Kitten Painting

Hey Nonny Oh No!

2008-07-17T17:41:00.005+01:00

Gah! Tapestry Goes West is cancelled! I was looking forward to spending a weekend in Wales dressed as a Biba Robin Hood, waving a plastic sword around like a goon and for it to be perfectly acceptable, nay legitimate behaviour. Best just dream of mead and admire the sleeve for this long-lost acid-folk rarity - genius.

The Early Years - Like A Suicide (Sonic Cathedral)

2008-07-06T19:03:00.005+01:00

Regular worshippers at Sonic Cathedral will surely have experienced glorious krautrock voyagers The Early Years, as they're frequently seen declaiming from the Cathedral's pulpit (is that enough ecclesiastical imagery now?). To celebrate Sonic Cathedral's tenth single release, the band have cranked a few levers and boosted themselves into electronica hyperdrive for 'Like A Suicide' (like Suicide the band - get it!) A mechanically churning intro spits out a factory-line groove that rumbles away throughout, becoming progressively more throbbing as the song powers its way through territory reminiscent of Death In Vegas' shoegaze-rockunroll-electro mishmashes. Electricity-comes-from-other-planets Neu-style skirls and loops twirl under some rather strident vocals which add a kind of, cripes! Numanoid feel to things. And then there's this unhinged scrabbling guitar making it all deliciously disorientated. It's sorta kosmiche electro space-drone glitch disco and I reckon it could sound ALMIGHTY live.

Driven by a monster authoritarian drumbeat, AA side The Computer Voice sounds like machines communicating, flickering static, glowing wires and more of those portentous vocals. Glowering.
An intriguing aperitif to the second album. More of this wibbling experimentation please.

http://www.soniccathedral.co.uk/
www.myspace.com/thesoundoftheearlyyears

The Lovely Eggs – I Like Birds But I like Other Animals Too (Filthy Little Angels)

2008-07-02T18:05:00.001+01:00

Living up to their name (the ‘Lovely’ bit mainly), The Lovely Eggs sent me a charming letter along with their CD. It’s got drawings in different coloured felt-tips and everything. Like their letter, The Lovely Eggs music has a cracked-childhood deranged sweetness to it. On first listen, their record is a trifle startling, but then you get all endeared by the simple kid-fi honesty of their songs.

Lead track, ‘I Like Birds But I Like Other Animals Too’ has got the most ‘instrumentation’ going on, skittering along on trashy, thrashy guitar, twinkling glockenspiel and Holly’s Violet-Elizabeth brat vocals. “Cuck, cuckoo, cuck, cuckoo, cuck, cuckoo koo” they sing and the see-saw tune rams itself into your brain for good, like someone singing, “I know a song that’ll get on your nerves”, only without the getting on your nerves bit.

Next, set against the military patter of a drum and one-note recorder tootling, Holly sings a paean to the brill illustrator Jon Carling (www.myspace.com/ifeltthat), “I know an artist and he draws about owls”. It’s a fitting tribute; curious, a little twisted, fallen-down-a-rabbit-hole magical – like Carling’s work. The song is preceded by fellow Egg David (maybe?) listing different breeds of owl – soothing/unsettling.

Then there are assorted la la lo lo fi ravings, 'Dirty At Farms/I'm Having A Party/Cops And Robbers/Fade' which sound like the tapes we made as kids, singing earnestly but a bit stupidly, enjoying just making stuff, saying whatever; “I always get my shoes dirty at farms”; “Cops and robbers, crime and punishment, cops and robbers”.

‘I’m Having A Party’ has muffled vocals and a rattling drum that might not be a drum and is reminiscent of the first Beat Happening album – tracks recorded RIGHT HERE with 0 instruments – no production or layers of blah, just straight-up communication of songs and ideas, out of their mouths and into yr ears.

When The Lovely Eggs music comes to an end, you feel a bit bereft, like you’ve been playing with your mates all day, caught up in your own zig-zagging world and now they’ve gone home for tea and it’s just you and normalness again.

www.myspace.com/thelovelyeggs

Oh hello world! I had a change of heart. Fave Tunes April / May 2008

2008-06-29T13:24:00.007+01:00

The Chameleon - The Left Outsides Perfectly executed Barretty folkadelia

Glory To The World - El Perro Del Mar Happy heart and candyfloss head

I Fell Asleep In The Sunbleached Grass - Skygreen Leopards Sounds like what it says

No One Word - Vetiver Summer trees ruffled by breezes, swallows swooping the sky.

Girl Of The Skies – The Canterbury Music Festival Instrumental soft-pop rarity on RevOla re-release. Just the right side of queasy.

Subterranean Bazaar – The Dilettantes Blammin’ pop-sike for doing beatkid dances too.

Tallahassee Bop - Slowdown Tallahassee Sugar buzz nursery rhyme drone-pop
http://www.myspace.com/slowdowntallahasseegirls

The end of the summer on Bookbinder road – Cocoanut Groove Long lost baroque pop that The Left Banke dropped down the back of the sofa
www.myspace.com/cocoanutgroove

Sweetness I Could Die In Your Arms – Horowitz Delicious fuzz-coated Razorcutty cuteness
http://www.myspace.com/horowitzband

Sundropped – Earthling Society Harmonia swirls become Teardrops Exploding through a sun-psych prism. Perfectly titled.
www.myspace.com/earthlingsociety

My Bloody Valentine - The Roundhouse, 23 June 2008

2008-06-24T13:22:00.009+01:00

Hallo. I went to see My Bloody Valentine again and it was EVEN BETTER than on Friday.

A rearranged set-list, clearer sound. I can hear Kevin and Bilinda's vocals enough to recognise individual words tonight, whereas on Friday their voices drifted in and out of the fog, so you'd have to strain to identify them. Tonight I also get a great position in front of Kevin, one person back from the barrier, so I can peer at his pedals and marvel at his selection of guitars.

Best song of the set is 'Come In Alone', a majestic beast, storming in a stately manner. 'Sueisfine' is rendered almost unrecognisable again, rattled out as a hardcore thrash, complete with backdrop of irradiated blue skies full of fluffy white clouds whizzing by dementedly. ‘Soon’ expands into a repetitive beat drone dreamscape. I can clearly hear/feel (thanks to the blasts of warm sound-waves on my face) the way the sound is ratcheted up throughout the set. Bass kicked up monstrously for 'Slow', and up again to nearly unbearable levels for 'Feed Me With Your Kiss'. I scrunch my earplugs in deeper, preparing for the finale - the blasting away of time and space in the middle of 'You Made Me Realise'. It's like being strapped to the outside of a rocket on blast-off (I imagine). Shivering chaos. And then further noise gets piled in on top, deep, boneshaking. Its not just the awe-inspiring loudness, but the pressure of it effecting your whole body. I stand still and try to absorb it, watching Kevin tinkering with the sound. It's not just a testosterone fuelled noise mush, crazy shrieking frequencies blend in and out, now and then a pedal is tapped introducing or removing slices of noise. I start to hear ghost symphonies playing deep inside the maelstrom. Towards the end the frequencies creep upwards, creating the feeling of being plummeted back towards earth from outer space, tearing up the atmosphere. A sickening trajectory.

