Loud And Quiet 61 – Death From Above 1979

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 61 / the alternative music tabloid

DFA 1979 Don’t Call It A Comeback

Plus: Vashti Bunyan — Banks — Chris Lombardi — Protomartyr Shura — Sleaford Mods — Peaking Lights

contents

welcome

banks – 12

I went to see Death From Above 1979 in 2011, at London’s Kentish Town Forum, a few weeks after they’d reformed – no doubt for a notable fee – for Coachella festival. It wasn’t great.

For starters, it was far too quiet for a band so brash and violently sexy. But that wasn’t it. Bands as defiant and stubborn as DFA, to all of a sudden reform and play out nothing but old material, it smells bad. At those comeback shows, the band can never win – every look is scrutinized; no words deemed genuine enough. At the Forum, Sebastien Grainger and Jesse F. Keeler – perhaps resigned to the fact that we were all going to think what we wanted anyway – combated this by neither exchanging glances with one another, nor words with us. They got on, played their only album in record time, and got off. What did we expect – everyone knows they hate each other.

Three years later, perhaps the heart of that particular show really was as rotten as it looked from the auditorium, but with a new DFA album released next month (only their second, following 2004’s ‘You’re A Woman, I’m A Machine’), there’s good cause to question if it was all about the cash, even back then.

Death From Above’s reformation is itself at odds and in line with a group so pigheaded. At full flight in 2005, Grainger and Keeler split, with a world of opportunities in front of them. It essentially saw their stock rocket whilst shares in bands like The Strokes and Interpol plummeted with each release thrust out amidst decent in the ranks and fraying relationships. That refusal to suck it up in their twenties has now been inverted for a second coming that started in 2011. Simply put, it’s not in Death From Above 1979’s nature to care too much about how their actions are perceived. A lot of bands reform for money, but far fewer split up when they’ve got it as good as DFA did in 2005.

Stuart Stubbs

Chris lombardi – 14 peaking lights – 16 vashti bunyan – 18 sleaford mods – 22 protomartyr – 24 shura – 26 death from above 1979 – 28

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 61 / the alternatIVe musIc tabloId

DFA 1979 Don’t Call It A Comeback

Plus:

Co ntact

Contr ib u tor s

A dve r tising

i n fo@lou dandq u ie t.com

Amy P e tti fe r , au stin l a ike , Chr is Watke ys, daisy j o ne s, dav id zammitt, Danie l D y l a n-W r a y, dan ke ndall, Danny Cante r , Elinor Jone s, Edg ar Sm ith, F r ankie Nazar do, j ack do he r ty , JAMES f. Thom pson, jame s we st, Janine Bu llman, j e nna f o x to n, joe g og g ins, josh su nt h, le e b u llman, Gab r ie l G r e e n, Ge m har r is, Mandy Dr a ke , Nathan We stle y, Owe n Richa r ds, P hil Shar p, Re e f Y ou nis, Sam cor nfor th, samu e l ba l l a r d, Sam Walton, T im Cochr a ne , thomas may, tom fe nw ick

a dve r tise @l o uda ndquie t.co m

Lo ud And Qu ie T LTD PO Box 67915 Lo ndon NW 1W 8TH

Peaking Lights — Banks — Chris Lombardi — Protomartyr Shura — Sleaford Mods — Vashti Bunyan

c o v er Ph o t o g r a phy J en n a F o xt o n

Ed itor - Stu ar t S tu b b s Art Dir e ctor - Le e Be lche r Sub Editor - Ale x Wilshir e fi l m e ditor - Dar r e n C he swor th

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T his M o nth L &Q L o ve s A nna be l cr o w hur st, B e a co ns f e stiva l , B e th D r a ke , D unca n C l a r k, G r a e m e C unningha m , J o die B a na szkie wicz, L e a h wil so n, na ta sha P a r ke r , R o b chute , S im o n Fo ga l , stua r t D avie The vie ws ex pressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the res pective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opinions o f the magazine or its sta ff.

All rights reserved 2014 Loud And Quiet LTD. ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by S harman & Com pany LTD .

Distributed by loud and quiet LTD. & forte

THE BEGINNING

Yorke’s Notes The month’s hidden headlines, revised / Dance music website Resident Advisor has launched a fan-to-fan ticket exchange to help stamp out touting. The new service allows fans to add unwanted tickets to a re-sell pool once an event has sold out, and ensures that new buyers only pay the face value. www.residentadvisor.net

Try this at home

Illustration by Diogo Freitas

Reach Out And Touch Bass: Josh Sunth’s 7-day diet of Drum’n’Bass / I’d started the evening drinking fireball whisky in a Wetherspoons, and ended up alone in a room full of snapbacks and sweaty Drum and Bass enthusiasts. The friend who’d invited me to try out this alternative to Friday’s usual blend of pop remixes and Jaegerbombs had snorted a sizeable amount of coke in the mucky upstairs toilets, and disappeared with a mate from Asda into the maul of sportswear. Consequently, I was left to my own devices – armed with only a (highly regretful) affair with Pendulum during my teens to fend off the onslaught of 170bpm ‘bangers’. It was exactly how I’d imagined it.

An hour or so later, what first seemed like a guaranteed failure had turned into a refreshing antidote to basically every club night I’d experienced previously. It was frenetic and infectious. It was totally new to me. It was a novelty, to say the least. But it did little to persuade me that I’d ever become a casual listener of Drum and Bass (or that such a thing even exists). And I’d certainly not given the genre any more thought until I was confronted with the obstacle of writing this article.

