This is the first I’ve heard of Montana’s Touchers, but on the evidence of this, their sixth long-player, they are in a strange place. The sleeve folds out to reveal a collage including Nazi children, a three-breasted pinup model, several guillotines and many sharks. Perhaps The Underwater Fascist is a concept album, then, a meditation on aquatic fascism; but this isn’t obvious from the music here. Not that that’s a problem – the thirteen tracks need no over-arching theme to do their job. They do just fine as they are. And what they are is a dizzying collection of rockabilly rhythms, throat-shredding screeching vocals, upbeat pop melodies and an unhealthy bucketload of weirdness and threatening desperation.

The most obvious musical reference point is Come On Pilgrim-era Pixies: latino skipping timings, clean guitar lines and damaged-sounding vocals that veer from gruff proclamations to screaming outbursts. I have literally no idea what songs such as ‘Aphrodite Has Gone Mad’, ‘The Mattress Song’, ‘February 22nd 1975’ or ‘Brain’ might be about, but then I’ve never been much of a lyrical analyst. What Touchers are good at is creating an atmosphere of something, an ethereal weirdness that’s as unsettling as it is musical and listenable.

Tracks like ‘Michigan’, with its rolling drumbeats and frenetic strummed guitar, butt up against odd acoustic singalongs like ‘There’s The Rub’, which seems to open with the line “I think you are beautiful, but you are for the worms”. There’s certainly a variety of styles and moods on display here, but I guess that despite what I wrote earlier, an over-arching musical theme becomes apparent as the album comes to a close. Touchers sound like a little like many bands at times – Melvins, Pixies, even Butthole Surfers on the closing musique concrete noise of ‘Fire When Ready’ – but they retain a uniquely strange vibe and a confident grasp of whatever they’re about as a band. I’m still trying to work out what that is, but it’s certainly a positive thing.

Touchers

Indietracks is a festival where the worlds of indie-pop and trains collide. Not literally of course; that’d be horrendous. But it’s certainly a unique concept, mixing up a two-day festival of some excellent indie-pop with train-related fun. Organiser Stuart Mackay kindly answered some questions below, and even more kindly has offered a pair of free tickets to one of the lucky people that can answer the question at the end of the interview…

Tell us about Indietracks.
Indietracks predominately showcases indiepop music, which actually encompasses a surprisingly wide range of styles. We had our first night in April, a much smaller event with three bands playing on the station platform (Pocketbooks, Slow Down Tallahassee & Tottie), and in-between bands everyone went for a steam train ride with DJs (Spiral Scratch, Offbeat & Tastyzine) and dancing (and a bar!) on-board. It was an amazing success, hailed by many as the best indiepop event ever. But the formula meant it was also restrictive in numbers, and so our ideas for a second event grew and grew until they became this two day festival.

What should a visitor to the festival expect?
This event’s at a different station from the first, so visitors will need to catch a steam train to get to the festival site where there’ll be an outdoor stage and a smaller stage in a church. The festival arena, out in the Derbyshire countryside, is surrounded by museums – featuring railways, static power engines, buses and even a fork lift museum! There’s a railway shop, model railways and a miniature railway offering rides. There’s things like a signal box you can go in and see how they work, and even a petting farm and a country park. And of course there’s steam and heritage diesel trains running all day, you can go for a ride whenever you like! There may be some acoustic sets on board these trains. Everything is included in the ticket price other than the miniature railway, and family friendly. We’re not offering camping on the railway, but there is a caravan / campsite a few minutes walk away.

What is the steam train/railways connection all about?
Nothing really inspirational behind it, unfortunately. I’ve worked at the railway for a number of years, restoring old trains back to running order. We regularly hire out the train with the disco carriage for birthday parties, weddings etc. and I eventually got round to thinking it might be a place where gigs could be held. I nearly didn’t go ahead with it because of the out of the way location, and there’s no normal train service to Ripley, but I needed have worried, the April event sold out three months in advance! There’s good bus services here from Derby and Nottingham, so it isn’t that hard to get here.

Will there be more Indietracks events in the future
Fingers crossed the festival will become an annual fixture! We’re well advanced with the concept for the Christmas event. They won’t be held all that regular, to help keep them novel.

