Find Copy Haho CD under pile of other CDs. Think ‘why do I still have this in my review pile? I am obviously never going to listen to it’. Read press release and spot words “members of Hookers Green No.1”. Think ‘ooh, I must listen to this’. Put back in pile. Repeat. This is what has been happening for the last few months until finally, FINALLY, I actually listened to the CD. And, you know what, it’s fantastic. It’s a rare thing indeed for a song from a review CD by a band I’ve never heard of to make it on to my daily bus ride favourite songs playlist and much much rarer for both songs to go on the playlist and still be there two months later. Ergo, Copy Haho are something special.

Bookshelf starts off all twinkling keyboards, lilting vocals and meandering guitars, stumbling sleepy-eyed through the dusk before they take a wrong turning and lurch unexpectedly into a lost chorus from Slanted & Enchanted. Which, of course, is brilliant so they stand firm, coolly acting like this was part of the plan all the while looking for the door so they can get back to wandering and remembering. Dessert Belle is even more dazed and dreamy, the vocals smudged around the edges and the music swirling around, tinges of Hood and, yes, Hookers Green making it all the more lovely. Oh, Aberdeen, how much better you are doing since I left. I almost miss you.

This is actually a 7″ and you can buy it now.

Copy Haho at Myspace

San Franciscans The Weegs have got that whole New-York-early-80s-no-wave-mayhem thing going down, not least in terms of vocal delivery – the lyrics are presented in the form of yelps and exclamations that evoke skinny weirdos contorting around microphones whilst self-harming in the centre of the (slightly afraid) audience.

Musically, they’re more sedate and melodic than the early no-wave noise of your Sonic Youths and your DNAs, but they get their freaky thrills in other ways. The nine tracks here are tight like post punk, but messy like punk. Stabs of guitar play off loudly-mixed synth parps, with a rhythm section laying down broken-leg-danceable beats and twisted funk energies. The result is like the first couple of Human League records, if they’d been played by drug-damaged Americans with less sense of style. Excepting the last 45-minute track ‘The Million Sounds’, which is an endurance-testing ramble through sound and texture, this album is made of alien pop songs that share a demented sensibility with Butthole Surfers and Devo; music that is brashly strange and confidently abrasive.

Who knows what they’re like as a live outfit, but this CD makes The Weegs sound like a threatening confrontation of oddness. I’m not sure I’d want to live in their world, but it’s good to have had a glimpse.

The Weegs
Hungry Eye Records

The Davidians were featured on the excellent Psychedelica Volume One compilation with the reverb-heavy, swooning ‘Getting By’. This is included here on this twelve-track album, which follows similar stylistic themes to that track: blissed-out shoegazing guitar music with one foot in the dreamy Californian desert of the late ’60s, the other in the introspective, effects-drenched world of Ride, Slowdive, Spiritualized, the Telescopes and so on.

As the album goes by, the mood rarely deviates from a sleepy-eyed, drowsy tempo. Vocals are delivered in a soft drawl that heavily recalls Richard Ashcroft when The Verve were at their best (circa A Northern Soul, as if you need to know), and the music is a fantastic blur of echoed, sweet guitar, with Hammond organ tones filling out the background. It’s to the Davidians’ credit that they don’t let the soporific nature of this music dip into a dirge – it’s carefully handled and contains enough melodic richness and drug-addled hypnotic grooviness to keep things fresh.

The music also steers clear of a kitsch ’60s bubblegum trap by introducing dark elements that create a foreboding sense of night on tracks like ‘Inbetween Everything’ and ‘Don’t Get Hung Up’, with brooding basslines and thick swells of sound that create a fog of sound that hovers in the room. Final track ‘No Tomorrow’ sees the album out with a pained and desperate sense of anguish – bluesy guitar lines developing into a mantra of noise that ends up exploding into itself.

Despite the heavy-handed gimmick of having vinyl noise and the sound of a turntable turning itself off grafted onto the end of the album – not really necessary, to be honest – this album shows the Davidians to be a band that are at ease with some obvious influences, and totally capable of lining up as equals with those influences.

