Loud And Quiet 56 – Eagulls

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 56 / the alternative music tabloid

Eagulls From Leeds to Letterman

+ Martin Creed Planningtorock Wild Beasts Simon Raymonde Liars Angel Haze

contents

welcome

liars – 12 Simon Raymonde – 14 Angel Haze – 16 Planningtorock – 20 Wild Beasts – 22 Martin Creed – 24 eagulls – 28

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 56 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

Eagulls From Leeds to Letterman

+ Martin Creed Planningtorock Wild Beasts Simon Raymonde Liars Angel Haze

c o v er Ph o t o g r a phy E l i n o r J o n es

Simon Raymonde should be dead. It’s not something I wish for, just what he was told by a doctor in NewYork, which, considering he was only after a new inhaler for his asthma, is probably why so many people don’t like going to the doctor’s.

Raymonde is the head of independent record label Bella Union and an ex member of the Cocteau Twins.This month, he becomes the first interviewee in a new series we’ve dreamt up called Record Heads, which will have Ian Roebuck speak with a selection of bosses from some of the record companies we most admire throughout the year.

You might think that that sounds like yet another record label profile feature, but it’s not – those features rarely deal with established labels that have stories to tell and worthwhile pearls of wisdom to share. They hardly focus on the individuals responsible for starting or running the companies either, and someone like Simon Raymonde could fill a book before you have a chance to get to Bella Union, a venture he founded with fellow Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie in 1997.

Record Heads is inspired by Alan McGee’s recent autobiography, Creation Stories: Riots, Raves and Running a Label. I didn’t expect to care for it as much as I did, but there’s no denying that he’s banked a tale or two in his time, even if they do all end in, “if only they knew how many drugs I used to take…” Maybe not in quite the cartoonish vein of Alan McGee, Simon Raymonde has seen his fair share of triumphs and traumas too, and in this issue he offers a unique vantage point of the music industry; that of a man who has existed in it as a musician, producer and businessman since 1983.

At 51, he somehow remains less jaded than most people half his age.

For me, keeping cynicism at arms length has this month lead to a redesign of Loud And Quiet, beyond a new feature about record label bosses.

Feel that? Go on. The paper’s thicker too.

Stuart Stubbs

Co ntact

Contr ib u tor s

A dve r tising

i n fo@lou dandq u ie t.com

Amy P e ttif e r , au stin l a ike , Chr is Watke ys, daisy j o ne s, dav id zammitt, Danie l D y l a n-W r a y, dan ke ndall, Danny Cante r , Elinor Jone s, Edg ar Sm ith, Fr ankie Nazar do, j ack do he r ty , jame s we st, Janine Bu l l m a n, je nna f oxton, joe g og gins, josh su nth, le e b u llm a n, Gab r ie l Gr e e n, Ge m har r is, Mandy Dr ake , Mike Bu r ne l l , Nathan We stle y, Owe n Richa r ds, P hil Shar p, Re e f Y ou nis, Sam cor nf or th, samu el ba l l a r d, Sam Walton, T im Cochr a ne , thomas may, tom f e nw ick

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T his M o nth L &Q L o ve s T he ha y wa r d ga l l e r y, ke o ng wo o , dunca n j o r da n, na ta sha p a r ke r , sine a d m il l s, ste ve p hil l i p s, J o die B a na szkie wicz The vie ws ex pressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff.

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ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by S harman & Com pany LTD .

Distributed by loud and quiet & forte

THE BEGINNING

Yorke’s Notes The month’s hidden headlines, revised / Skinny Puppy are a post-industrial electro band from Vancouver, Canada, formed in 1982. I hadn’t heard of them either, but, then, I haven’t been to Guantanamo Bay yet. The guards there have, allegedly, been using Skinny Puppy songs as a form of torture, something the band aren’t too happy about, which is why they’ve slapped The Pentagon with a royalties bill of $666,000, “a figure somewhat relevant to the evilness of the deed,” says band co-founder cEvin Key.

Try this at home

Illustration by Gareth Arrowsmith www.garetharrowsmith.com

Sam Walton spent a week listening to twee and realised that he’s just not smug enough / The old-fashioned genre purist must be on his way out: surely only a psychopath would brazenly ignore the modern-day, internet-enabled feast and plough on with ham sandwiches. Then again, is there some enlightenment to be had from going deep rather than wide? I spent a week listening exclusively to one genre – twee, indiepop and all its doe-eyed cousins – to find out.

Day one came served with three Los Campesionos! albums and the first volume of Rough Trade’s Indiepop comps. Within minutes, the real hallmarks – ardent championing of amateurism, the revelling in mainstream persecution, demonstrations of obscurist knowledge, intermittent poignant introspection – were abundant. Occasionally I would be bowled over by a song’s charm, but generally the music divided itself into blandly bookish niceness and tiresome, attitude-laden paeans to being better than Kasabian.

Day two began with more of the same – a comp on Spotify called ‘The Kids At The Club’ (whose cover is adorned, of course, with a photo of girl with a bowlie haircut and stripy top) and a dip into older waters with the cult-classic NME mixtape ‘C86’ – but by day three I was becoming unexpectedly naturalised: while rationally I heard Helen Love and identified a band resorting to cultural snobbery in order to reassure themselves of their self-worth, I instinctively started backing them. I began resenting successful men with less muso trivia at their fingertips than me, and understanding the political agency in cack-handed drumming. I was all for hapless rebellion, and no longer suspicious of supposedly confessional

songs about situations that were clearly made up (“I did the ironing in a cowboy hat” – no, Camera Obscura, you didn’t). In short, I was becoming radicalised. I was all up for forming a fucking band.

On day five, though, I had my moment of clarity to a song by Tullycraft called ‘Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend’s Too Stupid to Know About’, which ticks all the indiepop boxes: wilfully crap musicianship, lyrics constructed to transform outsiderness into superiority, a catchy melody, the occasional wry joke. What cut through, though, was a combination of ugly misanthropy and sheer redundancy: here was a bloke listing little-known indie bands in order to assert himself over an ex who probably reckons he’s a bit of a berk anyway.

The song is spun to make you think that heartbreaker here and her new fancyman are philistine Green Day fans, and Mr Tullycraft is the real catch because he likes Neutral Milk Hotel.

However, all I experienced was a crushing realisation that with indiepop, the only feelings of satisfaction available are those tethered to resentment. If you actually get the girl, sell the records – heaven forbid, find happiness – then prepare for a legion of bedroom saddo mediocrity devotees to start sharpening their toy xylophones.

Perhaps in a bygone era, when genre segregation was enforced by record store owners, twee’s fierce tribalism was useful: you knew which clubs to go to, who to pull and, perhaps most importantly, who to bitterly destest. My week with indiepop took me to the dark side, where a twee Emperor Palpatine was encouraging me to “let the hate flow through you”. The only problem was, I struggled to see what was in it for me.

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Crate-digging label Light In The Attic have opened a record store. That can only be good news in 2014, even if, for us lot in the UK, it’s based in the label’s hometown of Seattle, where, in fact, the locals don’t get it much easier. The store is open for just 4 hours a week, between 1 and 5pm on Fridays.

Closer to home, South Records is a new independent record store opening in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, this month. Founder Richard Onslow, who also runs the label Half Machine Records, calls South, “a kinda small town Rough Trade”, which will also host in stores and shows, in an attempt to put L&Q’s own hometown back on the touring circuit.

Loud And Quiet will, once again, host the main stage at this year’s Beacons festival, which takes place 7–10 August in Skipton, Yorkshire. Bands already confirmed include The Fall, Jon Hopkins, Darkside and Eagulls.

As a Village Voice journalist and radio personality, Howard Smith spent 1969 through to ’72 interviewing every icon of pop music’s golden age, later releasing these lost conversations as The Smiths Tapes in limited boxset format and via iTunes. On April 15 a set of eight new discs will be released called ‘I’m Not the Beatles:The John & Yoko Interviews With Howard Smith, 1969-1972’, which collects five conversations John and Yoko had with Smith over a three year period.

Dom Yorke

books + other

Indirect Hit The surreal soap opera comic centred around a record label full of weirdos and wannabes / Numbers 1 and 2 are already in comic book stores, selected record shops and available to order via Great Beast’s website.

It’s the serial and surreal nature of Hitsville UK that makes it an addictive read – being in on the joke and how bat-shit-crazy that joke is, as daydreams, call backs and drug trips are dropped in the middle of scenes with no prior warning. Riordan and Cox say they know where it’s all heading – the main hoops the characters are going to jump through, all the way up to issue 6 – making it a comic for collecting, or else you might miss an important chapter in Hitsville UK’s unsavoury rise and probable fall.

It’s full of fanboy musical references, too, with each front cover paying homage to a different classic album.

“It’s also an attempt to convey the sheer excitement of pop music in the broadest sense,” says Riordan, “of a whole bunch of creative weirdos rushing off in lots of different directions at once, embracing various genres and trying different things. From the off, we wanted Hitsville UK to read a bit like watching a surreal sketch show like Vic & Bob, but with a narrative that stitches it all together.” www.greatbeastcomics.com @hitsvillecomic

The ensemble cast of Hitsville UK – a graphic soap opera from illustrator John Riordan and writer Dan Cox, published independently by Great Beast comics – is made up of freaks, bores, pseudo revolutionaries and chancers; just the kind of people you’d expect to find at a new, delusional record label. Hitsville’s owner is Gerry Corden, an aging David Brent type and failed pop star. His producer is a pill-munching sociopath with rotting skin; his company accountant a puke-green devil.

Hitsville’s roster consists of a bullied nerd DJ and his imaginary battle droid killer robot (“he looks like Harry Potter but is a super dense ball of hatred,” says Riordan of his Haunted by Robots rage-case), a politicised multiracial ska-dub-rap band (“like The Specials crossed withAsian Dub Foundation”), a spiv called Jack Spatz, a girl band that crosses The Bangles, Le Tigre and the Scooby Doo gang, a group of middle class boys tentatively experimenting with drugs because they’ve heard Sgt. Pepper’s once or twice and a grotesque who sings like James Blunt but whose resemblance to Gollum is impossible to ignore. “That’s Gwillum, the depressed Country & Western troubadour; we’ve really got it in for him,” says Riordan who, with Cox, has planned 6 editions of Hitsville UK.

b y j anine & L ee b ullman

Boy, Snow, Bird

by Helen Oyeyemi

Live at the Brixton Academy

by Simon Parks and J.S. Rafaell

Ye-Ye Girls of ‘60s French Pop

by Jean Emmanuel Deluxe

picador

Serpent’s Tail

Feral House

A fantastical retelling of the Snow White fairytale with race relations at the heart of the matter finds Boy Novak embarking on a new life as she takes the last bus from New York as far as it will go. Flax Hill, Massachusetts is where she lands, home of Arturo Whitman and his precious daughter Snow.

Snow is exactly the opposite of the little girl Boy once was and Boy is completely enchanted by her and Arturo. When Boy gives birth to Snow’s sister Bird, their three lives are turned upside down. Boy, Snow, Bird is a fascinating look at families and the secrets they keep, a tender portrait of three women from one of Britain’s most exciting young authors and playwrites who wrote her first novel, The Icarus Girl (2005), whilst still at school.

When Simon Parks was twenty-three years old, just a year after the streets surrounding the excinema had been torn apart by riots, he boughtThe Brixton Academy for a pound. Since then, the legendary venue has carved its name into the annals of Rock‘n’Roll by playing host to indoor fairgrounds, a bewildering array of iconic gigs and the odd cultural shift. It’s where The Smiths had their last stand, and where Dire Straits and The Police would rehearse. Parks began by staging reggae gigs at The Academy but soon widened the net to include everyone from The Clash to David Bowie, all of which renders Live at The Brixton Academy an entertaining memoir written from a unique perspective.

It’s easy to imagine that female pop in the 1960s only really happened in Britain, where Dusty Springfield and Marianne Faithful sang their hearts out, or on the East and West Coasts of America, home to the Wall of Sound girl-groups and Motown. In Ye-Ye Girls, Jean Emmanuel Deluxe’s zeal for a brief but magical period of musical history serves as a reminder that French Pop was every bit as cool and captivating as anything else out there, and that it produced some great tunes. The scene’s musical influence has been present since but has for too long solely been the preserve of the pop aficionado, so Ye-Ye Girls serves as the perfect introduction to a golden scene.

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getting to know you

Let’s do it...

9 artists share the love songs they just can’t resist /

Toby Kidd of Hatcham Social True Love Ways

by Buddy Holly

Ezra Furman

Fránçois from Fránçois and the Atlas Mountains

My Baby Crying

by Bill Fox

Ne Me Quitte Pas by Jacques Brel, performed by Nina Simone

“This is a wonderful soundtrack to teenage romance. At the start of the song you can hear all of the sounds of the room in which the track was recorded; there is some chat and a call of ‘quiet boys’ before the piano plays a single pitching note for Buddy to begin.The intimacy of the room makes the song so much more beautiful. To me Buddy Holly is the king of rock and roll; his mixture and subversion of popular styles, his pristine look, his Coca-Cola characters, his rebellious singlemindedness: a lyrical poet of the milkshake age.”

“Bill Fox was in a band called The Mice, then he made a couple of solo records, then he disappeared aggressively, shunning all performance and press opportunities. This song cuts deepest for me. The lyrics depict not only a scene, but an entire world.

This world is completely callous to Bill’s tearstained beloved, whom Bill wants nothing more than to protect.Tie that to a gorgeous melody and a gorgeous voice and you’ve got something that’s both deeply painful and deeply consoling. Oh, I cling to this song. I love it desperately.”

“Love shows its greatest strength when the lover has gone. I’m really not a massive fan of Jacques Brel but this song goes a million miles beyond liking him or not. It’s a classic, at least in France.

Nina Simone apparently found it important enough to make her learn the many words of its original version. It’s hard for me not to cry when I hear it. It’s such an important song for me that, even though I hadn’t heard it for years, I realised while writing this that I had nicked the expression “or et lumiere” for the lyrics of my song ‘Piano Ombre’.”

MØ

Daniel Falvey of Fear of Men

Keel Her

Someone Like You

by Adele

Love In A Pub

by Icy Spicy Leoncie

‘You Swan, Go On’

by Mount Eerie

“The lyrics, the melodies and the vulnerable yet aggressive vibe of her voice make every centimetre of my body ache. Adele is the complete singer – she has the most amazing technical skills but also (and most importantly) the gift of authenticity.

‘Someone Like You’ is the ultimate heartache pop song of our time. Once I fell asleep in a taxi on my way home from town drunk, and I woke up to this playing on the radio and started crying. Whilst I’m not very proud of this, I’m not embarrassed either, ’cause this song definitely deserves my tears.”

“As good as I could possibly imagine my life getting, it did, after I met you,” opens Phil Elverum on this song, expertly distilling the heights of love into one simple line with minimum fuss. It’s a sentiment that in lesser hands could be cloying but the reason I find ‘You Swan, Go On’ so beautiful is because it unfolds into an elegy on a love that was generous and giving, rather than jealous or possessive. By the end of the song the narrator has transformed from a “grey goose” to a swan, the relationship over but our protagonist better for having been a part of it.”

“This is my favourite love song mainly because the way she pronounces the word ‘pub’ is very satisfying. It’s also melancholy because her lover has just lost his job so now he goes to a lot of pubs.

Overall, this song has a good ratio of ‘upbeat’ to ‘depression’, which is what love is all about. I don’t know much about the artist but I’ve looked up her discography on Wikipedia just now and one of her albums is called ‘Radio Rapist-Wrestler’, so I’ll probably check out what’s going on there.”

East India Youth

Joe Mount of Metronomy

Samuel T. Herring of Future Islands

‘Silly Little Love Songs’

by Paul McCartney

Wonderful world

by Sam Cooke

“On one level it’s the song that Paul McCartney was designed to make – y’know, it is what it is. But there’s something about Paul McCartney, when I listen to him, imagining him in love with Linda, and on some of those earlier songs he doesn’t come across as the most genuine guy. But then you hear something like ‘Silly Little Love Songs’ and it seems like it’s coming from a very genuine place.

And if you’re going to have a favourite love song, it might as well be an overtly mushy one. The lyrics are brilliantly forward. ‘I love you.’”

“Sam Cooke says it all in this simple and beautiful song. ‘Wonderful World’ basically sums up our approach to love in our music. We don’t claim to be the most intelligent guys; we actually try to play it down as much as possible. However, we’ll always sing confidently when it comes to matters of the heart. As humans, it’s the only thing we can know for certain – how we feel on the inside. And that’s as personal as it gets. Plus Sam Cooke is the man.

He always hits home with the sweetness.”

Surrender

by Suicide “I think Suicide’s third album is underrated. While it may not have possessed the cultural impact of the previous two records, it did allow them to flex their sonic muscles much further. ‘Surrender’ is a great example of this. Structurally and harmonically it is reminiscent of a classic 50s love song but the lyrics, in true Alan Vega style, are barely comprehensible; something I think heightens the romance of the track. Love should not be so easily interpreted, it is a much too complex and beautiful thing to be intelligible.”

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my place

At home with Liars

01. Set lists “It’s tough because we have quite a few records and it takes us a while to figure out what songs are possible to play on the road because what is also a big factor is that pretty much every song has its own particular set of gear, or one particular piece of gear that makes that song work, so we’ve got to go through a lot of them to see if the pieces of gear are working right and if it’s possible to take that on tour with us. So it takes a while to figure out what we’re going to play, so that’s why we have so many [sheets].”

