Loud And Quiet 5 – The Horrors

Loud And Quiet Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 05 / 100 percent surprising

The Horrors What a difference a year makes

The xx Magik Markers Graham Coxon Kap Bambino Wild Palms Banjo Or Freakout No Pain In Pop Passion Pit Dirty Projectors Peaches

Wild Palms

The Horrors

Banjo Or Freakout

Alcopop

In Bloom Pssst. Have you heard? Capitalism is evil, the economy is screwed, and no, it’s not going to be alright for quite some time. Oh, you have? How about this new thing called Twitter, got wind of that? That too, aye?

Right, but surely you’ve had no whiffs of just how amazing The Horrors’ new material is! Ahhh maaan, seriously, we don’t know why we bother sometimes.

Of course you have though - it’s hardly been music’s best-kept secret, even if a full second album isn’t out until May 4th.The wagging tongues of those with advanced copies – and of the 200 people that saw the band’s comeback gig last month – have existed only to echo those around them, rushing to be the first to break the news that The Horrors have quite possibly written the best record of the year.We’re as guilty as the next. ‘Primary Colours’ really is that good. Spring has sprung; Southend’s psych punks have morphed into krautrock-ing Portishead prodigies; change is everywhere.

For Ex Lion Tamers, a name alteration has been noted. ‘Wild Palms’ [page 16] has been slashing those Wire associations for a month or so now, allowing the gloom-wave Londoners to go about their angular business free of preconceptions. Banjo Or Freakout [page 17] – the Italian whom ditched the brilliant Disco Drive to make washy, minimal shoegaze on his lonesome – is now basking in the rewards of a rethink more than ever. Graham Coxon [page 20] has rejoined Blur but ‘gone folk’; Alcopop Records [page 10] are attempting to change the way music is released and distributed.

2009 finally feels like it’s started. www.loudandquiet.com

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Contents 05| 09 Photographer: Pavla Kopecna

LOUD AND QUIET ZERO POUNDS / VOLUME 03 / ISSUE 05 / 100 PERCENT SURPRISING

The Horrors What a difference a year makes

THE XX MAGIK MARKERS GRAHAM COXON KAP BAMBINO WILD PALMS BANJO OR FREAKOUT NO PAIN IN POP PASSION PIT DIRTY PROJECTORS PEACHES

07 – Free / French / Girls 08 – Really / Wild / Filth 10 – Big / Scarey / Booty 14 – Kilroy / Silk / Thief 19 – Fucked / Up / Pain 20 – Weird / Cheese / Boss 24 – Think / Sick / Thoughts 25 – Jesus / Loves / Horrors 26 – Two / Footed / Parasite 30 – Pout / To / Lunch 37 – Floating / In / Space 38 – You / Got / Dirty 41 – Stop / Making / Me 46 – You / Fat / Monster

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Contact

info@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet 2 Loveridge Mews Kilburn London NW6 2DP Stuart Stubbs Alex Wilshire Live Editor Kate Hutchinson Art Director Lee Belcher film editor Dean Driscoll Editor

Sub Editor

Advertising

advertise@loudandquiet.com Contributors

Anna Dobbie, Ben Parkes, Benson Burt, Chris Watkeys, Danny Canter, Danielle Goldstien, Dean Driscoll, Elizabeth Dodd Greg Cochrane, Kate Hutchinson, Mandy Drake, Owen Richards, Rebecca Innes, Reef Younis, Sam Little, Sam Walton, Simon Leak,Tim Cochrane This Month L&Q Loves

Andy Fraser, John Bills, Jon Wilkinson, Keong, Leah Stafford, Nita Keeler, Richard Onslow The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserved 2009 © Loud And Quiet.

The Beginning 05| 09

SOUTH BY SOUTH BEST Danielle Goldstein goes in search of the ultimate urban featival Photographer: ANDREW KENDALL

It’s that time of year again, when the festivals begin encroaching on our weekends and leaving us in a befuddled stupor for work on Monday morning, but there’s one big gun that gets in there early and it takes place a little further west of the Watford Gap than Glastonbury.

That’s right, it’s South By Southwest, and this year Loud And Quiet skirted across the Atlantic pond to see if the Yanks do it any better.

Instead of hitting an immediate wall of touts when we arrived to pick up our wristbands, we were met by scores of strangers telling us not to bother buying tickets because there would be a plethora of free shows going on throughout the week. That’s got to be worth at least three points against The Great Escape, Stag and Dagger and any other urban fest you can traipse around in the name of music.

And, of course, the sun shines

at a beautifully baking 30°c everyday, so you can forget getting drenched in the April showers at Camden Crawl, or being blown about in the sea breeze off Brighton beach.

Once we were officially kitted out with lanyards, sun cream and shades, we started worrying about how to catch every band we wanted to see. Nightmares of five hours of queuing to see TV On The Radio at last year’s Concrete and Glass festival come flashing back and downtown Austin is more than twice the size of Shoreditch. Surely we’d have to split in two to reach all the venues in time? Well, we may not have had Bernard’s Watch, but we did have the free shuttle provided by SXSW, allowing us to get to the furthest points of the festival and back again. Or, if we were lucky, the band we wanted to see was playing 18 different shows, like Vivian Girls did, or The Mae Shi who played so many that we lost

count. And so what if we missed Jane’s Addiction at the Playboy party, we were busy downing free margaritas that were thrust into our eager palms at a hairdresser’s on Sixth Street.

When it comes to SXSW, there’s a community spirit that no British counterpart can compare to. Every shop, museum, restaurant and bar throws open its doors and arms and lays down the welcome mat among a mountain of freebies. We managed to survive the entire week without having to spend a penny on provisions. At the French Legation Museum we scooped up some free ice cream, followed by a hearty barbecue at Aquarelle and washed all of this down with complimentary beers at the Cedar Street Courtyard. At the Camden Crawl they’ve only just introduced free programmes.

As well as being brilliantly organized, Austin in April ensures that you’re satisfied every minute of your stay, and

there are a myriad of surprises waiting to be discovered throughout the day – you’ve just got to hunt them down. While we were out there we were amused by numerous street performers ranging from free hugs to free dog kisses, mice and bunny entertainers, and the obligatory buskers. We caught No Age at a book store and Graham Coxon playing in a hat shop, surrounded by Stetsons. Where else can you find this sense of novelty? Ok, so Concrete and Glass offered up some contemporary art last October, but it didn’t have the wowfactor like seeing a middle-aged Devo perform - flowerpot-hats and all – directly after Tricky.

We’ve collected all our evidence, dusted four day’s worth of detritus from our weary bodies and arrived back on English soil in one piece and can safely say that Texans know how to throw a party. America – 1, England – 0.

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The Beginning

Books

By Janine Bullman

Punk Fiction. An Anthology of Short stories Inspired by Punk Edited by Janine Bullman with foreword

by Johnny Marr (Anova books) Your favourite band pen tales about their favourite punk tracks ---------------------

RIP Guerrilla Gigs… … hello Black Cab Sessions and an updated way of seeing bands stripped down Writer: Sam Little Photographer: ANDREW KENDALL

The Others: an east end band of crack-happy drooges who befriended Pete Doherty while he was still considered a musician, infiltrated Universal to ink a major record deal and scored an NME front cover by gobbing worthy lyrics like, “This is for the poor, not you rich kids”.

They were fun, weren’t they?

Apparently they’re still together, planning a comeback in the name of their cult-ish fanbase, 853 Kamikaze Stage-Diving Division. The nation holds its breath.

For all of their gash-ness though, Dominic Masters’ gang of skanks did leave us something of a legacy in their excrementstained wake. They certainly didn’t invent ‘guerrilla gigs’ – that was probably The Beatles when they made such a racket on a rooftop that the filth swiftly pulled the plug on the Fab Four – but their constant championing of shows on tubes and famous road crossings (well, Abbey Road’s to be exact) made them something of pioneers when the closest thing we had to another Libertines was The Paddingtons.

We’ve never quite gotten over seeing bands in such intimate and unusual environments; the

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craze propelled by every fadgobbling mobile phone company who were quickly on hand to offer The Rakes a packet to play in a kebab shop, and Amy Winehouse a fortune to quack on in an old – not very unusual at all – church. The corporations nearly ruined it of course, but while guerrilla gigs have become more predictable than shows in actual venues (seriously, it does happen!), websites like blackcabsessions.com are breathing new life into the tired phenomenon.

Youtube meets superstar busking, BCS is the brainchild of Gen and Chris, a couple of music and film lovers who take an artist, hail a London taxi, bundle said artist into the back of the vehicle and film them performing one song in one take.

The brief show is actually only for a live audience of them and the lucky cabby they’ve stopped, but all of their sessions are then uploaded to their site for fans of The Walkmen, Stricken City, Death Cab For Cuite and even Brian Wilson to see.

“Guerrilla gigs are growing so fast they’re not really guerrilla anymore,” says Gen. “Roof top sessions, black cab

sessions, balcony sessions, bandstand sessions – there are so many everywhere, which can only be a good thing in my eyes.

I suppose guerrilla gigs are so ubiquitous because there is a worldwide demand for them – fans increasingly want to see their music idols up close and stripped down. It’s this sense of one-on-one intimacy that the contained space of a black cab accentuates, sometimes to uncomfortable levels of intensity, but then discomfort is probably a good thing. It shows we’re trying at least…”

Also ‘trying’ – and embracing home video equipment and DIY editing software – are the folk behind bandstandbusking.com.

Again, the clue really is in the title. The stage is more traditional than five cramped seats moving as one, sure, but permission from an appropriate authority hasn’t always been given for these rushed shows, which is exactly what’s really missing from guerrilla gigs today – spontaneity and mischief. And in that sense, Gen’s right, guerrilla gigs no longer need or deserve their ‘guerrilla’ prefix; Dom Masters’ legacy has finally reached zero.

From Johnny Marr’s foreword to John Robb’s conclusion, all punk rock life is captured here in this anthology of short stories inspired by punk songs.

Contributors include Bloc Party’s Kele Okereke, The Rakes’ Alan Donahoe and Kills frontwoman Alison Mosshart, as well as novelists and writers including Cathi Unsworth and Salena Godden. The range of contributions in the book is every bit as wild and wide as you would expect from such a lineup, ranging from straightforward traditional storytelling to Sex Pistols inspired streams of consciousness and fantasy, ensuring something guaranteed to capture everybody’s imagination. Profits from the sale of the book will be donated to The Teenage Cancer Trust. So go and buy it.

Delta Blaine

Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fiction inspired by The Smiths Edited by Peter Wild (Serpent’s Tail) The Smiths’ become muses for this collection of short stories --------------------Peter Wild’s third collection of fiction inspired by the music of particular groups - his first two anthologies focused on the work of The Fall and Sonic Youth - is every bit as engaging and intriguing as those he has previously edited. Some writers included here have been inspired by the music of The Smiths, some have taken a song title and run with it, others have responded to the band’s humour, to their politics, or their mystique. All, though, have presented strong, readable individual pieces which make for a worthwhile and wholly recommended Spring read.

Janine Bullman

The Beginning

IT takes a lot of bottle Danny Canter discovers that Alcopop Records have no desire to release records the way you’d expect them to Illustration: Eleanor dunk at elbowdesigns.co.uk

Since it reared its head and we respectively started to whinge about the damn thing (first in Issue 2 of Loud And Quiet), Spotify’s existence has seen us obsessively quiz bands on how they feel about the digital streaming phenomenon. That ends here with issue 5, namely for the sake of our sanity. At our last tally the nays had been roundly trounced by the ayes, but before burying the subject that’s achieving very little when it’s not making us look like stuffy technophobes, we dragged it on one last jolly to our Horrors cover feature. They’d never even of heard of it, so we explained and Faris Badwan promptly surmised, “There’s no character in a bunch of mega-bites.” We’d ended on a high; closure was ours. That is until we heard that an Oxford indie label felt exactly the same.

Alcopop – the Big Scary Monsters-affiliated team from the home of Radiohead – have always prided their celebratory compilations on their special packaging and creative formats.

The series – called Alcopopular

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(clever, eh?) – reaches volume three on May 15th and the brains behind its conception have outdone themselves in making sure that this latest comp contends with those that came before.

“First we had a 3” CD,” explains Jack, the man whom founded the label with winnings from a football bet he made with his dad’s money. “Next was a hand spray-painted tape. Now we have the bottle.”

You’ve not turned over two pages at once and Jack is not living up to his label’s namesake by being faced… we think. To explain, “the bottle” is to be just that: a sleek glass receptacle, usually dedicated to holding a beverage, now completely empty but for a scorched parchment containing a URL address and password. The proprietor of each bottle then downloads the album via the unique information given to them.

It might all sound a bit postmodern (a digital release in a physical package), but Alcopop ensure us that’s not knowingly the case. Nor is combating the laziness of MP3 buyers the aim.

“We’re not attempting to be overtly post-modern in truth,” says Jack “or make people work harder for their songs. We’re just trying to make the music we deliver (which we love and hope others will too) much more appealing. This is a reaction to the drop in standard, duel case, run-of-the-mill sales. We continue to love physical releases but it needs to be something special. No longer can record companies lumber about releasing the same old formats month in, month out and expect to survive. We’re pitching at real music fans, and in our experience people appreciate not just quality music but a bit of creativity, and something that’s a bit special. The quality of the songs from the likes of Tellison, The Computers, Unicorn Kid, Electric Owls and Paul Steel (and everyone else on the new compilation) deserve to be presented in the right way!”

As gimmicks go, these days they don’t come much more fun than this. When Spiritualized originally released ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In

Space’ they did so in massive plastic pods with foil lids that resembled paracetamol packaging.

Listening to the CD was bittersweet as it meant ruining the box it came in. The cassette release of Oasis’ ‘Cigarettes & Alcohol’ was sold in a cardboard sleeve mocked up to look like it housed fags; Manic Street Preachers’ debut single, ‘Motown Junk’, was initially going to be partly covered in sandpaper so that it scratched and destroyed every other record or CD it came into contact with.

Today, digital music has made us more concerned with how quickly we can hear new music, and at the most cost-effective price. In the middle of a recession it’s completely understandable, but maybe it’s now that we need labels like Alcopop who’ll offer us something a little out of the ordinary.

There’s no character in a bunch of mega bites, but there’s a hell of a lot in a bottle containing a modern day pirate treasure map that leads you to some audio booty.

Magik Markers Friends of Sonic Youth and house band to The Devil, this Brooklyn duo have made the darkest record of 2009 Writer: Tom Pinnock “We were in this town, it’s right on the Russian border in Estonia,” says Magik Markers’ drummer and multiinstrumentalist Pete Nolan, explaining the biggest inspiration behind their new album. “We’re in this old Stalinist-era Soviet ballroom and it’s like completely in ruins, you know?