DnB is just too aggressive for me. Its speed and power comes from a place which I find... confusing – if only because I don’t see any appeal in such relentless, bleak sensibilities. Or in a style that’s at odds with many of the virtues I value in music. In fact, if it wasn’t for this experiment, I might well have held off for a lifetime. But with the deadline looming, I convince myself I’ll be able to at least appreciate the craftsmanship of some albums (maybe even enjoy a few), and two days later I’m scrolling through the /mu/ essentials (look it up) of

the genre, flicking through albums, and wincing at names like ‘Even Angels Cast Shadows’ and ‘Hard Normal Daddy’. (Squarepusher’s reputation precedes him, so I steer well clear).

I start with an album called ‘Anatomy’ by Calyx and Teebee. It contains songs titled ‘Vortex’, ‘Warrior’ and ‘Ultimatum’, and sounds like a thumping sci-fi nightmare of sub bass and pummelling drum lines. It’s a relentless – often blunt – object, but one that embodies the cluboriented vein of Drum and Bass that many people associate the whole of the genre with. I can admire the craftsmanship of it – the way it never slips out of glossy, futuristic overdrive for more than a millisecond – but I’ll admit I feel slightly disorientated by the elastic ending synth as ‘Vortex’ fades away, glad my trial by fire is over and I can go onto something more palatable. Because the way I see it, Drum and Bass can be split into two distinct groups: music produced for clubs, and music produced for headphones. I began my listening indiscriminately, but after a day or two, I find myself veering heavily away from the former, particularly enamoured with High Contrast’s third studio album. ‘Tough Guys Don’t Dance’, as its name suggests, is far less straight-laced than many other Drum and Bass LPs, and draws me into a vein of the genre that’s infused with melodic vocal lines, organic instruments and nods to various strands of pop culture. I actually enjoy the playful “Don’t let them sleep” sample taken from the titular film, and the soulful melodies of guest vocalist J’Nay on ‘Eternal Optimist’ – but only in the context of something like ‘Anatomy’.

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Efterklang (together with Artist Kasper Vang and radio journalist Jan Høgh Stricker) have launched a new, experimental radio platform dedicated to experimental music and recorded sound. The Lake broadcasts 24 hours daily with randomised playback to make it unique every time you listen. “The antithesis of commercial radio.” www.thelakeradio.com Darkside – the duo of Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington, who released ‘Psychic’, their debut album, just last year – have announced their end.

Just two more Darkside tracks will be released, on a compilation called ‘WORK’, released via Jaar’s own label, Other People. From the ‘Psychic’ sessions, the tracks are called ‘What They Say’ and, fittingly, ‘Gone Too Soon’. www.otherpeoplerecords.com Publishers Foruli Codex are to release Obsure this month (Sept 18th) – an in depth photographic book of The Cure, shot by photographer Andy Vella. As a man who has shodowed the band since 1981, Vella’s collection has been largely unseen, featuring photos from the road and in the studio. www.forulicodex.com Before Fugazi released their debut EP in 1988, they passed around a demo tape of 10 tracks, which Dischord will now offically release later this year on CD, LP and as a download. It’s called ‘First Demo’, and will also include ‘Turn Off Your Guns’, a track that wasn’t included on the orginal cassette. www.dischord.com Dom Yorke

books + second life

Paralegals and Paradiddles Reef Younis investigates what rock stars do next No.3: Dave Roundtree / feel Resigned, Tender, Far Out…” “Slow Down…” “…I’m barely Coping with the legal fees. I lost my Country House toThe Debt Collector and now I live in a Caravan on a Trailerpark.”

“Well, We’ve Got a File on You,” Dave begins, “and in this case, there’s really No Distance Left to Run.” “Well, This Is a Low. There’s No Other Way?” you plead.

“You’re On Your Own.” “What happened to ‘I Got Law’?!” you challenge. Dave calmly looks down at his watch.

“I’m sorry, we’re Out of Time.”

Frustrated and angry, you storm out of the office and stride into the nearest Pret a Manger, determined to track down Dave’s credentials on Linkedin before launching an aggressive, but undoubtedly fruitless, digital attack. But as the red mist descends, it hits you! Dave was a local politician; he knocked on your door asking for your vote a few years back…Labour, probably*.

Placated, you think to yourself that maybe he should have tried it in ’97 whenTony, Rule Britannia and Brit Pop were in full swing. He might’ve won.

Walk past the offices of Kingsley Napley law firm in Farringdon - as I did for five years on a semi-regular lunchtime scuttle – and nothing immediately stands out. Depending on your legal circumstances, or perhaps an accident at work, you’d only really notice it if you were swinging by for a pricey consultation with the likes of Verity Danziger, Michael Caplan QC or David Rowntree.

You’d probably step into a well-appointed waiting area, where a receptionist diligently takes your name and politely asks you to take a seat. You briefly wait before being led to an office lined with legal literature and deep mahogany furnishings; its framed legal certificates offsetting the glint of the platinum records set on the back wall. A man in a black suit and tie walks in and offers a handshake.

“Hi David, I know you’re busy but appreciate you taking the time” you enthuse.

“No problem. Yeah, the morning was a bit of a blur but please, call me Dave.”

You sit down and give Dave the background.

“I want to say I’m Fine but the stress is starting to Wear Me Down” you begin.

“I Got Law,” Dave confidently reassures you.

