This is a vindictive little record aiming true at the current crop of “indie” acts buzzing around London A&R circles. And equally I feel quite the victim myself as I hand over my hard earned fiver at Rough Trade’s Talbot Road shop for a copy on “limited” pink vinyl which keeps skipping, over and over and over (piece of shit).

Having created something of a buzz in itself on Myspace, the targets in question are perhaps the first wave/generation of Myspace acts to transfer from the computer screen onto the big screen (whatever that is).

Of the acts assaulted some deserve it and some don’t (well, no one is really innocent) but it is hard to fault anyone to who refers to Miss LDN herself as “Lily Keith Allen”. It’s snotty and cynical but you can’t help but laugh at the cattiness of it all because in actuality it is generally pretty spot on in its statements.

I think I have had a taster of the “scene” addressed here first hand as I have sat and watched at work for a year a young lad that looks like Alex Zane act as A&R in the publishing department where I toil, displaying neither any real musical taste/knowledge or with any hope in hell of actually getting anything signed. He may be mates with The Kooks but in reality the fact he just spent all day staring at one particular website earned him the name “Myspace Boy.” I say “spent” as in the past tense because he has fucked off now as the publishing function has now been downsized to next to nothing. “Bye bye A&R you’re not needed here any more.”

Musically the track, complete with Nathan Barley sample at the close (point made), consists of pretty standard beats relying on witty snipes by it’s inventors and whilst it is hardly likely to change the course of music history I certainly feel it gives a good lesson.

For what it’s worth it sounds like the work of Peckham’s DJ Rubbish to me.

Thesaurus moment: cocky.

LDN Is A Victim

Packaging wise this is an interesting CD as it has a barcode but doesn’t actually have any kind of record label attached to it, it would seem. Is this where the industry is apparently heading – where bands/acts are now self released brands and record labels have been made unnecessary and redundant. Regardless though the cover artwork looks fantastic, like some kind of explosion taken from a Golden Age Marvel or DC comic.

Initially the record reminds me a lot of a long lost band called Letters To Cleo although the occasional vocal quirk does suggest a penchant towards Alanis Morissette combined with a chorus that could be straight out of The Corrs back catalogue.

For a girl (soft) rocker there feels a distinct lack of a rebellious edge, this is all so horribly well adjusted, agonised but in that soft victim way. Comparisons aside, judged on its own merits the songs are very clean and competently created but not really pushing any boundaries.

By the close of the record ultimately I just cannot judge nor decide as to whether the true leanings sway towards alternative rock or full on pop. Certainly at times I am reminded of The Cranberries and very much an Irish Alanis Morissette (with a dab of Avril Lavigne) but having made such trite comparisons I would really hate to come to release that I am acting listening to (dealing with) some haggard old punk trying to play it straight.

There is a lot in this record for people to take and enjoy, those people just happen to be either elderly and/or very dull.

Thesaurus moment: duplicity.

Lori Steele

Hello people. I haven’t reviewed anything in a while but I have been taking a break from reality and hiding from the real world. In other words I have been watching far too much TV and trying my hardest not to think too much, if at all.

In one of my more lucid moments I agreed to help Marceline by sorting through the CDs that come through the diskant door. In doing so I am exposed to some appalling artwork and press releases but I also get to pick out stuff that looks interesting. Dan Deacon’s Spiderman of the Rings was one such find and I am hugely glad it caught my eye.

It is brilliant. I put it on expecting mildly pretentious, but potentially entertaining, sample heavy electro-noodling only to be entirely blown away. This is great fun mutant cartoon electric funk rock with fantastic tunes. If I realised reality could sound this good I would not have stayed away so long.

Dan Deacon’s website
Carpark Records’ website

Despite being unfathomably fantastic, Soe’za are not the most prolific of bands. They’ve been going nigh-on a decade and have thus-far delivered two full-length albums and one EP (third album due later this year!). Amongst their ranks is Chris Cole of Manyfingers/Movietone/Matt Elliott infamy, who obviously has a few other things on the go. But what do the others do in their convalescence?

Soe’za’s principal male singer Ben Owen started Line back in 2002 along with some friends as a vehicle for his own songwriting recipes and “They Took Great Proud In Their Work” is their second Extended Play offering. This particular meal’s 25 minutes long and has 6 songs to get your teeth into, with an extremely nutritious diet of acoustic and electric guitars, drums, keyboard, occasional horns and some real, human voices in there too. Cooked up and preapred in just one day last August, it’s a particularly fulsome, yet delicately-flavoured dish, comprehensively stuffed with melodic joy and invention.

