NEWSLETTER

VITALIC		SLIMY
ANDREW W.K.		NEIL LANDSTRUMM

TERROR DANJAH Gremlinz Planet Mu The problem with this collection of classic Terror Danjah instrumentals (yes, grime really is so dead that labels are now releasing retrospectives) is that when you hear, for example, the opening bars of “Haunted” you expect to hear Trim’s epicly languid “Boogeyman” bars come in. You can’t really blame Planet Mu for the absence of MCs on here, though. Who wants to sit at Limehouse DLR station for four hours waiting for some guy to roll out of bed to go and sign a contract? Also, I think the world could really have done without Terror’s sole attempt at jungle stuck on at the end, “Reloadz”, which sounds like a Bogdan Raczynski b-side. Still, if you’re a longhaired 15-year-old electronica fan from Kansas, this is probably almost as essential as a MILF girlfriend on Second Life. CHEEKY BANTER T.O.K. Our World VP		V/A Five Years of Hyperdub Records Hyperdub In the same way Warp managed to transcend its position as a label that just released bleep and rave bangers, Hyperdub has tiptoed away from its decaying dubstep roots. Ignoring the glitchy hip-hop by the likes of Samiyam and Flying Lotus (which will always sound to me like a brain-damaged monkey rubbing its tongue up and down a synthesiser), the depth of quality this tiny label has put out over the last half-decade is astounding. Let’s just hope Kode9 doesn’t sign an act as terrible as Maximo Park ten years down the line. FRANKSY

Ageing Jamaican dancehall boyband with the famous song about incinerating gay people (ask your streetwear-obsessed DJ mate from west London with the double-barrelled surname) have kind of done a Take That and come back with a later-career LP that really exposes their vintage. Instead of club-friendly vocals of raw dancehall rhythms like “Baddis Ting”, you mostly get uplifting one-drop ballads like “Guardian Angel”, plus an intro that sounds exactly like Sade (not that these are both not great things). I can’t, however, envisage Take That releasing a song called “Afternoon Pornstar” any time soon. JIBES KARTEL
PATRICK COWLEY & JORGE SOCARRAS Catholic Macro Beyond full marks for curiosity value: Catholic is a long lost, never released album by San Francisco’s synth lord and disco icon Patrick Cowley and his vocalist pal Jorge Socarras, recorded between 1976 and ’79. Stylistically it’s all over the place, veering from Devo-style art-rock (“Cars Collide”, “Eddie Go to My Head”) to Numanoid post-punk (“Memory Fails Me”) and woozy lullabies (“I Remember”), but somehow, presented in their raw and primitive state, these 14 songs reveal a side to Cowley, who died of AIDS in 1982 aged 32, rarely glimpsed in the high-energy froth of “Megatron Man” or “Tech-No-Logical World”. DUKE KENSINGTON NEIL LANDSTRUMM Bambaataa Eats His Breakfast Planet Mu Bambaataa may be eating his brekkie, but reading the accompanying press release with this, I was ready to throw up mine. “Melted patois voices”? “Pulverising bass”? What is this, the soundtrack to a ketamine-fuelled student dubstep night in Bristol? Oh, hang on, yes it is actually. SGT. SMOKES VITALIC Flashmob PIAS French disco warrior Vitalic takes a break from inventing the future to deliver his second long-playing masterpiece this decade, and the results are nothing short of astonishing. Anyone interested in the possibilities of electronic music, or anyone who feels the genre is stuck in a rut, should investigate Flashmob to hear how Pascal Arbez-Nicolas, a vastly improved musician, blends styles—disco and techno, chiefly—with such bravura that you fear for his peers. A hymn to the imagination that you can dance your face off to, this record has grace (“Poison Lips”), muscle (“Flashmob”), beauty (“Still”), elegance (“See the Sea (Blue)”), ecstasy (“Second Lives”), disco (“Your Disco Song”), and a track about a chicken lady (“Chicken Lady”). It’s pretty much perfect. SUBURBAN DWIGHT		BOYS NOIZE Power Boysnoize Records A slow hard fisting of an album compared with the excitable splurge of his Oi Oi Oi debut, Boys Noize’s Power rumbles along like a Soviet tank entering some minor break-away republic, crushing everything in its path. Credit where it’s due, though: Alex Ridha may be the electro-house world’s goofy pin-up, but he’s a first-rate producer capable of sparkling rave moments like “Jeffer” or “Transmission”. Still a lot of vulgar Justice compression going on, but the way he handles his tools has to be admired. THEYDON BOIS COLD CAVE Love Comes Close Heartworm/Matador For such a peculiar record, Cold Cave’s debut has attracted plenty of attention this summer, leading to its reissue by Matador a few months after it first came out on Heartworm. Most of Love Comes Close sounds like a Magnetic Fields album smothered in distortion; the chiming melodies of the title track and “Life Magazine” ring sweetly through the fug, while others just gurgle naively. Cold Cave’s one-handed leader Wes Eisold has assembled a band featuring the girl from Xiu Xiu and the guy from Prurient, so expect more achingly noir fluff soon. STEVE CHICKEN FUCK BUTTONS Tarot Sport ATP The last couple of years of playing to holiday camps full of twitching indie kids hoofing up bumps of MDMA powder from their forefinger when the bouncers aren’t looking means that Fuck Buttons have morphed from a kind of Early Learning Centre noise duo into kosmische ravers, dedicated to wringing every last drip of euphoria out of you being totally off your face. Galloping beats and endless waves of neon-coloured synth go on forever and ever, and it turns out that being more or less a straight cross between Black Dice and Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 is actually a very good idea indeed. SASKIA WELLS

