diskant is an independent music community based in Glasgow, Scotland and we have a whole team of people from all over the UK and beyond writing about independent music and culture, from interviews with new and established bands and labels to record and fanzine reviews and articles on art, festivals and politics. There's over ten years of content here so dig in!
I have just come to the conclusion that these two records are the best two records ever made. EVER. I once travelled to New York just to see Chavez and they sucked. This has not clouded my opinion of these mighty works. Thank you.
There are some albums where each track is very different, and this makes the album seem like a disorganised mess from a band who can’t decide what they’re doing. Then there are some albums where each track is very different, and this serves to reinforce a band with almost more ideas than they can handle. Luckily this one is from the latter camp, and whilst Last of the Juanitas seem all over the place in terms of song structures and styles, they hold it together with an odd sense of noise, paranoia and aggression which is both captivating and exhilarating.
So this album starts with a brooding, doom-laden sludge of a tune which sounds like Low trying to pull off a Part Chimp cover. Then as tracks go by, there are elements of all kinds of other bands hurled into the mix: Prolapse’s relentlessly tense dual-gender vocals; the Nightblooms’ sharply carved guitar chaos; Quickspace’s pop-under-a-pile-of-rubble tunefulness; American Heritage’s heavy angular rock’n’roll shapes. The combination is enriched with a strangely hallucinogenic feel and a foreboding sense of anger, making for a great and surprisingly original-sounding album.
That’s Kill Yourself, the band famous for Not Sounding Like Shellac. Maybe in their formative years there was more than a little of the Albini stop start skrrng about them but they’ve long since beheaded THAT albatross, and pushed the envelope into a distorted postbox of maniacal screeching, off-kilter time signatures and evil bass riffs. I wonder if, at age 80, I’ll find myself humming more Kill Yourself songs than Shellac numbers, terrifying the ‘life’ out of the bed-wetting squares I’m sharing my twilight years with. Because these two songs are up there with the best, young man, mark my words.
‘You Are Good’ starts the OAParty of my future with its disjointed verse, tension-tastic middle bit and torso-bangingly euphoric chorus, and then before you know it its all falling apart again. Very, very good. But its ‘Fill The Sails’ which is the real killer no filler on this bit of (blue) wax. A toe-tappingly relentless repeato-riff underpins toe-curlingly creepy vocals, a genuinely unsettling ‘quiet bit’ genuinely unsettles me and it all comes to a head with a coda I can only describe as ‘punishing’. If this is still in my head at age 80 I’ll be a happy, if slightly deranged, old codger.
So was I the only one who was massively disappointed by Boris last night? It was certainly far from the crushingly heavy festival of death I was hoping for. It was all high-end and cymbals and spangly guitar, with no real beef to the sound whatsoever. Granted this possibly wasn’t their fault, but no band with an album called Amplifier Worship should ever sound like that.
DCs finest psychedelic heaviosity merchants DEAD MEADOW are playing a one off at the BARFLY in CAMDEN on TUESDAY MARCH 15 – TOMORROW!
STINKING LIZAVETA are on in the middle, you might have seen them at the Shellac ATP
LORDS are ex Wolves Of Greece and open up and ARE ONSTAGE AT EIGHT O CLOCK NO FUCKING SHIT.
cheers
Also I saw Wilco last night and everybody NELS CLINE! Give it up! NELS CLINE!
Hello, I’ve been away. I would just like to amend the comments in the article “diskant’s favourite films of 2004“. Sherry Ostapovitch returned my DVD of ‘Before Sunrise’ back in January, but I have not had an opportunity until now to clarify the situation. The defamatory claims made about her in my contribution to the article were written back in December 2004, but Ms Ostapovitch – otherwise known as “MusicForOne” – ensured that the DVD had returned to my library before diskant published said article. Sorry Sherry.
Please also note that the DVD is once again available for loan to anyone who asked to borrow it last August.
I keep writing about Wäntage USA releases on here, don’t I? But they keep releasing great things. What am I to do? (Well, admittedly, widen my listening spectrum a little bit. And I will. I will.)
Anyway. Fireballs of Freedom rock like crazed fuckers! This CD is invigoratingly fast-paced, and dumb-ass simplistic. For the duration of listening to the album, I’m convinced that you can keep your complex mathematical rock, your inward-looking folkesque strummings and your skittering electronica experiment. The people want WAILING, my dudes. And this band wails with the best of ’em.
They’re one third Kiss showmanship, one third Ramones chugachug rockaway freneticism, one third Mudhoney late-80s style grunge and one third Superchunk melodical lyricism. They’re dumb-ass rock enough to care not that that adds up to more than a whole. And that is the way you should like it. And will like it. Fat chunks of raw bleeding meat guitar chords, cross-song widdling solos and brief bangbangbang structures. A band for the early 1980s mid-American flannel shirt-wearing slackers amongst us.
FREE RECORDS!!!!!
I’m moving house soon so it is time for a clear out. I’ve already chucked out about ten million crappy old cassettes and am currently working my way through an ENORMOUS box of zines I found at the back of a cupboard. I also have some half decent cassettes, CDs and 7″s* that you are welcome to for the price of postage. Use the comments box or email marceline at diskant.net to claim anything, first come etc. Most of this is either review stuff, things I also have on vinyl or where I’ve copied the good songs to MP3. It’s all going to charity otherwise. More soon, maybe.
*I did go through my LPs and 12″s but only managed to discard one so I put it back in…
Ooh, I forgot I also have the following:
LEXMARK inkjet printer – does colour OR B&W but not both at the same time. It’s okay.
EPSON Scanner – only works with Windows 98, usefully. Pretty good scanner though.
These are FREE to anyone who can pick them up from Glasgow. I doubt they’re worth the cost of postage.
On Tuesday, Vialka are back playing at Stereo. Hooray!
and…
The Copy Left Film Festival
Free Films in March !
(donations highly appreciated…)
Glasgow University, Mondays 3 PM, Boyd Orr Building
7th – Weapons of Mass Deception
14th – Dr. Stragelove
21st – Land and Freedom
28th – Surplus & Total Rubbish
Glasgow School of Art, Mondays 6 PM, Bourdon Lecture
theatre (architecture building) … please arrive on
time or a bit before so we can let you in the
building.
7th -Brazil
14th – Outfoxed
Strathclyde University, Fridays 1 PM, Graham Hills
Building room 550
4th – Corporation part 1 & 2
11th – Corporation part 3
18th – Weapons of Mass Deception
25th – Land and Freedom
Tommy Vance. Rock on and on and on.
(Kevin Smiths birthday present to me a couple of years back – it reads “Very best wishes, Happy B’day Chris. Tommy Vance, Rock On and On”)
