Loud And Quiet 46 – Foxygen by LoudAndQuiet

Loud And Quiet Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 46 / the alternative music tabloid

F OXYG E N The 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic

fiction deptford goth fun adultS Blank Realm unknown mortal orchestra night works yo la tengo

contents MARCH 2013

0 9 . . . . . . . . . . W h e n w i l l th e i nte r n e t e at its e l f? It’s been a shitty 2013 so far for music’s Material World

10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . songs & Books The month’s singles, EPs and page-turners from Wild Smiles, Drenge, Galpals and more

cover photography Gemma Harris

1 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LEFTO V E R S FIDLAR ASK TRASH TALK about injuries, road rulEs, skate boarding and who get’s the most girls Contact info@loudandquiet.com

R e - e d u ca t i n g i n d i e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 London band Fiction discuss their part in returning indie music to its book smart roots

H A P P Y E V E R A FTE R LIFE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 6

Loud And Quiet PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Editor - Stuart Stubbs Art Director - Lee Belcher Sub Editor - Alex Wilshire film editor - Ian roebuck

Deptford Goth happily present bedroom-produced debut album ‘Life After Defo’

Advertising advertise@loudandquiet.com

No Ch i ldre n Allo w e d . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Contributors Bart Pettman, Carl Partridge, Chal Ravens, Chris Watkeys, Cochi Esse, Daniel Dylan Wray, Danny Canter, DAVID Sutheran, DK Goldstien, Elinor Jones, elliot kennedy, Edgar Smith, Frankie Nazardo, Gareth Arrowsmith, Janine Bullman, LEE BULLMAN, Kate Parkin, Kelda Hole, Gabriel Green, Gemma Harris, Leon Diaper, Luke Winkie, Mandy Drake, Matthias Scherer, Nathan Westley, Owen Richards, Olly Parker, PAVLA KOPECNA, Polly Rappaport, Phil Dixon, Phil Sharp, Reef Younis, Samuel ballard, Sam Walton, Sonia Melot, sonny McCartney, Tim Cochrane, Tom Pinnock, TOM Warner

Fun Adults inevitable success will no doubt come from the band’s personal history AND skills in stone masonry

Fam i ly T i e Dy e s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 9 Daniel Dylan Wray gets weather envy as he talks to Brisbane lo-fi psych siblings Blank Realm

N i g h t W INNING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 0 The third coming of Gabriel Stebbing (as Nigh Works) might just be his greatest hour yet

D R UGGING T H E V OID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 2 Ruban Nielson quit music only to fill the gap by accidently creating Unknown Mortal Orchestra

B r e at h e I t I n . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4 Foxygen’s bid for ’60s greatness is too blatant and accomplished to be challenged on grounds so stuffy as originality

N o t Fa d e A way . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 0 After 28 years in the underground’s outfield, latest album ‘Fade’ has reinvigorated love and interest Yo La Tengo

This Month L&Q Loves Amanda freeman, Duncan Jordan, Keong Woo, lucy Hurst, Richard Onslow, Sacha Shaikh, Stuart Davies The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opini ons of the magazine or its staff. All rights reserved 2013 Loud And Quiet. ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Sharman & Company LTD.

36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . albums films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Hookworms, mazes, daughter, the strokes, palma violets, psychic ills and more

Ian Roebuck Pitches the blockbusters against the little(r) league of 2013

4 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . l i v e par t y w o l f . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 0 kraftwerk, dinosaur jr., maria minerva, conor oberst, metz and more

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Idiot Tennis, Thought sport, ...on Gangs, My time and The sexy world of ian beale

welcome March 2013

For the physical world of music – and music journalism, in particular – it’s not been the happiest 30 odd days between last month’s Loud And Quiet and this March 2013 edition. Despite some confusion on Twitter, Artrocker magazine didn’t close down but rather swapped paper for pixels as it unexpectedly re-launched as a ‘100% tablet publication’ while The Stool Pigeon called it a day altogether, on the same date that iTunes logged its 25 billionth download. Stuart Stubbs rounds up the shitty start to 2013 on page 09 and notes that the Internet’s video content boom might prove to be in the music journalist’s favour. A young band that don’t seem to be too concerned with the rise of the machines is Foxygen (page 24), which considering their ages (God knows what they are, but ‘young’ covers it nicely) is something of a surprise, and considering their music (re-written Summer Of Love pop) definitely isn’t. Jonathan Rado and Sam France have always known the Internet and their shunning of it – hardly uncommon in the world of indie bands – feel less like a stubborn grudge and more like two young men too engrossed in their record collections to log on to FaceBook. ‘New’, we’re reminded in this issue, doesn’t necessarily mean ‘original’, and ‘unoriginal’ doesn’t always mean ‘shit’. After all, while Foxygen’s new album might fall short of ‘Let It Bleed’, if The Rolling Stones had written anything half as good since the early seventies they wouldn’t still be playing ‘It’s Only Rock’n’Roll’. Which of course it is.

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contri b utor

D av id Z a mmi t t Writer

David began contributing to Loud And Quiet in September 2012, as we were putting together issue 42. He’s settled in marvelously. He writes for a number of online mags including This Is Fake DIY and The Quietus, but this is his spiritual home and he weeps every time he sees his name in print before posting tens of copies home to Derry, Northern Ireland. A champion of eighties pop, his dream is to interview Daryl Hall & John Oates, while he has the “four most perfect words in the synthpop canon” tattooed on his foot: Together In Electric Dreams. For this month’s paper he interviewed Deptford Goth (it’s on page 16) whom he found “charming” ahead of the release of his debut album, ‘Life After Defo’. David likes Marmite.

Inside shoot: night works by sonny mccartney the bootstrap company, dalston, London. 6 February 2012

beginning MArch 2013

: :(

When will the Interne t e at itself?

Words by Stuart Stubbs

So far It’s been a shitty 2013 for music’s material world There must be volumised books on this by now, so obsessed are we with everything World Wide Web. Trolling, cookies, privacy, piracy, ISO devices, iPlayer, Netflix, hashtags – if Napster started up now, Metallica wouldn’t even clock it: there’s just too much other digital noise to be dealing with. And by ‘dealing with’, I mean ‘calculating’, especially for those connected to the music industry. The questions are always the same – ‘is this good or bad?’ and, ‘just how scared should we be?’. That you might be reading this on our website or in the digital version of Loud And Quiet 46, but are most likely holding a physical magazine, means our ears tend to burn whenever the Internet heats up and/or the real world takes a hit. One month into 2013, the web is on fire and reality – music reality – is a bloody pulp. HMV’s slip into administration on January 14 (36 days before the time of print) has shown early on in this young year just how Internet-eyed we’ve become, first in the company’s collapse due to a shift in us shopping online, but moreover in how quickly the whole sorry affair seems to have been marked ‘spam’. It made major news headlines, but only for a day or two, and even then the general consensus seemed to be that the world saw it coming. Owning shops around the country – were they fucking mad!? And then, after Everything Everything told John Snow “Who cares?” on Channel 4 News, we all got back to checking Twitter in front of the TV. On January 30, monthly music magazine Artrocker announced that they were switching off the printing press, not to shut

down altogether, but rather to relaunch itself as a “100% tablet publication”. The news was spread with cheery spin (“We can’t express in words how excited we are”) but another music paper has vanished from the newsstand all the same. Two, in fact, since The Stool Pigeon announced its complete retirement on February 6 – the biggest loss to UK underground music journalism since Everett True’s Plan B title was bundled into the back of a car by growing pressure from the Web in 2009. The Stool Pigeon’s announcement came as a shock, delivered in a transparent fashion typical to the paper’s frank style. The crux of it was they were knackered, not broke. As founding editor Phil Hebblethwaite noted how printing the paper had become “increasingly less effective and exciting than publishing journalism online” it was a modest goodbye, and yet one that is increasingly hard to deny. The Internet is nothing if not effective. (Incidentally, iTunes reached 25 billion downloads on the day of Stool Pigeon’s announcement). By online networking giant Cisco’s reckoning, video content will make up 90% of online traffic by the end of 2013, a bold number that YouTube head Robert Kyncl was of course keen to repeat last year. And perhaps that is where print press catches a break, in the eye of the Internet’s insensitive storm. I mean, if 90% of what we look at online becomes video based, is it not a matter of time that we’ll fancy something else, something not on a computer screen at all, even? It’s like how Ozzy Osborne warned

his kids when they first wanted tattoos, feeling that some ink would make them stand out, as most young people do – “but everyone’s got one,” he said, “so if you want to be noticed or different, my best advice is to not get any tattoos at all.” And you thought he was just a rock’n’roll casualty. It’s important to not get too misty-eyed and retro-manic about archaic formats and ‘the good old days’. We print a magazine, but there’s no denying that the Internet’s good far outweighs its bad. It’s made life a hell of a lot easier, if faster and a less personable, but then I’m not quite old enough to remember a time when things were much different myself. And besides, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, as they say, which is why I always find it alarming when people kick off about Facebook – an integral part of so many peoples’ lives that nobody has paid for – telling a market research company that you like jam. When I ask ‘when will the Internet eat itself?’, it’s not really a day that I hanker for, but I don’t think it’s inconceivable that certain aspects of the web will feed itself to death either. In December 2012 while interviewing Adam Bainbridge aka Kindness, he told me of how a friend of his was questioning their would-be-dream career of making music videos on account of how months of work are so quickly dismissed online. “Even the most successful music videos are only hot for a day,” he explained, “and then there’s another hundred tomorrow.” It’s no wonder. Ninety. Per. Cent. It begs the question of why bother at all, doesn’t it?

Not Music Page 9 and John Ford already has something else he’d like to talk about Used to be that TV adverts were only ever concerned with the short game. “Buy a Big Mac now, while you’re still breathing,” that kind of thing. Get em in and get em spending. Marketing strategies were like firework shops; temporal and good for now, not something to invest in, certainly not a way of life. If they were a member of the family at all, they were an uncle you forgot you had as soon as he left the building for another God knows how long. It’s not like that anymore – we have to choose: a bank, a car, a supermarket, an insurance company – for life! I blame John Lewis, who have since set another stylistically hokey trend of taking a classic-but-cool song, stripping it to the bone and claiming it poignant rather than chilling. Before that they set about telling us how their store is in fact something that can be eternally relied on – one comforting constant in this mad, mad world, from cradle to grave. “Our lifelong commitment to you,” is how they put it in their 2010 ad that whooshed through the defining moments in one girl’s life (childhood, adolescence, motherhood, retirement, fade to black before it gets all too sobering and she has no idea who the film crew are). It won awards, so, naturally, other companies got the “our crap’s for life” bug too. Renault did it with the aid of a Trailer Trash Tracys track (indie cred to soften the news that the car manufacturer will feel personally slighted should you ever consider buying, I don’t know, a Nissan one day). “No matter where life takes you, we’ll be there,” said Renault. A promise or a threat? Aviva are the worst yet, hawking their wares via bafflingly pointless regional accents from Paul Whitehouse. They’re jolly, simple folk that Whitehouse portrays, eager to lighten up the stuffy business of insurance. Except for that one last year when it turned out he was dead. Isn’t it a good job he had all that insurance for his family? Adverts used to trade on some sense of spontaneity, now they seem to be forever reminding us that life isn’t actually that short at all. It’s pretty long, in fact, and costs a bomb, so why not let so-and-so lighten the load. They care. But remember, it was “Dr Pepper, what’s the worst that can happen?”, not, “Dr Pepper, we’ll be there when the worst happens.”

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beginning singles / EPS / books

by L ee B u l l m a n

Tangled Hair by Wild Smiles

( IN V ADA ) R e l e a s e d MA r c h 1 1

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Feeder EP by Raisa K

( S e l f R e l e a s e d ) R e l e a s e d N o w

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Bloodsports by Drenge

(infectious) R e l e a s e d MA r c h 4

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Invada Records need to be careful here – Hampshire trio Wild Smiles might just give Geoff Barrow’s avant pop label not a ‘hit’, but certainly a track that you can whistle along to. ‘Tangled Hair’ is so loaded with Beach Boys good vibes it would probably be washed out to sea with all the other surf pop turds had Barrow not given it some extra drone God caché. On taking a minute to hear Wild Smiles’ predictable impersonations of California accents, though, you can’t argue that they also come with some pleasing early grunge fuzz too and a riff that should have been dreamt up long before now.

When I first played Raisa K’s debut EP in my office, the guy next to me – a typically tranquil kind of man – became incensed; about the endless whirl of escaping air; about the clack of falling objects; about the anti-sung, mad lyrics. “This is probably the worst thing I’ve ever heard in my life!” Geoff had not heard Raisa’s main concern, Micachu & The Shapes, which is probably for the best. He’s right, of course, it is “a fucking racket”; ‘Repetition’ is completely obnoxious in its playground nerner-n-ner-ner, taunting jaunt; the rhythm never settles down. It sounds just like Micachu.

‘Drenge’ doesn’t mean anything, but it sounds like it should, and like it shouldn’t be very nice. On top of that, the Castledon duo’s debut single is called ‘Bloodsports’, with a b-side called ‘Dogmeat’. And look at that artwork! ‘Bloodsports’ remains tempered garage rock fare, though, resembling a Queens of The Stone Age who don’t want to be in trouble with the neighbours. It has gone 8pm, after all. Drenge are Reading Festival more than Download, even, ripe for a warm up spot on Biffy Clyro’s tour now they’ve been consumed by playlists nationwide. They’ll do very well.

Ghost by Sir SLy

For Our Sake by GALPALS

( N a t i o n a l A n t h e m ) R e l e a s e d M a r c h 4

(Howling owl) R e l e a s e d NOW

( Ch e ss C l u b ) Released February 25

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‘Ghost’ is the kind of song that could make you listen to the radio more. That’s not to say the terribly named Los Angeles trio of Sir Sly belong in your record collection, but you’d much rather hear this kind of expensive sounding synth balladry in H&M than, say, more David Guetta. ‘Ghost’, with its easy, lighters-out tempo and easier “You’re a ghost” vocal hook, is good for a week away – a stratospheric, stars aligning song that suits that optimistic, content feeling you only ever get on holiday. The rumours put it best really, that Sir Sly are a ‘dark’ offshoot of Foster The People.

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Where Dum Dum Girls sound like they’re forever hopelessly in love, and Vivian Girls eternally jilted and heartbroken, Austin duo Galpals seem to be taking the piss a little. ‘For Our Sake’ is typically indebted to ‘60s girl groups, but Phil Spector never produced anything so ballsy on top of all the cute tambourines and dual vocals. When Galpals yelp, “Are we making you nervous”, the answer is, yes, you kind of are. As they do in ‘For Our Sake’’s tweegone-bad video, Galpals make music for spiking your homemade lemonade to. What it lacks in originality it makes up in silly fun.

Pilgrim by MØ

Danish born singer Karen Marie Ørsted (or MØ) appears to have all she needs in order to become a darling of i-D magazine. Her hair looks good in a bun, her body good in a cat suit, and she’s clearly not a day over ‘too old’. More than that, she makes the most stylish kind of electronic pop music, here presented as the sexybut-not-too-sexy ‘Pilgrim’, which features the work of one audibly smart producer. The deep bass lines, pseudo-tribal drum fills and group hand-clap are good, but the trumpet hook is even better as MØ can be heard to pout and cry out in measured bursts. It’s good.

Be d s i t D is c o Que e n : Ho w I gr e w up a nd t r ie d t o be a p op s ta r B Y T r a c e y Thor n (Virago)

Since her first band, Marine Girls, pretty much defined the look and sound of early eighties indie music (becoming one of Kurt Cobain’s favourite bands in the process), throughout her time with Everything But The Girl and more recently as a solo artist, Tracey Thorn has consistently sung with one of the most beautiful, distinctive and downright coolest voices in British pop. Bedsit Disco Queen plots Thorn’s career from recording the first Marine Girls’ album (1982’s ‘Beach Party’) in what was essentially a garden shed to forming her most success duo at Hull University and luxuriating in a five star Sydney hotel room nearly twenty years later where she would decide that no, thank you very much for asking, but I won’t be accepting that support slot on U2’s upcoming arena tour. Along the way Thorn has her life changed by The Smiths’ debut single, ‘Hand In Glove’, meets the man who will become her life-long music and life partner and watches a plethora of musical movements and cultural revolutions come and go – New Romantics, Acid House, Grunge, Brit Pop: she was there for it all. By the time the book ends, Thorn is about to release her thirteenth album and is in many ways a completely different person from the sixteen-year-old girl who went out and bought her first electric guitar, and yet somehow she seems not to have changed at all. Thorn claims she “tired” to be a pop star, when of course that’s exactly what she became. Most rock biographies, like most rock music, make the loud, empty sound of men showing off. Bedsit Disco Queen bucks the trend with an honest, self-aware and utterly unpretentious take on time spent in an industry where its author has been both feted and ignored, revered and ridiculed, and where it seems she has never felt completely comfortable.

