This from the most recent Volcanic Tongue e-mail update:

“Totally vile artwork on this new ultra-limited handcut lathe courtesy of Nate Young of Wolf Eyes’ AA records from European actionist Andy Bolus. Sound is suitably disgusting noise mong with blasts of automaton crud and a particularly queasy aspect that’s all his own.”

…but can I dance to it? That’s what I’m asking.

You have to love the stupidity/pretentiousness of the underground noise scene at times!

Buy records here: Volcanic Tongue

I ended my review of TD Lind’s previous single ‘Come In From The Cold’ with the suggestion that he ‘could be pushed into the mainstream with the help of a hitmaking producer and an integrity-free manager’. What do you know, on ‘Radio Proposal’ that seems to have happened. Kind of.

Admittedly, the producer here is Lind himself, and I can’t say who he’s managed by. But where his previous single was a chirpy blues number without many connections to the current foibles of mainstream music, ‘Radio Proposal’ borrows from the mid-70s pop stylings of Supertramp or Godley & Creme (and, perhaps tellingly, with their recent success, The Feeling). It’s all one-two-one-two rhythms, plonking goodtime piano and overblown production. It’s not particularly offensive or unpleasant, just strange as a follow-up to TD Lind’s previous single – simplicity and subtlety replaced by pomp and musical-comedy style arrangements.

For my money, it’s one of the other two songs on the CD that proves a better indication that Lind is capable of more interesting work. ‘Last Kiss’ echoes ‘Come In From The Cold’ with quiet and repetitive backing music to a simple vocal delivery, building and receding in intensity and featuring a bowed saw solo that is as bizarre as it is pleasing.

On the basis of the two singles I’ve heard, TD Lind is slightly struggling to find his stylistic feet. If he can choose the path of invention that seems open to him, he could fare very well.

TD Lind

So it seems that NME, the “world’s greatest rock weekly” (a quote that would have applied pre-1990 more readily than it does today) wants a new features editor:

Department: NME
Contact: To apply please complete the following potential cover feature treatment for three bands: The Twang, My Chemical Romance and Razorlight

– Cover photo concept/structure
– Main cover sell
– Feature picture concept
– Feature headline
– Feature sell
– Brief for the feature with word count
– Two potential feature pull-quotes

Include a CV and email to: editor@nme.com

Closing Date: 23rd February 2007
Email: editor@nme.com
Reference: (M&S608)

(Also see here)

Get your applications in today, people, and you could be hyping the next flash-in-the-pan self-created ‘scene’ within weeks. Bring on New-Nu-Post-Rave!

In other news, the new IPC Media logo has effortlessly repositioned them into what looks like a local graphic design company from the mid-1980s.

What with Arctic Monkeys, Futureheads and the (geographically realigned from Oxford to Ashby de la Zouche) Young Knives all achieving varying degrees of success and fame lately, not to mention the constantly impressive output of bands from places like Leeds and Nottingham, it seems that a non-Southern demographic is driving a lot of indie music these days. That’s not to say that London isn’t still a focus for bands and the music industry, but it’s interesting that bands that exist in distant locations, far from the perceived centre of music, seem to have much more fun in their music. It’s refreshing to hear enjoyment and silliness in music at times, as opposed to relentless grit and ‘real’-ness.

Dartz! have no short supply of bouncing, ‘up’ songs, on the basis of this, their debut album. They’re at the connecting point of the melodic straightforwardness evident in the music of the aforementioned bands, and the complex guitar patterns and syncopated rhythm structures of more hip, in-the-know outfits like Battles and Foals. What stops Dartz! from turning out twelve songs of middling copyist style-over-content short term appeal – which is, I’m sure, all that many of their contemporaries are capable of – is a genuine skill at assembling songs and injecting just enough individuality to hint at great things to come.

