit somewhere between the regimented electronics of Kraftwerk and the groovy, silly beats of Chromeo. It’s a solid debut, and much as there’s nothing genre-changing to be found here, synth pop is seldom done better than this.

Within the first minute of ‘C’mon’ Alan Sparhawk takes a deep breath and lets loose a droning, churchy croon, which is kind of the thing that has become Low’s trademark sonic quirk.Yes, the Duluth trio approach their ninth studio effort with the same craftsmanship they approached their seventh, or their sixth, or their first – glacial, sculpted, reverberating gorgeousness that absolutely envelops the listener.The quiet compositions swoop, emote, and float back into the frigid air that birthed them. Constantly crestfallen, occasionally grinding, but always rewarding, by the time the anthem ‘Nothing But Heart’ hits its marching potency, all the sighs you uttered when you saw the 8-minute running time seem rather mute. ‘C’mon’ contains no surprises, but Low always have a knack of reminding us exactly why we’ve missed them.

Crystal Stilts In Love With Oblivion (Fortuna Pop) By Polly Rappaport. In stores Apr 11

08/10

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It’s fair to say that psychedelic doom-and-gloomrockers Crystal Stilts have cheered up considerably since we last heard from them in 2008, and there are more than a few tracks on their sophomore record that are tempting to throw enthusiastic go-go shapes at – the blindingly bright guitar and jangling tambourine on ‘Shake The Shackles’, for example, are utter bliss and totally infectious.Their lyrics, however, remain in the realm of the peculiarly gothic (falling through ﬂoors, black holes, burials, aliens… you get the idea), but, as anyone who likes a bit of Ziggy Stardust knows, dark sci-ﬁ and plugged-in pop make superb partners, giving Crystal Stilts the opportunity to print their brooding garage trademark on some classic retro sounds:There’s something of the Shangri-La’s in the slow, sweet ‘Precarious Stair’, and ‘Prometheus At Large’ swaggers along with all the East Coast hipness of the Velvet Underground.There’s something strangely familiar, thrilling and addictive about this LP.

LIVE

Yes, it’s Come to This SETLIST Trust Me Don’t Mug Yourself Let’s Push Things Forward Puzzled By People ABC The Escapist OMG Everything Is Borrowed Weak Become Heroes It’s Too Late Never Be Friends Soldiers Blinded By The Lights Never Went To Church Heaven For The Weather Dry Your Eyes ---Turn The Page Fit But You Know It Going Through Hell

THE STREETS

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Brixton Academy, London 05.03.2011 By Stuart Stubbs Photography by Ian Bines

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Streets live shows have always seen their fair share of calamity, lairy bravado, dreadful musicianship, some pretty suspect duel rapping, brilliant geezer wit and a couple of inspired moments that serve as a reminder to why Mike Skinner is the British hip hop genius of our time.Tonight is the last show of his last tour. Ever! So why break the habit of a lifetime? Wearing all black (it is his funeral, after all), it’s not long before a clumsy rendition of ‘Don’t Mug Yourself ’ sees Skinner trip over his own words, and not for the last time tonight. It’s a similar fare come the following ‘Let’s Push Things Forward’; long-time cohort Kevin Mark Trail also keen to chat off piste, although never at the same time, nor with the same “Alright Brixton?”, which makes for shouty doubledutch most of the time. Initially they get away with it because, a.) we’re excitedly singing over the cracks, and b.) you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead.This is the last time we’re going to see The Streets – we desperately want it to be good. And the occasion does eventually win out.

‘Weak Become Heroes’ is annoyingly funky rather than euphorically downbeat, there are far too many weepy numbers (not because ‘Everything Is Borrowed’, ‘Never Went To Church’, ‘It’s Too Late’ and ‘The Escapist’ are crap – even though they are – but because by lumping them all in together it’s suddenly apparent how identical they are) and the overall sound quality is so bad that we can often hear nothing but the drums, as impressive as they are. Still, during this send-off for deep-seeded urban decay in British pop music,The Streets have one charmingly funny ﬁgure centre stage. “This is Rob, he used to be in a band called The Music,” says Skinner of Robert Harvey. “I fucking love him, but he looks like Voldemort.” After orchestrating some “calm seas” (that’s hands) to crowd surf over (in a suit, for a new video to ‘Computers & Blues’’ standout track ‘OMG’), Skinner climbs back on stage and says, “I’m really sorry to that guy there. Sorry mate, I just had to kick you in the head. I’ll buy you a pint.”Three songs later he does. Most touching,

though, is the rapper’s farewell speech following ‘Dry Your Eyes’. He thanks his mum and his wife, confesses that, “the last few years have been really hard” and reasons, “I always said the party would be for real, and it always has been; I’ve never wanted to fake the party.” And as for those flashes of inspired ingenuity, one comfortingly comes from ‘Turn The Page’ – the first track on The Streets’ debut album, which finally sees Skinner rap solo to rising strings that we can actually hear – and another is delivered with paranoid pills anthem ‘Blinded By The Lights’. It’s still not loud enough, but it’s a hauntingly dark track that is often overlooked when thinking about The Streets, and it’s ended tonight in both calamity and lairy bravado; the audience succumbing to Skinner’s wishes and sitting on the damp floor before going ape shit on command to an unexpected cover of Katy B’s ‘Katy On A Mission’. If this were just another Streets gig, it’d be the same as the last, nothing special. But it’s not, which amplifies its spirit over professionalism.

