(Originally posted April 2003)

Hey kids. This month, I’ve been VERY, VERY EXCITED INDEED about my recent promotion in the diskant staff to diskant Talent Spotter, which now means that I have a duty to you, the diskant reader, to hand pick some great new bands and write words about them that say stuff like what they sound like and whether they’re any good and stuff. So to start you off, here are five lovely new bands you might want to go and seek out. Well, four bands and a record label from Italy, anyway. Happy listening.

4tRECk are random, beautifully random. A ‘”musette’-style cover version’ of ‘Slave Ship’ by the almighty Jesus Lizard (what is off of their album Liar). Only there are no mind-blistering David Yow screams and no squalling, urgent walls of guitar noise. Instead, we’re treated to a drum machine, a piano and 132 accordions battling it out in the all-in National Touch & Go Sea Shanty competition 2003. All told, it’s a right glorious knees-up around the old Joanna and a fascinating way of making something new rather than attempting a note-for-note retread with unbearable indie earnestness. Interesting also that it’s the lead track on the EP, with second track ‘Socasam’ sounding for all the world like a one-minute theme tune to a nightmarish children’s TV show, presumably featuring monsterdragons knitted from the remains of kids who didn’t go to bed when they were told to. ‘Frankensinatra’ does exactly what it says on the tin, a ghostly proto-hip hop beat backing snippets of Ol’ Blue Eyes dipping in and out of the mix hypnotically – and all, apparently, deriving from an initial accident. And closing track ‘Eye of the Tiger’ is 35 seconds of Rocky meets Alice in Acidland, stabs of instrumentation mutating into a drunken cover of ‘Eye of the Tiger’. There are some great ideas at work here, partially formed by chance and improvisation, but with the imagination to carry it through to completion. The main drawback is that without the backing of a solid structure to carry an idea through to completion (as they have when taking the Jesus Lizard as a template), the ideas remain half-formed, embryonic and frustratingly full of promise while not quite getting there. It’s crammed with imagination though, and that’s one of my favourite things, along with ice cream, Sundays and Turkish Delight.

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(Originally posted November 2002)

An encyclopedic spread of bands from across the UK this month, and across the alphabet, as Ann Arbor and Zebedee Numchuck allow me to present what is, quite literally, an A to Z of some of the best new British bands you might want to go and have a listen to.

A is for…
Starting off like the theme from the advert for Smash instant mashed potato (the one with all those pre-Metal Mickey look-at-us-we’re-covered-in-tin-foil-aren’t we futuristic tin Steven Hawkingseses), Leicester’s Ann Arbor hereafter turn their hand to the genre known henceforth as GRAAAAAARGHcore. Take away the fact that the main riff to ‘Tensed Up’ sounds more than a little bit like ‘Selling Jesus’ by Skunk Anansie, and you’ve got a Big Black-fuelled noise party for all the family. It’s stripped down the bare essentials (there are only two members: guitar, programming and bass), and loud enough and good enough to make you honestly expect Steve Albini to pop up shouting about crows or squirrels any minute. I’ve had the privilege of seeing Ann Arbor perform live, and it took my ears two days to recover from their atomizing songs about fucking then. I’m looking forward to many more happy hours of deafness from this ‘ere demo.

G is for…
God_Only_Knows – another band combining electronics and guitars, you might think. What to expect? Only too often, bands can end up thinking they’re some kind of Renaissance men (or women), simply by the introduction of a bit of kit with ‘Roland’ stamped on the front. Refreshing then that God_Only_Knows (complete with underscores, natch) don’t drown their music under squeals, breakbeats or vocal samples, instead weaving a spacious and pretty mesmerising twist on standard post-rock fare that sets them apart nicely from the pack, thank you very much. The opening track (the fantastically-titled ‘Ailsa Stewart’) starts off promisingly, but ultimately weighs in about two minutes under its proper fighting weight, coming to a close before it’s really got going. Unlike ‘Reflections In Natural History’, seven minutes of swooping, sweeping and bleeping that genuinely gives the impression it’s got something to say for itself. It’s not all plain sailing – ‘Plane/plain’ does suffer from too many inconsequential beeps and not enough ideas, leaning rather self-consciously towards Autechre territory without committing fully to it, but on balance a offering that varies from substantial and worthwhile to flamin’ beeptastic, mate. No Beach Boys covers, either.

