Aural Aggravation

skoghall rekordings – 8th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s nothing like a descriptive title to set out plainly what you’re getting. As the notes which accompany this EP release inform us, ‘Leeds postpunkspacerockers Farming Incident released a couple of LPs over their existence and ceased to be in June 2010… The three songs on this release are the first and only batch of recorded songs that were put to tape in late 2007 as part of the proposed 3rd LP which sadly never came into existence…… These songs were rediscovered by FI vocalist Dave Procter in December 2023 and are now released in their full glory.’

Agent Procter has been busy with myriad musical projects since the demise of Farming Incident, many of which have been covered here at Aural Aggravation, and his relocation to Sweden to escape the post-Brexit hell of this sorry island meant that we lost another great Leeds / York postpunkspacerock act in the form of boilersuit-wearing motoric mofos The Wharf Street Galaxy Band. Perhaps in another decade we’ll be treated to some of their final lost session recordings – but for now, we should keep our attention on the release at hand.

To establish the chronology, the band’s untitled third album, which was clearly very much in its early developmental stages, was in progress before their second album, Nine Degrees of Torture (reissued last year) was released. On the strength of just three songs, it’s difficult to determine the level of ‘overlap’ and / or ‘departure’ when weighing up the content of the next album versus its predecessor.

‘the message’ is a heavy-duty full-throttle blast that really transports the listener back to that bridging point where punk split into post-punk circa 79, and with its stonking bass and hectic drumming, I find myself thinking of Joy Division’s early demo recordings as Warsaw. It’s raw, furious, and all the fire. Busy, jangly, messy with treble and without even a smear of polish, it’s real alright. Procter isn’t a singer – he’s a vocalist, and the fact he strains for the higher notes – which is half the song isn’t just ok, but integral to the raw sound. He sounds rather like David Gedge on ‘the pit of doom’ as he sings ‘you’re slipping on the slope / grasping for the rope’, while the band scrabble and scratch away at the instrumentation. The guitar is a scaping chang of treble which chops and splinters into a mesh of top-end amidst streams of feedback.

‘menezes’ is another rough and ready guitar-driven explosion that’s more the sound of ’79 than ’07… although I’m struggling to think what the sound of ’07 actually was. There’s a sense that this was something of a murky spell for music. The post-rock explosion which had erupted circa 2003-4 which seemed to last an eternity was in fact dying of in 2007, and while there was undoubtedly good new music out there – and I was writing about it – there was no real dominant form, no genre which stood out as defining the period, and we trudged and lurched our way through a no-man’s-land of nothing much at all. Small wonder that a band like Farming Incident should peter out. They weren’t part of the zeitgeist: there was no zeitgeist. It’s a shame: Farming Incident were good, and their works in progress showed serious potential, however out of step.

As an aside, their page mentions that ‘All proceeds of any sales will go to Médicins sans Frontières. Thanks for your donation. Go to this link for more details -> http://www.msf.org and of course donate directly here -> http://www.msf.org/donate. Ta(ck).’ It’s good. Give it a blast. And give money.

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