Archive for the ‘Singles and EPs’ Category

I Like Trains – The Spectacle

Posted: 15 September 2022 in Singles and EPs
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15th September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

The evolution of I Like Trains continues with their first new output since 2020’s Kompromat, which marked a seismic shift both sonically and lyrically. Not their first, either, since they made a giant leap after Elegies for Lessons Learnt, after which they made the change from being iLiKETRAiNS to I Like Trains and towards a more conventional dark alternative rock style. But Kompromat saw them ditch the last vestiges of jangling echoed guitar and baritone crooning in favour of politically-charged angularity, that saw them become more aligned with Leeds forebears Gang of Four than anything remotely tied to their post-rock roots. It was unexpected, but it really suited them.

One thing I have immense respect for I Like Trains for is their self-awareness, and knowing when something has run its course. Elegies took the historical events recounted against brain-melting crescendos format established on Progress Reform to its absolute limit with the nine-minute ‘Spencer Percival’. They recognised that, and moved on. Kompromat was a one-off, and ‘The Spectacle’ bookends that particular spell.

As they write, “‘The Spectacle’ is a standalone single. Part of the KOMPROMAT world, but not quite closure. There’s more where Boris came from.”

We know this to be true: Johnson’s replacement continues his trajectory down towards the lowest common denominator soundbites without substance. Only whereas Johnson’s ideology was largely built around what favoured Johnson, Truss seems blindly fixated on hardline Conservatism, even if it bankrupts the country. And ironically, having dismissed Scotland’s first minister as an ‘attention seeker’, the new Prime Minister’s penchant for a cheesy photo op seems to only accentuate her obliviousness to pretty much everything. As such, The Spectacle continues, and the refrain of ‘Keep it light and repeat it often’ continues to resonate beyond Boris.

But ‘The Spectacle’ is a transition that unfurls before your eyes / ears and is one of those songs that ends in a completely different place from where it started without it being clear where the transition took place. It’s a disorientating, time-bending experience, smoke and mirrors and spin in action, and a brilliant piece of songwriting.

It starts out with the choppy guitars and largely spoken vocal style of Kompromat, which finds David Martin stomping in the steps of not only Mark E Smith, but closer to home, James Smith of Post War Glamour Girls / Yard Act – a style which suits him remarkably well – before the song takes off in a different and unexpected direction around halfway through, when he tosses the mantra and launches into a slab of lyrical critique over guitars that slow at first, before building in crashing sheets of noise and a mangled solo breaks out, and drags the song to a taut finish. They pack a lot of action into just shy of four and a half minutes, and they’re unashamed in pointing out that the single – like so many singles – is a promotional device, here with the purpose of enticing punters to the upcoming merch-flogging opportunity which is their forthcoming tour.

We’re all trapped in the wheels of capitalism, but ILT show that they can simultaneously play and subvert it – while at the same time making great music. ‘The Spectacle’ is as sharp as a pin, and ILT continue to thrive as strong as any virus in a post-pandemic world.

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Leatherette – Sunbathing

Posted: 13 September 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Bronson Recordings

Christopher Nosnibor

Life’s short. Too short. It may not always seem it, when you’re slugging through long days in grinding employment that earns a wage that buys less by the year – or, right now, by the week – or when you’re sitting in waiting rooms in doctors or dentists or hospitals, or waiting for trains or busses, ever fewer and ever later. Life as lived, in real-time, is often a drag. But then you realise a year, three, five, ten, has evaporated while you’ve been willing each day to pass just so you can move on from it and move on to the evening, the weekend, a better future that never comes.

But even when time drags, we’re busy and don’t have time to waste on shit we don’t want to do, beyond the work, the groceries, the bill-paying, the essentials. What little leisure time we have that we’re awake enough to enjoy is too little to squander on crap that isn’t the crap we want to spent it on, meaning life’s too short for crap bands and crap music.

On opening the email urging me to listen to the latest from Leatherette, the single ‘Sunbathing’, lifted from their upcoming debut album Fiesta, out on 14th October, my heart sank as my slow, scrolling broadband, revealed a promo short of the Bologne-based quintet a segment at a time.

