December 2012 I showed up totally exhausted in Vancouver BC after touring stupidly and relentlessly for however many straight months and got a job at a call centre raising money for the Red Cross. It was a scent free office but one time this woman cooked a piece of fish in the microwave for 10 minutes on low and hot boxed the whole office - we got sent home early no pay. There was the other woman I named the Call Centre Coltrane because her pitch and routine usually involved improvised flights of fancy that went off in both directions at once somehow landing back down with a credit card number and a donation. I used to sleep under the desk. I was there a few months and at the time I reconnected with John Brennan who I had played with briefly in Montreal at the Mutek Festival. In Montreal John was running an experimental music night at a burrito shop downtown called Garbage Night. While in Vancouver I began connecting with the music scene there and would go hang out with the Shearing Pinx lads who I think lived with Sydney the bass player at the time. I knew Nic and Jer from an AIDS Wolf Tour and was so stoked to get to know them both better. I really fell in love with that era of Vancouver's music scene.

Fast Forward to today. 2024

Actually it was the dying days of 2023 but you get it and John asks if I'll sit in with Earth Ball and I keep thinking about Earth Balance, the vegan butter everyone eats here. I brought my aching bones and my ipads on the beautiful ferry named the Queen of Oak Bay and out to Nanaimo BC, home of the nanaimo bar (a dessert treat - special to this region - that seems to be more popularly found under the weird glass sneeze guards in office building deli's out east in Ontario.... anyhoops ). No one in Nanaimo wants to talk to me about the famous treat. I asked a couple of people. Silence. Nanaimo is like London, Ontario but more fried and by the sea. The town is filled with blown out old sea dawgs with tin coffee pots and loose leaf tobacco, then there's the usual streetfolk you find in this part of the Canadian Pacific Northwest and a bunch of bohemians who I guess have left Vancouver behind - that fine city having become uninhabitable for those not making over 100k a year. And then up the way are all the retirees. Yup Nanaimo is a strange one. They mined the shit out of this region and Nanaimo is surely haunted by those buried in mining shafts or maimed by the heavy machinery or blown up by accident in the explosives store house. And when Earth Ball fire up the amps in Izzy and Jer's basement you can hear the voices of the ghosts hum through electrical lines and out the speakers, Kellen's hued feedback, Izy's sturdy basslines, Jer's paperbag guitar tone and rumble pack zaps, Liam's (aka the Kid) sheets of sound and Brennen's multidirectional drums. You wouldn't guess Earth Ball was auto-composing and from what my rat brain can tell - the lyrics are improvised too...Improvising lyrics and singing them is the hardest thing to do in all of music.. Izzy and Jer are pros. And their attitudes are pro too.

TRACK LISTING

1. Moon FM
2. Antifreeze
3. Through & Through
4. A Need To Cool Down
5. Flash In The Pan
6. Hollowgramma

‘Empires into Sand’ is the first album of new material from Normil Hawaiians in 40 years. The group first refined their sound during the early 80s, hitting on a pastoral experimentalism that drew on ambient drone, motorik impulse and post-punk pep.

‘Empires into Sand’ came together in the familiar manner of their original three albums, with improvisation and nuance informing the blueprint of the tracks. It was with the official release of this last record ‘Return of the Ranters’ (originally recorded in 1984/85, but then unconsciously shelved) in 2015 by Upset The Rhythm that led to the group reconnecting with the intention of playing music together again. Normil Hawaiians played a launch show for that ‘lost album’ and followed that up with more concerts, including an appearance at Supernormal, a residency at the Edinburgh Festival, gigs at Cafe OTO. They were even chosen by Richard Dawson to perform with him in London.

Throughout this time, Normil Hawaiians revisited their original songs for live performance. However for a group always so interested in evolving their sound, it came as no surprise that they shirked at the idea of a faithful retread. The band pushed their songs into new inventive dimensions, still progressive at core, but now imbued with a cosmic uncanny. A cinematic approach that was always quietly present has come to the fore. The quaint weirdness of folk song, the humanity of communal practice and the group’s ecological mindedness have all found a place in Normil Hawaiians’ current sound world.

When Normil Hawaiians write and record music they prefer to gather in a remote location and live together for a while, such is their communal ethos. Being far-flung across the UK, the Family Hawaii (numbering seven key members) decided to encamp to Tayinloan, a small village on the west coast of the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland. They set up their own studio in an isolated, windswept house overlooking the sea and started the tape rolling. Noel Blanden from the band explains the process neatly: “we set up and began playing, slowly and patiently, allowing the music to take its own shape based on where we were staying and our ongoing friendship. We recorded for days, capturing everything. A lot of new and rich ideas began to emerge”.

Normil Hawaiians took their time to develop these threads at their own pace, allowing songs to mutate and settle over months. Simon Marchant deftly produced and recorded the album whilst also performing in the band, this marked the first time the band had total control of their own sound. The last few years has seen the band reconvene in Herne Bay, Faversham, London and Leith to record new parts, constantly responding to the changing form of these quietly spectral songs of defiance.

‘Empires into Sand’ incorporates samples from old rehearsals and live music into the new finished pieces, this is in continuum with their previous records. Snippets of sound from the static of short wave radio and satellite transmissions also embellish the work. In fact the whole album is stitched together with interludes, creating an acutely immersive 45 minutes. ‘Exiles’ opens the album amid swirling atmospheres, synth flights and recordings of Vilnis Egle (father of Zinta Egle from the band) retelling his experience of fleeing his home in Latvia during Soviet occupation in 1942. George Bikandy also features on this track talking about his flight from Syria in 2014. ‘Ghosts of Ballochroy’ is a winding river of a song featuring a lively discourse in Scots courtesy of Rodney Relax. There’s a commitment to truth telling present across this hopeful album populated with angels, incoming tides, long shadows and the rose-washed sun. “From our broken windscreen, we feel the breeze” soars Guy Smith triumphantly over the driving beat of ‘Waterfalls : Bedford 330’. ‘Big City Sky’ flutters and sparkles with rapid synth runs, tape-looped drums and Jimmy Miller’s commanding vocal. With ‘In The Stone’ Zinta’s melody is deliberately jagged and blunt, exaggerated by octave-layered vocals and interjections from Guy.

This is thought-provoking, boundary-bothering music. Honest in intent, a solidarity of vision. The album’s title is derived from a poem by band member Mark Tyler, who sadly passed away during the recording process and the transience of life is felt heavily throughout. Noel best coins the group’s wish for the album: “we wanted to create an album that acknowledges our history and also reflects who we are today. We remained true to ourselves and we wanted to make something beautiful without removing the edges.” ‘Empires into Sand’ certainly does that, it’s an echo from the past, an echo from the future.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
01. Exiles
02. Ghosts Of Ballochroy (ft. Rodney Relax)
03. Waves NR728524
04. Back Home To The Stars
SIDE B
05. Waterfalls / Bedford 330
06. We Stand Together
07. Big City Sky
08. In The Stone (Luddenham Mix)
09. North Atlantic

CD Bonus Tracks
(The LP Version Will Also Feature These Via The Download Card.)
10. Where Is Living?
11. Ornament Of The Tribe
12. In The Stone (Scratch Mix)
13. Deep Beneath Snow

Green shoots have burst forth from Parsnip, let’s warmly welcome the Australian group’s sophomore album ‘Behold’.

The production is ambitious, with 12-string and acoustic guitars, percussion, piano, saxophone and harmonium all sitting comfortably in these outstanding songs. Drawing comparisons with Dolly Mixture, Sara Goes Pop, Look Blue Go Purple and The Field Mice, Parsnip are an animated ensemble, full of life, emotional complexity and humour. The laughter in the dark is real, but then the sun comes up and we all must meet the day. Even the flowers turn their faces. Behold!

Recorded across three sessions over the last three years, ‘Behold’ is a testament to Parsnip at their most creative, catchy and collaborative. This album showcases the multi-talents of all four members, with spirited performances adding dazzle to the thirteen tracks.

Paris Richens lets the bass playfully roam. Carolyn Hawkins tumbles feeling into the drum rumble. Stella Rennex’s guitar soars alongside her saxophone work, whilst a sprightly keyboard is tenderly attended by Rebecca Liston. Everyone sings amidst this lush canopy.

Patience, environmental cues and internal signals are integral for a garden to flourish. The same can be said of the conditions necessary for ‘Behold’ to emerge. It is an album gleeful in reassessment, changed priorities and anticipation. The roots are deeply anchored to mystery, drinking up a hidden wonderment that lies within. ‘Monument’ is a twist of melody and mania, “For what am I? But a channel of light” they attest amongst the whoops and hollers. ‘The Babble’ sounds like Ray Davies playing Wordle for enlightenment. In fact most of these songs are pointing the way towards growth and understanding. ‘Turn to Love’ is mesmeric and timeless, thoroughly serene and perfectly judged. Parsnip write songs as a form of communion with the intangible in our increasingly delusory world, but there is always a gentle reminder; don’t take anything too seriously! “My head is gonna split in two, fix it with flour and glue” they demand on ultimate bop ‘Papier-Mâché’, this juxtaposition of mature resolve with childlike astonishment packs a more powerful punch.

On ‘Behold’, Parsnip explore both the inner and outer realms of consciousness with quick wits and some seriously quality jangle and jolt. ‘The Light’ is a whip smart workout, sprouting naturally from the propulsive nature of their debut album ‘When the Tree Bears Fruit’ (2019). ‘Placeholder’ is also devastatingly honest and channels The Field Mice as it buries itself like an arrow into your heart. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Monument
02. The Light
03. Duality
04. L.O.N.E.
05. Placeholder
06. Pockets
07. Unearthing
08. The Babble
09. Turn To Love
10. Clear Blue Sky
11. Swan Song
12. Papier Mache
13. Kutastha

The Pheromoans are tenants of an unruly domain. Over the last 18 years the group have evolved from garage rock primitivists to auteurs of their own curious sound; a frothy brew of loose electronics, refractory rock and humdrum musing. Their songs are mutable, capricious, unreliable narrations, often withholding as much as they reveal. Russell Walker’s understated vocal has always been the band’s unifying focus, it is wry, unsparing and wilfully honest. Walker’s lyrics are an observational tour de force, sometimes droll, yet often tipping over into unlikely pathos. With previous releases on Upset The Rhythm, Convulsive and Alter, 2024 will witness The Pheromoans return with lucky album number 13, entitled ‘Wyrd Psearch’ (out March 1st on Upset The Rhythm).

‘Wyrd Psearch’ was recorded in Lewes throughout 2023. This was undertaken by founding member James Tranmer, his keen instinct for how the band should sound shaping many of the creative decisions. Joined by new guitarist Henry Holmes, the five piece doubled down on a decidedly breezy, melodic approach. Scott Reeve’s drumming is ever brisk, whilst Daniel Bolger explores AOR peripheries on keyboard and bass. “Wyrd Psearch finds us on relatively zestful form” affirms Walker “whether it be merrily recalling the Jason Williamson / Tim Lovejoy Covid summit, or mentally bathing in the pleasures of lunch hours spent strapped to a listening post in Borders.” With The Pheromoans there is always a familiarity at play, only broken and reassembled, like a bygone sitcom gone rogue in your memory. This contributes to the group’s peculiarly British outsider perspective, one that shouts from the sidelines, but never goes unnoticed.

Subjects covered lyrically on ‘Wyrd Psearch’ include “mid-life crises, male pattern baldness, and thwarted artistic and personal ambitions” according to Walker himself. “Nothing is off limits for scrutiny, even rural arts communities” he concludes. Lead single ‘Downtown’ swings with chiming guitars and finds Walker mid-breakdown trying to persuade a loved one to accompany him into the town centre to collect controlled medication and wind back the clock to happier times. “I want to keep you in cotton wool until pay day” he confides. ‘Cropped to Death’ and ‘Father Austin’ are ruminative and more relaxed in nature, whilst ‘Twibbon Wife’ is a more energetic effort, all jabbed synth chords, circuitous basslines and rampant drum fills. ‘Faith in the Future’ similarly bounds along with reverie.

Walker claims that the album’s title is an expression of his frustration at the ubiquity of people claiming things are eerie or weird / wyrd in the present cultural milieu. The artwork for the record is designed as an actual word search too, a knowing nod to how we all grapple for meaning amongst the absurdity of each day. Leaning into ‘weird’ as a coping mechanism is not on The Pheromoans’ agenda however. This album holds little sway with the supernatural, it’s not enough. The overriding impression given by ‘Wyrd Psearch’ is of a band renewed with ideas. There’s no trouble finding the right words, they’re hitting their mark, keeping up with the commentary. ‘Wyrd Psearch’ is a document of The Pheromoans mastering their unquiet moment.

TRACK LISTING

01. A Brash Child
02. Downtown
03. Father Austin
04. The Inland Road
05. 00’s Wyrking
06. Twibbon Wife
07. Faith In The Future
08. It’s A Little Bit Different
09. General Mojo
10. Compound Shock
11. Cropped To Death
12. Pop-up Companion

Brontez Purnell has been making music since the ‘90s. The Southern-raised, Oakland-based American musician and writer has centered his queerness and Blackness in projects Gravy Train!!! and Younger Lovers as well as in his award-winning books ‘100 Boyfriends’ and ‘Since I Laid My Burden Down’. He is also a dancer, film maker and choreographer.

‘Bachelors Theme’ opens ‘Confirmed Bachelor’ and sets the scene perfectly with the heady, rush along swoon of it all. Jagged riffs, bubblegum bounce and Brontez’s vocal effortlessly racing to dizzying effect. “That's when I heard the doctor singing to me, "Son; you got all those boys in love, I wish I knew what you were saying to them. Their storming castles are coming for you!” It’s a tour de force of bop and bravado. This is what the album does so well, it sweeps you off your feet first, making its lyrical disclosures all the more affecting.

‘Rude Life’ begins in lilting, measured contemplation. “You're the rudest boy I know, and I've a real rude life” confesses Brontez as the violin laces through his vocal. This is all shook up at the halfway mark though when the adrenaline kicks in and the drums pummel. ‘Sky Opens Up’ similarly dials up the tumbling, careening clamour and energy buzz. ‘Hellish Banger’ is more of slow dance meets grunge reverie. The album also boasts an amazing spiraling auto-tuned cover of The Amps ‘Bragging Party’. ‘No Cigarettes / Stay Monkey’ is pulse-grabbing rally of unadorned declarations split into two fleeting sketches.

‘Hey Boy’ and ‘Boy With Butterfly Wings’ are more reflective in intent, both yearning and unapologetically poetic. In fact the little details observed in the lyrics across the whole album are quietly elegiac; winter nights, electric bills, ticking clocks and many allusions to hauntings only lending pathos to the lovedrunk / lovelorn axis of the record. ‘Confirmed Bachelor’ is a hot wonder, upbeat, witty and ever-lively only with a forlorn core, a resolute focus and defiant honesty. It’s a rare triumph, a record you can dance your Friday night away to, whilst the songs’ subtly work on your emotions from the inside out.

TRACK LISTING

01. Bachelor’s Theme
02. Hey Boy
03. Sky Opens Up
04. That Boy Is A Dead Cruiser
05. Hellish Banger
06. Bragging Party
07. Boy With Butterfly Wings
08. Winner Takes Nothing
09. Rude Life
10. No Cigarettes / Stay Monkey
11. Shaboolee

Melbourne/Naarm synth-punk five-piece screensaver return with ‘Decent Shapes’, their second album. ‘Decent Shapes’ is loaded with bubbling tension, a low grade but growing fever, a rising rage. The frustration is so tangible you can taste it. Detachment and dissociation become survivalist coping mechanisms.

Thematically, screensaver's latest offering finds them exploring existence on an ever-growing trash heap where we’re desperate for the new, the nice and the shiny. A world where materialism reigns supreme and corporate niceties litter the public dialogue but behind closed doors the sentiment is warlike, total domination is the only answer to the bottom line. All of which is underpinned by the band's sonic sense of urgency and a commitment to creating a sound that taps into the mood and spirit of post-punk whilst also allowing space for new wave elements and electronic experiments to shine through.

‘Decent Shapes’ was recorded and mixed by Julian Cue, who was also the recording engineer for Expressions of Interest. Defined by a kinetic energy, dynamic range and brooding atmosphere, the 10-track release comprises some tracks that were mainstays within the band's live shows - featuring in their US tour set-list - alongside others which were written later in the recording process. During the creation of ‘Decent Shapes’, the band also experimented with swapping instruments, allowing for different playing styles and song-writing approaches.

screensaver was formed in 2016 as a trans-Pacific project between Krystal Maynard (Bad Vision/ex Polo) and Christopher Stephenson (Spray Paint/Exek). Their debut album Expressions of Interest received support from the likes of Brooklyn Vegan, Beats Per Minute, DIY and Post-Trash and last September the band played a 12-date tour across the US.

TRACK LISTING

01. Red Lines
02. The Guilt
03. Party Interest
04. Future Trash
05. Drainer
06. Severance Pay
07. Direct Debit
08. Cancellation Notice
09. No Vacation
10. Signals

Returning once again via Geelong, Australia; Vintage Crop offer up their new single “Springtime”. With 2022’s “Kibitzer” album still looming large in the rear-view mirror, the band now speed ahead once more with this two-track seasonal treat.

“Springtime” exhibits the band’s growing strength in harmonic arrangement, whilst staying true to their taut roots - allowing the lyrics to shimmer. Following the arc of a relationship on the rocks and both people coming to terms with their situaEon, the song is a rare moment of vulnerability for the band that demonstrates their range. The flip side of the EP sees “Mercenary” deliver the sort of post-punk punch that fans have come to expect from the band. Brutish, brash & refusing to sit still; all the makings of a classic Vintage Crop number. Paired with lyrics exploring the online music scene, the track pokes fun at the “Internet Sound” that now dominates the underground. Springtime is a firm foot forward for Vintage Crop.

TRACK LISTING

Springtime
Mercenary

Water Machine is an office romance between Hando Morice (they/them), Flore de Hoog (she/her), Jimmy Gage (he/him) and Goda Ilgauskaitė (she/her). An unassuming supergroup formed out of Glasgow institutions including Goth GF, Passion Pusher, Brenda and Soursob, their sound careens between punk, country and alt-rock underpinned by the unique quality they call “Raw Liquid Power”.

Following last year’s self-titled demo tape on Gold Mold Records, and fresh off of shows with the likes of Holiday Ghosts, The Cool Greenhouse and The Orielles, as well as a rollicking Viagra Boys afterparty, the four-piece  release their highly-anticipated first studio effort ‘Raw Liquid Power’ on Upset The Rhythm.

The EP opens with a menacing, modulating synth melody. Gage’s guitar enters with a mighty bend before breaking into the chugging rhythm of ‘Water Machine Pt. 2’. This timely reminder to refill your water bottle - “don’t be late, hydrate!” less a wellness mantra than a threat - builds to a spacey outro with flashes of the art-punk weirdness of Suburban Lawns. ‘Stilettos’ marches on indignantly with a spiky riff punctuated by Ilgauskaitė’s cowbells. Staccato talk-singing tells a playful tale of stray cats following you home, but belies a darker subtext as the breakdown gives way to paranoid duelling guitars evoking The Fire Engines.

The anti-anthem ‘At the Drive In’ skewers joyless DIY crowds, reminiscent of much-missed Glasgow punks Breakfast Muff. Water Machine’s irrepressible sincerity can’t help but shine through in the final moments though, as jibes about “late night trade potential” give way to plaintive vocal harmonies. Morice tears public transport a new one on closer ‘Bussy’, a First Bus diss track bemoaning precarious employment amidst crumbling infrastructure. “That’s why I’m not on time!” they roar over de Hoog’s frantic, pounding bass, bringing the record to a skidding, screeching halt. 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
01. Water Machine Pt. II
02. Stilettos
SIDE B
03. At The Drive In
04. Bussy

Me Lost Me delights in experimenting with songwriting and storytelling, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully weave together disparate genres, drawing influence from folk, art pop, noise, ambient and improvised music. Hauntological in part, RPG is concerned with tales and with time - are we running out of it? Does insomnia cause a time loop? Do the pressures of masculinity prevent progress? Jayne Dent asks these questions and more on RPG, her homage to worldbuilding and the story as an artform, calling back to those oral traditions around a campfire, as well as modern day video games - bringing folk music into the present day as she does so.

Me Lost Me presents sound reaching in opposite directions, straddling time towards the archaic and timeless traditions of folktales, and towards the possible and potential futures of pastoral Britain and the world at large. Part speculation, part reminiscence, what results on the new album RPG is music that sounds ultimately displaced and yet omnipresent, adjacent to a hapless Vonnegut hero whose life is scattered throughout time and history, but full of wonder and curiosity rather than fear.

On track “The Oldest Trees Hold The Earth”, we see time stretched out between the branches of impossibly old beings in the woods. This track was co-written in Aarhus, Denmark with fellow Newcastle folk musician (with Danish heritage) Ditte Elly. The pair wordlessly passed a sheet of paper between each other to write the lyrics, inspired by Højbjerg and Mosegård, the woods they were sitting in. “How long should I wait/Before the moss grows?/On my skin, on my outstretched arms,” the lyrics are sung in a round, the close harmonies delicate and detailed.

