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diskant is an independent music community based in Glasgow, Scotland and we have a whole team of people from all over the UK and beyond writing about independent music and culture, from interviews with new and established bands and labels to record and fanzine reviews and articles on art, festivals and politics. There's over ten years of content here so dig in!

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a good band: The French Quarter

Posted: October 26th, 2008, by Simon Minter

Sorta post-rock, sorta like Appliance, they sound warm and uplifting:

The French Quarter Myspace page

diskant rewind: Mild Head Injury #18

Posted: October 24th, 2008, by Simon Minter

(Originally posted February 2004)

Mild Head Injury by Simon Minter

Looks like it might be time for another column – all the signs are falling into place: a parcel of review goodies turned up from the boss this morning, I’ve got the day off work, and it is currently blizzarding outside to an extent that makes me think not only that there’s no way I’m leaving my house at the moment, but also that I may never leave the house again. So here I sit in my warm reviewing chamber, cup of coffee before me, with a pile of stuff to tell you about. This column’s theme? Here’s a load of records and CDs which I’ve bought and which I’ve been sent to review. What a concept, eh?

Füxa We could be together (7″, The Great Pop Supplement gps06)
Kinski I guess I’m falling in love (7″, The Great Pop Supplement gps07)
The latest two releases from the wonderful Great Pop Supplement, the label dedicated to releasing beautifully packaged, carefully chosen, stupidly limited (111 copies per release) records. Füxa offer two mellow, melodic and warm dreampop songs, which almost sound like two halves of the same ‘piece’. A trumpet plays out vocal-style melodies over sleepy, pleasant backdrops, and the general feeling created, to place it in the current meteorological context, is one of a warm sweater and a log fire to counter the freezing conditions outside. Kinski’s record is wrapped in a hand-sprayed silver foil sleeve, which is most attractive. Strange tunes these ones; ‘I guess I’m falling in love’ is a low fidelity, simplistic and repetitive barre chord-workout which falls somewhere in between drone rock heaven and ‘first band’ nervousness. Like Stereolab, aged seventeen, playing Stooges covers in a rehearsal room. Or something. However, flipside ‘Hiding drugs in the temple’ is the sound of a warped tape playing at the wrong speed. Seriously – that’s it. Not meaning to sound old or out of touch, but is it supposed to sound like that?

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diskant rewind: Mild Head Injury #17

Posted: October 21st, 2008, by Simon Minter

(Originally posted October 2003)

Mild Head Injury by Simon Minter

INCOMING!

Wow, hey, look at this great big pile of records and CDs I have before me, which I should have been listening to diligently and reviewing regularly. It’s almost like I haven’t written any reviews for ages, and like I’ve been neglecting my solemn duty to keep you informed of, er, musical things. Let me try and address this problem. Some of the things you read about below may be slightly out of date – but such is the nature of the internet. Anyway, how do I know that you’re not reading this in 2056?

I have to be honest with you. I have no recollection about where this first CD by Calamateur, called ‘Tiny pushes vol.1 (how to be childlike)’, came from. As good a place to start as any though, eh? Weirdly, although this is a CD, this whole collection is available to download for free here. Hey, don’t worry too much about big slow download times either, because the whole ten songs clock in altogether at only around seventeen minutes. It’s worth downloading the whole lot too, as some of the tracks individually are cut-up snippets and fragments of random samples and sounds, and so it’s best listened to as a whole – the more ‘song’-like tracks (which, even then, are only glimpses of ideas) being interspersed with passages of vaguely electronic, vaguely dreamlike strangeness. It’s hard to get a grip on where Calamateur are at, but from this selection, they seem to exist in a world of half-asleep-yet-heartfelt acoustic songs in a suitably lo-fi style. They remind me of tapes which people used to put out in the old indiepop/underground cassette days, ideas committed to magnetic tape before too much refinement comes into play. An interesting listen which makes me want to hear more – hopefully, their invention and reluctance to submit to traditional songwriting rules is carried throughout their other work.