All single reviews by Austin Laike

beginning le fto v e rs

FIDLAR

TR A S H TA L K

Last month We interviewed la skate punks fidlar they left these queries behind for hardcore heroes trash talk

FIDLAR: Who gets to hit greens the most? Trash Talk singer Lee Spielman: “Garrett, hands down. No competition. Garrett smokes more than anyone I know. They should give him an award or something for how much weed he smokes.” Who’s got the best nollie? “Mikal’s got the best nollie ‘cause he’s got long legs and he’s lanky, but I’ll smash him when it comes to nollie flips.” What can’t you do on a board that you’ve always wanted to? “I’ve always wanted to be able to hard flip but I just can’t seem to get the board to go in between my legs. It fucking sucks ‘cause hard flips look so cool.” In a Battle Royale between the four of you, who’s coming out on top? “Sam Bosson. He’s a beast. Look how big he is. That shit’s crazy.” Who would Trash Talk like to tag team with and why? “Hmm this is a hard one. I’m gonna have to say Juicy J so we can turn up at functions anywhere, no matter what’s happening.” What’s the gnarliest shit that’s ever happened at a Trash Talk Collective show? “Broken leg, broken arm, broken nose, broken ankle all in one set at – rather fittingly – Chain Reaction in Anaheim.”

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Wow, did that happen to members of the band or the crowd? Did the show not even stop for that? “It all happened in the crowd. I didn’t see any of it cause we were playing and I never see shit when we are playing. I noticed it when I went outside and saw kids laid out. It looked like some sort of war movie outside!” What does Mikal do? “I’m still asking myself the same question.” Where/How do you guys record? ‘Cause your records sound fucking rad! “We like to record analogue to tape but we are kind of down for whatever. We have hit a lot of studios to try different stuff out. We are still locking that part in.”

“Check out the flex from leeds. they will rip your fucking head off”

Are there any new bands we should be checking out? “Check out The Flex from Leeds, UK. They will rip your fucking head off. Hardcore the way it’s supposed to be played!” We feel like the Trash Talk/Odd Future collaboration is some ground breaking shit – hardcore kids at hip hop shows and vice versa. How’s it been, crowd wise on the Trash Wang shows? “It’s been sick. Hardcore kids are down for rap and rap kids are down for hardcore. It’s usually just one big room full of

kids who wanna get loose and turn up. It makes for a pretty interesting show when a kid in a Brick Squad T shirt dives off of a balcony head first to some slam jams.” If we got Trash Talk stick-n-pokes [DIY tattoos], would one of you dudes get a FIDLAR stick-n-poke? “Fuck it dawg, life’s a risk.” What would Trash Talk’s motto be? “‘DESTROY’ is the motto.” Where did Spencer and Garrett get such rad amps? “Emperor Cabinets. They are made deep in a cave off the coast of Brazil. They fucking rule. Louder is better.” What’s the worst injury Lee has ever gotten during a show he’s performing in? “I broke a knee cap once in Japan. Dived off the stage and came back crippled. It fucking sucked. One of the worst pains in my entire life.” When was the last time you heard a record and thought, fuck, I wish we’d come up with that? And what record was it? “Garrett played me the newest Pissed Jeans record yesterday in the car and it completely blew my head off. Those guys know how to make anything sound good. So much style.” What’s your key bit of advice on surviving the road? “Save your change. You might need it one day when you’re stranded and all you want is a one-dollar cheeseburger from McDonald’s. It may not sound appealing now but sometimes desperate times call for desperate measures!” Who gets the most love from the females? “Ad Ross.” When are we touring together? “I hope we tour the world and space together hella soon. I don’t know if people are ready for that kind of wildness yet. It might be too much for the nerds to handle. One love.”

Photography by Dan Kendall

Sacramento hardcore band Trash Talk spent part of 2012 talking up fellow skate enthusiasts and Californians FIDLAR. The respect, unsurprisingly, turns out to be mutual, and when we interviewed the Los Angeles-based FIDLAR for last month’s Loud And Quiet the band they chose to leave their burning questions for were Trash Talk. Singer Lee Spielman does the answering, laying to rest all you need to know about touring with Odd Future, skateboarding, the worst pain in the world, gig pile-ups, rules of the road and which other punk bands will rip your fucking head off.

ndie isn’t what it was. Or maybe it is. In the beginning there was The Smiths and The Cure and R.E.M. and Talking Heads – bands that were as wilfully smart and proudly bookish as they were gifted in the art of the 3-minute pop song. By the mid ’90s, though, indie was feeling Supersonic and embracing the simpler things in life. To know guitar chords beyond G, A, Em and D was to be over qualified as Brit Pop’s punk appropriation of indie made it all the way to 10 Downing Street. Even politicians could get it. ‘Landfill’ seemed like a fitting prefix as children of Cool Britannia formed bands like The View, The Fratellis and The Pigeon Detectives ten years later. A few years ago I hosted a show on a community radio station, taking along a few of my favourite records. “Oh how indie,” said the producer, and not in a good way. Indie, for all its brainy beginnings, had until very recently become the genre of the unimaginative. “I think a lot changed when Foals came along and introduced concepts that were more associated with the classical world, like minimalism,” says James Howard, guitarist and occasional percussionist in London band Fiction. “Those things have kind of become the sticky ideas that people are interested in, and some people are doing that to greater affect than others. Bands like Dutch Uncles, it’s music that’s almost hard to get your head around, because there’s so much intelligence behind it, but it’s also music that makes you dance, and it’s kind of nice to dance to a pattern of music that you can’t quite translate.” “I think people have always shown influences from more leftfield places, but maybe it’s more acceptable now, or more mainstream,” says singer/keyboardist Mike Barrett. “When The xx got their songs on Radio 1, that was quite a big turning point, because they’re songs with so much space and silence in them.” Fiction – alongside Foals, The xx and other conscientious bands like Django Django, Everything Everything and Alt-J – are here to re school guitar pop. Their debut album,‘The Big Other’, is core reading, and has a lot more in common with ‘Fear of Music’ than it does ‘Be Here Now’. It’s a record high on nostalgic rom-pop (previous claims that Fiction could singlehandedly soundtrack all of the Brat Pack films are not without justification) and higher on social perception. By album track ‘Vertigo In Bed’ the band have become so slick in their sound that they resemble Sting (a compliment, believe it or not) as they note: “Sigmund Freud is unemployed / Just a naughty boy”. Previous single ‘Big Things’ is something like Talking Heads covering The Cure’s ‘Six Different Ways’ from memory. It also covertly documents a car crash, something that was seemingly missed by Ford when they licensed the song for a TV ad in 2011. After experimenting with syncopated industrial drums, ‘See Me Walk’ is a halfway point so smart it features guitars laced with just enough delay to cause them to harmonise not with each other but with themselves. ‘The Apple’ – no less ‘jaunty’ or high-end than anything else on such a shiny, hook-laden

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Re-educating Indie Ahead of debut album ‘The Big Other’ London band Fiction discuss their part in returning indie music to its book smart roots

photographer -

Phil sharp

writer -

record – isn’t about Digsy or Mrs Robinson’s Quango but Alan Turing, the computer scientist of the early 1950s who committed suicide by eating an apple containing cyanide (reportedly giving birth to Apple’s logo in homage) as the British government forced him to take female hormones to ‘cure’ his homosexuality. “It’s a constant cycle,” says James. “You had prog and you had punk. I mean, Oasis were a band that prided themselves on not knowing that much about music, and that definitely has its place, but the cycle goes on...” “[Strum-along indie] was saturated, that’s the thing,” adds Nick Barrett, band guitarist and brother to Mike. “What’s happening now is the aftermath – post-indie. The people who are doing it now are really dedicated to it because they’re not making loads of money from it.” Cash has shaped Fiction since they last appeared in Loud And Quiet, three years ago in February 2010, on the eve of releasing debut single ‘Curiosity’ (it’s not made the cut for ‘The Big Other’). Then, James, Mike and Nick were joined by bassist Daniel Djan; it was impossible to pick out a ship’s captain, as it is now, with Dave Miller on bass and Jacob Smedegaard on drums. Fiction remain an ensemble cast. Music years are a lot like dog years, though, and a lot has changed since 2010. The industry’s slope just got slipperier, labels tightened their purse strings and then padlocked them, and promising new acts that would have otherwise been clawed at five years earlier were suddenly a risk that few were willing to take.That, in part, is how Fiction explain what the hell has taken them so long – the band that in 2010 liked the idea of “making a really snappy first album”. Mike says ‘The Big Other’ is a better album for the time spent on it, but less cohesive as a result.Truth is, he probably hears disjointed ideas and ugly cracks that you or I never will, like a painter who gets a shade of blue wrong and can never fully express how he saw it in his mind.To many,‘The Big Other’ will appear too melodic to be questioned on any other level whatsoever, simply enjoyed as a collection of songs you can dance to while disregarding how insular the whole thing is. For others, there’s a world of social theories behind the title alone. “The best songs appeal to the heart and the head,” says Mike, “so hopefully we can appeal to some people who just want to hear a good song on the radio, and to people who want to really dig into an album and understand it as a concept.” The Big Other is a concept of French philosopher Jacques Lecan, introduced to Fiction via writer Mark Fisher in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?. “The sentence in the book where we got the album title from is ‘the big other is the collective fiction’,” says James. “It obviously has nice implications because that’s our name and we are a collective, but in general what it implies is an imagined society where people play with their image and how they’re present themselves.” “It’s a collective perception that doesn’t really exist because essentially everyone is an individual,” adds Mike.

stuart stubbs

“So it’s about that tension between being an individual and being part of the masses. It’s a very personal thing because it only exists in your head – it’s your perception of how people perceive you.” “Self-editing your Facebook profile is a symptom of people’s perception of The Big Other,” explains James. “Because we live in a very atomized culture, everyone tries to cultivate themselves as an individual in order to be unique in The Big Other but also be considered unique by The Big Other. “A lot of the lyrical themes on the album are about this dialogue that’s taking place within one person. Most people’s conversations are with themselves, but one of the voices that you’re playing is The Big Other, so you have this almost Greek chorus of people who you’re in conversation with about the choices you make – which books you say you’ve read, which shoes you buy, what music you listen to.” James points out that we’ve reached a point where we’re so concerned with what others think of us – and have become so savvy at understanding the zeitgeist – you could in fact tailor-make music for a particular radio station or audience and it can’t fail. “A scary thought,” he says. Calvin Harris’s latest album, I think. “The way we talk about it, it makes it sound like the album is really political,” says Mike, “but when people listen to it, it’s really not overtly political.” We continue to discuss The Big Other – how we can no longer live with out it, how all politicians know the War On Drugs has failed but The Big Other won’t allow them to admit – and Nick comes up with a lighter way of summing it up. “It’s like Peep Show,” he says, and suddenly I get it – Mark Corrigan internally wrestling with himself, to-and-fro between what he wants to say and what he should say. “I think we’re at risk of sounding like our writing sessions are really boring and we’re theorising all the time,” says James, “but we’re not – it’s a very instinctive process.” “Yes,” says Mike.“When we make music it’s a physical thing and it’s fun.We don’t sit around talking like this. If you listen to the album on a purely sonic level you can easily say it’s jaunty indie pop, but for us, what we’re interested in is the ideas and the concepts of the songs. We think a lot and a song is an idea as much as anything. A song like ‘Museum’, it sounds quite ’80s and people might say it’s a retro pop song, but actually the song is about retro-mania. It’s called ‘Museum’; it’s about the museumification of our culture. It’s a product of its generation. If it sounds ’80s, in a way it’s meant to, because it’s about the past.” The Kooks had a song called ‘Jackie Big Tits’.

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Ha ppy E v er A f te r l ife Deptford Goth’s bedroom-produced debut has seen Daniel Woolhouse avoid rushing out and shouting about it. Today, he happily presentS ‘Life After Defo’

As I head to the Strongroom Bar in Shoreditch, to meet Daniel Woolhouse, better known as Deptford Goth, I’m tempted to drop a quip about the south Londoner venturing to the city’s eastern enclave and hipster epicentre. As buzz builds towards the release of his debut album, ‘Life After Defo’, much has been made of his name-checking nom de plume, but he’s sceptical of being cast as a London musician, let alone one that’s confined to one of its constituent boroughs. For a start, he’s not even from Deptford. “I had that name hanging around, and I was putting a track on the Internet and I thought that would be a good name. I kind of had it in mind as a character in a story or something but never actually wrote anything. It conjured up some nice imagery. I live in Peckham but I don’t know if I really see myself as a London-centric or a UK-centric artist.” Woolhouse sees the capital, then, as an enabler rather than a defining force, its rich cultural tapestry allowing artists to soak up inspirations that hail from far beyond the M25. “You’re probably influenced by the fact that you meet a lot of people who have a lot of diverse tastes in music and you get to listen to a lot of different music, and you can go to see a lot of live music. So it definitely opens doors in that sense compared to if you lived in rural Spain,” he reasons. “It obviously does affect what you make because that’s what making stuff is; you’re processing something and making stuff out of that, but I’m not aware of, really, what that is doing. The stuff I wrote, lyrically, is on a human level rather than a sociopolitical level. I think that’s kind of a universal thing, anyway – human emotions – geography doesn’t really come in between those.” In the course of my research I had read thatWoolhouse started life as a guitar-strumming singer-songwriter but my sources prove inaccurate and he’s quick to stamp on my neat narrative arc.“I wasn’t really an acoustic artist or

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anything. I guess I had an acoustic guitar and a Casio keyboard so it was kind of born out of those elements. I liked playing around with tape and stuff.” So you didn’t set fire to the guitar? “No, no, there was no transition. I did record stuff with a four track but I never really finished much. I don’t think I ever decided, ‘Oh, I’ll make this type of music’.That’s a difficult thing to think about.” So where does Deptford see himself fitting in in today’s sonic landscape? The idea that he follows in the footsteps of electronic songwriters such as James Blake and Jamie Woon has been foisted upon Woolhouse but he’s circumspect when it comes to the parameters of an emerging canon. “I don’t think the listener needs to do that to music. It’s normally people who are writing about music that need to do that to tell the listener to listen to it or not to listen to it. There’s the electronic soul tag that gets bandied around. That’s quite vague in a way; a lot of genres are really specific. It’s really restrictive to label something. I guess I just think of myself as a songwriter who uses some live and some electronic elements. I wish I did have a label and I could just say, ‘This is it’. It’s the perennial problem.” In his nascent career Woolhouse has already worked with Rodaidh McDonald, a producer and engineer whose alumni include The xx and Gil Scott-Heron.“I’d finished the album, basically, and needed someone with another set of ears to come on board and bounce stuff off, and to get the final mix done,” says Woolhouse. “I met Rodaidh and he seemed like a really good guy to help me out, having spent a lot of time alone [with the record], just going, ‘I’ve kind of lost all opinion of this.’ I recorded it at home so it was like, ‘Let’s listen to it really loud through some really good monitors with someone who knows exactly what they’re doing,’ and it helped tie everything together sonically.”

While I’m mindful to avoid the suggestion of an over-arching scene, there is a discernable similarity in the atmosphere of the music of Blake and Woon et al and that of ‘Life After Defo’ – Deptford Goth seems entrenched in the small hours, too. Says Wooldhouse: “I don’t expect someone to have to wait until night time to put the headphones on and listen to the record, but if it works to do that then I’m more than happy for someone to treat it that way.” Still, I can’t imagine this record being the product of a sunny Tuesday afternoon. “Well, I used to make everything nocturnally because I’d come home from work, make my tea and then make some music until I thought, ‘Oh, I need to go to bed because I’ve got work tomorrow’, but I think that shifted slightly. I definitely found it odd trying to make stuff during the day because it feels like you maybe should be doing some other stuff, although having said that, a lot of stuff gets decided or written or thought of when you’re doing something else anyway. I can be doing anything and I hold on to that idea or I make a note of it and then come back to it later. Sort of like collecting things throughout the day and then having a look at them at the end.” We’ve all come to accept the romantic idea of the tortured solo musician, toiling in the studio on a slow descent into mental fragmentation, but Woolhouse is positive about his own experience, despite obvious tracts of lassitude. Over the six months it took him to write and record his album,Woolhouse “definitely went through long periods within that time of being quite downcast about what I was doing”; a time he now acknowledges as a simple case of writer’s block. “You can’t just think ,‘Oh I’m going to do something,’ and then go and do it,” he says. “Like what I said about doing other stuff – like stuff coming to you while you’re

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Gabriel Green

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David Zammitt

doing something else. It’s quite easy to forget that that’s how it actually works.” There is also a sense that he sees his Deptford Goth output as a holistic, multi-sensory suite, which he clearly approaches as a labour of love. Indeed, he has been the creative force behind the visions for the three promotional videos thus far and is keen to retain this role. The video of ‘Life After Defo’ was all Woolhouse, recorded at home, a lot like the record it titles. The following promo for ‘Union’ (featuring Woolhouse in front of the camera) was then a joint effort between a few close friends. “I guess it’s just using the resources that are available to you,” he says. “It’s not like I need to control the stuff but it’s something that I just really like doing. So it would seem a bit odd not to do it, because I feel really lucky to be able to. It’s not a hassle, it’s something that I would do even if it wasn’t my songs and someone asked me to do a video,” he says with wide-eyed gusto. “I think it’s important that they’re coherent and that they work together, rather than it just being that someone’s been sent a track and they make a promo for it and then it’s sent back without any crosspollination – it just looks slick.” Before all this, Woolhouse was a teaching assistant and he immediately lights up when I ask him about it.“I really loved it but about six months into it I was fairly certain I didn’t want to be a teacher,” he says. “I was quite happy being a teaching assistant but it was a lot of work. The kids were really funny. They’re amazing. It was a primary school. Year one, so 5, 6 year olds. A primary school in Deptford. It was probably one of the best years of my life, as a job, because it’s so unpredictable what a kid’s going to say.There’s no pretense or anything. It makes you stop and laugh.” He grins. “There were some quite funny little chaps that I worked with.” While his enthusiasm is infectious, his levelheadedness is equally impressive. Deptford Goth hasn’t yet polished his live act, and his total lack of complacency and self-conscious desire to entertain is endearing. “I really enjoy doing it but there’s definitely an anxiety attached to it, mostly probably in the sense that you want people to enjoy themselves or have a good time. Someone’s going to buy a few pints and watch this.” When I ask him what kind of reaction he’s expecting, he’s more self-effacing still. “I can’t imagine people dancing. A little shuffle, maybe. Really slow, slow motion.” As I broach the subject of plans for 2013,Woolhouse perks up once again, and I genuinely sense that the whole process is treated as an adventure. “There’ll be gigs in support of the album and hopefully throughout the rest of the year,” he enthuses. “I’ve never been to America so I’d like to do that. It’d be good to tie that into a sightseeing tour. Definitely some European stuff. I’ve had a few emails from people from places like Sweden, and I haven’t actually been to Sweden. “I don’t know what’s going to happen out of any of this,” he says. “I like writing songs and if someone says, ‘Oh we’re going to release your record…’” He pauses and reiterates the patience that’s made ‘Life And Defo’, and the substantial pinch of salt he takes with all things Deptford Goth. “You know, I don’t expect to make any money out of this.”

