With its stabbed guitar lines, ramshackle drumming and freaked-out stop-start rhythmic structure, Architectural Failures’ opening track suggests that this is an album of yet more of the post-everything angular indie rock that is so goddamn hip right now. Then it goes off in a weird direction, with spooked chant-a-long lyrics and atonal synthesised drones forcing a wedge between the traditions. And so it goes on, introducing odd new aspects to what could just have stayed a good, but uninspiring set of songs. The vibraphone used on a large part of the album is a welcome and refreshingly ‘trad’ sound, adding a joyous twist to songs like Magic Teeth and Oskar which evokes that beautifully warm early-Tortoise sound. I don’t know too much about Hi Red Center but to my mind they’re more jazz than rock – more Soft Machine than Doors, if you will – and their music is more about crafting musical shapes than pummelling out rock familiarities. In the same way that a band like Liars arrive at a good place by travelling along a tortuous, complicated, frustrating but worthwhile journey, Hi Red Center don’t seem afraid to open themselves up to new ideas.

Hi Red Center
Pangaea Recordings

The world is overrun with cynicism and misery, and it’s entirely wasted on Volumen. Despite this album being, in the cold light of day, all over the place stylistically, it’s tied together by an unerring positivity and sparky YIP!manship that it’s near impossible not to surrender to, let alone to ignore. Over its fifteen tracks the album smears zippy weirdopop – which will please fans of Flaming Lips, Pavement, Man or Astroman or even Sonic Youth in their lighter moods – in all kinds of crazed directions. Within songs, and the work as a whole, there are countless surprising forays into noise, rock’n’roll, synth-driven indie-pop, strident pomp-rock, hell, even musique concrète! But whilst many bands are scuppered by their inventiveness and willingness to experiment, Volumen seem to have delivered something of a prog-indie-rock small masterpiece. The weirdness is beautifully kept in check, the confusion offset by pure pop sensibilities and a musicianship and proficiency that is almost relentlessly charming and captivating. Science Faction is heavy in concept, but playably light in conception.

Volumen
Wäntage USA

Spraydog have been quietly plugging away with their comfortably familiar brand of fuzzy indie pop for about a decade now, and it’s almost in their favour that as independent music in the main now seems more backward-looking than ever, they’ve stuck to their guns. This means that here there is no knowing irony, no nods to new wave, no desparation for Myspace-heavy, hey-we-could-get-signed-with-this mainstreaming. Whether it’s a good thing that hearing this kind of lazy male/female vocal fighting for vinyl space with warm, rough-edged sweeping guitar lines provokes thoughts of bands that were around at the time of Spraydog’s birth – Superchunk, Pavement, Boyracer, etc – or not, it’s hard not to enjoy the simplicity of decent, buzzing, morose pop music. It’s far from revolutionary or devastatingly exhilarating, but music is currently drenched in seriousness and desperately new music of varying degrees of success. Sometimes it’s no bad thing to play and listen to music for music’s sake.

Spraydog

Smokers Die Younger appear at first to exist in that currently-popular musical sphere of wry social commentary set to varying eighties-tinged degrees of new-wavey pop. But across this album there are a number of things that, for me, set them way apart from (and in front of) many contemporaries. To explain a specific few of these things: the Breeders-like wailing vocal interludes on ‘I Spy Dry Fear’; the sudden bursts into incredible, lush, horn-tinged musicality on ‘It’s coming straight for us!’; the beautifully sad, beautifully simple jaunt into country blues territory on ‘Three cigarettes in an ashtray’ and the final track’s development from meaningless vocal repetition into bizarre, pounding lo-fi techno. Aspects like these, when combined with the approachable, off-kilter, Pavement-go-angry-indie-pop sound at the core of Smokers Die Younger, result in a richly varied album that hints at true musicianship that is yet to be reigned in by industry pressure, self-consciousness or a reluctance to give things a go in the hope that they work. And they work!

Thee SPC
Detail Recordings
Smokers Die Younger

I just read this:

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The UK’s biggest Festival organiser, Mean Fiddler (Reading/Leeds, Glastonbury) announces the arrival of something a little bit different on 14th – 16th July 2006.

This brand new festival is situated in the beautiful grounds of the historic Henham Park Estate in Suffolk. Positioned near the most easterly English coastline between Southwold and Aldeburgh, Henham has been in the Rous family line since 1544. The vision of Mean Fiddler boss, Melvin Benn, Latitude is inspired more by European festivals such as Lowlands, than anything currently on offer in the UK. Expect Music, Art, Comedy, Film, Literature, Theatre, Performance Art, Dance, Sculpture, Workshops, Restaurants and Waiter Service Bars. In short – the best bits of all festivals rolled into one.

