Posts Tagged ‘The Fall’

Nine O’Clock Nasty – Smash Grab & Go

Posted: 17 February 2024 in Reviews, Singles and EPs
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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.

Beige Palace – Making Sounds for Andy

Posted: 4 November 2023 in Albums
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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.

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Farming Incident – Nine Degrees of Torture

Posted: 8 July 2023 in Albums
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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.

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Mules – Illusions of Joy

Posted: 17 May 2023 in Singles and EPs
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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.

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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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Percy – Monorail

Posted: 18 June 2022 in Albums
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June 2022 – Ten Foot Records

Christopher Nosnibor

Most bands start out splurging output and slow down over the course of their career. Percy aren’t most bands, and over the last decade have accelerated their output. And also, contrary to the common trajectory, instead of mellowing, they’ve got angrier, gutsier, ragier. Monorail really does find them at the top of their game, bursting with zeal and brimming with vitriol, kicking arse like never before.

‘Chunks’, premiered at their recent York show supporting Percy slams in hard and angular, landing between Grotesque era Fall and Truman’s Water. Jagged, jarring, it’s a full-throttle it’s an instant headache. ‘We’re all just chunks in gravy’, Colin Howard snarls and sneers, and it’s punchy – a very different kind of throbbing gristle. There’s no let up as they pile into the scorching ‘I.C.U.’ and it’s immediately clear that Percy have hit a new level.

They haven’t changed fundamentally: they’ve always been sociopolitical, and they’ve always cranked out driving riffs with a choppy, discordant edge, accentuated by Howard’s Mark E Smith influenced slightly nasal sprechgesang, and there’s a clear continuity that’s run from their self-released 2013 debut album, A Selection of Salted Snacks, through their debut album proper, Sleepers Wake on the esteemed Mook label and 2020’s Seaside Donkeys, which featured the Brexit demolition anthem, ‘Will of the People’.

Monorial isn’t so much about evolution or progression as it is about hitting that sweet spot – which really isn’t so sweet. In other words, their two years out from gigging during a tumultuous time socially and politically has seen them really hone their frustrations into their most attacking material yet. Same style, same form, just harder, faster, more pissed off. It’s not only their best work to date, but it’s absolutely essential listening, especially for those who still reminisce about John Peel and the golden age of indie, because these guys are everything you could want and Monorail has future cult classic written all over it.

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Soma Crew / Percy / The New Solar Drones – The Crescent, York, 24th May 2022

Posted: 26 May 2022 in Live
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Christopher Nosnibor

This is by no means the first time I’ll have mentioned that sometimes, the best gigs are the ones you have to drag yourself to. The dragging here is no reflection on the bands, so much as the fact that when work and life are sapping your soul and you’re not feeling like doing anything ‘people’ orientated, the prospect of venturing out to be among people on a Tuesday night is not one that fires a burst of enthusiasm. You want to stay home. You want to hibernate. But the combination of beer and live music is so often the best therapy – and this proved to be one of those nights.

I have long lost count of the number of times I’ve seen or otherwise written about both Soma Crew and Percy, and while they both fit the bracket of ‘local’ bands, they’re both bands who bring great joy to see, and no-one dismisses London bands who only play a circuit of half a dozen small venues in London as ‘local’, do they? And you can’t watch ‘local’ bands in London with a decent hand-pulled pint in a proper glass for £4 a pint, either.

All three bands are playing on the floor in front of the stage, and The New Solar Drones have a lot of instruments spilling out, including a maraca, triangle, and timpani. It’s quite a sight to behold on entering, and the additional percussion goes a long way to giving the band a distinctive sound. Mellow country flavoured indie branches out in all kinds of directions. The rolling, thunderous drums lend a real sense of drama to the waves of noodling synths. The guitar workout on a song about Hollywood gets a bit Hotel California, but it’s well executed. The final track marks a shift from laid-back easy-going Americana into some kind of post-rock progressive folk that’s rather darker and lasts about ten minutes, complete with clarinet solo. They’ve got some rough edges to iron out, but the songs are solid and it’s an impressive debut.

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The New Solar Drones

With a new album around the corner, this is Percy’s first gig in seven months. Three quarters of the band are crowded to one side of the stage, while singer/guitarist Colin is on the other. Either it’s because he’s a grumpy sod, or perhaps just because his guitar amp is so bloody loud. ‘Going off on One’ kicks off the set energetically and sets the pace for a career-spanning selection that focuses on the more uptempo aspects of their catalogue. Bassist Andy’s post-lockdown look is J Mascis, but he charges around cranking out low end beef, and it’s the rhythm section that dominates, while Paula’s keyboards bring some melody and definition in contrast to the scratchy guitar sound.