“I’ve started taking Tracy Jacks and Chinese bombs to deal with the court appearances but I

by j anine & L ee bullman

That Close by suggs

Wounded Wolf Press

Quercus

James Vella is better known for his musical undertakings in the highly acclaimed post-rock band Yndi Halda and as a solo artist. His debut book, Devourings, is a collection of short stories.

Inspired by Vella’s own travels, these tales stem from every corner of the globe and the collection is nothing short of breathtaking. The opening ‘They May Gladly Carry Her’ is reminiscent of Hemmingway in its use of sparse but effective language, as is the short but poignant ‘Holy Comet’. Both help to make Devourings an exquisite book to behold, the attention to detail not only in the prose but the choice of binding, paper and typeface that makes for beautiful reading, but also for a stunning artifact.

Thus far, Suggs’ career has seen him travel from cellar bars in North London to the topper-most of the popper-most, to fish finger commercials, to unlikely gameshow host, and arrive with his sense of humour and good taste in footwear completely intact. That Close though, is more than just the account of a group of friends making it big and living it up. In the book, Suggs relishes his role as storyteller at a lock-in and tells a tale that begins in ’60s Soho and ends half a century later a mile away on top of Buckingham Palace, celebrating the Queen’s Jubilee. Throughout proceedings Suggs is open, funny and sincere and strikes an easy, conversational tone that leaves you wondering where the pages went.

loudandquiet.com

Pegasus Epitaph: The Story of the Legendary Rock Group Love

by Michael Stuart-Ware

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Helter Skelter

Like the Velvet Underground, Love were a band whose influential reach far exceeded their record sales. The two LPs that the band recorded in the late Sixties, ‘Forever Changes’ and ‘Da Capo’, are bona-fide classics and Michael Stuart-Ware played the drums on both of them. Pegasus Epitaph is Stuart-Ware’s insightful and honest rendering of the music, psychedelia, acid, cash, dope and egos that formed the backdrop to the California scene of the time. Had Love kept it together through all that, they could have been bigger than anybody, and Stuart-Ware evokes this fascinating period with a keen eye for detail. Pegasus Epitaph is an authentic record of an extraordinary time.

*In 2010 Dave finished in second place in the Cities of London and Westminster election with 8,188 votes

Devourings

by James Vella

getting to know you

Perfume Genius Still just 32, Mike Hadreas spent the early part of his life battling drug and alcohol addiction, and depression surrounding his sexuality.

His forthcoming, third LP, ‘Too Bright’, sees the Seattle artist in his most confident state. We asked him to fill in our Getting To Know You questionnaire to prove that recording artists are people too /

The best piece of advice you’ve ever been given “Fuck ‘em”

The thing you’d rescue from a burning building My dog Tawanda.

The celebrity that pisses you off most even though you’ve never met them Vincent Gallo.

What talent do you wish you had?

Weightless flight.

The best book in the world Cathedral by Raymond Carver.

What is the most overrated thing in the world?

Phones.

The worst date you’ve been on One time I made out with a guy and then had to borrow bus money.

The worst birthday or Christmas present you’ve received The Jewel book of poetry [A Night Without Armor].

The characteristic you most like about yourself Bravery

Your favourite word Xena.

Your pet hate Guys over 25 in baseball caps.

If you could only eat one food forever, it would be…

Honey.

The worst job you’ve had I was a telemarketer for a few months at a “mortgage bank.” My boss was a crook – my pay cheques would bounce; he cursed us all out constantly. Most people I cold-called would curse me out as well. Horrifying overall.

Your favourite item of clothing The lady’s tuxedo jumpsuit I’ve been wearing onstage.

Your hidden talent Crying during greeting card commercials.

Your biggest disappointment Any time I’ve compromised out of bullshit fear or insecurity.)

Your guilty pleasure Rogue-like RPGs [Roll-playing games].

Your style icon Lately I’ve been trying to dress like a highpowered female lawyer.

What is success to you?

Going For It! Your Biggest Fear Going insane.

How would you like to die?

Don’t care, just nothing involving fire.

The film you can quote the most of Thelma & Louise.

Favourite place in the world Home.

how would you like to die “don’t care... just nothing involving fire”

The one song you wished you had written ‘Song to the Siren’

by Tim Buckley

The most famous person you’ve met I saw Paul Rudd at a party once and drunkenly babbled to him.

What would you change about your physical appearance?

My face and body.

What’s your biggest turn-off?

Lack of compassion.

What would you tell your 15-year-old self?

You have nothing to be ashamed of.

Your best piece of advice for others There is nothing wrong with you.

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Tell Me About It

The World according to BANKS Strongly tipped major label acts don’t come much cooler or purposefully underexposed as Banks.

David Zammitt met the LA singer-songwriter to let her do the talking photographer: Williams + Hirakawa / writer: david zammitt

There’s a touch of mystery around Jillian Banks; a duality that doesn’t quite seem to add up and yet which somehow works. With her pixie-like speaking voice, she seems every inch the ingénue, and the Banks who I chat with belies the powerful vocal heights she reaches in her music. Her evident shyness stands in stark contrast to the strident confidence on tracks such as ‘Fuck Em Only We Know’, and her forthcoming debut album’s title track, ‘Goddess’ – a vociferous feminist call to arms. Indeed, when I congratulate her on completing her first record I get a barely audible, coquettish, “thank you,” that seems to trail off in embarrassment. It’s a reminder that music is one of the great enablers, potentially transforming this 26-yearold music industry novice into the spokesperson for a voiceless generation.