The back projection is showing a disorientating freefall of images – like a cross between falling out of an aeroplane and seeing your life flash before your eyes. Three quarters of the way through the twenty-two minute (we timed it, we nerds) aural assault the images cut to a black screen with slashes of white light strafing up and down horizontally. As each light beam passes over Kevin’s face, it reveals him watching the crowd through narrowed eyes, looking kind of evil, trying to figure if we deserve more punishment. Clearly we do, when the chords of the song finally fall back into place and we’re released from our suspended state to grab onto the tune like it’s a life raft, we find it’s a life raft adrift on a sea that’s aflame, the remainder of the song just discernible beneath an unearthly shriek. Horribly brilliant.

M. B. V. Good

2008-06-18T09:45:00.012+01:00

It's My Bloody Valentine Season!

Thursday 12th June sees a flurry of excitement from the Kitten old-skool gig-going masssive as we discover My Bloody Valentine are playing at the ICA over the weekend. The ICA? That's (relatively) tiny! Tickets and guest list places are secured, though not for me as I have an urgent weekend appointment to run round and round a garden with two dogs and two small boys.

Saturday morning reports trickle across the wires:
'All good on the MBV front. AMAZING (really)'
'So the good news is that MBV still sound, and look, just like MBV. 15 songs, all post Ecstasy, one of which lasts for considerably more than 3 minutes.'
I start to feel excited about our rendezvous with the Valentines, we've got tickets for their penultimate Roundhouse gig. Then, a text from M. There's a spare place going for the opening night at the Roundhouse, do I fancy it? Er, YES!

Friday 20th June: a queue snakes from the Roundhouse doors up the road and round the corner. Anyone who isn't queuing is over the road in The Enterprise, There's Nat, the 'Bishop of Shoegaze', there's that bloke from The Early Years who looks like an owl...and here's M bearing Valentines tales and magic guest list words. And behold...a triple A pass. A ha ha ha! In your face, world!! (It turns out there's another pass I could have on Saturday, but I don't notice the text until Sunday. Why world why??!!!)

My Bloody Valentine wander onstage, start playing 'Only Shallow', and oh dear! every other band in the universe might as well give up now, MBV show us how far everybody else hasn't come in the twenty years since these songs were written. Now I remember why I was never totally taken by the likes of Ride and all that 'gazey lot, they were inconsequential meteor showers to MBV's whirling universe. By the time Lush et al appeared, we'd already gorged ourselves on Valentines and Spacemen and Loop. We were spoilt.

My Bloody Valentine still look exactly like My Bloody Valentine. Kevin, shaggy of hair and saggy of clothing, lurking nondescript to the left and just doing this...stuff with a guitar that nobody else in the whole world seems capable of, bending sound, creating ripples in smoke. Bilinda's apparently unchanged delicate looks bely the fact that she's complicit in kicking out this raging storm of music. That was always the beauty of MBV, they didn't need big characters or fancy staging (although there are some magnificent back projections filling the stage with colour and light tonight), each member was a vital component, but they just each did their thing and let the music destroy us all. There's the fabulous Debbie on bass. I'm glad to see she's still doing her vicious 'I'm digging your grave' attacking action on the noisy bits, throwing her whole body behind the chords. And of course, Colm's out of body drumming blur. I never could figure out where he found the stamina to hit things like that.

The set takes in tracks from the two albums and assorted EPs the band released after 'Ecstasy' - the record that saw them shift from trebly indie noise-pop scamps to sonic adventurers. I was always more of an 'Isn't Anything' girl than a 'Loveless' fanatic (although it's like saying I prefer breathing to eating). The more visceral attack of the likes of 'When You Wake (You're Still In A Dream)', the queasily punning 'Sueisfine' (which threatens to become unmoored tonight, a skidding and sliding maelstrom, I find it hard to catch its beat) and machine gunning 'Feed Me With Your Kiss' are the songs that make me grin the widest here. And then there's the oozing 'Slow' grinding along on monster bass, compelling the crowd to sway and lurch in time to its sickly rhythm. Oh, and 'Thorn', soaring and dive-bombing on drill-bit guitars - it sounds so vital, I have to do a bit of good old hair shaking to it. The softer textures and intricate layers of the 'Loveless' tracks, the fluffy fog of 'Blown A Wish', the looping, dipping, loopily dippy 'When You Sleep', the whalesong keening of 'I Only Said' seem to fill the Roundhouse with a tangible haze of downy sound. The audience reacts with the most glee to 'Soon', the familiar ticking rhythm and see-saw tune setting off a burst of enthusiastic dancing that dies down after everyone realises they're not as young as they were.

Finally, it's time for that behemoth of sound terrorism, 'You Made Me Realise'. How will the band top their previous performances during which they bent and stretched the middle of the song over one chord louder and louder for longer and longer until they were easily topping ten minutes, blitzing the audience with NOISE? I always had to stick my fingers in my ears when it happened. Thank the Lord that today I've had the foresight to nip into Boots for some earplugs (also available free at the Roundhouse bar). I love MBV but they're not destroying any more of my hearing.

So, the song starts up with its familiar bursts of atonal urgency, swooning and gliding across the verses, exploding into car crash patterns, until The Chord happens. Oh Sweet Baby Jesus and His Mary Chain! It. Is. LOUD. Nuclear Bomb going off loud. Rearrange your DNA loud. For nearly twenty minutes the band stands casually chanelling pure white noise up into the domed roof of the building until I peer upwards nervously, convinced it's going to crack open like an egg. I sneak my earplugs out for a few seconds...argh! and quickly stuff them back in again. I've seen MBV doing this aggressive noise assault business on numerous occassions, but I've never experienced anything like this: shrieking, roaring, twenty jet-planes taking off in your head. I can feel the soundwaves soft and warm on my face, rattling my teeth, as a slightly uncomfortable pressure across my chest. For a while I close my eyes and sort of sunbathe in it all, strobes bright on my eyelids. After a while I look around. People are hunching over, fingers stuck in ears, creeping away from the front, looking stricken. It's uncomfortable, but it's also genius.

I glance at my watch, it's twenty-five to eleven, Oh God, what if the band are planning on playing this chord all the way up to eleven o'clock? They don't, eventually, the remainder of the song crashes back in, we snap our heads in time to the familiar beat, relieved, riding survivor's highs. And then it's the end. We came, we saw, they wiped the floor with us.

Soon - Japancakes (Sonic Cathedral)

2008-06-09T19:00:00.010+01:00

Wooziness, mmm, it's great. Floaty, drifty, spacey sounds that fill the world with downy clouds and lazily spiralling dust motes. Wooziness is Japancakes' stock-in-trade. They use that most deliciously laconic of instruments, the pedal steel guitar, to great effect, invoking a fug of dreamy well-being in their songs that makes you just want to, well, pass out. In a good way.