RUSTED SHUT Dead Load Houston wrong ’uns Rusted Shut have been spewing out erratic missives since 1986, failing to make any impact outside those few misanthropes who favour limited cassettes over friends and social lives. Ugly, half-formed Texan psych-noise in the grand tradition of fellow Longhorn State institution Butthole Surfers, this album comes swinging into the room scattering the faint of heart with piss and punches akin to the mighty Brainbombs and Caroliner. WULF ICE THE MELVINS Chicken Switch Ipecac What’s left to explore for the masters of the absurdly heavy and heavily absurd? Why, getting other people to remix their back cat, of course! And judging from some of these names, the idea has been kicking about for a while—V/Vm? Panacea? Expect the usual storm and scree from the likes of Merzbow, but the surprisingly blissed-out drone of Sunroof! and Lee Ranaldo’s trio of rhythm-heavy makeovers are worth the admission. Like a lot of The Melvins’ releases, consider this gloriously inessential. SHIRLEY TEMPLE-DOG MONOTONIX Where WereYou When it Happened? Drag City Have you ever seen Monotonix live? Imagine if Lightning Bolt and Hella got together to do a pub rock band, but way smellier. I swear my t-shirt still smells from the time someone pushed me into the drummer guy. Do they not have showers in Tel Aviv or something? BRUCE GROBELAR BLACK BONED ANGEL Verdun Riot Season

OM God is Good Drag City Since writing the truly mighty Dopesmoker, an hour-long hymn to the mystical qualities of lighting up a doob, for his band Sleep back in the mid-90s, Al Cisneros has basically made it his life’s quest to fuse trudging post-Sabbath doom with a heavy dose of Jesus. Cisneros first shows up on “Thebes” after three minutes of droning sitar and nodding bass notes, chanting something about “the eye of the sacred flame”—hey, dude, can I borrow your lighter? But while there’s basically something transcendentally ridiculous about OM, their, uh, slow-burning approach is basically the key to an epic heaviness that doesn’t so much beat you round the head as crush you in slow motion. LOUIS PATTISON EAGLE TWIN The Unkindness of Crows Southern Lord Taking OM’s power-duo mantra and layering it up with majestic pomp and proggish twists, Salt Lake City’s Eagle Twin have created, without doubt, this year’s heavy masterpiece. Elemental in its force and stature, this is droning doom reimagined as shamanic ritual, complete with throat singing, vast, ringing powerchords and cavebound monolithic rhythms. TED WONG SHIT AND SHINE 229 2299 Girls Against Shit Riot Season Wow. Shit And Shine still sound like they’re playing their cacophonous racket through equipment that might have broken at some point in the late 80s by bludgeoning sound out of it through sheer being-really-angry-all-the-time-ness and, as ever, it sounds better than just about anything else I’ve heard this year. CIRCLE JAMS