‘Goddess’ may be Banks’ first fulllength but it’s a collection which features a host of much betterestablished collaborators who have beaten a path to her creative door over the last couple of years. Sohn, Lil Silva, Shlomo, Jesse Rogg and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs give ‘Goddess’ a kaleidoscopic range as it moves from nocturnal electronic dance pop to sombre piano-led ballads.

However, while to the untrained eye it may look as though her rise has come out of nowhere, this is an artist who has worked for over a decade on her sound. As she tirelessly refined what it actually meant to be Banks, she found herself alone, with the exception of a cheap, tinny keyboard, in her bedroom, recording track after lo-fi track until she finally felt ready to give her work over to listeners and critics around two years ago. Yet on meeting this new, hippest of pop commodities, it seems that regardless of what people think, she’s just happy to be in a position to make the music she makes with compulsive drive.

“Releasing ‘Goddess’ is a relief”

“I didn’t even think of it as practising”

Writing, for me, is always just a release. It’s something that I just need to do no matter what, so it was amazing for me to do it. I can’t wait for it to come out officially. I don’t really have any hopes for it once it’s released.

I don’t think of it like that. I’m really excited for people to hear it and of course I hope people connect to it, but I think when you make music you can’t really make it in the hope of anything. For me, I just have to make it, and whatever happens with it, happens.

Of course I want people to connect to it and connect to me but I don’t really think of it like that.

I just wrote non-stop. When I discovered it I just needed it so bad and it was such a special thing for me.

It was my safe place where I could be the most ‘me’ I could possibly be. So I just kept writing, and over the years my style changed a little bit. I really magnified all of the things that make me the most me because I was doing it alone. I was just doing it. I just did it and it happened. And then all of a sudden I had my own way of phrasing and my own way of rhythmically singing – probably more syllables in one line than most people would put in. Things like that.

It’s funny; my parents and everyone around me who did know about it, they saw how necessary it was for me and they kept asking me if I wanted lessons. They asked me if I wanted to take vocal lessons or piano lessons because they heard me banging away and I never wanted it. It was such an individual process for me. I didn’t think of it in terms of needing to learn certain things, I just did it! It was my own thing and I never wanted to learn from anybody else.

“Music is a private thing.

You shouldn’t rush it”

I think when I met my manager, I started letting go a little bit more and being a bit more open with everything.

I think I was just patient with myself for a long time until I felt really, really ready and strong. And for those ten years I was writing and kept it really private. I don’t know… I gave myself time to develop my own voice and develop my own atmosphere and just develop as an artist. I think the time that I met my manager, it was just meant to happen at that time. I felt really ready.

“It all started on this keyboard that I think my dad got for me”

I don’t even remember because I didn’t even ask for it. All of a sudden I just noticed a keyboard in my room. That’s how organic it was. I never thought, ‘I’m going to start writing music, I’m going to be a songwriter or a singer.’

All of a sudden my little fingertips started twiddling on these keys that just happened to be in my room that I don’t even remember how it got there.

It was this really cheap keyboard and I

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still have it! I still write on it when I’m at home. It’s just natural to write on it because I started out that way. I remember one of my first studio sessions was with Jesse Rogg and I brought that keyboard in and he was like, ‘What is that? Get it out, I can’t even look at it. That’s embarrassing.’

And my manager, Trevor, and Jesse were just cracking up. I just brought it in thinking we would use it to record and I had no idea it was so shitty.

“When I work with people I like to get in the room with them”

I don’t think you really get to inspire each other’s flavours unless you’re in the same room. They [hook ups with producers Sohn, Lil Silva, Shlomo, Al Shux, Tim Anderson Jesse Rogg, and Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs] all happened differently. All of them are completely different people, and so I have different connections with each of them and different relationships with each of them that maybe inspire different moods.

Working with somebody, for me, is such an intimate experience and process because you have to be so open and honest. And you have to take risks, you know? Music is… you have to be completely non-judgemental because it’s somebody’s heart. When they’re doing it for the right reasons it’s really somebody’s whole heart. And to work with someone who you’re inspired by, when you see their whole heart it’s really incredible. It really fuels me. It’s nourishment. It’s amazing.”

“Lil Silva is the best”

We were on the same label [Good Years]. When I was meeting with them initially they played me one of his beats. He’s so juicy – you can feel his heartbeat in the beat. He’s just the sickest, and I think he felt the same way about me. He just felt me and my voice and the rhythm that I sing in. I dunno, we’re partners and it’s great.

He’s awesome.

“I would describe my music as blue and black and spicy and infinite and crunchy and I would place it in outerspace”

That’s just off my brain, spewing.

“Goddess may be an hour long, but I left so much off”

That was the absolute hardest thing about this album for me. I still have songs that aren’t on the album that are really weird for me to leave off, because it’s my first album and it was so important for me to touch upon things that made me who I am.

I feel that after people listen to this album they’re going to know everything about me, which is so weird. So it seems like a lot but it’s not because I’ve been writing for so long and I’ve got so much to say, because I was patient with myself because I wasn’t ready but now I’m so ready. I’ve got so many things that I wanted to say.

I’ll never have a problem with not having material. For me, it’s like another form of language to me that is a constant dialogue in my life. But I’m really happy and fulfilled with the group of songs that’s on there and they can kiss each other and make out and they all are great together.

“Women are queens”

I want to say whatever I’m feeling. It’s not as thought out as this but definitely there are underlying themes to the record. I really want to empower people. ‘Goddess’ was such a special song for me to make because I feel it so hard that women are Mother Earth.