Last year, Japancakes 'controversially' put all their wooziness powers into creating a marshmallowy instrumental version of My Bloody Valentines 'Loveless'. Yes the whole album. With pedal steel and cello taking the place of the original's gauzey, distanced vocals. It's a great album if you fancy a spot of cross-eyed ,wibbling, other-dimensional lift-muzak. Which we all do now and then don't we? Apparently we don't as a few shoegazey blow-hards have kicked off about Japancakes' experiments with 'Loveless'. Ho hum.

Anyway, now the ever delightful Sonic Cathedral are putting out two remixes of Japancakes' versions of MBV's 'Soon' and 'Touched' on double A-sided 7" white vinyl. Nice.

'Soon' has been roughed up into a hedgehog ball of spikes by James Rutledge. Juddery, Christ-the-cd's-stuck! messed up beats. Where the original see-sawed sinuously, this fits and skitters curiously.

Ricardo Tobar takes 'Touched' and stretches it into a vast Balearic summer space-out. The original - a brief between-track soundscape shimmer - is sent reeling through hyperspace on a dubby, clubby bassbeat. Trippy whalesong echoes of Japancakes' gliding guitar noise rise and fall across fathoms of...I'm trying not to say 'blissed out' here, but, hell, that's what it is...a blissed out sonic skyscape.

http://www.soniccathedral.co.uk/

Accident & Emergency

2008-06-07T09:24:00.005+01:00

Here is the latest in pseudo-rock 'n' roll casualty 'get me to a doctor, maan'. chic: a Spiritualized hospital wrist-band! Classy and not at all tacky. No. And I didn't feel at all embarrassed when the man in Sister Ray sheepishly handed it over to me with my purchase. No.

If you are a design nerd or a Spiritualized nerd, or perhaps both (hello!), you may find this item from Creative Review interesting as it combines both subjects in one handy article.

Somewhere - The Hot Puppies (Purr Records)

2008-05-26T10:46:00.006+01:00

Ooh, you can't accuse The Hot Puppies of having no sense of pop drama or a lack of sparkling ambition. 'Somewhere' is an expansive fantasia of a song that sees the band grabbing you by the hand and flying out across the rooftops to meet your fairy-tale self. Its a song of diamond stars winking above darkened treetops, of chasing dreams and catching them on the other side of the rainbow, of making you use words like 'gorgeous' and 'swooning' and 'these kids are crazy, but I love 'em!'. Its an insanely epic flight of fancy and if it doesn't get your spine tingling, you are clearly clinically dead.

Singer Becky embraces her inner fairy princess, her voice swooping and soaring above an enchanted forest of sound. She's a knowing Dorothy in a 21st Century Oz (no coincidence that the way the first word is sung echoes the opening of 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow'?). Click your heels together three times and let the almighty pop woosh carry you to "somewhere we can build our fires and find a new way to be young."

www.thehotpuppies.com

Available on ltd edition 7" vinyl from www.purr.org.uk

Blow Up Records

2008-05-25T14:11:00.010+01:00

Blow Up – we’ve all done our hip wee mod shoe shuffles down at Blow Up at some point in the club’s history. Be it at the (long gone) Laurel Tree in Camden when the place was clogged with members of Menswear and Spanish mods questioning me closely on the make of my scooter (er, the non-existent make). Or at the (also long gone, hmm, there’s a theme emerging here) Wag Club, grooving to the bands and clambering up and down the stairs. Or possibly even hanging out after a Saturday night gig in the stinky (literally - the place smells of toilet cleaner) old Metro. But, you know, Blow Up do records too! They’re a record label with all sorts of eclectic musics to choose from. Lets have a look, eh?

Baltic Fleet is a road movie of an album. Not a sun-dappled, rolling out along the blacktop dose of Americana, but something more European and cerebral. Written by keyboard player Paul Fleming whilst on tour with Echo and the Bunnymen, the album works beautifully as a series of sonic snapshots, moments snatched and captured amidst the flurry of life on the road. Almost entirely instrumental, it’s a collection of musical mood pieces that spin from thumping beats and harsh electronica (‘Double Door’, the Nordic drone-rave of ‘Reykjavik Promise’) to delicate flickers of sound eked out sparingly (the ruminative ripples in a pond of ‘Pebble Shore’). The tracks that do deal explicitly with the U.S. still sound European. The graceful ’48 Hour Drive (Boston)’ is soothing, speaking of grey dawns and foggy eyes, of endless miles being eaten up in a mesmerising blur. ‘To Chicago’ with its flashes of female vocals is other-worldly and drowsy and gorgeously Neu!-ish.

Opener ‘Baltic Intro’ is essentially a drum solo with wibbling, wooshing noises, trains rattling down tunnels and Will Sergeant’s guitar samples. Don’t get the fear though, as this is followed by ‘Black Lounge’s’ serious motorik pummelling, a delicious autobahn beat straps you into the song nice and snug, like a Krautrockin’ safety-belt and you’re away. There are all sorts of sonic textures to be tempted by - wooshy, beepy bits; fair helpings of echoy, shoegazey guitar strummage – the sumptuous, staring out to sea kind; portentous piano playing; luxuriant soundscapes to lose yourself to. This is 21st Century Kosmiche musik, a round the world trip you can take with your eyes closed.

http://www.myspace.com/balticfleet

Cosmic shenanigans of an entirely Other order come courtesy of The Bongolian (aka multi-instrumentalist Nasser Bouzida). From the title, you may be forgiven for thinking ‘A Psychedelic Trip to Outer Bongolia’ is nowt but a cheeseball goof-fest, possibly even a goofball cheese-fest – kitschy lounge doings of the sort made ‘popular’ for two seconds in the late nineties by the likes of Bob Downe. But, hurrah! that’s not what The Bongolian is about at all. This isn’t easy listening for ironic twatsters, this is galactically groovy space soul. There’s a lot of hard-core Hammond action, great swathes of funky organ twiddling demanding you immediately cut a rug. ‘Feel it’ is The Spencer Davies Group kicking it in tin-foil space-suits. ‘Rock Me’ is snotty sixties garage spun into orbit, stomping along on a dirty bass-line, then weirding out amongst the stars with some oddball whirry bleeping sounds. ‘The Horn’ switches pleasingly between a sweetly summery organ riff and sinuous 70s cop show funk. ‘Space Meter’ is a low-down, hip-swinging psychedelic astro groove that Primal Scream are wishing they thought of. ‘Paris Colonade’, sounds like a breezily sophisticated spin around the city and we’re promised Holly Golightly is somewhere on the track amongst the Gitane-tinged ‘la la la las’. ‘Marimba Down At The Hare’ contrasts elegant, almost Japanese sounding marimba playing with some slippery jazz piano.