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GLASSER XOYO, Old Street, London 22.02.2011 By Sean Denning Photography by Marcus Moxham ▼

Think of a pop star who dresses the dubious side of sane. Now ask yourself this: when Lady Gaga was playing underground warehouse venues like London’s breezeblock lined XOYO was she in outrageous character even then? Okay, the answer is ‘no’ because Gaga, despite what she’ll have us believe, is a manmade product; a marketing trick conceived on ﬂipcharts and spider diagrams; and marketing tricks don’t play the XOYOs of the world. Not ever. But if she were more Fever Ray than contrived 1980s Madonna, the answer would probably still be ‘nah’. Not in the case of Cameron Mesirow, it seems. The basement is full, but it’s still a basement in London’s glam-free east end, and here’s Glasser wearing unexpected oriental garb and a couple of clumps of Blutak on her head; her band in pastel boiler suits. Stylistically, it’s Yeasayer meets Bjork.

And while Mesirow jerks her shoulders and spreads here arms through the tribal rumble of ‘Apply’, the message is clear – this might be ‘an act’, but it’s one that she’s conﬁdent will soon be on bigger stages where pop can be comfortably fantastic. There’s little doubt that she’s right, and minus two a cappella hymns that have us holding our breath as if at a Feist show for one, the songs that make up debut album ‘Ring’ (all of which are played) can never be loud enough. “Turn it up” is the overall criticism, which, truth be told, can probably be achieved with one onstage switch, regardless of what the live band setup suggests.There just seems to be a lot of electronic equipment up there for a sound this organic. Samplers over humans is no doubt a forced decision for Glasser right now though, and to dwell on logistics when Cameron Mesirow’s cries are as poignant and soaring as they are is deﬁnitely a little unfair. Until the basements swell to warrant an orchestra worthy of Glasser’s choral world hymns there is no doubt that she is playing the part of conceptual artist as passionately as possible.

FEAR OF MEN Green Door Store, Brighton 04.03.2011 By Nathan Westley ▼

Positive media coverage can help lift a band to new heights, yet the fight to cover a band first can sometimes unwittingly lead to their downfall. Pushing them into the limelight before they are truly ready can ensure that they either implode or become old news before they fully hit their stride or lived up to one killer tune.With a bandcamp page and a very limited cassette release so far being enough to set tongues wagging before tonight’s debut live performance, this is something young quartet Fear Of Men will need to be fully aware of.There is something quite quaint about the way they nervously stand onstage in this dimly lit, half filled room.Their fragility and natural shyness punctuates the darkness, while their hauntingly spirited, vocalised songs arrive in a similar way, but wrapped in an eighties, shoegazetinged, reverb-laden coating that recalls a hybrid between Veronica Falls and Electrelane washes over an entranced audience. By the end of the set one thing is certain; while this band do appear to be slightly androphobic, they make for an enchanting live band, on the basis of their very first show.

PJ HARVEY The Troxy, Limehouse, London 27.02.2011 By Chal Ravens ▼

An Edwardian angel of death glides onto the Troxy stage, feather headdress bobbing, widow’s weeds swishing, leather tightly binding a bird-like chest. PJ Harvey’s captive audience whips itself into a frenzy of earnest fandom at odds with the singer’s sombre exterior. “Polly, you look wonderful!” they burst out, ejaculations met with disapproving shushes from embarrassed grownups. And grown-up is the tone of the evening. Harvey tackles the none-more-serious topics of war and nationhood on her acclaimed new record, ‘Let England Shake’, which makes up the bulk of tonight’s set. Her new higher register marries well with the thorny subject matter as she wavers

between control and hysteria like a rock & roll Hecuba, twisted and vulnerable. But you’d think wearing half a bird of prey as a hat while strumming an autoharp in an East End bingo hall would suggest a playful sense of theatricality, perhaps? Nope, we get barely a word. Harvey’s static, almost functional performance and the makeshift atmosphere of the Troxy (Sunday afternoon’s roast dinner is wafting round) weaken the emotional punch, with the exception of ‘England’, a haunting hymn to a nation that never really existed.