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(Originally posted July 2002)

If you, like me, have been watching VH1 every day almost constantly in the hope of seeing
that Enrique Iglesias video where he gets off with Anna Kournikova, it’s probably time you, well, got out more frankly. And while you’re out of the house, you might want to go and buy some new music. Maybe even some of this new music.

’03/04/02. Michael injures his lungs. 03/04/02. Bass’s nut broken in sword fight. 20/04/02. Michael blows the output tubes on his amp.’ Wisconsin’s New Blind Nationals don’t have photos or a list of influences on their website like mimsy indie rock hopefuls. Theirs is a list of damage – and what’s more, ROCK damage. Onstage lung wounds notwithstanding, opening track ‘Used Up’ proclaims ‘rock ‘n’ roll is pretty lame’ with the conviction of an English oak wardrobe being dropped onto the Hives’ collection of IKEA fake pinewood furniture, to labour the metaphor. In fact, by the time I’ve finished typing said metaphor, ‘Sturtevant By Night’ (Sturtevant? Free copy of the album to anyone who tells me what this means) has already pissed on my shoes and run away laughing. Four of the tracks here are terrific and make The Vines sound like the sub-GCSE Nirvana covers band they are, swelling and cracking their way out of the speakers as if they were recorded through blown amps using instruments nicked from the skip outside …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead’s house (which they may have been, given the band’s apparent propensity for BREAKING STUFF). Vaguely grungey, and garagey in neither the Strokes nor the Genius Kru sense, the nearest reference points that fling themselves from the shelves of HMV are Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge-era Mudhoney and the much-touted second coming of grunge, The Catheters. Unfortunately for the New Blind Nationals, calling a song ‘End Of The Good Songs’ only works if it’s a storming rock anthem direct from the toilet bowl where AC/DC got rid of their last curry, rather than actually being the end of the good songs. To be fair, it’s not that bad, but the final three plod along with a few inconsequential keyboard sounds, as if the band are being (slowly) pursued up the road by a lame Moog, until the screaming finale of ‘In Armed Decision’ sticks a few drumsticks where the sun doesn’t shine and reminds me why this would be the demo of the month, were such a spurious award to exist.

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(Originally posted May 2002)

Press releases are funny things. Like a CV, you can spend days honing phrases like ‘a smorgasbord of honey-dripped ballads in sharp contrast to the coruscating hardcore on display elsewhere’ until you (or your publicist/manager/label whore) have made the band in question sound like the greatest, most essential new band of the decade. That is, until the reviewer/A & R person puts the CD into the player and your music undoes all the good work your flowery prose did in five seconds.

A good press release, like a good CV, should be clean, to the point and no more than two sides of A4. It should only tell you what you need to know: where you’re from, what you’ve done, what you sound like, how to get in touch with you. So let’s take a look at the peculiar phenomenon of press release hype.

If size really did matter, then Dustbyte might possibly be bigger than U2, offering up a seven-page behemoth of a press release, detailing every bit of press the band have ever had (including about a page’s worth of gig listings from two years ago), every review and possibly some guff about how they all like fish fingers, except the singer, who’s allergic to them. But as we’ve established, a long press release is almost as bad as one that’s too short, and kind of gives the impression that the band are trying to make themselves out to be one of Britain’s biggest bands. It’s like reading through the guitarist’s mum’s scrapbook of the band, and half expecting to see a baby photo over the page.