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diskant rewind: Mild Head Injury #16

Posted: October 17th, 2008, by Simon Minter

(Originally posted April 2003)

Mild Head Injury by Simon Minter

This week, or month, or year, or however often I do these columns during brief moments of lucidity and calm, I’ll be approaching the affair in an altogether orthodox way. I have a pile of things to review. I’m going to review them. You will read the reviews. Your life will become better by an insignificant margin. My review pile is made up of actual things which people have sent for review, so who knows what might happen over the course of this column? Snap judgements? Rash decisions based on a first listen? Hell yeah! I’m never gonna land that choice reviewer’s job on the NME if I think about what I’m writing logically and rationally, am I?

JUXTAPOSITION
EP 5-track CD
This is one o’those oh-so-modern CDs with a silver side and a black side, like you get with Playstation games. Modern technology, huh? Next you’ll be telling me that they can record sound onto thin strips of magnetic ribbon. Anyway. This is a very well-recorded, cut crystal set of songs which roughly exist in the 50% “melodic epic indie” (Coldplay, James et al) + 50% “slightly odd noisy pop” (more recent Flaming Lips, Grandaddy etc) brackets. To me, personally, this means that it is unfortunately 50% “slightly annoying” as my tastes tend to fall into more skewed and bizarre brackets these days. However, I am in full appreciation of the care and attention with which this has been put together, which makes me realise that the band aren’t just some random chances who are playing at music. Self-belief is always refreshing to see in today’s climate of cynical and manipulated/manipulative bands.
www.capturedmango.co.uk

GRANDMASTER GARETH
Introduction to Minute Melodies CD album
Awkward Records AWKWARD 005
Hmm strange one this, thirty one-minute long songs/compositions which I entirely imagine to have been created by a strange loner sitting in a dark room at a computer and giggling to himself. The album takes us through a series of somewhat frustrating and aggravating ‘sound sketches’ (and hey, you can use that phrase if you like), taking in hallucinogenically-enhanced children’s television show themes, cod-hip-hop, sub-musique concrete word poems and general ‘ho ho I’m so funny’ experiments with samples and sound effects. It all sounds like it’s been created with a sustained blast of ‘messing around with my new music software and seeing what happens’. Over thirty tracks, despite their short nature, I’m afraid to say it gets kind of grating, and makes me that the album has been created for self-amusement rather than as any kind of grand musical statement. But I’m in two minds about whether that’s actually a bad thing or not…
www.awkward-records.co.uk

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diskant rewind: Mild Head Injury #15

Posted: October 14th, 2008, by Simon Minter

(Originally posted December 2002)

Mild Head Injury by Simon Minter

Ah, hello again everybody. I hope this finds you all in good health and in good spirits, and not with a sore thumb like I’ve got, after accidentally stabbing myself with a scalpel earlier on. So you’ll be expecting a column, I presume? Well, here you go. I’m going to break with convention this time and do one in the most straightforward way possible – yes, this is going to be a list of reviews, and nothing else besides! You see, I have a few things here which I am obliged or feel compelled to write about, and in either instance I know that I’ll feel bad if I don’t write about them. Being the logical creature that I am, I’ve put them in a pile in front of me and will be going through them one by one, reminding myself of each of them one by one, and telling you about them one by one. That is, if my damned CD player ever realises there’s a CD in it, rather than spinning aimlessly and forcing me to try out all kinds of stop/start/skip-track trickery in order to get it to play.

LEMON JELLY
CD single
Not exactly sure what this is, as the (rather attractive) packaging has no mention of artist, songs, names, anything. It turned up with a note from Marceline along the lines of “the one with the nice packaging is Lemon Jelly, one of those electronic bands”. I suspected I heard the Lemon Jelly name before, and in the back of my mind seemed to remember them as a horrendously ‘accessible’ trip-hop-dance-lite kind of outfit. And lo, I was right! For shatter my knees if this isn’t a god-awful trio of tracks which in no way challenge, add to, upset, make you think about, or reinforce one’s interest in the musical landscape WHATSOEVER. Rather attractive packaging, though. Anybody want it? My CD player’s just refused to carry on playing it!
www.lemonjelly.ky