Percy

Percy

“Fray Bentos pie! With gravy!” The slower, synthier ‘Alice’ sounds more like Joy Division than their usual jagged post­punk grind and graft, but while most of the lyrics are indecipherable, the pie and gravy seem to be the focus. They really attack the snarling ‘Will of the People’, and its relevence seems to grow by the day. Colin comes on like Mark E Smith at his most vitriolic… and there, I failed in my attempt to review Percy without recourse The Fall. Seems it just can’t be done. They close with a brand new song, ‘Chunks’, about ‘chunks in gravy!’ Yep, definitely a theme, and if Percy are something of a meat and potatoes band, it’s in the way The Wedding Present are hardy perennials and brimming with northern grit.

A resonant throb gradually leaks from the PA, and from it emerges Soma Crew’s quintessential motorik pumping. Standing near the front, I reflect on the fact I could use a wide angle lens to get all of them in. They have a lot of guitars. The front man from The New Solar Drones is on keys and lap steel and, later guitar, and the lap steel accentuates the band’s overall drone and gives something of a Doorsy vibe.

They’re on serious form tonight, sounding solid and energetic. Shifting up to three guitars, they hit a swinging rock ‘n’ roll blues boogie groove.

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Soma Crew

While I find myself drifting on this tripped-out repetition, I consider the fact that less is more. Chords, that is, not instruments. Four guitars (if you count the bass) playing three chords in an endless cycle is better than two guitars, which in turn is better than one. The songs and structures are simple: the effect is all in the layering up and the reverb. Listening to bands that are overtly about the technical proficiency is often pretty dull. Passion and mood count for so much more. Volume helps, and with a brutal backline and sympathetic sound man, they hit that sweet spot where it hurts just a bit even with earplugs. Simon’s slightly atonal droning vocals are soporific, and everything just melts into an all-engulfing wash of sound. ‘Mirage’ kicks with volume and solid repetitive groove, while ‘Say You Believe’ is straight up early Ride/Chapterhouse, before ‘Propaganda Now’ is a blistering drive through a wall of Jesus and Mary Chain inspired feedback that brings the set to a shimmering, monster climax.

I stumble out, my ears buzzing, elated. Because everything came together to surpass expectations to make for an outstanding night.

Little Musgrave – Matches

Posted: 29 April 2021 in Albums
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Wild Goose Chase Records – 27th April 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Little Musgrave – the vehicle for Brussels-based Joey Wright – was conceived and recorded during the first Coronavirus lockdown, and its homemade, DIY, lo-fi stylings are perhaps representative of the style and form that will, ultimately, prove to define the period from Spring 2020 to Summer 2021 as musicians, twitchy and desperate for release took to recording at home, minus bands, and without access to studios or even half their kit, let along bandmates. Primitive drum machines, apps, recording and even mixing on mobile phones and releasing via Bandcamp has for many been the only way.

Why not wait? You may ask. Because creatives often need to create and to put it out there: creativity is a compulsion, and for many, public reception is validation of their output, even though got many it’s equally a source of anxiety and self-doubt.

‘Matches’ is a no-messing mess of sinewy guitars chopping out some rough and ready post-punk tinged indie that lands, lay-legged and in a heap between The Fall and Pavement. Wright isn’t really a singer in the conventional sense, often adopting a more Sprechgesang mode of delivery – although that isn’t to say he can’t sing, and there are some brief moments of melodic reflection. This is also a fair reflection of the abstract / elliptical lyrical content, which is wildly veering and often abstract, but not without moments of sensitivity.

The lack of polish, while borne out of necessity, is endearing in that it also presents a lack of pretence. And, also of necessity, the fizzing guitars and simple, insistent rhythms that pump away and pin the loosely-played songs together, are found alongside, as the liner notes proffer, ‘sounds which could have been recorded live in the dentist’s chair – we’re talking drills, saws and high-pitched whines’. With trips to the dentist off the table during lockdown, one assumes these extraneous sounds were sourced elsewhere, and primarily around the home. It’s remarkable just how unsettling a blender or electric shaver can sound when recorded and played back out of context, you know.

More often than not distilled into sub-three-minute bursts, clattering percussion and jarring angles are defining features; ‘Your Reputation Precedes You’ pitches a semi-spoken word performance over a clanking industrial-edged backdrop, while elsewhere, ‘Workers’ day’ is dissonant, difficult, and antagonistic, but as a thunking synth bass groove emerges through it all, it takes on an awkward electrofunk vibe that evokes the stylings of early Shriekback – before dissolving into a mess of feedback, whirs, and buzzing, and the scratchy Fall-esque ramble ‘Stick By Stick’ collapses into mangling noise.

And while Matches doesn’t sound like The Fall per se, its wild eclecticism and the levels of discord achieved by the guitars (are they in tune, let alone playing the same key? Just listen to ‘Which of you has done this?’ to get a handle on the stylistic collisions that aren’t just characteristic but define the album.

Weird and wonderful with the emphasis on the latter, Matches is inventive and unusual. At times difficult and brain-bending, it’s also self-aware and interesting, and deserves some time to adjust to. It’s not mainstream, but it’s got real cult potential.

