Following the demise of Needlework, who we absolutely loved here at Aural Aggravation, front man Reuben Pugh has been keeping busy and keeping creative, with the swift emergence of lo-fi slacker country act Troutflies.
Ahead of an imminent debut album, The Dancing Years, they’ve dropped the song ‘Cross on a Hill’, which has hints of Pavement and Silver Jews, blended with the drawl of Mark E. Smith, and is accompanied by a video that matches the loose, low-budget feel of the song. We dig.
AA
Christopher Nosnibor
When it comes to formats and the strategies for marketing new releases, it’s clear – particularly in hindsight – that the 90s was the peak period for milking fans with myriad formats, each featuring different mixes or edits, B-sides, and artwork. Now, I am by no means a nostalgia nut, but as a collector, part of me does miss this – particularly when most releases aren’t even available physically anymore, and some aren’t even downloadable. Adding a track your playlist is… nothing.
The latest offering from Glasgow’s wonky lo-fi maestros, Dragged Up, sees a different approach, at least, with an edited version of the A-side being released to streaming platforms but a full-length version available to download via Bandcamp, with the B-side being released a week later, followed by a physical release via the ever-innovative label Rare Vitamin.
You really need the full five-minute version of ‘Blake’s Tape’ to take it all in, to bask in the glory of the epic intro of churning feedback and rumbling discord which eventually gives way to a stomping, rambunctious indie tune which brings in elements of post-punk and folk, a collision of UK 80s and US 90s, and with the verses and choruses sounding like they belong to different songs, the dynamic is strong, switching as it does from nonchalance to pumping energy. And both are magnificently executed.
‘Clachan Dubh’ is a fast-paced, high-energy blast of fizzy guitars and blissfully loose interswitching vocals, and again it’s a collision of Pavement and The Fall plus all the scuzzy indue acts you’d read about in NME and Melody Maker in the early 90s. It’s less a case of them sounding like this band or that band, and more about the way they distil these various zetigeists and amalgamate them into a magnificent alt-rock hybrid which sounds like so much that’s gone before, and at the same time completely unique.
Oh, and they’ve got songs. Great songs. Get stuck in. And maybe go and see them on tour in a small venue in August, because after touring as the support for Steve Malkmus’ new band in the summer, there’s a fair chance they’ll be playing bigger places by this time next year.
AA
4th April 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
I miss Fawn Spots. I didn’t especially like them at first – musically, they were lo-fi, energetic, and thrilling, but they came across as bratty, even a shade twatty, at times, notably in my recollection as coming across as somewhat ‘off’ and disparaging when supporting The Twilight Sad at The Duchess in York. I miss The Duchess, too. I suppose, like Fawn Spots at the time, it had its faults: the pillars weren’t great for views at times and the sound was often a bit crap, but it brought some top-notch touring bands to York, with The Fall, and The Psychedelic Furs’ DV8 performance being clear standouts.
But I came to feel an affection for Fawn Spots: they evolved, in every respect – from a raw, messy two-piece cranking out some frantic racket, to a proper band, with some proper songs – although not too polished. They never got so slick as to lose their edge. It’s easy to take bands who are always out on the local circuit for granted, and it’s only when they move on – whether it’s because they call it a day, or move on beyond the local scene – that their significance on a personal level becomes apparent. You go from seeing them every other week either headlining or supporting a bigger-name touring band and it all being so much ‘yeah, whatever, cool, but this is the sixth time this year, and it’s only May’ to suddenly, they’re absent.
After a clutch of indie and self-released EPs and bits, and some touring, and with the release of their critically-lauded debut LP From Safer Place in 2015 on Critical Heights, which received coverage from Record Collector and Louder than War Fawn Spots seemed to be on the brink of something. And then… they vanished, and we forgot about them because we were busy with our lives and all the other bands we were listening to, and all the rest.
This posthumously-released album has been lurking in the vaults for some time. As they write – and at the same time highlighting their wildly eclectic influences – ‘A few months after recording this album the band ceased to exist… The product of a period of obsession with Arab Strap, Angels of Light, Lungfish and the song ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ by Crowded House.’
