I like Foals (new video centric).

I do, truth. The Oxford five-piece have been mainstays on the iPod since before their debut album, Antidotes. Since I like it so, here’s the new video to ‘Olympic Airwaves‘ (released October 6 via Transgressive), directed by regular cohort Dave Ma.

This seems to be a revised recording, too. At least to these ears.

Foals, ‘Olympic Airwaves‘

Find Foals on MySpace here, and an interview I did with Yannis here.

Shred Yr Face tour

One of the last things I did at DiS was work with a number of super people on the pulling together of a tour for October, the inaugural Shred Yr Face tour. It’s headlined by Los Campesinos!, with support from No Age and Times New Viking. Three great bands from three great labels – Wichita, Sub Pop and Matador – on one great tour.

And now things are hitting their stride – there’s a Facebook group for the tour, which you can join, and soon there will be a blog running, with updates from participating bands and guest contributors. Add to that exclusives (songs, competitions, things) and the whole community vibe, and it’s all pretty sweet.

At the moment Shred Yr Face dot com isn’t a whole lot to look at, but it’ll expand before long, so do check it out and keep your eyes and ears open for further developments.

I’m doing what I can to aid the tour’s cause at the moment, but obviously finding a job comes first; applause is due, therefore, for the efforts of Gareth D, Natalie J and Tom W, who are gonna make this an interactive success, and hopefully set the foundations for further Shred Yr Face tours.

The tour dates run as follows:

October
14 Brighton Komedia
15 Liverpool Carling Academy 2
16 Leeds Irish Centre
17 Dublin Whelans
18 Glasgow School of Arts
20 London Electric Ballroom
21 Bristol Fleece
22 Manchester Academy 3

Click here for details on tickets and age restrictions. Tickets are on sale NOW.

No Age, ‘Eraser‘

Los Campesinos!, ‘Death To Los Campesinos!‘

Times New Viking’s ‘Zebra Session’

Six-pack: August’s best albums

Since it’s over, as of some hours ago…

Jaguar Love, Take Me To The Sea
(Matador – read a review on DiS)

Vessels, White Fields And Open Devices
(Cuckundoo – read a review on DiS)

The Week That Was, The Week That Was
(Memphis Industries – read a review on DiS)

Late Of The Pier, Fantasy Black Channel
(Parlophone – read a review on DiS)

Oneida, Preteen Weaponry
(Jagjaguwar – read a review on DiS)

Bowerbirds, Hymns For A Dark Horse
(Dead Oceans – read a review on DiS)

Just don’t go thinking that new Verve record is any good, okay… it really, really is not.

‘The fall’ does make sense, really.

So, apparently it’s the end of the summer – television stations are switching to their autumn afternoon schedules (I’m looking forward to all the episodes of A Touch Of Frost), leaves are falling from Tulse Hill’s tallest trees, and the wind’s getting up to the extent that the cats don’t want to go into the garden to do their business. To get me through the stinky next few months: five records I’m really rather looking forward to (four of which I’ve actually heard, natch).

Parts & Labor (pictured above), Receivers
(Jagjaguwar – released November 3)
Now a four-piece following the addition of guitarist Sarah Lipstate, Brooklyn-based Parts & Labor’s fourth album revives the more anthemic qualities of their last, Mapmaker, while balancing the record’s pace so that the jagged edges don’t cut quite so deep; typical, relatively speaking, songs are interlaced with snippets of sampled found sound, crackling static and misfiring receivers (title, d’uh), to create a seamless whole certain to appeal to hardcore and converts alike.

Windy & Carl, Songs For The Broken Hearted
(Kranky – released October 14)
Transcendental drone akin to Stars Of The Lid tackling Clear Horizon material… now that’s a Kranky love-in. Just gorgeously arranged ambient washes of textural sound, full of that unpronounceable ache that manifests itself within all of us when we mine emotional depths so familiar but rarely visited.

Eugene McGuinness, Eugene McGuinness
(Domino – released October 13)
Eugene makes the step up from Double Six to Domino proper for his debut album, the follow-up to last year’s The Early Learnings Of… EP; throughout the young singer-songwriter flexes creative muscles developed beyond his years, lyrically and melodically, and goes some way to delivering on all the promise he’s displayed on past recordings and a variety of solo and band-backed live appearances. There’s no reason why he shouldn’t taste mainstream success with this brilliantly instantaneous collection.

