The Black Static

Hi, How Are You and Thanks For Visiting.

2010-10-07T09:23:00.000Z

Nothing new happens here any more, it's all over at the NFR Blog, but my guess is you just came from there.

I do have a load of stuff in here that might be interesting to read and some of the mix/compilation links might still be active, so feel free to hunt down the links archive and see what you can find.

MxBx

Just to quickly say that...

2009-11-06T14:29:00.000Z

...I am really looking forward to writing up my top 50 albums of the year this year. The process drives me to the edge every time but it's an enjoyable one and this year especially I have heard some seriously inspired, inspiring and mind blowing music so it's a challenge I am inviting on myself more than ever.

Also, this being the coincidence of my 30th year and the close of the first ten years of the 2000's I am tempted to make a little top 10 albums of the decade. I already have strong feelings over five or six records so I am feeling like I want to do it.

This shit writes itself anyway, doesn't it?

MxBx

Not For Resale Vol. 5 (IMP 49, August 2009)

2009-09-28T20:46:00.009Z

It's Not For Resale at the Penthouse this week - Thursday. Diaries out. good good. coincidentally, this month's download mix for you in a Brighton based NFR special.

This is your sneak preview teaser trailer of a mix of demo mayhem. There'll be 4 more hours of this and then some later in the week when we hit the Penthouse for an NFR which might also double as an epliogue or addendum to my 30th birthday from Sunday.

It's the 5th installment of the Not For Resale mixes I make for the Project. Usually these are compiled from demos, self- and subterranean label releases we’ve been playing from all over the world; but this one is more special. This is an exclusively Brighton only mix (except the xbx jingles. He’s from the US, but no one in town has made me a mini-jingle yet…hint hint!) –designed to show off the undeniably awesome strength of a music scene that’s full of razor sharp talent, freaks and undiscovered genius. Just in time for Brighton Live too, which is pretty much lacking in a lot of that.

So here you go. Here’s Brighton for you:

NFR!

www.nfrblog.blogspot.com
www.myspace.com/notforresaledjs

Not For Resale Volume 5 (IMP 49, August 2009)

DOWNLOAD

Tracklist:

01. Power Up! – NFR Jingle
02. Masks - Fang
03. 129 Die In Jet! - Progression
04. Elks – Four Pale Letters
05. Awesome Wells – I Think I Just Heard The Hens Applauding In The Henhouse
06. Bellows - Troop
07. xbx – Shut Up NFR Jingle
08. Beadle – Chasing The Feedback Monkey
09. Curly Hair – Oh Brother
10. Halogen – Not The Remix
11. Drum Eyes – 50 50 (Live At The Engine Rooms)
12. Nullifier – If Days Corrode
13. Everyone To The Anderson – The Man Who Was Born Inside A Horse
14. Hind Ear - Coconut
15. Lamp – 1 Means 2
16. Esben And The Witch - Corridors
17. xbx – WolfMeat NFR Jingle

MxBx

Crawling Lke A Leech

2009-09-10T19:05:00.004Z

I haven't listened to this kind of buzz for a while then this turned up on The Worried Well.

Along with the music, it's probably the most disturbing video I have ever seen.

Start Beef I

2009-09-01T11:01:00.000Z

More of these are getting out there. Check yrselves.

Start Beef: ONE

Summer Winter (IMP 48, July 2009)

2009-08-27T20:31:00.006Z

July’s IMP mix concludes my Summer Trilogy on the bleakest of notes. Somewhat predictably of me I realise, but it’s a kind of predictable I can live with especially given the premise of the series – the soundtrack to my summer split into 3. The final part is 70 minutes of black metal, ranging from the claustrophobic through the ambient to feral punk, doom, back-yard and downright (read subterranean) dirty. All that and more. 12 individual caustic/beautiful entities to climax this triptych.

Sounds just right for long summer days lazing around the beach right? Yep.

Fuck off.

Summer Winter (IMP 48, July 2009)
Download

Tracklist:

01. De Silence Et d'Ombre - From The Dark Unknown Space
02. Carrion Wraith - Vers Une Nouvelle Ère
03. 1349 - Maggot Fetus... Teeth Like Thorns
04. Woe - Alone With Our Failures
05. Weapon - Cacophony! Black Sun Dragon's Tongue!
06. Bone Awl - Make For Yourself A Last Vision
07. Al Namrood - Atba'a Alnamrood
08. Bone Ritual - Attend To The Signs
09. Darkcell - II
10. Urfaust - Unter Töchtern Der Wüste
11. Teitenblood - Infernal Dance Of The Wicked
12. Cobalt – Two Thumbed Fist

MxBx

Summer Strings & Skins (IMP 47, June 2009)

2009-08-02T08:00:00.000Z

June’s mix is part two of my Summer Trilogy and it’s all the guitar based tracks that my summer is revolving around. That’s as far as the concept stretches but it’s still come out as a really involving listen from the patient intro that builds up and bounces on to Wild Beasts right down to the imploding amp firestorm of Mayyors and out into the quivering pulse of Jungle Gym Vaginas; Shifting through scenes and sounds this keeps a certain heat and excited momentum going throughout.

Summer Strings & Skins (IMP 47, June 2009)

DOWNLOAD

Tracklist

01. The Flowers Of Hell – Bluemchen
02. Wild Beasts – The Fun Powder Plot
03. The Maccabees – No Kind Words
04. Oneida – It Was A Wall
05. Atlas Sound & Panda Bear – Walkabout
06. Best Coast – Sun Was High (So Was I)
07. Velvet Davenport – Ocean Summer Time
08. Ilyas Ahmed – Enter A Shadow
09. The Warlocks – Standing Between The Lovers Of Hell
10. The Phantom Band – Folk Song Oblivion
11. Magic Wands – Kiss Me Dead
12. Mayyors – Deads
13 Jungle Gym Vaginas – Wavy Caps Side A

Summer Dub & Bass (IMP 46, May 2009)

2009-07-31T08:10:00.001Z

May’s mix has finally been completed right at the end of July. A terrible state of affairs that I can blame on all sorts – mostly I am saying that it’s because I was working on the best mix I might ever make if I can actually ever finish it. More on that when it’s done. Instead of that I conceded defeat for the time being and put together a load of grinding bass heavy dub tech and ambient soulful dubstep. This is the first part of my Summer Trilogy - named in an homage to Oneida’s Kill Yr Parents trilogy for sure.

Summer Dub & Bass (IMP 46, May 2009)

DOWNLOAD
Tracklist:

01. Mount Kimbie - Verticals
02. La Roux - In For The Kill (Skream’s Lets Get Ravey Remix)
03. Kwaidan - Masaki
04. Raffertie - Sugar
05. Bar 9 - Coalescence
06. 16 Bit - Chainsaw Calligraphy
07. Bombaman - Rear End
08. Egyptrixx - Godzilla
09. Joker - Snake Eater
10. Ramadanman & Appleblim - Justify
11. Peverelist - Clunk Click, Every Trip
12. Silkie - Purple Love
13. Goth Trad - Far East Assassin (Distance Remix)
14. Coki - Goblin

Thrash Hits Nachmystium Review

2009-07-24T07:30:00.004Z

I was recently approached by Thrash Hits magazine to write about US Black Metal for them and they seem to be happy for me to flex a bit and really go for it across the whole world of the genre which is awesome news and a thoroughly welcome development for me. I have a couple of pieces in the works on Canadian and Saudi Arabian BM but my first piece for them went up last night - a review of the new Nachtmystium EP, Doomsday Derelicts.

Read it: HERE

Songs of the year so far

2009-06-18T21:08:00.013Z

Halfway through month six of 2009 seems like a suitable time to drop some kind of landmark for the year. I will definitely be doing another top 100 tracks of the year come December/January. The kind of exhaustion it made me feel last year was masochistically enjoyable and it was a far more popular and well received exercise than I imagined it would be. But that's for later, just so you know its coming and to prepare yourselves, for now I just want to drop my current two favourite songs so far.

I don't think revealing my relationship with these two songs is going to give too much away at this stage, anything can happen in the next six months, song, album, demo releases and my own opinions, but halfway through the year these are the two songs that for me have, in one instance have distilled and defined the sound of the year so far, and in the other created a whole separate world just a sidestep from this one furnishing it with songcraft of genuine genius and arresting lyricism.

The first 3 months were totally owned by Mount Kimbie's Maybes from the Maybes EP on Hotflush. Ostensibly a soulful dubstep and bass label this branch out in sound totally spun the game around on its head and incorporated some kind of shoegaze element into the continually evolving beast that is dubstep. The track features a rippling echo of a guitar part for half its length before dropping a bassline bomb and shuddering stuttering female vocal hook along with the electronic ornamentation. Simply put; Icy cool.

The second of the two is Sunset Rubdown's Nightingale/December Song from Dragonslayer on Jagjaguwar. For the first few listens it was the first half of this album that I found especially compelling then suddenly I could get past this one song - or rather, I had to skip straight to it: "Let me hammer this point home" - and more than that, the structure of it is the pinnacle of everything the album tries to create (and does successfully across it's entire length), but here it all comes together in the buzzy electronic drum beat and voice of valour and heroism striding across it, the euphoric swell of the verse into the chorus, the sensual eroticism of "sacrificial virgins" and "fast explosions" and the organ breakdown/build up. After all that, I'm not sure whether the ending is a bit of a let down or not but by then it's too late to worry about a simple thing like that.

So far I have about 30 songs vying to get in my top ten of the year, but these two are my current obsessions. Let me know if they become yours.

MxBx

Home Shopping

2009-06-04T09:49:00.001Z

Yesterday I received a lot of stuff in the post all on the same day and last week I got a whole stack of records I'd been waiting a while on receiving. I've got a lot of listening to do! A few of these are albums from my top 10 last year that I promised myself I'd buy and I only got round to it now, the rest are brand new exciting. The Wormsblood 12" is amazing - it's the blue/black splatterfest up there. The grey Heavy Winged is really nice too, real heavy. These things are objects of beauty. Adam also gave me all the albums he's been working on recently, so there's a journey of about 5 hours of deep claustrophobic psychologically challenging drone I am about to embark on.

Adam Lygo – Legend Of The Grey Woods (Hive Music)
Adam Lygo – The Mythology Of Mirrors (Hive Music)
Adam Lygo – The Mythology Of The Spiral (Hive Music)
Adam Lygo – Virus (Hive Music)
Amesoeurs – Amesoeurs (Profound Lore)
FNU Ronnies - 12" (Night People)
Harvestman - In A Dark Tongue (Neurot)
Heavy Winged - Waking Shaking 12” (Aurora Borealis)
Horna - Sanojesi Aarelle (Debemur Morti / Moribumd)
Invisible/Sarah Walpole – A Life In Whispers (Hive Music)
Our Love Will Destroy The World - Stillborn Plague Angels 12” (Dekorder)
Ride For Revenge - Wisdom Of The Few (Bestial Burst)
Sylvester Anfang II – Sylvester Anfang II (Aurora Borealis)
U.S. Christmas - Eat The Low Dogs (Neurot)
Wooden Shjips – Dos (Holy Mountain)
Wormsblood - In The Stars 12” (Aurora Borealis)

Not For Resale: Quad Throw Salchow

2009-05-28T08:29:00.000Z

Quad Throw Salchow Myspace

The Swarovski Mix (IMP 45, April 2009)

2009-05-21T20:04:00.005Z

Like a lot of the mixes I make this has been based on me noticing a theme running through a lot of the music – usually artists names – that I have been listening to. I am making a concerted effort to be a bit more intellectual about things, but am failing dismally – the proof is clear in the title of this mix. After noticing a lot of jewels in my playlists – Emeralds, Diamonds, Crystals - I realised they were nearly all Crystals so I just went with those and came up with the most stupid, cheap name and artwork I could think of. It’s a really varied selection of music though, so I think it works. I got away with it. Just. I am under duress to stress that the Mr Crystal Face track is one of the greatest pieces of music ever created.

There. I said it.

The Swarovski Mix (IMP 45, April 2009)

Download

01. Crystal Plumage - Three Mothers III
02. Mr Crystal Face - Polar Bears
03. Crystal Castles - Untrust Us
04. Crystal Fighters - Xtatic Truth
05. Lazer Crystal - hotpinkbmx
06. Crystal Antlers - Parting Song For The Torn Sky
07. The Crystal Unicorn - The Light The Light
08. Crystal Stilts - Crippled Croon
09. Crystal Shards - Two Hard
10. Crystal Dragon - ‘Untitled 2’

NFR @ NWFA Fringe Festival Weekender

2009-05-20T18:49:00.001Z

Super stunning Fringe Festival weekender starring Meatbreak and Fokka Wolfe!!

These flyers say we're djing after bands, but we're on from 8 til midnight. Change of plans! Because the best laid ones.....

THE NICE WEATHER FOR AIRSTRIKES FESTIVAL
Brighton Fringe 22 -24 May Bank Holiday 2009
FREE ENTRY!!!
“A weekend of PostRock, Shoegaze, PostPunk, AntiPop, and loopladen soundscapes from Brighton’s Nice Weather For Airstrikes Records.”

* BANDS FRIDAY AND SATURDAY NIGHT
* ALL DAY SUNDAY ACOUSTIC AND LOOPS
* NOT FOR RESALE DJS FROM 8 - MIDNIGHT
* AT THE DRUIDS ARMS, Ditchling Road, Brighton

USBM DNLD

2009-05-19T12:02:00.010Z

“This thread, and the other one about the PlanB article, are the best things on the music board since the minimal techno thread.”
marckee

http://drownedinsound.com/community/boards/music/4181610

In response and in addition to Plan B’s article on USBM and my reply post on Drowned in Sound I made my own compilation of US Black Metal to illustrate a whole range of styles of black metal that will hopefully reveal the many different facets and angles to what can be done with this genre of music - or more specifically, what American artists are doing with it, how they are interpreting the templates that already exist and how they are mutating them. I think that it is evident that even the more traditionionally indebted tracks still display a sense of progression and flair for interpretation while the out and out progressive shows scant regard for what went before other than it simply being the style of music the artists enjoy most.

No compilation will ever be complete, exhaustive, succinct or get into all the niches and dark little corners that exist and I can only ever be subjective in my selection, but what I tried to do here is cover as wide a range of sound and influence as possible, from original Heavy Metal, through traditional Scandinavian BM, to post-rock, prog-folk, doom-drone and power-electronics.

In reducing this selection down to something fairly concise and focused instead of the enormous compendium I was tempted to do I have ended up compiling 21 tracks of US Black Metal recorded since the year 2000 – in alphabetical order. It comes in at 2:22:23, which I think is nice and tidy. Shame it wasn't 22 tracks and 22 seconds, but never mind., I don't think it means too much anyway.

Also worth noting – because of the unique way black metal is recorded, the sound levels and qualities between songs are unpredictable, if nothing else.

Brace yourself.

DOWNLOAD

Agalloch - Limbs (Ashes Against The Grain, The End)
Ash Pool - Origin Of Man (Saturns Slave, Hospital Productions)
Black Witchery - Holocaust Summoning (Upheaval Of Satanic Might, Osmose Productions)
Bone Awl - Culture Denied (By Ropes Through Dirt, Demo-Worship Him-Klaxon)
Brown Jenkins - Forever Funerals (Angel Eyes, Moribund)
Chaos Moon - Illusions of Dusk and Dawn (Origin of Apparition, Wraith Productions - Ars Magna Recordings)
Cobalt - Pregnant Insect (Gin, Profound Lore)
Draugar - Dust Chains Idiots (From Which Hatred Grows, tUMULt)
Enbilulugugal - Slicing The Blood Clotted Cunt Of The Rotting Virgin Angel Slut (Nun Twat Armageddon, Dipsomaniac)
Inquisition - Of Blood & Darkness We Are Born (Magnificent Glorification of Lucifer, No Colours)
Krallice - Forgiveness In Rot (Krallice, Profound Lore)
Leviathan - Fucking Your Ghost In Chains Of Ice (The Tenth Sublevel Of Suicide, Moribund Cult)
Lurker Of Chalice - Granite (Lurker Of Chalice, Southern Lord)
Servile Sect - Into The Bloom (Stratospheric Passenger, Sounds Of Battle & Souvenir Collecting)
The Angelic Process - We All Die Laughing (Weighing Souls With Sand, Profound Lore)
Velvet Cacoon - 1 (Genevieve, Full Moon Productions)
Weakling - This Entire Fucking Battlefield (Dead As Dreams, tUMULt)
Wolves In The Throne Room - Behold The Vastness And Sorrow (Two Hunters, Southern Lord)
Wormsblood - A Wolf In The Night (Mastery of Creation, Barbarian)
Wrath Of The Weak - Journey Of Many Days (Wrath Of The Weak, Bastardised)
Xasthur - Soul Abduction Ceremony (Nocturnal Poisoning, Blood Fire Death)

USBM & PlanB

2009-05-14T12:19:00.002Z

Congrats PlanB. Joseph Stannard wrote one of the best features to appear in the magazine for some time, and that's not just because the subject matter is something I am so close to. It didn’t descend into the kind of cliché or rhetoric that cripples almost every piece written about the genre, it was very even- and steady-handed and really quite thorough. At the risk of sounding a bit supercilious, I would have published something on the genre this time last year, or even the year before, when all these bands featured were already releasing records and artists like Leviathan and Xasthur were still kicking it, but the country’s still buzzing with this, so now is just as good a time as any – there’s plenty more where they came from.

I had a few thoughts on it, and here they are:
It concentrated on the more cerebral figures of the moment - or I suppose in another respect the more ‘hipster-metal’ artists - which I guess could have been either to:
a) give a coherent, focussed, narrative to the piece, or
b) to make it appear that the kinds of BM being produced in the US are all these artly crafted, cross-genre worthy strains.
There was no mention of the more base, violent, unsubtle thrashier end - No Black Witchery, Baphomets Horns, Bone Awl, Black Horns (…loads of other’s not beginning with ‘B’!). Although they got a brief mention, even Dominic Fernow’s Ash Pool are pretty down there, but deliberately so. Not too big a problem, but for the uninitiated it would be worth mentioning that the moronic Satanic sludge is not only still alive and kicking, but also producing some killer chops – just check Bone Awl’s new 7” for proof.

I guess that the foil to the more progressive side of the piece was Averse Sefira. Despite their unorthodox Kaballistic angle they are a pretty orthodox sounding BM band, more indebted to and corralled by the Scandanavian form, with a rigid attitude at odds to the rest of the bands in the article.

It felt the article didn’t quite finish off what it started in considering the lefty/liberal conundrum of musicians and the army, but it’s a real toughie for sure – For me, I want to give Cobalt my money so they can quit the army (and in recognition of their music of course), but at the same time, I wonder whether I want to give anything to the kind of person who would be in the army – that’s a superficial reaction to the idea of ‘Army’, which doesn’t consider any of the number of reasons why someone might want to join, and that’s the question I felt could have been asked of Phil McSorely, as opposed to the more patriotic angle.

The one tangible thing holding the scene together is arguably Aquarius Records and Andee Connors. In making all these records available – even down to the 10 copy tapes – in one place alongside practically every other genre of music conceivable, by listing Neu! next to Necrosadistic Goat Torture, Wormsblood next to Wolfgang Voight, The Vaselines next to Varghkoghargasmal… etcetcetc…., he’s drawing the disparate sonic elements together and providing the overarching narrative/attitude/forum that gives the idea that all these sounds can and do tie up. He would never even acknowledge that as a viable hypothesis, but the evidence is there. This is why Wrath is wrong when he says his band is “not engaged in any USBM scene” Just because this US scene is more ethereal and doesn’t revolve around a record shop…oh no, wait…

Joseph pegs it when he says that “the moment record stores added a black metal rack…the music was changed forever”, but I would go one further and say that they remain the energising, sustaining force.

It was especially good seeing Umesh Amtey get some page space - Brown Jenkins released one of my top 3 albums of 2008 and has been deserving of attention as much as more prominent groups like Nadja for combining sonic elements and moving metal forwards through a refreshing mindset.

Also, finally, Joseph must know, if not through the grapevine then personally, that Brandon Stosuy is writing a book on USBM – I wonder if he just wanted to get a cheeky little pop at it first!
PlanB, you should have stuck yr neck out and put Cobalt on the cover. The UKBM scene is coming on strong, with a few veterans…any plans for a follow-up?!

Syd's Second Crawl (Happy Birthday Mum!)

2009-04-24T06:48:00.010Z

I don't normally post much really personal stuff, but since it's my Mum's birthday I'm posting it up for her, and since this happened yesterday it's breaking news that the world needs to know. Syd starts crawling! Does this count as crawling? It looks more like swimming on the floor - or thrashing and floating. What a little boy!

This Is How We Did It (IMP 44, March 2009)

2009-04-13T13:35:00.011Z

March's IMP mix seems to have taken so long to make. I had the idea for it ages ago where originally it was going to be a comparison of white UK and black US 90's chart R&B, Hip-Hop and a bit of Pop. After listening to a lot of East 17, 5ive, Westlife, Take That and other UK stuff I realised that the UK entries just looked embarrassing and sounded so weak and clueless next to their US counterparts. I guess that was actually the intention of the mix, but we already knew that (though it is interesting to hear in hindsight and proximity and just how large a disparity there is between the sounds - the reality falling so woefully short of the intention). So what it has been distilled down to is pure solid gold 90's chart R&B and Hip-Hop without the cultural cross-examination. The only exceptions are two songs I stumbled across while looking through all this stuff and couldn't resist putting them on because not only must they be in my top 10 guilty pleasures, but they also fit in pretty well as a break in pace too. After refining the tracklist the artwork took me ages to get right too. I think I‘ve done it.

This Is How We Did It (IMP 44, March 2009)
Download

Tracklist:

01. Montell Jordan - This Is How We Do It
02. Backstreet Boys - Everybody (Backstreet's Back)
03. Blackstreet & Dr. Dre - No Diggity
04. 2Pac - Changes
05. Mark Morrison - Return Of The Mack
06. Ginuwine - Pony
07. K7 - Come Baby Come
08. Haddaway - What Is Love
09. Ce Ce Peniston - Finally
10. Bobby Brown - Two Can Play That Game
11. Luniz - I Got 5 On It
12. TLC - Creep
13. Boyz II Men - Motownphilly
14. R Kelly - (She's Got That) Vibe
15. Method Man & Mary J Blige - You're All I Need

Primary Colours preview equation

2009-04-03T10:42:00.005Z

Horrors = √ MBV X Neu – (Joy Division / Sex Pistols)

The Procession

2009-03-19T20:17:00.006Z

Electric Wizard - The Procession
Rise Above

There is a new one song Electric Wizard release thing! Not sure how else to describe it. It sounds like it was recorded on Spanish radio or something. What it is, is a 500-copy limited pressing on single-sided black vinyl with fold-out cover and A2 poster, released for the Rise Above Records 20th Anniversary Show at London ULU, Saturday December 13th 2008, where it was sold exclusively. That will be why I am a bit slow on the uptaek on this. But new Wizard is always exciting and this is no different....no wait, it is very different! Listen >>>

Download

DJ VS. Band Vs. Blog Action

2009-03-16T21:41:00.002Z

Me and Fokka Wolfe have been busy blogging and setting up the new NFR blog over here - www.nfrblog.blogspot.com We have no idea whether anyone will read it, or even how to get anyone to read it. Answers on a postcard if you do know....seriously. I will be focussing all my NFR related stuff on that blog, and using this Black Static for more personal things - well, not personal as such, just less NFR-oriented. I am not sure how well that will work, but I guess I will be putting anything that is more Brighton or demo oriented over on the NFR and anything and everything else here.

So far we've posted up our opening mission statement, March's Penthouse setlist, a bit on Japanese shoegazers Hedgehog and a review of the Everyone To The Anderson gig we DJ'd at on Friday. Things to come will be a bit on Revenge of Shinobi, an Old Mayor preview for Wednesday (so that's coming in a minute!), and if all goes well and according to plan (which is very unlikely considering how quickly all major operations are going with me at present), a new download for you too.

MxBx

Look at us, we made a BLOG!

2009-03-13T15:17:00.000Z

Yes, me and Fokka Wolfe have made a Not For Resale blog. Our mission
statement first post is up, plus our first setlist and extra curricular gig details >>>

http://www.nfrblog.blogspot.com/

see you there!

MxBx

Friday mega gig

2009-03-10T20:34:00.011Z

I am DJing at this on Friday. Bring everyone you know >>>

Everyone To The Anderson are my favourite Brighton band, on record and live. I don't even need to say Brighton, they are one of the bands I enjoy most full stop. There is an intensity and aggressive to them that commands attention, a (barely) controlled sense of chaos and a proclivity to volume that verges on hostile. All wrapped up in a warm and cosy sense of fun.

Elks I have not seen yet so I do not know about them. If Ben is putting them on, I trust they will be worth watching.

P For Persia are great! Psychedelic doom rock, full on volume and dirty low slung good times, telephone vocals and disco keyboard mayhem. Or something like that.

Be there.

MxBx

NFR Setlist 5th March, 2009

2009-03-07T18:28:00.008Z

Another Not For Resale setlist for all who came and stared in wonderment at the speakers wondering what it meant. And another setlist for youze who missed out and can read what you missed out on. No instant link to Fokka Wolfe's set yet, but I'll stick it in place of this sentence when I do.

We are working on an NFR blog as we speak, and I suspect this setlist will be the second post up there - after an introductory/celebratory one, naturally. More news on that as and when.

Here you go, Meatbreak's jamz from the Penthouse. The first hour was pretty stargazey droney and intense - School Of Seven Bells clicked it back into the realms of pop and we hit it up and off, kicking and screaming from there:

Crippled Black Phoenix – Rise Up And Fight (The Resurrectionists, Invada)
Heavy Winged – Wool And Water (Monolith:Earth 12”, Music Fellowship)
Wolves In The Throne Room – Ahrimanic Trance (Black Cascade, Southern Lord)
Kontakte – Motorik (Soundtrack To Lost Road Movies, Drifting Falling)
These Feathers Have Plumes – Quiet Sun, Indian Summer (These Feathers Have Plumes, Period Tapes)
Six Organs Of Admittance - Punish The Chasms With Wings (RTZ, Drag City)
School Of Seven Bells – Iamundernodisguise (Alpinisms, Ghostly International)
Passion Pit – Sleepyhead (Demo)
Minnaars – To Jackals (Minnaars EP, Self-Released)
Turbowolf – Seven Severed Heads (7”, X-Taster)
Lloop – Lei-Tei (60 Hertz, The Agriculture)
Distance – Konkrete (Repucussions, Planet Mu)
Yeah Yeah Yea’s – Zer (It’s Blitz, Interscope)
Mayyors – Airplanes (Megan’s LOLZ 7“, Self-Released)
Everyone To The Anderson – Harpoon Flesh Wound (Doodlebug, Toy Soldier)
Action Beat – Dinosaur (The Noise Band From Bletchley, Southern)
Cotti – The Search (12”, Soul Jazz)
Apollo Sunshine – Brotherhood Of Death (Shall Noise Upon, Headless Heroes)
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – This Love Is Fucking Right (The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, Slumberland)
Turbowolf – Read And Write (7”, X-Taster)
Crippled Black Phoenix – Rise Up And Fight (The Resurrectionists, Invada)
Quttinrpaqq – The Sea And The Birdman (Dragged Through The Streets, Blackest Rainbow)
Ty Segal – Watching You (Ty Segal, Castle Face)
Blank Dogs – Spinning (The Fields, Woodsist)
Lotus Plaza – Different Mirrors (The Floodlight Collective, Kranky)
Wormsblood – Inheritor (In The Stars, Skulls Of Heaven)
Emeralds – Living Room (What Happened, No Fun Productions)
Alva Noto – Xerrox Phaser Acat 1 (Xerroxx Vol II, Raster Norton)

MxBx

Blitz it!