I love Angels of Light, but don’t love nostalgia: however, while cooking the other day, I flipped to the 80s music day on the Smithsonian channel, and heard ‘Don’t Dream It’s Over’ – a song I own on 7” – for the first time in ages, and was reminded just how good it is. It’s not the first thing that comes to mind listening to the fuzzing, buzzing guitar blast of Ersatz.
‘Fortunes’ is a bit Fugazi, a bit Girls Against Boys, gritty, driving, sturdy, while ‘Blossoms’ is dynamic, textured in the way Nirvana pushed soft and chiming vs max overdrive.
The album has energy, that’s for sure. It also has some dense riffs and some keen melodies. Some are keener than others, it’s true, and the hollering ‘Daylight Runner’ feels a bit emo with a dash of mathiness. The same could be said of ‘Strangers’ but the early Dinosaur Jr vibe rescues it., while ‘Faint House’ has the post-punk-with-a-commercial-edge feel of White Lies. Quite liking White Lies, and bearing in mind the timing and context, I have no issues with this, but a decade on, I can comprehend why some may be rather less enthused.
Listening to these songs now, I feel I’d have appreciated them more contemporaneously. Buzz does count for something, it seems, as does being in the moment. If they’d sustained their momentum, if they’d remained current… things would likely have been very different. And perhaps some sounds do date, until nostalgia resurrects them. What goes around comes around, but sometimes it takes time.
Winding the clock back, the songs on Ersatz are well-realised, and played with real energy. But this an album that is, essentially, of its time. It’s not so much that its dated, as that is just feels… not entirely confluent with the zeitgeist of 2025, not entirely gripping in the sense that you need to check your back yard to feel safe.
Had it been released in 2015, and given the right press push and media uptake – because. let’s be honest, leading horses to water is only part of the equation when it comes to getting new bands heard – Ersatz could have propelled Fawn Spots to the next level – not because it was their best work, but their most accessible, and their most zeitgeisty work. And it has hooks: the post-punky ‘No Source’ is bold and guitary, but catchy, too.
Ersatz is now a historical document. It feels anachronistic, and doesn’t really sit anywhere in 2025. But it reminds us not only of how things were, but what could have been… and how we miss Fawn Spots.
AA
Cruel Nature Records – 21st February 2025
Christopher Nosnibor
This split release has a lengthy backstory, which is given in full on the label’s Bandcamp page – but the short version is that when York’s Neon Kittens (how had I not heard (of) them, given that they appear to be from round my way and absolutely my bag? I feel ashamed, and fear I cannot even remotely claim to have the finger on the pulse of my local scene right now – but still, better late than never, right?) approached The Bordellos about a collaboration, the latter, having taken an eternity to only half-finish their current album-in-progress, some ten years after the release of will.i.am, you’re really nothing, offered everything they had for a split release. And lo, this is it.
I suppose the eight songs Neon Kittens have contributed here provide a solid starting point to their rapidly-expanding catalogue, and being paired with The Bordellos works a treat. Both espouse the same lo-fi DIY ethic, with a certain leaning toward indie with a trashy punk aesthetic.
That the cassette edition sold out on advance orders hints at the anticipation for the release: for, as The Bordellos describe themselves as being ‘ignored by millions, loathed by some, loved by a select few’, when you’ve got a small but devoted following, they get pretty excited for new material.
‘Set Your Heart to the Sun’ is perfectly representative of their scratchy, harmony-filled indie – kinda jangly, a tad ramshackle, but direct, immediate. Dee Claw’s airy vocal contributions really lift the sound and raise the melodic aspects of the songs. Not all of the songs have full drum-kit percussion, often favouring tambourine or bongos or seemingly whatever comes to hand, and more than any other acts, I’m reminded of Silver Jews or really, really early Pavement – those EPs that sounded like they were recorded on a condenser mic from the next room with more tape hiss than music, but still undeniably great tunes. And yes, they really do have great tunes – overall, they’re pretty laid-back in their approach to, well, everything: remember when ‘slacker; was a thing? Yeah. In place of polish, they have reverb, and these songs tickle the ears with joy.
