Loud And Quiet 32 – Veronica Falls by LoudAndQuiet

LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 32 / THE ALTERNATIVE MUSIC TABLOID

Veronica Falls ADOPTED BY THE CITY OF NEW YORK

+ S T I LL CORNERS T H E ONE R O O TS MANUVA T E E TH F R I ENDS C I V IL CIVIC

CONTENTS NO V E M B E R 2011

09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . IT’S NOT M E, IT’S YOU REEF YOUNIS HAS LOVED MANY BANDS, THE THING IS, THEY DON’T SEEM TO LOVE HIM BACK

10 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SI NG LES / BOOKS THE LATEST 7” RELEASES AND PAGE-TURNERS, FEATURING THE SOFT MOON AND SHAUN RYDER

COVER PHOTOGRAPHY GUY EPPEL

13 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . W E’V E GOT N0I DEA LOUD AND QUIET LAUNCHES IN JAPAN, THANKS TO A TOKYO ARTS COLLECTIVE

14 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LE FTO V E RS SUMMER CAMP ASK NO AGE WHY THEY’RE SO OBSESSED WITH DISNEY LAND

FRI E N DS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 COMING IN PEACE: BROOKLYN’S DISCO BAND WHO “WEIRD THINGS” HAPPEN TO

TH E ON E . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 SOUL MUSIC THAT DEALS WITH THE DARKER SIDE OF LOVE AND LIFE

STI LL CORN E RS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 THE MOVIE SCREEN MEETING OF GREG HUGHES AND TESSA MURRAY

ROOTS MAN U VA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 AFTER 10 YEARS OF MAKING MUSIC, RODNEY SMITH IS STARTING TO REALISE HOW INFLUENCIAL HE IS

TE ETH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A DAY IN THE LIFE OF NOISE-POP TRIO AS THEY PLAY TWO SHOWS IN ONE EVENING

V E RON ICA FALLS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 ADOPTED BY BROOKLYN HAVING MADE THE SAME ALBUM TWICE

CI V I L CI V IC . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 MODERN LIFE ISN’T RUBBISH. IT’S HOW AUSSIE DUO CIVIL CIVIC SURVIVE

CONTACT INFO@LOUDANDQUIET.COM LOUD AND QUIET PO BOX 67915 LONDON NW1W 8TH EDITOR - STUART STUBBS ART DIRECTOR - LEE BELCHER SUB EDITOR - ALEX WILSHIRE FILM EDITOR - IAN ROEBUCK ADVERTISING ADVERTISE@LOUDANDQUIET.COM CONTRIBUTORS BART PETTMAN, CHRIS WATKEYS, DEAN DRISCOLL, DANIEL DYLAN WRAY, DANNY CANTER, DK GOLDSTIEN, DEAN DRISCOLL, ELEANOR DUNK, ELINOR JONES, EDGAR SMITH, FRANKIE NAZARDO, HOLLY LUCAS, JANINE BULLMAN, LEE BULLMAN, KATE PARKIN, KELDA HOLE, GABRIEL GREEN, LEON DIAPER, LUKE WINKIE, MANDY DRAKE, MARTIN CORDINER, MATTHIAS SCHERER, NATHAN WESTLEY, OWEN RICHARDS, PAVLA KOPECNA, POLLY RAPPAPORT, PHIL DIXON PHIL SHARP, REEF YOUNIS, SAM LITTLE, SAM WALTON, SIMON LEAK, SIMON GRAY,TIM COCHRANE, TOM GOODWYN, TOM PINNOCK THIS MONTH L&Q LOVES BEN WHYBROW, BETH DRAKE, FELICITY WEBB, GRAEME BORLAND, HANNAH GOULD, KEONG WOO, NAZLEE JANNOO, THOMAS BELLHOUSE THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN LOUD AND QUIET ARE THOSE OF THE RESPECTIVE CONTRIBUTORS AND DO NOT NECESSARI LY REFLECT THE OPINI ONS OF THE MAGAZINE OR ITS STAFF. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2011 LOUD AND QUIET. DISTRIBUTED BY LOUD AND QUIET AND FORTE DISTRIBUTION. PRINTED BY SHARMAN & COMPANY LTD.

36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ALBUMS FILMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 DIRTY PROJECTORS & BJÖRK, SPECTRALS AND ALL THE MONTH’S KEY RELEASES

IAN ROEBUCK PICKS WHAT ARE SURE TO BE HIGHLIGHTS AT THE BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . LI V E PARTY W OLF . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 RECENT LIVE SHOWS BY ALT-J, METRONOMY, THE WAR ON DRUGS AND MORE

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THE VIOLENT WORLD OF IAN BEALE / WOULD YOU RATHER? / GET THE JODIE MARSH LOOK

At the beginning of this year we published an article entitled Remember The First Time that listed our six most anticipated debut albums of 2011. Veronica Falls were on that list and two months ago we got to hear their eponymous LP. It didn’t disappoint, perhaps because they made it twice. We didn’t know this to be the case as we travelled to New York to meet the band, just that ‘Veronica Falls’ is an album of extreme emotions (love and death) and finely crafted melodies; a mix of 60s girl groups gone early 80s lo-fi. We knew that Brooklyn was a home from home for the band, although we didn’t realise to what extent. There they know everyone and everywhere, in a city that also deals in extremes – a place where you’re served sidewalk hotdogs with a slap on the back and bistro sandwiches with a slap in the face. The band showed us around, took us to dinner and sat us in front of two impressively full shows on the same nights that Radiohead were in town. Closer to home, rave-core trio TEETH released their debut album last month. It too featured on our January list, although when they told us it was going to be called ‘Whatever’ we thought that even they must be joking. They weren’t, and ‘Whatever’ has ended up being one of the noisiest electro-thrash, ADHD records we’ve come across. It’s certainly a party album, so this month we partied with them, shadowing their every move on September 29th. They do everything at double speed, so it was little wonder that one evening with TEETH meant two shows, a lot of running around and a certain amount of panic.

CONTRI B UTORS 01

L E ON DI A P E R

GU Y E P P E L

N AT H A N W E S T L E Y

PHOTOGRAPHER

WRITER

Leon hails from Fordingbridge, Hampshire, a town that boasts a homicide rate about eight times higher than the national average. He found escape from the crushing sameness of early ’90s South England through the images of Robert Frank and William Eggleston, who inspired him enough to study photography and The Art Institute, Bournemouth. Since then he’s moved to London where he runs indie label Marshall Teller when he’s not being published here and in TANK, Dazed and The Observer. For this month’s issue Leon shot Friends, who just so happen to be pals of Total Slacker, who Leon has just released on MT.

Guy Eppel has contributed to Loud And Quiet many times before now, although mostly when he was still living in his hometown of London. He’s since moved to Brooklyn, New York, so he was the ﬁrst port of call when we ﬂew to the States to meet up with Veronica Falls, and not just because he let us sleep on his furniture. Guy also shoots for NME and Rolling Stone, dates a pop star and seems to know every band in town. This month’s cover shoot is his fourth for us, and involved a ticking off by a psychic healer in the Lower East Side and a tour of Guy’s Williamsburg neighbourhood. Guy is currently obsessed with Detroit.

When Nathan isn’t seeking out new music to online, he can usually be found hiding in one of Brighton’s many venues with a pint of stout, doing much the same thing. If he’s not there he’ll be searching for striped tops to add to his ever-growing collection of striped tops, or trying to look intellectual in some art gallery or other, or watching semi-pretentious art house ﬁlms. For this issue of Loud And Quiet, Nathan contributed the Roots Manuva feature, and of his time with Rodney Hylton Smith says: “It was a genuine pleasure. Roots Manuva is one of those rare artists who helps to push music forward and into new territory.”

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BEGINNING NO V E M B E R 2011

Illustration by Gareth Arrowsmith - www.garetharrowsmith.blogspot.com

IT ’S NOT ME, IT ’S YOU

AMERICAN BOY / TALES FROM THE OTHER SIDE BY LUKE WINKIE: OUR MAN IN BAR AK ’S BACK YARD

REEF YOUNIS HAS LOVED MANY BANDS. THE THING IS, THEY DON’T SEEM TO LOVE HIM BACK

THE YEAR THAT HIP-HOP MET INDIE IS THE YEAR THAT OLD HOP-HOP FANS WANT TO FORGET

I’m besotted. Giddy in love. Anyone daring to suggest otherwise is aggressively cut down with a venom and poisonous revulsion typically reserved for sex criminals. It’s me and them versus the world. They get me. They understand me. They speak to me like no one else does. But then…whatthefuckisthis!? It’s over! If I’m lucky, the grim realisation will take a few minutes to sink in before it truly hits home. I feel sick to my stomach. All those hours. The emotional investment…the financial investment. Did that time mean anything to them? ANYTHING?! I gave them the best years of my life and here I am heartbroken and hurt, hurling their CDs out the window, burning their clothes, stifling a tear with every NME cover story. These were the bands I idolised. Adored. Obsessed about. The ones where I queued outside Our Price (it was a shop) for midnight single launches; the bands I missed a day of school to see; the bands I’d spend starry-eyed minutes (whole minutes!) chatting bollocks to knowing my last train was inching out of the station. And it was all worth it. The posters, the plectrums, the t-shirts proved the loyalty, but then I got ‘Be Here Now’. I got ‘First Impressions of Earth’. I got ‘Know Your Enemy’. I got ‘One By One’. I got ‘Era Vulgaris’… I got, well, a growing timeline of confusion and disappointment. For a sickening moment, as Justice’s ‘Audio Video Disco’ beamed out my speakers for the first time, I felt it again; that sharp knot in my stomach, the little voice of doubt familiarly rushing, rattling to the front of my skull, the alarm bells and the megaphone and the violent rush of blood to the head…whatthefuckisthis?! What happened to the coruscating volume? The seedy, Gallic magnetism? The Spinal Tap dramatics? Admittedly, it’s always been a snap judgement; a fly-by minute speed date where loyalty is either revitalised or put to the test. It’s a relationship like any other, in that when the bond is broken once it can never be the same again. And from the angry affront of failed expectation to the passing indifference of forgetting the milestones that once governed your life, you’re left despondent. Deflated. Destined to be alone until you find someone ne… WOW! Whothefuckisthis?! There’s always someone new. For many though, the glory years drastically cloud any sane judgement. It’s how Oasis lollopped on for so long, and how Noel Gallagher’s new record will still do very well, thanks to people telling themselves “this is great… isn’t it?”. But if you love them, set them free. They’ll only beat you to it.

I love hip-hop. I grew up on the stuff. I also grew up in a predominately white suburb outside of San Diego. The stuff pilfered through our culture; all backwards baseball caps and lifted trucks. I used to see the more conscious types pull their skinny jeans over their sneakers – it was just the thing to do. One of my favourite music writers continually captures this feeling perfectly. Tom Breihan (Pitchfork, Village Voice) has an almost absurdly geeky love affair with hip-hop, as he documents a uniquely American white-boy feeling of coming to rap from a distinctly dorky origin. We have no way to relate, but the stuff feels good, even if we have to edit out all the N-words when we’re goofily rapping along in our cars. The American indie kids have become increasingly united with hip-hop too. Part of this has to be irony – the skyrocketing profiles of memes like Lil B, Odd Future, Waka Flocka, and, arguably, Rick Ross are all chalked up to a group that finds warmth in the place of being ‘that guy’. Ross specifically hasn’t achieved notoriety with a solid flow or a delectable taste in beats – no, generally people just like to scream along to “THESE MOTHAFUCKAS MAD THAT I’M ICY!” When he recently performed at a Vice party in New York, the amount of white hands in the air could have easily symbolised the final resting place of a career that never meant to explode initially. To be fair, I too like Rick Ross – it’s great car music. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t looking forward to his next record, but it’s a disconcerting thought to consider most of my peers found themselves fans through bizarre hipsterisms rather than genuine love for the art of the music. As someone that came from a completely un-ironic adoration of hip-hop (with a difficult cross-cultural identity crisis to boot) it can be hard not to be depressed. It could be a great thing that rappers have demolished the walls that indie built, but you often have to question their motives. I mean, is it an ironic fashion statement? Then there’s an entity like Das Racist who wear Panda Bear shirts, namedrop Jeff Mangum, and get El-P guest verses. They could be the most forwardly hipster-friendly group because of their phonebooks and vocabulary, rather than their music. Of course, on stage, in front of all the newly-bred hiphop fans, they’re utterly contemptuous. At SXSW it was a half-hour of sarcastic audience-abuse and a few fragments of songs. Sure, their demeanour puts them in a place of hierarchy, but I think some of the attacks come from knowing they listened to A Tribe Called Quest before their shirts were in Urban Outfitters.

THESE WERE THE BANDS I IDOLISED. ADORED. OBSESSED ABOUT.

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BEGINNING SINGLES & EPS / BOOKS 01 BY JA NIN E & L EE B U L L M A N

(CAPTURED TRACKS) OUT OCT 31

DE P T F OR D GO T H Y OU T H II

BE AT Y HE A R T S L U S H P UP P Y / C OL A

(MEROK) OUT OCT 16

(WORRY FREE) OUT OCT 24

Daniel Woolhouse has been Deptford Goth for nearly a year, having swapped piano and guitar composition for electronics. He’s from south London, so the Deptford bit holds up. As for the Goth part, not so much. ‘Youth II’ isn’t remotely gothic. What it is, in abundance, is nostalgic, like a lot of electronica made in bedrooms with robot vocals. It’s surprising how much you end up rooting for Woolhouse’s auto-tuned cyborg on ‘Real Life Fantasy’ though, even if you are a little bored of his bleating by the closing title track. ‘Time’, meanwhile, could go on for twice as long as it does, as it traverses dubstep, chillwave and downbeat ambience. Maybe it’s because ‘time’ remains such an agonising thought for us mere mortals, or maybe it’s due to Woolhouse’s impressive understanding of a genre he’s so new to. Either way, like Gold Panda before him, Deptford Goth has the cold world of computer music feeling not so chilly.

South London’s Beaty Heart are a band of drummers, who all hit things at the same time. It’s what makes their name so apt. They don’t only drum, of course – they build up layers of afro-beat samples and various percussive sounds, along with vocals that sound very much like those of Animal Collective. A lot of what Beaty Heart do sounds like Animal Collective, in fact. This three-track EP is the band’s ﬁrst, and while the lead track titles suggest something syrupy and ironic, even, ‘Slush Puppy/Cola’ is a brilliant, rhythmic 12”. The lyrics are pretty much Double Dutch, cherub’d like those of other AC-a-likes Gentle Friendly, but all three tracks here sound like summer in the winter, from ‘We’re All Friends Here’’s gentle patter to ‘Slush Puppy’’s tropical, loose, rainforest jam. ‘Cola’ then cruises to a colourful Casio loop, making this EP far more than the work of copyists but rather a great advertisement for drum lessons.

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T W IS T ING M Y ME L ON : T HE A U T OBIOGR A P H Y B Y S H A UN R Y DE R (BANTAM PRESS)

Shaun Ryder ﬁrst came to our attention as the shambling waster genius of The Happy Mondays.Since then he has “been addicted to crack cocaine in Barbados and gone cold turkey in Burnley”, written some of the best tunes of the last thirty years and soundtracked a genuine cultural revolution. Twisting My Melon is his memoir in which Ryder plots his journey from dealing pills to Hacienda revellers to roughing it in the I’m a Celebrity jungle. He shies away from nothing – the Mondays eventual, inevitable split is covered in detail as is the singer’s long and hardfought battle with hard drugs. But there are also more laugh out loud stories than you can shake a maraca at and a sense by the end of the book that most of our current crop of indie pop-stars are perhaps just a little dull by comparison. Step on.

F R E A K OU T ! M Y L IF E W I T H F R A NK Z A P P E R B Y PA UL INE BU T C HE R (PLEXUS)

…or what happens when a rather straight English girl arrives at a secretarial temping job and ﬁnds herself working for mad-as-ahatter Mother of Invention, Frank Zappa. Following their ﬁrst meeting, Pauline Butcher went on to work for Zappa for the next four years as his PA, fan club president and general go-to girl. She moved into a log cabin in the California hills with the band leader and his entourage, a place frequented by pretty much everybody who was anybody in the free love and good dope mecca of late sixties California. Butcher manages to capture well the heady atmosphere of the time and offer some insight into one of rock’s truly maverick voices.

Single reviews by Mandy Drake / Stuart Stubbs Blowback by Lee Bullman and Michael Forwell published by Pan Macmillan available now. www.leebullman.com

T HE S OF T MO ON T O TA L DE C AY

It’s been a year since Luis Vasquez released his debut album as The Soft Moon and in doing so dispelled the myth that musicians from San Francisco like it fuzzy, scuzzy and chased by a spliff. ‘The Soft Moon’ was not a psychedelic record. It wasn’t meant for weed. Some drugs maybe, but not weed. People listening to ‘The Soft Moon’ on weed might eat themselves. ‘Total Decay’ is an equally paranoid trip at the hands of vocals that are nightmarishly whispered to taunt and alarm, served with swathes of Witch House static and, on ‘Visions’, voodoo drums. It has an electronic centre with a garage band outer shell – a new kind of krautrock designed to disturb but never feel cartoonish. ‘Total Decay’, as a title, says it all really, and so does Captured Tracks’ decision to release this EP on Halloween. Most clever though is the fact that Vasquez’ voice from another realm doesn’t arrive until song two (‘Alive’), and then it only hangs around for the following title track. It’s like a slasher movie – anticipation is the real scare, not the Boogie Man himself. Although, when Vasquez’s hushed monster does turn up it only makes his brand of stark cold wave all the more shit-your-pants beguiling and ultimately original.