EDWARD SHARPE & THE MAGNETIC ZEROS Old Vic Tunnels, London 12.03.2011 By John Paul Nicholas ▼

Alex Ebert is quickly forgiven for threatening Axl Rose lateness as he rasps greetings and his band shingle through the crowd Hare Krishna style. On stage, assembled like a cleaner Gogol Bordello – a happier Arcade Fire – they sway into ‘40 Day Dream’.The audience succumb, caught by the sweetening ambience as a new bluegrassy number transposes into ‘Up From Below’. Not that we are left wanting for atmosphere.The Old Vic Tunnels are a carnival-esque setting from Elephant Man-era London. ES&TMZ take one cavern, and in each of the others stranger shows continue – a charred man with a wrecked umbrella wanders in silhouette before an Olafur Eliasson sun; a geisha ballerina dances under a huge spherical moon; burlesque acrobats whirl around a rope climbing frame; banjos play to a room of deckchairs; louche harlots slouch in a pop-up Texan dive bar. The set is sober in comparison, with Ebert’s shamanic theatrics mercifully absent.The songs speak, and the band share the spotlight until ‘Home’ crescendos and he ﬂings himself into the crowd, a messianic crouton. “Who’s got a story?” he asks. A fan grabs the mike, “I travelled 2,000 fucking miles to see you man. 2,000. Fucking. Miles.YEAH!”We travelled just over four fucking miles, but are equally star-struck by the encore.

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LIVE ▼

CUT COPY HMV Forum, Kentish Town 06.03.2011 By Sam Ballard ▼

Surfer Blood. Pic: Elinor Jones

Nodzzz. Pic: Owen Richards

Entering this gig you could be forgiven for feeling slightly sceptical of what lays before you. On the one hand you have Cut Copy’s recent album, ‘Zonoscope’, still ringing in your ears (a more subtle record than 2008’s brilliantly party-heavy ‘In Ghost Colours’, but an impressively smart disco record all the same); on the other, you have a nagging feeling that you are wandering into a pop concert and are about to be confronted by a sea of 16-year-old girls. Although the latter proves to be half right (‘sea’ might be pushing it but there are a lot of fresh faces here), our fears are put to rest as soon as the band start to play. Cut Copy are extremely good at what they do, and what they do is pop. From opener ‘Nobody Lost, Nobody Found’, front man Dan Whitford steers the outﬁt through a ‘best of ’ set from their threerecord catalogue, going head-tohead (literally) with guitarist Tim Hoey as the two do battle during a solo for ‘So Haunted’. Pop it may be, but these boys know how to put on a show. And while Cut Copy are never going to be everyone’s cup of tea for as long as they make these kind of unchallenging, electro tunes for people to dance to, you have to ask what’s wrong with that? Tonight, they have the Forum captivated, in the palms of their Aussie hands.

NODZZZ The Victoria, Dalston, London 12.03.2011 By Chal Ravens ▼

Cut Copy. Pic: Elinor Jones

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“I don’t wanna! Smoke marijuana! I just wanna get high....on another drug!” American twee may be louder than British twee, it may have retro guitars in Formica colours and crashy, clashy, garage stylings, but as Forrest Gump might’ve said, twee is as twee does. And talking of Gump, Nodzzz singer and guitarist, Anthony Atlas, has really committed to those high-waisted trousers, paired splendidly with checked shirt and nerdy specs.They say he was voted ‘Most Likely to Succeed’ in his

1968 high school yearbook. Hot! More to the point, Nodzzz have also committed to that niche brand of sub-two-minute, lo-fi-pop-ism plied by bands like Grass Widow and tour buddies The Mantles (who are “delirious” with jet lag but excellent tonight), with a handful of songs about girls, smoking, karaoke and their hometown of San Francisco. Other discernible influences come from the early years of punk rather than ‘60s garage rock – the squareness of Jonathan Richman meets the playing-dumb of Ramones, Buzzcocks or Television Personalities – with lightweight, off-key solos and melodies as weak as diluted orange squash. By having tracks that are counted in seconds rather than minutes, the set feels longer than it really is, and as if it’s made up of hundreds of songs. How much of this punkpop finger food you can stomach will depend on your taste for bitesize treats and quirky flavours. See also: Reese’s Pieces.