Neon Kittens bring a rather denser sound and a greater sense of urgency with the buzzy, scuzzy ‘Better Stronger Faster’. A hyperactive drum machine stutters and flickers away beneath a sonic haze of fuzzy guitar: there are hints of Metal Urbain crossed with The Fall and Flying Lizards in the mix, while ‘All Done by Numbers’ brings Shellac and Trumans Water together in a head-on collision – and one suspects any similarity to Shellac’s ‘New Number Order’ is entirely intentional from a band who recently featured on a Jesus Lizard tribute. ‘Cold Leather’ presents a spoken word narrative over a lurching, lumbering morass of discord, held together by the whip crack of the snare of a vintage-sounding drum machine.
The majority of their songs are around the two-minute mark, and crash in, slap you round the chops, and are done before you really know what’s hit you. ‘Deaf Metal’ is a work of beautiful chaos, constructed around a thick, rumbling bass and rolling drums., while the rather longer ‘White Flag’ is almost a stab at a grunge-pop song, while the discordant clang of ‘Sailing in a Paper Boat’ is absolutely The Fall circa Hex Enduction Hour: lo-fi post-punk racket doesn’t get much better than this.
AA
Ex Records – 20th September 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
It’s hard to conceive that The Ex have been going for a full forty-five years. It’s more than understandable that the pandemic proved a challenge for them, a band accustomed to getting out and doing it live. As their bio points out, in 45 years they did more than 2000 concerts in 45 countries. But creativity isn’t something that can simply be switched off. Again, to turn to how their notes set it out, ‘The pandemic was a standstill for many, including The Ex. Or perhaps it was more a kind of recharging, as the band is back on national and international stages with new music, ready to return to the studio… It was time for a new 45rpm 7” single. From the brand-new set they are playing full-on this year, they picked two blinking tracks: ‘Great!’ and ‘The Evidence’.
For some reason, I’ve always considered The Ex to be more of an album band, but as the compilation Singles. Period evidences, they’ve released a fair few singles through the years. And what’s interesting is how they clearly approach singles and albums very differently, exploring expansively on albums in the same kind of way they do live and striving to see just how far out they can push things, while exercising remarkable discipline and concision with the single releases, with tracks of two or three minutes and rarely exceeding four in running time. This awareness or tailoring of material to medium is quite a rare thing, but illustrates their phenomenal versatility as musicians, and also provides some insight into their methodology and creative processes.
‘Great!’ is. It’s an uptempo meandering sliver of discord whereby the musicians play across one another rather than together to spin a slice of angular post-punk that’s not a million miles from The Fall in their early years. ‘The Evidence’ – which clocks in at under three minutes – is more focused-sounding, and more noisy. Both songs are the work of a band who are still firing on all cylinders with ideas and energy.
This single is exhilarating in unexpected ways. It sounds fresh – and yes, it might also sound like it’s from circa 1979, but it sounds authentically 1979, rather than some old buggers trying to recreate and rekindle the vibe of their youth. Just what their secret is, I don’t know – although one suspects the fact that they’ve continually striven to create, and to create something new, something different, is a significant factor. In life, as well as with musicians, it’s so easy to simply settle, to adopt a routine, to take the easiest path within an established comfort zone. Fair enough: most people want an easy life, especially when they reach a certain point. But, critically, to accept a diminishing scope for activity is to consign oneself to a future of diminishment in every way. This clearly isn’t the mindset of The Ex, and this single provides ‘The Evidence’ that they’re still ‘Great!’.
And after that shameful punchline, I should probably get my coat – but shall instead pour another drink and get to the next review – because diminishment is stagnation and death, and re-engaging with The Ex post-pandemic is an invigorating experience.
AA
10ft Records – 24th May 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Percy have been going since the mid-90s, but didn’t get to release an album till 2013. They’ve maintained a steady flow since then, particularly since the solidification of their current lineup in 2017 with New Phase being their fifth album in and their fourth in six years.
