Posts Tagged ‘Polevaulter’

Watch: ‘Pissed in the Baths’ by Polevaulter

Posted: 29 January 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Leeds based militant dance-punk duo Polevaulter dropped their debut album ‘Hang Wave’ on Friday to widespread acclaim.

If you haven’t heard it yet, it’s a superb sonic assault of seismically sharp bass and loin-grinding beats, and we wrote about it at length recently.

Now following the album release and ahead of their UK / EU tour starting this week, Polevaulter have unveiled a brand-new video for the album’s latest single ‘Pissed In The Baths’, which you can watch here:

The sonic assault the two create is almost arrogant, fathered from the marriage of seismically sharp bass and loin-grinding beats. The words are quipped and brayed atop the aural landscape. They are boastful, accusing, repellent and inviting, they question and skewer the veins of masculinity, sexuality, the order of things, the music industry and the miserable reality of the North. Polevaulter have toured with JOHN, shared a stage with Thank, Mandy Indiana, Pink Turns Blue, Bambara, A Place To Bury Strangers, VR Sex, and others.

Now, following the album release and ahead of their UK / EU tour starting this week, Polevaulter have unveiled a brand new video for the album’s latest single ‘Pissed In The Baths’.

On writing the track, Polevaulter’s Jon Franz explains; “Pissed In The Baths came about from Dan’s chorus riff which he just pulled out of thin air, we made the verses more straight and got it to swing with my delay. I wrote the lyrics pretty quickly on a bus to the doctors, lyrically it’s about manifesting strength and about us setting sail, I tied the chorus into it as those lines came from a while ago about warming oceans and rising sea levels, it all got glued together.”

The result is a cacophonous injection of climate change activism, brimming with hypnotic beats and thick fuzzy bass and glossed in a coat of sharp unnerving darkness. Chaotic and smashing you in the face with its tidal wave of full-on noise and addictive shouted refrains, Polevaulter are not holding any punches with ‘Pissed In The Baths’ as they continue on their bulldozer-like mission to tear up boundaries.

Debut Polevaulter album ‘Hang Wave’, is a hard-hitting dark and fiercely off-kilter slab of awesome sickly noise alongside baritone-led lyricism acerbic, vitriolic and intense throughout, raising eyebrows and dropping jaws. The album features recent hits like ‘Trend’ and newly released single ‘Violently Ill’ which Polevaulter’s Jon Franz explains- “has more sparse vocals than most of our tracks, gives our music a chance to shine. Its maybe my favourite song on the album.” Other tracks like ‘Pissed In The Baths’, ‘Mint Condition’ and ‘Mia Goth Made Me Do It’ all stand out in what is essentially an absolute mind melting juggernaut of a punk electro dance record for 2024, which lays down the gauntlet from a studio perspective alongside Polevaulter’s diligent process to earnestly take the title of ‘hardest working band in showbusiness’.

Polevaulter weren’t always a duo though as Jon Franz recalls, “We were steaming along as a post-punk band with various noise elements and then lost some members over covid, but me and Dan wanted to keep going. We thought about starting a new band, but we felt that this still had legs. Ultimately, it’s not that different, me and Dan did most of the composition, and we’ve got a clear vision on what we want to do. After touring last year as a two-piece, figuring out whether we could even do it, we realised there’s definitely no reason to stop – and it’s definitely getting better every time we have a round of gigs. I like not carrying instruments around – that’s quite nice. Although, having said that, we’re a duo now and we have more amps, which is weird. Dan has three amps now, and I have two.”

The album was co-produced by longtime friend and artist Shaene Hunter which straddles confidently atop several themes, to which Jon Franz says, “This being our first album or our maiden voyage, I dunno why, but I like a lot of nautical terminology and see that kind of visual imagery when this album was being made. I also write a lot of lyrics about things that directly affect me, like my masculinity, my mind, about being tough and overly arrogant to sell the image of us we’ve created. We have a lot of reference points that I work in, and since we’ve become a two piece, I think there is a lot more depth to everything we do now. We’ve made ‘Hang Wave’ because it’s about time we made this kind of a statement about who we are, what we want to do and what we sound like after multiple line-up changes and situations slowed the progress me and Dan were desperate to make. Since we’ve been a two piece, we’ve got far more done, and we both feel really proud of this album, and we feel strongly that it will do what we need it to do.”