2009-02-27T14:36:00.002Z

The new Yeah Yeah Yeah's album It's Blitz! is here....ish. It's due on 12th April or some time waaay far in advance of now. I got the leak yesterday. Exciting? Could be.

Starts off with the very electro Zero and gives the impression that they have given up on creating something that could be better than Maps or Date With The Night, or Machine and gone for a much more superficial, contemporary - so much so it will sound dated in a months time - sound designed solely for dance-floors. I think this is where a lot of people have stopped listening judging from initial reports. Maybe the really indie-schmindie kids got scared off here and deleted the file in disgust. It's not disgusting; it's just pretty disingenuous...but still pretty. Second track Heads Will Roll is very similar but eases off the electro and brings in a bit more guitar. Already the shock reports of no guitars are w.r.o.n.g. Nick Zinner has got plenty of tricks up his sleeve across this album. The 3rd and 4th tracks are pretty subtle and more listens, and the actual high quality CD rather than a crappy mp3 will probably reveal a lot of sound design within them. Having said that, next up is Dull Life which comes on like a hammer blow. It's textbook YYY's anthemic and euphoric with a thick guitar riff that makes up for it's lack of subtlety by striking an immortal rock-pose of the kind the last two albums did so well, replicating the fist-pumping stadium filling Y-Control. The lack of electric textures is made up for by the entrance of acoustic guitar in the second phase verse - it's an excellent addition to the tones of the track and is deployed much more effectively than the acoustic guitar in Gold Lion.

Jump two more tracks. It's not that they're filler, more like I want to save you something to discover yourself >>>

Track 7 comes in with the kitchen sink romantic collapse of Runaway. I am always disappointed with love songs, not only are they boring subject matter but someone like Karen O is supposed to be the one making boys cry. She never mopes, lope. Ah well. The track is a winner though; swept into a climax of strings that breaks the heart of the song and adds a sudden sumptuousness to the centre of the record. Off the back of that and just so you know where they are coming from, leaving you in no doubt as to their credentials, the skulking dropped kerb bass-line lead of Dragon Queen is instantly arresting. The track goes on to mention Nightclubbing in lyric and sounds a lot like the rhythm of the Iggy Pop song too. Sweet chewy Pop with a hard Punk centre. Or at least, it was made in a factory that contained punk, so sensitive kids be careful.

This could be good. Really good.

MxBx

i-pod shuffle

2009-02-27T11:40:00.005Z

This is a thread of DiS. Play shuffle, write about the first 5 tracks. Since I have my headphones on at work I could play. Good game...(not really a game though is it)

Play >>>

01) Grampall Jookabox - I’m Absolutely Freaked Out (Ropechain)
Amazing start! Messed up paranoid grooved-out soulful ‘jungle-folk’, better whistling than P,B&J + mean bass break and war whooping on Jeffry Lewis’ Ashtmatic Kitty label. “Black soul yes black soul / black strength yes black strength” Can’t remember exactly where I heard about this band first – maybe Ongaku Baka - but this album turned up on a lot of American blogs in their end of year lists. Quite rightly. Amen to that.

02) Crippled Black Phoenix – Rise Up And Fight (The Resurrectionists)
Awesome second song. This is going great! Sounds loads like dusty, dark 60’s road blues – chung-a-chugga-chung-a-chugga…..claustrophobic and expansive at the same time. That’s agoraphobic, right? This planes out into a totally blissed-out Stooges Vs. Spiritualised epic cosmic ending of U.S. Christmas proportions. Heartbeat to finish. Coming as either a double album or succession of releases some time very soon, if not already.

03) Fake Shark Real Zombie – Shame On You Scabs (Zebra! Zebra)
Someone mentioned this band here on DiS as an album of 09 so far, so I looked into them. This is a protest/union rights song, right? They sound like 3hostwomexicansandatinofspanners – and will probably last as long too.

04) Headquarters - Playskool
Saw this band support Action Beat in Brighton the other day. Why have I never heard of them before? Tense, nervy, taut Albini style Dischord guitars with an organ tying everything up together, really engaging frontman. Bombastic country. This track is just a snippit of weirdness though. Good enough as a break before…

05) Backstreet Boys – Everybody (Backstreet’s Back)
“Am I original?” No, but this track is one of the best pop tunes EVER!
“Am I the only one?” No, there was a lot of this going on, but not as good as you, I’ll give you that.
“Am I sexual?” Hell yeah. This has groove, style and a ruffneck bass that makes me KNOW you could bring me home baby.
“Am I everything you needed?” at this moment in time, abso-fuckin-lutely.

Baphometic Goat Worship (IMP 43, February 2009)

2009-02-16T19:47:00.009Z

Every once in a while I need to purge myself of some filthy bestial black metal. I have done it twice before and each time I pity the recipient, because in all likelihood they really aren’t going to like it. Fuck ‘em. For this mix I picked only the most goatly Satanic bands I could find and tempered them with both black rituals and evangelical preaching. In many ways, this is the most coherent, complete and self contained mix I have ever made, and despite the restrictive nature of the subject matter I think there is a real broad range of sounds. I tried to keep it down to an hour and then realised too late that I should have gone for a 66 minute 6 second running time. Instead it is 63:54 which looks like one of the least significant numbers ever. Enjoy. or not, as the case may be.

Baphometic Goat Worship (IMP 43, February 2009)
Download

Tracklist:

Anton Szandor LaVey - Black Mass Opening Hymn (Lords of Chaos)
Aosoth - Rebirth By Fire (Aosoth)
Akercocke - He Is Risen (The Goat Of Mendes)
Archgoat - Rise Of The Blackmoon (Angelcunt (Tales of Desecration))
Rev Emmet Dickenson - Hell And What It Is (Goodbye Babylon)
Baphomets Horns - Attack Annihilate Desecrate (Satanic War Command)
Beastcraft - Unholy Blood Ritual (Into The Burning Pit Of Hell)
Blasphemy - Fallen Angel Of Doom (Fallen Angel Of Doom)
Bestial Warlust - Satanic (Vengeance War Til Death)
Rev AW Nix - Black Diamond Express To Hell Pt. 1 (Goodbye Babylon)
Beherit - Werewolf (Drawing Down The Moon)
Aleister Crowley - The Pentagram (The Great Beast Speaks)
Akercocke - Zulicka (Rape Of The Bastard Nazarene)
Mystifier - An Elizabethan Devil Worshippers Prayer Book (Göetia)
Sarcofago - Desecration Of Virgin (INRI)
Rev AW Nix - Black Diamond Express To Hell Pt. 2 (Goodbye Babylon)
Teitanblood - Ultimate Revelation Descend (Black Putrescence of Evil)
Impaled Nazarene - Sadogoat (Goat Perversion)
Revenge - By Force (The Only Option) (Infiltration.Downfall.Death)
Rev TE Weeins - God Is Mad With Man (Goodbye Babylon)
Black Witchery - Baphomet Throne Exaltation (Upheaval of Satanic Might)
Anton Szandor LaVey - Black Mass Closing Hymn (Lords of Chaos)

New NFR Posters

2009-02-14T11:19:00.006Z

It is time for more postering and a lot more effort going into the next load of Not For Resales. I am still using these amazing images that Owen made for us and bastardising them in my own unsubtle way. I made three up and I'mnot sure which oen to go for. We already used the tree/rock one for the last few at the end of '08 and the planes one we used for the Toy Soldier Records special night in August. That's far back enough to recycle I reckon. If we are allowed to recycle images. I am drawn to the wolf because it is brand new. And because it's a fucking wolf, yeh?

Any opinions and suggestions gratefully received>>>

2008 gigs

2009-02-11T10:53:00.004Z

Well, all the gigs I went to in 2008. Which was only 21, not 2008, as that somewhat misleading title suggests. I have been tidying up my IMP page where I have been keeping this list and just deleted it out to start a new from this year. Since it's a really really quiet day at work I thought I'd post this up. I don't really know why.

I thought my last gig was in August, but it wasn't it was in July - Which means it has actually been 6 months since I've seen any live music! That's gone past so fast, craziness. Babies are very time consuming - all good time though. Only in the build up to Wolves In The Throne Room did I really start missing live shows and the Wolves totally put paid to that on the 2nd February. More on that later, because I do want to drop a post to say what that was like.

These gigs then. The bands are in order of appearance at each gig, not headlining order:

Grasscut / John The Savage / Sooks / Crackle (Club Savage @ The Komedia, Brighton, 31-07-08)

Teeth Of The Sea / The Heads / Wooden Shjips (Freebutt, Brighton, 18-07-08)

129 Die In Jet / -A+M / Everyone To The Anderson / Winchell Riots (Bully The Ugly Girls @ The Hope, Brighton, 17-07-08)

The Cathode Ray Syndrome / Power Up / Cottonmouth Rocks (Not For Resale Live! @ The Hope, Brighton, 11-07-08)

Power Up / Tropics / Applicants / Pope Joan / Pagan Wanderer Lu / Pseudo Nippon (OIB Vs. Brainlove All Dayer @ Westhill Hall, Brighton, 06-07-08)

Laish Band / Stars Down To Earth / Last Days Of Lorca (NFR @ The Hope, Brighton, 26-06-08)

Frightened Rabbit / The Twilight Sad (Theatre Royal, Brighton, 17-05-08)

Robert Lippok & Beatrice Martini / Paul Ayres / William Whitehead / The Necks (Brighton Dome, 15-05-08)

Pope Joan / Turbowolf (Throw Up & Die @ The Water Margin, Brighton, 10-05-08)

Autumn Choris / Kontakte / Passiondale (NFR @ The Hope, Brighton, 09-05-08)

Threatmantics / Clinic (Audio, Brighton, 10-04-08)

Tom White / Chris T-T (Komedia, Brighton, 08-04-08)

Blood Red Shoes (Resident Records, Brighton, 07-04-08)

Des Capulets / Last Days Of Lorca (The Hope, Brighton, 26-03-08)

Dr Razzu / Pope Joan / The Laish Band / Girls From Egypt (Hiero Terrific, The Hope, Brighton, 15-03-08)

MC Fashion / One Unique Signal / Everyone To The Anderson (NFR LIVE! @ The Greenhouse Effect Basement, Brighton, 14-03-08)

Zettasaur / Towering Breaker / Action Beat / Axis Mundi (The Greenhouse Effect Basement, Brighton, 27-02-08)

Mr Jack Cooper / The Riddles / The Flesh Happening (Halloween Club, Engine Room, Brighton, 27-02-08)

The Lucans / Plastic Passion / Foxes!(NFR LIVE! @ The Greenhouse Effect Basement, Brighton, 08-02-08)

-A+M / Revenge Of Shinobi (Freebutt, Brighton, 31-01-08)

Diagonal (Catacomb Carousel, the Hope, Brighton, 19-01-08)

NFR Setlist 05-02-09

2009-02-07T17:32:00.005Z

Thursday was the first Not For Resale of the year, and it went pretty damn well. being off for a month means we were stocked full of new-ness, and being the first of 2009 it was only right that we set out our stall in pretty fucked up fashion.

Here's the jamz from me and the Wolfe >>>

Wolves In The Throne Room – Hate Crystal (Malevolent Grain 12”, Southern Lord)
A Death Cinematic – A Short Story On The Theme Of A Broken Dream (A Parable On The Aporia Of Vengeance And The Beauty Of Impenetrable Sadness, Simple Box Construction)
I Hope You Suffer – I Could Move Mountains For You (Pocket Change Sampler, Pocket Change)
Women – Lawncare (Women, Flemish Eye)
Grampall Jookabox – I’m Absolutely Freaked Out (Ropechain, Asthmatic Kitty)
Mi Ami – Echonoecho (Watersports, Touch & Go)
Der Blutharsch – VIII (The Philosophers’ Stone, Tesco)
Psychic Ills – Fingernail Tea (Mirror Eye, Social Registry)
Action Beat – Le Chap (The Noise Band From Bletchley, Southern)
Blank Dogs – Spinning (The Fields, Woodsist)
Wavves - Wavves (Wavves, Woodsist)
Apollo Sunshine – Brotherhood Of Death (Shall Noise Upon, Headless Heroes)
The Death Set – Impossible (Etan Remix)
South Central – Nothing Can Go Wrong (The Owl Of Minerva, Egregore)
Quttinrpaaq – The Sea And The Birdman (Dragged Through The Streets, Blackest Rainbow)
Fever Ray – Coconut (Fever Ray, Mute)
Animal Collective – Summertime Clothes (Merriweather Post Pavilion, Domino)
Cardopusher –Cockpit (Mutant Dubstep Vol. 2, Spectraliquid)
Turbowolf – Ghost Hunt (Demo)
Nullifier – 30 Minute Heat (Demo)
Foals – Two Steps Twice (Antidotes, Transgressive)
Grasscut – Swallow The Day (Demo)
Grampall Jookabox – We Know We Might Be Fucked (Ropechain, Asthmatic Kitty)
Black Mountain – Lucy Brown (7”, Sub Pop)
Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened (Microcastle, 4AD)
Paavoharju – Tytto Tanssii (Lau;Lu Laakson Kukista, Fonal)
Factory Floor – Taxidermist (Planning Application, One Of One)
A.H. Kraken – Black Borny (A.H. Kraken, In The Red)
Tayside Mental Health – I See Hygiene Issues (Metal Eyes Ep, Self-Released)
Mayyors – Airplanes (Megan's LOLZ 7", Self-Released)
Hateful Abandon – Lungs (Famine (Or Into The Bellies Of Worms), Todestrieb)
The Hospitals – Sour Hawaii (Hairdryer Peace, Self-Released)
Diagonal – Child Of The Thunder Cloud (Diagonal, Rise Above)
Hotel Wrecking City Traders – The Lakeshore Strangler (Black Yolk, Bro Fidelity)
Crippled Black Phoenix – 200 Tons Of Bad Luck (The Resurrectionists, Invada)
Fauna – Rain (Rain, Aurora Borealis)

Laurence played all this stuff:

An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump - "100 percent"
Baltimore Club Music - "Mc Nuggets Remix"
Cow'p - "Chip808"
Black Moth Super Rainbow - "Hairy Candy"
Moses Strongpice and The Going Home boys - "Mating Call"
Yeasayer - "Wintertime"
Numbers - "Crimson & Clover"
Nothing Vampirz - "nnnnnn"
Fuckwolf - "Afro Cuban"
Unicorn Dream Attack - "W34k 4nd Sm4ll"
Black Lips - "Bad Kids"
Liars - "Sailing to Byzantium"
Electrocute - "Tiger Toy"
1-800 Zombie - "XXYY"
Gameboy/Gamegirl - "Sweaty Wet Dirty Damp"
We Wait For The Snow - "Forgotten Lovers"
An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump - "Lights Out"
Women - "Woodbine"
Jagannah - "Pyl"
T.I.T.S - "Lady Whispers"
An Experiment On A Bird In The Air Pump - "The Past Between Us"
Cobra Killer - "Mund Auf Augen Zu"
Toxic Lipstick - "Rape Me"
She - "Gum"
Habsyll - "1 Pt 2"
Moses Strongpiece And The Going Home Boys - "Panty Monster"
MGMT - "The Youth"

Twelve Scattered Chessmen (IMP 42, January 2009)

2009-02-01T10:16:00.006Z

The inspiration for the first IMP of 2009 came from watching Guy Maddin's 'My Winnipeg' over xmas and (aside from it being an incredible film in it's own right) this image just demanded to be made into an album cover, with the narration serving up the title almost verbatim. But what music to go with it? Wintery? Cold? Dead horses? Dubstep? Does that follow? It did to me. I fleshed it out with a little bit of chilly ambience and something nice to lift it a little – after all, this is almost a tribute to Maddin’s film so there has to be something warming amongst the icy atmosphere.

Twelve Scattered Chessmen (IMP 42, January 2009)
Download

Tracklist:

Alva Noto - Xerrox Teion Acat (Xerrox Vol.2)
Gas - Koenigsforst (Nah Und Fern)
Ricardo Villalobos - Theoreme Darchimede (The Au Harem D'Archimede)
Pluxus - Transient (Solid State)
Dusk & Blackdown - Drenched (12’’)
EQD - ‘Untitled B’ (Equalized #002)
Appleblim & Peverelist - Circling (12'')
Distance - V (12'')
Cotti - The Search (12'')
Joker - Gully Brook Lane (12'')
Cardopusher - Cockpit (Mutant Dubstep Vol. 2)
Flying Lotus - STUNTS (Mr Oizo BlessKUTMAH Remix)

Where to now?

2009-01-25T13:28:00.005Z

How's your 2009 going? Animal Collective have brought on a heatwave pretty early on in the year huh? Merriweather’s where it’s at, properly sunny and free-spirited and a bleak-month mood-lifter. Those dual Crippled Black Phoenix albums are pretty special, really. If you weren’t quite sure of A Love Of Shared Disasters, then this might be the thing that really sucks you in to this band. Spreading their massive post-rock vistas over a wider area that brings in a bit more country, a bit more found sound sampling, a bit more of a groovier riff, a bit of stoned Doorsy pulse. The Doors have cropped up in Golden Animals Free Your Mind and Win a Pony, which is pretty much a Morrison/Manzenera tribute, but respectably so. More throwback action from The Dutchess & The Duke who have produced an heroically rocking Rolling Stones record of their very own. The Blank Dogs The Fields cassette on Fuck It Tapes is way way cool, all the surfy garage psych(o) rock’n’ roll you could ask for (Plus De Stijl just re-released Wavves that Fuck It put out last year which Blank Dogs jump off the back of, but a bit slicker like a helicopter drop on to an even bigger wave in deeper waters….meh, that’s an analogy that not going much further than Long Beach). Speaking of deep, The Hospitals Hairdryer Peace deserved it’s Wire number 3 spot in their EOY list (could/should even have been number 1 over the Bug). I have been playing that a lot and getting more out of it each time, swapping between paying attention to the groove and the backdrops they’re set against – both of which constantly switch focus anyway. Grampall Jookabox are my other pretty essential what-the-hell?! Album band of the moment - Ropechain on Asthmatic Kitty is a real melting pot of surrealism, absurdism and down right screaming soul-jacked rock and roll brilliance. They call it Jungle-Folk. It’s a good a name as any. Also been playing a lot of These Feathers Have Plumes, which Syd really loves too – baby boys can really get into that heavy heady flowing liquid murk and phosphorescent eddies of that tape. Hakobune has also been a pretty effective ambient nursery brew of pretty pretty homeostatic Japanese contours and electronic chanting. Incredibly, Persistent Repetition Of Phrases, the album from V/VM’s new incarnation The Caretaker is another hit with little boy; not sure whether grainy, spectral 40’s instrumentals were intended to be the soundtrack to an 18-week-old’s sleep, but it really works.

Things of a grimmer nature that have darkened the skies over Chez Meat is Fauna – temperate climate black metal from the US – warm, wet, humid misty guitars. So-long frostbite, hello heatstroke – it’s all as blurry and overwhelmingly crippling. Szarlem, another in a long-line of outfits from Varghkoghargasmal’s Avenger, tears it up in suitably lone-ranger fashion. Lots of utterly oppressive sustained claustrophobia from bands like these: Brulvahnatu, Lyrinx, Ashtoreth Incesti, Darkspace, Exitus Letalis, Hopeless and Paranomia. Mutant BM is likely to get even weirder this year, thanks to the January release by Den Saakaldte that features vaudeville and Arabian flourishes, trumpet and….woahwoah…yeah? I think we can leave it on BLACK METAL TRUMPETS and ponder that for some long time.

…..Black metal trumpets. Where to now?

Oh yeah – Old Mayor release their debut ep on London based Paradigms Recordings. Should be due February or March. Awesome news.

MxBx

IMP Last.FM Group

2009-01-21T14:24:00.004Z

I went a bit IMP fan-boy and made an IMP group on Last.fm. I've really gotten into Last.fm over the last 6 months so much so that I combined my love for it with the International Mixtape Project and made this:

http://www.last.fm/group/International+Mixtape+Project.

I made a bit of a cheesy first topic post on it, but I still think it's a good idea for a thread. Hopefully the IMP can get some good use out of it, there's a lot of potential in it I think (but then I would, I made it!!)

MxBx

101 : 08

2009-01-18T20:18:00.004Z

For the first time ever I have made my top 100 tracks of the year. The main reason being that I have listened and loved so many dubstep/bass 12"'s this year which didn't go in to my end of year albums list that I just wanted to post something up that represented the massive impact they have had on me this year, plus there’s loads of singles and some amazing compilation tracks which I wouldn't include in my albums list either but I wanted to rep on here too. Plus, this was pretty fun. It has taken me almost an entire month of near-constant post-work work to finish it, so whether I can be bothered to do it again is another matter, but it was a lot of fun.

There’s always the chance that this list would change depending on the week it was finished, but since it’s taken me so long, I’m pretty sure that these tracks are accurately ranked to a precise and highly scientific degree.

Something like that anyway.

So here is my list, my cross-section of my year, my boiled down essence of 2008, my essential elements – the tracks that really made me stop and listen right from the first bar to the final beat (or hum), every time.

No descriptions or anything this time – just the list and downloads in four parts, because the whole thing is pretty massive. I really hope you enjoy all this, because I really do!

MxBx

Tracks 77 – 101: Download
Tracks 51 – 76: Download
Tracks 26 – 50: Download
Tracks 01 – 25: Download

101. The Rotted - 28 Days Later (Get Dead or Die Trying)
100. Melencolia Estatica - 'Untitled' I (Letum)
99. Awesome Color - Already Down (Electric Aborigines)
98. Appleblim & Peverelist - Circling (12”)
97. Joker - Gully Brook Lane (12”)
96. Aosoth - Never Betrayed (Aosoth)
95. Errors - Pump (It’s Not Something But It Is Like Whatever)
94. Totalselfhatred - Ruoska (Totalselfhatred)
93. The Black Angels - Snake In The Grass (Directions To See A Ghost)
92. Fortresse - Les Corbeaux (Les Hivers De Notre Epoque)
91. Dananananaykroyd - Pink Sabbath (7”)
90. Black Mountain - Bright Lights (In The Future)
89. Leviathan - Made As The Stale Wine Of Wrath (Massive Conspiracy Against All Life)
88. Pagan Hammer - Ode To My Fathers (Ode To My Fathers)
87. Flying Lotus - STUNTS (Mr Oizo blessKUTMAH Remix)
86. Horse Feathers - Heathen's Kiss (House With No Home)
85. Religious Knives - The Storm (The Door)
84. Emeralds - Magic (Solar Bridge)
83. Grouper - Disengaged (Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill)
82. Pangaea - Router (12”)
81. Shackleton - El Din (Part One) (12”)
80. Prussia - Lady Lady (Dear Emily, Best Wishes, Molly)
79. Pivot - O Soundtrack My Heart (O Soundtrack My Heart)
78. Hakobune - Yukidaruma (Melting Reminiscence)
77. A.H. Kraken - Black Borny (A.H. Kraken)
76. Cloudland Canyon - Krautwerk (Lie In Light)
75. Woodpigeon - Knock Knock (Treasury Library Canada)
74. To The Boy Elis - Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down (Love Is Like The Cost Of Living)
73. I Haunt Wizards - Incentive To Miscarriage (Demo)
72. Pied Plat - Double Trouble (12”)
71. John the Savage - Hoser (Demo)
70. Tayside Mental Health - I See Hygiene Issues (Mental Eyes Split EP)
69. Sparkling Wide Pressure - Tearing Rippling (Touching Pasture)
68. Wild Beasts - Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyant (Limbo, Panto)
67. Varghkoghargasmal - Near The Stars (Drowned In Lakes)
66. Natural Snow Buildings - Song For Laurie Bird (Laurie Bird)
65. Cheval Sombre - Hyacinth House (Sonic Visitations)
64. Factory Floor - Taxidermist (Planning Application EP)
63. Plastic Passion - Beneath The Light (Contrived Imagery)
62. Oneida - 'Untitled' 3 (Preteen Weaponry)
61. Hercules & Love Affair - Blind (Frankie Knuckles Remix)
60. Hotel Wrecking City Traders - The Lakeshore Strangler (Black Yolk)
59. A Forest Of Stars - Earth and Matter (The Corpse Of Rebirth)
58. Wovenhand - White Knuckle Grip (Ten Stones)
57. Rudi Arapahoe - Conversation Piece (Echoes From One To Another)
56. Paavoharju - Uskallan (Laulu Laakson Kukista)
55. Kowloon Walled City - My Hands Are Turning To Bricks (Turk Street)
54. Grasscut - Muppet (Demo)
53. Department of Eagles - No One Does It Like You (In Ear Park)
52. Portishead - We Carry On (Third)
51. The Death Set - Impossible (Etan's Positive Outlook Remix)
50. Abandon - Lungs (Famine)
49. Women - Lawncare (Women)
48. Los Campesionos - You! Me! Dancing! (Hold on Now Youngster)
47. One Unique Signal - Dismemberment (Dismemberment EP)
46. Gnod - The Somnambulist's Tale (The Somnambulist's Tale)
45. Fuck Buttons - Colours Move (Street Horrrsing)
44. Nullifier - 30 Minute Heat (Demo)
43. Pocahaunted - Riddim Queen (Island Diamonds)
42. Wavves - Wavves (Wavves)
41. White Fang - Acid Reaper (Demo)
40. Revenge of Shinobi - Organ (Demo)
39. The Bug - Poison Dart (London Zoo)
38. The Caretaker - Long Term (Remote) (Persistent Repetition Of Phrases)
37. This Mono Galaxy - Team Building (The Glamour And The Pain)
36. Revenge - Death Heritage (Built Upon Sorrow) (Infiltration.Downfall.Death)
35. Iron Pirate - Abominable Iron Steamship of Death (Iron Pirate)
34. Pete & The Pirates - Bright Lights (Little Death)
33. Benga - 26 Basslines (Diary Of An Afro Warrior)
32. Pyha - Hyungga Is A Tangled Story, Pt. 1 (The Haunted House)
31. Lonely Ghosts - Happy Lovers-Friends Forever (Don’t Get Lost Or Hurt EP)
30. Foals - Two Steps, Twice (Antidotes)
29. I Hope You Suffer - I Could Move Mountains For You (Pocket Change Records Sampler)
28. Racebannon - The Killer (Acid Or Blood)
27. Zombie Zombie - Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free (A Land For Renegades)
26. Caina - Temporary Antennae (Temporary Antennae)
25. Krallice - Forgiveness In Rot (Krallice)
24. Times New Viking - Drop-Out (Rip It Off)
23. Brael and Tokyo Bloodworm - Golden Mean Rectangle (Living Language)
22. Laish Quartet - The Love Written Down (One-18, Toy Soldier Records)
21. Apollo Sunshine - Brotherhood Of Death (Shall Noise Upon)
20. Urfaust - 'Untitled' 1 (Drei Rituale Jenseits des Kosmos )
19. M83 - Couleurs (Saturdays=Youth, Mute)
18. Old Mayor - Bring In The Sleeper (Demo)
17. Frightened Rabbit - I Feel Better (Midnight Organ Fight)
16. Der Blutharsch - 'Untitled' VIII (The Philosopher's Stone)
15. Crystal Antlers - Parting Song For The Torn Sky (Crystal Antlers)
14. Action Beat - Maximum Bletchley (Thirty Years Of Hurt Then Us Cunts Exploded)
13. Crystal Castles - Alice Practice (Crystal Castles)
12. Cotti - The Search (12”)
11. MGMT - Kids (Oracular Spectacular)
10. The Mae Shi - Run To Your Grave (Hlllyh)
09. Mayyors - Airplanes (Megan's LOLZ 7”)
08. Horna - Liekki Ja Voima (Sanojesi Äärelle)
07. U.S. Christmas - Uktena (Eat The Low Dogs)
06. Brown Jenkins - Forever Funerals (Angel Eyes)
05. Deerhunter - Nothing Ever Happened (Microcastle)
04. Distance - V (12”)
03. Turbowolf - Power (7”)
02. Late Of The Pier - Heartbeat (Fantasy Black Channel)
01. TV On The Radio - DLZ (Dear Science)

20:08 (IMP 41, December 2008)

2009-01-11T20:18:00.006Z

20:08 (IMP 41, December 2008)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/bb209b

Tracklist:

Disc One
20. Iron Pirate – Abominable Iron Steamship Of Death (Iron Pirate)
19. Woodpigeon - Knock Knock (Treasury Library Canada)
18. Los Campesinos! - You! Me! Dancing! (Hold On Now Youngster)
17. Pyha - Hyungga Is A Tangled Story Pt. 1 (The Haunted House)
16. Krallice – Forgiveness In Rot (Krallice)
15. Prussia – Lady Lady (Dear Emily, Best Wishes, Molly)
14. WOLD – The Frozen Field (Stratification)
13. Frightened Rabbit – I Feel Better (The Midnight Organ Fight)
12. Women – Upstairs (Women)
11. Fuck Buttons - Colours Move (Street Horrsing)

Disc Two
10. Times New Viking - Drop-Out (Rip It Off)
09. Action Beat - Justice Yeldman (1977 - 2007: 30 Years Of Hurt Then Us Cunts Exploded)
08. Urfaust - ‘Untitled’ (Drei Rituale Jenseits Des Kosmos)
07. U.S. Christmas - Uktena (Eat The Low Dogs)
06. Horna - Liekki Ja Voima (Sanojesi Äärelle)
05. Rudi Arapahoe - Conversation Piece (Echoes From One To Another)
04. Caïna - Temporary Antennae (Temporary Antennae)
03. Brown Jenkins - Forever Funerals (Angel Eyes)
02. Late Of The Pier - Heartbeat (Fantasy Black Channel)
01. Paavoharju - Tyttö Tanssii (Laulu Laakson Kukista)

For my December IMP I always make it my top twenty tracks from my top twenty albums of the year and this year is no different. 2008 has been an incredibly interesting year for music. Again. Making this list really did feel like an impossible task, much moreso than other years – and it is not because this year has been lacking in greatness; quite the opposite as far as I am concerned. My end of year list has also been a pretty tough challenge because I have listened to so much music this year and have struggled to take it all in. This was the year when I felt dwarfed by the enormity of scale in the range and sheer volume of music in the world and I started really asking myself a lot of questions about what I wanted my relationship with music to be. It can never be a casual affair, but I have lifted the lid off something so large that trying to get to know every recess of it intimately would futile. I have no idea how I am going to tackle 2009, but I am sure I’ll think of something.