A central thesis of this album is the joy of creation, something which is paid homage to in the album’s final track, “Science And Art” (Not because we need it to last/just because we needed to make it - so we invented the words/this language). It is also reflected in the definition that Jayne gives for “folk” itself. She comments, “To me, folk is quite an expansive idea. I think of it as creative work that's often made ad-hoc, with things that are at hand and more often than not it's born of a DIY ethos. It is songs and stories of the people, as in the traditional sense, but also creative coding, game design etc. Whatever outlet someone has for their creative expression could be described as folk. It's the things we make because humans need to make things, and the stories we tell about ourselves and the world around us.”

Crucially, on latest album RPG, Dent expands her songwriting and looks towards the unreal locations of worldbuilding in video games for inspiration. She comments, “I think the main similarity is the importance of a song's setting/environment to inform its narrative and textures, I'm often most inspired when out walking in the natural landscape, in cities and travelling to places I've never been before - the environment I'm in really impacts the work I make. While writing this album, however, I found myself inspired by imaginary landscapes, those in video games, paintings, etc. I was writing stories into these unreal locations instead. Even the songs inspired by real places, like The Oldest Trees Hold the Earth, have a very surreal quality to them in the songs, like they're being warped and turned into something not of this world. I think that's the main difference for me in terms of the thematic content and inspiration behind this album - I've been getting more and more interested in balancing surreal and fantastical environmental elements with ordinary and everyday settings.”

RPG upends the concept of the eternal return - we may be in the midst of inevitable repetition, but we tell stories whilst awaiting the passage of time.

TRACK LISTING

01. Real World
02. Eye Witness
03. Festive Day
04. Heat!
05. Mirie It Is While Summer I Last
06. The God Of Stuck Time
07. Side Quest
08. The Oldest Tree Holds The Earth
09. Collide
10. In Gardens
11. Until Morning
12. Science And Art

“Are we having fun yet? Living in the grey zone”? The Toads ask the question and already know the answer. There’s many a wry smile, often packed with gallows humour, shared on the Melbourne groups’ debut album “In the Wilderness” (out June 9th on Anti Fade and Upset The Rhythm). Navigating the dross of modern life, whilst keeping one foot in a dream is the key to their nervy post-punk scuffle. Featuring members of The Shifters, The Living Eyes and Parsnip you’d be forgiven for guessing what The Toads sound like, but their mordant step and minor-key enchantment makes for an intriguing parry.

The Toads hatched after a short period of domestic readjustment mid-2021. Billy Gardner (guitar) found himself in need of a roof after his home was consumed by fire, and was kindly hosted by friend Stella Rennex (bass). Elsie Retter (drums) was a regular visitor to the house and after seeing Miles Jansen (vocals) tear it up with his other band at the local bowls club, they invited him along to sprinkle his deadpan musings across their fledgling sound. Pretty quickly they hit on their direction; a savvy, snappy lo-fi pop as openhearted as it is brooding.

After playing some formative shows, including a debut at Jerkfest in 2022, The Toads set about recording five songs mid-year for a tentative EP. Realising the songs were too long to fit on a 7”, they booked in another recording session the following September to extend the EP to 12”. Two tracks’ chords structures were fleshed out with new melodies and arrangements, and by this point The Toads were surprised to find they had an album’s worth of material. ‘In The Wilderness’ is a beguiling record, full of twists and turns. It’s arch, resilient, thoughtful and straight-at-your-head catchy to boot.

It’s fitting that the title track “In The Wilderness” draws this record to a close, being the peak of their invention so far. Drums pound and tumbling bass-lines sprint among the crisply stabbing guitar phrases and soaring horns outro. It’s a survivalist epic of hard-worn wisdom, ambling and restless. “I open up the door trying to get all of us through” sings Miles, becoming progressively more dizzy and despondent. There is a sense of toughing it out that never falters though and this is the essence of what The Toads do best. They push onwards into the darkness and keep their appetite, pulling us all into the light.

TRACK LISTING

01. Nationalsville
02. Two Dozen Functions
03. Sacred Books And The Damage Done
04. Ex-KGB
05. Gimme Little More
06. The Wandering Soul
07. Tale Of A Town Split In Two
08. Sir Francis Drake
09. The Next Door
10. In The Wilderness

Call me Terry! It’s been a hot minute since we last heard from Terry, what’s he been up to? Five years on from their last album, ‘I’m Terry’, the Australian post-punk quartet proudly present their new record, ‘Call Me Terry’, for release on April 14th 2023.

Terry is made up of pairs Amy Hill & Al Montfort, and Xanthe Waite & Zephyr Pavey who started playing together for the fun of it in 2016. Seven years, four albums and three EP’s later, Terry is ready to pick up the phone again. Over the past few years Terry have kept themselves busy - but not only with Terry things. On top of numerous releases with alternating side projects (Constant Mongrel, The UV Race, Primo!, Sleeper & Snake, Chateau, Rocky, the list goes on… ) members of Terry have moved interstate, undertaken studies, had children and started new fields of work.

Terry began sharing the demos for ‘Call Me Terry’ online with each other in 2020 - as we all did - before getting together in 2021 at their trusty rehearsal space to record the beds. Overdubs were completed at Terry’s homes over the following year. Lyrically, in true Terry fashion, the record wastes no time in scrutinising Australia’s corrupt, colonial history. They sing it loud and sprawl it across the jacket of this record, highlighting the greed, privilege and entitlement of white, wealthy “Australia” which they won’t stand a second for.
Musically, ‘Call Me Terry’ still has the classic Terry sound; the four vocals singing as one gang, sharp guitars and quirky, burbling synths, the rolling bass and drums, all amidst their clever, dancey pop songs. Since day dot it’s been hard to reference a band that really sounds like Terry, which is always amazing. Truly a sound of their own!

But the sugar on top here may just be some of their finest horn, string and piano performances to date - all of which never feel crowded, cluttered or over-involved. More just excellent, necessary melodies. Rest assured Al still gives his famed Fuzz Factory a workout - and throws his tremolo into the pedal chain. It goes off. Tremolo is the order of the day for Amy and Xanthe too who also embrace the wobble, whilst Zephyr keeps the pulse of their politico-pop anchored.

Terry isn’t afraid to call the shots and Terry isn’t afraid to point the finger. Listen to what Terry has to say.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Bright, blistering melodies and perfect vocal harmonies ride atop Terry's unmistakeable cheery post-punk groove. Bringing to mind the lighter side of Joanna Gruesome, but with an off-kilter electronic sway.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
01. Miracles
02. Centuries
03. Gold Duck
04. Balconies
05. Market
SIDE B
06. Golden Head
07. Gronks
08. Jane Roe
09. Excuses
10. Days

Historically Fucked is a four way entanglement made to create short, eruptive songs and then set about obliterating them from the inside, like improvising a barrel to encase themselves in and then proceeding to lick their way out of it. It is about playing and laughing at playing, and it is about not doing either of those things sometimes. Sometimes it is to do with talking, howling or grunting, and sometimes it is to do with hitting and rubbing.

Historically Fucked contains four people, who each share the same duties, and whose names in sequence are Otto Willberg, David Birchall, Greta Buitkuté and Alecs Pierce. They are from Manchester and often other places. Guitar, bass, drums and voices keenly jostle amid the group’s frenzy of spontaneous rock throttles. Some of these rampant exercises in avant are collected on ‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’, the band’s new album, released by Upset The Rhythm on February 3rd. This is the group’s first release since 2018’s mantlepiece staple ‘Aliven Wool’ (Heavy Petting). This is Rock and/or Roll as fertilizer, uncivilised and free, as if one were to imagine what the Plastic Ono Band would’ve hit upon if they had read ‘Riddley Walker’, the sound of an entire timeline of expression put back together back-to-front, misshapen and irradiated.

‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’ is not mere Sedentary Rock but Blasted Basalt, Frog worshipping cave-funk, harmolodic hullabaloo-wop, a musical game of “badger in the bag”. It is the sound of sacks crammed full of aggregate, a chimerical mind-meld, a seductive din that is to a hound dog in blue suede shoes what a raking of the dorsal fin with a fat marrow pinecone is to a pelican in the midst of being fired from the academy.

‘The Mule Peasants’ Revolt of 12,067’ by Historically Fucked was recorded by Rory Salter, mixed by Otto Willberg and mastered by Mikey Young. The liminally worrisome artwork was painted by John Cobweaver.

“They say these days that History is Fucked. Nothing ever dies but continues to rule the earth as an undead tyrant that cannot accept its own decomposition, look earwardly upon the dance of the proudly dead and decrepit!”

Vymethoxy Redspiders, Leeds 2022

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
01. The Mule Peasants’ Revolt Of 12,067
02. Lumic Screed (lynx To The Masters 1 By 1)
03. Dismal Abject
04. Seven Eggs For Seven Sisters
05. I Could Not Look In My Lung
SIDE B
06. The Greasy Wheels Of Industry
07. Donkeys Subjected To Indignity
08. Twelve-stool Dad

Shake Chain have been busy demolishing audiences and expectations for the best part of three years. Vocalist Kate Mahony sets that standard by starting each live performance by crawling from the back of the room through a disbelieving crowd’s legs in a shiny yellow raincoat. The resulting questions that frantically arise of ‘what’s going on?’, ‘am I hallucinating?’ and ‘is this part of the show?’ are hallmarks of how Shake Chain approach making their unruly, lyric-bespattered rock music.

The four-piece from London are completed by Robert Syres (guitar, synth), Chris Hopkins (bass, synth) and Joe Fergey (drums), all artists hailing from Goldsmiths College, Nottingham Trent and Wimbledon, University of the Arts. A mutual love of thought-provoking performance art and a yearning for disruption have helped Shake Chain lock into their wayward sound. Twitchy guitar lines jolt and jerk, synths burble noisily and tack-sharp drums pin things down for Kate’s reeling vocal to vault and slur. Kate’s singing has drawn comparisons with Yoko Ono, Su Tissue and even a seance with it’s unique embrace of flights of atonal fancy, head-first repetition and ecstatic frenzy. Opinion-dividing arguably, but singular in making Shake Chain dauntingly brilliant.

Shake Chain’s debut album ‘Snake Chain’ was recorded in the New Forest’s Chuckalumba Studios early in 2022. The tranquil setting only slightly skewed by the intense extratropical cyclone occuring outside. When asked to sum up the album the group collectively settled on it sounding like “crying in a Catholic sex dungeon with Eastenders on”, perhaps only half tongue in cheek given the soapy dramatics of opening track ‘Stace’. ‘RU’ is a stompy triumph of ad lib monotony, heavy and wonky, its vocal slowly unwinding into residual sense. Shake Chain’s songs are populated with cowboys, cherry-pickers, content-addicts, private investments, a careless driver called Mike, architects and by much lamentation at the state of our confusing existencies. This last point underlined in luminous marker pen with slow-building vortex ‘Highly Conpeptual’ and whispered closer ‘Duck’.

‘Copy Me’ races along with radiant headbangs of dynamic abandon, one part tumble, two parts pummel, “hold your breath til something changes” commands Kate whilst everything of course is in hammering flux. ‘Second Home’ is similarly coruscating yet bouyant, whilst ‘Arthur’ feels like it could tear inside in two amid sobbing wails and the twining of its disparate parts. Throughout all the unhinged freakouts, found sounds and blasting rhythms though is Kate’s questioning, resilient presence, anchoring everything. On bruising creeper ‘Birthday’ she asks most tellingly “Do we speak language or does language speak us? Is there a mouth in the middle of the desert? Do you ask how cups are designed? Would you say yes when you really mean I don’t know”? Shake Chain are cathartic and absurd, humorous and deadly serious yet always inspired. Its this tightrope walk which makes their album such a thrilling, vital listen.

TRACK LISTING

01. Stace
02. RU
03. Copy Me
04. Birthday
05. Cavalry
06. Highly Conceptual
07. Mike
08. Second Home
09. Arthur
10. Architecture
11. Internet
12. Duck

Geelong’s favourite sons Vintage Crop return with their much-anticipated fourth album, ‘Kibitzer’. Running with the ball that 2020’s “Serve To Serve Again” punted forward, this album marks another energetic break towards the goal for Vintage Crop. ‘Kibitzer’ sees the band define their field of play, more melodic at times, still bruising, forever droll. These ten tracks of ‘snappy as elastic’ Australian punk are packed with tensile riffage, hefty beats and witty refrains of everyman curiosity.

‘Kibitzer’ was written in quick response to their critically lauded ‘Serve To Serve Again’ album. Harsh guitars, a brutish rhythm section and a knack for always having the right words at hand are still abundant, but this time Vintage Crop’s songs expand upon their forceful nature with greater harmonic arrangement. It was recorded by Jasper Jolley in one single session on a former apple orchard in Geelong, a backdrop that mirrors the band’s own organic growth whilst highlighting their willingness to approach capturing their own sound their own way. The album was then mixed and mastered by Mikey Young.

‘Kibitzer’ delves into themes of identity, resilience and acceptance; some of the more upbeat notions that the band have dealt with to date. ‘Casting Calls’ opens the record, slamming through the speakers with gusto and setting the tone for the following 30 minutes. “It’s rolling, we’re rolling, we’re winding back the tape, we’re getting better with each take” sings lead songwriter Jack Cherry. Accepting your limitations and taking pride in your work are key themes on ‘Kibitzer’. In fact ideas around learning, growing and being able to take things in your stride are strongly felt through their entire body of work. These themes hit home with the album’s title too, with Cherry feeling that ‘Kibitzer’ is an apt way to describe a lot of the band’s focus. “I feel like a lot of our lyrics over the years have been our unsolicited opinions on other people’s situations, the very definition of the word Kibitzer. So for this record we wanted to lean into that tendency by acknowledging it and even go as far as stamping it on the album cover.”

Musically the band have expanded their palette on this album; exploring a world of rhythmic harmony and a newfound vocal melodicism. There’s also greater lyrical elaboration and considered song structures at play. ‘The Duke’ is a mob of rollicking chants and heavy hitting, catchy to the core. ‘The Bloody War’ is a more sanguine reflection of tumbling drums, struck chords and shrill keyboard warble. “He’s got the keys to the universe and they’re hanging from his belt loop, his wit is as quick as lightning, his disapproving gaze is the thunder that follows” pipes Cherry on ‘Double Slants’, guitars chiming through the hubbub. ‘Hold The Line’ turns the wry amusement of dealing with cold callers into a fidgety anthem of knowing frustration. Whilst ‘Switched Off’ even welcomes the introduction of horns (courtesy of Heidi Peel) to the group’s repertoire, ushering in an unexpected serenity into their tough sound. 

TRACK LISTING

Side A
01. Casting Calls
02. The Duke
03. Double Slants
04. Hold The Line
05. Impact Of Wisdom
Side B
06. Drafted
07. The Bloody War
08. 2K Hip Pocket
09. Under Offer
10. Switched Off

Naarm/Melbourne 4-piece screensaver is back with a double A-side 7-inch single just 6-months after delivering their 10-track debut album Expressions of Interest on Upset the Rhythm (UK) and Heavy Machinery (AU) to positive international response.

The band return with two distinctly different tracks that extend upon the blend of post-punk, new wave and synth-punk on their debut.

Side A, Clean Current is a burst of high-energy: nervy guitars and groovy bass underpinned with krautrock drums and cosmic synth noise, overlayed with delay heavy vocals. Repeats is the flipside of the coin, a moody post-punk stomper, led by gritty sawtooth synth, chorus-soaked guitar, textural percussion and soaring vocals. Lyrically Clean Current spits out retorts aimed at the engulfing nature of anxiety whilst Repeats critiques the repetition of modern life, languishing human existence.

TRACK LISTING

01. Clean Current
02. Repeats

Clear History’s debut mini-album is entitled 'bad advice good people' and will be released by Upset The Rhythm on November 5th. The six songs here cast a huge net across themes of raucous opposition, identity, closeness, gifting and exploding cars. They are a full-hearted call to arms from a stubborn Aries concerned with wasting time and energy. With such rapport for the touchstones of danceable post-punk (ESG, Kleenex, Gang of Four) Clear History are proud hi-hat botherers, bounding along with the plummy bassline, joining the dots whilst thinking to the beat. This debut documents the tantalising first sparks from a band intent on holding up a magnifying glass to the sun.

Their influences include correct grammar, Rihanna & ‘The Waiting Room’ by Fugazi. They make muscular songs about intimacy whilst dreaming of an extravagant breakfast the day after the rapture. What will the dance floors look like over there? What music will ring true and make the people move? Clear History are giving this their full attention!

STAFF COMMENTS

Laura says: Great angular post punk grooves from Berlin. I'm liking this a lot.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Solar Death Ray
2. Song In The Key Of Emo
3. Presents

SIDE B
4. Morsels
5. Bad Advice Good People
6. The Mall

Bertie Marshall is a writer/ performer. He is also an acclaimed memoirist, most well known for his book ‘Berlin Bromley’ (2006) about his transformation from Bertie, an anxious, androgynous, depressed teenager, into Berlin, a teenager who would reject suburban values and become a founding member of punk’s ‘Bromley Contingent’, alongside Siouxsie Sioux, Steven Severin and Billy Idol.

Upset The Rhythm release ‘Exhibit’ by Bertie Marshall, collecting for the first time his songs and spoken word tracks from this fertile period of the 80s-90s.

He’s currently working on ‘Looking: Backwards To Go Forwards’, picking up from where ‘Berlin Bromley’ left off. His other books include the debut novel ‘Psychoboys’ (1997), ‘Nowhere Slow’ (2014), ‘From Sleepwalking to Sleepwalking’ (2016), ‘Wild - re write’ (2017), ‘The Peeler’ (2018) and ‘Pete’s Underpants’ (2019). In 2015 the British Library purchased his writing archive.

From 1980-83, Bertie was the frontman for post-punk boundary-pushers Behaviour Red - they released one single (favourably played by John Peel), did a mini-tour and broke up. At various times Behaviour Red featured Noel Blanden of Normil Hawaiians and fine artist Nicola Tyson. Their sound was characterised by looseness and freedom, boasting at times tribal drumming, streams of vocals, dazed guitars and feedback. Bertie continued sketching out atmospheric compositions afterwards too, walking a tightrope between bewildered pop and gothic folk. Central to everything is Bertie’s commanding voice; heartfelt, impassioned and masterfully leading you through the story.

Bertie became interested in spoken word and performance poetry in the 90s, which then led him into writing and performing in his own plays and devised theatre pieces. He did regular readings and performances in NYC and began writing books inspired by the visceral talents of Acker & Burroughs. Having lived in Berlin, San Francisco, and Brittany, Bertie now lives in London. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Ke Ke Ke Ke Ke Ya
2. Talk To Tapestries
3. The World Is Round
4. The Old Man Carrying A Black Bag Is In Their Garden
5. Chihuahua Talking Dog
6. St Mar
7. Meshes Over Morning
8. Offerings
9. Sang Sang
10. Shaking Johnny
11. The Tattoo Breathes
12. Little Red Sports Car
13. Commit To Fire
14. Authoress

‘Dark World’ collects together choice material from Normil Hawaiians’ formative early years of 1979-1981. Tagging along with the band from their peppy post-punk origins (so brilliantly debuted on ‘The Beat Goes On’) into the looser, dubbier territories that laid the foundations for the group’s landmark album ‘More Wealth Than Money’.

‘Dark World’ gathers the group’s energetic 7” singles on Dining Out and Illuminated Records, their metamorphic ‘Gala Failed’ EP (Red Rhino) and a lively last-minute Peel session from 1980, alongside outtakes, rarities and demos.

During this feverish time, founding member Guy Smith was motivated to make music that reveled in always trying out different things. Normil Hawaiians was a very fluid ensemble at this point, Guy often accompanied by Kev Armstrong and Jim Lusted encouraged saxophones, violins, synths, pianos and a select pack of female backing singers to take their post-punk sound into wilder directions. One of the earliest line-ups of Normil Hawaiians featured a 15-year old Janet Armstrong on vocals alongside Guy, ‘Ventilation’ best showcases her deadpan digressions. Janet went on to sing alongside David Bowie a few years later on his breathtaking mid-80’s gem ‘Absolute Beginners’. By this point Kev Armstrong was also guesting for Bowie on guitar duties too.

Another guest to join the ranks of Normil Hawaiians during this fertile time of cross-pollination was Bertie Marshall (aka Berlin of the proto-punk Bromley Contingent). ‘Sang Sang’ is a good example of how he was inspired to deliver his poetic treatises over the band’s atmospheric, floating improvisations. Bertie’s impressionistic influence helped the group uncouple further from rock tropes, as they became restless and more rhythmically-focused. ‘Still Obedient’ fidgets, soars and careens across the dancefloor, “if you’re ahead close your eyes, you won’t notice the subtitles” chants Guy.

By the end of this transformative two years Normil Hawaiians had spun an exceptional chrysalis around themselves. The dark world surrounding wouldn’t win out, they’d eaten-up the music and grown continuously, wrote and recorded rapidly, covered Zappa & even David Lynch and could feel the light beginning to shine through. ‘Dark World’ is a snapshot of a band in flux, finding their feet, stretching their limbs. Normil Hawaiians cover an awful amount of ground in such a short time-frame on this record and these tracks document all the glittering debris from their magpie’s nest. Emergent, hopeful and resistant in sound and ethic.