If you hadn’t guessed, this is really, really lovely stuff. Light as a souffle, tasty as salsa-enhanced salad, satisfying as a three-course all-you-can-eat buffet, this EP is as pleasant a listen as you cold hope for – all twinkling melodies, carefully arranged musical textures and imaginative arrangements. There’s even some super harmonised humming towards the end of penultimate track “Two Coats Colder” that makes me break into an unconscious smile whenever I hear it. I can’t remember the last time a record made me do that. And then you get some awesome whooping and hollering in final track “Love In The Trenches,” which cracks the grin as wide as my face. And I certainly can’t recall the last time a record made me do that. Can you?

Music as wistful and carefree-sounding as this has obviously had some real craft go into it, and it’s a credit to Line’s arrangements that each track flows effortlessly, sounding like a stream of masterful pop songs… if only we lived in an alternate universe where mostly instrumental wide-eyed acoustic music like this could be viewed as viable marketable materiel by the major label suits. Whatever the case, Line should take a bow for an excellent accompaniment to the encroachment of the summer weather. Thanks, chaps.

www.superfirecords.com
www.myspace.com/linemusic

There comes a time in everyone’s life when you wonder if you’re finally losing touch with youth. For me, it came about 30 seconds into this debut album from crack post-emo/screamo-power-violence outfit The Mock Heroic. This album delivers 11 songs in the space of 23 minutes, which may not be much on the likes of The Locust, but these 4 lads from Norwich deliver some incredibly intricate music that splatters all over the place but is also amazingly technical. And I’m glad it’s not any longer, because I feel wholly inadequate to appreciate it fully.

Personally, my ears find it heard to deal with this kind of music. With so many rhythm and tempo changes and not so much in the way of a melodic hook, repetition or any kind of inviting texture to the lean, punchy sound, the music feels like a purely technical workout of quickfire bouts of aggression. I can just imagine the drummer counting off the amount of times he plays one riff before he goes to the next, and because there’s no groove, no grace, no goofing off, no solos, no humour – absolutely no letting up in any way – to me it becomes like a lesson in pure musicianship rather than an enjoyable experience. And where’s the fun in that?

But it’s a remarkably assured and aggressive debut for a young band, and if you have any interest in where the trails blazed by post-hardcore and screamo have reached in this day and age, you should really check them out. Similarly, the fuss around people like “underground” band Enter Shikari or even “technical metal” bands like Sikth (or even Eden Maine) makes me laugh when you compare them to The Mock Heroic. For me, the closest musical equivalent to this band I can think of (outside of 31G bands) would probably be Orthrelm – stunning in terms of individual musicianship, but punishing to such an extent that it can leave you dazed. As someone who counts himself as a Kevin Drumm fan, I thought I knew all about finding pleasure in pain in music, but – like Mick Barr’s outfit – The Mock Heroic’s approach to songwriting just gives me a headache.

It would also be very easy to joke about or dismiss the earnestness behind this music. There’s no so much of a whiff of humour in the full set of lyrics and explanatory notes for each song printed in the jacket, but it would be missing the point to expect any, or to accuse the band of being preachy (even if there is a song about the horror of vivisection). The Mock Heroic’s music is all about teenage angst winding up so tight that you explode with anger and outrage, and it is their musical precision and technicality that is the devastating blow. With such controlled bursts of aggression, there’s no catharsis, which just makes you tighter and tighter. And this is why I feel old – kids go nuts for this stuff these days, and The Mock Heroic are as good as any band of this ilk that I’ve heard. In fact, for me they blow people like Orthrelm or latter-day Hella out of the water in terms of sheer listenability and the idea of playing as a band. There are certainly no discernable egos on display here, which must be praised in a band so obviously full of talented musicians. But I struggle to find pleasure in music devoid of any catharsis – Morton Feldman would struggle to ratchet up more tension than is on ‘Dignified Exits’ – and chock-full of angst about things like the importance of being true to yourself and not subsuming your personality with excessive admiration of others (this is all spelled out in the liner notes in case you don’t follow the incoherent screaming). For me, listening to this album is exhausting. You young pups may well enjoy it a lot more.

