PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth, Dead Can Dance, Black Sabbath, Birthday Party.

In Blood is the group’s 14th album and the follow-up to 2020’s critically acclaimed Dances/Curses.

It was typical of a band so well-known for stellar live performances to release their most successful album at a time when they were unable to back it up on the road. As was the case for many, lockdown changed the band’s lives in unexpected ways. Some felt a form of cabin fever at not being able to continue to make music (diverting their energies elsewhere - founding Wrong Speed Records for starters) whereas others relished the peace and quiet, perhaps questioning whether they wanted to return to the life they had before. Gigs (so long the lifeblood of the band) were booked, postponed, and cancelled. Things began to unravel and perhaps for the first time since the band formed in 2003 it was hard to see how it could continue.

A plan was hatched to attempt to re-energise and reassemble the band: they would begin work on a new album. They would approach this as though a Somerset version of The Desert Sessions – members old and new and guests would contribute as and when time and restrictions allowed.

Lyrically, British folk and ghost mythology provided the starting position for the song themes ranging from mutated stories of grief and loss written in the 14th Century (Perle), spiritual reawakening by ancient apparitions (Avalon) to the growth of nature after devastation (Can’t Feel Around Us, Over Cedar Limb), a metaphor also for spirit and body renewal and rebirth after trauma.

The results sound free of any genre shackles and it suits Hey Colossus. They have taken the expansive anything-goes approach that made Dances/Curses so successful and fine-tuned and shaped it into an 8-song single album that never treads water or fills time. The prominent vocals steer the listener through the music, defining it as opposed to punctuating it (or being buried by it).

The album is a calling card for the band in their 20th anniversary year. As odd and challenging as long-term fans would expect or hope for, but somehow more accessible and to the point than ever before. It is the closest the group have ever come to a pop record, radiating positivity through the murk like a small ray of light in some very dark and very weird times. Music can never entirely negate these feelings but, like the natural world referenced in the lyrics and sleeve, it invisibly bonds people together, lifting us up if we choose to let it.

TRACK LISTING

1. My Name In Blood
2. I Could Almost Care
3. Perle
4. Can’t Feel Around Us
5. Curved In The Air
6. Avalon
7. TV Alone
8. Over Cedar Limb

RIYL:Jockstrap/Working Men’s Club/Stealing Sheep/Broadcast etc.

Much anticipated debut album from this Leeds-based electronic duo, following high-profile UK festival slots, and shows alongside luminaries The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Warmduscher, Sea Power, Moonlandingz, The KVB, with multiple plays across BBC6/BBC Introducing and Amazing Radio, jellyskin are finally ready to unleash ‘In Brine’, their first full length release. The result of four years spent writing, recording, and refining the album between Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol, Palamos, and Berlin, ‘In Brine’ showcases the many talents of Will Ainsley and Zia Larty-Healy in a work straddling iridescent electronica, tungsten-tipped techno, art pop, and queasy, brown acid folk.

The songs are pieced together with themes of longing, misadventure by the sea, desire and aquatic apparitions that showcase Larty-Healy’s warm but urgent vocal range, as at home around the campfire as it is in the club. The pair’s meticulous arrangement and rearrangement, sculpting, recording, and mixing was a glacially slow process of adaptation, mutation, cooperation, growth, and, yes, natural selection. First single ‘Bringer of Brine’ thumps from the speaker anthemically and forcefully, pitched somewhere beautiful and uncanny; Larty-Healy’s vocals soar and skim off the production like a smooth stone across choppy waves.

The radio-ready pop electronica of ‘I Was The First Tetrapod’ bursts into the world with an urgency in line with the lyrics. An aquatic tale of crawling onto land for the first time, desperate to make new life forms, it’s also a positive, joyful rebuke to the despair of the world around us. “Growing my legs...”. The fuzzed-out psychedelic keys and forward-moving, Knife-like structure echo throughout while beautiful lyrics detail visions of where this would all lead life as we know it-“I can run freely, white horse behind me. Flexing my bones and artery twine, find human tone and reach for the vine.” ‘Fox Again’ opens with chopped alarm clocks segueing into a lurching rhythm, before exploding into skittering beats and a soaring chorus. The effect is like waking up drowsily, going over to the window in your room and yanking open the curtains to be blasted by searing sunshine.