All this, the album sleeve urges you to note, created in an entirely sample-free environment, with a spot of backwards guitar where needed - just like in the olden days when tricksy playing and a canny ear was all the eager sonic explorer had to hand. And a primed set of bongos, of course.

http://www.bongolian.com/

Mockingbird Wish Me Luck are yet more Swedes going pop! Orchestral pop with a wee nod to Belle and Sebastian in their stylings to be precise (check their record cover design).
Their album ‘Days Come and Go’ is chocka with rinky-dink tunes that fill out into sweet-hearted, expansive sing-alongs thanks to some nifty instrumentation. There’s mariachi brass expanding the songs into super wide screen sunset anthems, folkily baroque trills of flute, ice-cream tingles of glockenspiel... Mockingbird Wish Me Luck are an eight-piece band and they sound like it.

Centre-piece song ‘Days Come And Go’ packs all in all of the above and chucks in a massed choir of voices for good measure, ensuring that epic sweep is full-on. “Take me out tonight, take me somewhere where someone cares” they sing, lyrically echoing The Smiths on ‘Let’s Watch The Sunrise’, a catch-in-the-throat, banjo-plucking pop lament soothed smooth with brass and percussion. ‘Step In Concrete’ lilts along irresistibly, twinkling amongst Afro guitars, topped with a trumpet solo. ‘New Beginnings’ is made for doing an indie-pop quickstep too. ‘Summer Again’ winds up with a Camberwick Green music box whirr built from banjos and glockenspiel, toyshop pop. By the time ‘Days Come and Go’ has been and gone, you’ll be fully summer-shined. A pop album for picnic days and warm nights of dancing with all the windows open.

http://www.myspace.com/mockingbirdwishmeluckswe

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – 9 May 2008, Hammersmith Apollo

2008-05-11T15:49:00.006+01:00

Much has been made of the revitalising effect of old Nick’s nasty old Grinderman project on The Bad Seeds repertoire – the way playing bone-crunching raw eyed swamp rock has fired them up. Certainly the latest Bad Seeds album, ‘Dig, Lazarus Dig!!!’ sees our Dark Lord in a playfully rockin’ mood (and using the punctuation of an excitable twelve year old girl). So as we settle into our circle seats, feeling quite young in comparison to our fellow audience members (all traces of past gothery erased – these are nice mums and dads reliving their big-haired youth), we wonder what delights there are in store. Surely the band won’t be able to surpass the last time we saw them - a sublime mix of the devotional and the deranged, complete with gospel singers.

Whomp! Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds hit us right between the eyes from the get-go and don’t let up for two hours. They are spectacular, filled with a ferocious lust for life, booting their older songs up the arse and dragging us by the hair on a rip-snorting ride around the new album.

The Bad Seeds are on top form – men who mean business. Aside from Mr Cave himself, Warren Ellis is the obvious star of the show. Looking like a wild eyed prophet who’s just staggered in from the wilderness, crazy old man beard and hair a-flurry, he wrenches diabolical shrieks from guitar and viola alike. You’ve never truly seen a man play viola until you’ve watched Ellis terrorising the instrument. Who knew you could treat it like that? During ‘We Call Upon The Author’ he’s on his knees, supplicant in front of a crazy guitar/mandolin thing alternating between torturing noise from its depths, pounding on the floor with his fists and going into unlikely backbends to reach for the microphone.

Wire-thin, managing to carry off a look that no fifty-something man should really be attempting, Nick Cave is squeezed into a tight jacket, pinstriped kick-flares and pointy Chelsea boots. He looks like a character from ‘Yellow Submarine’. Later, he emerges wearing a skinny-fit ‘Dig…’ tee-shirt plundered from the merch stall and Good God he looks amazing; rushing frenziedly across the stage; cavorting out to tease the front row of the audience; hurrying back and forth to bash out a few notes on his keyboards; doing crazy Cave-esque hands-above-the-head disco belly-dances. He even goes for the full-on rock-out factor by strapping on a guitar for odd numbers. This isn’t the Cave of reflective sojourns behind a piano that’s for sure. The man Entertains. And that’s before you even get to The Songs.

‘Tupelo’ rumbles stormily, complete with a vast, thunderous night sky as a backdrop. It’s screamy and sweaty and full of thrillingly intense viola desecration. ‘Deanna’ is full-on vaudeville, a crazy-eyed clap-along. ‘The Lyre of Orpheus’ takes up the music-hall thread, the audience encouraged to join in with its half-camp/half lamenting refrain of "Oh! Mama!" which they do with gusto. ‘Papa Won’t Leave You Henry’ rollicks around menacingly. ‘Let Love In’ is given a Johnny Cash make-over, in the way Johnny Cash gave ‘The Mercy Seat’ a make-over (a song, incidentally, conspicuous by its absence tonight – but really, there’s such an embarrassment of riches on display here its presence is unnecessary). ‘Today’s Lesson’ and ‘More News From Nowhere’ are both unspeakably groovy in different ways (one a Stooges/ organ-funk swagger, the other laconically swinging).

Cave introduces ‘We Call Upon The Author’ thus, "Check this out. This is worth the price of admission alone." He’s right, the band ransack the entire history of garage rock, funnelling it into a hypnotic hurricane of a song, before cracking it with white out blue-funk NoiZE. Jeez, no wonder they need two drumkits.

There are few concessions to Cave’s sublime oeuvre of big bad ballads, we get ‘The Ship Song’ (squeals of joy from the audience) and the ever gorgeous ’Into My Arms’, but that’s really not what tonight is all about. To prove it, the set ends with a double flourish, ‘Hard On For Love’, as nasty as the title suggests and a terrifying ‘Stagger Lee’, the stage illuminated blood red, Cave screaming at the top of his lungs. Argh!!

Here’s ‘In The Ghetto’ with a young Mr Cave looking thoroughly skagged up, but damn! totally cool. See how beautiful he is with that magnifique explosion of hair? Who knew heroin was such a great conditioner? Man, what a crime it is that that hair is slowly being lost now. Can’t we get a preservation order slapped (no pun intended) on it? Luckily, thanks to the cannily cropped press shots and artfully framed videos (the edge of the frame always seems to come just above Nick’s eyebrows?) we can try to not notice the obvious and keep our memories of those raven-tressed glory days intact.

The Tamborines / Roy And The Devil’s Motorcycle – 2 May 2008, Dirty Water Club

2008-05-06T19:48:00.002+01:00

It’s been a while since we’ve been dahn the Dirty Water Club, and in our absence time seems to have progressed. It’s no longer 1967 with the garage / psych kids in the back of The Boston Arms, we’ve fast forwarded a decade and the place in crawling with ye olde punk rockers – there’s a blue mohican on display and everything. We clutch our drinks as Johnny Throttle do their unreconstructed punk rock maniac skinny body thing across the stage. Johnny Throttle's singer is that crazy bloke who used to be in The Parkinsons. Maybe this is why these punksters are here? They don’t seem all that interesetd in proceedings though, nor in The Paper Dolls who are girls in the garage rock ’n’ roll ladies (and mans) from the USA and rattle along entertainingly enough. Meanwhile, The Tamborines are feeling a bit unnerved by all the punker-ing, what will they make of The Tambos’ Velvets-JAMC-Feedback-Psych smash up?