Polevaulter recently performed their debut album on repeat for 8 hours straight via a livestream to raise funds for the Gaza Sunbirds, a para cycling team based in the Gaza Strip. The team is currently providing emergency food parcels and aid to families sheltering around the Gaza Strip. Watch the livestream back here:

– And to donate visit: https://www.justgiving.com/page/polevaulterforgazasunbirds

Polevaulter will tour the UK and EU as follows:

Jan 31st – The Fenton, Leeds – Album launch

Feb 2nd – Hatch, Sheffield

Feb 3rd – Little Buildings, Newcastle

Feb 6th – New Adelphi, Hull

Feb 7th – The Lounge, Manchester

Feb 8th – Old Blue Last, London

Feb 9th – Bear Cave, Bournemouth w/ JOHN

Feb 10th – Craufurd Arms, Milton Keynes w/ JOHN

Feb 13th – DAda, Toulouse, France

Feb 14th – TBA, France

Feb 15th – Le Lezard, France

Feb 16th – Melody Maker, Rennes, France

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Polevaulter – Hang Wave

Posted: 24 January 2024 in Albums, Reviews
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26th January 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Polevaulter haven’t come from nowhere but have, it seems, evolved – or devolved – from a regular band with guitars and a regular drummer, to a brutal drum-machine driven duo, a model which has landed them some high-profile support slots and attention in their own right. Debuting – at least in this incarnation – with ‘HILTSCTW’ (That’s ‘How I Learnt To Stop Chewing The Wasp And Face The Bulldog’) in February 2020, they’ve put out a couple of EPs on tape and CD, both of which have sold out, as well as a couple of digital singles, ahead of this, their debut album, which they performed live for eight hours straight and streamed it on YouTube as a fundraiser for Palestine the other week. It might not have had the intensity of one of their half-hour support sets, but it set out their position politically and as people, suggesting that as much as they’re about impact, they’re also about endurance.

With the exception of the last couple of singles, none of the songs on Hang Wave have been previously released. Hang Wave, then, is no sweeping up of their catalogue to date, but an album proper, and a work which is focused on where they’re at now, not where they were.

It’s a thudding pulsing bass drum bear that drives ‘Mia Goth Made Me Do It’, the first of the album’s ten tracks. It’s tense, and it’s dark: the bass is low-slung and bulbous, but the vocals are subject to really high-treble EQ and some crisp, dry reverb which gives them a harsh edge. This is no gentle introduction: they’re straight in and at the jugular. A mangled, confrontational industrial / goth assault, it makes for a challenging, confrontational opening to an album that’s stark and uncompromising.

Single ‘Trend’ packs snappy (and in places somewhat bizarre) lyrics, with lines like ‘Don’t tell me to put my vase away’ and ‘I do a line off a horses dick’, and stuttering beats, a monstrous bastard of a bass noise and some woozy discordant notes that bend and melt in the incendiary heat of the fire of the vocal ferocity. ‘Pissed in the Baths’, just unveiled as a final taster of the album is another murky morass of dingy post-punk, and as likely to deter more prospective listeners than it will attract. You get the impression that Polevaulter couldn’t care less, and that they’re not doing this to garner popularity, to get played on the radio, for accolades or to get rich or famous – which is a good job: in articulating alienation and also simply venturing, without restraint, down the deepest, darkest, and most obscure tunnels against a backdrop of the most unrefined, angular noise, Polevaulter have pretty much guaranteed they will achieve none of these things. Of course, in repelling the majority, they’re appealing to an extremely devoted minority of people who actively enjoy music that hurts, physically and mentally.

It’s hard to make out what the fuck they’re ranting and raving about most of the time, but the delivery – half spoken word, half hollering – is strong and is a message in itself. Because anger is an energy, and shouting into the abyss is the most exultant catharsis. Polevaulter deliver that catharsis in the bluntest, starkest of manners, and the production accentuates it all.

‘Industry Plant Based’ seems to be a swipe at more than one contemporary issue, and it’s fair to say it’s hard to imagine an act further from The Last Dinner Party.