A. BLOODFLOOD AA. TESSELLATE THE DEBUT SINGLE BY ALT-J

IN STORES NOW ORDER FROM WWW.LOUDANDQUIET.COM LAQ004

AVAILABLE AT ROUGH TRADE, LONDON / PICCADILLY RECORDS, MANCHESTER / NORMAN RECORDS, LEEDS / BIG LOVE, TOKYO / PANDA PANDA, TOKYO

BEGINNING TH E P RE V I E W

NOT MUSIC : JOHN FORD’S NON AUDIO FE ARS AND FANTASIES

騒々しく、静かな日本

Photography by Owen Richards

F A NC Y DR E S S No one knows exactly when or how it happened, but Halloween has become a big deal. Not American big, but definitely seismic enough for a witches hat with green hair attached to be completely shit. That won’t do anymore – you need a costume more imaginative and post-ironic than the person next to you, who’s dressed as Sarah Palin, Super Mario or Ronald MacDonald. At an Anchorman party a couple of years ago, one person turned up not as Ron Burgundy, as I did, but as Zeus’ beard. Another as a lamp. And there I was, dressed like a human. Personally, you don’t need to ask me twice to dress up in public. As well as Burgundy, I’ve become Hulk Hogan, Anakin Skywalker and white suit era John Lennon in recent years, with mixed results. The proto Lord Vander get-up was pretty half arsed, in the name of Secret Garden Party and assembled en route. The following year I made up for it, dressed as a WWF wrestler, even if one passer-by did note to his friend that he’d “never seen a punier Hulk Hogan”. Neither of them were dressed up at all, which was probably wise once the initial shame of not joining in had subsided. Because that’s the thing with fancy dress – it provides an instantaneous buzz; a sharp shot of competitive silliness, and then it’s gone. Some of the truest words put to celluloid spill out of Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls as she observes that fancy dress, for certain young females, is simply a chance to dress like a slut – a witch’s cat that wears just a black bra; a vampire that wears just a black bra; a Super Mario that wears just a black bra. It didn’t really fit with the film’s message, I guess, but she could have also mentioned just how short lived the thrill of fancy dress is. It’s all about the reveal – that moment when your friends see what you’ve dreamt up, and you them. Get it right and strangers will shake your hand or ask for a picture with you, even. But there’s only a certain amount of time that you can point out the genius of your mate’s homemade Mr Blobby costume. Before long you’ll want to talk about more serious things, and even if it’s only along the lines of your day job, it’s hard to do it when you’re a Wookie and they’re Buzz Lightyear.

WE’VE GOT N0IDE A LOUD AND QUIET LAUNCHES IN JAPAN, THANKS TO A TOKYO-BASED ARTS COLLECTIVE From the camp krautpop of Alphaville to Tom Wait’s manly bourbon croak, being “Big in Japan” has always been something worth singing about. Tokyo, especially, remains a place that most of us “have always wanted to go to”, and yet we’ll more often than not overshoot it and end up in Australia – somewhere twice as far from home and nowhere near as alien or exciting to the British. Everything, we are told, is very different in Japan, except, perhaps, for the country’s healthy appetite for guitars and music. Figuring this to be the case, this month we’re launching

“THE INTERNET IS NOT THE BEST WAY TOO TO COMMUNICATE MUSIC”

Loud And Quiet Japan – a retail version of Loud And Quiet available in Tokyo that will come with our UK editions intact, plus interviews and articles translated into Japanese and presented with exclusive photography not seen anywhere else. It’s all the idea of n0idea – a Tokyo-based collective who met whilst studying in London. The team – made up for art, music, architecture and publication nuts – have recently launched their own record label, lOW VOl, releasing Argentinean singer-songwriter Pablo Malaurie and a Brooklyn compilation, but their main

concern is their creative space, Vacant, where they host exhibitions, live shows, talks and workshops. “We ﬁrst got to know about Loud And Quiet from our friends living in London,” explains Vacant Director Yusuke Nagai. “Initially we were planning only to distribute it in Japan, however looking through back issues we thought it would be such a luxury to provide ‘fresh-off-the-scene’ content in Japanese.” n0idea haven’t translated and re-published a publication until now, but they have distributed British titles in Japan before, like graphic design books Unit Editions. “When it comes to working with foreign publications, we always consider the ways to make them accessible to a Japanese audience,” explains Yusuke, “in terms of both content and price. I guess we want something between the authenticity of an underground zine culture and the comprehensiveness (or public accessibility) of popular culture magazines.” Tokyo is a robot city, though. It’s a neon playground where the world’s toys are invented, tested and reﬁned. Technology rules in Tokyo; printed newspapers, we imagine, don’t so much. “We don’t necessarily agree that the Internet is the best tool to communicate what music represents,” says Yusuke. “We believe in and value the physical aspects of music, like the actual listening experience in a live environment over Ustream broadcasting, for example, or the quality of printed record jackets over web formatted tumblr images. “If the original source of the communication in music is the physical act of playing instruments, any form of representation should carry touch of hands.” --Loud And Quite Japan launches in Tokyo on November 10th. A new edition will follow on the 10th of each month. Visit www.loudandquietjapan.com for details

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BEGINNING LE FTO V E RS

SUMMER CAMP

NO AGE

WE INTERVIEWED SUMMER CAMP LAST MONTH THEY LEFT THESE QUERIES BEHIND FOR RANDY RANDALL OF NO AGE

what does being an asshole get anybody, except for a lot of hurt feelings? It’s easy to be nice to people, and when you’re on the road you might meet a person for a couple of minutes and we might be having a shit day, or be tired, but we chose to be out there. When people are like, ‘Oh but I’m tired’, it’s like, ‘Well, what did you think you were going to be? You’re the one that booked all of these dates and went out on the road! It’s not their fault. They’ve worked all day and have come out and paid to see your show.’ So no, do not give up and become assholes.

On ‘Everything In Between’ you were inspired to use samplers by UK post-rock heroes Disco Inferno. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Yeah. Disco Inferno are an amazing band. They used sample technology in a way that we then did on ‘Everything In Between’, loading in these abstract sounds and layering them to create rhythm. Like, ‘Glitter’ is written around a series of four samples that sound like guitars but they’re these affected sample parts. It was inspired by Disco Inferno’s ‘Footprints In The Snow’, where there’s this sound that sounds like brushes on the snare drum, but it’s actually footprints in snow.

We’ve heard you’re big fans of the Disney theme parks. What is it about them you like so much? Oooh. Well, that’s more me. Dean, not so much, but I have issues. I like all theme parks, but especially Disney, and it’s for the same reason I like airports and hotel lobbies – it’s this

“FUCK THAT! WHO THE FUCK SAID WE WERE NICE GUYS?”

We’re a duo too. When we disagree on something it can be pretty hard to resolve it. What happens when you guys totally disagree? Errm, yeah, what do we do? We use our powers of persuasion. If we really disagree we talk it out. I think in a funny way when you’re a duo it’s more like a marriage, a friendship, a creative partnership and business partnership all rolled into one. Like, if you watch that Metallica documentary – because they are essentially a duo – it’s all about the idea of communicating. You need to put all the bullshit to one side and get to what it really is.

simulacra; this conception that you can just go somewhere else by just walking through the door. It’s this Alice Through The Looking Glass thing. Disney do it beyond just throwing a couple of rides out there. I mean, they have manufactured doorknobs!

You guys have a reputation for being super nice guys. Do you think that’s been a big factor to your success or should we just give it up and start being assholes? Haha. In response to that, ‘Fuck that! Who the fuck said we’re nice guys!?’. Nah. Being nice, yeah, why not? I mean,

Every band has a music industry bullshit moment. Ours was when an A&R painstakingly explained the difference between an engineer and a producer to us. What’s yours? Oh God. Hmmm. There’s almost too many to narrow it down

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to one. Fortunately the folks at Sub Pop don’t really fall into that category – they’re music industry without the ponytail. Like, we had one guy who was trying to court the band, I think, and his ﬁrst approach was to ask us what drugs we did. ‘Well, we don’t really do any drugs.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ He had to reconsider his whole approach. It was a bit like, ‘Really? We rode our bikes to meet you at a vegan restaurant. What gave you the idea that we’d be pulling out drugs?’. We love ATP. Who are you looking forward to seeing when you play the Les Savy Fav one in December? And who would play if you were curating? Okay. Well, I’m excited to see Nisennenmondai who are three women from Japan who are incredible and play technical prog-rock that’s kinda like Can. And if we were to curate one… who would it be? Jonathan Richman would be on there. And I’d try to get each member of Damaged-era Black Flag there, in whatever respective solo groups they have, just in the hope that if they’re all there, y’know… it might come together. It would probably never happen but y’know, it’s the dream scenario. We’ve heard you want to create your own venue/art gallery. Yeah, that’s something that Dean and I have been talking about. The idea is that we create a space that we can do what we want with, like an art gallery, a skate shop, a music venue – an overall spot where we’d like to hang out. We’ll get to a point where we’ll start looking at properties and then we go somewhere on tour and we’ll put that idea away again. You’ve done splits and collaborations with the likes of Zach Hill, Abe Vigoda and Inﬁnite Body. Who would you most like to collaborate with next? We’ve wanted to collaborate with Wayne Coyne and the guys from Flaming Lips. We met at a couple of festivals this last year and we’ve been talking about doing something. They’ve been releasing their own limited edition vinyls – they did one with Lightning Bolt – so we’ve been talking about that and it’s just a case of us having to send them something. We’re just stuck in logistics land, but it will happen.

Photography by Ben Parks / Phil Sharp Read an extented version of Summer Camp and Randy’s interview at www.loudandquiet.com/tag/leftovers

Hey Randy. We’re huge fans of No Age, so, most importantly, what’s on the way? Are you working on a new record? Well, we’re currently in the talking, dreaming, getting lost, beginning phases of what could be coming next. We’re taking a little time to clear our heads. There will be another record, but it’s going to be a little while. We’ve been talking with [fashion designer] Hedi Slimane about doing a sound installation for a photography show he has coming up, so that’s the ﬁrst thing we’ll be working on next.

tanding beneath a tree in the churchyard of St James’, Clerkenwell, currently having their pictures taken is Friends. Not our mates or, dare we even mention it, those shockingly wealthy actors from the TV series, but five hiply dishevelled Brooklyners who make fun, percussion-filled pop music. Suddenly Samantha Urbani, the frontwoman of the troupe, who has green eyelashes at the moment, paired with ripped fishnets and sequinned plimsolls, screams and rushes past our unwitting photographer to their manager Steve, who is holding a freshly pressed copy of the band’s new seven inch ‘I’m His Girl’. Grabbing it from him, she slowly slides out the record and waves it around audaciously, while pretending to lick it. This ought to give you a good idea of the sort of band Friends are. Ranging from their mid-twenties to early thirties, this outfit of former squat-dwelling misfits are Matt Molnar on synths, percussion, bass and guitar; Nikki Shapiro behind the keys and guitar; drummer Oliver Duncan; Lesley Hann doing a bit of everything, but mostly bass and backing vocals; and the bubbly Urbani, who sings and “dances a few groovy moves”. “I play my body,” she drawls demurely, failing to keep a grin from bursting across her face. “Everybody plays everything except for me.” During the live show, they’re a sensual cacophony.While the rest of the band swap instruments – so frequently that Duncan doesn’t even sit down – Urbani whips around the audience, grinding alongside both those willing and unwilling, the latter frozen to the spot and looking in any direction other than the skimpily clad nymph rubbing against their leg. Friends are over here to play their debut UK shows, kicking off with two London dates with the similar sounding Caged Animals, who happen to be the band of Urbani’s ex-boyfriend,Vincent Cacchione, who played a small part in getting Friends together. “Matt was in a band with my ex-boyfriend three years ago.” Urbani reveals. “Me and Lesley grew up in south-eastern Connecticut and we went to elementary school together. Lesley and Oliver have been friends for a few years – they met through music in New York and played in a band together. Matt got me a job in a vegan restaurant called Angelica Kitchen two years ago that Nikki worked at and we became friends.” It wasn’t until a few unfortunate incidents in the summer of 2010, however, that the five of them decided to form a band. “We all ended up at my apartment at a certain point,” starts Urbani, “because Lesley and Oliver had bedbugs in their apartment and my subletters – I’d been in Berlin all summer – had totally demolished my apartment. They threw away shit, stole a bunch of stuff and wrecked a bunch of stuff and changed my locks and I was miserable,” she huffs. “We had nowhere to stay,” adds Hann. “We were all totally fucked and it was the end of the summer and I don’t know… It was a weird transitory kind of thing.” Urbani already had a few songs to hand, which she brought to the table and this is how they’ve made music ever since. “I come up with as much of the songs as I can,” she explains. “Lyrics, melodies, vocal structure – then I’ll usually make a demo for the beat and instrumental licks. And I might have an idea for the vibe I want the song to be. Then I’ll bring it to everybody and we’ll work it out.” When she says “vibe” she means the mood it will put you in, but Hann enlightens us from behind her jet-black sunglasses that match her jetblack curls falling around her face by seriously stating,

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“It’s the attitude of the song, it’s abstract.” Back then, they were still called Perpetual Crush, which changed after a serious brainstorming session at a band meeting one day, when they finally, and happily, settled on the most difficult name to Google. “Totally,” laughs Urbani. “Yeah, that was definitely an interesting thing for us,” adds Molnar. “I think it’s saying ‘Fuck you’ to the Internet generation a little bit,” Urbani continues. “But it’s cool because our…our…,” she looks around shiftily, then leans forward and whispers “legacy”, like it’s a dirty word, “had to spread word of mouth for the first few months before anybody knew what our songs were called. We just played tons of shows in Brooklyn and I handmade these little pins and gave them to people – tried to sell them – but mostly just gave them away and everyone was talking about us. So it was very grass-rootsy coming up, because you couldn’t just Google Friends. That wasn’t a particular intention from the beginning, but it worked out really well for us because that’s how we wanted our…legacy…to develop.” At the moment they’ve got an album in the works,

“WE LOST A COUPLE OF SLEEPING BAGS, LEATHER JACKETS AND THE LEFT ASS CHEEK OF MY FAVOURITE SHORTS” but nothing set in stone like a title or release date, other than “before SXSW” next year. To whet your whistles, though, they already have a seven inch, ‘Friend Crush’, available with a new single, the aforementioned ‘I’m His Girl’ that was being fondled by Urbani, coming out on October 31st. It’s an RnB-laced track with a marching beat and plenty of triangle that apes Little Dragon, even though none of the band have ever heard of the Gothenburg-based electro-pop quintet. “Are they terrible?” asks an incredibly mellowed Shapiro, who has an air of couldn’t-give-a-toss hanging about him. “No, they’re really good,” Urbani shoots back. Musically, what does influence them is a love of Michael Jackson – “watch my dance moves; tell me they look like him when he was 12,” Urbani urges us – Krautrock, dub and RnB. In fact, the B-side to ‘I’m His Girl’ is ‘My Boo’, a cover of the ’90s hip-hop trio Ghost Town DJ’s track. “I feel like since I’ve been in this band I’ve started listening to a lot of ‘90s R&B,” says Duncan, “because everyone in the band listens to that a lot and I never did before, so I guess that’s been a big influence.” Not all of Friends’ inspirations come from songs, though. Urbani tells us that, “personally, I don’t like to think about writing music as being influenced by other music. I used to do visual art and I specifically didn’t look at other art for a long time because I wanted to do my own thing, so at that time I feel like I was really influenced by music. But now I’m writing music, I feel like I’m more influenced by other sensory things and

feelings and thoughts.” And the practice space where all of this comes together? Molnar’s living room.“It’s tiny and it sometimes smells like things that don’t smell that good,” mutters Urbani, wrinkling her nose at the thought as Molnar blames his cat. “…and it’s really fucking hot in the summer because there’re no windows,” Urbani rants on. “Well, we also practiced a few times at Market Hotel,” she says.“It’s like a big, old ex-ex-venue and living place in Bushwick,” and also the squat that each member of the band has lived in at one point or another. Now, having quit their day jobs, which between them varied from gas station attendant to flyering, waiting tables and working in a world instruments repair shop, with odd jobs taken up here and there – Urbani was a PA on a Beyonce music video last month – they’re focusing solely on the band and touring – something that isn’t always such an easy ride, especially when you forget vital components like Friends do. “Matt left a super important power adaptor in his house in Brooklyn, so we don’t know if we’re going to be able to play the right synth,” Urbani directs at Molnar. “So if it sounds weird, like medieval cheesey…” “Medieval cheese?” butts in Hann. “It’s a new thing,” retorts Urbani, with barely any hesitation. “It’s just special for you guys,” she smiles. Of course, your van going up in flames while you’re driving through Wyoming in the snow can also set you back.“That was really weird,” pronounces Urbani.“Matt lost a sentimental acoustic guitar. We lost a couple of sleeping bags and leather jackets. The left ass-cheek of my favourite shorts!” she exclaims, while sitting in said shorts (the hole has a grey piece of fabric stitched into it), “which is clearly not deterring me from continuing their… legacy.” “My iPod got torched and melted but it still works,” adds Molnar. Hann continues: “Some of the gear and a lot of our gear bags that we’re still using right now have burnt-up holes in them and melted plastic that have fused onto them and they smell really bad sometimes, but we didn’t lose anything that we need to technically play a show, which is totally unrealistic. I mean, the van was… Fucking. On. Fire! I thought we were done.” “Weird things happen to us everyday,” justifies Urbani. “We got turned away from Canada because me and Oliver both have criminal records.” She’s referring to an incident that involved stealing icing for a friend’s birthday cake while she was on a solo road trip when she was 19, but Duncan doesn’t reveal his misdemeanors. “You played with that kid whose mum was a cat,” Molnar offers up. “Oh yeah!” remembers Urbani. “There was this little kid who was two or three years old and looked like a little punk. He had a ripped up denim vest on and no inhibitions about talking to everybody, but his mum was one of those people who you see on ‘Ripley’s Believe It Or Not’. Super tattooed with metal, surgical whiskers.” They may be magnets for the weird and wonderful, but it’s probably because they give weird and wonderful. There’s a reason that they’ve managed to build something based purely on their live show, because as well as funky tracks, their stage presence makes you feel like a voyeur, yet involved, excited and intrigued and a lot like you’re being let in on a secret that no one else knows about. Their growing legacy.