And the music? Live, the influence of the Jesus Lizard and the Pixies on Dustbyte is clear enough in their pleasing squealy guitar noise and infectious (not in the disease sense, don’t worry) stage presence. Here, though, first track ‘Priscilla’ sounds like Hüsker Dü being played through jam while Brian Eno juggles bits of keyboard in the background with the help of a few of the Clangers. The chorus, rather than being spiky and catchy in the way that good choruseseses in this sort of music are wont to be, is actually pretty irritating. ‘The Misadventures of the Great Red Shark’ is much more like it, bounding along like an excited teenager on the way to his first Frank Black and the Catholics gig.

Muleskinner Jones (Terrible Stories EP) make the mistake of not actually putting their name on the press release, but it does take the form of a hand-signed, typed letter asking for ‘any feedback/criticism/abuse’. There are no biographical details at all, though, so I’m going to have to make them up. ‘Muleskinner Jones were formed in late 1953 in Mid-West America and raised on a diet of cowboy movies, trips to the American Adventure theme park and Mary Poppins. They moved on to Ireland sometime in the early 1980s, where they listened to the Pogues and took acid for 22 years.’

This would go some way towards explaining the finished product of their output. First song ‘How Come That Blood On Your Coat Sleeve?’ genuinely sounds like a cross between Kirsty McColl and Shane MacGowan’s hit pop song and something from Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, as sung by Kirsty Gallagher off Sky TV and ‘top’ impressionario Alistair MacGowan. I honestly can’t tell if this utterly bizarre countrified duet about murder and bloodstains is taking the piss or not. It’s Nick Cave if he’d been brought up by Cletus and Dwayne, the only inbred gay couple in all of Arkansas. And I mean that as a compliment, really I do. Traditional songs recorded on an Apple Powerbook by an insane genius with straw between his teeth – Muleskinner Jones, we salute you, because we don’t know what else to do.

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(Originally posted April 2002)

So this is a column designed to shout about a few new bands you might want to check out, but you’ve got to have a system, right? You get a huge pile of miscellaneous tapes, CDs and records to pick and choose from, and like a magpie trapped in a giant box of Quality Street, the nice shiny things catch your eye first. So I’m going to review these bad boys in order of how nice they look from the outside, even if they end up tasting like those horrible coffee creams that make you gag every Christmas. Send me pretty things. I like pretty things. Mind you don’t send anything that sounds like the Pretty Things, though.

First up is West Wales’ Jarcrew, whose press release takes the form of a bit of A4 with some scrawl on it in black felt pen, which is a nice personal touch. It does, however, promise the bribe of several – several, mind – Kit Kats, none of which I’m yet to see, so words will have to be had [sorry, I steal all the bribes – overlord]. The CD’s a fantastic home made package covered in brown parcel tape, black cardboard and that silver pen that only the pretty art teacher at primary school gets to use. Quite apart from the quality packaging, they also have things like ‘kill all musos’ and ‘sex ‘n’ hugs ‘n’ rock ‘n’ roll’ written all over it, which puts me in a good mood straight off. First track ‘Deemo’ is 30 seconds long: drums, bass, weird keyboard flid-outs and a man who has reverb in his mouth shouting ‘deemodeemodeemo’ over and over. I’m not sure what ‘Deemo’ is, but I like it. ‘Deth Car’ is one and a half minutes of dirty garage rock and distorted vocals that I entirely agree with – it’d ace to drive round, pull up next to a load of girls and invite them to get in my deth car for a ride. And if I did, this would be the soundtrack. ‘Boy Wonder’ is more expansive and instrumental, and gets going just when you think it’s just a mimsy instrumental to link tracks together. The most disappointing track is ‘Opakow’, if anything because it’s the most straightforward, after the band have set themselves the (high) standard of being wilfully strange. More please.