What parts of the lineup are you most excited about?
Without a doubt Rose McDowell! One of the first bands I ever saw live was Strawberry Switchblade, more than twenty years ago. I’ve listened to them regularly ever since, and so I was absolutely delighted when Rose accepted the invitation to come and play, and to include some Strawberry Switchblade songs in her set. Cats On Fire I’m also excited about seeing again, they deserve to be huge. But there are many others I won’t miss, in a way it’s quite a personal festival as I got to ask along all my favourite bands!

Visit the festival website for more information and a full line-up.

Interested in those free tickets? Just e-mail simonminter@diskant.net, along with your full name and address.

The winner will be drawn and contacted on Sunday 15 July. They’ll get free tickets, but will need to organise transport to the festival and accommodation themselves.

For the next few months the Beatnik Filmstars are offering a free EP (a real, physical EP, none of your daft digital download nonsense) to anyone who answers a few BF-related questions. See here. All you pay for is the postage. Free noisy indie-pop music! FREE!

Def Jux release some good records. If you visit their homepage right now, you’ll see a mysterious code. Work out what it means and you might win $150 to squander on Def Jux goodness. Bosh.

In one of those strange collisions between music and, er, cordwainery, Johnny Marr (ie the bloke from The Smiths and latterly Modest Mouse) has designed a rather nice-looking shoe. Take a look here. You collector types will love it, as only 216 pairs will be made. They’re to be sold via eBay from 10 July, with the proceeds going to a good cause.

Isn’t that nice. Perhaps the shoes will make one a better guitar player. Perhaps not.

Ten tracks of bizarre, semi-electronic strangeness from this mysterious outfit who sound like they’re improvising under the influence of a furious combination of amphetamines and hallucinogenics. Apparently this CD is the result of many hours of freeform experiment, subsequently chopped down – but not overdubbed or remixed – to form these ‘songs’.

Initially this makes me think of the band in Driller Killer – confrontationally strange, whacked-out punks hammering relentlessly away at some kind of groove, with yelped vocals echoing all over the resultant mess. The music is made with, in the main, a standard instrumentation of drums, bass and guitars, but augmented with electronic swoops and glitches, trumpet, turntable noise and a rich variety of effects.

By the fourth or fifth track, it becomes clear that The Wire Orchestra are mainly about rhythm – either in the form of syncopated drum patterns, vaguely funk-driven basslines or super-repetitive guitar lines. This makes me line them up along with bands like Silver Apples, Can, early Soft Machine or This Heat!: standard pop music dissected and repeated into a form that’s highly experimental yet strangely approachable.

Like Sunburned Hand Of The Man or Vibracathedral Orchestra in spirit more than in sound, The Wire Orchestra seem to happily exist within the moment of their own tunes. It’s not consistently successful or even – at times – musical, but there are many moments on this CD where things lock in to something primal – a fuzz bassline, or an alignment of instruments into pure rhythm. For these moments alone, I can happily listen to these tracks over and over.

MT6 Records

This five-track, 36-minute collection from Vibracathedral Orchestra’s Bridget Hayden is something of an aural companion to the scrawled, handmade dream diaries to be found on her website. It’s random, messy and hints at hidden messages and meanings behind a childlike scribble of ideas.

‘My steel game’ opens proceedings like a distorted, spliced-up blues jam – subtly-treated stabs of fretboard exploration butting up against fuzzy, wandering low-register notes, before opening out into layers of drone and broken-up noise. The effect is disorienting, especially when the first snippets of speeded-up tape (later to return throughout the CD) are thrown into the mix. ‘They’ve sent me to a trust Assylum’ is more of the same, albeit in a heavier, more aggressive-sounding form, with thick slabs of fuzztone and screech underpinning the sound.

‘Your heart is your thumb’s usher’ switches mood to something akin to the Eraserhead soundtrack – odd, humanistic wails and childlike melodies floating above smeared, distorted sheets of sound. It segues into ‘Cracked open’, which is a lighter, super-high-tone take on the same components, before abruptly turning into the nineteen-minute finisher ‘Do I have to speak in heat?’. This final piece takes its time to grow, beginning with eight minutes of churning, low-key feedback and echo before drifting off into a stack of speaker hums, tones and supernatural voices before gradually eating itself into a dense finishing point, reintroducing the tape snippets from earlier on and ultimately dissolving into a mess of guitar.