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N o C h i l dr e n Al low e d Fun Adults inevitable success will no doubt come from their personal history... and their skills in stone masonry photographer -

An hour or so before they’re due on stage, Fun Adults are humming with nervous tension, quietly chatting amongst themselves, all preoccupied with the night ahead. Most of them have been friends since high school – singer Declan Pleydell-Pearce, guitarist Huw Thomas and drummer Dan Jacobs all grew up in the West Country. Bass player Kyle Molleson first met Huw at University, in the group’s adopted city of Leeds.Tonight they are opening for Dutch Uncles at the local Brudenell Social Club, before setting off on tour with fellow Tough Love Records alumni Cymbals. After releasing just one demo – ‘Til Sleep’: a curious, twisting descent into melodic and jarring beats – the band were picked up by the London label and are currently writing what will become their debut album, which for Fun Adults’ highly methodical style means “endless redrafts” and countless hours spent in the studio. Luckily they have their own recording HQ, in a recently converted 200-year-old barn based just outside Edinburgh. “It’s actually my Dad’s place and he’s always had a studio there,” explains Kyle, “so I’ve been doing recordings on various projects out there. Basically it was always near the house, he’s got two barns out the front, big old stone cattle barns, and so I’ve been threatening for a long time to turn one into a studio, but never got round to it. So we went up last summer and converted it, did lots of joinery and stone masonry. We’ve also had a few friends in bands going up there and helping out building the studio in return for a bit of recording time.” “It’s pretty high up,” says Declan, “lots of midges in the summertime, snow in the winter, but it’s beautiful and a really great place to work, very inspirational. It sounds terribly cliché, but there’s no phone signal, lots of animals everywhere and it’s just a really nice place to be

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Bart Pettman

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kate parkin

cut off, because you’re not distracted by things.” Taking some time out from the pressures of the studio, the band recently created a mix tape for the Loud And Quiet website. Featuring an eclectic mix of artists including Fleetwood Mac, Aphex Twin, Frank Ocean and African soul singer Nahawa Doumbia, the recurring themes of intricately layered percussion and innovative production hold the collection of songs together, much like Fun Adults’ own material. Echoes of Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ shiver through the lightly textured beats of recent single ‘Sap Solid’, blending with airy voices and pinched acoustic guitar for a light-headed glow. The track sold out as soon as it was released in October 2012, and is now doing the Internet rounds, largely collecting uniform praise and one handwritten note from junior blogger Duncan, aged 7 ½, who thought it was “bloody awful”. Language, Duncan! ‘Sap Solid’’s video, meanwhile, showcases drummer Dan’s talents for animated visuals, with paint brush effects that create fiery sunsets and trees dancing gently in the breeze – a mix of abstract impressionism and childhood drawings painted with dexterous ease that Duncan should in fact bloody well like. Huw assists but insists: “Dan’s the animation man. He showed me the ropes, but he was the brains behind all these, he’s very talented. Artwork is really important for us, we wanted to really mirror the sound with the imagery.” Dan smiles shyly.“Me and Huw, we work on stuff together,” he says. “We have similar ideas of how we feel about tracks. I think we’ll move more towards figurative stuff a little bit more now, because that where things are going with us as a band too, stepping out a bit and showing our faces.” He laughs. “Hey, maybe in the next one, it’ll just be just a close up of Kyle’s face for a few minutes.”

Fun Adults’ penchant for home recording combines with it a level of honesty that comes from being friends since boyhood. Although each are barely in their early twenties, their relentless search for perfection has created an understated master class in ‘Sap Solid’’s accompanying ‘Acacia’, with swirling Grizzly Bear tinged harmonies interwoven with fractured percussion. Facing their next challenge of recreating these sounds in a live setting, they are undaunted.“We are becoming players as well as writers and sometimes that’s a bit different,” says Kyle, “tearing up the computer and turning it into real stuff.” “We do place an importance on production and we definitely spend time around computers,” says Huw, “so there’s going to be some electronic stuff, but we know where to leave it as well. There’s a couple of songs that we’ve just finished writing where it’s quite bare. And if live instruments are doing their jobs properly, in lots of places they can sound fantastic on their own.” As well as developing their sound within a burgeoning Leeds scene, the four friends are currently working on recording projects with fellow local band Adult Jazz before concentrating on their own grown-up duties. With the attention they’re currently generating it’s easy to forget just how ‘new band’ Fun Adults are, but living together means “the creative tap is never turned off ”, leading to a constant stream of shared ideas and an accomplished musicianship that’s so evident in any number of their songs and YouTube video thus far. “You’ll always hear something new through the floorboards and you’ll run upstairs and say, ‘What are you working on?’” smiles Huw.“We’re all quite musically in sync with each other. We’re very tuned in to what each other are thinking, but that comes with knowing each other so well.”

s I sit on the phone to Australia at 8 in the morning, I slug on espresso, gazing out of my window at a dreary, lifeless sky, looking like it might simply vaporise or implode out of sheer desperation or boredom.The streets are lined with a silver, slimy sludge – dirt coated snow slowly melting away, leaving just yet another slab of grey concrete underneath as the bite of the winter’s morning shivers through the windowpane and leaves an aching cold hanging in the air. About halfway through my conversation with Blank Realm’s Daniel Spencer, after a constant reoccurring noise that pierces and clicks loudly in the background of the phone-line, I have to stop him dead and ask,“Can I hear crickets in the background?” He laughs. “Yeah, I’m sat out on the porch. The wildlife is kinda loud out here”. While this Brisbane-based psyche-garage outfit may be on the other (currently way more appealing) side of the world, their recent signing to the excellent Fire Records probably means that we’ll be seeing and hearing a lot more of them, and not without good reason. The band consists of three siblings Daniel, Luke and Sarah Spencer, along with their “spiritual brother” Luke Walsh. “We would always spend time together and do fun and creative things like put on plays as kids,” Daniel tells me,“but it wasn’t until we got into our twenties that we started picking up instruments and playing together, just making a noise together.” Many bands consisting of family members often crack and collapse as a result of ruminating and bubbling, misplaced nepotism, jealously or seething rivalry; in the case of Blank Realm, however, the family unit of the group actually proves somewhat conducive, as Daniel tells me “we don’t really fight that much. And if we ever do, or disagree over musical

matters it’s always more important and necessary to make up, just because it’s a brother or sister – anything else seems trivial.” The members’ collective mind-sets were turned on by similar influences – “I mean we all had our mind’s blown by bands like Pere Ubu and CAN. Lot’s of Krautrock and post-punk stuff,” says Daniel – and absorbing other people’s music in mass quantities is something the group have always continued to do as they’ve got older. “I sometimes think having a drug habit would be cheaper than having a record buying habit,” Daniel chuckles. “I’m due to move house this weekend and I’m not looking forward to moving my records. It’s like carting around barrels of crude oil.” Blank Realm have been doing the underground rounds for some years now, their earlier records mostly coated in a heavy but hazy swath of pysch-noise-drone, disparately put out by various labels over the years.They have been championed and released by Los Angeles imprint Not Not Fun and the home-brewed Bedroom Suck, the latter releasing their most recent, and rather glorious, album ‘Go Easy’, which Fire subsequently picked up and are about to re-release to the wider world. “Yeah, it’s a bit strange,” says Daniel. “We made that record about two years ago but it’s given it a new lease of life, so it’s fun to play those songs again.” Those songs are not quite the shattering slabs of unrelenting guitar wailings that soaked Blank Realm’s earlier work but instead are presented as a group of refined, albeit no less raucous, bursts of garage-pop.The album reaches a dizzying peak via the elongated grooves of ‘Pendulum Swing’, which somehow manages to sound like the perfect amalgamation of the best of

Deerhunter with the most enticing parts of The War on Drugs. ‘Go Easy’ is set to get a release on pink vinyl, something the group are in unified delight over. “One of the things about working with a lot of smaller labels in the past is that they are all on pretty tight budgets,” Daniel explains, “but we’ve always wanted to put out a heavy vinyl in pink and now we can.” I say that this is Blank Realm’s own version of rock’n’roll flamboyance and extravagance. “Ha ha ha , yeah,” Daniel bursts. “It’s our version of having a limo and pouring champagne all over ourselves, I guess.” Daniel is soft-spoken, and although a loquacious fellow, he’s also pretty mellow and relaxed too. Like his response to many questions, when asked of the balance struck between the noise and pop elements on ‘Go Easy’, his answer is: “it wasn’t really something we thought about.” Placed in the context of the group’s lineage, it makes perfect, abundant sense.This album marks the first ever time that concentrated song writing has actually taken place. “Before we would just take jams and turn them into songs,” says Daniel,“but with this album we sat down and wrote out the songs and worked on them.” As we say goodbye, even Daniel’s accent feels gleaming and sun-drenched. I glance once again outside and it begins to fling down in that twisted, rancid fusion of snow and rain – just a hurtling bag of wet and cold. I scowl and frown; at whom or what, I’m not even sure. It might be my mind playing tricks on me, but I swear I can hear Daniel popping an ice cold beer open in the background as he no doubt sits there, feet stretched out on a throne-like rocking chair on his nature-surrounded, mansion of a porch.

F am i l y T i e dye s Daniel Dylan Wray gets weather envy as he talks to Daniel Spencer, front man of Brisbane lo-fi psych siblings Blank Realm

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Sarah Werkmeister

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daniel dylan wray

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Night W i nn i n g The third coming of Gabriel Stebbing (as Night Works) might just be his greatest hour yet

It was in March 2012 that the video for ‘I Tried So Hard’ by Night Works first surfaced online – a soulful, melancholic, RnB-touched pop song that melded together a simplistic piano motif, a single vocal line and a reverberating snare that captured the midpoint between night and day. No one had any real idea who had made it, although this was no stunt to stir intrigue; it was instead a concentrated effort in trying to achieve the complete opposite. “Well, it was a conscious decision,” says the man behind the band, Gabriel Stebbing, formerly of Your Twenties and – more notably still – Metronomy.“I really didn’t want to be a international man of mystery or something, but without sounding above my station or anything, if you’ve been in a couple of bands before people might have gone, ‘Oh Well, this is another Metronomy or Your Twenties side project’. It would have arrived with quite a bit of baggage, I guess. For that track, which is a nice way to introduce the music, I thought it would be a good way to slow down that kind of tidal wave of information and just let people judge it on its own merits.Within twenty four hours people had figured out it was Gabriel Stebbing, so it wasn’t as if we wanted to keep it a mystery, I just wanted people to judge it on its own terms.” I ask Gabriel if Night Works is a new chapter in his life. “It sort of is in a way. Perhaps for me, it is a little different to what I’ve done before. I suppose in Metronomy I was obviously playing Joe Mount’s music, but I was closely involved and got to play on some of the records and stuff.Your Twenties, was my first venture out of Metronomy and I was trying to write and capture the perfect three-minute pop song: that was what was most important to me, trying to capture a youthful evanescence – that was what the bandYour Twenties was about.The Night Works thing is almost as if the writing is what led everything else. As I wrote more and more, I felt kind of more grown up in some ways.” Gabriel leaving Metronomy came as no small surprise in April 2009. The underground success of concept album ‘Nights Out’ had the then trio on the cusp of far greater success, but bassist Gabriel was keen to work on his own material. There was no fight in electro pop’s most amicable parting of ways. Gabriel formed indie band Your Twenties and he and Joe Mount remained so close they would continue to collaborate on material for both Metronomy and Your Twenties, and go on to cowrite ‘I’ for Nicola Roberts of Girls Aloud. Mount also helped his old friend get the ball rolling on Night Works. “I started off making the Night Works album with Joe producing it,” Gabriel Explains. “What happened was that we had started making an album for Your Twenties and by that point he had produced a whole record, but the band had started sliding off into each of its own individual parts; James had Veronica Falls, Michael, my brother, had formed NCZA/Lines and Robin was in Male Bonding. So the band had disbanded, but the process of me and Joe recording the album went

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sonny mccartney

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Nathan westley

on and the songs started to get longer and slower. The first song that Joe and I recorded was ‘Long Forgotten Boy’ which is the most recent single, but by the time we had made that track it didn’t sound like Your Twenties anymore and it didn’t sound like it was overly influenced by Metronomy, even though Joe had produced it. It sounded like a new thing and then we went on and made ‘The Eveningtime’ and ‘I Tried So Hard’ together and between those three songs we hit upon a sound that felt really unique to us, so from that I was able to go ahead and produce the rest of the record myself. I guess, with the writing, I was trying to do something that felt a bit truer to myself.” Gabriel says that binning his unreleasedYour Twenties album took some getting over. Once he had moved on, it took a further year to write and record ‘Urban Heat Island’, Night Works’ debut album that largely veers from electro pop of the ambient and RnB varieties. It’s one easy listen, which, completed on 6 March 2012, will have been in the can for a full year by the time it’s released on Loose Lips next month. As Gabriel puts it, “It’s been a really long breakfast – an exercise in delayed gratification, I suppose.” While notably the work of a man once in Metronomy, ‘Urban Heat Island’ saw a change in Gabriel’s writing style, which led to the formation of several characters who pop up throughout the album and also in the videos that have already been released.“Songs previously had always been written from my point of view or describing something,” says Gabriel, “they’d be me or you songs basically.With Night Works, I started trying to imagine myself into other people’s heads or lives. I was thinking about the kind of people that I had met while out on the tours I did with Metronomy and the people we would meet in the night life situations. I was also thinking about the texture, well not texture but the feel of living in London. I moved here in 2006, when things started to get busy and I found it quite inspirational; the feeling of living in London at that time and particularly the financial crash, I found it quite a strange place, especially around east London where you are brushing up against pity. Like, you occasionally run across cityborns in a bar and you get the impression that you are rubbing up against quite a lot of money and wealth. Obviously knowing what had happened and how much had been gambled away, it got me thinking, not just about writing songs about love and relationships, but about types of characters that I wanted to get into the heads of. At the same time, everything on the album is very personal in a way. Long Forgotten Boy and Long Forgotten Girl, for instance, kind of appear in the video for ‘The Eveningtime’ and the ‘Long Forgotten Boy’ video is bits of me really; every one now seems like it’s a little bit of me. “I’ve always admired songwriters like Ray Davies and Damon Albarn,” he says,“both used to write a lot of character songs. I used to love how they would write in a really observational way, but I guess the characters I

was putting on my album are a little bit more personal; they’re facets of myself, I guess.” For many, Night Works’ understated, louche grooved pop is more Hall & Oates than Brit Pop and its grandfather, but delve beneath the top layer of ‘Urban Heat Island’ and there is a wealth of other Eighties influences that have subconsciously seeped in. “It’s funny about the Hall & Oates thing,” Gabriel laughs. “When I was in Metronomy we would listen to Hall & Oates a lot.When we were on tour once in America, we ended up in an old bargain basement vinyl store and Oscar found every single Hall & Oates LP for a $1 each. It was almost part of the air that I was breathing while in Metronomy, so there is probably a Hall & Oates thing in the background, but I’m more directly influenced by English songwriters from a similar era, like Prefab Sprout and Scritti Politti. What I like about both those guys is that they are writing very intelligently, very thoughtfully and there is care about the craft and what they do, but they also wear it very lightly.There’s always a pop facet that you take at face value but if you spend a bit of time with it, there are all these layers that you can keep peeling away that keep rewarding you. That’s probably as much, if not more of an influence, and there’s bands like Steely Dan, bands that have kind of a rhythm, an old school RnB influence. That was really important and that was alongside other stuff like old French touch bands, Daft Punk and the space in Air records... there was tons of things that were flying around.” ‘Urban Heat Island’, then, is “the product of absorbing stuff, almost by osmosis”, and also a record conceived in complete isolation. It comes back to the same reason why Gabriel didn’t want a fanfare accompanying his return to releasing music – the one thing he wants to avoid more than anything else is becoming a buzz band. “There’s so much of a turnover of music and new bands are continuously coming on to the scene and I didn’t want to get involved in that,” he says. “I knew the type of album that I wanted to make and I never wanted to get into the situation where I had anyone from a label hearing one or two tracks and then going,‘Hey! We like the chorus of that one, so why don’t you write an album that sounds like that?’. I think most musicians feel the same way. It was a bit scary, taking on the production helm, and as previously said, Joe produced the first three tracks, but he then went off to promote the ‘English Riviera’ and Metronomy, so I was kind of left holding the baby, but in the best possible sense. I had to just realise the potential we had established and then just run with it. “It’s funny because it kind of feels like I’ve done it backwards; the other bands that I’ve been in it’s always kind of been, ‘Okay, let’s jump into the Ford Transit and drive up to Carlisle and play’, build a fanbase and then make a record. This has been make the record first, so we’ve been doing it in reverse. Hopefully some people will want to come and see us.”

