Emetrex are the latest in a long-line of lo-fi, high-octane subterranean pop bands that America does so well. Their second album ‘Wish Me Dead’ is patchily brilliant, but brilliant nonetheless. A stripped-down, flame-grilled mix of desert rock, slacker-pop, molten riffs and grunge that manages to be brittle, nervy, raw and woozy all at the same time. If you can imagine Dinosaur Jr covering Sparklehorse using the Jesus and Mary Chain’s instruments you wouldn’t be a million miles away from Emetrex’s badly-blistered stoner-pop landscape. Album opener ‘I Think The Sun Makes Me Move’ is a brutally-short lesson in alt.perfection and sets the tone for their Sonic Youth-interfering-with-Spoon vibes. The album reportedly “chronicles the band’s own creative self-destruction”. I’ll applaud their appetite for destruction, but i certainly won’t be wishing them dead…
Steve Lamacq loves them, I love them, soon you’ll love them too.
A genuine off-kilter treat.

www.seriouslygroovy.com

Three weeks without home internet and I barely missed it. And now that I have it back I seem reluctant to pick up where I left off. It seems I may finally have learned how to relax. I haven’t completely neglected diskant though ‘ you may notice I’ve recruited a bunch of new reviewers and the diskant review box is now almost empty. Hopefully from now on things will get reviewed in a more timely manner and by a wider range of people. I’m certainly looking forward to seeing all the new reviews and you should keep checking the reviewsblog.

I still have a personal review backlog as I’ve been blighted with a complete block on review writing for the last, er, 6 months or so (sorry to all those bands and labels). Help has come from unexpected places with some enforced fun at work. What started as a simple CD swap has now grown into a team CD ring requiring track by track reviews with scores. I’ll probably post up some of my reviews here at some point but it’s been a relatively unexposed opportunity to try and remember how to write about music. Not to mention the exposure to all kinds of bands I would never otherwise hear. And with no internet I’ve been listening blind, having to trust my heart and not what my eyes might tell me are a bunch of hipster losers. I may not get through this with my pride or my cool intact but that’s half the fun these days.

What little cool I still possess I will be clutching to my heart on the 19th of June at Mono in Glasgow where we will be sharing a stage with the mighty Wolf Eyes. Do come and see us.