I have also been questioning the channels through which people have traditionally come to hear about artists. This was the year I fell totally out of thrall with music journalism. There are still writers I can read who inspire me who are extremely talented, perceptive, and have their own vision as much as the artists they choose to write about, but they are now very few and far between. Over the last 12 months I have got so tired of people writing to make themselves look good, or trying to place themselves in some kind of involved role of importance amongst the groups they are writing about. Far too much is written that comes across like attempts to write the cleverest sentence that the author could be writing about anything, the net result being so worthless and far removed from the task in hand. But I still continue to buy the magazines and read the websites (after all, I am on their side), but I still get angered at narrow minded editorial policy, at the limitations in both knowledge and writing and at the hapless delusions of grandeur.

Of course, I include myself in this, my limitations show themselves every time I hit a key or speak a word; one reason why I have written so little this year and another catalyst to my feelings of bleakness.

But yeah, I still read, and I notice that no two lists of the year have really been that similar, even across the mainstream. It seems this was a year when people’s listening habits became more fragmented than ever. More labels, publications/websites, blogs, social networks, P2P, Web2.0……yet, there seems to be a general consensus across many magazines that this year was pretty dull and lacked any really major classic albums or Big Events like Arctic Monkeys. Whenever anyone says that to me I always reply “You don’t listen to enough music” – which is almost always true. Those people who say this, who ignore word of mouth successes like MGMT or Bon Iver, have simply not been paying attention. But that is not the point. If they are looking for greatness they are looking in the wrong place. For me, this year was not the year of the difficult third album, but of the ever more limited tenth CDr, the swansong label and artist releases, split tour 7”s, free download net labels, sharity blogs, debuts and demos (always always more and more demos).

Apparently the record industry is in trouble and there is some kind of economic crisis crunching everything up. If that were true, why is it so many releases on so many labels have all sold out? Why are all the gigs still selling out? Why are people still making music?

My record industry is not in trouble.

My record industry thrives because the people involved love their music and art and create every part of it themselves. It is created by people, for people who actually care about every detail, right down to the kind of stamps on the envelope they send the records out in. It is this natural spirit of independence that makes the music individual, makes each record an almost incomparable entity to another, gives each artist their identity and a reason for existing.

This is what my top twenty represents and this is what it sounds like.

Top 50 Albums of 2008

2008-12-15T16:39:00.023Z

It feels like this year I should have an enormous preamble to my Top 50 list, and I will; just not quite yet.

This year was probably the year when people’s listening habits became more fragmented than ever – which left the music industry struggling to smother any individual with marketing. More of these kinds of thoughts later, but I say that because it leads me to this (then I will get on with the matter in hand):

Everyone seems to be saying that this year was genuinely pretty dull for music, and there were no Big Events like Arctic Monkeys. Whenever anyone says anything remotely close to that sentiment to me I always reply “you don’t listen to enough music” – which is almost always true. I had loads of seismic revelations about music, brought on by newly discovered artists breaking into my field of vision. Those people who say there was no equivalent Arctic Monkeys this year, who then glide past MGMT have simply not been paying attention. Word of mouth hasn’t moved so virulently as it did when carrying the name Bon Iver around the country this year. I am totally claiming that, I told you so on that one. How can someone who is making peoples number ones, yet was unheard of 4 months earlier not be counted as a Big Thing.

Either way, more on those thoughts later. You know I don’t care about Big Things, or Little Things, and if you don’t I will explain why in the coming weeks. But for now, I start my Top 50 albums of 2008. For bands and artists that have released more than one thing this year, instead of splitting them up and placing them individually I put them together with a kind of aggregate placing, or just placed them wherever the hell I felt like.

This was an awesome year – making this list was nigh on impossible.

50. Mogwai – The Hawk Is Howling
(PIAS/Wall Of Sound)
For a couple of albums there, Mogwai weren’t really making Albums as involving or with as visionary a narrative as Young Team or CODY, so when ’The Hawk…’ came out I wasn’t expecting much. Well, Album Mogwai are back and sounding as much like Mogwai as they always do…except here on The Sun Smells Too Loud, which has a totally euphoric hook, is the closest they have ever come to a pop song and the most different they have sounded….ever?

49. Rose Kemp - Unholy Majesty
(One Little Indian)
A couple of years ago I came across Rose on MySpace and loved her delicate folk songs and the group of acoustic artists she was associated with around Bristol. I turn my back for a year then come back to discover she’s been dabbling with metal riffs, noise textures and is fast becoming the new Diamanda Galas or Jarboe. Woah.

48. Natural Snow Buildings – Laurie Bird / Slayer Of The King Of Hell
(Students Of Decay) / (Digitalis)
The beautifully named Natural Snow Buildings are the French duo of Mehdi Ameziane and Solange Gularte . They have jammed out too many albums, in too limited quantities, to have kept up with - 10 this year – so they could have better ones than these, but these are the ones I’ve held on to and continue to get the most out of. Huge, heady landscapes of heavily effected guitars, ringing feedback, layered chanting, percussion and the occasional distant sightings of drums on the horizon – the beats in Song For Laurie Bird come after twenty minutes and take another ten to develop into a suffocating climax.

47. Pocahaunted – Chains / Island Diamonds
(Teardrops) / (Not Not Fun)
The Eagle Rock, CA based duo of Amanda and Bethany brought in the drum and production talents of Bob Bruno (of Goliath Bird Eater) to both these records and took their hypnotic, smoky psychedelia two different ways – 'Chains' lifted their sound up to the poppiest end of their rainbow while the heavier 'Island Diamonds' sunk it down to a murky, clanking dub.

46. Barn Owl - From Our Mouths A Perpetual Light
(Not Not Fun)
Another two-piece, Barn Owl are Evan Caminiti and Jon Porras. In ‘From Our Mouths…’ they presented a shamanic ritual; all shuffling percussion, barefooted dust storms and majestic headshaking, carried along on the winds of organ drone and electric currents of guitar. It also comes on white vinyl, which looks way cool.

45. Hotel Wrecking City Traders – Black Yolk
(Bro Fidelity)
The Melbourne based duo of brothers Toby (guitars) and Ben (drums) Matthews smashed out this album of mostly improvised heavy, noisy post-rock/metal album that drew inspiration, but never limited them to, the sounds of the likes of Karma to Burn, Om, Torche, Capricorns, Mogwai, Goliath Bird Eater, Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. The long songs gave the listener time to breathe, but it was in the shorter ones that really held focus and I have yet to find a more rocking track this year than The Lakeshore Strangler - five minutes of joyously intimidating riffs; of surging rhythm patterns set on top of a sawing distorted backdrop with drums that switch between psychedelic dexterity and cantering locked-groove.

44. Wild Beasts – Limbo, Panto
(Domino)
This year’s Voice belonged to Hayden Thorpe of Wild Beasts. If you heard it, you had an opinion on it. In the same way that the rich soul of I Am A Bird Now surprised people by coming from the body of Antony Hegarty, the epic falsetto sweeping, tearing and plunging across 'Limbo, Panto' equally shocked by coming from a skinny white indie kid from Kendal. It helped that the album’s guitar and piano based arrangements supported the grandeur of it, while lyrically it was all juxtaposed with football fan angst, peace offerings of cheesy chips and joyriding.

43. Brael & Tokyo Bloodworm – Living Language
(Moteer)
An album of such quietly brushed electronic-folk, that it was barely there in volume, bit in presence it consumed the room. Acoustic guitars were submerged into a humming exhalation of a record with a centerpiece, Golden Mean Triangle that sighed as mournfully as a Godspeed interlude.

42. Sparkling Wide Pressure – Touching Pasture
(Students of Decay)
Named after a Jupiter Moon special move from Sailor Moon, one man Tennesse’en band Sparkling Wide Pressure is Frank Baugh’s musical foil to his paintings. This album is immediate. From the very first track; Tearing Rippling – built from a woozy, thick, bassy drone-riff, haunting tone pealing off from it, soft beat patting underneath - the record progresses through a heaving, throbbing, buzzing wilderness of whited out scenery, with enough detail hidden amongst it to keep coming back to.

41. Der Blutharsch - The Philosopher's Stone
(Tesco-WKN)
Elvis style sideburns and shades adorn Albin Julius as he greases up his industrial outfit Der Blutharsch with a newfound sense of Rock and Roll. Mixing it with a heavy loping style of kraut-rock, a free-wheeling sense of sixties psychedelica and a core of rhythmic neo-folk, 'The Philosopher’s Stone' comes off like Grails forced into leathers and jack boots – against their will.....

40. Of Montreal – Skeletal Lamping
(Polyvinyl)
Skeletal Lamping, the ‘never going to be as good as 'Hissing Fauna…’,follow up to my Number 1 album from last year in which Kevin Barnes revealed his transgender, bisexual black alter-ego, is a bloody-minded, deliberately awkward listen – and not just because it’s mostly about him doing it. Each funk-soul-pop-noise-hybrid is jarred against the next, each a rapid fire rush of too many ideas to keep up with, each one a potential technicolour fucking headache or a life changing mini pop-opera. Sexual deviance has never been so…well yes actually, it has always been this entertaining, but this is something else.

39. Wavves – Wavves
(Fuck It Tapes)
Sing-a-long choruses, insanely catchy harmonies and invigoratingly short songs all totally overdriven to oblivion, pushed right up into the red and in your face, interspersed with feedback and pedal carnage. Wavves is Nathan Williams from San Diego, California and his creation is a motherfucking surf-rock noise punk record that is as obnoxious as it is instantly gratifying. Quite how Fuck It have reflected two of this years niche trends I have no idea - More surf-rock and overdriven beauty to come.

38. Varghkoghargasmal – Drowned In Lakes
(tUMULt)
Varghkoghargasmal is Avenger; A one man ambient/acoustic Black Metal band from Germany who describes his sound as ‘Wooden Metal’ and that is as apt a description as any, despite how ridiculous it sounds. Wonky didn’t just hit dubstep this year, it hit BM too – This album is a compelling drunken dance with beats that barely stay in time, surf-rock riffs that dip in and out of time, keyboards pumping along to their own merry minor-key march, with it all haunted by a weird, reverbed otherworldly atmosphere and structure.

37. The Donkeys – Living On The Other Side
(Dead Oceans)
I think Dolphin Center is about swimming with dolphins, I dunno, but the rest of the songs are definitely about girls and getting high. This band could not get more sundazed and stoned if they sat out in the Californian sun for days getting stoned more. Sorry. But they couldn’t. You can hear the lead heavy arms of the bassist straining to get that last note, heat slackening the strings; lazy elliptical organ riffs pulse through the centre of the songs, the singer’s dry hazy voice drifting across the calmest of sea breezes. You can almost see the heat shimmer rising from the pavement.

36. MGMT – Oracular Spectacular
(Columbia)
Until DLZ came along, Kids was probably my favourite song of the year….just like everyone else then. No surf-rock here though so, moving on…

35. Crystal Antlers – Crystal Antlers
(Touch & Go)
First time I heard this Long Beach, CA sextet I did actually think it was just formless noise with all the different members pulling in different directions and falling over each other in their efforts to get there. Maybe I needed that first listen like a warning shot across the bows, so I could retreat a bit, figure out what the hell it was that I was facing then shift my feet and change posture accordingly. After it squeals into action and Jonny Bell’s first delayed/reverbed vocal screech dies down, the totally organic single minded entity reveals itself and explodes into an infinitely repeating fractal pattern of cosmic psych, surf-rock (yes, again, I told you it was everywhere), sludgy punk, and roaring blues until the final 7 minutes of Parting Song for the Torn Sky which pins the chaos down with the lowest slung bassline groove and the most euphoric key change of the year. All of that in a record that is under 25 minutes long.

34. Woven Hand - Ten Stones
(Sounds Familyre)
David Eugene Edwards's Woven Hand band release an even more muscled and deep wrinkled, dust-blown record than 2006’s Mosaic. A steely gravitas imbues these songs, a grimness that recalls Tomahawk’s ‘Anonymous’, an album that is only a couple of metal heavy sidesteps away from this with it’s Native American influences. It feels like a constant presence shadows this record, some dread spirit watching over the Wild West, a doomy boiling tension building as thunderclouds on the horizon, breaking out into stomping beats war dance style in Kicking Bird – either to fend off the evil, or bring it upon an enemy. Either way, it’s a pretty scary prospect.

33. Religious Knives – It's After Dark / The Door
(Troubleman Unlimited) / (Ecstatic Peace)
A double whammy of albums that disappointed the feral purists, but excited those who felt that the clouds of the storm parting heralded a freshness and a future. The three headed noise generator found some limbs and cast off their distorted shroud to reveal sleek lines of nocturnal rhythms with a progression of increasingly kraut-rock and post-punk albums reflecting New York at night, the hulking silhouettes of the skyline, the white noise and clamour of the city floor, the claustrophobia of its subterranea, the hearbeats that propel it, encapsulating it all in heady cyclical drone and sweaty momentum.

32. Kowloon Walled City – Turk Street
(Wordclock)
The tone of this record is absolutely perfect; A rocking, heaving, juggernaut of thick warm fuzzy fuck-off Metal with softly rounded edges – an all consuming velvet buzz, fat, solid drums and vocals that remind me of Jens Kidman’s from Meshuggah - at times the music does too, but this Californian four-piece’ are much less complex, much more direct and all the better for it.

31. Deerhunter – Microcastle
(Kranky)
Bradford Cox’s meticulous attention to detail resulted in this fascinating album of mini epics. The signing to Kranky is a clue to where the sound is at on this album – a heavier emphasis on the soundscaping that backs the pop – but pop it still is nonetheless, moving ever closer to a harmonic fusion of Echo and the Bunnymen and Brian Eno.

30. The Last Shadow Puppets – The Age Of The Understatement
(Domino)
The main draw of this album – recorded in two weeks, no less! – is undoubtedly it’s unashamedly brash Scott Walker arrangements (courtesy of Arcade Fire’s Owen Pallett), complete with all the lyrical subversion of grandeur that goes with it, accents intact. The other draw, may be the portrayal of glamour within the album, not just on the cover. Along with the musical style of the late 60’s, it is all about smoky femme fatale figures; some with the potential to deliver and reward - ’Kiss me properly and pull me apart’ – but that is the first track, acting as a lure to draw you closer. Thereafter she is unobtainable. Dangerous hot sex appeal smoulders inside the high-street sirens that stalk the songs, like in Only The Truth where weak male minds are snipered by ‘The girl with many different strategies’. Noir then, but elevated by galloping Spaghetti Western rhythms, uplifting orchestral flourishes and camp twists and turns of phrase, resulting in a musical eloquence perhaps unexpected, and entirely absorbing.

29. Leviathan - Massive Conspiracy Against All Life
(Moribund)
With his last ever album as Leviathan, Wrest has left an indelible mark and an insurmountable legacy for one man black metal bands to assail. That anyone playing in a band can sound this spontaneous is an impressive feat, let alone against themselves and machines. All the Leviathan elements are here in force; the suffocating atmosphere, the grim dirgy ambience, massive riffs twisting and cutting from highly kinetic thrash to grinding funeral march at just the right moment to leave you a little breathless in awe, hypnotic rhythms ratcheting up the tension with a poise, elegance and intensity pervading it all like no one else can. A flawless execution in every way.

28. To The Boy Elis - Love Is Like The Cost Of Living
(Pocket Change)
A free download from a San-Fransisco based post-rock/ambient oriented net-label, this was the starkest contrasting release on their schedule this year, and one of the most contrasting albums released by anyone. To The Boy… is Henry Derek from Atlanta, Georgia. He plays the rawest form of blues imaginable, singing them in a gnarled sneering croak of a voice that twists its vowels and drags its consonants viciously across the gravelly instrumentation. Mixing the more traditionally destitute delta-blues sound of battered strings and footstomp beats with a more modern, yet primitive preternatural howl of tape loop noise and ambience, this album comes across like a lost in the woods slasher film, and a blood chillingly tense one at that.

27. Foals – Antidotes
(Transgressive)
Shame after all that cool 7” artwork that the album cover looked so shit. It’s kind of a shame that all those singles weren’t on this album too, but then it wouldn’t have sounded so much like an album. Sounds were one of they key tabloid hooks for this too; the big question was who did a better production job on the Foals album - Foals or Dave Sitek? There’s only one way to find out – FIGHT!! Or leak those tapes please. It was a bold move to ditch the original mix, but this version sounds great; For a dance band, Foals created a very cohesive record that, as well as sounding dead fucking cool (debatable for sure, but I say Cool), lived up to repeated listens by incorporating not just polyrhythmic guitar lines and locked down grooves for the disco, but detailed textures and narratives to the tracks. The Afro-Beat rhythms that everyone thought were going to take over 2008 were pretty much dealt with single handedly – no one could do them better than Foals, and it would have been embarrassing to try (stand up and get out Vampire Weekend). They could work a crescendo like no one else and flip it on the head of a pin, plus the lyrics to Cassius do say “Laurence is an accident”, right? Don’t disappoint me.

26. M83 – Saturdays=Youth
(Mute)
They arrived around a similar time, aren’t exactly the same, but for some reason I had M83 and MGMT stuck together as two composite parts of a whole. That both take their main influences from the 80’s probably had a lot to do with it, and both wore them on their sleeves pretty proudly. Both had massive dancefloor filling trance tracks at the centres too. But where MGMT were the singles band,, M83 was the album band and the one that delivered a richer environment; a whole John Hughes/Joel Schumacher stage, set for an overwrought teenage drama to unfold; right the way from the dramatic piano lead opener You Appearing, the (doomed?) twilight couple Kim & Jessie; the distraught gothic girl lamenting “I'm fifteen years old and I feel it's already too late to live” in Graveyard Girl, through that huge heart-stopping, pulse-quickening neon-shoegaze rush of Couleurs down to the ghostly Twin Peaks like haunted coda of Midnight Souls Still Remain.

25. TV on the Radio – Dear Science
(Interscope)
I’m pretty certain that DLZ is my favourite song of the year (although last.fm tells me Late Of The Pier’s Heartbeat pips it at 19 to 14, but it doesn’t know everything). It’s definitely the Wolf Like Me of ‘Dear Science’ – the silence before ”Never you mind / Death Professor"” is the most devastatingly weighted and well poised in any song you could mention – it’s the song that delivers the greatest musical release after all the pent up funk, twitching post punk and motorik running on nervous energy, with the clipped rapped vocal lines an especially arresting departure. ‘Dear Science’ captures a Brooklyn, and by extension America and possibly the world, in a fitful state of paranoia and alientation – its surface may be slick and clinically presented, but underneath factions rage in turbulent aggression with each other. It is a lyrically angry album, balanced by potentially chart-friendly instrumentation with so many ideas jostling for space that it is almost uncomfortable – but most definitely bearable, and more so.

24. Pete & The Pirates – Little Death
(Stolen Recordings)
A beautifully rich voice and elegantly penned songs about life on the mean streets of teenage indie-kid-hood characterized the second album from Reading’s Pete & The Pirates. There were some ballads (Moving, Humming), but mostly this was a set of rocking grubby disco numbers. Even when they were melancholy (The vocal harmonies on Dry Wings are almost heartbreaking), this album surprised with it’s instant, persistent charms; the spiky aggression punching in both frustration and elation – Lost In The Woods and Bright Lights tearing it up with euphoric rushes of soulful fury, the comedic moments like “Get out of bed, it’s the wrong one” from Knots and the bit in Bears after singer Thomas Sanders says “Oh mummy bear and daddy bear as angry as can be” where the guitar solo goes apeshit. As true an Indie album and as rewarding a listen as you could ask for.

23. Grouper – Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
(Type)
Liz Harris’s shimmering solo outfit hits a murky peak with her third album, veiling half singing/chanting under spectral guitar tones. The title may be land-based, and somewhat grim, but the noisier gristle of previous albums has been cast off in favour of a more watery sound, a lot of this echoing the movement and sounds of the sea; a constantly rolling wash reverberating across its 12 immersive tracks. Yet it is still a brittle creature, delicate and fragile, each layer of sound hanging across the next with intricate details hidden deep between them. Yielding much now, and hopefully more after further listening, this isn’t an album that gives up its secrets easily and may never be likely to.

22. The Mausoleums - Blackened Fawns Cleanse The Earth With Fire
(Chinese Workers Labor Union)
The second album from Chicago based one man Black Metal band The Mausoleums plays mostly with overdrive, feedback and volume - and this was almost certainly the loudest thing I heard all year, pretty much the only thing I need to turn down before pressing play. Underneath those three key elements, submerged beneath the ferocious blackened buzz and boiling distortion is a record that understands Pop. It is coming at it from a whole load of angles; swirling shoegaze guitar lines, cantering super rhythmic, super fast beats, rattling Link Wray riffs, thick and fast BM drone, shrieking vocals that layer on more distortion. This is where the surf-rock turns nasty. It’s a risky formula; waaaay too noisy for radio, too rocking for pure black metal, too black for pure rocking, too dreamy in places to be scary and too intimidating overall to really ever be Pop but that’s what makes it all the more engaging. Absolutely not background music, this is right up there in your face, demanding attention.

21. Portishead – Third
(Island)
If they had changed their name and released ‘Third’, except for Beth Gibbon’s distinctive voice giving it away, no one would have known it was Portishead. Maybe that’s why they didn’t want to call it anything other than ‘Third’. They are still as subterranean, dense and claustrophobic sounding as ever, but with a renewed faith in music delivered by bands such as Om and Sunn O))) the resulting album is more brooding and bleak than ever before. Opener Silence sets the eerily gothic tone, its funeral aura carried on the rippling kraut-rock pulse, setting the sound of the rest of the record; the grim tearing noise in Hunter adds to the crushing darkness, while the very real threat of night terrors abound in We Carry On. It is a chilling album and one which will probably exorcise those coffee-table demons that haunt the previous two.

20. Iron Pirate – Iron Pirate
(Neigh Music)
“Welcome to your doom!” So begins the home recorded, hand-made, self-released journey of the Iron Pirate as he takes his first steps into his 8-bit, digital thrash metal odyssey. It isn’t just the concept of this that is compelling, but that the songs themselves are such gargantuan entities in their own right. If this was an album played out with full thrash/death metal instruments it would be hailed as one of the greatest collections of Metal anthems committed to tape. Despite its lack of vocals, there is a fully realised imagery conveyed through the music and the battle lore invoked through the song titles is tangible – Cathedral Of Doom, In The Realm of The White Spider, and this, probably the best thrash title ever: Abominable Iron Steamship Of Death. The artwork is exceptional, each track illustrated by iconic 80’s cartoon imagery and embellished by the hands of the Pirate himself. As with any high octane metal record, there are so many moments when one riff yields to another, synthesized or not the section in Iron Steamship where the steely pumping section grits its teeth before baring down, all sword-slashing gun-blazing synth-guitar soloing. Pretty much the Crystal Castles of metal, and yeah, 1 better than Portishead……..and in a mystery I have just discovered, he seems to have disappeared off the face of the internet. The links up there used to have him, but no more.

19. Woodpigeon - Treasury Library Canada
(Awesome Calgary Awesome)
Originally named Woodpigeon Divided By Antelope Equals Squirrel (or W/A=S in equation form), this Canadian chamber-folk troupe revolves around the songwriting and lyrical direction (and verbose song-titling) of Mark Hamilton. There is a lightness and daydreamy quality to the music, a heartwarming prettiness and joyful twinkle that belie the darker subject matter of the lyrics. Sometimes the songs are stripped back to the bone and the dry, black humour lounges so comfortably across them, sometimes it only takes a brief flicker of embellishment to makes it, like the opening Knock Knock where a tremolo hammered guitar line peals away from the body of the chorus, but on others, serious issues arise; the dour tales of bedridden depression in Battle of Sun Vs. Curtains Sun Wins and We Sleep Until Noon that are backed by the full quietly rocking folk orchestra, ornamented with brass, organs, and percussion played by the ever changing collective line-up. A work of contrasting, beguiling, disturbing beauty.
18. Los Campesinos! - Hold On Now Youngster
Wichita
It took me a long time to get in to Los Campesinos!, and now I have I am not sure what put me off. I think it sounded so horrendously twee at first, the clique mentality of all the references to ATP and the accompanying journalistic gush were all equally nauseating. But then in a somewhat more lucid moment of calm and reflection, when those aggravating factors had diminished, this album just totally floored me with its whip smart sense of humour, genuine youthful zeal, enthusiasm and excitement. Each Arcade Fire style epic rush of song was like a sweet hit of reminiscence and nostalgia for an attitude that has deserted me, but they are laced with a cynicism and knowing self-effacing demeanour that I can totally appreciate. It’s still twee as fuck mind, but that was never the bad thing in itself.