02. L.A Clippers flag “We bleed Clippers. You wouldn’t have to be too familiar with the basketball thing to know the Lakers – they are a big team historically in L.A and the Los Angeles Clippers are like the bastard step-child, noteven-let-out-of-the-basement team, but in the last four or five years they have slowly taken over from the Lakers and now are regarded a much better team, so it’s been a really nice ride for us because we latched onto the Clippers because they were the ugly step-child from the start.”

The lone guitar (hidden)

Photogr ap hy: N a th an ie l Wood / writer: Dan ie l D ylan Wr ay

“We do have more than that, but yeah, the reality is that, yes, definitely on the new material, there is almost no guitar or bass guitar.”

The ever-transformative Liars are back, and, true to form, another metamorphosis has taken place. Their beat-charged new LP, ‘Mess’, further takes on the ground-shaking sound of ‘Brats’ (the almost anomalous stonker found on the band’s 2012 album, ‘WIXIW’) as the noise trio offer up a record imbued with electronic darkspace fury – the kind we saw hints of at the band’s pitch-black, dance-clogged Primavera set last year.

‘Mess’ is a record as thrilling as anything the band has ever done, amalgamating tense, vortex-like atmospherics with grit-your-teeth charged intensity. For a group so unpredictable, uncategorisable and evasive of conventional consistency, there seems to be a rather methodical approach to their creative output: minus the curveball exception of 2007’s ‘Liars’ LP, they have put out a record every two years since releasing their first with Mute in 2004. These time scales appear to represent periods of intense immersion, absorption and the complete focus and dedication to that particular artistic incarnation of

the group. By placing themselves so intently in their records and the aesthetic and stylistic shifts they so frequently are accompanied by, when they do finally come back up for air they are ready to move on and take the plunge into fresh, unexplored waters once again. A glimpse in their L.A. practice space here will attest to the band’s need to shape their environment aesthetically and artistically to match the sounds they are creating.

‘Mess’ was largely recorded in the band’s own home studio in L.A.. Since then, they’ve mostly been found in their practice space in the north of the city. “This is Burbank,” says band frontman Angus Andrew. “It’s basically what you would know as ‘The Valley’ in Los Angeles. We’ve been here since we finished recording and started to think about how to play the stuff live.

“It’s always a bit of a mind-bender when you make a load of the material within a computer and you have to create it in a physical live setting. It’s a challenge. It’s important for us not to just stand there with laptops but to put some physicality back into the songs.”

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Eagle head “We’ve just spent a few days shooting our first video for the single ‘Mess on a Mission’ – which was definitely the most elaborate video shoot we’ve done, it was this big screen project – and part of that video involves some ‘Natives’ and so Julian and our stylist, Mary Pearson Andrew, made these crazy costumes for them.”

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03. Egg carton ceiling

Skull

“We just eat a lot of eggs. Nah, I’m kidding. There is nothing above us, it’s just a matter of trying to keep the sound in and the sound out really. I don’t even know how well that works but we came across a tonne of these egg cartons on our way up to the studio one day and we thought what the heck, let’s give it a go.”

“This is another element that was considered as an album cover, so basically, we came across the idea of the string in connection with objects, so there’s a tonne of these things: we wrapped hairdryers with string, we covered lamps with string and plants with string and this skull is just another example of something we applied the string theory to and then photographed it. So all those items we photographed and looked at and the fan won out.”

04. Fan covered in coloured string (‘Mess’s album cover)

01

07

“The impetus for the album cover was really just to replicate the vibrancy and immediacy we felt we were creating with the music. When we came across this idea of attaching all this coloured string to a fan we realised that the string could be something useful to extend beyond the album cover and so it became interesting to use a lot of different aspects of how you would view that fan with the string on it – like, sometimes you can consider it just a mess, or you can consider it something that’s really detailed and appreciate that someone has put a lot of time and effort into it. So it’s like that duality that we started to work with, and we started to put the string around town and that becomes another element of that duality – is this just a bunch of rubbish string kind of hanging out there or is it very particularly placed in a way for a more artistic idea? As a band, we are part musicians but also part visual artists and I think that a big part of making a record for us is also the chance and opportunity to think visually on the project and when you spend nights and days stuck in a studio staring at a computer screen, it’s such a relief to be able to go out and throw some string around and take some photos of it.”

06. Angry Birds cap “When I found this I wasn’t aware it was an Angry Birds hat – what I liked was that it just said ‘A is for Angry’. I didn’t realise until somebody told me that it was Angry Birds. I found that in Michigan in a very small town at a Salvation Army store. At the same time, which was even huger, I found this awesome Metallica t-shirt which was from the ‘…and Justice for All’ album.That kind of t-shirt is a serious thing but it was only 69cents, so that gives you an idea of how deep into the Mid-West I was at that point.”

Studded Leather Jacket

05. Mini skateboard

07. Liars Hoodies

“I was on my way to rehearsal and there was a guy selling a bunch of stuff on a street corner. I saw from afar he was hanging this jacket there and I had been looking for a jacket like this for a while so I went over and took a look at it. I tried it on but it was pretty small for me, and I liked this moment because I said to the guy who was selling it, ‘what do you think?’ and even as a salesperson he was like, ‘no, that doesn’t work for you’, but I couldn’t resist. I brought it to the studio in the hope that Aaron would start wearing it, as it suits him better but he’s not done that yet; he seems to think it looks good on me with the short arms and not covering my mid-riff.”

“I was given, as a Christmas present, this videogame, which was Tony Hawk, and it came with this mini skateboard and you’re supposed to use that as a controller. I was pretty excited about it and actually the first thing we did on New Years Eve – and this is a little embarrassing – was me, Aaron and Julian, we all went to Julian’s house and I unwrapped this thing. We went to set it up but its got some flaw because we just spent hours trying to get this thing to function and it wouldn’t at all and we were drinking and getting more and more belligerent, looking up YouTube videos of teenagers in their bedroom also all getting upset about how they couldn’t make this thing work.”

“Julian (Liars’ drummer) came up with that ‘L’ and we latched onto it very quickly and then mass-produced it. It’s fun and we wear them quite often, especially when we record – we keep those there and we chuck them on and it makes us feel like we’re worker bees in a factory or something like that, which is kind of a cool thing to do when you’re going through the motions of rehearsal and stuff like that. So we have fun wearing those, although obviously it’s awkward when we go out to lunch at band practice and people are really trying to get their head around who these people are.”

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Record heads

Simon Raymonde Bella Union boss and ex Cocteau Twins member Simon Raymonde is addicted to signing bands Photography: Roy J Baron / writer: Ian Roebuck

You have to be a real nut job to do this “I went to a doctor in New York and they told me I should be dead.” Simon Raymonde is quite matter of fact. “I only went to get an inhaler for my asthma and then they checked my blood pressure – I didn’t realise as I don’t feel stressed out about anything.”

Simon certainly doesn’t seem like a man on the edge. The 51 year-old head of Bella Union – and ex Cocteau Twins member – drinking mint tea and smiling out of the window looks pretty content to me. “Well I got married and moved to Brighton last year,” he says. You’re settling down then? “It looks like that doesn’t it, the old slippers and pipe.”

Really, it’s quite the opposite.

Simon tells me that he’s been making his own music again, for the first time in a while. “I have a recording studio in Hackney where I put bands in and I do a radio show every week, so I am quite a busy bloke. My wife is American and she lives in New York. I’m constantly on the move.”

Despite decades in the music industry, the convivial Simon Raymonde shows no real signs of letting up. From his time in the Cocteau Twins to running Bella Union he’s helped shape independence and our perception of it. “I am not an empire builder,” he says, “I am not a Martin Mills, you know, although I think he is brilliant at that. He is a real music man too and we are similar in that respect.”

As the Founding Chairman of Beggars Group, Martin Mills has around 150 odd employees; Simon has just four. “It’s tiny, yeah. We have a

sort of extended team at PIAS who help us execute the plan so I go there a lot, but yeah, we’re a really small family.” So the Bella Union house must be a cosy one, with Simon in charge of the coffers and the kettle. “No, I am never in the office!” he says. “I am always out meeting people or going to see bands or going abroad. I’m not one for sitting in the office anyway. We have a big label meeting every Monday and I speak to everyone every day, but I can’t really sit still for very long.”

Bella Union might be relatively small scale, but it’s a label that thinks big, with bands like the Flaming Lips and Fleet Foxes on the books. Most remarkable is the company’s breadth of taste and sheer size of its roster, the mention of which leaves Simon grinning from ear to ear.

“The industry keeps telling me that we have a lot and we’ve got to slow down a bit,” he says. “I think everyone has got a way they like to do things and I am not saying my way is right or wrong or Richard Russell’s is right or wrong.”

I suggest that perhaps XL – Russell’s label – are just plain lazy, noting that where their success with The xx and Adele has been followed by a pairing down of releases, the financial freedom afforded to Bella Union in the wake of Fleet Foxes’ two albums thus far has seen Simon’s roster balloon. “Well, XL only sign one or two bands a year, which as a model you can hardly fault with the incredible success they have had. I am a bit of fidget in the way that I get obsessed about music; I love it.”

It’s difficult not to get swept up in Simon’s gentle enthusiasm and amongst the clank and rattle of a nearby kitchen we discuss Bella Union bands, from recent signings Horse Thief to the acquisition of Xiu Xiu. It’s a joyful conversation that boils down to one mental state: “You have to be a real nut job to do this, really you do, you have to be obsessed with music, discovering music and helping people, those are the three things you have to do.”

Sat opposite him it’s easy to see a band succumbing to Simon’s charm, and the philanthropic side of the man, and his past experiences, must really inform many an artists decision. “Let’s be honest,” he says, “I have been on a few labels in the past as a musician and I always say Bella Union should be the label that I would have liked to have been signed to.”

This familial atmosphere clearly drives Bella Union. It applies to any record label, but when you’ve been at the coalface yourself, a band can appreciate that. “You know, when I was in the Cocteau Twins there was always this distance between label and artist, it was unspoken but it existed.

Maybe because we were antagonistic but there was always a slight edge to conversations – they’re taking our money, they’re ripping us off, we’re the cool artists doing what we are doing and they can’t be trusted. That’s generally what artists are supposed to feel about labels but I don’t see how that’s very productive.”

For a label so low on manpower,

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Bella Union really do get around.

Simon acknowledges this more than anyone and his answer to managing expectations is patience. “There’s so many fucking bands out there it’s impossible to get the attention you may have got 4 or 5 years ago without a slow drip of information about a band. It’s a huge world, sometimes it’s small but most of the time it’s fucking enormous.” He ends with another contradiction but you see his point. So in a world obsessed with the now, Simon believes strongly in the art of nurture. “That’s what a lot of my job is doing,” he says, “trying to explain to people why you do things in a certain way. Money are a very good example of this. They’re incredible kids, super talented and ‘The Shadow of Heaven’ is the first time they have put a record out. Just because they’re not in the papers every 5 minutes it doesn’t mean that nothing’s happening; on the contrary we are doing everything we can to make sure this band are around for an awful long time.”

Beach House are a similar case in point. The Baltimore band broke through with their third album, ‘Teen Dream’, in 2010. “You can see similar things with Money,” Simon says.

“They’re super intelligent and they do know all this stuff so that is why they have been gently gearing up with their touring and playing a lot of shows out of town. They’re off on tour with Wild Beasts very soon and that will be perfect for them because they’re a band that have gently and organically grown.”

Being an A&R man is the easiest job in the world

Oh my god, what have we done?

Simon Raymonde’s considerate treatment of bands may have remained the same since he co-founded Bella Union in 1997 but the act of signing acts has changed dramatically over the last 17 years. “The way you hear and discover music is quite different. I can sign a band every day!” he laughs with his entire body. “I do a new music radio show for Amazing Radio and it’s really good fun. We can only play what exists on the catalogue, so if you’re a band, a PR or a label then you can upload your track with a bio and within five minutes I can put it on my show. I have learnt more as an A&R man doing that than I ever have before.”

“To be quite honest, being an A&R man is the easiest job in the world ¬– as long as you have confidence in your own taste it is simple!” Simon cracks up again, loving to talk about his passion. “I tell you what, we don’t care about the competition; we tend to not go to gigs that everyone else will be at.

For example, at South by Southwest you hear there is an industry gig for so and so and all the A&Rs are going to be there, well, I would just run to the other side of town. In the old days we wouldn’t have had the money to sign a band – if it was Beggars, 4AD, Domino and us, I mean, who would they sign to? Before Fleet Foxes anyhow, they would have gone to those other labels, so there’s no point in playing that game; we find our own bands!”

Five guys from Seattle transformed everything for Bella Union in 2008. “It was a game changer,” says Simon. “It coincided with a loads of other changes

Simon now chooses to work with a truly independent outfit in PIAS, a no brainer given his background. “You have to think of it from the artist’s point of view and major record labels aren’t designed to do that, they’re designed to do things from a business point of view.”

But the Cocteau Twins, they signed for Capitol after being with 4AD for so long didn’t they?

“Well moving to a major has to be regarded as one of the most stupid things we did.”

The question definitely throws him, at least for a second. “At the time our relationship with 4AD was so claustrophobic and personal, Robin [Guthrie] and Liz [Fraser] lived with Ivo [Watts-Russell, 4AD co-founder] for a while and everyday they were our best friends and our family, very like what Bella Union is today. It all just went horribly wrong; you know financial stuff and contracts. We thought we should have no relationship with our record label at all as all we want is money from them. That was a very naive fantasy, within three months we were like, ‘oh my god, what have we done?’.”

He’s laughing now but Simon insists it changed his outlook. “Nobody ever came to the studio to listen to a Cocteau Twins record being made, ever. It was a bluff, we had this bubble you see, which is great in a way, but for a major, they don’t understand this bullshit.You have to remember though that if a major label gives an artist 300 grand they do have some right to try

and to be honest just before I signed Fleet Foxes I was seriously considering just jacking it all in as I wasn’t really enjoying it. I was really frustrated with the lack of investment I was able to make in great artists like Midlake and Laura Veirs. It is incredibly difficult to get to selling 10,000 records, but then from 10,000 to 30,000 isn’t too hard; once you’re on a roll and your band starts selling shows you think wow, I can really achieve something and then you have to be an idiot not to take that on to 40, 50 and 100 and that’s what wasn’t happening and I was really frustrated by that… and then our distributor went bust and we lost a whole lot of money.”

Rescued by Co-Op, a distributor formed in 2005 from the ashes of V2 (one of the biggest indies around at the time), Simon’s label was able to flourish but it was a close run thing. “You have to be really dogged and determined and one to take the knocks,” he says. “I thought I have fucking worked for this for so long I am not giving up because someone can’t do a job well and luckily I have made some good friends in this business.”

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and work out how they are going to get that back and we didn’t really understand that; we understood art and doing our shit and being left the fuck alone.”

And are the band left the fuck alone nowadays? Is there any truth in the rumour they got asked to play Coachella for £1.5 million?

“The Coachella thing was the first time it seemed like a real possibility, rather than just an email saying do you want to. The only reason it looked a remote possibility anymore was that the guy who put it together was our booking agent from the old days who now runs William Morris – he put the Pixies back together again so he knew it was possible to put a bunch of dysfunctional reprobates back in a room. We were probably only a few weeks away from getting into rehearsals and talking about songs, but you know, I am really glad it never happened – you can’t just wipe away all the emotional drama of not just the 15 years when I was in the band but all the stuff before I was in the band and all the stuff since.”

We get the bill and I mention the one and half million again to rolled eyes. “You can’t just forget everything by waving a big fat cheque in someone’s face! I would have retired, slowed down and bought a flat somewhere rather than having to rent a two bedroom flat in Brighton.” But slowing down is not an option for Simon. He would have sunk at least some of the money back into his passion for music, back into Bella Union.

Talking to an angel There’s a lot to discuss with Angel Haze: the Detroit rapper who grew up in a cult, experienced sexual abuse, became estranged from her family and leaked her own major label debut to honour a promise to her devoted fans P hotogr aph y: P h il S ha r p / writer: D avi d Zammitt

It’s a dark and blustery February evening as I take shelter under the flimsy covering of Shoreditch’s Boxpark, a pre-fab shopping village made from welded shipping containers. A venue intended for East London’s more balmy evenings, I find the raindrop-studded clear plastic of its walls nevertheless packed with about a hundred fans huddled in quiet reverence at the sight and sound of Raykeea Angel Wilson, known to them, simply, as Angel Haze. She’s holding a question and answer session for her London support base who hang, spellbound, on her every word. As hands shoot in the air and anxious, giggling teenagers get the chance to quiz their hero, the syllabus can be summed up thus: be yourself and work hard. All else, Angel Haze preaches, will follow.

After all, just look at her. Not yet 23, a large chunk of the hype around her work has concentrated on the glaring biographical details that have informed it, rather than the music itself. That’s not to say, however, that the media have dwelled on her background for any longer than necessary, or any more than the artist herself has dictated. Angel Haze’s music is so deeply rooted in a story that includes childhood years spent in the oppressive, cult-like surroundings of Pentecostal Greater Apostolic Faith and several incidents of rape.

Since 2012’s ‘Cleaning Out My Closet’ burst on to the scene by foregrounding the realities of sexual abuse, it’s been difficult to separate Angel Haze’s art from her upbringing, and to attempt to do so would be missing the point. Her cover of Macklemore’s ‘Same Love’ bravely hinted at her sexuality, something that caused conflict between herself and

her family. Again, context is always key and the goal is always to empower.