‘Workmanlike’ isn’t a criticism when it comes to certain bands, when their solid and consistent output and regular gigging is central to their way of working and to their identity, and while it’s not an exclusively northern thing, The Fall and The Wedding Present are bands which immediately spring to mind as acts who deliver albums like it’s a job. Said albums may all share a certain commonality, but push those tight parameters each time, and if Percy can be guaranteed to sound like Percy, then it’s all to the good.
New Phase is an apt title for an album which sees them take a lunge into darker territory, both sonically and lyrically. A fair few of the songs have featured in their live setlist over the last year or two, giving a fair indication of the direction they were heading with the new material, but to hear these songs all together and as full-realised studio recordings has a different kind of impact. On New Phase, they sound invigorated, vivified, but also tense, paranoid, embattled. Colin Howard’s lyrics are less given to social critique and instead present scenes of horror, of personal torment and heightened anxiety. Whatever the fuck’s been going down in his life or neighbourhood, or whatever grim stuff he’s been streaming on Netflix, the resultant art is powerful. The musical accompaniment captures the same uneasy mood of high tension and darkness.
‘Sink Estate Agents Satanic Rites’ is – remarkably – their most Fall-like track to date, a jagged paranoid spasm that’s dragged from the space between Grotesque and Slates. It’s tense, uncomfortable, and there’s something weird about the production that pulls in different directions and renders it even more difficult, and vaguely gothic in the early post-punk sense, too.
‘Blackout’ has hints of early Arctic Monkeys lurking amidst its clanging mess of guitars and panic-filled lyrics which narrate a bleak tale of alcoholic excess ‘there’s bloodstains on the floor / there’s bloodstains on the wall / and someone’s banging on the door… and then it hit me’.
Narrative is a strong feature of the lyrics, as is nowhere more evident than on the nightmarish ‘I Can Hear Orgies’. Are these auditory hallucinations or is weird shit going down round Colin’s way? Or is it a side effects of the meds?
The title track is raw, ragged, angular, more Shellac or Bilge Pump or even Part Chimp than The Fall, bringing a new level of aggression and noise to Percy’s repertoire.
More conventional Percy territory is covered in ‘Thinking of Jacking It In Again’, ‘Do You Think I’m on the Spectrum?’ and ‘Last Train to Selby’, delving back into the world of work and sociopolitical matters and delivered with powerhouse drumming and choppy, clanging Gang of Four guitars – and of course a dash of Fall-like rockabilly, because it’s Percy. ‘Wah-wah-wah-wah’ Howard signs off. ‘Greedy People’ is a classic Percy swipe at an obvious target, but as Colin spits ‘It’s not about the money / it’s about the principle’, there’s a palpable anger, articulated as much though discordant guitar.
New Phase marks a step up for Percy, and in many ways. They sustain the tension across the duration of the album’s ten tracks, with only the six-minute closer, ‘Afterlife’ calming down and taking a more synth-led dimension, but still presenting a bleakness and heavy melancholy that fits with the album as a whole. The production is tight and solid, bringing to life the album’s sonic and lyrical tensions.
New Phase is a magnificently awkward, challenging, angular set, and perhaps Percy’s least commercial, least overtly ‘indie’ album to date. But for my money, it’s also their best-realised, most authentic, and most exhilarating album yet.
AA
17th February 2024
Christopher Nosnibor
Writing on their single ‘Existential Dread’ in these virtual pages in October, James Wells was hugely enthused by the track, but made no bones about the fact he wasn’t keen on the band’s name. But listening to this, it makes perfect sense: with a filthy, serrated bassline that grates away like a rusty saw, it’s nasty alright, and probably best not to be aired pre-watershed. It’s punky, but also owes an immense debt to The Fall, not least of all with the delivery of the sneery, snarky vocals, chewing on the refrain and spitting it out, mangled and messy. The there’s the thumping repetitive drumming and, appearing unexpectedly, some quite buoyant 80s indie synth work. But it’s not just some cheap Fall rip-off – although its lo-fi fizz is integral to its appeal – but brings elements of The Pixies into play as part of its grungy four-chord stomp. They’re not wrong when they describe it as ‘Simple. Direct. Violent.’ And say that they’ve made ‘a song that sounds exactly like the adrenaline rush when you realise that life will never be the same again.’ Clocking in at two minutes and fifteen seconds, there’s no space for mucking about.
