Blimey. Just spotted the announcement for two more All Tomorrow’s Parties weekends for next May curated by Mudhoney, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Special Guests one weekend and The Shins, Sleater Kinney and Ween the next. I’m still noticing a lack of electronic stuff here which disappoints me. I think I am officially bored of indie rock.

If you are looking for a madcap amalgam of The Walker Brothers, Neil Hannon and The Rezillos (and lets face it, who isn’t?) then Misty’s Big Adventure are the band for you.

Full of enthusiasm and humour, this is an album full of great lyrics, strong songs and killer arrangements, with an obvious grand vision at play.

Featuring serveral obvious singles like “The Story Of Love” with its Boo Radleys style radio-friendly perkiness, simple verse and killer hooks, the more overt tracks are blended very well with much more interesting stuff like the glorious, Wire-esque “Smart Guys Wear Ties”, “Evil” and the intoxicating “It’s Not That Important”.

“Never Stops, Never Rests, Never Sleeps” features some hilarious battle scratching effects at the beginning while blending Jacques Brel and The Divine Comedy and along the rest of the way there are hints of Johnathan Richman, The Kinks, Julian Cope and The Polyphonic Spree, while strong references to the glory days of Cud and The Frank and Walters also abound.

A lot will depend on whether you enjoy the voice and humour of vocalist Grandmaster Gareth (not a moniker to conjure much confidence I know) but if you do, you’ll find “The Black Hole” delivers a more than diverting experience.

Misty’s Big Adventure

KICK-ASS:

Crazy Boys – The best song on the new Rachel Stevens album and that really is saying something. I have listened to this about 14 times today and have had to copy the album on to CD so my Last.fm stats don’t get completely ridiculous (and so I can listen to it even louder and run around the room).

Fighting Boys – I will kick your ass, and enjoy it too.

del.icio.us – Nothing (much) to do with boys but a super-helpful mishmash of bookmarks, RSS and blogging that is pretty much acting as my online memory and to-do list. I will make a diskant group collaboration one soon. It’s the future!

Howl’s Moving Castle anticipation – It’s been out a whole week but I’m finally going tomorrow and I’m so excited I can’t even eat my free cake.

LAME-ASS:

Rocktober – If it’s October it must be time for 700 bands you like to come and play in your town all in the same week. And charge you £9 a ticket. What’s so great about live music again?

My TV – Why why why do you have to hate Channel 4? Why not Channel 5 or ITV? WHY?

Telephone Spam – Every time I answer the phone it’s one of those recorded messages (about what I have yet to find out), some guy trying to sell me something or this woman who keeps calling and then saying she has the wrong number. And then my mother phones and she wonders why I sound so aggressive.

Over-ambitious zine making – see comments.

It was a cold September evening and I was travelling across town to see Misty’s Big Adventure play King Tut’s. Unsure of what to expect, I had hoped to get a listen of their debut LP, The Black Hole, beforehand but I forgot. The free newspaper which litters Glasgow’s buses these days had given them a brief but curious write-up. I had seen it that morning and read it again as I crossed the city on what was my 5th bus journey that day. “Eclectic-Jazz-Brummies” was the gist of the worrying description…

The first band on were called El Jugador, an entertaining four piece consisting of two guys and two girls. As they hit the first chords of their opening song I wondered how long it would be until I thought they were rubbish. As it turned out, I didn’t have time to finish that thought and was quickly trying to stop myself from laughing out loud. Despite this I thought they were good fun, a bit daft and perhaps a bit casual. I don’t know if it was lack of rehearsal or confidence but there seemed to be a certain energy missing. Although they did have a matey charm that made me warm to them a little and feel mean for not liking them more.

Misty’s Big Adventure was everything I feared and more. Overtly smug and painfully eccentric, I was nauseated by the over-riding pretension. Inventive and catchy arrangements, that owed a significant debt to classic Hanna-Barbara cartoon scores, were overshadowed by pithy lyrics and live ‘sampling’ of electronic nursery toys. In the interest of fairness I should point out that the most of the audience seemed to be able hear something I didn’t and were on the whole receptive to the front man’s dour, deadpan delivery.

I got so angry that the unhappy little man wouldn’t shut up about George Bush, having two brains and ‘tapeworms of love’, and therefore ruining the great music produced by the rest of the highly talented band, that I had to sit at the side and hold my head in my hands. I guess I didn’t get it then, the buttoned down square that I am.

How To Swim in comparison were like a hot water bottle on a winter’s night. A multi layered melt of sounds and instruments, the band teased some great melodies out of what could be easily be an overcrowded mess. There were at least 9 folk on the small stage, the fact that they all could fit was almost as impressive as their beautiful songs.

I had seen them live once a couple of months before and was disappointed to see that, whilst still putting on great show, the band were not enjoying themselves as much as before. I couldn’t help thinking that there must have been some reason, perhaps nerves due to being the last band on, that enthusiasm was not always as it could be throughout the set.

So, all in all, an interesting night. Misty’s might be the more polished band but How To Swim are the ones that I’m looking forward to hear more from.

