I’ve waited two whole years for a slab of DeSalvo vinyl.
It was worth the wait.

DeSalvo include members of Stretchheads, Dawson, Nostril and, um, Idlewild.
DeSalvo are almost certainly THE BEST metal band in the world right now.

Lurching violent riffs that can’t keep to a time signature for more than a couple of bars, Desalvo move from hulking black metal to atonal faster-than-light avant noise and back in the blink of an eye.

Towering over this racket is the unmistakable scream of P6, who just happens to be one of my favourite singers.
(singers? howlers/screamers/yelpers might be more fitting).

The only thing that’s wrong with this record?

To really hear and understand DeSalvo you need to see them live.
I’ve watched them reduce girls and boys to tears of fear.
They always make up in the end, but a DeSalvo live show is something to behold.

Oh, and the vinyl is BROWN.

All hail the new ROCK.

Happy New Year! I welcome you to diskant’s ninth year of existence. Yes, we are planning some exciting things for our tenth anniversary, thanks for asking. I hope you all had a happy, fun and pie-filled festive season and are not finding the return to hard work as difficult as I am.

Having some time off our real jobs means that there has actually been a flurry of activity on diskant in the last couple of weeks with ou articles about our favourite albums and films of 2006 now online and our writers picking out some of the best things about the year over on the weblog.

We do have plans a-plenty for diskant this year. Hopefully we can increase the regularity of new content as well as bringing in some new features and tidying up some old ones. At least three of us have made resolutions to review more records this year so I hope it will be a while before the terrible excuses start. As always, if you have any ideas of ways we could improve do let me know.

I decided not to send out a December issue of the diskant newsletter as things were so quiet. Instead there will be a double issue for January, hopefully with a new exciting competition. Watch this space for more info or just join up now.

Current listening: Joanna Newsom, Bertine Zetlitz, Deerhoof, Lily Allen, Belle and Sebastian.

Albums of 2006

Battles – EP C/B EP – Immense. Immense!!

That Fucking Tank – Day of Death by Bono Adrenalin Shot – quality gung-ho rock noise.

Squarepusher – Hello Everything – An updated, more major and hopeful Feed Me Weird Things which is sadly not as incredible as FMWT was back in the day. Gorgeous art work.

The Ladies – They Mean Us – Zach Hill, the drummer from Hella (all time favourite band), provides clean and quiet fills with Rob Crow from Pinback. Haven’t the slightest who Pinback are but an excellent slice psychedelic pop nevertheless.

Thom Yorke РThe Eraser Рnit-picked from depressingly huge hypermarch̩ in Calais Рnot proud of it but for once, crime pays. Mesmerizing art and beat-work.

Don Caballero – World Class Listening Problem – Damon Che is the best drummer I have ever seen – flashy but still tasteful. Some songs are even 4/4 and happy!

Kieron Hebden and Steve Reid – The Exchange Session Volume 2 – these boys really take their time – it’s pretty long winded electronic free jazz but it pays off – it’s a beautiful hypnotic journey through Hebden A.K.A. Four Tet throbbing melodies and some drummer geezer who played for the late James Brown.

Plan B – Who Needs Action When You’ve Got Words – Possibly the only album I’ve ever listened to that has made me properly empathise with a full-on, ‘shit your pants while crossing the street’ chav. Mike Skinner doesn’t get anywhere near this for shocking brutality. Ben Drew speaks, no, powerfully raps the awful truth and the truth hurts indeed.

Hella – Acoustics – Bought this one late so Muse is off the top ten. It’s the highlights of their 2 greatest albums: The Devil Isn’t Red and Hold Your Horse Is but just played on more acoustic-y instruments. http://www.hellaband.com/

Melvins – A Senile Animal – probably most accessible Melvins album, ever-idiosyncratic sludge of King Buzzo’s guitar to new bassist and two, yes TWO drummers! A colossal, heaving noise.

GOOD FOR GIGS
Polmo Polpo – Port Mahon, the most moving gig experience in all my days.
Black Dice – Oxford Wheatsheaf, cheers for the tinnitus boys.
Battles – Oxford Zodiac
Don Caballero + Todd – London Scala
Melvins – Zodiac
Animal Collective + Battles – Astoria
Suitable Case for Treatment + The Mules – last gig ever at the Zodiac

BOOKS
Haven’t read any published this year, but…
Music and the Mind – Anthony Storr
Any Human Heart – William Boyd
Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
Maribou Stork Nightmares – Irvine Welsh

DVD
Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace
Mighty Boosh Boxset
Pixies Live (when they’re old and wrinkly, won off Gideon Coe’s breakfast show on 6 Music. We talked about porridge and muesli mainly)
Twin Peaks Series One

MAGS
Stool Pigeon: http://www.feedthepigeons.com/

2 BEST THINGS
Singing tenor in a choir full of incredibly lovely old(er) people.
and
‘Wish you Were Here’ on beautiful blue vinyl.