They add: ‘We made a song about something complex and difficult. Identify. Surveillance. Scrutiny. Or maybe it is a song about sending dick pics or shoplifting? Really, it means whatever you want to mean. In Crowland you decide what something means. What is truthful.’ One may argue that this is something of a cop-out, but by the same token, it acknowledges and accepts that songs take on meanings which are personal and individual to each listener, and to impose meaning is likely futile – or a likely cause of disappointment to some. There aren’t many lyrics to unravel, as it happens, with the verses consisting of the lines ‘Pixelate me! Hide my face!’ between choruses consisting of the title repeated. Its simplicity is its genius.
Human Worth – 10th November 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
I know it’s not really cool to make that you’re cool because you’re in the know or whatever. A few years ago, it was the way of the hipster, but after what felt like forever, they seems to have disappeared, probably because everyone grew beards during lockdown, so the hipsters had to shave and resort to telling people they were wearing a beard before the pandemic or something. Nevertheless, I can’t help but take some satisfaction from having observed Beige Palace from their very dawn, at their first show in the now-lost CHUNK rehearsal space-cum-gig venue way back in the spring of 2016. The place was a bugger to get to from the train station, being practically in the middle of nowhere you’d actually want to go, and to describe it as basic would be polite. But what CHUNK provided was a place where anything went. It was BYOB, pay what you can, and it was a hub of creativity which lay at the heart of the DIY scene in Leeds. And so it was that Beige Palace – perhaps not quite a supergroup at the time, but simply people in other bands (Freddy Vinehill-Cliffe (Thank), Kelly Bishop (Gloomy Planets) and Ant Bedford (Cattle)) doing something different together – came to be.
They’ve come a way since then, notably with slots at The Brudenell supporting Mclusky and also Shellac, with a personal thumbs-up from god himself, Steve Albini. There’s likely a number of reasons for this, apart from the simple fact that Beige palace are bloody good, a major one being that they make angular noise without being overly abrasive, preferring instead to push sounds that are slated, skewed, imbalanced, jarring, jolting. This is right up front at the start of this, their second long-player, with ‘Not Waving’, a scuzzy collision of Shellac, The Fall, early Pavement, and Truman’s Water. The bass is right up in the mix, the vocals down low, and everything about it is absolutely wrong in terms of conventional sound. You can imagine sound engineers all around the country shaking their heads and saying “but that bass is just booming… it’s drowning out the vocals… and the guitar, maybe you should take the treble down a bit?” But Beige palace’s sound isn’t conventional, and they’re not going for radio-friendly pop tunes.
The album’s title appears to make a nod to XTC, and calls to mind the band’s hit ‘Making Plans for Nigel’ (surely one of the greatest snappy tunes of the New wave era) and the fact that Andy Partridge was co-frontman of XTC. Coincidence? Am I joining dots and identifying references which simply don’t exist? Possibly, but then again, for all the wrongness, the off-key and the off-kilter, there are some neat hooks to be found leaping out from the rumbling basslines and loping drums. ‘Local Sandwich’ is representative: the rhythm section strolls along kicking a loose groove where the bass and drums are seemingly playing alternate to one another, the discordant sprechgesang vocals of the verses overlap one another, making for a tense combination – and then out of nowhere, pow! Hook! And then a squalling climax.
The genius of the songwriting lies in its unpredictability: for as much as the compositions are largely built around repetitive motifs, hammering away at the same nagging loop for minutes at a time, adding and subtracting elements such as keyboard or guitar, they’re prone to veer off somewhere else or otherwise change tempo or burst into a scratchy blast of noise at precisely the moment you least expect – and just when you expect something unexpected, a song like ‘My Brother Bagagwaa’ doesn’t do it. They’re as keen to explore the space in between the notes as the notes themselves, and there are numerous passages on Making Sounds for Andy where they pull things back to stark minimalism. This makes the crackling bursts of distortion and clattering drums all the more impactful.
