The first 50 records that come to mind that have been worth your money in 2008

Because it’s November and in a few weeks you won’t be able to move for lists…

(PS: List in no order, and there are probably omissions obvious to me later… these are just all ace, simple as.)

Why? – ‘Alopecia’ (Tomlab)

Cadence Weapon – ‘Afterparty Babies’ (Big Dada)

Deerhunter – ‘Microcastle’ (4AD)

No Age – ‘Nouns’ (Sub Pop)

Fuck Buttons – ‘Street Horrrsing’ (ATP)

TV On The Radio – ‘Dear Science’ (4AD)

Flying Lotus – ‘Los Angeles’ (Warp)

Johnny Foreigner – ‘Waited Up Til It Was Light’ (Best Before)

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – ‘Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!’ (Mute)

Rolo Tomassi – ‘Hysterics’ (Hassle)

 

Lovvers – ‘Think’ (Wichita)

Errors – ‘It’s Not Something But It Is Like Whatever’ (Rock Action)

Pluxus – ‘Solid State’ (Kompakt)

The Bug – ‘London Zoo’ (Ninja Tune)

Portishead – ‘Third’ (Island)

Foals – ‘Antidotes’ (Transgressive)

Youthmovies – ‘Good Nature’ (Drowned in Sound)

Abe Vigoda – ‘Skeleton’ (Bella Union)

Wild Beasts – ‘Limbo, Panto’ (Domino)

Torche – ‘Meanderthal’ (Hydra Head)

 

Dananananaykroyd – ‘Sissy Hits’ (Holy Roar)

Late of the Pier – ‘Fantasy Black Channel’ (Parlophone)

Mogwai – ‘The Hawk Is Howling’ (Wall of Sound)

Gang Gang Dance – ‘St Dymphna’ (Warp)

Times New Viking – ‘Rip It Off’ (Matador)

The Week That Was – ‘The Week That Was’ (Memphis Industries)

The Ruby Suns – ‘Sea Lion’ (Memphis Industries)

Pyramids – ‘Pyramids’ (Hydra Head)

Enablers – ‘Tundra’ (Majic Wallet)

Remember Remember – ‘Remember Remember’ (Rock Action)

 

Russian Circles – ‘Station’ (Suicide Squeeze)

These Arms Are Snakes – “Tail Swallower And Dove’ (Suicide Squeeze)

Ponytail – ‘Ice Cream Spiritual’ (We Are Free)

Eugene McGuinness – ‘Eugene McGuinness’ (Domino)

This Town Needs Guns – ‘Animals’ (Big Scary Monsters)

Lords – ‘Everyone Is People’ (Gringo)

HEALTH – ‘HEALTH//DISCO’ (Lovepump)

Of Montreal – ‘Skeletal Lamping’ (Polyvinyl)

Hauschka – ‘Fendorf’ (FatCat)

Charlottefield – ‘What Are Friends For’ (FatCat)

 

Black Mountain – ‘In The Future’ (Jagjaguwar)

The War On Drugs – ‘Wagonwheel Blues’ (Secretly Canadian)

British Sea Power – ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’ (Rough Trade)

Beach House – ‘Devotion’ (Bella Union)

Mystery Jets – ‘Twenty One’ (sixsevennine)

Hercules & Love Affair – ‘Hercules & Love Affair’ (DFA/EMI)

This Will Destroy You – ‘This Will Destroy You’ (Magic Bullet)

Vessels – ‘White Fields and Open Devices’ (Cuckundoo)

Volcano! – ‘Paperwork’ (Leaf)

Jaguar Love – ‘Take Me To The Sea’ (Matador)

British Sea Power at the BT Digital Music Awards

I went to the DMAs on Wednesday. Was okay – didn’t win owt (both DiS and Clash were nominated for awards) but the pie was edible and the few bottles of free red wine quaffable. Can’t say fairer than that. I’d feel different, obviously, if I’d personally paid for the ticket.