There are no tunes to speak of on Hang Wave, and choruses are in short supply, too. Perhaps the most obvious and valid points of comparison are Benefits and Sleaford Mods – but whereas the latter bring hooks and groove, Polevaulter present nothing but bleak trudging, and while the former are focused on the channelling of rage with passion and a politically-charged message of unity, Polevaulter bring us blank nihilism delivered with a twist of crushing desolation. There are dance elements in the mix, but the mix is a cement mixer churning away a blend of grit and napalm, and this is nowhere more strongly evidenced than on single cut ‘Violently Ill’, a song so wrecked as to twist your intestines, while the air-raid siren howl of ‘GabWorld’ is chilling and unsettling.

The album winds up in a twitching, glitching, explosive mess in the form of the snarking, sparking, meltdown that is ‘any%WR’.

Hang Wave is harsh. There are no mellow moments, or softer interludes. There is nothing remotely pretty or pleasant about it, either. Outside, a storm rages – the second in as many days, and the tenth since October. The river just a few hundred yards away has burst its banks again. The sound of other people’s recycling rattles past my front door as it bowls down the street, and it’s a potent reminder of the reality and the palpable effects of climate change. It looks very much like we’re on the brink of WW3 s the UK and US dig deeper into their commitment to fire missiles into Yemen; Gaza is all but decimated; Trump looks like he’ll running for president once again, and no-one seems particularly concerned because they’re fretting about how they’ll pay the rent and the next energy bill. It’s a sick, sick world. All of it mounts up and compounds and you feel ill. With Hang Wave, Polevaulter do absolutely nothing to lift the mood or make you feel better, but Hang Wave is the perfectly bleak, nihilistic to these utterly fucked-up times.

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Watch: ‘Violently Ill’ by Polevaulter – album, tour dates, and Gaza benefit performance announced

Posted: 9 January 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos, Singles and EPs
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Standing alone in the cold north, militant DIY dance punk duo, Polevaulter toil and labour to explore the limits of underground achievement. Known the land over for their hypnotic live performances home and away, the Northern noisemakers have built from nothing something few can argue with.

The sonic assault the two create is almost arrogant, fathered from the marriage of seismically sharp bass and loin-grinding beats. The words are quipped and brayed atop the aural landscape. They are boastful, accusing, repellent and inviting, they question and skewer the veins of masculinity, sexuality, the order of things, the music industry and the miserable reality of the North. Toured with JOHN, shared a stage with Thank, Mandy Indiana, Pink Turns Blue, Bambara, A Place To Bury Strangers, VR Sex, and others.

New Polevaulter single ‘Violently Ill’, is as the title suggests, a hard-hitting dark and fiercely off-kilter slab of awesome sickly noise and follows recent acclaim for the duos work from the likes of The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano and Louder Than War. The track combines pulsating beats and glitchy electronics with intense repeating shouts to create an intoxicating and exhilarating experience. With the track, Polevaulter announce their debut album ‘Hang Wave’ for release on 26th January and UK/EU tour dates starting February.

On ‘Violently Ill’, Polevaulter’s Jon Franz explains- “I created the track out of a sample I found from a free library, it was inspired by our trip to Tallinn in April. I demoed the track pretty much as is as soon as we got back, and Dan liked the sampling a lot, so we moved forwards. The lyrics were the first things I thought out at practice, and I like the fact that it has more sparse vocals than most of our tracks, gives our music chance to shine. Its maybe my favourite song on the album.”

Watch the video here:

Alongside the single release, Polevaulter are set to perform the debut album on repeat for 8 hours straight from 4pm to midnight on 13th January via a livestream to raise funds for the Gaza Sunbirds, a para cycling team based in the Gaza Strip. The team is currently providing emergency food parcels and aid to families sheltering around the Gaza Strip. For more info and to donate visit: https://www.justgiving.com/page/polevaulterforgazasunbirds

Polevaulter will tour the UK and EU as follows:

Jan 31st – The Fenton, Leeds – Album launch

Feb 2nd – Hatch, Sheffield

Feb 3rd – Little Buildings, Newcastle

Feb 6th – New Adelphi, Hull

Feb 7th – The Lounge, Manchester

Feb 8th – Old Blue Last, London

Feb 9th – Bear Cave, Bournemouth w/ JOHN

Feb 10th – Craufurd Arms, Milton Keynes w/ JOHN

Feb 13th – DAda, Toulouse, France

Feb 14th – Le Mans, France

Feb 15th – TBA, France

Feb 16th – Melody Maker, Rennes, France

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Pound Land – Defeated

Posted: 25 November 2022 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 2nd December 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Having raved about Pound Land’s second album, Can’t Be Arsed back in March, I was pretty thrilled to find the follow-up landing so swiftly. What with the exponential rise of Benefits, and acts like Polevaulter emerging, it seems that now is a good time for angsty, angry music with noisy tendencies and gritty sociopolitical leanings. Of course it is: it’s a sign of the times, and besides, it’s not a good time for anything else, unless you happen to be a non-dom billionaire or a CEO at an oil company.