The Stevenson Ranch Davidians

The genre that pops up whenever I put this into the changer reads “General Blues.” That sums it up. Very generic sounding and I can’t help but think I am shopping in some high end clothing store when the album plays. Open mike night gone horribly wrong, this is what this record sounds like. “Hey Johnny! You still got that old geetar? Come on out to the coffee house and show the people some of your tunes! This stuff has got to be heard!” Yeah, I leave disgusted and hoping that the joint will be the victim of an electrical failure and the whole shithouse goes up in flames. Just make sure to get your kicks first by punching this guy in the face.’

www.myspace.com/amosleeofficial
www.amoslee.com

This record was reviewed favourably last month by my fellow Diskanteer pascalansell, but I wanted to have a go at it since I’ve been following Antifamily since the British-based Difficult Fun was a fledgling label with a few hand-printed CD-Rs and a dream. Plus, it’s not even out here and I had to go and beg DF to airmail me a copy. So, search out Monsieur pascalansell’s review and contrast.

Antifamily, to me, means big minimalist songs made from a variety of instruments, but clearly with the computer at the forefront of the music-building. And yet, not much remains the same on an Antifamily record throughout. To start, warm, globby synths trade cross-fade crossfire with higher pitched attack-synths. Then there are the more organic songs – for instance “The Shaft” features bouncy basses playing a funky kind of soccer with a razor sharp guitars. But then the very next song, “Same Old Same,” the synths take the driver’s seat. That variety is astounding, really. Rumble-pack punk-funk bass lines work it out like P.I.L. joining Can for a jam, but that can just as easily give way to a synthesized bass. Dub influences pop up here and there, as do their obvious debts to Kleenex and Delta5.

I could go on forever describing the different sounds found on this record, but it would make it seem uncohesive. It’s actually quite cohesive and it feels like Antifamily are hyper-aware of the sounds they are making. Always the songs are sung/shouted by the girls Melanie, Anja, Rachel, Agnese and Juliette, and that helps. Despite the likeliness five singers can seem just as confusing as all that I’ve described is going on, the production always seem to keep the girl’s voices somewhat similar sounding.

Some of the less impactful songs may have been rethought, as the record does tend to run a bit long (though some of the best stuff, like “I of the Law” where “death performs in the background,” come at the tail end of the record). But every family has it’s flaws and Antifamily is no different. Fantastic stuff.

-Maxwell Williams

Antifamily

Why is it that minimalist pop music seems to find a way to sound as, if not more, impactful than its wall of sound counterparts? I could ponder all day as to why I think Yellow Fever is one of the best things I’ve heard all year, with their deconstructively simple (the first half of “Donald” is a single repeated snare) drum beats, single note rubbery bass and their one word choruses. Even the songs each have one-word titles. They’re like an indie-pop version of the Young Marble Giants, except there’s two like-voiced Alison Statton’s intertwining their vocals into thick melodies that reach above the strangled guitars and crash down with a foggy hiss on top of the unhit cymbals.

The best songs on the self-titled/self-released EP come backloaded: the charming “Alice” marches into the enigmatic (and least minimal) “Psychedelic” which gives way to the a cappella closer “iMac.” It’s “Psychedelic,” though, that truly stands out. It features a cascading chorus that goes: “Why won’t you recognize how psychedelic I am, and love me?” And in the second verse when lead singer Isabel Martin sings, “I see your eyes/they’re higher than mine/pinecones will shimmer and cross timber lines” with that big voice of hers, I get so giddy that someone could come up with such clever lyrics and pair them with such lovely music.

-Maxwell Williams

Yellow Fever on MySpace

You may not realise this, but at the heart of diskant is a pop-loving indie kid, who hasn’t yet shaken off their fascination with the glossy sheen of Girls Aloud, the ramshackle sweetness of Sha La La flexidiscs or the confident jangle of Spector’s girl groups.

So while I know that The Revelations, on the basis of this five track album sampler, sound utterly contrived, totally manufactured and relentlessly bouncy, the songs here still twang at some long-forgotten heartstring. I know that ‘You’re the loser’ is one step removed from B*Witched, dammit. I know that ‘Don’t let him go’ is the musical cousin of Madonna’s ‘True blue’. But in the moment of listening to the songs, I really don’t care.

Naturally, in more pretentious company I’d never let on that I’ve listened to this CD five times today. Cynicism being the worldbeating force it is these days, I’d scoff with everybody else at the simplicity of a Ronettes/Bangles template twisted into modern bubblegum with some shiny recording skill. Maybe I’m having a day of relenting, but at the moment, this music does something basic and life-affirming for me.

Even up against the current vogue for the likes of the Long Blondes and the Pipettes, this sounds lightweight. It’s nothing special; the songs are cliched and predictable; the performances utterly free of chaos and dirt. And maybe that’s the point. Maybe there’s enough white noise and black-hearted moodiness out there, and The Revelations are existing in their own space and time, and in doing so showing more spirit and individuality than they’ll ever realise.