Next, it’s disoma from Southampton, whose tape package must have taken longer than the songs to put together. Every line of text is individually cut out on separate bits of paper and stuck to the tape sleeve, hopefully not with Pritt Stick but with industrial strength atom-bonding glue they guzzled between takes. ‘Squeal, squeal, squeal – DAH DAH DAH’ would be my answer if I were asked, for example in an oral examination to pass my GCSE in math rock, ‘how would you describe disoma’s music using only the medium of onomatopoeia?’ And I like to think I’d get at least a ‘B’ for that. ‘I Like Me, You Like Me, Let’s Be Friends’ stops, starts, stops, then chugs off in all the right places, punctuated by one of the young scamps shouting ‘BLAAAR’ (the Emo Noise(r)). So far a cracking tune, until it goes into a hilarious sub-solo that sounds like it might have sounded funny turned up dead loud in the practice room. It’s not funny, at all. In fact, it’s rubbish. Second track ‘God vs. Prog’ does pretty much the same thing, only without Joe Satriani turning up in clown shoes, so it wins the day in my book. ‘Ollie’s Dead Too’ does the quiet/loud thing, but not half as interestingly as the rather splendidly-titled ‘Providence Exotic Fish’, which builds up ‘Yes I Am A Long Way From Home’ style like the world’s biggest sandcastle made by a busload of kids with attention deficit disorder. I bet they’re ace live. I’d go and see them. ‘Have you ever been so low that you cried?’ What kind of a lyric is this, please? It’s like ‘have you ever found something so funny that you laughed?’

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(Originally posted February 2002)

2001. A year in which one of the top selling albums was a compilation of classic lounge covers by Robbie Williams and The Strokes used the events of September 11 as a marketing opportunity (we’ll pull ‘New York City Cops’ from the album, in case any of you were worried. Go Team Strokes!). What else happened? I can’t really remember, but I expect it was good. You’ll have to make do with my vague top ten of 2001 – imagine it’s being excitedly presented by wee Gail Porter in a tiny top or something.

Starting at the top, the gold medal, bottle of champagne, scantily clad girl and place atop the winner’s rostrum goes to an EP called Morning One by a gentleman going under the assumed name of Aarktica (Ochre Records). The lead track of the three, ‘These Days Fail To Bring Me Near’, is the most involving piece of new music I’ve heard this year. It’s basically five minutes of ambient washes of noise, vocals you can barely make out and a really simple picked guitar part. And that’s it. The most pretentious thing about the EP is that it’s themed around soundtracking the moment when you wake up in the morning with your arms around someone you love (your mum doesn’t count) for the first time. Which would make me laugh in its face, apart from the fact that Jon only goes and pulls it off. The other two tracks (predictably) don’t rise to the same heights, but this has the first choice of biscuit from the Tesco Finest selection simply because I want ‘These Days Fail To Bring Me Near’ to be the last song I hear before I die, it’s that good.

No prizes for originality for choosing Confield by Autechre, but that’s not the point. Messrs. Booth and Brown have been making fantastic records for forty-nine years now, records consistently far better than anyone else in electronic music (yes, even Gary Numan). ‘VI scose poise’ starts the journey like the track Aphex Twin meant to write when he was messing about with ‘Bucephalus Bouncing Ball’, and by the time ‘lentic catachresis’ arrives, Autechre have actually smashed music to bits like petulant children with drum machines. Half of this record makes me want to sit down and write something even a quarter as good, and the other half makes me want to give up making music because Autechre are so far ahead of the game, it’s pointless anyone else even trying. As that German bloke might have said to Ned Nederlander in The Three Amigos, ‘Autechre are gods in my country.’

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So, that was the end of Dave Stockwell’s columns from the old diskant zine days. I’ve been trying to line up Ross McGivern’s awesome set of columns for months now but he is re-editing them so go shout at him. While we’re waiting, I thought we could do a poll to help me decide the order of schedule for the remaining columnists. VOTE NOW!