They’re so powerful and I just want them all to feel the juiciest and most special and most powerful because we are queens. But also, not just women, all people.

I’m really open and I write about feeling really dark and feeling weak and feeling confused, feeling angry.

Things that might not make you feel powerful, but I just think that you should embrace those things as natural, beautiful human emotions.

We’re not robots. Just embracing the most human qualities of yourself – that is powerful in itself. Even if you try to avoid them they’re there. That makes you a goddess, that makes you a god; that makes you powerful.

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“I don’t really separate America and the UK”

A lot of people ask me questions in terms of success in the UK or in terms of America or in terms of Europe.

People are people and if they connect to music then they connect to music.

Obviously the BBC poll was incredible [Banks came second to Sam Smith in the Sound of 2014 poll] and it’s so flattering and everyone on that list was incredible so it’s really special to be grouped with everyone but I don’t know, I just feel really happy that it happened.

“It’s music or nothing”

I honestly can’t say what I’d do other than music, because I don’t think I would have allowed anything else. I got a degree in psychology and I wanted to learn about that, so that’s why I did it, but no, I don’t think I would have allowed anything else.

record head

Chris Lombardi In 1989, a young New Yorker dropped out of college and founded Matador Records in his small apartment. Now living on America’s west coast to gain some perspective on what has become a global, independent operation, Ian Roebuck meets Chris Lombardi

June 4th 2013 and Queens of the Stone Age release their sixth studio album, ‘Like Clockwork’. Just one week later the Palm Desert band hit number one on the US Billboard 200.

91,000 copies were sold giving the independent Matador their first chart triumph, but label founder Chris Lombardi was left numb. “I remember I flew into NewYork and when I landed I was told the record was going to be number one and a group of people were gathering to celebrate. When I got there everyone had already been into a few bottles of champagne and whatever and I wasn’t… it was hard for me to be celebratory. I told Josh [Homme] congratulations on the number one but I felt a little bit lost.

Sure, it was an incredible achievement to hit number one, but at the same time you could only go down.”

A year later and I’m talking to Chris at his LA home.The born and bred New

Yorker is more up than down, having fled west to nurture and grow his label of 25 years. “Well, Matador’s hub is still New York,” he says. “I have been here for five years and LA is a more meditative place for me. It is where I can think about the big picture shit, which is what I do.” He sounds relaxed and content. I ask how it compares to where he grew up: 80’s Manhattan.

“New York is an entirely different city. When I grew up there were still neighbourhoods from the turn of the twentieth century, immigrants, so you had the Jewish community and you had the German town area or little Italy and Greenwich Village was kind of hippies and poets and stuff, and, you know, Harlem was African American and soul food and there was a lot of poverty and a lot of wealth – they were neighbourhood, but they’ve changed dramatically in an instant. So New York is a wonderful playground;

it’s a great place to be.”

Inevitably, that playground would go on to shape Lombardi’s musical tastes and the future of a record label he founded in 1989. Aged 10, though, his first love was for classic rock, as the pre-teen would attend shows by Queen, Led Zeppelin and Kiss. He laughs at the confession. “But then I got interested in New Wave and stuff like the Clash and the Jam, and then I started getting into more of the punk aspect kind of things.”

It was an unassuming record store located at 118 West Third Street in Greenwich Village that would hold sway in Lombardi’s formative years.

“My musical discovery really started when I was going down to Bleecker Street at 13 and visiting Bleecker Bobs and buying the Melody Maker and NME and getting UK imports and stuff, when they came out. The English music papers would come out

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Thursday so I would go down there after school to get them straight away.

That’s how you learnt about it, there was no Internet.

“My being in the music industry was purely by accident,” he continues.

“It was basically what I cared about, I cared about music and I cared about the social side of it. It was the only thing that I knew how to do at that point. I was just out of High School, I went to college for a very short period of time, so there I was in New York, not knowing what to do, but knowing that I liked going to shows and I liked going to record stores. So, in New York there were tons of bands coming through, playing CBGB’s and what not and we would all hang out on the sidewalk in between bands and it was a super social scene. I think I had decided because I knew record stores up and down the country through my job at [small-time, Long Island-based

record head

photographer: nathanael turner / writer: ian roebuck

label] Homestead Records that I wanted to document some of the things going on at the time in New York. The main purpose of Matador was to document the scene – in many ways the original New York – but of course Teenage Fanclub were from Scotland and Pavement from Stockton and Superchunk were from North Carolina so it had to do with everything being funnelled through the city at the time, which was kind of global. If we could put records out and sell a couple of thousand of them and keep the lights on and order some pizza at the end of the day then that was great.”

Having met and trusted Gerard Cosloy, a colleague at Homestead, Lombardi asked his friend to help run Matador from his own apartment. “I had a lot of sleeves in my place back then because you had to run a minimum of 5,000 jackets, so it didn’t really make sense to make less. It was 100 bucks more or something stupid for 1,000, so you had boxes and boxes and boxes of sleeves and then you would have the records come to my apartment and we would have sort of drug-fuelled record stuffing parties where we would insert the vinyl into the jackets. We would stay up all night with the bands and our friends doing this. On some of the records we would even draw on the inner sleeves.”

That homespun feel, so entwined with the myth of indie and its roots in the late ’70s and ’80s, sounds like a lot of hard work, especially at a time when so few had proved it to be a successful model. “But no,” says Lombardi, “it was a lot of fun – that was hands on a hundred per cent, you know. It was ordering the print, the records, talking to the mastering lab, giving the bands a cassette to listen to, calling up and dealing with the colour separation for the artwork and having an album stuffing party and going to the post office and, you know, delivering all the stuff personally, sometimes to record distributors, it was really good fun. It helped if you were picking up a cheque when you got up there though,” he chuckles.