17. Pyha - The Haunted House
(tUMULt)
Black metal thrives on rumours and incredible stories just as much as the music itself, and things don’t get much more incredible than those surrounding Pyha. I will hand this over to the horses mouth, Aquarius Records and tUMULt label head Andee to explain the story:::

“Recorded over the course of a year or two and released when he was 14 years old, it took almost two years to track Pyha down, and then almost four more to sort out the eventual release of this grim depressive black masterpiece. Here's how it started: Longtime aQ pal Steven Schultz (he of Puny Humans and Stalin Claus Superstar infamy) was studying in Korea and bought a bunch of records. None of them really impressed him that much, except for one mysterious disc, by a 'group' called Pyha, which in Korean means 'ruins'. He later discovered that Pyha was the work of one man, err, kid actually, a 14 year old eighth grade black metaller! Needless to say, WOW. Anyway, on returning, Steven passed the CD on to Andee who was BLOWN AWAY. Completely floored, so much so that he knew he had to release it. More people HAD to hear this. So the hunt was on. How to track down a 14 year old kid in Korea? Pre-internet it would have been impossible. But another aQ pal, Jason, was actually living part time in Korea, weirdly enough he's a minor television star there, and offered to try and track down Pyha. Which miraculously he did, and we then discovered that there were in fact 4 albums, all recorded when Pyha was between the ages of 14 and 17! All of which are amazing, and all of which should eventually be released on tUMULt. But this is THE ONE.”

I took that from the Aquarius website - www.aquariusrecords.org. There is more detail on it and the story gets more incredible when you learn that this album is full of anti-military messages, yet Pyha himself, now some 20-odd years old, has been conscripted into the Korean army. But enough story – what does this sound like? It is a fiercely blown out, filthy black pall of a record that exerts a considerable emotional pull, either through a beautiful chord progression and weighted ambience, or through sonic terror intimidation. The beats come from distorted drum machines, the guitars move from lightly plucked acoustic passages to ferocious walls of buzzing noise, while the vocals vary similarly, from crooning whisper to choked rasp, to guttural bellow. It is a combination of the original frosty pulse of Burzum, the modern cavernous atmospheres of Leviathan, the wild feral scree of WOLD, and the fuzz-washes of Wrath of the Weak. All the while listening to this, remember: 14. Years. Old.

16. Krallice – Krallice
(Profound Lore)
Clean, clinical, precise, meticulous production values. Rare features amongst traditional characteristics of black metal, yet all those things and more make this one of the most progressive and important releases of any genre this year, not just across the metal spectrum. Behold...the Arctopus’ Colin Marston and Orthrelm’s Mick Barr (along with Astomatous’ Nick McMaster – and Lev Weinstein on bass and drums) brought their avant-garde, hyper-shred-technical abilities to bear on an album that focused them, dispensed with a lot of the showy, superfluous fretboard abuse and streamlined it into six sleek and elegant tracks of repetitious, hypnotic black trance. A thick, clear drum sound complemented the shiny tones of the guitars, with a bass sound that punched low and hard with a real physical presence – the final 15 minute long Forgiveness in Rot, bringing the album to a climax with a huge set of essentially only three riffs that slide into one another creating an unbearably steely tension that never quite breaks, each new loop of the cycle ratcheting it up another nerve fraying level. Thoroughly absorbing and rewarding, Krallice set a milestone for black metal, marking 2008 as the year that something genuinely shifted.

15. Prussia – Dear Emily, Best Wishes, Molly
(Common Cloud)
I heard of this Detroit based indie soul outfit through Ongaku Baka. An utterly un-self-conscious smash and grab soundclash of happy musics that, in 30 minutes of the most tastefully (but not cynically) measured fashion, takes in elements of Scratch Perry dub, Tamla shimmy, strutting Calypso, Mexican mushroom psyche, sun-dazed surf-rock…..the Sesame Street theme...Great Lakes really does sound like that, but even that isn’t off-putting in the context of the song – it’s a little ray of innocence in an album greatly concerned with the woes of the planet. I haven’t heard of them anywhere else, probably because this was limited to 300 copies of hand-screened and numbered artwork, but if is, and it l surely deserves and will be, awarded a re-release, I expect to see their name around big time next year.

14. WOLD – Stratification
(Profound Lore)
Another wintery fusion of black metal, industrial strength noise and the cold fury of Mother nature at her most aggrieved, WOLD bring album number three to bear on to a world that is barely recovered from the almost unbearably bleak ‘Screech Owl’. Well, even bleaker is the landscape formed by ‘Stratification’, and even less forgiving are the minds of Obey and Fortress Crookedjaw. The album is built on a lot of trance inducing repetition; Sleigh Ride features an almost rhythmic wobbling bassline underneath a fizzing blizzard of white distortion, the numerical duo of Nine Paths and Nine Creeks are an almost dry and wet mirror image of each other, both featuring a similarly scratchy guitar riff with the former focusing a crackle, splintered top layer, and the latter a rushing undercurrent of psychotic babble. Brief, relative, mercy comes in the form of The Frozen Field, where all the layers of guitars drop away leaving the crackling buzz of a drum beat smashing an irregular rhythm, punctuated occasionally by the violently feral, blown-out screech of the vocals. WOLD dwell in a harsh place, absolutely, but if you can take the pain there is a lot to get out of the experience and it will stay with you too. Life’s most harrowing episodes always do.

13. Frightened Rabbit – The Midnight Organ Fight
(FatCat)
With lyrics like “Midnight organ fight / Yours drips into mine / it’s alright”, the second album from Frightened Rabbit is as visceral, sexual, and very possibly anti-sexy, as anything penned by Aidan Moffat and looks set to stand the band in as cultishly admired a position as Arab Strap themselves. Detailing the events and aftermath of a relationship breakup, ‘The Midnight Organ Fight’ is very much like getting in the middle of a fight you should never have been stood near in the first place; Listen to Scott Hutchinson nonchalantly threatening “I might not want you back but I want to kill him” in Good Arms Vs. Bad Arms, and in Keep Yourself Warm spitting a sour “You won’t find love in a hole / it takes more than fucking someone to keep yourself warm." By the end, the details get pretty gory and I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise of the ending for you. Lyrically, this is not an album to take lightly, but the music almost works counter to this, making them all the more durable; mostly short songs of throaty folk-rock that hit their peaks quickly and move on in the most refreshing fashion. One of this year’s most potently accessible releases.

12. Women – Women
(Flemish Eye)
Canada seems to be producing no end of incredible bands at the moment. I am not sure if that has always been the case and I’ve only just started noticing, but Women are another band of essential Canucks to add to the list, and like Prussia, expect to see everyone going nuts for this band in the New Year when this album gets an official US and UK release. This album is built of so much that it is hard to nail it to any overarching genre; rhythms cast from post-punk angular rock, noisy backgrounds and interludes, brief rafts of ambience, gritty driving proto-skronk - It’s this blatant disregard for any one listener’s taste and flagrant disrespect for any potential marketing that makes it so great. The overall effect of ‘Women’ is like every Velvet Underground album condensed down into ten tracks of jaw-dropping rock. Truly, this year has been one of casting indie bands into fiery pits of noise, galvanizing them with a gnarlier exterior and leaving them scattered across the blogosphere for unsuspecting net-fiends to find and claim as their own. I claim this one: Women. Have them. You will love them.

11. Fuck Buttons – Street Horrsing
(ATP Recordings)
More noise covered skeletal frames for you, but this one – the two-piece of Benjamin John Power and Andrew Hung from Reading – start from a basic chassis of throbbing electronics, pulsing drum machines and Pandora’s effects boxes, build them up with layers and loops of distortion and inaudibly mangled lyrics then stretch them out to six individually twisted narratives of around ten minutes a piece. The result is the most hypnotic psychedelic drone rock record of the year.

10. Times New Viking – Rip It Off
(Matador)
Ohio, Columbus based three piece TNV write acoustic based beautiful doo-wop harmony pop, reminiscent of Pavement, Guided By Voices, and even a bit of Yo La Tengo at their most succinct – then fuck it over with as much overdrive and distortion as any speakers could handle. Dubbed ‘Shitgaze’ this terribly named genre only really belongs to this band – but to it I add Wavves, The Mausoleums, and even Crystal Antlers in the round up of all the bands I have loved this year that would all be hailed as Pop geniuses if it weren’t for their concerted efforts to undermine any remote Pop potential by destroying all traces of it from their songs. For anyone that ever said demos sound crap, I can always refer them to Times New Viking – a band resolutely proud to put out cheap and deliberately ‘bad’ sounding records, then be highly praised for it. Released right at the start of the year, this album has had a lot of time to sit with me and reveal its songwriting skills and charms and there are a lot of them. The harmonic glow of Drop-Out, the over-excitable exploding mess of Faces On Fire, then after all the noise, they go and give you a sneak peek of what you could have won at the end of Times New Viking vs Yo La Tengo, where they cut back on their safety blanket and sit there, naked and acoustic as nature intended. The very best of this year of violently noisy pop.

09. Urfaust - Drei Rituale Jenseits des Kosmos
(Debemur Morti Productions)
Dutch ambient avant-garde black metal two piece Urfaust released this 20-minute 3-untitled-track mini-album in the summer and not once has another record been released that comes close to conveying the same sense of restless unease or disturbing imagery. This is a disorienting listen, immediately plunging the listener into a grinding squall, sawing layers of guitar tones shifting uneasily across each other, harrowing unearthly vocals and ghostly effects rising and falling through the mix. This record oozes atmosphere and mystery, not least because the origin of the sounds is almost impossible to distinguish – any physical playing of guitar riffs is blended into the heaving mass of noise, a smoothly churning noisescape more than actual riffing; the drums, a heavily distorted mechanic pulse add a woozy spaced-out ambience, a slow and hypnotically rhythmic element almost like they are gently steering the flow of the torrents of guitar and vocals. In an all too brief running time, Urfaust manage to conjure a deep labyrinthian environment and build upon all their previous releases with their finest work to date.

08. Action Beat – 1977 – 2007: 30 Years Of Hurt Then Us Cunts Exploded
(Self-Released)
I’m not sure if this was released in 2007 or 2008. It was recorded and finished around the end of 2007, but what date stamp it has I don’t know. All I know is that I got it this year and was blown away. I went to see them and was blown apart some more. I describe them as 3 Sonic Youth’s playing at the same time. Maximum Bletchley sounds like that plus Holy Fuck - White hot sheet noise multi-drummer dance music. With each track containing varying numbers and combinations of guitars, bass and drums, occasionally augmented with saxophones and violins; you haven’t heard polyrhythms until you’ve heard Action Beat in full flow and you haven’t seen ANYTHING until you’ve seen this band live. Recently signed to Southern with an album due and about to hit the road for another year long stint of touring, Action Beat are going to eat 2009 alive.

07. U.S. Christmas – Eat The Low Dogs
(Neurot Recordings)
Coming from North Carolina, from a town in the Appalachians, US Christmas have a lot of space to star gaze, a lot of space to gaze into and a lot of space to make their band sound massive. Against that backdrop they play out like Crippled Black Phoenix, Neurosis and Hawkwind, the cosmic reference encapsulated in another band covering similar terrain – Comets On Fire. This is a kind of stoner rock, with none of the monged out drugginess. It is clear headed shades of light and dark, better able to cope with the paranoia creeping through the cracks and it’s played out on an enormous scale, shadowed by the mountains under which it was created. The album deals in a blues-rock based cosmic sludge, a coalescence of galactic effluence, space dust and solar gas. Against the hulking riffs and slowly lumbering notes progressing across the skyline, the constant whirr, fluttering, phasing and twittering of theremin builds the songs into a full on modern age psychedelic assault, neon tails of burning dust lighting the night with phosphorescent vapour. When the beat drops in on second track The Scalphunters, little pinpoints of light accelerate into streaks screaming past your periphery like hyperspeed just kicked in. Space rock in extremis. "WE ARE ONE AND ONE WITH GOD" – Euphoric disco beamed in from extremely fucking far away; an alien revenant fronting a musical combination of Spiritualised and Stooges; a majestic harshness. “PRAY TO THE SKY!” – drone soldiers in relentless skyward vigil. This is one of those long sought life-affirming albums you never even knew you’d been waiting for.

06. Horna - Sanojesi Äärelle
(Debemur Morti Productions)
Finland’s Horna are now 15 years into their career, with main-man Shatraug being the only surviving member. Chopping and changing line-ups seems to matter far less to metal bands than it does to many others – the departure of Graham Coxon from Blur, say, was the death knell for them. Any metal band in that position would have simply got another axe-man in and ploughed onwards. Another metal trait is the ability for bands to release superior work in the later stages of their careers. This is undoubtedly true of Horna, who on their seventh full album (and thirty sixth release in total, including 7”’s, splits, EP’s and a couple of live albums) have struck upon such a rich seam of instinctive, exploratory, black metal trance that it’s mesmerizing moebius strip of sensual assault holds focus across the full 85 minute double album. The production is impeccable – the keyboards wrap around the edges of the guitar tones like the banks of a river channeling the rushing, boiling torrents of riffs; the drums acting as both brittle and brutal punctuation when the tempo suits. For all its sophisticated song structures and considered, nuanced production this record is still defiantly primitive in sound and scope; as concerned with Satanism and the occult as ever. All the more reason to hail it as pure, unadulterated, dangerous, life affirming rock and roll - as it should be.

05. Rudi Arapahoe - Echoes From One To Another
(Symbolic Interaction)
Since this album was released in May, I have managed to discover absolutely nothing else about the sole composer responsible for it; but then, that enigmatic lack of detail has added a deeper layer of mystery to the music and moved what was already faintly tangible, otherworldly and unreachable that little bit further out there. Musically this is a mix of synthetic tones, samples and found sounds, musique concrete, a few stirring moments of haunting singing and occasional very minimal drum machine beats. The constant swell of soothing dreamscape suspends a story based around Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. ‘Echoes From One To Another’ starts with a death, possibly of the artist/narrator who then leads the listener, or perhaps it is the listener who should assume the role of the deceased. From that opening, the album moves through the afterlife, at which point, album highlight Conversation Piece starts throbbing it’s distant drum machine pulse, operatic vocals drift across the speakers, the eerie siren song bringing on the final theme of the album, a purgatorial debate over sin and specifically, lust. A beautiful, thought provoking and involving voyage quite unlike anything else this year.

04. Caïna – Temporary Antennae
(Profound Lore)
'Temporary Antennae' is Sussex based Andrew Curtis-Brignell’s third, finest and final album as Caïna (a 10”, 7” and 3”CDr will finish things up in the coming months). 2007’s ‘Mourner’ was one of the most groundbreaking metal releases of that year, but with 'Temporary Antennae' he has bettered both his previous record and the efforts of almost every metal artist in the last 12 months. Steeped in an essence of Englishness the profoundly involving nature of the album grew from it’s focus on elements, flora and fauna, the Gentian Osman watercolour stag beetle cover art and insert, through song titles like Willows and Whippoorwills or ...and Ivy Wound Round Him, and of course, the range of sounds it incorporates - 80’ s darkwave, post-punk and shoegazing drone. As an example of the fearless genre warping inventiveness, Ten Went Up River features churning roars of distortion that gently descend into brooding ambient passages, build through a shuffling acoustic section then gracefully morph into chiming effervescence. The centre-piece Larval Door is a shimmering Cure-esque instrumental, while the title track takes a long, meandering ramble through some dark, shadowy post-folk before exploding into a euphoric disco-trance finale. 'Temporary Antennae' is a remarkable album, from a powerful artist, one which has Caïna move black metal further into a stage where it could and should be taken as a far more meaningful genre deserving of wider acclaim. It is possibly a shame then that his new project The Red Cathedral (with members of Wraiths and Krieg), is to be a spite fuelled noise bastard black metal outfit; having promised so much for metal’s future, it seems he is already taking it away and replacing it with something far more primitive. But then, maybe underground is how he wants it kept.

.......So, my number three album of 2008 or the first of my joint-three number ones? I’ve kept swapping these three around so much, in this list, on my stereo, on the I-Plod, at work, at NFR – they are all so utterly different that comparing them against each other along any quantifiable measures is futile. So, you can consider these all number one, or in this almost arbitrary order, whichever suits. Here goes:.........

03. Brown Jenkins – Angel Eyes
(Moribund)
Whenever I have read anyone this year saying that they haven’t discovered any bands to get obsessed with Brown Jenkins is the name that always smashes straight into my frontal lobe. In fact, it was already there before the question was raised; this year everything has revolved around the shadowy figure of this Texan one-man black metal band. No metal album could touch Umesh Amtey’s vision in it’ vastness, originality or execution. The music comes from an incredibly dark, primal place, minimal in vision but maximal in scale and space. Bleakly down-tuned, minor key arpeggiated notes cascade across the foreground, layered over distorted blurs of seething masses of shifting riffs. Songs are almost dragged along on inexorable paths of driving monolithic doom, sharply detoured by dynamic shifts in tempo hurling them in a new direction, maintaining momentum and intensity. The drums are machine generated but the whole record carries a spontaneity that belies them, yet at the same time, the drunken, stumbling style that characterises Angel Eyes could almost come from Umesh constantly chasing the beat with his riffs were the overall effect not so conspicuously deliberate. Occasionally the pace quickens from polyrhythmic sludge to buzzing hypnotic trance-like states of proto-thrash, splinters of guitar tones shearing off the massive body of music. The vocals are invigoratingly brief. Themes of the occult and Lovecraftian cosmic horror and mysticism are dealt with in sparsely distributed lyrics, each song may have only five or six lines of deeply bellowed mammoth roars through it’s length. Like Caïna, this is Brown Jenkin’s prelude to the end. In November Umesh called Brown Jenkins to an end, with the project to be concluded at the end of 2009 with an already recorded album titled 'Death Obsession.' Despite that, it’s still not too late for this man to change you.

02. Late Of The Pier – Fantasy Black Channel
(Zarcorp)
This is an album whose genius snuck up on me entirely. From their demos of 2006 and singles of 2007 there were occasional flashes of inspired songwriting, but that full Zarcorp demo was all over the place and only the Erol Alkan produced Bathroom Gurgle really did them justice. 'Fantasy Black Channel' totally overhauls everything that went before and like some wondrous feat of metamorphosis converts all that caterpillar potential into a fully actualised entity with an almost butterfly effect in the songwriting – one snare hit here triggering a voodoo hip-hop stomp there and a glitch breakdown further down the line. Singer Samuel Dust (Their stage names are great too) said something that helped tune me in to 'Fantasy Black Channel'. He said they don’t like all of the parts of the album but everything in it was necessary to finish each song. Those are the words of someone creating art. We also had Friendly Fires release an album along similar lines, to show what happens when this kind of dance-oriented mashup doesn’t work. This album unassailably does. This smashes a hole straight through the dead-end of new rave, taking all the excitement that it was built from and bolting on some seriously high-powered multi-genre upgrades. In the one song that encapsulates the band in as much as is possible, the vampiric protagonist of Space And The Woods makes no apologies for its behaviour “Not after what I’ve done” before standing it’s ground with “I’m shit hot so say what you think about me”, then divulging another personal secret about their musical aesthetic “chopping chopping me down so I fit in your laptop.” Either that, or it’s seriously how they disposed of the body. All that, plus they live and practice in a house together – I don’t know how long since they started in 2001, but that’s a good long time, and a good situation to get to know each other. All those things – names, ethics, house - make me want to reference Beefheart’s 'Trout Mask Replica'. Yeah, I did just compare LOTP to The Don.

01. Paavoharju – Laulu Laakson Kukista
(Fonal)
It would be too easy to say this that album is too hard to describe, but that’s nigh on the truth. Making reference to other artists is futile – there are too many flitting around, interwoven into this complex tapestry to name, but this is everything that makes this, very probably, the greatest album of the year. Paavoharju are a Finnish free-folk collective of ascetic Christians who, in a year of really, really weird free-folk from Finland (Udon, Islaja, Kemialliset Ystävät, Lau Nauk, Shogun Kunitoki, Kiila to name a few), have created an album that pushes everything just about as far out as it can get. The 6 main members, centered around two brothers, Lauri and Olli Ainala, along with 13 additional musicians follow up 2006’s ‘Yha Hamaraa’ debut with ‘Laakson Kukista’ (“A Song about Flowers of the Valley”). It is an album that defies expectations even moreso than Late Of The Pier. This small orchestra of musicians weave an enchanted dreamworld of a record with a Brothers Grimm fairytale darkness lurking in the forest shadows; the effect is an almost pastel coloured Ingmar Bergman or Guy Maddin film - in turns ethereal, playful, innocent and creepy, sinister, menacing. This band and record utterly trumps the frail and tentatively genrefied folktronica of bands like Tuung and Four Tet - This is a seamless and natural marriage of the mechanic and organic, acoustic and electronic, a spiritual channeling of the modern and historic; formed from guitars, pianos, all manner of string, wind and brass instruments, curious pieces percussion, with the weirdness set by interludes of animal and baby noises, songs interspersed with field recordings, choruses dissolving into musique concrète. If all that sounds like a twee campfire concert, then take songs like Uskallan and Kevatrumpu, that suddenly shift into grand swells of bombastic, operatic pop with thumping drum machines, glitchy techno and churning guitars. As definite as it is abstract, this is a hauntingly evocative album that fuses a human soul with Reason and lets nature take its course.

MxBx

2008-12-14T09:26:00.000Z

November’s mix is the 4th installment of my 8 monthly Not For Resale IMP mixes. Every new one of these I do I think is the best one yet. All 4 back to back would be….a night at NFR! Without further ado, let the demo mayhem commence:

Not For Resale Vol. IV (IMP 40, November 2008)
http://www.sendspace.com/file/2z35bi

Tracklist:

01. Power Up - Not For Resale Jingle
02. John The Savage - Hoser (Demo)
03. Diagonal - Child Of The Thunder-Cloud (Diagonal, Rise Above)
04. I Hope You Suffer - I Could Move Mountains For You (Sampler, Pocket Change)
05. Kontakte - Life’s Road Movies (Winterlight Remix) (Life’s Road Movies, Drifting Falling)
06. Laish Quartet - The Love Written Down (One:18, Toy Soldier)
07. Lebanons - One Arm (Demo)
08. Nullifier - 30 Minute Heat (Demo)
09. Plastic Passion - Beneath The Light (Contrived Imagery, Knew Noise)
10. Bats - These One’s Lay Eggs (Demo)
11. Old Mayor - Bring In The Sleeper (Demo)
12. Grasscut - Muppet (Demo)
13. Last Days Of Lorca - I Am Rat (Demo)
14. Turbowölf - Ghost Hunt (Demo)
15. I Haunt Wizards - Frost Mountain Part II (Demo)
16. South Central - Golden Dawn (The Owl Of Minerva, Egregore)
17. Spleen & The Flesh Machine - Will To Kill (Demo)
18. Awesome Wells - Not For Resale Jingle

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Parting Songs For Tearing Skies (IMP 39, October 2008)

2008-12-14T09:06:00.000Z

October’s mix has no theme at all, just stuff that I have been listening to a lot recently. I have been using a new program to mix these with ,so it was more an exercise in learning to use that…which means there are some dead fucking smart segues and transitions in it, even if I do say so myself. The ones between High Places and Deerhunter, Zombie Zombie and TVOTR are perfect, perfect I tell you!

Parting Songs For Tearing Skies (IMP 39, October 2008
http://www.sendspace.com/file/s9ty2e

Tracklist:

01. High Places - Papaya Year
02. Deerhunter - Nothing Ever Happened
03. Frightened Rabbit - The Twist
04. The Black Angels - Science Killer
05. Kiss The Anus Of A Black Cat - The Firesky
06. Paavoharju - Uskallan
07. Zombie Zombie - Driving This Road Until Death Sets You Free
08. TV On The Radio - DLZ
09. Rachel Unthank & The Winterset - Blue Bleezing Blind Drunk
10. Woodcraft Folk - Old House At Home
11. Shackleton - Death Is Not Final
12. Cotti - The Search
13. Sparkling Wide Pressure - Tearing, Rippling
14. Appleblim - Vansan
15. Wovenhand - White Knuckle Grip
16. Shearwater - Century Eyes
17. Crystal Antlers - Parting Song For The Torn Sky
18. The Donkeys - Pretty Thing

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Disciples Of Frith (IMP 38, September 2008)

2008-12-11T09:44:00.005Z

Here is the second posting of my IMP mixes.

September's mix was smashed out just before Syd Hauk was born. I knew that if I never got it out before he arrived it would be waaaay late, so it is kind of rushed and kind of simplistic. It's a load of new British bands that I thought my IMP friend across the pond might like to hear in case they never make it over.

Disciples Of Frith (IMP 38, September 2008)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/9rgb12

01. The Indelicates - Last Significant Statement To Be Made In Rock & Roll
02. Hateful Abandon - Lungs (Demo Version)
03. David Thomas Broughton - Aint Got No Sole
04. Future Of The Left - The House That Hope Built
05. These New Puritans - Swords Of Truth
06. Metronomy - My Heart Rate Rapid
07. Late Of The Pier - Bathroom Gurgle
08. A Forest Of Stars - Earth And Matter
09. Jonquil - There Is No Ian Bridgwater
10. Frightened Rabbit - I Feel Better
11. Pete & The Pirates - Mr Understanding
12. Los Campesinos! - Broken Heartbeats Sounds Like Breakbeats
13. Wild Beasts - Brave Bulging Buoyant Clairvoyant
14. Working For A Nuclear Free City - Eighty Eight
15. Errors - Pump
16. Double Handsome Dragons - I Saw Simon Dance
17. Caina - Constantine the Blind
18. Wreaths - Bury My Tracks

IMP Downloads

2008-12-10T13:18:00.007Z

I am going to start posting up the mixes I make for the International Mixtape Project. I am not going to be posting them up on the actual IMP site, because Muxtape got shutdown for hosting mixes and I don't want the same thing to happen to the IMP. Not that I think me alone would cause that to happen, but shit like that happens...especially to me.

So, there will be one mix a month coming, but over the next few days I am going to back date it a while, starting from the summer. I have no idea if anyone will be interested in this at all but it's no effort to post them up so i might as well.

Introduction over. Here's the first one:

The Killer (IMP 37, August 2008)

http://www.sendspace.com/file/q6f7za

August's mix started off a just a load of tracks I'd been listening to recently. then I kind of tightened it up into a cohesive atmosphere but it still didn't really feel right until I found a title and sorted the artwork. It's nice when that happens, and i don't use that approach too often but I especially liked this one a lot for it when it all clicked together. Despite what it seems I don't actually spend all my time listening to music and songs that remind me of killing or death....not all of my time anyway.