Turns out they’re infinitely better to listen to than they look, and ‘Sunbathing’ very much fits with everything I’ve just said about life being too short. It’s pitched as a ‘song about hope, dreaming of a better life and telling the world to go f**k itself when needed. It sounds loud, fast and rough, an irresistible punk-shoegaze anthem’, and the band explains that “‘Sunbathing’ was almost born as a joke, it came out of nowhere. We wanted to write a happy cheesy pop song and then completely destroy it from within”.

And they succeed: in the space of just over a minute and a half, they throw down a sackload of post-punk angularity delivered with a rawness that brings real bite. Drawing on a broad range of stylistic elements all tangled together, it’s simultaneously familiar-feeling and fresh, not to mention exhilarating, with squalling guitars howling through a rack of effects lurking behind a pleasant jangle and played at a frantic pace, propelled by some whirlwind drumming. It’s a rush, a clash of sensations, disaffected and yet uplifting. Short lives demand short songs, and with ‘Sunbathing’, Leatherette are spot on.

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Tracksuit – Ghost of Rome

Posted: 12 September 2022 in Singles and EPs
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James Wells

Fucking hell, we really are running out of names, aren’t we? To the point where even otherwise memorable bands are forgettable because of their ultra-generic name. And some acts sink without a trace because they’re simply impossible to even find through an Internet search. Actor is an obvious example for me, but then we’ve recently had Loungewear grace these virtual pages, and now bloody Tracksuit. How would The The or The Police have faired in the Internet age, I wonder? I mean, stepping aside from the fact their music is tedious and people would probably skip their songs faster than ever now. But it seems like bands aren’t even trying now: Sports Team? Two very different acts operating as Working Men’s Club? Are they trying to bury themselves before their careers have even begun, or do they simply have no imagination and no concept of how The Internet works? Or have we simply reached the apogee of postmodernism, the point at which truly everything has been done, there is no ‘new’, only regurgitations and rehashing, and culture has reached its inevitable dead-end?

It’s a shame Tracksuit have doubly done themselves a disservice with a moniker that’s not only super-generic but also a bit shite, especially as it really doesn’t reflect what they’re about at all. It’s a shame because ‘Ghost of Rome’ is decent. It’s not some lame rappy shite or laid-back bedroomy r ‘n’ b: it’s fundamentally a stripped-back psychedelic rock tune with a keen sense off dynamic and a palpable energy, meaning there’s a lot to like as they dig in with a lively and buoyant bass groove that’s got action and detail. It’s got a heavy 70s vibe about it and it kicks ass – but probably doesn’t need anymore cowbell, because everything is just right.

Click the image to listen:

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GLDN – Suicide Machine

Posted: 11 September 2022 in Singles and EPs
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9th September 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Brooklyn-based blood and gore and dark-fixated industrial metal act GLDN keep on mixing things up with their singular and innovative take on industrial / metal / electronica, and the first single released ahead of the upcoming album Hemophilia, released early October, is another genre-smashing blast of excitement.

At the start of the video, front man Nicholas Golden is wearing a minidress on a mock-up of a slightly fuzzy-looking VHS clip, and while in itself it’s not edgy, it’s both resourceful (can’t afford actors for your promo? Do it yourself) and parodic in setting a dystopian tone n a retro setting. The trouble with retro dystopias is that, as we’ve come to find the hard way, is that the projected future which is now the present is actually worse. 1984 no longer reads like fiction, but reportage. What do you actually do with that knowledge? How do you live with that grim realisation? You too could be the owner of an obelisk…

The lyrics pick at social media and Instagram perfection, and on reading the lyrics, I remember with a slow sinking feeling how I read on a daily basis in the tabloid media how professionals – nurses, teachers, name it – are taking to OnlyFans to make ends meet and in no time they’re quitting their stressful, shittily-paid dayjobs in favour of coining it in to pay off their mortgages:

Got no flaws, no imperfections

The unachievable is my new obsession

Can’t get enough, I’m never satisfied

I’ve got to whore myself out just to feel alive

‘I’d rather be dead than be irrelevant’, Golden concludes, and it’s a stark yet fair reflection: people crave the attention as much as the money, and the bottom line is that the system is fucked and society and culture is fucked.