—

Not exactly sure what it means. A music festival? Some kind of art happening? Reading festival without the camping and marauding beerboys? We shall see…

Maybe it’s just gaps in my musical education, or a listless, lazy and badly-thought-through response on my part, but much indie-mainstream-guitar music released right now seems drenched in Echo & the Bunnymen influences. Cherubs have that band’s spooky, echoed vocals, sweeping guitars and lush melodies in spades, but I’m happy to say that they also have a certain something that sets them apart. It could be that they’re aping the past so accurately that I’m fooling myself into memories of times gone by… but it could as much be that on ‘Paper cut moon,’ this single’s title track, and to a lesser extent on the other tracks here, there are enough great little turns of musical phrase – a major-to-minor key change here, a lovely Marresque guitar corner there – to suggest that Cherubs are at least able to put a good song together. In the current musical climate of identikit, style-over-content ‘indie’ bands, that counts for more than may be a good thing. But it counts for something, at least.

Cargo
Cherubs

You don’t give me much to go on here, do you PR people? A single-track CD, with scant information beyond a release made up of carefully-dropped names (“…support slot for Deep Purple”, “Produced… with the legendary George Young… at London’s Olympic Studios (Studio 1, used by Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix”). Okay, okay, the illusion of mysterious-yet-connected heavy rockers has been created. ‘Into the gutter’ starts up with a riff gnarled from Black Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ and quickly power-chords and blues-slides its way into deepest yelping Led Zep/Who/The Darkness* territory. Utterly, utterly derivative and in no way contributing to the furthering of music in new and exciting directions; but I suspect that the band are happy enough where they are. Presumably they’d prefer to be supporting Deep Purple thirty years before now, but there you go.

*ack.

The Answer

The whole of this album is shot through with some fantastic fuzz bass, holding together a ramshackle selection of tunes with a sturdy, mean-sounding growl. The effect as a whole is akin to Ozzy Osbourne circa 1971 fronting a Queens of the Stone Age covers band made up of ardent Iron Maiden fans. For every dense, hard-riffing twist of a tune there’s a counterpoint of heavy metal mayhem – double kick-drum and portentous vocals aplenty – which delights and confuses in equal measure. As much a part of a just-created-for-the-sake-of-this-review new wave of hard rock spearheaded by the aforementioned QOTSA, Hellacopters and The Mars Volta, as they are a melodic NWOBHM Hard Rock tribute act, Cadillac are doubtless black-clad denizens of the night who occasionally kick back with their MC5 collection and consider their emotions. They rock, this much is true. Whether they rock with the new or the old school remains to be seen.

Kong Tiki Records
Cadillac

To put it in as pretentious a way as I can manage, O are post-music. The sounds they conjure are far removed from songs, from tunes, from rhythm and from melody, but – to echo what Yann (the man behind the O) suggests – the listener makes it music. This CD is almost totally abstract, with hints of ideas and suggestions of sounds being born, writhing confused within the speakers for a moment, only to be supplanted by the next in line. Whilst there are very vague hints of repeated motifs throughout the album, it’s an exhilaratingly confusing listen – it skips from random guitar lines to fucked-up gamelan to Prurient-like noise to Sunn o)))-like doom from minute to minute. Bizarrely however, and beautifully, the album succeeds when listened to with open ears. Heaven knows how this was recorded (it’s like a contact mike was placed on a brain), but it was done with an expert touch. The individual sounds here are engaging and captivating, and as a whole piece the album is as relevant as a Sunburned Hand Of The Man stone jam, or a Vibracathedral Orchestra mantra, or a Keiji Haino cavern of noise.

Antenna
O

Ex-eeebleee frontman Dave Griffiths has a knack for writing obtuse, vaguely sinister lyrics and delivering them in a laconic, Bolan-inflected style which serves to accentuate their weirdness. The subject matter of the four songs here is a mystery to me – I’m sure they’re about something – but I prefer to enjoy the sound of the singing rather than the content. For a self-released single this is determined and ambitious stuff; music constructed with the typical drums/bass/guitar instrumentation is overlaid with trumpets and piano, then bent double with subtly odd constructions. Like Smog or Mercury Rev, Witches can take an average, well-written pop song and turn it into something special by adding certain touches of arrangement and contrast. At times the recording quality struggles to contain the vision at work here, but this is an impressive debut which doesn’t buckle under its own complexity. It takes a lot of skill to create songs which seem initially simplistic but which grow and develop on repeated listens, and Witches have a lot of skill.

Within the Woods/Witches