I’m not on the payroll for Wäntage USA, in case my continual reviewing of their releases seems suspicious. They just keep releasing stuff that I want to give some wider exposure. Anyway. This five-track, thirteen-minute CD sounds like it was recorded five hundred miles underground in a lava-filled bunker. To strip The Pope down (no religion-baiting pun intended) would be to reveal, maybe, a pretty average hard rockin’ grunge outfit. They have pounding drums, riffs emerging out of sludgey, overdriven guitar lines, and yelping, tortured lyrics. What gives them their edge – on this recording, at least – is the incredible noise they’ve piled on top of everything. It’s all feedback, grime and intensity. I’d be interested to see the more Wolf Eyes-like direction they edge towards with some more abstract mid-song passages, but then again, I’d be interested to see them continue to batter the hell out of music, existing in their own peculiar fuzzy pit.

Wäntage USA
The Pope

If you haven’t yet done so, get yourself over to The Wire and download Richard Youngs’ previously super-limited CD-R Garden Of Stones. Wow wow wow. It’s knickers-wettingly wonderful. If this isn’t top of the diskant Audioscrobbler chart next week, there’ll be some difficult and searching questions to answer. Go now!

Hurray, we finally got our group quota on Audioscrobbler a couple of weeks back so you can now view our weekly charts of top artists and tunes. I’m not entirely sure what kind of maths they use to calculate these charts (I assume how many of us are listening to the same stuff) but it’s as wilfully non-overlapping as usual. I’m sure this can only get more exciting as the weeks progress…

This has been a tricky review to write. I like Denmark’s Barra Head a lot, I played some shows with them a few years back and they were great. But there is this weird thing with European bands that tackle this (largely) American genre of music. That genre being part hardcore, part indie rock, part (whisper it) emo etc etc. The best example of a band doing this stuff well is The Lapse (or The Breaks or Sparrow or whatever they are called now).
The last Lapse album In Truth Loved is a masterpiece. A solid gold masterpiece. The reason is that it moves the goalposts. To hear Chris Leo sing some of the words on that record was a revelation to me. To actually sing “I know I’m dirty but baby I’m still dandy and I know I can be a bit too dandy but baby I’m still dirty” was revolutionary at the time. Because all of us – male/female, straight/gay/bi – know what it’s like to walk down the street and eye up someone we fancy. ALL of us make crass comments. Hell, I bet Ian MacKaye has rude thoughts sometimes. I saw him kiss a girl once. It’s true.
Barra Head sound mightily like The Lapse. And their songs are cracking. This album also sounds exquisite. The guitar playing is wonderful throughout. But, like I said, the goalposts have moved. And to get back onto the European thing again, it seems to be a trademark of bands from mainland Europe to abide by some rules that really were never in place. There is a sterility to this music that should be fought and not embraced. From the packaging to the lyrics to the presentation, Barra Head seem to seek to remove the kinks and the eccentricities from what they do and it leaves it cold, good though it is. You’re just dying for a wah wah freakout in the middle or for the lyrics to be silly for a moment but the way it sticks to defined boundaries and is so reserved just feels like a step backward and ultimately you want to shake them so their music represents everything about their lives it can do – not just what they think is acceptable to be represented in the genre they exist in. Because when they do they’ll be out of the shadows of their peers and become the amazing band they’re only threatening at being here.

Excellently named band. The blurb says they have one song and “a whole heap of PISSED OFF”. The one song part is true. This seven inch has a remix of the A side as the B side. The original version sounds like Marc Bolan singing a Blues Explosion tune. But something off the last couple of records. It’s OK but if you’re going to come out of the gates blasting for 2 minutes it’s got to be memorable and there’s not much of a tune and neither is it really “well mental” enough to make you either shit or spume your pants (which is the mark of a good record, obviously).
The B side is a slowed down version of the vocals pasted onto some squelchy dub bass and a lengthy coda that sounds a bit like Snap. It makes more of a tune of it and the slowed down vocals improve them no end making them sound like the awesome exclamations of the God-like Lord Buckley, or Channel 4s WG Grace impersonator.

Beautifully packaged CDR release/demo callitwhatyouwant. It has a hand written quote inside it, mine’s from Woody Allen. I hope it’s a different one in each CD.
Kyote play a sort of downbeat indie rock that recalls Arab Strap if I was being lazy (I’m sure that’s the not the first time they’ve heard that) though The New Year is a better comparison due to the economy of the playing (it states the EP was recorded live).
The band sounds a little embyonic at times, the riffs are sometimes of the kind where they go exactly where you think they will. In a time of insanely complex mathematical bands who end up sounding like a Spectrum 48K cassette loading, this is no bad thing. And like The New Year and Bedhead there’s this tension created by the band constantly sounding like they could suddenly drop a rock-out with no problems at all, they’re just choosing not to. Good stuff.