“Basically what it boiled down to was we were the house band playing for this demonlooking character up in this balcony, he was in charge of the whole show and we were playing for him and all his friends on fancy dinner tables.

“Then he brought out all these women who were supposed to be like signs of the Zodiac, and this monster, this devil dude, gave a speech about the fall of the Zodiac and everyone held up these signs to vote for the sign that they wanted to go down.

“So this one woman, I don’t remember what sign it was, they chose her, and these bouncers dragged her backstage, then they chopped her up and everyone ate her.”

Unfortunately, not a regular day for Magik Markers – drummer Nolan and guitarist and singer Elisa Ambrogio were flown out to spend a few vodka-fuelled days in darkest Estonia to play themselves in an arty Estonianlanguage horror film, The Temptation Of Saint Tony.

“That shit was weird as hell,” Pete laughs from his home in Brooklyn. “Everyone on the set was freakin’ wasted, like the whole time, they were just pouring out the vodka for four days. For one of the shoots we had to do we could barely stand.”

He admits that this had a massive influence on their new album, ‘Balf Quarry’. It’s undoubtedly a one-way ticket into creepy country - perhaps one of the freakiest, most occult records we have ever heard.

There’s the voodoo declamations of ‘Don’t Talk In Your Sleep’ – a droning bluesy sludge. Then there’s the

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extremely unhinged ‘Psychosomatic’, the kind of pop song a Broadmoor inmate might think is commercial.

The stunning, apocalypsesummoning ‘State Numbers’ is one of the highlights, a skeletal piano ballad of descending chords, distant military drumming and synth-created wind noise. Bizarrely, it seems to be about playing the state lottery – although lines like “your oxygen is running low”, “Indian summer of cancer” and “luck never gives, it only lends” suggest that the price of a scratch card in Connecticut is probably your mortal soul.

For fans of their cacophonous free noise live shows and past releases, there’s still some of their customary noise-rock. For example, ‘Jerks’ is a ferocious blast of hardcore that metaphorically kicks your head in for a minute and 44 seconds as Elisa screams out, “What you got don’t mean dick”.

Magik Markers have saved the best until last, though.

‘Shells’ is a ghostly drum-less dirge, led by funereal harmonium, a scraping violin and twinkling piano. Oh yeah, and it’s nearly eleven minutes long.

Trying to out-do Nico’s ‘The Marble Index’, right?

“It’d be hard to say. What do you mean ‘it sounds like Nico!?’” Pete laughs. “To be honest, we were like, ‘Oh, we wanna do something like this!’

We didn’t want it to be a straight up ripping it off, I think we would have a hard time just totally replicating a sound just because our shortcomings would translate into strengths, sometimes – hopefully.

“When we were mixing that song – I’ve just had a baby – that song’s lyrics, when it gets to that middle part about the little birds getting ready to crack open their shells, it just sounded so good down, and when it got to that part, like, I was just crushed, I was just devastated. It hit me so personally.”

Magik Markers sought out an unusual collaborator, one Julian

Amrine, to play the spooky violin on the song.

“We wanted to have someone play the violin that wasn’t me or Elisa,” says Pete “and we weren’t gonna have a professional, so we went on Craig’s List and put this ad saying we want someone to play violin who’s interested in improvising or whatever.

“And we got all these responses. The first one we got was from this guy who’s like, ‘My son is a violinist, he plays bluegrass music’. The next one we got was from some kind of professional musician and we’re like, ‘We’ll go with the 12year-old’.

“So we got him in there and his dad came in, and was like, ‘Yeah, give my kid a chance’, and the kid looked like Harry Potter or something – superprecocious – and he took all these takes and it was cool, sort of bluegrass thing, I think it made the end of that song really freaked out, kinda like ‘Helter Skelter’.”

2007’s ‘Boss’ was one of the highlights of the year, a Sonic Youth-esque collection produced by none other than Lee Ranaldo.

So how come ‘Balf Quarry’ is so different, so much quieter, but so much weirder?

“When we made ‘Boss’ we sort of went in with a few ideas,” Pete explains “and it sort of organically came about, but I sort of figured out, going around playing shows and stuff, ‘All these songs have the same beat’ - it’s cool, it works on the record, but [I thought], ‘This next record’s gonna have some different stuff!’”

Compared to ‘Boss’’s guitar, piano and drums, ‘Balf Quarry’ – named after a stone quarry that mined traprock for the first streets of Hartford, Connecticut – features a plethora of extra instruments, including ‘zoner’, ‘tapes’, ‘mosquito’ and ‘piper guitar’, most played by Pete. “‘Cause I got a bunch of other projects where I play all different instruments, I think at some point Elisa was like, ‘How come you just play the

drums in Magik Markers? Why don’t you do everything you can do, especially if there’s just two of us?’ Elisa’s playing a lot of synth on this one.

“Elisa goes nuts when it’s coming time to make a record, she’ll just lock herself in her room and writes and writes and writes. She’s sort of developed these ideas about songwriting from the last record, just from various sources, like reading about Tin Pan Alley songwriting, and how in blues music the words don’t rhyme, like each rhyme lends something to the music where it becomes an incantation, and it gives weight to all of the sound, something more like a spell, that’s beyond just words.”

It’ll be pretty hard to recreate songs like the sambafied ‘7/23’ live, but the duo reckon that’s the beauty of it.

You can check out their show in the summer, when they’re likely to come over for some gigs, joined by an extra keyboardist and Pete’s tape recorder for blind people as extra accompaniment. Watch out, though – they’re known for their violent shows and violent reactions from the crowd.

“I think that might be a myth,” says Pete, before going on to totally destroy his claim.

“One time it got a little violent while we were playing in Belgium. Leah, who used to play bass with us, just, like, swung around and a giant tuning peg hit Elisa right in the forehead.

It was total pro-wrestler style, right at the end of the set, and she was drenched in blood.

“I remember at the end of the set standing up and there was blood everywhere, splattered all over the ground. It was like some sort of gore scene!”

Check out ‘Balf Quarry’. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s one of our favourite records of the year so far – beautiful, freaky, noisy, creepy and downright stunning. The Estonian devil dude would agree.

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XX

The

You’ve never heard Aaliyah or Womack & Womack sound quite like this Writer: Stuart stubbs Photographer: OWEN RICHARDS They love a good cover, do The xx. Not in the ironic McFlydoing-I-Kissed-A-Girl-in-JoWiley’s-hilarious-Live-Lounge sense of the word. Nor in a Mark-Ronson-defecating-brassall-over-The-Smiths vein either.

No, when The xx take on another’s creation they strip it to its bones; they expose its inner beauty.

Until we’d heard the band’s take on Aaliyah’s ‘Hot Like Fire’ (sitting on the B-side to new single ‘Crystalised’) we’d taken the fallen princess of RnB on nothing but face value. Mrs R Kelly was a well-connected voice of new soul, but she was still largely singing songs to sell records, not to emotionally reach listeners. ‘Hot Like Fire’ wasn’t a soundtrack to falling in love, but rather one for doing the rude to. The drum-less version that this shy quartet have committed to tape changed all of that.

“I like to take a song that’s really different to us and make it my own,” explains band coleader Romy, almost in a whisper “so I liked Aaliyah because we’re not an RnB pop band.”

“I’m a big Aaliyah fan,” says second head-honcho Oliver, only slightly louder. “I’ve got an older sister, and, like with most older siblings, you steal their stuff. So I stole loads of my sister’s CDs – TLC and Aaliyah – so it’s something I’ve wanted to try for a while.”

If Romy’s personal aim was to make the track her own, she’s certainly succeeded. The transformation from slick hipgrinder to minimal, beautiful love note is quite astonishing.

It follows on from the band unearthing hidden depths in Womack & Womack’s ‘Teardrops’ some twelve months ago.

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Admittedly, the 80s classic is quite the emotionally-charged soul pop hit in its original form, but less so in the incarnation that the band happened upon – “Shamefully, we got it from the garage remix,” winces Oliver. Regardless, we’ve been hooked ever since.

Like Hillary Clinton forgiving Bill’s late nights in the office [insert crude and obvious orifice joke here], relations found in certain bands are strictly professional means to an end. Johnny Borrell’s is the only signature on Razorlight’s contract for example, with all other members taking home a salary that could never be big enough, but is rumoured to rival the average Sainsbury’s pay out; the Val Kilmer doppelganger in The Killers is there because Brandon Flowers’ pretty little mush knows that he needs him. Bono is actually tolerated as an inside joke between the rest of U2 these days, but you get the picture. The xx will forever be exempt from this group though, on account of its core forming at nursery school.

Oliver and Romy – the band’s duel singers, writers, and bassist and guitarist, respectively – are a pair that are as bashful and polite as each other. After christening our now-monthly club night last June, compliments of their set flustered the modest duo. As would any pair of 19-year olds that have lived in each other’s pockets since they were 3, they trust each other completely.

When it comes to writing music together they only sing the lyrics they pen themselves and never voice their interpretations of what a song is about.

“Because we come at it from different angle, it’s never about the same thing,” explains Romy. “We’re never singing to each other. A lot of the songs have references about relationships, but because Ollie’s my best friend I’m never going to be singing, ‘Oh I miss you’ at him. For a lot of our songs we have our own interpretations of what they’re about. We’d never say ‘this is going to be our break up song.’”

At 16, when Oliver and Romy became band mates as well as best mates, they soon found a creative ally in another studying – and failing – music at their school. Baria [keys] was then “a big Distillers fan” and the three were left to their own devises, experimenting with the music department’s new multi-track recorder. James completed the lineup a year later to programme the band’s beats and recreate them onstage with his speedy fingertips bouncing over a series of tabletop pads.

Ducking into an east London pub, on route to their first ever video shoot, all four members of the band are as softly spoken and courteous as when we first met. Oliver even mentions how much he enjoyed one of our rambling podcasts a few months back, quoting a libellous comment I’d made about Robert Kilroy Silk being a thief. And how The xx carry themselves is synonymous with the dulcet pop they make but cannot describe.

“We’re always described as ‘hoody-wearing’,” notes Romy “because we wear hoodies, but that’s because we’re cold. It’s not like we’re from an estate or anything. Most people our age wear hoodies. I’m still having a bit of trouble describing us,

and what other artists we sound like. I don’t think we can be considered any one genre.”

“It’s strange,” says Oliver “because of our age we get urban quite a lot. And then people start mentioning… Skins.” The towering bassist grimaces, setting off a domino rally of similar facial expressions around the table. “A lot of it is just because of our age.”

That’s one of the struggles of the youth, I guess. If you’re a band made up of 19 and 20-year olds you’re going to be compared to the characters from desperate TV shows commissioned at the end of a meeting that was pencilled in the diary as ‘Hollyoaks with tits brainstorming session’. In

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truth, The xx’s music is a far cry from Skins: less ‘Standing In The Way Of Control’, more down tempo Metronomy on sedatives. The covers they’ve tackled have been a success, but the band’s original compositions are set to shatter hearts further.

Preceding an album that won’t be out until September is this month’s debut single, ‘Crystalised’. Featuring the hushed vocals of Oliver and Romy – which alternate before synchronising as if made to do so – it’s an emotive affair that we’ve already learned to expect from the band. And its creator’s reluctance to discuss its message shouldn’t be a surprise

either.

“You said it better than me,” says Romy to Oliver.

“Did I? errm… I always struggle with explaining this…” comes the reply.

Romy: “You said it after my cousin ask, ‘so what is this song actually about?’ And you said it. You said…” Romy pushes her hands out as if a Supreme singing ‘Stop! In The Name Of Love’.

“What?” say Oliver, grimacing once more through a smile. “I dunno… it’s pretty selfexplanatory…”

Romy finally goes for it.

“It’s about… if someone’s getting a bit keen, it’s like, ‘slow down.’” She does the hand

gesture again, which suddenly makes a lot of sense.

Clearly, The xx are very private individuals. And, as history’s shown us time and time again, those not chasing the London Lite column inches often make the best and most personal music – Anthony Hegharty, Thom Yorke, Burial, and now The xx, to name but a few.

Any hype they’ve received – most notably, the band featuring in NME’s ‘Ones To Watch’ issue this year – doesn’t bother them because they remain oblivious to it. “I didn’t realise that there was much hype,” says Baria “because our manager doesn’t tell us about any of that.”

Oliver simply considers being

written and talked about “a really big compliment” and thinks little else of it.

Success could, of course, change all of that. Next time we see The xx – after they’ve supported The Big Pink, been the surprise hit of the summer and delivered one of the year’s most beautiful albums – the free Reeboks they’ve recently wangled (“Freeboks”, as Oliver calls them) may have mutated into many ugly, corporate endorsements as the band cross the road to avoid wretched mortals like myself. I very much doubt it though.

There’s more chance of seeing them in Skins.

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WILD PALMS Shoreditch isn’t big enough for this band, whatever their name Writer: CHRIS WATKEYS Photographer: brendanandbrendan.com

When you’re being held back as a band by something as seemingly superficial as a name, it’s time to do something about it. That is why, two or three months ago, London four-piece Ex Lion Tamers severed themselves from their Wire-associated moniker and, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, became Wild Palms.

Nothing has changed about the music - a powerful blend of spiky beats and squally guitars - but since the switch the band are no longer weighed down with listeners drawing immediate and overbearing comparisons with the post-punk outfit from whose song their original name was taken.

“The actual name itself wasn’t such a problem - we were just using it at first as a kind of handle to go in the studio with ‘cos we were all with different bands,” says singer Lou Hill.

“But it’s just when people come and watch you, and what they see and what they hear is completely marred straight off, like you’ve already sown the seeds.”

Guitarist Darrell Hawkins agrees: “At least with Wild Palms it’s something that can become ours.”

I’ve met the band outside the Old Blue Last pub, one of the many venues in the Shoreditch area that forms the hub of the East London scene. It’s a scene

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which, while spawning some great bands, has become somewhat insular and inward-looking. Wild Palms don’t intend to fall into that trap though. Lou: “The problem with playing in East London is that you can become, or people start out and they already are, homogenised, because they’re trying to... they’re emulating what’s going on at the moment, for that short fix of ‘let’s go and play East London.’”

Drummer James Giblin displays a thinly veiled contempt for a lot of the dross knocking around this scene, of which he feels there is plenty.

“You almost feel like you’re old hat just for being good at your instruments,” he says. “If you can play, you’re considered to be some kind of outsider Bull & Gate band, trying to come in to the Shoreditch scene.”

Neither is being successful in East London an end in itself, reckons Lou as he tells me, “a lot of new bands - it’s not like we’re old veterans by any means - but I see a lot of bands who are playing the East London scene, and after playing a few gigs there, it’s like they think they’ve made something in some way, but anyone can play anywhere in East London basically. And for us it’s the

tip of the iceberg.”