Met up with British Sea Power there, and spoke to Yan ahead of the band’s appearance at the awards (they were up, rather optimistically, for Band of the Year or some similarly titled award), for ClashMusic.com. Read the full piece HERE, and an extract below…

Tell me about this Cornish fort you recorded ‘Do You Like Rock Music?’ in…
The fort was owned by the military, and they started doing exercises halfway through the recording. So you’d get a Chinook helicopter flying over, and dropping off a cannon. They’re impressive machines. I’m not into warfare, but the machinery and sounds involved are fucking amazing.

Not that you’d want it in your back garden, mind…
In this fort, you’d look out the window while doing a vocal, and you’d see these teenagers, new recruits, in full camouflage, with guns, sneaking around. They looked really innocent. The captain there heard me doing a vocal, for ‘Atom’, and he said it sounded worse than someone being tortured. And I got the impression that this was a person who’d actually heard someone being tortured for real…

Doll domination? Children, cover your ears

(Previously published HERE)

I don’t care for your counter argument: pop is educational. It has to be, based on personal precedents set. And because ‘Sesame Street’ uses songs. A great many things in this world would not be obvious to me without pop music. For example, without Ash’s ‘Burn Out’ I might have never properly twigged that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Okay, I would’ve… but every time I think about it I wouldn’t hear Tim Wheeler.

Pop is also aspirational: it bleeds into our dreams, moulding our hopes and doing away with out fears. It’s the great optimist: anything is possible if you believe. Which is why The Pussycat Dolls’ latest abomination of a single should be removed from playlists immediately.

A dance ensemble turned schlock-pop five-piece (very successfully), the California girls’ ‘When I Grow Up’ precedes the release of their second album, the questionably titled ‘Doll Domination’. The work of three writers with past credits including Michael Jackson, Beyoncé and Sean Kingston, it’s predictably addictive, getting stuck in the brain like the nastiest tumour. And it’s equally bad for you.

Well, I say ‘you’; who I mean is the nine-year-old girls – their lives barely mapped, every possible career opportunity yet to be explored, all the potential in the world within them – who’ll hear it on the radio, previously impressed by first-LP ditties such as ‘Don’t cha’ and ‘Buttons’ – both raunchy numbers, but (comparatively) innocent enough of content. Do I wish my girlfriend was as hot as you? Sure. But do I want a nine-year-old girl hearing this track. Aw hell no.

The video is bad enough – nubile bodies flexing atop shiny cars, essentially a backwards knuckle-dragger’s fantasy scenario – but the lyrics… Really, no child should be subjected to these:

“When I grow up
I wanna be famous
I wanna be a star
I wanna be in movies

“When I grow up
I wanna see the world
Drive nice cars
I wanna have Groupies

“When I grow up
Be on TV
People know me
Be on magazines

“When I grow up
Fresh and clean
Number one chick when I step out on the scene”

So, when you grow up (but you are, Nicole – Wikipedia reckons you’re 30; and don’t give me that “read all the lyrics” shit – this is the HOOK) you want to be, in the following order: used and abused by money-makers out to exploit your debatable talents, you want to then use loads of other people’s money to do a load of things and never pay them back, you want to be in everyone’s face 24/7 ‘til you’re as ubiquitous on the goggle-box as fucking Kerry ‘Ooops all my money’s gone’ Katona and music telly parasite Lauren Laverne, and you want to bump and grind your way to the top ‘til your bits are withered and your face sags.

Or something like that. Basically: these things, goals, DREAMS are not the sorts of things children should be looking forward to. And onwards it rolls:

“I see them staring at me
Oh I’m a trendsetter
Yes this is true ’cause what I do, no one can do it better
You can talk about me
‘Cause I’m a hot topic
I see you watching me, watching me, and I know you want it”

I don’t want kids to be thinking of ‘it’! They should be thinking about… oh, I don’t know, killing more people on Grand Theft Auto, or stopping up late to watch freeview porn, or reading up on Rose West and adopting her as some sort of idol… anything but getting sucked into a fake reality concocted by idiotic songwriters for blank-faced mannequins, where morons rule the media and consumers are stripped of choice, reduced to absorbing such banality AND LIKING IT.

Oh.

The bitterly unsavoury nature of ‘When I Grow Up’ has ‘Dirrty’ sounding (and looking) like the theme tune to some CBeebies puppet show. Does Redman do theme tunes? He should… I’d much rather grow into a past-it rapper than a gristle-crotched Pussycat Doll’s idea of what is and isn’t successful.