It’s her sheer survival that makes Haze such a role model for this group and thousands of others around the world. It also means that the fervour of the queue that seems to form instantly, post-Q&A, restricts my time with their idol to less than 20 minutes. Though my mind admittedly wanders to the ever-distant prospect of a hot dinner, I find myself amazed at how remarkably patient she stays as she spends the guts of an hour perfecting the autograph of the Instagram age, the selfie. Luckily for me, she speaks at a rate of eloquent knots as we tick off life, love, music and endurance in a whizz of words.

She stares at me, eyes wide, as I deliver my list of questions and she seems to take each one as the starting gun of a hundred-metre sprint.

When we get into Boxpark’s security office, the makeshift pressroom where we finally get a chance to chat, it’s strewn with bags. I ask if she’s indulged in a spot of retail therapy during her time in the UK. “No, my fans brought me it.” What, all of it? There are about 6 bags of clothes and at least two pairs of shoes. She laughs. “Yeah.” It’s obvious, however, that the relationship between artist and fans runs a little deeper than trinkets. “To me music is philanthropy.

If I can get out into the world and spread a message of positivity, selfacceptance, pain becoming promise, I’ll be happy. I want to be a voice for the voiceless, for the people who have been too afraid to say or don’t know how to say or just won’t say.”

She doesn’t hold back in her assessment of where this leaves her on the cultural landscape. While it means she cuts an incongruous figure (“It makes me a very controversial artist, it

makes me sometimes a jagged pill that’s too hard to swallow.”), it also, she says, sets her apart in a more positive way. “It makes me painfully real and it makes kids like them relate to me every single day because they’re going through shit actively and no one’s saying anything about it.

Everybody needs a push. My music isn’t always pain, pain, pain. It’s pain, progress and then promise. You go through it, you grow from it and then you walk into something that’s better than you came out of.”

This determination to take negativity and channel it into something not only beautiful but also tangibly useful is at the heart of her debut LP, ‘Dirty Gold’, and when I ask her about its title it’s as if she’s been practising her response all day. “It’s sort of how I view people as a whole. I think that everybody has a past.

Everybody has dirt they need to get through to get to the point where they are priceless, worth something. All of their pain is worth something in the end. So I chose to name it that genuinely because of that reason.”

With the name of the album agreed upon, however, there was still one glaring detail left to be ironed out. The album’s release date. With her label pushing it back to early 2014, Angel’s promise to her fans to put the album out before the end of the year was looking as though it would be left unfulfilled. On 18th December she took to Twitter to announce that she was taking things into her own hands.

Her pithy sub-140 character release note read: “So sorry to Island/Republic Records, but fuck you.”

She admits that it all became a bit much after she clicked send. “I think that I was having a rush of all different types of emotions. Nervousness,

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excitement and then it just kind of felt like nausea. It was cool because I was getting so many tweets from people going, ‘You’re fucking going to get dropped from your fucking label.

They’re going to sue you and your whole life is going to be over.’”

Fortunately, they chose not to turn on one of their brightest stars. “I go into my label and they’re like, ‘We understand why you did what you did.’ They were super cool with it.

Then the album came out. The only thing they kept stressing was, basically, no new artist puts out an album in the last quarter of the year. It just doesn’t happen. I was like, ‘I want to do it,’ and we did it.”

C

oming from a young woman who once posted a pseudo self-help video on her Tumblr titled ‘How To Give No Fucks’, ‘Dirty Gold’ functions as a manual on how to get through in the face of negative forces.

Its unrelenting conviction is striking as its lines – often shocking, always defiant - are set to the massive production of Markus Dravs. Its huge, reverbed beats and nightclub synths imbue it with the feeling that its creator is taking long, confident strides out of a somewhat darker place. “I want ‘Battle Cry’ to go big,” she says. “I mean, like, Billboard top 100. I want it everywhere. I’m working my ass off, dude. I haven’t seen my bed in like a month and a half. I believe in my music and I believe in that song particularly because it touches people in ways I didn’t expect.” A hip-hop ballad, it’s clearly aimed at occupying the airwaves while drawing upon a more leftfield palette. That, she says, was the aim. “I wanted to make something that was genuinely genre-defying. I wanted to construct an album that people could dance to, that people who love lyrics can listen to and that people who want the duality of both of them can have.”

As well as providing a platform from which to reach out to others, Angel’s art has also allowed her to focus on herself and exorcising some of her own demons. She tells me: “Music is a very cathartic thing. You find means to release and I’ve always found means to release in writing. And putting it to music was a totally different thing.” It allows her to put things into a box and move on. “At any point I can completely revive those feelings. I can listen to ‘Cleaning Out

My Closet’ and go through all of those feelings but I did it and I threw it away.

I don’t listen to that song. It’s not on my iPod, it’s not anywhere in my house.” She opens her eyes wide as though to signal that she isn’t joking.

“Just don’t fucking play it near me.

Because you let go, and that’s the best thing about music. I let go of it, but my pain and my heartache and all that other stuff became someone else’s promise, someone else’s reason to be like, ‘Holy shit, I’m not the only person in the world going through this. If she made it out I totally can ‘cause she’s fucked up.’”

Starting life as an amateur poetcum-blogger, the written word was the original conduit through which Haze let her feelings flow from within towards a safer place outside of her.

“Tumblr blogs about my feelings like a girl only would do.” She giggles coquettishly, as if to underline her status as a young female. “That’s pretty much it. I’ve written two books to date but I keep them private because that’s the thing that I’m most shy about. I’ve got a private Tumblr blog that I sneak away and write too. It’s always a part of them that I’ll have to keep. It lets me know where I am in my head.”

As someone who thinks things through to the minutiae of their detail, it also allows her to make sense of what’s happening to her on a daily basis. “I go through life so much daily where I’m doing X, Y, Z all the time and I’ve no idea how to feel until I sit down, and then by the time I sit down I’m asleep. I carry my journal everywhere. It makes me feel like I’m still real, basically.”

A

n undoubted feature of ‘Dirty Gold’ is its bluster, yet much of its most rewarding moments come when Haze lets her guard down and engages on a more gentle level. The album is also much more layered in its themes than it has been given credit for since its official release on the last day of 2013. On first listen, a track like ‘Deep Sea Diver’ sounds characteristically aggressive, but delve deeper and it’s a tender paean on lost love and longing. “I fell for you hard, babe.” Haze has admitted that the concept of love has always fascinated her and when I bring it up she gets bashful. She bows her head and fidgets with her fingernails in mock awkwardness but it doesn’t last long before she’s back doing what she does best, speaking from the heart with a machine gun staccato of words. “I’ve always said that I think I’m going to die alone, still wanting this unachievable, unattainable, completely inexplicable and unimaginable love that I love in my head. It’s really hard to translate that to someone who loves in reality. They rely on actions and they rely on everything to think that love is real, and inside of me.” Mere seconds after clamming up, her voice rises to a booming declaration. “I’m just bursting with it, you know? It’s difficult and I don’t have successful relationships at all ‘cause feelings – oh my God, people and their feelings! But yeah, I’m still obsessed with it.”

This idealised view of love appears

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to stem from her inauspicious upbringing, which was at times painfully lonely, particularly the years within the church, which she describes as a cult. She is remarkably open about its effect upon her. “I don’t have my family actively in my life. I’ve never really known my family because I don’t know them. I grew up with just my mother and my brother.” Her language is disarmingly blunt. “Now that I don’t have them the amount of loneliness I feel is so immense. I feel like everything else I’ve ever felt in my life pales in comparison to this. I have active issues with being alone, with feeling alone. I had to bring my best friend on tour with me because I cannot for a single second feel like I’m the only one here.” She stops and becomes more circumspect. “But then I realise I have fans, I have kids who are just like me, who are going through exactly what I’m going through, except for they live at home with their families and their families ignore them on purpose.”

Her story is humbling and I find myself fumbling for a response that doesn’t undercut the gravity of her words. The best I can do is to ask if she feels like her situation is, at least, improving. “Yeah, totally.” She shrugs her shoulders as if to say ‘of course’.

“Because I’m tired of her being here right now. It’s like babysitting. I swear to God.” She collapses in raptures of cackles before switching to serious. “I had to learn how to be alone and not feel alone. I don’t have a problem with being alone, I have a problem with feeling lonely. I’ve just learned over time that you can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends and your friends basically are your family. And I’ve got the best friends in the fucking world. All around the world, so I can go anywhere and not feel alone.”

Having tossed an album into the public domain, she has a couple of ambitions yet to achieve in 2014.

“Finding a house finally, finding somewhere that feels remotely like home so I’m not like a fucking hobo, travelling the world.” After that she wants to, “move to Montana and live in the forest and write books,” though luckily that doesn’t mean we won’t get to hear album number two (“Oh yeah, I’ve already started it.”) With that, the Boxpark security guard tells us we’ve already overstayed our welcome. With fans banging on the window and chanting her name, it looks like 2014 might just be the year when Angel Haze fulfils everything. She collects her bags of gifts and goes, once more, to meet her delirious public.

‘All Love’s Legal’, Planningtorock’s new album, has equality at its heart, so much so that its creator has changed her name to something completely genderless. Daisy Jones speaks with Jam Rostron about doing away with binaries, freedom in Berlin and accepting feminism

Misogyny Think of the name Planningtorock – with or without spaces – and your mind doesn’t immediately go to gender boundary-smashing electronic music and experimentation. It sounds like a rip-off version of ‘Rocksmith’, a learn-how-to-play-guitar Xbox game, but it’s not – it’s the stage name of Berlin-based Brit musician Jam Rostron, who last month released her third solo album, ‘All Love’s Legal’.

Her musical back catalogue is exciting and increasingly politically charged; her sound draping between danceable house beats and a brilliantly nightmarish concoction of keyshifting and voice-warping that is as comical as it is intriguing.

With song titles such as ‘Misogyny Drop Dead’ and ‘Patriarchy (Over and Out)’ one might expect Rostron to be as earnest as her lyrics or as obscure as some of her more bizarre music visuals. After a few days of trying to get hold of her over Skype, her icon finally appears on the screen (a photograph of the back of her head) and a friendly northern accent filters through the speakers.

Born Janine Rostron, it was only recently that Jam changed her name to something outwardly androgynous. “I mean, I’ve been called Jam for a long time in my private life,” she explains, “but then it came to releasing the album. A lot of the motivation to change my name to ‘Jam’ is to have a name that’s not gender-defined and that’s linked so solidly to lots of things off the album. I thought that this is the perfect time to make that announcement and to make it clear. It really is part of it and it feels good.”

This change of name makes perfect sense when considering her songs are packed with lyrics that reject the binary nature of genders and sexuality, a segregation that generally works in favour of ‘straight’ white men. Her lyrics are refreshingly and potently direct (“patriarchal life, you’re out of date”), a fact that has drawn criticism for resembling a feminist seminar in its plainness, or for being too simplistic.

But it makes you wonder why people are so afraid of using certain words – ‘feminist’, for example. “There are many reasons, but we can pick a few,”

considers Jam. “White men are generally the more dominant in our society. So of course when they dominate a section of society they want to hold onto that space, they’re not going to want to give that up so anybody that is going to challenge that is going to have a hard time.The easiest thing to do if anybody is going to challenge that is to make them feel isolated so women are deliberately made to feel uncomfortable by thinking about or saying that they’re feminists because it threatens another persons claim to space.”

Rostron’s lyrics didn’t used to be so unswerving but something changed after the first Planningtorock album (2006’s ‘Have It All’) and the creative crisis that followed it. “I thought to myself, why am I afraid to say what I’m really thinking?” she says. “And that in itself is worth questioning.

What are the risks? That people disagree that misogyny should drop dead? Well, if people disagree with that then that should be talked about.”

Somehow we get onto the subject of Lady Gaga. “It’s quite weird, actually

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– the other day a friend posted an interview with Lady Gaga back in 2009 and in one sentence she criticises the interviewer for judging her for being sexual on stage in a way that she wouldn’t if she was a man. It was a really interesting point she was making and it was really articulate and it was bob on. And in the next line he asked whether she would consider herself a feminist and she was like ‘no, no, no I’m not a feminist’ and she was so nervous about it and your heart sinks.

But there are a lot of reasons why people in society don’t want women to get their equality because they feel like it takes their privileges away.”

Jam’s lived in Berlin for 13 years, but she was born and raised in Bolton.

Her introduction to music was one that musicians seem to unanimously share. “I got into music because of my mum,” she says resolutely. “She had and still has a really great record collection and is one of these people that starts the day with loud music, so she would always put on a different record in the morning.

“My first interest [in making

Drop Dead Photogra phy: Alexa Vachon / EFF ECT S: p2r / writer: D AI S Y J ONE S

music] was in the sounds of strings and orchestras, so I started to learn violin. That was my first instrument, which is a nightmare and the worst instrument to start playing because it takes ages to sound half decent. But I stuck by it and I played that for ten years or so. I still use a lot of strings. I find they have a great melodrama and they’re very powerful.”

It is this same preoccupation with the powerful and melodramatic that makes Planningtorock’s music visuals as much a form of art as the music itself. Rostron recently released the video to ‘Human Drama’, a synthheavy, shape-shifting electro anthem that is the conceptual embodiment of ‘All Love’s Legal’. Donning glasses imposed with psychedelic blood-red swirls and wearing 1950’s bowl-style wigs, Jam Rostron and her friend and collaborator Hermione Frank (AKA Roxymore) mouth the song’s words whilst their androgynous forms blend amongst dripping, lava-like globules of colour.

“For me, imagery and sound or music together is the best, most

beautiful, addictive language around.

I’ve been making videos for so long and when I first started out I’d be writing shot lists and concepts and stuff like that, but to be honest, whenever I get on the set and I start shooting, just fun things happen and I try to feed off the moment. With ‘Human Drama’, it was quite a tricky video to make because it was extremely personal and was referring to my own sexuality. It’s really an amalgamation of many feelings but I also wanted it to be very funny.”

She says she thinks about making a feature length film all the time. “I love film!” she tells me. “I also really like TV, though. I sometimes think it would be fun to make a funny TV series or something because I watch a lot of TV Series online and all kinds of shit.

“I’ve got loads of scenes in my head, almost little comedy scenes.

Maybe that’s how I’d have to start, like shoot a load of scenes and glue them together.”

But it’s not just Rostron’s experiments with aesthetics that are striking; she explores the verges of her

own voice by warping the sound of her vocals to a low, throaty tenor, the kind you might find on an old house track. It’s a simple move, but one that is playful in its lack of gender specificity.

“If you’re a musician, your voice is a really instant instrument and if you’re on your own and nobody’s listening you can do really amazing stuff with it.”

What sort of amazing stuff?

“The technique I do is that I’ll have a track and then I’ll pitch it up a few percent and then I’ll sing it high, which is difficult for me because I have a very low voice.Then when I pitch the whole thing down I get a certain presence in the voice, which is an over-emotion I feel, and you can’t place it, you can’t place the gender or anything else. I like the sound of it, I like the way it makes me feel.”

After moving from her hometown in Bolton, Jam went to Art school in Sheffield before naturally gravitating towards Berlin in the early noughties, where she has lived ever since (an experience she describes as “very liberating”). It was Berlin, in fact, that compelled her to perform. “It wasn’t

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that living in England wasn’t enjoyable,” she says, “but it just suddenly freed a lot of space up in my head. I was making music in England but it was a secret thing and I wasn’t playing to anybody. But when I came to Berlin I quite quickly built a makeshift studio and started to record quite seriously and I also started to perform here so I think it gave me this opportunity. I guess I just didn’t feel inhibited about making mistakes or trying things out.”

As the interview draws to a close, I ask Jam to map out a vision for her perfect world. She seems like the kind of person who might have imagined it before now.

“If we didn’t have this social idea of gender and it was more personal and less binary, I feel that would make such a difference,” she says. “You wouldn’t have half of society discriminated against and the other half privileged.

In a way, what stops that from becoming a reality is capitalism because capitalism really thrives off the binary genders; ideals for men, ideals for women.”

Where the wild things are now From their 2008 debut to ‘Present Tense’, their fourth album, released this month, Wild Beasts have remained nomadic in song as much as anything else Photogra phy: Jenna foxton / writer: R eef Younis

Cut adrift in Kendal, disenchanted in Leeds, and faced with the fear and loathing of London, geography has played a central part in Wild Beasts’ history. Half-heartedly thrown in with the (thankfully) defunct ‘Gangs of New Yorkshire’ scene, courtesy of their tenuous Leeds connection, the band has survived the cynical scenes, outlasted the buzz bands and stayed committed to stubbornly making it work wherever and however they can. In fact, their transience has probably helped them not just survive but endure.

After touring themselves into oblivion from the release of their 2008 debut album, ‘Limbo Panto’, to the gruelling end of ‘Smother’ (the band’s third and last LP, of 2011), I’m sat with one of British guitar music’s quieter success stories in a pub in South East London, just around the corner from the Deptford studio where their latest album, ‘Present Tense’, was recorded.

Now with semi-permanent roots in London, Hayden Thorpe,Tom Fleming, Chris Talbot and Ben Little’s latest migration over the north/south divide feels like a natural, almost inevitable, culmination of Wild Beasts’ wonderfully nomadic habit. But even though they seem to have settled in the likeliest of concrete jungles, they’re still a band that proudly defies

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definition with every release.

“That was absolutely the climate we came up in, but I don’t think we’ve ever had to survive a scene because I don’t think we’ve ever been cool enough,” says Thorpe. “What we do is probably always going to be, and always has been, divisive enough to create a healthy and unhealthy distance for us to not have to rely on that. In our early days we’d probably have loved to have been in a scene to give us a piggyback but we had to brave it out and we’re better for it, and have independence in that sense.