TRACK LISTING

LP Tracklisting:
01. Dark World
02. Coincidence
03. The Beat Goes On
04. Ventilation
05. In Heaven
06. Uncle Green Genes (Peel Session)
07. Memories (Peel Session)
08. Levels Of Water
09. Obedience
10. Sang Sang
11. The Return
12. Party Party
13. Still Obedient
14. Should You Forget
+ (8 Bonus Tracks Included On Download Card Too)

CD Tracklisting:
01. Dark World
02. The Beat Goes On (demo Version)
03. Coincidence
04. I Wanna
05. In Heaven
06. The Beat Goes On (7” Single Version)
07. Ventilation
08. Outside
09. Levels Of Water (Peel Session)
10. Uncle Green Genes (Peel Session)
11. Memories (Peel Session)
12. The Beat Goes On (Peel Session)
13. Obedience
14. Levels Of Water
15. Sang Sang
16. The Return
17. Party Party
18. Still Obedient
19. Should You Forget
20. Exhibit
21. I Feel Like
22. In Buttered Pieces

‘Expressions of Interest’ is the debut album from Melbourne/Naarm post-punk group screensaver.

Sonically, the 10 track album is rich and detailed, and pays homage to its era of inspiration (late 70s-mid 80s post-punk and new wave) with gripping vocals, dissonant guitar, melodic basslines, washes of synths and motorik drumming. Engineered by Julian Cue alongside band member Chris Stephenson and recorded over multiple studio sessions between 2020-2021

The album opens with the ominously titled ‘Body Parts’, an immediately arresting song that showcases the bands penchant for blending classic post-punk elements, leaning into a sound somewhere between the Banshees and Protomartyr.

Maynard doubles down on these themes in the frenetic second track, ‘No Movement’. Guttural organ tones swim under overdriven guitar, jagged and intense. Additional textures and sound effects are used percussively to embellish the dynamics, creating a feverish atmosphere with some Martin Hannett like flourishes.

The album takes a surprising turn into electronic driven krautrock on track three with 'Buy, Sell, Trade' - a rollicking piece of danceable ephemera, dominated by swirling synth sounds and punctuated with electronics reminiscent of Sparks/Moroder collaborations. Chris Stephenson's masterful guitar work begins with Greg Sage-esque determination before a crescendo into a lush Frippertronics outro.

'MEDS' transports us back to the foundation established on 'Body Parts', a gothy piece, full of tribal toms and dirge-y synths. Industrial punk rock nearly swallowed whole by the keys in the middle and slowly building back to complimentary guitar and vocal hooks.

It's from this point in the album that the band let's their other influences rise to the surface, as they explore touches of EDM on 'Static State' - a brutal, death-disco style track, Krystal Maynard's lead synth and gloomy vocal complimenting the pounding drums and dub-esque bass line culminating in a track worthy of the dancefloor.

Opening side two we have 'Skin', beginning with a solid and simple backbeat, James Beck’s post-punk percussion provides a steady and minimal framework for the rest of the band to colour in with great depth and detail. Giles Fielke’s bass guitar wobbles brilliantly leading the verse melody, whilst Chris Stephenson’s guitar drives the chorus that folds neatly in on itself.

In ‘Attention Economy’, Krystal Maynard is flexible with her lyrical style, and knows how and when to lend her voice to the greater backdrop of the composition. ‘Attention Economy’ has an almost Kraftwerkian structure - repetitious, but engaging with its constant tom driven beat, lush synth lines and minimal bass tones.

Just when you thought things had slowed down, screensaver ramp things right back up again with ‘Overnight Low’ - a no holds barred thumper. Giles Fielke underpins the hard-edged sound with his bassline, keeping things smooth and tight. It brings to mind a hybrid of PiL’s ‘Annalisa’ and Wire’s ‘Two People In a Room.’

Before you can catch your breath, we have ‘Regular Hours’ - another industrial track, and perhaps the sister song to ‘Static State’ heard earlier on side one. Seething electronic drum samples cut through an abyss of growling synths, Giles Fielke hanging up the bass temporarily to accompany Krystal Maynard on synth duties.

The album closes with the fittingly titled ‘Soft Landing’, literally bringing the listener back down...softly. The song is heavy on atmos, and resembles the aesthetics previously encountered on ‘Attention Economy’ a few tracks earlier.

‘Expressions of Interest” was recorded at various locations across Melbourne, with a handful of songs being captured before the start of the Covid pandemic in January 2020. With the recording timeline being drastically altered, the band shifted focus to work on what would become their first single ‘Strange Anxiety’, throughout the first months of the Melbourne 2020 lockdown. 

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
01. Body Parts
02. No Movement
03. Buy, Sell, Trade
04. MEDS
05. Static State

SIDE B
06. Skin
07. Attention Economy
08. Overnight Low
09. Regular Hours
10. Soft Landing

BUFFET LUNCH are a Scottish group who make it their mission to craft satisfyingly imperfect pop songs filled with imagery and humour.The group’s elementary parts are Perry O’Bray (Vocals/Keys/Guitar), Neil Robinson (Bass), John Muir (Lead Guitar) & Luke Moran (Drums), united by a shared love of music on the ABBA-to-Beefheart axis.

These four ricochet between Glasgow and Edinburgh, creating music that bristles with DIY spirit and upbeat wonkiness. Their tracks are vigorous excursions, meandering into clattersome terrain as often as hiking up into the breezy, melodious foothills.The desire to lead the listener along a curious tale helps tie things together, showcasing a lyrical playfulness that pins down their puzzle of sound.

Having been an active band for a few years, playing regularly north of the border with like-minds such as Irma Vep, Robert Sotelo and Kaputt, Buffet Lunch spent early 2020 working on the follow-up to their two EPs on Permanent Slump.The fruits from such labour bore out as the band’s debut album ‘ThePower of Rocks’, out may 7th on Upset The Rhythm.

‘ThePower of Rocks’ was recorded in a Crofters cottage/studio on the banks of Upper Loch Fyne in Argyll, over four nights and five days at the beginning of March 2020, before Covid-19 made itself such an ongoing concern. Back then four people could occupy the same space and make music, lunch and dinner together. Days fell into a pattern of long sessions and long meals.The album came together as a luminous mix of Buffet Lunch’s live chestnuts, some sparky recent songs and some new material entirely written and recorded in situ. All tracks were recorded by Neil Robinson acting as the in-house engineer.

As the seriousness of the virus and talk of national lockdowns developed - there was a feeling of anticipation more than fear in the air, but being holed up in cottage in a wild corner of Scotland surrounded by snowy mountains still took on an apocalyptic feel, albeit an apocalypse where the band were safe and overdubbing vocals. After leaving the cottage, reality (as it must) set in and finishing the album became a more remote task.

Over the following months, an extended period of listening awarded the recordings a deeper realisation, as they bounced between band members computers. Perry also started writing on his Casio keyboard and collaborated on a couple of songs (‘Ten Times’ & ‘Ashley’s New Haircut’) with Jayne Dent (of electronic music project Me Lost Me), drawing on her ethereal singing voice as a counterpoint to his own more ‘spoken’ vocals on the album. These gauzy, dreamlike tracks were then sent to other members of Buffet Lunch to add their respective parts, creating evocative new dimensions to close each half of the album with.

The Power of Rocks’ rattles along like a short-story collection, exploring a variety of narratives. When it comes to the music itself, Perry describes their approach as “see what happens” but admits to a preference for simple synth melodies, plenty of percussion, and prickly guitar-parts. ‘Red Apple’ opens the album with a dizzy swagger, guitars and keyboard notes swirling in forays whilst its lyric tackles notions of social bravado. ‘Orange Peel’ follows equally serpentine with its blattering tune and jagged, yet jolly melodic twists.The themes across the album are wide-ranging and personal, from irritation with out of touch politicians (‘Pebbledash’), to love letters to seaside living (‘Bladderwrack’), to even the frailty and confusion of old age (‘Said Bernie’, ‘It Helps to Know’). Title track ‘ThePower of Rocks’ is an ode to the power of nature sunk within a rolling wave of cheery jangle. “Do you believe in the power of rocks when the sun is too hot on your face?” sings Perry as the song zigzags with consequence. ‘He Wore Two Hats’ sports similarly bop-worthy riffs and addictive nods as it deals with its story of savvy man who’d bitten off more than he could chew.

Buffet Lunch’s debut album accomplishes a lot in its brief 38 minutes. It stuns and startles, intrigues and entwines, drawing the listener further into its characterful world. When asked about any intent posed with this debut record Perry confides that “we hope people can hear the joy the band had making the album and the curiosity and frustration that went into the writing. There was no process or design, but there is detail, and deliberateness in our wish to explore and create.” It’s this attentive focus alongside a keen sense of humour that really sets Buffet Lunch apart, with ideas darting wilfully to and from the poignant truths at hand.

TRACK LISTING

01. Red Apple
02. Orange Peel
03. Pebbledash
04.ThePower Of Rocks
05. Bladderwrack
06. Ten Times
07. Looking At Liz Talent’s Chair
08. Said Bernie
09. Helps To Know (Time Moves)
10. He Wore Two Hats
11. Ashley’s New Haircut

Vintage Crop serve to serve again. Over the last four years the Geelong group have become a burgeoning force in the Australian punk scene. Their burly, brusque yet supple songs have evolved from the garage rock of 2017’s ‘TV Organs’ album into the post-punk panic attack of last year’s ‘Company Man’ EP. Now they’ve sculpted their sound further, the barrage now offset with robust songwriting, their full-pelt bounce tempered with flailing guitar lines and sardonic commentary. Bringing to mind Wire tackling tracks from early 7”s by The Yummy Fur, it’s an inspired approach, both striking and effortlessly mirthful. Vintage Crop still dish-up plenty of commanding stomp, their lyrics remain as keen-eyed as ever, but now they’re unafraid to mess with the tempo and drive their point home.

‘Serve To Serve Again’ is Vintage Crop’s third full-length album. It was recorded by Mikey Young after a year of playing solid shows, including tours in Europe and the UK alongside Louder Than Death and URSA and some of the band’s biggest shows to date in Australia with Amyl & The Sniffers, R.M.F.C. and The Stroppies.

This allowed Vintage Crop to nail the songs live before committing them to tape, pulling and pushing ideas, stretching them into new-found territories. ‘First In Line’ races off the blocks with its sawtooth riff and splintered beat, all jagged edges and ragged vocals. Quickly follow a pair of totemic bruisers in the guise of ‘The Ladder’ and ‘The North’, both brimming with a nigh anthemic quality, confident in their faculty to rouse the rabble. ‘Jack’s Casino’ is a lurching romp about gambling, ‘Streetview’ is similarly propellent, only choosing to meander and divert itself with cryptic trips around the neighbourhood: “He only moved to that side of town because the postcode is worth it’s weight in gold”.

There’s no better poised nod to frustration than ‘Gridlock’ - “the hustle and bustle of inner-city traffic is driving me nuts because the radios on static”. Guitar lines entwine and wriggle wildly free from the song’s pouncing rhythm and potent vocal, making for the most vigorous of rackets. ‘Just My Luck’ prowls with a shared thrumming verve, whilst ‘Everyday Heroes’ closes out the album with measured flair. Skewed and fervent, rangy at times yet always assured in its intent ‘Serve To Serve Again’ is long-legged leap for Vintage Crop into the delirious now. These songs strive to make sense of futility, they criticise the chain of command, question privilege and most importantly make us want more from life. Now all we have to do is turn up the volume!

TRACK LISTING

01. First In Line
02. The Ladder
03. The North
04. No Praise
05. Jack’s Casino
06. Streetview
07. Serve Again
08. Gridlock
09. Life And Times
10. Just My Luck
11. Tension
12. Everyday Heroes

THE GREEN CHILD is the once long-distance, now based in the same house recording project of Raven Mahon (furniture maker and former member of Grass Widow) and Mikey Young (recording engineer and band member of Total Control, Eddy Current Suppression Ring). The duo draw their spectral pop sound from an illusory past as much as they stalk into pastures new. Broadly retro-futuristic in scope, verdant acres of lushly evocative synthesizers and vintage drum machines underpin most of The Green Child’s upbeat yet decidedly uncanny songs. Raven's calmly scenic and measured vocal flits like a will-o'-the-wisp throughout the tracks, proffering a guiding hand as she walks us through the often eerie electronic concoctions. With the advent of Raven moving from California to live with Mikey in Australia, The Green Child was reborn in the basement studio of their beachy, house on stilts in the seaside town of Rye, just an hour south of Melbourne on the Mornington Peninsula. This change of circumstances for the duo resulted in the band’s new album ’Shimmering Basset’ sounding more assured and auspicious than their self-titled debut of 2018.

With ideas permitted the time to grow and develop close at hand, the group were able to realise the whole record as a body of work, tying together themes, meeting challenges. Raven explains further, “it feels more cohesive because over the year or so in which we wrote these songs I started to feel a desire to take the lyric writing part more seriously… my head is rooted in this new place now and that’s settled into the songwriting.” The songs collected on ‘Shimmering Basset’ are concerned with life after relocation and deal with distance and staying connected. ‘Shimmering Basset’ also concerns itself with the subjects of transport, escape, the centering of home, humanity in the performative news arena and the idea of time being a beast, animate and hungry.

TRACK LISTING

01. Fashion Light
02. Low Desk: High Shelf
03. Dreamcom
04. Tony Bandana
05. Health Farm
06. Witness
07. Smart Clothes
08. The Installation
09. Resurrection
10. Double Lines

While Sleeper & Snake pairs up the great Al Montfort (Total Control, The UV Race, Dick Diver) and Amy Hill (Primo!, Constant Mongrel), who’ve both found themselves in league as band mates in Terry, this album isn’t quite the pop pairing that it seems on the surface. Accompanying the strums, jangles, and geniality there’s also present offbeat electronics and free jazz fizz.
Sleeper & Snake are Amy Hill and Al Montfort. As members of Terry and innumerable other vital acts from the Aus-underground, you might be expecting some strummy pop slap from this relatively new project, but Sleeper & Snake is a more subtle, intriguing and experimental endeavour. Homespun vignettes of warbled keyboards, fizzed improv interludes, shifting layers of skewed harmony and wistful yet pointed lyrical pep is their measure. The duo still lock into a mordant lo-fi mode but there’s a delicacy at play here too with cello, harmonica and even sarangi being employed in the foundation of these frothy concoctions of outsider folk and post punk hodgepodge.

Following on from last year’s ‘Junction and High’ debut, new album ‘Fresco Shed’ unfurls with the same floating free atmosphere. The record launches with an uncanny field recording before being drawn onward by the coalescing alto and tenor saxophones of ‘Miracles’. ‘Flats Falling’ is a crystalline assembly of cello, drum machine and plucky bass which freewheels around, curlicues of sax sparking off amid the duo’s matter-of fact vocal parade: “Disclaimer, disclaimer, disclaimer. The place has a curse.” Deceptively catchy and barbed with hooks, Hill & Montfort stick to their strengths with this first single from the album. Comparably buoyant, ‘Shoot Through’ also conceals inner depths in wraiths of wild melody and memory. It’s never as comfortable a listen as you first think with Sleeper & Snake.

‘Rokeby’ is more of a serenade into the wind, showcasing the duo’s love of alliterative wordplay: “wish I would wake, wake up in the wash, wish for fail, wish for friends”. ‘Reach Out’ strolls down a similar path, only pursued by bursts of Wurlitzer: “reach out for rent and riddle more, riddle with rats, keep your cards racked.” Hill and Montfort’s vocals are mirrored in unity but still retain their ability to wrong-foot expectation. For instance, ‘Lock Up The Loose’ is reminiscent of a cosmic, country ballad, only written for a children's party. The song’s jejune delivery belying lyrical concerns around the notion of incarceration.

‘Fresco Shed’ takes its title from a line in tremulous, keyboard ponderance ‘Lady Painter’, a track that spins its ‘colour wheel’ around ‘paupers in palaces’ and ‘farmers full of feeling’. An acoustic guitar and cello mark the decentred rhythm here, in contrast to the clustering synth-lines and sax breezes that tangle throughout ‘Piles’. An interplay of saxophones alone builds ‘New Togs’ heady ambience, with multiple horns weaving through each other’s reverb trail, this is dauntless, spry music, no resting on laurels allowed. ‘Declare’ closes the album with a whirl of melodies that stretch to their limits before vanishing into thin air. Like the best magic trick, it’s over in the wink of an eye and you can’t see how they got there. ‘Fresco Shed’ is transportive, ludic, humane and homemade, ruminative and resourceful. It’s an album that’s as light on its feet as it’s heavy with meaning, a total triumph of substance over style from an endlessly creative duo determined on surprising all (themselves included) with each new song.

TRACK LISTING

01. Miracles
02. Flats Falling
03. Rokeby
04. Lady Painter
05. Piles
06. Shoot Through
07. Lock Up The Loose
08. New Togs
09. Reach Out
10. Declare

First new music from the renowned post-punk group Normil Hawaiians since 1985.
A pressing of 500 copies only for the world.

When Upset The Rhythm released Normil Hawaiians’ lost album ‘Return Of The Ranters’ back in 2015, the band members got back in touch with each other after a 30 year break and starting playing music together again. Out of this the group played a launch show for the album and followed that up with more concerts, including an appearance at Supernormal, a residency at the Edinburgh Festival, gigs at Cafe OTO and supporting Richard Dawson in London too. They even recently toured Greece in support of having all three of their renowned exploratory post-punk albums finally back in print.

Throughout this time, Normil Hawaiians revisited their original songs for these live performances. However for a group always so interested in evolving their sound and seeking nuance, it comes as no surprise that they shirked the idea of a faithful retread of old material in favour of reimagining their songs. The group experimented by pushing their songs into new inventive dimensions, still progressive at heart, but now imbued with a cosmic uncanny. A cinematic, even pastoral approach that was always quietly present has come to the fore. The quaint weirdness of folk song, the humanity of communal practice and the group’s ecological mindedness have all found a place in Normil Hawaiians’ current sound world. With this conducive atmosphere brewing, the band’s first new songs in decades started to emerge.

Being far-flung across the UK, the Family Hawaii encamped to Tayinloan, a small village on the west coast of the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland with the intention of recording new music. They set up their own studio in an isolated, windswept house overlooking the sea and started the tape rolling. Noel Blanden from the band explains how the spirit of the location was such an inspiration to the group during this initial recording session: “Our time immersed in the place and the unique energy it generated in us allowed us to write ‘In The Stone’. It goes right back to our first album, this need to document experience before it passes over and eludes us. We were grabbing at the musical ether and letting it shape itself through the band.” From loose, improvised sessions and reflective periods of listening in Tayinloan, Normil Hawaiians captured the moment. ‘In The Stone’ is a motorik thrill of distorted guitars, locked rhythms and morphic resonance. Guy Smith is joined by Zinta Egle on vocals, skilfully sharing lyrics informed by Alan Garner and Nigel Kneale’s ideas around recurring events being linked to place and historical artefact; a kind of residual haunting known as ‘Stone Tape’ theory. In keeping with the context of the song, sounds from several previous live recordings of the track were woven into its present being. Flipside ‘Where is Living?’ is a decidedly more delicate affair of questioning lyrics and eerie traces, droning strings and impressions smudged. This resultant 7” is a tantalising glimpse of Normil Hawaiians now, an echo from the past, an echo from the future.

Vivien Goldman-style dubby post-punk synth pop.

With a handful of twitching insta-sketches, each addled with late-nite D.I.Y. quiver, the duo’s side-hustle sprouted in classical easy/cheap fashion [see the demo tape on their Public Nipples imprint for evidence].

As “global” concerns slowed, compatriots Michael Zamora (a superbly slanted multi-instrumentalist late of BAD BAD) and Alejandra Alcala (the region’s one true bass supervisor, also of bright lights BLUES LAWYER and PREENING) joined Sermeńo & Jordan as additional exposed flesh.

In full form, Naked Roommate has not only become a must-see, ever-evolving live act, but architects of Do The Duvet, one of the most intriguing and inspired recordings to come out of 2020’s American subterranea.

Do The Duvet proffers leftfield hijinks via punk execution, answering all the questions posed by questionable post-punk revivalism with sour lemon sneering and cherry-sweet smiles. It’s a fever dream, really…A flailing, sparking wire of hyper-compressed rhythms (breathing and synthetic), devolved guitar work and minced electronic compost. The resultant congealed groove is suitable for club situations and/or living space pulsations alike. Either way, the landlord is pissed.

Jordan’s beat programming, presumably inspired in part by recent obsessions with unjustifiably discarded electro sounds, manages to elicit physical response without veering into genre clichés like decay dance or Armageddon rave.

Instead, movement is prompted by sheer playfulness and high humour: see the sleepily sampled City sax on “Fondu Guru” or the comically taut bassline from “Credit Union”, itself a dreamwork born straight from a lovingly held-tight 99 Records 12”.