Coming on like an electro-infused black metal cross between Placebo and Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails, ‘Suicide Machine’ finds GLDN in darkly abrasive form, peaking with a blistering climactic finale that’s utterly punishing. Bring the album.

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Listen: ‘Joy Thief’ by Dosser

Posted: 5 September 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Agh. We shouldn’t dig this… but we do. It’s kinda grunge light, a bit Weezer (ugh),and early Foos (meh) but then it’s also a bit Bivouac, and so on, and it’s hard to hate it in a nostalgic kind of way…

Over the past decade, it’s become increasingly in vogue for bands to pay lip service to 90s alt rock, but many of them capture only the most surface level cosmetic elements, missing the critical components that defined that decade’s underground scene. A chorus pedal, a Big Muff, and a flannel don’t go far on their own merits. To put it bluntly, many groups fundamentally do not “get it”. But Baltimore, MD’s Dosser absolutely does.

Where many of their contemporaries are little more than thinly-veiled pop punk acts doing retro cosplay, Dosser gets at the core of what made 90s guitar rock such a compelling force. From leads that hearken back to early Weezer, massive riffs that evoke Jawbox, and razor-sharp pop-rock sensibilities that bring to mind the Foo Fighters’ debut LP, this is a band synthesizing the best parts of various forms into their own potent formula.

Formed in the summer of 2018 by Will Teague, Bret Lanahan, Eric Dudley, and Max Detrich, Dosser’s debut LP finds a band playing at a level well beyond what their short lifespan might suggest. Coming out on Really Rad Records in January 2023, Violent Picture / Violent Sound is about as strong an opening volley as it gets.

Of the track, Dosser’s Bret Lanahan (guitar, vocals) says: "Since I was a kid I’ve struggled greatly with crippling anxiety and depression. I didn’t understand when I was younger what either of those things were and always thought something was wrong with me or I had something bad inside me making me feel this way. I used to have this kind of weird day dream a lot that if I could just open up my chest and let whatever was inside of me that was making me feel so terrible just spill out, maybe I would feel better.

It wasn’t a bloody scene or anything like that, I guess it was just the only way my younger brain could picture getting rid of bad thoughts. As I got older and had a better understanding of what mental illness looked like I was able to get help in the form of medication. The song goes back and forth with the feeling of being trapped in one of two corners that I think are pretty common in people trying to deal with or treat mental illness. Either you treat it with medication and get to a point where you feel almost nothing at all and totally empty, or just deal with it and have such intense feelings that you can hardly bare it. Finding a release is the hardest thing to do. The lyrics are fairly simple but they hold a great weight for me."

Listen to ’Joy Thief’ here:

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Photo: Zack Pohuski

Pistols at Dawn – The Truth

Posted: 5 September 2022 in Singles and EPs
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16th June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

This one may have been kicking around for a while, but I’m playing catchup here, as Henry Kelly often used to say on Going for Gold – although I always remember it sounding more like he was telling the contestants ‘yir playing ketchup’. If this seems like an unspeakably strange digression, that’s simply how my brain works, by a lengthy chain of obscure connections, but it does serve to lead – perhaps more by accident than design – to the nostalgia point, in that I remember watching Going for Gold in the early 90s (it ran from 87-96 with Kelly presenting), and while there’s no actual correspondence, I associate the period with my discovery of music in the sense of an awakening: there was a real buzz about the early 90s that is hard to convey to anyone who wasn’t immersed in it, and it went beyond grunge.