ECONOLINE
Full tar
CD single
A taster of what’s to come on their album (more of which later…), ‘Full tar’ is an Econoline pop song, with catchy melody lines dipping their toes in and out of grimier, noisier waters. Great drums too, sounding like they were recorded at the bottom of a giant oil drum. Like all good pop songs it’s over in around two and a half minutes, leaving you wanting more and – were it not for the aforementioned album – scrabbling around for old Superchunk and Boyracer records. The two other tracks here, I presume, showcase the ‘other sides of Econoline’, being a slower, slightly introspective sort of tune and a fuzzy lo-fi recorded-at-home alternative-version sort of tune (the latter being a bit too much along the Graham Coxon intentionally reduced quality line for me…)
www.seriouslygroovy.com/econoline.htm

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diskant rewind: Mild Head Injury #14

Posted: October 10th, 2008, by Simon Minter

(Originally posted October 2002)

Mild Head Injury by Simon Minter

So hey yeah, there’s been a lot of great movies on television lately. And I’m not even talking about super-special they-beam-it-from-space satellite TV either, just those regular five channels are keeping me furnished with film treats… Maybe I’ve just never noticed before but it’s in your interests – every one of you – to scour the television listings on a weekly basis. You’ll be surprised at what you may find. You can then go on to videotape films you like, cover them in dust and show off to your friends about how long you’ve had such cool films on tape for – like, “what, you’ve never seen Alice In Acidland?“. But never, never make the mistake of actually letting those friends watch your videos, or they’ll immediately place their recording with a kind of modern carbon dating, through the adverts and so on, and show you up as the lying movie one-upper you always suspected you were.

So, er, anyway, I’ve watched on television recently films including Boogie Nights, Clueless, If…. and Casino, and due to the decaying moral structure of the country, such films are being cut less and less as time goes by, avoiding that whole “I’m sure there was a bit more violence in this film”-type scenario. Why, it’s like a cinema in your living room! Well, if you like your cinemas with a fake wooden surround and a thirty year old screen, it is (at least in my case). Comfortable chairs, though – they should definitely install sofas in cinemas.

It’s worth paying particular attention to the late-night TV listings too, as that’s where you’ll find all the weirdy indie flicks, 1950s B-movies and classic Hammer horror films, tucked away at 3.30am on a Wednesday morning. God bless the video recorder timer facility! It’s a whole galaxy of fun trying to work out whether a film is worth taping and watching or not from the 5-word (at a push) description of it. I favour the date/genre snap judgement; as in “1968 sexploitation”=hurray!; “1994 erotic drama with Shannon Tweed”=boo, and so on.

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diskant rewind: Mild Head Injury #13

Posted: October 7th, 2008, by Simon Minter

(Originally posted October 2002)

Mild Head Injury by Simon Minter

Without sounding too self-obsessed, I think that for this column I’m going to run through ‘the events of September 7’… that is, the AUDIOSCOPE festival, which I helped set up and which featured (among others, obviously) the band which I’m in. Is that self-obsessed? Am I self-obsessed for worrying about whether you think I’m self-obsessed? Arg. Oh well. If you don’t like it, turn off your TV and go and do something less boring instead, or something. Anyway, word up, it was a fine fine day and despite me obviously enjoying things in that certain special way which came from having helped make it happen, I was consistently to be found standing open-mouthed in front of bands thinking “wow, this band is actually something special…” A result, as they say! And it looks we raised about three thousand pounds for charity, too! (The charity being Shelter, who want everybody in the country to have a proper home, a worthwhile and honourable cause I hope you’ll all agree).

Anyway, first up was my band (me! me! me!) SUNNYVALE NOISE SUB-ELEMENT, and we played either (a) a stunning set of mindbending electronified existential punk rock music with effortless precision, or (b) a somewhat disappointing set marred by ‘bad sound’ (honest!), albeit with some very pleasant slides being shown at the same time. Take your pick from these decisions based on whether you (a) didn’t see us, or (b) did.