Thematically, Do The Duvet bounces between dissections of bourgeois trickery, the absurdity of domestication and the recognizable insanity of living in this particular age.As narrator, Sermeńo’s vocal presence is time-capsule great: a commanding grand-slam performance, alluring yet switchblade-dangerous in terms of wit and gaze. So totally wonderful.

What do you really own, anyway? What if your home does not even exist? Why not simply Do The Duvet and answer these queries yourself?
Mitch Cardwell 

TRACK LISTING

01. Mad Love
02. We Are The Babies
03. Fondu Guru
04. Credit Union
05. Je Suis Le Bebe
06. Fake I.D.
07. Fill Space
08. (Do The Duvet Pt. 2)
09. Repeat
10. (Re) P.R.O.D.U.C.E.

Incorporating a diverse range of influences, from samba to no wave, Handle, a three-piece from Manchester (now based between Manchester / London / Brussels) made up of Giulio Erasmus and Nirvana Heire former members of D.U.D.S (the first British band to sign to Castle Face) and Leo Hermitt, a genderqueer multidisciplinary artist, renowned for their challenging, thought-provoking work on the city’s arts and literary scenes. The group mesh politics with a trans experience of time and a vibrant, avant-garde freedom of approach.

Handle make a uniquely minimal sound, buoyed by poetic, urgent vocals. Each instrument (bass, drums, keyboard and voice) is permitted its own space, yet somehow the result is a brilliantly unified yet understated sonic experience that demands then commands your attention.

Powered by looping, hypnotic synth lines, quaking flexes of bass, clattering tribal percussion and expeditious, often agitated vocals that cordially sprint, Handle's songs – all of which clock in around the two minute mark – owe as much to performance poetry as they do to the vibrancy of post-punk and new wave. In these times of anxiety and confusion, Handle provide a much-needed dose of musical catharsis, albeit disorientating at times, pre-empting sense from the shards of sound they gather about themselves. 'Life’s Work' begins with isolated swells of pitch before driving full throttle into an exuberant rhythmic workout. 'Sunday Morning' shares this elasticated feel for melody and communication, twisting about itself in rubbery fashion. 'Coagulate' is more disembodied from the pulse, but similarly retains a boldness of vision.

'Step By Step' showcases what Handle excel at, it's a clangorous leviathan of beat-forward dance punk, peppered with Leo's fluid vocal inertia. It's dizzying yet divinely exuberant. 'Punctured Time' evokes the same cascading flow "Punctured time, bicycle wheel, what if I told you that your lips were like venus, lips were like what? Lips were like venus and that my tongue was a trampoline?" sings Leo amid undulating bass, toppling drums and jabs of keyboard ambience.

Handle make music occupied by dark shapes that move beneath a roiling surface. Jolting, shattering, cracking, smoothed, bounded, punctuated. Handle's debut album ‘In Threes’ is a collection of frenetic sounds for frenzied forms. 'In Threes' was recorded and mixed by Robin Williams and follows on from the band's previous EP 'Demonstrations', released through their own imprint Absolute Fiction. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: 'In Threes' is a brilliantly diverse, oddball suite of clashing grooves and jagged melodies. Sonically interesting, thematically consistent and ram-packed with influences from all over the musical spectrum. What a trip.

TRACK LISTING

01. Vocal Exercise
02. Punctured Time
03. What It Does
04. Lifes Work
05. Coagulate
06. Sunday Morning
07. Mhmm
08. Rubber Necks
09. In Tension
10. Step By Step
11. Describe

LUNCH LADY are a sparky group from Los Angeles redolent of the desert heat, pining hearts and that chorus-soaked cloak of sound held dear by followers of British early 80s post-punk.

Numbering four, Lunch Lady consist of Rachel Birke (vocals), Juan Velasquez (guitar), Victor Herrera (bass) and Robert Wolfe (drums). The band began in 2017 when Velasquez asked Birke if she’d like to start a new music project with him, their respective other groups Abe Vigoda and Heller Keller having co-existed in LA’s DIY orbit. Birke explains that they “immediately decided upon making the new band a kind of love letter to Kitsch.”

Lunch Lady’s dreamy punk forays into country ballad territory certainly swoop into sentiment, but its the melancholy of artifice that defines their outlook. “I like the way Susan Sontag explains Kitsch as being something that lacks the context or materials to reach the effect it sets out to achieve. Also that tragic aspect of Kitsch, we loved the futility of how literal it is, we wanted to evoke that with our band name and definitely my lyrics” illuminates Birke further.

Lunch Lady recruited friends Herrera and Wolfe into the rhythm section, swiftly recorded a demo and started playing live. The bands’ music began to grow into sun-warped vignettes, often miniaturist character-studies in outlook. These songs are studded with unquiet recollection, all delivered with a curious objectivity that pulls the listener into the circle. Birke’s vocal is unhurried and assured, pressing her characters’ motives and words into the sprightly guitar trails and jogged rhythms that characterise the sound of the band. During the summer of 2018, Lunch Lady had assembled the tracks for their debut album, which they took into the studio towards the year’s close. Lunch Lady’s debut album, ‘Angel’ was recorded at Gauchos Electronics, a key studio in the history of Los Angeles punk and the place where many of their peers had laid down albums previously, including Gun Outfit, Feels, Ty Segall and No Age. Pascal Stevenson produced the album, whilst Scott Cornish helped engineer and mix. Mikey Young then mastered this vibrant record.

‘Angel’ is an album of resounding yearning, of cold fire and hot, sticky blood. It’s an album of troubled tales, buried hearts and wandering homeward. Throughout, Birke’s narrative-heavy lyrics keep things themed and theatrical. This is most strongly felt on cinematic swirls of song like ‘Preacher Man’ and clicky, strummer ’Sweet One’. The stunning track ‘Dolores’ creeps and ranges around under a dark cloud of disclosure. Struck chords hang in the air like smoke whilst Birke intones “you say he’s a bad man, and a killer too, and you tell me like I don’t know.” Birke wrote those lyrics from the perspective of the female character in Eddie Noack's serial-killer C&W jaunt of the same name. The song rattles with craving, whilst the guitars wheel and loop, strident drums pinpointing. ‘Window’ whirls by with all the flourish of a card trick. Drums tumble whilst the guitar line twists through the taut stretch and sprint of the bass turns. Birke’s low-slung yet smouldering vocal confesses that “my hands are as clean as a remembered thing, my hands are as clean as I want them to be.”

Thematically, Lunch Lady’s debut cascades with crumpled wishes and hotly recalled visions. Throughout writing the lyrics for the album Birke spells out that she’s “been trying to tackle my own feelings about nostalgia, especially that romanticisation of one’s own childhood. The album’s also about that painful feeling of looking at a family album and trying to reconcile yourself with the kid you see in the photograph. ‘My Dead Dog’ is about that and became one of my favourite songs on the album for that reason.” The album swims with a type of anxious nostalgia. Birke’s cover art of a flaming Cadillac falling through the sky is a case in point. “I never had a love like the love that I never had” sings a resigned Birke towards the summit of ‘My Dead Dog’. Whilst ’Preacher Man’ addresses the problem of nostalgia more on a cultural level, a host of avenging angels, sisters in white robes and gun-toting men crop up elsewhere via the cool detachment of time passed. You get the feeling that Lunch Lady prefer to face these dangers face on. They seem most at home staring down the uneasy. See the simmering clamour of ‘Young Bride’ and ‘Sister’ with its swooning bloom of melody for further evidence. This sense of fight or flight is keenly felt in ‘Snakes’ too. Herrera’s bassline nags at Wolfe’s beat, whilst Velasquez’s chiming guitar spills wistfully. “Cold sweat, smooth hands, hot blood. Your babes are crying, your life’s cast in iron now” evokes Birke in a sweetly hushed vocal as relaxed as casual conversation.

Lunch Lady turn on all the lights in this haunted house of an album. Each room populated by a vividly drawn cast of whispered hopes and threatening dreams. ‘Angel’ is an album that murmurs like a river down the staircase, exploding with unexpected melodrama, brandishing it’s desire like a weapon. Let it take you by the hand and guide you out into the night. Out into the glimmer, before the stars go out and the warmth of the sun returns to cool passions.

TRACK LISTING

01. Angel
02. Sweet One
03. Sister
04. Window
05. Snakes
06. My Dead Dog
07. Pardon Me Miss
08. Dolores
09. Preacher Man
10. Young Bride
11. Deeper Variation
12. Deeper

TRASH KIT are Rachel Aggs (guitar, vocals), Rachel Horwood (drums, vocals) and Gill Partington (bass). Three deeply creative individuals who play in a multitude of other groups including Bas Jan, Sacred Paws, Shopping and Bamboo, united by a shared decade of spry musicality that surges through their bodies, hearts and heads with Trash Kit. Their songs once succinct, patchwork post-punk numbers of an honest diary-like nature now tussle more with long-form songwriting, expeditious polyphony and cascades of sung-spoke vocals. This new focus began with their last album ‘Confidence’ (2014) and has now grown into something exhilarating and rapturous. New songs like ‘Disco’ have had their very fabric stretched into smart new shapes, allowing the band to run away with refrains and unlock the dancefloor. Although Trash Kit have their forebears in bands like Sleater Kinney, The Ex and The Raincoats, their sound is still very much their own take on facing forwards and relies as much on the naturalism of an internalised folk music as on their sincerity of vision.

Since forming in 2009, Trash Kit have released two albums for Upset The Rhythm and a selection of singles, this July however they make their most majestic move yet with their resoundingly huge Horizon album. For this album, carefully crafted through years of playing out live, the band have chased down the distance between what they wanted the record to sound like and its realisation. They’ve augmented these songs with choral arrangements, piano, saxophone, harp, viola and cello. Pulling ideas from everywhere between the earth and sky, to push themselves further, to go beyond. Aggs' guitar playing for this album was informed by her love of guitar music from Zimbabwe, her cyclical motifs billow with lean Mbira rhythms. Horwood has similarly approached her drumkit with an untamable freedom, allowing it to breathe as a vivid lead instrument. Trash Kit's music is woven with silence and punctuation, and this is where the resonant, driving bass of Partington fits in. The bass has become now central to shaping the melody of this new collection of songs.

Lyrically the album has edged into an exemplary construct of the personal politic and the profound, quiet, almost unnoticed observations that we all make through each day without realising their true significance. Horizon finds itself abrim with themes, especially the notion of looking to the future, “personally as well as to the future of the band, the future of marginalised people making music, political futures, trying to imagine and re-imagine our world, thinking about what possibility and change sound like” attests Aggs. ‘Coasting’ which opens the album is concerned with “the end of the world and also the afterlife” and was written after Aggs read ‘The Parable of the Sower’ by the Afro futurist sci-fi writer Octavia Butler, a novel set in an apocalyptic California and featuring a protagonist in search of change and renewal. “When all this ends, without warning, where will we be?” sing Horwood and Aggs in robust unison. ‘Sunset’ draws on similar themes of ending and salvation, and proves equally ruminative. ‘Dislocate’ on the other hand is an upbeat sprint of spinning guitar and piano riffs showcasing both Rachels’ overlapping vocal magnetism.

Pivotal to this new album, ‘Horizon’ is sleeping giant of a title track, forever reaching out and intensifying throughout its lively five-minute lesson in reinforcement. “‘Horizon’ is quite literal I think, I was thinking about the edge of the earth - how people interpret the planet, how you can sometimes forget the enormity of the world and the universe and how small that can make you feel” Aggs continues. ‘Every Second’ was written in the aftershock of Trash Kit’s tour with The Ex on their big convoy anniversary tour (with Thurston Moore, Fendika, Peter Brötzmann and Han Bennink). Aggs sheds further light on the songs’ significance: “We played some really big venues on this trip and whilst it was challenging we learnt lots about improvising on stage, how to hold your own in that kind of environment. ‘Every Second’ is about how you never get to actually see yourself play live and how you have to not think about that in order to really embody it? The ‘chorus’ is also about feeling accepted into a scene of ‘serious’ improv music and how that affected our confidence as musicians who get tokenised a lot.”

‘See Through’ sounds pointed and surly, urging us to “transcend, break down” outdated categories and patterns of thought that only restrict. Partington’s bassline plummets heavily to hammer this home, making it one of the most affecting songs from the album. Meanwhile ‘Get Out of Bed’ deals with “being an overachiever and the struggle to overcome self doubt, get motivated, never feeling like you’ve done enough” Aggs admits. Whilst “the chorus is the flip side looks at how creating something beautiful, cathartic or fun can be an end in itself.” A strong undercurrent throughout Horizon concerns itself with the freeing up of power to make our own definitions, in this case how we can decide what truly makes us feel like we’ve achieved something.

Some of the final lyrics for the album were composed by Horwood for the choral parts on ‘Traffic Lights’. Those include the lines "we play in tune not touching, we play in time not listening, your music inside my body in my heart and my head!" Horwood wanted these lines to highlight her understanding of the musical friendship that she shares with Aggs and Partington, and to draw on “how powerful and good it feels to make something with other people, to sing with other people.” With this album Trash Kit have become intoxicated with collaboration and with Emma Smith and Serafina Steer contributing viola and harp to certain songs, and Dan Leavers adding his saxophone touches to ‘Every Second’, ‘Horizon’, ‘Sunset’, ‘Disco’ and ‘Traffic Lights’ that proves an triumphant decision. It goes further than that though as the band collaborate with their audience too, stepping in time to each other’s impulse, giving and taking cues, building things up from new foundations. Trash Kit’s approach to life as with music is one of openness, inclusion and potential and Horizon is an album with that in dutiful abundance. It is an album that forever listens for the next moment and will meet you once more at the vanishing point.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: While this definitely has echoes of the bands whose members it's made up of (sacred paws were immediately obvious), it is clearly more than the sum of its parts. Oscillating between flickering indie-rock, off-piste angular mathy stuff and soaring anthemic orchestral. It's a heady and rich affair, and one that only improves with every listen.

TRACK LISTING

01. Coasting
02. Every Second
03. Dislocate
04. Horizon
05. Sunset
06. Bed
07. Disco
08. See Through
09. Traffic Lights
10. Bed (reprise)
11. Window

Upset The Rhythm present a reissue of Normil Hawaiians' What's Going On?, originally released in 1984. To Normil Hawaiians, getting out of lockstep with Thatcherism seemed imperative. Adding to an overriding sense of anxiety, close friend and band associate Martin Pawson took his life in July 1983. Following More Wealth Than Money, released on Illuminated Records in 1982, there was an impetus to make good on hard won achievements. Rehearsal and writing sessions resumed in the early months of 1983 at Intergalactic Arts Studios. IGA was a ramshackle, semi-residential rehearsal space.

Illuminated Records had been sending artists to Foel Studios in Powys, Wales for years, and it had become a kind of refuge for the Hawaiians. Studio owner/manager Dave Anderson (Hawkwind/Amon Düül II) was welcoming, unruffled, and accommodating when around a dozen band members, friends, and family emerged from the "mini-peace convoy" of vehicles into the hazy, pastoral care of the warm, Welsh countryside. Whereas More Wealth Than Money had evolved in the recording studio, What's Going On began to develop as a more pre-meditated, albeit piecemeal work. "Quiet Village" and the unreleased "Outpost" had already been finished at Foel in February 1983.

Recording Engineer Brian Snelling recalls how the Hawaiians approach to making the album was unconventional and spontaneous, reveling in chance and openness. Rehearsal tapes from IGA were played along to, and improvisations allowed to develop, with further layers of sound accreting (as can be heard on "Big Lies"). "Free Tibet" was created by the band playing together exploratively with Snelling waiting to hit "Record" until he heard that something interesting was coalescing. He recalls the sessions being initially unorthodox, but eventually settling into a friendly, productive, and very familial affair. Mixed tapes were then taken by Dave Andersen and Guy Smith to Charly Records' editing studio in London. Here they spliced the recordings into an irregular yet coherent, flowing work. Final masters were then EQ'd and cut by Graeme Durham at the newly opened Exchange Mastering Studios in Camden. And then nothing happened. Unbeknownst to the band, Illuminated Records were getting into deep financial problems. The label gave the band 250 copies, but the record shops wouldn't touch them -- the company had been blacklisted. This intricate, challenging and engaging work had been failed by poor circumstance. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Quiet Village
02. Martin
03. Slaves
04. Louise Michel
05. Ignorance Is Strength
06. Big Lies
07. South Atlantic
08. Going Down
09. Market Place
10. Free Tibet

Bonus Tracks
11. The Outpost (unreleased Single, A-side, Feb 1983)
12. Quiet Village (unreleased Single, B-side, Feb 1983)
13. Oggere (album Out-take)
14.The Fog [Eddie Waring Mix] (album Out-take)
15. Alice (album Out-take)
16. Louise Michel (live At DOK, Edinburgh, Aug 2017)
17. Big Lies

BAMBOO (Nick Carlisle - keyboards, production, also of Peepholes / Katy & Nick) & Rachel Horwood (vocals, electric banjo, also of Trash Kit / Bas Jan) announce their third studio album "Daughters Of The Sky", on Upset The Rhythm.

The album was written and recorded over a two year period where ideas and arrangements were allowed to slow-cook and develop over time, in contrast with the last album "The Dragon Flies Away" which came together relatively quickly for the duo. The music comprises the usual (for Bamboo) mix of Horwood's flawlessly resonant folk cadence and Carlisle's pristine synth production, whilst TR808 drum machines and samples lock together with acoustic drums, themselves often given the "Tony Visconti" Eventide Harmoniser treatment of Berlin-era Bowie albums. Ancient ARP synthesisers and Mellotron flutes and horns sit next to contemporary digital sounds and samples in a hauntological tapestry over which Horwood can intone her sometimes mournful, often uplifting vocals.

The first single taken from the album, "Weeping Idols", reflects upon a recurring theme of religious dogma and spiritual entrapment, and is accompanied by a stunning video shot by Jack Barraclough around the North Coast of Northern Ireland, taking in the Giant's Causeway and the Kinbane Castle ruin. Carlisle's infectiously colourful synth riffs and pop production, featuring sun-burst harp playing from Brighton-based singer/multi-instrumentalist Emma Gatrill, contrasts sharply with the darker tone of Horwood's lyric, jarring in a way reminiscent of "You Have Placed A Chill On My Heart" by The Eurythmics.

Although "Daughters Of The Sky" breaks away from the storybook concept format of The Dragon Flies Away, in that sense being more similar to Bamboo's debut album "Prince Pansori Priestess" (2015, ★★★★★ - Record Collector Magazine), there are still recurrent themes that run through the album such as motherhood, the cyclical nature of life, emancipation and liberation. "Branches dancing, bud stems growing, fibres swaying, arms unfurling" Horwood sings in The Deku Tree, a song which roots motherhood in nature's eternal cycle of birth and death. In the title track we see two perspectives of women spanning time and geography, Horwood drawing inspiration from the personal and also political. In 1917 a Russian match stick worker looks out of her window dreaming for a better life; in 2019 a Filipino maid in Hong Kong yearns to return to the children she has left behind. Both share a revolutionary spirit, protesting and fighting for a new world.

What might be the centrepiece of the album, "East Of The Sun / West Of The Moon", an 11 minute epic, begins with a serene, desolate ambient intro which eventually transports us over the waves to some unknown land. Here we track the journey of a displaced people who are rejected from pillar to post, prevented from crossing over political lines, judged by fellow humans by their few differences over their myriad similarities. "And we all walk a different pace, though we end up in the same place" sings Horwood, as the song's new-found rhythm seems to break apart again and slowly splinter away in different directions, the fragments hanging in the air as a new section emerges featuring a rare lead vocal from Carlisle.

Bar the brief instrumental coda "Tenebrae", the album ends on an optimistic note with "A World Is Born", an upbeat song of renewal. Horwood sings of the creation of a new world for a new generation, out of the ashes of a society stagnating under the collapsing weight of late capitalism. Saxophones provided by Emma Gatrill (her second guest appearance on the album) answer each vocal line in call and response style over more harmonised drums reminiscent of Bowie's "Low". Carlisle originally wrote the music following the death of Bowie, and Horwood added some Prince-like backing vocals (Prince having been name-checked in the title of the first Bamboo album). Although her lyric makes no reference to the loss of these giants, their influence hang over the song in a way which can only add to the sense of hope and rebirth, a sense which is indeed felt throughout the album.

TRACK LISTING

01. Diamond Springs
02. Weeping Idols
03. Daughters Of The Sky
04. Memories All At Once
05. Off-World Colony
06. East Of The Sun / West Of The Moon
07. The Deku Tree
08. Under Larches
09. A World Is Born
10. Tenebrae

Melody (vocals, synth), Casey (vocals, synth), Bill (bass), Scott (guitar) and Marcus (drums) united through a shared post-punk sensibility and began experimenting with some angular drum and guitar give-and-take, layered with duelling synth refrains.

Over this Melody and Casey worked-up their vocal harmonies through impulse, developing an interplay reminiscent of The Go Go’s at both their most serene and severe. The pairs vocals drift through each track, punctuating the profound and guiding us through each song’s uncanny terrain.