AVIARIES Nation of Shop Keepers, Leeds 26.02.2011 By Kate Parkin ▼

One of the sunniest bands to come out of Leeds in, well, ever, Aviaries sound as if they’ve strolled right off a beach. Keeping their guitars strapped high, their delicate afrobeat twangs entwine with fractured yelps. Like Bombay Bicycle Club meets Egyptian Hip Hop, belting voices are shadowed by clustered electro beats, and with song titles like ‘Palms’ and ‘Bermuda’ they are more suited to an episode of Hawaiian Five-O than their gritty Northern surroundings.The crowd shufﬂe in closer, only to be swept back by the powering drum beats of ‘Camomile’. Finally glancing up from his guitar, singer Scott injects some venom, delivering the opening ‘Don’t You Like Women Darlin’?’ with a hint of a snarl. Chopping and changing their name from ‘Bright Sons’ and ‘Valleys’ to this current moniker, Aviaries thankfully abandoned their proto bawdy 90s guitars for twinkling Casiotones also.They’re still puppyishly young, but debut EP title track ‘Hydrology’ sounds glossy, fresh and accomplished, delivered tonight with shufﬂe-

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footed naivety. Increasingly spreading their wings (excuse the pun) across the festival circuit, this band bring a glowing shot of summer to a gloomy winter’s night. And so what if it’s far from their most conﬁdent performance? It’s still made exciting by its raw edges and newness. If you’re looking for bands to get excited about in 2011, Aviaries are that band.

GRUFF RHYS St. George’s Church, Brighton 26.02.2011 By Nathan Westley ▼

It is safe to say that there are not many people in this world like Gruff Rhys.The Super Furry Animals frontman and key instigator in Neon Neon’s formation has a natural tendency to keep himself busy, and this tour to promote his recently released third solo album, ‘Hotel Shampoo’, is one that offers much more than a normal, straightforward gig. Whether performing alone on either guitar or keyboard, or whether backed by instrumental beanie-hat-wearing surf band Y Niwl, tonight’s performance sees him deliver a saucer of folk-tinged pop songs that proudly tell us that Gruff remains the eccentric artist who infamously once blew SFA’s label advance on an armoured tanks as a ‘promotional tool’. He still has a penchant for writing about the peculiar. (It’s worth noting that ‘Hotel Shampoo’ is a concept record about just that, and that Gruff, having collected miniature bottles of hair soap for fifteen years, recently built a hotel – okay, it was more like a kennel – for a Welsh art gallery out of his findings).That he should also pepper the evening with several comedy segments where he either stops a song mid-flow to relay its meaning, verbally encourage the audience to break out into a Mexican wave or to alternatively hold a cardboard sign directing people to clap once a song has ended, only helps reaffirm that he is a unique talent, and nullifies the downside that a good portion of tonight’s beefed-up guitar pop is incomprehensible to most as it is sung in his native Welsh language. Gruff Rhys is a genius who does whatever he wants.

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SURFER BLOOD The Scala, King’s Cross, London 09.03.2011 By Olly Parker ▼

GOLD PANDA XOYO, Old Street, London 01.03.2011 By Stuart Stubbs Photography by Lee Goldup ▼

There’s not much to look at at a Gold Panda live show – just a young man called Derwin bent over a tabletop of flashing LED lights, a chaos pad, some wires, some triggers and an Apple MacBook, which tonight Gold Panda has forgotten to plug in. Halfway through a set that opts for techno bangers over the personal nuances of Derwin’s debut album, ‘Lucky Shiner’, the digital instrumentalist legs it off stage. He returns triumphantly with a white mains adaptor, hits five buttons simultaneously to abruptly end the deafening, stuttering house samples and yells, “THANK YOU!” It’s the first moment of silence in half an hour, which is soon filled with the first whistles and cheers of the evening. Before then there simply isn’t time or space for vocal appreciation. “I forgot to plug this in,” he says, “which makes me pretty stupid.” Derwin – forever putting himself down

while electro fans herald him the lord of down-tempo trance (not unfairly) – clearly hasn’t changed, but his live shows have. There’s still not much to look at, but we all look at him anyway, and he seems to enjoy reassembling his tracks these days, unlike before when he freely admitted to not being gigging’s biggest fan.The more he nods, the more we do, and Derwin nods hardest to his new trance beats that rattle the iron staircase in the corner of the room. He’s more ﬂuid at slipping from one banger to the next too, which is a point best proved when ‘You’ is introduced with an adlibbed break-beat, drummed out by Derwin’s rapid index ﬁngers. It’s the track that, when dropped, gets the loudest reception, which wouldn’t be a surprise if the closing song wasn’t a rare appearance of ‘Quitter’s Raga’ – the playful, free-formed glitch single that put Gold Panda on the bedroom-produced-electro map. It’s still joyous and brilliant, but clearly no longer the fans’ favourite. Because while there’s not much to see at a Gold Panda live show, there’s a hell of a lot to hear, from brutalised versions of album tracks to new, smart house that’s been born loud and rave-ready.