Tracklist:

01. Urfaust - Untitled (Drei Rituale Jenseits Des Kosmos Track II))
02. The Mausoleums - Commerce
03. Racebannon - The Killer
04. Thee Ohsees - The Guilded Cunt
05. A H Kraken - Black Borny
06. Brown Jenkins - Forever Funerals
07. Deerhunter - Never Stops
08. M83 - Kim And Jessie
09. Der Blutharsch - Untitled (The Philosophers Stone Track II)
10. Awesome Color - Already Down
11. Double Handsome Dragons - There Are Ghosts
12. Come Jolly Death - That Night Everything Went Slomo
13. Ihopeyousuffer - Armed With Colour
14. U. S. Christmas - Uktena
15. A Place To Bury Strangers - To Fix The Gash In Your Head
16. I Haunt Wizards - FF
17. On Earth - Risen

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Not For Resale Setlist 4th December 2008

2008-12-05T20:01:00.001Z

So. End of the year as far as NFR goes. Me and the Fokka Wolfe went of 2008 blazing our best tracks from the last 12 months - or at least, as many as we could squeeze in to 4 hours. To hear that Krallice track at intense volume was worth the trip out alone. An amazing riff to spend 15 minutes with.

More on details later though - This is almost a prelude to my own Top 50 of '08, which will be coming soon. But it isn't. It's EN EFF ARGH!!!!

Next Penthouse jam is 5th February. Wrap up warm, don't get lost or hurt and we'll see you then.

M83 - Kim & Jessie (Saturdays = Youth, Mute)
Diagonal - Child Of The Thunder Cloud (Diagonal, Rise Above)
Religious Knives – The Storm (The Door, Ecstatic Peace)
Cotti – The Search (12”, Soul Jazz)
Acid Mothers Temple & The Cosmic Inferno – Brainstorm (Sonic Attack (Psychedelic Warlords, Trensmat)
Crystal Antlers – Parting Song For The Torn Sky (Crystal Antlers, Touch And Go)
The Black Angels – Science Killer (Directions To See A Ghost, Light In The Attic)
Krallice – Forgiveness In Rot (Krallice, Profound Lore)
NFR Jingle – Awesome Wells
Plastic Passion – We Have Come So Far (Contrived Imagery, Knew Noise)
Pete & The Pirates – Dry Wings (Little Death, Stolen)
Wavves – California Goth (Wavves, Fuck It Tapes)
Caina – Temporary Antennae (Temporary Antennae, Profound Lore)
Deerhunter – Little Kids (Demo) (Nothing Ever Happened 7", Kranky)
Fucked Up – Golden Seal (The Chemistry Of Common Life, Matador)
Of Montreal - Alter Eagle (Id Engager 7”, Polyvinyl)
Pocahaunted – No More Women (Chains, Teardrops)
Who Owns Death TV – Cathode (One:18, Toy Soldier)
Turbowolf – Ghost Hunt (Demo)
Kowloon Walled City – My Hands Are Turning To Bricks (Turk Street, Word Clock)
Nullifier – 30 Minute Heat (Demo)
The Death Set – Around The World (Worldwide, Counter)
Errors – National Prism (It’s Not Something But It Is Like Whatever, Rock Action)
Double Handsome Dragons – I Saw Simon Dance (Double Handsome Dragons, Pocket Change)
TV On The Radio – DLZ (Dear Science, Interscope)
Paavoharju – Kirkonväki (Laulu Laakson Kukista, Fonal)
Mogwai – The Sun Smells Too Loud (The Hawk Is Howling, PIAS)
Foals – Two Steps, Twice (Antidotes, Transgressive)
Late Of The Pier – Heartbeat (Fantasy Black Channel, Parlophone)
I Haunt Wizards – Pimp Someone Else’s Ride (Demo)
Benga – 26 Basslines (Diary Of An Afro Warrior, Tempa)
South Central – Golden Dawn (The Owl Of Minerva, Egregore)
Tweak Bird – Whorses (Reservations, Volcom)
U.S. Christmas – The Scalphunters (Eat The Low Dogs, Neurot)
White Hills - Be Yourself (Sonic Attack (Psychedelic Warlords, Trensmat)
Awesome Color – Already Down (Electric Aboriginies, Ecstatic Peace)
White Fang – Acid Reaper (Demo)
Hotel Wrecking City Traders – Cup Weekend Murders (Black Yolk, Bro Fidelity)
The Mausoleums – Skeletal (Blackened Fawns Will Cleanse The Earth With Fire, Chinese Workers Labor Union)
Oneida – Untitled/Track 1 (Preteen Weaponry, Jagjaguwar)
Witch – 100mph (Paralysed, Tee-Pee)
Black Mountain – Stormy High (In The Future, Jagjaguwar)
Iron Pirate – Shark (Iron Pirate, Neigh Music)
Medicine & Duty – Flags And Cannons (Flags And Cannons, Foolproof Projects)
Frightened Rabbit – The Twist (Midnight Organ Flight, Fat Cat)
Varghkoghargasmal - …Near The Stars (Drowned In Lakes, Tumult)
Grails – Take Refuge (Take Refuge In Clean Living, Important)
Action Beat – Maximum Bletchley (1977 – 2007: 30 Years Of Hurt Then Us Cunts Exploded, Self-Released)
Brown Jenkins – Forever Funerals (Angel Eyes, Moribund)
Wold – The Frozen Field (Stratification, Profound Lore)

MxBx

MxBx back catalogue up for download

2008-11-10T20:00:00.003Z

To mark the occasion of new recordings commencing (both Meat and other) I have put all the Meatbreak releases up for free download.

New material coming soon.

Previous emissions, here:

First full album of bassline noise, electric buzz and psych drone, released 2007

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD: THE INTROVERT PERVERSION (FUCKING RACKET RECORDS)

Tracklist:
01. The Sun
02. Masked Target Recovery
03. Grinding The Meat For Bungalor
04. They Will Follow The Stick If It Has A Good Beat
05. Socioneurological Entropy
06. Serpentine Tuberculosis
07. The Death Of Meatbreak
08. The Moon

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Bliss drone/ / skewed electro ep from winter 2006

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD: MEATBREAK VS. NEWBEING6 (FUCKING RACKET RECORDS)

Tracklist:
01. Spirit Shifter
02. The Conjuror's Best Trick
03. Variant

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Live two-piece / head-to-head Drums and Bass recordings from spring 2006

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD: MEATBREAK VS. G-CHRIST

Tracklist:
01. Thunderfoot vs the Hydra
02. Auto Necrotic Asphyxiation
03. Grind The Floor Electric
04. The Rising Tide Of Belief
05. Low Wood Watersports
06. Penny Reel

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First Meatbreak recordings and early demos from 2002 - 2006

CLICK TO DOWNLOAD: MEATBREAK

Tracklist:
01. Chrysalis
02. Reasion Chews
03. Demonstruate
04. Frozeneon
05. Noiss
06. Oooh Jiggy!
07. Slabac
08. Hocum Pocum
09. Arborate Them
10. Monkey Trap
11. What's It Made Of
12. The Deathslide
13. Poon On Bush
14. Must Keep Moving In The Light
15. Life Is Better Left Alone

Not For Resale Setlist – 6th November

2008-11-10T19:59:00.001Z

Thanks to everyone who attended that grand NFR return to The Penthouse this month. Thanks too go to Oli for covering us while we took a bit of time off to get to grips with some new developments.

The time off meant we'd totally stocked up on a streamlined, otherworldly, outlandish full night's worth of new releases and demos – we still dropped a couple of regular essentials in for The Research and their fans (and Peter & The Wolf, The Special K's and The Fayres – hello again to youze all).

So yeah, we are back – next one's the 4th December. See you there for more of this:

I Hope You Suffer – I Could Move Mountains For You (Sampler, Pocket Change Records)
Kontakte – Life's Road Movies (Winterlight Remix) (Life's Road Movies, Drifting Falling)
Oneida – Preteen Weaponry III (Preteen Weaponry, Jagjaguwar)
A Place To Bury Strangers – To Fix The Gash In Your Head (A Place To Bury Strangers, Killer Pimp)
129 Die In Jet – Progression (Demo)
Cotti – The Search (12", Soul Jazz)
John The Savage – Hoser (Demo)
Racebannon – The Killer (Acid Or Blood, Southern)
Sparkling Wide Pressure – Tearing, Ripping (Touching Pasture, Students Of Decay)
Deerhunter – Nothing Ever Happened (Microcastle, 4AD)
M83 – Kim & Jessie (Montag Remix)
Paarvoharju – Kevatrumpu (Laalu Laskson Kjukista)
Caina – Larval Door (Temporary Antennae, Profound Lore)
Crystal Antlers – Vexation (Crystal Antlers, Touch And Go)
Pocahaunted – No More Women (Chains, Teardrops)
Turbowolf – Ghost Hunt (Demo)
Tweak Bird – Shivers (Reservations, Volcom)
Nullifier – 30 Minute Heat (Demo)
Late Of The Pier – Heartbeat (Fantasy Black Channel, EMI)
Telepathe – Devil's Trident (7", Merok)
Lovers – Teenage Shutdown (Think, Wichita)
Wavves – Wavves (Wavves, Fuck It Tapes)
T.V. On The Radio – DLZ (Dear Science, Interscope)
Women – Black Rice (Women, Flemish Eye)
Diagonal – Cannon Misfire (Diagonal, Rise Above)
Religious Knives – Basement Watch (The Door, Ecstatic Peace, 2008)
Mayors – Aiplanes (Megan's LOLZ, Self-Released)
Horna – Liekki Ja Voima (Sanojesi Aarelle, Debemur Morti)
South Central – Nothing Can Go Wrong (The Owl Of Minerva, Egregore)
Shackleton – But The Branch Is Weak (Soundboy's Suicide Note 12'', Skull Disco)
Mogwai - The Sun Is Too Loud (The Hawk Is Howling, Wall Of Sound/PIAS)
Double Handsome Dragons – Goat And Chicken, Best Of Friends (Double Handsome Dragons, Pocket Change)
The Black Angels – Science Killer (Directions To See A Ghost, Light In The Attic)
Wovenhand – White Knuckle Grip (Ten Stories, Sounds Familyre)
Grasscut – Muppet (Demo)
Friendly Fires – Paris (Friendly Fires, Xl)
Of Montreal – Ed Engager (Skeletal Lamping, Polyvinyl)
MGMT – Electric Feel (Justice Remix)
Bats – These Ones Lay Eggs (One:18, Toy Soldier)
Plastic Passion – Everything Changes (Demo)
Hotel Wrecking City Traders – The Lakeshore Strangler (Black Yolk, Bro Fidelity)
Late Of The Pier – VW (Fantasy Black Channel, EMI)
Action Beat – Justice Yeldham (1977 – 2007…Thirty Years Of Hurt Then Us Cunts Exploded, Self-Released)
The Mausoleums – Skeletal (Blackened Fawns Cleanse The Earth With Fire, Chinese Workers Labor Union)
Urfaust – I (Drei Rituale Jenseits Des Osmos, Debemur Morti)
Spleen & The Flesh Machine - Useless Pumping (Demo)
Errors – Pump (It's Not Something But It Is Like Whatever, Rock Action)
Shackleton – El Din (Part One) (12", Mordant)

MxBx

Pocket Change Records Label Profile

2008-08-26T19:54:00.006Z

Pocket Change Records
A glimpse of the future in an interview with an internet label.

Post Rock, Ambient, Instrumental, Experimental, Electronic, Psychedelic, Analogue Noise. These are the sounds. The theme running through them, that binds all of Pocket Change Records’ releases so far, from the very first wreaths to the current (at time of writing) Talbot Arms, is one of an enveloping atmosphere. The ultimate goal of soundscape artists is to build a bubble that refracts the world beyond it; the wall of sound the speakers throw up doubling as a blank canvas for the listener to project synaesthetic accompaniment, an emotional relationship that invests itself in the narrative of the album that needs silence for reflection and solace after the music finishes.

Now that the MP3 is king of formats the rise and potential dominance of the net label is inevitable, free music is about to mean something more that just piracy and theft. Pocket Change is a free-download net label run by San Francisco based 21 year old Bobbi Westfield. He began it in May 2008 as a way “to help out talented musicians who may get overlooked because they're not sure how to market themselves” and already has a roster of 15 artists with over 1000 downloads clocked up and counting. What is it about an internet based, download label that attracted Bobbi to it? “With all of this "illegal downloading" and "Music piracy" going on today I think it's important that artists have a choice. If they want to charge people $17.00 for a CD that’s fine - but if they want to give it away - really want to because they are so excited and proud of their music, then I think they should be able to do that as well.”

EMI just brought in the CEO of a private equity firm to take over the helm and make it more profit. With the internet becoming the dominant music medium the death of traditional forms is inevitable: “The music industry today is trying to relive the glory-years of the 1960's - 1970's. And they are failing. I'm trying to keep it less about money and more about music/creativity/originality.”

Originality is something Pocket Change’s bands have in abundance. A defining feature of each release has been the sense that it starts in familiar terrain, yet instantly moves from there into uncharted territory. To describe just a few:

UK based Double Handsome Dragons’ combination of guitars, keyboards and samples offers an interesting and arresting angle to that heavy post rock template. I Saw Simon Dance and Goat & Chicken Best Of Friends are both incredibly propulsive tracks full of tricks, twists and riffs;

The Newcastle based wreaths creates doomy sad drone, embellished with touches of post-rock guitar work with a beautifully weighted production that oozes a heavy paranoid atmosphere;

Tunbridge Wells’ On Earth builds on a heady mix of ambient references that recall Eluvium, Meursault, Acre, Stars of The Lid, Natural Snow Buildings…a lot of intense records that combine into really beautiful flowing ambience;

From the USA, Arizona’s incongruously named ihopeyousuffer is a super heavy (but distinctly un-Metal) vista of guttural guitars mangled into a heady airless space with an inherently melodic core that makes for an exhilaratingly dense and claustrophobic listen;

Albuquerque’s ZH - who is the only artist Bobbi has put out two releases for, which should indicate how alluring this artist in particular is. As Bobbi himself says “Probably the most underrated artist I have. His work is genius” – both albums are woozy, surreal trips, intricate microclimates of sound with an overarching atmosphere that is similar to the apocalyptic sighing of the "They have a large barge with a radio antenna tower on it" section from Godspeed’s East Hastings;

Michigan’s A Death Cinematic, one of the farthest out of all PCR releases so far, is a one man instrumental (although nearly all PCR releases fit that description) heavy guitar drone improviser who you can really hear putting a lot of himself into his music. An intense artist with a direct, raw approach, stripped to the minimum that is a wonderful counterpoint to the detailed layers and textures of the other artists on the label.

Every new release has created a sense of anticipation over where Bobbi will take the sound of the label. Receiving submissions at a rate of “2-3 a week” is a very healthy start for such a young label. Is there a grand scheme at play with a mapped out trajectory and releases planned in advance? “Generally, I try and have a release every Monday. Sometimes I'm booked up with releases for a month in advance. We're working on a CD sampler that will have an original song by most of the bands on the label, so things have slowed down considerably while working on it. They will be packaged in beautiful white digi-packs with original artwork, and each and everyone will be handled, folded, stamped, and numbered by yours truly. They will go on a limited run of 200 copies with a PCR sticker, and cost less than $10.00. Aside from the CD release, there are a few big changes and surprises coming to PCR.”

Keep your eyes and ears, bookmarks and favourites locked to this label. Artists planned for releases in the near future include To The Boy Elis, [praw], Iconx6, and Yellow6. After such an encouraging start, with the owner’s focused, open minded attitude Pocket Change Records has the potential to develop into a postrock/ambient/beautiful sounds contender to rival current genre leviathans like Kranky and Constellation.

Links:

Pocket Change Records
www.myspace.com/pocketchangerecords
www.archive.org/details/pocket-change-records

Artists:
Conceptual Reality - www.myspace.com/conceptualrealityband
A Death Cinematic - www.myspace.com/adeathcinematic
Double Handsome Dragons - www.myspace.com/doublehandsomedragons
False Awakening - www.myspace.com/falseawake
Icon6 - www.myspace.com/iconx6
ihopeyousuffer - www.myspace.com/ihopeyousuffer
On Earth - www.myspace.com/chrissansonmusic
piers. - www.myspace.com/theweathercouncil
[praw] - www.myspace.com/prawmusic
Talbot Arms - www.myspace.com/wecryforwine
To The Boy Elis - www.myspace.com/totheboyelis
wreaths - www.myspace.com/wreathstaperecordings
Yellow6 - www.myspace.com/jonyellow6
ZH - www.myspace.com/zhus

Not For Resale Best Of Mix

2008-07-13T21:10:00.002Z

Not For Resale’s July mix has arrived and it’s a very special one for you indeed. We have reached number twelve in our series of free monthly downloads and to celebrate we present to you the very best of the bands and artists featured over the last year of our mixes.

Download: NFR Mix 12 (July 2008)...The Best Of...Part One

Download: NFR Mix 12 (July 2008)...The Best Of...Part Two

It wasn’t possible to fit all the incredible music we’ve heard on to one mix and be satisfied that we were really presenting the best of Not For Resale, so we have produced TWO for you with over 30 bands and artists spread across 140 minutes of unbridled demo and underground label mayhem including all these peoples…..

-A+M / Action Beat…The Noise Band From Bletchley / Awesome Wells / Bearhead / Bucks & Gallants / Candy Sniper / Comradedown / Cottonmouth Rocks / Curtis / Deliberate / Everyone To The Anderson / Fenech-Soler / The Flesh Happening / Foxes! / Hotel Wrecking City Traders / Kontakte / Kotki Dwa / Lonely Ghosts / The Middle Computer / Milk / The Miserable Rich / Monsters Build Mean Robots / Old Mayor / One Unique Signal / Plastic Passion / Power Up! / Pseudo Nippon / Quiznight / Revenge Of Shinobi / Sharing Sheaths / Turbowölf / Yuchi / Zettasaur….

Enjoy.

MxBx

Scalphunters From Space

2008-06-23T20:26:00.004Z

U.S. Christmas
Eat The Low Dogs
Neurot Recordings

I've had their self titled 12" for months and had it on heavy rotation. Heavy rotation is something these guys know a lot about. Blues based cosmic sludge, the coalescence of galactic effluence, psychedelic neon tails of burning dust lighting the night with their burning arcs and phosphorescent vapour. This album is something I've been waiting for. Coming from North Carolina, from a town in the Appalachians US Christmas (named after the Sam Pekinpah film), or USX for short, have a lot of space to star gaze, a lot of space to gaze into and a lot of space to make them feel small. Against that backdrop they play out like Crippled Black Phoenix, Neurosis and Hawkwind, the cosmic reference encapsulated in another band covering similar terrain – Comets On Fire. This is a kid of stoner rock, with none of the monged out drugginess. It’s clear headed shades of light and dark better able to cope with the paranoia creeping through the cracks, it’s enormity and scale companion to the environment it was created in.

In The Light Of All Time flickers into life like watching distant stars stuttering grasp on the firmament, slipping on and off it. This first track sounds like it was recorded by people half conscious in the best way possible. When the beat drops in on second track, The Scalphunters, little pinpoints of light accelerate into streaks, to scream past your periphery like hyperspeed just kicked in. Which it pretty much has. The effect is something to feel and it lasts for four minutes. The lyrics, barked out "BLACK AND COLD!" softened by echo and reverb, hardened by cold and exposure and darkness. Space rock. "WE ARE ONE AND ONE WITH GOD" See, not metal at all. Just disco beamed in from extremely fucking far away. “PRAY TO THE SKY!” – the coda. The rich, parched voice hoarse and unyielding in the face of the night. “PRAY TO THE SKY!” – drone soldiers in relentless skyward vigil.

It might be a touch cold, but other parts of the album come swaddled in earthy blues, a throbbing heartbeat of humanity, all the while dripping space dust and solar gas. The constant whirr, fluttering, phasing and twittering of theremin building the songs into a full on modern age psychedelic assault that draws from a healthy understanding of it’s history and tradition – which is to say that there are solos and striding passages of emotionally wrought supermassiveblackriffs – but they are sentiments that will get you because by the time those string bends tear the sound up, scarring the hulking body of the songs, they’ll have hooked into your head and heart and will be dragging it screaming into the abyss with them.

That’s Screaming good, not Screaming bad, and that’s good Abyss, not bad Abyss.

MxBx

2008-06-19T19:48:00.002Z

The McDonalds and a Gun Plan Fanzine Not For Resale Interview
(Also known as The Full Body Dunk and now The Fighting Drunk)

Conducted June 2007 - reposted for posterity

How did you get started promoting?

I write for the Brighton Source magazine, covering local band and label gigs, demos and releases which keeps me involved and in contact with a whole load of amazing music so we started Not For Resale in the upstairs bar of Fitzherberts in the middle of Brighton as a way for people to hear each other’s sounds and play the bands we find most interesting and exciting. We’ve put on acousticy stuff with a small PA and laptoppy things, though we did also have The Robot Ninja Dinosaur Bastards play up there once which was probably the loudest, heaviest thing to grace that pub ever - and it’ll probably never be topped either. I was asked by the manager of a club if we wanted to expand a bit and the prospect of being able to put on full band shows in a club environment was a done deal for us, it’s exactly what we were looking to do. That’s pretty much the story. Not much too it, you’ve just got to take the chances when you can.

How long has NFR been going?

NFR has been going almost two years now. We started the NFR Live! club nights in April this year, so they’re pretty new, though the two shows we’ve had so far have been absolute stormers. We’re just about to have My Device play their new aalbum in it’s entirety live, we’re putting on Marnie Stern for a one of international guest special with Skill 7 Stamina 12, Ashley the drummer from Charlottefield’s other band and Towering Breaker with their freak noise fizz and crackle supporting, we’re having The Flesh happening and Robot Ninja Dinosaur bastards together at the same gig which will totally flip people out, we’ve got a black/death metal band playing but I haven’t figured out what other bands should go with that yet. Got to keep it mixed like some freaky compilation, not enough people willing to take risks and we’re one dangerous liability waiting to collapse under it’s own ambition but we’ll keep it that way until we do.

What are the goals of NFR?

Our goals are manifold really. We want the Fitzherberts’ DJ nights to be a place for people to come and listen to a whole load of freaky music and hear what other bands around town are doing. We hope it serves as a place for bands to begin and collaborations to form out of hearing each others work, which it has to some extent because the whole ethos behind it is to celebrate creativity not just to stand around getting pissed (though there’s massive sofas too, so if you want to sit and get lost in deep conversation you can) We want bands to be noticed by audiences and go off and see them live and pester them for demos – just get the whole thing moving along and keeping everyone enthusiastic. It’s a place for people to hear stuff they’ve never heard before and, though we don’t really like to say it because it sounds pretentious and is kind of implicit in the aesthetic of the night, we play a lot of obscure and very limited releases that people probably won’t be able to hear anywhere else. We love it when bands we’ve been playing demos of start to get big and the ball rolls out of control, like with Klaxons and the Horrors. It’s not something we brag about, it’s just what we do. I don’t know, maybe we should shout about the fact that we’ve been playing this stuff and it’s got massive, but that’s not our style, there’s really no need for it. Words getting around at a welcome pace The NFR Live! night is there to showcase bands that we’ve been playing at our bar night, putting our money (though it’s all free) where our mouth is and giving people the chance to jump around, dance and sometimes cry. It’s been known to happen.

What should anyone coming to an NFR night expect?

They should expect to get their heads wrecked. We give people a damn good time and they come away exhilarated and enthused about the infinite possibilities the universe has to offer. We crack open minds with mysterious new sounds and people love it. The other week I played demos from Extinction and Bone Awl – two very different Black Metal bands, back to back, watched as half the crowd went nuts and a few faces went deathly pale, then the whole place flipped when we dropped Holy Fuck on them straight out of Bone Awl.. Everyone went ballistic, running all over the place like their minds had just blown out their eyes. See, it’s mixing it up, grabbing people’s attention with stuff that we really enjoy and our people enjoy it too – sometimes they may not think so for a while, but then the moment takes them. Causing physical and psychological reactions – just getting people into the mind set of experimenting; offering them stuff they can’t hear anywhere else. A sense of mischievous aural terrorism coupled with the desire to include everyone works for us and the people that come to our nights.

The MGP’s idea of a Promoter differs from many other people’s idea of one - what do you think a Promoters job should be?

A promoters’ job is NOT about rinsin’ kids and bands to make a tidy profit. I’ll come back to that later. Money? You’re in the wrong game man, but I hear that’s what a lot of people are after. Promoting should be all about creating environments for people to hear stunning new music, finding it and giving it to people, making the most hard to come by stuff accessible, challenging people and creating that buzz in their head where they’re running off pure excitement. Picking the right combinations of bands to play gigs, giving bands opportunities to play and audiences the chance to hear them. It should be about making beautiful artwork and atmospheres, setting up the future, broadening horizons and setting new standards. You think a promoters’ job is to put on a gig? That falls way short of what we expect and deliver at Not For Resale.

Just how hard is it to keep a good night going?

Haha. Ask me in a year if we’re still going. How do you rate success? Keeping a night going is all about pushing yourself to find new and exciting stuff, simple as that. You’ve got to get out there and watch bands, get demos off them, scour the internet, go see stuff, don’t sit on your arse, be active, get involved. It takes energy and commitment, but it’s not hard. It would be hard if you didn’t really want to do it and if you don’t really want to do it then you’re not going to deliver and surpass peoples’ expectations. Every week I have something new that’s really worth getting worked up about and I often wish the nights would come round quicker so I can play stuff to people. Enthusiasm is contagious; I can see it in peoples’ eyes when I’m cuing something up and they’re wondering what the hell it’s going to be. Challenge people, but don’t come over all pretentious, play stuff to people like you know it’s about to become their best friend for life – shit, it already is their best friend, it’s just waiting for them to hear it.

What question would you most like to be asked?

The red pill or the blue pill?

Who are you listening to at the moment?

Right now I’m listening to some demo riffs for my band The The The Repeat Peters – but that’s not what you meant is it? A lot of Heavy Winged, absolutely the most essential band of the moment for me and everyone who comes in to contact with their records. Bone Awl, Furze - loads of Black Metal always, you’ve got to keep going back to Burzum to understand how to make beautiful music caustic and keep the emotion there; BM is on a totally essential cutting edge right now, especially the noise-BM crossover like Wold, Genital Tomb and Extinction; loads of psychedelic and Krautrocky stuff from Europe, like Tivol, Dungen, Circle, total headshaking multicolour drone bliss – American stuff like Wooden Shjips, Grails, Goliath Bird Eater, freak pop like Of Montreal, Candy Bars, Battles, Parts & Labor, all that psychotic dance like Justice, Digitalism, Knifehandchop, Para One, Black Strobe, Dandi Wind, Grabba Grabba Tape, Gui Boratto,…All that Ed Banger, Kitsune, DFAWrong Music, Gigolo stuff…Anything that Aquarius Records in California tell you to get, GET. They know their stuff. Anything from labels like Jagjaguwar, Not Not Fun, Todestrieb, Sathanas Rex, Battlecruiser, Nuclear War Now!, Battle Kommand, Code 666, Southern Lord, Polyvinyl, Brille, Snakes & Ladders, Kemando, Bella Union. This is making my head spin. There’s so much stuff around.

Can you recommend any new bands to the MGP?