After a busy year of local shows and bouts of instinct-first songwriting, Red Channel chose a number of their most resonant songs to record with Andrew Schubert at Golden Beat. These were subsequently mixed by Eric Carlson and then mastered by John Hannon for this debut 7” EP on Upset The Rhythm entitled ‘Crazy Diamonds’.

The title track launches the listener through a stratosphere of cascading notes, swoonsome lyrical turns and tack-sharp pivots in rhythmic practice. ‘Crazy Diamonds’ is an exhilarating rush of a song, both wistful and defiant. Melody explains that it is “about the forever fluctuating reality that weaves in and out of ecstasy, loneliness, yearning and destruction. It’s about women being free from a superficial beauty, it’s about the cessation of ideals and power worship.” ‘Giver’ is a similarly sprightly yet pointedly questioning track, “alone in your room, alone with your thoughts, of sleepless shadows, but what do I get?” sing Casey and Melody in spooked unison.

‘Demons’ swirls with minimalist pop moves, a trailing backing vocal and a tumbling bass motif, whilst a dream-like quality pervades the guitar and keyboard lines. Melody then peppers the song with references to extinguished lights, evil forces, bags of sugar, floods and heaven on earth, drawing us so close that we enter the vision too. ‘Slowness’, which brings this debut EP is a close, is another triumph of illusory lyrical association and punchy gesture. In fact the band sound “caught in a fragment, non-corporeal” throughout all the four tracks. Opalescent passages freewheel into splintered eruptions, there’s a duality constantly in play, “somebody dies, somebody’s born”.

The songs collected here are manifestly catchy, conjured in cyclical patterns that are distorted by a desire that tends towards stream of consciousness. It’s this willingness to wake-up in the unreal and see each moment reflected in the mirror which really sets apart Red Channel’s first record.

TRACK LISTING

1. Crazy Diamonds
2. Giver
3. Demons
4. Slownwess

“Once we really leaned into the space that being a three-piece afforded us, our writing started to make better sense and connect,” explains guitarist-keyboardist-vocalist Natalie Hoffmann. “It made for a more interesting record than if we stayed comfortable and safe in the way we were writing.”

“More interesting” is a classic hard undersell. When Alexandra Eastburn left nots in 2018, the threat of losing the gnarled texture or her hammering synth progressions resulted in some real growing pains for the band. But once the newly anointed threesome arrived at Bunker Audio in Memphis to record with trusted engineer and friend Andrew McCalla, each member had embraced nots fresh identity.

Rather than abandon the noisy synth attack, Hoffmann instead decided to add another role to her expanding sonic arsenal, painting the backgrounds of tracks like “Floating Hand” and “Half-Painted House” with melting buzzes and swirling waves that sound menacing and ominous at one turn and hypnotic and seductive at another. After the record began to take form, it felt much more accurate to understand 3 as a different force altogether from its Goner predecessors, Cosmetic (2016) and We Are Nots (2014).

Themes of lost control and societal division are spread throughout 3. They can be heard not only via Hoffmann’s reverb-drenched drawl, but also in the sneaky tightness between drummer Charlotte Watson and bassist Meredith Lones that occasionally (and quickly) devolves into a beautiful, reckless cacophony before shoring back up again (see opener “Low” as excellent proof).

Elsewhere, on cuts like “Persona” and “Rational Actor,” nots explore the loss of reality in performance and just how exhausting it can be to navigate the blurry line between playing an actor and playing human. It’s all pretty heady stuff, no doubt, but because nots tracked and recorded 3 live—as has been their way with all of their albums—they were also able to infuse it with what Hoffman describes as “an intensity and improvisational energy.”

So to what does that ultimately amount? A dark, unpredictable, raucous, liberating, and bold tour de force of a third record from the Memphis three—along with a strong impression that the best still yet to come.

TRACK LISTING

01. Low
02. Woman Alone
03. Floating Hand
04. In Glass
05. Persona
06. Half-Painted House
07. Rational Actor
08. Far Reaching Shadows
09. Surveillance Veil
10. Built Environment

A glance at the résumés of Hash Redactor’s members might seed certain expectations. But with their debut full-length, Drecksound, the band―fronted by guitarist Alec McIntyre of Ex-Cult, featuring NOTS rhythm warriors Meredith Lones on bass and Charlotte Watson on drums, and rounded off by George Williford (stringed instrumentalist of various Memphis acts) on second guitar―banishes any residual side-project status.

Though Drecksound at times evokes certain mini-masterpieces of recent history, like The Country Teasers’ Destroy All Human Life, or labelmates Spray Paint’s Feel the Clamps, it ventures into musical territory tethered neither to its own lineage, nor to that of the current era...a clattering, distorted oasis in the sleek digital desert of the late twenty-teens.

Yet perhaps both because and in spite of the isolation that can typify rock music-making at the end of this malfunctioning decade, these twelve songs deliver a timely and cathartic social criticism: one that champions a comic nihilism, acknowledging the abyss while laughing in its face. As McIntyre wryly sneers in the opening lines of Open Invite to the Cave Party, “I won’t settle for anything less than a four-star refugee camp...” McIntyre’s writing chortles in puckish amusement at humanity’s paradoxical impulse toward self-destruction. A merry prankster, but one more in the mold of a black-clad Terry Gilliam than a Ken Kesey acid casualty. This is on no fuller display than in A-side epic In The Tank, written through the eyes of a vindictive custodian who boils alive the wealthy patrons at the isolation tank facility where he works. HR is out for some weird revenge, tongue planted firmly in cheek.

McIntyre and Williford’s guitar interplay draws from a rundown of usual and unusual suspects in the tight corner of avant-punk guitar work, conjuring some free-association that includes: Marquee Moon, an imaginary-electric John Fahey, the playing on Ornette Coleman’s mid-70s Body Meta and Dancing In Your Head, prime-era Flesheaters, plus the first two Meat Puppets albums. Without anything resembling traditional leads, guitars snake in and out and around Lones’s bass lines, which alternate between slinky, ohrwurm hooks and steel-cable raw power. All of this is locked together by Watson’s visceral swing. It doesn’t feel controversial to claim that the duo of Watson and Lones constitutes one of the best rhythm sections to be heard anywhere in contemporary punk music. Taken as a whole, the songs possess the character of drunken koans—belabored jokes that, peeling away layers of churning riff and gnarled hook, possess some kind of ultimate truth, albeit a cheeky one.

After playing out heavy in 2018 with a refined live show, a four-song demo, and several Gonerfest appearances under their belt, Drecksound was cut entirely at home on a borrowed 8-track cassette machine. Matt Qualls of Memphis’ Young Avenue Sound mixed the resulting deranged mess into its final form which Goner Records and Upset The Rhythm have teamed up to release.

 'Girl with Basket of Fruit' is a rowdier, yet more stylistically splenetic offering than 2017's 'Forget', with the usual eye-catching list of collaborators this time including Eugene Robinson (Oxbow), Devin Hoff and Haitian percussionists Emmanuel Obi and Ayo Okafor. Xiu Xiu is the conduit for the uncompromising and unnervingly personal musical works of Los Angeles-based multi-instrumentalist Jamie Stewart, plus a roll call of collaborators both in studio and onstage.

TRACK LISTING

01. Girl With Basket Of Fruit
02. It Comes Out As A Joke
03. Amargi Ve Moo
04. Ice Cream Truck
05. Pumpkin Attack On Mommy And Daddy
06. The Wrong Thing
07. Mary Turner, Mary Turner
08. Scisssssssors
09. Normal Love

RATTLE is an ongoing musical project concerned with experiments in rhythm, metre and tension. Katharine Eira Brown and Theresa Wrigley make up the duo from Nottingham, who with just drums and occasional vocalisations weave an expanse of percussive vortices. Their songs swirl and envelop with all the physicality and drama of another world pulling together around its own shifting centre of gravity. The drum beats phase and sidestep, they trade accents and overlap, providing a suitably alive terrain for the vocals to explore similar tendencies of pattern.

Rattle’s debut album was released in 2016 through Upset The Rhythm / I Own You and was greeted with much critical praise, this often singled out their hypnotic minimalism and ecstatic regard for the dance floor. The following six months saw Rattle support Animal Collective on their UK tour before heading out around Europe with The Julie Ruin.

Rattle used these opportunities to try out new material and unconsciously began writing their next album. Brown recalls that “hearing our drums in these larger venues, with amazing sound, made us excited about how beautiful and magic the drums sounded, we were quite spellbound by how they were able to fill a venue so completely.”

‘Sequence’ was written in much the same way as their debut, with the duo facing each other over their shared palette of drums, allowing songs to develop naturally and suggest their own direction. However, Brown and Wrigley were more confident of what they wanted to achieve with this follow up, having already proven the concept watertight through their debut and subsequent concerts. They knew they could wrestle songs out of the silence with such a setup, so afforded themselves greater time to explore extended, long-form composition. ‘Sequence’ is composed of four tracks, each clocking in around 10 mins or over and focused squarely on a deeper resonance with the creative act, illustrative of how ideas build from scratch, of how music can grow out of repetition. Recorded at JT Soar in Nottingham with Phil Booth and Mark Spivey (Rattle’s live sound engineer), the album developed out of these four points, with Rattle honing their sound with detail. Everything was stripped back to just the drums and Brown’s voice. Percussion flourishes were deemed unnecessary, overdubbed layers of vocals were kept to a minimum. As a result, this quartet of songs are more meditative and aware than previous efforts, with the duo’s attentions spent tapping into each track’s potential, mapping out expeditions in tempo and making much of the journey over destination.

‘DJ’ is the first part of the album to unfold, its insistent, rotating beat slowly morphs into an avalanche of shimmering cymbals, before a plateau of echoed rim shots cools all to the core. Throughout, Brown’s wordless singing tethers the song to its atmosphere, an effect similarly employed to perfection in ‘Disco’ which follows. ‘Signal’ unfurls as an odyssey of rhythm, it’s tumbling beat, punctuated by shivers of hi-hat bluster and mesmeric tom fills. “Put your ear to the ground, it’s an incredible sound” confesses Brown in her most telling lyric from the album, leaving you convinced that Rattle are somehow channeling all this music from a quiet, elemental other-place. ‘The Rocks’ concludes the record with sparse assurance, it’s an exercise in magnified scope and altered states. Wrigley and Brown divide duties across all these tracks, with the cadenced, dynamic shifts of hi-hat and cymbal being Theresa’s domain, whilst Katharine holds down the toms and snare. Brown notes that “each song can be seen as representing a different drum in my set up”. ‘DJ’ is an exploration of her snare, whilst ‘Disco’, ‘Signal’ and ‘The Rocks’ are based around the floor tom, rack tom, and bass drum respectively. All of this is complemented further through the production interventions of Mark Spivey, who wanted to capture Rattle’s huge live sound on tape for this album with all its incurred dub-delay trippiness, taming and melding.

‘Sequence’ is a liminal album, thoughtfully crafted with themes of transition and realisation at its heart. It feels like a trance or ritual if you give yourself to the recording. It urges you to step outside and listen deeper. Rattle are seeking out a vivid array, an order from the noise, a pattern that unlocks the next. This album is the nurturing of intention and when we walk to its beat we arrive anew. 

TRACK LISTING

01. DJ
02. Disco
03. Signal
04. The Rocks 

London-based punk band Sauna Youth are releasing their third album this September under the thrilling and fatal moniker Deaths. The album will once again be released by Upset the Rhythm.

The final part in a trilogy of LPs that started with Dreamlands in 2012 (wide-eyed, naive beginnings introducing listeners to the world the records inhabit), followed by Distractions three years ago (what happens while you’re heading towards a destination, the unknowns, the unexpected outcomes), the songs that comprise Deaths are collectively about the act of finishing, an ode to ‘the ending’.

Creating this album was a working research project embodying what is sometimes the hardest part of musical endeavour: completing a record. Making a new album is always daunting, but when all band members also have full-time jobs and other commitments it can also seem logistically impossible. Then there is the nagging, unattainable perfectionism that can draw out a record for months or even years - an experience that didn’t bear repeating. When is something finished? Is finishing necessary to move on?

The album was created and facilitated through a series of deadlines. The recording studio was booked before any songs had been written. Having a deadline in advance allowed for productive freedom through limitation and finite time: five months to write the album, that was it. This meant meeting every week to write no matter how many members could make it, filling in on each other’s instruments (reminiscent of how side-project Monotony came about: writer’s block in a Sauna Youth practice - removing yourself from your role in a band removes the old expectations) and using automatic writing processes.

The limited time didn’t allow for much reflection and overworking. Placeholders became final tracks through committing to songs at early stages, keeping them immediate. The album is site and time specific - those months in an archway in Peckham, which live on through samples including amp interference from trains passing overhead. It’s also very much of this specific point in history, influences, and band members’ lives. This process created a tension through trusting decisions and not questioning what was produced.

The 12 tracks touch on political rhetoric, artistic legacy, action and passivity, work and leisure, and, of course, distraction, referencing many musical genres in the process while never leaving punk’s orbit.

Creative living becomes more gruelling and endless than the 9 to 5 on ‘Leisure Time’, how freelance living and having multiple jobs both result in no free time. Being in a band is leisure time, but can be a lot of work. Our lives should afford us with time, but we fill it with activity.

‘No Personal Space’ looks at the cyclical nature of music, referencing ‘New Rose’ - the first single by a British punk band - via a drumbeat and lyrics, exploring the enclosure of the genre; a blown out recording of practising constantly interrupts the band.

‘Percentages’ was written at a point of political and social upheaval and problematizes the use of numbers as a form of proof. Whole groups of people have been reduced to statistics for political reasons, and people use and manipulate statistics to prove any point they want.

‘In Flux’ is about whatever is opposite to creativity, what kills it dead, the communication of a song or a piece of art can kill it, even trying to see an idea through to its conclusion can be what kills it.

The pure pop number ‘Laura’, according to Jonah Falco who mixed the record, sounds like “The Desperate Bicycles went to graduate school in the fields of Salisbury while being yelled at by two sides of their conscience, oddly enough, telling them the exact same thing.”

‘Problems’ - a former Monotony song - reduces the punk song to its essential elements, aiming to sound like being inside a brake factory and repeating “Problems” until it has rendered the word completely meaningless.


The album ends with a wild and playful rejection of patriarchy and a frustration with those who uphold it either willingly or through inaction in the form of the unhinged Theatre 83. It’s like English music hall meets ‘We’re A Happy Family’ by The Ramones.

Like the previous two albums, Deaths includes writing put to music. ‘Swerve’ and ‘The Patio’ are extracts from a short story written by band member Ecke about the murder of an artist whose estate is overseen by her ambitious sister, and is read by writer and frontperson of Marcel Wave, Maike Hale-Jones.

Samples are as important as they ever were - this time including the aforementioned electrical interference, recordings of practice and YouTube videos of lawnmowers and cafe noise that people (including members of the band) listen to while working to distract their mind in order to focus.

An album once finished is frozen in time, solid and no longer resistent or adaptive to outside forces. Does the difficulty to find an end come from the genre, from punk’s revisionist impulse, redoing the same thing over and over? Do we avoid an ending because playing in a band is a distraction from everyday life?

The album was recorded by John Hannon of No Recording Studios in June 2017 over three days, mixed by Jonah Falco and mastered by Kris Lapke.

The cover was shot in a garden in Brixton by Owen Richards, who also photographed the covers for the previous albums. Additional artwork provided by R.M. Phoenix. The first 500 copies of the LP version each come with a unique 3 colour screen-print produced by Mince at The Positive Press.

Sauna Youth is Boon, Mince, Ecke and Pines. They played together in the band Monotony, and between them have played or do play in other bands and music projects including Primitive Parts, Feature, Child’s Pose, Lilac, Cold Pumas, Oblate, Teufelskreis, Mind Jail, Gold Foil, Tense Men as well as being involved with the organisations Good Night Out, The Positive Press, Constant Flux & Heart n Soul.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Another crashing punk assault from Sauna Youth with thudding kick drums, fuzzed guitars and snarling, spitting vox akimbo. Yet another reason for this London 4-piece to enter your collection, as if there aren't enough already.

TRACK LISTING

01. Percentages
02. Unreal City
03. Leisure Time
04. In Flux
05. Problems
06. No Personal Space
07. The Patio
08. Distracted
09. Veiled Critique
10. Laura
11. Swerve
12. Theatre 83

I’m going to set Carpe Diem as my alarm for the next week and see how that makes me feel. It will be replacing an alternation of Werewolves of London and Baby, It’s You. After a week the familiarity might feel kind of insane but kind of nice. Ad nauseum to the coffee. Yeah! Terry is into repetition. Terry often feels like the daily grind but set inside a Loony Tune. They can be slightly nasty and violent, but funny at the same time. I laugh at Terry riffs a lot. The lyrics are droll, yes, but have you heard the riffs? It’s like they’re tickling you. It’s like Terry has got his great big fingers under my arms. But this is all part of a strangely conceived plan. I would almost say that Terry is highly conceptual. Possibly the most conceptual band I’ve been around, possibly in my whole life. Like… what’s really going on here? Why am I listening to jingles and feeling so moved?

My favourite songs on Terry’s new album ‘I’m Terry’ (the band’s third record in three years), are Under Reign, it’s a creepy one, sandwiched between other new faves The Whip and Crimes. There’s a theme of dominance and submission here, but kinda unremarkable and ignorable, like knowing you're enslaved by your streaming service but just gently putting that out of your mind for another week. Terry is domesticity. Terry romances the mundane. This is how romance ekes out a triumph amidst mundanity. That’s what Billy Bragg’s New England and Squeeze’s Up The Junction do. Terry’s suburban escapism moment is Ciao Goodbye. Listen to Ciao Goodbye on an arterial road under the yellow streetlights of a weeknight. Terry has never been this beautiful. Terry may never be beautiful again, definitely not on this record. The next song is psycho.

That’s what I like about Terry, there are few rules in Terry’s world. They seem to make a song out of whatever sounds good to them. I literally don’t know what they’ll do next. They aren’t a genre study. The only stylistic consistency is in their hat wear. I’ve never been in a band like this. I’ve been in a band that simultaneously studied genre and also hats. But never only hats. Have you noticed the reggae undercurrent in Terry? There is one. This is good. Terry are kinda like Steely Dan or 10cc. Both bands make me queasy after a certain point. Terry probably also make me a bit queasy, singing about police beatings and nationalism and all that. But they’re not out to hurt you. They’re like the kindly bearer of bad news. There’s some awful shit going on in this country. Terry knows. Terry puts it in terms that speak to me. It’s a tragicomedy. I want to laugh and sometimes I want to consider crying. But I don’t think I will. I’m pretty certain Terry isn’t perverse, they’re just the harbinger of the encroaching perverse world. I’m pretty certain Terry wants to be my friend, and your friend. Our friend, Terry. Lee Parker, 2018. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: With the recent reissue of the Moldy Peaches' eponymous lo-fi indie opus, they've reignited a previously roaring fire for clanging guitars and crashing drums, and it just so happens that Terry are the 'If They Could Play Their Instruments' version of the aforementioned. A similar whimsical sensibility, but underpinned with the tuneful twists and turns of a band know what makes a perfect progression. Brilliantly balanced and delivered.

TRACK LISTING

01. Carpe Diem
02. Bureau
03. The Whip
04. Under Reign
05. Crimes
06. Oh Helen
07. Jane Roe
08. Fortress
09. Ciao Goodbye
10. For The Field

Apostille is a man who’s torn through enough sound-systems to know the difference between gesture and meaning. Alongside running his own acclaimed DIY record label Night School Records, Glasgow native, Michael Kasparis has spent the last few years making forays into the realm of hardcore punk with his groups Anxiety and The Lowest Form. Throughout all this, his solo electronic venture, Apostille has continued to evolve with each twist and turn of the world. What started off as a quest to whip up a mood and force that into a song has steadily become more of a mission in communication. His audacious 2015 debut album ‘Powerless’ self-released through Night School set the template by hooking up his honest delivery to some manic expositions in electronic pop. At once minimal and courageous with intent to connect, Apostille songs race off with unchecked abandon, skittering drum machines, thick walls of sequenced synth and decidedly elastic basslines. The resultant live shows, noted for their frenzy and ragged vision, soon left Kasparis wanting to reach out in a more imaginative way than through volume and conflict.

TRACK LISTING

A1. Fly With The Dolphin
A2. Feel Bad
A3. In Control
A4. Hanging On
B1. Without Me
B2. The Mordant
B3. Thirteen Minutes
B4. Choose Life

Debut album from Glasgow indie rock quartet that channel Kleenex and The Smiths, featuring members of Golden Grrrls (Slumberland / Night School). Following on from the band’s two cassettes of demos on Comfortable On A Tightrope and their sold out and well regarded 7”.

“somewhere between the oblique minimalist pop of Flying Nun and early Rough Trade signings such as The Raincoats.' CLASH.

Playing their first shows in Glasgow in 2015 during a summer that never threatened to show up, Vital Idles’ origins are closely tied with a tireless underground culture, a culture that informs the band’s refusal to take it easy. Matthew Walkerdine, Nick Lynch and Higgins are responsible for Glasgow DIY publishing institution Good Press - an independent volunteer-staffed zine and art book shop - while Guitarist Ruari MacLean’s pedigree stretches back to breakneck-indie-pop group Golden Grrrls and the Rose McDowall band.
Following two self-released demos and a sold out debut 7”, Vital Idles arrive on Upset The Rhythm with ‘Left Hand’, a bare manifesto layered with meaning and non-meaning. The group can conceivably be called artists, or Artists, but in approaching their debut album Vital Idles have stripped away all extraneous ornamentation to sculpt an incredibly life-like, vibrant pop music completely détourned and re-thought.