Kids: never let a dancer tell you how to live your life. Just ask Michael Flatley’s ex.

(FYI: recent slowdown here is down to me now editing ClashMusic.com. Do check it out, yeah?)

Raising the bar (tab)

When did this happen?

The past few days, I’ve been at a couple of gigs: firstly Black Lips at Heaven, last night Torche at the Underworld. Heaven – to be found just off Villiers Street, ‘tween Charing Cross and Embankment stations – is a nightclub first and gig venue second, so prices were expectedly high. But as much as £4.40 for a beer? Surely not.

But this was no one-off: at the Underworld, Camden, last night, two (different) beers both cost £4 or over. When did we reach the £4 pint? (Or less, size-wise: one of two was just under a pint, in bottle form.) And why was I not informed before being stung in the wallet this week?

Shocking. But the gigs were great. Check out a clip of the end of Black Kids’ Lips’ Heaven show here:

Black Lips on MySpace
Torche on MySpace

Rewind: Botch (and why the time for reformation is nigh)

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With only two studio albums proper to their name, that Tacoma’s Botch remain so very revered today is testament to the impact their dramatically taut and technically astute hardcore made at the time; and, more pertinently, how that blast has echoed ever since their 2002 disbanding.

A reunion isn’t out of the question, as members remain active in (not so) new projects: bassist Brian Cook is in These Arms Are Snakes (and contributed to the second Russian Circles LP), vocalist Dave Verellen is currently fronting Narrows alongside members of Some Girls and Tropics, and guitarist Dave Knudson is a key player in Minus The Bear. Only drummer Tim Latona seems to have dropped off the radar. But despite occasional rumours of a one-off revival, nothing’s ever been confirmed, with members reportedly proud of their achievements but not interested in dipping back into Botch’s catalogue for a final hurrah.

But what achievements: 1997’s compilation The Unifying Themes of Sex, Death and Religion made little impact internationally (it was reissued in ‘redux’ form in 2002, and again in 2007), but critics began to take notice of the four-piece’s intelligent interpretation of hardcore come their second, 1998’s American Nervoso (later reissued in 2007 with five bonus tracks). Here was an album that took the brutality common in so much American hardcore and matched it with technical prowess – an ability to wrestle the most abstract noises from the most conventional means – way ahead of the band’s peers. Its influence was immediate, fellow Washington State band The Blood Brothers acknowledging Botch’s immense input on their debut, This Adultery Is Ripe. Others, too, couldn’t shake the feeling that Botch were pushing the hardcore genre down wholly new avenues of adventurous arrangement.

Botch’s follow-up to American Nervoso would prove to be their final album, and undoubtedly their best. We Are The Romans is the classic of their canon, an album inducted into Decibel magazine’s Hall Of Fame in 2005 and rated as the second best album ever by Rock Sound a couple of years later, behind Refused’s The Shape Of Punk To Come. As with all Botch long-players, it is also available in an expanded form, its deluxe edition of 2007 running to two discs and featuring a wealth of demos and live recordings. But the original album is brilliant enough to stand up for itself, even almost a decade after its release.

‘Saint Matthew Returns To The Womb’ builds upon motifs of high-end guitar trickery, blood-curdling roars and crunching riffs that made plenty of appearances on American Nervoso, and ‘Mondrian Was A Liar’ runs a similar course, but these two instantly engaging offerings are but surface-level distractions: explore the album deeper and We Are The Romans reveals its wonderful idiosyncrasies. ‘Swimming The Channel vs Driving The Chunnel’ is a slow-shifting, almost post-rock piece with mumbled, deadpan vocals which somehow still convey a great sense of emotion. It fizzes and buzzes, like helicopters circling overhead, while the whole time drums appear to be building to a peak, only to fall short a few feet from their goal, intentionally. It’s a brilliant sidestep, indicative of a desire to not be shackled by genre conventions. Not that Botch ever really played to the rule book, but this was the four-piece at their most playful, at their most fearless.