One last aside: as a nice addition to the crisp recording and mastering, the CD’s gatefold slipcover features some nice artwork of a naked man courtesy Brighton-based artist Karen Constance (who also plays in Blood Stereo), whose artwork was last seen on the cover of [Thurston Moore/Paul Flaherty/Chris Corsano/etc project] Dream Aktion Unit’s debut album. Good work!

www.superfirecords.co.uk
www.myspace.com/superfirecords

A promising EP recorded in a London church hall (with a nice view of HM Holloway) by a Sheffield-based duo who otherwise go by the names Iain Chambers and Alex Jones. After splitting a The Wire-acclaimed 7″ with a band called Asbourne’s Strongest Man, this is an opportunity to experience in full their flourishing vision of sparse, electronically-affected experimental rock music.

Beginning with a basic improvising set-up of drums and guitar, a lot of post-production, editing, manipulation and experimentation has obviously gone into the 4 tracks presented here, as well as some guest instrumentation and assistance from Pedro member James Rutledge. Though their press release references Tortoise, Wolf Eyes and the Constellation label, the music here takes me much further back to the approach of the masterful This Heat, who pioneered many ideas on display here almost 3 decades ago. Heavy editing and stitching together of seemingly disparate takes and ideas, “non-musicianship” utilised as a spontaneous source for textures, electronically-effected drums (the opening buzzing of a delayed drumkit sounds remarkably like ’24 Track Loop’) and dizzying layers of sound sources creating a disorientating and uncertain soundworld are all techniques that Angela Valid employ in deference to their progenitors. This is hardly a criticism though, as few bands have successfully taken the template established by This Heat and done anything interesting with it (Laddio Bolocko are just about the only people I can think of), and Angela Valid at least shower a small roman candle of idea-sparks that dazzle in comparison to yer average (and increasingly conservative) ‘post-rock’ band or braindead (and increasingly tiresome) ‘free-improvising’ dirge unit.

Bristling with overloaded circuits, clattering percussion and murky layers of meandering melodic progression piled on top of electronic squiggles and musical echoes, this EP meanders through its 33 minute duration in a very pleasant fashion, occasionally turning your ear with a particularly inventive idea or sound. Nicely restrained, it never threatens to overload your stereo with any kind of bombast or noise assault, and even in its most minimal moments the band sounds confident and assured. They are exploring textures and spaces that have been addressed before, but it’s been a whle since anyone did so with such vim and vigour.

Apparently Angela Valid will have further releases this year, culminating in a debut full-length album before 2008 hits. I, for one, will be listening out for these, as well as further releases by World In winter, a new London-based collective/label as young and imaginative as this band. You can find out more about both by checking out these links:

www.myspace.com/worldinwinter
www.worldinwinter.co.uk

Thankfully often more Mingus than Mogwai, the bass heavy bass led Rothko have been creating tuneful musical soundscapes for several years now, with each release often bettering the prior. Spread over ten tracks, this is Rothko’s Nth album and shows them yet again at the height of their strengths, their latest release since the A Personal Display Of Conflict EP on Bad Hand Records.

With song titles nearly each reference elements of the environment, this is another serious and sombre sounding collection of songs ideally saved for moments of relaxation or requiring clarity – this is truly a collection that establishes boundaries and a sense of perspective into the whole generation of a person’s purpose and place into the whole structure of proceedings. Seldom can and does post rock/soundscape music move me but there is a true uniqueness and individualism to the sheer weight of emotion that Rothko can muster.

The record opens with subtle Dirty Three-esqe strings as the tension within the engine of the album builds before moving on electronic buzzes that gives it a futuristic, cybernetic pipe feel that fuel it with something of a Far Eastern vibe. If Bill Murray returned to Tokyo in the future and made a sequel to Lost In Translation, this and not Kevin Shields would be asked along to score.

As the record proceeds the tone becomes darker in its beauty, layered with a grand variety of sounds and instruments each giving the song held within a new personality and character. Examples of this in action being the suspense created during “Be Invisible”, a track that would serve perfectly for some nuevo Asian horror movie with the juxtaposed dynamics of tender string harmonies complimenting the apparent menace giving depth. Likewise “Weather Every Storm” plays out like an eruption as it builds and finally explodes.

Served as an example of how to create a modern composition, this collection continues the legacy of excellence that has come to be familiar with any Rothko release and one that gives much hope to the future of post-rock music displaying that there are still avenues still to be ploughed and explored within the genre.