It’s actually been a while since I went to what you would call a “proper” gig. My random encounters with new music usually end with me somewhere in a dark corner of London wondering if I’ve attended a band’s rehearsal by accident. So imagine my surprise when a band I like a lot got to the point where they could play the Scala. Every bland cliché of the modern gig experience suddenly felt like a novelty, with the exception of paying four quid for a crap pint of course – that shit never gets new. I’ll be honest about Surfer Blood; I’ve got envelopes that are more sonically forward thinking.The point is they write staggeringly good pop songs that sound like The Shins with a couple of punk records thrown in, or Pavement without the aching irony.The real test is whether or not your songs are good enough to ﬁll a space like this and make every person in the room feel something, and these Floridians are good enough on both counts. If they keep writing songs as good as ‘Swim’ then in ﬁve years time I’ll be walking into far larger venues with the same look of bewildering excitement on my face. Say hello as I’ll probably have snuck some whiskey in.

FLATS The Victoria, Mile End, London 04.03.2011 By Danny Canter ▼

London four piece Flats have set their minds to reminding the world of the early days of punk, with a supposed manifesto for chaos, brutality and knuckle raw jams. On stage however, they’re a lot tamer than that. Despite spending interviews talking up bands like Swans and Arab On Radar as key inﬂuences, and telling the world they want to be the kind of band that sends people running from the room, Flats are actually a much politer proposition in the ﬂesh, actually coming over as nothing more than a bit disjointed. Sure, every guitar riff that buzzes from the amps is laced with

menace and aggression, while the drums and bass clatter along without much thought to each other’s whereabouts in the songs, but the volume isn’t ear splitting nor the band’s stage antics anything to raise an eyebrow to.Their tracks, most of which are two minute blasts like ‘Top Hat‘, ‘Big Souls’ and ‘Are You Feeling Rusty?’ sound like UK underground punk bands like Crass or Discharge, rather than Napalm Death, but they’ll probably be okay with that.Their politeness is actually best summed up by singer Dan Devine’s closing words – “This is our last one, I hope you like it.” And that’s not very punk at all.

NEW YEARS EVIL Old Blue Last 12.03.2011 By Mandy Drake ▼

New Years Evil are a band in need of a singer.They do have one, but tonight, at least, his deeply distorted guitar outshines his charmingly dorky cap and specks combo, and both are better than his ﬂat vocals. Perhaps the trio don’t need vocals at all – they appear so ﬂeetingly, admist Sonic Youth feedback and scattershot drums, that they do seem tacked on, as if the band feel that there would be a gaping hole without them. Usually it’d be a fair point, but where totally instrumental post-rock bands like 65dayofstatic distinctly lack the human touch that comes with lyrics, the monotonous yells of New Years Evil threaten to detract from their impressive grunge racket. At least the character-less moans aren’t being swamped in reverb, though – the cheat de jour since No Age masked their limited singing skill with detached effects; DIY rock’s auto tune. Most odd is the fact that their best song is also their least interesting. As they fuzz through the garage pop of ‘Sonic Summer ’ 91’, with all the youthful exuberance of Cloud Nothings, it’s quite a leap from the beginning of the band’s set, which hints at the blackened grunge of ‘In Utero’-era Nirvana, and, if explored, is a sound that the band could easily make their own.They just need to sort out the vocal, because right now they’re bringing down a promisingly gnarly band.

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CINEMA REVIEW

FILM By IAN ROEBUCK

HOWL Starring: James Franco, Jon Hamm David Strathairn, Mary-Louise Parker Director: Rob Epstein / Jeffrey Friedman

6/10

Craig Roberts and Yasmin Paige in Submarine

Cinema Preview Hip to be square... and British ---“I came here to drink milk and kick ass... and I’ve just finished my milk,” cries Richard Ayoade’s unmistakable Moss in The IT Crowd.Taking a break from kicking ass at Street Countdown, Ayoade has directed the wonderful Submarine and the film’s reinvigorating take on the coming-of-age theme is refreshing to see, not least because it’s British talent given space to prosper. Ever since Warp Films released its dry presser in the first person perspective of Oliver Tate (played by newcomer Craig Roberts), in which he stated that he’d be surprised if the film lasted under three hours, we’ve been twitching for a glimpse down Submarine’s periscope. A promising trend has hit the zeitgeist where strong comedic talents are expressing themselves on the big screen, and Ayoade could well be the poster boy. His adaptation of Joe Dunthorne’s book draws comparisons with Wes Anderson and Alexander Payne, and you can see why. Ayoade’s idiosyncratic approach to music videos has helped him stand out from the crowd and form a close friendship with Arctic Monkeys; the public’s love/hate reaction to the promo for the band’s single ‘Cornerstone’ a perfect demonstration of his filmic potential. A one-shot vid, Ayoade showed some nerve to present Alex Turner singing on his tod against a white wall, its cheeky premise rubbing many up the wrong way.Then the Yeah Yeah Yeahs promo for ‘Heads Will Roll’ demonstrated he could be glossy and comically inventive as well as obscure; perfect