Special thanks to Callum Toy / Amy Hendry / Grace McCracken / Zachary Butcher at Boot Strap Company

photographer -

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Drugging The Void Ruban Nielson quit music only to accidently create Unknown Mortal Orchestra, tour the world, have a good time, then a bad time, then write a second album based on the experience photographer -

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owen richards

writer -

Stuart stubbs

uban Nielson has always struggled to piss off his dad; a jazz musician who, once his son was born, moved his young family from Los Angeles to New Zealand and joined the Navy band “to clean up his act.” Up until that point (some time in 1980), Nielson senior and his bride of three years (a hula dancer, no less) had been on a massive bender from the day they’d met entertaining guests on a cruise ship. They’d sail from LA to Honolulu, Ruban’s mum dancing, his dad playing trumpet and saxophone in a lounge band called ‘Drumrolls’. Ruban’s arrival stopped all the fun. “My dad is quite a cool guy,” he tells me. “He was always kind of a druggy and really into jazz, and would wear a leather jacket and shades, with long hair, tight, black jeans. It was really hard to scare him, but then with Wu Tang Clan he didn’t quite get it. I could see that it was taking him time to understand it, and that alone was like, ‘Yes! Got him! He doesn’t quite understand this!’.” Sounds like the kind of dad that everyone at school wants to have until he is your dad. “Exactly,” says Ruban. “When that guy’s your dad you’re like, ‘I wish my dad was normal and wore specs and had an insurance business.’” Ruban’s first musical experience wasn’t a pleasant one. At the age of five, as the children of the Navy band were taking turns pretending to conduct their parents, he was snubbed. As he picked up the baton and walked to the rostrum, the clock had run down, everything stopped and everyone went home.“I was devastated,” he says. “It was a traumatising introduction to music.” New Zealand, though, is something of a conductor of Anglo/Yankee pop culture; “bombarded from both sides” by Brit Pop and Grunge simultaneously by the time Ruban was a teenager. At home, his folks were still listening to jazz – John Coltrane and Miles Davis. “My dad didn’t quite get punk rock either,” he says, “because it’s so simple and loud, and so much of it is about assaulting people with noise.” It’s what Ruban and his younger brother Kody had started to do with their band The Mint Chicks – a group that would segue from discordant noise into increasingly more acid damaged melodic pop by the time they split in 2010, seven years and a lot of drugs after their debut single. “I decided that the most shocking thing I could do after that was to tell everyone I was not going to make music anymore,” says Ruban. “I had it in my head that I’d be like Captain Beefheart and not make music anymore, just do something else, like visual art for the rest of my life.That was the plan.” How this plan monumentally failed has been well documented in previous Unknown Mortal Orchestra articles – how Ruban moved to Portland, Oregon; how he made a track called ‘Ffunny Ffrends’ and posted it online; how no one knew who had made it but everyone loved it and blogs melted under its hip-hop snare rat-atat and stoner androgyny.Yet to hear Ruban describe the tale of UMO himself, it’s as if he’s still coming to terms with the fact that it’s true – that, after years of schlepping around in a guitar band, his greatest success (and work)

would come as he finally let go of trying. He realised that ‘Ffunny Ffrends’ had blown up five days after uploading it, when he heard his song coming from another computer in his office at film production company Kamp Grizzly. It was late and Ruban was finishing one of his illustrations (it was his job to sit in a corner and draw what he was told, anything from flaming skulls to a samurai slicing a basketball in two).“I went over to the guy who was playing the track and asked him what he was doing and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve got a friend at Nylon and they’ve just sent me this – it’s some band that’s really blowing up’. I was like, ‘I made this. I recorded it a few nights ago’. He was like,‘this is insane!’, and I asked him not to tell anyone because I thought I could sweep it under the rug if I decided I didn’t want to do it.” Once Pitchfork.com had picked it up, Ruban was soon contacted by many of his favourite labels expressing interest. It took him seven days to decide if ‘professional musician’ was still a career he was interested in. “I thought I should forget about it for a week,” he says, “because I’d got to the point in my mind where I was really comfortable that I’d stopped and I had something else going on. I really didn’t need it. It was strange, because these things that would have been a dream come true two years earlier, I was now over that dream.” Ruban ums and arrs when I ask him if he regrets the decision he finally made. Essentially, he doesn’t, but the touring lifestyle that came with the release of his eponymous debut album in 2011 “beat me down a little,” he says. “Getting in control again was the process last year. Me and [touring bassist] Jake are cutting back on our drug use and doing various things to get our lives back on track again.” ‘II’, UMO’s second album (it’s far more imaginative than its title suggests), sounds like a direct product of a world turned upside down – the isolation experienced predominately by solo musicians, and the meltdown that comes with too many late nights and all that entails. In October of last year, Ruban told Pitchfork, “the last record was really warm and happy; this one’s lonely”. Indeed, ‘II’’s opening refrain goes: “Isolation, it can put a gun in your hand, it can put a gun in your hand / If you need to, you can get away from the sun, you can get away from the sun…”. On ‘Swim And Sleep (Like A Shark)’, Ruban wishes he could “fall to the bottom” and “hide until the end of time”, as he dreams of being a Great White – the most standalone creature of the deep blue. And new single ‘So Good At Being In Trouble’ (UMO displaying a penchant for the breathy, slow funk of Prince) is no less sombre in words, getting “lonely” in within its first 10 seconds.This is just the opening three tracks. “The ‘isolation, it can put a gun in your hand’ line is just a truism, really. I guess it’s just that idea that the Devil makes work for idle hands. I also heard this story, and I probably shouldn’t use names but I went to someone’s office and they had a 44 Magnum and I was messing around with it and it was loaded. The person who owned it looked kind of nervous and I found out later that another musician that we knew had pointed

the same gun at this person who owned it. Maybe that’s where that line came from – this idea of letting yourself get into a dark place, because I knew that was happening to me. It could be a suicidal idea as well – you never know what you’re going to do with a gun. “Intuitively, the album came out feeling lonely. I was definitely taken over by this feeling of loneliness, and being lonely in a crowd.The loneliest thing in the world ever was travelling the world and meeting hundreds of new people, hanging out and talking shit with people, doing drugs and having these fake, epic conversations, but really it’s meaningless. It starts out fun, but after a while it’s kind of brutal.” It’s ‘II’’s refusal to wallow that makes it such a smooth follow up to ‘Unknown Mortal Orchestra’. That record was full of rudimentary break-beats and good times; ‘II’ has a painful inspiration behind it, but it’s hardly a glum listen, full of ricochet guitar licks (‘The Opposite Of Afternoon’), ’70s wah-ka-wah-ka flange (‘One At A Time’) and Beck-ish disco (‘No Need For A Leader’). It’s a lot more psychedelic, from a man who’s been into psychedelia before he even knew what it was, as jazz filled his family home and he dreamt of being a comic book artist like his French hero Moebius. “When I discovered him, it just changed my life. Until then I didn’t realise there was all this culture surrounding psychedelia. “It’s funny though, because when I first started making music I thought there couldn’t be anything less cool. I thought I’d removed myself from the zeitgeist completely, and it was nice to not worry about that, but now everyone’s talking about the psychedelic wave. It’s always disappointing to me when someone says, ‘oh this band is really psychedelic’, and you listen to it and it’s just a synth pop band.” Ruban’s true psych chops haven’t come from his hallucinogenic drug use, the tattoo he has below his Adam’s Apple of an eye, his breathy whisper on his records, or his ringing guitar, even, but in fact his ability to let go. It’s how Unknown Mortal Orchestra started, and, so Ruban tells me, how he decided to make a second record – by “feeling the time was right to do something with the ideas I’d recorded onto my phone”. Equally, there’s nothing desperate about Ruban Nielson. He feels like a man who’s not about to kiss the feet of the music industry for giving him this chance because, truth is, he can take it or leave it. When talking about his father, he referred to him as “the black sheep of his family”. Somewhere along the line, Ruban was taking notes.

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Stuart Stubbs finds that Foxygen’s bid for ’60s greatness is too blatant and accomplished to be challenged on grounds so stuffy as originality photographer -

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gemma harris

writer -

Stuart stubbs

Once was a time that The Columbia Hotel was it – London’s premier rock’n’roll roadhouse. If you were a band and you weren’t staying here, in the five converted regency townhouses on Hyde Park’s northern perimeter, you were either doing something very wrong or so very right that you no longer needed to take advantage of the hotel’s scrimper rates. At The Columbia breakfast started at 10am. Alcohol was served around the clock. Oasis were eventually banned for throwing glasses out of the window and onto cars below, one of which happened to belong to the hotel manager. But that kind of behaviour doesn’t go on here anymore, and hasn’t done for some years. London’s rock’n’roll hotel now, if indeed it still has one, is K West, a couple of miles down the road in the far less lustrous area of Shepherd’s Bush. The Columbia inverted, K West looks like a moulded concrete Wreck Centre with a branch of Foxton’s installed in the ground floor. But inside it’s no nonsense modernity: glass tops and glacial, white space that tells you your bottle of beer is going to cost £6 even before Sir is presented his bill on a miniature silver dish. On Lancaster Gate, a little off white from decades of London fumes,The Columbia still looks magnificent and grand, its entrance beneath thick, thrusting pillars. Of course where K West combines a council estate facade with such a high-end, luxurious interior, The Columbia’s frontage can only ever disappoint once inside. Foxygen arrived here an hour ago from Paris, and as a Californian

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band so happily inspired by the music of the late 1960s it seems fitting that they should choose to stay in a place as out of time and out of taste as this. We wait for the lift but it never comes, nor looks like it ever will – the LCD screen flickers as it tries to spell out floor numbers but it never quite manages to muster a decipherable digit. On the sweeping stairs (threadbare, tears patched by gaffer tape, but sweeping nonetheless) there is a huge vase full of dried flowers that have seen better days. They might not have started off dried, in fact. When we finally reach room 304, having managed to pass not one single hotel guest (a trend that will continue for our entire visit), I half expect to be greeted by a rotting woman in the bathtub.“Hey, I’m Rado,” says the wire-haired, band-on-the-road-thin young man who answers the door. “It’s a bit Shining here, isn’t it?” Rado (first name Jonathan) is one half of Foxygen, one fifth when performing on stage. Drummer Sam introduces himself while Rado puts in a call to band singer and other one half/one fifth Sam France who soon bounds into the greying suite with bassist Justin and backing singer Lizzy. France is straight to our photo shoot, offering sunglasses on or off and the same with his vintage yeti jacket. Rado looks a little more ill at ease with this side of things but comes alive in interview mode. The pair, close since a very young age and surely no older than 22 now, occasionally bicker, as if they’re working on a full-blown Mick’n’Keef affair. No doubt they’d love that. Rado might just be the band’s musical genius, while France – blasé in conversation and a pantomime drug casualty on stage – is definitely the group’s showman. At New York showcase CMJ last year France emptied a can of Coke on Rado’s curls after calling him a hipster, something of a major slight in the Foxygen camp. Our interview takes place the following morning in the back of two black cabs and on two cold pavements as I tow France and Rado from one BBC obligation to the next.

I could be asked any question by an interviewer it would be, ‘can we not do this interview?’” As we leave The Columbia at 10am, just as breakfast is being served, I think, France’s less affable mood doesn’t last for long, although he does manage to get out: “I’d like to talk about things that are not music related.” “I don’t have a problem talking about music to be honest,” says Rado. “I think the reason we talk about it so much is probably because of me.” “The other day I remembered my earliest musical memory, which was driving through the desert from Las

Vegas to California… I’m sorry, Sam, I’m talking too much,” he says, in an ‘I’m sorry if you’re too selfish to spend time with me’ kind of way. “… and we were listening to ‘Rumours’ by Fleetwood Mac in the car. Then I got into Blink 182 and pop and went off on all these weird areas and then came back to that. Now, my favourite thing in the world is ‘Rumours’.” Rado stops and we both look at France. “Oh. I just played on my uncle’s keyboard when I was little, that’s what I remember first. And listening to the Jurassic Park soundtrack.” “I tried to watch The Lost World the other day,” says Rado, “but it was just Julianne Moore in ripped jeans falling over.” “That one’s a little more violent,” says France,“a little more PG13.” “A lot of Jurassic Park was animatronics,” Rado points out keenly. “E.T., too. That’s why I hate what Spielberg does now – he goes back in and fucks with E.T. and puts scenes in.” What I want to talk about is ‘We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic’, Foxygen’s second album, depending on your definition, and one that’s as freewheeling and joyous as it sounds. On it, Foxygen (with an integral helping hand from producer and orchestral arranger Richard Swift) traverse and transform their heroes from the far-out end of the ’60s, from Bob Dylan to The Beatles to The Velvet Underground to The Rolling Stones, sometimes all within one song. It’s certainly the case on ‘No Destruction’, a steady country lilt that has France building to a cracked Jagger croak via Dylan sing-speak and a fleeting phrase delivered like Nico. ‘On Blue Mountain’ is all Jagger where France is concerned.You can almost hear his pout, even when the honky-tonk rushes and especially when blues breaks down. There’s Phil Spector’s right-hand-man Jack Nitzsche in the motorcycle instrumental ‘Bowling Trophies’, Serge Gainsbourg in lust letter ‘Shuggie’, The Zombies everywhere,The Modern Lovers in the drunken yabbayabba of the title track and ‘A Day In A Life’ in the odder-than-a-dream, closing ‘Oh No 2’, which gladly nabs the endless piano, waking cries, dippy ‘Egg Man’ harmonies and similar stock footage to that of the Fab Four. Few songs end sounding anything like they did when they started, and when they do it’s after any number of tempo swerves, funk passages and/or the arrival of idyllic flutes and horns. Foxygen haven’t pinched from the greats one at a time but rather from all of them at once, and it’s worked due to their impressive competence. Bands like The Black Lips, Strange Boys and Thee Oh Seas are far simpler magpies, bashing out garage rock that sounds a little like ‘Get Off of My Cloud’ but not really. With far greater finesse, Foxygen

have gone after far greater sounds of the ’60s, aiming more for ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ and ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. Considering they so clearly are, though, Rado and France can’t seem to work out if they’re a ‘retro band’ or not.They contradict themselves and each other on the matter more than once. “We’re not a retro band…” says Rado as we glide past the park. “Well, we are,” France interrupts. “Dude, we’ve moved from the most un-retro music, y’know? The music we were making when we were 16 was the most un-retro thing you’ve heard in your life. There was nothing ’60s about it – it was like rap music, just ridiculous.We’ve moved into this and it’s what we’re into now, and it’ll change again.” Rado makes his point, although when I later ask how they feel about being dogged with throwback slurs from others, France replies by saying, “We don’t care.We are a retro band,” to which Rado concedes,“Yeah, they’re not wrong about it.” “I just don’t like when it’s a negative thing,” he continues,“when people think we’re being uninventive or just rehashing stuff because that’s not how it seems to us. I mean, that blog the fucking Quietus, the little pieces of shit, they’ve done four pieces on how much we suck, and that’s just too much hate.” “Oh yeah, I’ve heard about this,” says France. “It’s become their thing – they just write about how much they hate us. It’s just wrong, man!” he laughs. “I was hoping it would seem so much like a ’60s album that it could be an album that actually came out in the ’60s, not a record from a new band that has a ’60s influence, because those bands wouldn’t really make sense in the ’60s.” “It’s not an homage to the ’60s,” says Rado, “it’s a record we wanted to put out in the ’60s.”

two members of Foxygen (a name coined by a friend who fancied a guy so much she said the ‘fox’ was her oxygen, or foxygen) met and grew up in Westlake Village, on the northern tip of Los Angeles. The success of ‘21st Century…’ has them pegged as an overnight thrill, but they’ve been making music since 2005, and have already released a handful of EPs and one 7-track album – the much rougher, more wandering ‘Takes The Kids Off Broadway’. France says: “I think we’ve become slightly uncooler and slightly more popular.With the old album it’s kinda raw and cool, but for people who have an impression of Foxygen just coming into the new album, we might come off more like an MGMT pop thing.The new record is a properly produced thing, with pop hits, but it’s not cool.”