Next though, it’s Roy And The Devils Motorcycle. Tinkering around their MySpace page, I learn that they are ‘three guitarist brothers [who] grew up in a Swiss mountain village. Soon after moving to a larger town with a 'rock club', where they first saw Spacemen 3 and some other sonic pioneers of the time they got immersed in the energy of garage punk and primal rock and roll’ Cor! I’ve been looking forward to seeing them and Christ on a bike! they’re stupendous!

Roy And The Devils Motorcycle look like they don’t give a shit about anything much, a motley gang just mooching onto the stage and then casually locking into these huge outer spaced, hypnotic drones laced with evil feedback, guitars churning and wailing. They do monstrous thousand yard stare grooves driven by nasty ragged garage blues, whiting out into the stratosphere. It’s utterly captivating. The band’s Spacemen 3 influences are easy to espy – there’s a hobo spacerock cover of ‘May The Circle Be Unbroken’ – once also covered by Sonic and Jase – and a song that takes up where the Spacemen’s ‘Suicide’ left off, building an unhinged fireball of sound.
These are exactly the kind of spaced drones we want; raw and menacing and going on for a very long time so you can get properly lost, not someone making floaty noises with a few distortion pedals and thinking they’re the new My Bloody Valentine. Woohoo! Roy And The Devil’s Motorcycle are the mostest!

We haven’t see The Tamborines for a while and here they are with a new old drummer, i.e. the drummer they originally had before the last drummer and the drummer before that. He seems like a very nice man, especially as he kisses me on both cheeks continental style when we’re introduced. He can sure whip up a storm on the old Dirty Water drumkit as well. This heavy hurricane thump is most in evidence on The Tamborines cover of Beat Happenings ‘Bewitched’ which they whip into an evil hoodoo of voodoo sound, Lulu scowling ‘I got a crush on you, I got a crush on you’ cattily. It’s nice to see her take the lead on a song, managing to look menacing whilst stationed behind her keyboards. As ever, the band kick out a magnificent electric storm of noise laced with pop art beats. Even the punks appreciate it.

Harmonia – 19 April 2008, Queen Elizabeth Hall

2008-05-05T14:23:00.002+01:00

Tonight is the first! ever! live UK showing of the marv and legendary Harmonia. It’s only been, um, thirty-four years since these kings of kosmiche initially emerged from the Forst countryside with ‘Musik Von Harmonia’ refracting the sunlight into weird new shapes.

As we arrive, Led Bib are going Free Jazz squibbly squonk mental in the foyer. The sound they make hurts our insides and upsets our sense of balance. It makes the lady at the ticket desk scowl testily. We cower in a corner until the scary jazz has dissipated, then make our way into Queen Elizabeth Hall’s soothing wood-lined auditorium to find our seats amongst an ocean of beardy baldy men (inc. author Toby Litt who fits in well).

The beardy, baldy men and us and a small boy who has been brought along by his beardy baldy man dad are in a state of high anticipation. The stage is set mysteriously with three trestle tables swathed in black cloth. Laid out along the tables is Equipment – laptops and wires and stuff. You know the way it works with electronica – lots of Equipment, not very sexy, unless it’s olden times analogue Equipment with big reel to reel tapes and clacky bakerlite switches and dials and things. Which it never is.
Harmonia take up their positions behind the tables. Hans Joachim Roedelius is bald as an egg and wears his trousers old-man high – this is perfectly acceptable as he’s in his seventies. To the left of the towering Roedelius, Dieter Moebius is small and bespectacled. To Roedelius’ right, Michael Rother appears to have hired a younger man to pose as him.

And so they begin, stretching delicate ambient sounds out across space, choosing notes carefully. The beardy, baldy men are a bit let down. This isn’t a greatest hits thing. This is three men renowned for their mischievously experimental explorations with sound doing what they do – experimenting, improvising, building precarious structures with slivers of noise. Behind them, a screen twitches with images of themselves as younger men, in monochrome days of longer hair and lots more Equipment. The small boy is lead out weeping silent tears of boredom. After some time, a voice from the audience calls in frustration ‘Make it louder!’ They make it louder, washes of sound filter the room, techno beats thud engagingly. It’s weird to be sitting still and silent amidst an assault of such obvious dancey sounds.

Michael Rother takes up a guitar – ooh! to throw furzy, looping chords into the mix, a motorik backbeat kicks in – aah, that better. Then…more ambient drops of sound. I discover its best to close your eyes and really concentrate on each note, making each one into a little universe to be explored minutely. Time is elastic. How long have we been in here, sitting in the dark, absorbing soundscapes?

Then, finally, finally ‘Immer Wieder’ from meisterwerk second album ‘Deluxe’ ripples and flexes its way across the auditorium, yawing laconically. Beautiful. Underneath its mighty flood you can sense mass sighs of contentment. This is really what everyone came for. As the song comes to a close, too soon, too soon, the audience is euphoric, leaping to its feet to offer a standing ovation. It’s been an intriguing and touching evening.

Phil Wilson - 10 April 2008, Gramaphone

2008-05-05T14:14:00.004+01:00

The Gramaphone is full of big grins and bobbing heads. Pocketbooks are playing back-up band to Phil Wilson who’s bashing out a pop euphoric cover of The Go Between’s ‘Lee Remick’. Next, they take on an exhilarating ‘In The Rain’ by Wilson’s olden band, eighties indie poppers The June Brides. It’s a fabulous, fun-filled, life-affirming end to a sweet-hearted gig.

We learn from Phil Wilson’s MySpace that he has once again taken up music, performing as a solo artiste. Tonight’s gig should therefore not be confused with the brief but jolly June Brides reformation that happened a few years ago
(evidence here). To make it even more confusing, Mr Wilson is joined by two original June Brides - viola player Frank and trumpet man Big Jon and their set consists pretty much entirely of The June Brides’ back catalogue played along to a backing track. Not that anyone here is complaining. These songs are tatooed onto our fluttering indie kid hearts. Songs that hop, skip, jump and jangle their merry way out of our pasts and back into our arms like they’d never been away. Like we’d never put aside guitars strummed with such violent enthusiasm, trumpets soaring sunbeams straight to our hearts and pop tunes that made us dance stupid steps, singing along fit to burst, ‘Lets shout out loud to prove that we’re alive’. They’re all here, those songs, ‘Every Conversation’, ‘I Fall’, ‘Sunday To Saturday’. Yay! Then there’s the teary, cheery downbeat ache of ‘This Town’ which makes me feel like someone’s walked over my grave – sort of nostalgic and freaked out and happy and sad as the trumpet line tangles its way around my heart and twirls up and over the rooftops.

We also get the Phil Wilson Creation Records solo stuff, like the fab flamenco-tinged gallop of ’10 Miles’, the wistful croon of ‘Even Now’, the country stagger of ‘Waiting For A Change’. There’s even room for a new Wilson song which fits in with the general jangle just fine, perhaps getting a bit lost amongst all the swooning over yesteryear that’s going on.

It may be pure nostalgia, but we get our pop thrills where we can. Oh yes, and can Pocketbooks always be Phil’s band please?

