This wee single was has suffered the classic diskant delay of indescision. It languished for a while whilst the robots that rule us wondered who to give it to for reviewing. I left it alone for a while too, mainly because I’m just lazy like that.

So, sorry for the delay guys but this track is a grower and has taken time to reveal itself. (If more than just two versions of the same track were included perhaps I may have reviewed sooner?) “Prodigal Son” is a fine mixture of sparky guitars, poised vocals and measured drumming. While not great, it only misses the mark by sounding too perfect. There isn’t a point where the whole song could come crashing down around itself and propel the listener to jump, cry, dance or gin. In other words it doesn’t quite have enough grit or soul to really take hold.

Envy & Other Sins look and sound like a band that really knows its stuff and I’m sure they will be capable of much more very soon. “Prodigal Son” is good fun and well worth a listen at least.

Envy & Other Sins
Envy & Other Sins on myspace
Loog Records

I kept coming back to these songs while I was away on tour as they made me homesick for Glasgow in an oddly comforting way. The times I broke out of the unreality of the touring bubble to take my iPod and wander the streets were some of my favourite times of the tour. These songs fit so well with the clear light of Glasgow and wherever I was I always found myself looking at the sky: the strongest bluest sky against the red sandstone in Glasgow, sunset on Brighton beach, trees silhouetted against the fading light in the back streets of West London.

Errors have an ear for detail that keeps things constantly interesting across this 5 track EP; crackles and flutters that pinprick the heart and accentuate a sound which manages to be both lush and sparse, fluid and technical and full of heart-in-mouth dynamics. There’s a moment in the middle of opener Mr Milk where things build back with such delicious anticipation that every time I hear it my hand goes up involuntarily to smother the stupid grin on my face when the beat kicks back in.

If you want more prosaic comparisons, Errors take cues from label mentors Mogwai’s electronic dabblings on Rock Action (the album) and match it with the attic bedroom inventiveness and seasonal disorder of Hood. You can’t pin them down quite that easily though as they mix and match genres and instrumentation with little concern finding room for loping basslines, echoing scraped guitars and a myriad of synth sounds. Terror Tricks has intricately clever laptop beats that skitter alongside mournful vocoder but there’s also warmth, playfulness and a sense of humour (and a love for throbbing synths that go URRRRR) that steers things well away from IDM clinical anxiety. Looks like I may have been too hasty in rescinding Errors’ title as my new favourite band.

Top marks too for the parquet and chintz decorated sleeve. Oh, if only Rock Action could have stretched to the real things.

Errors
Rock Action

London trio Olympus Mons have been together for just over a year, and have already attracted plenty of attention after supporting The Pete Doherty Drug Circus (aka Babyshambles) on tour last autumn. Fortunately, their own music has little in common with Babyshambles’ half-baked dirge. Olympus Mons play geeky art-pop or arty geek-pop – depending on which way you look at it. Either way, it’s ace. Stand-out tracks ‘Circles’ and ‘Follow You Down’ manage to blend the Buzzcocks and Bloc Party to great effect, whilst other songs add hints of Pavement and The Cure. Two parts edgy to one part catchy. Top stuff.
www.theolympusmons.com

To put it in as pretentious a way as I can manage, O are post-music. The sounds they conjure are far removed from songs, from tunes, from rhythm and from melody, but – to echo what Yann (the man behind the O) suggests – the listener makes it music. This CD is almost totally abstract, with hints of ideas and suggestions of sounds being born, writhing confused within the speakers for a moment, only to be supplanted by the next in line. Whilst there are very vague hints of repeated motifs throughout the album, it’s an exhilaratingly confusing listen – it skips from random guitar lines to fucked-up gamelan to Prurient-like noise to Sunn o)))-like doom from minute to minute. Bizarrely however, and beautifully, the album succeeds when listened to with open ears. Heaven knows how this was recorded (it’s like a contact mike was placed on a brain), but it was done with an expert touch. The individual sounds here are engaging and captivating, and as a whole piece the album is as relevant as a Sunburned Hand Of The Man stone jam, or a Vibracathedral Orchestra mantra, or a Keiji Haino cavern of noise.