Math-core, metal-core… terms used in relation to Botch, but no sub-genre really sticks, even now. Listening back to We Are The Romans, to American Nervoso and the band’s final recording, the five-track (discounting a short opening track) An Anthology of Dead Ends EP of 2002, it’s tough to pick any names from today’s hardcore ranks who’ve reshaped the field in such a dramatic way. The aforementioned offshoots play their parts, but where are the bands nowadays producing records that shift from the purified rage of ‘Vietmam’ to the understated splendour of the morose ‘Afghamistam’ (both sequential tracks from An Anthology…). I never saw the band live, but knowing that (most) members are still exploring creativity within their musical callings gives me hope that, perhaps, they will again match the heights achieved with Botch. Not that these highs were evident at the time – like many true classics (rather than instant-hit 5/5s), We Are The Romans has only been elevated to such a level over the course of a good few years.

It seems to me the time is right – if not before this year is out then certainly next year, the tenth anniversary of We Are The Romans – for a special, one-time-only reunion, be it in Washington, London, Australia, Japan… wherever. Have albums, will travel. Such an event would simply be too great to miss. To say the chances are slim is an understatement – as outlined above members have so far made it clear that any reformation is highly unlikely to happen – but if Botch were ever to set a stage alight once more, 2009 seems the year to do it.

Video: ‘Saint Matthew Returns To The Womb‘

Video: ‘Hutton’s Great Heat Engine‘

Video: the encore at Botch’s final show

Botch on MySpace
Botch on Wikipedia
Rewind: Unwound

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Thoughts on the very idea of ‘classic’ albums.

As lifted directly from the boards of DrownedinSound.com.

(Pluto Prize list centric)

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i’ll bet that there’s not one album on the list that people are still goin to be listening to in three years time. as i said, maybe fuck buttons
haribo7989 | 8 Sep ‘08, 15:50 | Send note | Report this | Reply | x

That’s rubbish.
Have you heard all twelve? Didn’t think so.
Besides, who cares if they’re being listened to in three years’ time? I rarely listen to albums I consider classics from three years ago – I listen to what’s new, mostly, as do many people who genuinely love their music.
As a snapshot of excellent albums from the period July 2007-July 2008, the Pluto 12 plus the Mercury 12 = a pretty fine 24 indeed.
Mike_Diver | 8 Sep ‘08, 15:53 | Send note | Report this | Reply | x

oh ‘most people who genuinely love their music only listen to new music’? fuck off! no wonder so many people around here express daft opinions like ‘the beatles were shit’..i listen to tons of new music (i’d say about 3 hours of new music a day) AND i listen to classics.
just cos you’re passionate about music doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have standards, in fact it should make you more demanding about what’s truly great and what’s merely good. but then again, you are the guy who saw fit to award ‘weekend in the city’ a 9 rating.
for the record, i own 7 of the albums and i’ve heard enough material from the other ones to decide that they’re not worth my hard-earned.
haribo7989 | 8 Sep ‘08, 16:09 | Send note | Report this | Reply | x

Seven from twelve? So you’re only just over 50 per cent qualified to state what you did above? Well done. And where do I say ‘only new music’? Rarely was the word I used, and I’d imagine that most people who frequently visit DiS for news on current artists breakthrough and mainstream listen to those acts much more than they do, say, the Beatles, Led Zep, Pink Floyd, Wire, Public Enemy, etc.
I own many a ‘classic’ album – whatever you mean by classic (presumably you’re referring to albums that critics too old to remember the last time they went to a gig that wasn’t seated consider genre- and era-defining documents and artifacts? Fuck them, fucking dinosaurs) – but rarely turn to them when there’s such a brilliant stream of new music coming out week in, week out. It only takes a little time to turn over some stones and discover something magic, something to rate alongside these perceived ‘classics’, which are only ‘classics’ today because nobody has had the balls to properly stand up for records released since the birth and death of punk. To move the goalposts. To stick two up to John Lydon and tell him ‘Bollocks’ is bollocks, and piss on the graves of Harrison and Lennon spelling ‘only two songs off the white album are any good, you self-absorbed self-aggrandizing dead twats’ as they go.
I HATE the notion of classic albums, given the wholly subjective nature of the absorption and assessment of art – unless you’re analyzing the process over the product, exactly what are your guidelines? There were ten or more albums released last year that were better than Sgt Peppers, or Dark Side, if not more… there was because that’s progress, evolution, development; it’s refinement and redirection and the embracing of technology and sociological elements that simply never existed before the time of those records’ gestations.
Music is movement, not moments; it’s not judged on static fossils, but on living processes. Snapshots serve as reminders, lists as spotters guides, but there’s no such thing as categorical zeniths, as absolute classics. How can there be? If there was everyone making music today would give up.
Saying that the Beatles were shit is not a daft opinion. It is an opinion. Do you not see that that’s the beauty of such instantaneous art as pop music – one man’s brilliance is another’s annoyance. If you can’t see that standards exist only in the mind of the individual, and that the archaic notion of classics is born of redundant commentators alone, then truly you’re discussing music in the wrong place. Go talk to a wall.
What does it matter what I gave an album that came out last year? What’s the relation of that to this argument? I like Bloc Party.
Mike_Diver | 8 Sep ‘08, 16:28 | Send note | Report this | Reply | x

