On their debut album Unsoothing Interior, Stockholm’s Vero reflect the nature of life itself. Their songs prioritise feeling over perfectionism – what feels, or sounds, best – creating a record that tumbles through its contents with a sense of unpredictability, excitement and curiosity. “We don’t want to be super musicians; we want to write the best fucking songs and just have the best energy and show people that we’re having fun,” explains singer and bassist Julia Boman. “We don’t want to be a perfect band, in that sense.”
Fun has always been at the heart of Vero’s story, which began when guitarist Clara Gyökeres walked up to Boman and asked if she wanted to start a club night together. With the bassist’s school friend Amanda Eddestål, also now on guitar, they started DJing as a trio before eventually deciding it would be more enjoyable to play their own music rather than other artists’ and formed the band. “We DJed old disco music, but all three of us were going to rock concerts and loved rock music,” Boman says. “We were like, ‘We’ve all made music in some way before so we should start playing together instead’.”
Voracious music lovers, at first they struggled to settle on one sound, purely because they wanted to try their hand at “every genre possible”. But during the making of their 2020 EP ‘Heaven On Earth’, they shifted from synthesised sounds to using guitars and real drums, and had an epiphany.
“Synthesisers are so controlled,” Boman explains. “You have to really be like, ‘Oh, that’s not the right tune’, but when you’re playing the guitar, it can sound pretty chaotic. When we write now, we don’t have much control. We’re not very picky about it.”
Ahead of the album, they’ve released the single ‘Cupid’. Listen to it here:
While the majority of their output belongs to the post-85, second wave of post-punk / indie-goth, both (timewise) and sonically, Salvation’s roots actually go back to the murkier days of when The Sisters of Mercy were a true Leeds band, living in a dingy terrace in LS6 and recording at Kenny Giles’ 8-track studio in Bridlington and running a label not so much on a shoestring, but on zero budget and Letraset.
Salvation’s first ingle, ‘Girlsoul’ was released on Merciful Release in ’83, and was produced by Eldritch, before a parting of the ways not dissimilar from that which befell The March Violets took place, and while their second single, ‘Jessica’s Crime’ was produced by Wayne Hussey in 1984, the mini-album Clash of Dreams which was scheduled for A Merciful Release in 1985 was shelved and only got to see the light of day in 2014.
By then, they had evolved into the more accessible indie-goth sound, which emerged circa 1985-6, and which perhaps not coincidentally corresponded with The Sisters of Mercy’s evolution towards a more commercial sound with the arrival of Wayne Hussey and their signing to WEA and the release of ‘Body and Soul’ and First and Last and Always, before the split that led to the emergence of The Mission.
But their coming together with Hussey early on marked the beginning of a longstanding partnership: in fact, it was in 1990, supporting The Mission at Sheffield City Hall I first encountered Salvation, which would have coincided with the release of their major label debut Sass, which marked something of a more commercially-orientated direction, and would also represent the band’s last new material as the band crashed under the pressures of relentless touring.
Fast-forward to 2020, and the band have emerged from their retirement to tour Europe with The Mission. We Gave You Diamonds… Live at De Casino was recorded Live at De Casino, Sint-Niklaas, Belgium on March 7th 2020 on the final night of a four-date tour supporting The Mission, and it’s a career-spanning showcase of a set that captures salvation on fine form, and Daniel Mass sounds relaxed with his chat between songs.
Only two of the eleven songs ‘(Clearing Out the) Debris’ and ‘Paint it Rose’ are from Sass, and the set is otherwise culled from their independent years, kicking off with ‘The Answer’ from 1986’s ‘Seek’ EP. It’s clearly of that mid-80s vintage, but still sounds fresh and is delivered with an energy that translated through the medium of the live recording, with its thumping bass and flowery guitar flourishes both crisp and clear. ‘Ladyfaithe’ from the same EP, which would subsequently their 1987 debut album Diamonds are Forever is also dropped early.
Mass probably doesn’t need to announce that they’re from Leeds at the start of the set: they sounds like a Leeds band, to the core. They also sound like a band who are having a blast, and the songs are played with precision and power, and they’ve held up well despite the passage of all the years: ‘All and More’ still kicks ass with twisty guitars and a solid bass groove, and reminds us just how strong they were at penning sharp hooks and nagging guitar lines.