For a conglomerate of art outsiders and aesthetes, Vital Idles are primitive, whimsically brutal. Sculpting a skeleton from a body already lean, there’s a thrilling minimalism that runs through every beat and strum, a sparseness that feeds Jessica Higgins’s surreal, oblique vocal delivery all the nourishment it needs.

Following practice room and bigger-budget recordings with Glasgow engineer Andy Monaghan, Vital Idles took complete control of their debut album, with Edwin Stevens (aka recording artist Irma Vep) providing an outside perspective on the hermetically sealed group’s music. Engineered by Stevens and MacLean, ‘Left Hand’ crackles with a raw, punk approach to writing warped pop songs that don’t just talk of disorder but often actively demonstrate it. At the heart of ‘Left Hand’, the beating pulse in the tool box, is a conflict never resolved. Higgins manages to create dialogues that she narrates both parts of, Dada-ist songs that seem obfuscated by layers of meaning that, when taken on their own terms as evocative mini-worlds, reveal themselves to be pieces that have an internal melancholy and logic. Like Gertrude Stein growing up on Dunedin pop groups, peel away the deliberate awkwardness and ‘Left Hand’ reveals itself to be a book of complex, literary short stories at pleasing odds with the wired, no-frills melodic thud MacLean, Lynch and Walkerdine serve.

At times a perilous journey into the unknown and at others an immensely enjoyable foray into form deconstruction, lyricist Higgins repeatedly builds narratives out of mis-hearings, peons to doing things wrong, sideways-glances at conventional narrative. The delivery tightrope-walks between deadpan epithets and a Smiths-ian pop singing which gives many of the lyrics bite, pathos, and a surprising amount of surrealistic positivity. With Chains’ Troggs-ist chug stomping, Higgins flips the symbolism of the Chain into something to be tendered, cared for, is it a warped metaphor for the future, is a chain an aspiration? There’s an existential friction at the heart of Cave Raised that sees the narrator attempting escape, perhaps, unsure of themselves, “a poorly appointed project manager who says the best part is bowling around, which is a little like knocking around” that breaks into a melodic reprieve that feels like an unexpectedly romantic pay-off in the middle of “white space,” “Let’s tread the tides of time, to live it down, we’ll stretch these shores of mine to steal away.” Like many of Vital Idles songs, it can be read as a mini treatise on the song itself, or enjoyed as a visceral song that never does what you want it to.

Like fellow Glaswegians Life Without Buildings, Vital Idles make the oblique sound essential. On Like Life, Higgins is at her most precarious with straight-up emotion; MacLean’s melodic bassline seems to duet with the vocal as it seems, for once, to be straightforwardly vulnerable. After telling us “I don’t really care but I could, I should” our narrator begs the listener “Don’t leave me at home with all the people I lost and all the things I forgot. For all the people I lost, I care.” Whether it’s a slip of the artist’s mask of distance or a deliberate trick to fool us into caring, we care. It’s indicative of the tension in Vital Idles: pop songs unwilling to bend to convention, chart hits in the alternative timeline where Messthetics compilations are Now That's What I Call Music, endlessly inventive linguistics that reveal emotional depth, a dry, punk minimalism able to turn on a dime into a mouldy, witty kitchen sink story narrated by Samuel Beckett. It’s a tension that threatens to fall apart into dissonance or resolve into sweetness but thankfully does neither, rather it keeps Vital Idles moving forward, never standing still, never taking it easy.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
01. A Premise
02. Solid States
03. Chains
04. Fall Into Shape
05. Waxes Colder
06. Carve A Bat
07. Cave Raised

SIDE B
08. Blue, Black & White
09. Time Free
10. Rising Damp
11. Geraniums
12. Like Life
13. Now & Again
14. The Scenery

Terry's second seven inch with three new songs exploring themes of patriarchy in politics, mass consumption versus lifestyle choices and the dating scene.

'8 Girls' is a pop nugget that references female politicians including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Julie Bishop, controversial leader of the One Nation party Pauline Hanson and Senators Penny Wong and Jacqui Lambie, who on the cover looks to be dressed as a sumo wrestler.

Divide Terry into four and you get Al Montfort (UV Race, Total Control, Dick Diver), Amy Hill (Constant Mongrel, School Of Radiant Living), Xanthe Waite (Mick Harvey Band) and Zephyr Pavey (Eastlink, Total Control, Russell Street Bombings).

Originally released on a short run by Aarght records in Australia, this version on transparent vinyl housed in a reverse board sleeve, limited to 400 copies!

"Oakland, CA’s No Babies return with their second LP, another furiously ecstatic exploration of the overlapping margins of punk, hardcore, and no wave. The pieces we’ve come to expect are all here: Jasmine Watson’s invectives against capitalism, binaries, police; Ricky Martyr’s inimitable and always surprising stop-start guitar; horns of all stripes breaking through the noise (Misha Poleschuck on tenor sax, clarinet); a nimble and powerful jazz-influenced rhythm section (Laura DeVeber on bass, Sean Nieves on drums).

Their particular brand of composed/improvised noise/music has never been chaos at all (they’ve always known exactly what they’re doing), and this time around the band seems more at one than ever, aided by the crispness and brightness of Jack Shirley’s able production. These are walls of sound, something like a runaway train, or a writhing sea serpent, and we are along for the ride. This is music that feels necessary. These are songs that sound vital to survival. We must play them or we will explode. We must play them in order to explode. California in 2018 is a place that feels difficult to survive in. Our friends and neighbours are murdered by the state and its negligence; our homes could crumble or be stolen from us at a moment’s notice; capital is bearing down in new and even more unimaginably cruel ways. The land itself is telling us that we shouldn’t be here: fire, mudslides, earthquakes.

‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ is a reminder of the twin powers of sorrow and strength, noise and melody, anger and joy. “Joy / Joy / Joy / Joy / Joy / Joy / Joy / Joy” Watson screams at the end of the album-closing titular song. Joy may be the only way out of this fresh hell—No Babies make joyful noise and for that we should all be grateful." - Grace Ambrose.

The Green Child is the long distance musical collaboration of Mikey Young and Raven Mahon, who met in 2013 in when their bands, Total Control and Grass Widow played a show in Oakland, California. They started writing songs together in Australia in 2014 and the project has been on a slow burn since. Their selftitled debut album is the culmination of few years of putting ideas together internationally and periodically recording in Mikey's home studio. Some of the lyrical content and the band's name was inspired by Herbert Read's 1935 utopian, communist, sci-fi novel called The Green Child.

With such a choice name, it’s no surprise that The Green Child draw their sound from an illusory past as much as they stalk into pastures new. Broadly retro-futuristic in scope, verdant acres of lushly evocative synthesizers and blippy drum machines underpin most of their upbeat yet decidedly uncanny songs. Raven’s calmly scenic and measured vocal flits like a will-o’-the-wisp throughout the tracks, proffering a guiding hand as she walks us through the often eerie, electronic concoctions.

‘Traveler’ opens the album all redolent, beat-minded and labyrinthine. Twisting melody lines swirl and envelop like a sandstorm, whilst Raven coolly projects on a “solitary man” lost to “green oblivion”. Similarly, ‘Her Majesty II’ glistens with its playful yet plaintive vocal and iridescent arpeggios, whilst ‘Bertha’ slows things down with tumbling chimes and stately use of space.

The Green Child are adept at atmosphere, their songs are refined from gently unfolding ideas that never fail to realise and build to their potential. Tracks like ‘Walking Distance’ (featuring Al Montfort on saxophone) and ‘New Years Eve’ are exercises in evolved composition with ideas budding off and blossoming into truly resonant dimensions. The band’s cover of ‘Marie Elene’ (by Keith Pearson) and closing track ‘Destroyer’ are further crowning achievements, both pieces subtly handled with poise and ample melancholic grandeur. The Green Child fix their sights on the heights they want to reach within their songs and much like the project itself don’t want to rush to the finish line. When it becomes more about the unfurling journey, why not take the time to enjoy the trip and burn slower?

Darlene Shrugg is unabashedly a rock ’n roll band. Formed in Toronto in 2013, it’s something of a local enigma; Darlene more or less abstains from an internet presence, and its public performances are sporadic at best. Now, over two, reticent years, Darlene has completed an LP, coaxing out an imaginatively produced debut album of brash theatricality and uninhibited Rock and Roll.

Darlene represents collaborative convergence. The band was conceived initially by Maximilian Turnbull (formerly Slim Twig) and Simone TB, who played together for ten years as art-punk duo, Tropics. Seemingly having exhausted the limits of their angular, hermetic approach, they felt it time to broaden horizons. They invited Meg Remy, creative force behind the critically lauded U.S. Girls project, to compose lyrics and vocal melodies for a new band’s repertoire. It was quickly apparent that Remy should also perform in the band, at which point both Carlyn Bezic and Amanda Crist, known for their electro-pop duo, Ice Cream, also joined. An interesting dynamic developed. Turnbull & TB generated instrumentals for Remy to write to. Furnished with lyrics and melodies, the songs were then arranged by the entire group. This work and a schedule of infrequent live shows continued for a couple of years until Young Guv, of Fucked Up fame, cajoled the band into a studio with engineer-producer Steve Chahley to finally record some of the exciting new tunes.

A certain alchemy has helped to establish the unique force found on the debut album: four women, one man; four Canadians and an American; musical collaborations stretching back to nascent high school years; punk exuberance meeting studio finesse. Darlene exudes an easy confidence in combining the raw, blunt power of the band’s writing and arrangements with Turnbull & Chahley’s layered and, at times, elaborate production. The concise blast of their self-titled debut seeks to compress, absorb and invert the energy of classic rock. They profane, as much as pay tribute to a lineage of foundational bands, arguably stemming from Black Sabbath and Alice Cooper through Thin Lizzy, and on through the boy’s club fantasy of early 2000’s, ‘raw’ rock revival bands, like The Strokes or The Hives. Gauche rock moves are ransacked and transformed with the glee of an amateur cast production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. All of this unfolds in less than half an hour, leaving time for a detour into the sublime with album centrepiece, Strawberry Milk, an interstellar power ballad turned meditation on Eve, and the confrontation between sex and eternity.

With their glammed-up, high intensity live show featuring all members contributing vocals (save drummer TB), Darlene Shrugg seems not to rebut so much as disregard the notion of Rock’s diminished cultural capital. Their diverse brand of hard rock resists genre pigeon-holing. They fan out an array of stylistic threads, which they might later choose to follow up, or perhaps just as likely, skip past. They’ve laid waste to the Toronto underground. Now, they’re hungry for more.

TRACK LISTING

01. Inherit The Wind
02. First World Blues
03. Wah Wah
04. Strawberry Milk
05. Technicolour Surround
06. National Security
07. Pete Rose Boogie
08. Where’s Your Brother?
09. Freedom Comes In A Plastic Card

Four voices tousle loudly as they leave the soft realm of the body, venturing out into the world. Reproduction and traditional instruments (guitars, drums, samplers, digital, voices) allow the human generation to play right now. Playing is intersubjective, we appeal to consciousness. Here in the human era we dialog, reference, and reproduce with traditional reference and frustration. Kissing lightly decided harmonies, Gen Pop plays in the human generation and is from the human era. Playing used in its most remedial sense, an occasion to slap together a narrative and generate trust between each other.

Gen Pop produced a small run of tapes featuring 3 tracks from their debut 7” on Upset the Rhythm earlier this year. This 7” brings to totality the sinews and olfactory system of the Gen Pop promo tape. The essence of what they are doing and not the end of it. The first track ‘On Screen’ whinges lackaday about screen oriented living. “I’ll be chained and beaten, in a motel room its our first time meeting” shoots the moon for the loneliness of access and an end to curiosity (good riddance). Honestly though, a screen can and will be held by all.

The product of exposure can be found in ‘Easy’, the ballad of confused ability. The lacing of MaryJane Dunphe’s noise guitar, brought back to life from her days in Polly Darton, meld with David Strother and Theo Maughan’s air tight rhythm section. Ian Corrigan, playing 2nd guitar, and Dunphe vocalise together in frustration, this all should be quicker, easier. Corrigan and Dunphe played together previously in Olympia, WA’s maelstrom of punk and passion known as Vexx (also released through Upset The Rhythm). ‘Teach Me How To’ peaks in winding energy, standing tall as a pinnacle of frustration and excess. “The poor need lessons, they’re far too crude, but what about your life? Have you known rot tooth” Dunphe cries in resistance to plutocracy and vapid hegemony.

Access will be had by all, but not until the human era is over and the internet is a human right. In ‘Dear Jackie’ simple harmonies on the guitar lap lightly at the toes of a bulky thick rhythm section that is strolling late night on the beach. Each note that Dunphe and Corrigan hit are planned to harmonise, intention over expression. Strother’s voice digs deep into choosing, choosing an ending, his pummelling drums and margin walking sense of genre helps the band approach a more lighter sound. Finally, closer ‘The Wall’ can speak for itself. “I know, we’re guilty, these eyes so milky,” the powerless individual’s eyes cataract while watching an indigenous land be divided by a white contingency. And if its called white supremacy they might as well “ take my head and turn it clockwise”. Needling guitar parts crescendo into a furious finale, reminding all that Gen Pop as one of the last human bands are trying twice as hard to keep ahead of the future.

PIKACYU-MAKOTO are an intergalactic love and peace duo, featuring two figureheads of underground Japanese music; PIKA from Afrirampo and Makoto Kawabata of legendary psychedelic avatars Acid Mother’s Temple. 

As a duo they embrace both sides of the coin, drums and guitar, chaos and order, male and female, ying and yang, the angel and the devil. They are more than the sum of both counterparts though, making for a maximalist auditory experience. PIKA brings her skills of mystifying performance to the table, all free-drum bluster and vocals veering between shrine maiden and wild spirit. Kawabata's guitar-work moves from a roar to a whisper, a yell to a sob, he’s working on the same canvas of extremes. The aim of their unity is to write truly celestial hymns for the outer world and odes of love for the inner cosmic context.

No strangers to one another, the pair have not only gigged together with their respective bands but also recorded together, when these two outfits temporarily fused in 2005 to become Acid Mothers Afrirampo (releasing an album of the same name). Two years later they distilled their collaboration, all other players being stripped away to leave the core of Pikacyu's manic drums and pop vocal, and Makoto's schizoid guitar conjurings. In 2011 they spent five weeks touring the US and their first album, ‘OM Sweet Home: We Are Shining Stars From Darkside’, which was released by the esteemed UK label of all things heavy and brilliant, Riot Season. Last year they spent two weeks touring through Europe whilst writing a new album suffused with the outreaching sound and message of their impulsive live performances. This new album is entitled ‘Galaxilympics’ and will be released by Upset The Rhythm on August 4th on LP and CD.

‘Galaxilympics’ is an album of contrasts, so much colour, so much shade! ‘Space Sumo’ kicks off the record in explosive style. Pikacyu's drums jitter, crash and stumble, but steadfastly refuse to groove. Makoto attacks his guitar, cloaking himself in reverb to produce a wall-of-sound, alternating between melody and noise. ‘Funifunikonefuni’ follows with it’s frenzied take on pop music, bubbling with energy and PIKA’s multiple vocal layers. ‘I’ll Forgive’ is chant-like in its devotion to following the tumbling melody line of the song even to absurd and unpredictable dimensions. ‘Pika Mako Hall’ is a more serene affair, with whispered echoes and guitar drones swirling amongst bursts of rapid sequencer ambience. ‘Castle Of Sand’ picks up on this more spacious approach with slowly developing programmed electronics, before the title track erupts with gurgling synths, soaring guitar trails and PIKA’s most searching vocal yet.

The album concludes in reflective manner with the suitably titled ‘Sayonownara’, a song as much in the present as it is in the act of saying farewell. It’s positively elegiac with washes of cymbal and deep acres of guitar drone for the first five minutes before PIKA’s drums take things up a gear and into more psychedelic out-rock terrain. This insurgence eventually peaks and the album melts away to silence. PIKACYU-MAKOTO have made an album that takes you on a trip into your very soul before emerging once more at the edge of another galaxy. ‘Galaxilympics’ is a triumph of opposites united, it enjoys walking out into the unknown, but it’s also a portal into the very real world of two musicians who find peace and semblance through their interaction. Hymns and odes to one side, this is a giant album of future-facing song and noise, where better to find harmony enthroned? 

Terry is a latent man of mystery. Terry is also a band from Melbourne, Australia. Divide him in half and you split the genders, into quarters and you get Amy Hill (also of Constant Mongrel, School Of Radiant Living), Xanthe Waite (Mick Harvey Band, Primo), Zephyr Pavey (Eastlink, Total Control, Russell St Bombings) and Al Montfort (UV Race, Dick Diver, Total Control). Guitars, bass, drums, all four sing. Terry are busy people and Terry is a particularly active project too, having released two EPs and a full length album (‘Terry HQ’) last year on Upset The Rhythm.

After returning from summer 2016’s European tour, Terry set about writing a new album of songs. These are now grouped together as ‘Remember Terry’, an album full of wish fulfilment, critiqued characters, memorial muscle and historical hustle.’Start The Tape’ is a not quite two-minute careen through what Terry are best known for; gang vocals, chased-down melodies and acerbic commentary. “The Boys in Blue are no nonsense, but no nonsense just won’t hold up” they assert throughout the song, amid unbridled drum rolls and keyboard sirens.

Terry draw on their everyday realities to make personal conclusions; “I can’t live here, I can’t leave here” they collectively sing through the strummed guitars and skittling synths of ‘Heavin Heavies’. Somehow the serious nature of the themes handled in their songs are only further emphasised by the tuneful, arguably ‘sing-along’ treatment Terry usually employ. ‘Give Up The Crown’, ‘The Colonel’ and ‘Gun’ are other prime examples of this, packed full of assembled vocal harmonies, contagious riffs and rhetoric.

With tracks like ’Glory’ and ‘Homage’, Terry allow us for the first time to see a more laid-back side of his personality. Supplemented with fluorescing synth lines and adopting an unhurried pace, both songs lull you into a false sense of pleasantry, only to pack a greater punch when lyrics like “Off his bloody head goes” or “No head, no choice, no land, no time, no crime, no good” surface. ‘Take Me To The City’ is a similarly evocative stroll through the “bright night city lights”, with Amy and Xanthe listing their nightlife observations over languorous guitar lines and programmed drums. Their “all they talk about..” refrain drifts off effortlessly into dazed disclosures. Terry prefer to make a profound point in a quiet way, hectoring bypassed for self-revelation. The truth is in there, just skating below the surface of their glammy, country-stepping punk/pop odysseys, we only have to listen carefully.

‘Remember Terry’ is a fitting follow-up to last year’s celebrated debut album. Ideas are pursued and new ground explored. Throughout this expansion of sound and subject-matter though, Terry remain committed to telling it straight, reporting from the frontline of the political made personal. ’Remember Terry ‘ was recorded by Terry at Grace Lane and Terry HQ through the first few months of 2017. Digitised by Nick Kuceli. Mixed and Mastered by Mikey Young.

TRACK LISTING

01. Rio
02. Start The Tape
03. Take Me To The City
04. Risk
05. Give Up The Crown
06. Heavin’ Heavies
07. Glory
08. Gun
09. The Colonel
10. Homage

Pega Monstro are sisters Julia Reis (drums) and Maria Reis (guitar), both sing. They share the same birthday but are not twins and have always lived in Lisbon, Portugal. 

Having played music together in other groups since their mid-teens, Maria and Julia, resolved to become a duo in 2010 focussing on their intuitive sense of harmony and expressionistic dream-punk sound. Pega Monstro released their self-titled debut album on their own Cafetra imprint in 2012, with national critical acclaim meeting the raucous garage-rock inflected record. Whilst, 2015 saw Pega Monstro team up with UK label Upset The Rhythm for their impressive and more sonically developed ‘Alfarroba’ album that led to international attention. Now Pega Monstro return with their third album entitled ‘Casa de Cima’, which translates as ‘Upper House’. The album shares its name with the Villa in which the album was recorded, nestled amongst the pine-scattered terrain of the Sintra mountains. ‘Casa de Cima’ was recorded through September 2016 by Leonardo Bindilatti, who also produced their last record. 

‘Casa de Cima’ opens with ‘Ó Miguel’ its first line translating as “I changed the strings on my guitar”. Like the first line of a spell, the words entreat you to hear how much Pega Monstro have grown in confidence and vision, they are trying something new. There is no rush, only effortless intent, they sound compelling and assured and let the song unfold in its own leisure. The stunning ‘Partir a Loiça’ follows with its stammering rhythms and soaring, swirling vocals. The song’s title, literally ‘break all the dishes’, is a saying in Portugal meaning to shake things up and exceed expectations, a worthy title indeed.