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What great LOLs.

On the pros and cons of internship

DiS – my employers until really quite recently – are on the look out for interns. Fair enough says me: I recall well how many packages would arrive a day, dreams dashed against rocks without padded cells even being broken. Simply too many for one man alone to handle, so it’s sensible to call in support.

There are positives to agreeing to such work for no remuneration, beyond the occasional cost covered that is. Connections mean everything in the music industry – it’s an old but true adage that it’s not what but who you know – and it’s possible that whoever is brought in by DiS will worm their way into the industry successfully. Past employees proper have gone on to run labels and work at management companies, and earn a crust, so the idea that DiS can be a stepping stone is a valid one. Here’s hoping the trend holds true for me.

Also, if you’re truly into music in its myriad forms, the material you’ll be exposed to will be like a dream come true. Without working within the industry there would be loads of favourite bands I’d have missed: of the right now, that’s acts like Nadja, Pyramids and Calories. On the downside, those rose tints will soon turn a shade of grey, as it’s easy to become a cynic, sceptical of every act’s motives. You will question ties with particular companies, and develop something of a competitive streak: in the world of online music coverage, first is everything.

There’s no such thing, really, as an online exclusive unless you chase it – provisions from PR companies exist as exclusives for seconds, minutes maybe, as blogs x y and z link to your site, or simply lift the relevant code. It’s a 24/7 deal – during my two-year full-time tenure at DiS I never switched off – even on holiday, on a hillside in Scotland, I was taking calls about the booking of a DiS gig, and organising for writers to attend certain gigs. It takes a determined mindset to make it in music journalism, in terms of editorial/full-time positions, and most interns will fall by the wayside at great speed. Friends of mine have caved in, and they’ve gone into such roles with plenty of experience. It can simply be too much for many.

Also, interns demand a lot of time from employees proper – I was always reluctant to take them on as DiS consumed almost all of my time per day, except for a 30-minute stop for lunch. I didn’t have time to show whoever came in the ropes properly – their experience was delivered in drops rather than rivers, and as such thumbs were left to twiddle. Whoever goes into DiS to help out should expect to do this, unless the idea is to truly strip back the content on the site to but a few news stories per day, and perhaps one feature and one review.

There are interesting points made by former DiS writer and current in-house NME bod Ben Patashnik on the DiS ‘advertorial’ piece, accessible here. I agree with much of what he says, but it is very rare for anything substantial to come from an unpaid placement. If the successful candidate really mucks in, above the call of duty, they may find their place in a shrinking industry. But most people just want a few free records and a name on their CV.

The point? Don’t walk in blindly, I suppose. From the outside looking in the idea of writing about music for a living must seem phenomenally attractive, but once that thrill subsides it really is Just Another Job. It has perks, but so do all positions – just depends on what constitutes an appealing bonus in your book. Be prepared for the hard grind, the toil and what feels like the weight of the world to be heaped atop you. But trust me too when I say: it’ll feel amazing when you make that mark and the rewards come your way (and I do not mean monetary ones – if that’s what you’re after: wrong business for you!).