Fucked Up, The Chemistry Of Common Life
(Matador – released October 13)
Canada’s well-educated punk-rock marauders come out bawling lyrical complexities on their second full-length, and first for Matador, but conceptual frameworks aside this simply bites and snarls in the manner the initiated will be warmly expecting – transplanting their tumultuous live shows to the studio may have proved impossible, all six members rarely in the same room during Chemistry’s gestation, but the end result is a mesmerising achievement that’s going to see its makers explore audience avenues never before open to them.

Deftones, Eros
(Warner Bros – released TBC)
Oh man, I cannot wait for this one. When that release date’s confirmed: I am going to do a cartwheel.

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.)

Review: single-paragraph appraisals

Because sometimes it is nice to review things. Should anyone care for this opinion.

Constantines, Kensington Heights (Arts & Crafts, 22/09/08)
Canada’s Constantines’ fourth LP follows precedents set by their previous form – namely this is tears- and beers-stained rock and roll in a vaguely similar vein to The Hold Steady, but while Craig Finn and his cohorts play the blue-collar chords, here songs are streamlined for a more discerning listener. ‘Million Star Hotel’ cranks up the tension, Bryan Webb’s Springsteen-recalling vocals impassioned and pure of soul; ‘I Will Not Sing A Hateful Song’ is the eventual release, a kind of tenderness replacing the quintet’s twitchy rhythms as calmness cools their punk-infused cacophony. The band’s arrival on Arts & Crafts feels like something of a homecoming following a period on Sub Pop’s books, and the album title echoes this – Kensington Heights is the Toronto street on which you’ll find their rehearsal space.

Adventure, Adventure (Carpark, 15/09/08)
8-bit party glitch from North Carolina-raised Benny Boeldt, presently residing in Baltimore as he looks to make a name for himself this side of the Atlantic as Adventure. This self-titled album presses many of the same buttons as fellow townsman (and Wham City cohort) Dan Deacon’s Spiderman Of The Rings, but ultimately doesn’t possess the furiously powerful NRG of said potential peer. Occasional vocal samples are latched to Sonic-style beats and, while hardly original, the overall product’s a pleasantly distracting muddle of refined synths and coin-op arcade game FX. If your idea of tomorrow’s music today is Crystal Castles or, perhaps more preferably, Daedelus’ rave-chic retrogressions, this’ll fit into your collection sweetly enough. If the sight of neon clothing makes you barf, best steer your attentions well clear of this candy-coloured patchwork of ringtone-level hedonism.

Also on the stereo: Hey Colossus’ Happy Birthday. Sounds like a choir of feedback harpies being stepped on by fire-breathing dinosaurs with blame-the-Melvins tinnitus ringing in their why are you not extinct earholes. Brutes.

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.

Sort of the only editorial column I’ll ever sort of write…

Here.

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.

Rewind: Unwound

Following my repeat-play rotation of Lovvers’ Think, today I was lucky enough to get my hands on a few Unwound albums. I’ve been dropping by their ‘tribute’ MySpace page fairly frequently of late, so it’s great to have some CDs to further my renewed interest.

The connection between Lovvers and Unwound is very, very tenuous – both bands are punk by basic design but miles apart in how they lay their music down – but in the latter you hear a timeless rawness distilled further and wilder in the former. Certainly there are plenty of ‘punk’ bands today whose ideas of what makes for intensity, of that dynamic of hold and release, could be broadened considerably by hearing Unwound.

Actually, fuck it. There’s no real connection whatsoever. I just wanted some sort of bridge between posts.

For those at the back: Unwound were DC hardcore sorts who should/could have mattered immensely in the mid-’90s (formed in ‘91 and broke up ten years later), but they never quite made the waves of the similarly-pitched Fugazi (who do pre-date them, to be fair); they favoured all-ages shows, toured hard, and really helped Kill Rock Stars make a name for itself in the ’90s alongside Sleater-Kinney. They’re well worth your immediate investigation, as some of their material really hasn’t dated any. Follow that MySpace link in the above paragraph for a taster. They can (could) be as brutal as Young Windows and as tight as Burning Airlines, sometimes in the same song. Some phenomenal stuff in the catalogue, which is pretty expansive (I’ve only enough material to scratch the surface at present).

I’m off now to play their last-ever album, Leaves Turn Inside You (from which the below song is taken). I’ve never heard it before. Exciting times.

Video: Unwound, ‘Scarlette‘