Discovered a couple of records from the rather lovely Highpoint Lowlife rekkid label in the new music box (unlocked once a day at precisely midnight, releasing new musical treats into the world), the first of which is the debut album from DoF, If More Than Twenty People Laughed It Wasn’t Funny, the work of one Brian Hulick. Opener’A Path Lights This Way’ is all acoustic guitar plucking rubbing up against tricky beats, mechanical whirring and dancing robots, as if Smog and Aphex Twin were doing a live set at opposite ends of the same room. Initially, it’s an arresting formula: a monochrome, frantic take on the bucolic breakbeats of Four Tet. Yeah! Squarepusher goes folk! Ace! But then track two is all acoustic guitar plucking rubbing up against tricky beats, mechanical whirring and dancing robots, as if Smog and Aphex Twin were doing a live set at opposite ends of the same room. And track three…

And therein lies the problem – there’s not enough going on, in terms of track structure or variety of ideas to sustain an album. An acoustic guitar or piano melody generally kicks things off, accompanied by the odd spatter of spilt drums, and built up until the beats subsume everything else and the track becomes more about rhythm than melody. In fact, it’s the record’s shortest track, ‘Conformity To Fact’ that gets me most excited: swoops of keyboard taken straight from the set of Alien drown themselves in the drum patterns, and there’s a welcome break from mimsy acoustic guitar. Final track ‘Heartbeats of Fireflies Among the Stars’ is the most satisfying interpretation of the DoF sound, with a melody that resonates throughout, and sounds like a DHR remix of something by Neotropic or Capitol K.

In small doses, then, this is excellent, but each piece builds and drops in pretty much the same way, and with half of the album’s track topping six minutes, the record’s not without periods of longueur. And, although really well put together in their own right, the beats seem to sit over the top of the guitar and piano melody with apparently little regard or thought for what the other is doing, as if they’ve been crossfaded by a malevolent DJ over the top of some pleasant but inconsequential instrumental folk.

Some more variety in instrumentation might also help things: as it stands, there’s potential for a fine individual take on Venetian Snares-meets-Aerial M, but an unwillingness to veer away from an imperfect template means I’ll be getting my folktronic kicks elsewhere for now…

More: Highpoint Lowlife

DoF

Something of a neo-classical gypsy violin-stuffed treat today, from New York’s Tarantula, who stitch together elements of chamber orchestra and post-rock to create something really rather good. Opening track ‘Rail’ plucks its way in minimally enough, the doleful opening section enough to make me roll my eyes at the ostensible similarities between Tarantula and Tarentel, but it builds up triumphantly into something like what Rachel’s might sound like after forty cups of coffee and a spell living in travelling caravans. The mid-section has the feel of an instrumental version of something like ‘Cemetery Polka’ by Tom Waits, and really hits the mark where it combines traditional strings from the Romanian orphanage side of the tracks, with the bold, stomping bass ‘n’ drums undercarriage of something altogether more Western. Yer bog-standard post-rock-spotter’s-points instruments the glockenspiel and melodica pop up to pad the sound out from time to time, and occasionally the band lose their focus and drift into pleasant but in no way arresting bistro music, as in the first half of ‘Opening Theme’. On the whole, though, they’re most successful when hammering together the disparate elements of their lineup to create something that sounds like the soundtrack to some moody eastern European film, as played by Sophia or the Chicago Underground Duo. Good stuff.

More info: Tarantula website

Someone broke into my car last night, so I awoke this morning to a letter from the police and a whole stack of glass all over my seats. Apparently some cretinous punter from the club round the corner smashed the window and tried to use the glass as a weapon to fight the police. But I digress – the net effect was to put me in a REALLY BAD MOOD, which makes me all the more intolerant towards crap demos. Fortunately for me, what should drop into the pile but the Collected Recordings 2003-4 from Sennen, in a pleasingly-minimal dark blue sleeve. Sennen mash up a pleasingly-wide range of influences, simultaneously pushing themselves further than most bands of their ilk manage to while not running away shrieking like girls from the idea of writing a ‘proper’ song. ‘Just Wanted to Know’, for instance, hooks itself around a two-line refrain delivered with more than a shade of Jason Spaceman’s laconic drawl, before lifting off into the kind of euphoric, mid-paced noise that Six By Seven made their own on their first record. An elegance a bit like wot Martin Carr’s best pop songs has done got marks out’I Knew a Girl’, a disarmingly effective Pop Hit that doesn’t outstay its welcome despite clocking in at two-and-a-half chart pop hits in length. In fact, most of the songs easily top five minutes, but they build well and offer no small reward for hearing them out.