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ingredients for a lengthy career in the movies. So what next for the man Moss? Word is he’s weighing up a suicide cult comedy with Ben Stiller or an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Double. But Submarine is just the start of British TV comics making for the movies. After spending much of his youth deconstructing film sets and making mini movies with lego men, Adam Buxton’s friend and colleague Joe Cornish makes a welcome directorial debut come May 13th. Attack the Block takes Cornish’s encyclopaedic knowledge of films and mashes them up to create both scary and funny results, a difficult tone to hit. If anyone can do it though it’s Cornish – with writing credits that include Big Train (surely one of the finest sketch shows ever) and Spielberg’s new Tintin, he knows his way around a script. Having Edgar Wright and Garth Jennings on speed dial can’t do much to harm your skills behind the camera either, and the film’s premise of ‘Inner City vs Outer Space’ is perfect for Cornish’s English bent. If anyone can stop an alien invasion in South London then it’s surely it’s a load of kids in hoodies and Nick Frost. Produced by Big Talk Productions, it’s another addition to their envious portfolio that includes Paul and Scott Pilgrim. Companies like this currently lead the way in both their business model and zest for capturing talent. Able to produce great telly like Spaced, Free Agents and Rev, and of course great cinema, they enable a creative bubble, a basis to flourish and a forum for artists to develop. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost and Tom Hollander have all been in their TV shows and successful films over the pond. Long may it continue.

Beat Poetry hasn’t sung on screen to any particular note, but now Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is set for our cinemas with Sam Riley starring and Walter Salles directing. Before that we have Howl, an Allen Ginsberg biopic that’s as gauche, eccentric and playful as its protagonist. And no, these aren’t necessarily positive attributes. The film asks the audience for both patience and an open mind, much the same way as Ginsberg’s work did. James Franco plays the poet beautifully in all of them. Whether it’s his languid voice reciting Ginsberg’s work in a crowded bar or his itchy presence, squirming in a chair for a mock one-on-one interview, he envelops the character impressively. In fact his striking performance is the best thing about this disjointed film by a country mile, and, unusually, its lack of coherence is both its strength and downfall. Take the obscenity trial that Ginsberg’s work is subjected to, for instance. A strange disjointed affair which dispels of Franco at the heart of the film, it we leaves us with Jon Hamm and David Strathairn – two fine actors entirely wasted in a stale, anticlimactic scene that manages to slow a film already at snail’s pace. Then we have the animation – so effective in the stunning opening titles but overused and repetitive in the bulk of the movie. There is plenty to admire though, especially as Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein originally set out to make a straight documentary.The demented hybrid we are left with is a result of two guys overshooting their deadline by three years, a feat any beat poet would be proud of. ‘Howl’ is of course Ginsberg’s epic poem of the same name that he famously released upon an astonished audience in 1955. A stunning affront to bourgeois, middle class values, its jazz rhythm and homosexual undertones shocked most at the time.The film’s blatant disregard to follow convention is a commendable nod towards its source; unfortunately it renders the final product as a forgettable oddity.What’s great though is I don’t think the filmmakers or true Ginsberg enthusiasts will actually care.

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LONDON 333/MOTHER BAR 333 Old Street, Shoreditch 55 DSL 10a Newburgh Street, Soho 93 FEET EAST 150 Brick Lane, Shoreditch AMERSHAM ARMS New Cross Rd, New Cross BARDEN’S CAFÉ 38 Kingland Road, Dalston BAR CHOCOLATE 26 d’Arblay Street, Soho BAR MUSIC HALL Eastern Road, Shoreditch BEYOND RETRO Great Marlborough St, Soho BEYOND RETRO 110-112 Cheshire Street BRIXTON WINDMILL 22 Blenheim Gardens, Brixton BUFFALO BAR 259 Upper St, Islington BULL & GATE 389 Kentish Town Rd, Kentish Town CAFÉ KICK Shoreditch High St, Shoreditch CAFÉ OTO 18 – 22 Ashwin St, Dalston CAMBERWELL COLLEGE OF ART Peckham Rd, Peckham C.A.M.P. 70-74 City Road, Old Street CARGO Rivington St, Shoreditch CATCH Kingsland Rd, Shoreditch CLUB 229 Great Portland St COFFEE PLANT Portobello Rd, Notting Hill CORSICA STUDIOS 4/5 Elephant Road, Elephant & Castle DALSTON SUPERSTORE 117 Kingsland Road, Dalston DREAMBAGS/JAGUAR SHOES Kingsland Road, Shoreditch DUBLIN CASTLE Parkway, Camden EPISODE 26 Chalk Farm Road, Camden FLASHBACK NEW VINYL 50 Essex Road, Islington, N1 8LR FOPP 1 Earlham Street, Covent Garden GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE Lewisham Way, New Cross GUN FACTORY STUDIOS 49-51 Leswin Road, Stoke Newington HMV 360 Oxford St HOXTON SQUARE BAR & KITCHEN Hoxton Square, Hoxton ICE FATHER NATION 33-35 Commercial Road, Aldgate East ICMP Dyne Rd, Kilburn INTOXICA Portobello Road, Notting Hill KESTON LODGE 131 Upper Street, Islington LIK NEON Sclater Street, Shoreditch LOCK 17 Chalk Farm Rd, Camden