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Rado describes their even earlier efforts as “strange little kid music. But it was really good for 15/16 year olds,” he says.“I mean, we were pushing ourselves really far.” Pre-‘Kids Off Broadway’ Foxygen combined hotpotch musical elements that knew no snobbery, mixing “spacey” types like Beck and Flaming Lips with Willy Nelson slide guitar, amateur rapping and a lyrical obsession with aliens. Remnants can be found on ‘Kids Off Broadway’’s 10-minute centrepiece ‘Teenage Alien Blues’. “I’m the most proud of ‘21st Century…’,” says Rado. “I think it’s our best songwriting, and then ‘Take The Kids Off Broadway’ is really close to my heart, and then all the records we made as kids too. But yeah, if you’re just coming into this now, it might seem that we’ve not been doing this for ten years.” “Yeah,” says France, “it’s like, ‘who are these idiots? Oh great, they’re rehashing ’60s pop.They look like two fucking idiots!’” As France and Rado enrolled in two different colleges, they kept Foxygen going in the holidays. France also played in a “kooky funk band” while Rado “played hired piano for the worst singer/songwriter, like, the worst music you could hear in any coffee shop ever!” The rumour – started by the band, it turns out – goes that Rado was a child prodigy of the classical world circuit. “Sam, are we going to keep going with this one or…” “Dude, this is not my thing.” “Well, it was,” insists Rado.You started it.” “I started it but you kept going with it.” “Ok, what happened was…” “In the last interview that we had I think Rado said that he used to play classical music and the interviewer kept asking about it and Rado was just making up these lies,” say France as he peers out of the taxi window. “Yeah, people keep asking me about it so I have to keep going further with it,” Rado nods.“The story now is that I was classically trained and my parents made me play all of these different instruments – like tuba and trumpet and every instrument of the orchestra – and then I would perform at these sold out concerts all around the world…” “And then your babysitter pushed you out of a window and you hit your head and now you can’t play classical music,” says France. “That’s what he had to say to keep my lie going, but it’s just terrible lying about this. It’s useless, a waste of time.” I ask Sam what else that I’ve read might not be true, particularly a story of him being a babysitter for the rich

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when the band relocated to NewYork in order to record ‘Take The Kids Off Broadway’. Sitter Studio’s gimmick is they employ and deploy ‘artists’ to families that are capable of putting a sizable price on boho experiences for their Hugos and Millies. “Yeah, that’s true,” he says.“I was kind of like a nanny for these really wealthy families, because the parents are just off and don’t take care of their kids. “I was a children’s birthday entertainer once, too, like a clown, basically. Like I’d get into suits… This is not a lie,” he insists. “It was called A Aaron’s Happy Kids Entertainment, just this random weird company I found on Craig’s List. I would dress up as Elmo or Buzz Lightyear or whatever and go and do balloon animals at birthday parties, just be a clown and do some magic – simple magic tricks. And I had a job where I taught playmation [the animating of Play Doh] to kids after school.” “All your jobs involve kids!” says Rado. “It’s because it’s the only job I can get hired doing. I don’t know why, but people trust me around kids.” I think I might, once I see France on stage that night. He’s almost a completely different person to his nonchalant, perma-stoned self. He bounds to the microphone flapping both of his hands in a double wave and yelling “hello, hello” before he’s even got there.The fact that he’s either extremely high or hamming up what it is to be a 1969 Haight-Ashbury dropout, aside, he’s a natural performer, funny, absurd and all-inclusive –

everything a children’s entertainer should be. He’s like Jim Morrison cloned with Elmo, only stepping out of character to occasionally glare at Rado, like when the guitarist garners ‘ooooos’ from the crown as he announces, “So we played at the BBC today, which was pretty cool. What did you all do with your days?” One guy counters with “We went to see Foxygen!” and order resumes. This kind of fun is the lifeblood of Foxygen, who say that ‘We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic’ was a record born out of two simple goals – “to make a ’60s album and to make an album that could have a pop hit.” “Everyone wants to write a pop hit, just in their own way,” says France.“I think that what’s not cool is wanting to write a rock hit.” “And a lot of indie bands are writing really good pop hits at the moment,” says Rado. “Like that Tame Impala song ‘Feels Like We Only Go Backwards’, that’s like an incredible song.”

the band finished recording ‘Take The Kids Off Broadway’, Rado stayed put in New York while France soon moved back to the west coast. “It’s a little to crazy for me,” he says, somewhat more diplomatic than when he told Pitchfork “New York’s kind of evil.” Rado keenly points out that he lives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, not in Brooklyn, new indie’s Silicone Valley. But that hasn’t prevented Brooklyn from becoming a talking point of Foxygen’s new album regardless; thanks to one lyric that leaps so far off the record it’s all anyone wants to talk to the band about. It’s hardly a real shit-stirrer, but at the point in ‘No Distraction’ when France leans into the microphone and delivers the line “There’s no need to be an asshole, you’re not in Brooklyn anymore” it’s pretty amusing if nothing else. And where the band continue to deny any ill thoughts to the hip borough of New York you can’t help but think we’re still talking about it because it rings true – a joke that is too close to the bone for so many. Foxygen themselves have been labelled hipsters too, a little unfairly and ultimately due to the recent positive press and fresh faces. Their hair and the number of personnel has raked up comparisons to MGMT, too. “We love ‘em,” says France. “Love ‘em! We fell in love with ‘Congratulations’ and then I went back and got the first album, and I love that too. I remember when the pop hits came out – ‘Time to Pretend’ and all that.” The two duos do at least share a similar perspective on hallucinogenics, spirituality and happy thoughts. “It’s a very positive record that’s meant to be very uplifting, so I think we were trying to make those feelings happen,” says Rado. “We were making a record for the end of the world that never happened and that we didn’t want to happen.” “We warded it off,” says France. Producer Richard Swift played his part in warding off the day of reckoning, too. Now a member of The Shins, Swift first came across France and Rado face to face, when, as he left his own Manhattan show, the pair handed him a CDR copy of ‘Take The Kids Off

Broadway’. The record had been finished and burnt to disc just hours earlier and Swift was evidently impressed, perhaps by the title of the closing track most of all, ‘Middle School Dance (Song for Richard Swift)’. “I don’t think we could have made this record with any other person,” says Rado. “We just love Richard Swift so much and we knew he could do it as well or better than us.” “It really was a collaboration,” says Sam. “Like, it should really be ‘Foxygen with Richard Swift’, because every album he produces, the artists know going in that he’s going to put his shit on it – he’s going to have some fucking xylophone on it!” As our second taxi pulls up at our second destination, France, who seems to have completely forgotten all about it, finally gets his second request – to discuss something other than music, moments before the band disappear into the BBC’s Maida Vale studios. It’s related, of course, because everything is when you’re in a band, and the subject of the modern world is a fascinating one for Foxygen – two young men who have always known the digital age yet don’t really care for it. They certainly don’t care for the music it’s produced, having previously called so much of today’s new bands “un-harmonious” and “anti-melody”. “I dunno man, I mean, I love it, I love it,” he says. “I love the modern world, I’m just really disillusioned by a lot of it. “I think that our governments are really messing things up. Our cultures are becoming increasingly more controlled by certain aspects of new technology that to me isn’t productive and it doesn’t really help people – these new technologies are just being used to monitor and control people. “I don’t know,” he says, “there seems to be just so much fucking war going on. Obviously there always has been, but people seem to be pissed but no one is doing anything about it. That’s what the album is about – this feeling of change that people feel they need. Human life, y’know, Obama’s just shooting drone missiles at the Middle East everyday, just signing off on this stuff every day and killing people every day. It just needs to stop. I don’t know why people are oblivious to this stuff in the modern world when there’s so much shit that we’re suppose to look at.We’re not even thinking about what’s happening. That’s why I’m not a fan of the modern world, but something could happen, who knows?” It’s hardly the cheeriest of endings to a morning flitting through the streets of central London, but politics and the unfathomable business of war are surely par for the late ’60s concept course. Foxygen might spend a lifetime defending ‘We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic’ and just how much it sounds like their omnipresent heroes. Then again, if guitar-led pop music (like “proper pop hits”, as France puts it) can no longer go any way but backwards, why hasn’t anyone else revisited rock’n’roll’s golden age with so much skill as this before? Foxygen wanted to make a record that sounded like it could genuinely be mistaken for a long lost classic, and one that could feature a hit single. Forgetting that hit singles don’t exist for bands anymore, Sam France and Jonathan Rado’s new record remains a great success. At 12:04pm, The Columbia are probably starting to think that their guests have stepped out for breakfast.

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No t Fad e After 28 years in the underground’s outfield, Yo La Tengo’s latest album ‘Fade’ has reinvigorated love and interest in the New Jersey trio

Back in the day, when they were still a husband and wife duo, Ira Kaplin and Georgia Hubley named themselves Yo La Tengo (Spanish for “I have it”, a term that became ingrained into American baseball due to fielding mishaps and collisions caused by language barriers of players not being able to understand one another when shouting for the ball) because they wanted to avoid any English connotations.When naming their group in 1984 it may have been to avoid any trappings, clichés or associations that many names can bring, but now, in 2013, the name Yo LaTengo packs more musical connotations,associations and weight than they could have ever anticipated. Studio album number thirteen, the excellent ‘Fade’, has just been released, which, if you throw in as many EPs over the years, some compilations, cover and film score albums, you have a group for which being inexhaustibly creative has been a persistent attribute. The band’s consistency is even more remarkable. I speak with James Mcnew as he awaits their sound check in Ann Arbour, Michigan,“home of the Stooges,” he tells me. It seems fitting that so early on there is a cramming-in of musical references, and for the next forty-five minutes we spend time gushing over shared musical loves and experiences, from the apocalyptic fury of Boredoms to The Melvins’ plans for a new covers record. Mcnew as it generally goes, is far more comfortable talking about the majesty of other people’s music than he is his own, not out of resistance or reservation, but simply out of a combined sense of modesty and an unrelenting love for listening to music. On new album ‘Fade’, he isn’t necessarily trusting of his own ability to judge the final outcome.“My perspective is… is, it’s not good,” he laughs. “It’s never good. But I think I am really happy with it. My mum really likes it. That’s generally my barometer. She’s not particularly critical of our records,” he says,“she’s always enthusiastic. Although the first time my mother and father came to see Yo La Tengo was in Richmond, Virginia, in 1992. I didn’t really ask them whether they liked it or not afterwards but my Mum congenially offered the question, ‘was it supposed to sound like that?’. “I think my mum much prefers the music of Lambchop and Kurt Wagner. She’s quite refined.” As a bassist and singer, Mcnew joined Kaplin and

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Hubley in 1991. It’s a long time to be in a band. “Some parts get easier over time,” he says, “and other parts remain… not excruciating, but require a lot of effort. I feel like we really challenge ourselves to grow but keep our identity as a group and I think that’s just who we are. We like change. “Playing together for a long time, we’re not exactly telepathic but we’re pretty close to it and I think we’re very comfortable playing with each other and very confident playing together and I think that allows a feeling for experimentation.” It seems that this positioning of the band is not lost on James, and gratitude is something he regularly expresses, saying: “We never dreamed it would be possible [to get to where we are] yet here we are, and I don’t think a day goes by that that’s lost on us.” This humbleness and sense of, well, having their shit together, recently lead Interview magazine to quip: “Out of all the indie rock stalwarts (Sonic Youth, Guided By Voices, Pixies, et al) Yo La Tengo are easily the bestadjusted and least scandalous of the lot.” It’s a quote that James bats off with humour. “Well I guess you’re not scandalous until people actually find out what it is you’re doing that’s considered scandalous. So in that sense, we’ve never been caught. In a way, perhaps that makes us the most dangerous of the lot! “Would we be more popular if we were more volatile and snappier?” He ponders and stops for a moment to think. “My cynical response is ‘yeah, probably’,” he says, “but we’re not. So I’m sorry.” I inform Mcnew that it’s not really something he needs to apologise for or be regretful about. “Ha!” he says. “Well, maybe to the record label. Or some club promoters.” Yo La Tengo’s focus has always remained ahead, eyeslocked at the forks in the road, at change, evolution, growth and development. Each record has always – for better or worse in the ears of the listener – sounded like an experiment. The near eighteen-minute atmospheric ruminations found on ‘Night Falls on Hoboken’ (from 2000 album ‘And Then Nothing Turned Itself Out’, a record in which succinct bursts of melody and refined pop blur with plaintive, textural harmony) would itself occupy half of ‘Fade’ in its entirety.They are a group that

defy sitting still or stewing in reflective, introspective indulgence, and this has also reflected in their varying sense of pace and tone as greatly as it has their length and focus – for every ‘Mushroom Cloud Of Hiss’ they offer (a chugging repetition of furious guitars and screeching vocals) they also have the devastating beauty of ‘Tears are in Your Eyes’ (where the song’s physical effect mirrors that of its title). This desire to move forward has meant that the band, in recent years, occasionally suffer in the company of the constant stream of retrospective outings many bands churn out with bored frequency these days. “There are a lot of those reunions that are just nostalgia acts,” says Mcnew. “Some of those I just thought were grotesque, but bands like Mission of Burma who get back together because they still had something to say and have since released four albums after a twenty-year break, they’re different. They’re still so powerful and they’re still changing. Or bands like The Clean, who just came back and continue to grow. I’m really interested in that.” I ask ifYo La Tengo had been approached to undertake such a retrospective – to perform a classic album in its entirety. “Yeah, we have been offered but it doesn’t appeal to us at all. So we won’t be doing it. We would be very interested in playing someone else’s album though,” says Mcnew with gusto, “but nobody has offered us the opportunity to do that yet.” What albums would you like to cover and perform? “Oh gosh that would be a long-list… let’s see… At sound check today, which we are due to do in about an hour, I bet we could stumble through most of ‘The Village Green Preservation Society’ if we had to.”

interviewed Clint Conley of Mission of Burma last year (Clint produced Yo La Tengo’s debut album in 1986, too) and we spoke about Yo La Tengo.“One of the best stories out there,” he told me. “It’s been amazing to watch what Yo La Tengo has accomplished. Inspiring!”

away photographer -

Carlie Armstrong

writer -

Daniel Dylan Wray

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When I relay these thoughts to Mcnew he goes eerily quiet. “Wow,” he quietly, gently mutters, seemingly taken back. More muteness hangs, transmuting nothing but radio silence from the phone-line in Michigan. “I’m not capable of thinking of them as peers, those guys are gods to me. Clint was my favourite bass player and I feel like I stole everything I know from him just by listening to his records over and over again and basing my life on his decisions, so that means so much to me that I can’t even think about it right now, it’s too much for me to process.” At this point, it stops being an interview and just becomes a music fan talking to another about his love and passion, not for simply making his own music, but the resonating and long-burning effects of what the music of others means to him. However, in the context of his creative output this is one of the beautiful anomalies of Yo La Tengo, a group that instils as much fandom and worship via their own music as they insatiably posses themselves for the music of others. The group’s albums have always been littered with cover’s, no artist too great or untouchable, they’ve all been taken on: Bob Dylan, The Kinks, The Velvet Underground, The Beach Boys, Big Star. Then they annually support WFMU, an independent radio station in their hometown of New Jersey who’ll ask callers to pledge money for Yo La Tengo to attempt to cover a song of their choice, on the spot.The 2006 release ‘Yo La Tengo is Murdering the Classics’ captured the very best and worst of these attempts made between 1996-2003. Their listening habits have always been an ingrained part of the creative process, however, if ever a band has managed to refract flat out absorption and plagiarism it’s this one. It can even be argued that by choosing to perform other people’s songs in their entirety, Yo La

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Tengo avoid derivativeness, reproducing songs fully almost as a means to bypass its direct influence or proper affect on their own material. It’s difficult to steal ideas, melodies and drum-fills of a song/artist you’ve been obsessed with if you just choose to play their song fully and credit them as doing so.And whereYo La Tengo may be famous for covering songs, you’ll be hard pushed to blatantly hear the work of other’s in their own material. “Either that or we’re just incapable of recreating what we’re trying to,” he says. I inform him that about an hour before speaking with him I had just received a press-release informing me that the Melvins’ are about to release a covers album of their own and I reel off the list of artists that they are taking on, from Queen to Throbbing Gristle, Bowie to The Kinks.“Wow!” Mcnew says.“See, I learnt a lot from that already without even listening to it. I thought, wow, I never knew I had that it common with them. It gives you a look behind the curtain of a band and how they think and how they react to each other and how they think about their band. I always find it really illuminating when people do cover songs”. We end up talking about various bands and artists,

‘Some of those r eu n i o ns I j u st t h o u gh t w er e g r o t es q u e’

some stuck in money-grabbing time warps, others pushing forward, defying odds, convention and expectation. “There are some bands that have been going all along, whose dedication to their art – the Boredoms in particular – is not just a musical inspiration to me but certainly a spiritual one,” say Mcnew as I tell him that I saw Boredoms play two days in a row last year, opening each morning of the Jeff Mangum curated ATP, blasting hangovers, along with the contents of people’s brains, hurtling to the wall at the back of the room of Butlin’s. “Wow,” he quietly says again. “I’m not sure that my system could take seeing them once a day.They just resonate so strongly that I think I would need some time to think about it. Maybe once a month.” At which point we get an intervening voice transferring in from the Matador office across the country, “It’s time to wrap it up guys”. I had reams of unanswered questions, avenues I had barely even looked down. I had theories, metaphors and insights that were no doubt all convoluted nonsense that I hadn’t had chance to offer as yet. Perhaps fuelled by a few too many pre-match cocktails at my end, our conversation had runaway with us, losing course and structure and winding up as a freeform, arbitrary conversation. But as I hang up the phone and think about it, what should an efficacious interview really offer anyway? What should it consist of and what should it mean? Fundamentally, perhaps, it’s one that should be representative of the group or person you are talking to, one that captures the spirit, essence and function of what that band embody. And really, missed opportunities and undeveloped thoughts aside, what’s a more perfect way to capture the spirit of Yo La Tengo than sitting around and spouting about your favourite bands for a little while.