With ‘The Truth’, taken from their album Ascension, released on 19th August, Atlanta-based Pistols At Dawn invite comparisons to the driving guitar-driven anguish of Filter and encapsulate that mid-to-late 90s US alternative sound. The guitars are thick and chunky, and there are hooks galore and a huge chorus. The production is dense and its both crisp and dirty, and throw in a backdrop of explosions and backwards baseball caps and everything comes together perfectly. It’s not all about the nostalgia factor, and credit has to go to Pistols at Dawn for a kicking riff-driven tune that’s well-executed – but it’s undeniable that the fact it calls to mind what was, for many people of a certain demographic, an epochal spell in guitar-based music, is a significant part of its appeal.

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BELK – The Committee

Posted: 3 September 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Human Worth – 7th October 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Since the launch of the Human Worth label, initially as an outlet for releases by Modern Technology, we’ve witnessed the label grow – although never beyond its means and never beyond its principles. Each release sees a portion of the proceeds donated to a nominated charitable cause, and it’s so heartening to see a label and its artists use their platform for social good. With this latest release, a 7” EP from Leeds makers of noise BELK, 10% of all proceeds are being donated to Action Bladder Cancer UK, who work to support patients, raise awareness, improve early diagnosis and outcomes, and support research into bladder cancer.

But let’s never underestimate the social good of music with meaning – and by good, I mean sincere and visceral. Anyone who has ever stood in a room being bludgeoned by a full-blooded sonic attack will likely appreciate the incredible release of the experience, and the sense of community it entails. It’s not easy to articulate the way in which something that’s ultimately private, internal, is heightened by the presence of strangers immersed in that same experience, in their own personal way.

In congruence with the rise of Human Worth, we’re also seeing a satisfying upward arc for BELK, who unquestionably deserve the exposure and distribution, and one suspects that being limited to just 100 hand-numbered vinyl copies, the vinyl release of this is likely to be a future rarity.

This 7” EP packs five tracks into mere minutes. ‘Warm Water’, unveiled as a taster for advance orders on September’s Bandcamp Friday, is a minute and eighteen seconds long. It’s fast, and it’s furious – a focused channelling of fury, no less, distilled to 100% proof, and there’s no holding back on this attack.

There are a couple of additional demo tracks, in the form of ‘Net’ and ‘Question of Stress’ from their 2022 promo as downloads.

It’s all pretty raw, and ‘studio’ doesn’t mean much more polish than ‘demo’, and that’s exactly as it should be BELK trade in proper dirty noise, the likes of which Earache specialised in in the eighties and early 90s, before they went soft and became a rock and blues label, releasing stuff by the likes of Rival Sons. Human Worth have snatched the noise baton in a firm grip, though, and the quality of their releases extends to the artefact as well as the art.

‘Net’ is a stuttering slugfest reminiscent of Fudge Tunnel, only with harsher, higher-pitched squawkier vocals that are more conventionally hardcore, and it all stacks up for one killer release that delivers a ferocious slap round the chops.

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The Slow Cooked Bears – We’ll Never Be Apart

Posted: 23 August 2022 in Singles and EPs
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2nd September 2022

James Wells

The last time we encountered Slow Cooked Bears here was back in December 2020, on the release of their single ‘The Grand Scheme’, the follow up to the stark, tense-sounding ‘Space Odyssey’.

They’ve been hard at it back on the live circuit since then, and these things change bands, harden them, shape them, give them focus, and a reforged sense of identity. Well it can, or it can crush them. The London trio have followed the former path, and rather than becoming crushed by the wheels of industry, have been building themselves nicely.

Pitched as being for fans of The Smashing Pumpkins, Queens of the Stone Age, Placebo and Pixies, ‘We’ll Never Be Apart’ was produced with Michael Smith whose former clients include Wolf Alice and Anteros, and promises ‘a giant leap’ – and yes, it delivers.

With a rolling bass and chiming guitar by way of an intro, it breaks into a big bridge that becomes a surging chorus. You don’t get many songs where the hook is the guitar section after the vocals, but with ‘We’ll Never Be Apart’, they bring it. And, while in places it hints at the kind of early 00s arena indie, the songs packs in drive and edge that’s emotionally rich and owes more to the likes of The Twilight Sad than it does to Keane or Coldplay back in the day.

