So here are my 26 As of the year, instead (in no particular order)…

Audioscope

Asking for Trouble putting Sunnyvale in the box set

Aufgehoben album released on Fourier Transform!

Anxiety, Clinical: and the slow fight against it

Alice

All Tomorrow’s Parties

All Tomorrow’s Parties (went to two this year)

Aquanaut (my old band whose tapes I have rediscovered)

A new G5 iMac!

Appearing on a big stage at Truck Festival

Alphabetising my record collection

A growing interest in NWOBHM. Kind of

Acquiring the new Sonic Youth album, the best one in ages

A big graphic design magazine featuring the Aufgehoben sleeve!

A new pair of glasses

Attending my friend Tom’s wedding and realising I really should stay in contact with people more

Absolutely loads of gigs this year – I’ve seen more bands than ever

Accepting that I have no need for hairdressers and can do it myself

Acquainting myself once again with the fun of all night excessive binges

Another trip to Glasgow

Actually meeting Damo Suzuki – pretty cool

Attempting to design anything and everything music-related in Oxford

Ageing: it’s not so bad

Always having too much to do

Arguing

Absolutely loving living in Oxford

Hi, we’re the diskant team and we have some new content for you…

Dave Stockwell’s new column – an obsessive exploration of the work of Davenport.

Interview with SuperFi Records – they’ve released stuff by Trencher, Melt-Banana, Biblical Proof of UFOs and lots more.

Interview with Hookers Green No. 1 – ‘…the quirkiness of Gorkys and The Flaming Lips as well as the lushness and anxieties of Hood.’

Interview with Hex – ‘Stuart Braithwaite used to like us but I don’t know what he thinks of the new stuff.’

ROCK OUT, MY PEOPLES!

www.nwobhm.com

DIDDLYDIDDLYWEEEEEEEEE BABABA KLANG ROCKANDROLL!!!!!

The Long Blondes’ split single with the Boyfriends was reviewed earlier in these hallowed, er, web pages, and now here they are with their very own 7″ record, on glorious heavyweight pink vinyl. This record is continuing the affirmation of Thee Sheffield Phonographic Corporation in my mind as an indie-pop label like there used to be – effortlessly combining DIY values and 60s style. One step away from hand-coloured foldaround 7″ sleeves in plastic bags, I tells ya. Magic!

Fans of super-high production values and flashy musicianship will find little to latch on to here. That’s not a criticism of the record – it’s a criticism of those people. This record is sheer unashamed pop music, which sounds like it was recorded about five minutes after deciding to start a band. As such, it slots right into a long line of bands (maybe roughly going from The Shaggs to X-Ray Spex to The Fat Tulips to The Long Blondes). There’s elements of a Spector girl group in here, of new wave female-fronted bands, of the Shop Assistants… get the picture?

www.thelongblondes.co.uk
www.heychuck.com/theespc

A quick wee mention for this single, featuring diskant’s very own Joe Morris on bass!

Sarandon rock just like it’s C86, in many ways… there are seven tracks on this fizzy record which whip by at a jerkily furious pace. Everybody’s loving the whole world of jerky/angular/80s-style noisy pop right now, we’re told, so maybe this is Sarandon’s time! Ridiculous music industry trends aside, this is a fun and funny single; anybody with more than a passing interest in the lineage of Josef K – Fire Engines – Stump – Bogshed – Big Flame – Yummy Fur will, I think, find something to make them smile on here.

www.runoutrecords.com
www.banazan.com

It’s been great following Hood’s musical career from the days of their early, scratchy, super-lo-fi demo recordings in the early 90s (split demo tapes with Boyracer, ah, happy days…) right up to their status nowadays as low-key underground superstars. They’ve proved, amongst many other things, that a band can get to a point where it sells a lot of records and plays concerts all around the world, without the slightest deviation from their intent or musical purpose.

Yet still they get themselves out of playing Audioscope each year. But that’s another story.

