It was our grumpy pals in Six By Seven who wearily trawled on about ‘another love song’, I believe, and here are two more to add to the list, as the Somatics offer us a quickfire one-two with ‘Did You Ever Love Me?’ backed with ‘We Never Loved You’. The Somatics featured Richard Green of Ultrasound, but there’s little of that band’s epic pomposity in The Somatics’ slimmed-down, taut arrangements – the lead track here is nicely composed but ultimately unremarkable frippery. You’d probably hum along to it if it found its way onto daytime radio, but it’s too insubstantial to hold up to too much repeated listening. Angel Delight rock.

Perversely, the tracks get better from here – trebly guitars bolt out of the traps on ‘We Never Loved You’, and the song as a whole is powered by an urgency that puts the opener to shame. And over the six minutes of ‘Waiting’, the band open themselves up to exploring what they can do at leisure. Onerous pre-delay on the vocals thankfully sits low enough in the mix to avoid intruding too much, allowing guitar and keyboard drones gradually engulf the track until we’re in early nineties dream-pop territory. Can’t help the feeling that the band are reining themselves in throughout the three tracks, though, and are capable of much more interesting stuff. Here’s hoping.

The Somatics

Now this is more like it. The 7″ from top Scottish art-rock types Alamos comes with a nice hand-written letter musing about everything from what they’ve been up to recently to the rise of Franz Ferdinand and how this here record came to be in the first place. Charming, and not a hint of wanting to rub the human race’s face in its own vomit. It’s enough to make me want to be their penpals, but I should probably limit myself to listening to the single. ‘Kill Baby Kill’ is a sharp-edged little beast, coming over like a less embittered McLusky: overdriven basslines and Magazine-like guitar figures tumbling over each other in a race to the middle eight, where they replace what lesser bands might fill with a feeble solo by cranking up the Angular-o-meter to, ooh, eight (which makes it less jagged than Nation of Ulysses, but more all over the place than GVSB on the scale I’ve just made up). Imagine Franz Ferdinand playing Jawbreaker songs, and if that sounds like your bag, then my notes tell me the single’s out today, so check it out.

Alamos
Pet Piranha Records

Help me, I am in GOFF HELL.

Ultranoir – it means really, really black, y’know. Their demo comes with a Manifesto of Noirism (no, really), which variously describes the band as “the vacant content of everyday” and “whores of the self-repeating cliches of the commodity known as art”. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but their take on things seems to descend directly from the tenets of futurism and surrealism… nope, hang on, snakebite and black and pewter jewellery with dragons on it. Anyway, the music. Kicks off with sample from The Prisoner – yes, the same sample as Iron Maiden used back in the day, but let’s not hold that against them, eh. What we might hold against them is that their first tune is called ‘Angst Macht Frei’, and sounds like a six-year-old Trent Reznor pissing about with his first Goth-O-Matic Doom Anthem machine. You’d warm to it a bit more if it was presented with a twinkle in the eye, but it’s all Neil Gaiman, role playing games and Crow sleepovers round these parts. Even the CD is black, goddammit.

While there’s a certain ice cold bleakness permeating ‘Schoolboy Deathwish’ that makes me think this could quite easily have formed an alternative soundtrack to some Cure completist’s musings while they waited for Robert Smith to pour out his latest, the biggest problem is that the pomposity of the sentiments accompanying the CD is in no sense matched by the music. For the most part, it’s GOFF-by-numbers dark synth pop, which – naturally – has little in the way of soul, but also nothing individual enough about it to separate it from the pack, or to back up their overwrought posturing. Ultranoir’s parting shot is “making sure each drop of their sweat, blood and piss is going to the eyes of the ones who don’t care”. I’m keeping well out of their way until they CHEER UP.