They delve right back as far as ‘The Shining’ (a standout and a personal favourite that always gets lodged as an earworm whenever I play it) from their second single as well as the unreleased ‘The October Hour’ from the debut that never was. ‘Payola’ and ‘Pearl Necklace’, the B-sides from their single release of Donovan’s ‘Sunshine Superman’ from 1988. Yes, it’s a blast from the past, but this doesn’t have the vibe of a nostalgia trip: Salvation sound like a band reinvigorated and energised and feeling the songs.
And now, as we finally crawl out of the seemingly-eternal suspension of life that was the Covid pandemic, Salvation are once again set to play as support to The Mission – although the handful of dates isn’t quite the crippling schedule of thirty years ago. On the strength of We Gave You Diamonds, it’ll be worth making it down early doors, and with any luck they’ll be booking a few headline shows of their own before long.
Nothing says ‘I love you’ like a slice of blues-hued alt-rock that deals with paranoia and a sense of disconnection from other people, right? Blackpool’s Rendered land their second single on Valentine’s day, and it’s a proper punch in the kisser
It begins with a slow-build, a big, spacious guitars chime that’s bordering on shoegaze before exploiting a classic quiet / loud verse / chorus, and when the guitars kick in for the chorus, boy do they kick in strong. It’s the perfect vehicle for the lyrics which wrestle with internal contradictions and the troubles of mental health; the fear and loathing, flipping between the urge to lash out and to simply hide.
‘Paranoia’s what they tell me I got /Well it’s real to me and it won’t stop now / (Must be the enemy!)’ guitarist/vocalist Dale Ball hollers in a blend of pain and panic, articulating the anguish of decoding situations; after all, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after you, and just because you feel you can’t trust anyone, doesn’t mean you’re delusional or overly fearful, and it’s a fact, not hype, that you can’t be too careful… but then, to what extent can fear rule your life before it’s no life at all? It’s a fine line, and right now, so many people are so on edge about everything. The language of fear used to ensure compliance during lockdown gave many the jitters, and shaking that fear isn’t proving so easy. Then you turn on the news, there are stabbings and murders of random strangers all over, the government has been proven to have bene constantly lying the whole time, and now continue to lie about the fact they’ve been lying in the face of concrete evidence, and who can you believe or trust when you can’t even trust yourself or your own instincts?
Well, you can trust Rendered to deliver solid tunes with real resonance, if nothing else, and ‘Must Be The Enemy!’ is the proof.
Short review for a short single, where the reading time and running time are probably about the same, and that’s the way we like it. Yes, London fuzzy indie punk noisemakers Argonaut return after an enforced hiatus corresponding almost precisely with the covid pandemic and its successive lockdowns and restrictions, which curtailed any in-person collaboration or rehearsals for so many bands.
Nathan and Lorna kept themselves occupied and active with their lo-fi bedroom indie side-project, Videostore, which they put to bed with a one-off live show, paving the way for the return of Argonaut. And what a return it is!
Inevitably, there’s much stylistic overlap between Videostore and Argonaut, and both acts espouse the same DIY aesthetic, while kicking out punchy pop tunes, but the input of the rest of the band and their influence on the sound is apparent when listening to this, not least of all in the way the vocal harmonies come together – and bounce off one another – and the impact of live drums as a sturdy spine holding together the retro synth sounds that wibble around with a Stereolab vibe, which is countered by the fizzy, treble-maxed guitar fuzz that crackles away at a restrained distance in the mix.
With ‘Futoko’, Argonaut pack enough energy into two-and-a-quarter minutes to run a house for a week, and deliver it with such infectious vibrancy it’s hard to resist: it’s exactly what the world needs right now.
January is always a shitter. Whether you love Christmas or loathe it, or even if you’re largely indifferent, January is invariably a slump month of epic proportions. Those of us who aren’t mad keen on Christmas tend to cling to the light at the end of the tunnel that is new year, not because of the New Year celebrations, but because of the prospect of things getting back to normal, where everyone isn’t flapping about doing Christmas shopping and your mates aren’t in an endless conveyor-belt of work and other social commitments and might actually have time for just a pint and a chat, and because gigs and regular social activities resume and you can turn on the TV, radio or walk into a shop without hearing wall-to-wall fucking Christmas tunes.