Anyway, here’s a new single as a taster for the forthcoming new album, and it tastes good. ‘The lost you’ is fantastic – if I was David ‘Kid’ Jensen, I’d say this is ‘classic Hood’ – building from sketchy sample jitters, piling on the layers of guitar, typical sad-sounding vocals, driving guitar, piano?, feedback and so on right up until the point of takeoff at the end of the tune. Seriously, this would have Number One written all over it if the charts weren’t full of shite.

Four further tracks back up ‘The lost you’ with a diverse selection almost designed to showcase the band’s confidence and range – reverb-heavy fuzzy drawls, skippingly upbeat pop tunes and spooky sequenced mantras. Certainly a band which I’d like to watch playing live. Perhaps at a festival. Called Audioscope.

www.hoodmusic.net
www.dominorecordco.com

Remember ‘slowcore’? You know, Codeine, Red House Painters, Bedhead, Low, all o’ that stuff? Langurous, stretched-out melancholia with an undercurrent of anger and noise? The Narrows are still ploughing that nicely miserable furrow, and this release (a compilation of two previously-released albums) proves that they’re on the button with the dangerous combination of fuzz-drenched guitar and long, slow songs.

It is, naturally, maudlin as fuck, but you have to love that. I’ve always thought that the saddest of sad songs have a weirdly uplifting effect, and when that’s combined with outbursts of guitar noise and minor-key melodies stretched taut over many minutes (as on this release) the result is a winner. Let’s sum it up with an incredible cliche: “perfect music for evenings spent alone”. Yeah, this is hardly party-party music. But parties are overrated anyway.

By the way, the vinyl version is packaged in a gatefold sleeve featuring a pop-up crocodile. In case you get too depressed.

poolorpond.net/thenarrows.html
www.wantageusa.com
www.tapesrecords.com

I love Wäntage USA, they seem to have a constant stream of hard rockin’ albums to share with us and never let up on the quality or determination which flies out of the speakers. Le Force are described as a ‘chrome plated predatory falcon’ on the label’s website, and that’s a pretty good description – they’re sleek, dangerous, erratic, and have small brains. No offence.

To my metal-illiterate ears this album reminds me immediately of the Fucking Champs; a (generally) vocals-free selection of super-tight riffs and mock-prog NWOBHM ‘explorations’. So in here we’ve got the devil-horn-sign metal rock (‘We may belong to you… but our souls belong to Satan’) through like, uh, deep music, dude (‘Sometimes everybody needs a tissue (trilogy)’) and right back to foot-on-monitor, hair-in-face, angular (both in shape and sound) guitars firing out missiles of rock’n’roll (‘The last nail in my coffin’). And nobody can argue with simple rock’n’roll in the crazed (Bush-led) world of today.

www.le-force.com
www.wantageusa.com

Economy Of Motion is a two-man outfit, made up of Chris Summerlin (he of diskant.net/Wolves! (Of Greece)/Reynolds/Damo Suzuki’s backing band/etc/etc) and Gareth Hardwick, and their electric guitars. Nothing more than that; no drums, no bass, no keyboards – it’s just electric guitars and the sounds made by them, looped, reverbed and effected-up.

It’s wonderful stuff – very relaxed, and relaxing, sound, with layers stretching and building over the course of five tracks and 35 minutes. The guitars are barely recognisable as guitars, except for a few picked notes here and there. The sounds created are so heavily treated that they’ve become pure tones, allowing the tracks to exist like floating masses, with moments of tension and feeling drifting gradually and slowly in and out. At times the sounds reminded me of Sonic Youth when they’re deep in a ‘noise break’ circa Evol, but really this CD reminds me much more of so-called ‘ambient’ or ‘minimal’ musicians such as Phill Niblock, Eno or Phillip Jeck.

www.honeyisfunny.com/eom

Anybody who’s anything to do with independent (in all senses of the word) music now – more than ever – owes it to themselves, and to all of us others who are involved, to keep on making the effort. A mainstay, whom it was all too easy to take for granted, is now gone.

Condolences to the Peel family. John will be sorely missed.