FR I E NDS COMING IN PEACE, TO THE SOUND OF NEW DISCO photographer – LEON DIAPER

writer – DK GOLDSTEIN WWW.LOUDANDQUIET.COM

n a very basic, but-GIRLS-are-actually-guys kinda way,The One are a puzzling prospect, and not just because they are in fact two.Take Joe Ryan, the drummer who dreamt up the future soul project in the first place. He’s a hardcore drummer, isn’t he? His other band, Fair Ohs, had us believing so, even if they have sailed more tropical seas since their early punk shows and recordings. Joe – a musician so proficient he teaches others how to bash when he’s not playing himself – still pounds as much as he swings, after a lifetime of forming noise bands with his brother Sam, who now tours as Tom Vek’s guitarist and performs with The One when they’re not one or two, but in fact four. Pete Havard also joins them then, but really The One are Joe and Emeson, a six foot five south Londoner who knows what’s expected of his appearance. “When a big black dude walks into a room, everyone’s like,‘oh, he’s going to sing some soul’,” he says, “and I’ve not tried to get away from that, or my background in soul, but there’s also an electronic side [to The One], and we’re trying to approach things in a different way, and that’s something I was doing in solo projects before. “Working with Joe is still soulful, but there’s load of other elements in there.There’s latin in there, there’s jazz in there, some pop in there.” Emerson doesn’t teach singing, but he should.When we meet in a north London pub, he plays a very convincing vocal coach as he assures me that anyone can sing.The owner of a classic baritone purr, it’s a little like Audley Harrison telling you anyone can box. Emeson grew up on Stax, his dad an avid collector who would teach his son the history of each record he owned (“I’d be like, ‘But dad I wanna go outside and play,’ and he’d say, ‘Sit down, listen to that, and then I’m

T HE O NE SOUL MUSIC THAT DEALS WITH THE UGLY SIDE OF LOVE AND LIFE

photographer – PHIL SHARP writer – STUART STUBBS 18

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going to tell you where it’s from’.”), while Joe’s musical education originated in ’80s Minneapolis soul and Seattle grunge – a perfect mix of gnarly rock and classic pop. The two met when Joe heard Emeson soundchecking at east London arts centre the Institute of International Visual Arts. “Music wise, Joe had already gone so far ahead,” says Emeson, “and I was singing in INIVA, in Hoxton, and this guy comes up to me as I’m warming up and says, ‘ooh, yeah, yeah, I just heard you warming up there and I really like what you’re doing’.We started talking about drumming and about this project he was thinking about working on and I was like,‘there’s something interesting there,’ so we exchanged numbers and had a good ‘ol chin-wag, and then we didn’t speak again for about a year. And then out of the blue we got together and he started playing me this amazing stuff.” Joe made the call (“I’m always the bloody instigator. Like, ‘Will you go out with me???’”), saying, “Well, why don’t you come to my studio (my bedroom) and we’ll try and put some vocals on?” And now, having spent a little over a year assembling songs via email (“The songwriting process was a lot like The Postal Service,” notes Joe, even though the pair do live in the same city) The One have completed their debut album, ‘Who Are You?’. Inspired by Flyte Tyme Records, the ’80s label of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who have produced everyone from Boyz II Men and Mariah Carey to Janet Jackson, Barry White and Mary J Blige, it’s a proudly commercial sounding record in many ways, and yet with this being the year of new RnB and soul, it couldn’t have arrived at a better time. It ﬁlls in the blanks between James Blake’s dark, post-dubstep take on the genre,

Alexander O’Neal’s FM hits and Cameo’s motoric sex beats. The synths are dub and funk inﬂuenced and the drums often simple and stark. “The thing is, you can say all different things about it, because maybe it’s a bit more of a dance album than it’s meant to be, but everything about it is soul, really,” says Joe, while Emeson explains that songs like ‘This Time (It’s Over)’ and ‘Double Life’ are not tracks that even Luther could bed anyone with. “The beauty,” he says, “is that the record doesn’t just address love, per se. Most soul records will. He loves her, she loves him. But even if our songs do deal with that, there’s another meaning there also. “The way I see it, is ‘Who AreYou?’ questions people’s characters – who you are, what you’re about. It talks about love, but it’s a bit murkier and darker, and not so straightforward. It questions are the things you’re doing now right for you? Is this what you want your life to be, and if not are you questioning that, or are you just going to go with it. “So it does all of that and then it’s also just songs. And you can dance! Y’know, it’s weird playing ‘Let’s Get It Straight’ and seeing people just dancing to it, because it’s like, ‘Do you know what these lyrics are about?’. But then, it’s just a song that we wrote, and people can take what they want from that. It’s not like we’re going, ‘ooh we’re really quirky and here’s a double entendre, get us’. People can feel what we’re saying in the songs, and that’s cool, or they can just listen to them as songs and enjoy them that way. Either is a huge compliment. We just want to get them out there.That’s fulﬁlling enough.”

STI LL CO RN E R S

photographer – LEE GOLDUP writer – DANIEL DYLAN WRAY

THE MOVIE SCREEN MEETING AND UNDERSTATED ATMOSPHERICS OF GREG HUGHES AND TESSA MURRAY

Greg Hughes, founding member and principal songwriter behind Still Corners, is an American living in London, ﬁnding his way over from Texas in 2002 due to “a girl”. “I came over here to see if it would work, but it didn’t,” he laughs, adding, “but I ended up staying because I’d built up a life and some friends and I love it, it’s a great place.” Fast forward some years down the line, and the results behind one of the most quietly gripping debut records of the year is really down to nothing more than a serendipitous meeting. “It was really weird,” Greg tells me. “I was going to London Bridge to see a friend and for some reason the train went to Kidbrooke, which is like another twenty minutes out or something. So I got off and this person came up to me and said did you get on the wrong train too?”The person in question was the now lead singer of Still Corners, Tessa Murray. “We got to talking and she said she would be late for choir practice and as soon as she said that light bulbs started going off in my head,” enthuses Greg. That chance encounter was the foundations to the band’s birth, one that lies even more heavily on luck than just that fortuitous meeting. “Actually,” continues Greg, “Tessa told me recently that she was going to go and sit down on a bench that day but the bench was so wet she didn’t.” Had she done so, her encounter with Greg would have never happened. “So it’s really weird that this whole band has hinged on the fact that that bench was wet.” After exchanging words and ideas, the two started to work on demo’s until Greg ﬁnally said: “Why don’t you be in my band?” to which Tessa accepted

and “everything has just really fitted into place from then on in.” After working on more complete versions of songs, and becoming a full band by taking on Luke Jarvis on bass and Leon Dufficy on drums, Greg and Tessa soon garnered attention. Sub-Pop expressed an interest. “They bought a song from our band camp,” says Greg. “Then I got an email a week later, they came to some shows and we had some drinks and they were just really cool peeps. The whole thing just happened organically. So we signed with them and the rest is rock’n’roll!” he laughs. The album, ‘Creatures of an Hour’, has a nighttime darkness to it; an almost nocturnal stillness; elegiac yet somehow elevating. “Yeah, that was intentional,” ponders Greg. “I mean, we worked on the album at night a lot, as we all had day jobs and I guess the title reflects that. I have my own studio and the album was recorded there and we all rehearse there, so there was a lot of nighttime activity when creating this record, definitely. I think how you described it in your review [‘music for 3am breakdowns’] sums it up perfectly – that’s spot on.” Likewise, the album has a cinematic scope and tension to it. Ensconced within the layers is a brooding sense of atmosphere of which the cinematic quality is no coincidence. “I’m a big movie nerd,” says Greg. “I’m a big Alfred Hitchcock fan and I wanted to try and capture some of those eerie qualities, so I think some of his vibe found its way onto the record. Some of the emotions he was evoking interested me.Also some horror guys like Dario Argento, there is some of that on there as well.

“I mean there’s also some real music inﬂuences on there too, like CAN and stuff.” This musical exploration transforms into a record rooted deep in texture and tonality, so I want to know, was this exploration as much a focal point as song writing? “Oh yeah, absolutely” says Greg. “Whenever me and Tessa would click on something, it was always around an eerie atmosphere or something.” All this may lead to a presumption that ‘Creature…’ is a calculated and outright spooky album, full of faux horror for dramatic effect, but there is an overwhelming gravitation towards human emotions on it, which leads to a delicate and affecting balance between song craft, atmospherics and emotional investment. Next the band are to head out on a headline, coastto-coast American tour, “which we’re all really excited about,” enthuses Greg. “It’s going to be great. We’ve never played the West Coast before” he bubbles. Free from the shackles of employment, Greg has been able to work tirelessly on more material for Still Corners too, which means that while the debut has barely had time to ﬁnd its way onto your turntable, there could already be a follow up on its way. “Yeah, I’ve been working on a lot of stuff for the second one and hopefully that will be out fairly soon,” Greg nods, before giving further insight into his creative restlessness. “I handed in the debut record on April 25th and the next day I was in the studio working on new stuff,” he laughs. If you can keep up with Still Corners, their gorgeous debut album is out on Sub Pop now.

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R OO T S

MA NU V A

AFTER 10 YEARS, THE GODFATHER OF BRITISH URBAN MUSIC IS FINALLY COMING TO TERMS WITH JUST HOW INFLUENTIAL HE HAS BECOME

Roots Manuva – aka 39-year-old, south Londoner Rodney Hylton Smith – has come a long way since the release of his debut album, ‘Brand New Second Hand’, at the tail end of the last century. From humble beginnings, his life journey has so far taken in the release of a series of highly heralded albums, several Brit Award nominations, a Mercury Prize nomination, high profile collaborations and a deep influence on UK urban music, which casts him as a highly respected figure for many currently emerging artists. It’s been a journey quite unlike any other, and one that is unlikely to come to a halt anytime soon. Rodney has developed a habit of making genrehopping albums that pull from a vast range of influences and merge into death-disco, raga, grime, hip-hop and reggae, yet he’s remained largely on the underside of the mainstream – a familiar name to many, but one who has been left enough room to be inventive and forwardthinking, and in the week of his fifth album, ‘4everevolution’, being released, he can be found in his North London studio, in and upbeat, talkative mood. He begins by telling me how the creation of his latest record was not part of a pre-planned turnaround – it was a lot more organic than that. “From start to finish I’ll say it was two and a half years,” says Rodney of ‘4everevolution’’s… erm… evolution. “I never sit down and keep going. I have intense periods of two weeks and then stop, stop for half a year and then keep going back to it and then there are other times where it is a six week or a two month run straight. I’ve never been disciplined enough to just hire a cottage and go there with a bit of equipment and record, then say that’s the album. I just don’t have that kind of focus. “It’s good, but it’s not economically viable at all, I tell you. Making this record has really stretched me on loads of different levels – on personal levels, a financial level, a business level to artistic integrity level, every single level you can think of.” With Roots Manuva there is an overall sense that the pressure to push things forward is not from an external source but instead one that flourishes from within. As Rodney puts it, “it’s a pleasure never a pressure.” “But it’s an expensive pleasure to indulge in,” he

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nods, “to keep trying to further yourself and delve into a love of sonic exploration.” Over the past twelve years, Roots Manuva has obviously established a loyal following who eagerly await what’s coming next, but it doesn’t silence the nagging voice in Rodney’s head; the one that asks ‘what are people going to make of this?’. He needs to think about his new fans too, because unlike other acts as established as he, Roots Manuva is constantly picking up admirers – the Godfather of UK hip-hop who inspired everyone from Dizzee Rascal to Dels and Toddla-T. “The thing is, the audience grows,” he explains, “but I’ve not really been in touch with how the audience has been growing of late, because my kids have gotten older and they are into certain albums and certain songs that their friends are into. I wouldn’t say my kids’ friends are super fans, but they know of me. I’ve been to pick up my kids from school and from their friends’ house and have been referred to as Roots Manuva by a friend of one of my sons.That really knocks me for six – that’s too weird! I don’t really expect a five year old or a six or seven year old to have heard of me, but their parents listen to it and we live in the age of the internet where it is not necessarily someone who has bought your record that knows of you. It constantly shocks and startles me every day,” he says, wide-eyed,“the different amount of people that recognise me while I’m just going about my daily business. Even on the phone using the company Roots Manuva card and someone at the insurance company knows who Roots Manuva is, or went to a concert recently or happened to be in America while I played in some strange place in Cincinnati, it really is a revelation.” These same people may not exclusively know Roots Manuva from his own pure work. Rodney is fond of collaboration; an artist that has worked with a vast array of musicians that stretch from the Black Twang to The Cinematic Orchestra and The Maccabees. His most high profile stint, however, can be found on The Gorillaz album ‘Demon Days’, specifically on the track ‘All Alone’. “It really pushed things forward,” he says. “That was seven years ago and it was a real push out into the mainstream as such, and seeing how the mechanism works on that big multimillion pound level. I had just

finished my own awfully deep tour, which I had been moaning about, and then I went out onto this massive, massive Gorillaz monster. In all, I only did ten dates on their own tour (five dates at the Manchester Apollo and five dates at the Harlem Apollo). I did one of those crazy sub dates that Damon Albarn does too, the African Express. I did one of those dates in Paris, which is another monster as well, because there are so many people, so many different artists that you know over the years and you want to talk to, but you can’t talk to them as you’re half in shock and half star struck and you have to behave yourself. “I remember sharing a dressing room with Neneh Cherry and constantly wanting to sing one of her songs and you just have to restrain yourself as it’s really annoying. If people come up to me and starts whistling ‘Witness’, I would really get annoyed as I’ll rather they knew another tune, something less obvious, even though people are only ever going to know what they know. I can’t chastise someone for only knowing ‘Witness’, can I? It’s one of those weird things.” It’s been more than 10 years since the emergence of that track, though, released on Rodney’s second album, the 2002 Mercury Prize nominated ‘Run Come Save Me’. It remains his most well known song, which must be annoying for any artist that has continued to create for a decade. “For me, ‘Witness’ has always been the fluke. The tune I never heard at all. It wasn’t just me.The musicality – the words, the drumbeat, the bass-line – was all made by me, but the wider production of it was done by a team. Big Dada Records and my old management team who I am no longer with put a lot of effort into moulding what would become the Roots Manuva sound and it’s just one of those weird things that happened and that we can’t seem to top yet. It’s like England winning the world cup in 1966, that’s what has happened here. 2001 was a great year for British music and we can’t seem to achieve the same heights again.” While some artists tend to view such crossover hits as a mainstream launch pad, Rodney outlines that there was already an underlying confidence beforehand, that things were progressively moving forwards. There was, back then, however, a particular pivotal point in his

photographer – ELLIOT KENNEDY writer – NATHAN WESTLEY

career. “Before ‘Witness’ I was getting offers of work,” he says. “After the first album it led to working with lots of other scenes and genres. The thing that really opened the door, though, was working with Leftfield. That was probably the most significant element that influenced the way in which I approached making music. Sitting around the studio with those guys opened my mind as to how to abuse technology.” As we sit in Rodney’s studio, he tells me about how his desire is to “just make good music”, citing himself as “a writer” who covers everything from “the mundane to the political astute to love and the respect and honour of your team”. With Britain being in a bit of a state, us being in Tottenham, the epicentre of this years London riots, and with many of ‘4everevolution’’s tracks having a political bent, we discuss politics, albeit briefly. “At first [with the riots], I was a bit like, ‘this is just a load of bollocks! This is rubbish! This has been orchestrated by the powers that be for them to be able to change laws and create a state of emergency!’. Now I’m realising that it was a lot more serious than I thought. Walking around talking to people who really got affected by it, and seeing how much damage was truly done to small businesses (not really to big businesses) and how it is going to affect working people, it’s a real complicated issue and I’m a bit uncomfortable talking to you about it, as I’ve not quite worked out what’s gone on. I’m in this artistic bubble in this warehouse, living quite

comfortably, working as a self employed creative person and I’m not really that in touch with what is really going on out in the street.” Another notion that doesn’t quite penetrate the Roots Manuva bubble is the influence Rodney has had on acts that have followed. “People have had to sit me down and really explain quite pedantically what was happening at the time of the very first Roots Manuva album and afterwards, step by step, as I would be an arsehole to try and claim all of that, but I have to respect the fact that I did play a part in it and I do have to somehow find it in myself to say,‘Yes, I influenced that new bloke, whatever he’s called, and yes, that new girl quotes that rhyme.’ I have to start saying yes, yes. It’s not very respectful to be over polite, and to answer your question, yes, I did influence a whole wave of British music, both urban and indie related. I even remember that before the Arctic Monkeys blew up, even they came to see us play.” Many of these artists that Roots Manuva has influenced, particularly that of an urban disposition, have gone on to have some level of success in the USA, but Rodney Hylton Smith isn’t of the perspective that UK based acts have now suddenly got breaking the States any easier. “British urban music has always had a regard in America,” he says, “it’s just never managed to get the right funding over there. It just works on a corporate level, from a micro-corporate to a small person to the

massive majors, it just works so differently – it’s a lot faster. In Britain we are just ho-hum – over there things work! You see someone give them the masters and they put it out. Things just angle and move forward so differently.You don’t take eighteen months to negotiate one point on a contract over there, it’s just move, move, move.You don’t sleep, you eat, drink and breathe it. The British way is a bit slow, a bit archaic, sitting around playing nicey nicey and being all civilised when we should be saying what the Americans say: ‘You’re breaking my balls man, we can’t have that!’. We need to start expressing ourselves with some of that direct language instead of playing around with long words.” And for emerging artists who are currently hoping to make music a long-lasting career, Rodney’s advice is simple, if not what many musicians would like to hear. “I would just say avoid viewing music as something you can just depend on straight away. Avoid that. It’s an illusion. Today’s artists have to be open to having other careers as well, open to working ten or ﬁfteen years for the gas board or for the council. It’s the total opposite of what happened to me.When I got offered a job from the council when I was nineteen, I didn’t take it, I was like, ‘Fuck it, I’m going to do music’. I would not advise that to anybody. Your music would be all the better for the fact that you have more of a rounded life experience than just being a musician and experiencing a musician’s life. As wonderful as it is, there is more to life than being a musician.”