Antenna
O

Look who i’ve just found lurking in the woods after dark…

Brighton’s newest strange children The Woodsmen “are here for your souls, or whatever else you got”. Their first offering – ‘Only Man In Heaven Wearing Black’ sounds like Nick Cave challenging The Pogues to a knife-fight at a barn-dance, and is creepy enough to unnerve a carny.

The music rests its sweaty head at a grubby halfway-house somewhere between folk and rockabilly, but pitch-black rock ‘n’ roll blood still bubbles in their veins.

Their single – purportedly recorded on equipment half-inched from Pinewood Studios and haunted by the death rattle of Vincent Price and Peter Cushing! – is available for whiskey or hard cash.

Gawp at them at: www.thewoodsmen.co.uk

Ex-eeebleee frontman Dave Griffiths has a knack for writing obtuse, vaguely sinister lyrics and delivering them in a laconic, Bolan-inflected style which serves to accentuate their weirdness. The subject matter of the four songs here is a mystery to me – I’m sure they’re about something – but I prefer to enjoy the sound of the singing rather than the content. For a self-released single this is determined and ambitious stuff; music constructed with the typical drums/bass/guitar instrumentation is overlaid with trumpets and piano, then bent double with subtly odd constructions. Like Smog or Mercury Rev, Witches can take an average, well-written pop song and turn it into something special by adding certain touches of arrangement and contrast. At times the recording quality struggles to contain the vision at work here, but this is an impressive debut which doesn’t buckle under its own complexity. It takes a lot of skill to create songs which seem initially simplistic but which grow and develop on repeated listens, and Witches have a lot of skill.

Within the Woods/Witches

It is with some embarrassment that I note the release date of this double ‘A’-side/25-minute EP was a while ago, but it is with no small enthusiasm that I recommend you go and dig this sucker out from your local indie store.

By all rights, the Chemistry Experiment should be an institution. Wilfully idiosyncratic and fascinatingly off-kilter, their brooding and experimental pop music deserves far more recognition than it generally receives. Plus, their devotion to perfectionism should be lauded – not many bands would have the patience to spend so long tweaking and fiddling with their debut album, with such spectacular results. Now, after slaving for five years over that rightly lauded album (released last year), they’ve already got around to banging out another four tracks (plus a song off the album) for this EP, led by a characteristically strange and sprawling amalgamation of two songs by other people.

Pressing play for the first time on this CD, I was struck how the first ten seconds sound like a snatch from DJ Shadow’s “Endtroducing” album, but then I realised that this was the Experiment playing “Forever Autumn”, a song best-known for its inclusion in the famous War of the Worlds soundtrack (no, nothing to do with Spielberg). And a grand job the kids do in tackling a fairly drippy song,

Around four and a half minutes in they start vamping it up and you realise that the dreamy wistful melodies have been replaced by chaotic echoing slide dobro, droning synths, clattering drums and smears of cymbals that gradually peter out before regrouping and kicking into that familiar chord progression from “Interstellar Overdrive” by Messrs Barrett and those other cunts. Then, just to top it off, the Experiment pull a double-reverse and segue straight back into one final refrain from “Forever Autumn” as one final cherry for as proof of the pudding for this feast of a sonic gateau.*

Twee enthusiasts and apologists who might be feeling scared by this point, please note: the radio edit of the title song and album track “You’re the prettiest thing” (serving as the other ‘A’ side) save this CDEP from all-out prog nonsense. Don’t worry, the Experiment haven’t forsaken you entirely. But watch out! The remaining EP tracks include disco beats with swashbuckling wah-wah guitars on “Karin”, and then lots of heavenly squiggling synths alongside some neat vocodering of Steven J. Kirk’s distinctive vocals on a cover of “Belt and Shoelaces” originally by The Butterflies of Love.

Something of (another) triumph from The Chemistry Experiment then – a fantastically good-value-for-money deal on a serious chunk of music, along with a cracking couple of covers. Go seek it out.

[*Yes, I said sonic gateau. Sorry.]

www.thechemistryexperiment.co.uk
www.fortunapop.com

Yeesh; bit of a weird one this one. The prodigiously talented Ms Vipers wrote, arranged, performed and produced this 6-song, 3-track, 26-ish minute “single”, which calls to mind Kate Bush, This Mortal Coil, opera singers, prog rock and god knows what else. Primarily driven by pianos and a gusty set of lungs, this release is guaranteed to sound out of kilter with pretty much everything else musical you would encounter in an average day.