The Lionheart Brothers – 1 April 2008, Hoxton Bar and Grill

2008-05-05T14:10:00.006+01:00

Into the heart of darkness that is Hoxton we venture to see these whizzy wee Norwegians fizzing out songs from their fab MBV meets the Beach Boys swirling pop feast of an album. Live, they’re more squirly shoe-gazey and less weirdly-flavoured West Coast bubblegum, but they’re still exhilarating, especially when the one that looks like a small boy dressing up as a Keith Richards new romantic pirate goes mentals with his guitar, throttling it and whacking it around all over the show, making squiddly sqaaww noises for aeons. Fun!

The end of summer on Bookbinder road – Cocoanut Groove (Phonic Kidnapping Records)

2008-04-20T17:26:00.000+01:00

Oh my! This is amazing. Cocoanut Groove is the work of Olov Antonsson (yes, another talented Swede – bah!), his pop daydreams fleshed out into real live moments of exquisite beauty with the help of numerous musicians. With ‘The end of summer on Bookbinder road’ they have created an astonishing thing. It’s baroque pop with a big, teary sound and on first listen you’ll feel like you’ve known this song all your life, whilst wondering where it’s been all this time. There’s melancholic brass, gauzy flute, and best of all a harpsichord stretches sedately underneath the whole thing – this pleases me immensely. My ideal band (the one in my head) has a harpsichord.

The obvious band name to drop here is The Left Banke – masters of sweeping pop moments that sparkle like jewels and of course the finest harpsichord purveyors in the pop universe. But there are also hints of Saint Etienne’s soft pop side and The Young Tradition’s sugar-spun West Coast-isms.

Even the title is perfect, like the name of a lost children’s literary classic full of scratchy ‘50s line drawings and a fading two-colour print dust jacket.

B-side ‘Shadow’ is spare and a little bit folky. Olov’s regret-stained voice, gently plucked guitar strings and a spectral violin suggest ripples spreading quietly over the surface of a pond. The music perfectly complements the imagery of the lyrics, ‘the stillness of the afternoon’, ‘a hazy August sky’ and ‘ten dusty books on a dusty shelf’. Sounds like holding your breath and remembering.

Buy this record and play it on repeat right now:
http://www.myspace.com/phonickidnappingrecords
http://www.myspace.com/cocoanutgroove

The Dilettantes / Sky Parade / Winter Drones / Time. Space. Repeat - 21st March 2008, Sonic Cathedral at The Social

2008-04-15T14:49:00.006+01:00

It’s Good Friday, so diligently we go to worship at Sonic Cathedral. We take the sacrament (in a glass, with ice, numerous refills) and settle in for Time. Space. Repeat. who are just one bloke today doing swirly, drifty, shoe-y, post-rock-ish stuff with his guitar and voice. It’s pleasant enough, but I get distracted by the episode of shit sixties sit-com ‘Mothers In Law’ that’s showing on a screen behind the stage. In it, The Seeds are making a rather embarrassing guest appearance. They have lovely shiny hair and Sky Saxon swirls his cloak around. Hurrah! "We hope you like it. We think it’s gassy!"

Where were we? Oh, now Winter Drones are playing. Prior to clambering onstage, their keyboard player has been sitting with her back to me, sticking her bony elbows into my shoulders. This suggests a certain lack of co-ordination, as does her actual keyboard playing. But this is Winter Drones’ (good name, well done) first gig so we’ll give them some leeway, eh? Their songs hint at the whites of eyes rush of early Telescopes dissolving into the static crackle and snowfield hum of, er, late Telescopes. Intriguing.

Sky Parade are a bit too manly rocking for me. A bit too (metaphorical, I hope) foot on monitor, wind in hair riffin’. They’re another one of those bands that feature an ex-BJM band member (they get everywhere, don’t they?) in this case ex-bass player Tommy Dietrick – now vocalist/guitarist. And although they have their swirling moments and psych twinges, they’re just too sleek and rawk for me. Their sound suggests The Cult circa ‘Love’- dark, sleazy, goff-tinged. When I was fourteen, this would have been a good thing. Now it leaves me cold.

As anyone with eyes and ears nose, Joel Gion is the reason everyone digs ‘Dig’, Ondi Timoner’s Dandys/Jonestown crockumentary. He’s the one with the wild frizz and ginormo fly-eye shades, the stupid voices and the wacky antics. Well, he was. That was a while ago. Now he’s the leader of The Dilettantes, a band of psych-rock troubadours who take to the stage and give it some welly in a fine mod-poppin’ style.

They work their way through a set of beat tunes that sounds like its been lifted wholesale from some pop-sike compilation of long-forgotten garage-rockin’ nuggets. The guitars sparkle and sunshine melodies snap at your heels – these are perfect tunes for dancing like a loon.

Joel concentrates on playing the songs, not playing the fool. He sings in a rumbly drawl, shaking his tambourine with classic Gion aplomb. "Here comes the tambourine man, yeah you know what I mean" he sings on ‘Ready To Go’, storming in on a thumping backbeat - a spikily groovy call to arms for the beatkids. ‘Subterranean Bazaar’ is a furious fuzzin’, hard janglin’ freakbeat delight, blamming along at breakneck speed for optimum pop thrills. ‘The Whole World’ is high as a kite bubblegum fun that gets the crowd singing along with its instantly insistent ‘ba ba bas’, and for the few minutes it lasts the world is a goggle-eyed whirl of colour. ‘Don’t You Ever Fall’, on the other hand, does pastoral wide-screen psychedelic swoonage in the vein of the lovely Lovetones.

The band look fab in that Carnaby Street threads ago-go way that Yanks can get away with. We ponder the fact that if The Dilletantes were British, their clothes would make them look like gits. We also ponder the fact that one guitarist looks like Noddy Holder. Excellent work all round.

Horowitz / Town Bike / Mai 68s - 20 March 2008, Betsey Trotwood

2008-04-13T14:42:00.005+01:00

Hurrah! First Bank Holiday of the year coming up and to celebrate there’s a handy Spiral Scratch Pop Show being held in the perfect indie-pop venue!

At least two of The Mai 68s songs begin with ‘Be My Baby’ / ‘Just Like Honey’ (delete according to taste) drumbeats leading me to think that maybe all their songs are going to start like this. Such an affectation would, of course, be utterly stylish. Turns out some of the songs have different rhythms. Oh well. I enjoy The Mai 68s and the racket they make. I like their plundering of revolutionary iconography in true first year art student style – the band name, the sixties underground garb, the er, shout-outs to Ulrike Meinhof. They have a stand-up drummer playing in the ‘bom, bom, bish’ style (like Bobby G. in The Mary Chain, obvs.) They have a guitarist who spends most of the gig ‘tuning’ up and who has more pedals than he knows what to do with, including, joy! a Fuzzface! As a result there are some highly satisfactory levels of fuzz ‘n’ feedback. It’s hard to tell which bits of these are actually meant and which bits are bonus noises as The Mai 68s don’t seem that in control of proceedings. This is another reason I enjoy them.