The pair brought in Berlin based co-producer, mixer and masterer Lewis D-t to help finesse the tracks into fat-free hunks of ecstasy and sonic exploration, their rich depths marking ‘In Brine’ as an album everyone should be talking about this summer and beyond-all nine tracks will have feet moving and hearts swelling in equal measure. As opening track ‘Lift (Come In)’ positively opines “Going up!/Just want to keep going up!”. It’s time to get in on the ground floor...

TRACK LISTING

1.Lift (Come In)
2.Bringer Of Brine
3.Fox Again
4.Chicken, Milk, And Oranges
5.Marmalade
6.I Was The First Tetrapod
7.Pulpy Mouth And Skin
8.52 Blue
9.Punnet

RIYL: Sonic Youth, Comets on Fire / VU / 60s garage / early Flaming Lips, new band from Leeds/Glasgow - you'll know some of the people involved, we couldn't help but fall in love with it.

Here's some words from T House (Sweet Williams/Charlottefield): “Ostrich tuned and chronically distressed, The Web Of Lies is Neil Robinson (Buffet Lunch) and Edwin Stevens (Irma Vep, Yerba Mansa). Having played together years back in Robert Sotelo’s band and forged a singular connection, the pair have been biding their time, waiting for the perfect moment Nude With Demon, their first LP, lurches from the incendiary to the world-weary, like a drunk alternately haranguing and commiserating on the rush hour tube. Drafted quickly in a handful of hungover early morning sessions, fleshed out with a few carefully chosen collaborators - Kathryn Gray (Mia La Metta, Nape Neck), Dylan Hughes (The Birth Marks), Ruari Maclean and Jess Higgins (Vital Idles), Neil Campbell (Astral Social Club) and Dan Bridgewood Hill (dbh) - it’s one long dribbling lunge at the grab strap, regret seeping from the pores, mitigated by wry humour and, when the rage momentarily subsides, the suggestion of humanity"

TRACK LISTING

1. Receiver
2.The Wasp
3. RnR Resurrection
4. Best Friend
5. Crossed Arms
6. Yeah Yeah Yeah
7. The Golden Road
8. Redeemer
9. Ender

In the psychic wastelands of the 21st century, one particular sonic force looms large. Transcendental like the malignant force that fuels the zombie movies of lore, Part Chimp have made it their business to shake speaker-stacks, fry brains and induce jouissance and tinnitus alike all across the UK. Yet now Drool - their fifth and perhaps finest transmission to date - is set to launch forth triumphantly to a world beyond the vinyl racks and battered amps where they’ve already achieved godhead status.

Guitarist and vocalist Tim Cedar sums up the raison d’être of Chimp as “the stupid amounts of fun you can have with very loud amps, stupid tunings, weird pedals and weird people. That inspires us. I think our joy at playing our tunes comes through the panic and chaos“.

Echoes of their forebears - the ornery prehistoric lurch of Melvins and the droogy ur-clang of Sonic Youth among them - can be distantly discerned, Yet they’re now drowned out by an individual assault as pulverising as invigorating, nihilistic yet life-affirming. Smash together abandon and intent, and what you get is Drool - a fearsome testimony to a band with a skewed melodic skill to match their mighty potency. This band will demolish your house, but you’ll cheerfully thank them for it afterwards. Drool is where unwise decisions blossom into serendipity. It’s more joy through vacuum-tubed catharsis than you’re entitled to. It’s coming for the hearts and minds of heavy music dropouts everywhere whether they like it or not, so they’d be best advised to pay attention. 

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: Yet another full-force sonic assault from the masters of catatonic grooving noise, Part Chimp. We get blazing riffs and half-hidden psychy wails wallowing beneath huge cavernous percussion and unmitigated distortion. It's yet another tour de force from one of the heaviest bands around.

TRACK LISTING

1. Back From The Dead
2. Wallow
3. One In The Eye
4. Clever
5. I Feel Fantastic
6. Drool
7. Up, With Notes
8. No Sad Faces
9. Dirty Birds
10. It’s True Man
11. USisA
12. Worms