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Al bums 07/10

Palma Violets 180

Hookworms Pearl Mystic (Gringo) By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Mar 4

09/10

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The opening static fog of ‘Away/Towards’ hangs with a palpable sense of menace and dread, the solitary strikes of the bass guitar linger and loom like the far away footsteps of a murderer closing in on its victim. Like an accomplice, the drums creep in, crawling, rising and rumbling as the steps get closer. Distorted vocals shriek; everything gets louder, nearer, more intense, frightening and then the explosion – the attack, the murder, the hit.The opening three minutes of Hookworm’s debut album are like waiting for your heart to give up and explode. ‘Pearl Mystic’ doesn’t just start, it ignites – lighting the fuse for a whooshing cosmic galaxy that submerges the listener. ‘Away/Towards’ charges and thunders along, chugging a la ‘Roadrunner’, bursting with momentum and drive.The fury and fireworks of this band’s eponymous EP is not only recreated here but also honed and extended via the opening track and the following and ‘Form and Function’, the latter descending into a cacophonic pile of white noise filth. The vehemence and mania has grounded and settled idyllically by the time we reach ‘Since We Have Changed’ – the group have simmered down to a gentle groove that could have been a standout on The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s ‘Give it Back’, except the opiate-induced

sedation of the latter record is not the driving force here.The sounds are created with brave, masterful restraint and a penchant for texture, production and awareness of space that is years ahead of the group’s incarnation.Throughout these slower moments the bass is a gorgeous, gentle, cradle; a baritone lullaby that consistently transmutes you into a blissful reverie, as the guitars flow, purr and float often cloud-like in an omnipresent haze. Other moments such as the triplet of ‘i’, ‘ii’ and ‘iii’ show the group’s ability not only to just create a linkage and sense of fluidity to their debut, but to make two minutes of oscillating texture sound just as vital as the raging six minute tracks. ‘Preservation’ is a vortex, a washing machinelike spin of pulsing guitars that screech, howl and drill manically into your psyche. It’s a seething, foaming beast of a song, teeth gritted, eyes-popped and ready – growling with a ferocity and fear that oozes from every pore. The end of the song is like a rocket blasting at light speed into the unknown, hurtling and squealing as fillings are lost via the sheer velocity of it all, raging into a wall of static noise, the sound almost becoming indistinguishable then BLAM, someone hits the eject button and you’re gone.Thrown forth, unplugged, sucked out of your vessel into a black, cold silence while the sounds still ring and ruminate through your skull. As you drift out into the final moments of ambience on the record it becomes very clear that this is not just an album, it’s a ride.

At the height of his Brit Pop insolence, Liam Gallagher reasoned, “so what if someone’s already thrown a TV out of a window before, I haven’t.” It might be the cleverest thing he’s ever said – a childish ‘me-me-me’ remark, but one that’s nevertheless hard to counter; swift and simple, like the rock’n’roll that is constantly attacked for being nothing new. ‘180’ carries with it a similar sense of forgoing originality in favour of something more instantly gratifying for band and young fan alike. It feels exactly how you’d probably expect it to – like a hurried debut from a group aware of how quickly hype can find a new infatuation. It’s loose and anti-produced to give it that Libertines feel – as if Palma Violets were in need of any more comparisons to that particular band – and beneath the subtly cracked, busted-amp vocals there’s the mob yelps of The Clash (‘Rattlesnake Highway’), something to DJ after Inspiral Carpets (‘I Found Love’) and a couple of guitar lines borrowed from Pixies (the slow building ‘Three Stars’). A good hour or so could be spent picking through other notable influences, most of them from indie bands you’ve heard ripped off before, but I don’t think that’s what Palma Violets are doing here.To “rip-off ” is to deny you’ve done so, to feign ignorance when told you sound like you’ve been listening to x; ‘180’ feels more like four 20-year-olds mining their record collections and thinking, we should do this, it’d be fun.That’s no doubt what their fans will be thinking, not, my dad’s right,The Clash have already made this record. It’s a stark reminder that rock’n’roll is best enjoyed as it is by those young people who’ve made it – at face value.

Photography by Bart Pettman

(Rough Trade) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Feb 25

06/10

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Chelsea Light Moving

Parenthetical Girls

GNOD

Psychic Ills

Young Dreams

Chelsea Light Moving

Privilege

Chaudelande

One Track Mind

Between Places

(Matador) By Chris Watkeys. In stores Mar 4

(Splendour) By Amy Pettifer. In stores Mar 4

(Rocket) By David Zammitt. In stores Feb 25

(Sacred Bones) By Sam Walton. In stores Mar 25

(Modular) By Josh Sunth. In stores Mar 4

Since (and before) the days when Sleater-Kinney sang “I wanna be your Thurston Moore”, the Sonic Youth founder has been the indie musician’s musician. Chelsea Light Moving is the latest vehicle for Moore’s undimmed creativity, and yet this eponymous debut is a record that offers few surprises.The opening two songs recall Pavement and Nirvana respectively; the latter, ‘Sleeping Where I Fall’, even sung with Cobain-esque cracked vocals. The album is shot through with passages of brain-shakingly low bass, which give way to clean guitars and jangly melodies, and Moore, now in his mid-fifties, somehow still sounds like a stoned, sullen teenager, spitting lines like “too fuckin’ bad” over a petulantly simple antimelody on ‘Lip’. Meanwhile, songs as engaging as the post-rock, spoken word ‘Mohawk’ are heavily outnumbered by those as interminably dull as ‘Frank O’Hara Hit’.

‘Privilege’ is a confusing record. Its melodrama, affectations and sonic schizophrenia should make it unbearable, but it’s actually oddly addictive in its bombastic confidence and range. Reverting to their core membership, Portland’s Parenthetical Girls are led by Zac Pennington who wholly inhabits the lyrical sneer of the record and its 12 tales of wealthy hedonism and cracked veneer, his voice soaring and quipping over lush orchestrations and oleaginous electro-pop. Composer Jherek Bischoff has clearly plucked a few verdant leaves out of Stephen Merrit’s epic songwriting handbook and delivers four opening tracks that knit together so perfectly you’re forced to throw in your lot and join them for this ludicrous ride. “Bring me the head of my love life”, the title track demands over a score as dreamy and epic as the Twin Peaks title music. Ok.You got me. I give in.

The follow-up to 2011’s ‘In Gnod We Trust’, ‘Chaudelande’ is set in a shadowy, claustrophobic place.With the average length of its six tracks standing at just over 10 minutes, it can quite fairly be labelled as an epic. In terms of sound, the most congruent pigeon hole to reach for might be post-punk, but Gnod also straddle metal, dub and electronica whilst maintaining an improbable cohesiveness. ‘Entrance’, for example, is math rock that sits somewhere between Slint and Mogwai, sounding as though the snares are always on the verge of combustion, while ‘Man On The Wire’ creates a disturbing, manmade landscape that’s reminiscent of early PiL or ‘Chairs Missing’-era Wire.The stand-out, however, is ‘Visions of Load’, driven forward by a dirty, rumbling bass synth that’ll induce an eerie hypnosis a la early ‘70s Can via The Fall’s ‘Imperial Wax Solvent’.

While there’s nothing particularly ignoble about making music to get nicely blazed to, Psychic Ills’ brazenly basic approach to achieving that goal – namely, straightforward, pastiche-heavy, mid-tempo, fuzzed-out guitar rock songs – comes across so lazily that one wonders if they’re maybe pursuing their goal a little too eagerly. Accordingly, ‘One Track Mind’ –appropriately named given its slender imagination – presents the listener with a conveyor belt of standard psych tropes, in which we have a lot of driving down roads (yeah) and losing one’s mind (yeah) set against heavy-lidded grooves and stodgy, if sporadically catchy, two-finger riffs. Several of ‘One Track Mind’’s songs are perfectly pleasant – particularly the insistent earworm of ‘Might Take A While’ – but taken as a whole, this is 45 minutes of meat-and-potatoes stoner-dude rock-by-numbers.

When you’ve got twelve band members, a slew of instruments and a propensity for layering sounds, it’s dead easy for things to get messy very quickly. Luckily for Young Dreams, avoiding such pitfalls seems to be second nature – the Norwegian gang handle their wistful, floaty way through ‘Between Places’, reconciling playful atmospherics, percussive flourishes and Matias Tellez’ constantly hopeful vocals with relative ease. At times it can seem unnecessarily mild-mannered, though, lacking forcefulness away from the romping celebration of ‘Fog of War’. Yes, they’ve got the crisp vocal harmonies and the love of going ‘off the beaten track’, but Fleet Foxes comparisons seem somewhat generous, mainly because Young Dreams never quite manage the feats of honesty that made the Seattle boys’ debut so genuinely euphoric.

The Strokes Comedown Machine (Rough Trade) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Mar 25

07/10

The Strokes have at least learned one lesson from previous album ‘Angles’: five years to make a record that sounded so lazily found-out-the-back just won’t do.At one and a half years in the making,‘Comedown Machine’ is the band’s most quickly produced album yet, and for its more inventive moments (the falsetto,A-ha-pinching ‘One Way Trigger’; calypso highlight ‘Tap Out’; the funk imbued ‘Welcome To Japan’, which features the non-too po-faced line, “I didn’t really notice, what kind of asshole drives a lotus?”;‘Chances’ – a ballad that is at once stadium soft-rock, a nod to Kate Bush and strangely beautiful) it’s already loads better than anything post ‘Juicebox’. Foolishly, the band are to next unveil ‘All The Time’ – a bland demo-at-best that jars with this noted evolution, presumably to quash any hate that ‘One Way Trigger’ has garnered.There’s plenty of that here too, of course – The Strokes sounding like The Strokes; one five-minute dirge called ‘80s Comedown Machine’ – but some spontaneity too, from band we now expect to be idle and spoilt.

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Al bums 07/10

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Beach Fossils

Concrete Knives

Night Moves

Clash The Truth

Be Your Own King

Colored Emotions

Pillow Talk

(Captured Tracks) By Hayley Scott. In stores Mar 11

(Bella Union) By Nathan Westley. In stores Mar 18

(Domino) By Jacob Boswall. In stores Mar 18

Klaus Dinger & Japandorf

Despite the overall progression and slightly more florid production of ‘Clash the Truth’, Beach Fossils’ second album is not an explicit evolution from “bedroom DIY” project to “a better fidelity”, more refined studio album.With production duties being assigned to Ben Greenberg of The Men, he and head fossil Dustin Payseur manage to capture a lo-fi, surf rock aesthetic with an underlying aggressive urgency that counterparts the energetic spontaneity of this band’s live performances. Beneath the hazy guitar textures, soporific vocals and beautifully crafted melodies lies the spirit of punk, with the first couple of notes on the opening title track ostensibly paying homage to the familiar first chords of ‘Pretty Vacant’. Still at home in his lo-fi sensibilities, Payseur’s punk-rock disposition prevents ‘Clash the Truth’ from sounding like a mere pastiche of its dream-pop contemporaries.

Normandy outfit Concrete Knives unleash their debut album on a public that is currently largely unaware of their energetic, playful ways.While boisterous opener ‘Bonholmer’ gallops along with a mischievous pop spirit that harnesses the buoyancy of early Los Campesinos, it, like ‘Brand New Start’ and many of the other tracks on ‘Be Your Own King’, also firmly arrives ensconced in an overly polished sheen, while ‘Greyhound Racing’, with its loose tribaltouched drumming, funk-edged rhythmic chops and ‘na na nah nah na’ vocal refrain, sees the band sauntering nearer to being a French version of near forgotten, fleeting indie pop darlings Black Kids. Put simply, things get very annoying very quickly, like they did with similar playschool pop duo Matt & Kim. Melody rich, this album is in fact too much so and will leave you feeling bloated on its sickly candy.

Awash with urgency, Night Moves singer John Pelant’s charismatic falsetto is undoubtedly the band’s major selling point on this, the Minneapolis trio’s debut album. But while there’s something alluring about the combination of Pelant’s rich, blusey melodies and the atmospheric, dreamy soundscapes coordinated by producer Thom Monahan, ‘Coloured Emotions’ is notably lacking in ambition, if not the masterfully mixed flavours of country, blues, psychedelia and a gamut of other genres like glam-rock and synth-pop. It’s an unabashedly retro appeal that applies to triumphant moments like lead single ‘Headlights’, but whilst the album can boast character and persistently catchy blues riffs with certain easy, it lacks variety to such an extent that only hardened fan of this of this all American sound will be impressed.

Japandorf (Grönland) By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Mar 25

It seems the gifts that Klaus Dinger left this world just keep on giving. Aside from inventing one of the most emulated and forward propelling drumming styles in the existence of modern music in Neu!, he too has been at the creative – and often overlooked – helm of La Dusseldorf.While legal issues have forced a name change from the latter, the title of Klaus Dinger’s final swansong is thankfully somewhat irrelevant. Swathed heavily in guitars, ‘Japandorf ’ is a driving, chugging and rhythmic affair coated in the static fuzz on the six strings.There are moments on the record that are as beautiful as they are progressive – no signs pointed to Klaus slowing down in his dying days as the man responsible for the blood-curdling screams and frantic force on ‘Hero’ can still very much be heard in full here.

Man Like Me (The Beats) By Josh Sunth. In stores Mar 4 On one near unforgettable single from ‘Pillow Talk’, Man Like Me list the ways the world has changed since their day – iPhones have replaced Nokias,Van Persie has replaced Bergkamp, N-Dubz have replaced East 17 – “it’s so peculiar” goes the hook as the playful brass fanfare erupts beneath it. Social commentary like this is nothing new, and Man Like Me are not as self-aware as the likes of LCD Soundsystem, nor as incisively accurate as, say, Mike Skinner (who is a co-producer here). However, their odd blend of electro, ska and pop, fuelled by a totally unashamed devotion to making infectious music, is surprisingly charismatic. And although ‘Pillow Talk’ can admittedly often be heavy-handed and awfully sugary, especially when it’s trying too hard, tracks like ‘Sleaze’ – with that smooth disco shuffle and RnB-indebted hook – are infinitely redeeming.

Tomorrow’s World Tomorrow’s World (Naïve) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Apr 8

03/10

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A car in their press photos. A car on their album sleeve. A song called ‘Drive’. Noirish, sensual, widescreen electro from the lips of an audibly striking femme fatale and the fingers of a synth pop hero.The debut album from Tomorrow’s World (a new project from Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel and former New Young Pony Clubber Lou Hayter) is bound to get compared to Cliff Martinez’ Drive soundtrack. If the whole thing sounded like previous single ‘So Long My Love’, which has Hayter dueting with a crashing modem, it would be in with a shot, but the couple’s foray into suicide, peril and dark sex is short lived.There’s something to the ZX Spectrum chase of ‘You Taste Sweeter’, but largely ‘Tomorrow’s World’ feels like an endless nightdrive that you don’t want to be on. A song like the swaying ‘Think of Me’ is wildly misplaced at track two, feeling like an interlude that’s been left on repeat for a long 4 minutes, while ‘Catch Me’’s overly literal lyrics would even have Drive’s man-in-lift rolling his eyes in his squashed skull.