Like it or not, there comes a time in an independent label’s lifespan though where art must translate, in business terms, to a commodity, intended or not. On that, Lombardi agrees wholeheartedly, but says that for Matador it became about responsibility rather than commerce.

“I’m talking about when responsibilities became reality,” he says.

“Certainly, you have the responsibility to promote the record first – you must be passionate about the band – then figuring out how to pay royalties, then hiring some friends of ours who were

not in the music business but liked music. All of a sudden you had to make payroll for these people and when some of these records started to take off it became a problem! The more we sold, the more we had to make and it’s hard to get paid; it’s not the easiest thing when you are a small record label, you know. When you have two or three albums out, it’s easy for someone to say I will take 2,000 or 3,000 copies of your record and I’ll pay you for as long as they want to, as they don’t necessarily have the next big thing coming down the pipe, so we kind of found ourselves in a scenario where we were really scrambling to figure out how to make more records, which is a problem you want to have, but it is a real problem. And at the same time, wanting to remain as independent as you possibly could.”

This is the crux: to make money as an independent you need money.

More often than not a label like Matador’s intentions are pure, they simply want to help create an actual thing. Financial gain is at the bottom of the list, but if that thing takes off, you have to be prepared to go with it. It’s something Big Dada found out more recently, when rank outsider Speech Debelle won the 2009 Mercury Prize but too few copies of ‘Speech Therapy’ were pressed for the label to capitalise on the surprise success. Matador, like so many other Indies, had a responsibility to the artist and themselves to see those early albums

succeed. “Eventually, people started coming around and Atlantic Records came to listen and offered us a joint venture scenario,” Lombardi explains, in a tale of major label backing that has been recurring through our Record Head series. “We got financing from them which helped us really grow the company at that time and one of the things we put out at the time was The Fall and to put a Fall record out was a crazy dream, and the idea that we put that record out on that deal was kind of whacky as well. We signed all kinds of things at that time – a Yo La Tengo record, we grew quickly. I started with a teeny tiny corner of my apartment and then after the Atlantic deal I had a big office and many more employees than I could hire from just my friends, and it was great, great fun.”

Matador now sits nicely under the Beggars umbrella. Independent again and framed beside the likes of 4AD and Rough Trade, they’re free of the shackles that come with major label partnerships. “The thing that we learnt through the relationships with Atlantic and Capitol was that even more than ever we had to stay true to school,” says Lombardi now. “Having these great labels woo you and dine you is kind of like the way bands are – they get wined and dined and wooed by A&R guys and they get told what incredible success they are going to bring them and in the end, in a corporate environment, it’s really about the corporate executive. They

“When QOTSA went to number 1, it was hard for me to be celebratory loudandquiet.com

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only seek out what they think will be successful in order to further their career – it’s about climbing that ladder and getting a new contract because you signed so and so. They washed their hands of their failures. When we did the Atlantic and Capitol deals both the guys that came and wooed us over to their companies left during our deals. When we try to sign a band we tell them: ‘The guys who are sitting in this room, these guys you are talking to have been in this company for 25 years doing the same thing. You know and we’re not going anywhere.’

“There is a criteria with Matador and it’s not based on how well its going to sell,” Lombardi insists. “We have never signed a band for commercial reasons, but these days perhaps you have to be a little more careful. Now with our relationship with Beggars, we have people all over the world working on an album – that makes it difficult to put out a record that maybe a select few are interested in. We can do it and we do do it from time to time, but occasionally we have to let somebody else do it now.”

But not if it’s a potential number one, too, I presume.

“Going to number one, I already knew would happen. When you work with QOTSA… they’re one of my favourite bands of all time, I wanted to work with them for so long and I had got to know Josh for quite a while.

When he delivered that record I called him and, you know, I said, this record is such an artistic statement that we have a great responsibility to care for the album, like we do for all records that we release. To get a number one was cool, being top of the heap was a good feeling for sure. It felt, I don’t know, man, it was a great win. I don’t think we were ever chasing that number one, though. Our philosophy as a label is to really put stuff out that we care about.” This is the first time in an hour that Lombardi sounds ruffled.

I wonder how he would have felt 25 years ago on the streets of New York, running a successful and global independent label and talking to an English music paper?

“I don’t think I have changed that much,” he says. “I mean, I still send out my own packages and stuff. It’s hard to do a big mail out as it’s on a much bigger scale but nowadays it’s just sending a link to something. In terms of the really hands on, the piece of vinyl that you’re sending in the mail and 5 days later someone calls you up and says, ‘man, I heard that record, it sounds great,’ you know, it’s not as instantaneous. That home brewed kind of way of doing things doesn’t exist as much anymore.”

my place

At home with Peaking Lights

05 01. Tape Machine and 8-track: Aaron: “We bounce a lot of stuff to tape to saturate it, and we used to use these for live sets when we first started.

We’ve always just dug stuff out of thrift stores and junk piles, and this is some of the first kit we ever bought.

When we were locking into a sound, these pieces were integral in what’s become the Peaking Lights sound.”

Aaron: “This EQ is the first synthesizer I built, around the turn of the millennium, and it still works! It sounds killer! We don’t tour with it anymore, but we used to, and I’ve used it for a lot of stuff that I’ve done. Like, this old band that I was in called Rahdunes – we used to have these noise stacks of oscillators and we’d go and crash raves and jam with the DJs. We’d tell the people at the door that we were part of the band and my friend Nate and I would set up and just jam noise right next to the DJ. We actually got a lot of compliments doing that.