LOCK TAVERN 35 Chalk Farm Rd, Camden LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS Houghton St, Holborn LONDON SCHOOL OF FASHION Princess St, Oxford Circus LUCKY SEVEN 127 Stoke Newington Church Street MTV STUDIOS 17-19 Hawley Cresent, Camden MUSIC AND VIDEO EXCHANGE 62 Notting Hill Gate, Notting Hill NORTH LONDON TAVERN Kilburn High Rd, Kilburn POP BOUTIQUE Manmouth Street, Covent Garden RETRO MAN Pembridge Rd, Notting Hill RETRO WOMAN Pembridge Rd, Notting Hill REVIVAL RECORDS Berwick St, Soho ROCKIT TRUE VINTAGE 225 Camden High St, Camden ROCKIT TRUE VINTAGE 101 Brick Lane, Shoreditch ROUGH TRADE EAST Drays Walk, Brick Lane, Shoreditch ROUGH TRADE WEST Talbot Road, Notting Hill RHYTHM FACTORY Whitechapel Rd, Whitechapel SISTER RAY Berwick St, Soho STAR GREEN TICKETS Argyle Street, Oxford Circus STRONGROOMS 120 Curtain Road, Shoreditch THE ABBEY TAVERN 124 Kentish Town Road, Kentish Town THE ALBANY Great Portland St THE BORDERLINE Manette St, Off Orange Yard THE CAVENDISH ARMS 128 Hartington Rd, Stockwell THE DEFECTORS WELD 170 Uxbridge Rd, Shepherds Bush THE GEORGE TAVERN 373 Commercial Rd, Aldgate THE GOOD SHIP Kilburn High Rd, Kilburn THE HAGGERSTON 438 Kingsland Road, Hackney THE LEXINGTON 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Islington THE MACBETH Hoxton St, Hoxton THE MUCKY PUP 39 Queen’s Head Street, Islington THE OLD BLUE LAST 38 Great Eastern St, Shoreditch THE OLD QUEEN’S HEAD Essex Rd, Islington THE PREMISES STUDIOS 201-209 Hackney Road, Hackney THE RELENTLESS GARAGE Holloway Rd, Islington THE REST IS NOISE 442 Brixton Rd, Brixton THE SOCIAL Little Portland Street, Oxford Circus THE VICTORIA 10 Grove Road, Mile End THE VICTORIA 451 Queensbridge Road, Dalston

THE VICTORY 281 Kingsland Road, Dalston THE WILMINGTON ARMS Roseberry Ave, Islington THE WORLD’S END Camden High St, Camden TOMMY FLYNN’S 55 Camden High St, Camden UNIVERSITY OF ARTS LONDON Davies St, Mayfair VIBE BAR Brick Lane, Shoreditch WATER RATS Grays Inn Rd, Kings Cross YOUREYESLIE Unit 6B, Camden Lock, Camden

MIDLANDS COW VINTAGE CLOTHING 85 Digbeth, Birmingham HMV 38 High Street, Eastside Birmingham HMV 9/17 High Street, Leicester HMV Unit 28, The Victoria Centre, Nottingham POLAR BEAR 10 York Rd, Kings Heath, Birmingham RAPTURE ENTERTAINMENT Unit 24, Riverside Centre, Evesham TEMPEST RECORDS 83 Bull St, Birmingham THE BAKEWELL BOOKSHOP Matlock Street, Bakewell, Derbyshire THE CUSTARD FACTORY Gibb Street, Birmingham

NORTH ACTION RECORDS 46 Church Street, Preston ALT. VINYL 61/62 Thornton St, Newcastle Upon Tyne CRASH RECORDS 35 The Headrow, Leeds COMMON 39-47, Edge Street, Manchester FACT 88 Wood Street, Liverpool HMV Headrow, Leeds HMV 5 South Johns Street, Liverpool, Merseyside HMV 90-100 Market Street, Manchester HMV Arndale, New Cannon St, Manchester HMV Northumberland Street, Newcastle Upon Tyne HMV 14-18 High Street, Shefﬁeld, South Yorkshire ISLINGTON MILL James Street, Salford, Manchester JUMBO RECORDS 5-6 St Johns Centre, Leeds MELLO MELLO 40 – 42 Slater Street, Liverpool PICCADILLY RECORDS 53 Oldham St, Manchester PROBE RECORDS 9 Slater St, Liverpool RAIDERS VINTAGE 38 Renshaw St, Liverpool, Merseyside RESURRECTION 17-19 Bold Street, Liverpool