08/10

Mazes Ore & Minerals (Fat Cat) By Hayley Scott. In stores Feb 25

08/10

Keaton Henson

The Men

Birthdays

New Moon

(Oak Ten) By Chris Watkeys. In stores Feb 25

(Sacred Bones) By David Zammitt. In stores Mar 4

Another year, another surfeit of timorous records made by introspective male singer-songwriters. But sitting somewhere in the melancholy hinterland between Bon Iver, Perfume Genius and Elliot Smith, Keaton Henson’s fragile and trembling vocals, coupled with his shimmeringly beautiful musical backdrops, mark out the man in the upper echelons of this bloated genre pool.This is the second record from the performance-averse Londoner, and it’s a thing of quiet beauty and subtle power. ‘You’ is awash with strings which swell with a gut-wrenching energy, alongside a violin part which quickens the pulse while it breaks your heart. ‘Don’t Swim’, by contrast, almost knocks you off your feet when it explodes from an acoustic introduction into violent, amplified life; a forty-second blast of pure noise. ‘Kronos’ is similarly turbulent, and it’s this contrast to the lonely quietude of the rest of the album which elevates ‘Birthdays’ to genuine greatness.

The fourth album from the prolific Brooklyn punks finds The Men in easily their most diverse form to date. While the songs are again generally administered at breakneck speed, Mark Perro and co. pepper their sound with even more folk, country and neo-Americana leanings this time around, making an altogether more interesting textural tapestry.The album kicks off, for example, with ‘Open The Door’, which sounds more Belle & Sebastian than Dead Kennedys, while ‘High and Lonesome’, an instrumental that touches on the Southern rock of Band of Horses, is the group’s most reflective moment yet, allowing Nick Chiericozzi’s sumptuous guitars to soar with delicious weightlessness. ‘The Seeds’ is another experiment, this time in straight up indie rock, but it’s pulled off as an unmitigated success. Early fans and angst aficionados needn’t fear, however, you’ll almost be able to taste the sweat as it condenses on the cold concrete walls during the high-octane triptych of ‘The Brass’,‘Electric’ and ‘I See No One’.

07/10

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Photography by Sonny McCartney

Mazes’ debut album, ‘A Thousand Heys’, was anything but a stylistic precursor to what was to follow, as the band return with a record that sees them navigate towards a more refined, electronic/kraut-infused path. ‘Ores & Minerals’ melds together the scuzzy indie rock facets of Mazes MK 1 with a subtle, if not tentative, appreciation of primitive computer techniques, steeped in motoric rhythms, loops and samples that become increasingly lucid with each listen.While the band have employed a slightly more complex approach here they’ve managed to retain the jaunty buoyancy that made their debut so unobtrusively charming, and after some line-up jiggling, their classic hooks are now enveloped in hypnotic psychedelia with a scattering of field recordings and instrumental tricks. Opener and single ‘Bodies’ is testimony to it, with Jack Cooper’s minimalist lyricism being underpinned by repetitive loops, escalating into one long, mesmeric drone-scape, while ‘Jaki’ and instrumental ‘Leominster’ provide an introspective mystique that shows the band at their most contemplative. Here Mazes have delved into more embellished territory without sacrificing their unpretentious disposition by keeping their aptitude for melody and nuance intact, whilst producing something that’s more likely to get us moving in the process.

Al bums 09/10

Daughter If You Leave (4AD) By Sam Walton. In stores Mar 18

08/10

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Marnie Stern

Night Works

The Chronicles of Marnia

Urban Heat

(Kill Rock Stars) By Amy Pettifer. In stores Mar 18

(Loose Lips) By Reef Younis. In stores Mar 4

Four albums into her career and Marnie Stern is doing a solid job of establishing herself as a force of nature. On this record she is achingly raw and blazingly industrial, nee noring her way through a set of siren songs that are as beguiling as they are confrontational. The finger-tapping, for which she has become infamous, is as well used here as ever, but her voice is percussive too, almost Sue Tompkins-esque – capable of rollercoastering rhythms and exploiting every inch of its Minnie Mouse timbre, in short, making no apologies for its lack of stereotypical, rock credentials. The songs are about fantasy, struggle and the total mystery of being who you are. “You’re gonna need a sledgehammer to walk in my shoes,” she sings. Maybe the footprints of this slight prodigy are light, but the tracks are clearly visible. Stern well deserves her place alongside Hersh, Phair, Deal and Hatfield as an artist putting herself at the front of her music and compromising nothing.

Once upon a time, Gabriel Stebbing’s musical success seemed intrinsically linked to Metronomy’s but, just as the band’s star began to really rise, so did his solo conviction. A fresh foray as Your Twenties (with Michael Lovett aka NCZA/Lines) proved pretty forgetful, and where Lovett gave us one of last year’s most sublime cuts of sighing electro-pop, Night Works is the sultry contender for this year’s gossamer gong. All fragile melodies, delicate emotional wisps and hazy R&B ballads, there’s an awful lot to love about ‘Urban Heat Island’.Taking the fleeting waft of sumptuous disco on ‘Tried So Hard’, the effortless Chromeo-esque grooves of ‘Share the Weather’, and the crisp, minimal funk and tumbling guitar lick of ‘Long Forgotten Boy’, Stebbing’s current work slips neatly between blissful pretension and retro ’80s revivalism. Upbeat and offbeat, it’s an album that wriggles with the energy and ingenuity you’d expect from a Metronomy mind.This time, though,‘Urban Heat Island’ feels very much like his own.

08/10

Photography by Timothy Cochrane

If 2013 finds guitar music in a parlous state, it might seem counter-intuitive to suggest that a band whose debut album recalls Coldplay’s stadium splendour is the group to rekindle the fire. But if there was ever a record to remind the music-listening public that songs of the epic and soaring variety aren’t all meaningless irritations written purely to soundtrack the next Volkswagen ad, then ‘If You Leave’ might be it. Because while Daughter’s debut is undeniably a grand record, full of shimmering guitars, pounding drums and the kind of exquisitely melancholic melodies so often prone to lyrical claptrap, it’s also a brutal, quietly poetic affair, unafraid of confrontation. Across its ten tracks, amongst more typical subjects of heartbreak and isolation, are songs that allude to sexual assault (‘Human’) and abortion (‘Lifeforms’), and arrangements that aren’t afraid to cut down a song’s towering peak in its prime in order to thrust singer Elena Tonra’s bare, beautiful vocals into thrillingly stark isolation. Indeed, it’s a record whose size suits the songs rather than the venues in which it hopes they’ll be performed.The last record to offer a similar combination of majestically desperate songs and almost bruising intimacy so well was ‘The Bends’.While Radiohead’s subsequent relationship with guitar music is well documented, on present evidence Daughter are picking up the reins.

07/10

06/10

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club

The Experimental Tropic Blues Band

Golden Grrrls

Theme Park

Golden Grrrls

Theme Park

(Night School) By Austin Laike. In stores Feb 25

(Transgressive) By Jacob Boswall. In stores Feb 25

Golden Grrrls’ eponymous debut album – inspired by New Zealand and Australian lo-fi indie and bands from their hometown of Glasgow like The Pastels and The Vaselines – features purposefully rough vocal harmonies from the off.Where bands like Veronica Falls sing in a decidedly meant-to-be fashion, the boy/girl vocals of group founder Ruari MacLean and guitarist Rachel Aggs feel awkward and like they don’t quite fit together, him flatly burring, her sweetly chirruping. It’s how young love should be – bumpy. Exuberance is another requirement for this kind of charmingly naive guitar pop, which ‘Golden Grrrls’ has in abundance. ‘New Pop’ is pitched somewhere between a borderline twee Dinosaur Jr. and the jittery sound of UK ‘70s new wave – it’s a fitting tone to set at the top of a record so awash with DIY nobbles and so clearly high on brilliantly cultish indie songs.

Occasionally there’s an album that reminds us there’s more to life than dark days and anti-freeze.Theme Park’s eponymous debut album does exactly that, recreating the sort of ecstatic weightlessness that everyone feels after leaving forced education – “that rich period of life between school and early 20s.” In simple terms (something that suits Theme Park and their accessible, funky, syncopated synth pop), this is indie-pop done more than a little well, produced by Luke Smith and prone to recurring bouts of samba-inspired percussion and illusions of sun, sea and sambuca that The Inbetweeners would embarrass themselves to. It’s euphoric, bright, energetic, and catchy to a point that you’ll every either completely love it or hate it. And yet for all its clear craft,‘Theme Park’ feels late to the party. It would have been best promoted on tour with Friendly Fires in 2009.

Specter at The Feast (Abstract Dragon) By Amy Pettifer. In stores Mar 18 It’s hard to deny that growling chords, garage licks and thudding bass remain a universal language for any entry level rock band full of riot and snarl, but the middle section of ‘Spectre at the Feast’ – rammed with BRMC’s familiar, jubilant stomp – feels more formulaic than it did ten years ago. It’s rock music by the book, but it feels stuck searching for the voice that fits it now. In places, this sixth album resembles Radiohead’s first – a bad and good thing, the contemplative moments (coloured by the recent death of Robert Been’s father) providing a more interesting direction. ‘Sometimes the Light’ is a sonic homage to Spiritualized and hits equally maudlin heights, the 8-minute closer ‘Lose Yourself ’ destined to bring out the emo-teen in anyone within earshot. It sounds cathartic and maybe now BRMC can move on.

07/10

Liquid Love

Steve Mason Monkey Minds in the Devil’s Time

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Mar 4

(Double Six) By Chris Watkeys. In stores Feb 11

If the band’s name didn’t quite indicate enough how they might sound, then the fact that John Spencer produced this album probably will. Of course it’s primal, primitive blues-rock-garage-noise. The group, however, are in possession of as much humour as they are rambunctiousness – calling themselves such names as Boogie Snake and Dirty Coq, they instil a careless, reckless bluster to ‘Liquid Love’, a record named after a meeting place on Brooklyn’s hipper than hip Bedford Ave. Aside from the flat out bursts of guitar charge and garage-swamp swagger, a smatter of funk struts its way through the record too – in the end paying equal parts homage to Sly Stone and the Cramps. New ground may not be being broken here, but the old one is being stomped to death with a giant pair of boots in a gloopy puddle of splattering mud.

One thing we’ve come never to expect from Steve Mason is a dull album, and this twenty-track semi-opus is no different.The spoken-word pieces and samples that link each song, rather than being mere distractions, feel integral and necessary to the music, and Mason’s inherent ability as a songwriter is once again in plain view on the Beatles-esque melodic simplicity of ‘A Lot Of Love’ and on ‘Lonely’ – a mildly euphoric vignette brushed with gospel touches.Whether on a straightforward indie-pop record, or a semi-concept album such as this, Mason’s talent seem to always shine through. Elsewhere, ‘More Money, More Fire’ is a seething, politically enraged hip-hop track sung by a guest MC, which sits somewhat incongruously amongst the indie haze yet is all the more full of impact for it.

(Jaune Orange)

Autre Ne Veut Anxiety (Software) By Reef Younis. In stores Feb 25

07/10

Mining the despair and depression of an anxiety disorder isn’t your typical inspiration but it’s a catharsis Brooklyn-based, electro artist Arthur Ashin (or Autre Ne Veut) has made play out. Stridently bringing his struggles to life, the aptly titled ‘Anxiety’ pushes through ’80s pop hooks, big melodies and slurring R&B. A part ‘listen to me’ Glee bonanza, part heart-on-sleeve diary confession, his piercing falsetto forms the centrepiece as the album dances between avant-pop, prime time X-Factor dramatics and warped, witch-house eeriness. Pushing past vocal boundaries, Ashin warbles into wild octaves and lavishly cuts between the crisp and strained. As the howls and hollers are let loose on ‘Gonna Die’ and tip the edge on ‘Don’t Ever Look Back’, ‘Ego Free Sex Free’ characterises the unerring mix of warped sex jams, dark honesty and arty pop pretension. One to bump heads over, instead of uglies to, ‘Anxiety’s a real Rorschach test of an LP.

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01 Kraftwerk Photographer: Peter Boettcher 02/03 Jamie Stewart / Eugene Robinson Photographer: Roy J Baron

Live

03 Maria Minerva Photographer: Roy J Baron

KRaftwerk: The Catalogue ‘radio-activity’ Tate Modern, Southwark, London 07.02.2013 By Stuart Stubbs

www.loudandquiet.com

‘Radio-Activity’ – Kraftwerk’s fifth studio album, released in 1975 – is, as the one-sheet we’re handed on arrival at Tate Modern tells us, “a highly innovative science fiction movie soundtrack about radio-activity and the activity of the radio”. It was also the band’s first entirely self-produced record, the first to come from the soon-to-be classic line-up of Ralf Hütter, Florian Schneider, Karl Bartos and Wolfgang Flür, and, perhaps most importantly, the first Kraftwerk record to be completely electronic, since the preceding ‘Autobahn’ had also incorporated flutes, violins and guitar. “Firsts” are of course very Kraftwerk, and an eight-night retrospective at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall is another for the list. A world famous Modern Art gallery encased in an old power station, the Tate and its grand, concrete hall fits Kraftwerk like a black tie on a red shirt.We arrive through the gallery café and are handed a cushion (which we won’t need) and a pair of ‘Radio-Activity’-branded 3D glasses (which we definitely will need).The show’s running time is said to be two hours, but even though the album weighs in at less than 38

minutes the extras we get from the band are overwhelming.The lights go out (all of the lights – complete darkness), the curtain goes up and 1000 people assume positions that most won’t abandon for the rest of the night – specs on, eyes wide and mouths open in front of four aging German men in glowing cat-suits stood behind trademark plinths and in front of a giant 3D screen.Without the screen Kraftwerk would sound incredible but look like taxidermy. As ‘Radio-Activity’ gets underway, it’s easy to forget that this most important of electronic albums is being reproduced live at all. Kraftwerk themselves shrink and flatten further still as they unexpectedly perform ‘The Robots’ from 1978’s ‘The Man-Machine’ as cyborg versions of themselves reach out halfway across the room with telescopic limbs. It’s like the giant Hütter is patting the head of the guy four rows in front. Avatar didn’t look this good. As for the songs from the album – most of them extra minimal and ambient by comparison to Kraftwerk’s later work – they’re illustrated incorporating ‘Radio-Activity’’s inner sleeve artwork (stylized drawings of radars, sound-

waves and the like) and scenes of outer space – all made for flying towards the viewer. Still nobody moves, transfixed in the dark. ‘Autobahn’ (complete with a Sims-like video of a VW versus a Mercedes on the open road) marks the start of everything else – a dazzling zip through Kraftwerk’s history that shines a glaring light on just how much they’ve given electronic music. From here on in the surround speakers flanking each side of the Turbine Hall are cranked, ‘Trans Europe Express’ sounds beastly, like it’s been sampled by Timberland. ‘The Machine-Man’, ‘The Model’, ‘Computer Love’, ‘Computer World’ – we get it all, by which time 3D visuals are the norm and trips into what would become known as techno, trance, euphoria, Detroit house and, even at one point, dub-step become the focus. It’s a chronological ride that makes Kraftwerk’s progression all the more clear, with ‘Electric Cafe’’s (1986) ‘Boing Boom Tschak’ and ‘Musique Non-Stop’ perhaps sounding most impressive of all, or at least certainly the ballsiest as they boom around the place. One at a time, Kraftwerk take a bow and exit. Finally, people start to move.

Sal Mineo Cafe Oto, Dalston, London 06.02.2013 By David Zammitt

The latest project from Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu and Oxbow’s Eugene S Robinson, Sal Mineo’s set was never going to be an easy ride. It starts with a sharp, inhaled breath and a deafening wave of static noise that forms an ominous preface to a wilfully disconcerting performance, underpinned by an unbroken electronic buzz that always threatens to flare up and explode. Stewart remains seated for most of the show, perspiring as he controls his vast desk of hardware; twitching like an exorcism as he acts as a conduit for some diabolic force, and rising only to crash his twin cymbals as a welcome catharsis in the digital tension. It’s a bizarre and intriguing nigh out and Robinson has the audience on tenterhooks as he narrates a brutal tale of abduction at the hands of an unnamed malevolent force, while Stewart draws on a pallet of sounds that come straight out of an early Aronofsky soundboard. The range of Robinson’s vocal dynamics are incredible, moving from whispers and cracked falsetto to unwavering screams and quasi-gospel choruses, his story detailing the protagonist’s burial as Stewart evokes birds, snakes, and fireworks, panning his aural landscape from desert to afterlife with dexterity. Captivating, but not for the faint-hearted.