“There was that New Yorkshire thing,” he smiles, “and it was quite shocking at the time because I’d left Kendal feeling a little burnt that we couldn’t make it work. The ideal was that we would develop in our own little pocket but then to arrive in Leeds and be so disenchanted with everything around you was quite devastating. We almost proofed ourselves because we had to. Ladproofing might be too strong a term, because our music was never going to be sung from the terraces, but it was about the terraces, and there’s something beautiful about that.”

“I do think we feel a great kinship with Leeds,” says Fleming, “but I feel like if we’d started to come up now, in

‘To us, you’re one step from oblivion or one step from triumph’

Leeds, no-one would give a fuck, and that’s a shame. We were lucky enough that the attention was there at the time and we were visible enough, and maybe those opportunities aren’t there right now. I always really enjoy playing in Manchester because there would be kids at our gigs almost clutching their library books, and lads with their arms around each other singing their hearts out. I’m no Oasis fan but that’s the environment we came from and we have some of that in our DNA.” After emerging with the bold concepts, ball-gripping falsettos and flowery, outsider pop of ‘Limbo Panto’, the band hurtled into the sexual restlessness of ‘Two Dancers’ (2009) and then almost immediately stripped everything back for the understated beauty of ‘Smother’. It marked a particularly gruelling period of tireless touring and relentless recording that, Thorpe admits, left the band desperate for a break. “I think we were pretty burnt out at the end of ‘Smother’ because ‘Two Dancers’ bled into that the same way ‘Limbo Panto’ had bled into ‘Two Dancers’. From 2007 to 2011 it was about four years of complete transient life. There was this lack of stillness, and it was very tumultuous, but I think we’ve instilled a sense of clarity on the new record.”

Energised by a newfound permanence, the band set up in the capital and stepped back. But the move to London was as much a mental leap of faith as it was a logistical one. “I was fucking terrified of London,” says Thorpe, “especially in the early days of the band. It felt like the epitome of being corrupted, that that would be it; we’d all have to get jobs to try and afford to live here.That was the outside fear. Would it still be about the music or would we disappear down crack pipes?” he laughs.

“I think when we had the little studio in Kendal, there was a sense of staying put and just doing it there, where in London there was a sense of righteousness that we could command the world from here. This was HQ. I think the thing about being in London is that you can never really feel like you’ve outgrown it; it swallows you and you just crawl back out.”

Characterised by the electronic production of Lexx and Leo Abrahams, new album ‘Present Tense’ feels like a record under the influence of the city and its constant, bedroom-produced heartbeat, but with Thorpe’s domineering voice, Fleming’s baritone counter balance, and the measured, tumbling melodies, it’s still definitively, instinctively, Wild Beasts, just, as always, with a slightly different pulse.

“We started off being proud purveyors of the organic instrument, as it were,” says Thorpe. “We always write songs from an emotional stand point and I think there’s still a bit of sensuality in them, but the sonics you can achieve with electronic instruments can be far more vivid and widescreen than what we can do with guitars. We work in the dark a lot with electronic instruments because we’re not geeky in how they work; we just know they work and our world becomes a lot richer and a bit more evocative through those sounds.”

“There’s always a temptation to try and over-perfect, which is something we tried to avoid,” adds Fleming. “It also means that when something new comes into the song you can really hear it. There’s no decoration for the sake of it, so with the drums, and even some of the lyrics, they’re quite simple and dubbed, but just because it’s straighter doesn’t mean it’s necessarily simplistic.”

Simplistic isn’t an accusation levelled at Wild Beasts with any real conviction, but as Thorpe explains, their principles of finding the balance between analogue and electronic had to be perfect for them to feel credible pushing a more overt electronic sound.

As he puts its: “If you work as we do, you can’t confuse what a human has to do and what a computer can do well. A computer is only used if it’s something a human can’t do and vice versa.

Singing in a heartfelt way through a computer is quite a difficult thing to pull off, and I think if we started to get involved in vocoders or those kinds of things it would have been quite hard to remain believable.

“When a song is ready and right, it has a nature to it that you can’t describe,” he says. “It’s more of a gut thing, and it’s where our expertise comes in. What we’re good at, and should be good at, is knowing and judging whether it’s right. In some ways it’s a bit rough, and a bit ugly, but in other ways it’s incredibly graceful and touching. Ultimately, I think if we compared the computer-based versions to the ones we’d done at the end, our versions are never as near or tidy or correct but they’re always far more moving.”

It takes us into a discussion about the depth and space on the album, with the electronic ripple of ‘Daughters’, the moody, minimal discordance of ‘A Dog’s Life’, and the heavy keys of lead single ‘Wanderlust’ pulling the production into even sharper focus.

“That’s something that Lexx and Leo said, actually,” Fleming agrees. “It was about defending the space and it requires a bit of discipline to do that and say, ‘it’s done, leave it alone’.”

Thorpe says: “There’s also a crucial point towards the end of recording songs where people go from saying, ‘this needs this’ to ‘it doesn’t need this’.

It’s a reversal where you almost can’t put enough clothes on it but then end up ripping them off the other way.

Eventually there’s no-one else left in the room saying it needs anything and it becomes an unspoken understanding.”

Perhaps that’s why ‘Present Tense’ feels like Wild Beasts’ most accessible album to date. Where the ostentatious flourishes and literate flamboyance

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brazenly took centre stage, their latest work feels measured; controlled, even.

That’s not to say they’ve dispensed with the qualities that made them so enthralling in the first place; it’s more the case that they’ve taken real ownership of their music and polished the alternative pop tropes into something increasingly refined.

“I don’t think we’ve been brave enough, or willing enough, to put something like this, out there,” says Thorpe. “I take that as a compliment to be honest because I think part of having to make the leap is to step into dangerous territory. We’ve always said we make pop music until we’re blue in the face and I think a lot of the songs had the potential to tip into syrupy, over sentimental… ergh… mess?” he laughs. “I think we also got quite tired of having our songs carved up, or having thirty seconds knocked off just for radio edits. If you’ve made a piece of work, you think it’s right as it is, so it was almost a way of reclaiming our work and saying if that’s how it has to exist, we’re going to have total control over it, and it doesn’t have to be denatured or butchered to fit in those parameters.”

So at four albums in, and a slew of defunct contemporaries resigned to dusty CD shelves and forgotten iTunes playlists, you could excuse Wild Beasts for feeling a little self-satisfied. Smug, even. They’re not. Instead, the creature fear that’s compelled them to make it this far is both as fragile and fierce as it’s ever been.

“You’ve got to make your peace with never doing it again,” says Fleming, “and we’d done that already.

The first record cost quite a lot of money to make and didn’t sell very much so it’s always in our consciousness that this might be the last record we make.”

“I think you also accept that as a musician you exist in two year lifecycles,” says Thorpe. “You don’t really see your life beyond that because the next two years will define who you are and that’s kind of the beauty of it.

We’re of the mind frame that your old work is worth shit, in the now, and you have absolutely no reliance on what’s gone before when it comes to the quality of your work. To us, you’re one step from oblivion or one step from triumph. The margins are that close.”

A Modern Way of Letting Go Martin Creed gives Reef Younis a tour of What’s The Point of It?, his retrospective exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery Photogra phy: ph il shar p / writer: R eef younis

The last time I spoke with Turner Prizewinning artist Martin Creed it was against the Barbican’s brutalist backdrop, his colourful candy stripe ensemble offsetting the cold grey concrete of the City’s surroundings.

In one of the Barbican galleries’ many quiet corners, we discussed his uncluttered approach to his work and the personal process of bringing debut album, ‘Love To You’, to painstaking life. A record driven and defined by the battle between love and hate, it also marked Creed’s first proper experience of exposing his music to a level of scrutiny his visual work has always had to withstand.

This time, we’re stood in the South Bank’s Hayward Gallery to a backdrop of 39 snickering metronomes (Work No.112) and a 13ft plus neon installation of the word ‘Mothers’ (Work No. 1092) unnervingly whooshing overhead because, for two months (January 29 – April 27), the ‘What’s the Point of It?’ exhibition is showcasing a retrospective of Creed’s visual work.

“Normally all these things were made to be on their own, as I try and make things that can stand up in the world,” he explains as ‘Mothers’ completes another whirring revolution above our heads.

The exhibition itself presented a challenge to both Creed and the curators. For the gallery, working to find the right pieces was a conundrum of budget and logistics. For Martin, it represented a proud opportunity but one that came with its own questions.

“It’s not actually a show of all the things I really wanted,” he says, “it was a mixture of what I wanted and what was possible due to money, size, space, height, weight. But in that respect, it’s probably quite similar to the way the world works, anyway. When I was invited to do the show I made a list of

everything I wanted to be in it. Some of those things were paintings owned by people in Japan so when it came to it, the budget for the exhibition couldn’t pay for that because flying the painting from Japan and all the insurance and shit could be paying for a whole room somewhere else. In the end a lot of the things came down to really boring business decisions.”

The first thing you see, hear, instinctively look to avoid the moment you step into the exhibition is the immediacy of ‘Mothers’ and its imposing, moving frame. It’s a brilliantly enlivening beginning and one that seems pre-orchestrated by particularly clever positioning. “’Mothers’ can only go in here,” says Martin. “I wanted to make it as big as it could possibly be, then to do that, I realised it would actually be quite close to people’s heads. The reason I wanted to make it big was because I thought the word ‘Mothers’ would look good, big. To be a mother, you’ve got to be physically bigger than the baby. It’s not like I set out to be dangerous but when it turned out that it would it be quite imposing, I thought that wasn’t a bad thing, and that was when I decided to make it spin round as well. It was a happy accident.”

It brings us onto other works in the exhibition that were born out of trial and error, or enforced selection. For a man whose work and music feels so grounded in the black and white of life, the difficulties of curating an exhibition seem at odds with Creed’s outlook.

“It’s frustrating, but it’s not like I didn’t expect it. When they asked me to do the show, I just said ‘Yes!’ because I wanted to have a show at the Hayward.

Then the next few weeks after that it’s like ‘Shit!’ and basically a feeling that my life is now going to be taken over

by this for the next two years, and that’s what happened.

“One thing is to try and make something you’re happy with or that you’re excited about. Another thing is to take that and try and play it live, or exhibit it in a gallery, and at that point it’s a different thing because it’s a case of making the best of what you’ve got.

But even if you like it, maybe it doesn’t look good on that wall, so it’s a case of playing around with things. Juggling.”

As we move into the second room, I ask Martin about the works he felt compelled to have in the exhibition; those pieces he wanted to be included outright. It’s a question that makes him pause for thought initially, and a prompt that becomes increasingly redundant as the tour progresses.

“I guess I always knew the show would have ‘Don’t Worry’ in it, and the Pyramid paintings, but this fist sculpture is a recent work that I made and I think it’s a bit irrelevant to the show. I was thinking about stuff I made before, like before I was trying to go to art school and stuff like that, and this is a sculpture I made when I was a teenager and my mum kept it,” he laughs.

“Last year I got asked to make a trophy for an art prize in a primary school and I remembered this fist sculpture I made out of clay, so I had it cast in bronze and gold-plated with the idea of making a heavy, big trophy for the kids to hold up.”

It’s an interesting meeting of an old piece of work re-imagined for a fresh purpose but, as Creed admits, its place in the show goes deeper than merely repurposing.

“Although I made this new, it was cast from a thing I made when I was 14, so whenever that is… 1982.

There’s also a self-portrait there I made when I was a teenager, and that fits into what you’re saying. I thought it would be good to put something in

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U

nhealthy is a word that seemed to characterise much of the process around Creed’s 2012 debut album. He described some of the songs on it as “like children kept in a basement for too long”, but a renewed commitment to letting go, and working quicker in all of his work has left second album, ‘Mind Trap’, feeling noticeably less agitated.

“I had to try and record those songs because living with them for so long was unhealthy. I’ve been trying to work quicker since that, both in my visual work and my music work,” he admits, “so the new album’s had a much quicker turnaround. I always try and control things, and I’m really anal, and keep them in too long, and by the time they come out, they’re so controlled that they’re dead. So the album, plus the new works in this show, are examples of a faster turnaround. In a way, the work’s not as finished, maybe because it hasn’t been through so many processes of letting it lie.”

Armed with this fresher focus, the gospel and orchestral influences on ‘Mind Trap’ are a step on from the banging, simple chord structures of his debut, and there’s the sense that this album comes from a much better mindset.That isn’t to say the emotional extremes aren’t there, as Creed admits.

“There’re probably a couple of songs that could have been on the first album but weren’t finished or didn’t sound right, but then there’s some new ones that had a much faster turnaround from writing to recording.

I wouldn’t like to say which is better in terms of the weight of work but for sure, I feel like it’s good to try and work a bit faster. There’s still some love and hate on this second album but it’s more of a laugh, really.” And so Martin laughs.

Taking in Chicago, London and the Czech Republic, the recording process for the new record bordered on ‘one take’, focusing more on capturing the moment than blurring the details. The

change in mindset allowed Creed to become less obsessed with finding every angle and putting everything into it.

“It reminds me a bit of my first show,” he says. “You want everything to be in it because if that’s the only show you’re ever going to do… The first album was maybe a bit like that and it became harder and harder to finish, because it could never have everything in it. So as soon as there’s a second album, the pressure is divided between the two. All of a sudden you

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have two containers for everything.

“So maybe when I did the second album, there was more of a feeling it didn’t have to have everything, and be looking at all the angles, and it could have a few of the songs from Chicago with the gospel singers, and it could have a few with the orchestra, and who cares if anyone is ever really going to listen to both of those parts, and who cares if they do? It’s more like thinking I’m going to try and do this but it doesn’t necessarily all have to add up. I think it’s just accepting I’m limited and it doesn’t have to sum up the whole world.”

Another difference between the two albums was the decision to work on tape for ‘Mind Trap’ for both aesthetic and decidedly more philosophical reasons.

“There’s a huge difference between working on tape and working digitally,” he says, “because when you’re working with digital, you’re always looking at the song, you can see the soundwaves. When you record it onto tape, the only thing you can do is listen to it or have the memory of it.

You might write down ‘take one… good’ but you can’t look at it or flick through it on a computer screen. I think there’s a danger in looking at a song, it’s not a fucking visual work.”

To a backdrop of 1000 multicoloured Broccoli prints (‘Broccoli’ Work No.1000), we talk about the different styles of the albums. Released to favourable reviews, where ‘Love To You’ might have felt like an artist making a record, ‘Mind Trap’ carries some expectation.

“Maybe,” says Creed. “It’s probably

Additional photography courtesy of The Hayward Gallery

before I thought I knew what I was doing, because I basically think I don’t know what I’m doing now, I’ve just got better at thinking I do know what I’m doing. I think it was when I got to art school that I was making work I could talk about, and work I could defend using words.”

It raises the question as to whether, even now, he’s comfortable and confident putting together an exhibition of this size. It seems, to him, that the process of re-treading his own steps is an eternally unappealing one.

“It’s scary,” he says, “and the overwhelming thing was fear and kind of feeling sick. I love doing shows and I find it really exciting working on new stuff but curating your own work is like playing your own shit. It’s different from doing new work because it’s basically quite wanky, and you go to meetings about yourself.

There are all these things I made a long time ago and it’s just going over the same things. I think there’s something unhealthy about that.”

more accessible but you could say the orchestral stuff is less accessible if you’re not used to listening to those sort of pieces. I think it’s more straightforward but in terms of what people think, lately I’ve been trying not to read any press. I do get really wound up by it – even if it’s complimentary it’s a whole world you can just fall into, and it’s quite narcissistic and this forever revolving thing of ‘do they like me, do they not like me?’, and that’s work in itself and if you read the reviews you have to learn to accept what the person says.”

A

s we head back down through the gallery, the conversation turns to the contrasts between Creed’s visual and musical work. With so many different forms on display within the gallery – from sculpture and painting to sound and film – is there a natural divide?

“They’re quite similar but the album’s different because it’s a thing that’s out there, even if it’s in a digital form. This is more of a live show, a theatrical show, more equivalent to a gig, where the album’s more equivalent to a book publication. The album’s a bit more out of reach – who’s buying that? I don’t really know.”

It leads us into a discussion about

the influence your surroundings can have on both creating and consuming art and music. For Creed, a gallery has a specific allure. “I suppose when you’re here, you can leave but it’s just like when you’re at a gig,” he says, “you have to make a bit of an effort, whereas if you’ve got something on your iPod or Kindle, you can put it down or pick it up,” he suggests.

“That’s the thing, people here can look where they like, so in the way you select a playlist, everyone’s selecting here. So maybe it’s not that different, really. If you go to a theatre you’ve committed yourself and might not feel you can leave.”

In that sense, this exhibition forms a sort of soundtrack to Martin Creed’s life; a pic’n’mix selection of the thoughts, ideas and executions that collectively form his body of work to date. To most, looking back creates a wistful sense of sentimentality but nostalgia isn’t something that always comes easy. He says that because he’s been working on this for so long, he wouldn’t call it nostalgia. “I don’t know, actually,” he ponders. “I don’t know what it is. It feels weird; it feels removed from me, in a way, even though I was involved.

“I look at this and these are not necessarily the works that I made.

What has happened here is me and the people that helped curate it have taken those things I’ve made and we’ve made this exhibition with them. All the

individual pieces of work are like the tubes of paint we’ve used to create a new painting that has all of this stuff in it. It’s like this isn’t the thing I’ve made, it’s like a copy of the thing I’ve made that’s now part of this other bigger thing I’ve made, so then there’s a feeling it’s not definitive.