No one was ever like, ‘Fuck you guys!’”

03 Redwood Photograph

writer: s tuar t stubbs

Indra: “This photograph was taken by my dad’s uncle in the early part of the 20th Century, of the Redwoods in Northern California. Growing up, it was on the wall of our house, and I would stare at it a lot but I wouldn’t pay too close attention to it, until one day I noticed that there are people in the picture as well standing by the trees. Obviously, these are Californian Redwoods so the people look really small against them. It’s almost like they’re gnomes. I grew up in the midwest, where there’s nothing like Redwoods, so I was always intrigued, and it planted the seed for me to come to California to see these magical trees.

I moved here as soon as I could.”

It’s a makeshift setup for a record that sounds as polished as it does, although that is an observation relative to the group’s previous output. Dunis tells me that she and Coyes are now interested in “a more hi-fidelity sound, something more dancey and poppy, where you can actually hear what’s going on.” It explains how elements of disco have been added to Peaking Lights’ neo-psychedelic stew of dub, hypnagogic pop, minimal house and static wash, as Dunis coquettish singspeaks “Get up, get down, a new girl’s come to town” on ‘New Grrrls’. Reverb remains an integral part of her vocal contribution, but she’s significantly clearer than she was on 2012’s ‘Lucifer’ and the preceding, breakthrough album of 2011, ‘936’. The tracks are shorter, too, most condensed to around 4:30 minutes, and a couple well under – a lot trimmer than Peaking Lights’ early sprawl of formless psych-pop tracks, which in turn were more mantra-like than these new verse/chorus numbers.

Dunis says that it was “fucked modern pop” that Peaking Lights were initially reaching for back inWisconsin; ‘Cosmic Logic’ feels like they’ve hit that target.

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02. Homemade EQ:

pho tographer: na t hanael t urner

Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes started making music together as Peaking Lights in 2008, having met in San Francisco. Dunis, from Latvian heritage and herself originally from Wisconsin, convinced the Californian Coyes to move back to her home State with her, away from the Bay Area’s extortionate rental market, where they found a 4-bedroom place in the countryside for just $600 per month. They kept the lights on by mining yard sales and thrift stores and selling what they found on Ebay, while turning their new rental into a studio for their new project, collecting analogue equipment that would make Peaking Lights’ woozy, lo-fi dub pop their very own, and in turn as infectiously frazzled as it remains today.

Now living in Echo Park – a Central Los Angeles neighbourhood once home to the film industry – with their two infant sons and family dog, their home studio is confined in a converted garage in their back yard. Vintage kit is stacked up; homemade synthesisers, soldered by Coyes, balance on one another. It’s here where Peaking Lights made ‘Cosmic Logic’, their forth album, due for release October 2014 via Domino imprint Weird World.

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04. Citizens Band Radio Aaron: “This is an old, homemade radio kit, called Citizens Band, and I’ve always thought that would be a good name for a solo project, and the font is so dope on it. I think it looks like it’s from the 1970s. There’s a nice bowl haircut on that.You don’t see children on the front of toy packaging anymore. It’s all just shitty cartoons and lots of colours.”

05. Empty Calendar: Aaron: “This isn’t even on the right year, let alone the right month. I just like the picture of the waves.We’ve lived in Echo Park for three years and I’d love to stay in LA, but I would like to move west so I’m closer to the beach.”

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Denim Jacket: Aaron: “We found a Dashiki at a thrift store (in fact Indra and I used to have a thrift store and record shop that we owned in Wisconsin), and obviously I’m pretty influenced by reggae, dub and dancehall, and so I made a back patch out of it so I could role out with it, conquering my inner Judah.”

Indra: “We moved back to Wisconsin from San Francisco in 2008, which is where we started playing as Peaking Lights. We’d go to a lot of thrift stores and yard sales, and for a while we’d

09 08

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01 04 02 Stick’n’Poke Aaron: “When I lived in Australia a friend of mine did a homemade tattoo book, there are a bunch of my tattoos in this book. This was a tattoo gun that I made and was experimenting with.

Actually, it worked pretty good when it was working. I mean, I’ve got more tattoos than I can count now, but they’re all spontaneous and erratic.

They’re impulses because I don’t really think about things for a very long time.

I don’t regret any of them, though – they’re all parts of time. You can get a tattoo removed, but you still know that it’s there, y’know.”

08. Australia Tea towel:

which is where my parents met. They didn’t stay together very long but my grandparents were very nationalistic and they wanted me to remember my roots, learn about Latvian culture and even learn how to speak Latvian. It would have been their dream to marry a Latvian also, but that didn’t happen.

Anyway, when Latvia became independent in 1990, my grandfather went back and bought this piece of amber, so it’s got history for me and I’ve worn it in a lot of Peaking Lights performances and photographs. It has a real grounding affect on me and reminds me where I came from… plus it’s a massive chunk of amber, which looks amazing!”

make our living by finding these treasures and selling them on Ebay.

That’s changed a bit now, as people have started to research how much things are worth and what they can sell them for – people look it up on the Internet, but even just a few years back, nobody had a clue. You could pick up some really cool things for a dollar and only ever know what it was worth if you ran into a specialist somewhere.”