(Originally posted January 2005)

Records that were good in 2004

That time of year has wound around again, and everyone who’s got an opportunity to make themselves heard (and this being t’internet, that means a lot of people) has compiled inevitable endless lists of what they liked about the previous 12 months. You may have noticed that diskant towers itself plays host to such humdrum marvels – though I have to be a back-slapping sonuvabitch and say that I’ve always enjoyed reading our lists and bolshy arguments far more than yer average boring coolometer measurements on all those other boring sites…

Annnnnyway, it was when I started thinking about what candidates I would be putting forward as my nominees for the diskant team top few musical recordings of the year that it slowly dawned on me: there’s only the tiniest chance that more than a couple of my favourite records of 2004 would receive a single vote from anyone else. Why do I know this? Because I’m a fucking obscurist cuntbag. As mentioned in the last time I shat one of these incubi out I’ve developed a worrying affection for/interest in tiny CDR labels dealing in obscurer-than-thou artists and miniscule print runs (you know Davenport have got a tape coming out in an edition of 11? Bastards!). So, is this gross arrogance and patronising behaviour on the most disgusting scale? Fuck knows. But honestly, there’s no posturing here: the records I’m going to blather about are genuinely far more interesting and exciting to me than pretty much any of the ‘properly’ released records you’ll find us arguing over in our annual records round-up. As the mainstream “industry” stagnates, and independents are increasingly either swallowed up or bankrupted, why shouldn’t music released on CDR format be considered ‘valid’ or ‘proper’? I’m not directing this at you, good reader, for I am sure you are pure of heart and clear of head, but alas others are more ignorant and prejudiced, whether they realise it or not. Obviously, this argument also dates back to tape labels, but with no discernable quality difference between a ‘proper’ CD that was produced by the thousand in a pressing plant and a ‘homemade’ CDR that was burnt at home, the case for considering all this music is ever more pressing. Whatever.

“C’mon Dave,” you might want to say to me, “could you not at least talk about how great the latest Sonic Youth LP is?”

“NO!” I would knock back like a cancer-ridden Bill Hicks preaching to the unconverted, “It’s a disgraceful half-asleep assortment of soft-rock songs knocked out between too many arty side-projects, and it’s the worst fucking thing they’ve done in years!”

“…”

Honestly, that’s my genuine opinion. 2004 was the year I fell out with the Youth. It’s pretty sad really. Almost made me cry.

Ahem. Anyway. Now with you suitably hushed (and no doubt wondering exactly what kind of delusion I am suffering from this year), please allow me to begin detailing precisely why I’d choose a bunch of no-budget recorded-in-a-shed lowlifes over a particularly turgid offering by a band that (admittedly after 20-odd years of being mostly incredible) sound like they’re lost the central idea about why music is such a beautiful thing to get excited about in the first places.

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(Originally posted November 2004)

DAVENPORT: A minor love letter

Dear beloved,

Let me introduce you to my favourite band of 2004. Personally speaking, these past twelve months have been pretty thin on the ground for ‘proper’ releases by bands on ‘proper’ CDs and vinyl, and slowly but surely I have found myself increasingly immersed within the ever-burgeoning world of ‘free’ music and homemade CDR labels. Thanks variously to the element of random chance and a couple of excellent UK-based distro kids (namely Melody Boa and Shoryobuni), I bought my first Davenport record a few months into this year, and was instantly smitten. Being the voracious music-consuming monster I can be (when meagre finances allow), I knew I had to seek out everything I could by this mysterious group. The problem was, as soon as I thought I’d managed to get everything I could, something new would pop up. Here’s a list of Davenport’s discography, as of 25 October 2004:

• self titled CDR – limited to 20 copies (sold out on 23 Productions)*
• Springtime on Saturnalia 3″ CDR (on PseudoArcana)
• self titled c60 cassette – limited to 23 copies (sold out on 23 Productions)
• Little Howling Jubilee 3″ CDR (on 267-Lattajjaa)
• Loki’s War 4.6.04 – limited to 18 copies CDR (sold out on 23 Productions)
• Free Country CDR – limited to 93 copies (sold out on Foxglove)
• Sun Your Open Mouth 5.18.04 CDR – limited to 41 copies (sold out on 23 Productions)
• split w/ Maths Balance Volumes CDR (sold out on 23 Productions)
• split w/ Son of Earth CDR (out now on 23 Productions)
• O, too high Ditty for my Simple Rhyme CDR – limited to 100 copies (sold out on Time-Lag)
• Owl Movement CDR (sold out on 23 Productions)
• split w/ Seen Through CDR (on Haamumaa)

I’m pretty sure all this came out this year. And then there’re at least a dozen more releases in the works. They might even squeeze out a couple of new CDRs before the end of the year. I certainly wouldn’t bet against it: there’s a whole two months to go just yet.

