Posts Tagged ‘Rare Vitamin Records’

The Battery Farm – Hail Mary

Posted: 18 August 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Rare Vitamin Records – 23rd August 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

Ramping up the anticipation for their upcoming album, hot on the heels of ‘O God’, The Battery Farm slam down a second single in the form of ‘Hail Mary’. One of the physical formats happens to be a rather nifty mini-CD. I’m rather partial to these as objects – so much so that I released a double-pack of EPs on 3” CD recently. Back when CDs singles were a standard format – and more often than not as a standard and limited edition, alongside a 7”, 12”, and cassette single, back in the early 90s at the peak of releasing as many formats as was humanly conceivable in order to milk fans and maximise copies sold for chart placement – the mini CD offered a format that was both practical and novel: with a capacity of around twenty-three minutes, they provided just the right amount of playing surface and so not only seemed less wasteful than a 5” disc with its seventy-odd minutes space, but they looked dinky, too. The challenge was always how to package them, though: I have 3” singles by The Sisters of Mercy from the late 80s in 5” jewel cases, complete with plastic adaptors for those whose CD player trays didn’t have a 3” divot, although this sort of seemed to defeat the object of the object, if you get my point, while the ‘battery pack’ style limited editions of the singles from the second album by Garbage were as stupid as they were cool, inasmuch as to play the things, you had to trash the packaging – which was probably the idea as an artistic wheeze, presenting fans and collectors with the dilemma of whether to play or preserve it (or buy two).

Of course, while presentation matters, it’s ultimately the content that counts, and with ‘Hail Mary’, The Battery Farm continue the trajectory of ‘O God’, with some sparse, jittery, slightly mathy instrumentation providing a tension-building lead-in before things kick in hard with a fat, buzzing bass around the mid-point.

‘Get this thing the fuck away from me,’ Benjamin Corry snarls with in a thick northern accent, dripping with vitriol, his throat full of phlegm and gravel, and in no time at all, the anguished vocals are spluttering out through a whirling cacophony of noise. It hits like a punch in the guts, and every spittle-flecked syllable feels like it’s being coughed up from the furthermost recesses of Corry’s soul. And yet, amidst it all, there’s a nagging riff, thumping beat you can really get down to, and even a snippet of backing vocal adding a bit of harmony.

For The Battery Farm, B-sides represent an opportunity to explore and experiment, and ‘2 Shackwell Road’ is no exception, with a collage of vocal samples looping across a stammering drum ‘n’ bass beat which gives way to a low-end rumble and occasional blasts of industrial noise. The result is strange and disturbing.

Taken together, the two singles thus far likely give us a fair indication of what we can expect from the album, Dark Web, due in November. It threatens something stark, uncomfortable, a psychologically demanding set of songs which go deep into dark territories, and promises to be their strongest work to date.

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Battery Farm - Hail

The Battery Farm – O God

Posted: 26 July 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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Rare Vitamin Records – 26th July 2024

Christopher Nosnibor

The accompanying blurb informs us that “‘O God’ is the 13th single from Manchester Doom Punks The Battery Farm’, and promises that ‘The single marks a bold expansion of the band’s signature Gutter Punk sound, adding elements of UK Garage and Metal to an already potent mix to create something dark, heavy, taut and unhinged.’

It’s quite phenomenal that they’ve racked up thirteen singles in what feels like a fairly short time. But this is a band who are absolutely driven, driven to make music and get it out there. They’ve grafted hard, and scoring increasingly high-profile support slots has done a lot in terms of reaching a wider audience, and it’s richly deserved. And I don’t mean it’s deserved simply because they’ve worked hard: they wouldn’t deserve it if they sucked! But they kick serious ass, and possess the one thing no amount of effort and luck or songwriting skill or musicianship can get you, and that’s authenticity. And with Rare Vitamin Records, they’ve found a label who are more than happy to provide a platform to their high-volume output, with this being the fifth single on the label (and it looks like the 7” has sold already, so hard luck vinyl enthusiasts, and CDs are running low already, too).

Unlike many acts from the punkier end of the spectrum, they’re by no means anti-intellectual, or given to base anti-establishment sloganeering (as my introduction to the band, ‘A Shropshire Lad’ abundantly evidenced. It’s a rare position they occupy, balancing poeticism and introversion, and deep reflection, with brute sonic force. On this front, ‘O God’ is exemplary.

As they explain, ‘O God explores the idea of being alone in a universe of chaos, with no guiding hand to stop you plummeting into a hell of someone else’s making. We always ask why, and we always search for meaning. ‘O God’ reflects starkly on the idea that there is no why and there is no meaning. Just one action leading to the next, merciless and unfeeling. Is that a thought infinitely more terrifying than the guidance of His healing hand? Or is it just life?’

