The Good

The new site at Butlins in Minehead features clean, well appointed chalets with widescreen-TVs and DVD players. You didn’t see that at Camber Sands.

Meeting fellow Diskanteers who had previously just been names at the bottom of reviews.

Alexander Tucker’s wonderful folky-melodies, which are looped and layered and looped again until building to a wonderful and soothing drone. I’m keen to check out some of his recordings, none of which, sadly, could be found at the merchandise table.

Decent weather for the first couple of days.

Lots of friendly folks who are happy to chat to you even when sober.

David Tibet and Nurse With Wound in hip-hop collaboration shocker!

Getting in to see the Stooges on the second day (despite not having the “correct” wristband). This was the last band of the festival for us, and after three days of chin-stroking, some all-out rawk showmanship was the perfect closer.

The Bad

Lengthy queues to get into the two main venues at any time after about 8pm. You didn’t see that at Camber Sands. The best tactic seemed to be to pick the stage which featured the most acts you were interested in, find a comfortable spot, and stay there. Gone, sadly, are the days when you could flit from stage to stage and potentially catch every band of the festival.

The mad crush to get on the coach to/from the nearest railway station. On the way there we opted to avoid the crowds and get a taxi, only to be scalped £45 for the privilege. On the way back we had a lengthy wait in the rain in order to have a reasonable chance of getting a seat on the first bus, and there was plenty of pushing and shoving in the scramble to get on board.

Jackie-O Motherfucker cancelling.

Third-day noise fatigue.

Our neighbours inviting the whole camp back to their chalet for a party at four in the morning.

The Ugly
Dead Machines’ samey noise and urine-popsicle story.

“Tell Me Something You Do Like” sings Mr. Hibbett in the opening song of this prettily packaged album.
Well, OK Mr. Hibbett, I like your new album.

I’ve been listening to it now for a good two months and you seem to have been stalking me for the last 20 years watching me go to gigs, nearly get beaten up, fall for girls, fall out with girls and act like an arse.

You see, MJ Hibbett is a master of the minutiae of life as an indie schmindie record buying, spectacle wearing clever clogs.

You know that moment you visited London for the first time and got trapped in a tube carriage with a bunch of Gay Activist marchers?
Well, Hibbett was there too and he’s telling the world all about it.
Or the time when you finally realised that, after spending weeks and months telling people, “The Smiths are rubbish”, that deep down you adore them even though they’re hip.
Yup, you guessed it.
He’s way ahead of you again.

This album is witty, fun, clever and intruiging.
Musically it’s a bunch of old fashinoned (in THE BEST sense of the term) indie guitar pop.
Guitar pop like guitar pop used to be.
But then surely that’s part of The Validators schtick – picking up threads of life as it was, things that have happened, and singing them so you KNOW THEY WERE THERE.

As many of you already know, i don’t like music very much.
But this is an album I LOVE.

‘Keeping Up Appearances’ steams in with a certain amount of choppy-guitar riff rock power before quickly striking up a ska-punk vibe that makes me think of grown men with carefully-fashioned mohicans, jumping in V-shapes with baggy shorts whilst a thousand teenagers nod along during a four-hour long Tony Hawk PlayStation session. It’s hard to deny the immediacy and upfront energy that seems to be inherent in Capdown’s music, but it’s hard (for this reviewer, at least) to hear it as much beyond simple, cartoonish punk pop music that often edges more in the direction of Busted than Dead Kennedys.

B-side ‘Serious Is Not A Sin’ is confusing with its combination of a dour title and more of the same high-speed, super-efficient and super-polished glee-rock. Despite some attractive pseudometal widdly-diddly soloing, and in spite of some tentative dub-light passages, it seems too simplistic in its effortlessness: I prefer more chaos and more mess in my music, and Capdown here seem unfortunately polished to the point of being bland.

Capdown
Fierce Panda

Any band with pretensions of making it ‘big’ needs at least one killer track in its musical arsenal. You know the one, the track that jerks you from your sonic dogmatic slumber and makes you believe in the power of song again. It makes you say to yourself, “Now that is a blinding track” while sinking its aural hooks into you.

Well, I heard one of those today. It happened when I played Secret Chiefs, a demo EP from a band called Superkings. The track’s called Hit The Ground Running, an understated epic of a song, brim-full of imagery and allusion, a tale of ennui and yearning in a strange, seemingly perpetual and intense sexual relationship.

And it’s not a one-off either. Secret Chiefs contains two or three first-magnitude gems, and showcases a band that seems remarkably at ease with itself, one that can turn its hand to a number of styles while retaining its core sound. Superkings are a group that appear to know that while they might not always be flavour of the month in the fickle world of the music press, they are nevertheless ready, and expect, to make the break from obscurity.

I, for one, would not be surprised. This band is a definite ‘one-to-watch’ for 2007.

Superkings
Feedback Records

A quote from The Cubes’ press release states that if Syd Barrett were still alive today, he’d sound like the lead singer, Marc Donovan. Some claim indeed, and one that might have some credence if Mr Donovan came anywhere close either lyrically or musically. Unfortunately, he doesn’t. He sounds like exactly what he is – a twenty year old with a few precious songs which fail to escape their influences rather than drawing on them to create something familiar, yet still individual. This is hardly a surprise, though. On the plus side, these four songs aren’t bad, and there is potential here. But, hey guys, lay off the ridiculous hyperbole a bit and get on with finding your own musical voice. The musical elements and arrangements are interesting enough to suggest this is achievable.

Prince Valium is one half of the Icelandic duo Sk / um (the ‘um’ side of it to be precise) that produced the well-received electronica mini-album ‘I Thagu Fallsins’ in early 2003.