WALL OF SOUND 42 John William St, Huddersﬁeld VINYL EXCHANGE 18 Oldham St, Manchester, M1 1JN

SCOTLAND AVALANCHE GLASGOW 34 Dundas Street, Glasgow AVALANCHE RECORDS 63 Cockburn St, Edinburgh HMV 113 Union Bridge, Aberdeen HMV 129-130A Princes St, Edinburgh HMV 235 Buchanan Street. Glasgow KANES RECORDS 14 Kendrick St, Stroud MONORAIL MUSIC 12 Kings Court, Glasgow ONE UP RECORDS 17 Belmont St, Aberdeen

SOUTH/SOUTH EAST APE 79 Mount Pleasant Road, Tunbridge Wells EDGEWORLD RECORDS First Floor, 6 Kensington Gardens, Brighton HMV 48-50 Churchill Square, Brighton HMV 12/15 Lion Yard, Cambridge HMV 43/46 Cornmarket Street, Oxford HMV 13 Holy Brook Walk, The Oracle, Reading HMV 56/58 Above Bar Street, Southampton PEOPLE INDEPENDENT MUSIC 14A Chapel St, Guildford, Surrey RESIDENT MUSIC 28 Kensington Gdns, Brighton ROUNDER RECORDS 19 Brighton Square, Brighton SOUNDCLASH RECORDS 28 St. Benedicts Street, Norwich

SOUTH WEST BLACKCAT RECORDS 42 East Street, Taunton, Somerset HMV 24-26 Broadmead, Bristol JAM RECORDS 32 High Street, Falmouth, Cornwall RISE Unit 19, Beechwood, Cheltenham RISE 70 Queens Rd, Clifton, Bristol THE DRIFT RECORD SHOP 91 High Street, Totnes, Devon

WALES DIVERSE MUSIC 10 Charles Street, Gwent HMV Unit 4 53-57 Queens Street, Cardiff SPILLERS RECORDS 31 Morgan Arcade, Cardiff TANGLED PAROT 15 Bridge St, Carmarthen TOM’S SHOP 13 Castle Street, Hay-on-Wye

PARTY WOLF PHOTO CASEBOOK “The Persistent World of Ian Beale”

You’d think because I smell like chips I’d have gone right off the taste of ’em, but I haven’t

Anyway, let’s get on with it! I have a list of instructions here. You do em and I’ll give you a free ﬁsh supper, plus any canned drink other than Lucozade. Deal?

Christ, Ian, you’re so persistent. But yeah, Deal!

GET THE LOOK Like all fans of real music, I am massively into Kings of Leon. I have been ever since their debut album, ‘Sex And Fire’ – it’s wicked. I love driving to it (and The Killers) and, naturally, the Kings’ fashion has rubbed off on me too. Lee Cooper do pretty good jeans, which are just like the ones the band wear, and my advice would be to go for the boot cut style, which are a bit like cool ﬂares. Sunglasses are a must when you’re dressing like a rock star also and I read in Shortlist magazine (the modern man’s bible) that oversized shades are in.Tucking them in the top of your shirt is really trendy... NOT! so slot them into a vintage cowboy belt instead (pick one up at Uniqlo for 12 quid). But who am I kidding? It’s all about the shirt where the Kings of Leon (and my) look is concerned. I peacock the shit out of an open-knecked tailored cowboy shirt! This one was a present from a friend who works in banking (;-p) and has a paisley feel, but why not improvise with different patterns? Just remember to tuck it in to show off that belt and those sunnies. Now rock out like Bobby Chambers!

LONELY HEARTS “It’s not weird, it’s a sexy Facebook”

GoOutWith MyFriend.com Chuck

)

“

Ok, I’m in! What’s next?

One minute... I’m just doing something

“ 50

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45, looking for a bitchin’ bitch

I AM V 5 YEARS OF LOUD AND QUIET MAGAZINE

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The limited 12â&#x20AC;? album featuring exclusive and rare tracks from HEALTH, Telepathe, Gold Panda, Metronomy, Comanechi,Teeth!!!, Chapter Sweetheart,The Bitters, Christmas Island and Trailer Trash Tracys Available in store at Rough Trade Shops and Piccadilly Records, Manchester and at www.loudandquietcassettes.bigcartel.com