The Revelations

Rose Kemp has a lovely voice, and she is pretty. And she has a band. That’s all I know about her and that’s all I’m worrying about for the time being. Her single, ‘Violence’ was released late last year, and since then she’s been touring like a mad(wo)man. ‘Violence’ doesn’t start off too well, it sounds like any generic ‘dark’ indie song, but soon an onslaught of distortion kicks in and I know I’m in good territory. The choruses don’t have vocals, just blistering noise, and you have to wait another four minutes before it gets interesting again: an unsettling riff set to a perfectly danceable beat which then fades out way too soon. The second and last song, ‘Fire in the Garden’ picks up form instantly, with Rose’s elegiac crooning looped over and over, much like the beginning of Björk’s sublime ‘Medúlla’ LP. ‘Fire in the Garden’ defines Kemp’s unusual experimentation, and it’s when she is daring enough to turn a song on its head that her real forte is revealed.

Pascal Ansell

The piano is undoubtedly the king of all instruments. It’s extremely versatile, has a huge range and it is probably the easiest instrument to express oneself on, and that’s not to mention the extensive timbres accessible through the push of a pedal. ‘Room to Expand’ from Fat Cat’s latest artist, Hauschka (Volker Bertelmann to his mum) furthers my point. This Düsseldorf-based pianist decided that, in the same vein as minimalist maverick John Cage, he’d chuck a bunch of screws inside a piano and then see what happens. Well, not quite. He ‘prepared’ the piano: clamping wedges of leather, felt or rubber between the strings, weaving guitar strings around the piano’s gut, that sort of thing. The result is fantastic: the album collates various clicks, pangs, scrapes and modified notes in layer upon layer of texture into a lovely multifaceted listen.

‘Paddington’ is a sprightly bundle of timbres and knockings, and it swells with tiers of assorted piano clatters, which is the idea running through ‘Room To Expand’. The ingeniously titled ‘Watercolour Milk’ slowly builds up one chord with sundry embellishments and one driving knock, and ends with echoing string scrapings. The serene beauty of ‘Sweet Spring Come’ is the album’s standout track – rather poignant considering the dismal English weather of late. It’s lead by a clever piano plonk acting as a snare, then minutes after a florid piano line, in comes a delicate bassline and a ethereal strum on the piano’s strings.

‘Room To Expand’ largely resembles the masterful piano vignettes of Aphex Twin’s ‘Drukgs’ album, and a more condensed version of John Cage’s ‘Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano’, yet Hauschka’s effort will take many, many listens before it becomes tired or predictable. Through close listening over time, the album unravels – it’s possible to discover a new sound in each song with every listen. This already has to be a contender for the most outstanding, even unique, album of 2007.

Pascal Ansell
http://fat-cat.co.uk/fatcat/release.php?id=218

The North Carolina based singer/songwriter David Karsten Daniels likes a wee trick. Looking at the artwork from his latest release, you’d expect something awfully dark: the drawing of a naked man eating a woman’s intestines is cheekily deceiving. What is delivered through the speakers is a completely different picture: gentle acoustic pop with florid orchestral arrangements (courtesy of Polyphonic Spree violinist Daniel Hart) fill the airwaves, instead of the doom and gloom anticipated.

Opener ‘The Dream before the Ring That Woke Me’ is an instantly memorable journey through ones childhood, while the triumphant horns arrangement on ‘Scripts’ provide much needed variety. ‘Beast’ takes a hefty slice of inspiration pie from labelmates Amandine and Sigur Ros: lyrics whispered at double-slow speed influenced by the former and the epic clashing moments by the latter. It’s such a sweetly soporific effort that I nearly fell asleep on the bus and missed my stop.

Daniels’ voice is clear and crisp, not the most remarkable of voices even on the mighty Fat Cat label, but it’s pervasive and it heats the slightly lukewarm parts of the album well enough. A snail-paced tempo is fixed throughout the whole of ‘Sharp Teeth’, narrowly escaping the pecks of tedium of Larry Lag-behind Jaybird. There are some beautiful moments on this album, yet it’s just not lively or evocative enough to transform it from a decent to an outstanding album. Sharp Teeth? More like soft chew.

Pascal Ansell
http://fat-cat.co.uk/fatcat/release.php?id=215