Unlike many others, collective ownership of the songwriting process is important for Wild Palms - in terms of the tunes themselves, this lot are as democratic a band as you’ll find. No individual makes a greater or smaller contribution to the process than the next man; the creative process for Wild Palms is more organic than the veg rack at Waitrose. Doing it this way has spawned tracks like free download ‘Over Time’ a street-prowling punker for dancing to - and keeps their music from settling into a stylistic rut, says Lou. “And it’s exciting as well, because what you do, every little bit you do is filtered or morphs into something else that you never thought it would. Like, there are ideas that people come up with, and someone else takes them somewhere that you never envisaged.”

Some decent record labels have been sniffing around Wild Palms in the weeks preceding our meeting, and the boys are hopeful of one putting their money where their mouth is and backing them.

“Come December, we’ll be signed to a label”, says James.

“That will happen. With the interest we’re getting, and with

the manager we’ve got, who is gonna put all of his fingers into everything we can get... the labels that are involved are good labels.”

Which leads onto Wild Palms’ long term plans. With the concept of making a profit out of recording and selling music pretty much dying on its arse at this level, what hopes do the guys have for trying to make a half-decent living out of this whole thing? James gives me the short answer: “Don’t! That doesn’t really bother us at all, I wouldn’t worry about that yet”.

“If that’s what you’re in it for then you’re gonna find it hard”, says Lou “because you’re not gonna get that. I think we’re realistic about our aims and what we’d like to do, and the band we’d like to be remembered as. And I don’t think that [making money], in all honesty, is our thing.”

A band entirely without pretension, with realistic aims, making great music and genuinely doing it for the love of it: we’ve heard it all before but that does genuinely appear to be Wild Palms’ ‘thing’. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves, this lot are fastly proving to be a class act.

BANJO OR FREAKOUT Disco Drive founder finds his true calling in laptops, looping beats and soaring shoegaze

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Writer: IAN ROEBUCK Photographer: ELINOR JONES

“I understand why my cover versions get a lot of attention but after a while I just want to do my songs; my songs are much better,” muses Alessio Natalizia as dusk falls on the watery labyrinth of Camden Lock.

The 29-year old Italian, also known as Banjo or Freakout, first came to prominence posting earcatching covers on his blog.

Burial, Battles, and even Amy Winehouse have all been transformed by his distinctive production style, and this unique take on familiarity, combined with his own celestial noisepop, soon found a feverish audience - DFA boss and all round tastemaker James Murphy one of the first to express admiration. There is a lot to admire, a melancholic merger of beats and melodies making for an enchanting sound. “Everything I do is just me,” says Alessio.

“Banjo or Freakout is basically me putting myself 100 percent out there.”

True today, that wasn’t always the case. Alessio was a founding member of Turin based post punk outfit Disco Drive until something changed. A reconnaissance mission into the world of programmed beats was carried out with a stealth and subtlety that soon found a way into his music. “I was still

playing in the band when I first came to London,” he reveals. “I would practice on the laptop undercover whenever I went back to Italy then return to London to work on Banjo or Freakout.”

The metamorphosis was complete when the musician made a permanent move to London. Only then could the boundaries of Banjo or Freakout be fully explored - “It was when I came here that I discovered this computer world,” he says “until I was 27 I didn’t even have a laptop. It was like a revolution for me.”

Embracing this Garage Band universe with typical brashness, its been well documented that Banjo or Freakout is a one take wonder, a cowboy of the laptop frontier that records everything first time and first time only.

“I have been misunderstood though,” says Alessio. “It’s not like it’s straight off, I practice a lot beforehand to find the perfect balance of everything and then I record it.

When I press REC I am not going back, but it’s not meant to be pretentious - I try to give myself rules otherwise I’ll go on forever.”

Loops, samples and programmed sounds create Banjo or Freakout’s layers of beauty that regularly draw comparisons with

bands like My Bloody Valentine and Animal Collective, but the sound is probably closer to Panda Bear in its use of repetition and washed out static. However, each track has humble beginnings. “It is just verse/chorus/verse/chorus,” we’re told. “If you take out the noises and the loops they’re actually pretty stupid songs.”

But they’re Alessio’s ‘stupid songs’, and, being a hugely personal project, the leap from bedroom to stage was initially full of trepidation – “I remember when I was playing by myself I was terrified,” Alessio lets on. “A new country, a new everything.”

Soon the live show saw Alessio keeping company on stage when half of the blissful London duo Gentle Friendly - Daniel, to be precise - agreed to help out.

Alessio says: “With someone else on stage its better for the music, and its better for my nerves too.” And it seems to work. More and more, the pair are bringing an added live element to the processed beats of tracks like the tropical pots’n’pans of ‘IR’. Between the two of them they make an incredible cacophony, and it could be just the start. “I’m open to putting other people in the mix but it has to happen

very slowly,” explains Alessio.

“When I do the album and tour a lot I can include other people and maybe we’ll start writing together.”

While the relatively infant project of Banjo or Freakout remains an intimate work in progress, outside focus is gaining fast. Titled ‘Upside Down’, a new EP is soon to be released by Half Machine Records (Neils Children, Theoretical Girl, MIT). A bewitching collection of songs (and yes they are actually songs), it’s a 12” release that draws you in with a warmth and charm that was perhaps missing from Alessio’s earliest recordings. The lo-fi glitches and imperfections that you originally fell in love with are still there, along with the rattling repetition and loops, but this is a record with heartfelt sincerity.

“I think it’s quite different,” says the man behind the soundscapes. “Its more like pop in a way, and it has the loops, but there are more actual songs.”

Not afraid of developing his sound and adopting influences as he moves forward, it feels like Banjo or Freakout can go anywhere he wants.

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Standing out in today’s saturated clubland is no mean feat while writing a blog that people actually read is practically unheard of. Singles label No Pain In Pop have managed both though, applying their DIY ethos to the tired indie disco mould and waffling on about their results in cyberspace. Celebrating the past year, which saw the New Cross team curate Fabric this month, is a new compilation that should tell you all you need to know about this media-straddling indie enterprise.

“You’re probably just saying that because it’s down in New Cross,” says Tom King, now starting to look uncomfortable.

“It’s slightly removed from the rest of London, so there’s a mystique about it. It’s not consciously cool, and I don’t think we’re cool… I mean… look at me!”

For those not sitting opposite Tom, he’s being modest… hard on himself even. Far from a Hoxditchian dandy he may be, but a spod from the Hollyoaks extras bus he ain’t either. Regardless, there’s little escaping the fact that his co-founded club-night is considered the coolest evening out in London at the moment, or at least it was until its Amersham Arms base paused its live music licence in

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January until Transport For London reopen the East London tube line, lassoing New Cross and dragging it nearer to those north of the river. “They’re concentrating on selling booze and playing cheesy music in their back room for now,” discloses Tom. Being nudged from their comfort zone has worked out well for No Pain In Pop though. By the end of 2008 Tom King and partner Tom Oldham had conquered the areas surrounding Goldsmith’s University, flyering halls of residence safe in the knowledge that their stiffest competition was neighbouring dive The Venue - a vast building that continually plays host to white jeans and hilariously named tribute bands like SOASIS

and Antarctic Monkeys. On the other side of New Cross Road, in The Amersham, the two Toms would throw a far more interesting party with live sets from the newest bands trying their hands at originality; bands like Telepathe, Banjo Or Freakout, Buttonhead and The Big Pink.

“I guess you can say things are very ‘No Pain In Pop’,” says King of his club’s experimental music policy “but I don’t know how you define that. When I talk to people and they ask, ‘what kind of bands do you put on?’, I don’t know how to answer. If you say ‘indie’ people think of guitar indie, and it’s not that at all. I don’t think we’ve even released at single with a guitar on it… apart from the b-side of Banjo Or Freakout. We just say

‘not shit, and not completely generic’. You don’t get those two things very often. The nights are more dancey, with grime and dubstep as well.”

The lack of competition helped, but becoming the soothsayers of southeast London was largely due to the club’s willingness to promote musicians that dared to flout the verse/ chorus/verse formula. Instead, bands like Gentle Friendly and A Grave With No Name would whirl sounds around the stage that seemed to come from instruments we’d never heard before. But the Amersham was soon to be redundant of live bands, leaving NPIP to prove themselves elsewhere, which they duly did, firstly at The Lexington in Angel, and again at Fabric where

Blog / Club / Label

06 01 – NPIP Kode 9 poster 02 – NPIP Halloween poster 03 – Health 04 – Gentle Friendly 05 – Telepathe 06 – Banjo or Freakout ‘Mr No’ sleeve

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Writer: Danny Canter

they curated Room 2 of Easter’s Adventures In The Beetroot Fields.

“It is a compromise doing joint nights like those,” notes King “we never get full say about who we book on the lineup, because we’re not in charge of the budget or anything like that. We wanted to book people that Fabric weren’t happy with so the final lineup is a compromise and there’s one band on there that we don’t want to have on but we had to in order to keep everyone happy.”

London’s best super-club invaded, the two Toms – supported by artwork chief Tobias and head blogger Kev Kharas – can presumably step away from promoting events and concentrate on their original conception – a record label.

“It’s worth being three dimensional,” says King in response. “The music industry’s

so fucked up, and there’s no money in selling records any more. None of our sides [blog, club, label] work as well without the other two being there.” And so, the indie discos clearly aren’t over just yet, simply on hold while a new venue to call ‘home’ is found. And while the search continues, plans for more physical releases can stride on, starting with this month’s compilation, cannily entitled ‘No Pain In Pop’.

Cited as a collection of tracks that sum up the last year of the label/night/blog, it features bands already released by the team (HEALTH, Banjo Or Freakout, Telepathe) and those that have played past club nights (A Grave With No Name, Ponytail, PENS).

They say: “it’s definitely our graduation plan to release more albums.” We say: we’d expect

nothing less considering that King and Oldham first met quibbling over another totally independent record label with big ideas – “Tom and I met in the shop at Goldsmith’s union,” remembers King. “We got in an argument over Theoretical Girl who was on an Angular Records compilation. I really liked it, he didn’t.”

The local label of Angular is still considered an inspiration, as is Geoff Travis’ Rough Trade.

Ask any young music fan releasing records and they’ll probably say the same, from the brilliantly to the simply obscure. “In the last 6 months, the amount of DIY stuff about is just ridiculous,” says Tom. “It’s obviously good but it does become really elitist when people are suddenly putting out 300 7” by bands you’ve never heard of. When something becomes niche it does become quite

elitist at the same time.”

With that in mind, where you’d place NPIP in terms of elitism is unclear. The erratic, metallic strikes and zombie vocals of ‘//M\\’ by HEALTH (released by the label last year) seem to be as niche as things can get, and yet it rapidly sold out due to the LA noise-core-ers being the underground hit of 2008. The label’s debut release tells a similar story as ‘Chromes On it’ – following much blogoshpere excitement – secured Telepathe’s hipster crown of hype on this side of the Atlantic. Like we say, No Pain In Pop have become soothsayers of leftfield indie, whether its founders think they’re cool or not.

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Graham Coxon

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What with a fantastic new solo album out on May 11, the imminent Blur reunion and his work on Pete Doherty’s solo album, there’s a lot to talk to Graham Coxon about. Loud And Quiet spent a few sunny hours in the legend’s motorbike-strewn back garden.

Writer & Photographer: Tom Pinnock

Tom: How have you been Graham?

Graham: I’ve been alright, I’ve been a bit tired, a bit narcoleptic at the moment. I’ve had jetlag. I was in South By Southwest down in Texas and that was good – that was running around basically playing. I was feeling a bit surreal the first two days, trying to make sense of where we landed and where we were, it was pretty weird actually, a weird old place.

T: I saw some pictures of you playing in a hat shop there – you’re a big hat fan, right?

G: The hat shop was great. Yeah, I like hats. They had a couple of hats that I liked, I got a couple. They weren’t free though.

T: What types did you get?

G: They were caps, like flat caps-type stuff. Sort of an American-style flat cap, sort of like 30s Chicago hoodlum type of hats. You know, like ‘The Sting’, with the triangular panels and the button on the top, I’ve got one that’s a bit like that, it was in a sort of Ben Elton-suit-tweed, black with flecks in it.

T: Your new album sounds great – I’m very into that kind of late 60s, early 70s British folk stuff.

G: Is that what it is? Oh no...

T: Well, I can tell it’s influenced by that...

G: Yeah, it is influenced by that – I suppose I’m easily inspired, things rub off on me pretty easily, it’s surprising how influenced I can get without really knowing it. I get it when I listen to Van Der Graaf Generator and The Jam, you know, I get shocked just how much of it rubs off on me. And I suppose the first folk record I got was ‘Rave On’, which was a collection of things from the early 70s, so I suppose that started to get to me a bit, and Davey Graham and John Martyn and Bert Jansch, all them lot, you know. I thought instead of moaning that I’ll always just be an indie strummer I should actually try and play along with this music and see if I could cope with playing anything like it. So I just decided to try and [finger-]pick, it’s kind of four years trying to do that.

T: So it’s a concept album about someone’s life, is that right?

G: Yeah, it kind of is, yeah.

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But I refrained from filling the album with too much gumpf about any story or narrative... I used to get annoyed with the illustrations on the front of DH Lawrence books when I was a teenager, I used to cover them with brown paper – not ‘cause they were rude or anything, but because I didn’t want a picture of them on the front. More or less it’s a story – the first half’s a bit weird and innocent, it’s about love and magic and girls and growing up and adolescence, and then there’s war, and then the second half is all fucked up and innocence gone and relationships destroyed and addictions, you know, all that kind of thing. It’s loosely based on anybody’s life, I suspect, who’s gone through anything. Apart from the war part of it, and getting shot and brought back to life, that doesn’t happen very often to people. These are the first songs I wrote in the countryside, and they come from my love of Symbolist painting, von Stuck, those mad Victorians that were scared shitless of the Sphinxes.

T: It’s quite an evocative title, ‘The Spinning Top’ - is it a reference to the character’s lost childhood?

G: I thought it was more, kind of the world, that’s what the world is.

T: You’ve been doing a lot with Pete Doherty on his solo album – you almost seem unlikely friends, as he’s still battling addiction.

G: We all are. There’s not a day goes past where I don’t want a drink or a smoke, or want to, in some way, enter into a void of some sort, so he’s probably just a little closer to actually doing it. He seems really great.

Some people say, ‘God, isn’t that the last place you wanna be, near Pete?’ Actually, I only saw him swig on a Guinness and have some orange drinks onstage and that’s it. He’s struggled with a lot of stuff, but he’s good fun, you know, I think he does have a talent for words, he has a great romanticism and I certainly think things like ‘Lady Don’t You Fall Backwards’ are absolutely beautiful, you know, chordally, melodically and the words. So I think he’s done some well good work, I’m proud to be involved in it.

T: So you coped with him smoking a lot around you then?