Much like the mysterious water jug on the cover of the album, burnished with unknowable symbols suggesting art-deco hieroglyphs, Pega Monstro constantly reach for something beyond plain comprehension, stretching songs to their limits before collapsing them back into new, more interesting forms. The Portuguese poet and writer Fernando Pessoa had a similar mutable approach to his work, inventing over seventy different pen names, called heteronyms, to act as conduits for the limits of his imaginative writing. Pega Monstro recite one of Pessoa’s poems called ‘O moinho de café’ during the third act of their epic yet romantic track ‘Cachupa’. Having their home city of Lisbon in common, Pega Monstro untether Pessoa’s words from the city’s fixated tourist treatment and let them breathe back their soul. The band’s approach to song has always been both refreshing and eloquent and ‘Cachupa’ is a good example of how natural and spontaneous Pega Monstro can sound.

TRACK LISTING

01. Ó Miguel
02. Partir A Loiça
03. Fado Da Estrela Do Ouro
04. Cachupa
05. Pouca Terra
06. Sensação
07. Odemira

Rat Columns is the mutable musical project of David West, an artist as prolific as he is diverse in his output. West is the driving force behind the groups Rank/Xerox, Liberation and Lace Curtain, he was also a member of Total Control, and most recently debuted a solo album proper.

Whether its forward-facing punk or turning his hand to crafting sleek prisms of pop, West’s credentials check out. Rat Columns is no exception, always central to his vision and returned to many times since its inception in Perth almost a decade ago. Over the years the band has morphed and continued with an array of different friends from the USA and Australia, always finding David West dancing through the long shadows at its core. Working with many distinguished underground imprints including Blackest Ever Black, Adagio 830, Smart Guy Records and RIP Society, Rat Columns have left in their wake a trail of 7”s, EPs and two full length albums. Now a third album, entitled ‘Candle Power’ is cued for release through Upset The Rhythm.

Recorded in Guildford, Western Australia, with the Perth crew of West, Amber Gempton, Louis Hooper and Chris Cobilis, ‘Candle Power’ sees the band's universe of chiming guitar pop explode into new worlds of colour and shade. It’s an album as happy to walk home in the rain as it is to reel dizzily through daylight. It’s melancholic lilt tempered by a quietly-sung optimism. ‘Candle Power’ tunnels further than ever before down the pop mainline, cutting in with moments of soul, disco and experimental plots. West is a magpie-like musician, unafraid to assemble songs from a motley collection of influences and ideas. He weaves songs together with a deft hand and an acute grasp for the memorable yet momentary.

A drumroll sputters to life kicking off the album with first track ‘Someone Else’s Dream’, a bittersweet remonstrance of bounding brightness underscored by West and Gempton’s shared vocals. It’s a song about an inability to let go of the past, sounding defiantly sunny amidst the vivid keyboards, guitar jangle and resolute beat. This knack of teaming up decidedly heartrending subject matter with some of the most affirming music imaginable is a trait well understood by fans of 80’s independent music and it’s safe to say that whilst being a fan himself West can still breathe new life into this approach. “I trail off like Sunday bells, unwanted” sings West on the equally introspective ‘She Loves The Rain’ whilst xylophones and shimmering patterns of guitar interlock in blithe harmony. ‘Time’s No Vessel’ also plays a part in reinforcing this method. Against a dreamy guitar refrain that’s pure Johnny Marr, West laments that he knows “time is no vessel for our love, it’s a dark cloud that rains down from above”.

‘Blinded By The Shadow’ marks an about turn for the album, seeing the record start to flex its motorik muscles with a sequenced bassline and rock-solid drumbeat. The song’s title is sung in a call and response manner that drifts over the dance floor hypnotically. Handclaps, violin and tambourine join a host of percussion to further enhance the captivated groove. ‘Is This Really What You’re Like?’ takes on a similar focused shuffle only with a more minimal demeanour. Whilst, ‘Candle Power II’ takes the disco to the other side of the tracks with its shimmering synths, violin drones and uniform beat. It’s at once mesmeric and meandering, zoning in on the ephemeral theme of the album, acknowledging its sense of transience. The difference between letting go and moving on.

That is what ‘Candle Power’ as an album is reaching for, it is enamoured to the fleeting. That flicker of recognition between one choice and another. ‘Northern Soul’ chases its own heartbeat through lush, sweeping synths and hushed refrains, it’s a heartfelt song in hot pursuit. ‘Dream Tonight’ concludes the album with its propulsive drum machine, searching keyboard lines and effusive bassline. It’s a tour de force of pristine pop akin to New Order in its ability to capture this mercurial feeling, to listen through the music. “You could dream tonight, try to keep an ember alight” West sings repeatedly through the song, before it dissolves into something once there. There’s an elusive beauty in the most short-lived moment and with ‘Candle Power’ Rat Columns breathe warmth across the coals to live in their glow a moment longer.

TRACK LISTING

01. Someone Else’s Dream
02. She Loves The Rain
03. Blinded By The Shadow
04. Time’s No Vessel
05. Is This Really What You’re Like?
06. Candle Power II
07. You Don’t Have To Try
08. Northern Soul
09. Dream Tonight

The album was produced by John Congleton (Blondie, Sigur Ros), Greg Saunier of Deerhoof and Xiu Xiu's own Angela Seo.

It features guest appearances by fabled minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine, L.A. Banjee Ball superstar commentator Enyce Smith, Swans guitar virtuoso Kristof Hahn and legendary drag artist and personal hero of Xiu Xiu, Vaginal Davis.

FORGET was recorded during a period of epic productivity for Xiu Xiu. While writing FORGET, they released the lauded Plays the Music of Twin Peaks, collaborated with Mitski on a song for an upcoming John Cameron Mitchell film, composed music for art installations by Danh Vo, recorded an album with Merzbow and scored an experimental reworking of the Mozart opera, The Magic Flute. All of this frantic, external activity lead to a softly damaged dreaminess and broadened intent that has not been heard before in other Xiu Xiu works.

Standout track, “Wondering” is one of the catchiest boogie pop gems in the Xiu Xiu catalog, but like much of FORGET, it still bears an underlying tension that manifests differently in each piece. From the haunted guitar duet of "Petite", the hilariously fraught lyrics of "Get Up," the advanced industrial boxing match of "Jenny GoGo," or the experimental goth explosion of "Faith, Torn Apart", all the songs, in their own ways, build to a roiling boil of a fate in vanishing.

The calligraphy on the cover translates literally to "we forget." It bows to the universality of everything and everyone's inevitable decline and foggy disappearance. Regarding the album title, Xiu Xiu singer Jamie Stewart said, “To forget uncontrollably embraces the duality of human frailty. It is a rebirth in blanked out renewal but it also drowns and mutilates our attempt to hold on to what is dear.” FORGET is both the palliative fade out of a traumatic's past but also the trampling pain of a beautiful one's decay.
Xiu Xiu is Shayna Dunkelman, Angela Seo and Jamie "Butch Jenny" Stewart.

Recorded immediately following on from their truly epic European tour last Summer, ‘Wild Hunt’ by VEXX is a deliriously hot-wired mini-LP. Showcasing the band utterly consumed in the moment, these six tracks blaze with giddy abandon, raging mere heartbeats away from oblivion.

Recorded by Hayes & Sam at Dub Narcotic in Olympia, mastered by Golden Mastering. This LP is a one-time pressing (on black vinyl) in collaboration with our good friends at M’Lady’s Records, with incredible artwork drawn by Maryjane herself depicting the supernatural Wild Hunt in hot pursuit.

Nottingham based drumming duo RATTLE release their eponymous debut LP via Upset the Rhythm. Rattle focus almost exclusively on drums and more drums, beneath a delicate overlay of vocal harmonies and percussive effects.

Formed by Katharine Eira Brown (also of Kogumaza) and Theresa Wrigley (also of Fists), Rattle began as an experiment in crafting rich songs and melody using drums and voice alone. Their music weaves and intertwines post-punk, minimalism and experimental rock, through off-kilter rhythms, patterns and counter melodies. Their live performances are at once hypnotic, monastic and danceable, having entranced audiences at Supersonic Festival, Dot to Dot, throughout the UK during a recent tour with Witching Waves and in Europe with Zea (Arnold de Boer from The Ex). 

The duo formed quite by accident in Nottingham in 2011, where Katharine and Theresa knew each other from playing in other local bands. Katharine was a guitarist who had recently started playing drums in the band Kogumaza and Theresa is the enthralling drummer from Fists. They originally met up to skill swap guitars and drums but soon enough they found they were having more fun with a double drum set-up and started making the sound of their first song “Boom”, which became a blueprint for their new band’s sound. As Katharine explains; “It seemed obvious right from the start that nothing else was going to be required in terms of instruments.”

When it came to recording the album it made absolute sense to bring in their regular live sound engineer Mark Spivey (also of Kogumaza) who has been working closely with the band from the beginning. Live, he adds additional effects and manipulations from the sound desk and these techniques were transferred over to a studio setting at The Big Mouse House, in Sneinton, Nottingham (in the studio owned by Tony Doggen, of Spiritualized and coincidently where Jake Bugg recorded his new album). A lot of time and attention was taken to get the best sound possible from the drums in the room. As Mark explains: “We wanted the record to be and sound very real, and to sound like what it is, which meant (by definition) that it needed to sound unlike anything else.”

Having mostly played in experimental or avant-rock settings Rattle first discovered that they could make their awkward audiences dance with opening track “Trainer (Get You)”, which was specifically designed to make the listener move in some way. Whereas other songs embrace different moods, for example “Starting” has a sense of urgency and a repeated lyric phrase that becomes a mantra, and “Click” is more soothing and meditative. The high hat and cymbal hits in “Sorcerer” have a sword-fighting feel and “Stringer Bell” is more of a cocktail song from a 1950s city apartment.

Often starting by picking out the ghost notes from the drums to develop a melody, the song then reveals itself in rounds and harmonies with layer upon layer of rhythm and vocal, lending a choral feel to some of the tracks. Rattle effortlessly blend the avant-garde with irresistible melodies and hypnotic drum beats, using rhythm and harmony to create a refreshing sound that is utterly new - a pretty rare feat these days when we’re saturated with so much music. Their live shows conjure all the magic and excitement from their exhilarating creative process, allowing the audience to share in the very special bond between the duo as they dazzle with their drumming skills.

TRACK LISTING

01. Trainer (Get You)
02. Starting
03. Click
04. Boom
05. Thunder
06. True Picture
07. Stringer Bell
08. On Balance
09. Sorcerer
10. Elegant In The Mouth
11. Dulling

Love is a highway, but you’re not likely to find Terry there anymore. He’s on the train. Terry saw the light, and he put on his sunhat. Ring Ring…‘If you're carsick, get outta the car!’
There’s only room for one big pug in this doggy daycare. Terry’s taken to the night. Thank you nurse, I'll see myself out.

LOOK! There he is, peeping through the cracks in your screen. Nuanced. Mercurial. Free.Blowing you a kiss. Marcel Marceau, Shmarshel Shmarsheau! But Terry…. How unforgettable.

What will you do when the cloud gives way? When the map leads you to a pile of potatoes? We wuz wrong. Hit me with your algorithm stick!

Siri, is death an illusion? Siri, am I locked in a prison of my own making? Don’t pull that thread kiddo.Siri’s gone. Talk about truth! But when you're ready for real answers…Talk about TERRY.

After all the accolades from press and peers, what’s a legendary band left to do? Rent out an abandoned office space in the middle of the desert in New Mexico in lieu of a regular recording studio, go in with little or no preconceived notions of what would happen, set up, plug in and get loud! After seven days Deerhoof had found (you guessed it) ‘The Magic’, a raw and refreshing wallop of an album about leaving your comfort zone and finding a pineapple.

With ‘The Magic’, Deerhoof dreamed up an alchemy of '77 punk, pop, glam, hair metal, doo-wop, hip hop, and R&B, late-night car rides, long days, spandex, shadows, and attitude. Poetry into noise, volume knobs into pleasure, friendship into rock band.

"Maybe it came from the music we liked when we were kids, when music was like magic - before we knew about the industry and before there were rules - sometimes hair metal is the right choice. We all showed up in the mood to sing," says drummer Greg Saunier.

For singer and bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, the making ‘The Magic’ was the latest episode of an ongoing gamble. "I joined this band a week after I arrived in San Francisco from Japan. I hopped on a MUNI bus to have a first meeting with Deerhoof. I got off at a wrong stop. I was lost and confused. They found me on a dark street corner after I called for help from a pay phone. Since then my adventure expanded. Deerhoof is a vehicle with four powered wheels that takes me through forest, desert and buildings. My life is adventure!"

‘The Magic’ is a mixtape imbued with Deerhoof's sorcery; boldness, wonder, technical know-how, risk. It is a mixtape by the kid with the biggest music collection you've ever seen, who will take you camping and show you how to pull a rabbit out of a hat.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Never one to go with the flow, Deerhoof have once again come up with a fresh approach to songwriting. Both psychedelic and melodic, but never boring, Shimmering guitar hooks and grooving bass permeate the driving drum refrains. Slightly hazy vocals float atop murky rivers of grunge. Post-punk attitude with a psychedelic sheen. Impossible to categorise, but easy to appreciate. Classic Deerhoof.

TRACK LISTING

01. The Devil And His Anarchic Surrealist Retinue
02. Kafe Mania!
03. That Ain’t No Life To Me
04. Life Is Suffering
05. Criminals Of The Dream
06. Model Behavior
07. Learning To Apologize Effectively
08. Dispossessor
09. I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire
10. Acceptance Speech
11. Patrasche Come Back
12. Debut
13. Plastic Thrills
14. Little Hollywood
15. Nurse Me

The new band from Al Monte from Total Control, UV Race, Dick Diver etc.

Second Pressing on CLEAR VINYL, 300 only... 

Terry is getting ready, combing his hair, buttoning his jacket, turning the key in the door. “I’m doing fine” sings Terry out loud, he knows. Divide him into four and you get Al Montfort (UV Race, Total Control, Dick Diver etc.), Amy Hill (Constant Mongrel, School Of Radiant Living), Xanthe Waite (Mick Harvey Band) and Zephyr Pavey (Eastlink, Total Control, Russell Street Bombings).

Inevitably, Terry likes to make a noise. Drums, guitars and all his voices come into play, making a solid raft for Terry’s melancholic musings to navigate the languid rapids. This all unravels at its own pace, conducting a conversation with the commonplace. ‘Talk About Terry’ marks the band’s first venture into the recorded domain collecting together three of the greatest misshapen glam pop tunes Melbourne, Australia has to offer. Let’s sit up at the table. Let’s start the dialogue now, as Terry is well on his way.

Pega Monstro are sisters Júlia Reis (drums) and Maria Reis (guitar, keyboard), both sing! The duo’s name translates as ‘catch the monster’, perfectly countering the band’s striving dream-punk sound. The name ‘Pega Monstro’ also references a novelty toy in the shape of a jelly hand on a string, which children have been throwing at each other in delight for many generations in their native country.

Born and raised in Lisbon, Portugal, Maria and Júlia have been playing music together since they were 15 and 17 respectively, in other groups first before resolving on becoming a duo. Back in 2010, both sisters started a record label, along with some of their musician friends, called Cafetra Records to document Portugal’s garage punk scene. Cafetra represents a community of like-minded musicians who all help each other, making music that they’d want to hear, powered by enthusiasm. Pega Monstro were among the first bands on the label, releasing their ‘O Juno-60 Nunca Teve Fita’ EP the same year to a burgeoning audience of devotees, who’d turn up in growing numbers to each show and sing back the lyrics. Maria puts the band’s instant attention down to being different, “we were girls, we were young and we could rock, people weren’t used to that at all”. 2012 saw Pega Monstro release their self-titled debut album, which was produced by B Fachada, an extremely well known Portuguese singer songwriter. The band and producer hit it off like wildfire and recorded an impressive, raucous debut record that met with critical national acclaim.

Now Pega Monstro have a new album ready for Upset The Rhythm, whom they hope will bring their music to audiences outside of their homeland too. ‘Alfarroba’ is the name of this second album, it’s title meaning ‘carob’, after the sweet tasting bean that grows in the wild trees that spontaneously spring up along the Mediterranean coast. Maria explains further, “In Portugal there are a lot of carob trees in the Algarve and our mother's side of the family is from there, we spent every summer there as children. The scent is unlike any other. So apart from the phonetic appeal of the word, ‘Alfarroba’ is also a homage to that heritage”. The songs on ‘Alfarroba’ deal with many themes, some universal topics like love and growing up, others focusing on the nature of writing songs themselves, whilst some try to make sense of the world from a female perspective.

‘Braço de Ferro’ kick starts the album with torrents of energy, translating as ‘arm wrestling’ the song’s title is apt for a track so full of back-and-forth, ‘no prisoners’ phrasing. Júlia and Maria excel at bouncing ideas off each other, snare rolls trigger flights of guitar, fogs of cymbal form steps for the vocal to climb. “My only problem is that near you I feel so weak” they sing over and over again, there’s an honesty present that goes deep. The lyrics have a very conversational feel to them, Pega Monstro sing as they would speak, directly into your head, avoiding poetics. ‘Estrada’ for instance fortifies itself with a cement-solid riff, allowing the vocals to float and drift across the occasional lilting melodic refrain. The inevitable satisfaction that comes with repetition is shown off to full effect here, with the immense rhythm resuming when the time comes for the song’s mesmeric downpour to dissipate. “I’m going out on the road to see who I am” they sing in unison, breathing myth into their everyday anxieties. ‘Branca’ is a song with a propulsion so compelling that it’s hard not to just start spinning around with your arms trailing out like helicopter blades. The vocals drive against the drums, the drums push up against the guitar, it all feels gloriously lightheaded and overridingly positive in attitude.

Songs like ‘Fado D'Água Fria’ and ‘És Tudo O Que Eu Queria’ also showcase the Pega Monstro’s more reflective mood too, with both songs pausing for the clouds to pass, delivering some well-anticipated melancholic moments to offset the album’s otherwise dizzying ascent. ‘Alfarroba’ was produced and mixed by Leonardo Bindilatti, a good friend of the band and Cafetra Records. Bindilatti has worked on many releases from the close-knit group of bands from Lisbon, including his own Putas Bêbadas, this familiarity comes through on the recording too. Nothing feels rushed, there’s a leisure afforded in getting everything sounding just right. Pega Monstro make rapturous music, it’s brisk, it’s contagious, it laughs at the language barrier and just keeps running headlong into more and more new ideas. ‘Alfarroba’ is not an exhaustive listen given that though, it’s more like an antidote than an endless anecdote, as restless, impulsive and smart as the band that made it. ‘Alfarroba’ by Pega Monstro will be released on July 6th through Upset The Rhythm worldwide, whilst the band themselves have European tour plans throughout the summer. 

TRACK LISTING

01. Braço De Ferro
02. Branca
03. Não Consegues
04. És Tudo O Que Eu Queria
05. Fiz Esta Canção
06. Estrada
07. És Tu, Já Sei
08. Amêndoa Amarga
09. Fado D'Água Fria
10. Voltas Para Trás

Sauna Youth are an evolving band of future humans making truly irregular punk, not quite comparable to anything else. 'Weird' is a meaningless platitude, and 'art punk' is a classifier that shouldn't be required.

Album announced on The Quietus: http://thequietus.com/articles/17299-listen-new-sauna-youth

Consisting of Richard Phoenix (drums, vocals), Lindsay Corstorphine (guitar), Jen Calleja (vocals, sampler) and Christopher Murphy (bass), Sauna Youth are a punk band that’s happy to embrace all of the contradictions that go along with that notion. On paper Sauna Youth sound considered - live they can barely be contained. They are at times furious, unstoppable and severe with the sampler wailing like an alarm coming from a parallel universe – then chugging, poppy, harmonious and fun. Forever loud. As Kurt Cobain once asked "Why can't we be both Black Sabbath and The Beatles?" Sauna Youth consistently pose the question, “Why can't we be both The Ramones and Steve Reich?”

Having formed in Brighton in 2009, the band then moved to London in 2011, shifting its line up to its current constellation. Brand new album, ‘Distractions’ marks the first time the band has managed to write everything in a room together and also documents the first time they have entered a studio to record; the songs in turn created through the process of learning to write together. ‘Distractions’ was recorded over a couple of days in July 2014 at Sound Savers in Homerton with Mark Jasper, then mixed by the band and mastered by Kris Lapke.

‘Distractions’ is made up of 14 songs about desire, but more importantly, about that area just out of reach of desire, at the very centre of the human psyche. It looks at what it means to be distracted from being yourself. It thrives in the desire to be someone else, the very idea that you could be someone else. It’s also an album that feels instinctive and natural, flowing freely from a band that have come to terms with the sum of its parts. Ultimately though, Sauna Youth have made a colossal record which is impossible not to dance to.