On the down side, there’s a tendency for too many songs to amble along at the same pace, which given the length of the tracks does lend the disc as a whole a slightly lumbering feel in places. But there’s real composure and quality here as a whole, and what’s more, they’ve cheered me up. Nice one.

More info: Sennen

Well, AUDIOSCOPE‘s all over for another year, and Chris has summed up the flavour of the day better than I’m able to at the moment (give it a week or so, but by then it’ll be old news), so I won’t go into too many details – if anyone’s interested, there will be plenty of post-event chat here. Just to add to what Chris has said about Damo Suzuki – I’m sure everyone who meets him has the same impression, but he really is a remarkable man. For all he’s achieved and seen and all his travelling tales, he’s completely down-to-earth and egoless, willing to chat to anyone, and even pitching in on the Saturday with blowing up Shelter balloons and loading in stuff to the venue. What a hero.

Anyway, to the point – it occurs to me that with organising one thing and another, I’ve been rather neglecting my duties of listening to new bands and offering up some regular thoughts on here, so I’ve undertaken a MONTH OF REVIEWING PENANCE, starting today. I’ll be reviewing AT LEAST ONE record from some new band, somewhere in the world, every day this month. And if I don’t, I’ll be flagellated and forced to listen to bad funk rock.

So yeah, let’s kick things off with a double helping.

First up are a very seriously named band from Utrecht called We Vs. Death, who don’t do things by halves: we have badges (one reading ‘WE VS.’ and the other, in an ultimate rock’n’ roll stylee, emblazoned ‘DEATH’), stickers, and the CD, Postneoliberalise, comes wrapped in an intricately-folded black ‘n’ white sleeve that I just know I’m never going to get back together and I’m gonna have to dump with all the unfolded road maps in our spare room. But anyway, onto the music, and blow me down if this isn’t a little instrumental post-rockin’ treat. Now I’m getting as sick as the next man of instrumental post-rock, but this is pretty neatly put together – there’s oodles of trumpet all over the first track ‘My Dog Is Watching Me’, and pretty flourishes give way to crunching chord progressions that remind me almost to a frightening degree of Oxford’s Stravinsky-meets-Tortoise heroes The Rock of Travolta. Strings and the effortless-yet-studied feel of a Dianogah track punctuate ‘City Council Cosmos’, which pootles along for eight minutes with a great deal of dignity, if not too much in the way of development of musical themes. It’s all earnest, heads-down post-rock, but it’s the jaunty-meets-spiky splashes of colour and cracking dynamics on the opening track that steer this more in the direction of interesting and individual, rather than soundscaping by numbers.

And so onto a two-track demo so home-made it was probably recorded in one of the demo bedrooms at B & Q, but then that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Go! Team! Go! Sounds like they should all be Manga characters with massive boggling eyes and comedy oversized instruments, and it’s a few minutes of woogling keyboards, play-fighting and yelping vocals. The first track sounds like The Capricorns gatecrashing Kim Gordon’s eighth birthday party, the highlight coming when a big, enthusiastic wave of feedback breaks down into a playground chant. It’s toy keyboards thrown out of prams, thrown together with relentless enthusiasm: rough around the edges and sometimes overly keen to get to where it’s going, but at the same time a thrilling listen and enough to make ’em a prospect well worth keeping your eyes on.

Go! Team! Go! (e-mail rmanber@aol.com)

In keeping with my current listening tastes and my effort to take myself back 8 years minimum I have discovered an amazing band I feel I need to tell you about.

They were called Nirvana.

They were a punk rock band from Aberdeen in Washington and were sort of wrapped up in the K/Kill Rock Stars thing. If you like Unwound then you’ll have no problems with Nirvana who are, if anything, slightly more polished at times than their big brothers from Olympia.

Their debut album Bleach is quite sludgy in sound and lyrically a little immature but still contains some great moments. It came out on the Sub Pop label and shouldn’t be too difficult to track down on EBay but ultimately it’s a little less satisfying than their contemporaries of the time like The Melvins and Karp.

Their next album Nevermind is a real cracker. I urge you to track this one down and give it a spin. Essentially a concept album about singer Kurt Cobains break up with Tobi Vail of Bikini Kill, this is a fantastic bittersweet pop record albeit with thundering drums (courtesy of David Grohl who’s work you’re probably aware of from his time in Dischord band Scream) and lascerating guitar.

The genius part of this record is the decision to polish the production in a lot of respects. Like The Pixies Doolittle it really adds to the quality of the songs. There’s not a duff track on it, it’s a real pop winner. I’m not sure which label put this out but it shouldn’t be too tricky to get hold of.

After this came a split 7″ with heavyweights The Jesus Lizard. Obviously, nothing was going to quite live up to the might of Puss from the seminal Liar LP but Nirvana did their best with a raucous “Oh The Guilt”. This is fairly rare though, maybe someone should put together a Nirvana box set style compilation?