“It’s like every time you try and solve a problem, you just find more problems, so now we’ve been trying to do a retrospective of my works but we’ve failed to do that because all we’ve managed to do is make another work. It’s like you’re doomed, just fucking doomed,” he chuckles.

It’s an interesting perspective for a man who spent so long holding onto songs, once upon a time, that they almost drove him crazy. Perhaps it hints at an artist more ruthless with his visual work but who has learned to apply that same detachment to his music?

“Maybe it doesn’t feel nostalgic because I’m different. It’s like you were saying about listening to music, if you’re doing the washing up or you’re on a train or you’re sad or you’re on drugs or alcohol, you’re going to hear the music totally differently, and I am different to when I made that yellow painting there, even though I’m quite similar too. Maybe to describe it like a big work, made of these works, is a way to try and cope with it, rather than thinking that’s definitive. It’s kind of like every song, which version is it? Is it the live version

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or the one produced by this one, or the remastered one or the one you heard on a wireless. They’re all different. This one is the Hayward version but if you’d seen that painting 10 years ago in another gallery…”

“It’s like this is the equivalent of me having the chance to go to Chicago and work with the gospel singers.

Here we had the budget to do certain things… it’s always a sum of the practical possibilities at any given time.

It’s the reason we’re all stood here, we’ve all got our vested interests,” he smiles.

Walking around the gallery, there’s a constant, comforting reminder of the simplicity of the work. It’s in the gleeful soft peril of ‘Mothers’’s metal beam scything through the air two inches above your head, the minimal intent of the crushed ball of paper in Work No.88, the disjointed clacking cacophony of Work No.112’s 39 metronomes or the various bells, whistles, fart noises and unabashed bodily functions. Sure there’s emotion, if you look hard enough, but the wry, dry humour is what gets you first.

We step into an empty, darkened room with one wall projecting films showing people being sick and defecating. Martin takes his place for the last shots of the afternoon, the wretching sounds filling the room.

“These are ones I thought should definitely be in. I thought it has to have a shit and a sick,” he laughs, “otherwise it’s not true to life, you know?”

Nervous yet?

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Last month, post-hardcore band Eagulls performed on the Late Show With David Letterman in New York, an unlikely booking for a punk group from Leeds who play around with pig brains and write open letters to everyone else currently making music with guitars. Their debut album is out this month and ‘Eagulls’ is a potent mix of melody and aggression that the underground could do with just as much as mainstream America Ph otography: Elinor Jones / writer: Daniel Dylan wray

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uring the stages of planning this interview and brief gallivant around Leeds, Eagulls decided upon the first meeting point: the train station Wetherspoons, at 11am. I arrive to a packed pub that feels more like it’s 11pm, but that’s Wetherspoons for you, full of early morning boozehounds sucking down cheap ale, people inhaling grease-soaked English breakfasts, football fans fuelling up on their way to away games and a minority of people waiting for trains.

Eagulls arrive in dribs and drabs, singer George Mitchell and Guitarist Mark Goldsworthy first, shortly followed by drummer Henry Ruddel and bassist Tom Kelly, bleary eyed and with two hours sleep under their belts. Only hours earlier, at 6.30am, Henry had fallen asleep in the doorway of his local co-op next to a homeless man. Second guitarist Liam Matthews is the last to arrive and despite the visibly affecting hangovers of some, we all opt for a morning round of Guinness and beer.

Eagulls have something of a prickly reputation if their press is to be believed, but it soon becomes clear that any unease around – or disliking for – journalists they have may well be grounded in some most justifiable footholds. The group informally recall a recent journalist’s write-up of an encounter, which took an innocent, flippant conversation the band were having about the rumoured register that exists if someone checks out Mein Kampf from a library, which was turned into a line about how the group sat around discussing “Nazi Shit”.

Similarly, the band’s upcoming album release show is priced at £1.79, a price too steep for some writers who have already been emailing the band requesting guestlist. Their relationship with the press wasn’t helped by events last year either. 2013 started somewhat

tumultuously for Eagulls when the band published an off-the-cuff, daft open letter to, well, everyone, largely deriding the current music scene of ‘Beach Bands’ and mummy and daddyfunded, trend-following, fad artists (“You do not surf. You are not gnarly.

Stop saying dude, rad, bro... Shut your rich mouths”).The letter, when read as a whole, is certainly vitriolic but it’s clearly not something that has been well thought through – it’s a reactionary, spontaneous vent at some systematic issues found in modern music culture but at the same time it’s also purposefully, intently stupid and meaningless (“Gary Numan would knock all of your Dad’s out!!”).

Unfortunately, a small part of the rant could, somewhat understandably, be interpreted as being sexist, which resulted in something of backlash. The group feel that single point, misguidedly written as it maybe was, was picked up on and taken unnecessarily and uncharacteristically out of context and it is now something the band are keen to forget and move on from. (The letter has now been taken down from the band’s blog and replaced by a picture of a penis poking through someone’s buttocks with eyes drawn on them, with hands touching the tip of the phallus with the title

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‘Letter closed. Fingers on Lips’).

The inevitability of a question relating to the letter is such that the group collectively drum-roll the table in anticipatory build-up to me asking about it. “You could take any line of that letter and place it out of context and write an article about it,” Goldsworthy tells me. “If you read the whole letter and have a bit of common sense, it’s obviously not sexist. We wanted to criticise the people that facilitate the sexist attitudes in music, I got really upset when people thought that… Anyone who knows us, knows that it couldn’t be further from the truth. I can understand why people would misinterpret it a little bit, especially if you don’t know us, but they were like vultures, man, and they completely stripped that carcass of meat. They had a good fucking meal on that.”

Thankfully, 2014 has started with a much clearer message from the group, in the form of their eponymous debut LP: a nerve-shredding record most succinctly described at post hardcore, with flashes of The Cure’s ‘Three Imaginary Boy’, The Horrors’ ‘Strange House’ and the dead-eyed punk of Iceage. From the opening guitar maelstrom and seething fury that follows on, it’s a group-of-masked-

men-kicking-in-your-front-door kind of a record; one that keeps you as on edge as frequently as it allows you to remain content in the force of its execution. Considering the opening song, ‘Nerve Endings’, was one born out of the nervous energy and anxiety of Mitchell, it sets a perfectly apt precedent for the rest of the record. It’s the kind of guitar album that places as much focus on the grit as it does the sugar and ultimately its success lies in the twitching amalgamations taking place between melody and aggression, between the focused and the unhinged.

It’s cloaked so intensely in apprehensive energy and surging, forward propulsion that it makes you want to head-butt a wall and simultaneously try to figure out the atmospheric guitar pitches going on.

Back in 2011 Eagulls released a split 12” with Mazes, on which they covered ‘Mystery’ by Portland punk band Wipers, a group Eagulls seem to share an ethos and mindset with. The brutal, brilliant concoction of gushing energy with a keen focus on tones and textures is only one of the many qualities that made Wipers such a superlative, cult guitar group, but these similar approaches and principles are what also make ‘Eagulls’ such a juggernaut.

As we finish up our second or third beer, we leave Wetherspoons for a wander around Leeds to take some photographs, stealing a stranger’s dog at one point. Walking along the closeto-flooding canal banks, a quiet disdain for the landscape can be sensed and heard from within the band. The skyline is punctuated by looming, shimmering glass buildings; tall, garish, Lego-like blocks of student and young professional flats with the odd remaining old, brick-based building looking more tokenistic by the day. A particular one that Kelly picks out is the old Yorkshire Evening Post building, a sad looking anomaly of a building that, along with the old railways tracks and bridge nearby, is a disappearing aesthetic in the city, drowned out by the shiny and the new.

It’s an attitude shared by the group and one that can also be traced to the band’s choice of album artwork (by long time collaborator Andy Jones) – Sheffield’s monolithic ode to Brutalism, Park Hill housing estate.

Subject to equal parts derision and veneration, it’s a Grade II listed estate that is undergoing the Urban Splash treatment, transforming the exposed and soot-stained brickwork into a sea of brightly coloured exterior shapes that resembles something from the

Early Learning Centre. In the foreground of the shot is a burnt out car the band found there, next to a red telephone box. It’s a snapshot image of modern Britain clinging onto a past with a grip that is ever loosening. It’s a photograph almost too perfect, almost looking staged to the cynical eye, but as the band point out “as if we could fucking afford to place and burn a car for a photograph.”

After we walk the streets for an hour or so we retire to a pub called ‘The Red Lion’, a Samuel Smith brewery pub where a pint costs £1.80, the woman behind the bar serves you in her slippers and there is a pub dog happily trotting around the place and falling asleep on feet it doesn’t know. It seems a perfect setting for a group who, it turns out, are not prickly, inherently aggressive or antagonistic – they just have very little time for bullshit or people who deal in it.

They’re the first band that Brooklyn-based label Partisan Records are putting out simultaneous in the US and UK, and having (quite unbelievably) performed on the Late Show With David Letterman in New York last week, they’re keen to point out that they’ve reached this juncture largely by themselves. As Mitchell tells

“Apparently when Tim from Partisan was talking about signing us he went to some of his mates and said ‘Hey, you heard this band Eagulls?’” says Kelly, “and they were like, ‘yeah, they’re old. They released their single two years ago!’.”

“Record labels want younger people so they can manipulate them,” says Mitchell. “We’re an older band now; we’ve already done all that shit so we know what we’re doing.”

Goldsworthy: “Some of the bands we’ve played with are ridiculous. They can’t even get up in the morning, sometimes they’re pretty much paying someone £30 a day just to get them out of bed” “Fucking £30?” interjects Kelly, “try £100 plus a day, just to wake them up, get them out of bed and get them to a gig. If you can’t do that yourself, why the fuck are you in a band?”

Talk soon turns to their recent Letterman performance, a wonderful, strange occasion that has no doubt either seen underground bands in the UK swell up with pride or sour with envy. “Considering a lot of our friends are in the hardcore and DIY scene, you might think a lot of people would turn their nose up at that but everyone’s been really proud,” says Goldsworthy.

‘Do you want to see behind David Letterman’s desk?

It’s a right shit-hole’ me: “People might look at us now and say ‘oh it’s not do it yourself anymore’ but we’ve been doing it ourselves for four fucking years.”

Indeed, ‘Eagulls’ was made without a deal, recorded at the band’s own pace and generally steering clear of industry convention.

“When we first started playing we would play with loads of bands that would get loads of hype and buzz and then die within a year,” says Ruddel, while Matthews is glad the waiting period is finally over. “I’m keen for it [the album] to be out,” he says, “because shows are different when people know your songs. Like, if I’m seeing my favourite band and they play five new songs in a row, you just can’t get into it as much and that’s essentially what we’ve been doing for the last year: playing an album that nobody has heard”.

“A bit of piss-taking but everyone seems happy for us.

“I’m really sceptical about stuff because I know how fickle the music industry can be, so I take everything with a pinch of salt. Until the album is out, it’s just a little bubble that PR and press people have created. The real test will be when the album is out, that’s how I judge it.”

“It’s made me really pessimistic,” says Kelly.

“Yeah, like the only way is down!” says Goldsworthy.

Ruddel: “We’ve got a shitload of press since last week, which means you get a lot more people who like you but you also get a lot more people who don’t like you.” Kelly asks if the band read “that” comment onYoutube.

“No, I can’t, man,” says Goldsworthy.

“No, it was class,” laughs Ruddel.

“It just said: ‘They sound good. Look

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shit’. That’s fucking mint, that.”

Ruddel recalls the early aspirations their label had for them. He says: “I think the third time we met [Tim] he spoke about his ambitions for us and things and we were all just sat around having a drink and he said, ‘I’ll get you on Letterman’ and I remember spitting my drink out laughing, being, like, ‘fuck off’ and he was dead straight faced and said, ‘I bet you any money I’ll get you on Letterman!’”

Partisan has quickly become “family”. “The people that work there at the label are the most down-toearth, real people,” says Mitchell. “The way that they work, they’re just really good.”

“It was really odd the first time I went to their office though,” says an apprehensive Goldsworthy. “I had in my head visions of Nathan Barley shit, people whizzing round on microscooters, playing ping-pong and stuff, with it being a record label in Brooklyn, and we walked in and everyone was just working solid.”

Their Letterman appearance was with Bill Murray, and Kelly commemorated the occasion by getting the actor’s name tattooed under his pre-existing Eagulls tattoo (“when he saw it the first thing he did was come up and start kissing it”). If Murray had cancelled for any reason, it would read the name of his replacement – the slightly less impressive Dr Phil.

Of their recent time in New York and on the Letterman set, they all have varying insights. “It was cold,” Mitchell recalls.

“Apparently he doesn’t put the heating on,” says Kelly. “He likes to keep everyone on edge. Or that’s the rumour anyway.”

Goldsworthy says: “It was a rollercoaster. After soundcheck it was like 7 or 8 hours of sitting around asking each other every five minutes if we were nervous...” “… and that fucking journalist from NME,” says Kelly.

“He was awful,” says Matthews.

“He just turned up and said, ‘Can I have a beer? How do you feel the day before doing Letterman?’ The next day: ‘Can I have a cigarette? How do you feel, it’s 10 minutes to doing Letterman?

Oh, can I have another beer. How do you feel 10 minutes after Letterman?’

And the next day: ‘How do you feel the day after Letterman?’”

“It’s all he asked,” Mitchell says with irritation.

“I pulled him aside the day before the last day,” says Goldsworthy, “and I said ‘mate, I’m not being a dick, but

you haven’t really asked us anything yet, so do you want to think of some questions and we’ll do it tomorrow because you’ve got four pages to fill and you haven’t asked us a fucking thing.’ By the last day I think he knew we hated him as well, so I’m sure that’s going to taint how he writes it.

“I have no idea how or why he’s a journalist. Maybe just for extra money, but even if you’re getting paid, he could have at least done half an hour’s research on the Internet.”

“Fuck him, man,” says Mitchell.

“We’ve been talking about him for about twenty minutes.”

“Have we got any photos of him for the article?” Goldsworthy asks.

“Yeah, with a target on his head,” says Mitchell.

We move back to Letterman and particularly the audience.

“They were gutted because they thought The Eagles were playing,” Kelly laughs. “They have a hype man who comes out before the shows and he went, ‘tonight we’ve got Bill Murray’, and the crowd cheers, ‘and we’ve got The Eagles’, and the crowd are going ballistic,” Goldsworthy tells me, with Ruddel laughing and recalling, “If you went on Twitter there were loads of pictures of people in the crowd of David Letterman, taking selfies saying things like ‘I’m seeing the Eagles tonight.’”

The confusion didn’t stop there.

“The day after that, at a gig at (Williamsburg venue) Baby’s All Right,

a woman came with her daughter thinking it was an Eagles tribute band.

She was trying to get her money back, I think, and it was a mental show as well, people throwing themselves all over and people were pretty wrecked because it was like one in the morning.

She was so gutted for her young daughter.”

“Do you want to see behind David Letterman’s desk? It’s a right mess.”

Ruddel shows me a painfully normal picture of a rather tatty desk from behind. “It’s a right shit-hole.”

“All the floor and carpets are all scuffed,” says Mitchell.

Matthews: “They had a woman coming round with paint, just filling in the gaps in the displays.

“Personally, it’s never been anything I’ve aspired to do,” he says.

“That’s why it was so surreal. You just try your best to play naturally”.

F

rom one anomaly to another, Eagulls find themselves up for an NME Award in the Best Video category (for ‘Nerve Endings’) against some laughably big artists: Arcade Fire, Arctic Monkeys, Haim, Lily Allen and Pharell. But the band are suspect about NME’s intentions. “We’ve basically been told as much that we’ve only been invited to the awards because they think we’re going turn up and get

in a fight or cause a scene or something.”

The video for ‘Nerve Endings’ cost approximately £50 to make, but it could have also come at the price of a night in the cells as it saw them briefly risk arrest. They filmed a pig’s brain naturally decomposing, behind which a rather amusing anecdote lies.

Says Goldsworthy: “When I was getting the brain, I was going around Leeds market asking for a pig’s brain and one butcher got really violent and he was like ‘What the fuck do you want a Pig’s Brain for?You sick bastard.’

Because they were selling pig’s heads and I was asking them if they could take the brain out for me and he was like ‘I’m not fucking doing that’ and he was arguing with the other butchers and I went round the rest of the market and nobody else had pigs heads so I had to go back to this butcher. I went back and he started apologising to us but he wouldn’t take the brain out of the head. He gave us a rough guide on how to chisel and pop the brain out. I had a hammer and a knife and did it at home, it was fucking horrible. I popped an eye out. It’s really hard. It took ages. So I prized it open and it was like an avocado, half of the brain was still in.”

“The lads who we record the videos with came round and just started to be sick whilst filming it,” says Mitchell.

Goldsworthy: “We set it all up in the basement anyway and we were starting to worry about it because it had been a week and a half and it still didn’t have maggots. So we were considering cheating and going to get some from a fishing shop.”

“Anyway, we were going to Brighton to play a show,” Ruddel takes over. “I was finishing work at 5 and the van hire place closed at 5.30 so I had to get there in time to pick up the van, but I forgot to bring my license to work with me, so I had to get home to get it and then get to the van hire place in 30 minutes, in rush hour traffic. So, I got a taxi, got home and legged it from the taxi to my house and I was rushing to get my keys in the door and the neighbours all came out, the people from the tyre garage next door and they were like, ‘you’ve had CID and police here kicking your door in, what’s going on?’ And I had ten minutes to get across town, so I was just like, ‘I don’t know mate’, and I ran in, got my licence and ran back out to the taxi and he followed me to the taxi and was like, ‘they’ve been kicking

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your door down, what are you doing in your basement, you mentalists?!’.