If you like things that sound like Corrupted, Asunder, or the universe being chained to a medieval rack and tortured into nothingness, then this is for you. I’m guessing the title refers to the First World War battle. It would certainly have made a chillingly appropriate soundtrack to those hellish nine months. BIRCHVILLE BRAT MOTEL

WOJTEK GODZISZ S/T Tigertrap Records Gather round, children. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. A long time ago in a place called the early 1990s there was a band called Symposium. Looking back, they weren’t particularly good but I would have fought you if you’d said otherwise at the time. I wanted to get their logo tattooed on my wrist and the lyrics to their song “Fizzy” engraved on my headstone. And so I cannot quite convey how happy I was to get through the letterbox the debut solo album by Symposium’s bass player and general lynchpin, and to be pleasantly surprised that he’s morphed into some kind of Moondog character. In fact, the music he now makes is really rather good and, bizarrely enough, has Alexis from Hot Chip on it. AVERAGE MAN THE MOUNTAIN GOATS The Life of the World to Come 4AD And now John Darnielle has recorded a whole album of songs named after books from the Bible. What is this, Praise Jesus month? Not that Darnielle’s too pious about the whole deal. The Life of the World to Come, in common with most of his albums, is a collection of hyperliterate tales of wit and wisdom sung in Darnielle’s nasally whine, or sometimes through clenched teeth, like a pissed-off Kermit the Frog. Wait, do frogs have teeth? EL PEE SLIMY Paint Your Face Perezcious Music Frankmusik, Miley Cyrus, Rye Rye… with an endorsement track record like that, how was the first record on Perez Hilton’s own label ever not going to be a stone cold classic? The fact that the record in question is made by a genderless gnome with smaller testicles than Mika, and who appears to have stolen Macy Gray’s wig, should also come as no surprise. PERRY NUTKINS VIVIAN GIRLS Everything Goes Wrong In the Red Becoming, like, lo-fi hipster superstars was so totally easy! We just recorded a bunch of rilly simple guitar punk songs with kind of off-key harmonies and then got a friend to smother everything in reverb. For the second album, we thought we’d do something a bit different. But no one could really come up with anything, so we just decided to play the songs, like, a bit slower. Think anyone will notice? DWAYNE BRAVO BETTY DAVIS Is it Love or Desire Light in the Attic If Miles Davis had never met his wife and muse Betty, he would never have hung out with Hendrix, taken acid and started to dress all superfly, and so for that alone we should put her on a pedestal. Best known for a trio of dirty funk records from the early 70s, Ms. Davis was a proto-Grace Jones and a female Rick James: black, proud and aggressively sexual. Here is a completely unreleased and unheard album from ’76 that manages to take her staccato funk and audio eroticism into even filthier and more bizarre territories. As quintessentially 70s as cocaine, Studio 54 and bushy pubes. TONY MOLESTER KURT VILE Childish Matador Apparently Kurt Vile is his real name and not a curled eyebrow reference to the German composer Kurt Weill. This is a problem, because it means I can’t listen to his shittily recorded sub-Exile on Main Street blues rock and write something like, “Shouldn’t he have called himself Kurt Rubbish?” TINA SUIT-SPOOL		ANDREW WEATHERALL A Pox on the Pioneers Rotters Golf Club Hubble, bubble, toil and trouble? Must be the latest from Weatherall, a finely stitched collection of bruised boogie, tender rockabilly and confessional new-wave—an intimate and tuneful self-portrait of middle-aged geezerdom. For a bloke who’s been around the block a few times, Weatherall has an angelic voice that tends to