So for every melody-rich, comfortably familiar tune like previous single ‘Once, twice, again!’ or ‘Laser Eyers’, which fit right in with the listening habits of hip young haircuts about town, there is a glimpse into a depth of ingenuity and quality evident here. Be it ‘Prego Triangolos’ with its falsetto backing vocals, ‘St. Petersburg’ with its ridiculously catchy funk rhythm section, or the unnamed secret track which effortlessly develops Tortoise-like lazy repetitions into dreamy Explosions In The Sky-style layers of distortion and echo, Dartz! have done on this album what I hoped they would. They’ve taken a template of influences and style which currently works well for many bands right now, and started to twist it with their own ideas and skill into something new. What’s very exciting is that they seem to be able to capture that magic combination of radio-friendly recognition and beard-stroker-friendly quirkiness. This is how bands become influential, rather than being purely based on their influences.

Dartz!
Xtra Mile Recordings

A bit of market research, if you all don’t mind. We here at diskant are eager to hear your suggestions for bands and labels (and indeed anything else) that you would like to see featured/interviewed on the site. We can’t promise anything (especially if you want to see an interview with Elton John or something), but it’d be great to get some ideas about stuff to cover here.

You can see some of the other people we’ve covered here: www.diskant.net/features/index.htm.

Feel free to leave suggestions as comments on this post, or alternatively you can e-mail Marceline or I at the usual addresses… thanks!

From the illustration on the front cover (businessman with briefcase, with clockwork winder emerging from his back – do you see?) to lyrics such as these…

“Music ain’t the only means of venting our frustrations
But we can use it to provoke some emotion
Apathy is taking hold of our jilted generation”
(‘Generation Next’)

“Some say that they are ravers
Some say they’re rock and roll
But I for one like music based on
quality control”
(‘Wind up toys’)

…it’s clear that Capdown have a chip on their shoulder about something, and across its twelve tracks, this album is almost relentless proselytising. They want us to get what they’re telling us, but what that is doesn’t seem to be exactly clear. It seems to be something about there being a lot of fakers in the music industry, and a lot of people somehow not living their lives with the same free spirit as they.

Now that’s all fine, I don’t have a problem with it being reaffirmed that the world, and the music industry, isn’t the most honest, truthful or original place. But a small alarm goes off somewhere when lyrics like…

“…up until now all you seem to put out
Is a badly played version of Blink meets No Doubt”

…when it’s tied to such derivative ska-punk as is scattered across this album. Putting these double standards aside, and accepting the fact that Capdown may have been doing this stuff for long enough to have at least some longevity points, there are some perfectly solid songs here. Angry-sounding guitars and clanging rhythms are tied to the odd sax squonk and that immediately familiar wailing vocal style so favoured by our ska-punk brethren, but it’s not all so one-dimensional.

In its less vocally-reliant passages, the music here can be thunderingly engaging. At times – such as hardcore-styled ‘Thrash Tuesday’ or the riffed-up ‘Keeping Up Appearances’ – Capdown show some different sides to their seemingly singular style. It just seems to not quite ring true that this album, proclaiming vociferously the downfall of modern music/the world, sounds like the work of so many other bands. Are they bringing down the system from within, or naively contributing to the very things they seem to be railing against?

Capdown
Fierce Panda

Since their early days as Dustball, Dive Dive have always maintained a certain steady handed reliability, and been a super-tight live band with a knack for a certain familiar type of poppy indie rock. As a recorded prospect, however, they’ve left me slightly cold in the past, and it’s been hard to think of them as much beyond one of very many such bands like Jetplane Landing, Ash, Econoline and so on. A good band, don’t get me wrong, just not yet a great band.

I was hoping that this album might be the one that tips the scale toward greatness. For the first few tracks, it seems like it might not happen, and then a trio of songs – ‘Maybe I’m OK’, ‘Holding Back the Broken Door’ and ‘Take It, It’s Yours’ – solidify all of the glimpses of magic that Dive Dive have been hinting at over the past couple of years.