2 WORST THINGS
Reading Festival, Saturday.
and
I’m not being funny here, but the execution of Saddam Hussein saddened me quite profoundly. I don’t want to jump on the soapbox just yet but I think it’s awful, merciless brutality. Do like the old emperor of China and employ him as a toilet cleaner.
Phew.

EVENT OF THE YEAR
Truck Fest: Battles + Drum & Bass in the Barn!! Going on a rampage with a marigold mysteriously on my left arm…

THINGS YOU DID MOST THIS YEAR
Mostly charity work and warming the hearts of crippled children…

PLACES VISITED
Pretty local: Sheffield, France, Somerset

LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2007
New Hella album
Going to Peru and cycling down a big volcano
Driving (learning to)
Reading some classic books
Room 237 in Oxford

OVERALL
“I’ll get a mop”

I was going to copy I Like and do 1 photo from each month but I appear to not have done anything in January and an awful lot in Feb/March. Plus 15 makes for a better screenshot. It’s difficult only picking one photo of each place I visited but it does look like I had quite a fun year.

L-R top to bottom:
1. Brighton Pier at dusk on the Uter tour
2. Me and Econoline at 3am in the great Blizzard of March, Glasgow
3. The hilariously twee wallpaper in my first purchased home. Yes, we kept it.
4. Todai-Ji Temple, Nara. My favourite photo of Japan.
5. Largs on one of the hottest days of the year
6. St Stephens Church in Dublin – again for an Uter gig
7. Visiting my sister in London
8. Best costume winners (but disowned by my own mother)
9. Another great Audioscope and a lovely afternoon with Parts & Labor.
10. Angel Bunny joins us for a weekend in Newcastle for crafting
11. I made so many things last year but my brooches were the most popular
12. Detour round Speyside while visiting my family
13. Meeting Bob the Builder at Minehead ATP
14. My handmade Christmas cards
15. Me. I look very different to me in 2005

Full photos here.

I’m going to do an A to Z of 06 when I get chance, possibly tomorrow to cure the inevitable hangover but in the meantime…

MUSIC
Bo Diddley
Groundhogs
Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac
Loren (MazzaCane) Connors
Marc Ribot
Monorchid
Skull Kontrol
Wrangler Brutes
Comets On Fire
Erase Errata
Daniel Higgs / Lungfish
Bilge Pump
Sailors
Geriatric Unit
Nels Cline

LIVE
Spiritual Unity at the Festival Hall
Brotzmann/Bennik at ATP
Stooges at ATP
Whiteout w/Nels Cline at ATP
Bonnie Prince Billy/Harem Scarem in Easter Ross
Monorchid at The Note, Chicago
Touch & Go Festival in general (PW Long, Negative Approach, MOAM?, Ted Leo, Enon etc)
Powerhouse Sound at the Hideout, Chicago
Part Chimp every time I saw them this year, especially Latitude Festival and in Glasgow too
Bilge Pump every time I saw them
Comets On Fire in Nottm
Birds Of Delay supporting Magik Markers in Cambridge
Unit Ama and Lafaro in Easky, Ireland
The Gossip, Dinosaur, Boredoms, Big Business at April ATP
Lightning Bolt in Nottingham
Tom Verlaine and Jimmy Rip at Latitude
The Horse Loom in Nottingham
Hey Colossus in Brighton
The Good Anna a whole load of times
Carla Bozulich in Nottm
Erase Errata in Nottm
Chris Corsano at Nottm Raffles
US Maple and High On Fire Supersonic
Earth in Birmingham

FILM
Saw very few new ones. Enjoyed:
Get Carter
Idiocity
The Devil & Daniel Johnston

BOOKS
The Psychic Soviet by Ian Svenonius
The Biggest Secret by David Icke
Timequake by Kurt Vonnegut
How To Live Like A Lord Without Really Trying by Shepherd Mead
Them by Jon Ronson
Love & Death by Halperin & Wallace
The Sweeter Side Of Robert Crumb by Robert Crumb
Billy F Gibbons: Rock n Roll Gearhead by Billy F Gibbons

MAGS
Stop Smiling
Vice
MOJO

WEBSITES
Flickr
I also discovered the joy of Soulseek this year

BEST THING
It’s been a good year, personally, for music stuff
Going to Chicago

WORST THING
It’s been a frustrating year, personally, for music stuff.
The United Kingdom going down the pan

OVERALL
Not bad not bad.

Good call.