Parisienne/Mancunian 4-piece The Clerks offer up 5 self-assured slices of fizzy, fuzzy pop on their new demo. It’s a lo-fi blend of Factory cool and Gallic insousiance as befitting their origins. They’ve played with Mercury Rev in the past, but their own sound is essentially a low-budget blend of bubblegum pop and drone-rock.
Best tracks: ‘The Dissidents” narcotic groove is The Velvets-as-remixed-by-Beck; ‘Get Off Stage’ is slurred cowboy angel blues like the Dandy Warhols after a nervous breakdown. Good stuff.

“They are so very proud of their music it’s almost indecent.”
So they should be.

www.the-clerks.com

“Catnap was conceived sometime in early 2003 in Zone 5, North London, and was delivered to the world a year later in Brighton – where all its members currently reside.”

Now Catnap have been thrust, kicking and screaming into the big, wide world, what do they sound like?
Unorthodox.
This is woozy, talkative Sonic Youth-derived pop – at once dark ‘n’ twisted and bubbling ‘n’ playful.
My favourite track is: (deep breath) ‘One Day We Will Grow So Tall That Your Institutions Crumble Beneath Our Feet Like The Spineless Pests They Are'(phew)- which, slightly bizarrely sounds like my old favourites Urusei Yatsura.

“Catnap is still a child, but it is growing up”.
Heaven help us when they discover alcopops, bostik and underage sex…

If you’d like to be part of their grubby, freaky little art-rock riot check out www.catnapmusic.co.uk

It’s been a while. If you remember the deep dark beginnings of diskant you’ll remember the diskant bands – The Oedipus, the Gringo lot and of course The Hypotheticals, the band of diskant stalwart Greg Kitten. Back in those days the Hypotheticals were a fun indiepunkpop band but now they’re back, they’ve ditched their The and they’re a bit angry. Opener Feel (Felt) has some duelling guitars, screamy vocals and a good dose of pissed off that lets you know things have changed round here and you best just get used to it. It’s always good when a band finds some attitude. These new songs have much more of a riffy, punky thing going on bringing Hirameka Hi-Fi to mind, mainly due to the sulky, shouty Essex vocals but also in the frantic drumming and sharp, sparky scrapey guitars. Klobber is the catchiest by far with a weebly twiddly bassline and a fantastic EEP guitar bit that you know they do synchronised moves to onstage. Let’s hope they can keep up this kick-ass attitude and get themselves a new record out.

more info: gregkitten at gmail dot com

A new series whereby we call out anomalies in the diskant group charts on Audioscrobbler/Last.fm and let you the reader guess the answer. The exciting part is that only the person who is the answer knows the answer (i.e. the asker doesn’t)

Today: Who else (other than me, obv) has been listening to Girls Aloud this week?

Also, as Simon P rightfully demanded the other week: who the hell’s been listening to Dire Straits??

Make your guesses in the comments. Hopefully the accused will come clean (otherwise this will die a quick death, I guess).

I am finding the whole Audioscrobbler thing fascinating. Do I really like Rachel Stevens more than Hood? Is it surprising that 7 out of my top 10 artists are female-led? Are the RIAA secretly monitoring the stats to see who’s listening to albums that haven’t been released yet, you dirty music stealing pirates? How relieved am I that I listen to my own band less than other people in the diskant group listen to theirs? And why do we willingly give so much information on our lives to the public?

What is it with Iceland? You can blame the unending winter nights, glaciers and treelessness all you like, but it’s still hard to credit a single place with producing such consistently otherworldly music. Where, for example, are the Icelandic skate-punks, boybands, and insipid R’n’B divas? It’s an odd state of affairs, but not one to complain about, as long as they keep giving us artists like Ölvis.

Based on the evidence of this, his second album, Ölvis (aka Orlygur Thor Orlygsson) seems less self-conscious than some of his peers, and perhaps a little less fearful of referencing more traditional folk and rock forms without first distorting them beyond recognition. There is little in the way of gibberish wailing, and effects are employed with sensitivity, rather than smothering the music to death in a ham-fisted attempt at creating atmosphere. There’s not much electronic twiddling either, save some minimal organ sounds. Where the likes of Sigur Ros (some members of which guest on this album) pretend to be ghosts, the music on this record seems very much of this Earth. Or, at least, a slightly out-of-focus Earth, endlessly looping the sun with a melancholy inevitability, expressed in psychedelic lounge-folk music.

If there is criticism to be leveled, it is that there’s very little variation to be had over The Blue Sound‘s eleven tracks. It’s perhaps best to take it as a single, lengthy piece, divided into sections that are easily digested on their own, should the mood take you, rather than impose upon it high expectations of excitement. Once you’ve sampled the first couple of tunes, you should have a reasonable grasp of what the rest of the album is going to be like, and whether it is, or is not, for you. However, to these ears, at least, it’s gently refreshing, and I would urge you to try it on your own.

Resonant

1. I hate students. Everyone says that but I hated them when I was one. Yes I know that means I hated myself. They are fucknuts, they don’t pay council tax and they make more mess than anyone else in this city because they need their parents to wipe their arses for them. If that sounds Tory then work in Lenton.

2. Tortoise are ace. I just got the new Burn To Shine DVD and the Tortoise song is the shit. Red Eyed Legends too.

3. A Hartke 4×10 bass cab weighs a lot which is something I discovered at 2.30am as I tripped up a kerb carrying one and left half my knee on the pavement.

4. T-Rex had some riffs.

5. I am freezing cold and my feet smell.