If Sleaford Mods set a new template for the paired-back duo setup as being in vogue before the pandemic, the combination of lockdowns and crippling economic circumstance has rendered this an operational necessity for many musicians.

Pound Land may be up to their elbows in grimy dishwater and wading through excrement in streets where the drains and sewers are backed up due to torrential downpours and a lack of council funding, but they share little common ground with Sleaford Mods, and that’s despite favouring repetitive monotonous Krautrock-inspired grooves over dynamic structures: Pound Land are far doomier, dingier, lugging their way closer to sludge metal than anything you could possibly dance to.

The Stockport duo’s third album is a monster slab of punishing, gut-dragging, bass-heavy grimness, and one has to wonder how much to read into the title. The people are weary, ground down: will they rise up, or curl up and give up?

The blurb points out that the album finds the Stockport band pushing their ‘post-industrial kitchen-sink drama preoccupations even further on Defeated, exploring the dark comedy of everyday life in the dismal land of eternal recession. Sometimes the vision expands out of shitty Britain too, ‘Drone’ recounting the wearied observations of an electronic device as it traverses the globe… You’ve got to laugh, because if you don’t you’ll kill yourself. Or somebody else.’

The laughter is pretty dark and pretty hollow, though, and derives as much from the keen observations as any particular knack for a punchline (a line about mobility scooters with Northern soul stickers on stands out as particularly pithy) and the stark musical backing isn’t especially musical, more of a pounding trudge that provides a backdrop to an endless stream of vitriol and bleak depictions of the everyday, from pavements caked with dogshit and news items about rising fuel prices and their effect in the average household. If it sounds mundane, it is, but then we need art that speaks to us about life as we experience it, and the majority know far more about scrabbling for change to buy a loaf of bread than luxury cars, watches, and clothes.

‘Violence’ is their equivalent of Public Image Ltd’s ‘Theme’, a brutal, sprawling, brawling, squalling monster that opens the album with a relentlessly heavy battering ram of a racket, like Sunn O))) with a howling harmonica and sneering Lydonesque vocal. It crushes your skull, before it fades out swiftly and unexpectedly, which somehow works. But maintaining the PiL comparison, it’s Metal Box that is perhaps the closest similarity, in that the album as a whole is diverse, fractured, unpredictable.

‘Carry On Screaming’ sounds like The Fall in a three-way collision with Yard Act and Melvins. It’s a mangled mess of drum machine beats and psychedelia and noise with a monotone vocal drawl.

Against a thumping dirge of a noise, a grating mesh of distortion and dolorous drum, the title track is a gnarly hybrid of early Swans, and elsewhere, as on ‘Sick Day’, it becomes less about songs and more about spoken word narrative delivered against a backdrop of mangled noise, and at times, it’s pretty harrowing. Lyrically, Pound Land don’t pretty things up. Sonically, they don’t either. It’s magnificently raw and un-produced, and this is no more true than on penultimate song ‘Pathogen’, a dirty slow stomp that’s pure rage and invites comparisons to Uniform. And it sounds like it was recorded on a phone from the next room.

‘Drone’ sneers and snarls like Lydon at his best, closing with a venomous refrain of ‘fucking twat’ delivered in a thick, spitting Manchester accent.

Defeated may only contain eight songs, and only a couple of them extend beyond the five-minute mark, but it’s feels immense, and experience that’s exhausting both physically and mentally. Listening, you feel the weight of the world condense and compress as the angst and anguish press down ever darker, ever denser. It’s a bleak, suffocating document of everything that’s wrong right now. This is the sound of broken Britain, and it’s a harrowing insight into just how fucked everything is. But in this channelling of nihilistic anguish, you realise you’re not alone. It doesn’t change anything, but it’s something to cling to.