Maria Minerva Shacklewell Arms, Dalston, London 07.02.2013 By Amy Pettifer

Climbing up on stage, Maria Minerva relates a conversation in which someone asks her elliptically, ‘where the forefront is’.We all know the notion is arbitrary but at the same time it’s pretty clear that the forefront is probably where we are right now; namely in an unpolished corner of Dalston at the behest of one of the most interesting underground artists of the moment. In the two years since Minerva started carving out her dusky, DIY-techno niche her work has acquired a richness that belies the secrets of adventures beyond her bedroom set up.Where earlier performances were full of solitary restraint, this one is rich with other voices, snatches of dialogue and song (including the chirping refrain of The Chordette’s ‘Mr Sandman’, on 2012’s ‘The Star’) over which Minerva croons a lugubrious counterpoint. Her performance is wilder now, her voice loose and primal, scrambling the circuits that produce her gluey, techno underscore. Despite this confidence, her presence remains disarmingly personal – for Minerva the forefront is in your room or in your head and while tonight might not be the apex of her potential, it certainly confirms her status as an unpolished, goofball genius whose sonic references act like hyperlinks back to the stories and music that have brought her here.

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Live 01 Conor Oberst Photographer: Roy J Baron

02 Dinosaur Jr. Photographer: Lee Goldup

Dancing Years

Indians

Serafina Steer

Metz

Conor Oberst

Oporto, Leeds 30.1.2013 By Kate Parkin

The Lexington, Angel, London 01.02.2013 By David Zammitt

St. Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch 24.01.2013 By Amy Pettifer

Birthdays, Dalston, London 02.02.2013 By Stuart Stubbs

The Barbican Centre, London 04.02.2013 By David Zammitt

▼

Live at Leeds Festival announced its line-up two days ago and the room is crammed full with people waiting to see one of the most hotly tipped acts on the bill, Dancing Years. Formerly performing as ‘Joseph and David’ after their two founding members, the newly christened band seem shy of the attention, singer David Henshaw muttering so inaudibly his voice almost disappears through the floorboards.Trapped in a painful struggle with their own shyness, their fierce concentration gives ‘Borderline’ an air of uneasy tension, until suddenly they transform shy whispers into a heady crash that surges dangerously towards the brink.The crowd huddles closer as their chaotic clustering of strings, keys and accordion collide, the spartan chords of ‘Suddenly Still’ giving way to David’s heart-trembling cries of, “For the first time in my life, I’ve found peace in my mind”. In the offbeat charms of Bright Eyes and the rallying screams of Arcade Fire their sound finds a home. Roused from their melancholy reverie ‘Falling Woods’ they raise a chorus of voices to block the rain-lashed world outside. Unplugging their instruments and finally facing the crowd with a steady smile, people are practically phoning Live At Leeds tickets as they turn and leave.

“Hey London! We are Indians.We are from Copenhagen, Denmark.” Søren Løkke Juul’s compere work is a little gauche but what he lacks in skill he makes up for in enthusiasm. “How are you?” he asks the Lexington crowd and he genuinely seems to care.The stage is barely big enough to host the three-piece Indians live incarnation, hunched and shifting from foot to foot as they work their keyboards, synths and a single ride cymbal to shake the beertinged sweat off the walls. Juul’s voice is raw amid the Animal Collective-esque dance discord, forming the centre of a rough around the edges euphoria, and ‘Reality Sublime’ is the hypnotic jewel in the set’s crown. Its upbeat synths and handclaps build before descending into a three-way jam of crunchy arpeggios with the singer writhing, his hair falling over his oversized medallion.The performance is not without its flaws, however, and the selfindulgence of some of the extended instrumentals becomes tiresome, while the more maudlin songs are lost in the live setting, betrayed in equal measure by their repetition and the context of a Friday night in Islington. Juul et al do a solid job of conjuring their ethereal atmosphere, but, like the eponymous album released days before, the performance is light on substance and in need of structure.

It’s a relief to step off a raucous east London street and into the world of Serafina Steer’s music, which, despite very real hints of the everyday grit peeping through cracks in the sonic gloss, is a welcome escape and perfectly at home in the ethereal reverence of Shoreditch Church.To launch her album ‘The Moths Are Real’, Steer has assembled an impressive band of adventurers including a string quartet, a trio of doo-wop backing singers, Kohhei Matsuda from Bo Ningen, plus Steve Mackey and Jarvis Cocker, the latter being the record’s producer who tonight makes a charming effort to remain inconspicuous, even while operating a wind machine.This motley crew flawlessly reproduce the rich complexities of the album’s production – the considerable dynamics of analogue samples, drone guitar and voodoo drums never once overshadow the incandescent vocal and musical talent that has corralled them together. Switching between delicate shanties (‘Night Before Mutiny’), confessionals scored with church organ arpeggios (‘The Removal Man’) and lush, myth-folk tales (‘Island Odyssey’, ‘Alien Invasion’) before rounding up with the blinding genius of ‘Disco Complication’ (a storming, danceable and totally unholy marriage of harp and synth) Steer balances grandeur, sincerity and clean, unquestionable skill without ever dipping a finger into the overblown, saccharine or twee.

It’s only when seeing Toronto band Metz in the flesh that it makes complete sense that they’ve released their eponymous debut album via Sub Pop. Hardly a label known for guitar squall anymore, their mythological past remains impossible to ignore – almost as much as the extent to which Metz resemble ‘Bleach’ era Nirvana tonight. On the simplest of levels there’s three of them, but that’s not it. Front man Alex Edkins – with prescription glasses fastened like swimming goggles – is a gawky kind of figure, more like Steve Albini, but pumped rather than nastily angry, with Big Black’s dark churn of industrial noise being another noted influence. Edkins is the guy with the amphetamine twitch and a wretched howl that, deep and very hardcore, is the least inspired thing about the band. So his voice isn’t it either (in fact, it does a lot to remind us how Cobain’s tortured drawl lifted Nirvana’s songs above those of yet another noise band). It’s Metz’s complete sense of attack that has them playing the part of a protogrunge trio that time forgot, and very convincingly if you can stand the metal-cutter volume.“Let’s move it around right down here,” says Edkins early on and summoning a mosh cyclone front centre. It doesn’t quite happen, but gets pretty close as Metz thrash through the feedback and Edkins permanently wrings the neck of his Fender Jaguar – a thirty-minute continual string bend to make your ears burn.

An all-seated affair, there is a reverent decorum in the Barbican hall that Conor Oberst seems determined to overthrow as he rifles through a set of reinterpreted ‘Bright Eyes’ and ‘Mystic Valley Band’ songs that climax with an upstanding singsong and Oberst urging a white-haired fan to take the mic: “This guy looks like he has a big voice”. Ben Brodin’s diligent performance allows Oberst to express himself, but his bowed xylophone technique on ‘Lua’ steals the show, adding a ghostly beauty that transforms the original from acoustic lament to an unearthly hymn. Oberst seems more at peace with himself than ever and there’s maturity and a rye sense of humour in his conversation that makes the set all the more engaging. Selfdeprecating throughout, he slates bloggers but goes on to give his own songs a three out of ten rating. Highlights are ‘First Day of My Life’, ‘Lua’, and ‘You Are Your Mother’s Child’, a new song about being an uncle that marries dark humour and melancholy perfectly as Oberst urges his newborn nephew not to be as lonely as him. By all intent and purpose, tonight’s performance is as rousing and much as it transcends a slightly fusty setting and frames Oberst as an accomplished, enchanting showman.

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Dinosaur Jr. Tate Modern, Southwark, London 07.02.2013 By Stuart Stubbs

The stage is a wonderful site this evening – a giant, towering stack of Marshall amps encircling the stage like someone has hired Stonehenge to put on Sunn o))). A couple of days later I heard press-release reader and giggling sycophant to the Radcliffe and Maconie show Elizabeth ‘alcopop’ Alker complain of the group’s Manchester show. “it was just drums, bass and guitar…there wasn’t any visuals and they didn’t even say ‘hello, Manchester’,” she moaned with the strained exasperation of a bored toddler. For a group who have made no bones about being completely content on making a primitive racket with just those three instruments, seeing a stack of amps so tall and engulfing that it makes them look the size of children is just about the greatest and most pertinent visual representation of Dinosaur Jr. that could ever exist. And even more importantly, the sound that emits from them is, of course, a noise-spraying, riotous and consistently ear-furrowing affair. Still touring on the back of their 2012 LP ‘I Bet on Sky’ (‘return to form’ pressed to vinyl), the group dip their toe into the record rather than fully immerse themselves as we might expect. In fact, post-reformation albums ‘Farm’ and ‘Beyond’ barely get an outing either. Instead, we are ostensibly given a blast of what a greatest

hits album might sound like. The early couplet of ‘The Lung’ and ‘The Wagon’ pave the way for a largely irresistible set-list. Mascis’ voice hangs low and rough in the mix and to hear his indistinguishable anxious yowl one has to strain; a futile attempt considering the sonic force-field created by the deafening guitar, furious bass and boot-stomp drums.While J’s vocals may be prominent on record, as those who have witnessed Dinosaur Jr. live before will know, he puts himself in second place on stage behind his true voice – his guitar. A man of very few words anyway, it makes sense, and why talk when you can uncurl a noise that sounds like a fire alarm going off under water? By the time the band reach ‘Out There’ the crowd have been whipped into a frenzy. Crashing bodies rocket out and spring back like pinballs and the stream of people clambering onto the stage – only to promptly throw themselves head-first back into the crowd – is constant for the rest of the show. ‘Start Choppin’ and ‘Freak Scene’ both still charge with irresistible menace – they don’t feel like bored, workmanlike, running-through-the-motions renditions, but instead still create a glorious sensation of spirit and blistering, pummelling noise. As Lou Barlow hammers his bass, it’s sometimes difficult to work out whether he’s

playing or punishing it. As encores go, a wailing rendition of the Cure’s ‘Just Like Heaven’ married with an elongated and unrelenting ‘Sludgefeast’ is about as good as it gets.The guitar tone Mascis manages to acquire on their take of the Cure hit is a whirling, spiralling and – ironically – deeply original, joy to behold. ‘Sludgefeast’ still packs as much punch and bite as it did in 1987, the ground-shaking noise, ringing out throughout the venue like a thousand gongs being simultaneously pounded and amplified. While Dinosaur Jr. may be creeping ever closer to the thirty-year mark since they formed and fifty years since they were born, they still instil a rambunctious spirit of youth, both in their music and via their fans and audiences. They exude a timelessness tonight that has nothing to do with nostalgia or a fad-driven return to the sounds and aesthetics of the 1990s, but is more related to their meticulously crafted, occasionally brash/occasionally melodic, consistently brilliant songs. Many bands from their original time period represented a spirit or a sound that was of the time, as a result of the time; Dinosaur Jr. have focused on writing songs, and that’s why they still hold so much clout as they do today, even if they don’t say “Hello Manchester!”

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film

C I NE M A REVIEW

By IAN ROEBUCK

Hitchcock Director: Sacha Gervasi Producer: Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren, Scarlett Johansson

05/10

Blockbusters, what would we do without them? Ian Roebuck’s searches for the answer by pitching the big-hitters against the little(r) league Clash of the metal men Tony Stark returns in his new Extremis armour for Iron Man 3, no doubt with a sarcastic one liner or three for Robert Downey Jr to revel in. A widely publicised, more serious tone has been emphasised numerous times already by new director Shane Black, who wrote Lethal Weapon and directed Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but Ben Kingsley’s ludicrous bad guy seems to defy this statement. Just look at his hair cut. The newly knighted Danny Boyle, meanwhile, is back for Trance, complete with all the raging black wit of the Iron Man franchise but it’s a thriller set in London... in real life. James McAvoy is plunged into dark territory after stealing a Goya painting with Vincent Cassel as his demon who should have all the menace of Ben Kingsley’s Mandarin but with a grip on reality modern hairstyles. Trance isn’t straightforward of course – Rosario Dawson plays a hypnotherapist who’s drawn into the tumultuous plot as McAvoy’s forgets where the painting is.All perfectly plausible, then. Men of Steel Directed by Zack Snyder, produced by Christopher Nolan and scripted by Davis S. Goyer, Superman’s Man Of Steel has got something of a dream team behind it, or maybe not. Russell Crowe and Kevin Costner are in this one and Clark Kent himself is played by Henry Cavill whose IMDB credits include a spot on Midsomer Murders and a role in Tristan and Isolde. OK, it’s a pre-emptive dig, although if the trailer is anything to go by this treads exactly the same path as Nolan’s Batman reboots. No bad thing of course, but predictability breeds contempt. A film about the real man of steel is The Grand Master, about the Ip Man (that’s the martial arts master who tutored Bruce Lee). It’s a mouthwatering biopic even before you add in the talents of Wong Kar-wai. Granted, My Blueberry Nights was a catastrophic mess but the In the Mood for Love Director is surely due a return to form and this is just the vehicle for it.Tony Leung Chiu Wai from Hero and Infernal Affairs plays the Ip man; put the tights away, Henry.

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Leo vs Leo Potentially no lycra involved on this one, but Baz Luhrmann hasn’t half stretched The Great Gatsby out. Due for a release back in May 2012 it’s now set to hit our screens a full year late, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Jay Gatsby alongside Carey Mulligan and Isla Fisher. This will look beautiful, of that there is no doubt, but will it sound beautiful? Lana Del Rey is rumoured to be leading the soundtrack. DiCaprio will then return in Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Also starring Jonah Hill, Matthew McConaughey and Jean Dujardin, Marty’s meticulous eye focuses on Wall Street for what’s set to be a sprawling cinematic wonder. Despite Gangs of New York and The Departed both hitting high notes, Scorsese and Leo haven’t really soared together, but perhaps this is the film to do. With Terence Malick’s To The Wonder, Roman Polanski’s Venus in Fur, Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo and the Coen brothers Inside Llewyn Davis all set to be released this year, too, we’re in for more cinematic treats away from the blockbuster. Sure JJ Abrams is releasing Star Trek and sure there’s another Thor film out in time for Christmas, but these auters are what we’ll be looking out for… and the Alan Partridge movie.

Hitch has Alma Reville to whip his creative juice into shape but who does Sacha Gervasi have? Judging by this wet mop of a movie there’s no spark in Sacha’s life at all. For such rich subject matter (the making of Psycho, terrifically put to paper by Stephen Rebello), director Gervasi provides a rigid, uninspired canvas for the real star of Hitchcock to run amok. From the very first scene where Anthony Hopkins addresses the camera with all the pithy, derivative deadpan you’d expect from Alfred himself, right through to the fantastic one liner Hopkins delivers at its welcoming denouncement, this is his film. There’s admirable support from both Scarlett Johansson as Janet Leigh and Toni Collette as Hitchcock’s PA Peggy Robertson, and clearly Hopkins relies heavily on Helen Mirren’s solid, emotional balancing act of a role as Alma Reville, in much the same way as Hitch relied on his wife, but you walk away with only one memory – Hopkins plays Hitchcock with such glee you can see his eyes sparkle through the prosthetics. Full of kitchen sink melodrama and heavy-handed ticks and tricks that would have sent shivers down the great auteur’s spine, Gervasi’s limited experience as a director tells. His one film, Anvil:The Story of Anvil, is a delightful doco about the human spirit behind heavy metal and you can see he’s aiming to pull heartstrings with Hitchcock but the film falls way short. Using serial killer Ed Gein as both a spiritual guide and tormenter to Hitchcock is wasted on Gervasi, whose clumsy dream like sequences fail psychologically and narratively. Interestingly Ed Gein inspired both Norman Bates and Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, another virtuoso performance from Anthony Hopkins and I just couldn’t shake that thought on leaving the cinema.

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IDIOT

Peter Stringfellow

Rich mullet man

FAME

Rich mullet man in a thong

“Do you think I’m sexy?”

MOST LIKELY TO SAY

“I think I’m sexy”

“Do you have these in a long?”

LEAST LIKELY TO SAY

“Man, Page 3 is so degrading to women”

You know he’s not really Scottish, right?

IDIOT POWER PLAY

Peter complained that he wasn’t hacked by NOTW

Rod Stewart

What’s sexy about a bitter hobbit?

1 2

GAME, SET & MATCH

MY TIME Diary of a somebody So the ball comes over to me, right, and I’m finkin if I fall on it, yeah, this guy playing for the blues will have to tickle me to get it back, plus my team will win, so it’s win win all round. But he don’t tickle me, does he, he booted the ball from under me.Well, I ain’t havin that, so I pretend he’s really hurt my tummy, and so he gets sent off and I’m laughing (in my head).Turns out though, that everyone hates the blues but not as much as they hate young blokes doing nuffin wrong, so the next day at school everyone’s well laughing at me and showing me what shit people are chattin on Twitter about my bracelet and tings. Mum made me eat extra Findus pancakes that night, the horse ones. I was bare vexed.

1. Snake is the best! 2.That’s it, Colin, do the rude gesture but not too much 3. Don’t stare, but that is Calvin Harris! 4. Can’t beleive it, Dad’s letting me do the wanker sign. He’s alright, really. 5. Maybe now is a good time to bring up the divorce?

...on gangs

A terrifying bunch, the lot of them. From the lady who sings right down to the Wonga guy. ‘Chuckles’ tried to make me touch his ear. It was like staring at an uncooked beef burger taped to a 4-day old balloon. I had to get out of there.

Tell me what you’re wearing

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You wouldn’t believe me if I did, pal

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

Photo casebook “The sexy world of Ian Beale”