The timing of this release couldn’t be better: half of America seems to be frothing at the mouth over the ‘divine intervention’ which saved Donald Trump from a sniper’s bullet just the other week, proclaiming that he has been ‘chosen by God’ to lead America and the world, while at the same time, the IDF continues to pulverise every inch of the Gaza Strip, reducing buildings to rubble under the pretext of revenge, of rescuing hostages, and eliminating terrorists. But ultimately, it’s about reclaiming land some see as having been God-given. And where is God in all this? He seems strangely silent, yet those of a certain mindset are absolutely convinced this is all God’s will. For those of us not of this mindset, it seems deranged, and that humanity is off the rails, and we live in disturbing, and truly terrifying times.

This renders the sentiment of ‘O God’ remarkably prescient.

It pairs a nagging, vaguely mathy, snaking bass groove with guitars that sounds like a bulldozer, atop which Benjamin Corry delivers a quivering, tremulous vocal in the verses, and then swings between menacing and absolutely bruising in the explosive choruses. It all adds up to a blindingly intense two-and-three-quarter minutes which conveys the complexities of internal conflict and existential anguish with a rare – and raw – power.

Flipside, the acoustic, ‘Find’ showcases a far gentler side of the band, and its intimate, tranquil feel is genuinely pleasant.

Once again – and again – The Battery Farm have excelled themselves and delivered something immensely powerful and uniquely their own.

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Watch: ‘Missing Person’ by Dragged Up

Posted: 1 February 2024 in Recommended Streams and Videos
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Hot on the heels of their acclaimed EP Hex Domestic, Dragged Up release their new single ‘Missing Person’ on Rare Vitamin Records on 2 February, as digital, super-limited CD and cassette.

The single is taken from the band’s forthcoming album, High On Ripple, which will be released in April by Cruel Nature and Rare Vitamin Records.

Check the video here:

Missing Person was recorded by Robbie Wilson (The Kundalini Genie) and Chris Geddes (Belle and Sebastian), mixed by Tommy Duffin (The Cosmic Dead) and mastered by Sam Smith at Glasgow’s legendary Green Door Studio. The flipside is the a dub-dirge remix of the title track, entitled ‘Machine Person’.

Dragged Up are an off-kilter psych-garage proto-grunge band with a spoken word element, founded in late 2018 by Eva Gnatiuk (Violent Butlins) with Simon Shaw (Trembling Bells) and writer Lisa Jones. Chas Lalli (Vom) and Stephen Mors (The Owsley Sunshine) joined in 2019 and 2022 respectively.

Upcoming live shows (more to be added):

Feb 3rd – The Ferret, Preston (daytime)

Feb 3rd – The Source Collective, Carlisle (evening)

March 8th – Summerhall, Edinburgh (with Amateur Cult)

April 11th – Stereo, Glasgow (supporting House of All)

May 2nd – The Ferret, Preston

May 3rd – Big Hands, Manchester

May 4th – The Underground, Bradford

May 5th – Museum Vaults, Sunderland

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(Click image to listen / purchase both tracks on bandcamp)

The Battery Farm – House of Pain

Posted: 24 October 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Rare Vitamin Records – 20th October 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The Battery Farm have had a truly extraordinary twelve months: the Manchester foursome released their debut album last November, and have been gigging hard off the back of it, with some pretty high-profile shows along the way. And this is a band that’s driven – not so much by ambition or aspirations of stardom, but by passion. These guys are purveyors of political, pissed off, authentic punk – not haircuts and threads, but sweaty, full-throttle 110% all the way. Benjamin Corry makes for a powerful presence, vocally, visually, and in the interviews he’s given. He may appear a shade scary and borderline deranged, but comes across as affable, articulate, and genuine.

The band exists to rail against the shitness of the world we find ourselves in, and perhaps buoyed by the reception of the album and recent shows, their twelfth single is more amped-up and fiery than ever. ‘House of Pain’ is three minutes of riff-driven fury that blasts in at a hundred miles an hour with a message that needs to be heard. Arguably, that message could be boiled down to the barest bones of ‘fuck this bullshit’, but the expanded articulation is that it addresses ‘the shame imposed on all of us who are scraping by in an ongoing and worsening cost of greed crisis. You do what you have to to survive, and how dare anyone in a position of privilege look down their nose.’