BTW: I have never done an unpaid internship outside of university, where it was part of the course, and strongly advise those not living with parents/those who can cover bills to not do it. It will drain your reserves, emotionally and financially, and chances are that nothing will come of it (certainly not enough to repay what you put in). If you’re still keen (I do recommend it to students with financial support), you know where to go.

Further reading:
Eikongraphia
‘Ask the experts’
A proper pros and cons article

Listening clearly, not critically

Oddly, since entering this (hopefully brief) period of unemployment, I find myself able to listen to records without skipping ahead and forming sentences of assessment in my mind; it’s a strange freedom brought about by an unexpected one, but embraced nevertheless.

Take Isis’ Oceanic, my accompaniment from Liverpool Street to West Norwood earlier today – never have I heard the record that gives this blog its name in such clarity, where I was able to weave between the lines of Aaron Turner’s thunderous roars, and the band’s titanic guitar work. I wasn’t playing it as a point of reference, retrospection for contemporary analysis of a peer-level release; I was playing it as a fan. In an industry that moves as quickly as music, it’s easy to forget how to listen for pleasure.

But that’s exactly what I am doing now, right now, as these fingers find their way onto a keyboard that isn’t mine (but I’m too much of an idiot to work out how to properly connect my acquired-from-work PC to the home broadband – tips on a postcard to the usual address) to the delightful – and that’s a word overused in critiques, but definitely accurate here – sounds of Stars Of The Lid’s And Their Refinement Of The Decline. I think I may have, belatedly, discovered an album to rank among my most loved. And I’m barely into disc two. It’s that immediate a hit.

And I think its impression is partially down to me not playing it for any other purpose but because I want to – no PR officer or label intern is pestering, I simply bought the record from a shop earlier today, after months of failing to, and have allowed it to fill the tiny room I’m presently hunched in. I know it rated highly on Metacritic last year – I think it may have made the site’s top ten based on aggregated scoring, or whatever system they use – but until now I’d never given it a chance.

Had I not been made redundant last week… or the week after (a downside to unemployment is that days rather blur into one, especially after a heavy weekend)… I doubt very much I would now be enjoying this music; chances are I’d be sorting through promotional records, trying to filter the best for review coverage. I’d not get the chance to go back, to pick up something special that I missed first time around.

On topic, I picked up Harmonia’s Musik Von… today too, although that rather predates Refinement. The day seems fine for the absorption of shimmering drone, drifting clouds of soft sound that pay no notice to pop structures. Truly, this is some of the most gorgeous music in the world.

Everyone should buy Refinement, right now. Assuming they can find it easier than I could.

(I still have to write up a piece on Fucked Up. This sonic influence on my mindset does not encourage the writing of punk-rock features.)

In praise of: Keith Fullerton Whitman’s ‘Stereo Music For Yamaha Disklavier Prototype, Electric Guitar and Computer’

Call me a nerd – I’ll freely take it on what chin I have – but there’s something magic about music that does so much with so little. Just the other day, over two cups of fine tea in a Stoke Newington cafe, I talked with Bill Drummond (KLF, etc) about hearing movement in music that might not be there. It was in relation to the sound made by his the17 choirs, but tonight I’ve found the perfect piece of music to apply the idea to.

‘Stereo Music…’ is from Keith Fullerton Whitman’s Multiples album, released via Kranky in 2005 and recorded at Harvard. Yes, the university. It runs for ten minutes and is, at its core, a single loop, soaked in various layers of echo and hum, hiss and blissful choral drone. It doesn’t really do anything; it just is for ten full minutes. It doesn’t even really get going until four minutes in, when a faint ripple of what could be a processed voice (but isn’t) rises gently in the mix. It’s so very serene that, truly, words do it no justice. The ’song’ is the most perfectly delicate piece of instrumental music I own, maybe – pristine in its arrangement and execution, meticulously detailed despite so few constituent parts.