That’s what we do. I’ll give you a load from Brighton, then we’ll move further afield:
The Flesh Happening – absolutely essential, like the first days of the Stooges when everyone was too scared to understand it; Robot Ninja Dinosaur Bastard – puke-tronic metal D&B dino-core; Revenge Of Shinobi – melancholic guitar dance with vocal loops and added disorientation; Old Mayor – the most amazing two piece Doom band ever, amazing vocals delivered at such a crushingly weighted pace; Zettasaur –they’ve got angles and they’ve got droney riffs hypnotically smashed together; The Mekano Set, gothy electronic effects heavy mood music like New Order zombified; Enid Blitz – wonderful full on indie stuff that goes straight for the heartstrings; Coin-Op - are back and meaner,. Faster, harder than ever; Vile Imbeciles – death jazz they call it and you’d better agree; Catnap – rioutous guitar scree with BEATS!; The Miserable Rich – beautiful folky pop, really err..rich sounding and overwhelming; Ben Parker – one name, whole band, awesome surfy melodic summer tunes with cheeky lyrics; Bearhead – one man effects heavy guitar drone genius; Dreamer – sub-bass black metal riffing on epic scales.

Let’s move on.

From London - The Be Be See - channel baiting spite-pop; Shock Defeat! - Urgent urgent rage wrapped melodi-core; The Roaring Twenties – yeah, they roar and it’s a beautiful noise;

O.K. I’ll speed up the tour:

Turbowolf from Bristol are fucking immense, and we need a band to replace DFA 1979 and they’re IT!, plus Kotki Dwa’s weird out pop and Love Team’s electro rock, Hasting’s Data.Select.Party do a similar thing really well, The Middle Computer from Southampton – totally fucked up noise, heavy dance beats and guitars, blessed out instrumentals, funny lyrics, the real deal, Curtis from Liverpool – heavily overdriven gorgeousness; Bucks & Gallants from Virginia, USA – like Oneida but more direct, totally pumping; Bay Of Creatures from Canada, real murky psychedelic freaky stuff……..

Come back to me if you need more, I live for this stuff.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?

In 5 years time? We’ll have a record label that’s putting out all the stuff we love and runs of records will be selling out faster than we can print them. We’ll be putting on free gigs in massive venues with bands no one’s heard of to ecstatic audiences with their minds wide open in rapture. And they will be dancing. Industry people will be battering down our door demanding to know how we do it and we’ll tell them to ‘Fuck off’ because this is for the people, not for their pockets Other nights will be springing up all over the country playing demos from their town, invigorating every fucking scene everywhere, the nations mindset will shift from consumerism to activism, middle men like profit making shops that give shit all back will be cut out because people will realise they can go straight to the label or the bands themselves and the NME and Radio 1 and all that crap will become redundant when people realise they don’t need a seal of approval stamped on what they can listen to, people will absolutely not accept paying £140 for a ticket to a festival and the corporate bands that demand those fees will be buried under the DIY aesthetic and vigorous love for music in and of itself. The climate is right but the mass audience need to realise it’s there for the taking, we just need to tear down that veil that’s confusing them into not being able to take the initiative themselves. Every indie band member will have to work in a call centre, at least part time to talk to the man on the street and find out whether he really is a cunt or not. Not For Resale will be the catalyst to all that.

2008-06-19T19:40:00.002Z

These New Puritans
Beat Pyramid
Domino Records

“Number One is the individual / Number 2 duality / Number 3 numerology is all shit / Number 4 is a number that will run through this music.” This is how the lyrical element to Beat Pyramid begins. References to numerics, mnemonics, infinity, history, synchronicity, repetition, patterns and mathematics form brief crystals of cryptic significance that shatter, multiplying tenfold. The music starts with the second half of a track concluding with the beginning at the end of the album. Not chaos, not even random. Elegant form designed to loop, repeat, and loop and repeat. Beat Pyramid is an edict full of harsh spidery guitars crawling all over its surface, rubbery reflexive beats thumping along its’ length, and across it all a skeletal vertebrae of sharp snares and hi-hats jutting through the mix, creating continually unfolding fractal patterns from the repetitious themes uncoiling out of the speakers. Some smoother tracks stay closer to the ground like the ominously paced Numerology with its softly shimmering guitars slipping out between spaces vacated in the wake of drums, or Doppelganger’s duel disorienting effect of low hum and swirling synth kaleidoscope – these tracks contrast with the more dynamic dance-floor oriented propulsive riot engines; the Eastern slashing Swords of Truth and teeth-rattlingly kinetic Elvis. Peaks in linearity within an album, peaks within linearity in song. Contract, relax, tense and release. Energies dissipated, pooled and unleashed. This is how Beat Pyramid continues long after the sound has left the stereo

Hotel Wrecking City Traders - Black Yolk

2008-06-16T07:28:00.003Z

Hotel Wrecking City Traders
Black Yolk
Bro Fidelity

Two piece bands seem to be making up a large percentage of my listening time at the moment. Bands like (in no particular order) Blood Red Shoes, MGMT, Fuck Buttons, Old Mayor, Cobalt, Sharing Sheaths, -A+M, Crystal Castles, Pocahaunted, The Death Set, Noze, Bone Awl, This Mono Galaxy, Ting Tings, Goliath Bird Eater, Worriedaboutsatan… yeah, there’s a lot of two pieces about at the moment. The appeal for the musician is an easy one to understand and the appeal for the listener is, I suspect, the audible result of that same attraction: spontaneity and intimacy. To make this relationship somewhat more prescient, the Hotel Wrecking City Traders (an awesome name once you get your head around it) are brothers.

The Melbourne based duo of Toby (guitars) and Ben (drums) Matthews follow up last year’s self titled EP with their debut full length album Black Yolk. It is an album that occupies some kind of middle ground between rock, post-rock and metal, with six completely instrumental tracks building upon their previous recordings momentously, demonstrating an evolved interplay between both musical styles and brothers that has produced an album of not only sheer volume and seismic riffs, but of shapes, textures, space, and density.

The six tracks are split into three short, two long and finish with a final short burst. It sounds great. Two longer songs sit next to each other and really give the pair room to work with the textural elements of their sound, allowing themselves the time to develop and expand on the echoic ambience that haunts the shorter songs. The four short songs are your instant fixes, although they still pack in a lot of twists and turns. The opener, ‘Cup Weekend Murders’ is both the shortest and simple; a direct, straight-at-the-throat statement of intent. Of the kind that should be opening albums. ‘The Lakeshore Stranglers’ is five minutes of joyously intimidating riffs; of surging rhythm patterns set up on top of a sawing backdrop of distortion, with drums that switch between psychedelic dexterity and cantering locked-groove. Heavy and agile – and if HWCT’s sound could be distilled into a soundbite, that might be it. The longest track at 12 minutes, ‘Eavesdropper’ picks it’s way up slowly, menacingly, atmospherically, then bursts into a galloping, perfectly weighted riff section that disintegrates under it’s own momentum before grinding down into a stretched out string bending finish. The album finish comes in ‘Pagoda’, another sublimely loose-limbed rocker of ecstatic intensity.

So many shadowy images of it’s influences and peers appear that the album never sounds as if it was ever dependant on them. Across the album the ghosts of Torche, Karma To Burn, Mogwai, Capricorns, Goliath Bird Eater, Circle, and of course, Zeppelin and Sabbath, rise from the tracks like hypnotic, post-metal leviathans with these two grand mages in the centre conducting and realigning.

What really sets this album apart from so many of the rock-out acts around is the subtlety with which each song section slides onto the next, the natural flow of the songs that delivers moment after moment without you quite realising it is upon you until you are in the middle of it, yet feels wholly spontaneous and, yes intimate. All consuming, then.

MxBx

www.myspace.com/hotelwreckingcitytraders

Zero Tolerance Reviews The Introvert Perversion

2008-06-14T09:07:00.002Z

This month's Zero Tolerance mag reviewed my album. They wrote this:

Meatbreak
The Introvert Perversion

This one-man project from Birmingham provides an off-kilter mix of genres, drawing largely from the rock and metal arena, with elements of industrial and electronica creeping in. The Introvert Perversion comprises eight repetitive tracks, constructed from loops and recurring motifs, gradually changing as the song progresses. The demo production doesn't allow the nuances of this experimental approach to shine through. While it's an interesting effort, improved focus and execution are needed to take Meatbreak's concept further.

3/6.
Russell Garwood

You can download it for free and hear for yourself: http://www.sendspace.com/file/6m4j7m

At the risk of getting a bit too Bradford Cox and deconstructing this, that was pretty much the reason for me sending it in for reviewing. I just wanted to see what would happen, and what it feels like to send in an album and press release and read what comes back. I'm ignoring the Birmingham, but since a big part of this is lifted from the biog I sent in with the album they could have lifted the right town too. I take issue with 'off-kilter' too - eurgh. A horrid, lazy phrase that I always interpret as meaning 'I don't understand' or, maybe more generously 'ah, I don't have enough time before deadline, or space in the review to fully explain what this actually sounds like - luckily I have this conveniently reknowned aphorism to fall back on'.

But really none of that needs to be said. We all know 99% of writers are dead lazy, huh?

Just another day in the office?

2008-06-13T19:15:00.004Z

I had another enjoyably solitary day in the office today. With everyone else being out at conferences and meetings it meant it was just me and the I-Pod and whichever psychologist just happened to email me about journal stuff. A very quiet day on the actual work front gave me all day to piss about on myspace, get some writing done and errr...resign from being new bands editor for Source Magazine. Yeah, maybe more on that later.

For now though, my soundtrack to all of that, beginning with my nice sunny walk to work went thusly: >>>

I Haunt Wizards – Along Came Polly / But Com'On I'm Useless / FF / Wolfis Vs. Witchuz / Frost Mountain / Gnomz / Incentive To Miscarriage
Turbowolf – Do Me Wrong / Mystery / Playland / Bite Me Like A Dog / Power
Heavy Winged – Alive In My Mouth
Hotel Wrecking City Traders – Black Yolk
The KLF – Last Train To Trancentral
Of Montreal – Beginning To See The Light
One Unique Signal – Venus In Furs
Iron Pirate – Iron Pirate
Goliath Bird Eater – Pentagon Black
Adam Lygo – The Changing
The Cool Kids – Bake Sale
The Fleet Foxes – The Fleet Foxes (This was crap, don't believe the hype, if it builds to anything)
I Haunt Wizards – NYMPTHS / Otaku World Print / Sailor Moon / That's A Nice Dress / Vampire AIDS
Plastic Passion – We Have Come So Far / It's Been Done / Look Around / Everything Changes / Homage / File Under
White Fang – The Sea / Choad / Acid Reaper
Hotel Wrecking City Traders – Black Yolk (Yes, Again, It Is That Amazing - it's what's on now - Can anyone write anything more earthshakingly rockin' than The Lakeshore Stranglers?!)

So that's my day. Good day.

MxBx

Not For Resale Mix 11 - June Download

2008-06-09T21:24:00.000Z

The next Not For Resale mix has arrived! It's been away a little too long but this is one set that's going to wipe away all the bad memories you ever had and make up for the two months we left you adrift. We are sorry, and this our apology.

Download it here: www.sendspace.com/file/6i0qj6

I always say "This is the best one yet", but there's LOADS of reasons why this is THE BEST ONE YET!!!

What’s in it this month? It opens with our new theme tune from Deliberate, our good friends in the North, then we work our way all over the country taking in the heady electro ambience of Nottingham’s Rookiecop, London’s most essential art-punk crew Plastic Passion, the art-doom-(in-joke?) of Gravanzia and the helter-skelter office-job-baiting beats of The Humanity. Across aways we go to Colchester for hardcore’s answer to the Arctic Monkey’s – Seas – at 16/17 years old, this band already have a hell of a lot nailed down hard – so hard it’s barely believable that they can pull these songs off (and we sure as hell heard that about Alex Turner too). Brighton gets its reps from Stars Down To Earth, Last Days of Lorca and Power Up – all three bands are playing our Live shows in the coming months and we stand by every twitch their muscles make – all three, intensity personified in their own very special ways. There’s the neon diskko of Drownsoda from Limoges, France, the neon nightmare of Toxic Lipstick from Osaka, Japan and the unsubtle wrath of Brisbane Oz’s one man BM band Black Anal Goat Vomit. This whole thing culminates in three of the most exciting acts around at the moment – Turbowolf, Fenech-Soler and Lonely Ghosts. As dream line-ups go, that’s a set of bands we’d love to see sharing a stage together. Wembley and Madison Square gardens, preferably

There’s much more than that too, all these peoples in fact:

Atlanticists / Black Anal Goat Vomit / Cables / Deliberate / Drownsoda / Fenech-Soler / Gravanzia / The Humanity / Jesus Knives / Last Days Of Lorca / Lonely Ghosts / Plastic Passion / Power Up / Rookiecop / Sam Amant / Seas / The Stars Down To Earth / Toxic Lipstick / Turbowölf

Enough from me then, get clicking.

Meatbreak

Seaside factory traders

2008-05-26T20:07:00.004Z

Pope Joan
Hot Water, Lines And Rickety Machines
One Inch Badge Records

I’ve been listening to this album for months and my relationship with it is as restless and the music. At first it seemed like an awkward listen, like none of the parts were sitting properly, or where I expected them to. It was easy to take a breather from it and rethink my approach – all I had to do was to remember the Vile Imbeciles and how threateningly wrong that sounded on the first few spins. It’s a rare thing to find an album like this, in an age where we supposedly reject anything that isn’t immediately gratifying – at least, that’s what the culture pages of the papers would have us think (I have a whole response to that on the way; so much of the I-Gen discourse is completely irrelevant to me, yet I’m told it is how I behave? No, I reply is coming). There is something –a whole lot in fact – in Hot Water…that keeps calling me back to it, despite my initial reservations.

Pope Joan deal in that 80s throbbing factory trade of jerky rhythms and propulsive, syncopated beats whilst scrawling jittery lines of heavily effected guitar over the top. Two tracks stand out from this overarching form; both ‘Boxes’ and ‘The Same As When You Asked Me The Last Time’ add soaringly melodic harmonies, like gentle peaks over clouds, into the jagged riffing, but where the leap in ‘Boxes’ is jammed in abruptly, the lift in ‘The Same…’ swells up and runs out in a smoother, more naturally assured fashion. It has the time to though; it’s near five minute length making it over twice that of the surrounding tunes. Most of the songs come in around two minutes, with the final ‘Pocket Change’ dissolving into a long four minute industrial ambient stew. One of the key’s to me unlocking this record was realizing how compact the songs were, and how many ideas were crammed into them – these songs could easily be slowed down to reveal a whole new world of shades and shadows that aren’t readily apparent. Some of Tom’s guitar work is similar to Nick Zinner’s, especially in the slanted shimmer of ‘An Alternate Route to the End’, which has a very Yeah Yeah Yeah’s ballad aura about it. ‘Pocket Change’ too, has a slithery, zippy line like fluorescent fish darting through the gaps of the rhythm section and if it was stuck out front on it’s own it’s the kind of riff that audiences could be singing back at the stage – "ZEOW! ZEOW!!"

This is not background music in the slightest, it is too demanding on the attention for that. No bad thing. I am appreciating an album that has me work for my rewards.

Links:

www.myspace.com/popejoan
www.myspace.com/oibrecords

A ghost in a blizzard

2008-05-26T20:00:00.004Z

Lonely Ghosts
Don’t Get Lost Or Hurt EP
One Inch Badge Records

Tom Denney’s solo project should shortly be finding itself eclipsing the reputation of his parent-band Help She Can’t Swim. Live, with core OIB label-mates on guitar duties, Denney cuts an imposing figure of potent talent, a whirlwind of energy, his onstage manic blur seemingly teetering on the edge of extreme mental and physical exhaustion from the first song. This EP peaks into the same wild eyed hysteria of the live performances, sweat visibly dripping out of scrunched up eyes and snarling mouth, the lively bounce and off-the-wall kinesis convincingly translated onto CD.

Serving as a sweet teaser for the full album due out in August with a few songs previewing the full length, the rest of the eight tracks here are unique to this record. It’s not too much of a stretch to say they are unique full stop. After hearing he was going solo, this is what I’d expected Dev’s Lightspeed Champion to be turning out after Test Icicles imploded. But don’t let that give you the wrong impression. Lonely Ghosts is definitely not Emo like he has a black fringe and dodgy record collection. Certainly, these songs are wrenched out of Tom like his life depended on it, filling a space very much in the realm of the emotional, but closer to the space and pressure of My Bloody Valentine than the specious pressures of My Chemical Romance. The tracks of this EP are neatly built on increasingly intense layers of guitars alternating between poignant torch and blazing dancefloor, backed by a drum machine which evocatively disappears for the melancholic, but for the most part is a blistering pulse, or constantly threatening it. There is nothing overwrought here, just a direct and fully fuelled individual allowing himself to be overcome by a lot of shit. Fortunately for us, his shit is our milk.

Lyrically, Tom casts a bleak eye over the desperation inherent in attaining and maintaining modern beauty in ‘So Young So Beautiful’, weighs up the preferable affects between crippling un-quenched lust and shallowly sated desire in ‘Happy Lovers – Friends Forever’ (I think…it’s either that, or the idea that certain people could be better platonic friends once they’ve had sex, just because it’s something friends can (and should?) do sometimes). Those two are the tunes with the most monster club-centric beats, rhythms cased in dynamic walls of chewy guitars that rip up the speakers with a churning momentum. Songs like 'Plough Through', 'It’s Time To Wake Up' and 'Maybe You Can Save Me' build up into near-tear-jerkers of intensity but start of quietly, delicately, like they are exploring your emotional depths before deciding how far to push you. Me? I’m no easy push-over, but this floored me.

Links:

www.myspace.com/lonelyghosts
www.myspace.com/oibrecords

One Inch Badge Records Label Profile

2008-05-26T19:52:00.004Z

Brighton based record label and gig promotions collective One Inch Badge (OIB Records) put out their first release at the end of 2006, after a slow and steady build up this year they are about to come further out from the underground with a string of new signings and key releases scheduled for the next six months. Speaking to OIB mainman Alex Murray we discussed the story behind the label’s inception and where this group of intensely committed individuals plan on taking their passionate DIY label next.

“OIB came about incredibly organically” begins Alex. “Jim Morrison (of The Tumbledown Estate, not that one) and I met about eight years ago and instantly bonded over a mutual love of the Soft Bulletin by the Flaming Lips. We spent the next six years studying and daydreaming about starting a label. Experience wise we all came from incredibly defined areas. I'd spent nearly three years at Sony Music and two years at Southern Records so I'd got a pretty good understanding of the workings of both sectors of the music industry. Jim interned at Tru Thoughts (Successful jazz-funk-house label) and had a graphic design degree so between our business knowledge and Jim's design capabilities we were well on our way to having most bases covered. Jim and I had been friends with Tom Denney (Lonely Ghosts) for years but due to his commitments with Help She Can't Swim he didn't join us straight away. However with all the live music experience and contacts he'd gathered over the years he's proved invaluable to the label.”

Daydreaming finally became a reality in late 2006 when Alex’s friends My Device asked if they'd like to release a vinyl version of the 'Eat Lead' single they were doing for Shifty Disco. You might remember My Device winning the NME unsigned bands competition in that year – but don’t let that trick you into thinking they’re some back-pedaling schmindie outfit – they smash Melvins psychotic lunacy into a twisted party-metal power base and front it with psychedelic lyrics. Not your usual then. Starting a label is always a daunting experience, as Alex says “We had no wide scale distribution, no press team, no backing, and no hands on experience of getting a record physically made, however we did know we wanted to make the record as lavishly packaged on our budget as we possibly could. We ended up pressing the 7” on transparent purple vinyl which was white labeled on the b-side of the record and the band painstakingly stayed up all night and hand-drew a completely different image on every copy.”

Next up was the Mewgatz 'Underfelt' EP. Mewgatz is an intriguingly talented electronica artist who bases his music around scrambling the brains of old 80's keyboards and toys that he finds at carboot sales. “In true OIB fashion we decided to throw more money down the drain and press the record solely on 10” vinyl, the most expensive and equally unmarketable format around” says Alex in resolutely defiant, yet realistic terms.

The label’s next move was to begin their series of split 7”s; five records showcasing four bands per release. The first features Gay Against You (confrontational spazz-core two-piece, like Crystal Castles with a sense of humour), Munch Munch (Bristol-based polyrhythmic quantum-pop), Lonely Ghosts (palpitating electro body-shocking glam-pop) and The Tumbledown Estate (one-man avant-pop explosion). In pure fanatical record-collector style, each record came with double-side printed reversible sleeves, lyric sheet and badges of each of the bands involved. Every 7” in the series will be limited to 500 copies and is due to culminate in 2009 with an incredibly extravagant vinyl boxset and CD compilation. Alex is enthusiastic about the response to the series and the upcoming bands scheduled for the next volumes; “We've already lined up recordings by Lovvers (a punk band from the Midlands featuring members of infamous screamo post-metallers The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg), SJ Esau (intricate loopstation oddball signed to Anticon), Knyfe Hyts (the new pure rock band from Ex Models), Best Fwends (manic electro punk outfit from Texas), Half-Handed Cloud (a beautifully quirky singer-songwriter from California who was part of Danielson's band and Sufjan Steven's Illinoise band), and Casiotone for the Painfully Alone (intricate emotronica artist from Chicago).”

The label’s current and almost sold out release is the Casiotone for the Painfully Alone EP titled Town Topic. A haunting, folktronic soundtrack to the first feature-length film by cult New York/Los Angeles artist Laurel Nakadate that recalls Air’s accompaniment to the Virgin Suicides. Coming up in June is an astonishing eight track mini-album of new banging electronica from Lonely Ghosts with a full album due in August, then later in the year the full-length release from Mewgatz, a mysteriously titled “OIB Records house-bag series” and finally (for now) June will see the debut release from Brighton band Pope Joan - a politically aware Fugazi influenced post-punk avant-rock four-piece.

This collection of wide ranging sounds from both sides of the Atlantic illustrates how respected their output so far has been, the diversity of music this label is willing to front and stand by, and as the defining line that relates all these bands, how entrenched in the DIY ethos One Inch Badge are. Undoubtedly the most invigoratingly experimental label in Brighton, it should not be too long before OIB become a recognizable name underscoring some of your favourite releases of the near future.

Links:

One Inch Badge Records: www.myspace.com/oibrecords
Best Fwends: www.myspace.com/bestfwends
Casiotone for the Painfully Alone: www.myspace.com/cftpa
Gay Against You: www.myspace.com/gayagainstyou
Half-Handed Cloud: www.myspace.com/handycloud
Knyfe Hyts: www.myspace.com/knyfehyts
Lonely Ghosts: www.myspace.com/lonelyghosts
Lovvers: www.myspace.com/letscommunicate
Mewgatz: www.myspace.com/mewgatz
Munch Munch: www.myspace.com/munchmunchband
My Device: www.myspace.com/mydevice
Pope Joan: www.myspace.com/popejoan
SJ Esau: www.myspace.com/sjesau
The Tumbledown Estate: www.myspace.com/thetumbledownestate

March NFR Download

2008-04-03T08:29:00.000Z

March’s Not For Resale Download is up and ready for you to collect. 20 tracks of the best demos and new releases from the last month’s NFR nights:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/l61t66

It’s the tenth mix in the series, and this one is a bit of a slow builder, sliding out of a noisy intro, through some baroque ambience and up into stuttering electro mayhem. After that, it’s all freefalling through distorto-guitars aplenty with some wry pop genius wielded maniacally for good effect.

All of that, brought to you by these intimidatingly good bands and artists:

Cera / Fenech-Soler / Fix Bayonets / I Am Blip / Illness / Invisible / Bela Emerson / Kontakte / Kumiss / MC Fashion / Medicine And Duty / One Unique Signal / Revenge Of Shinobi / Rinoa / Stars And Sons / The Great Park / The Resistance / This Mono Galaxy / Witch Hats / Wrath Of The Weak

Enjoy.

Yours,

Meatbreak

NFR January Download

2008-01-25T09:41:00.000Z

This is what we’ve been scouting round and found this month to bring to you in the full glory of Not For Resale’s January mix.

Download here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/cge8z4

To hear:

Fenech-Soler – The Fight (Demo)
Cobra Dukes – Life Of The Party (Airtight Single, Prestel)
Dirty Fingernails – Bruno (Demo)
XBX – 1,2,3,4 (Demo)
Tayside Mental Health – Diary Of A Donkey Fucker (Evil Hands Are Happy Hands, Contaminated Recordings)
Charlottefield – Pacifically (What Are Friends For, FatCat)
Reverence For Benjamin – Grey Sky Winter (Demo)
Cottonmouth Rocks – Cellar Door (Demo)
Comradedown – Alone (What Is For Me Won’t Go By Me EP, Self-Released)
Kill Krinkle Club – Ballrooms Waiting For Us (The Bloody Murder of Krinkle, Self-Released)
Deep Hole – Touch The Earth (Demo)
Sky:Lark – These Kids Have Weapons (Demo)
Epideme – Ex-Crown (Demo)
Sloath – Black Hole (Demo)
Kontakte – Ghosts Of Electricity (Demo)
Lonely Ghosts – Happy Lovers – Friends Forever (Demo)
Plastic Passion – Look Around (Demo)
Mr Jack Cooper – Don’t Give Up The Day Job (Live at Engine Room, Brighton)
Action Beat – Justice Yeldman (Demo)

NFR December Download

2007-12-28T16:20:00.001Z

>>> DOWNLOAD HERE <<<

21 tracks, 72 minutes of demo mayhem it contains all these tunes by all these terribly fine soon to be popular beat combos:

Failure Mode – Twin Box Failure (Demo)
Working For A Nuclear Free City– Troubled Son (Working For A Nuclear Free City, Melodic)
Everyone To The Anderson – When Beasts Attack! (Doodlebug Ep, Toy Soldier Records)
Diagonal– Cannon Misfire (Demo)
Koala Part– You're Right There (Demo)
Voice Of The Seven Woods– The Fire In My Head (Voice Of The Seven Woods, Twisted Nerve)
Zettasaur– Grip Of A Caveman (Split 7", Signature Tune)
The Flesh Happening– Bleed (Single, Tamworth Records)
Hotel Wrecking City Traders – The Porch (Demo)
Blood Red Shoes– It's Getting Boring By The Sea (Blamma Blamma Remix) (Single, V2)
Transformer– Cinema Car (Long Version) (Demo)
Lonely Ghosts – Predictions (Split 7", One Inch Badge Records)
The Middle Computer– Fiction (Ultra Console Mayhem, Non-Applicable Records)
Pseudo Nippon - Fishlady (Demo)
The Hornblower Brothers – Android With A Heart (Demo)
The Melody, The Melodica And Me – Track One (Demo)
-A+M– End Up Like Superman (Dials, Lancashire & Somerset Song And Dance Society)
Woog Riots – Martial Arts (Demo)
Deliberate- XEXTXIX (Demo)
Wrath Of The Weak – Journey Of Many Days (Wrath Of The Weak, Bastardised)
Autumn Chorus - Remember The Dead (Demo)

Enjoy.

MxBx

Top 50 Albums Of 2007

2007-12-22T09:51:00.001Z

To say it's been one hell of a year is as understatement. What did I do? Got married, went on honeymoon, started NFR LIVE!, smashed up the BBC airwaves and won that competition, met, spoke to, shook hands with loads of incredible people who shall be named at a later date and listened to a huge amount of amazing music that shall be named now: >>>

50. Wooden Shjips – Wooden Shjips
Holy Mountain
Five tracks of throbbing kaleidoscopic weed-smoke drone that instantly find their groove in 'We Ask You To Ride', introducing an album that sits in the foggy headspace of 60's West-coast psych-rock, rolling around in the sun-baked blues trance for just over half an hour.

49. LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver
DFA
In Sound of Silver James Murphy produced the perfect foil for his debut, incorporating all the heroes he baited his listeners for holding up on 'Losin' My Edge'. There's a lot of Bowie, Prince and Kraftwerk, there's a lot of funk, electro, post-punk and there's 'All My Friends', 'Us Vs. Them' and 'Watch The Tapes'.

48. Phosphorescent– Pride
Dead Oceans
No Bonnie Billy this year? Not to worry, Phosphorescent man Matthew Houck picks up that battered country bleakness baton and, well, not so much runs off with it, but slouches onto the porch and sits picking out mournful sunset ballads to beckon the encroaching darkness.

47. Jonquil– Sunny Casinos
Try Harder
Oxford's Jonquil create a feral, fractured folk that's a bit mangy round the edges, scruffy like it's slept in the gutter for months. Barely-there vocals are set back into the mix, surrounded and supplanted by the rushing sounds of pianos, guitars, drums and percussive paraphernalia that add to the bare bones of some already wonderful tunes.

46. Mammatus– The Coast Explodes
Holy Mountain
After being underwhelmed with their previous self-titled album, this huge slab of heavy drone burst into my brain with the opening track 'Dragon Of The Deep Part Three (Excellent Swordfight)'. A totally storming monolithic album imbued with the perpetual brewing menace of black thunderheads on the horizon.

45. Dungen– Tio Bitar
Kemando
In a rougher, wilder, more atmospheric and eloquent record than its' predecessors Gustav Ejstes' fourth album at the helm of Dungen is a huge progression into his obsession with drawing out the psychedelic and harmonious elements of late 60's/early 70's errr…progressive rock.

44. Tomahawk– Anonymous
Ipecac
No more proggy metal for Tomahawk it seems, as Mike Patton looked to native American rhythms for Anonymous. In tracks like 'Ghost Dance' and 'Mescal Rites I', Patton, ex-Jesus Lizard Duane Denison and ex-Helmet drummer John Stainer interpret an entire culture of sound and add a modern surface of synths and riffs without undermining the natural feel of the source.

43. Bergraven– Dodsvisioner
Hydra Head
In a year where Xasthur was conspicuous by his absence of especially great records, Sweden's Bergraven stepped in with a second album to fill the claustrophobic labyrinthian breach. What Pär Gustafsson adds to the complex tapestry is taken from the forefather of Scandinavian darkness – Quorthorn – and welded to stomping, shrieking post-black metal shoegaze, prog-forest twists down shadowed paths and out into the slightly less well known.

42. Patrick Wolf– The Magic Position
Loog
Ex-Minty member Patrick Wolf brings a bit of the circus back with his third album. Wind In The Wires and Lycanthropy were acoustic folk inflected minor chord lamentations but this is him in full drag, upping the key and the drama, waltzing around in full technicolour glory.

41. Monotract– Trueno Oscuro
Load
A pestilent surge of debased feral rock and roll. Its noise clad to a striking form hammered out violently on drums and screwed up electronics, guitars dragging Neanderthal knuckles across the charred surface, weirdly effected vocals piercing through the miasma. But yeah, this is rock and roll for sure.

40. Blood Of The Black Owl- Blood Of The Black Owl
Glassthroat Recordings / Bindrune
Any album that has three minutes of distant wolves howling in the wind deserves attention. Or maybe it's the 74 minutes of relentless doom laden pitch black riffs surrounding it that can't be ignored. One of the two, or even both. Yup.

39. Bill Callahan – Woke On A Whaleheart
Drag City
Until I saw Bill Callahan play at Green Man this year I'd never heard much Smog, despite friends best efforts. I don't know why I'd never really got into it before, because his performance was one that really tripped something in me and when he played 'Diamond Dancer' it instantly became one of my favourite songs of the year. 6 months of constant listening hasn't dimmed the magic.

38. Gui Boratto– Chromophobia
Kompakt
Brazilian producer makes psychedelic minimalist blog-house record of the year. Not that I'm totally sure what 'blog-house' is but it's a phrase that turned up all over the err..blogosphere this year. For an album with such a metronomic beat, this never gets dull, considering the label, due to the subtly produced constantly shifting scenery flowing past the gently pulsing engine.

37. Modeselektor– Happy Birthday
Bpitch
Ram-raiding through dance genres like nobodies business, and featuring the most impressive/disgusting belch on record, Modeselektor release a unique vision cast from acid-dub, trance, hip-hop, IDM, electro and well, whatever else you can pick out of it yourself really. Having worked together for 15 years, Gernot Bronsert and Sebastian Szary pretty much know each other as intimately as any partnership and the results are fortunately, as much fun to listen to as they must have been to make.

36. High On Fire– Death Is This Communion
Relapse
A band ostensibly formed as a platform for Matt Pike to volley forth riff after riff, High On Fire have suddenly become the consummate synthesis of the entire library of every discerning Metal fan. A blackened wasteland stalked by ferocious blood-thirsty beasts, of drawn swords and clashing steel, of chest-pounding aggrandisement and cosmic valour. Death, Black, Thrash, Power, Speed – this album has it all.

35. Earth– Hibernaculum
Southern Lord
Hex tried to twist the old Earth into an Americana like template of Western desert ragas but this is the full realization of that project. This reputedly began as a piano based album, with string embellishments gradually phasing out the key parts, but the timbres and tones of the guitars would have you think this could never have been cast from anything else. Gentle piano and two basses add to the long droning resonances plucked out from Dylan Carson's guitars while unobtrusive drums urge the pace along but never hurry it. Really something to get lost in the backwoods of your mind to.

34. Mammal– Lonesome Drifter
Animal Disguise
A record that is by turns ambient to the point of non-existence and cruelly harsh, Gary Beauvais seems to have created the sound of someone realizing that there is more to noise music than simply battering as hard as possible and twisting all the dials up to the max. It is nuanced, stark, spacious and breathes precious life into a genre littered with rotting carcasses and the stench of stale death.

33. Tivol– Interstellar Overbike
Last Visible Dog
Pedal to the metal leather-clad, diesel stinkin' Finnish freak-noise blasted out over two huge space-jams of cosmic disorder and intergalactic chaos courting. This record doesn't really let up in density at all, the only times the guitars part is to allow the synths to come strafing into the void with their lazer guided melodies.

32. Deepchord Presents Echospace – The Coldest Season
Modern Love
I'm still not sold on Burial. What I hear when I listen to Untrue is nowhere near as convincingly formed as this record. Detroit based ambient-dub producer Rod Modell teamed up with Soultek's Steve Hitchell to create an analogue snowstorm of silent ambient static. The Coldest Season is made more of sensations than music, the first sign of a beat taking over four minutes to appear in opener 'First Point Of Aries' and over the course of the album their shadowy presence never builds into much more than fleeting glimpses through the blizzard.

31. Lietterschpich– I Cum Blood In The Think Tank
Heart & Crossbone
Rock and roll based noise has never been the same since Wolf Eyes tore it up so hard with Burned Mind a couple of years ago, but Lietterschpich have added an extra sort of turmoil to the mix – an element of humanity and vulnerability. Not the kind of things Wolf Eyes would ever allow to creep in.

30. Voice Of The Seven Woods - Voice Of The Seven Woods
Twisted Nerve
The debut album of the Manchester based Rick Tomlinson, is an electrically revved psychedelic mind-melter of a folk album. Coming off the back of several self-released 7"s and CDRs, it's a freakish hybrid of fuzz-tone guitars, acid acoustics, blown-out psych-rock and kraut rhythms that keeps burrowing its way further into my brain with each listen.

29. JohnnyTwentyThree- JXXIII
Self-Released
The only band JohnnyTwentythree really remind me of is Brighton's Revenge Of Shinobi, much moreso than Explosions In the Sky and those of the gentler end of the post-rock spectrum – the lightness and space, the shimmering gossamer tremolo, the peaks that dance on tiptoes, the intensity - though that's not to say this doesn't get dense. It does. Very. An hugely involving listen that can take ten minutes to build up into a throbbing crescendo, and on 'Ghost Soldiers' is holds that peak for another ten, raining sheer euphoria into the room over every second.

28. Caina– Mourner
Profound Lore
The work of the lone underground Sussex-based black metal visionary Andrew Curtis-Brignell, Mourner is a record of complex woven moods and sounds, taking black atmospherics into genuinely uncharted territories. All the hallmarks of raw turmoil are there in abundance, but few albums create such involving spaces to find yourself immersed in. Not surprisingly, the next album won't be out for another year – creating Mourner must have been an exhausting expenditure of energy and emotion.

27. Heavy Winged – On The Marble Cliffs
Trensmat
This is the first appearance of Heavy Winged in my list and this release is the most unfettered, noisy and downright unyielding of them all. Reasonably short by Winged standards, first track 'Concrete Glass' concludes after a bewildering six minutes of atonal scree and polymorphous feedback screeching. Very Japanese, but not in the least bit derivative, this trio do not normally go in for such furiously blown out indecipherable walls of noise but this is as in keeping with their greater vision as the beat driven shapes of the other two albums still to come.

26. Om– Pilgrimage
Southern Lord
This is not an album of music created through conscious thought and rehearsal, it is cosmic reverberation ciphered through human hands, already existing outside of the mortal sphere, the flesh a mere conduit for the galactic energies pooling themselves in the records grooves. Meditative and transcendental, Chris Hakius and Al Cisneros have locked into another set of super-massive riffs, and though it may not feature my favourite Om track (which would be 'Rays Of The Sun - To The Shrinebuilder' from the Current 93 split 10" Inerrant Rays Of Infallible Sun. Though Unitive Knowledge Of The Godhead comes a pretty close second) it does contain the most variety and depth of any of their releases so far.

25. Alcest– Souvenirs D'Un Autre Monde
Profound Lore
Alcest is the solo incarnation of Avignon based black metaller Neige - the guiding member of caustic outfit Peste Noir and the much lighter Amesoeurs. One of the most controversial releases this year, Souvenirs D'un Autre Monde (Memories Of Another World) has received both rapturous and spiteful receptions from all corners of the metal world. It is principally a shoegaze album with heavy reference to bands like Ride and Slowdive – all clean vocals heavy with reverb and chorus, big cloudburst guitars, a wash of blissed out drone. No metal at all, except for the occasional, surprisingly deployed blast-beat that ripples underneath the hazy melodies.

24. Heavy Winged – We Grow
Not Not Fun
Probably the most beautiful looking record released all year, the deep heavy marbled blues of the vinyl resonated through into the music itself. A murky oceanic turbulence, the groaning of ships hulls, the clatter of collapsing rigging, strings dragging across wood, flesh caught in the centre, at the mercy of the elements imposing themselves on it's frail, vulnerable nakedness. Standing up to Heavy Winged without succumbing is an impossible feat.

23. Efterklang– Parades
The Leaf Label
Parades takes it's time in spreading the peaks and valleys across its entirety; the choral vocals swelling over the microfauna of strings growing out of the digital landscape, the euphoria naturally unfurling in an elegant display of restrained beauty. Some people are still making albums that aren't a collection of songs which have to show the bands full hand the whole time.

22. Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Paw Tracks
Panda Bear makes me tolerate the beauty in the Beach Boys harmonies because I don't have to think of Brian Wilson or Mike Love when I listen to them. Instead, I can get lost in the heavily reverb drenched delinquent psych-ragas of 'Bros' and Good Girl – Carrots' while anticipating the shadowy corners of 'I'm Not' with it's solemn Benedictine intro, a measured counterpoint to the playful acid contortions of the epic sprawl surrounding it.

21. The National- Boxer
Beggars Banquet
The National have in Matt Berninger the sexiest voice on record this year (as Mrs Meatbreak reminds me every time we listen). The most perfect drum sounds, clean guitar lines and memorable, achingly potent hooks combine with stunning lyrical imagery and story-telling into a smooth urban rock album similar to The Hold Steady though shorn of all the unkempt druggy religious iconography.

20. White Hills – Heads On Fire
Fuck Off & Di
Turn up, head down, trance off. Pretty much must be what the band ethic around the White Hills is every practice. Signed to Julian Cope's label they have put out three increasingly heavy albums of pure unrestrained drugged out Spacemen 3, MBV style freak-drone. The air at the edges of this record crackles with energy, a pulsing, persistent never-ending torrent of opiated luminescence. It's noisy, direct and it plays the best bits over and over and over and overandoverandoverandover…………

19. Gnaw Their Tongues – Spasming And Howling, Bowels Loosening And Bladders Emptying, Vomiting Helplessly
Self-Released
The complete synthesis of noise, metal and electronics, Gnaw Their Tounges epic soundscapes recall Atari Teenage Riot at their most pulverisingly, misanthropic severest, and Burning Star Core at their bleakest. Stretching the boundaries of speed and excess is what the lone Mories does best, but he breaks it up with haunting samples and entrancing drone. The complete works of the metal and extreme electronics communities bottled in one potent elixir.

18. Caribou– Andorra
Merge
At first this seemed like a similar album to Grizzly Bear's Yellow House and I never paid it as much attention as that, until one day something just popped around the first verse of 'She's The One' when Dan Snaith's voice breaks just a little and the strings are swelling up pretty behind him, then I was finished by the little chugging mandolin after the chorus. After that it seemed like some long lost Perfumed Garden relic and the rest of the album came into focus that beautifully realised.

17. Gravenhurst– The Western Lands
Warp
The thing I like most about this album is that I have no real idea of what it actually is. It is a music that defies easy categorization. Could it be post-folk? Who really cares when the music herein is of such luscious, melody oriented hues? The flickering instrumentation, the graceful lines, swallowed by ferocious feedback and volatile percussion reappear as dignified twilight acoustic tunes the other side of the fury. ="">It could all be quite confusing, were it not on Warp – a sign that something not quite of the ordinary is occurring.

16. The Twilight Sad – Fourteen Autumns And Fifteen Winters
FatCat
With their full-force white-out guitars, cacophonous percussion, brusque Glaswegian accent and stories of children on fire The Twilight Sad are only a small side-step from fellow countrymen like Mogwai and Arab Strap. But there is a greater sentimentality working between the sheets of noise that does not just rely on the power of the music or the sinisterly day-to-day mundane recounted in the lyrics. It is traditional folk music filtered through nostalgia and modern cynicism plus a shit load of effects pedals giving it a unique aura and a unique voice.

15. Klaxons– Myths Of The Near Future
Polydor / Rinse
Forget all that crap about nu-rave and listen to Klaxons for what they really are: Not some scene inducing media glitch, but a legacy of post-punk's enduring aesthetic of fetishising sonic iconography and imbuing it with dangerous modern daring. They take their sound from sonic reverberations hidden in apocalyptic hieroglyphs, in demonic scripture, mythical rhetoric and human hedonism, binding them into an album that's a detailed ritual of progressive guitar dance. Who'd have expected that then Reynolds?

14. Wolves In The Throne Room – Two Hunters
Southern Lord
I made Wolves' debut album my number one last year and this is gifted with the same deftly deployed atmospheric brilliance as that, so the question I should ask is why isn't this as high in my list. It's not an enormous progression is the real answer. This is a subtle, nuanced reworking of a template which is pretty much theirs alone, but just as Mogwai and Godspeed emboldened their sounds with a more pronounced confidence after their debuts, so to have Wolves In The Throne Room.

13. The Angelic Process - Weighing Souls With Sand
Profound Lore
After 9 years, The Angelic Process have come to an end with K.Angylus's broken hand sealing their fate. This album is as fitting an exit as any. With his wife, M, this mysterious couple forge harrowing romantic poetry from an almost impenetrable wall of feedback. Each song building swiftly, lifting from the spine of a slow metronomic drum beat, thick soft noise shrouding the ascent, vocals surfacing between the waves. A huge sound and hugely fulfilling experience.

12. Aluk Todolo – Descension
Public Guilt
French black metal krautrock noise - a sub-genre containing surely only this one band. It must be the only black metal album to feature a slide blues guitar riff too. A deeply immersive experience that hisses through four James Plotkin mastered tracks, all heavy industrial clatter, dark ambience and teutonic groove. The sleeve credits only drums bass and guitar, but how they conjure the crumbling landslides collapsing all over this record with those three elements is a mystery and goes a ways to creating the aura pervading it.

11. 65 Days Of Static - The Destruction Of Small Ideas
Monotreme
A band that keep pushing to produce something new, creating new angles and opening up different headspaces, 65 Days Of Static are now on their high octane drum battery and hurricane force effects phase. One of the most carefully produced albums this year, the sound of each drum padding, thumping can be felt connecting solidly, the crackle and hum of impending guitars swelling like pregnant pauses fills the room before the peaks burst the calm apart. When it's quiet, it's very very quiet and when it's loud it's scary.

10. Deerhunter– Cryptograms
Kranky
A noisy little acid-fried post-punk indie-disco comedown-meltdown bastard of a record. Like when Outhud flipped out all kaleidoscopic and made your eyes bulge, this is that all over again but with more tone wash and fuzzbox. Big lakes of ambience sit between the motorik riots, keeping them apart or there'd be bitchfight blood shed and this record never lets itself dip into the undignified (unlike Of Montreal, but that's a whole different thing). Until 'Heatherwood' drops it's shoulder at the end and comes right at you.

09. Bone Awl – Meaningless Leaning Mess
Klaxon Productions
This two piece have been going since 2002 but I only discovered them in February when they released their debut album Meaningless Leaning Mess. Their fourteenth release. Ridiculous! Seven demos, three eps and four split singles later they spit this violent ball of spiky fisted, black crusted metal spite out. It's not too different to the addictive canon preceding it, but it sees the production even more overdriven, blown-out, the buzz burning that much fiercer, the eyes stretched wider, more frenzied, ragged throat screeching that much coarser, cymbals splashing their tinny crashes that much shriller. And the world shrinks that much smaller. If it is actually possible, this one could be even faster too, getting through 18 blistering tracks of hyper kinetic lo-fi scree in 38 minutes. Buckle up cunts, things are about to get very grim indeed.

08. One Unique Signal – Tribe, Castle And Nation
Genepool
One Unique Signal from Brentford, Essex; the grey-skied rain-cloud Stooges spinning off the dual axes of Joy Division and Spacemen 3. Bleak. Bleak, oppressive, the concrete walls of a city shot through with slices of light like gaps between buildings. Urban paranoia, environmental sickness, the threat of violence, the will to escape. Tribe, Castle and Nation embodies it all, releasing the bands' response to the oppressive through taught star-scraping drone rock, using angled breaks in rhythm like elbows in faces, a survivalists handbook to the mean streets.

07. Heavy Winged– Taking The Veil
Students Of Decay
First released in 2006 on Terrastock as a run of 20, then re-released on Students Of Decay who then only upped the run to 100, but it was enough to get them to my ears and this was my first encounter with a band that would consume me for the entire year. I blew the amp at The Greenhouse Effect at the first Not For Resale LIVE! with 'Through The Shimmer' and from there my relationship with this band was cemented. The other HW records in this list are dynamic in their own right, but this is an incredible trip over two near-half-hour tracks that suck the air from the room and the light from your eyes. And then it peaks. Holding it for 15 minutes, the driving surges buckle up into peaks, iridescent displays of showering feedback coursing from busted pedals, screeching through the wonky reels of an aging 4-track, driven by urgent propulsive drumming. Dance music for the fearless it is vital sounding and all-consuming to be in the presence of.

06. Cobalt– Eater Of Birds
Profound Lore
Holy shit, holy shit holy shit….Sometimes words fail and one is rendered a completely awestruck gibbering mess. After threatening their enemy with "One thousand strikes of the skull hammer" and leaving just a brewing tension between the drums and guitars the vocals drop back in on the appropriately titled 'Witherer' starting off a four minute build of searing tribal drumming that the guitars lock onto, layering up riff on riff, cruising at immense velocity, the vocals drawling in their guttural rasp. Absolutely do not fucking mess with this band. Ultra heavy is not all this album is. It contains three heavily effected, slightly disturbing acoustic passages all titled 'The Ritual Use Of Fire'. No need to expound on the importance of that element in its creative and destructive guises. Comprised of just two people – Erik Wunder on drums and Phil McSorely on guitar, both adding vocals – this is a primeval, primordial jam session of the most singularly minded crushing heaviness. Not only that, but it grooves so damn hard, reliant on the drums pushing the guitars on; it's a rarely heard interplay of the purest, most intimate form, that is invigoratingly world eating as a result.

05. Monsters Build Mean Robots - Monsters Build Mean Robots
Nice Weather For Airstrikes
The name is striking. Think about it for a while and it conjures a harrowing doom-laden image. Monsters Build Mean Robot's form of electronic oriented post-rock is formed of mostly instrumental songs with politically nuanced titles such as 'The Freedom To Fire Those Freedom Rockets', 'thisiswheretheoilcomesfrom.com' and 'Sometimes We Sit And Stare At Passing Tanks.' The intensity which that context lends the peaceful hum and whirr is palpable, becoming bolstered with guitars that really get noisy only the once for the peak of 'Chimes Break Through Light To Reach Us'. A truly powerful, graceful, restrained and haunting record.

04. Bon Iver– For Emma, Forever Ago
Self-Released
Justin Vernon abandoned his former band DeYarmond Edison and in the Winter of 2006 went out into a log cabin in the woods of Wisconsin where he lived for three months, keeping the fires going and spending long days considering his place in the world. Long recording sessions began and out of solitude and reflection came nine songs of brittle delicately anguished beauty. Lead by an arresting voice that sometimes feels awkwardly intimate, whispering close to your ear fears of frailty, inconsequence and vulnerability, this album captures on tape the sound of a soul wrestling with itself, the reverberations of the natural world and the quietude of life alone inside four wooden walls.

03. Future Of The Left– Curses
Too Pure
From the ashes of McClusky and Jarcrew rises a phoenix of bewildering shapes and sounds. Humorous, spiteful, vengeful and almost always obtuse, Curses is one of those albums that transcends the sum of its parts. Shouty angsty vocals with a comedian's timing, angular guitars driving like reckless yoof, broken fist pounded keyboards, create a whole with tangible character, harmonising vocals (anyone for a nice campfire round of "Colin is a pussy?") and songs that build into roaring stomping mechanistic beasts. Tracks like 'The Lord Hates A Coward' and 'Small Bones Small Bodies' grind forward, touching dancefloors, but most generally not giving much of a shit about anyone as they leave a trail of psychedelic devastation in their wake.

02. Wold – Screech Owl
Profound Lore
The village is in ruins and the shadows standing over the smolder hold swords burning red with fury. Opex on battle strings, Obey on scourge and Fortress Cookedjaw on poetry, vocals and devices. Twilight figures courting owls, dragons and cosmic energies. Fiercely intense, catastrophically harsh, this album is an expedition into some of the most unforgiving regions of sound imaginable. Taking the naturalistic form of BM to the furthest extremes they themselves say that "Wold venerate our ancestors and cultures through myth and existence, and remain open and reflective to other effective metaphors", whilst simultaneously deploying the Satanic element in another ideological statement; "Wold solemnly swear to adhere to the law of the Self" this band embody the truest essences of the genre whilst absolutely destroying it's legacy and creating a whole new one from critically red-lined fractured buzzing, festering riffs boiling under ragged shrieks and garbled incantations.

01. Of Montreal - Oh Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Polyvinyl
Five pieces of advice that will probably improve Kevin Barnes' chances of maintaining a relationship with the opposite sex:
5) Don't call your relationships 'Love Projects'. I'm fairly sure that kind of language is a bit of a turn off.
4) No violence. Paying someone to batter your Ex is going to get you a reputation that you won't shake even with the help of the 'Booty patrol'. Vicarious battery is still battery.
3) Don't select your Love Projects on the basis of being high at a foreign festival and discovering you have both read the same book. More is required.
2) After a tiff, don't go off and console yourself with black metal. It won't endear you or make you mysterious; it'll makes you seem like a scary freak.
1) Generally, your relationships with girls will have a greater chance of succeeding if you are NOT A SCREAMING QUEEN! to begin with.

MxBx

Not For Resale news

2007-11-06T10:00:00.000Z

Not For Resale's November Download is up now:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/7vly85

With these songs:

Bon Iver – The Wolves (Act I And Act Ii) (For Emma, Forever Ago, Self-Released)
Medicine & Duty – Last Request For A Heretic (Clouds Burn Slowly, Foolproof Projects)
Musixux – No Chemistry (Demo)
Milk Jaggit – End Of Lake (Demo)
The Middle Computer – Electreau (Ultra Console Mayhem!, Non-Applicable Records)
The Cathode Ray Syndrome – Track One (Argh Ep Demo)
The Teenagers – Scarlet Johansen (7", Merok)
Lords Spiritual – Feel The Love (Demo)
Numbers – Kosmos Love (Now You Are This, Kill Rock Stars)
Duke Raoul – Flood Me With Kisses (Demo)
Jakobinarina – Do My Love (His Lyrics 7", Regal)
Hotpants Romance – Shake (It's A Heatwave, Big Print)
Gnaw Their Tongues – Nihilism; Tied Up And Burning (Spasming And Howling, Bowels Loosening And Bladders Emptying, Vomiting Helplessly, Self Released)
Die Zukunft – Noir (Demo)
Palm Springs – I Start Fires (I Start Fires 7", Random Acts of Vinyl)
Monsters Build Mean Robots – will I avenge or revenge? (Monsters Build Mean Robots, Nice Weather For Airstrikes)

Exciting.

NFR has also moved from Fitzherberts every other wednesday to the last Tuesday of every month at The Penthouse. Big Penthouse party launch for the new Not For Resale. Poster coming soon, but here's an advance of the details:

Not For Resale Relaunch!
NEW TIME: Tuesday 27th November
NEW VENUE: The Penthouse
Free entry
8pm – Midnight

Residents Meatbreak and Fokka Wolfe with Special Guest DJ's Old Mayor and The Dirty Socials!!!

PLUS: We'll be giving away speshul yoo-neek handmade NFR T-Shirts and CDs

Something to look forward to.

MxBx

Stylus Eulogy / Obituary

2007-11-02T19:32:00.002Z

This is an article which I wrote for the International Mixtape Project website. it should be up there in a few days. This is a sneak preview (mainly to test the html works)

Stylus Eulogy / Obituary

When I heard the news of Stylus Magazine’s closure it was from checking the website on Monday morning of the 29th October. It took me a little while to register as I scanned the blurbs of each feature, until I saw the little bar across the top of the page which announced, undeniably, that Stylus would no longer be publishing from Wednesday 31st October. A flicker of genuine grief rose in my chest, flashed red across my cheeks wavered against slight self-conscious embarrassment then sank quickly and heavily into my gut where it pulled and gnawed at the pit of it for pretty much the rest of the day. As much as I wanted to think they were faking their own death in some kind of crazy way-out-there Halloween feature, or just taking a hiatus to reemerge the other side of the year meaner, tighter, sharper than ever I had a harrowing feeling that this was it, and as the three days counted down and the final articles and thoughts appeared the truth sank in deep and clearly. We had made it to the end.