Leeds has a habit of birthing weird bands who are nosy but not noise, with the legendary Bilge Pump and the should-have-been-legendary Bearfoot Beware providing a brace of examples – but Beige Palace are very much their own band. Making Sounds for Andy is a bold celebration of ramshackle lo-fi, delivered in such a way as to hit hard. It’s got ‘underground classic’ all over it.
AA
skoghall rekordings – 30th June 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
Racking up a second release in its first month of existence, new Swedish label skoghall rekordings – the gentler sibling of Dret Skivor – offers up a reissue of the second album by Farming Incident, originally released in 2008 on Wrath Records, home of The Scaramanga Six and Eureka Machines.
The tags which accompany this release include ‘experimental’, ‘hip hop’, ‘ambient’, ‘anarcho-folk’, ‘folktronica’, ‘politics’, ‘post-punk’, ‘post-rock’, and ‘space rock’, and if that seems an incredibly eclectic cocktail, it’s a fair summary of a band who never sat comfortably in any category, at a time when crossovers and hyper-hybridity were still pretty uncommon and even less accepted: this was a time in the wake of the 90s emergence of rap-rock crossovers and around the time when instrumental post-rock’s ubiquity was waning after what felt like an eternity but was in fact a span of maybe four years at most.
For this, their final album, Farming Incident had expanded its pseudonymous membership to four, with Agent Jones (guitar, bass), Agent Mays (drums) and Agent Procktaur (vocals, guitar, bass, keyboards) being joined by Agent Pushkin (backing vocals, guitar, bass) ‘to allow more flexibility in instrument swapping’. And that’s certainly a lot of guitar and bass-playing contributions across their personnel.
‘Elk vs Volvo’ is a choppy slice of post-punk that crunches Gang of Four and The Fall together with sinewy guitars propelled by energetic drumming. It’s also got that authentic lo-fi eight-track early eighties sound, and really only being familiar with Dave Procter’s work from the last ten years or so, it’s something of a revelation to hear him doing vocals – and actually singing(ish) – in a more conventional indie / rock context. The verses on the goth-tinged ‘Sadism vs Fadism’ (although it’s more early Pulp with a dash of PiL and Rudimentary Peni than The Sisters of Mercy or The Danse Society) finds him in more recognisable voice, with a Sprechgesang delivery with flattened northern vowels, before coming on more like David Gedge in the choruses.
There’s indie-surf and straight-up indie in the mix, and it’s all going on really. Casting my mind back to 2008, and some of it’s hazy because time, and beer, and so may gigs and albums, but this doesn’t sound like an album from around that time. The nagging bass and guitar of ‘Stiletto’, which reminds me of Murder the Disturbed but with the synths from B-Move or even Ultravox, giving it very much a feel of c79-81, before it locks into a motorik groove.
‘The Terrorist You Seek Is in the Mirror’ finds Procter in the kind of lyrical territory he’s made his home since, slogging out slogans with passion, but with a fairly standard four-square punked-up pub-rock instrumentation, it’s perhaps the alum’s least interesting track, particularly as it’s overshadowed by the atmospheric stroll of ‘G.O.T.H.’ which explodes in a colossal crescendo three quarters of the way in, flange and chorus heavy guitars dominating.
They chuck in a surprise grunge tune in the shape of ‘Phobos’, but it’s also got that early 90s noise rock slant that owes as much to the more obscure acts. And then there’s the final track, ‘Owls’. It’s a goth—tinged alt-rock screamer, one of those longer songs that simply could never be long enough even if it was half an hour long, in the same way that The Honolulu Mountain Daffodils’ ‘Tequila Dementia’ is simply too short. ‘Night vision, owls are gonna get you!’ Dave sings, channelling paranoia and panic while prefacing the avian themes that would resurface latter in his career on songs like The Wharf Street Galaxy Band’s ‘No Puffins For You, Lad’.