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D A Y

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T H E

L I F E

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TE ET H TWO SHOWS IN ONE NIGHT FOR TEETH PROVES THAT

BEING IN A BAND ISN’T ALL HIGH TIMES AND SHOWBIZ Sometimes, being a music journalist is just as awesome as it sounds. Times like when you get to follow noisepop outfit TEETH around for a day; chill in their flat, go shopping, get into their gigs AAA style. Some may call it stalking; I call it freelancing. TEETH have been gigging mercilessly for a number of years, but these days they’ve got something special to promote – their debut album, ‘Whatever’, a record that one publication, allegedly, refused to review because the band are “too hipster”. Now, when I think hipster, there are fuzzy guitars involved, and here there be no such thing – Veronica is on vocals, Simon plays drums, and Ximon (henceforth known as Babes, as he likes it) is on bleep control via a laptop. For such a small, simple set up, they make a big sound, and on a good night they can have the room sweating and squealing for more. I arrive at their flat at about 3.00pm – later than scheduled as last night the band’s van was burglarised outside the venue they were playing in Portsmouth. I learn this via a text from Simon at 6am. Veronica is curled up on the sofa, hugging a cushion, looking slightly drained. She tells me they’re ill – all of them – probably due to driving back from Portsmouth in the middle of the night with a window missing. Apparently Babes has texted her saying that he is too ill to go on tonight: potentially disastrous news as they have two back-to-back shows tonight and cancelling isn’t an option. “What are we going to do?” asks Veronica, as Simon wanders muzzily into the room in an enormous jumper, distributes hugs and disappears again. The only thing that can be done, for now, is to down some more cough mixture and hope that Babes can pull himself together in the next hour or so. I ask how

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Veronica’s magazine, L_A_N, is going. It’s a gorgeous piece of work; a slick amalgamation of design, technology and fashion; “a publication for the fashionable futurist with an interest in the world of tomorrow, today”. She says she hasn’t had enough time for it lately.A shame, but there is an album to promote. She has, however, been doing a bit of fashion writing for VICE magazine. At this point, hunger hits, so Veronica changes clothes and we wander round the corner, through the empty Whitecross Street Market, to buy some food, in Waitrose. We make a beeline for the bakery, on a mission for red velvet cupcakes (a mutual favourite), mess about with the copious shelves of Halloween miscellany on display and ﬁnally head in the direction of real food – soup to sooth the ailing band. Back at the ﬂat, Babes has arrived, and he’s in very good spirits. It transpires that his text to Veronica saying he was too ill to play was a joke. Everyone is relieved, if not entirely amused. While the soup heats up, Babes shows me his nail design blog, Forget the past believe in the Foocha™, onto which he is currently posting a music video for a song called ‘Twerk’: the video consisting almost entirely of women on all fours, shaking their voluptuous, thong-clad rear ends at the camera with an enthusiasm and vigour that is almost a bit worrying. I’m scarred for life. Babes is enthralled. After a quick bite to eat, it’s time to get going. Simon checks his gear and does some quick repair work to his snare drum with a roll of duct tape and Veronica packs a bag full of clothes and an assortment of medicines to keep her going. Babes is still on the laptop, looking for a song that, if played backwards, contains messages of devil worship. We’re running late. Load in was at 4.00pm and

photographer – COCHI ESSE writer – POLLY RAPPAPORT sound check is at 6.00pm. Fortunately, venue number one, XOYO, is a quick walk away. We all pick up a bag or two and head off, arriving just in time to hang about for a bit, installing wristbands an ear plugs – the phrase “hurry up and wait” springs to mind.This gig is for The Jonny Woo Show, presented in the format of a variety television show, with three bands, comedy and songs from the host, and the odd delightfully tasteless sketch. Jonny Woo, currently sporting shorts, a t-shirt and plimsoles, approaches and warmly welcomes the band before launching into his own sound check, swanning around the stage and various raised platforms, singing the Doors’‘Hello, I Love You’ to a canned backing track. One can only imagine what the full performance will be like. Next up to check is We Were Evergreen, a French trio who may very well be the epitome of twee.They’re not bad, but they conﬁrm suspicions that it is dangerous and wrong to have both a glockenspiel and a ukulele on stage at the same time.We retire to the front stairwell of the venue for a while, watching security sort out the metal barriers for the impending queue. More cough mixture is downed, and it’s time to see if TEETH are needed on stage. Just as they’re setting up to take their turn sound checking, the band’s tour manager, Kiko, arrives, carrying a large box full of merchandise and closely followed by his girlfriend Giulia. Kiko wastes no time asking the band if they have ﬁlled out an insurance claim form for the smashed up van, which they haven’t. They sound check in almost total darkness and then head upstairs to the bar to tackle the insurance claim. Simon hands out some beers and wanders off, Babes makes himself at home in the corner, preparing a mix

on the laptop, while Veronica goes through the online claim form. Eventually, Simon returns, bearing a chocolate cake with candles that spell Happy Birthday – it’s Giulia’s birthday today – and as pieces of cake are being passed round, it comes to light that it’s Jonny Woo’s birthday as well. A large slice of cake goes on a plate and a few letter candles are salvaged, spelling YAY. We troop downstairs, expecting to ﬁnd Jonny, but it’s just as well we don’t as the venue’s air conditioning blows the candles out. Finally, he emerges in full drag, complete with glittery makeup, voluminous wig and dangerous looking heels, graciously receives his cake and strides off. We move backstage into the dressing room, which is more or less the size of a small garden shed, where bands and half-naked transvestites are packed in, cheek by jowl, clambering for the drinks fridge, mirror space, or a place to sit or stand. Simon is plastering the walls with ‘Whatever’ stickers when Jonny pokes his head in to say things will be running twenty minutes late. It was already going to be a mad rush for TEETH to pack up and get from XOYO,

THERE’S A BRILLIANT SINGALONG, ABOUT THE INCREDIBLE HULK LIVING UNDERGROUND, EATING DOG SHIT

in Old Street, east London, to Koko, in Camden, north London – now it’s looking virtually impossible. The first call of duty for the evening is for each of the bands to be introduced to the audience, so they all file out to take their places in the now quite crowded venue. All of a sudden: “Where’s Babes?”We scan the audience to see if he’s gone off to chat to someone. Can’t find him. It’s one thing if he’s not there for the introductory wave to the crowd, quite another if he misses the first song. Then we see him making his way towards us through the crush. Crisis averted... until TEETH take to the stage to play their first track. Veronica’s mic isn’t picking up. She’s shouting, which is not the best idea when desperately nursing a cold and having yet another gig to keep her voice for. Despite the technical problem, the crowd are loving it, and Babes finds a working microphone so we can hear the words loud and clear for the rest of the song. Next there’s a brilliant singalong from Jonny Woo, something about the Incredible Hulk living underground and eating dog shit, and then a sketch sending up Fashion Week, wherein a transvestite struts up and down the venue and is asked to talk the audience through her outfit, which she does before ripping off her skirt to reveal a bright red thong, strutting again, and writhing lewdly on the floor before sashaying off into the wings. We see DJ, journalist and muse, Princess Julia, in the audience, who makes her way over for hugs and a photo op before the band have to dash off to get ready for their final two songs. These go off without a hitch and then it’s a lightning round of packing up, getting out and bundling into the van to make a break for Camden. En route to the next venue, we pass a Critical Mass of

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XIMON HAS BEEN SOBER FOR A WEEK, BUT HE’S NO MATCH FOR A SHINY BOX FULL OF RED STRIPE

cyclists and skateboarders and TEETH open the windows to cheer them on. How late are we running? Will the band get to sound check? They say they might get a line check, otherwise they’ll just have to go on and wing it – not something I’d want to do in a venue like Koko with an audience full of Club NME types. We speed round the corner and stop outside the loading in doors. More wristbands are administered and we stagger down the stairs, straight onto the stage. Good news – TEETH will get a sound check. They set about unpacking and getting to know the crew, and while they set up I peer round the large screen obscuring the stage to have a look at how the venue is filling out.The various balconies seem populated enough, but the floor is almost empty. Great. Meanwhile, Babes’ laptop setup is proving a bit difficult; the cable connecting it to a power supply is quite short, and the power supply is pretty damn big and heavy. He comes up with the excellent idea of putting the big heavy thing in his backpack and wearing it so he can still dance around the stage during the set. The headlining band, LCMDF, arrive and the bands share a warm hello before Kiko appears and plunks the large box of merch onto the stage. Apparently the club are charging a ridiculous percentage for any band merchandise sold, and it’s not worth losing so much money to sell a few t-shirts. Veronica dryly suggests selling them outside the venue on the pavement. Sound check done, we troop through the greenroom and up a series of winding staircases to the band’s private dressing room (this is SO much more like it!).Veronica is supine on one of the sofas within seconds and Babes moves in on the drinks fridge. He’s been sober for a

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week or so now, but he’s no match for the big shiny box full of Red Stripe. Frankly, I don’t blame him, and besides, he shares. TEETH are summoned to the stage, so it’s back down the labyrinth of weird Victorian stairs. Just before heading out into the firing line,Veronica hands me her lipsick for safe keeping and flashes a grin. It’s still pretty thin on the ground out there, so Giulia and I go into the audience to lend our support.The kids are leaning on the barrier and staring as though they’re at a zoo, and there’s no dancing. The set is sounding great and the band are giving it their all. Between songs someone heckles,Veronica crouches down to hear what they said and the message is passed to her via one of the photographers in the pit. “Sorry, babe,” she says, and stands up again (he’d been shouting “Will you marry me?”). Onwards and upwards, they launch into brutal single ‘Flowers’. “You know what to do, Spacebar,” says Veronica (which is another nickname for Babes).There’s a few jeers of “Spacebar!” and eventually a cup is thrown at Babes. TEETH make it through their set and calmly storm off to the greenroom. They’re understandably pissed off. Don’t like the music? Go back to the bar, go have a cigarette, just… go away. Throwing things and heckling seems completely uncalled for. I recall when some friends of mine were nearly booed off the stage during their turn at Club NME, and insist that these kids aren’t so much here for the bands as they are to get tanked and pull, and even the ones who are here for the live show are only interested in the headliner, a point is illustrated beautifully as Babes and I go backstage to watch LCMDF’s set. The floor is full and the crowd is lapping it up. Hard to believe the party

down there is the same group of kids from half an hour ago. Back in the greenroom, Simon is on his laptop and Veronica is exploring the widescreen video game facility, working out how to play a car racing game that seems mainly to involve going off road and landing upside down in some kind of shrubbery. It’s quite late now, and Kiko and Giulia would like to get going. If anyone wants a lift, they have to get ready now. Since we’re going to miss the end of LCMDF’s set, Simon quickly lays out plastic cups on the ground in the shape of a love heart and he and Veronica write a note to them, apologising for having to shoot off. Having relieved the dressing room fridges of most of their contents, we find our way back outside to the van and start to pile in. Babes has forgotten something and nips back into the venue, returning to announce that LCMDF’s set is over, and they are in the greenroom kicking over all the plastic cups – apparently they’re totally narked that TEETH didn’t stick around. Most of us are too tired to get worked up about it, and we drive back to Old Street to deposit a very sleepy Simon and Veronica. Babes briefly tries to goad me into going along with him to the Joiner’s Arms, a cult gay club in Shoreditch, but I’m exhausted. Even as I’m hauling myself up the stairs to my flat, I’m planning my lie-in and an afternoon of lazing about in a park.While I’m doing that,TEETH will be on their way to Oxford for yet another gig. No rest for the ‘hipsters’, then. But if the past twelve hours have taught me one thing about TEETH, it’s how seriously they take what they do. They party their hardest when they’re onstage, being noisey, ravey and a hell of a lot of fun.

The tricky first album / Veronica Falls show us what it’s like to be adopted by New York and discuss the making (and remaking) of their debut record

photographer – GUY EPPEL writer – STUART STUBBS

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Brooklyn, New York, is home from home for Veronica Falls. Drummer Patrick Doyle lived here for just five months in 2008, but in that time he made enough friends to be mistaken for Mayor Bloomberg. He “wanted to escape Glasgow for a bit” and before long so too did Roxanne Clifford. She joined Patrick in Williamsburg for what she describes as “an extended holiday”, cycling over the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan’s Lower East Side every day, only to cycle straight back again.“I didn’t have anywhere to go, I was just trying to get fit,” she says in her broad Manchester accent as we trundle over the jumbo structure and New York’s endless conga line of vehicles do the same. Guitarist James Hoare has never lived here, but he’s not short of hands to shake in the local bars and clubs either.And the same goes for Marion Herbain, who met Patrick and Roxanne in Glasgow and learned bass especially to be in this band with her friends. When I’m introduced to James and Patrick at the first of their two NewYork shows it’s as “the only person in the room you don’t already know”. It might not even be an exaggeration. “It was bad for my health, living here,” says Patrick.“I was just getting wasted every night.” It’s easy to see how they’ve done it – become New York’s favourite outta-towners. Their music – made up of his’n’her (and his) three-part harmonies, fantastic tales of the macabre, girl group drums and the warts’n’all stylings of early lo-fi bands like Beat Happening – is far greater than that played by most of the garage bands that surround them.They trade in clean guitars and enviably doe-eyed melodies, rather than forgiving reverb and scuzzy distortion. Everyone else is singing about catching a wave; Veronica Falls pine for the deceased (‘Found Love In A Graveyard’) and cherubly coo about suicide (‘Beachy Head’). Personally, it’s even harder to dislike them. During our two photo shoots – the second of which takes place early morning, before a five hour drive to Boston, where the band will begin a nationwide tour with The Drums – Veronica Falls willingly ‘play the pop group’ where so many shy away, automatically bored of the camera’s gaze. Roxanne has every reason to be fed up, having picked up an eye infection on the plane from California that cost her five hours in A+E yesterday. “It was an eye-opening experience,” she jokes, which climaxed with her right eye being frozen. Three hours later she was onstage at Brooklyn DIY venue Glasslands. When the infection spreads to her other eye two days later she tells me so with a dignified shrug. New York City is fast.There’s no time to mope. Before the band’s second show, at Manhattan’s Pianos club, we take a couple of hours to take some pictures, play with sidewalk trash (“I’ll get in the trolley,” says Marion, unprompted), get told off by a psychic (only in

NewYork) and catch the eye of countless passers-by, one of which screeches his mountain bike to a halt to see what the hell is going on. “Is this a band then?” “Yep.” “What are they called?” “Veronica Falls.” “Oh yeah, I know them… Are they any good?” You’d think, with this being the home of Saturday Night Live, Letterman and Broadway that New Yorkers wouldn’t even notice four people having their photograph taken in rush hour, but they do. Here, people like to talk, or shout, which is one of the topics of discussion at dinner, in a French bistro called Pink Pony, which, Roxanne says, “has not the best food but a nice atmosphere.”