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I Like Trains / Polevaulter – Howard Assembly Rooms, Leeds, 1st October 2022

Posted: 3 October 2022 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

I like trains. Ironically, it was a lack of trains that almost prevented my making this show, as the largest national strike in the series yet meant there were none operating. David Martin and his band also likes trains, as he reminded us during one of his few brief exchanges with the audience during the set, going on to add “we support the action”. So would many in the audience, judging by the response.

While we’re waiting for things to get underway, we’re afforded the opportunity to appreciate the magnificent surroundings to a backdrop of minimal instrumental beats, before northern noise duo Polevaulter take to the stage assault our ears with a truly abrasive racket. Having given a platform to the emerging Benefits late last year, ILT have come up trumps with another killer support act this time. Complimentary but contrasting to the headliners, Polevaulter hit us with stark, crisp programmed drums and dirty live bass grind and feedback and shouty vocals. They’re a powerful hybrid of post-punk and industrial, and crank out a blinding wall of nihilism. As much Cabaret Voltaire and Factory Floor as Benefits or Sleaford Mods, they equally belong to the Leeds lineage of drum-machine driven post punk defined by the mutant noise of Age of Chance.

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Polevaulter

More minimal beats pave the way to an atmospheric intro as I Like Trains take to the stage and launch into a set that – unsurprisingly – is dominated by tracks from KOMPROMAT, their first album in eight years. There’s a palpable urgency to the performance, which launches with the triple salvo of ‘A Steady Hand’, ‘Desire is a Mess’, and ‘Dig In’.

They’re tight and look reinvigorated – and Guy Bannister still looks the same as he did back in 2005, switching between – and sometimes simultaneously playing -guitar and synths, integral to the rich, deep, and full-bodied sound, while the visuals make for a full 360-degree multisensory experience. They still kill the crescendos, too, and I’m reminded once again why I’ve been coming back to see this band for the last fifteen years: they really do put everything into their shows, and play hard, too.

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I Like Trains

They pack the songs in tight, with minimal chat or pause, and deliver ear-shredding bursts of noise from seemingly out of nowhere, and tonight, they’re as good as they’ve ever been. Having moved from a baritone croon to a more spoken style of vocal, David Martin actually pushes himself a lot harder in his delivery: there’s real passion behind every line, and – more irony – in having assimilated slogans and double speak clichés into the fabric of his lyrics, he’s truly found his own voice as a writer.

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I Like Trains

Mid-set, they play a rearranged version of ‘The Beaching Report’ from Progress Reform. With some screwdriver slide guitar work, it’s bleak and haunting, and simply had to be played. Reform, reform… What goes around comes around, history repeats, and cuts bite ever harder. The song’s relevance now brings a lump to the throat: today’s strikes aren’t purely about pay, but reforms that will have a significant impact on safety.

History and remembrance have run as themes through I Like Trains’ work since their very beginning, but tonight, observing the contrast between the refrain of ‘Terra Nova’, of Scott’s doomed arctic expedition – ‘More’s the shame / they will remember my name’ – and Boris Johnson’s gurning face against the slogan ‘God loves a winner’ during The Spectacle’ – which absolutely kicks – is a sobering experience.

Toward the end of the set, they finally concede to a proper delve into the back catalogue (although there are no songs from Elegies to Lessons Learnt – thanks to the early finish meaning we don’t get the ‘Spencer Percival’ encore of the night before) or The Deep), giving us ‘A Rook House for Bobby’ (dedicated to the memory of Debs, “perhaps the biggest I Like Trains fan”) and ‘Terra Nova’ back to back, both bringing ear-bleeding crescendos.

They close with an absolutely stonking extended rendition of ‘The Truth’, with a thudding, insistent bass groove chopping a deep furrow against a backdrop of warped images of Liz Truss. The climactic thrust which sees David nailing the truth of the truth and appropriating my own stage performance style in the process (and who wouldn’t want to, right?), tossing screwed cards into the crowd and flipping the written cues in all directions… it feels like a performative metaphor, whereby the truth is discarded wantonly, recklessly, with no regard, before he finally intimates ‘The truth will trickle down… I am totally out of my depth’. He’s never been more intense than this, and I Like Trains have never felt more vital.