Ultranoir

I must confess to having been unduly excited by the prospect of this dropping through my letterbox, constituting as it does an overview of bands from in and around Derby. I’m an East Midlands boy myself, but having spent far more time in venues in Nottingham and Leicester and then decamped to Oxford, my experience of Derby’s bands only goes as far as Intentions of an Asteroid, Fixit Kid and a few others at the Victoria.

So it was with some enthusiasm that I started to dig my way through the eighteen tracks on offer here, and it seems like there are enough interesting things going on in the Derby area to hold up to most cities in the UK. Sure, there are a few moments of lumpen metal or generic punk rock that I can happily live without, but there are also plenty of highlights, including:

The Minor Fall – ‘Ivory Sirens’: Echoey guitar work and a pyromaniacal lyrical edge lend this a bit of an epic eighties feel – this’d go very well on a nicely-packaged 4AD 12″.
Lardpony – ‘I’m In Love (With a Noxious Gas)’: A quirky synth-pop departure from the serious guitar noise on offer elsewhere. A song about the insubstantiality of love through the medium of falling in love with various gaseous substances (no, really) with some nice burbling keyboards. Top marks for rhyming ‘pores’ with ‘weeping sores’, too.
Fixit Kid – ‘Horrible B’: Hurrah! Fixit Kid are still ace. Big slabs of guitar that sound not unlike the opening of ‘Il Porno Star’ by Shellac rough you up a bit, before they turn the aggression up to eleven with a convincing display of focused noise.
The Atoms – ‘Don’t Wanna Disco’: Cutesy disco pop a bit like The Bangs if they?d gone to the Blue Note every Friday during their formative years. Tsk, ex-girlfriends, eh?
You Judas – ‘Rats With Wings’: A fantastic, brooding soundtrack to all manner of wholesome activities, like strangling or poisoning. Brings me to mind of Part Chimp covering ‘Sweet Young Thing Ain’t Sweet No More’, and the towering instrumental coda really means business. This is excellent.

And the clincher? The compilation?s only three quid. Including postage. You can own Derby(shire) for THREE QUID. Off you go.

Stressed Records

Now there’s nothing like wearing yer influences on your sleeve, but for large portions of this split, The Boyfriends are completely in love with the idea of being The Smiths the way you might have been in love with Morrissey before he came over all rubbish. First track ‘No Tomorrow’ is all precise enunciation and loping Hook bassline. The chiming guitars and booming baritone promise great 80s-inspired fun, but the whole thing’s weighed down by some pretty hackneyed lyrics: “Live like there’s no tomorrow/ This very day could be your last” and variations thereon. Second track ‘I Love You’, although it’s the 387th song I’ve heard by that title, pushes things a bit further, opening with a torrid squall of white noise that makes me sit up and listen. But unfortunately I then find myself listening to couplets like “Cupid’s scored a direct hit/I’d do anything for you” – more’s the pity, sung without a trace of the detached humour that might save the lyrics from the banality to which they unfortunately consign what is otherwise a pretty decent tune.

On the flip, we get a couple of tracks from The Long Blondes, who presumably would make a lovely couple with the Boyfriends, and whose take on things is pretty straightforward, female-fronted jangly pop music of the sort that’s been on seven inches for decades and will hopefully remain so for a long time to come. ‘Autonomy Boy’ crosses the line between the punkier edge of Comet Gain and The Would-Be-Goods stripped of much of their tweeness. A promising start, but the (roughly) eponymic ‘Long Blonde’ is loads more fun, adding a rough-hewn surf-pop edge and a welcome change of pace in the spoken-word middle eight. The Ramones, relationships and rock ‘n’ roll – these girls sing about the important things.