So who the fuck are these pricks? And how the hell have they managed to release so much material? And why do it in such ridiculously small quantities? Here’s the official bio from their website:

“Davenport was started in Madison, in the Summer of 2002. It was originally a vehicle for folk song experiments by Clay Ruby. By Fall [otherwise known as Autumn] of 2003 many others had been invited to participate in improvisations, rituals, and recordings with Davenport. Since then there has been a surge in activity and output.”

What this means is that Davenport is a loose collective with a rotating cast that revolves around Clay Ruby. Some releases have only a couple of contributors; others feature a massed army of new-psych pseudo-folk avant-dreamers, wielding anything they can get their hands on: guitars, organs, drums, kongas, vocals, all kinds of percussion, and an awful lot of stuff you can’t readily identify, which they probably picked up from the street on their way to practice. Inevitably, there’s a whole lotta on-the-spot experimenting and improvising going on. Davenport apparently record live pretty much every single one of their get-togethers and performances, and then pick the cream of the crop for release. What is so breathtaking is the range and sheer quality of the crop. Don’t get me wrong, Davenport aren’t some awful ‘genre-straddling’ bunch of electrotwats or Jamie Cullum or whatever his name is; it’s the depth of mood, feel and texture that they generate which allows for some fantastic diversity between recordings. Here’s a reverse-chronology guide (call it a whimsy) to a few selected highlights of the Davenport 2004 oeuvre (and roll on the new stuff, which I’m told is even better)…

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(Originally posted September 2004)

[Before I begin ranting, let me just clarify that I am in no way a Metallica fan, and nor was I ever one. But…]

Fuck! I think I’ve finally found a film that I can safely say YOU HAVE TO FUCKING WATCH THIS about for 2004. It’s the Metallica documentary, Some Kind of Monster. I tell you, it’s the new This Is Spinal Tap.

No, seriously. You know how Tap was just crammed full of classic, unbelievable moments, hilarious quotes, and godawful haircuts? You know how there’re moments where you find yourself exclaiming out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of it all, and then there’s others where you’re howling in painful laughter? Well, SkoM probably matches it in all of these regards. It’s so much more than I was expecting. This thing was made during the recording of their new album, just after bassist Jason Newsted quit, and saw the entire band go into therapy, James Hetfield check in and out of rehab, and an awful lot of squabbling, sulking, repressed anger, and an insane amount of money spent on doing nothing.

I tell you, this film has got everything. I was going to reel off a list of highlights, but there’s just so goddamned many. I could write for hours. There’s the interview with Newsted, who’s hilariously candid about how he got bullied as ‘the new boy’ for a full ten years before he finally had enough; which is boosted by Hetfield saying that he’d driven him out because he felt threatened by Newsted’s desire to promote his other musical project, whilst merrily recalling that he never let the fella have any creative input at all into Metallica. There’s the bit whilst everyone sits around in the studio for A YEAR waiting for Hetfield to work up the botheredness to come back to work; during which Ulrich finds the time have a therapy session with Dave Mustaine, who breaks down in tears about how he considers himself an utter failure since he got sacked as Metallica guitarist back in ’82 (note: Mustaine has sold fifteen million albums in Megadeth). And when Hetfield deigns to come back, you get to see him sulking like a baby when the others dare to listen to tapes of sessions outside of the strict noon-’til-4pm schedule that he has to work by. Then there’s the band’s laughable attempts to work together on lyric-writing, which reaps some of the worst teenage poetry you’ll ever have the misfortune to hear outside of a GCSE English class populated by tragic Goths. Oh yeah, and there’s the awful lumpen riffs all over the place…

And this is just scratching the surface. There are just so many classic moments.

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