I also like the girl singer in her beret ‘n’ scarf ‘n’ glass of house red who divides her time between hissing at her band mates and intoning from her Big Book of Lyrics. The first ‘song’ involves Beat-like poetry being recited from the Big Book of Lyrics, whilst feedback reigns supreme -‘Howl’ set against a howl. Another song involves ‘nicking words from Dylan Thomas. He won’t mind, he’s dead’. One song stands out. ‘Froth On The Daydream’ (hey these kids know their French avant-anarcho stuff!) turns out to be The Mai 68s single – released in an edition of 100. As it says on their web site the song is delicious ‘sugar-coated chaos’, although there seems to be more chaos than sugar-coating going on here. There’s time for one last track, ‘Shall we do a noisy one or a jangly one?’ they ponder. The audience wants jangly, so that’s what we get. Just about.

Town Bike hurtle in wearing matching bowling shirts, pulling wheelies, doing headstands on their handlebars and generally fizzing about in an attention-grabbing manner. They’re full of energy and enthusiasm and it would be rude not to enjoy their 50 million song collection of punk-pop buzzbombs. Like fellow Liverpudlians Zombina and The Skeletones (only without the, you know, zombie element) they play on that whole fifties (American) High School bubblegum schtick, as originally appropriated by The Ramones and not left alone since.

Their first song is the Town Bike theme song which introduces each member of the band and their particular foibles (the bass player can get you anything knock-off apparently). One song features ‘audience participation’ – time for the indie milk-sops to clap their hands. In encouragement, singer and live-wire Sarah, yells ‘Pretend you’re watching Stereophonics’. So we all throw things at the band (not really). After a nosebleed race through fistfuls of punkpop fun, Town Bike end with the ridiculously stick in your head-ish ‘Trouble Fuckin’ Rocks’ which I initially hear as ‘Trevor Fuckin’ Rocks’ and think is a nice tribute to everyone’s fave Lost Music popbloke.

'Hug Target’, ‘Super Snuggles’, ‘I Need A Blanket’ – you could be forgiven for doing a bit of a sick at the industrial strength ultra-tweeness of Horowitz’s song titles. Or you could find them adorable and do little shuffly popkid dances to the songs and revel in the buzzsaw guitar action provided by Ian (he of the Gwegowy Webster voice and ‘What’s under the hat?’ hat) and Pete. Horowitz is just these two playing infectious, endearing guitar lines, whilst behind them lurks a large, bemusing-looking (technical term coming up) ‘backing music machine’ (yes, one of those).

‘Popkids Of the World Unite’ indicates that Horowitz have clearly been time-travelling and listening to our conversations circa 1987, when we’d snigger at ‘the swirlies’ (non pop-kid types in perms and stilettos) and sing ‘Popkids of the world unite and…hang the swirlies, hang the swirlies, hang the swirlies’ (two Smiths songs for the price of one, see?). Not very nice now I come to think of it. Unlike Horowitz, "All I ever wanted was a happy, happy heart and your cutesy hand in my hand" they sing and that’s the song lodged in your head for, ooh, at least the rest of eternity. ‘Sweetness I Could Die In Your Arms’ is full of spangly guitar sparkling like raindrops over a comforting fuzz meadow. ‘Traceyanne’ ends in the time-honoured indie-pop fashion with lots of ba ba bas and fervently jangled guitars peaking with a pop squeal of joy. ‘Sister’ is extra fuzzy and buzzy and thus extra enjoyable. For, despite the hardcore tweeness going on here, Horowitz are kicking up quite a racket. The kind of racket that’s only achievable with the treble and the fuzz turned right up, so our ears get a right old battering as the sound bounces around the Betsey Trotwood’s brick cellar. But hey, that’s what indie-pop’s all about. Right pop-kids?

Always On The Telephone - The Ladybug Transistor (Fortuna Pop!)

2008-04-12T20:08:00.002+01:00

I love The Ladybuggers, but it took me a while to come to terms with their sixth album, ‘Can’t Wait Another Day’. Sasha Bell no longer numbers among the band’s line-up, which is a shame as I have a bit of a lady-crush on Sasha and her ice-cold mountain stream voice. The music sounds more mature, less psychedelisised. And by the time I had come around to the album, the time to write about it had passed. Here, though, is a single from that album and cripes! it’s a track I initially had a bit of a prob with. This is mainly due to the saxophone solo and my immature inability to cope with same. As Gruff Rhys once said, ‘I vomited throughout your saxophone solo’.

So the sax makes me flinch a bit. The guitars though…Ahh, the guitars are liquid and luxurious. They peal out over everything as underneath the song glows warmly, country-tinged and rueful. There’s a downy, soft-focus quality to it all, like squinting through sunspots on the windscreen, or rummaging through browning photos of a long ago road-trip.

I can’t comment on the sleeve artwork for ‘Always On The Telephone’ ‘cos my copy doesn’t have any, but the cover photography for ‘Can’t Wait Another Day’ is sumptuous. Two of the band sit in an old subway carriage coloured in deep reds and dark greens. It suggests a mahogany seriousness, a grown-up-ness that comes from travelling and learning and managing to make your way through life without keeling over. Inside, the sleeve has images of expansive landscapes, each one leading the eye and the mind away towards a central vanishing point. There are paths to travel, journeys to make, horizons to explore beyond. And that’s what The Ladybug Transistor sound like. A rich sound. And really rather gorgeous.

(P.S. Photo taken by me. On my birthday)

Tape Art: Let Me Come Over

2008-04-12T13:31:00.006+01:00

Here I have managed to make Buffalo Tom who were in no way at all twee, seem simperingly cute by adding speech bubbles to my rendering of the original (back) sleeve artwork. This is because I loved the Tom and not because I wished to denigrate their manly guitar playing. I think this might be my fave album of theirs (although there is ‘Birdbrain’…hmmm…). It has the lovely, lovely ‘Mineral’ which features the opening couplet ‘All spangled up, glittering on / there’s a monster in the kitchen, his light's turned on’ along with whirring, fizzing guitars that gradually build into fireworks in a summer sky and hurtling down the road at dusk, hair and eyes streaming in the wind. Ahhh, I just played it again and remembered how I ended up with a minor case of whiplash after going to see Buffalo Tom at The Underworld in 1991, such was my unrestrained joy and unfettered head-banging.

He had a psychotic episode on a dude ranch that involved a bottle of ammonia: Fave Tunes February/March 2008

2008-04-12T11:49:00.008+01:00

Steel Your Girl – Neon Neon The twinkly side of sleekly constructed synth pop, sounding kind of like Wire’s ‘Outdoor Miner’. SerWOON! In danger of being played to death.

I Lust U – Neon Neon Synth bleepo disco-stuff, then Gruff’s voice makes your icy eighties heart melt. Once again: serWOONN!

My Elven Home - Gandalf The Grey Oddly jangle-pop sounding for something so obviously hippy-div.

Albert Goes West - Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds Lord Cave does The Jesus and Mary Chain whilst The Bad Seeds act like yobs. Plus, when old Nick asks ‘Do you wanna dance????!!!! Do you wanna move????!!!!’ with that much punctuation you’d better give the right answer.