hose guys talking to us in the street, I like that about here,” says Patrick.“I like it when you enter a shop and someone says, ‘hi, how are you?’. Strangers talk to you a lot on the subway here too, and I always felt that that made me feel safer when I lived here. If someone did that in London you’d be like, ‘I’m ﬁne.Why are you asking?’.” “You can be in a bar in New York and turn to someone and say, ‘hey’, and it’s not weird,” adds James. “You’re not hitting on them, you can just say hey. If someone speaks to you in England they’re a crazy person. I ﬁnd people in London, within mu sic, are bit closed off,” he continues. “Like, I’ve been going out to gigs in London for years, and I see the same people all the time, and it’s not like I have anything against them, but I don’t speak to them. I can’t imagine that happening here.” “When we were in Minneapolis, this guy gave us a hamburger for free!” Patrick exclaims. “He was like, ‘I ordered two but I’m probably not going to eat this one’.” James: “Now, if that was in London you’d think, he’s put this down his trousers.” “Let’s not be too down on Britain,” says Roxanne. “I prefer living in London to New York.” Patrick agrees. London is better for his health. “We were really lucky when we moved here,” says Roxanne, “in that we met this really nice group of friends who are all really supportive and are doing really interesting things.” “Everybody is very supportive of each other here,” nods James. “They all play in bands with each other and release each other’s records. In London things are bit

“YOU CAN BE IN A BAR IN NEW YORK AND SAY ‘HEY’ TO SOMEONE AND IT’S NOT WEIRD. IN LONDON YOU’RE A CRAZY PERSON”

more disjointed. So many good bands come out of Brooklyn and I think that whole supportive community must help a lot. It means that you’ve got a free-er attitude to working with people.” Roxanne: “I think it’s similar to Glasgow in a way – that was what I most liked about Glasgow when I moved there: everybody knew each other and everybody was doing stuff.” Brooklyn’s indie fertility comes from a simple moreis-more work ethic, reckons Patrick, who says: “I think people here are more willing to start more projects; they don’t put all of their eggs in one basket. Like, some friends of ours play in two or three bands.” “There’s something a bit more genuine about that as well,” notes James, “playing in bands for the sake of playing, rather than forming a band in order for it to become a job. It does seem that in London sometimes people can be a bit more calculated, starting bands and having all of these ideas about what they want to do before they’ve written a song.” Of course, that does go on here too, and to a greater extent since the wider success of MGMT, Yeasayer, Animal Collective, TV On The Radio, and so on, but James is right about the overall creative drive of the city – Brooklyn is the centre of Planet Indie; for most bands here there’s no need to be recognised outside of the party. And of course by them not caring if the world’s looking, we can’t help but stare. British musicians like Dev Hynes and Kele Okereke have even moved here. Natasha Khan tried.Tom Vek’s considered it. It’s in keeping with New York’s all or nothing philosophy, where the bloke on the subway is either asking how you are or pushing you in the back. In the street, pedestrians shout at cars that aren’t moving fast enough, while ﬂyer guys knock on your window, hand you a leaﬂet and politely deliver their sales pitch. New York exists on polar opposites, much like the lyrics of Veronica Falls. When I ask Roxanne if her songs have any recurring themes she plainly answers: “Love and death. Extreme emotions.” It’s a foolish question, really. One listen to the band’s debut album and that much is clear. ‘Found Love In A Graveyard’ says it all. And ‘Misery’. And ‘Bad Feeling’. And ‘Wedding Day’, about watching your loved one marry someone they don’t like as much they like you. And ‘The Fountain’, which if full of all kinds of doom. Having now met Veronica Falls, I’ve got to say, I was expecting them to be a far more dour bunch. “[The lyrics] are not really meant to be taken at face value, to be totally honest,” says Roxanne. “They’re tongue-in-cheek. Like how Daniel Johnson and Roky Erickson wrote lyrics that are so far fetched, it is more about the imagery and storytelling. If you take it literally then more fool you.”

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At the start of 2011 Veronica Falls reported to us the progress of their debut album. It was without a label, but it was complete. It had been recorded in the shadows of the Yorkshire Moors, in a residential studio that the band couldn’t really leave because they were snowed in. In January, Marion remembered the experience simply as “intense”, while Roxanne told us that it was “like being at boarding school 20 years late”. James said: “Apart from the actual joys of recording, very little excitement was experienced until visitors from London arrived.” Patrick didn’t say anything. Eight months later, at Pink Pony, with the release of ‘Veronica Falls’ a week away via the fitting Bella Union label, the drummer says:“You always imagine that when you finish making an album you’re going to want to go out and drink champagne and celebrate, but when we finished ours I wanted to kill myself.” The rest of the band felt the same, and it wasn’t because the thrill of being in the studio was over; a sudden return to London and normality with a bump. Veronica Falls hated their own record. Roxanne casually announces that they made their

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debut album twice over, halfway through discussing the band’s 60s influences and the aesthetics of bands like Young Marble Giants and Beat Happening (“stark and simple, childlike but really sinister”). “Yeah, after we recorded our album for the second time…” she says and pauses. “Do you know that we did that?” No. “Well, yeah, we did. At first we did it in a residential studio and we kind of just went about it in the wrong way. We did it all properly, recording all of our parts separately. It was something that we tried because we thought it might work for us, but it didn’t, so we scrapped it.” Remixed, three tracks from the band’s original album have made it onto the ‘Veronica Falls’ that you can now buy in shops, but, really, everything about the sessions in Castleford was wrong for a band wanting to capture their live energy on record. “Part of the thing that was so shit about the one up north was that it was a brand new studio and a very uninspiring place as well,” explains Patrick, “whereas Smokehouse [the studio in Wapping, London, where the band rerecorded ‘Veronica Falls’ in three days], we only spent a little time there but it’s full of old amplifiers and just looked like…” “…It just had a bit of history,” says James. “The Chairworks [in Castleford] was clinical, like a hospital, and they had a photographer who took photos of the bands and there were pictures of N-Dubz everywhere.” “There was just a really bad vibe about it,” says Roxanne. “Literally, you’d walk in and there’d be pictures of N-Dubz in frames everywhere!” says James again. Roxanne says: “It was the antithesis of what we’re about”, while Patrick compares it to “like recording in Ikea.” “And we knew it,” continues Roxanne. “As soon as we stepped foot in the door we knew it, but we thought, well, we’ve arranged this so we’ve got to give it a try. And then after that we thought, right, we’ve got to do the complete opposite of that, and then I watched that ‘Definitely Maybe’ documentary about how they made that, and, wow, that record sounds so good, and they ended up putting their amps in the same room, facing each other and playing really loud, so we just did that.” Certainly something had to be done because the band couldn’t even think about releasing the record they’d first left the studio with. The “joys of recording” that James reported ended up not being too joyous at all. “It was because it was so extreme,” says Roxanne. “If we hadn’t recorded it in a way that was so alien to us we would have been able to stand by it and say, well, this is

us. It’s not that we’re perfectionists or anything, it was just so wrong.” “So all over Christmas we were sat with this record, which we knew none of us were happy with,” says Patrick,“and we were getting pretty scared that we were going to have to release it. I mean, I couldn’t even listen to it!” “It’s a testament to our manager, Mark,” says James, “because we spent a lot of money on it and he was instantly like, ‘Fine. Do it again’.” (Just before the band take to the stage at Pianos, Mark (Bowen) tells me how it’s the only time the band have requested a meeting with him. “They said, ‘Can we come in to talk about something?’,” he remembers, “and they came in and said, ‘We don’t like it,’ and I said, ‘Great! Neither do I.You’re an exciting band so go and make an exciting record.’”) ‘Veronica Falls’ certainly is an exciting record, relentlessly charging forward and played on guitars with hands that blur with speed, stopping occasionally for a waltz (‘Stephen’) and some whimsy (‘Veronica Falls’). But it’s also a testament to the band that they had the nerve to reject their ﬁrst attempt.

“Well, you’d go through phases where you’d try to convince yourself it was good,” admits Patrick. “We had a progress meeting where Mark came up and we all sat and listened to the record so far,” says James.“I remember that was the moment that I was like, fuck, this is really not good, but everyone else was still pretending it was. Inside, deep down, I really didn’t like it, because it was so against what I like, and it freaked me out. I thought that was going to be it.” “It didn’t have that sleezy sound that it has now,” explains Roxanne, “where everything was driving together.” James: “It sounded clinical and charmless. [Our producer] would have us working for hours on vocals and one small thing.You want to just record something quickly and capture the moment. For me, it’s not really honest, that kind of producing.” Roxanne: “In an ideal world you’d write a song and it’d come out the next month, but of course that can never happen.” The band clearly haven’t forgotten the horrors of Castleford, or the session’s darkest hour when, as Marion

“WHEN WE FINISHED MAKING OUR RECORD I WANTED TO KILL MYSELF... I COULDN’T EVEN LISTEN TO IT”

remembers, they would “have to walk across courtyard in the snow at three in the morning to listen to some more tracks that we knew we weren’t going to release.” But Roxanne is adamant that it wasn’t a complete waste of time. “I feel like that was a really important part of making the album,” she says, “because we learned so much from that, and we really finished off the songs, so when I think of the finished album I think it was all essential.We knew exactly how we wanted it after that – they were kinda like really expensive demos.” After we settle up at Pink Pony, Roxanne – now with the flu accompanying her eye infection – quietly retreats to the band’s van to sleep before their stage time. She still refuses to mope or make a fuss; she just slips off.The rest of Veronica Falls begin shaking hands again, Pianos just as full as Glasslands the night before, the bill made up of more friends in more bands. Again, they put in a show that flies about the place, tambourines crashing and vocal harmonies on point. And now, thanks to Veronica Falls’s own volition, we can take that home with us.

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band born in Australia; a friendship strengthened and distilled by a mutual love and loathing, separated by mainland Europe but somehow driven by those few thousand miles, Civil Civic are a digitised still-frame of an unconventional dynamic prospering through modern means. If it’s not Aaron or Ben hurtling at a few thousand miles between their respective London and Barcelona bases, it’s their songs whizzing through air and fibre optics onto each other’s computer screens. In the same way we were infatuated by The Kill’s primal sexual tension and TransAtlantic phone calls, and Animal Collective’s ability to continue to wow from disparate corners of the globe, distance has become an increasingly common denominator. Once upon a time it was an obstacle. An inconvenience. A royal pain in the arse that meant if the drummer’s mum couldn’t give him a lift to rehearsal, you spent a wasted night kicking your heels. But with the right ethos, it’s capable of driving a process that’s just as dynamic, intense and painstaking than that of any highly-charged practice room. “Because it’s been that way from the start,” Ben explains, “I suppose we’ve just accepted all the drawbacks as a natural feature of the band. On the positive side it’s stopped us from just pissing around in a local scene and doing things piecemeal. For me, the tour always starts with a stint on Aarons’ living-room floor in Dalston, so that feels like a compulsory stepping stone to actually performing. Even if we had a run of Spanish gigs lined up I’d probably have to fly to London first and kip on Aarons’ floor just to make sense of it. “We have to organise a long, tight run of shows (or a big slab of studio time) for it to be worth the effort of even being in the same room so it provides focus. The other benefit is that our burning hatred of each-other only starts to really become a problem after a few weeks, and by then the tour is usually almost over.” It’s an interesting snapshot into the duo’s dynamic. As driven as they are distracted by each other, in many respects, their relationship is part of the fuel that drives them beyond the transit, displacement and creative isolation.You’d anticipate that when they do get together to bang heads it’s done with all the verve and energy of their music, but here we get the contrast because behind the rambunctious personality there’s a serious sense of consideration and commitment. “We probably should make some shit up about raising hell and getting arrested/beaten/fucked-by-models and what-have-you, but the truth is it’s all work work work here at CC HQ. Because we’re a geographically challenged outfit we only get to rehearse in a short window before touring, so it’s pretty hammer-andtongs. Plus we’ve got the record coming out, which

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C I VI L C I VI C MODERN LIFE ISN’T RUBBISH

IT’S HOW CIVIL CIVIV SURVIVE

“IF WE AREN’T MAKING FUN JAMS THEN PLEASE TELL US, BECAUSE THAT WOULD MEAN WE’RE FUCKING UP”

photographer – OWEN RICHARDS writer – REEF YOUNIS

means a zillion small tasks relating to the release. It’s basically all work and no spazz.” With such a demanding workload, the obvious suggestion would be for either Ben or Aaron to relocate to streamline their whole process, particularly with debut album ‘Rules’ in the pipeline. Paradoxically, though, the odd geography seems to be the one familiar factor that keeps the band on an even keel, and with Ben keen to impress that changing things now would go against the band’s initial mission statement, it’s clear that they don’t want a helping hand either. “It’s a valid query,” says Ben, “but this act was the product of a pretty speciﬁc concept, and “duo” is one of the fundamentals of that concept although our drum machine, The Box, has gradually taken on its own persona and gets more fan mail than we do, so maybe we’re a trio now. “Aaron tried to ﬁnd someone London-based to play the other role, but the search drove him crazy and in the end he was forced to come crawling to me! It was destiny. I’ve thought about relocating to London, but if I think about it too hard I start sweating and shaking and my tummy hurts. And if Aaron moved to Barcelona people would ridicule his translucent skin and nerdy wardrobe. So for now we’ll just stick to what we know. “Aaron is still very active as a producer/engineer/ songwriter/smarty-pants independent of the band. He produced the last Snowman record and has recently been working with Conrad Standish from the Devastations among other savants and luminaries. “For my part, I was a pretty productive musician/

songwriter/producer/moron before Civil Civic started, but I’ve done precious little of my own shit in the last few years. That could change violently and without warning. I have killer bees in my bonnet.” So for a band driven by impulse and intent on doing things via a literal scenic route, their self-enforced distance does have its benefits. Working independently and exchanging tracks via email, theoretically, it should give both Ben and Aaron the opportunity to apply a vigorous attention to detail and refine the way they operate. Away from the face-to-face exchange, there’s the chance to step back, deconstruct and evaluate. “That’s a sharp observation,” says Ben. “If you work up material together in a rehearsal room or studio, ideas get thrown up quickly and shot down/changed just as quickly, which is a valid and healthy way to do business. But when you get an MP3 of an embryonic track in the mail, you still have immediate reactions, but you end up listening to it a bunch of times and formulating your response in a much more methodical and considered way. Ideas have a chance to grow on you. “And how often we get together really depends on what’s going on. We try to organise ourselves around shows. For instance when I flew over for the mixing of the record we made that a prelude to our summer tour, and before that when we recorded and mixed the last single we made it coincide with some London gigs. We have to concentrate shit, because neither of us has the time or money to fly back and forth just to have a chat and a jam.” It brings us neatly to the here and now with Civil Civic setting off for Europe. It marks a hectic few months in terms of touring and the impending album, and neither Ben nor Aaron are thinking about downtime. Interestingly, though, they are thinking about their next steps and the overall reaction to ‘Rules’ is set to play a big part. “We’ve got some touring to do,” says Aaron, “so we can alert as many innocent people as possible to our existence and also our awesome, smelly album being released. After that we’re going to take a short break and see what sort of reaction the record generates. That’ll play a big part in dictating the next move. But there’s so much to do, even in so-called ‘down time’. We want to make a couple of good videos for tracks off the album and maybe do a bit of writing.That sort of stuff. All will become clear in time.” Bearing musical similarities with the likes of Errors, Holy Fuck, Moderat, Fuck Buttons and those who attempt to create instrumental music that goes beyond merely complementing montages of beautiful panorama, Civil Civic are no passive soundtrack. Creating a complex package of math rock,post-punk and screeching

white noise, at the heart of it all is a desire to be a party band, making them sound, at times, like Metronomy trying their hand at krautrock. Sure it can be loud, rhythmic and ultimately unhinged, but there’s also a resolute level of intelligence at work which is noticeably important to both Ben and Aaron. “When I hear the words ‘instrumental post-punk’ I have real trouble not falling asleep, instantly,” says Ben. “To me those words say boring, noodley, self-absorbed, jammy, long-winded, quasi-emo horseshit. I have no perspective, but is that really what we are? Shit, part of our mission statement is to be a Good-Times act. A pool-party band! Neither of us are vegans. We didn’t study jazz improvisation at school. Damnit, we’re fun! “We try and make sure that we are writing really songy songs, with tons of melody and good arrangements and all those vital ingredients, rather than just jamming out and looping it and masturbating over the top and expecting anyone in the world to give a shit. Perhaps that’s harsh. Jamming and looping and wanking are all great things in their own way, but we have rules about how to do business, and massaging our musical egos at the expense of the listener is most deﬁnitely against the rules. “One of our most cherished goals is to produce tracks that will get played at pool parties and under-age booze orgies.We’re proud of the prog /nerd elements in our sound, and there’s no way in hell we want to be a dumb disposable outﬁt, but if we aren’t making fun jams then please tell us, because that would mean we’re fucking up.” Fucking up is not something Civil Civic should worry about. The release of ‘Less Unless’ kick-started the typical blogosphere battle between speed and substance with the band forced to debate and deliberate it’s next steps. With Civil Civic still in its embryonic stages, the reaction took them by surprise, but armed with the insistent, triumphant ‘Run Overdrive’ and a growing reputation, Ben and Aaron shouldn’t have to worry about being pigeonholed as nerdy, noodling and self-absorbed. Civil Civic are pushing beyond that of shoegazing instrumentalists and their party is just getting started. “When ‘Less Unless’ started getting blog-love, the band was only 6 months old and we hardly knew what we were going to do with it,” says Ben. We knew that track had something special about it, but fuck, I’ve been in bands that toiled for years and released loads of stuff and never generated a reaction like that. I’m a cranky old band whore who’d resigned himself to total failure and anonymity, so the internet reaction to those singles completely revolutionised my whole outlook on life. I don’t even cry in the shower any more.”