And I just jumped in this taxi and sped off, like ‘see you later’.”

“We got back from Brighton a couple of days later anyway and the gas had been cut-off and the locks had been changed,” continues Goldsworthy. “The gas meter for the house was in the basement where we were filming, so the gas man must have come in – as we were having a dispute about who owed who some money at the time – so they came in to switch our gas off and he must have seen this filming and it looked like a kids brain and he must have thought ‘what the fuck is going on?’ so he phoned the police… We got back from a gig and it had just completely disintegrated. It disappeared. We never cleaned it up either. It reeks still but we never got any flies.”

Mitchell: “We did!”

“There’s a bit of footage in the video where you can see the gas man’s boot,” says Ruddel. “It’s either a gas man or a copper.”

Kelly then adds a key point to the rather amusing mishap. “But how the tyre place next door found out about it was because the gas man ran out of the house shouting ‘they’ve got fucking baby’s brains in there!’.”

Whilst the predications of ‘who will be big’ in the next year – along with dull, arguably rigged, polls – continue to shape how we view, and expect to view, the musical year ahead, Eagulls’ bizarre leap into the mainstream eye is one of the wonderful examples of how spontaneity, unpredictability and hard work can still be traits that get you places and consequently re-shape our all-toooften pre-determined musical landscape. They are a group who are used to – and perhaps most comfortable with – playing bring your own booze sweatboxes in the backstreets of Leeds and Sheffield than they are the David Letterman show and this is not likely to change any time soon despite support slots in big venues with the likes of Franz Ferdinand and as they take their raucous debut across the UK, U.S and Europe this year. There is no doubt that Eagulls have arrived in 2014 as some kind of arbitrary underdogs, but the year is theirs for the taking and few could begrudge them smashing it to pieces.

After all, how many bands in 2014 do you know that would turn down $20,000 to wear some chinos for a few seconds?

Reviews / Albums

09/10

Metronomy Love Letters Bec aus e

By To m F en wi c k. In sto re s Ma rch 10

Surveying Metronomy’s career, it’s hard to believe that ‘Love Letters’ is the work of the same man who made ‘Pip Paine (Pay the £5,000 You Owe)’; this album so far removed from the fumbling pop-tronic glitches of that 2006 debut. Of course, in many respects Metronomy isn’t the same project, these days a full band on stage, yet in the studio Joseph Mount still likes to work alone.

If second album ‘Nights Out’ made us sit up and take notice of Mount’s synth-pop eclecticism, his 2011 Mercury-nominated follow-up saw Metronomy stretch far beyond the confines of bedroom production.

‘The English Riviera’ – based around an idealised vision of Mount’s childhood home on the Devon coast – took the term ‘sea-change’ to a fitting conclusion, morphing his ebullient but niche electronica into unexpected realms of avant-garde

romanticism. And with this string of consecutively ambitious albums in his wake, it’s hard not to feel a little trepidatious as you approach fourth album ‘Love Letters’.

Certainly on initial listen, it might feel rather safe for a musician who has been so tireless in his progression; opening with a triptych of simple tunes, awash with programmed drums and minimal atmospherics. But scratch the surface and you’ll discover there’s a subtle complexity at work here; gentle acoustic campfire strum-alongs dissolving into moon-dappled blues (‘The Upsetter’); star-crossed lovers drenched in winsome doowop vocals (‘I’m Aquarius’); ominous rococo synths soundtracking moments of quiet drama on indie dancefloors (‘Monstrous’). These tracks, deceptively slight at first, are amongst Metronomy’s most

compelling to date; like subtle tears in muscle, it’s the minor shifts that serve to hone and strengthen Joe Mount’s sound.

Single ‘Love Letters’ arrives abruptly in a blast of pomp and ceremony; brimming with live percussion, a garrulous barroom piano, four-to-the-floor beats and soulful trumpets. It should be the apex of the record, but in many respects the entire album is constructed from moments of unexpected thrill. Whether that’s in the angular jangle on ‘Month Of Sundays’ – which blends pop with the fizz of rambling post-punk guitars – the darkly seductive bubble of ‘Call Me’, where Mount pleads, “We can get better/We can do anything” over foreboding digital bass and spidery piano, or in the album’s sole instrumental – ‘Boy Racers’: a song that feels almost incidental at first,

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but shudders with a buoyant motorik that dominates the centre of the album.

Of course, it’s not flawless, not quite – ‘Most Immaculate Haircut’ feels a little throwaway, despite Mount’s impassioned vocals, but this is a minor gripe, especially, when it’s followed by the dazzling pop wonder of ‘Reservoir’ and ‘Never Wanted’, the latter closing out the album on a surprisingly stark note.

Doing away with conceptual conceits that supported the paradigm shifts of previous outings, ‘Love Letters’ is the sound of a man with vital new confidence. It sees Joe Mount taking time to finesse the familiar into something rich and exceptional, elevating his lyrics and off-kilter music to a rarely more affecting state, while incorporating the very best elements of his early work.

Reviews 0 7/ 1 0

Future Islands Singles 4a d

By Jo sh S unt h . In sto res M a rch 24

“People change, but some people never do.” So sings Sam Herring on ‘Seasons (Waiting on You)’, the lead single from Future Islands’ third album. Yes, edges soften, blemishes dissipate, but things stay the same – and though Future Islands have worked themselves into the sort of sonic shape that earned their recent move from Thrill Jockey to indie mainstay 4AD, it’s abundantly clear, on ‘Singles’, that they still build their songs around one thing and one thing only – love.

It was over ten years ago Herring, William Cashion and Gerrit Welmers first started writing music together, and with every subsequent record – from the original unashamed

theatrics of ‘In Evening Air’ – they’ve curbed Herring’s characteristic over-pronunciation, weaned themselves off lo-fi sounds, and become more skilful songwriters.

Having recorded this latest LP out of their own pocket, then drafted in producer Chris Coady (who’s worked on everything from Foals to Beach House), the Maryland trio feel decidedly fresh and unusually confident – a band who believe every song here, according to a recent interview, is single-worthy.

Of course, what with Future Islands being hopeless romantics, you can’t help but eye up the double meaning of ‘Singles’, and the peachy lope of this LP (reminiscent of early

Blood Orange or even less electronic slices of Metronomy at times) seems indicative not only of a sonic progression, but a more mature outlook on love, and a more subtle style of song writing. ‘Seasons (Waiting onYou)’ is a love song, but a worldly one. ‘Light House’ is a bittersweet ode to lost romance.

‘Doves’ is a lilting synth-pop dream with Herring’s vocals somersaulting over the top, more evocative than anywhere else on the album as he croons: “Baby don’t hurt anymore.”

The peaks on ‘Singles’ are mighty lofty, then, but absent from troughs it is certainly not. ‘A Dream of You and Me’ is one of the wobbliest tracks here, and though it retains the

imperturbable beach vibe of the rest of the LP, finds itself getting too sentimental and too broad in scope: “Beauty lies in every soul.” ‘Fall From Grace’ errs on the side of melodrama.

There’s a lot of infectious funk on ‘Singles’, and Herring as a vocalist can pull off soulful with palpable ease, but this LP still feels as though it’s one step away from Future Islands’ masterpiece. As a sign of things to come, it’s an exciting record, but not all the tracks here hit the dizzy heights of the opening salvo – where Future Islands tread the line between laid back and grandiose with the poise you’d expect of a band who’ve been plying their trade together for a decade.

Now entering their 25th year, The Notwist’s stylistic picaresque has taken their listeners on a journey from early 90s heavy metal to the pop-tinged crunching electronica of their 2002 mainstream breakthrough ‘Neon Golden’. Math-, jazz-, indieand any number of hyphenated incarnations of rock have been touched upon in between, in an evolution that must rank amongst modern music’s most complete.

This, their ninth album, hints at each of the aforementioned micro

genres, which gives the collection of songs the odd feel of a retrospective.

Its title track and first single, for example, throws us in at the deep end of a pool of relentless synthesised aggression. The results are wonderfully disorientating. Its pummelling Knife-esque groove, however, gives way to the paint by numbers indie of second single ‘Kong’, and it’s this jarring dichotomy that sets the tone for an album that feels glued together and ultimately lacking in the conviction to leave

anything out. It’s a story that plays out across the LP. ‘The Fifth Quarter Of The Globe’’s 49 haunting seconds are infinitely more interesting than the sum of ‘Kong’’s Postal Service schtick or ‘Casino’’s unconvincing acoustic earnestness, while the Liars-inspired ‘Into Another Tune’ turns further and further into itself, building tension with a skill that forces you to question the need for ‘7-Hour-Drive’’s Britpop whimsy.

‘Close To The Glass’ excels when it dares to explore.

0 7/ 1 0

The Notwist Close To The Glass C i ty S l a ng

By Davi d Zammi tt. In sto re s M a rch 24

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Albums 0 4/ 1 0

0 8/10

06 /10

06/ 10

New Bums Voices In A Rented Room

Poemss Poemss

My Sad Captains Best of Times

Bleeding Rainbow Interrupt

Dr ag C i t y

P lane t Mu

Be l l a U ni o n

K a n in e

By J ack Doher t y . In sto re s M a rch 3

B y Jo s h S unt h . I n s to re s Mar ch 1 0

By R e e f Y o uni s . I n s to re s M a r ch 1 0

B y Da is y J o n es . I n s t o r es M a r ch 2 4

Acoustic music had its place once upon a time, there’s no denying that.

However, in 2014, it kinda feels like everything has been said, too many times to remember. Gardeners write folk music. Bankers write folk music.

Even Michael Shannon writes folk music, for God’s sake. In a way it highlights the human races’ lack of originality. People like to think they’re unique, but really, we’re all just like an episode of My Family. We may look a bit different on the surface, but we’re saying the same things we’ve always said, just in a different order.

With ‘Voices in a Rented Room’, New Bums do offer something a bit different to the world of folk, and not just by having ‘Bums’ in their name.

The album is the only acoustic record I can think of that sounds like the group are playing acoustic versions rather than songs made for the acoustic stage. The whole thing makes you scream out for a bit of fuzz. It comes eventually, on ‘Welcome to the Navy’, but by then the damage is done. The message is clear. For the good of mankind, the acoustic has got to go. I’d say “it’s not you, it’s me”, but I’d be lying.

‘Ancient Pony’, the opening track of Poemss’ debut album, suffers from the sort of voiceover that could put you off an LP in a single listen. It’s disconcerting and spooky, with no discernible relevance to the sound of the track itself, an almost inflammatory gesture at the beginning of an LP that, thankfully for Aaron Funk and Joanne Pollock, otherwise treads a perfect line between strange dystopian lullabies and more warm melodic exploration.

Poemss, though, don’t seem the types to worry over accessibility or ease on the ear – being much too preoccupied with their cerebral, lurching sound bites. As in the slow, spooky jam of ‘Moviescapes’, these often melancholic, and more often wildly obtuse, tracks work so well because they channel a sort of unfamiliar warmth: that polyphonic video game sound that seems to furnish most of Poemss feels more like it should be projected into space, but it’s by pure skill that tracks like ‘Gentle Mirror’ are worth so much more than the sum of their parts – and actually feel more and more human with every listen.

Three albums in, and newly signed to Bella Union label, ‘Best of Times’ is My Sad Captains settling into their downbeat sound. Two years on from the Americana-tinged ‘Fight Less, Win More’, theirs is still a sound centred on wistful melodies and Ed Wallis’ rundown vocal. Despite the positive title, it lends ‘Best of Times’ an almost rueful sadness with the sonic swells of ‘In Time’ and the drawn out Mariachi sound of ‘Extra Curricular’ adding to the soft-focus gloom. An album that’s as balanced as you’d expect from a band three records deep, there’s also a measured predictability that makes ‘Best of Times’ a largely one-paced listen. Tracks like the undetonated Secret Machines-esque intent of ‘All Times Into One’ build perfectly without ever threatening, whereas the maudlin guitar lines of ‘All in Your Mind’ only add to the sense that a little bombast to break the melancholy would really allow the album to flourish. Opener ‘Goodbye’ remains a highlight and the thick, reverb drench of ‘InTime’ serves up a snapshot of the impact this band could have if they chose to dial it up.

Despite having a name like your school’s answer to Placebo, Philadelphia four piece Bleeding Rainbow (formerly known not completely differently as Reading Rainbow) sound a lot different to a bunch of teenagers rehearsing in the garden shed: oh wait… no they don’t.

Not that this is a bad thing, though.

Combining ’90s shoe gaze and a lo-fi rawness to what is essentially pop music, the band’s fourth album, ‘Interrupt’, harks back to a time of messy fun and youthful instability.

Polish away the amorphous fuzziness and some tracks could almost be Blink 182 creations in disguise. “I want you to tell me what to do because I don’t know,” sings Sarah Everton and Rob Garcia in second track ‘Tell Me’, against a backdrop of pop-punk riffs and kicking drumbeats. The rest of the album continues in a similar vein; angsty lyricism, raucous drums, tangled together with a hypnotic sonic drone.

It’s a fun album but its only real moments of brilliance are when it gets grungier and dirtier than a flannel shirt caked in mud, and that’s just not often enough.

Lo-fi is a term that’s subject to constant misuse these days, so it’s pleasing to have somebody like Keel Her come along to set us all straight.

The solo project of Brighton native Rose Keeler-Schaffeler, this eighteen-track compilation of her scattershot online releases is bedroom pop in the original sense of the phrase, before the likes of Wild Nothing or Washed Out. A case in point: it was Keeler-Schaffeler who befriended R Stevie Moore online two years back, visiting the king of

bedroom recording in the States and even releasing music with him in 2012.

There’s not too much deviation from her basic sonic palette of scratchy guitar buzz and effectsladen vocals, but there is a fair bit of stylistic variation over the course of the record; ‘Go’ is cut from the same slacker-pop cloth as those early Wavves releases, whilst the doomridden ‘Black Hole’ creates atmosphere with church organ synths and an ominous, spiralling

riff. ‘Pussywhipped’ hints at the fuzzy dream-pop textures of the first Beach House record, although any suggestions of the titular Bikini Kill reference being a non sequitur are shot down by the blistering 2013 single ‘Riot Girl’.

Some of the shorter tracks here seem like discarded ideas that could do with fleshing out – ‘Overtime’ and the almost glitchy ‘Missing Time’ included – but this is a promising debut from an endearingly experimental artist.

0 7/ 1 0

Keel Her Keel Her C r i ti cal H ei g hts

By J oe G oggi n s . I n sto re s Ma rch 10

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Reviews 06/10

0 6/10

07 /10

07/ 10

Headland Sound/Track

Gallon Drunk The Soul of The Hour

Latimer House All The Rage

Real Estate Atlas

Head l an d

Clo ud H i lls

Ho nk

Dom in o

By T hom as May . In store s M a rch 24

B y J o e Goggi n s . I n sto re s Mar c h 1 0

By Jo hn f o rd . I n sto re s Ma r c h 1 7

B y D a i s y J o n es . I n sto r es M a r c h 3

Conceived as a soundtrack to a “non-existent 1970s surf-film”, this is a record predicated on a longing that can never be satiated: a nostalgia not simply for that which is lost, but for that that has never been. Murray Paterson’s Headland project takes its constitutive incompleteness as its central theme, with ‘Sound/Track’ proceeding as a series of haiku-like miniatures: mostly wordless and acoustic, uniformly embryonic.

Despite its near-ascetic modesty, ‘Sound/Track’’s reference points are nonetheless plentiful: echoes of Pink Floyd at their most pastoral, the rustic post-rock of Do Make Say Think, The Beta Band’s understated melodicism – all are subsumed into a spacious, folksy sonic fabric. Lean in and this is a record coloured by a muted spirituality, but the music’s meekness isn’t immune from seeming contrived. Perhaps it’s too prim, its lo-fi recording more homely than ragged. Or perhaps it’s just overly po-faced. In any case, by its close, ‘Sound/Track’ seems less concerned with evoking the mystery of its phantom subject than it is with decorating the walls.

It seems strange to say this about a band with influences as diverse as Gallon Drunk’s are, but their fans probably know what to expect from them at this point, twenty-five years on from their formation. Frontman James Johnston wasn’t chosen to be a touring Bad Seed for nothing; his band have mastered a similar sound to Nick Cave’s men, with dark, grinding guitars and growled, bluesy vocals providing a basic template to which all manner of eccentric instrumentation tends to be applied.

This eighth record is a decidedly mixed bag; epic opener ‘Before the Fire’ pitches the experimentation just right, a measured, increasingly stormy build-up giving way spectacularly to jazzy keyboards and triumphant trumpets. There’s similar instrumental choices contributing to the gloriously effortless strut of the title track, but ‘The Dumb Room’ sounds like present-day Pearl Jam and the hushed ‘Dust in the Light’ feels too restrained to justify its near-seven minute runtime.

Disappointingly few surprises, then, but there’s an irresistible selfconfidence about the whole thing, too.

Latimer House are an ex-pat band operating out of the Czech Republic, consisting of guys from England, Azerbaijan, Canada and America.

Visually, they appear to have a thing of Peter Blake, as if they didn’t sound hodgepodge enough already, and yet ‘All The Rage’ is a debut album of convincing focus that could have only been made by a group of musicians who a.) aren’t kids anymore, and b.) have an unchallenged faith in their leading figure – in this case, lyricist Joe Cook. It’s Cook, the Englishman, who more or less mutes the other nationalities of the group completely, his vocal as deadened and droll as Ian Dury’s, set to what else but rattling guitars and an organ to give tracks like ‘This Is Pop’ an authentic worker’s pub rock feel. There are a couple of classic ’70s Brit touchstones here (The Clash in ‘Open Your Heart’, Chas’n’Dave and the Minder theme tune on the barroom shronk of ‘Red Heart Sequin Blues’), but it really is the influence of The Blockheads that makes Latimer House unhip, gloriously so, and unshackled by fleeting trends.