Some music courtesy of our recent Talentspotter interviewee John Brainlove under the moniker of Junkplanet here. John used to be in an electro-punk band called The $hits, and he’s continued in a similar mindset here, creating slashed-up and spattering electronica that brings Kid606 let loose in a child’s bedroom to mind. Pelting a dizzying number of samples familar and unfamilar at you whilst snarling expletives in a familiar accent, or pausing to pay tribute to Aphex Twin’s ode to Pacman, or catching you unawares with a lull of acapella crooning, the one thing you can expect from this “album” is to be taken by surprise.

I say “album” because its ten tracks last for barely 17 minutes. A decent length, for any more brainmelting splatterings than offered here might well cause some kind of spastic fit. Lovely.

www.brainloverecords.com

The Open Mouths are two guys from East London who come across more like cabaret than a band. Making music in their bedroom, they’re a bizarre amalgamation of the Buzzcocks and the Moldy Peaches. Taking simple songs and strumming barely-in-tune guitars, they then proceed to tell gratuitously potty-mouthed lyrical stories that are either funny or annoying, depending on how you feel about hearing little ditties about internet sex, domestic abuse and being nasty to your family. All with incredibly annoying American accents. Bah.

The sound is appropriately lo-fi for a couple of guys having some fun with playing some music – there’s some incredible bad production on the third song “Sadistic Top”, which features the grunge staple of a guitar and some soft drums in the verses before “kicking in” on the chorus with some really distorted guitar and clattering drums that should obviously be about twice the volume as the verse. Unfortunately here the “huge” guitar and drums are about half the volume of the instruments on the verse. Oh well. It sounds shit, but it’s kind of amazing as well. Which is pretty much what can be said about The Open Mouths as a whole. Pretty shit, but sort of good as well. Or great, but terrible too. Like a Roger Corman film, or a Poppy Z. Brite book. Or a really tangy kebab from a skanky takeaway. You may well find them to be a guilty pleasure.

www.brainloverecords.com

Remarkable. Captain Wilberforce is supposedly a two-man band, but the sleeve notes mention but one Simon Bristoll as the guy who wrote and performed everything (except drums on a couple of tracks) on this nine-track, 32 minute CD of jaunty jangly indie pop. I’m sure the press release that I accidentally lost for this thing mentioned Radiohead at least twice, yet with all the harmonies and bright guitars playing major chords going on make me think of the mid-nineties, and Teenage Fanclub in particular. Impressive stuff for just one guy, especially as he’s tighter and more inventive than most of all those big indie guitar pop bands that Captain Wilberforce is so reminiscent of. He’s got a nice line in droll lyrics too, reflected in the song titles. My favourite is “Singer Wanted, Preferably Dead”. All the layers of instruments are well-constructed and everything locks together like an efficient machine of indie mayhem.

All very good, but Cpt. Wilberforce also managed to create 32 minutes of music without a particularly memorable hook to stick in your mind. Which is a shame, because everything else about this record is perfectly fine. Keep on going Captain, in this vein you’ll soon reach that treasure ye be seeking.

http://www.captainwilberforce.com/

This was actually the first time I’d been in Oran Mor despite it easily being the nearest venue to my house. It’s quite badly designed for this kind of gig as it was very easy for everyone to stand way way back and leave the poor bands technically playing to five people. The sound was pretty rubbish as well. Anyway, first up were The Needles who I’d been astonished to hear were still going after them being Aberdeen’s highest hopes quite a number of years ago. Worryingly they still looked and sounded exactly the same as I remember. They’re still highly entertaining to watch but they just don’t have the tunes to justify their performance meaning they ended up looking a little silly (in my eyes at least). It’s the sort of thing that endears you to a bunch of naive teenagers playing for the first time but not a well-established band. Shame though, with some actual tunes they’d really be on to
something.

Next up were Beat Trap – a crap band masquerading as a good band. Initially seeming to fit somewhere in the Rapture/Faint axis of dodgy greatness they soon showed themselves up as just being dodgy new wave. I almost started to warm to them when Alasdair started making ridiculous guesses of their stupid-sounding lyrics until we realised those actually were the lyrics. Then I started to hate them. It’s a while since I’ve been shouting for a band to please, no, don’t play another song, just GO, NOW but they weren’t listening anyway. I can’t deny sniggering when they messed up the end of their last song and had to shuffle off like losers. Entertaining in the wrong way.

Hurrah and hurrah, now it was time for Data Panik. Sound problems abounded and so we were treated to Stroppy Data Panik, giggling and fuming in equal measures. Things did sound a little awry but their melodies are so strong and their enthusiasm so great that they just about carried it off. At the end of their shortened set (a tremendous Cubis, owner of the burbliest bassline in history) Steven got so mad he threw his malfunctioning mic off the stage closely followed by the monitor. The sound man tutted loudly and shook his head.

Lucky Luke headlined and I’d heard good things about them but I wasn’t really feeling it. It was too much of a change of pace, especially for the end of the night. With their folky tinges and multitude of odd instruments they reminded me at times of the underrated Suckle but lacking their poise and sadness. I’m sure I’d like them better on a more sympathetic bill, or on record.