The Boyfriends
The Long Blondes

Hurrah! I bought some 7″s last week, and have just got around to giving ’em a listen. And three cheers for vinyl with good things etched thereon, they’re both grand. That I’m a fan of London-based Italians Querelle should come as no surprise to anyone who’s read this, but I’d only previously heard them live. ‘Invisible’, their contribution to this split with The Dudley Corporation is a crystalline and affecting, if brief, tug on the ol’ heartstrings. The guitar and bass lines snake around each other like prime Unwound, while there’s more than a shade of Blonde Redhead about the song’s emotional resonance. Warm and comforting like your favourite person on a cold day. On the flip, the Corpo throw out ‘Safety Shot’, which starts off a bit more lightweight. Coming over like an extremely well stitched-together patchwork of flighty pop and rousing emo, it doesn’t really get going until the guitars decide to show us what they can do in the final third, and then it’s all over too quickly, just as we were gettin’ into it.

There’s nothing like the familiar feel you get from holding a lush, properly produced heavyweight single in your hands, and the latest offering from Vacuous Pop is that esteemed label’s best offering since the first Cat On Form 7″. Help She Can’t Swim are a delirious collision of The Fall and Huggy Bear, all spiky urgency and yelping invective, but without forgetting that – hey! – we wanna dance too. Raucous, exhausting and brilliant, ‘Knit 1, Pearl 1’ smacks you in the gut and runs off with your sweets, and then gives way to a more considered second track in ‘My Favourite Lay’, which bizarrely sounds a bit like Bratmobile playing an early Placebo song. ‘Are You Feeling Fashionable?’ sports a terrace chant about erstwhile indie rag Melody Maker, and actually sounds a bit like Leeds riot grrl types Coping Saw – a good thing in my book. Sure, you can hear where Help She Can’t Swim have come from, but where they’re headed is far more exhilarating.

The further info bit:

Bands:
The Dudley Corporation
Querelle
Help She Can’t Swim

Labels:
Vacuous Pop
Big Scary Monsters

“Swing your partner by the head

Don’t let him go ’til he’s good ‘n’ dead”

Muleskinner Jones (aka James Closs) must be back, then… Death Row Hoedown is the first we’ve heard from him since his ‘Terrible Stories’ EP in 2002, and it’s his best yet. Taking a Nick Cavesque relish in horrible stories of death and murder, the Muleskinner’s music, Apple Powerbook and the occasional reference to Nintendo and Kwiksave notwithstanding, still sounds firmly rooted in 1890s smalltown America: ‘So Long, Mary Jones’ would have made a fitting soundtrack to James Marsh’s beautifully shot deathumentary Wisconsin Death Trip.

His folk-death-polka is tremendously macabre fun – all death’s head grins, pretty yet ill-fated girls, and the best bit of ostentatious harm wished upon landlords since the Jesus Lizard packed their thumbscrews away. The title track is the most straightforward, a galloping hoedown of undertakers swinging each other round an electric chair, while ‘Concrete Swamp’s booming vaudeville is what might happen if ever Tom Waits and The Cramps cross paths. In the Jack Daniel’s distillery, naturally. A healthily tongue-in-cheek obsession with murder the way it ought to be committed (y’know, hands-on, under a moonlight sky. With a gin bottle.) and some fascinating musical concoctions – strike me down if this ain’t the best little whorehouse in Texas.

More: Muleskinner Jones

Discovered a couple of records from the rather lovely Highpoint Lowlife rekkid label in the new music box (unlocked once a day at precisely midnight, releasing new musical treats into the world), the first of which is the debut album from DoF, If More Than Twenty People Laughed It Wasn’t Funny, the work of one Brian Hulick. Opener’A Path Lights This Way’ is all acoustic guitar plucking rubbing up against tricky beats, mechanical whirring and dancing robots, as if Smog and Aphex Twin were doing a live set at opposite ends of the same room. Initially, it’s an arresting formula: a monochrome, frantic take on the bucolic breakbeats of Four Tet. Yeah! Squarepusher goes folk! Ace! But then track two is all acoustic guitar plucking rubbing up against tricky beats, mechanical whirring and dancing robots, as if Smog and Aphex Twin were doing a live set at opposite ends of the same room. And track three…