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Active Child Atlas Sound Bonnie Prince Billie Cass McCombs Charlotte Gainsbourg Dirty Projectors & Bjork Dominant Legs Forest Fire High Places Holiday Places Hooded Fang Kate Wax Luke Haines M83 My Sad Captains Odonis Odonis Real Estate Spectrals Summer Camp Swimming The Church of Synth The Strange Boys The Field The Frontier Needs Heroes Turbowolf

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Î&#x201D; Brown Brogues Caged Animals Disclosure German Measles McDonalds Metronomy Milk Maid Neon Indian Old Forest Pinkunoize Shabazz Palaces Tanks Amigo The War on Druns Yugoslavia Boys

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Dirty Projectors & Björk Mount Wittenberg Orca (Domino) By Sam Walton. In stores Oct 24

07/10

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Dirty Projectors and Björk are not artists known for their embracing of simplicity. Between them, they’ve written albums constructed purely from human vocal samples (Björk’s 2004 album ‘Medulla’), covered entire records by 80s hardcore punks Black Flag from memory (Dirty Projector’s astonishing 2007 LP ‘Rise Above’) and released albums as a series of apps (Björk’s recent ‘Biophilia’). It might therefore be fair to anticipate a joint Dirty Projectors/Bjork effort to be pretty far up the batshit scale of crazy and, on that count, ‘Mount Wittenberg Orca’ doesn’t disappoint. It is, after all, a song cycle sung from the point of view of a family of whales: lead Projector David Longstreth plays the part of a hiker high up on the eponymous northern Californian mountain looking out to sea and observing a family of orca whales frolicking in the Paciﬁc, Björk takes

the part of momma whale and the three Dirty Projectors backing singers, themselves as slickly oiled a vocal unit as you’re ever likely to hear, are the whale cubs. Any instrumentation is used sparsely and quietly, as emphasis is placed on the vocal interactions of the group, and the album is over in under 22 minutes. Needless to say, Adele this ain’t. However, it isn’t a Dirty Projectors or Björk album either. At least, it doesn’t feel like one: while some of the stylistic touchstones might be in place – tangy, razor-sharp harmonies from Dirty Projectors’ camp, sleepy-throaty vocals from Björk’s – ‘Mount Wittenberg Orca’ is a departure for both artists, for better and for worse.The most obvious shift is that, save for an all-too-brief twang on ‘No Embrace’, Longstreth’s guitar is nowhere to be heard.The same goes for the rest of the Dirty Projector’s instruments, and the result is a clean, clear soundscape that places the singing centre stage. When that decluttering works, it magniﬁes the tenderness of all the combined voices to gorgeous effect.When it doesn’t, the suddenly

isolated backing singers sound shrill, overly acidic and faintly comic. Equally, the speed with which the album was recorded – three days – is a blessing and a curse: the album frequently sounds more fresh and invigorated than either of its contributors’ previous work, but that sparkle comes at the expense of occasionally under-explored arrangements. When it received its digital release last year, Longstreth described ‘Mount Wittenberg Orca’ as “‘Bitte Orca’’s younger, hotter sister”, and the comparison with the Dirty Projector’s last album stands up both positively and negatively: this is certainly rawer, more immature and more aesthetically stunning, but the complexity and the allure within it is often only skin deep. Nowhere here is there the slow unveiling at which both Björk and Dirty Projectors are so skilled, and while it’s as startlingly original as anything in either contributor’s discography, and a fascinating, enjoyable and inspiring album in isolation, its tantalising brevity and showy shallowness only emphasises the feeling of an opportunity missed for something truly extravagant.

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Strange Boys

M83

Dominant Legs

Bonnie Prince Billy

Active Child

Live Music

Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming

Invitation

Wolfroy Goes To Town

You Are All I See

(Rough Trade) By Chal Ravens. In stores Oct 24

(Naïve) By Reef Younis. In stores Oct 17

(Lefse) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Nov 17

(Domino) By Chris Watkeys. In stores Oct 31

(Vagrant) By Reef Younis. In stores Oct 24

The third record in as many years from this Austin band of brothers, ‘Live Music’ an after hours offering that is more drunkenly morose than it is drunkenly raucous. Ryan Sambol takes the lead on guitar, harmonica and piano but always sounds like he’s lost elsewhere, gazing forlornly into a bourbon and soda and slurring across his notes in a pleasingly lubricated honky-tonk fashion.The references are canonical and explicit – mid-Sixties Dylan on ‘Doueh’, Bo Diddley via the Stones on ‘Omnia Boa’, a taste of Tom Waits’ barroom Americana here and the Velvets at their ‘Loaded’-era sunniest there. It’s stripped-back and classic, but it never really approaches the quality of its forebears.You want to step through those saloon doors and upturn a few tables, smash up a tray of tumblers – anything to shake them out of their self-satisfaction.

It’s a tough task trying to quantify M83. Attempting to summate wave upon wave of often grandiose beauty that Anthony Gonzalez weaves is almost an insult in itself; that we’d even dare try and deconstruct and reduce his emotive, dreamy, introspective scores. But that’s what he’s offered here with this gargantuan doubledisc release. It’s the quintessential M83 timeline, distilled, purifying and gloriously blowing out what preceded all over again. It doesn’t have the narrative ﬂow of previous albums, or perhaps the sepia-tinged warmth, but the scale and exultant splendour of ‘Steve McQueen’, ‘Midnight City’ and ‘Claudia Lewis’ are all the more arresting, and it makes this a collection in the grandest sense. A heaving, breathing journey through the introspective and the bombastic, the ambitious and the apocalyptic, this is the sound of triumph.

A couple of months back, San Francisco duo Dominant Legs posted a video online for ‘Hoop Of Love’ – the best song of the summer due to how unashamedly pop it was without vulgarly aiming for the hit parade.The good news, then, is that ‘Hoop Of Love’ is here, on the band’s debut album, yodelling boy/girl vocal hooks and all.The not so good news is that it’s deﬁnitely the best song ‘Invitation’ has to offer. Part of that is certainly thanks to the band’s ability to occasionally stop resembling the classic indie pop of GIRLS et al (who singer/songwriter Ryan Lynch also plays with) and go a bit Empire Of The Sun or, worse, Mika, but if you give it time to warm to the Yeasayer-ish ‘Make Time For The Boy’ or the Smiths inspired ‘Loving Now’, or the heaps of white funk, you’ll realise that ‘Hoop Of Love’ is in fact in some ﬁne, less immediate company.

It’s over a decade since Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s landmark album ‘I See A Darkness’. Since then,Will Oldham’s music has tended towards the light, further from the ‘alt.’ and closer to the ‘country’. His genius for songwriting and starkly beautiful lyricism remains, and ‘Wolfroy Goes To Town’ adds yet more weight to this weird and wonderful songwriter’s credentials. It’s a gentle, laid back, quiet opening to the record, and the ﬁrst note struck with any kind of anger doesn’t arrive until the bitter strains of ‘New Tibet’.The slightly more off-kilter ‘Cows’ is awash with beautiful harmonies, but the standout track here is poor-man’s prayer ‘Quail And Dumplings’; fellow folkie Angel Olsen’s heartbreaking guest vocals in the middle eight like a stunning blow to the soul. Reﬂective, warm and moving, once again, the prince proves to be king.

Opening an album with layer upon layer of tumbling harp is a bold, if delicate move, not just because the first notes of a record aren’t usually a barometer of what lies beyond, but because no artist (or record company) wants to blow their load in the opening track. So the following icy backdrops of lo-fi RnB beats and Blade Runner atmospherics are an unexpected surprise. Pat Grossi’s all-consuming voice (a cross between the hushed breathing of Junior Boys and the vocal flourishes of Shearwater) is often in sharp contrast to the cold, organ chamber mechanics of his music, but it makes for a foreboding listen, and one wracked with a grand cinematic tension that’s given weight and warmth by his choirboy register. Using classical compositions to beautifully alluring effect, ‘You Are All I See’ is an album that doesn’t ask for your attention, it just indulges.

Spectrals Bad Penny (Wichita) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Oct 17

07/10

Given Spectrals’ – aka Louis Jones’s – thick Yorkshire accent (he’s from Leeds), it’s become increasingly difﬁcult to not liken his work to that of Alex Turner’s. On debut album ‘Bad Penny’ the two are closer than ever, with Jones slightly less in love with the doo-wop of his early singles, and Turner having released his bittersweet soundtrack to Submarine.Where one often sings about sex though, the other is a romantic – this is, as Jones says, a record of love songs about his girlfriend. At its lowest point (the jazz drum lollop of ‘Many Happy Returns’), Spectrals’ laconic style veers on the sluggish, while the jolly jangle of ‘Get a Grip’ is much better. It’s on Jones’ take on 60s hop music where he still shines brightest though; ‘Confetti’ being a measured dose of sweet naivety and giddy calypso rhythms. Records this ‘nice’ are rarely truly brilliant, and ‘Bad Penny’ doesn’t prove that theory wrong. If you like your surf pop hooky and heartfelt though, it’ll do very nicely indeed.

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AL BUMS 06/10

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Holiday Shores

Cass McCombs

High Places

Hooded Fang

Summer Camp

New Masses For Squaw Peak (Half Machine)

Humor Risk

Original Colors

Tosta Mista

Welcome To Condale

(Domino) By Tom Pinnock. In stores Nov 7

(Thrill Jockey)

(Daps)

(Moshi Moshi)

By Reef Younis. In stores Oct 17

By Edgar Smith. In stores Nov 7

By Polly Rappaport. In stores Oct 31

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Oct 31

The onset of the murky Autumn months and gnarled, beckoning finger of Seasonal Affective Disorder makes the release of woozy, surf pop a calculated gamble.There’s the premise of being energised by the sunny-side up warmth or disaffected by the slow death of long, summer days. Either way, it’s a challenge ‘New Masses For Squaw Peak’ is ill equipped to overcome. Alive with errant melody and lo-fi psychedelics, it’s undoubtedly pretty in places, but erratic, noodling interludes and the molasses-thick muffle of the album’s production undermine its pleasant nostalgia. ‘Spells’ takes the Vampire Weekend approach, jerking and jiving to awkward syncopation, but for the most part, ‘New Masses…’ is an unassuming blend of spaced out prog and echoing reverb that neither builds nor explodes but just fades out.

For nearly a decade, Californiaborn itinerant McCombs has been releasing brilliant records.The last two, however, massively slowed the tempos, framing the singersongwriter’s mysterious and literary words against spiralling, soporiﬁc dirges.Which is all very well, just a little… well, unexciting. Aside from the Lynchian ‘To Every Man His Chimera’ (which ‘barrels’ along at the speed of grass growing), ‘Humor Risk’ is a return to the lusher, sparkier climes of 2007’s ‘Dropping The Writ’. Chugging, more propulsive tempos are the norm, and this more popleaning bent in no way damages McCombs’ enigmatic lyrics. ‘Love Thine Enemy’ spends three perplexing minutes dissecting the phrase, ‘The Living Word’ tangles up L Ron Hubbard and Ho Chi Minh, and then things get even weirder. If McCombs hasn’t yet made his masterpiece, he’s getting closer.

High Places are members of the Brooklyn class of ’08 (whose alumni also include Yeasayer, Telepathe and Gang Gang Dance) and as such, their early material was tinged with tropically informed rhythms, blasé vocals and hippie sentiments.That’s not to say it was bad, it just didn’t really stand out. In 2011, it sounds like Mary Pearson and Rob Barber have developed as songwriters, as their third release on Thrill Jockey sees them embracing more electronic inﬂuences. ‘Banksia’ combines a comedown vibe with retro techno beats and soft vocals, while ‘Sophia’ has a more minimalist, melancholic edge to it, with gently dropping bass pierced by clicking drums. There are moments when the vocals go a bit too ethereal (‘Sonora’) and the whole thing starts bordering on the lightweight, but overall, this is an intricately worked, sonically mature album.

Canadian musical collective Hooded Fang’s UK debut is one of those brilliant albums that does exactly what it says on the sleeve. Plastered with images of rainbow coloured Mexican wrestling masks and titled after a Portuguese grilled sandwich, the record is both light hearted and tongue in cheek.The songs may all be based around the painful breakup of two Hooded Fang members, but the sound is evocative of summer sunshine and parties on the beach – clean, bright indie pop mixed with ’60s garage and a whiff of Tiki kitsch. Surf guitar and vintage organ strains, touched by the merest hint of reverb, dance over go-go drums and cleverly dry lyrics about heartbreak.There’s also the odd musical interlude between tracks; a vaguely twee, utterly apt nod to 1960’s retro, which ties the record together and is likely to promote spontaneous bouts of dancing.

The marvel of lead single and album opener ‘ Better Off Without You’ lies in its ability to not only be insanely infectious, but also manage to get you on the side of Elizabeth Sankey almost instantly – you even take a disliking to the ex in question. Managing to create the kind of pop/love song that makes you root for the protagonist is difﬁcult to achieve, but when done properly it can send an artist to the top of the charts. Kate Nash’s ‘Foundations’ proved that. Summer Camp, then, have got people on their side from the off and ‘Welcome To Condale’ continues to keep them there.There are moments where things almost plunge into tacky electro pop rehash, but songs like the wonderfully stalker-ish ‘I Want You’ keep everything tasteful.There are some exquisitely crafted songs here, on an album that is unashamedly pop and undeniably intoxicating.

Atlas Sound Parallax (4AD) By Sam Walton. In stores Nov 7

08/10

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Bradford Cox is an interesting persona. A legend built through a scuzzy scene, intimate, open-ended interviews, a constant flow of new songs, and a great set of albums, Deerhunter are an important rock band, while Atlas Sound continues to be a substantial footnote. It’s always been a deeply personal project, but here, on ‘Parallax’, the closed-in warmth is deeper.The summery, cosmopolitan euphoria of ‘Logos’ has been shrunken back down into an amalgamation of clicks, bumps and mutated acoustic guitar – not unlike ‘Halcyon Digest’.The record’s ‘Walkabout’ is ‘Te Amo’, a reticent and distinctly introspective affair, with a lot of empty space around its toy-store keyboard oscillations.This is an album about loneliness, but not the melancholy kind. It sounds like the moment where you’ve been lonely long enough that it feels comfortable, and crawling back outside seems at slightly terrifying. Cox knows this reclusiveness well, and this is his finest articulation of his conflicts.

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My Sad Captains

Turbowolf

Real Estate

Kate Wax

Forest Fire

Fight Less Win More

Turbowolf

Days

Dust Collision

Staring At The X

(Stolen)

(Hassle)

(Domino)

(Border Community)

(Fat Cat)

By Olly Parker. In stores Nov 7

By Matthias Scherer. In stores Nov 11

By Nathan Westley. In stores Oct 17

By Chris Watkeys. In stores Nov 14

By Nathan Westley. In stores Oct 17

They say that the music scene is healthier than ever and that those predicting its death have been sadly mistaken. Maybe the industry bods are right – on the surface of it there’s as much music and as many venues putting on great shows as there once was. But have you noticed how few of those headline bands are British? This makes the new MSC record rarer than hen’s teeth; a genuinely great record by a new British band, steeped in heartfelt, semi-twee pop that is strikingly well produced and seemingly done for the love of the art form itself rather than chasing some illusive hype buzz. Mixed by Larry Crane (Elliot Smith, Stephen Malkmus,The Decemberists), ‘Fight Less…’ is a joyous ride through the blessed strain of indie ploughed by US contemporaries like Grandaddy and Atlas Sound while still sounding like a product of home. Cherish this one.

Black Sabbath, System of a Down, Mastodon, Faith No More.The list of influences on this Bristol chaosrock trio reads like the inventory of a T-shirt stall in Camden Market. However, there is no whiff of terrible skunk about their debut album. In fact, it’s a great deal more fun than a wander down Camden High Street. Granted, that isn’t difficult, but a band throwing together sludge riffs, synth licks, disco rhythms and screechy, pressed vocals should be a great more irritating than Turbowolf turn out to be. Actually, the vocals are pretty irritating and let otherwise perfectly good, solid rockers like ‘The Big Cut’ down unnecessarily. Elsewhere, there are some feedback drone interludes to break up the relentless thump of the drums, but Turbowolf are best when combining punk rock tempo with a pop hook, exemplified by the very good ‘Seven Severed Heads’.