How could I have ever realized the extent of my affection for the site if it continued to exist? Quite simply, I would never have. I would have continued taking it for granted, cursing the reviews that countered my own feelings, flicking in and out of it during work hours to keep an eye on fellow commenters, slinging barbs and ill-formed ideology at chinks in arguments. I would have continued to half read reviews of albums that disinterested me simply through having a rubbish name, finding that many weeks later those same bands would reveal themselves to me, after which time I would return to the review, read it thoroughly and engage with the sentiments. A situation I now blithely refer to as the Pissed Jeans Effect.
So many writers with such a wealth of skill, knowledge and nuance behind the words, none of them chasing egos or out trying to claim badges of coolness. Though sometimes I was sure Dom Passantino and Alfred Soto were deliberately trying to anti-cool intimidate anyone coming within 20 feet of a haircut. Those were as marvelous pieces to read as the ones which conjured images, which provoked reaction, which plumbed the recesses of the author’s imaginations as well as the limitations of conventional journalism. Stewart Voegtlin produced a piece on Wold’s Screech Owl which reconfigured the album into a form and style you were unlikely to read on any other pop-culture website. Nick Southall wrote reviews with so much detail and observation you could read them over again and come out with new insights each time. Probably the greatest piece of writing to grace the site was Nicks. Imperfect Sound Forever made it into Da Capo’s Best Music Writing series, caused a complete furore in the comments box and influenced 65 Days Of Static in recording The Destruction Of Small Ideas. It is grandiose, but not inaccurate, to suggest that without Nick’s article this album would never have sounded so overwhelming. Todd Burns was right to open the Bluffers Guide with it, it is a remarkable piece of writing.

It wasn’t always the reviews and articles that were the most compelling feature of the site. The comments system was a playground for readers righteous, misrepresented and slighted to vent spleen against the music and writers; a place to offer words of praise and reinforcement in times of agreement. They allowed readers to claim a tiny slice of the site as their own, to leave their mark on it. A kind of reciprocal relationship formed over the years and whether that was Todd Burn’s intention when he took the risk of allowing comments he, perhaps unwittingly, created the environment for sentimental music freaks like me to end the life of the site sporadically welling up over the farewell articles. Derek Miller especially has a way of ending each year with a thoroughly heartbreaking piece of Year End Thoughts, but this Closing Time one? I was pure greetin’ into my mo(u)rning coffee. But before that, there were tears of mirth and some utterly insane exchanges courtesy of the enigma that was The Disexists until the whole commenting ball rolled into a head-on collision with Mr Burns as he slammed his iron fist down hard over Xmas 06 during the Top 50 Albums countdown. I have lots of people to thank on that site for adding extra discourse to the thought provoking material of the staff – namely GrandBanks, Florenz6, Raskolnikov, Terrorist (who just revealed himself as TheDisexists – that’s a shock), CWPerry, BoilingBoy – there’s loads more, but these are the names at the top of my head, and they all contributed to my experience of the site and kept me returning to it as more than daily routine. One of the ways I can tell I actually had some kind of relationship with it, was that Stylus even had the dubious honour of being one of the only sites I visited when drunk as evinced by several wayward and ill-conceived comments on my part. I think Bryan Berge took this one rather well. Apologies Bryan.

In David Moore’s ‘Pop Playground Sugar Shock #002: MySpacing, Part I’ (phew, some title), he introduced me to Brie Larson. Possibly the greatest pop star ever; most definitely my favourite. Even though, as far as I can tell, she never actually does much of the Pop bit. After Neon Bible came out she and I spent about a whole month slapping Arcade Fire lyrics on each other’s MySpaces, I sent her some stuff for her Bunnies and Traps and she even gave me a mention when she came back to Stylus for an interview. Very oblique mind, but then she’s that kind o’ gal.

One thing that always provoked strong reactions from the readers, and reminded me that we were always reading the work of people who knew an immense amount of music in detail were the Top Tens. Some of them were cruelly hilarious, especially the Friday ones which cut loose and really amused and antagonized. This one’s great in itself and for the comments underneath too: Top Ten Most Welcome Movie Deaths

Of all the articles posted on Stylus, probably the one that has the most lasting impact on me was the Shops We Love feature. Kind of useless to me being as most of them were based in the US, until I read about Aquarius Records. Thanks to one curious click I am now several notes shorter every month with a swelling collection of brain melting psychedelia of both the multicoloured and monochrome kinds.

I now realize I have so much to this site to be grateful for: Albums and bands Stylus has introduced me to over the years through reviews – mostly American bands that took another couple of years to really break into the UK music press, but which Stylus put me on to sooner - include, but is in no way limited to The Hold Steady, Of Montreal, The New Pornographers, Surkin, Wold, Ian Mather’s Goslings review was another benchmark, Gui Boratto, The Besnard Lakes, Birchville Cat Motel, Caribou, Richard Villalobos, Villains, Candy Bars, Isoleé, Horse Feathers, Wolf Parade.....Hundreds of intricate and thorough label profiles which placed them inside contexts and revealed the motivations and tribulations behind them including Anticon, Ajna Offensive, Aurora Borealis, Catbird, Kranky, the Universal Music Group, Rykodisc, Relapse, Facedown, Merge, Touch And Go, Violent Turd.....

And of course, I wouldn’t be a member of the International Mixtape Project today if it wasn’t for Rob Lott’s impassioned portrayal of Ryan’s baby.

The lists of everything Stylus has done for me could go on forever. But then, now rather, I realise they can’t because it is no more. A finite site cast adrift.

So Stylus, thank you and farewell. You were truly the greatest music website going and you will be sorely missed. Keep your archives alive as relic, legacy and testament to what should be achievable for those you have left behind and those that will be in the future.

Meatbreak

RIP Stylus Magazine: 2002

2007-10-29T14:12:00.000Z

Sad news today as possibly the best online music magazine shuts up shop with no new posts as of the 31st October. As much as I like to think they are faking their own death and will reemerge the other side of the year meaner, tighter, sharper than ever I have a harrowing feeling that this really is the end.

The magazine? Stylus.

For those of you that don't know it, and those of you that do they have posted a Bluffers Guide To Stylus Magazine: 2002 - 2007

Being in a mild state of shock and a far inferior writer to errr..most? (haha) of the Stylus guys and gals I'll let you read about it all yourselves in their words. Seriously, some of the writing on this site has been as inspirational as anything I have ever read, coming from some of the most informed, passionate and measured music journalists around. I have no idea why Pitchfork is ever indulged more publicity than Stylus. One of the things most attractive about it is that there was never any ivory-tower attitude with it being one the very few sites with the balls to allow comments underneath all the reviews and features opening discourses in which writers were harried as much as they were congratulated. The range of music the site covered, the depth of features, occasional bouts of lunacy which affected it from time to time, the knowingly reader-baiting articles and both the authority the writing commanded and the antagonism it provoked were all second to none - an immense achievement.

Anyway, enough from me.

RIP Stylus. You will be sorely missed.

The Freedom To Fire Those Freedom Rockets

2007-10-29T14:04:00.000Z

Monsters Build Mean Robots
Monsters Build Mean Robots
www.myspace.com/monstersbuildmeanrobots
Nice Weather For Airstrikes!
www.myspace.com/niceweatherforairstrikes

Subtleties make violence poignant, otherwise it’s just brute and unsexy.

Late one night, or early one morning, it was around that indefinable time – the comedowning hour - two friends played Grand Theft Auto with the sound off and this album playing at a perfect volume over the top. There were no noises of gunfire or tyres screeching; the mood was of affectingly merciful numbing slaughter, the victims sank slowly to the ground, hugging the floor in grateful complicity. As the avatar solemly paced the streets, the electronic paranoia hummed about us in one of those druggy moments of sheer coherence, sonic effervescence fluttering around our peripheral consciousness, the soft patter of failing beats like the hearts on screen, sinking into oblivion, washed over with a dusky reverie, a half light encroaching from outside echoed the eerie sounds crawling from the speakers into our slowly numbing headspace.

Sometimes We Sit And Stare At Passing Tanks

Nobody is writing any protest songs any more. Or rather, nobody writes any good ones. Nobody is writing songs about the war. Or rather, nobody writes any good ones. Radiohead are the most mainstream act to have come close, but their oblique strike missed its mark, coming wrapped not in a conical steel skin or sharpened blade that the masses could relate to but in obtuse ambience, hanging it’s sombre shoulders under the weight of others guilt. Monsters Build Mean Robots sound brings much of what made Amnesiac and Kid A such controversially engrossing experimental listens to the fore and submerges the guitars into rhythmic currents that flow underneath, supporting the body of the machine as it clicks whirrs and rumbles inexorably onwards

The muted pneumatics of the opening Do Uncles Dream Of Electric Kids? crumble into the softly crunching beats of Stroll Into Flames To Find Self and slowly the guitars begin to reveal themselves like analogue rays slicing through digital mist, slow-motion solar flares engulfing the shadows, shuffling beats flitting past causing eddies to suck in their wake; a dynamic exemplified in Chimes Breakthrough Light To Reach Us which sounds like a less tangible Errors or much of the Leaf Label, they release themselves, breathing in long, heaving rhythms, reverb drenched vocals ushering in a climax of ringing tones that gradually shimmer into aching view. The Freedom To Fire Those Freedom Rockets employs similar ambience to Mogwai’s Come On Die Young, delicate strands of guitars gracefully moving through a liquid darkness, delayed ring modulation pealing off in ripples from the core. The trippingly clipped Will I Avenge Or Revenge? recalls 65 Days Of Static at their most pensive and restrained, but this never bursts into such cacophonous territories as they do, it’s contemplative nature occupying a region neither of the aforementioned post-rock pioneers have quite broached as effectively as Monsters Build Mean Robots.

How politicised can a mostly instrumental album be? The track titles convey enough of a sense of the incensed that the setting against music of such serene composure imparts the greater horror of being thoroughly chastised by someone remaining totally calm – far more intimidating than an enraged castigation. The final track asks Shall I Fill With Air? To which the reply must question: Is it to unleash the most withering of frustrated screams, or is it to float away into the pre-umbral ether of oblivion?

MxBx

Caged Faced Weirdos

2007-10-29T13:58:00.000Z

Robot Ninja Dinosaur Bastards – Subhumanoid Meltdown
www.myspace.com/robotninjadinosaurbastards
Wrong Music
www.myspace.com/wrong_music

It’s been a long time coming and it’s only available on CD and download rather than 12” vinyl as expected but the full length album from Brighton’s Robot Ninja Dinosaur Bastards has arrived, and it has two intros! The first details the formation of mutant reptilian killing machines through a splicing of Terminator, Robocop and Killer Klowns From Outer Space samples (I think); the second, like an intermission to all the sordid gut churning B-movie sci-fi films that spawned this beast, is the trademark live show intro with cut up Jurassic Park audio and the theme tune that is slowly enveloped by The Demonsaur TECH 2001’s (Yeah, you read right) metal guitar version, electronics and beats coming in over the top before it’s totally consumed by the Bastard template of jittery cheapo gabba and speed metal riffing. I said template – they deviate from their own as much as they deviate from the rest of us and because they play by no rules the only thing they’re likely to break will be your legs. In fact, they have a song about it. Called Break His Legs. But don’t let that distract you; There’s some well produced hi-fidelity crunching, thumping and dexterous sound manipulation going on in here too courtesy of E. ROBOT 209, which, by virtue of their more than capable glitch-core, is how they came to be subsumed into the Wrong Music canon sitting alongside the haphazard and dangerous noises created by label boss Shitmat and the likes of DJ Scotch Egg, Ebola, Ladyscraper and Nailbomb Cults. Lyrically, there are few more debased that this band; Cyborgosaurus T-1999 tells of high speed disemboweling, decapitation, filling cavities with vomit and bodily waste, animal mutilation and drug abuse in a manic fever of hysterical shrieking – no, not shrieking, it’s something much more worrying than that, hell even the dude from Candlemass doesn’t have lungs this tight and no way does he spit this fast with as much wide-eyed insanity. Grind bands like Cannibal Corpse and Gorerotted plough their visceral furrow of horror-flick style violence through a purely intense heavy death/thrash formula whereas the Robo Ninjas straddle metal and gabba techno without settling into any kind of genre groove for too long. It’s like 3 technologically savvy apes infected with a Namco patented Rage virus. Come And Get Demented With The Dino Bastards starts with a filtered warehouse air-horn sound that pans about in stunted blasts before the beats drill through the centre of it. For all of 10 seconds it congeals into something danceable. You’ve got to be quick if you want to throw some dignified shapes to this. E-Robotika brings things down to a melodic level and it’s actually quite pretty in places but the scattershot effects and clipped beats don’t keep it that way for long.

They reckon it all sounds like “That bit in Robocop 2 when the little kid saws all his limbs off”, but I’m not so sure. To me it’s more like the bit in Terminator 2 when Sarah Connor dreams she’s at a kids’ playground and gets her flesh blasted off by an atomic bomb. Yeah. That’s exactly what it’s like.

MxBx

Lyrics like these are the reason I never bother

2007-07-10T11:31:00.000Z

Of Montreal
The Past Is A Grotesque Animal
Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
(Polyvinyl)

Lyrics by Kevin Barnes

the past is a grotesque animal
and in its eyes you see
how completely wrong you can be
how completely wrong you can be

the sun is out
it melts the snow that fell yesterday
makes you wonder
why it bothered
i fell in love
with the first cute girl that i met
who could appreciate Georges Bataille
standing at a Swedish festival
discussing "story of the eye"
discussing "story of the eye"

it's so embarrassing to need someone like i do you
how can i explain?
i need you here
and not here too..
how can i explain
i need you here
and not here too

i'm flunking out, i'm flunking out
i'm gone, i'm just gone
but at least i author my own disaster
at least i author my own disaster
performance breakdown
and i don't wanna hear it
i'm just not available

things could be different
but they're not...
things could be different
but they're not

the mousy girl screams "violence, violence!"
the mousy girl screams "violence, violence!"
she gets hysterical
cause they're both so mean
and it's my favorite scene
the cruelty's so predictable
makes you sad on the stage
though our love project has so much potential
but it's like we weren't made for this world
though i wouldn't really wanna meet someone who was

do i have to scream in your face?
i've been dodging lamps and vegetables
throw it all in my face
i don't care-
let's just have some fun
let's tear the shit apart
let's tear the fucking house apart

let's tear our fucking bodies apart,
let's just have some fun

somehow you've red-rovered
the Gestapo circling my heart
and nothing can defeat you
no death, no ugly world
you've lived so brightly
you've altered everything

i find myself
searching for old selves
while speeding forward
through the plate-glass of maturing cells

i fed the unraveller
the paw hellion
but even apocalypse is fleeting
there's no death, no ugly world
sometimes i wonder if you're mythologizing me
like i do you
apologizing me like i do you

we want our film to be beautiful
not realistic
see me in the radiance of terror dreams
you can betray me
you can, you can betray me
teach me something wonderful
crown my head crown my head
with your lilting effects
project your fears onto me
i need to view them,
see there's nothing to them
i promise you there's nothing to them

i'm so touched by your goodness
you make me feel so criminal
how do you keep it together?
i'm all, all unravelled
but'cha know
no matter where we are
we're always touching by underground wires

i've explored you with the detachment
of an analyst
but most nights
we've raided the same kingdoms
and none of our secrets are physical
none of our secrets, are physical
none of our secrets, are physical now

Meat + NFR on the BBC

2007-06-03T16:39:00.001Z

I'm on BBC 6 Music radio tonight - this Sunday - from 8pm. They'll be broadcasting an interview with me and playing my 1 hour mix of electro-indie and Brighton bands, either 8-9 or 9-10pm. Not For Resale has been entered into a competition. There's 2 dj's every Sunday for 4 weeks battling for a prize of a DJ set at Summer Sundae in Leicester or Indian Summer in Glasgow, then I guess 4 in the final in July with people voting again and the top 2 winning. I think I could do a lot of damage with a set at a festival so I’m kind of wanting to win now – at least the first round any way – I’m up against someone from Cambridge. I’m not sure what would happen to the world order if Brighton lost to Cambridge in a DJing competition, but it can’t be good.

Here's the URL to the BBC 6 website so you can stream it if needs be: http://www.bbc.co.uk/6music/shows/listener_6mix/

It is a competition, so I am requesting your votes. Out of pity for my terrible interview probably - I don't imagine negative mono-syllabic answers translate well on air, but I’m sure it will be funny if not simply humiliating.

You can text on 64046, or email them at 6mix@bbc.co.uk, or leave comments on their website. Maybe I’ll give a prize to the person who rips me apart the best. Or is the nicest, obviously.

You can stream it all week and vote until next Friday

I guess it's should be for good this time

2007-04-11T10:25:00.001Z

This pain is getting extrememly tedious now. It's slightly concerning when the Dr tells me that at 25, I shouldn't be getting gout and am too young, but then does not seem especially mostivated to find out why I might be getting it. 2 years later, as a 27 year old, I am still considered too young to be getting it, but attack it does and today is especially painful. Maybe it was the coffee I had at the weekend. Surely not though, really. Despite my intense regime of healthy eating and drinking having slipped away to almost 0% of my lifestyle nowadays, compared to this time last year when it was all soya milk, no wheat, endless fruit and veg juices and careful eating, I still rarely ever drink alcohol or eat meat - the two traditional ingredients of causation.

So, what the fuck, yeah? Maybe it takes about a year for all the acid to build back up in my system enough to cripple me like this. Pain has been hovering round my feet for the best part of a month now, on and off, and this time it is ON!

Back on the intense regime again I guess, and I guess it's should be for good this time, since giving it 16 months didn't permanently purge it. Looks like this is how it's going to be.

Rock and fuckin' roll.

Hair Raising

2007-04-05T14:31:00.000Z

Since this is still by far and away the greatest album i heard from last year, here's my review of it again for anyone who needs something new and exciting in their lives.

Wolves In The Throne Room
Diadem Of 12 Stars
Vendlus Records

Living in a self sufficient commune outside Washington USA, eschewing pantomime corpse paints and the distracting regalia of weaponry and spikes, Wolves In The Throne Room are not your regular black metal band. Perfect black metal in fact and their music is no less rebellious towards the genre.

Whilst there are many bands honing the form, creating equally masterful and progressive recordings (see USA’s Leviathan, Sweden’s Watain and Woods Of Infinity, UK’s Anaal Nathrakh and Axis Of Perdition, France’s Blut Aus Nord and Deathspell Omega for examples of how to push the limits of a genre), the continual adherence, even amongst most of these aforementioned bands, to sartorial and musical codes needed a radical shift in attention. For a genre so concerned with rebellion, adherence of any kind should be strictly outlawed, but such is the way of things that the scenes within black metal increasingly constrict themselves and disregard too much which they consider ‘untrue’. This is where Wolves In The Throne Room come in.

With two equally mesmerizing demos behind them, it was with great anticipation that I awaited the album proper, to see what this band could achieve in such a formal setting. From the highly atmospheric, misty forested cover and the scenes depicted on the sleeve, it was clear that this would be something else entirely, including as it does, ‘The Queen Of Borrowed Light’ from the second demo. The shortest song on here is 13 minutes, dead on, which tells you how grand a scale this band work on; cinematic, operatic but deadly serious and not prone to posturing theatrics, this album covers a huge amount of musical ground, seamlessly incorporating Norwegian droning, flights of technical fancy and grinding segments into songs that undulate like rivers, ghosting through the misty forests of the cover art. The album, whilst tense, nervy and aggressive, conjures a pagan, earth-worshipping atmosphere that is being slowly eroded from the black metal field to be replaced with head down violence of the likes of Black Witchery and Revenge and the necrotic filth churned out by the Finnish hordes of bleakness. More akin to Negura Bunget and Drudkh in spirit – the eastern European forms – where spiritual, naturalistic elements are the higher concerns. The force of Gaia is represented on this album through the presence of female vocals from Jamie (this band only ever use first names, real ones at that, not stage names – Aaron on drums, Rick and Nathan on guitars and vocals). Female vocalists are becoming popular in the more Death-oriented forms of metal, much rarer in black metal and their presence here is striking. Not only does the sound of them – ethereal, ephemeral, sleepily intoned, rising high over the surging motorik riffing – contrast with the caustic shrieking of Nathan and the more guttural vocals of Rick, but they represent the harmony of the earth, echoing the cyclical, sexual nature of the world, of birth, nurturing and creation. They are beautiful. A word rarely used with this form of music, and not in a sexual as in lusting, fucking beauty either, for they are too innocent, too pure and they don’t convey a human sexuality, more an angelic presence watching over the maelstroms of noise beneath, occasionally being smothered as happens in life, then returning wings unfurling, majestic, exuding femininity amongst the masculine energy as she sings of her “Heart beating against the soft rush of the river”. A section of acoustic guitar breaks up In A Night Time Mirror Part 1melting away Jamie’s vocals before being consumed by a violent storm as the electrics strike up and the drums come thundering in.

Nathan and Rick’s vocals are not excessively harsh, not high in the mix, not overbearing. Instead they sit gently amongst the guitars and drums, themselves not overly intrusive, so that the whole thing drifts along, dreamlike. They are strong and forceful, especially in Face In A Night Time Mirror Part 2 where after a suitably entrancing drone accompanied by a grave vocal undercurrent from guest singer Dino, the drums pick up into a forced march and the rhythm quickens; guitars clang and reverberate, panning out into a blissful vista where Nathan slowly screams through gritted teeth “Death was my angel”; a wraith like entity already dead, thanking its’ maker for putting it at peace with itself.

This album is elemental; conjuring spirits and evolving scenes of wilderness, the effect being to make the listener small and insignificant in its presence as if staring up from the foot of a mountain, yet the blood surging through the epic choruses embolden and energise. A return to the ancient sounding BM of old, quite unlike the current breed of destructive misanthropic bands seeking to annihilate and bludgeon everything in their path. Diadem Of 12 Stars is a life spirit, not a death spirit, astral and regal, as the title suggests, not of the earth, the bowels, fire and horror. With no blastbeats and no evilness, what makes this Black Metal at all? It is good to remind oneself that is while listening to this, as there is nothing quite like it around. It may be that with genrefication so acute nowadays, that this band can be considered Post-Black Metal, in the same way that Slint and Mogwai helped forge the term Post-Rock out of the shogazery noise bands.

The title track – (A Shimmering Radiance) Diadem Of 12 Stars – begins with guitars softly intertwining, shrouded in distortion, breaking into gulps of drum beats as crushing guitars crash in and out, the air in between adding weight. Slowly the density drifts apart, a shimmering guitar line slicing through the space, increasing in intensity before bursting into hammering lunges careening towards a thundering section where Jamie and Nathan sing together, one shining light, the other sucking it away. Drums roll turbulently across the churning guitars with the pressure increasing and dispersing like wind, the tone lowering into minor keys and the atonality veering off into soaring near-melodic passages. The lead guitar picks up for a brief moment as the rhythm gets choppy; crunching and biting into the drums, peaking with a sole high note then instantly descending into a funereal stomp with Nathan gradually increasing the strength of his guttural noises until real words gush out, space opening up in the music to allow him through. The drums gather pace as Jamie comes in, effortlessly shifting the album into the realms of spirituality with her softly gliding vocals, then slowly recedes into the shadows. The drums strike up again, cantering forward and the guitars give chase, thrashing and lashing out, though the ambience has shifted and a rising melancholy begins to creep in, sensing an end to things. Harsh screaming vocals bear down on the music, sweeping it aside as the track slowly fades out to the end. It is an exhausting and exhilarating piece of music, not unlike a Godspeed You! Black Emperor movement.

Which brings us neatly to the point where I started. The essence of Black Metal has always been a rejection of wasteful peripheral materialism and distracting influences, of rejecting normalities and dogmatic instruction, of free spirits and the value of individual expression. The old order has been deposed. The wolves are in the throne room

www.myspace.com/wolvesinthethroneroom

www.vendlus.com

Grizzle Yo Nizzle

2007-04-05T14:25:00.000Z

Here's another interview from the end of last year. Since Grizzly Giant are now reformed and rollicking round Brighton again I'm putting this up to spread the word. Not because they need all the help they can get. That's what alcohol's for.

Grizzly Giant

I’m at the Engine Rooms, and it’s swathed in dark red light, bodies sticking together on contact in the sweaty summer heat. Onstage there is a band of three people. Solid framed, bearded guitarist George is holding a video camera and filming the crowd for the benefit of member Lee, who is on holiday in Scotland. He is getting the crowd to shout jibes about his absence into the lens. Behind him Ryan, bearded and diminutive in comparison is shouting harsh insults in a thick Welsh accent and fumbling around, eventually producing a large hard-backed book. George puts the camera down and they ask the audience to pick a number between 1 and 74. ‘24!’ yells a voice clearly. As Ryan turns to the page, Rich starts a drum machine beating and releases glitchy noises into action as George hammers his guitar – Ryan begins singing from the book about myelination and greater specialization of function of neurological pathways, magically phrasing the lines so they fit with the music.

Meet Brighton’s art-punk terrorists Grizzly Giant.

I joined them in a pub before a rehearsal to understand how a band like theirs comes about.

“We’re like a cross between a bad punk band and The Price Is Right” says Ryan, animated band poet, surreal lyricist and Welshman, who was once described by a woman in a pub as “an ugly Elvis, but good looking Johnny Cash”. “We’d never be the kind of band to walk coolly onstage and take ourselves seriously as people” says Lee, the band’s founding mastermind.

So how did it all start?

Lee says that he’ll “Miss out the relationship bit” but found himself “Living in a shed with a desire to get on stage. I said to Ryan, ‘We’ve got a gig at the Albert tomorrow’ and got him to come. I said ‘Right, I’m going to play guitar and you say one of your poems’ and that bit went o.k., so I said ‘Right, now we’re both going to moan like zombies and when we stop moaning, I’ll play guitar for a bit’” Ryan interjects “I’d just like to point out that at the time I was playing a turntable with a plank of wood coming from it and an elastic band strapped to it” “Yeah, a Technics record deck guitar” confirms Lee matter-of-factly. “I’d wired a microphone under the stylus so it sort of went BOOWAAUUUNNNG”. Ryan says “The idea was sprung when we crashed that open mic night. It was at The Farm and we were pissed as fuckers, just invaded on the hippies and did a fucking screaming, howling fucking punk poem. Then there was the Rock Rave where we did the werewolf song, which is a bit like the Zombie song but with howling instead of moaning, and this dog came and sat right in front of me and went AWROOO! Fucking mental”

Do you rehearse or plan for this kind of audience interaction?

“No, we rehearse a really tight set, then on the night we play we just get shitfaced – it’s just nervousness” says Ryan “And these two have microphones trying to get some validation from the audience” says George, indicating Ryan and Lee “but we’ve played as a 1, 2, 3 and 4 piece, depending on who’s here, and we never play the same songs again, not even if we’ve got two gigs in one week.”

Ryan stresses he has “No emotional attachment to any of the songs. I don’t get precious about them, just use them at a later date if they’re any good”, so I ask how this transient approach to songwriting affect their recorded output, the band, formed under a year ago, having not actually recorded anything other than live shows.

“We’re doing an album” says Rich excitably. “We’re going to treat the studio very differently” asserts Lee. “Still raw, but layers of instruments that we couldn’t do live on stage – and we’ll probably learn from it stuff to take on stage.” Ryan’s vision of the band’s recording process is somewhat more apocalyptic “We want to hole up somewhere, treat it with a real bunker mentality, lock ourselves away with whatever we need and it will turn into Project Zombie. We’ll convince ourselves that the whole world has turned to zombies and the only way of getting out will be to produce an album that it so good it will hypnotize them. We’ll have intricate ways of smashing their heads in. Oh, and we’re bringing out our own liquor as well.” He says, becoming increasingly enthusiastic “The Grizzly Giant Project Zombie – we’re buying a still and worked out we could knock out about a litre of vodka every four hours.”

Expect to get shitfaced, expect to have your head caved in in any number of unimaginable ways, but most of all, as Lee says “”Expect the unexpected”. Grizzly Giant are coming for you. Prepare yourselves.