mask the contempt in his lyrics, and his black humour stains this excellent album a sticky tar brown. “Selective Walking” and “Walk of Shame” will tweak Sabres Of Paradise fans, but if anything, with its nods to Matthew Dear’s Asa Breed and to Richard Hawley, A Pox… is a safe bet for dad’s Christmas present. CANARY DWARF DEBBIE LEGGO Debbs Leggs Fire Krautrock used to be this big secret forgotten area of musical history you could only find out about by poring over gatefold sleeves in cobwebbed record shops like some ancient scholar. About six months ago, though, we reached the point where there are actually more bands in the UK claiming to be influenced by krautrock than by, say, the Arctic Monkeys. Debbie Leggo get round this not by polishing up their motorik beats but by sounding like Mark E. Smith hunting through the smouldering ruins of a German sex commune in search of half a bottle of whisky. LUIGI PATTAZONI FRYARS Dark Young Hearts Fryarcorp Been a long time coming, this Fryars album, and yet suddenly the prospect of another fruity synth-popper demanding attention with his histrionic drivel chills the blood. File next to Mika, Patrick Wolf and Frankmusik, lock the drawer, and then throw the thing in the Thames. Apparently Dave Gahan sings on this album. He must’ve been wasted. THANDIE NEUTRON CATE LE BON Me Oh My Irony Bored Cate Le Bon has a voice as delicate and dainty as a bit of dew trembling on a petal in a cool breeze. It’s quite good, then, when her pensive folk songs are invaded by buzzing space synths and you can idly daydream about Vashti Bunyan’s caravan being attacked by Daleks. TEASEL YARNWORTHY PENS Hey Friend, What You Doing? De Stijl If you’d told me when we ran a piece on Pens a while back that a year later they would have an actual record out on De Stijl then I am not sure what I would have done. I certainly wouldn’t have believed you. Well, stone me and my lack of belief because here is just that and these 14 tracks sound as fresh and chaotically cathartic as the band did the first time I heard them. Except I think they’ve learned how to play their instruments a teensy-weensy bit. JAMMIN’ JOHNSON GEORGE PRINGLE Salon des Refusés Deth to Fals Metal Big news a couple of years ago, and then quite quickly not big news at all, George Pringle is still the pretty girl who does spoken-word bits over surprisingly abrasive electro-pop. “I’ve always been fond of September,” she says on one song, before droning on about something adolescent. “Hey sexy, come on and get me,” she deadpans on another. Very much an acquired taste, it’s hard to imagine anyone, and that includes her close friends and family, listening to this more than once. JENNIFER JUPITER

ANDREW W.K. 55 Cadillac Skyscraper Music Maker Less “Dude, where’s my car?” for Andrew W.K. these days, more a case of, “This is my beautiful vintage Cadillac Fleetwood and I love it so much that I have been moved to compose an album of spontaneous improvised solo piano pieces in its honour.” Yes, the great motivational speaker and TV presenter of our time teams up with ol’ Joanna for an album that sounds like a demo for the next Meatloaf record. He’s classically trained, you know, but even so, I think I’ll stick to Elton John. LES PANINI		SAX RUINS Yawiquo Ipecac Tatsuya Yoshida’s Ruins were the splattery noise-rock duo out there doing it before all those other two-man crews came along plotting to steal their thunder. Maybe if all those bands had more than one idea they might have succeeded. Luckily Ruins—for a while there, just a solo Yoshida playing the shit out of his drums, now joined by saxophonist Ono Ryoko—seem to have about three great ideas every second. Guess you can boil it down to “super-complex music that hurts your brain in a good way”, though. BRAD SMODGE

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