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Videostore – They Closed Down The Videostore

Posted: 20 April 2021 in Albums
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Christopher Nosnibor

Videostore continue to make the most of lockdown, with the pair banging out a second mini-album, comprising three of their recent singles along with three brand new tracks. Does the title have a significance? Does the end of lockdown mark the end of Videostore as Nathan and Lorna return to work and also reconvene with Argonaut? Perhaps time will tell, but for now, this is a document of the effects of life in confinement – or, as they put it, ‘what happens when you are locked down with Disney plus and Taylor Swift and Spacemen 3 CDs for company.’

It’s an interesting blend, but also a hybrid that works and is distinctively Videostore: scuzzed-out lo-fi pop songs that articulate ennui and nostalgia with a rare energy. As ever, it’s the contrast between Nathan’s worldweary monotone baritone and Lorna’s light, lilting, airy tones that really distinguish and define their sound.

It starts off with single cut ‘Superhero Movies’, a lively blast of choppy guitars where they ruminate on the disparity between movies and life, whereby everyone aspires to be a superhero from the comfort of their sofa. Media and unattainable aspiration is also the focus of ‘Your Perfect Life’. ‘Halfway There’ is a middle-aged lament that finds Nathan mulling over the passage of time, and in its downtempo mood and delivery, I’m reminded of The Fall’s ‘Time Enough at Last’, and even the semi-spirited call of ‘techno techno techno techno’ and a swerve into synth territory near the end can’t lift the melancholy mood – that’s a job for the blistering Pixies-like blast of single ‘Your Mind’, which stands out even more in context.

Low-key single ‘Anglepoise’ marks another return to Brix-era fall stylings, and there’s something affectingly sad in the sound of tiredness, of defeat. The last song, ‘Go’ is the biggest surprise of the set. It’s not a cover of the Moby track, but it is an all-out electro dance banger. It’s incongruous, so say the least, but there are some trademark squalls of noise among the trancey synths and insistent beats.

They Closed Down The Videostore may only contain six tracks, but it’s their most diverse work yet – and if the store remains open, the indications are they’ve no shortage of ideas to pursue.

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Health Plan – Health Plan

Posted: 13 April 2021 in Albums
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Buzzhowl Records – 7th May 2021

Christopher Nosnibor

Health Plan’s all-caps bio on their Bandcamp doesn’t really tell us much, bujt it does, I suppose, tell us enough in the pan of three short, declarative sentences: ‘HEALTH PLAN ARE DAN, STEVEN AND FRANCOIS. WE PLUGGED GUITARS STRAIGHT INTO A LAPTOP AND MADE SOME POP SONGS. MEMBERS OF USA NAILS, BLKLSTRS, THE EUROSUITE, DEAD ARMS’. Whether or not that qualifies them as a supergroup I’m not sure, but this emerging hub of intersection musicians is proving to be a fertile melting pot, and on the musical evidence of this, their eponymous debut, they are a super group. And of course, as you’d expect, a noisy one.

The album’s eight tracks are an extended exercise in crashing, droning noise rock, and it’s not intended to be pleasant: this is the kind of music where you marvel at the layers of noise as they scrape and clash against one another, feedback shrieking against low-end-grooves, as reverbs bounce off one another in different directions. And maybe there is something masochistic about enjoying this kind of thing, but it’s about sensation, and feeling the sound batter your body and brain.

‘Post Traumatic Growth’ piles in as an introduction, a mess of buzzing bass, relentless percussion, and squalling guitars, landing somewhere between Big Black and The Jesus and Mary Chain, with additional blasts of exploding lasers and blank monotone vocals.

And this is the flavour of the album: motoric and messy, lo-fi and abrasive. The rhythm section holds things down, albeit muzzed up, fuzzed out and indelicately. It works a treat: the bass buzzes and booms, and the drums thump, and in combination they punch hard. The guitars are toppy, discordant and disco-ordinated, slashing away at angles across the linear rhythm grooves.

When they dial it down a bit, as on the altogether more sedate instrumental ‘Fade’, where a thumping bass beat flutters like a heartbeat beneath a current of swirling, meandering sound, the production is still such that it’s anything but comfortable, and it’s not lo-fi, but wilful awkwardness: there’s a cymbal that cuts through the mix at a mean volume, and it’s not smooth or in keeping, but harsh, crashing, incongruent.

‘Vapid Expressions’ comes on like The Fall, like MES at huis most hectoring in a swelling surge of motoric repetition that drills into your brain. ‘Stuck in a Loop’ lives up to its title, a cyclical repetition of a motif pinned to a relentless beat, providing some kind of lull before the acerbic hollering of ‘Cataract’ that drives it to a finish in a frenzy of sax and distortion.

While so many bands take cues from The Fall, Health Plan do so with real style, and moreover, take as much influence from the band’s stubborn refusal to conform, or to pretty up their sound with tidy production. To my mind, punk has always been about an aesthetic rather than a style – primarily about going against the grain and not giving a toss about anything other than pleasing yourself – meaning that Health Plan is truly as punk as fuck.

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