‘Maybe I’m OK’ leaps from its plaintive intro into a looping, loping guitar riff, before turning several melodic corners that take the never-not-hip angular guitar rock template and jam it artfully into a radio-friendly pop-shaped hole. ‘Holding Back the Broken Door’ takes its lead from early Placebo – it’s all vibrato vocals and guitar interplay over a relentlessly together rhythm section. ‘Take It, It’s Yours’ slows down the pace, with social-commentary lyrics developing a song from simple beginnings into a layered festival singalong tour de force: complete with requisite noisy forays and head-nodding bouncy bassline.

By the time these three short songs have passed, it’s clear that Dive Dive have finally nailed down what makes their live shows so enjoyable – on-the-money performances and arrangement, the combined forces of accessible melody and quirky dissonance, and enough stylistic breadth to maintain interest – and put it into recorded form. This is equally an aggressive, sensitive and playful album, and all the better for its self-imposed awkwardness. Like previous Oxford bands before them (Youthmovies and The Young Knives, for example) Dive Dive are attaining that rare combination of mainstream and experiment; familiarity and challenge.

Dive Dive

Just heard about this on the radio. ‘Ballads of the Book’ is a new project featuring collaborations between a variety of Scottish musicians and writers – Idlewild, Norman Blake, King Creosote, Sons and Daughters, Ian Rankin, Edwin Morgan and lots more. A good idea? A vaguely-famous-people vanity project? An affirmation of Scottish culture and originality?

More here: http://www.idlewild.co.uk/html/ballads.html

Catchy, goodtime, hi-hat-riding guitar pop, with many of the Current Indie Vogue boxes ticked (Stop-start guitar lines? Break for handclaps? Sounds a bit new wave? Tick, tick, tick). ‘Once, twice, again!’ hasn’t done much to advance the Dartz! sound since their previous release, but it’s still a perfectly get-up-and-go slice of infectiousness that would, if you can ignore the extreme Futureheads similarities, work brilliantly in a live context.

The dual forces of math rock skronk and new wave upbeat pop have been converging for some time, and Dartz! are right on that faultline – clear guitar melodies and vocals tightly bound to a jumpy, tight rhythm section. I still hope that they’ll be the one of the bands that drags an increasingly familiar sound into new territories, that brings something truly new into the world, but unfortunately this single isn’t going to kickstart that particular revolution.

Dartz!
Xtra Mile Recordings

I never heard Million Dead, Frank Turner’s previous band and a reference point that seems unconditionally attached to any mention of his name. Regardless of what they sounded like, on Sleep is for the week Turner’s music comes across as a blend of straightforward indie rock and folky strum, with a certain Celtic tinge to the vocal phrasing; lyrics to the fore and a selection of backing instrumentation ranging from simple acoustic guitar to rich, full band arrangements.

As with any singer-songwriter music, the words are the focus here. The lyrical content rarely deviates from a self-deprecating, self-examining stream of consciousness; obscure and tricky lyrics aren’t Turner’s thing, he’s all about baring the soul with descriptive words tied to specific situations and memories. At times the relentless self-focus and miserablism can grate – the heartless cynic in me wants to shake Turner out of his self-obsessed exclamations of unworthiness on tracks like ‘Romantic Fatigue’ and ‘Wisdom Teeth’. However, when such lyrics are delivered with less of a wearisome sense of irony and humour, and tied to either a richer, more dynamic melodic backing (‘The Ladies of London Town’) or an intimate, heartfelt reading (‘Must Try Harder’), they can really work.

This album presents Turner as being a nice guy, desperate to make friends, and eager to remind us of his shortcomings and hangups. The difficulty of this situation is that if you’re not in the mood for dealing with a needy friend, an indie loser complaining about his girl troubles over a pint at Nambucca, Turner can outstay his welcome with not quite enough glimmers of magic in his music. But then again, maybe we should be a better, more tolerant friend.

Frank Turner
Xtra Mile Recordings