Don’t You Ever Fail - The Dilettantes Dippy jangle refracting sun-psych
http://www.myspace.com/thedilettantes

Greasy Crisps - The Sunny Street Blurred wistful dreampop belies title
http://www.myspace.com/thesunnystreet

Sparrow - Mountain Home Espers-esque etherealness – the best kind. Plus, look at their picture – fabulous.
http://www.myspace.com/mtnhome

Replica - The Shortwave Set Stately kaliedoscoping psychedelia found at the back of a dusty old cupboard

Shared Islands – High Places Animal Collective using sunbeams as wind-chimes
http://www.myspace.com/hellohighplaces

Sa Trace Silencieuse – Minimilk (Phonic Kidnapping Records)

2008-04-12T11:05:00.000+01:00

Minimilk is Remi of Electrophonvintage / The Sunny Street murmuring in French to the accompaniment of a gently strummed guitar (courtesy of Sebastien). Remi sent me a nice letter with this record in which he uses the word ‘maladroit’ and for that alone I salute him. However, these four gossamer bossa tracks are also a reason to take a celebratory sip of coffee and stare wistfully out the window. These wispy songs, delicate as cobwebs, are the soundtrack to your own personal Truffaut film. They are breezes through open windows, sunlight flashing on lakes, buttercups under chins, lounging in the long grass and thoughtful walks home. Remi says the songs were recorded ‘a few years ago in the sunny kitchen…’ which is exactly how it should be. Tiny exquisite moments, elegantly packaged.

http://www.myspace.com/minimilkmusic

http://www.myspace.com/phonickidnappingrecords

Projekt A Ko vs. Horowitz (Filthy Little Angels)

2008-04-06T20:07:00.002+01:00

Like Talulah Gosh using childishness as a form of subversion, or Orange Juice being deliberately fey because it was punk, Horowitz are the sound of cheekily thumbed noses and being provocatively cutesy to get people’s backs up. This isn’t pigeon-toed limp indie with downcast eyes, but the sound of a band thoroughly revelling in the concept of twee-pop.

‘Sweetness I Could Die In Your Arms’ is a good old-fashioned jangle-pop anthem buzzing and sparkling, designed to turn the dance floor into a whirl of stripy t-shirts and flying fringes. It makes me remember why I fell for the anorak pop sound in the first place. Why it seemed like a rallying cry for the dispossessed – yes we have bowlcuts and dufflebags, but we’ll poke you in the eye with a lollipop and stomp on your feet with our Startrites, turn the treble up and make your ears bleed.

‘Hug Target’ (such an icky title it’s great) begins and end with perfect squeals of feedback (yum!) and in between weaves its merry way on an irresistibly chiming tune topped with la la las and Ian’s Gregory Webster on helium (yes! imagine that!) vocals. Sha la hurrah!

Over on the other, er, side (this ‘split seven inch’ is actually a collection of stinky old mp3s for me) we find more lovely distortion courtesy of Projekt A Ko who were once three-quarters of fab raygun noisters Urusei Yatsura. ‘Nothing Works Twice’ sees the band operating on the if-it-ain’t-broke premise, kicking up a welcome dust-storm of crunchy noisome pop. There are cheeky screeches of strangulated feedback, scratchy rhythms and cheery foot-to-the-pedal singalong bursts of tuneful chaos. ‘Goodbye Sunlight’, on the other hand, begins with unfettered guitar strumming, lulling you into a false sense of security before the fuzz-pedals get hit. The wooziness of the tune even hints at the sounds of late sixties soft-pop (say Harpers Bizarre or someone). A fabulous combination of J Mascis-style laidbackness and um, J Mascis-style guitar torturing. Sounds like going out on summer evenings as the light fades and the streetlamps come on.

Facts bit: The single, featuring two songs by each band, is limited to 200 copies, available exclusively online. You can order it now from http://www.filthylittleangels.com/

I Felt My Sad Heart Soar – Kelman

2008-04-05T12:39:00.005+01:00

This is a three-track sampler for Kelman’s rather excellently titled forthcoming second album and a very pleasing thing it is indeed. The band have built on their melancholic, alcoholic tear-stained sound, gently prising it open to let in wisps of fresh air. They say they’re aiming for a rawer sound, closer to their live excursions (which can be heart-wrestingly, wrist-snappingly wonderful) whilst keeping the warmth and intimacy of their debut. And jings! I think they’ve achieved this.

Kelman have warmth and intimacy for sure, at times you feel embarrassed to be eavesdropping on Wayne Gooderham’s thoughts. Take former single ’Is This How It Ends?’ reprieved here with its shiveryness and blood pumping in the ears rumble and the words ‘On the brink of something big. I’ve never known failure like this…’ You want to blush and look away, but icicle-drops of glockenspiel drip into a swell of guitar and organ and you cling on until seascape cymbals shimmer you towards a big finish, rushing impulsively over the edge.

‘Commercial Road’ sees Kelman in almost-optimistic-mood-shocker! It takes some song-writing ability to write anything of beauty about this particular East End street, but here is an affecting song filled with soft ripples of delight. A gentler, more soothing sound with twinkly bits and brass tones (you can’t be down when the brass kicks in) and those words, "I felt my sad heart soar". Hang on though, what’s this? "Oh Lord I need a drink". Oh dear.

There’s a lot of drunkenness in Kelman’s songs, and it seems like the new album will see more booze-fuelled long dark nights of the soul. This is, of course, no bad thing, as Kelman are quiet masters of the art. ‘Shut A Final Door’ sees Mr Gooderham "drunk in charge of a wired jealous heart" sliding through Tindersticks territory with cello and piano until everything cracks wide open on a jubilant organ riff and redemptively strummed guitar. Sounds to make your heart soar coming soon. Can’t wait!

http://www.kelmanband.com/

All Hat And No Plans / Great Expectations – My Sad Captains (White Heat)

2008-04-05T11:31:00.002+01:00

A double A-side from your fave superior-quality, melody-plying twangle merchants. Both tracks slather on that delicious, rollingly lush, glowing Captains sound you want to throw your arms right round. It would take a venomous churl indeed to deny the glorious, soft-focus (bitter) sweet-heartedness of this brace of pop lovelies.

‘All Hat And No Plans’ lays out a picnic of exuberant, chewing-gum guitar, dippy divey harmonies and la la las tempered with just the right amount of rough-edged buzzing waspiness to stop it all being syrupy. Just try and stop your heart leaping.

‘Great Expectations’ (they’re quite literary aren’t they? This is good to see) has the wee bespectacled singer man going "I’m gonna get you out of this if it’s the last thing I ever do" in a surprisingly rich voice (this is good to hear) and makes my memory hear fab olde pop tune ‘Nancy Sinatra’ by The Groove Farm. If that wasn’t delightful enough, the song slides lovingly into a series of "do ron ron a do rons" and it turns out that’s exactly what you needed to hear at that point. Genius!

http://www.myspace.com/mysadcaptains