It needs to be heard because, as I was reading only earlier today online in The Guardian, ‘The number of people experiencing destitution in the UK has more than doubled in the last five years – up from 1.55 million in 2017. One million children are now living in destitute homes – a staggering increase of 186% in half a decade.’ That every single supermarket now has a place to donate to food banks speaks for itself; yet our government, whose job it is to protect society’s most vulnerable, simply dispense advice that if you can’t afford a cheese sandwich, to forgo the cheese, and who seem to think that broadband and mobile phones are luxury items the poor should do without, despite the fact it’s impossible to apply for jobs or even maintain benefits without them. The privately-educated governing elite are in the pockets of the likes of the oil industry, and they absolutely fucking hate the poor, and they want you to hate the poor too. And their hateful campaigning and sloganeering is depressingly effective: how else do you explain working-class people voting Conservative? It’s bewildering to think that people in impoverished towns in the north of England would vote for these cunts who’d happily bulldoze every council estate in the country, that they might think that the likes of Bozo Johnson and Richboi Sunak give even a flake of shit about them, let alone represent them – but the increasingly right-wing Tories appeal to the mentality of the impoverished and disenfranchised by apportioning the blame for the state of everything on ‘illegal’ immigrants, who come over here and sponge all the benefits. Stop the boats! Right. Then what?

The Battery Farm are spot on when they describe the current situation in the UK as a ‘cost of greed’ crisis. Everyone who’s already in the money is making on this: banks, oil and energy companies, supermarkets… any increases in costs are being passed directly to customers, and then some, all to protect profits, all to pass on to shareholders, all to give CEOs even bigger bonuses. The injustice, the social division is at a point where something has to give. Sadly, it seems that something is the lives of those at the bottom of the heap.

The Battery Farm can’t change the world, but they can provide a voice and an outlet to the anger at this injustice, and flipside ‘A Time of Peace’ is another full-throttle gritty blast of punk fury, reminiscent of the sound of ‘79/’80 – I’m thinking grimy roar of The Anti-Nowhere League and fellow Mancunians Slaughter and the Dogs by way of references here.

At the time of writing this, four days after release (I’ve been slack / drowning in dealing with everyday life stuff (delete as appropriate); physical copies on 7”, CD, and cassette have sold out, which is a huge achievement and shows just how they’ve built a committed following through a combination of belting tunes and sheer hard slog. This is their strongest work to date.

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The Battery Farm – A Working Class Lad

Posted: 5 August 2022 in Singles and EPs
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Rare Vitamin Records – 5th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

It almost goes without saying, but I’ll say it – again – anyway: we live in pretty bleak times. Everything is fucked. But perhaps with the many things which have deteriorated, diminished or otherwise been eroded in recent years, from various freedoms and basic rights to quality of life, be it access to medical and mental health care to how far paychecks go, one of the most depressing in many respects is the rise of anti-intellectualism. It’s not even a question of dumbing down, so much as a culture that seems to mistrust, and even dislike intelligence, debate, and even artistry and creativity. To question the motives of funding of an individual or organisation is healthy: to denigrate and dismiss all ‘experts’ is insane.

England, in particular, has a uniquely worrying and ultimately debasing attitude which stems from members of its ultra-privileged, ultra-capitalist, right-wing government, which is disconcertingly open about nits agenda to attack the arts and culture, not only in having a minister for culture who has precisely none, but also an education department hell-bend on defunding and cancelling degree courses in the arts on the premise that they don’t dovetail into careers that pay. There’s clearly something wrong here, since the music industry generates billions of pounds a year in the UK – or at least it did, before the double whammy of the pandemic and Brexit screwed both grassroots venues and musicians alike.

The arrival of The Battery Farm’s ‘A Working Class Lad’, then, is something of a breath of fresh air. Taking its title from a poem from A. E. Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad collection (1986), it’s a song which addresses the uniquely British issue of class, and how class division can affect a family.

The Manchester four-piece may describe themselves as ‘gutter punk’ and promise ‘a ferocious, muscular, gnarly track that ebbs and flows with purpose, precision and venom’, but they’re unafraid to be open with their literary allusions and reflect on issues without lapsing into the common political / anti-government tropes through a bunch of half-baked slogans that are standard punk fare.

With a jet-propelled drums and a robust, chugging riff behind the sneering vocals, The Battery Farm prove in three minutes that it’s possible to be punky and abrasive but not dumb. Just as the song tackles duality and (inner) conflict while at the same time being a seething roar of vitriol, so ‘A Working Class Lad’ showcases some savvy songwriting beneath the fire of a throat-grabbing rager. It’s a rare joy to hear a song that actually says something, but is equally fine to take on face value as something to most around to and pump your fists at the raw energy.

With a brace of EPs under their belts and ‘A Working Class Lad’ being the first single from their debut album, out in November, The Battery Farm are a rare thing – the perfect combination of brains and balls, they’re a band worth getting excited about.

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