G: It was alright. Peter’s lungs sound like crisp bags, you know, bless him. When I went to see Brideshead Revisited there was such a lot of sexy smoking in that, that I was in the cinema dying for a cigarette for two hours. Lovely glasses too, people were drinking wine out of beautiful glasses, and that’s enough to make you want to drink wine. [People shout from the building nearby] Are they shouting at us? Bunch of loonies.

T: No, I think they’re just saying goodbye to someone. I was lucky enough to see you and Damon soundcheck at the NME Awards...

G: God, that was terrible.

T: No, it was really good.

Especially when you did ‘Strange News From Another Star’.

G: Really? Yeah, we did that, didn’t we.

T: It was quite moving seeing you guys up there.

G: Was it? People say that and I don’t know whether they’re just obliged to say it or feel that they should say it, when actually...

T: I’m not just saying it.

G: Well that’s really nice. I think people thought it was a nice thing and that’s good. I’d hate for people to feel obliged to feel moved in some weird way, because it was, after all, for me and Damon, a big deal, and it’s cool if it is for other people as well – I’m not expecting the whole world to start crying just because we’ve got onstage again!

T: Which songs are you personally looking forward to playing in the summer?

G: I really like ‘It Could Be You’ and ‘Globe Alone’, ‘Death Of A Party’, ‘Popscene’ is always good fun. ‘Bugman’ I think was a good one that I always enjoyed, ‘Mellow Song’.

There’s lots that I really like playing. There’s a few though, like I was just listening to ‘Mr Robinson’s Quango’, it’s just a nuts tune. I mean, god, how many more insane ideas could we cram into a song, it’s just crazy the amount of ideas we were having.

T: That used to be my favourite song on ‘The Great Escape’ when it came out.

G: I like ‘The Great Escape’

actually, I think it’s alright.

A lot of people think it’s a bit weird and miserable.

T: I listened to it a few months ago for the first time in ages on a nightbus, and it kind of made sense, drunk watching London go by.

G: Yeah, that’s kind of what it’s like, because it’s totally late night, hungover, award ceremonies, too much alcohol and darkness.

T: If you had to pick one Blur album you were most proud of what would it be?

G: Difficult really. I think ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ is nice, ‘cause it touched on the slick side of us but also the really out-of-focus kind of weird internal... things like ‘Oily Water’ and ‘Resigned’, I was really proud of those recordings because they came out of one day I think – ‘Oily Water’, ‘Resigned’, ‘Bone Bag’ and ‘Peach’, I think we recorded them four in one day, just on our own. I was really proud of those, I think they were the best recordings we ever made to be honest. So for them to make it on an LP was pretty neat.

T: You guys rehearsing at the moment?

G: We haven’t for a couple of weeks, ‘cause we’ve all been busy, but I think we’ve cut it down to about 70 songs that we’ve got to rehearse, and then choose from that what we want to play. I mean, it’s a lot of good stuff. I don’t know how many songs we’re gonna have to play but we’ve got to start getting some kind of setlist together soon, I reckon.

T: Has there been talk of any new Blur stuff?

G: Not really. If it feels good then we will, you know, I’m sure we will. But we’ll see what these shows are like, I suppose.

Damon’s got Gorilla things going on, I think, we’ve all got some stuff going on, so it won’t be in the immediate future, if we do decide to. But I think I’d be up for it anyway. If everyone else is really into the idea I think it’d be fun, it’d be interesting anyway. Interesting, if not fun!

T: So more importantly, have you tried Alex’s cheese?

G: Yeah, I’ve tried the old Blue Monday and the Wallop. The cheddar is really the big boss.

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The Change Gang Dividing opinion was fun, but now The Horrors are creating the music you’ve always wanted them to Writer: stuart stubbs Photographer: PAVLA KOPECNA

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ick Jagger said something about not playing satisfaction then he’s 50.The moment a band stops looking to the future they should just give up.” - Faris Badwan Since they first arrived there’s been many misconceptions about The Horrors, but none have been further from truth than those that questioned the band’s sincerity.They were the ultimate haircut band; all looks and styling; a fad; very possibly – in many people’s eyes – a flat-pack group; the result of an A&R executive’s Malcolm McLaren obsession.They had to be fakes and no amount of eyewitnesses could vouch for their image. If you’d been to Junk – the Southend club founded by Spider Webb (then plain old Rhys Webb) – and had seen Joshua Third’s preened Robert Smith bouf bobbing about to The Sonics, you were

mistaken, deluded, or on the sinister payroll.

And as Faris Rotter (now Badwan once more) would fling black paint at crowds and climb speaker stacks – barking lyrics as he went – he furthered suspicions, clearly pulling focus from his band’s musical know how.

We’d longed for a band that looked less like estate agents and more like the idols our parents could boast about, and once they’d arrived our cynicism worked overtime to rid the world of these stylish spectres. “[Our style] helped in the sense that just as many people would get into us after seeing a photo as they would totally write us off, so it sort of balances itself out,” explains Faris in his hushed, articulate tone. “But as we’ve always said, the way we dress just reflects the music we like.”

“As strange as it might sound, there was never much thought that originally went into that,” adds Spider Webb. “We’d be just running around Southend or going to London to watch bands and playing music together, so it was always the last thing we’d be thinking of, but of course, throw us in a climate where everyone’s wearing the same jeans or whatever and it does become a different thing. And we do come from a different place, and we don’t want to be that kind of band, which is why we listen to the records we do and try to be the band that we are, because we don’t really feel an affinity with what a band should or shouldn’t be. I imagine now how it could have been perceived.The funny thing is that people who knew our backgrounds and what we were trying to do when introducing bands

like The Seeds and The Sonics – be it kids, journalists or musicians – that was just it; it was there. For people that didn’t know where it was coming from it probably looked like a ridiculous display, which was missing the point completely.”

On the set of The Horrors’ new video shoot, the topic of aesthetics is unavoidable; partly because the oversized red carnation sprouting from the lapel of Faris’ white DJ is nearly having my eye out, and partly because the band’s appearance has once again been a media talking point surrounding their return.

Haven’t you heard? The Horrors have stopped wearing eye makeup! Shit! Has our ‘Jade Goody:The Am I A Minga Years’ issue gone to press yet, or can we claw it back for this big seller? - “I’m wearing the same clothes now that I always have,” says Faris on the matter, Spider Webb deflating any excitement left in the subject by simply stating, “I think most people look different two years later.”

Needless to say that while Coffin Joe’s hair length was absorbing more than its fair share of attention, being neglected was the music that made up The Horrors’ debut album. ‘Strange House’ charted at 37, and soon dropped from the top 40. Considering the band sang about asylum seekers (‘Sheena Is A Parasite’), collecting abandoned babies gloves (‘Gloves’) and covered Screaming Lord Sutch (‘Jack The Ripper’), it was a very respectable start. But their major label had gotten too caught up in the hype – plastering expensive tube adverts for the release across London – and, expecting more for the money invested, dropped the band.They, like

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most, had missed the point of the group, and tracks like ‘Count In Fives’ and ‘She’s The New Thing’ had their pop melodies overlooked by everyone except E4 who used the latter to soundtrack a TV trailer.

“For us, we did exactly what we wanted to do for the first record,” reflects Webb.

“When we got together the aim was to get out and play live, and possibly record a 7”.

That was our aim.We’d only been together for a matter of months and we were learning it as we went along… I think the first record is exactly what we should have done…”

“Absolutely,” agrees Faris. “As Rhys says, we chose to learn from the live environment, and the excitement of that, rather than in rehearsal rooms, and I think that record has its place in time, as does this new one.”

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n a forgotten east London venue called Toynbee Hall,The Horrors reset to mime once more to ‘Who Can Say’. Oddly, we’re still not sick of the track that will become the band’s first ‘proper’ comeback single, despite having heard it 15 times in the last hour. Granted, with every playback we do get a different Faris Badwan to keep us entertained – nonchalantly mouthing his words and twitching to cymbal crashes, over and over but never in the same places, much to the annoyance of the director, I’m sure – but it takes little away from the song itself. If the download-only release of ‘Sea Within A Sea’ demonstrates how much The Horrors have been experimenting with krautrock

“You could probably count the amount of good bands in london on one hand, and you’d still not make it to five” walls of sound, ‘Who Can Say’ boasts of the band’s progression in melodious song writing, sounding like a primitive New Order as its looping synth chimes over its author’s regretful lament – drawls Faris: I never meant for you to get hurt/And how I try/ Oh how I try. From its overdriven, grinding bass intro to its Shangi Las tambourine bashes, it’s due to punt those cynical ‘fashion band’ jibes out of sight, as is the rest of album number 2, ‘Primary Colours’.

The seeds have been sewn for the second coming of The Horrors. If water-cooler gossip is to be believed, promo copies of the new record permanently live in the office stereos of magazines, papers and websites everywhere. Everyone loves the band’s new sonic sound.Who’d have thought it? Well, very few, in fact.

“I think we kind of expected that,” says Faris of the surprise being caused. “We know that people have preconceptions and, in some ways, part of the satisfaction about making a record like this is that people like that will probably be confused.We were just

really excited to make it.We’d toured the first record for so long. In the first year of being a band, the first album was a documentation of our time writing whenever we could between shows.When we finally got to the end of touring that record it really felt like it was time to get started writing again, and we were really happy to do that. It wasn’t in any way a chore.”

“It was great,” continues Webb, as Joshua Third appears with a saw and wanders off in search of some health and safety-flouting amusement. “The best thing about it was that we’d been waiting to get back into the studio for so long that we hid ourselves away in this place in Stoke Newington where we worked best and could come and go as we pleased.

Even by the end of the sessions for ‘Strange House’ we’d started to branch out and take steps forward.Tracks like ‘Sheena’ and ‘Count In Fives’ were the first things we wrote as a group, but then with things like ‘Draw Japan’ and ‘A Train Roars’, written almost 8 months into being a band, we were already starting to explore different sonic ideas, and that set the pace for where we wanted to go.”

Sonics, walls of sound and krautrock drones: they’re all at the heart of ‘Primary Colours’.Tracks like the opening ode to The Jesus Mary Chain, ‘Mirror’s Image’, and the lethargic ‘I Only Think Of You’ (owing much of its hypnotic trudge to My Bloody Valentine) boast them more overtly than others, but shoegaze whirrs and unidentified noises underlie the whole album. From the baggy (yes, baggy!) ‘Do You Remember’, to the beautiful ‘Scarlet Fields’ (the band as www.loudandquiet.com

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single by X point. And we enjoyed that way of working then, but now we can explore as we write.”

But there was surely a self-perpetuated pressure. Few bands get a second bite at the cherry, none get a third, so what if ‘Strange House’ wasn’t a false start but rather the band at their creative peak? The Horrors had to believe that this is the most important record they’d ever make.

“I think we would always have that aim anyway,” says Faris “but I think to have that concern you have to worry about the money you’re going to make as a band. If we didn’t have a label we’d have made a record and put it out ourselves.When you’d be doing this anyway, you’re not really worried about how many people will buy your record in the short term. Ultimately, as it was our chance to make something totally coherent – write a body of work and pick from that – there was no pressure, because we knew we could do it.

We’d made an album with no time whatsoever, so when we were given time to do it we had no doubt that it would be a problem.”

O close as they’ll ever get to ‘doing Joy Division’), they’re there.

While Faris is already looking to a third album – “The next one will be better,” he’d told me earlier – Spider Webb is particularly excited about this one. Dragging on a cigarette while cameras are realigned and film crew huddles take place, he lets loose his enthusiasm about what his band are currently achieving. “For me, there’s an element of the record being this constantly moving, growing, throbbing sound, or piece,” he smiles. “‘Sea Within A Sea’ seems to tie the whole thing in this infinite circle.

Starting with the intro to ‘Mirror’s Image’, and ending with the sequences that take you out of ‘Sea With In A Sea’ seems to extend this idea of movement and infinity almost.”

Plainly,The Horrors are no longer bashing out simple, ferocious punk songs; they’re meticulously studying the form of everything they write.

In coming months the record’s producer will no doubt be accredited to the fine details that make ‘Primary Colours’ a great album, rather than a good one. And Portishead’s Geoff Barrow certainly deserves his curtain call, but so too does film director Chris Cunningham. As rumoured, he produced two of the album’s ten tracks, one of which the band cite as vital in shaping everything that followed. ‘Three Decades’ was the first song the band worked on after the promotional schedule for ‘Strange House’ finally halted.The blueprint of ‘Primary Colours’, it remains Spider Webb’s favourite track, he says, “because it cemented the idea of what we wanted to do.”

“Chris did two of the tracks but it got to a point where we needed to record the whole album and he was working on two

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films,” explains Faris “so we had the choice of either waiting a couple of months to do it with him or doing it there and then.We decided to just push ahead with it, because we already had a clear idea in our heads of what we wanted the record to be, so, y’know, we didn’t want him to come in and change things too much anyway. It would have been a great album with him, no doubt, but it would have been very different.”

Barrow was a wise substitution. His ear for industrial soundscapes – showcased on tracks like ‘Machine Gun’ from Portishead’s album ‘Third’ – sat side by side with Cunningham’s shrouded foundations, and he knew how to police the band’s creativity – “He’d definitely tell us when it was an idea too far,” says Webb – but no, he didn’t mould The Horrors into the band they are now, an opinion that detractors are already sharpening for battle.

He didn’t mould them because he didn’t need to. After a whole summer of writing, the bands were ready to record 10 of their completed 35 songs with an unmoveable sense of how they wanted each one to sound.

On a major record label, ‘Strange House’ had been finished in a matter of months to capitalise on the attention the band were receiving.This time around, on indie XL Recordings,The Horrors were given no deadline to deliver an album by.

“There was completely less pressure to write,” explains Webb “because this time we knew that we’d recorded the first album, we’d put it out and done completely what we wanted to do; we got peoples’ attention and we wanted to turn people on to something different. But this time we could take a step back.We weren’t being rushed into something, we didn’t have to deliver a

n The Rolling Stones’ last tour, Mick Jagger shook his elastic torso around the O2 Arena whilst croaking ‘Satisfaction’.With all the exuberance of a 22-year old, he pointed and pomped around the vast stage. He was 61. Last month, Faris Badwan led The Horrors on stage to perform their first gig in a year. In the Rich Mix Cinema, Bethnal Green, the band then demonstrated just how much they’d been heeding their own advice, “looking to the future”.They’re very own ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Count In Fives’, was heard, but delivered with all the rushed angst of a band performing out of duty, complete with a two-footed attack on the static crowd from the band’s front-man. On a set list of 10, only one other previously released Horrors song featured – ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’. “Enjoy this one while you can,” spat an unimpressed Badwan “we’re going to play it double time.”

Two things were of note that evening – the new material failed to disappoint, sounding far more epic than even an onlooking Jason Pierce had no doubt expected, and the two oldies that reared their heads didn’t appear out of place, however quick they were played.The proof was in every industry bod’s nod;The Horrors had evolved into something quite special while keeping their own identity in tact.