But no, everyone’s skint, the ones who aren’t are doing dry January and not going out, and the days are short and cold and miserable and Christ, it’s bleak. And for the self-employed, the unsalaried, those in the arts, it’s even bleaker, especially during a pandemic. But then, as ‘Happy Birthday payday’ reminds us, staying afloat in the arts is hard at anytime.
It’s ironic that while mainstream chart musicians are lauded and the pop icon is considered aspirational, those who actually commit themselves to the graft of being in a proper band – or pursuing creative activities like writing or visual arts as a means of earning a living are relentlessly knocked back for being dreamers or unrealistic. Granted, it’s only very few who achieve the heights of Coldplay or Radiohead, or JK Rowling or Damien Hirst, but that isn’t to say that an equitable living shouldn’t be out of reach for the many in the lower echelons, and it simply shouldn’t be the case that tends of thousands of streams on Spotify or iTunes translates to less than the price of a pint.
Moses aren’t a band who are willing to compromise to turn that pint into a round: ‘Happy Birthday Payday’ is culled from their second album, Almost Everything Is Bullshit, which is not only a cracking title but a verifiable fact in this time of endless fakery, but one that’s unlikely to see it garner much mainstream radio play. Similarly, while ‘Happy Birthday Payday’ is a strong tune, bursting with energy and hooks, and with a nagging quasi-rockabilly guitar-line and some storming bass runs, it’s hardly zeitgeist. It’s cut from the punkier end of post-punk, and could have been part of the early 90s New Wave of New Wave ‘movement’ hyped by the press. It’s fast, furious, and spirited, and exactly the kind of tunage we need on offer beyond the mainstream – which is why outsider acts need to be viable, because without them, we’re fucked.
The last time the once-ubiquitous Blacklisters graced us with their presence in Leeds was back in 2017. A lot has happened since then, including some substantial geographical ones for the bandmembers. In fact, there was a time when it seemed as if the band was no more: following the release of Adult in 2015, things went quiet, bar the unexpected release of the Dart EP in 2017 via Too Pure. The arrival of Fantastic Man in 2020came as a surprise. A welcome one, but a surprise nevertheless. Consequently, tonight’s double-header with associated / offshoot ace USA Nails is a cause for excitement: their fifth album, Character Stop, released just last month is atruly outstanding example of the angular / mathy / noise genre. And what a lineup!
In a late change to the advertised schedule, Care Home’s debut is shelved, with the band replaced by Hull noisemakers Cannibal Animal. Sound-wise, they’ve changed a bit from when I last saw them back in 2018 – less swamp-gothy, more post punk in their leanings, less claustrophobic and with more breathing space in the songs. Yet for all that, it’s very clearly the same band.
Cannibal Animal
The set lands with a throbbing drone before they power into some hefty chords. They’re not pretty, sonically or visually, but Christ, they kick ass. Strolling basslines and wandering spacious guitars shifting into ball-busting riffs. Busting bad moves throughout Luke Ellerington makes for a compelling and charismatic performer as he leads the band through a set that sounds like a collision between Pissed Jeans and The Fall.
The guy from BELK seems to have got his dates wrong and has come dressed for Hallowe’en – or at least made-up for Hallowe’en. The Leeds act are a screamy thrashy guitar and drum duo. They’re as heavy and fuck and there’s a mental moshpit from the off. Shifting pace and dynamics nonstop, it’s primitive and brutal with full on frenzied riffery and screaming vocals. Everything about their sound is abrasive, jarring, angular, although at times it’s a shade thin, and they possibly would benefit from some bass.
BELK
USA Nails don’t only benefit from some bass, but place the bass at front and centre to powerful effect. And that bass has that ribcage-rattling tearing cardboard sound reminiscent of Bob Weston. The emphasis may be on attack and hard volume, but they fully exploit the dynamics of these. The two guitars are often still for the verses bar feedback, bursting into life for the choruses. Along the way there are some expansive bass-led spoken word stretches that call to mind The Fall, with frequent forays into hardcore punk. It’s a strong set that flips between sub-two minutes and longer workouts, and it’s all killer.