On other words, it really is a huge evolution that sees the band straddling boundaries. It’s got enough heft to not be a complete sell-out, but it’s certainly not as dark or edgy as ‘Space Oddysey’, being a whole lot less Joy Division / Editors / Interpol / Cinematics, and less Placebo in collision with Royal Blood and Black Keys than ‘The Grand Scheme’, and hinting at ambitions of broader horizons.

Objectively, it’s a great tune, and could well mark a turning point for the band. Is it too early for me to say I preferred their earlier stuff without sounding like a hipster cockend? Guess that depends on the next single, right?

Artwork - Slow Cooked Bears

A.R.T – Nothing Better to Do

Posted: 13 August 2022 in Singles and EPs
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12th August 2022

James Wells

I have questions. Not least of all, why is the bassist with A.R.T, Tiarnan Mathews known as 10” Tiarnan? I sincerely hope it isn’t because of the obvious, unless it’s ironic. But then, they all have daft nicknames, with lead guitarist Bradley Allen being known as General Sweet Tooth, drummer Scott Gordon as Dijon Mustard, and rhythm guitarist Tom Strange also known rather dubiously as Daddy Strange.

To their credit, they’ve been favourably described as ‘Bowie meets The Killers’ rather than ‘oddball creepy buggers’, which s a plus, or they wouldn’t be getting a review. I’m not prejudiced, just really busy, and give preferential treatment to acts who aren’t a bit sus.

‘Nothing Better to Do’ is pitched as ‘strolling a line between indie rock and glam, whisked together with the charm of the likes of Madness and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ and I have to admit that this doesn’t sit comfortably. I loved Madness as a kid, but by my mid-teens I not only found them a little wearisome, but had started to take issue with their flag-waving fanbase. Granted, you can’t necessarily blame a band for the fans it attracts, but nevertheless, it can be offputting.

It’s early days for A.R.T, and there’s a lot going on here with a load of 80s indie in the nagging guitar line and a certain needling insistent groove that’s hard to ignore. There are hints of Orange Juice in the mix, not to mention a dash of funk but equally some raucous white soul and a splash of blues, before they chill the vibe with a mega sax break. Why did sax breaks seem to die a death in the 80s? Shit, we need more sax breaks. We need more A.R.T.

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Bedroom Tax – Kin

Posted: 11 August 2022 in Singles and EPs
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12th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

While we swelter in the middle of the hottest, driest summer on record, during which wild fires and hosepipe bands sweep the nation, people are shitting themselves about paying for heating in the winter as the cost of living crisis bites ever deeper. When a tub of butter costs £7 and people are staying home because they can’t afford to put fuel in their vehicles, it’s clear that things are beyond fucked and that this isn’t simply some post-Covid dip. This is aa cataclysmic collapse, exacerbated by shit government and capitalist greed. You see, not everyone is struggling here. The top guys, the ones who make all the money from the work of their employees, their doing ok. The major shareholders in the companies raking in profit by the million, by the billion, they’re doing ok. Bankers are landing double-figure pay-rises while the people who keep the country going – from the teaches and nurses to rail staff and refuse collectors – are queuing at food banks at the end of their working day. This crisis, then, is a crisis of social division, a crisis of capitalism.

Formed in 2018, Bedroom Tax sound nothing like Benefits, but both bands are clearly part of a growing swell of stylistically disparate but politically similar bands who exist to voice dissatisfaction, and their very name reminds us of just how hard the Conservative government has pushed an agenda to fuck over the poor.

‘Kin’ is a hybrid amalgam of indie, alt UK rap, and blues influences and they’re probably the post-millennial answer to The Streets – only they’re better than that.

‘Kin’ delves into kitchen sink territory, and blends social commentary and disaffection – not so much bile but a whole lot of downtrodden day-to-day depictions, with the jittery drumming and scratchy guitars of the twitchy verses leading into a magnificently melodic chorus that’s buoyed along by some jangling guitar work. It’s genuinely beautiful, and so well-delivered you can forgive the rhyming of ‘issues’ and ‘tissues’ in the blink of an eye.

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