In Toynbee hall one week later, Faris tell us, “I hated it”. On the night itself he’d huffed, “It’s like being in Japan, seriously”, a true observation of how stagnant the audience was.The band had been great but the gig hadn’t been.We’d love to blame the sterile white box room of The Rich Mix, but, in truth, it was due to just how journalist-heavy the crowd was.We couldn’t even hide behind the fact that we didn’t know 80% of the set list, because ‘Primary Colours’, as the trusty water-cooler gossip has informed us, had been our new obsession for weeks.

“I didn’t particularly like it,” reiterates Faris “but that was more due to the sound quality on stage. But I’ve always found it odd playing to people with their arms folded.”

Webb meanwhile considers the show an important moment in the band’s career, and one that he’s adamant to draw positives from.

“Obviously we were nervous playing our first gig in a year,” he says “but I usually have this thing where I’m nervous before but then when you get on stage you fall into place and the gig starts going on. It was strange this time having lived with the record and knowing all the songs, and choosing to play 8 new songs from a 10 song set, playing the first notes of the song and then suddenly being hit by ‘hang on this is quite different from before’. But then, by half way through, I could almost hear and feel the audience listening and being involved in a different way. And of course it was asking a lot to present this new record, but what brought the whole thing together was the reception for ‘Sea Within A Sea’, which had only been

released for a matter of days. It was bigger than the older tracks, so it put things into perspective, and I think that could have only ever happened at that point in time, with people having not heard the album.”

Next on the band’s live calendar is an appearance at Coachella Festival, followed by a US tour with The Kills that takes in 25 shows in 30 dates.

“Doing the States is amazing,” nods Faris “because every State is like a different country. And I find England so annoying because every town has the same shops, and that’s not happened in America yet. I just can’t handle seeing Marks & Spencer, Starbucks,Topshop; every High Street is the same, there’s no identity of any of the towns that you go to, which is shit really.”

Flying home for a UK tour in May, then, doesn’t bare thinking about – the pilot in

Topshop loafers, stewards pushing duty-free booze from Marks before the plane has even touched down. ‘Primary Colours’ will be 5 weeks old by then though, and people are going to want to hear it played live. Fans are going to want to hear it, and so too are the swathe of young bands that The Horrors unknowingly inspired with ‘Strange House’.

O.Chilrden, Ulterior, Ipso Facto and S.C.U.M. (the reverb band of Spider Webb’s brother, Huw), they (and plenty more besides) have spent the past 18 months dispelling another misconceptions about Faris and Co. – that The Horrors were just a fad.The ‘nu-grave’ tag might not have stuck to the monochrome gangs that followed the short, sharp belch of ‘Sheena Is A Parasite’, but the dark gloom-rock attitude of striving for originality did. As festivals like Offset, and club nights like The Dice Club, suggest, for

many, music is nearing its best once more.

For Faris Badwan though, young bands need to try harder.

“I can’t believe that there’s anyone who would think that music’s at it’s best,” he frowns. “Find me those people. I think that the best music is born out of difficult economic climate, so maybe we’re about to have a great flurry of brilliant bands, but, to be quite honest, right now you could probably count the amount of good bands in London on one hand, and you’d still not make it to five.”

We’re tempted to float a so-awful-it’ssurely-brilliant ‘Count In Fives’ gag, but we don’t. Instead, we join in verbally shoeing Spotify and digital music (unsurprisingly, the band that only buy second hand vinyl are fans of neither, once we explain exactly what Spotify is) and ask what the most important

lesson learned by The Horrors is.

“Personally, I’ve learnt that a lot of people’s opinions are meaningless.Y’know, we’re surrounded by bands who aren’t interested in doing anything different from the band next to them or the band playing the same club the following week. It’s funny that those bands try to dismiss things that are different to them, but ultimately it’s why no one has any longevity anymore, why no one makes more than two records, because they don’t have enough ideas to sustain themselves. I just have total conviction in what we’re doing – any critical response doesn’t mean anything in the short term. It’s all about long term.There’s going to be a bunch of perceptions drawn from this record and I’d be equally as happy to challenge those next time around.”

Faris smiles, sincerely, of course. www.loudandquiet.com

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kap bambino Not just any glitch boy/girl duo, but the original Writer: Danielle Goldstein Photographer: tim cochrane

In the genteel streets of West London, Kap Bambino are standing out from the crowd, and this time it’s not for their musical talents, but for Caroline’s (Martial, vocals) tangerine coloured hair and Orion’s (Bouvier, noise-meddling) handlebar moustache. Amid the middle-aged well-to-dos, the French pair are drenched in a wealth of youth and style.

Caroline buttons her fraying denim jacket to her chin, a trace of a silky scarf protruding from the collar, and buries her hair beneath a railroad engineer’s hat.

Meanwhile Orion sits at the rickety wooden table in silence, dressed head to toe in black.

Despite getting together in 2001, Kap Bambino have been sheltering under the radar, so you may be surprised to know that they are on the verge of releasing their third album, ‘Blacklist’. It’s a computerised concoction of Nintendo soundeffects backing harmless prattlings about lizard documentaries and mischievous games. And if you can make out the lyrics through all of the synthetic fuzz and electro-punk grit, you’ll notice that they’re scattered and almost nonsensical. But when you see the couple guessing and miming their way through a conversation, you’ll understand why and you’ll be unwittingly enchanted by their presence.

These Gallic grungers may not have their English down to a tee, but they certainly know how to please a crowd. Sometimes a little too much, we realise, when Caroline explains that their debut in America went down…well, not so much a storm, but more a level five tornado.

“The worst was in Long Beach, California. It was an all-ages party and when we started to play there was a stage invasion but the security guys were really scared and they started to taser the kids. We were so shocked that Orion said, ‘We’re stopping playing!’ It was a big mess, we tried to save the kids from the crowd and the police

wanted to arrest me. And this was just the second date from our first time in the US. Welcome to the US!” When Caroline and Orion tried their cheesy chat-up lines on each other eight years ago, they had no idea that it would develop into the kind of relationship desired by many.

They immediately started up an independent label together called WWILKO and Orion began releasing solo Kap Bambino material through that. It wasn’t until a few years later that Caroline plucked up the courage to ask Orion if she could sing over his tracks and they became the kind of couple who can spend every waking minute together without dismay. Of course, Orion took a little persuading. “I was embarrassed,” Caroline blushes.

“I just wanted to try something but he said, ‘No, I don’t think it’s cool if you come to sing on my music’. It was like, ‘We live together; if we do music together maybe we’re going to divorce in two months’. But after one track he said, ‘Ok, let’s do it!’ Now we run the label, we do Kap Bambino, we are couple - we do everything together.” She chuckles lightheartedly before taking a drag on the cigarette drooping between her fingers.

Kap Bambino’s sound is a manifestation of a childhood full of heavy metal and grunge pop, and the need to escape from the “boring” city of Toulouse and shake things up a bit. “We decided really quickly to create something because we had a big motive to do something different in the South of France, and we decided to raaarrr…,” Caroline roars like a tiny dinosaur as she mimics shaking somebody by the lapels.

Over the years it has progressed into something slicker, but they haven’t left their underground roots behind, and they refuse to record anywhere but their bedroom. “We do everything at home,” Caroline assures us. “We need to be in that environment, with plastic dinosaurs, zombie posters, full

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ashtray…” She trails off into laughter as she tries to tell us that ‘Blacklist’ took a maximum of three months to write and record because when they’re at home Orion can write up to three tracks a day, although, that’s not without a little helpful input from Caroline. “When I start a track she says, ‘It’s ok’ or ‘It’s not ok’ or ‘I like this part, I don’t like this part’,” explains Orion, breaking the vow of silence he seems to have been holding.

“Of course [our sound] is different because we try to push the limit every time,” says Caroline. “We have tried more melody this time and a lot of synths, and we have changed the effect on the voice because we have used a crap effect for a long time.”

“The voice is more clear now,” utters Orion before Caroline jumps in again, letting her English slip in the excitement and agreeing in French. “Oui! Not sure it’s more good, but it’s more clear,” she grins.

In terms of influences for this album, the two of them try to convince us that nothing was drawn from music. “It’s more things about life,” Caroline clarifies. “It’s not a direct influence. We put everything in,” confirms Orion. A good example would be track nine, ‘Human Pills’, which - regardless of the muffled lyrics about suffocation - is not about topping yourself. “It is really stupid lyrics,” exclaims Caroline. “It’s about when we get really drunk and fucked up with friends at home and we have a stupid game - the concept is to jump on the sofa - one jumps on, and two and three and four and five…” She emulates everyone leaping off the edge with her fingers, “and we are like human pills and the last one is suffocated under everybody.”

To ensure that we don’t assume the entire album is this playful, Caroline describes one of their more serious songs, ‘Blue Screen’. “It isn’t serious like, ‘Ooohhh, nooo’,” she croons as she imitates Tony Bennett. “I write like a teenager, it’s really spontaneous. I think people live behind a blue screen - everybody has a Blackberry or a computer and we stop communicating. It’s just a scream from me to say we need to maybe send postcards or continue to write. Like when people stop being with somebody and break up through messages.

It’s…argh, it’s crazy time.”

‘Blacklist’ is the first record that Kap Bambino aren’t going to release on their own label, but why are they making the leap now?

“We have produced Kap Bambino for five years and now we decided to sign for more things, to have a new playground,” Caroline says to help shed some light on the subject. “We do everything by

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ourselves – cover artwork, pressing vinyl - everything we do. We just have to do real mastering for the first time, but that’s it. They [Because Music] decided to sign us, but we decided together to keep Kap Bambino like this because if we try to change that doesn’t work.

It’s the identity and we come from the underground - if we start to say something different we are a liar or poser and it’s artificial.”

It has been a year since the band has released a single, but last month they made ‘Red Sign’ and ‘Acid Eyes’ available as a double A-side, even though this is usually something that comes with new-band territory. “It was our decision,” explains Caroline. “It’s a double A-side because we could not choose. We think ‘Red Sign’ and ‘Acid Eyes’ are two tracks completely opposite on ‘Blacklist’ and it was a good example of what we have created. Some things are more melody, more anthems, more pop on ‘Acid Eyes’ and some things are unusual on ‘Red Sign’ but more crap. It was just an example of the extremity of Kap Bambino.”

By this point you’ve probably realised that Kap Bambino are a boy-girl electro band and the words ‘Crystal’ and ‘Castles’ may spring to mind, but dampen those thoughts because these guys are sick of hearing it.

However, you wouldn’t hear them mention it because they’re too

polite for that, it’s their bodies that say it all. Their shoulders tighten as their faces tense for a split second before they discuss the matter and Caroline releases a siren-esque whoop before spilling her feelings. “We don’t care. We can’t fight with this, it’s already out there,” she sighs.

“They win because they are so famous. We can try to explain at every chance: ‘We were first’, but we just want people to hear the difference when they see us live and hear the record because, if you listen, of course we are so different. They are more…not cheesy, but more down-tempo.”

“More easy maybe? Easy?”

Grins Orion cheekily questions.

“Yeah… maybe more easy,” Caroline replies warily, a guilty smile forming in the corners of her rose red lips.

“But we don’t want to say bad things about them because they are so cool. It’s just a big problem for us because we come from the underground [scene].

“It’s for the popular people - they get involved with the first duet of electro, with this band, and now we arrive in the light - we are so tiny,” she says while stretching her fingers to form an inch and squinting at it. “And people say, ‘Oh yeah, this is like Crystal Castles’, and we say, ‘Noooo’. But if that helps you to understand, why not? I’d prefer they say Suicide, but good people know

the difference.”

You can judge for yourselves next month when the band comes over to launch ‘Blacklist’, where hopefully there won’t be any tasering. “We don’t control this,” Caroline states boldly.

“It’s the fusion of my energy and the music on stage. People who see us have the same reaction as for a punk or rock band – they start crowd surfing, or slamming or they push and it’s totally what we want because we don’t come from techno, we come from rock and roll. We aren’t into the electro thing because electro doesn’t understand Kap Bambino, but rock and roll doesn’t understand Kap Bambino – we are completely on the blade and it is good for us.

Sometimes it’s dangerous, but it’s like the danger of every rock band that ever played.”

As well as astonishing the Yanks, getting Because Music to put out record number three and starring in Matt Irwin’s short film for Armani Exchange amongst numerous New York and London models, Kap Bambino have also spent the past year busily rounding up a cult following that has resulted in some rather odd and terrifying gifts.

Because fans have cottoned onto the fact that Caroline and Orion run WWILKO, they realise that if they post presents to the label address, the band will inevitably receive it. Of course, they get pleasant oddities such as “a little ET, dog stickers - poopy stickers,” giggles Caroline. But occasionally they get eerie gifts. “We were sent some teeth,” says Orion, wide-eyed.

Not even a note? “No, nothing,” they respond in unison. “Just the teeth,” continues Caroline.

“We were completely shocked.

‘What can we do with these fucking teeth?’ I put them in the rubbish. Eurgh,” she recoils as she mimes dumping the teeth in the bin - holding the bag by a pinch. Orion explains that it was like a voodoo curse. “We were scared to take the plane for one week after that.” They both laugh at the strange circumstances they’ve been through. There’s never a dull or quiet for that matter – moment with these two. A consistent aura of joviality hangs around them and you’ll be lucky if you catch a pout forming on either of their faces.

Now that they’re creeping their way into the spotlight, however leisurely, and blinking in the surprising brightness of it all, what can we hope to acquire by submerging ourselves in a Kap Bambino live show or by listening to them on record?

Caroline describes it best when she says, “you will share all the years we have been on tour, all the experiences we have lived, and all the cigarettes we have smoked.”

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Passion Pit Manners (French Kiss/Sony)

By Omarrr. In stores May 18

08/10

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Sometimes it all comes too soon.When Massachusetts’ Passion Pit pulled the plug on their UK tour earlier this month due to “personal reasons”, rumours began eddying about the band’s mastermind, Michael Angelakos’, mental health. Understandably, the skyrocket from living room demo-ist to preening rock star isn’t a natural progression for everyone. It’s taken for granted that if you’re an embryonic band making extraordinary music, you’ll handle the pressure of regurgitating your past, pleasing executives and constantly starring into blank camera lenses.To the 21 year old, we suspect, it felt too unnatural, too strained, too heavy.

Little more than six months after the

‘Chunk of Change’ EP arrives this Chris Zaneproduced, New York-recorded debut album.

Despite the fact he entered the studio without any ideas, and regardless of his allergic reaction to hype, ‘Manners’ is the album Angelakos wanted to make.

By now you’ll have heard single ‘The Reeling’, a booming piece of electro pop pitched somewhere between Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Dance Wiv Me’, Dan Deacon and Grandaddy.