Thesaurus moment: poignant.

Rothko
Bip Hop

Here is a release by a band that regularly chose to pester me on Myspace so to placate them I suggested “send me a CD and I will review it online”. I never actually thought it would materialise. Whoops!

When I say they “pestered” me, actually I have to admit that I probably brought it on myself when I added them as a friend basically because I thought the singer’s boots looked cool. Such are the strife “politics” of Myspace.

Hailing from Dusseldorf in Germany it seems; DKDENT are a most electro pop proposition. Had these guys bothered to research my tastes, preferences and previous online reviews, I suspect they may have experienced second thoughts and reservations.

So what can I say……it is very poppy. I feel it is too restrained to have been a nineties MTV Euro hit but at the same time it is too tame really to appeal to a leftfield audience that would appreciate some of the qualities that they do in bands such as St Etienne, Client and even upbeat Ladytron. I think the Client comparison is the one that rings truest, perhaps even stretching to being more Dubstar-esqe. And then the odds are upped when the second track appears to have a keyboard riff perversely taken straight from the Inspiral Carpets and the vocals are now delivered in French, which seems something of an advantage as you no longer actually know what the girl is bleating on about (what an old cynic I sound!).

The more Parisian the songs become (complete with a lot of accordion) the more they begin to resemble Serge Gainsbourg-influenced Blonde Redhead as the strength of the female vocals really impress and take centre stage (most definitely on the track “Song For James”). I don’t think the intention was to appeal to such an audience but it is mission accomplished.

Taken as music alone DKDENT turn out to be a more interesting proposition than was expected although what is behind the music still remains an element that is unclear to me, not least for the indie no-no of including an advertisement in the inlay for a video game on which their music appears coupled with all the “supported by” mentions on the back of the sleeve (unsurprisingly including Moog).

Thesaurus moment: unforeseen.

DKDENT
Tony Music & Consulting

Here’s a band whose name I keep getting incorrect, often mistaking it for Cameltoe and/or Camelove (and just a moment ago even Camelot) – there is a lesson to be learned here when you name your band.

Another CD sent by an act that was bugging me on Myspace to whom I told “put up or shut up”. Cameltoe….sorry, I mean Camelone deliver their CD “EP” in a really nicely packaged CD sleeve, complete with very British cultural references including a dated CND protest sign, Che Guevara and sixties Mick Jagger – so how does the music hold up in comparison? Does it represent such imagery?

On with the rock and….it is Hammond heavy, dare I say Mod from a band that definitely appear to have the Arctic Monkeys in their record collection. There is also quite a heavy The View vibe to proceedings, which isn’t really inspiring stuff. At times it does occasionally tap into the same taste buds that appealed to Supergrass but the keyboards really do overwhelm the songs, which isn’t necessarily a good thing when they remind of bingo halls, cinemas and Clacton pier. Aside from the occasionally lapse into ska moments, there really isn’t much difference between the four songs on offer – each song is lyrically like listening to an excruciating conversation that Paul Danan might have on a Saturday night.

Where You Going? I wouldn’t like to say.

Thesaurus moment: hackneyed.

Camelone

A conceit used by most music journos is to pretend to know everything about a band’s ouvre before reviewing them. Maybe they don’t pretend, actually. Maybe they do research and stuff. I dunno. Anyway, I’ve never heard of Airport Girl, so I can’t tell you if this, their second album, is a massive departure from their first, though the accompanying press release seems to suggest so. If that is the case, then a cautious pat-on-the-back may be deserved, since I like the direction they seem to have taken, and if it’s a retrograde step then their last record must have been something pretty bloody amazing.

Yes, it’s a bit on the twee side, but on the strength of this relaxed and reverb-heavy record I could see Airport Girl becoming someone’s favourite band. That someone isn’t me. That person is someone a bit less cynical, and, by extension, probably a few years younger than I am. Airport Girl probably won’t even keep the coveted favourite band status for too long, but it these wistful and well-constructed songs will be the soundtrack to that summer where they went to that festival and got off with that girl/boy for the first time. It might even inspire their own musical exploits, the emphasis being on maintaining a warm multi-instrumental melancholy rather than technical noodling.

That there are similar bands who have explored similar territory, and that I personally would put on a Galaxie 500 record before this one, seems scarcely the point. Airport Girl provide a very acceptable entry point into that particular space.

Official Site
Their Myspace Page