Unremarkable places have long given rise to great music (Nirvana, Drenge... Britney Spears?). There’s something to be said about the stillness of the suburbs and some music’s ability to amplify the intimate moments, elevating the mundane into something more profound. This is a thought to bear in mind when listening to Real Estate’s third album, ‘Atlas’, a collection of songs that shimmer with the quiet loveliness of their hometown in New Jersey. This in itself could easily be boring (or even sickening) if it weren’t for the wryness of their delivery, off-colouring the psychedelic sunny haze of wooded highways with lyrics weaved with witticisms and melancholia. “How might I live to betray you?” wonders singer Martin Courtney on eighth track ‘How Might I Live’, his voice occasionally dipping into what sounds like Stephen Malkmus in ‘Brighten The Corners’-era Pavement against a backdrop of bare, beguiling guitar. Whilst jangling melancholic pop is nothing new, rarely is it as atmospheric and evocative as it is here.

California-resident, Mexican spouse duo Lorelle Meets the Obsolete sound as if they are one in a series of existentialist-themed children’s books – Rosie and the angry clock, Jim can’t tell if he’s Real etc. – but, prior to futures in publishing, Lorena Quintanilla and Alberto Gonzalez provide a more familiarly formatted contemporary psychedelia, pitched somewhere between the pastoral whimsy of Quilt, the motorik-narcotic explorations of fellow Latin Americans Follakzoid and the

gloves-off bad trip grunge of early Bardo Pond.

The world they move in connects DIY scenes in Buenos Aires, Chicago, New York and in the UK. Sonic Cathedral, who release ‘Chambers’ over here, took stock of these emergent sounds on their great ‘Psych for Sore Eyes’ compilation last February. Quintanilla and Gonzalez’s appearance on that gave rise to some low-rent globetrotting; supporting The Cure in Mexico City and whipping round

Europe to play Liverpool’s International Psych Fest. The single from around that time, the colourdripping motorway music of ‘What’s Holding You?’, is the opener here.

Recorded by heroic kosmiche head Cooper Crain of gamma-emitting space-rockers Cave and mastered by the much-solicited fingers of Sonic Boom, this is a long and meandering third record that rewards sustained attention as well as providing off-the-cuff standouts like ‘Music for Dozens.’

0 7/ 1 0

Lorelle Meets The Obsolete Chambers So n ic C a t h edr a l

By Edgar S mi th . I n store s Ma rch 17

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Albums 06/10

0 6/10

08 /10

08/ 10

Withered Hand New Gods

Scraps Electric Ocean

The War On Drugs Lost in The Dream

F or tu n a Po p

Fir e

Se c re tl y C ana di an

Hatcham Social Cutting Up The Present Leaks Out The Future

By C h r i s Watkeys. I n sto re s M a rch 10

B y Jac k D o he rt y. I n s t o re s M arc h 3

By Tho mas M ay. In s t o re s M a r c h 1 7

O G en es is B y H a r r y F l etch er . I n s t o r es M a r c h 1 7

While folk-pop is a timeless genre, its singer-songwriters are an endless commodity and each new addition to this almost depthless sea can easily sink without trace without something remarkable to buoy them up. It’s difficult to say that Scottish folkster Dan Willson (who goes by the worryingly limp name of Withered Hand) has achieved that with ‘New Gods’, his second LP. ‘Horseshoe’ is the kind of song which seeps out of SomaFM’s ‘Indie Pop Rocks’ channel; a jangly, melodic, insubstantial and slightly anodyne whiff of fresh air, and it’s difficult to dispel the image of Evan Dando sitting in a room, churning out b-sides to order, from your mind on ‘Love Over Desire’, a country-tinged, lap-steel travelogue with a soaring chorus. Then all of a sudden the magnificent ‘California’ reminds us that a handful of minor chords and a few sad words can still cut through the fat and sear the soul time and time again. In the final reckoning though, ‘New Gods’ is an album that will add merely a nickel and a few dimes to the inestimable wealth of this genre.

Every bedroom sounds like the 1980s.

Every. Single. Bedroom. If you stepped into a bedroom now, any bedroom, and placed your ear against the wall, you’d hear the 1980s. But it wouldn’t be the real 1980s; that died a long time ago. No, what you would hear from the bedroom would be a 1980s that was never lived. A 1980s with synth tones gooier than the gunge Dave Benson Philips got his own back in and reverb so dense you can’t see the wood for the bad haircuts. Scraps’ debut album, ‘Electric Ocean’, is a love letter to this fake decade adored by the bedrooms of the world. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that; in fact at times it’s quite heartwarming. ‘Gone’ and ‘Electric Ocean’ are like the popular motion picture Drive, but with more Gameboy action.

And if there’s one thing that film was missing, it was definitely a bit of Gameboy action. However, these moments are few and far between. In the main, ‘Electric Ocean’ is nothing but another synth pop experiment gone mediocre.The bedrooms will be raving about it all year. The ears won’t remember it next week.

It was inevitable that The War On Drugs would begin to distance themselves from their once-voguish brand of post-Chillwave Springsteen.

‘Lost In The Dream’’s lead single, ‘Red Eyes’, doesn’t so much emerge out of the bedroomy fog of second album ‘Slave Ambient’ as burn it off in the midday sun of the American midwest; singer Adam Granduciel’s vocals dominate a robust rock arrangement, the motorik-haunted stoicism of the group’s past music dispelled in a burst of compact hooks and visceral gear changes. Just plain-old Springsteen, then, or it would be were the political urgency of trad-Heartland rock not eschewed in favour of ambiguity. Throughout, Granduciel’s lyrics construct wisdom from evocative incomprehensibility, and when grand themes do surface, they’re cast as distant abstractions.

But if that all seems a little evasive, it’s only because The War On Drugs are aiming for something altogether loftier: ‘Lost InThe Dream’ embodies a big-hearted Americana, one that trades the knotted complexity of the quotidian for a wistful, widescreen beauty.

The BBC’s Sound of 2014 list was littered with anonymous honeyvoiced droids. Sterile pop is the order of the day, and guitar bands like Hatcham Social probably won’t be getting anything like the critical and commercial recognition they deserve this year. Nevertheless, the London four-piece are ploughing on defiantly with ‘Cutting Up The Present Leaks Out The Future’, their gratifyingly grubby third LP, and U-turn from the inspid pop of ‘About Girls’. Released on Tim Burgess’ O Genesis label, it smacks of early Velvet Underground, and Lou Reed himself would have been pleased with the sleaze of album opener ‘Ketamine Queen’.

There’s a refreshingly unrefined feel to the production throughout.

Guitars, drums, vocals, a few atmospheric strings, and that’s it.

The uncluttered composition gives a simultaneously candid and vulnerable quality to the album, no more so than on ‘To the Moon’, the sound of a burnt-out junkie staring wistfully up at the stars. It’s a grimy, gauche affair with bags of personality – something to be celebrated in 2014.

Four albums into a career that has yielded, relatively speaking, considerable commercial success, Wild Beasts seem to have consciously decided that it’s time to get serious. Gone for the most part are the stagey, yelpy vocals that helped mark out the band, and there’s certainly no infectiously poppy ‘All The King’s Men’ to be found on this new record. It is an album, though, that in places almost oozes with the talent of its creators, a talent slickly captured by clean, pure, polished

production.

Lead single ‘Wanderlust’ is poised electronic pop, with a strangely incongruous church organ floating under hard-edged lyrics (“Don’t confuse me with someone who gives a fuck” is the repeated lyrical refrain). On ‘Nature Boy’, Hayden Thorpe’s vocals have the resonant quality of a deeper-toned Antony Hegarty, while the sombre atmosphere and expansive, echoing percussion of ‘Daughters’ hints at Depeche Mode and makes it one of

the album’s most interesting tracks.

There is a feeling of restrained power running through ‘Present Tense’, and that can be a very good thing, but at times, like on closer ‘Palace’, Wild Beasts go too far in that direction and things become a little one-paced and ponderous.

For a band who don’t wish to repeat themselves – and who are no doubt ready to sell some records – ‘Present Tense’ makes total sense.

It’s a heavyweight effort, almost devoid of fun, but heavy with feeling.

0 7/ 1 0

Wild Beasts Present Tense Domi n o

By C h r i s Watkeys. I n sto re s Feb 24

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Reviews 08/10

0 6/10

02/10

07/ 10

Solids Blame Confusion

Vertical Scratchers Daughters of Everything

Dean Wareham Dean Wareham

F a t Po ss um

Merge

Sudden Death of Stars All Unrevealed Parts Of The Unknown

By Davi d Zamm i tt. In sto re s Ma rch 17

B y Sam C o rn f o rth . I n sto re s MA rc h 3

S o n ic Ca th e d r a l B y Da n iel Dy la n W r a y . I n sto r es M a r c h 1 0

Amp l e Pl ay

By Harry Fl et c h e r. In stor e s M a r ch 1 0

The debut LP from Montreal duo Solids is already being labelled as a throwback. But while ‘Blame Confusion’ takes the textural baton from early ’90s noise rock royalty Dinosaur Jr and SonicYouth with the firmest of grips, the imagination of Xavier Germain-Poitras and Louis Guillemette’s songwriting means that it manages to run unerringly forward, sounding fresh every step of the way. I’ve chosen to take the album’s title as a command from a pair who cite chaos as their muse, however, far from messy, ‘Blame Confusion’ gives a shape to that disorder. Like their influences, Solids place the utmost importance on melody and, though complex, this is very much a structured ride, teeming with towering choruses and tantalising hooks. The distorted high notes on the title track hit you just behind the tear ducts, while ‘Laisser Faire’ stirs up that melancholy optimism that only a perfectly sequenced series of distorted minor chords can conjure. The ethic here seems to be that if something is buried then it becomes all the more precious and I have to agree.

After meeting at a thanksgiving party, John Schmersal and Christian Beaulieu formedVertical Scratchers, and just like the mishmash of battered walls inside The Smell in Los Angeles where they recorded ‘Daughter of Everything’, the contents of this first album that they have made together is a jumble of unhinged garage rock. A rawness fizzles through every single one of these songs – most clock in under the two minute mark – but it most certainly isn’t an invigorating fist pumping racket like fellow Smell kings No Age produce. Not that this matters when ‘Someone’ shows a group breaking into a confident jangly pop stride and ‘These Plains’ perfectly shows off Schmersal’s dazzling falsetto, whereas ‘Get Along Like U’ features Robert Pollard’s guest vocals that make for a surprising jaunty boogie. However, on the whole, ‘Daughter of Everything’ is a baffling listen that is nauseating, frustrating and irritating with its stop-start nature that is a bit like being served up tiny portions of fifteen main meals in one bowl.

Silly songs and sitar wig-outs; this French collective may have put together the most un-essential album of the year. Combine Temples and Django Django, camp the whole thing up and add extra cheese and you’ve got Sudden Death of Stars; another of those kitsch guitar bands that are inexplicably still out there, in this case, from the more unusual area of Brittany, but still unimaginatively inspired by little more than The Velvet Underground.

‘Unrevealed Parts of the Unknown’, is a truly forgettable collection of psychedelic pop songs. Some of it, like opening track ‘The Void’, is languid Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd pastiche, while most of it sounds like phantasmagorical B52s b-sides. It’s indulgent, charmless and contrived, but most significantly, it lacks even the smallest scintilla of a memorable tune and wears very thin, very quickly.

“I’ve got a magical mirror baby,” sings the group on ‘Magical Mirror’.

On the evidence of this spectacularly tedious LP, they should use it to have a long hard look at themselves, and think about what they’ve done.

Since ‘Galaxie 500’, Dean Wareham has released many records via outfits such as Luna and with his wife Britta, as Dean and Britta, but this, a full 27 years after he first release an album professionally, marks his first fully solo venture. There is some characteristically glossy, silken and floaty production by My Morning Jacket’s Jim James and Wareham’s voice still quivers with a unique, fragile beauty - on album highlights (such as ‘Heartless People’) it can be wrenchingly affecting – “Somebody tell me, which way the power lies,” Wareham pleads over the country track that gently waltzes and wanes to brushed drum skins and weeping guitar strings. A propensity to curl-off Velvets-esque guitar swirls is still something Wareham can do with both ease and conviction, but he largely restrains throughout most of this record, and while there are some more explosive and inflammatory moments, it’s ultimately a sparse, restrained and minimal record, but one that understands the weight and power just a guitar and voice placed in the hands of Dean Wareham can hold.

With their first collaborative release in four years, Stanley Brinks (formerly André Herman Dune until he left the band named after him in 2006) and The Wave Pictures coalesce the best of both worlds in ‘Gin’, an album that is as intriguing as it is uncomplicated.

Following on from two previous joint albums released in 2009 and 2010, and recorded entirely live in the studio without headphones or overdubs, ‘Gin’ has been crafted with a great deal of improvisation,

partly due to The Wave Pictures not getting a chance to learn the songs before the session began because Brinks forgot to put a stamp on the demo tape he’d sent them from Berlin. It’s a favourable mishap because ‘Gin’ is something that sounds offhand but focused, and effortlessly captivating.

As a collection of songs, it weaves between the avant-garde and primitive folk, though it remains lyrically centred throughout with the classic recording techniques oozing

an old-school ambience. Inspired by my favourite tipple, the drink was the subject for the writing and recording process and ‘Gin’ sounds appropriately disjointed but surprisingly balanced.

For those who are familiar with Brinks’ huge discography, this is a notable rawer and less refined outing than some of his previous work, but it remains typically rich in a variety of sounds and original structures; the songs are looser, more playful and all the more endearing because of it.

0 7/ 1 0

Stanley Brinks & The Wave Pictures - Gin F i ka

By H ay l ey S c ott. I n sto re s Ma rch 3

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Albums 06/10

St Vincent St Vincent C ar ol in e

By Dani el Dy l an Wra y. In sto re s M a rch 13

After the airing of the rather jagged, scattered and slightly neurotic ‘Birth in Reverse’, all signs pointed to a fierce and unpredictable LP from St Vincent. While the capricious and tantalising mania found on said song has indeed succeeded in spreading through the presence and approach of this ensuing record, the streamlined consistency of its execution sadly has not. Any sense of unpredictability, at least in any experimental sense, often disappears into what can become quite a messy, muddy and (occasionally) even monotonous record.

The opening quartet of songs are charged, eclectic and coated with an atmosphere that radiates a delightful

sense of impulsiveness and showcase St Vincent at her greatest and most endearing. The opening (and arguable album highlight) ‘Rattlesnake’, for example, sparks a fuse to create a perfect concoction of discombobulated beats and wiry, scratchy guitar with Annie Clark’s tense but controlled vocal delivery.

It’s a track that can feel as light and bouncy as it can intense and seething. An early lyrical peak can then be found on ‘Prince Johnny’, the word play and imagery packed into its brief excursion again showcasing the wonderful highs that Clark is capable of reaching as a songwriter.

However, by the time we hit ‘Digital Witness’ (a scraggly, left-over

sounding cut from her recent David Byrne collaboration) things begin to wobble and lose momentum.

St Vincent can do simplistic, repetitive refrain wonderfully (see ‘Strange Mercy’’s beauty ‘Year ofThe Tiger’) but on the almost too similar ‘I Prefer Your Love’ it’s difficult to extract anything new from the now already familiar approach she’s undertaking. It becomes something of a recurring issue as way too many song structures and patterns sound like previous St Vincent cuts.

The second half of the record is scattered with moments of brilliance but just as frequently it is filled with the forgettable and the anticipated.

‘Psychopath’ feels somewhat

fleeting, a blurry sketch of a song that then bleeds into a murky, feeble hobble to the finish line.The following ‘Every Tear Disappears’ looks set to rattle and spark into life from the sputtering electronics that bubble and bark underneath but, like a lot of the latter half of the record, the most interesting musical experiments are hushed and supressed into the background, left to create yet another backing-track for a very vocalprominent take. As beautiful as Annie Clark’s vocals are, by album closer ‘Severed Crossed Fingers’ one can’t help but feel she’s stuck a little too rigidly to a formula and consequently squashed any underlying experimentation with it.

Good news for those who revelled in the online tizzy over MØ at the start of last year: it’s hard not to fall for multiple cuts from her wonderfullyproduced debut album, which, for the most part, is a colourful clamour of earworming gems. As hoped, the Danish songstress packs virtually every crevice of ‘No Mythologies To Follow’ with sparkling hooks and the result is something to be mooned over – like a 2014 Baccara, but for insatiable bloggers.

‘Fire Rides’ kicks off the party,

with a theatrical Florence-like organ intro and her Del Rey-ish inflection, which later morphs into the sort of whirring electro banger that littered Yeah Yeah Yeah’s ‘It’s Blitz!’. There’s also hints of Little Dragon throughout – a group MØ cites as an influence – but this isn’t nearly as demure; it’s spangled, unabashed and keen to woo. Her early forays still prove to be the epitome of this; ‘Pilgrim’’s glitchy jam and ‘Maiden’, with its juddering groove and pretty little guitar licks that flutter and swirl, both dazzle.