It could, and almost certainly will be, this year’s ‘Kids’. Gladly, it’s not even the best on show in this cabinet of gleaming trophies.

Opening crash ‘Make Light’ is a runaway cart of squiggling synth and Angelakos’ infectious, manipulated vocals, with a spinetingling chorus. Following that, ‘Little Secrets’ is an ingenious crochet of Talking Heads and Michael Jackson. Its there the tiny handprints of a children’s school choir are first debuted found on YouTube, ferried into the studio in a

rented bus and fed pizza by Zane - their intonation mimics Angelakos’ own. But ‘Manners’ isn’t restricted to one aesthetic-pop gear. A third in, ‘Moth’s Wings’ folds out like an origami dove, its ever-lapping organ and church bells underpined by angelic “ba ba ba’s” and a panoramic pop brevity last exhibited by Mercury Rev. Are we gushing? Yes, we’re gushing. But ‘Manners’ isn’t entirely faultless. ‘Eyes As Candles’ is the beginning of a brief dip, and the pair of ‘To Kingdom Come’ and ‘Seaweed Song’ are relatively aimless, shruggable moments.

They’re minor pockmarks on this glorious canvas, though. ‘Swimming In The Flood’’s orchestral fragility, ‘Folds In Your Hands’’s rainbow harmonies, and ‘Sleepyhead’’s Avalanches-esque charm more than make up for them.Were the best cuts of last year’s EP to appear here, we’d be looking at a record of the year.

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Camden based trio Man Like Me manage to do the impossible and make Just Jack look like a poetically gifted genius.That’s how terrible this album is. Sounding like the unavoidably terrible music of a 9-year old boy whose been given a Casio keyboard to bash in his ‘learning difficulties’ class, each song is full of ridiculous lyrics, stupid sound effects and camp Richard Fairbrass style lead vocals.

You may think you have hit a low when you hear the lyric “I’m a single dad, single dad’s my tag, single dad” but its about to get far worse with tracks ‘Doughnut’, ‘Carny’ and ‘Falafel’. Never before have I actually wished I was deaf. I can safely say it’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard and I’ve sat through two hours of Tony Blackburn pretending to talk to an invisible dog.

Adored by a few, ignored by the majority, Midlands based three piece The Wave Pictures have been quietly trotting out albums at a ferocious rate. Now onto their eighth, the band seem quite content with their standing in the world, as is evident on ‘If You Leave It Alone’, which sounds like a band in comfortable mode, happy with their sound and clearly not feeling any creative urge to mess with their formula.The influences are obvious – the jaunty pop choruses of early Weezer, the stripped downness of Pavement and a connection with middle English life that has served Blur and Suede so well.There’s nothing particularly wrong with it, but you’ll not want to listen to it more than once either. ‘If You Leave It Alone’ sounds wholly like a band on their eighth album.

What with that shouty, cheap racket they make, and their ‘Fuck!

Party! Foetus!’ humour, you’d mistake The Coathangers for Pens if it wasn’t for the extra member, the American accents and good tunes. Debut LP ‘Scramble’ is just what it says it is; a rambling bricolage of choppy C81 guitars, bargain-basement synths, caterwauled vocals and old movie samples. Sometimes it works (see referential ‘Sonic You’ and ‘Bury Me’) and sometimes – see ‘Pussywillow’ in which all the worst Casio percussion sounds are pressed relentlessly – it doesn’t. It’s a charming lo-fi outing but, in the same way that wearing a threadbare poncho for weeks can leave you craving a thick heavy piece of designer cashmere, two thirds of this album in you’d kill for something well produced.

The heat on Esser seems to have cooled off quicker than the dropping temperature of a polar bear’s muck. ‘Braveface’ both defends and attacks our fickle minds in equal measures.

‘Headlock’ – the rightful starter of the hype – you’ll know from every indie disco in town, but it’s tracks like the down-tempo, hazy ‘Bones’ that we’ve been hoping will prove the blogs right, and title track ‘Braveface’ silences doubters further, sounding like Blur at their most ‘Star Shaped’. ‘Leaving Town’ is then too ‘Kid Carpet’ to be taken seriously, while ‘Real Life’ is easily mistaken for Robbie Williams’ ‘Millennium’.The problem is that, ultimately, everyone knows that Take That are far better off without their fat dancer, so we have to ask if we too could do without Esser’s inconsistencies.

A-Trak’s CV reads quite impressively thus far: DMC champion at 15, a four year stint as Kanye West’s tour DJ and, more recently, the brains behind his own label imprint, Fool’s Gold. Another advocate of duurty electro mash ups and indie re-rubs, he’s prepared to show he can mix it up as well scratch it out, and this Fabric effort is the perfect, polished showcase for some of the monster tracks he’s been throwing down since last year.

The electro-house of Boys Noize and Zombie Nation is used to typically abrasive effect while the neat, BPM-dropped remix of Metronomy’s ‘Heartbreaker’, coupled with A-Trak’s unashamed penchant for keeping it club, ensures there are a few slick surprises, and proves his credentials as more than just an itchy finga thing.

The Strange Boys The Strange Boys and Girls Club (In The Red)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores now

05/10

The Strange Boys see In The Red Records flapping in uncharted territories. Until now, the LA garage label has been an all or nothing kinda deal, releasing the best lo-fi psyche rock inches away from the most directionless, drab guitar twangs: Jay Reatard next to Vivian Girls, for example. Largely, this release seems to be neither.Vocals that crack as they whine through a fuzzy microphone - and guitars that repeat the same sloppy blues riff 16 (16!) times over - suggest that The Strange Boys saw Black Lips passing through their hometown of Austin a few SXSWs ago and decided to give it a go themselves. Unfortunately, while nothing here offends quite like the Lips’ latest dud offering, little excites like the Atlantan’s at their most unhinged either.We’re not asking for the ol’ piss-in-the-mouth trick, just something a little more... strange. www.loudandquiet.com

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08/10

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04/10

07/10

St. Vincent

Sons of Noel and Adrian

Prefuse 73

Metric

Sleepy Suns

Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian (Warp)

Fantasies

Embrace

S/T (Shels)

By Edgar Smith. In stores now

By Dean Driscoll. In stores now

(Metric/Integral)

By Tom Goodwyn. In stores April 17

(ATP)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 11

Sprung from Brighton’s folk-fertile Wilkommen Collective (a label/ bunch of musicians so likeable we’ll let them off their associations with Lightspeed Champion), Sons of Noel… shake out the kind of progressive folk you’d hear when Spitz was at its most otherworldly.

You may still be grieving that venue, but now you can relive the experience at home with shopbought ale and this record.The pressing was done in California, the home of turning folk into psyche-smudging pop, and though Jacob Richardson,Tom Cowan and friends hail from England’s quiet corners, they share sonic turf with Americans O’ Death and Espers.

The wall-to-wall dense fingerpicking underpins wet-chalk vocal harmonies on ‘Divorce’ and some ace whistling on lead single ‘The Wreck is not a Boat’.

The prolific Guillermo Scott Herren has made a career out of being fast moving and difficult to pin down: recording under several aliases, Prefuse 73 is perhaps his best-known moniker. Suitably, this new album moves along at a rare old pace like Four Tet with Attention Deficit Disorder - many of the tracks clock in at under 90 seconds, employing the trademark Warp glitchyness and moving off in unexpected directions at every opportunity. It can, at times, be frustrating at the points when a track’s found a nice groove only to abandon it to move on elsewhere after only a few seconds, but tracks such as ‘Natures’s Uplifting Revenge’ make it all worthwhile one of the many captivating moments of tuneful clarity that emerge amongst the album’s 29 bursts of sound.

Having exploded into indieland in 2005 with their second album ‘Live It Out’ - a record that offered a frenetic mix of gore-splattered post punk and hooky pop - Canadian quartet Metric are back, and guess what? They’ve completely dropped the ball. ‘Fantasies’ is a decent record - ‘Help I’m Alive’ is a nice glacial pop opener and ‘Gold Guns Girls’ is a reasonable stab at an angry rock sound. But aside from that the tracks just glide by, screaming average as they go.The production is lovely and shiny, the songs are fine, but that’s it… fine.

Every box is ticked, but the album lacks any spark or any reason to treasure it. It seems as if Metric have treated making this album like filling in a tax return; as though they didn’t want to make it, but they’d clearly be in trouble if they didn’t.

From the outset, ‘Embrace’ evokes an atmosphere of sultry, smokefilled rooms and the sensation of being heavily, almost unpleasantly stoned. Groundbreaking this ain’t: ‘New Age’’s buzzing, bass-led grooves and wily solos create the impression of Black Sabbath jamming with late era Stone Roses.

‘Lord’, meanwhile, is a low tempo, piano-driven slice of late afternoon sunshine with a wistful and melancholic vibe.There is a heady intensity to this music, which draws you in, intoxicating and unnerving in equal measure, a simmering concoction of multitudinous influences. If we hadn’t heard it all before, I’d be running out of superlatives for Sleepy Sun; as it is, we can only say that these musical magpies are brilliant exponents of several tiredout genres.

Actor (4AD)

By Edgar Smith. In stores May 4 Her Christmas single from two years ago, ‘Jesus Saves, I Spend’, was so bad (it even had a drab cover of the untouchable ‘These Days’ as the b-side) that it was easy to write off Annie Clarke as a terrible and talentless drain on the world, like Micachu. However, a little research reveals that the Texan songstress earned her stripes on tour with Sufjan Stevens and in Glen Branca’s guitar orchestra; making the aforementioned catastrophe look out of character. Indeed, this second album for the brilliant 4ad label plasters over the pitfalls of her debut, ‘Mary Me’, so eloquently – with a sly turn of phrase, neoclassical-via-Disney-score harmonies, punishing beats and orchestral swells – you’d be prepared to forgive her almost anything. Just stay clear of the yuletide singles, aye Annie?

Jeffrey Lewis & The Junkyard ‘Em I Are (Rough Trade)

By Sam Walton. In stores April 20

05/10

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It has always been incredibly difficult to dislike Jeffrey Lewis. He’s admirably multi-talented, but also humble, witty and intelligent. His schtick has always been the modest, honest bloke who writes cracking little tragicomic songs. ‘’Em Are I’, Lewis’ fifth album proper, continues in the same ramshackle, homespun vein, with one noticeable absence: the tragicomedy that was previously so abundant in making 2007’s ‘12 Crass Songs’ such a wheeze is largely gone, replaced not with a newfound gravitas but just tedium.

So instead of wry musings on the everyday, we have songs like ‘Roll Bus Roll’, about how, if you’re taking a long bus trip, a rolled-up jumper provides a good makeshift pillow, and while

getting two seats to yourself is nice because you can stretch out, one is, y’know, fine too. Oh, and our Jeff prefers the window seat to the aisle too, if he has the choice. In terms of interest or humour, ‘The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song’ this ain’t.

However, while much of ‘’Em Are I’ is mundane, some is almost offensively disingenuous. In ‘Whistle Past The Graveyard’ we find Lewis wondering what will happen if he goes to Hell. He concludes: “People who assume you’ll suffer there are just selfish / If I were in Hell I’d be happy knowing other people were in heaven / It would make Hell not so hellish”, an opinion that is at best smugly selfeffacing, at worst plain bollocks.

Hitherto, it’s always been incredibly difficult to dislike Jeffrey Lewis, but if the New Yorker keeps dishing up long players like ‘’Em Are I’, it’ll be a feat we find considerably easier. In fact, it already is.

07/10

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06/10

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Jeniferever

Kotchy

Passe Montagne

Mika Miko

Video Nasties

Spring Tides

89

Oh My Satan

We Be Xuxa

On All Fours

(Monotreme)

By Nathan Westley. In stores April 20

(Civil Music)

By Dean Driscoll. In stores April 20

(African Tape)

By Sam Walton. In stores now

(PPM)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 4

(Dead Again)

By Phil Burt. In stores now

Some bands are forever destined to be haunted by certain words and Sweden’s Jeniferever are one seemingly ordained to suffer such a fate as adjectives akin to ambient, lush, expansive, heartfelt, poetic, icy and majestic are almost longing to be used to describe this sophomore effort, which fianlly follows 2006’s ‘Choose A Bright Morning’. It can easily be put down to them having developed a habit of flitting between sounding like a condensed Sigur Ros and a more ethereal sounding Death Cab For Cutie during the course of songs that often break the six minute mark. But that’s no bad thing.

While others are content to reign in their excessive natures, Jeniferever seem content to let theirs breathe and it is this that makes them step out from an often too dull parade.

There are certain comparisons that become meaningless after a point; such is their over-use. Indie bands with a yelpy singer = The Cure; dance acts indebted to Daft Punk if they have a French touch to them etc etc.You can add to that list comparisons to Prince, usually reserved for any solo artist with an electronic RnB-influenced pop sound, like Kotchy.Thankfully ‘89’ proves to be one of the better homages, infusing electronic RnB pop sounds with some of the glitchy electro of Jackson & His Computer Band.There’s also something of the Beck Nansens about the vocal delivery here. It generally works pretty well, and there are several stand-out tracks – ‘Gonna Have To Wait’ and ‘One For The Money’ in particular which make ‘89’ very much worth investigation.

A few facts about ‘Oh My Satan’: the whole album is 21 minutes long.There is no singing.There are about 20 different and unrepeated sections to each song, and heavy psych-rock riffs are sprayed across the whole album like bullets in a massacre. In fact, so unconventional is this record it would be no surprise if the vinyl version were actually made of feathers. Repeated listening does yield slightly more, but in truth this audio experiment from three French musician who like making noise is so knotty and dense that working out what’s happening is actually more time consuming than just listening to it.

Perhaps that’s the idea: so fiercely does this record reject any sort of rules that applying conventional logic to it is slightly futile. A 6 for sounding quite like nothing else we’re likely to hear this year.

A lot of bands like to claim that their music is “impossible to pigeonhole”, and dislike it intensely when us critics try to do just that. LA five-piece Mika Miko, on the other hand, do the job for us; they may as well be a bondageclad pigeon flying straight into the hole labelled ‘punk’.Their music has the raw ferocity and breakneck pace of early Lemonheads; twelve tracks in twenty-two minutes bear testament to their extreme brevity.

‘We Be Xuxa’ utterly reeks of raucous attitude, like SleaterKinney stripped bare of emotional baggage and in a very bad mood.

Given the right environment (say, The Smell where they spend most of their hours), they must be simply riotous live, but their record sounds like an anger mismanagement workshop set to music.

‘Jellybean’, track two on Video Nasties’ debut album, may make you think the next forty minutes are going to be full of similar infectious, fun, sub-2 minute bursts of excited boyish shouting. But you’d be wrong. Instead, ‘On All Fours’ (released on the band’s own Dead Again record label, noless) points to a band with a depth that allows them to undulate between all out garage punk (‘Albatross’) to mournful musings on past loves (‘Rolling’) without a hint of a dodgy cut and paste job.The faroff sound of James Churcher’s lead vocals conjure images of a lovestruck teen left alone at the school bop, but this is where the adolescence analogy ends. Here is a record with a level of maturity that makes you put down the BB gun and give Video Nasties your undivided attention.