DUSTBALL appeared on stage next, with a surprisingly early slot (due to some rock and roll commitment or other) for one of Oxford’s favourite bands. Now I’ve seen Dustball play live a few times before, and always found them to pleasantly amiable, like a more raucous (early-) Ash or a less angry Hüsker Dü, like all catchy melodies and choppy chop chop noise guitars and so on. But this time, I’m not sure what it was, maybe they’d just had their Ready Brek or something, they were absolutely blindingly spot on! Fiercely confident in their songs and treading the thin line between audience-pleasing and audience-baiting. I know that they play live, like, 5 times a week or so, but they seem to have suddenly magicked up a stunner of a show which has let them become (to me, at least), a ‘real’ band instead of a ‘local’ band.

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diskant rewind: Mild Head Injury #12

Posted: October 3rd, 2008, by Simon Minter

(Originally posted August 2002)

Mild Head Injury by Simon Minter

Okay. OKAY! right. Moving on up! Woo. Here we go. I’m hoping that this column will be something of a halfway house between the shameless debacle of the last one (wherein I did write about nothing but gibberish), and those of the future (wherein I will cover interesting films in the hope of enlightening you to some non-Blockbuster fare.

I am now in Oxford, land of arty people and independent cinemas (or so I hope…) and yes! I have bought myself a shiny new silver space-age video recorder. This means that once I’ve got over slight agoraphobia and not-so-slight laziness, I will be making regular trips out to little steam-powered cinemas to catch all the weird and wonderful offerings available, and also scouring Blockbuster for the one or two good tapes they generally seem to have hidden behind the latest hit (with an ‘S’) movies. But this is yet to happen. So for now, I can do nothing more than present you with some reviews & opinions of the latest few films I’ve been seeing on video, which generally (although not exclusively, I hope) fall into the I’ve-already-seen-that category. Before I get going, a minor aside: is it just me, or has the quality of films being shown on television rapidly diminished lately? There used to be several ‘better tape that’ offerings I’d notice in the TV guide each week, generally on in the middle of the night, but just lately there doesn’t seem to be any action. Maybe it’s the gradual takeover of the airwaves by SPORT which is to blame. Grr.

First up: here’s an odd film which I felt compelled to buy upon seeing it cheap. GET WELL SOON (2001), starring Vincent Gallo (he of BUFFALO 66 fame) and Courteney Cox (of some programme called FRIENDS, apparently). According to the box, this is ‘a twisted romantic comedy in the spirit of There’s Something About Mary’. According to me, this is ‘a somewhat offensive attempt at making a quirky comedy, and simultaneously a waste of talent’. The premise is this – Gallo is a successful TV chat show host (in the mould of Leno, Letterman etc) who suddenly cracks on air, and decides to track down his childhood sweetheart (Cox) in New York, with a notion that getting back together with her will make his otherwise shallow, meaningless life take a fulfilling course once more. Not wanting to spoil the subtle, twisting plot, he does find her, and everything does turn out OK. Is that a surprise? It’s not a bad idea for a story – the weight of fame and adoration pushing a star to the brink of wanting to lose it all – but it’s strangely handled; Gallo’s particular reasons for losing it are not really explained, Cox’s initial reluctance to see him is not really explained, and the supporting characters are one-dimensionally ‘weird’. Several of the minor characters in the film reside in some kind of mental institution, seemingly for no other reason than to get some cheap ‘mad’ gags in there, and to reinforce all kinds of straight-jacket/mad-people-talking-to-themselves stereotypes. (Or maybe – hey – they’re sane, and so is Gallo, and everybody else is crazy. Huh ? No.)

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HEY COLOSSUS – Happy Birthday (CD, Riot Season)

Posted: October 1st, 2008, by Simon Minter

Killer album. Truly magnificent. Listening to this is like being dragged face-first into the deepest circle of Hell, via metal-drenched Birmingham and repetition-drenched Berlin. Fuck! Frighteningly addictive.