MUSIC
Raccoo-oo-oon
Meneguar
Woods
Lords
The Goslings
Church of Misery
Electric Wizard
Growing
Mouthus
Prolapse
Om
Excepter
Iron Monkey
Animal Collective
Comets on Fire

LIVE
Sunburned Hand of the Man in Cambridge [March]
Boredoms at Primavera
No-Neck Blues Band at Primavera
Lords and Hey Colossus in Cambridge
Bilge Pump in Cambridge
Lightning Bolt in Nottingham
Dinosaur Jr at Primavera
The Flaming Lips at Primavera
Ligament in London
Comets on Fire in Nottingham

FILM
Watched so many films in the last 2 months that it’s kind of hard to come up with any kind of list of favourites. Here then is a random selection of things that weren’t shit:
Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
X-Men 1-3
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue
Psychomania
The Wizard of Gore
The Gore Gore Girls
Satan’s Slave
Frightmare
Con Air
Vampyres
If… / O Lucky Man / Britannia Hospital

BOOKS
Promethea by Alan Moore
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware
Notes From a Defeatist by Joe Sacco
Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo [again]
Buddy Does Seattle by Peter Bagge
Been a bit rubbish with actual books this year.

MAGS
Found
Dirty Found
Psychotronic
Little White Lies

BEST THING
Barcelona/Primavera

WORST THING
Crippling illness

OVERALL
Had it’s moments, but not a patch on 2005

You may have noticed that our annual Favourite Albums and Films of 2006 articles are now online. Go enjoy.

While doing the above, people complained that they couldn’t vote for stuff that didn’t come out this year or for gigs so I promised we would do it on the blog. We used to do this on ye olde diskant YahooGroup but that has really and truly died after EIGHT wonderful years of complete and utter timewasting. I’m sure the YahooGroups stormtroopers will miss us.

So, make up your own categories for the stuff you wanted to write about. I’m not doing ineligible albums of the year as I still intend to post my Songs of the Year thing.

MOST LISTENED TO BANDS (according to my iTunes)

Errors
Otterley
Findo Gask
Pet Shop Boys
Mogwai
Joanna Newsom
Burowelt
Girls Aloud
Gay Against You
Dananananaykroyd

It seems I am a walking advertisement for Glasgow.

GIGS

Lightning Bolt/Gay Against You @ Grand Ole Opry, Glasgow
Sonic Youth/Stooges @ ATP Minehead
Findo Gask @ The Arches, Glasgow
Ladytron @ Cross Central, London
Errors @ Stereo, Glasgow
Mogwai @ The Barras, Glasgow
Danananaykroyd/CSS @ Indian Summer, Glasgow

WEBSITES

Flickr – I live my life on Flickr. It’s my MySpace
Popjustice – Still hilarious and almost always right
Design*Sponge – has cost me an absolute fortune in buying cute things from design shops.
No Rock’n’Roll Fun – Makes most of the music press pointless
I Was Just Really Very Hungry – Intelligent and inspiring food writing
Wonderland – Computer gaming be fun!
Remember The Milk – has literally changed my life

FILM/DVD

NANA – Film of the Japanese manga
Everything is Illuminated – Amusing and then unbearably poignant
Bring It On – Cheerleading, cliches ahoy and Kirsten Dunst – what more do you want?
Hustle and Flow – Ridiculous
Whisper of the Heart – Finally on DVD with proper subtitles, my second favourite Ghibli because I am a sap

BOOKS

Harumi’s Japanese Home Cooking – my new bible
The Best of Smash Hits – All the best stuff from the classic 80s period
Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash – will make you horribly aware of every single thing you throw away
Paradise Kiss – My favourite manga for having a depressing undercurrent of realism underneath the fashion and relationships stuff, for being short and for not having a happy ending.
NANA – 2 girls called Nana, one a punk singer and one a cutesy ditz. Taking absolutely forever to get translated and getting darker by the week (if you sneakily watch the animes which are way ahead)
100 Posters, 134 Squirrels – Jay Ryan’s amazing posters. So good I bought a real one.

COMPUTER GAMES

Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS) – I am still playing this daily. I sent everyone in my town a “festive” tree and am currently trying to build perfect snowmen to get furniture (when dung beetles aren’t running off with my snowballs) while helping the Museum owl to get over his morbid fear of insects.

Cooking Mama (DS) – Learn to cook literally seven million Japanese dishes under the watchful and rather scary eyes of Mama. Making sushi and dumplings is hilarious fun – measuring rice and not dropping your steak on the floor less so.

Chibi-Robo (Gamecube) – Tiny robot runs around the house making everyone happy by cleaning and tidying and fixing problems. Why isn’t tidying the house this much fun in real life?

Tamagotchi Corner Shop (DS) – Just ridiculous. I really spent far too much time hanging out with a bunch of bunny-shaped things and puddings with eyes making them cakes, washing their clothes and decorating their teeth. Happy Tamagotchis thanking Stu for decorating their teeth with I HEART HITLER will live with me for a long time.