USA Nails
With the last train to York departing at 23:13 and Blacklisters not due on until 11pm, I was presented with the option of disappointment or sleeping on a bench. I gather that they were good, though, and just hope we don’t have to wait another four years.
Lucrecia Dalt and I have shared much music with one another, and over the course of the many years of knowing each other and sharing stages, we decided to collaborate on the track ‘Tanto’ for Qalaq. We discussed a few ideas and wanted to keep it minimal, but maintain the form of a ‘duet’. We exchanged some music and she came up with a beautiful tape loop for the backbone of the track, through which we were able to find our vocal identities. It was a haunting, eerie, out-of-time tape loop, which she proposed after I had sent her the (Arabic) lyrics and a translation of them—and most importantly, their intention. The song is meant to evoke the feeling of ‘envy’ familiar to many people in developing nations.
Legs in an Eastern sewage, eyes in a Western fictitious paradise.
Erin Weisgerber and I decided to make a small film for this song. I had wanted to work with the incredible Stacey Desilier as a choreographer and dancer. We exchanged some ideas and I sent everyone some film references, to which everyone echoed back others, and from there we settled on a setting and imagery and actions and shot this film in the forests north of Tiohtia:ke / Montréal.
– Radwan Ghazi Moumneh –
Watch the video here:
Qalaq album cover Photo of the 2019 Beirut October Revolution by Myriam Boulous
It seems that everyone has a doppelganger. As someone who’s prone to wearing a hat and dark glasses, to be told I’ve been seen in places I’ve not been in a city the size of York is pretty unnerving. But there it is: life unravels by strange and unexpected means.
‘Three Steps South’ is both strange and unexpected, and presents an interesting hybrid. It’s got that nagging repetitive cyclical, sequenced electro element and a noodly synth line that bubbles away and mines a deep seam while drums and guitars crunch away…there’s something about it that reminds of Placebo’s ‘Taste in Men’ to the main riff, but then it’s a slice of swanky, swaggersome indie rock at heart. To add to the eclecticism, the mid-section goes all spacious with a reverby western desert twang.
Most surprising of all is the fact that it not only all first together and works, but that it’s a catchy bugger of a tune.
After paying their dues pedalling their hefty wares in all the little venues the length and breadth of the country after relocating to London from Brazil, Your Mum are really starting to reap the rewards of some incredible sweat and toil for the release of their second album.
Having shared the stage with DIY stalwarts such as Maid Of Ace, Svetlanas, Healthy Junkies, Hands Off Gretel, I-Destroy & Dream Nails as well as well-established acts and legends such as New Model Army, The Adolescents, Vice Squad, Kirk Brandon, UK Subs, The Vibrators and TV Smith, they’ve scored prestigious deals with to Chapter 22 Records in the UK and M&O Music in France. For all that, their latest release is accompanied by a video which was shot entirely on a GoPro & edited by the duo, who are evidently staying true to their DIT ethos and their roots – no sellout here!
The title track of their new album, now released as a single, finds the duo weighing in hard and heavy with blistering overdriven bass that sounds like bass and guitar at the same time, propelled by thunderous drums: ‘Club Tropicana’ is ain’t and nor is it some mellow, languorous beach chillout with a cocktail: no, the only thong tropical about this is the raging heat, meaning it’s mostly about the fuzz, Anelise Kunz’ full-lunged vocals distorted by volume and it blasts away for a high-impact, high-octane three minutes of raw power.
If you’ve not yet met Yur Mum, let me introduce you – because you’ve been missing out, and this is a beast of a track.
“What does ‘regret’ mean?” “Well, son, a funny thing about regret is that better to regret something you have done, than to regret something you haven’t done.” I have no shortage of regrets, but one is that I saw Come and thought ‘meh’. It was 1993: they were supporting Dinosaur Jr, who’s just released Where You Been?, along with Bettie Serveert in Nottingham. I’d read reviews of, but was still yet to hear Eleven: Eleven at the time. They’d been all over the press with that debut album. And I just didn’t get gripped. Maybe it was because, at seventeen, I was just so revved for the headliners I wasn’t in a place to fully appreciate the supports.