And here’s where this notion of hearing shifts in the drone comes into play: the background sweeps vary to tiny degrees, second to second; progressively louder, slight alterations in pitch. But the (what could be a) piano loop remains the same. It does, I’m sure. Yet here I am, tapping different patterns to it upon my chest, wondering how two minutes ago it was an entirely different structure to what now washes against my ears. As the underlying undulations in the sheet of backdrop sound drift into the ether for good, this ‘piano’ plays out ’til it too is spent, never faltering in its repetition and reliability. It’s like Kraut-classical piano-prog, or something. Nah, that’s rubbish. It’s just perfect. And full of self-manifested nuances that only I know.

Keith Fullerton Whitman also records more ’straightforward’ dance music under various monikers, but for me his given-name ambient works shine bright as near-peerless exercises in modern composition. Some may call it ’soundtrack’ music, but if certain pictures can paint a thousand words, then pieces like ‘Stereo Music…‘ can sing a thousand paintings. (That said, some of Franc Tetaz’s work, such as the score to Australian horror film Wolf Creek, is close to Whitman’s in its eschewing of conventional ‘classicisms’.)

Today I also listened to new records by Nadja and Growing. Both were fantastic and tied in neatly to my Whitman enjoyment. The new Nadja (click name for MySpace) record is called Skin Turns To Glass, and it’s probably the most tonally beautiful thing of utmost brutality I’ve heard since the self-titled Pyramids album released via Hydrahead a few months back (review here). It’ll appeal to fans of Jesu’s less-vocal dirges. Growing’s (click name for MySpace) All The Way is typically idiosyncratic, but powerfully addictive of beat – it will set your toe tapping. Two new-release recommendations from two inspiring duos, right there.

Punk’s not dead (it just moved to Birmingham)

I’m thrilled, seriously, to see this morning (perhaps a little later than I should’ve) that Birmingham’s Beestung Lips have time set aside to record a follow-up release to their blistering debut EP Songs To And From An Iron Gut. The four-piece will be entering a studio on September 3 according to their MySpace page.

Since the release of said EP last year, via local label (and organisers of the excellent Supersonic Festival) Capsule, I’ve barely breathed a word about the band that hasn’t been dripping in extreme positivity. Even after an indifferently received DiScover Club show in March, where their regular vocalist was replaced by a temporary substitute (and alcohol took hold), my love for this fiery foursome dwindled none.

It’s in their eyes, you see, and you can see their eyes in their songs – bulging red, blood-shot, desperate; Watership Down terror. You feel they could kill for their art if such an action was necessary. They’re the full stop at the end of every sentence proclaiming band XYZ as ‘the next Gallows’, the natural conclusion to a cycle that’s seen punk rock co-opted by sports, literature, car design, questionable club nights, et cetera. Punk’s not movement, it’s a moment, and Beestung Lips should be the shadow cast furthest by the explosion back when – nothing needs happen after they inevitably burn out after another one or two searing releases.

‘Inevitably’ because there’s self-destruction in their veins, and some days a visual reluctance to acknowledge how fucking amazing they can be; nonchalance exuded where cockiness and a degree of self-aggrandizing attitude would be absolutely acceptable. That, and their vocalist is the cracked chain link, the seed of doubt – it’s nothing to do with his performances, but because he (he being one ‘Wayfarer Pearton’ according to MySpace) is a man with ills evident. Thusly he departed the stage early at Supersonic last month – I wonder if this post on MySpace is a reference to the day:

“I did walk off stage. Off stage, through walls, through hell to embrace the only feelings that are truly personal: joy and grief. There will be a new record, commited to posterity in September. I will be contributing. It will be the rock of all ages, it will have the balls to be pagan, it will be the big yell fuck of the year.”

That: commitment to a cause, however limited the cause’s widescreen ambitions. If he leaves and Beestung Lips fill the gap for good then they may succeed to a level where ten-date support tours become a reality, if they want it; if in his absence there’s only a void that sucks the remaining three into it, then so be it: Songs To And From An Iron Gut is a record I return to time and again, and it’ll always be a classic debut in my ears. Vitriolic, melodic, acerbic, challenging, accessible, surreal, suffocating, intoxicating – it’s a paradox set to compact disc, from a band that should be bigger than the sun but, failing that, scorch with an equal heat.

The fruits of September’s sessions can’t come quickly enough.