Hey Colossus
Riot Season

diskant rewind: Mild Head Injury #11

Posted: September 30th, 2008, by Simon Minter

(Originally posted August 2002)

Mild Head Injury by Simon Minter

Quick! I ran out of time to get a proper, well thought out, carefully structured and reasonably argued music column together, so I’ve instead thrown together a collection of quickly dashed off, barely thought through first impressions of a few CDs and records which have been passing through my crappy stereo of late. Now that’s professionalism.

Study of the Lifeless
CD, American Pop Project AMPOP207CD

Nasty, nasty cover; as if the sleeve of My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Loveless’ has been scanned in badly, and the contrast has been turned way up in Photoshop. And that’s a shame, because this album of shoegazey-style atmospheric music generally hits the spot in a ‘more upbeat Slowdive’ sort of way, with lots of blurry guitars and distant dual vocals. It falls short of the great heights of any MBV, or even Ride’s ‘Nowhere’ (probably because of the lack of aggression featured in much of those two examples), but it’s certainly a pleasing way to pass the time. >>>

Sterling Roswell
Girl from Orbit CD single
Mint/Jungle Records

Sterling Roswell used to be known as Rosco and used to be in Spacemen 3, which means he’s always going to be a stand-up kinda guy to some degree. This is his debut single as SR and sounds like the Shadows duelling with the Shadows of Knight in exceptionally slow motion, in an echo chamber, on the set of Battlestar Galactica, using instruments left behind by Phil Spector several decades earlier. And it can’t be made any clearer than that. It’s somewhat boring, though, strangely enough. Maybe he should have called himself Spacemen 1 and joined the ever-popular tribute band circuit. >>>

Sonic Youth
Murray Street CD
Geffen

On the Sonic Youth website at the moment it proudly features the quote ‘…their most accessible album in years’, which to me seems very wrong. Because whilst ‘Murray Street’ is a good album, full of beautiful melody and the usual intertwining/ meandering guitar lines which have become familiar over Sonic Youth’s recent couple of albums, it also leaves me wishing, to some degree, that they’d go back to their mid-80s peak of weirdosity and rock out in a goofy stylee some more. I love them, everybody knows I love them, and I’ll play this a lot. But not as much as I play ‘Sister’, ‘Evol’ or ‘Daydream Nation’. >>>

Misty’s Big Adventure
I am cool with a capital C CD single
Awkward Records AWKD003

Wow, this is weird, the press release drops all kind of names – Broadcast, Pram, Plone, Bentley Rhythm Ace – but this sounds like one of those literary style bands in the vein of Tindersticks, Jack and various things which used to come out on Setanta. It’s all eclectic instruments, self-consciously ‘knowing’ lyrics, pin-sharp production and arrangement, and I-just-wasn’t-made-for-these-times obliqueness. That’s all well and good, but music along these lines sometimes has a strange habit of making me angry… but I don’t want to burden you with my hangups. >>>

Phlegm, Telemak, Electroscope, Stasola, Francois Michaud
Lykill Records sampler CD

NOW! Watch me fit in detailed and explanatory descriptions of the three different records showcased on this CD. The Phlegm/Telemak 12″ is three tracks from the former (from soporific repetitive, wonderful intensity to angry, dazed riffing) and one from the latter (Rachel’s meets GYBE! in a random way). Electroscope and Stasola share a 7″ with scary-childrens’-books-stream of consciousness music on one side and Can-styled deranged and stretched out blues on the other. Francois Michaud and Stasola on another 7″ get all ‘le drum et le bass’ on your ass. This is a great CD. >>>

Primal Scream
Evil Heat LP
Columbia 508923 1

God bless you Primal Scream for sounding like a combination of early Pink Floyd, gospel choirs, Suicide, The Byrds, pissed-off Depeche Mode, Atari Teenage Riot, Motorhead, Loop, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Kraftwerk, The Fall, White Album-era Beatles, and all of your earlier records combined! This is a fantastic album which seems to have taken the angry elements of ‘Xtrmntr’ and made them angrier! A sharpened bolt of light directed straight into the centre of your eye. As a friend recently summed up, “Primal Scream! Fucking yes!!” >>>