Real Estate’s follow up to their eponymous debut is a slightly more polished record that at ﬁrst can wholly be summed up by the word – ‘pleasant’.This is not an album where the songs will become permanently ensconced upon your inner cranium after the ﬁrst listen. Instead, it is a grower; one that will slowly work its way in and take hold like a vine does to a weary wall. A mid-nineties, polished Pavement disposition is shown on songs such as ‘It’s Real’ where simple and often circularin-motion, slacker-pop chord progressions meld with a melancholic, indie-stained autumnal spirit. ‘Wonder Years’ then has a loose Simon & Garfunkel feel that stretches further than its “doo do do” vocal refrain and melodic chiming guitar line, which helps make ‘Days’ a solid enough album… given time that you probably don’t have.

Swiss-Tibetan artist Aisha Devi Enz, aka Kate Wax, has been writing and self-producing her music for several years, and ‘Dust Collision’ feels like a fully-formed slice of (mostly) downbeat electronica, tinged with that slightly self-indulgent feel that is sometimes a natural side-effect of the self-produced solo artist. Opener ‘I Knit You’ recalls a more restrained, chorus-free take on The Knife’s ‘Heartbeats’, and there are some moments of true greatness, like the distilled majesty of ‘For A Shadow’, epic in scope and cooler than the other side of the pillow in delivery. ‘Cool’ is the word, really. This is a coolly produced, coolly delivered album. But it’s also selfconsciously arty, and the generally delicate vocal lines, which ﬂoat over the good-but-generic musical backdrop start off intriguing but soon become samey, and thereafter irritating.

Forest Fire are from Brooklyn, but their debut album was released in 2009. Shouldn’t their time have been and gone? Apparently not, as ‘Staring At The X’ looks sure to see them beat the NYC, hipster curse and take another step towards greater recognition. It’s a sonically arresting stew, made from a recipe that makes it easy to see why they have been called ‘Cosmic Americana’ before now. ‘Born Into’ and ‘Future Shadows’ particularly sound like they could have been long lost Devendra Banhart tracks, recorded in space, while ‘The News’ has a classic T-Rex stomp to its undercurrent. Dub-styled basslines are then ﬂirted with on ‘They Pray Execution Style’, the album’s title track twangs like the sound of the old country, rather than the grime of NYC and ‘Blank Appeal’ slowly beams itself up to heaven in a drag of ﬁzzing chords. Far out, way beyond Broolyn limits.

Charlotte Gainsbourg Stage Whisper (Because) By Stuart Stubbs. In stores Nov 7

09/10

Considering that double albums are usually a disc too long and live albums outstay their welcome even sooner, let’s gloss over one half of ‘Stage Whisper’ – the half that is a very ﬁne collection of concert recordings, but of tracks largely already available to any Charlotte Gainsbourg fan.To the 7-track studio album, then, which is dazzling enough by itself in any case, from the opening scuzzy synth pop of ‘Terrible Angels’ that toys with trashily spat passages to the much more ladylike folk closer, ‘Memoir’. On both occasions, and everywhere in between, Gainsbourg sounds far more English than you’d expect the daughter of archetypal Frenchman Serge to be, but that one consistency aside, although short, ‘Stage Whisper’ is as varied as any record featuring Beck,Villagers and Noah & The Whale was bound to be.What’s more, Gainsbourg ﬂicks from the double bass-led, sombre ‘White Telephone’ to disco thump of ‘Paradisco’ with an ease so effortless it makes you think she can do anything.

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AL BUMS 06/10

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Swimming

The Frontier Needs Heroes

Odonis Odonis

The Church of Synths

Luke Haines

Hollandaze

S/T

9 1/2 Psychedelic Meditations on British Wrestling of the 1970s and early ’80s

Ecstatic International (Tummy Touch) By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Nov 7

Swimming’s second album is a wild and often erratic jaunt, riding the waves of pop music in all its forms, from the conventional to the experimental.The Nottingham outﬁt perhaps lie closest to Brooklyn pop-savants Yeasayer, and like said band they can be equally encapsulating and grating. At times, such as on openers ‘Neutron Wireless Crystal’ and ‘In Ecstatics’, they display a sneering gusto for pop that is as challenging as it is rewarding. However, as the album continues it often dips into safer or muddier waters, which results in a listening experience where differentiation becomes difﬁcult. It’s a high-pitched, wild, bombastic kind of record that will enamour some people and frustrate others; a very busy album, often making for a jarring experience, simply from its inability to be more sonically frugal. However, there is more than enough to warrant investigation.

The Future (Heroic Endeavours) By Chal Ravens. In stores Oct 17

From the opening call of ‘Space Baby’, beaming down from the darkest edges of the sky, this brother-sister duo are like a velvet cloak softly encasing your extremities. But don’t let that put you off – ‘The Future’ isn’t so much sickly sweet as spooky and nostalgic. Distorted guitars are placed low in the mix to disrupt the prettiness of the paired voices, while in the distance lay smoky layers of guitar picking and voices taking on strange and woody timbres.The record speaks of New World frontiers, as you’d imagine – the America of rose-tinted Republican history books, a place you might not expect Brooklyn siblings named Lauretti to feel much nostalgia for. But where the album goes beyond White Stripes album placeholders there’s plenty of weirdness to locate it at the stronger end of the alt.folk

07/10

(Fat Cat)

(Robot Elephant)

By Luke Winkie. In stores Nov 7

By Polly Rappaport. In stores Oct 17

Skronk-heavy, acid-soaked postpunk/surf-rock hybrids aren’t exactly Canada’s prime export, but it’s a pretty good look on Toronto’s Odonis Odonis.Taking the milder, more freewheeling attacks of similar bands to a more ferocious level, their torrential, evil-grin squall on ‘Hollandaze’ makes for an appealingly physical reaction. Solos crest lazily, drums are all bourbonsoaked – it makes you think this whole boggy garage-rock revival thing isn’t exclusive to Atlanta anymore. But mainly you’ll be too stuck on the cinematic pomp of ‘Handle Bars’ or ‘Seedgazer’ to start thinking comparatively.The band throw their whole bodies into the songs and often come back with something special to show off – sometimes boldness is all you need. Very much stuck in an aesthetic, the risks Odonis Odonis take do turn into something that demands ears, if not necessarily brains.

What happens when you take a psychotherapist with a passion for synthesizers and let him loose on the German goth scene? You get the bass-driven, chilling tones of The Church of Synth, whose frustration with his days spent listening to the baggage of his patients results in a series of cold, cathartic soundscapes, each one echoing the murky drones of a troubled mind. Opener, ‘Der Fall von Leviathan’, is a proggy, doomridden track, both ominous and compelling, while ‘Das dröhnen der göttlichen Räder’ comes from the realm of dark electro, with trance-like synths and a somewhat more ambient vibe. ‘Die paradoxen Gebote Gottes’ sets itself apart with a distinctive, almost grungy guitar riff, which is presented over an inky bass line and sinister percussion loops. Fans of witch house, lend this record your ears, it won’t disappoint.

(Fantastic Plastic) By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores Nov 7

A nostalgic trip to a childhood spent in the company of Britain’s wrestlers, Luke Haines’ skip down memory lane has been given a psychedelic twist, placing the likes of Giant Haystacks in inverted and psychedelic situations.What could have the potential to be total drivel is in fact pretty refreshing and intriguing.The lyrics are often hilarious and have a quintessentially British and working class feel to them, including locations like Les Kellet’s transport café in Bradford – “Egg and chips from the transport cafe is the worst food I’ve ever had/‘Do you want some more?’/Oh dear god no”. It’s a pretty weird record, but a delightfully playful one, and honestly the best psychedelic concept record about British wrestling in the 1970’s and early 80’s I have ever heard.

The Field Looping State of Mind (Kompakt) By Sam Walton. In stores Oct 24

09/10

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After the stylistic uncertainty that characterised The Field’s last album, Axel Willner has returned to more familiar territory with his third LP… somewhat. Gone are the hesitant attempts to write four-man-band rock songs, or even punk-funk, and in their place are more confident pieces built from the recognisable techno, ambient and house templates he originally used to make his name. However, a softer palette has been added to the mix this time around – the final third here is distinctly more mournful and reflective than what’s been before, and it makes for a compelling, if dreamy, end to a record. For all the subtle evolution in The Field’s sound, though, Willner’s more propulsive, motorik pieces remain most impressive. Album opener ‘Is This Power’ is one of the best pieces of dance music you’re likely to hear all year and the dense interwoven textures of ‘Arpeggiated Love’ generate a welcoming wash. ‘Looping’ is unlikely to earn The Field new fans, but it’s his most consistent, and impressive, work to date.

LIVE

The Loud And The Quiet

/ OLD FOREST The Victoria, Dalston, London 06.10.2011 By Danny Canter ▼

Photography by Gemma Harris

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Old Forest name all of their songs after different Simpsons characters. All except for tonight’s closing track, which is called ‘Slug’, temporarily, until the band figure out if ‘Chief Wiggum’ is a better or worse name for it than ‘Krusty’, or one of Matt Groening’s other jaundice toons. Having been together for over a year, the truth is that ‘Krusty’ and ‘Wiggum’ have probably already gone.We might have even just heard them bellow about The Victoria, although Old Forest’s reluctance to speak means that we can’t confirm or deny that. They are very young, which always seems like such an irrelevant point, but it’s worth bearing in mind here, because Old Forest look like the nervous teens they are, but sound like a band of twenty-something stoners from early 90s Seattle. Singer Tom Cox mumbles a hello twice (the first attempt really is too mumbly), but from then on all heads are down, amps are cranked, distortion is turned up high. Someone has labelled this ‘sludge rock’, which is a tag we should all take seriously considering how fitting it is. In plaid shirts oversized enough to pass for dressing gowns – and with Cox in a J. Macisaping cap – the grunge slowly spews from the speakers like goo. It’s incredibly loud and clearly

inspired by ‘In Utero’-era Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr., and the odd bit of doom metal. Its strength is in its purity, Old Forest’s likeness to Mudhoney and so on a testament to how well they play this no nonsense brand of punk. And ‘Slug’, which sees a proggy end to proceedings, is the band’s best track yet, with Cox, rather surprisingly, turning into The Edge as he makes his Stratocaster squeal. A lot quieter are who tonight launch their debut single (yeah, yeah, on our record label), at their debut London show.They’re why The Victoria’s back doors are open, people five rows deep on the wrong side, trying to get a look. They’ve played London before, but they were called Films then, and they’ve never played to more than fifty odd people, or so says visibly overwhelmed frontman Joe Newman. A sensible quartet who finished studying in Leeds this summer and chose to relocate to Cambridge rather than London, for fear that they’d be distracted and engulfed by the city, are masters of nuance.Their music, which is received with the whistles and cheers of a thousand friends this evening, trades on the forgotten art of delicacies and details.The xx do a similar thing, and Radiohead, but few others,

and it makes tracks like ‘Bloodflood’, which begins with metallic, clunking keyboard chords that are never overpowering, almost unique in their composure. At the other end of the spectrum – which isn’t that far away at all – are tracks like the (slightly) pacier ‘Tessellate’ that lurches to live break-beats that are played on bongos and sound like they’re coming from a can. Joe hunches his shoulders and expresses every word with triggered fingers, as if he’s rapping on a slow jam, feeling the words in the air. He also sings – almost exclusively – with his eyes closed, and in a tone that you’ll either love or loathe: a cross between Billy Corgan, Hayden Thorpe of Wild Beasts and the all-but-forgotten Finley Quaye.This evening, everybody goes for the love option. And sure, a review in Loud And Quiet of a band being released via Loud And Quiet Recordings is bound to be glowing, but the finest moment of the evening comes with the closing ‘Breezeblocks’, which is an Internet hit in its own right and is bound to be the band’s first proper release on some big fat record label, which is only what a band this carefully skilled deserve.

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METRONOMY Royal Albert Hall, Kensington, London 03.10.2011 By DK Goldstein Photography by DK Goldstein ▼

“It’s hard to believe that in this very room they used to have gladiators fighting to the death,” exclaims Metronomy main-man Joe Mount. It’s not true, of course, but it’s an entertaining thought, and Mount has become quite the entertainer since his hermit days of writing and producing for this particular project. In the vast, ornately decorated space of the Royal Albert Hall, he is in his element. Along with his trio of musicians – long-time member Oscar Cash on sax, keys and backing vocals, drummer Anna Prior and bassist Gbenga Adelekan – Mount makes such groovesome music that the audience dance around their seats. Even people in the second and third balconies are dancing, despite the threatening plummet. As soon as those solitary bass lines of ‘Heartbreaker’ kick in people rise like a wave; the front row stand first and the others quickly follow, out of necessity and desire. Although it’s not one of their poppier tracks, Metronomy have a knack for combining whirring, melancholic synths with fast-paced beats – as in ‘On Dancefloors’– which means even their sadder songs move you physically,

as well as emotionally. The London (by way of Brighton and Devon) foursome are also a band known for their quirkiness. Behind them hangs four crudely painted portraits that stare creepily into the crowd, as the lights they wear – the mainstay of their live show – flash rhythmically with the odd beats of the midi saxophone-filled ‘The End of You Too’. In this setting everything sounds crisp and booming, especially the unfussy but resonant drums of recent single ‘The Bay’ and the erratic blips and thumps of ‘My Heart Rate Rapid’, which they speed up to dazzling effect. As the sweetly subtle ‘The Look’ starts, Cash is rolled out on a keyboard that Mount describes as looking “a little bit like a car”, while playing the opening lines. Other stunts include an opening quartet who play renditions of Metronomy tracks, and during ‘Corinne’ former bassist Gabriel Stebbing riffs with his old band on the steps between the aisles. There’s so much going on it’s difficult to contain any excitement, which is clear from the amount of stamping after the closing ‘Some Written’ that demands an encore. Returning with the quartet, Metronomy satiate listeners with new single ‘Everything Goes My Way’ and ‘Radio Ladio’ and leave to a packed hall shouting “R-A-D-IOOOHH”. It’s a blinding show.

DISCLOSURE The Shacklewell Arms, Dalston 22.09.2011 By Mandy Drake ▼

One thing about sibling duo Disclosure spring to mind when you see them recreate their twostep live – they work together with psychic ease as they zig-zag behind their tabletop of MacBooks, chaos pads and electronic organs. Huw and Guy Lawrence never give each other the nod, they just slip left and right, ﬂicking triggers that the other has set off, bobbing to their clipped beats inspired by fellow south Londoner Burial. Every now and then, Huw picks up a bass guitar, offering a human touch to an otherwise completely computerised performance. It’s welcome but not needed. Disclosure are a truly modern band, and their music could only exist in a post-Skream world, where an electronic genre can be called ‘night bus’ and seem poignantly named rather than totally ludicrous. Most tracks feature spliced, chipmunk’d female vocals, which isn’t anything new in two-step, but the fact that they’re consistently so upbeat is. Disclosure’s songs don’t wallow in suburban decay, they playfully bounce, like Gold Panda’s ‘You’, and that’s what makes them so enjoyable live – they bring a celebratory dance party, not an introspective, lethargic show of bedroom electronics to question you McDonald’s day job to.

BROWN BROGUES The Lexington, Angel, London 07.10.2011 By Laura Davies ▼

Brown Brogues may sound like they were born in the deep south to Robert Johnson and Wanda Jackson, but the duo are rock’n’roll loving English lads from Wigan – just check out the booze-bingeing video for ‘Treet U Beta’ for evidence.With each track hovering around the two-minute mark, it’s hard to tell how many they blasted through in front of a small, but dedicated crowd.Twenty? Thirty, even? Guitarist and singer Mark Vernon jerks between a heavy reverb mic and your run-of-themill kind, resulting in a scuzzy, Flat

Duo Jets growl. No one has a clue what he’s singing, but it doesn’t seem to matter. Ben Mather hammers his paired-back drum kit so hard it’s a surprise he doesn’t smash through the stage. After a 40-minute set – and a broken curfew – it seems he is pleading with his hip-shaking frontman to stop playing.Vernon doesn’t listen. The fun (for us, not Mather) continues.Together they make one hell of a White Stripes-ish racket, and that’s not just a lazy two-piece comparison – there are real echoes of Jack White’s fuzz manipulation talents as the stage and room swells with grappling feedback.The reverb mic is put to further use with cheeky inaudible mutterings between songs.We’ll never know what’s on Vernon’s mind, but what’s on ours is that after they write just a few more decipherable tracks, Brown Brogues will be one to keep an ear out for.

CAGED ANIMALS The Shacklewell Arms, Dalston 28.09.2011 By John Beck ▼

In the studio, Caged Animals (Soft Black’s Vincent Cacchione’s new baby) deal in a faintly cloying, suburban youth-channelling indie with a twist; gently discordant guitars and faintly whimsical lyrics in tact, but they’re underpinned by a selection of loops, samples and electronic beats that suggest rather more of an RnB habit. Live, however – shorn of their everpresent distorto sheen, and with a real drummer replacing the synthetic – one might expect a reversion to shoe gazing type. Instead, they emerge as a rawer, more energetic proposition. A great deal of the credit for this surprising change in pace goes to Cacchione, who despite some highly questionable hand waving, makes an engaging frontman. Natty Hawaiian shirt in place, he repeatedly jumps into the crowd brandishing confetti sticks and belting out lyrics. It’s hardly balls out rocking of course, but lower production values expose tracks like ‘Girls on Medication’ and ‘Teﬂon Heart’’s surprisingly snappy pop foundations and rawer emotional elements. It’s just as well - dreamy introspection often doesn’t come over well in the ﬂesh.