Kat Vipers comes from Greece, and (inevitably enough) is very much classically trained. Trained enough to tire of just doing all that classical crap and start experimenting with songs herself, apparently throwing in “alternative rock”-influenced catchy bits (I think I must have missed those) and “jazz”y flourishes in something of an over-rich cavalcade of music inspired by many sources. The resulting mixture is certainly thick and voluminous. The tracks on the CD range from seven to eleven minutes long, each incorporating two distinct movements. The longest, closing track is one long overblown epic which goes all over the place like some never-ending story of a song. Her music is very difficult to do justice to in print – I suggest visiting her website and sampling some music for yourself if you’re thus far intrigued.

This said; I’d better make some effort to give you an idea of what you should expect though. Consider some key elements: First of all there’s Ms Vipers’ incredibly surreal, warbling voice, coming on a little like a husky Kate Bush with an extended vocal range. There’s a hell of a lot of pseudo-classical and Tori Amos-inspired piano. Ghostly wailing background vocals pop in and out, even predominating from time to time. The first song has an annoying bunch of wind chimes, and the last song has a drum kit popping up here and there to complement and emphasise sections. Oh, and don’t forget a bunch of synthesised strings popping up every so often to punctuate and unctuate with abandon. The construction of the music itself is certainly hard to pin down – there’s little pop-conventional repetition of phrases or melody, and there’s a lot of meandering minimalism and soaring vocals.

Mix together these ingredients and see what comes out: self-indulgent prog nonsense or refreshingly ambitious idiosyncratic music? Whatever your initial reaction, you’ll certainly need a few listens to digest and process such a rich soup fully. You should probably decide whether you want to risk indigestion for yourself.

www.katvipers.com
www.pyrecords.net

Noise is too often a lowest common denominator game with far too many charlatans armed with effects pedals, circuit bent electronics, and ring modulators thinking that their racket is somehow worth listening to, or worse, is challenging, when it’s really just lazy. Thankfully ‘noise’ is a broad umbrella and for all the fifth rate would-be Throbbing Gristles out there, there are sometimes gems. New Jersey’s Anthony Saunders is one of them. Ikh Khoring is three long tracks on the more ambient spectrum of things.

The CD begins with a long track that starts with a dark droning background overlaid with electronic chirpings and twitterings and is reminiscent simultaneously of the microsound glitch of Tetsuo Inoue and the electroacoustic compositions of Louis Dufort. The piece becomes denser and more frantic before gradually fading into a subterranean drone again overlaid with skittering electronic noises. The second track continues much in the same vein, bringing to mind subway tunnels populated by fragile but menacing digital structures, becoming something that sounds like cricket noises. This leads nicely into the third track, which leaves behind these nightmarish soundscapes for mammoth gently oscillating drones. It’s rather soothing.

It’s obvious that a lot of thought and work went into Ikh Khoring and it is a richly textured and evocative work, bringing to mind a lot of nightmarish subterranean images. Highly recommended.

Anthony Saunders
Troniks

I went to see Adult play Glasgow’s ABC last night and I was quite taken by the support band, Battant. For the same reason Marceline keeps telling me to stop listening to the likes of Interpol and get into Joy Divison instead, I am half sure Battant will be turn out to be fairly derivative of someone or other. While I’m listening in ignorance I have to say I fairly enjoyed their set and this, what I believe to be a self published EP I bought after the gig.

While on stage I noticed that I was mainly liking the songs they introduced their new ones. My favourite being ‘Jump Up’, the first track on this EP. It is an acid sharp heavy electric number with disaffected noisy vocals from singer Chloe Raunet. To be honest I can’t really make out what she is singing about but unusually for me that doesn’t matter here.

There is something enjoyably awkward about Battant. Despite the cut glass electronica, or perhaps because of it, there is a solemn, scratchy texture that intrigues and entertains. Battant make music that is dark, sinister and easy to get swept away with.

www.battant.co.uk