I expect everyone knows that this is the reincarnation of bis, back together after taking some time out with their other (excellent) bands The Kitchen and Dirty Hospital. If they were hoping to fool anyone with the name change they’re going to be disappointed. I first heard this playing in Monorail and it was immediately obvious who it was as Steven and Amanda have such recognisable voices. Sadly there’s a large proportion of people who have some kind of Kandy Pop Amplifiers that make all bis songs sound like Kandy Pop to them despite the enormous progression bis made over their 4 or 5 albums. But it’s obvious from this single that Data Panik just don’t care about them any more.

Lead track Cubis is so catchy it’s been stuck in my head since that first hearing with its jaunty chorus and mix and match girl boy verses. But on closer listen, it’s the music that impresses and delights me with a gurgling bassline, some brilliantly 80s electro flourishes and what sounds like half the Nintendo music archive crammed into the background.

Sense Not Sense is more typical of latter-era bis and could fit into Return to Central quite happily; all bubbling beats, stopstart guitars and Amanda’s slinky vocals. I can’t wait to see what they do with a whole album. Fantastic to have them back.

Data Panik

Far more restrained and almost traditional compared to Tiny Pushes vol.1, I think I prefer this. It seems to show a more considered approach to songwriting, with a combination of guitar and keyboards delicately mixing with samples and sequencing. The ten songs on here total less than thirty minutes, meaning that none of them outstay their welcome. Whilst vol.1 seemed to be more about almost random snatches of tune and sound fading in and out of a sometimes messy whole, this is more of a Complete Album: the songs, however short, pack a real emotional resonance, and their subtle textures remind me of Low and, at times, recent Hood records.

It’s an album which is available free to download, and I can’t complain about that value. Not that this is this some kind of quickly knocked-out freebie, it’s cleanly and nicely put together, reflecting – it would seem – a genuine altruism in trying to share some high quality music with whoever wants to hear it.

Calamateur
Autoclave

Weird-ass dancing music – a combination of kranging guitars, jerky rhythms and sex-tinged vocaaals. I can’t tell if I like this or not. Something like a cack-handed Beck without the expensive studio trickery, or a garage-bound !!! with some dubious hobbies. Gets the toes a tappin’, which ever way you feel about it.

No-Fi Soul Rebellion
Wäntage USA

This review’s being posted slightly later than originally anticipated, because I’ve had the album stuck on my turntable for a good week now, and not tired of repeated plays. This could either mean that in five years’ time it’s a record I’m thoroughly sick of and never play, or that it’s a rich and rewarding record which grows and intensifies with each listen. I’m pretty sure it’s the latter; ask me in five years’ time.

Comparing this with early Hood records is interesting – gone are the ultra-low-fi scratchy smears of disjointed pop; they’ve mutated into deep, layered and textured sound which, alongside artists like Bark Psychosis, stands alone from the current glut of aggressive noise which is out there. Hood’s very distinctive vocal style fits perfectly with effortlessly processed instruments. The processing is so subtle as to be almost invisible; but listen closely and there are loops of drums and guitars repeating, echoed sound holding them together to give the impression of straightforward plaintive melody. Listen even more closely and the careful arrangement of tracks becomes evident. Hood are pretty much out there on their own with this kind of blend of electronics and acoustics.

Hood
Domino

I have just come to the conclusion that these two records are the best two records ever made. EVER. I once travelled to New York just to see Chavez and they sucked. This has not clouded my opinion of these mighty works. Thank you.

There are some albums where each track is very different, and this makes the album seem like a disorganised mess from a band who can’t decide what they’re doing. Then there are some albums where each track is very different, and this serves to reinforce a band with almost more ideas than they can handle. Luckily this one is from the latter camp, and whilst Last of the Juanitas seem all over the place in terms of song structures and styles, they hold it together with an odd sense of noise, paranoia and aggression which is both captivating and exhilarating.

So this album starts with a brooding, doom-laden sludge of a tune which sounds like Low trying to pull off a Part Chimp cover. Then as tracks go by, there are elements of all kinds of other bands hurled into the mix: Prolapse’s relentlessly tense dual-gender vocals; the Nightblooms’ sharply carved guitar chaos; Quickspace’s pop-under-a-pile-of-rubble tunefulness; American Heritage’s heavy angular rock’n’roll shapes. The combination is enriched with a strangely hallucinogenic feel and a foreboding sense of anger, making for a great and surprisingly original-sounding album.

Wäntage USA

That’s Kill Yourself, the band famous for Not Sounding Like Shellac. Maybe in their formative years there was more than a little of the Albini stop start skrrng about them but they’ve long since beheaded THAT albatross, and pushed the envelope into a distorted postbox of maniacal screeching, off-kilter time signatures and evil bass riffs. I wonder if, at age 80, I’ll find myself humming more Kill Yourself songs than Shellac numbers, terrifying the ‘life’ out of the bed-wetting squares I’m sharing my twilight years with. Because these two songs are up there with the best, young man, mark my words.

‘You Are Good’ starts the OAParty of my future with its disjointed verse, tension-tastic middle bit and torso-bangingly euphoric chorus, and then before you know it its all falling apart again. Very, very good. But its ‘Fill The Sails’ which is the real killer no filler on this bit of (blue) wax. A toe-tappingly relentless repeato-riff underpins toe-curlingly creepy vocals, a genuinely unsettling ‘quiet bit’ genuinely unsettles me and it all comes to a head with a coda I can only describe as ‘punishing’. If this is still in my head at age 80 I’ll be a happy, if slightly deranged, old codger.