EVENT OF THE YEAR
ATP – Was good to be back and the new site made it doubly exciting, not to mention all the good bands, the company, the continental cheese, the chalet, the excellent television and that unique Butlins experience.

THINGS YOU DID MOST THIS YEAR
Eat Japanese food
Play with my DS
Put photos on Flickr
Make things
Read millions of blogs via RSS
Stand at bus stops
Wait for/on delayed trains
Order stuff off the internet

PLACES VISITED
Japan (Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara)
Oxford (three times!)
London (twice)
Brighton
Newcastle

LOOKING FORWARD TO IN 2007
Going back to Japan!
2006 being over

Things will inevitably be quieter for the next couple of weeks though, with our recent level of activity, I doubt anyone will notice much of a difference. Our annual best albums and films of the year articles are almost done and will hopefully be up sometime next week.

I’d like to take this opportunity to name and shame Findo Gask, Dot To Dot, Dananananaykroyd and Try Harder Records as the lazy/busy people who have been keeping me as the winner of my interview slackness stats. Particularly the first two who have been hoarding their interview questions since FEBRUARY! Hopefully we will see all these interviews sometime in the new year. Apologies go to Errors and 1990s who I have been failing to interview all year, mostly because both bands are doing so awesomely well.

While you wait for all this goodness here are some excellent year-end things by other sites that we love:

– The Popjustice A-Z of 2006
– No Rock’n’Roll Fun’s exhaustive round-up of the year’s happenings
– Pitchfork’s Top 100 Tracks and Top 50 Albums of 2006

Have a good Christmas and thanks for reading. Don’t forget to have some pie.

Where does the time go? It’s practically Christmas and I still have a million things to do. And, as I’m working through the festive period, very little time to relax and do all those things I never have time to do. I’ve been making big efforts to make presents and buy handmade giftss and it’s been so much fun, especially getting such beautiful things in the mail and being able to avoid the mad rush round the shops. There are so many talented people around and I’ve been adding my favourite sites to the Links page.

Since it’s Christmas we will be presenting diskant’s favourite albums and films of 2006 very shortly. I’m just awaiting the last few comments from our voters and then you’ll be able to see what caught our fancy this year. I’m glad to be able to say I’ve listened to a whole three of the top ten albums though I have seen only one of the films. At least I have some new additions for my rental list.

In the meantime, you can read about our exploits at The Nightmare Before Christmas, curated by Thurston Moore. It was the first to be held in Butlins, Minehead but everyone seems to agree the chance was mostly for the better. I’m not rushing to sign up for either of next year’s events (especially after seeing how the current wish list for ATP vs The Fans looks) but it was great to get back into the ATP swing of things.

There’s still time to join the diskant newsletter if you haven’t already. The final issue of the year will go out sometime next week and we’ll have some more exclusive competitions coming up next year.

Finally, thanks for reading diskant this year and have a great Christmas and New Year.

Current listening: Joanna Newsom, Gay Against You.

My building has a free wireless network, so last night I peeked and saw that my neighbor’s iTunes had a few Peter Bjorn and John songs from their new album Writer’s Block. She had a bunch of Cat Power and Joanna Newsom and a couple newer things like New Young Pony Club. But Peter Bjorn and John? I hadn’t even heard the whole record yet and I’m an editor at a New York culture magazine, which made this casual listener’s iTunes a testement to the incredible word of mouth success the sophomore record from the Swedish pop trio is enjoying despite limited marketing in the US, thanks largely in part to the rediculously infectious lead single “Young Folks.”

“Young Folks” revolves around a crisp whistle solo, gentle beats and some of the most alchemical boy/girl switch-verses this side of “Don’t You Want Me,” with the Concretes’ Victoria Bergman cooing indifferently about the hipsters, and choosing the unsure Peter over all the other boring people with even more unsure lines like, “I would go along with someone like you.” The romance of the song is new and intriguing, like when you just say fuck it, and you finally dive into that relationship that’s been brewing, but you’ve never been really sure until now.

Lyrically, the simple expression of small joys and slight losses seems to keep this album always clever and surprising. No one will ever confuse Peter Bjorn and John with the Beach Boys in terms of vocal harmonies. In fact, none of the trio’s almost equally used voices are all that great, but they’re sincere and they’re placed flatteringly with the various emotional highs and lows of the music.

It’s those various shifts in the music that makes Writer’s Block so compelling. They jangle for the Byrds, chime rhythemically for the Chills, bounce along for the Lucksmiths, croon for Jens Lekman. Always there’s a hidden dulcimer or Spanish guitar that climbs its way through the songs and the whole thing just sounds joyous and fresh in a way no other record has sounded to me this year. Too bad I caught on so late.

-Maxwell Williams

V2 Scandinavia & Finland
Wichita Recordings