Attracted to the possibilities apparent within a DIY philosophy, the band self-recorded and self-released their own music pretty much until the release of their debut LP ‘Dreamlands’ on Faux Discx/Gringo Records in 2012. ‘Dreamlands’, opened with the 10-minute introduction to the ‘Town Called Distraction’ where the stories on this new album find themselves living. This new album opens with the same locked groove from the end of previous one. Until ‘Transmitters’ suddenly breaks the cycling ambience, racing off at full pelt, its guitars pulsing and chopping in a terse manner before the chorus crashes in like a wave. By singing every word at the same time, Ecke (Calleja) and Boon (Phoenix) create a unified voice of no specific gender, allowing the songs to be sung from multiple perspectives, from a place of shared experience. The song’s lyrics branch out of ideas of Transhumanism; looking for a way to live forever, for something that makes us last, like recordings – “I want my thoughts scratched into plastic/hear my voice on an endless loop/I like persistence” they sing in unison.

‘New Fear’ is an elegy for endless lost hours, endless wasted nights, the strangle hold of feeling that you’re missing out. ‘Monotony’ represents a desire for a change that won't come: history repeats, music repeats, it's just the context that changes. This is echoed in the type of streamlined focus the band have on composition too, everything drives onwards with inner compulsion, there is no outward hesitation.

With ‘Cosmos Seeker’, the authenticity of character is explored. The drums strictly pinning in place the jabbing guitar chords and vocals into a propulsive swarm of sound. ‘Modern Living’ is a song that could only have been written now by the band, it sounds effortless yet thrilling all the same, so realised but seemingly spontaneous. ‘Modern Living’ considers another desire, this time the need for a new way of living that escapes the threat of your job becoming your whole life. ‘Distractions’ also includes two poems put to music: ‘(Taking a) Walk’ by Ecke is a rumination on the body, specifically female, in public spaces whilst ‘Paul’ by Boon explores individuality and authentic performance. Themes of anxiety, indecision and preoccupation run throughout the album.
As well as performing as Sauna Youth, all four members are also make up the band Monotony, which they formed while writing ‘Distractions’ last year by swapping their roles around in the group. They did two sessions over two days as both bands for Marc Riley on BBC 6 Music, and both bands were invited to play DRILL Festival by Wire. As well as playing in Monotony, members of Sauna Youth are also in Tense Men, Primitive Parts, Feature and Cold Pumas. They’ve previously played with Pissed Jeans, Thee Oh Sees, Ty Segall and Protomartyr, toured with Ceremony and Cold Pumas, and played at both Liverpool and Oslo Psych Fests. They have plans for a European and US tour later in the year and Upset the Rhythm will be releasing a split 7” by both Sauna Youth and Monotony in the run up to the release of ‘Distractions’ too.

Beginning and ending in squalling feedback ‘The Bridge’ is always the song that rings longest in your head when listening to ‘Distractions’, it’s full of the desire to set yourself apart, to connect and hold focus. It’s exactly this halfway house existence which best exemplifies the band, there’s no standing still when there’s such desire to escape to the next song, there is only transformation and desire.

TRASH KIT have a wild feel for melody, writing songs that pull at the reins with a spontaneous charm. Having formed the band in 2009, Rachel Aggs, Rachel Horwood and Ros Murray have since become the glowing core of London’s DIY underground. Their music is primal yet thoughtful, affirming yet sincere, drawing on the potential of post-punk and the naturalism of an internal folk music.

Although Trash Kit have their forebears in bands like X-Ray Spex, The Ex and The Raincoats, their sound is very much their own take on facing forwards. Galloping polyrhythms, overlapping sung-spoke lyrics and entwining guitars are all drawn together into a taut unity, sounding willfully alive. Both Rachels tangle their vocals with each other whilst expressive drumbeats and restless guitar flurries provide the rhythmic drive. Aggs’ guitar playing is as much informed by African fingerstyle patterns as the percussive attitude of various no wave shredders. Horwood approaches her drumkit with an untamable freedom, pushing it into the realm of a vivid lead instrument. Trash Kit's music is full of pauses, woven silence and punctuation too and this is where Ros Murray and her resonant, soulful bass work finds a perfect home.

In 2010, Trash Kit released their self-titled debut album on Upset The Rhythm, which met with critical applause. The Sunday Times called it “tumbling, spirited and joyously nimble”, whilst it reminded The Quietus that “female punk can sound like cocoons cracking open in full fierce sunlight”. Since then Trash Kit have toured Europe several times, recorded two more 7”s and explored other musical projects as members of Golden Grrrls, Halo Halo, Sacred Paws and Shopping most notably.

Writing for their new album, entitled ‘Confidence’, started up again in 2012 and saw the band over the last two years recording sets of songs at DIY recording hub Sound Savers with Mark Jasper. When the basket became full earlier this year, the tracks were then handed over to Canadian musician / sound engineer Sherry Ostapovitch for mixing, before they were mastered by Mikey Young (Total Control etc).

As a follow up to their exuberant debut album, ‘Confidence’ sticks with the “play it all live” pluck we’ve come to expect from Trash Kit. There’s a minimal bent, a lyrical directness, an unadorned ethic that all evokes the sense that the song is being written at the same time as it’s performed. Yet whilst the first album at times felt too fleeting, its succinct songs flashing by so fast, ‘Confidence’ is startlingly more assured, allowing ideas to develop, conclusions to be gathered. Tracks like ‘Hair’, ‘Skin’ and ‘Boredom’ embrace dynamics like never before. Their clatter and chime are complimented through subtler passages of introspection and the occasional noisy breakdown, with snare and cymbals approaching roar. Ros is joined by her previous bandmate Verity Susman (of Electrelane) on a few tracks including the adventurous ‘Shyness’ and lead single ‘Medicine’, lending some fluently inventive saxophone flourishes. It all adds to the heady, sensation of free-falling through the album. A feeling that the horizon has become broader.

‘Beach Babe’ dashes away with the start of the album, “We spent the summer waiting for summer to come, if we keep waiting we’ll be waiting for summer til it’s gone” declares Aggs over some decidedly racing drums, her guitar riff playfully leaping out in front of the rooted low-end. ‘Big Feeling’ is a patchwork rush of staccato chords, elastic bass and brisk drum fills, all set off by the band’s wordless vocalisations which feature on many of the songs when words can’t get close enough. ‘Leaves’ meanwhile is a more tender rumination, beginning with nature: “Sun shines in through the leaves, this warm glow. That way you look at me, I just know” harmonise Aggs and Horwood. Towards the end of the song its title shifts meaning though as we hear that it all “Leaves me speechless, leaves me speechless, try to hide all this but somehow you already know”. This delight in dual meaning is present in the album’s title too, with Aggs admitting that she liked the ambiguity of it. Her diary entry-like lyrics are seemingly spoken to you in confidence and trust, as well as embracing ideas of self-belief.

‘Confidence’ is a robust album with several themes at its heart that keep reappearing. Lyrically the tracks deal with identity, miscommunication, the passing of time and listening closer. Trash Kit are unmatched at making the personal poetic and vice versa, they never become overwrought, they just keep things honest and follow their natural course. Overall a feeling that you must run with the moment and trust in yourself emerges, echoed brilliantly through the instrumentation. There’s a restless energy that abounds, a momentum growing stronger, an alchemy at play between each member of Trash Kit and between each song on ‘Confidence’. It’s this reason why we should listen closer, listen to the sum of the parts, listen to ourselves. One day we’ll find gold where once there was only hope.

TRACK LISTING

01. Beach Babe
02. Medicine
03. Big Feeling
04. Skin
05. Hair
06. Leaves
07. Boredom
08. Cinema
09. Cheshire Cat
10. Teeth
11. Shyness

Upset the Rhythm and M’lady’s Records are very pleased to be teaming up for the first time to release the debut record from one of America’s most exciting groups today. VEXX, living in and playing out of Olympia, Washington, have been devastating the Pacific Northwest music hubs for the last year now. Their self-titled mini-album is explosive, vital, and many leagues deeper than it has any right to be in this wicked epoch.

Recorded by esteemed engineer, Dave Harvey (who also recorded both HYSTERICS 7”s issued on M’lady’s), this record originally came out in a small edition on the Grazer label late last year, which sold out instantly just through word of mouth. The very excellent Jason Ward (of Chicago Mastering Service) has since worked his magic re-mastering the recording, and now it’s even more wild and vibrant than ever.

VEXX hit the ground running like punk hasn’t happened yet! Blazing through the first three songs on side one with a fury rarely seen in the modern underground. ‘Clairvoyant’ is equal parts jagged as inventive, twisting out of reach at all the right moments. The song captures the band perfectly, raging headlong with unmatched momentum.

VEXX also know how to write a powerful slow burner, as evidenced by ‘Strength’ and the first half of ‘Ocean Shores’. Maryjane’s lyrics and vocals are a clarion call of intent; on fire with possibility, whilst wrestling with the power of everything. She’s such a force of nature as a frontwoman that you’re left stunned as much as amazed.

Meanwhile, Mike and Corey’s guitar and drum fireworks have left almost all spectators breathless (note: bass guitar duties on this recording were handled by Aaron, who has since been replaced by the very capable and excellent Ian). Each song is a maelstrom, whipping band and audience alike into a whirlwind. Pushing forward, thinking harder, striking home.

TRACK LISTING

01. Stress
02. Clairvoyant
03. Falling Down
04. Strength
05. Don’t Talk About It
06. Spirit / Constraint
07. Ocean Shores
08. Roky, Take Me Home

Here’s a new installment in Upset The Rhythm’s split LP series, that’s previously seen Gary War, Purple Pilgrims, Please and Spin Spin The Dogs swap sides most recently. This record teams up like-mindedly loopy, art-damaged Londoners Ravioli Me Away and Dog Chocolate. Inspired by an evening when both bands performed at London’s DIY-hub Power Lunches this LP came together through mutual appreciation, as well as gastronomic necessity.

Ravioli Me Away are a dangerously ambitious and delusional all-girl jazzy, post-pop-punk, hip-funk outfit with a stylistic theme spanning all past, present and future human cultures and subcultures. Consider vintage Bananarama played with twice the sass and urgency, only reflected in the eyes of a much overworked and downright exhausted Julie Burchill on acid. Featuring members of Plug and the aforementioned Spin Spin The Dogs, Ravioli Me Away don’t shy away from the impeccable vocal melodies and clattersome hooks you’d expect. ‘Mic Check’ is as hypnotic as it is sparse with plaintive keyboard touches and interplaying vocals that gambol across the drum machine. ‘Cat Call’ is a triumph of questing basslines and eerie synth blushes, locked down by Sian’s charismatic choruses and Alice’s asides inbetween, “When you leave the house and you turn around the corner you might see something you’d rather you hadn’t, who knows what it could be? You never know, take it from me!”

Dog Chocolate are an elasticated, punk quartet based on the principles of self-propulsion and having too much fun. Jono plays a couple of drums, Matthew plays a guitar and a load of pedals, Rob plays another guitar and sings selected songs whilst Andrew sings most the songs and plays impressionistic blasts of keyboard when he’s not. Having been active in a number of other bands including Yeborobo, Limn, Gasp! Cracking Eggs, Esiotrot, and Moulsecoomb Sword Gang, all four members are also frantic doodlers and illustrators. This over-spill of creativity can be seen on their side of this split LP, entitled ‘Or’, which sees the band sprint through ten tracks of barely-controlled chaotic glee. Never dwelling for long, Dog Chocolate treat us to songs about pregnancy, poisoned eyes, public transport and cakes. Their observational, often candid lyrics match their nonsensical attitude to their music too, which tumbles and chases pitchshifted guitars through thick forests of feedback and blasting drums. “Tony’s umbrella, Tony’s umbrella, it’s made of aluminium and replica leather” deadpans Rob on their anthemic retort to the possessive brolly owner before Andrew joins him to whip it up into a frenzy. It all leaves you convinced in the old adage that if you put a bar of dog chocolate next to bunch of bars of normal chocolate, it might look the same but it ain't the same, because you know it was made by dogs!

‘Dog Chocolate / Ravioli Me Away’ makes for a winning split LP, showcasing London’s glorious underground. When the menu arrives this tasty, who needs three courses? Limited to 500 copies on 180g black-n-green vinyl with printed insert and dual sleeve.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A: RAVIOLI ME AWAY – Ravioli Me Away
01. Mic Check
02. Hit By Love
03. Cat Call
04. Runaway Train

SIDE B: DOG CHOCOLATE - Or
05. I Wanna Give Birth
06. Give Chance A Chance
07. Dog Chocolate Theme
08. Cake Mistakes
09. Tell Too Much
10. Tony’s Umbrella
11. Poisoned Eye
12. Strange Train
13. Abilities
14. Foot Problems

This is music with no rules or preconceptions; pooling ideas and observations into music that can be raucous, sad, reflective, powerful, wistful, or whatever it needs to be. With vibrating harmonies and primal beats at its heart, sounds and words form together in response to the lives we all live.

Silver Fox is a place where anything can happen, where ideas are free to move and change. Pulling together lyrics and sounds from collective experience, Silver Fox create music that surprises and refuses to be categorised. Silver Fox make intuitive sounds led by a responsive, if-it-feels-good-do-it approach, giving free reign to all ideas large and small.

Their self-titled album with Upset the Rhythm will be released on 18th November 2013. Recorded in one day, Silver Fox partnered up with their long-time friend and producer, Andrew Hodson (Warm Digits), to create an album that reflects the energy of their live performances.

Silver Fox are Susie Green (vocals, keyboards), Rebecca Knight (drums), Laura Lancaster (guitar, vocals), Rachel Lancaster (bass guitar, vocals). They formed in 2009, and have had well-received single releases on M’Lady’s (Waves on in/Marble World) and Milk (Capital Kiss/Arosa) in 2012.

TRACK LISTING

01. Hearts Made Here
02. Arosa
03. Bed Bed Bed
04. Silent Movie Eyes
05. Force Of Habit
06. Horn Of Plenty
07. Marble World
08. Do One
09. Capital Kiss
10. No TV
11. Waves On In

THE PHEROMOANS are a six piece experimental rock band from the South East of England who deal in a deadpan DIY music. Wedded to the mundane, surreal reportage of our lives as reflected in the media, their music manages to address the truly restless boredom of everyday life. These are songs for the back of the queue, songs from underneath the ergonomic desk, a glimpse through the commuter window, blasted through with brilliant suburban sunshine.

Over the last three years the band have released a slew of releases, including numerous EPs, 7”s and three albums through labels as diverse as Night People, Convulsive, Sweet Rot, Monofonus Press and their own imprint Savoury Days. These releases largely focussed on a ramshackle, wayward rock ethic, underpinned by lyricist Russell Walker’s dry, observational musings that tread an almost diary-like pathway through the songs.

'Does This Guy Stack Up?’ witnesses a slight departure from their sound of old. With the recent addition of keyboard/violin player Dan Bolger to the band, their songs have leaned into a more pop-balanced realm, with the band’s experimental tape collage approach sounding more natural than ever. The bass (Christian Butler aka The Octogram), drums (James Hines) and guitars (James Tranmer, Alex Garran) together forging a coherent foundation for Walker’s voice to ramble amongst the radiant synth and electronic flourishes. ‘Old Lord Fauntleroy’ is a joyous barrage of roaming bass, primal beats and droning keyboard, whilst ‘Waterworld’ propels itself through drifts of violin fog.

Central to the appeal of The Pheromoans are Russell Walker’s insightful, often wonderfully humorous, self-deprecating lyrics that paint a picture of all of us as outsiders. ‘Don’t Mention It’ for instance is the only song we know that references both Royal Ascot and Puppetry Of The Penis. Finding much material in the slow and steady decline of the 21st century and its vain pursuits, Walker isn’t afraid to rattle the cage of populist politics, and other comfortable ways of thinking, sighting Mariella Frostrup as well as Richard Littlejohn in the crosshairs.

However, it’s often when he turns his critical eye on himself, that Walker becomes most profound. “I’ve been the victim of subtle putdowns” admits Walker on the barnstorming ‘I’m A You-Know-What’. “Scared of being late for work, I have to face the men-folk, I regret all decisions” he voices on ‘Grab A Chair’, a message further accentuated by the song’s prowling bassline, incessant beat and ascending stomp. These are bleak times, fixated by obnoxious forces, a time of “total confusion, total breakdown”, framed by the whipping rhythms and paranoid electronics of ‘баланс’ (Russian for ‘Balance’ FYI). ‘I want a puppy, a loft extension and a threesome, and silver shoes and preferably a Mercedes, because I am entitled, it was decreed’ sings Walker on ‘Power Watch’; our obsession with ‘possession as meaning’ lampooned over an impeccable keyboard reverie.

‘Does This Guy Stack Up?’ closes with the plaintive yet triumphant ‘Moth On The Mend’, perfectly encapsulating the album’s overall character: “I’d like to say to you I did the things I wanted to do…. this is the end of the world again”. This seeps into the music too, with most songs rocking their way through unravelment; sounding spontaneous and unaffected. With ‘Does This Guy Stack Up?’, The Pheromoans deconstruct a very English sense of ennui and in doing so show us its nonsensical building blocks. This album had the working title ‘Let England Shake’ and one can only wonder if a truer impression of modern life in this sceptred isle is one stalked by the nagging inadequacies and vacuousness detailed in ‘Does This Guy Stack Up?’. It’s hard to write about what you know, when what you know is increasingly marginalised but this album proves The Pheromoans are at their best when shooting from the sidelines.

TRACK LISTING

01. The Final Sugar Rush
02. I'm A You-Know-What
03. Don't Mention It
04. A Freak's Xmas
05. Power Watch
06. Waterworld
07. "баланс"
08. Grab A Chair
09. Deport Little John
10. Old Lord Fauntleroy
11. Deck Waltz
12. Moth On The Mend

This is the debut from Bristol quartet, Munch Munch.
For Fans Of: Sparks, Man Man, Deerhoof.
Munch Munch have toured with the likes of Why?, No Age, Dirty Projectors.

Previously known for their explosive and unpredictable live shows, this LP presents a more focused and ambitious side of the band, without losing any of the visceral energy. After a string of split 7 inch and EP releases, 2009 saw them concentrate on new recordings. In order to curb their previous indulgences, the band set themselves various rules including that of not using any guitars, and only using live percussion. The songs were initially sketched out on Piano, then fully realised using Farfisa and Hammond Organs, Vibraphone, Marimba and an Analogue Synth. Recording took place in various studios, cellars, practice spaces and houses over the course of 6 months.

Taking in influences as varied as Sparks, Bacharach, ABBA, Philip Glass and 80s R & B, a concerted effort has been made to engage with the structures of traditional 'pop' song craft, while always being ready to tear up the rule book at any opportunity.

TRACK LISTING

1. It's Nothing
2. Cyclorama
3. Night Corner
4. Bold Man Of The Sea
5. Autumn Mask
6. Car Wash (In The Street)
7. Wedding
8. Prank Call
9. Wolfman's Wife
10. River Gleams

Comprising Sian Dorrer (vocals and drums) and Georgie Nettell (bass, keys and vocals) Plug construct minimal pop vignettes, with bright, sumptuous basslines locking indelibly with crisp, taught drumming - a deceptively simple yet driving combination owing as much to hip-hop and dance music as the sparse clatter of post-punk. Songs are handled deftly with Sian’s strident, powerful vocals augmented by Georgie’s more subdued whisper. plug play a sophisticated kind of post-something pop with a brisk intensity, a wry sense of humour and canny knack for a memorable hook.

Plug is a record written with the intention to perfect each song so it encapsulates a chosen style in their own eyes. This is a pop record with a modernist narrative glimpsed through an open window into all our lives. Moments of great intimacy and detachment rub shoulders, diary-like, drawing you in. Sometimes you feel unnerved sometimes beholden as honesty seeps out of this record. These contrasts mirror our capricious lives, in all their erratic and compelling extremes. As the album finishes with the sound of a window closing on the world we’re left assured that Plug set out to make this day count.

TRACK LISTING

1. Intro
2. Don't Forget It
3. You Keep The Beats
4. Body Story
5. Man Vs Machine
6. Faces Of Diversity
7. Sexy Coma
8. Real Girl
9. Money Loves Drugs Fame
10. Day Tripper
11. Attractive

Fifth album from this psyche-pop troupe following two previous releases on Unsound and an album released on Dan Deacon's label, Lamb City. Alone to themselves, Bird Names has been singing a strange sweet song for four years. The song tells about the horror and wonder of truth in an acid-scrambled brogue pieced together from old pop and country music. In their singing they celebrate the honesty of the grotesque, the spirituality of ambiguity, the joy of singing. The band produced the album themselves (as they have most Bird Names albums), engaging their 1/2" tape studio with the amateur's imagination, inspiration and crudity. "Sings The Browns" is folk in its frankness, privacy, melancholy; psychedelic in its conjuring the displacement of drug experience; pop in its melody, stickiness, demand of obsessive listening.

Chops are a wild damaged dance band from Leeds. They share this record with Helhesten, a haunted howl noise ensemble based in the South. This split release is part of a series of records from Upset The Rhythm documenting the fertile and often overlooked experimental / underground scene in the UK. Leeds-based Chops hit the ground running through 2007 hellbent on perfecting their spontaneous combustion of jazzoid excess and lock-popping party bombs. Helhesten are a three-headed sonic blitz. Employing clarinet, beat-up guitar, effected-voice and a variety of percussion, Helhesten craft an aching flux of soaring and swamped-out sounds.