That said, MØ seems a little too eager to score an Icona Pop-sized smash, especially with new single ‘Don’t Wanna Dance’, which is a notquite-cloying behemoth saved only by its early mystery and eventual parping strut. Although, it’s a moot point, perhaps, considering it should well accomplish its mission to be heard in millions of homes alongside the orange faces and perma grins of Saturday night telly. Fun and intelligent, it’s like Grimes’ ‘Visions’ reworked for frivolous weekends.

0 7/ 1 0

MØ No Mythologies to Follow C h es s C l u b

By Ja mes Wes t . I n sto re s no w

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Reviews / Live

Bill Callahan Irish Centre, Leeds 0 5/ 0 2/ 20 14 wr it er Dan iel Dyla n Wra y Ph otogr a ph er Ro y J B a ro n

“So, I was in Dublin the other night playing at the Leeds Centre,” Bill Callahan deadpans a few songs into his set; a kind of humour that seeps out the tiny cracks of a smile he barely makes whilst saying it. He appears to be enjoying life on stage at the moment: from the mini skips and shuffles that his feet do when in a groove, to the near two-hour set he plays tonight, there is a subtle playfulness to Callahan and the performance. However, in true

fashion, this is something he uses as a platform to challenge us rather than pander us.

Abandoning the atmospherics of the flute-filled, gliding dreaminess found on recent LP ‘Dream River’, he sticks to electric guitar all night, the reverb dial turned high and with his tremolo bar an ever-shimmering presence. After the success of the ‘Apocalypse’ tour, he’s retained the powerful services of drummer and astute percussionist Neal Morgan

and the scratchy, atmospheric guitar wail of Matt Kinsey, and added the rock-steady bass rolls of Jamie Zuverza. Material consists almost entirely from his last three solo records which, when woven together as one, highlights a genuinely overlooked consideration: Bill Callahan has been at one of his highest artistic peaks in recent years, even if an early outing of an intensely stripped back Smog number, ‘Dress Sexy at My Funeral’,

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does get a loudly applauded outing.

‘One Fine Morning’ and ‘Riding for the Feeling’ are exemplary, majestic in their refrained echo, Callahan’s voice allowed to rise perfectly above the delicate, hushed backing and hit that magic spot of a song feeling like it’s being directly funnelled into your ears. But the success of tonight lies in the output of an artist comfortable in his achievements but refusing to rest on them.

Reviews

East India Youth The Lexington, London

Poliça All Saints Church, Brighton

0 6/ 0 2/ 20 14

1 0/ 02 / 2 01 4

wr iter : Th omas May

w r ite r : N a t h a n We stley P h o to g r a p h e r : Mi k e B u rnell

The grand room within All Saints Church may be more used to holding events of a religious nature, but on this blustery night it plays host to an American band that has slowly seduced the public with a bevy of understated electronic pop songs.

Whilst second album ‘Shulamith’ saw Poliça forge a stronger connection with fans of future RnB, it equally retained a healthy level of animosity, and on the penultimate night of this tour, the Twin City group hustle and bustle as they create a form of pop music that arrives cloaked in a sophisticated web of melodies and double pivoted rhythms, coated with the bewitching vocals of singer Channy Leaneagh.

The warped RnB grooves of ‘Lay Your Cards Out’ and the more vibrant ‘Chain My Name’ echo around the cloisters like a sermon from some strangely beautiful future.

It’s perhaps fitting that the plaintive strains of Arvo Pärt’s stately minimalism are chosen to herald William Doyle’s appearance on stage tonight. But if this is alt. pop’s New Simplicity, then East India Youth’s blocky textures also flirt with the simplistic in a way that Pärt’s avoid. Although this limitation is mitigated by the stand-offish precision of debut album ‘Total Strife Forever’, the tracks’ live transformations into head-banging/ f i s t - pumping / gui t a r- t hr a shing anthems only served to accentuate their latent sentimentalism. And yet whilst Doyle is doubtless a talented performer, carrying off an eclectic set with ease and panache, I can’t help but wonder whether East India Youth’s live incarnation might be considerably invigorated by an eensy concession to irony amidst its allencompassing earnestness.

Young Fathers Electrowerkz, Islington

Anna Calvi All Saints Church, Brighton

13 / 0 2/ 20 14

11/02 / 2 0 1 4

wr iter : Th omas May

writer: Na t ha n We s tley P hot o gra p h e r Mi ke Burnell

Despite often being labelled as such, Young Fathers aren’t exactly hip-hop, or even hipster hop. But nor are the Edinburgh-based group as “genre defying” as equally many have come to claim. What Young Fathers are are a great boy band.This is music that thrives on personality, a quality in which the group is steeped in. Yet, in the same way that Young Fathers’ stylistic eclecticism coheres to form an unpretentiously vibrant pop music, the group’s trio of front-men individualise themselves only to invigorate their unified whole.

Melodies and rhymes are traded with aplomb, as are the bedroom-mirror dance moves that surface in suitably ramshackle droves. And even if the façade of unkempt spontaneity is eroded momentarily during the precisely choreographed tableau at the climax of set closer ‘I Heard’, you’d have been hard pressed to care.

Critical appreciation may be a heavy weight to carry for some artists, but Anna Calvi never gives off the impression of an artist weighed down by expectation, as she sails through a nineteen-song set list in this grand venue. She steps out onto the high, dimly lit stage to deliver a captivating performance that, apart from a few whoops and declarations of love, silences the audience for the duration. Whilst songs such as ‘I’ll Be Your Man’ have traces of the type of dark nocturnal spirit that is commonly found on Nick Cave recordings, Calvi is more normally haunted by lingering comparisons to a more grandiose, ‘Rid Of Me’ era PJ Harvey. On songs such as ‘Suddenly’ it would be severely unfair to label her as anyone else, though, an perhaps it’s this – and her unflinching guitar playing – that provides Calvi with the quiet confidence she displays.

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Live

The bigger the venue Fuck Buttons play, it would seem, the slower, louder and more insouciant they become. At their biggest headline show yet, Andrew Hung and Benjamin John Power amble onto the Forum’s stage and launch straight into the lurching, dislocated drums of ‘Stalker’, the most hiphopindebted track on the latest record.

It’s a brave opening – less a grand arrival, more insidious slithering from the darkness – but it works, and the duo maintain the pace of slow menacing swagger for half an hour, gradually upping the volume from tactile to abrasive as they go.

Combined with the mesmerising projections resembling a deviant variation of the noughties’ iPod ads, all rainbow colours and gyrating silhouettes, it makes for a disorientating time warp: when the pair roll into ‘Olympians’, upping the tempo and general sonic temperature for a second act that feels altogether more sinister and, unbelievably, louder still, it feels as if they’ve been playing for hours. Their venues are growing, and their volume, but Fuck Buttons also seem to be approaching the peak of their musical powers.

Fuck Buttons The Forum, Kentish Town 0 7/ 0 2/ 20 14 wr i ter : S am Walton Ph otogr aph er : Ro y J B a ron

Girl Band Old Blue Last, Shoreditch

Mogwai Royal Festival Hall, London

Kylesa Brundenell, Leeds

Younghusband Madame JoJo’s, Soho

23 / 0 1/ 20 14

24/0 1 / 2 0 1 4

31 / 0 1 / 2 0 1 4

2 8 / 01 / 2 01 4

wr i ter : C h al Rav e ns

wri te r: C hri s Watk e ys

wri te r: S e an Mcge ad y

w r it er : S a m u el B a lla r d

Despite their (regrettable) name, Girl Band are nothing like any band you’ve seen in years. Devoid of the retrophilia that has reduced rock music to a recycling plant, the Dubliners attack their instruments as if they were self-taught, free of constricting tropes and often veering into metronomic, almost technoshaped heaviness. If you had to pin a precursor on them, you might think of Shellac’s clear-headed, no-fudging aesthetic, with vocals loud in the mix and very little reverb, while singer Dara Kiely is a descendant of Mark E. Smith, his wry lyrical nuggets barked into unlikely poetry (“He starts every sentence with / I know I’m not a racist but...”) in a manner so conversational and so utterly punk it belies what must be a well-practised stage demeanour. If you seek out just one guitar noise this year, make it the elasticated buzzsaw riff of ‘Lawman’.

Under the backdrop of a giant sci-fi eye, the always brutally loud Mogwai tap once more into that raging river of noise. New album ‘Rave Tapes’ – further proof that the band’s viciously realised creativity is yet to wane – dropped a few days ago, and tonight Stuart Braithwaite, the benign dictator of this venerated post-rock authority, sways and rocks stage right; while the huge stage seems a little bare, the noise this band makes has a huge physical presence all of its own. But the sheer volume is not merely a blunt instrument, shot through as it is with intermittent electronica, and while Mogwai bring the storm, they also bring the beauty, weaving melodies into their cataclysmic noise and retreating very occasionally to passages of quiet beauty in a set, which reminds us all of their unquenchable and continuing creative powers.

Laura Pleasants, hauls her Les Paul Goldtop back over her diminutive frame as she retakes the stage for an encore. Distorted by the room’s unusual dimensions, lights spiral across the crowd and bathe Kylesa in effervescent and fluctuating patterns, a spectacle analogous to the band’s kaleidoscopic sound.

Seeded in sludge, crust, and psychedelia, but with offshoots of pop, shoegaze and grunge, the enormous sonic weight with which they operate is deftly handled, with plundering rhythms, pulverising dual percussion, and leaden hooks presented with clarity and passion.

Laura’s is a magnetic presence, with vocals ranging from bloodcurdling to spectral, in contrast with the bellows of fellow vocalist Phillip Cope. By the time they close, Kylesa prove that despite swirling sounds, they’re able to strike a balance others butcher.

Entering the seedy underground lair that is Madame JoJo’s always thrills me. Whether it’s the sultry, illicit atmosphere or the seedy, stripclub furnishings, I’m not sure, but it’s the type of place you see in those 60s gangster movies. At odds with this are psychedelic four-piece Younghusband who are playing on the back of their debut LP ‘Drones’.

Right from the off, the show lacks something. Opener ‘Wavelength’ burns too slowly and leaves a lot of people at the bar talking – loudly. It sags on the side of background noise and the difficulty of playing a gig before a club night is brought starkly home.You’ve got to grab the audience by the throat and don’t let go rather than try and softly win them over.

There are highlights though and real moments with tracks like ‘Silver Sisters’, but overall I’d rather have been watching a gangster film.

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Cinema 08/ 10

It wasn’t me

by Ian Roebuck

The Double direct o r : R ichard A y o ade S tarring : J esse E isenberg , M ia Wasi k o wsk a , C hris O ’ Do wd

Jesse Eisenberg’s body language in The Double is a visceral celluloid assault. He’s effortlessly Simon James and James Simon, the takeover dramatic and all consuming… but he’s not the first.

When it comes to the movies, the dual-personality is a manipulative tool that’s been used to wicked effect. Here’s our top ten mind benders.

10.

Psycho’s Norman Bates Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel riffs with our perception of self; it’s certainly one of the earlier examples in popular culture of a character split into two.

Our Norman internalises his dead mother and climbs the stairs in a dress to put the willies into us all.

Alfred Hitchcock was instantly captivated and much of his output followed suit by exploring the troubled psyche.

09.

Lord of the Rings’ Gollum Haunted by a dissociative identity disorder, Gollum’s both frantic and fragmented. In the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings his Machiavellian behaviour dictates the plot and dominates the screen. A career defining showstopper from Andy Serkis.

08.

A Scanner Darkly’s Bob Arctor We’re all familiar with Keanu Reeves’ inexpressive face; it’s what stands him out from the crowd. Well in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly blankness is a virtue. As a result of too much substance D, the illicit drug that’s the focus of the film, his two brain hemispheres become separate and competing entities. Is he still the narc, determined to stamp out this dangerous drug, or the stoned addict sat on his sofa?

07.

Me, Myself & Irene’s Charley Baileygates & Hank Evans Off the back of the astounding Man on the Moon, Jim Carey returned to default with the Farrelly brothers giddy Me, Myself and Irene. With the unsubtle tagline ‘from gentle to mental’ the brothers grim gave Carey carte blanche to be as silly as possible, and the result is Hank. It’s why Renee Zellweger spends 116 minutes looking perpetually scared.

06.

Secret Window’s Mort Rainey Based on a Stephen King novel, this David Koepp film fell flat on its arse in 2004. A shame as it was swimming with potential and starred two of the best John’s around in Depp and Turturro. After a breakdown in his marriage, Depp’s writer Mort Rainey retreats to the forest and has an existential breakdown punctuated by plenty of knocks on the door from Turturro’s Shooter. We all saw the ending coming though, didn’t we?

is, romance so often the vehicle through which characters fracture, andTyler doesn’t pull any punches. Ha!

03.

Shutter Island’s Teddy Daniels Boston 1954 is the backdrop for Scorsese’s mind melting Shutter Island. Ever the craftsman, the Director gradually deconstructs Leonardo DiCaprio’s Teddy. Are we hallucinating as he fluctuates from an institutionalised mental patient who murdered his wife, to a US Marshal investigating a mental institution?

02.

Black Swan’s Nina Sayers The delicate Princess Odette, a pure white swan against the dangerous Odile, a venomous black one. That’s the crux of Darren Aronofsky’s delicious Black Swan, 2010’s runaway standout and a fantastical exploration of schizophrenia. Natalie Portman flutters from dark to light as the tension between her and Mila Kunis crackles.

05.

Raising Cain’s Carter/Cain/ Dr Nix/Josh/Margo

01.

Lost Highway’s Fred Madison

We love John Lithgow and we love Brian De Palma so this gloriously over the top thriller holds dear memories. It’s camp, heavily signposted fun and Lithgow clearly had a blast playing such manic and wildly scattershot roles.

Lynch manages to divide opinion like nobody else and in the Lost Highway he divides the film itself. The 1997 film marked the point of no return for the imaginative Director – why explain the unexplainable? We spend the opening hour with Bill Pullman’s Fred Madison and the closing hour with Balthazar Getty’s Pete Dayton.

A disjointed triumph that’s stolen by Lynch’s terrifying Mystery Man played by Robert Blake.

04.

Fight Club’s Tyler Durden Tyler’s perhaps one of modern cultures most referenced dualpersonalities. Created by the narrator of Fight Club’s insomnia induced insanity, it’s a love interest that triggers his appearance. Of course it

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There is an old Norse saying – ‘everything has two sides, at least’.

Here’s another: ‘he who lies on the floor doesn’t fall down’. Being half Norwegian, this deadpan Scandinavian sensibility floods Richard Ayoade’s work. His most recent and perhaps most revealing subject is The Double, an acerbically funny take on Dostoyevsky’s novella that uncovers Ayoade as a mutineer Director after the quixotic delights of his debut Submarine.

Ayoade himself admits this film is designed for discomfort but just as David Lynch tickled us in black fascination throughout the wonderfully dry Eraserhead, Ayoade conjures up a similar world. We shouldn’t laugh when Jesse Eisenberg’s timid Simon James is usurped in both his job and love life by the rambunctious James Simon but we do. Ayoade skilfully arches the arrival of this split persona and subsequent thunder with elegant simplicity and it’s testament to the believability of the brave new world we’re confronted with. Hums, clicks, whirrs and clanks soundtrack the dystopian backdrop, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, papers are copied and processed but we’ve little idea what for. It doesn’t matter as the soul of the story lays in the romance between the fantastic Eisenberg and the even better Mia Wasikowska, her Hannah a beautiful study of loneliness lent an air of mystery through Ayoade’s Peeping Tomesque touches of voyeurism. The clandestine relationship evolves into something real through the fog of the make-believe bleakness; the impressive clarity of human emotion that stirred Submarine is once again a welcome beacon here. So The Double is destined to be a subversive delight, a cult picture that showcases Ayoade as a future big-hitter. Can it break the big-time? Probably not, but as the Norwegian’s might say, ‘it was a small but excellent party, said the man; he was drinking alone’.

Party wolf idiot tennis Game. Set. Twat.

thought sport In the minds of horse racing fans 2

1

David Silvester

IDIOT

Vladimir Putin

UKIP’s weatherman

FAME

Dobby The House Elf

“Gays broke the weather”

MOST LIKELY TO SAY

“Gays broke Russian”

“Sorry. GALES broke the weather”

LEAST LIKELY TO SAY

“... so maybe I’m Gay?”

Joining UKIP and saying gays broke the weather

IDIOT POWER PLAY GAME, SET & MATCH

... and this guy

crush hour Finding love in a hopeless place

4

5

6

1. Urgh. He’s got his arm around Sam 2. So glad I’m not Sam right now 3. Poor Sam, he’ll leave a stain on that jacket 4. This is fun, right? It’s fine. I’m having fun 5. He doesn’t fancy Sam more than me, does he?

6. Cheese

Celebrity twitter

To the hen do I had a laugh with at Leicester Square, sorry about my wife. What was her problem?

The guy who sat on all of your laps

DavyC@David_PM

21m

RT “@GOsborne Bet we still have a ‘drought’ this summer. Lol”

To the hunk who I always lock eyes with at Benfleet train station, don’t be mad, but I followed you home Your secret admirer, Jean Barrett

DavyC@David_PM

22m

#wastedjourney

DavyC@David_PM

To the cute girl who asked me to push the button for her on the 29, you owe me!

Man in black gloves

25m

All the shops are closed!

DavyC@David_PM

To the fit girl I gave up my seat for at Old Street, it was like that when I sat down Nervous Traveller

I’m in Devon. Terrible weather

(

Photo casebook “The sexy world of Ian Beale”

(

Errrm, helloooo...

There is a queue here!

You’re for it now, sunshine!

Your arse isn’t going to touch the ground!

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27m

Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious

This guy...

How long have you got?

3