This is pretty opaque stuff – there’s not much in the way of melody, strict rhythm or convention to guide the listener along. However, the intimacy of the home recordings, reflected in the homemade tissue paper and paint envelope it’s packaged in, is charming and intriguing. As an exercise in feedback and guitar manipulation, or perhaps the earlier-mentioned aural manifestation of dreams, it’s very effective.

Bridget Hayden
Buy the CD at Volcanic Tongue

Here is some fun footage of QOTSA working on their new album Era Vulgaris. And here’s the track list:

01. Turning on the Screw
02. Sick, Sick, Sick
03. I’m Designer
04. Into the Hollow
05. Misfit Love
06. Battery Acid
07. Make It Wit Chu
08. 3’s & 7’s
09. Suture Up Your Future
10. River in the Road
11. Run Pig Run

Isn’t that nice. I hope all of the songs use the synth sound featured in that footage, as it’s a good sound.

Brian Christianzio, aka B.C. Camplight, makes quirky and perky pop tunes with a rich array of instrumentation and orchestration. Like Grandaddy, recent Flaming Lips and the just-mentioned-on-these-pages Dr. Dog, this is easier on guitars than us indie kids might be comfortable with; it’s full of plinking piano, plonking trumpet and all kinds of other things thrown into the mix.

It’s more show-tunes than tortured soul music: for the majority of Blink of a Nihilist, lyrics of love and confusion are swamped in a heady brew of arrangement and relentlessly melodic and tuneful experimentation. At times it gets too much; the odd second or two of trumpet or strings dropped into tracks like ‘Soy Tonto!’ and ‘The Hip and the Homeless’ seems forced, whilst the waltz or bossanova rhythms employed by tracks like ‘Werewolf Waltz’ suggest a half-hearted stab at Beck’s Tropicalia-infused Mutations.

For all its (admittedly minor) faults, this is constantly interesting and diverting listening. Near the end of the album, on ‘I’ve Got A Bad Cold’, Christianzio/Camplight suddenly reigns in the weirdness and offers Brian-Wilson-all-over multi-part harmonies; seemingly his own teenage symphony to God, and at last a chance for emotion to come to the surface. It’s this track that makes me think there’s more to this guy than what could seem to be shallow exercises in form over function. For that, I have listened again to the album with renewed belief and interest in an out-there, but definitely real songwriter.

B.C. Camplight
One Little Indian

Yellow6’s new album, the latest in a long line that stretches back to the late ’90s, isn’t a radical change of direction. It’s more another step in a slow exploration of floating, freeform sound that occasionally gets captured onto a recording medium. The fundamental template for this music is based on the careful selection of picked guitar lines, which echo forever and mould themselves into a backdrop of lush, rich blurs of sound.

Over Painted Sky‘s ten tracks, which run together to total slightly over an hour of music, time and care are employed to let each grow from nothing, weave their way around the room and then dissipate away. This isn’t music of dramatic textural changes a la Mogwai or Explosions in the Sky, but it’s like the music of those bands stretched way, way out so that their components are placed on display for our examination.

The album’s recorded in a close, intimate fashion – scrapes of guitar strings are evident, and everything is balanced to fill the listener’s head with layers of delicate and defined melody. The overall effect is to create a drifting-in-space feel of exhilaratingly sparse thoughtfulness, that could be used to define the phrase ‘head music’. On some of the tracks here (‘Common’, ‘Eighteen Days’, ‘Maré’ and ‘Azure’) the dreamlike washes of sound are augmented by beats, but for me Yellow6 are at their best when they leave textures floating in the air without such grounding. The utterly desolate ‘Realisation’ and the mournful ‘I know I shouldn’t (but I do)’ are outstandingly cloying. They reflect the work of Angelo Badalementi, The Workhouse, Earth, even Slint, but are so fixated on their own specific sound that they are as if no other music exists whilst you’re listening.

Yellow6
Resonant