Their 3rd album was recorded, like most underground US music, by Steve Albini and was called In Utero. This saw Nirvana go in new directions on some of the tracks but not succeed quite as well on others. Milk It and Scentless Apprentice are warzone barrages of noise with Grohls drums taking prominence alongside Cobains screamed vocals. Songs like Dumb and Rape Me are a little too rooted in their older material and don’t sit well on the record. But still, this is close to being a masterpiece. Heart Shaped Box especially melds the pop and noise worlds that Nirvana straddled. It seems to be a tribute in sorts to Cobains partner who I believe was Courtney Love, singer in the LA “riot grrl” band Hole who you might have heard of as Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth recorded their first album. Heart Shaped Box is quite beyond compare and special mention must go to the saucy bassline provided by Krist Novoselic (now a politician). Despite its inconsistencies, In Utero demands to be played loud and is for the most part very dark and compelling listening.

Then they just disappeared sometime in 1994. Whereas fellow bands from their locale like Mudhoney or The Melvins have gone on to something of a resurgence, Nirvana is a name not often mentioned anymore in hardcore or punk rock circles. So yeah, great stuff, well worth a listen.

Here are a couple of new things from the fine, upstanding, idiosyncratic Sheffield Phonographic Corporation.

Like Him + Her + Her + Me is a 7″ single by Champion Kickboxer on glorious heavy white vinyl, which lopes along with one of those Clinic-style circular basslines. It’s pretty weird, disjointed and hollow-sounding slow garage rock, all clomping drumbeats and not-quite-there vocals. Odd, but good.

Speaking of which, A Box of Odd is a compilation CD which is straight out of the Pebbles/Nuggets/Beyond the Calico Wall box – thirteen tracks of dumb, stupid, surf-y garage punk which is generally recorded sloppily enough and performed hastily enough to make it a gem of a selection for any keen freakbeat fan. It features The Motherfuckers, Beachbuggy, Chuck, The Special Agents, Texas Pete and G.G.Action, hopefully all of which have now split up and formed other bands playing the same kind of music.

Recently I have found my listening tastes have moved back to pretty much what I liked in about 1996. Jesus Lizard, Blues Explosion and Frank Black are getting regular spins. I was at a party last night and we were enjoying Girls Against Boys and “Washing Machine” by Sonik Yoot. Perhaps I am subconciously longing for a return to a period of my life when I didn’t have a shit job and I was getting laid regularly?

Anyway.

In this 1996 revival I feel a sudden need to bring to all of your attentions a severely overlooked and utterly amazing album.

“The Architect” by Elevate.

And they were British. There’s not a duff track on it. It does sound a bit like GVSB. Or The Fall. Who GVSB sound like anyway. But if it was GVSB it would be their best album. Cheers!

Veterans of this here blog may remember a minor classic of a post from Mr Summerlin earlier this year (when we were waiting for snowstorms, no less), in which he advised any of you looking for exciting music that you hadn’t heard before to GET POOR and invest in some old ZZ Top LPs. Well, I’ve been following that advice myself in the last couple of months, following a self-imposed ban on buying expensive new albums whilst in the midst of a personal finance crisis (called moving house and sacking off your crappy bar job because you despise the people who ‘run’ the place). The result of which monk-like activity has been that I’ve somehow ended up with all five albums by The Police for less than a pound each.

Now The Police (not to be confused with erratically great/mental noiseniks Hair Police), in my humble opinion, have been the victims of a bad rap since their inception. Because they were never a ‘proper’ punk band, and they dared to have influences outside of yer basic rock ‘n’ roll confines, they somehow got unfairly maligned and swallowed up by the Adult Orientated Rock prism – like the one in Superman II that those 3 baddies get trapped in. People these days only seem to remember ‘Every Breath You Take’ as some kind of wretched ‘beautiful love song’; personally, I could never understand why Puff Daddy would want to use a song about obsessive stalking as a tribute to a murdered friend. My bandmates and friends have all looked at me and shaken their heads when I’ve mentioned how much I love some of The Police’s stuff in the past.

But Gordon ‘Sting’/’Cuntchops’ Sumner, Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers were, a lot of the time, actually really fucking GREAT at being a jaw-droppingly tight, adventurous and ambitious band that also wrote some amazing songs that were often pretty damn simple but so crisply played that they’d put Shellac to shame. Sure, they got trapped in the overblown excess of the eighties towards the end, but even at their lowest ebb they’d often pull something out of the bag that was shockingly good.