Various Artists Cathedral Classics Volume 1 (Sonic Cathedral)

By Danny Canter. In stores April 20

07/10

It’s as if, way back at its conception in 2006, Sonic Cathedral predicted what 2009 would sound like. Okay, so that was only three years ago, but scoffs at the shoegaze genre preached by the label (formerly a club for wall of soundlovers) were a plenty then.The idea that The Horrors were capable of channeling My Bloody Valentine via Portishead was farcical; the thought of Kevin Shields picking up a guitar again, unthinkable. ‘Cathedral Classics Vol. 1’, then, is a perfectly timed celebration of the label’s stubborn perseverance to champion drones and soundscapes through years that saw believers short on the ground.

If you’ve always worshiped at this particular altar, pausing from prayer to pick up the 11

limited releases that Sonic Cathedral have thrust out thus far, there’s nothing for you here, just the tracks you already have, b-sides included. Some you could have lived without, such as Daniel Land & The Modern Painters’ ‘Within The Boundaries’, an arduous cul-de-sac of distorted drums and whirls, and The Tamborines’ cutesy 60s pop number ‘Be Around’. But that leaves 15 tracks here, including School Of Seven Bells’ debut single, remixed by Cocteau Twins’ Robin Guthrie (a celestial high point of the compilation that soars to expose shoegaze’s most euphoric side), a sinister Maps re-working of Kyte’s ‘Secular Ventures’, and the lo-fi 80s electronics of The Early Years’ ‘Like A Suicide’.

All are brilliant, and only pipped by M83’s beautiful take on Maps’ ‘To The Sky’, which is as dynamic and emotional as anything you’ll find on Spiritualized’s ‘Ladies and Gentlemen WeAre Floating In Space’.

You’re going to want to pull up a pew. www.loudandquiet.com

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Live

Rising Above

Dirty PRojectors

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The Scala, Kings Cross 02.04.2009

By Reef Younis Photography by Elinor Jones

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Swapping the dry,Texan heat of SXSW for the equally uncomfortable confines of the Scala, Dirty Projectors could be forgiven for taking this one easy.With barely enough time to shake off the trans-Atlantic jetlag, tonight’s show represents the kick in the tail of their UK tour.

Not that you’d know it. Having caused a bit of a commotion across the pond, and with an opening slot on TV On The Radio’s US tour, there’s a bit of a buzz (and a queue) for tonight.

Unsurprisingly, it’s a sell out, and a show that inspires total, jaw-dropping reverence.

Essentially a touring band moulded in David Longstreth’s experimental image, Dirty Projectors’ understanding is staggering – every skewed key change, every layered harmony and every heart stopping solo turn is executed with perfection. Consistency has no home here with Longstreth’s penchant for compositional deconstruction an unfathomable, challenging joy.Tonight, every track seems imbued with the kaleidoscopic ingenuity that make Animal

Collective and TV On The Radio so refreshingly vital.

Showcasing some material from forthcoming album ‘Bitte Orca’, ‘Stillness On The Move’ is given a stunning a cappella make under, while ‘Rise Above’ mellifluously soars to the head-nodding delight of the crowd.You’ll fall in love with the porcelain prettiness of feline trio Amber Coffman, Haley Dekle and Angel Deradoorian, marvel at their hypnotic turn as human panpipes, and remain riveted throughout.Their angelic vocals ascend and descend from the rafters as clean and defined as pure cut crystal, scything through Longstreth’s skittering, arty guitar picks.

Their leader co-ordinates his musical troubadours with contorted zeal, directing with an easy fluidity as the Projectors shift between syncopated free-form-tinkering, nu-jazz and blasts of post-hardcore abetted by painfully beautiful vocal harmonies. Amidst the personnel comings and goings, and instrumental pass the

parcel, standing out front Coffman’s the diminutive Sister Act with the Mariah Carey range. Initially cute and coy, she’s soon stealing the show, belting out enough top scale notes and jailbait shimmies to put Beyonce to shame.

Longstreth, in fact, runs severe risk of being demoted to side show status but you just kinda know it’s his show as he struts, guitar hitched around the stage - the edgy, flinching contrast to the mellow vocal lull of the girls.

You’ve got to stick with Dirty Projectors: there’s no beat, no easy access, no three minute numbers to bounce around to or snappy lyric couplets to commit to memory. It’s awkward, vivid, captivating stuff to leave you wryly smiling, jealous and wholly appreciative.You’ll spend half the night desperately trying to grasp a rhythm by its coat tails, only to curse every flick of Dirty Projectors’ restless fingers as it evades you once more.What you’ll spend the whole set doing, though, is revelling in this band’s staggering talent.

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Trailer Trash tracys Bull & Gate, Kentish Town 31.03.2009

By Stuart Stubbs ▼

Peaches Royal Festival Hall, South Bank 10.04.2009

By Edgar Smith Photography by Simon Leak

It took a while for the lovely folks at the guest tickets counter to work out how to read my name and let us in, so we missed what sounded from outside like a pretty tantalising stage entrance.Things didn’t get much better.

As a rough point of reference, try watching Bowie’s 1973 ‘retirement’ show on BBC Four: outfit changes, power stances and coke-sheen high camp, screened as a kind of vibrating museum piece. In place of the archive-footage feel tonight are the incongruous environs of the RFH, a venue for orchestras. Recently refurbished, in fact to be all the more suited to orchestral music, even when Peaches finally gets everyone to

stand up the vibe of this ‘Ether Festival’ event still doesn’t improve.

While the ace acoustics amplify the conversations of surrounding Nathan Barley extras and a technical douchebag runs around the stage to help her climb amp stacks – ruining what could’ve been a wellchoreographed show – some of the blame has to lie with Peaches herself.The music (revamped classics and pounding new Obama-referencing material) still rocks hard but, in explaining “how much it all means” to her and introducing her parents, she loses the confrontational swagger and playful sexual subversion that define her as a recording artist. Even the flashing vagina diode she wears for ‘Fuck the Pain Away’ totally lacks any impact.

In wince-worthy style, Circus’ Jodie Harsh crashes the stage at the end and invites everyone to “come party with Peaches” downstairs in the reception. Not a chance.

It’s Trailer Trash Tracys’ first proper gig – reportedly their last with Victoria Smith behind the drum kit before she takes over the monochrome world with her other outfit, Ipso Facto – and they’re squabbling. Initially it appears that the four-piece are less than pleased with each other (singer Susanne Aztoria and bassist Adam Jaffrey keep us waiting, guitarist JimmyLee scowls across the stage and shakes his head while bashing his instrument), but as the band’s Spector-esque reverberations quickly drown out Smith’s electronic drum pad it’s apparent that their vexed anger is directed at the sound man.Trying to ignore the fact that the distant beat they can hear regularly veers out of time, the band manage to plough on for five songs until enough’s enough and they exit the stage in disgust. And it’s a shame, because even with the sound problems Trailer Trash Tracys’ sonic shoegaze was sounding like it could evolve into something quite spectacular.

On tracks like ‘Strangling Good Guys’ Aztoria’s vocals are weightless, haunting and euphoric, Jaffrey’s lethargic bass wanders off into the distance like a forgotten riff from ‘The End’ by The Doors.

Jimmy-Lee’s at his best when picking arpeggios that echo through a chorus pedal, coating The Bull & Gate in a Technicolor glow.Too quickly is the psychedelic warmth of TTT’s snubbed out tonight, but we’ll definitely be back to bask in the sunshine soon.

The Pan I Am Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen 01.04.2009

By Polly Rappaport ▼

So! Edward Larrakin parts ways with previous project Larrakin Love, slinks off into the gloom to contemplate and concoct, and

eventually emerges as a conceptual creature known as The Pan I Am. This creature, it is told, serves up a smouldering brew of dark, lyrical beauty, infusing the pensive musical depth of mournful dirge folk with brooding, profoundly moving poetry. APRIL FOOLS! Ha! Gotcha – what really happened was Edward Scissorhands launched a rap career, which for some reason required a cello (perhaps Tim Burton insisted, who knows).

Seriously, our Edward is zipped up in a boiler suit (goth or gangsta?) and is covered from head to toe in talc dust, growling his text and lurching about the stage to ominous if overtly electro organ strains, at one point ranting along with one of those hip hop chipmunk voice effects. It’s by no means Monsieur le Manson level trashy and the lyrics do have an element of diatribe street poetry the introspective expounding of an extroverted introvert - but Larrakin, luv, whom ever is penning your promo should consider a rethink of the ‘folk’ concept and throw in words like ‘experimental’ or even ‘industrial’; hippies might not dig this.

A Place to Bury STrangers Jericho Tavern, Oxford 04.04.2009

By Tom Goodwyn ▼

New Yorkers A Place To Bury Strangers clearly take their music incredibly seriously.This is obvious from the fact that during tonight’s 45 minute set their gazes seldom leave their instruments, they don’t pause, not even once, and throughout the whole set they don’t speak to, encourage or even acknowledge the bustling crowd present. Given that frontman Oliver Ackerman’s day job is running a successful FX pedal business, it’s no surprise that his band rely heavily on distortion in their live sound. Backed by a powerhouse rhythm section, and with a huge projector beaming out constantly, the set is a hypnotic experience. Crossbreeding My Bloody Valentine layered www.loudandquiet.com

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Bleech. Photography by SIMON LEAK

psychedelia with a Sonic Youth inspired rawness, from start to finish you feel as if completed submerged in sound. ‘I Know I’ll See You’, ‘Missing You’ and a crushing ‘Ocean’ all leave the stage in enormous waves, washing over and sucking us in. Stepping out into the rainy night afterwards, you find yourself having to adjust completely from what you’ve just seen and heard. Everything seems duller, simpler and much much quieter. Back for the summer, APTBS may soon be having that effect on lots more people.

Bleech The Enerprise, Chalk Farm 26.03.2009

By Mandy Drake ▼

Danananakroyd. Photography by Casey Glasson

Pulled Apart By Horses. Photography by DANNY NORTH

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It’s of course with nonchalant selfconfidence, but everything about Bleech screams Britpop… or in fact drawls and yelps it like the know-it-all brat-spawn of Justine Frishman. Singing guitarist Jennifer O’Neill is a grunge-pop pinup with red curls in her face; bassist Katherine sports the hat-hair of Louise Wener; Matt Bick, the token fella-at-the-back, wears a Sonic Youth ‘Goo’T-shirt.The three are playing in Camden, naturally, and a loud club promoter has introduced them in a rowdy TFI Friday way, prompting a Japanese fan to take up pogoing to the band’s mid 90s indie, almost before they’ve even turned on their amps.

Unsurprisingly, all of this makes for the best gig The Enterprise has seen since Kinikie got real jobs (Lauren Laverne excluded), especially when the trio deliver new single ‘Is It True That Boys Don’t Cry’; a track so made for a pre-nu-rave Skins that it might as well be shagging its best mate for a laugh and vomiting up its mum’s curtains. It pounds along with a melody that The Ordinary Boys always strived for, as does the crunchy, Hole-esque ‘Animals’, and everything else that Bleech offer for that matter. It might not be reinventing the wheel, but it’s dressing it up like Elastica so well that you might just double-take what year it is.

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Lissy Trullie The Social, Oxford Circs 01.04.2009

By Omarrr ▼

Now, we know April Fools Day isn’t for everyone. Some folks just can’t deal with a whoopee cushion or the joke death of an indie star of yesteryear - in the case of Space’s Tommy Scott (bit far, yeah). But New York’s Lissy Trullie doesn’t look like she’s ever laughed. God forbid, a mild chuckle might crack her porcelain gills. Her 14-yearold-boy-stealing-a-crafty-puffbehind-the-gym-block-inGrange-Hill good looks have earned her a modelling contract back home but tonight, she’s characterless, humourless, and, more painfully (considering we’re on the end of half an hour of it) tuneless. In fairness it’s only her fourth UK show but the lack of connection between the husky Trullie - who speaks in a Courtney Love growl that’s even lower than she sings - and those in attendance is a worrying sign for newly inked shepherds Wichita (usually unequivocally great in their taste).

Plod popper ‘Self Taught Learner’ is wince-inducing, debut single ‘Boy Boy’ chronically out of tune and her cover of Hot Chip’s ‘Ready For The Floor’ would probably have Alexis Taylor ripping his own motherboard out in disbelief. For one so talked about we’re truly, madly, deeply, indifferent.

Pulled APart By Horses The Albert, Brighton 29.03.2009

By Nathan Westley ▼

The four members of PABH may be wondering to themselves just how they have become cast as the main player in the broadsheetapproved ‘new grunge revival’. If so, their performance tonight goes a long way to explain.With three energetic members huddled on a narrow stage, while singer Tom is nudged onto the floor, they fiercely twist and turn their way through

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30 minutes of sonic mastery that has far more in common with the hard hitting riff-orientated rock of Soundgarden then the pent up angsty frustration once offered by Nirvana. Songs such as ‘E=MC Hammer’ and ‘I Punched A Lion In the Throat’ follow a simple repetitive pattern where hard hitting, overdriven, fast paced guitar riffs ride high and are therefore central to the band’s sound.Yet this is not the only thing that makes PABH stand out.

Effortlessly shouted over the top of this stern backing lay unique and, in the case of ‘High Five, Swan Dive, Nose Dive’, nonsensical lyrics performed with a determined punk spirit that many others seem to lack.This only adds to their appeal.

Artefacts From Space travel The Good Ship, Kilburn 08.04.2009

By Stuart Stubbs ▼

Being the latest unearthing of Stolen Records, it comes as little surprise that Artefacts From Space Travel are a noisy garage rock trio that crunch their distorted guitars in the face of disco beats, American Apparel fashion and all things mainstream mediocrity. Bassist Sam is wearing a Bad Brains T-shirt, and not in the look-what-UrbanOutfitters-have-just-raped-me-for way, frontman Joe sports his best Thurston Moore hair do. Clearly influenced by grunge, the London three shake the pit stage of The Good Ship, largely sounding like ‘In Utero’-era Nirvana, Dinosaur Jnr and – rather oddly once ‘Recoop’ begins to really chug along – Blur doing a psychedelic version of ‘Coffee & TV’.

Regardless of their name, space doesn’t seem to come into it at all until straight up punk tracks like ‘Two Dead Men’ make way for the flange heavy ‘Power Of The Brain’, that whooshes about the place, and the closing ‘Dusty King’ - an almost lyric-less proggy stomp that allows Joe to showboat his best guitar hero noodles.The snag though is quite a large one.