And therein lies the problem – there’s not enough going on, in terms of track structure or variety of ideas to sustain an album. An acoustic guitar or piano melody generally kicks things off, accompanied by the odd spatter of spilt drums, and built up until the beats subsume everything else and the track becomes more about rhythm than melody. In fact, it’s the record’s shortest track, ‘Conformity To Fact’ that gets me most excited: swoops of keyboard taken straight from the set of Alien drown themselves in the drum patterns, and there’s a welcome break from mimsy acoustic guitar. Final track ‘Heartbeats of Fireflies Among the Stars’ is the most satisfying interpretation of the DoF sound, with a melody that resonates throughout, and sounds like a DHR remix of something by Neotropic or Capitol K.

In small doses, then, this is excellent, but each piece builds and drops in pretty much the same way, and with half of the album’s track topping six minutes, the record’s not without periods of longueur. And, although really well put together in their own right, the beats seem to sit over the top of the guitar and piano melody with apparently little regard or thought for what the other is doing, as if they’ve been crossfaded by a malevolent DJ over the top of some pleasant but inconsequential instrumental folk.

Some more variety in instrumentation might also help things: as it stands, there’s potential for a fine individual take on Venetian Snares-meets-Aerial M, but an unwillingness to veer away from an imperfect template means I’ll be getting my folktronic kicks elsewhere for now…

More: Highpoint Lowlife

DoF

Something of a neo-classical gypsy violin-stuffed treat today, from New York’s Tarantula, who stitch together elements of chamber orchestra and post-rock to create something really rather good. Opening track ‘Rail’ plucks its way in minimally enough, the doleful opening section enough to make me roll my eyes at the ostensible similarities between Tarantula and Tarentel, but it builds up triumphantly into something like what Rachel’s might sound like after forty cups of coffee and a spell living in travelling caravans. The mid-section has the feel of an instrumental version of something like ‘Cemetery Polka’ by Tom Waits, and really hits the mark where it combines traditional strings from the Romanian orphanage side of the tracks, with the bold, stomping bass ‘n’ drums undercarriage of something altogether more Western. Yer bog-standard post-rock-spotter’s-points instruments the glockenspiel and melodica pop up to pad the sound out from time to time, and occasionally the band lose their focus and drift into pleasant but in no way arresting bistro music, as in the first half of ‘Opening Theme’. On the whole, though, they’re most successful when hammering together the disparate elements of their lineup to create something that sounds like the soundtrack to some moody eastern European film, as played by Sophia or the Chicago Underground Duo. Good stuff.

More info: Tarantula website

Someone broke into my car last night, so I awoke this morning to a letter from the police and a whole stack of glass all over my seats. Apparently some cretinous punter from the club round the corner smashed the window and tried to use the glass as a weapon to fight the police. But I digress – the net effect was to put me in a REALLY BAD MOOD, which makes me all the more intolerant towards crap demos. Fortunately for me, what should drop into the pile but the Collected Recordings 2003-4 from Sennen, in a pleasingly-minimal dark blue sleeve. Sennen mash up a pleasingly-wide range of influences, simultaneously pushing themselves further than most bands of their ilk manage to while not running away shrieking like girls from the idea of writing a ‘proper’ song. ‘Just Wanted to Know’, for instance, hooks itself around a two-line refrain delivered with more than a shade of Jason Spaceman’s laconic drawl, before lifting off into the kind of euphoric, mid-paced noise that Six By Seven made their own on their first record. An elegance a bit like wot Martin Carr’s best pop songs has done got marks out’I Knew a Girl’, a disarmingly effective Pop Hit that doesn’t outstay its welcome despite clocking in at two-and-a-half chart pop hits in length. In fact, most of the songs easily top five minutes, but they build well and offer no small reward for hearing them out.

On the down side, there’s a tendency for too many songs to amble along at the same pace, which given the length of the tracks does lend the disc as a whole a slightly lumbering feel in places. But there’s real composure and quality here as a whole, and what’s more, they’ve cheered me up. Nice one.

More info: Sennen