I first heard The Police as a kid in the car, with an old greatest hits compilation tape going round and round on journeys to anywhere far away. Back then I thought they just wrote some catchy tunes, but going back to them these days I find myself entranced purely by the sound of Stewart Copeland casually thwapping the drums and making a minimal offbeat 4/4 rhythm sound like the classiest thing on earth, or Andy Summers tumbling out some more hand-crampingly spidery riffs with every song that passes. Even Sting’s lyrics generally haven’t reached a level of absurd pomposity until the last couple of albums, and even then they might actually be about something more complex than the hippy-dippy shit he comes out with nowadays ‘ check ‘Wrapped Around Your Finger’ or ‘Invisible Sun’ for songs about the machinations of a power struggle in an unbalanced relationship and growing up during ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland, for example.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of chaff and wheat when it comes to The Police ‘ even their strongest albums (Outlandos D’Amour, Zenyatta Mondatta, and Synchronicity) have got some turgid shite on there, but when they come up with something good, usually it’s gold. Here was a band that came from a jazz background into punk and new wave, and then had the gall to successfully experiment with world music, reggae, tango and even SKA, for fuck’s sake (and they pulled the ska off too, on ‘Canary in a Coalmine’). Plus, they wrote songs about prostitutes, fucking sex dolls, a (Nabokov name-checking) Lolita-esque relationship between a teacher and a schoolgirl, and how having tantric sex enabled you to perceive the world working in perfect harmonious motion. I think.

Of course, these days Andy Summers has disappeared into jazz/fusion hell, Sting is a self-important & self-righteous twunt whose solo career has consistently been a pox on the entire world that he purports to be saving (and let’s not even go into destroying ‘Roxanne’ with Puff Daddy in ’97), and Stewart Copeland has been playing drums for Ray Manzarek’s horrendous ‘re-united’ The Doors of late. But for some reason I’m willing to forgive them anything ‘ and not just because Copeland also scored ‘Rumblefish’ and ‘Pecker’ (he’s also done ‘Very Bad Things’ and ‘She’s All That’, amongst many others).

Go and check your nearest second-hand record stall, or just go on eBay if you’re feeling lazy, and see how many bloody copies there are of all their LPs for ridiculously cheap prices (they’re easy to spot ‘ they’ve all got diabolically bad artwork). Plus, you won’t be lining Sting’s pockets any further, so there’s no need to feel any guilt. If you’re feeling especially poor, you could just plum for a Greatest Hits and save yourself the sorting through the shit. Even ye old over-familiar ‘Every Breath You Take’ is worth listening to if you hadn’t noticed the piano behind the synth-strings ‘ listen! It’s just like John Cale’s contribution to ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog’ all over again!

Or you could just download some MP3s.

I’m probably being ignorant of what’s cool (or maybe it’s that I don’t read magazines), but it does surprise me that given the bizarrely still-burgeoning popularity of ‘punk funk’ at the moment, The Police don’t seem to have been given more attention than a terrible cover of ‘Message in a Bottle’ by Machinehead in recent years. At least the none-more-evil !!! haven’t associated themselves with them, otherwise I’d be physically sick. Then again, Pinback‘s Rob Crow covered a couple of Klark Kent (a Copeland joke solo project) songs whilst in Heavy Vegetable ‘ and if you’re telling me that Rob Crow’s wrong, I don’t wanna be right! Or something.

Ho hum, back to writing about clever clever stuff like Steve R. Smith’s latest album on Digitalis or the Ivytree’s Feathered Wings on recent interviewees Catsup Plate soon.

The most popular CD in my stereo right now is the double CD compilation, WANTAGE USA’S 21ST RELEASE HITS OMNIBUS. This is a compilation as they should be done – two CDs packed full of all kinds of exciting, quality music, wrapped in a nice-looking package with a substantial booklet containing full details of all the bands and how to find out more about them.

If you’ve any interest in the current underground music scene in America – and, randomly, the underground music scene in Latvia (where Wantage mainman Josh lived at the end of the 90s) – right now there, you should check this out. The music on here is that kind of punk/hardcore/’fractured noise’/indie-heavy-metal stuff which always seems so far ahead of what we’re doing here in England (to me, anyway). An inspirational introduction to what seems like a very healthy scene.

More info here – there’s 47 bands on this double CD, including The Fucking Champs, Oneida, Noxagt, Dub Narcotic, Stars of the Dogon and Early Humans.

With regard to Joe Morris’ excllent new column: Markus Archer, who sings on the new Alias record, is a member of The Notwist. So now you know.

In addition: The Parts & Labor half of the split album Simon Minter talks about is great! Tyondai Braxton is awesome too, but in a totally different, head-spinning kinda way. Looking forward to P&L’s cover of ‘Sugar Kane’ on Narnack’s forthcoming Sonic Youth tribute CD too…