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LIVE ▼

SHABAZZ PALACES White Heat, Soho, London 27.09.2011 By Chal Ravens ▼

German Measles. Pic: Guy Eppel

Milk Maid. Pic: Conan Roberts

Hooded and hidden behind shades, Palaceer Lazaro (or Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler, formerly of 90s hip-hop trio Digable Planets) commands his debut London performance as Shabazz Palaces; a show that’s sold out twice over judging by the jostling and jamming in White Heat’s basement.The ‘Black Up’ LP came out on Sub Pop this summer to immediate acclaim as well as curiosity as the label’s only hiphop release to date, an anomaly partly explained by Butler’s roots in Seattle, but perhaps signalling some continuing degradation of genre boundaries for internetdependent music fans. Flanked by percussionist Tendai Maraire, who chips in on vocals and choreographed hand gestures, Butler backs his rhymes with raw, weighty bass, noodling mbira, jazz piano cut-ups and other freeform eclectica. Drenched in wet reverb, the lyrics are too often buried out of earshot, but ‘Recollections of the Wraith’ finds a sweet spot almost unexpectedly with its simple come-on (“Clear some space out, so we can space out”) and startling melismatic vocal sample, as a slow jam ripples through the crowded bodies. An uncompromising and electrifying taste of a musician at the top of his game, a full 17 years after winning his first Grammy.

YUGOSLAVIA BOYS Brudenell Social Club, Leeds 25.09.2011 By Kate Parkin ▼

Shabazz Palaces. Pic: Hannah Pescod

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Yugoslavian Boys are burning the Punk rulebook, then pissing on its dead ashes. For starters they have no guitar, two drummers (though tonight one is missing in action); the scene of the stage is pure chaos before they’ve even played a note. Sunglasses duck-taped to his face, singer Billy Bonehead looks like a cross between Mad Max and a Russian tank commander, staggering between synths, trumpet and a battered trombone as the band screech through the manic thrash punk of ‘Ricky’s

Back’. Dragging us back through the punk wastelands via Nazi Germany, Devo and trashy horror films this trio of noise terrorists are out to inflict as much damage on your eardrums as possible. Howling about their “lust for cheese” over mind-melting industrial electro on ‘Shopping List’, the faces below them express a mixture of utter delight and pure bewilderment. Known for their stage trashing performances, disaster seems to trail after them and during the Stasi stomp of ‘Where’s Your Papers’ Bonehead flings himself around in such a fury he annihilates his own synthesiser. Drummer Coby Wong and bass player Seany Boodwah power on as he attempts to resurrect the beast, in what could be Groucho Marx comedy gold were it not for the furious deluge of screams and the angry tirade that follows from the frontman. Striding across the stage, dragging mangled keys and battered drums in their wake, the Yugoslavian Boys are the wake up call you’ve been waiting for.

TANKS AMIGO / GERMAN MEASLES Glasslands, Brooklyn, New York 27.09.2011 By Stuart Stubbs ▼

Facebook is full of lies, but when Brooklyn band Tanks Amigo promoted tonight’s show with a note on their wall that read “Come see the return of Tanks Amigo and the death of German Measles” they weren’t kidding, even if they were. A hotch-potch gang of doppelgangers,Tanks Amigo feature Dan Deacon on bass, Brian Jones on rhythm guitar (bobbed hair and teardrop guitar and everything) and John Candy on drums.To locals they’re a ‘supergroup’, made up of various other, better known band members, like JB Townsend of Crystal Stilts.Their singer wears a rain mac and squeaks like David Thomas of Pere Ubu, and while they’re an odd bunch to look at, we are looking. No one leaves as they skip through their spindly garage album, ‘We Play Jazz’, and as Candy holds down the beat in the most louche way imaginable, it’s a welcome, playful return for a band who giggle their way through the odd bum note. As for German

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Measles, they’re not splitting up, but they really should consider it. Behind an unfounded arrogance and a bad Mark E Smith impression, a very drunk Nik Curtin drones through some instantly forgettable garage punk while looking at the ﬂoor. He’s pretending to be a rock star but looks, at best, uncomfortable, and, at worst, like a complete dick as he chucks his microphone into the crowd, brains one of three people actually enjoying the show and refuses to apologise.The small girl who’s crying gets a mumbled “Sorry darling” some songs later. We’re still waiting for our apology for just how dull German Measles sound.

MILK MAID The Green Door, Brighton 20.09.2011 By Nathan Westley ▼

Despite the days of Union Jack plastered guitars and weather-worn parkas being a prerequisite of any northern based guitar band being long gone, Manchester indie groups are still often typified as being lager-swilling, knuckledragging delinquents more prone Oasis and The Stone Roses than the best of alternative American culture.Tonight, Milk Maid – the newish venture from Martin Cohen, the onetime bass player of perennial under achievers Nine Black Alps – show us that for this once-bedroom-based project he has discarded the angsty grunge fascination of his old band and hoovered up the underlying influences of Guided By Voices and Pavement.With a vocal that has a striking similarity to Graham Coxon’s, we are presented with a set that neglects much of the material from this year’s debut album, ‘Yucca’, and instead thoroughly swings towards ushering in a new era – one where Milk Maid is no longer a solo project, but a united band of four, as a succession of songs that have the underpinnings of melodicallydriven and understated lo-fi, American-flavoured indie happily bounce along like a Kangaroo on Crunk juice. ‘Yucca’ – taking its lead from Flying Nun Records, amateurish roster – wasn’t very special at all, but tonight is, and so Milk Maid Mk II look to be.

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MCDONALDS Pianos, Manhattan, New York 28.09.2011 By Stuart Stubbs ▼

THE WAR ON DRUGS Corsica Studios, Elephant & Castle, London 27.09.2011 By Chris Watkeys Photography by Lee Goldup ▼

The War On Drugs’ Adam Granduciel certainly gives their soundman a hard time. The frontman seems pissed off with the setup before the band even start playing, and there are more than a few choice comments aimed at the sound desk.The War On Drugs are not an angry band though, and it soon becomes clear it’s all just last-night-of-thetour banter.They’re unpretentious too; Granduciel relates the story of a 2008 UK tour where the band played an open mic night in Coventry and were apparently “kicked off stage after two songs”. Things are a little different tonight. Corsica Studios is packed – indeed this show has been sold out for weeks – and the crowd here clearly genuinely love this band. Opener ‘Best Night’ is as meandering and anger-free as much of the material from recent LP ‘Slave Ambient’. It’s swelteringly hot in this box-like venue, and the sweat drips off the

ceiling as the hirsute Granduciel and his band deliver an intriguing, melodic, stylistically wandering set.The vocals have strongly Dylan-esque inﬂections, the bassist looks and plays like a college professor of music, and the keyboards thread a river of melody through a sometimes gentle, sometimes chaotic musical landscape. This band span the boundaries of a lot of sub-genres, and there are discernible brushes of drone-rock too, a couple of relentless two-note jams over which semi-psychedelic solos sprawl like vines in a rainforest. And like a rawer, looser take on The Besnard Lakes, sometimes things can get just a little too proggy, although not on ‘I Was There’, which is ﬂoaty and relaxed, slashed through with the occasional stab of guitar. The harmonica comes out at regular intervals and a right-handed audience member is invited onstage to play a lefthanded guitar for ‘Brothers’, because, like their music,The War On Drugs are a collaborative, relaxed, easy-come-easy-go kinda band. Predictably enough, the set ends with an extended, keyboard-laden wig-out, but hey, it’s the last night of their tour, so they can be forgiven for that.

There is, of course, something brilliantly audacious about a DIY band naming themselves after a brand as globally known and fundamentally greedy as McDonalds, especially when the group in question will probably never make enough money to afford six Chicken McNuggets. A heavy amount of expectation comes with such a prank, though. It’s a daft name, and this local US trio are sure to be a daft bunch. Unsurprisingly, they are, with a singing guitarist dressed like Paul Simonon of The Clash, who shakes his ass like Faith-era George Michael, and a completely loopy guy on keyboard best described as Bez, if Bez could play a keyboard. He’s got a rave whistle around his neck that he toots, seemingly at unplanned intervals, and his knees almost hit his chin as his legs repeatedly spaghetti and spring up and down – it’s as if he’s the dance representative of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. It’s silly, alright, but it’s also extremely entertaining, and on top of this clowning, McDonalds can actually play, providing you like bonkers baggy dance punk that’s heavily inspired by The Happy Mondays and barked by a man in jeans tighter around the back than anywhere else. Everyone in the modestly sized Pianos do, refusing to slink back into the more comfortable bar area even if they don’t join in with progressive shape-pulling onstage. McDonalds are completely mad, but much better for your health than that crap Ronald pushes.

PINKUNOIZU White Heat, Soho, London 20.09.2011 By Chal Ravens ▼

Despite the Japanglish name, Pinkunoizu bring their ﬁligree rhythms and hypnotic movements from the slightly less distant climes of Copenhagen, working with what appears to be a standard issue post-rock vocabulary of drums, guitars, violin and more guitars. But with a mission statement to

“never come full circle, to move hazily in bended ellipses”, the ﬁvepiece deftly sidestep the earnest bombast of similarly equipped bands in favour of a tightly balanced propulsion that’s taut yet ﬂuid, dense yet ephemeral, like a bullet train speeding past Mt Fuji, you might say.You can taste Mogwai in the soft vocals and slowly evolving guitar phrases of quieter tracks, while the spectre of shoegaze is invoked at its most inspired and least dirgy as the set builds louder, faster and tighter. Battling guitars are couched delicately inside the mix rather than squealing for attention over the top, much like Yo La Tengo at their most rasping and rugged (there’s even the lesser-spotted female drummer to stretch the comparison) or the Velvet Underground on the viola-versusguitar jam of ‘Hey Mr Rain’.The ‘Peep’ EP, an even more delicate and exotic experience than Pinkunoizu’s live show, is out in November on Full Time Hobby.

NEON INDIAN White Heat, Soho, London 27.09.2011 By Chal Ravens ▼

Neon Indian’s Alan Palomo wasn’t born to be a venue-ﬁller, the warped, weird, homemade sounds of ‘Psychic Chasms’’ born from a place of teenaged reclusiveness, not necessarily structured to be played live. And his latest, ‘Era Extraña’, couldn’t be more downtrodden. But at the spacious Mohawk in his scene-origin of Austin, he could be a rock star. Backed by robots, lasers, fog-lights, and uniforms, Palomo seems quite enthusiastic that his bedroom project is becoming an actual band. He does the wild-eye stares, the lover-boy croons, he talks to the audience like he was Burt Bacharach; the evolution is complete. On American airwaves he might as well be Fleet Foxes – chillwave gone national, and watching him burn through a super-bass thwacking ‘Deadbeat Summer’ to the crowd’s utter euphoria is almost uncanny.There was a time when this project was miniature and mysterious, a combination of hype and a few great songs. Now Neon Indian is just a working man on tour. Congratulations to Palomo.

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CINEMA REVIEW

FILM By IAN ROEBUCK

DRIVE Starring: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Christina Hendricks Director: Nicolas Winding Refn

8/10

Jean Dujardin as George Valentin in The Artist

Cinema Preview The best of British, at this year’s BFI Film Festival ---Since Venice played host to the World’s first film festival in 1932 they’ve danced around the globe at a sensational speed.These days, a breath-taking amount of events are plaguing the public and it’s nigh on impossible to keep up. Recent highlights in the festival calendar include the gloriously independent Branchage in Jersey with its pitch perfect programme, and San Sebastian’s annual parade of Basque beauties, which was drenched in a surprise downpour this year. Now London looms as the BFI are gearing up for their 55th year of frantic organisation. Despite Leicester Square being in a constant state of disrepair throughout the summer, it seems the builders will up and leave to make way for reams of red carpet. Something of a celebratory fortnight, this year’s event will be a victory lap for British film.We’ve seen gems in every genre but it’s been comedy that’s arguably shined the brightest, with The Inbetweeners nabbing all the treasure and sailing off into the sunset and Submarine impressing greatly, or at least not sinking without a trace. Elsewhere, Attack the Block showed swagger and ingenuity can mix at the same party, as Harry Potter finally reached its crushingly boring crescendo.Yes, all in all Britain has excelled both artistically and commercially this year, and the listings for this year’s London Film Festival show us there’s more to come.

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It was 2002 when Lynne Ramsey released the fiercely underrated Morven Callar.We’ve had to wait nine years for the Scotswoman’s follow up, as We Need to Talk About Kevin get its London airing this month. Lionel Shriver’s 2003 Orange Prize winning novel is charged in controversy as it is. Add a tour de force from Tilda Swinton and an astounding supporting cast (John C. Reilly) and you’ve got a serious Oscar contender on the cards. Michel Hazanavicius’ The Artist (it’s not British but it’s sure to cause a flutter at the festival this year) is a daring take on the silent movie genre that’s a fitting homage to Tinseltown in the twenties and it’s not just a love letter to the period. More a celebration of film itself, we follow movie star George Valentin (played with empathy and humour by Jean Dujardin who picked up Best Actor at Cannes) whose fame is threatened by the talkies and new Hollywood’s movers and shakers. Pushed by the Weinstein’s and lauded by every festival it’s screened at so far, The Artist will no doubt light up London throughout October. Also sat alongside The Artist will be David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method.The ever-interesting director has enjoyed a career in pseudo-science himself and now he takes a look at its history with Viggo Mortensen and Michael Fassbender starring as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung respectively. Keira Knightley and Vincent Gallo also make appearances in what completes a promising line up in London.Well, I say complete: there are hundreds of films showing so get involved.The BFI London Film Festival runs until October 27th.

REO Speedwagon’s hit ‘I Can’t Fight This Feeling’ blasts out of the car radio, a strange Danish man sings at the top of his voice whilst his passenger squirms with delight beside him, eyebrow no doubt arched upwards.That’s how the story goes. As cult director Nicolas Winding Refn gave Ryan Gosling a lift after a disastrous meeting about Drive, they subsequently bonded over power ballads and the film jump-started to life… and what a film! It was never in doubt that the maker of Pusher and Bronson would surprise and shock with his next project, but his steady, wellinformed eye manages to combine a healthy knowledge of European art house and Hollywood with emphatic results. Assembling a remarkable cast with two hotterthan-the-sun-leads in Gosling and Carey Mulligan, and two of TV’s most sought after in Bryan Cranston and Christina Hendricks (Breaking Bad and Mad Men), was a triumph, but to combine that with a thrilling plot (stunt man moonlights as a get away driver) and a killer script with minimal dialogue/maximum impact deserves a jumping high five. However, we will stop short at a firm handshake, because while this is an incredible film on many levels, unfortunately these levels don’t always fall in together. First of all, it looks spectacular, almost too good.The hypnotic, contemplative drive sequences seduce as intended, beautiful and sparse (like some of the dialogue) they offer moments of quiet amongst the chaos. Unfortunately these washed out vignettes tripping in and out of the film often drift into aftershave ad territory.When the chaos arrives it’s sharp and brutal and the violence here is just that, very violent.The film’s heart is cold (and warm) in the right places, but undeveloped characters and slow burn scenes means the violence leaves a bad taste in the mouth. Of course intended, but it doesn’t mean we have to like it. What we are left with is Sofia Coppola re-making Scorsese – not to everybody’s taste, and a picture you’re going to either love or hate… a bit like REO Speedwagon.

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PARTY WOLF PHOTO CASEBOOK “The Violent World of Ian Beale”

You’re totally right, it does get dark early now

GET THE LOOK Whoah there! Are you hitting on my girl?

Let’s face it, I used to look a right state. No, really, I did. All those revealing outﬁts I wore! What was I thinking? I thought I was making myself look better, but I looked worse!!! But now look at me! Goddess much?! I’ve basically been working out a bit, and bulking up by eating a lot of meat. Look, I’ve even tucked a sausage in my briefs in case I get peckish whilst on the rowing machine. If I was a little more ﬂat-chested, it might help me sneak into the men’s shower room too, right ladies? ;-). I suppose the lipstick would give me away, but I like to keep it glam down Fitness First, and I largely do that by having the best tan in Basildon. Currently, I’ve gone for the C3PO look, which is two parts creosote/one part coffee, and boy do I get some attention for it.

WOULD YOU RATHER... Sometimes the old games are the best

Christ, Ian! What was in that thing?

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... only ever eat ham sandwiches from now until the day you die, or shit your pants once a week, at an unannounced, unplanned time? It’s an easy one, right? Only it’s not. If you choose the sandwiches, you really can’t eat anything else. Christmas dinner: ham sandwich. Breakfast: ham sandwich. Desert or snack: you get the idea.You can’t toast the bread either, so don’t try me on that one.You’re at the movies and everyone’s eating popcorn, but not you.You’re eating ham. At least there wouldn’t be at risk of you shitting you pants before the trailers, though. Option two is that, and no, it doesn’t happen at the same time every week, and yes, meeting new people, ﬂying, catching the bus and doing pretty much anything other than shopping in Iceland is going to be pretty bloody difﬁcult from now on. Mull it over and get back to me.

Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely ﬁctitious.

It might be your birthday, Terry, but you ain’t unwrapping my present an’all. Besides, you’ve got this cake all to yourself