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

Is there NOTHING exciting happening this month? Normally we highlight an upcoming exciting event on the homepage but we have had nothing since mid-December since no-one has emailed me about anything noteworthy and nothing has caught me eye during my daily trawling of the web.

So, what I am saying is tell us about your events. Whether it’s a music all-dayer, a film festival, an art show, a craft fair, whatever – if you think our readers would be interested in it then maybe we’ll feature it.

Two things to note:
1. we’re talking EVENTS here, not just your average gig.
2. give me a bit of notice. I’m not going to spend time writing a blurb and finding an image for something that I can only put on the site for a couple of days.

Got anything? Email me at diskant-overlord AT diskant.net. You can email me stuff that’s happening after January too, of course.

UPDATE: FatCat‘s upcoming 10 year anniversary shows have fixed this problem for the immediate future but keep your event suggestions coming. As commented below, the Chinchilla Fest 07 is looking awesome.

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

How is your 2007 going so far? Weather-wise, this has been an atrocious year for me so far (although it has just started snowing, yay!) Luckily things were brightened up by what is already my gig of the year – Joanna Newsom and the Northern Sinfonia at the City Halls, viewed from row B right in front of her pretty little face (and amazing shoes). She was perfect in every way and I started regretting giving up my cello for art and normal teenagerdom. I loved playing in an orchestra. If anyone has a spare cello please send it my way….

Have you broken your resolutions? I am still slacking terribly on the review front though I did tackle the overflowing diskant review box so I could hand a few piles out to our reviewers. Quite a few things that have been sitting in there for months got binned as well so if you sent something before October-ish and we haven’t reviewed it then we probably didn’t like it, one way or another. As anyone who has the misfortune to be within shouting distance of me when I rummage in the review box will know, my one tip for sending us CDs is BUT WHAT DO YOU SOUND LIKE? I don’t care where you met your drummer or whether you’re tipped as the next big thing, I want some way of figuring out which reviewer might like your record. Okay, I’ll calm down now.

Other than reviews, diskant is a little quiet just now. I’m mostly working on stuff behind the scenes including wrestling with the new version of Blogger, trying to tidy up long-neglected areas and getting the diskant robot back to work. I have also set up an Amazon aStore for diskant so you can buy some of the things we write about. More information about that is on the weblog

Don’t forget the special double issue of the diskant newsletter will be going out at the end of the month so join up now.

Current listening: Joanna Newsom, Cat Power, Shigeru Umebayashi, Fugazi, Deerhoof.

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

I have set up an Amazon aStore for diskant so that you can buy some of the things we go on about on here. Obviously we’d recommend you use your local independent store but if you’re going to use Amazon then at least a tiny proportion of the cash is coming back to us. At present we have our favourite albums and films of 2006 and a bunch of personal recommendations from your own diskant Overlord. Hopefully some of the other diskanteers will do their own recommendation sections but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Do rest assured that I will not be plastering ads all over diskant – the shop is completely seperate to diskant and will only be linked by text in a few relevant places. I also guarantee that all profits made will be spent by me on great things which I will subsequently write about on diskant. At present I personally pay all the hosting and domain registration costs for diskant out of my own pocket. The day diskant ever starts to cover its costs we will decide what to do with the money (free pie for everyone of course).