I had no way of knowing that their second album would become one of my absolute favourites. Again, having picked up Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, I wasn’t immediately enamoured. I guess it took me awhile to appreciate the album’s subtlety and emotional depth – and it has so much depth – but investing in listening properly and not holding out for the big riffery of Nirvana or Dinosaur Jr or the general sound of the class of ’93-’94 unlocks Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. Some of it’s about maturity, some of it’s about patience – I didn’t really dig The God Machine on the first few spins of Scenes from the Second Storey.
It was a long album, for a start. Only two of the songs are under four minutes long, and half are five or more. The structures aren’t obvious, there’s not a lot that’s straight verse / chorus / verse. It was also a bit slow, and quite country / blues. It really wasn’t the sound of the grunge zeitgeist of 1994. But one day, somehow, something clicket. Quite possibly it was by absently half-listening to it, that moment arrived in ‘String’. I have this thing, whereby a fleeting moment of a song -m a change of key, chord, a single sound, or something else otherwise minor, extraneous, will absolutely make it for me. By which I mean, I am completely obsessive about this. When a moment strikes me as ‘pivotal’ I simply have to hear it, over and over, and that will be a reason to play an entire song – on repeat. That first scrape of fingers on strings at the start of ‘My Black Ass’ on Shellac at Action Park? Yeah, that’s one such moment. That moment at 3:05 on ‘String’ in Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is another. It just hits an instant of musical perfection, and it’s absolute bliss.
The song is a standout – on the CD, it’s positioned after the slow, blooding ‘Let’s Get Lost’ and picks the tempo up. The fact it arrives after a false ending or sorts and a change in direction is key, and the guitar interplay is sublime… The trouble is, explaining it in words simply doesn’t convey the impact, the way it resonates. But there it is. And now, here it is again, remastered. And it sounds great, all over again, as well as giving reason to revisit what is a remarkable and courageous album, one that represents a band committed to making the music they want to make instead of succumbing to trends or record company or peer pressure. And revisiting it only further highlights the dynamics, the tempo changes and unexpected shifts, and the way those sonic twists can instantly alter the mood, and the way the band imbue every bar with emotion. It’s so, so powerful, and all the more so for the fact it isn’t immediate. In fact, all of the things that made it ‘difficult’, that I struggled with at first, are the reasons I love it now and are the reasons it’s such a remarkable and accomplished album, and one that proved without doubt that volume is not the sole driver of intensity. Thalia Zedek’s vocal with its rich patina has a deep rasp, and carries a greater emotional than tonal range, and it’s perfectly suited to the twisting, restlessness of the songs: these are songs to lose yourself in.
The remastering is nicely done – nothing too intrusive, it just feels that bit crisper, somehow, the details clearer, and that’s nice.
The bonus disc, Wrong Sides contains an entire album’s worth of additional material, and with the exception of the demo version of ‘German Song’ (with some magnificent spiralling guitar work and if anything, this slightly less polished take, with the notable addition of clarinet and piano packs only more aching beauty), it’s not a gathering of alternative takes, radio sessions, and rehearsals, but a truly worthy assembly of contemporaneous material – B—sides, stray compilation tracks, and unreleased material, and it’s fair to say that it’s all killer.
‘Angelhead’ – a ‘String’ 12” B-side was recorded on a stop-off on tour, and is one of the most directly riff-centric grungers of the band’s career. ‘Cimarron’ is up there with the best of Come, with some crunchy guitars augmented by sweeping violin. Their cover of Swell Maps’ ‘Loin of the Surf’ is a groove-led math-rock instrumental workout, while ‘Submerge’ is chunky, crunky, dense, lumbering. This is the version that actually predates the one that appears on Eleven: Eleven, and instead came out on the German Sub Pop 12” and CD of the menacing ‘Car’ (also featured here with its warping guitars alongside B-side ‘Last Mistake’. But what matters most is that every single bonus cut here would have been worthy of the album.
With the additions as strong as the album, what the expanded version of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell reveals is an insight into a great – if massively underrated – band at their absolute peak.
Aural Aggravation 