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Without his vocals passing through any kind of FX box, Joe’s shrill voice can’t help but grate.The Pixies-eque ‘Cul De Sac’ would have otherwise been a perfect lesson in no-wave excellence.

Plug Vibe Bar, Shoreditch 30.03.2009

By Polly Rappaport ▼

London is churning out a healthy catalogue of borderline tuneless woof/whine, slam/whack, plunk/ punk noise that you can’t quite dance or sing along to. It’s addictive in its artful awfulness and is a blissful counterstroke to the melodic, (more) marketable music of the (more) mainstream. Sian and Georgie, them of unsurprisingly Parlour Records-signed Plug, have taken a swig of this swelling flow of post-punk minimalism and spat it out in a spew of psychedelic, sinister melodies coupled with droning vocals – what it might have sounded like if Nico had started a garage band with some perma-shroomed ex-riot grrls.The drumbeats are passively predatory, the bass lines moodily pigeon-toed and hypnotic, and the stroppy vocals manifest themselves as lungfuls of thick, abrasive bellowbelts, which paint each track as more of an attack than a song.

Tracks such as ‘Sexy Coma’ harness the pull of both magnetic poles: attractive and sultry yet stark and homely, like that plain girl at school who got the guys because she had a hot bod under that frumpy jumper and knew what to do with it. So, effectively, Plug’s oddly engaging shouty anti-psych is the musical equivalent of teenage trailer trash. How hot is that??

Danananakroyd The Engine Rooms, Brighton 30.03.2009

By Nathan Westley ▼

Sometimes you have to ask yourself if a band are being entirely serious.You see, Dananananaykroyd

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are not the type of band that like to stick to traditions. From their irregular number to their complex tongue-twisting name, they like to flout predictability at any given opportunity. It’s in the live environment where they have built up a healthy reputation that all their eccentricities come together and make perfect undeniable sense.

Huddled together they launch into a high-energy, chaotically-laced set that makes it instantly apparent that they have evolved from when they first raised their heads and rolled out of Glasgow.Where passion, energy and a desire to entertain have always been at the forefront of Dananananaykroyd, tonight sees the rise of a newly informed pop sheen to match the band’s harder edged, complicated guitars and tight aggressive rhythms of audience favourites ‘Totally Bone’ and ‘Pink Sabbath’.Yet positioned comfortably alongside these wellconstructed multi-limbed behemoths lies a lust to put the fun back into a sometimes too regimented live experience; one that sees them stop halfway through, cause a large circle split in the audience and break out into a serious set of 80s-tinged body popping. Danananaykroyd neglect convention and are all the better for it.

Detroit Social club 100 Club, Oxford St 02.04.2009

By Omarrr ▼

The last time a band had an identity crisis this big a smiling inflatable willy nearly split up Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Detroit Social Club - no relation are six canny lads from Newcastle who are managed by Arctic Monkeys’ ‘people’.This much is certain. Fact, in fact. As far as what/ why they are though, no-one knows. “It’s a sort of laddy, psychedelic, visual, blues anthemic mix, you know?” someone next to us mumbles. No we don’t know, and nor do they. Looking at the stage, superbly-voiced lead singer David Burn attempts to conduct

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the crowd – like Beck used to before he got serious – whilst the rest of the band skulk in the glow of some half-arsed water colour film clips. C’mon now, do you want to be Kasabian or My Bloody Valentine? Like the great cake or donut conundrum, you can’t have both. Clumsy, but huge sounding, single ‘Sunshine People’ would suggest they’re the former but then cuts like ‘Lights Of Life’ the latter.

Not that we’re ones for boxing things up, but until DSC decide if they’re one or the other, they’re neither.

Skint & Demoralised The Plug, Sheffield 09.04.2009

By Kate Parkin ▼

Skint and Demoralised, AKA Matt Abbott and the anonymous MiNI dOG, are a product of our times disillusioned with a welfare state and morally bankrupt regime.They are distinctly and unmistakeably Yorkshire, giving the feeling of a local hero’s homecoming.The confident delivery of ‘The Thrill of Thirty Seconds’ adds to the increasingly inebriated, but jovial atmosphere. Despite Abbott happily admitting that he is “not much of a singer”, new single ‘This Song…’ is effortlessly catchy.While likening them to Scouting For Girls seems frankly bizarre, comparisons to The Streets seem more on the money. Painting pictures of sticky dance-floors, leering bruisers in the corner, eclipsed by the eyes of a pretty girl, ‘O.L.I.V.I.A’ replaces the North London swagger of Mike Skinner with a soft Wakefield burr. Matt Abbott is a consummate entertainer; a technical hitch is quickly filled with a spontaneous poem about Scarborough’s dubious charms. Inspired by the rantings of John Cooper Clarke, the show has a distinct political undercurrent.

Climbing aboard the speakers to deliver ‘BNP: Nazis On The Doorstep’, the singer directs the full force of his ire onto the hecklers below. As the recession deepens, Skint and Demoralised

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will continue to be a band with something to say. But for now none of that matters, as fellow Northerner Shameless’ Frank Gallagher would say, “Scatter!

Party!”

The Detachments Queen of Hoxton, Shoreditch 03.04.2009

By Polly Rappaport ▼

As far as stage presence is concerned,The Detachments certainly live up to their moniker: it’s unclear whether their disinterest in the audience is a style choice (a la Kraftwerk, minus the plastic hair) or whether they pawned their collective charisma to fund a new bass pedal. If this lack of personality is a style choice, the band would do well to embrace the deadpan thing more fully as right now their literal detachment comes across as awkward.This is a twofold shame: for one thing, the music this quartet of pokerfaces are making is a slinky, slick brand of new wave with a smattering of robotic indie rock, which makes it a pleasure to listen to and even better to dance to.That brings us to the second thing: the band are so static and the tunes so danceable, that the majority of punters are boogying their tits off and completely ignoring the fact that the music is live.The roots of this synthy bleep sleaze are buried deep in an ethos of ‘by weirdos for weirdos’, so I say The Detachments should absolutely go for the autistic automaton vibe – such an edgy sound deserves a razor-sharp performance.

THE Lyrebirds Concorde 2, Brighton 24.03.2009

By Nathan Westley ▼

News of another Joy Divisionaping band will surely entice a heavy groan from a large number of people already tired of the excessive, almost endless role out of

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one dour post-punk inspired band after another – a continuous line that threatens the belief that “you can’t have too much of a good thing”.The Lyrebirds are the latest band to appear off said conveyor belt with trusted formula freshly tweaked.Though predictable clichéd moans will be amplified by the fact they have named one of their most hitting songs ‘Closer’, it would be a foolish man who didn’t recognise that there is something slightly special brewing. Still very much in their infancy, they confidently peer out onto a fresh faced audience silenced by a stream of soaring songs that are rich in detached haunting vocals; ones which hover over reverberating bass lines, atmospheric keyboards and occasionally towering guitar lines that recall Echo and the Bunnymen at their most cutting.

All in all, it’s a combination that distances them a tail-feather’s length away from White Lies.The Lyrebirds may not win praise for originality but that will not stop people from singing their praises either today, tomorrow or anytime in the forthcoming year.

Adventures in the beetroot field Fabric, Faringdon 09.04.2009

By Danny Canter ▼

Remember when Easter used to be about chocolate eggs and Jesus pushing a boulder from in front of his own tomb? No? You’ve probable been to too many of AITBF’s annual holiday blowouts then, you lucky thing. Other than the bonus of no work for two extra days, this long weekend was a nonevent until these Fabric takeovers changed everything and guaranteed Good Friday comedowns.This year the standard was predictably high, with No Pain In Pop hosting Room 2 and Simian Mobile Disco closing Room 1. Between, Ebony Bones may be as contrived as a soap star changing tact to avoid the dole queue, but Stop Making Me’s dubby DJ set particularly begs for next year to roll on. www.loudandquiet.com

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film

T he retur n of 3d

by Dean driscoll

Monsters Vs Aliens / CAroLINE

Above: Hugh Jackman at Wolverine

A Fanboy’s perfect m on th Last month we made mention of the grimly imminent release of Fast & Furious (AKA Another Movie Where Paul Walker Gets Out-Acted By A Car Exhaust), decreeing it likely to be a big hit with morons everywhere. At the time of writing the movie still hasn’t been shown to critics - a popular tactic for studios hoping to avoid the kind of buzz-killing prerelease reviews certain films deserve. Alas, this hasn’t stopped the movie storming to a huge opening weekend in the US, taking $72million and breaking all kinds of those convoluted box-office records in the process, including biggest ever April opening weekend.

Sigh. It’s a great few weeks for geeks coming up though, with the relaunch of two huge franchises whose stock in trade is fanboy fervour - X-Men Origins:Wolverine and Star Trek.

The original X-Men trilogy served as a classic example of the comic-book movie Rule of Threes, which also afflicted Spider-Man and serves as a stark warning for the Dark Knight if Christopher Nolan decides to take on the impossible task of bettering the last Batman outing (or indeed if he bails and some other extremely brave/foolish director attempts it instead): Solidly enjoyable origin story; brilliant, epic sequel; ball-dropping third installment. In X-Men’s case the disappointment of X-Men 3:The Last Stand was directly attributable to Bryan Singer declining the opportunity to follow-up the brilliant X2, with the reigns being handed over to Rush Hour hack Brett Ratner.Thankfully Ratner is being kept far away from the tale of the X-Men’s A-list hero Wolverine’s beginnings, with South African Gavin Hood helming, having proved his calibre with the Oscar-winning Tsotsi and war on terror drama Rendition.

Wolverine (released April 29th) marks another move by Marvel to expand their cinematic universe, taking the opportunity to introduce wider audiences

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to fan favourites Gambit (played by Taylor Kitsch) and Deadpool, played by the perfect actor to match the character’s combination of Wolverine-style indestructability and Spider-Man-esque wisecracks: Ryan Reynolds.Telling the tale of how Logan became Weapon X and took the moniker Wolverine, it pits the lupine force of nature played by Hugh Jackman (or more appropriately ‘Huge Action’, as BBC critic Mark Kermode has dubbed him) up against his evil halfbrother Sabretooth (the underrated Liev Schreiber).

Loaded with action, it looks capable of bridging the fanboy/wider audience divide that was out of reach for Watchmen, though it will be interesting to see how much of that is hampered by the leaking of the film online.

Star Trek (May 5th) returns to the big-screen with another origin-story honeytrap for fanatics, with an attempt to make Trekkies of a whole new generation of geeks. No stranger to obsessive fandom, director JJ Abrams launched Jennifer Garner’s career with Alias before baffling audiences worldwide with Lost.

Though he’s only directed one big screen feature so far (the action-packed Mission Impossible 3), he was the driving force behind the success of Cloverfield.Trek largely eschews big-names stars for a fresh-faced cast including Heroes’ Zachary Quinto as Spock and Simon Pegg as Scottie, while the most high profile actor of the movie, Eric Bana, is unrecognisable in the role of Romulan nemesis Nero. But the real star of Trek is the USS Enterprise, which was the subject of all the trailer money shots since the initial teaser last year, as the makers set out to make it one of cinema’s most iconic vessels all over again.

This month’s cinema highlights: April 17th: In The Loop, I love You, Man April 24th: State of Play April 29th: X-Men Origins: Wolverine May 5th: Star Trek, Coraline

Having heard the declarations of 3D’s capacity to revolutionise the cinema experience so many times before, most movie-goers have long become immune to the promises of an apparent impending revolution. One of Hollywood’s big plays for the 3D uprising, back in the early 80s, was Jaws 3D when you’re pegging your revolution’s hopes on a film that bad, you know you’ve got problems.The form has never really managed to break out of being a gimmick for forgettable horror B-movies, such as the 6th installment of the Nightmare on Elm Street saga, Freddy’s Dead. However, with the arrival of Disney’s Bolt last month, a new wave of movies that sought to make 3D a new cinemagoing norm had arrived upon us.

Ironically, the biggest 3D movie of this wave so far is itself a homage to the sci-fi B-movies that championed the 3rd dimension in the 50s: Monsters Vs Aliens. Like Bolt, the CG animation lends itself perfectly to the transition of 3D, and the technique is employed less as a gimmick, more a genuine enhancement, and with the studios pinning their hopes on 3D to deliver the industry from the evils of piracy and making the cinema experience once more superior to home-viewing, it will be encouraging that Monsters vs Aliens is doing well. But can it become the norm or will audiences tire of the latest ‘gimmick’? Much of that will depend on what happens next, and whether non-animated films benefit from a 3D enhancement.

This month’s Coraline - the new stop-motion animated effort from Henry Selick and Tim Burton looks to be another one in the win column for 3D, but the big one getting filmmaker Stevens from Soderberg to Spielberg declaring it to be a cinema landmark to equal The Jazz Singer and the arrival of sound, will be James Cameron’s Avatar (out December 18th), in which the man behind the biggest movie of all time unveils the 3D technology he’s been working on for nearly a decade. Apparently it’s going to change everything, and this time it seems like they mean it.

Promos “The Better you Look, the More you See” WWW DAVID HELLQVIST BLOGSPOT COM “The Ins and Outs of Power Dressing” WWW FASHION IN POLITICS BLOGSPOT COM DAV I D @ DAV I D H E LLQ V I S T .

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AND NEVER MISS ANOTHER ISSUE

party wolf Photo Casebook“A spring in my step”

Spring has sprung, Rod, and I dunno about you but I feel great! Me and the lady have booked our summer hols to Napa.

horoscopes Pisces

Wahey me old mucker.

I love a bit of techno and funky house.

You can probably hear the influences on ‘Maggie May’

You, Pisces, are a fish! A big, fat, stinking fish. Repulsive to even your own kind, a slippery customer, legless, and thus the lowest of the low both physically, as your bloated gut drags on the floor, and metaphorically as the attention-grabbing monster you’ve turned into!

That is what some people will be saying about you this month. HOW. DARE.THEY!? They’re probably just jealous though, envious of your awesome flare, welcoming grin (which definitely stays the right side of sex-pest) and popularity.Well sod ‘em. Another good month is forecast for you as the moon signifies a cracking good time. Li-Lo’s doing the ‘no pants thing’ again and Britney’s due a breakdown. CHA-CHING!!

Celebrity twitter See! Famous people are normal, just like us.

You know what Rod, I can. You sound pilled off you box on that track. Yeah, I’m lovin’ the holiday plans, but my lass is already banging on about what to pack!

R. Williams

Maybe they thought I said The Queen’s Head.

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@hdonald: Nice one H. Meet me and Johnny Wilkes down The Ten Bells. First one there gets to karaoke ‘Angels’ with me! LOL

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Shall I take both string bikinis babe?

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Phoarrr!

You jammy git PW!

If anyone fancies a pint later, give us a yell. :-p And I do mean <i>anyone</i>.

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“Touch my Rudebox, spank my Rudebox, be a Rudebox, do a Rue...” Oh, what’s the point?!