Andlaus is almost entirely instrumental save for one track, Crying Hearts, and really is a product of its environment. When you listen to this album, you really couldn’t imagine it being spawned from anywhere other than Scandinavia. It is crammed full of ambient Arctic, glacial soundscapes that are evocative of acts like Sigur Ros. It is a testament to Prince Valium’s skills that an album as sonically wide-screen as Andlaus could be produced entirely from his bedroom. And for this he should rightly be given great credit.

However, the album is fatally tied to its musical heritage if not Prince’s own influences. The ghost of Sigur Ros hangs over the whole affair. Indeed, given that Andlaus is produced by an Icelander, it feels like one already knows it will sound like Sigur Ros before the first track even begins. Even the vocals on Crying Hearts, has more than a passing, disconcerting resemblance to Björk.

That said, there are moments of great beauty and reflection on Andlaus, particularly the opener, Mixed State. The tracks are expertly crafted in terms of mood. However, while there is much to commend Andlaus in terms of its addition to the canon of contemporary Icelandic music, there is not enough here to lift it out of that position, as there is so much here that one has heard elsewhere.

I seem to have been far too busy lately to be updating this, for which I apologise. Some of it is diskant-related though as begin the annual attempt to coax the diskant contributors into sending in their top ten albums and films of the year. Only a trickle of votes in so far but there’s already a few things with multiple votes, thankfully.

So, what have I been doing? A trip Up North to visit my relatives since I will be working over Christmas, a weekend in Newcastle which I enjoyed enormously and much pre-Christmas crafting. I have been making big efforts to give mostly handmade gifts this year, whether made by myself or by others and I’ve been receiving so many beautiful things in the post that I shall have a hard time giving them away.

Those of you who live in Newcastle, you are very lucky. We did a craft fair in The Cluny which was an awesome pub/venue/cafe crammed full of lovely people on a Sunday morning and plastered with posters for excellent shows. We also had an amazing Japanese teppan-yaki meal at Hanahana and made a quick visit to The Baltic which had well-timed exhibitions of Japanese and urban art. I recommend both and will definitely be returning.

>We’re all off to ATP in a couple of weeks so do come and say hello if you see us. We’ll be the ones eating pie, and shivering.

And don’t forget to join the diskant newsletter if you haven’t already. The next one goes out on the 30th and includes an exclusive competition. See the weblog for more information.

I couldn’t figure it out, and the music nerd inside me was taunting my lack of recall. We nerds are supposed to be able to sniff out a Memphis Minnie cover or an Ennio Morricone sample from a mile out. It was driving me nuts. I passed the CD over my cubicle to my co-worker.

“What does this sound like… Something ’80s, right?”

He put his headphones on. He agreed with me that it was something ’80s “or something.” I listened again and then called over another co-worker. A few hours (and a 2am phone call to the obligatory ’80s dance music aficionado friend) later we had deduced that the melody to the 7th track on Snakes Say Hisss!’s self-titled debut record sounded like the chorus to Taylor Dayne’s dance pop mega-hit “Tell It To My Heart.”

The point is, Snakes Say Hisss! essentially make dance pop in the vein of Taylor Dayne if she used filthy big synth loops and glitched out drum machines and sang mawkish near-emo Pavement-isms. And were underproduced. And, well… okay the Taylor Dayne comparison is a stretch. But that one song sort of sounds like her. I swear.

Bonus: Snakes Say Hisss! comes lovingly packaged in a beautiful screen-printed zine.

Double Bonus: They hail from the remote little village of Potsdam, New York, a town whose ice hockey team we beat the snot out of every time we played them.

-Maxwell Williams

Famous Class

I breathed a slight breath of disappointment to myself upon hearing the all-too-familiar uptight-cymbal-and-bass introduction to the first track on Songs From The Lodge. Here comes another in the seemingly endless production line of Hot New Bands with their stylistic feet plonked squarely in the new wave cliches of the ’80s, I muttered to myself, like the grouchy killjoy that I doubtlessly am.

Well, maybe I need to stop judging albums on their first opening seconds quite so much, as whilst New Rhodes owe something of a debt to the mini-epics of Echo and The Bunnymen and their ilk, they certainly give it enough of their own personality and lightness to stand them in fine stead. Their twinkling guitar melodies and tightly-controlled, complex-of-bassline songs certainly remind of such fine bands as McCarthy or even The Smiths, but the twelve songs here ooze charm, excitement and a cynicism-free sense of joy that’s lost in the music of many of their recent contemporaries.

I think that there are two reasons that New Rhodes can’t help but connect. Firstly, the vocals are delivered with such a fine sense of diction and poise, as they athletically wander across an impressive range, each line ending with a vibrato wiggle, often backed up with Ronettes-gone-city-centre backing harmonies. Secondly, the songs are so damned perky, with high-speed, bright guitar thrum tying itself up with nifty melodies into clean structures that don’t stay beyond their welcome.

I realise all of a sudden that New Rhodes take me back to the heady independent pop days of yore, simultaneously sounding naive and confident and betraying a love of performance and purity that hasn’t yet been marketed or produced out of existence. I was all set to dissect this album with reason and cynicism, but as the album went by I found it impossible to find it in myself to do so.

New Rhodes
Salty Cat Records

This is diskant. He likes Takoyaki, amusement parks and ‘Now’ compilations and dislikes Microsoft Word, Emo and geese. He has been made of felt and buttons by the wonderful Miso Funky and we are giving him away on the diskant newsletter. To be in with a chance of winning you need to be signed up before Thursday, so GO JOIN NOW. You’ll also get updated on what’s new at diskant and what you might have missed. Imagine the excitement awaiting you on Thursday!