A lot has happened in the last fifteen years. We’ve had thirteen years under a Conservative government for a start, and the whole world seems to have taken a nosedive socially, politically, economically, and it seems impossible to think now that Trump and Brexit and Johnson and Covid were only the tip of the iceberg. But while we’re seemingly more divided than ever as people wage war over pronouns and images of Mickey Mouse in hostels for asylum-seeking children, we do seem to have become more accommodating of music that is so eclectic as to seem rootless. Nine Degrees of Torture probably feels more at home in 2023 than it did back in 2018, but even now, it doesn’t really sound like anything else. Bits of stuff, yes, like a magpie raid on bits and bobs from all over, but it’s not grunge or post-punk or anything really, but somehow it hangs together nicely.
AA
HalfMeltedBrain Records – 9th June 2023
Christopher Nosnibor
They may have only formed in 2020 during lockdown, but Brighton’s heavy post-punk noisemakers Mules (not to be confused with 90s US punk blues band, Mule) have already racked up three digital single releases before this six-track cassette EP. And while three of the tracks here are the preceding singles (with a studio recording of the live debut, ‘I Think We Need to Talk’, Illusions of Joy stands as a taut, cohesive document.
Their bio pitches their sound as being ‘equal parts dissonant and melodic, with a tight rhythm section providing insistent motorik grooves and angular rhythms’, adding that ‘In the tradition of Mark E Smith, the vocals are generally spoken, with very little concession to melody. Occasionally they escalate into a desperate and emotional yelp. With roots in the punk scene, Mules take influence from the first wave of post-punk, indie-rock, 90s noise-rock, and various more contemporary bands such as Parquet Courts, Metz, and Gilla Band.’
At the risk of repeating myself, shit times do at least make for decent music, and it’s no coincidence that the social and political landscape in which we find ourselves, which bears remarkable parallels to Thatcher’s Britain, is spawning a wave of disaffected musical voices. It’s not simply that the contemporary crop are aping the sound and feel of the first generation of punk and new wave acts because it feels fitting: the music itself is a means of articulating those knotty emotions that are a conglomeration of anger and frustration and the sense of powerlessness in the face of a need for change. Angularity, discord, dissonance, noise; these are the sonic vehicles which carry the sentiments sonically.
And so it is that while the primary grist to Mules’ mill is ‘everyday life in Tory austerity Britain’, they also pull on ‘broader themes, which draw on Tommy’s MA thesis, such as cultural hegemony, global political economy, and systems of control.’
There’s something particularly pleasing about hearing the words ‘cultural hegemony’ in the first verse of the first song on a record. Because as much as we live in shit times on so many levels, a real bugbear – and a genuine issue – is the dumbing down of culture; we have a government who openly attack intellectualism and deride ‘experts’, who refuse to engage in debate and view critical thinking as unhealthy – and in their tenuous position of power which serves only to protect their own interests – and, specifically, wealth – it is. And so it is that ‘Ergonomic Living’ takes its lead from Marxist social critique, and while the verses are defined by an insistent beat and wandering guitar, it all explodes into a roaring chorus. I’m reminded rather of Bilge Pump, and this is very much a good thing.
‘The Things We Learn in Books’ spews lists of theory against some driving guitars, and the urgency of the delivery is gripping and exhilarating. ‘Lonely Bored and High’ is the most Fall-like of the songs, but there’s a dubby element to it as well as spacious atmosphere, rendering it as much Bauhaus as The Specials, and again, it rips into a raging chorus. Fuck, these guys have such a knack for dynamics and tempo changes, it’s hard to respond in any way other than pumping your fists, because YEAHHHHH!!! FUCK, YEAHHHH!
‘I Think We Need to Talk’ is mathy, messy, disorientating, hypnotic, and ‘Clapping for Carers’ largely speaks for itself. Claps don’t pay bills, motherfuckers, and it shouldn’t be volunteers distributing limp packaged sandwiches and bags if crisps to the people sitting for ten hours or more in A&E units up and down the country (this one’s particularly sore for me, but we’ll save that for another time and just leave it that hearing a song like this really revs me).
Feeling angry and frustrated but disenfranchised and disempowered? Mules speak to, and for, you.
AA
Aural Aggravation 