Obscene Baby Auction

I keep writing about Wäntage USA releases on here, don’t I? But they keep releasing great things. What am I to do? (Well, admittedly, widen my listening spectrum a little bit. And I will. I will.)

Anyway. Fireballs of Freedom rock like crazed fuckers! This CD is invigoratingly fast-paced, and dumb-ass simplistic. For the duration of listening to the album, I’m convinced that you can keep your complex mathematical rock, your inward-looking folkesque strummings and your skittering electronica experiment. The people want WAILING, my dudes. And this band wails with the best of ’em.

They’re one third Kiss showmanship, one third Ramones chugachug rockaway freneticism, one third Mudhoney late-80s style grunge and one third Superchunk melodical lyricism. They’re dumb-ass rock enough to care not that that adds up to more than a whole. And that is the way you should like it. And will like it. Fat chunks of raw bleeding meat guitar chords, cross-song widdling solos and brief bangbangbang structures. A band for the early 1980s mid-American flannel shirt-wearing slackers amongst us.

Fireballs of Freedom
Wäntage USA

In all fields of entertainment, there’s much to be said for the carefully planned opening move that grabs your audience from the get-go, leaving them rapt and attentive for the rest of your set. Fireworks Night clearly took this advice to heart, because “The Gold Leaves”, track number one on this, their debut album, immediately makes the listener sit up and take notice. And not with a gimmicky sledgehammer to the ears, either, but by being such a mournful and delicate song it makes you feel like slipping into a warm bath and opening your wrists. It’s a lovely, dark thing constructed out of minimal, booming percussion and delicate vocals. Sadly, It’s also the best song on the album, which does the collection as a whole no favours. Fickle buggers that we are, being grabbed in the first minute isn’t quite enough when you spend the rest of the album’s running time waiting for one which does the business as well as the opener.

It’s a pity, really, because, on first listen at least, it takes a lot away from what are generally fine songs. The Bill Callahan-esque baritone never returns, replaced by a Wayne Coyne-like squeal, though the trend for carefully understated but imaginative instrumentation happily survives intact. While the acoustic guitar reigns supreme, there’s still room for some nicely trashy banjo, and a precisely-judged cheap organ sound that brings to mind a dusty back room in which there’s an old woman accompanying Daniel Johnston on an ancient Casio. But maybe that’s just me. The mood of the record is more hopeful than it at first appears, as though, once kicking you into the gutter, they invite you to take a peek at the stars. And it works, to a point. But misery is a force to be reckoned with, and it’s only on subsequent plays through the album that the beauty of some of the later tracks reveal themselves.

Entertainment is all about tweaking your emotions, and making you feel when the drudgery of day-to-day living has left you numbed. Fireworks Night are yet to break new ground in this area, but they have the tools and have demonstrated the ability to do so. I’ll be expecting big things from album number two. Don’t let me down, guys.

Fireworks Night

The main draw with this, the second Hey Colossus long player aptly titled Hey Colossus II, is the emotional depths and insight bestowed upon us by Ian, Bob and James the vocalists in the group.
Like other great lyricists of recent times (Malkmus, Berman, Oldham, Callahan, Neko Case) you feel that it is not only the genius of the words being sung but it’s their context as part of the song in which they fit that justifies their status as genius. Scanlon, for example can sing the phone book and I’d listen but there’s a new sense of maturity and emotional sharpness to his work with Colossus that marks a move into the big league.
Take opener Red Giant for example, when Scanlon steps to the mic and delivers this unforgettable line:
“MMMMWWWWARRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! NNNUGHHHHHHRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!”
it would take a cold hearted human to not just burst right open.
It’s not just Scanlon. In Raise The Flag (The Planet’s Ours) Davies brings forth this couplet of sheer beauty:
“IIIIIIFUUUUUCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKNWAAARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGG
GGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRWAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Or in the mighty tune Vengeance where the sheer subtlety and deftness of James’ delivery almost renders this wondrous line inaudible
“UGGGGGGG. UGGGGGGG. WWWWWAAAAUUUUUUUURG!”.
If you’re not already rushing for the stores then let’s not forget to look at the music of Hey Colossus. The rhythm section breathes like a creature all of its own. Complex and deft tricksy rhythms are handled and delivered with nonchalance and true beauty. A beauty somewhat akin to someone with really big shoes on kicking you over and over again in your arsehole.
The guitar playing is similarly sparkling. Where mere mortal bands might make do with 1 or 2 guitarists, Colossus use 3. Any danger of them getting in each others way and clouding the tonal palette is rendered null and void by the breadth of sounds they use. At the end of Red Giant one guitar plays a delicate figure along the lines of
“SSSPPPPLLLLLLURRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”
whereas the other two intertwine around this in a way Television* would be proud of with separate parts that go a little like this:
“WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRR”
and
“SKKKKKRRRRRRRRREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE”.
It is also rendered null and void because they are deaf. As you will be.
*When I say Television I mean Television if they were mental and had really big amps and did not want to make any friends.
Someone told me Colossus sound like Isis and Neurosis. That’s a sack of shit. Those bands are metal bands who are trying to get arty. These guys have done arty indie to death and now they’re doing metal. Totally, totally different. Better. Less embarrassing. Heavier because the rhythms are more pulse like. Nastier because it’s not just riffs, it’s messy riffs with noise sitting round every note like a scarf of squidgy evil.

Hey Colossus rules.