06. Dublab Posters: Aaron: “These two are from Dublab, which is an online station that I DJ on.

This was a krautrock show that they did where bands covered their favourite krautrock records. We were on tour when that went down, so we couldn’t play, but if we had been there I would have wanted to do the Sand LP, ‘Golem’. I love that record.”

Amber Necklace

07. ‘Lucifer’ Poster:

Indra: “This is a bit of history for me.

It’s a huge chunk of Amber that was bought by my Grandfather in Latvia, for my Grandmother. Basically the history of it is that my family is from Latvia, but they had to flee the country in World War Two. A lot of family that did the same settled in Wisconsin,

Aaron: “This is a poster that was in the inside of ‘Lucifer’, and we’ve just draped some tape loops around it, because, y’know, we use a lot of tape loops to create samples and noise. It’s at the heart of the band.”

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Aaron: “I lived in Australia for a year and half, before Peaking Lights. But we actually found this tea towel while we were on tour in turkey. It’s there to cover up the crappy cardboard that covers a window for sound. But I love Australia. I almost stayed. Melbourne is one of my favourite cities.”

09. Homemade sound engineering: Aaron: “I’ve been trying to get this room to sound good, so I’ve wound a bunch of t-shirts and blankets together.

The one in the corner is for bass and the ones behind are for the speakers.

The idea is that with these we’ll get better sounding mixes.”

10. Peaking Lights Candle: Aaron: “Our friend Courtney made this candle. She has a company called Napkin Apocalypse, doing repurposed clothes and awesome stuff. Her boyfriend is a surfer called James Reynolds and I helped him with a soundtrack, so she sent us this Peaking Lights candle.”

A Diamond In The Rough Vashti Bunyan has never considered herself to be the folk musician that the rest of us have. She didn’t want to turn her back on music for 35 years and become a cult figure – it just turned out that way photographer: Graeme Cunningham / writer: daniel dylan wray

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n a musical aeon strewn with reformed bands, with artists from the – and in their – 60s and 70s taking to stages and cashing pay cheques as frequently as they did thirty or forty years ago, the idea of an enigmatic artist coming back from an age-old, black-hole of mythical obscurity is no longer so much of a unique tale.

However, in the case of Vashti Bunyan there are components to her backstory still too irresistible to gloss over.

Perhaps because so much of her tale is rooted in an intangible part of musical history, some of which has died, with other parts capturing a phase in music so infinitely different to the one we inhabit today.

Bunyan was an active songwriter in the mid-sixties, who was picked up by Andrew Loog Oldham (The Rolling Stones’ manager-come-impresario).

He signed her to Decca Records for whom she would then record a Jagger/

Richards penned single, ‘Some Things Just Stick in Your Mind’. A few more songs followed but then, frustrated, she decided to leave London and head for the Hebridean Islands, where a commune had been planned by fellow 1960s songwriter Donovan. She would take this journey with her partner, travelling via horse and cart, a surely antiquated method of transport even back then. It took them so long that Donovan had left when they arrived. On the road she continued to write songs, which would form her debut album, ‘Just Another Diamond Day’, released in 1970. Back in London, the album was produced by the now legendary Joe Boyd; Robert Kirby would perform string arrangements fresh from doing the same on his previous two projects, Nick Drake’s exquisite ‘Five Leaves Left’ and ‘Bryter Layter’. Members of both Fairport Convention and the

Incredible String Band would also contribute to the album. At the time, nobody really gave it much attention and the album was deemed a failure.

So devastated by this rejection, Bunyan turned her back on music, never even touching an instrument or listening to music again, retiring to the wilderness to raise her children on a remote farm.

An inquisitive Google search of her own name around the turn of the millennium led Bunyan to discover the cult – and greatly treasured – status of her debut album. It led to a reissue, and the modern-day reappraisal, in the context of bourgeoning artists such as Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, finally gave ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ a home and an opportunity to be listened to and understood in a manner that it simply wasn’t thirty years earlier.

In 2005, Buyan would release a startling new album, ‘Lookaftering’; a

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bookend of a record that seemed intent on tying up the myth of her debut. It was littered with contributions from a new wave of songwriters and artists that were clearly in awe of Bunyan’s work (Banhart, Newsom, Adem, Adam Pierce and it was produced by Max Ritcher). Nine years later Bunyan has released another – very likely to be her last – album in the shape of ‘Heartleap’.

Now at sixty-nine years of age, Bunyan, in her home in Edinburgh, finds herself in a reflective mood, looking back on a fifty-year period since she started as a wide-eyed teenager with dreams of being a pop star.

“I can’t quite believe that I finished it... I do feel as though I’ve emerged from something,” she says of the album’s long creation period. With a nine-year gap between records, seven of them have been spent making this one. Of reaching a final, finishing point, she tells me: “It’s like leaping off

a cliff edge, I think – you just say: ‘okay, that’s it.’ I don’t know how you know it’s finished.”

While her previous record was incredibly collaborative, ‘Heartleap’ was recorded and engineered largely by herself, some of which in the solitary confinement of her own home.

Was this approach, I enquire, born out of dissatisfaction with the previous collaborative approach or simply a desire to approach things freshly?

“I know the press release gives the impression that I wasn’t happy with what went on before, but that is so not

right. I tried to get it re-written as I thought it hinted at dissatisfaction. I was really worried about it and worried about upsetting Max [Ritcher] in any way, because he was fantastic and I could have never made it without him and I learnt so much from him and it was because I learnt so much from him that I was able to carry on and teach myself. The more I learnt about the process of recording, the more fascinated I became with it. After about three years I realised I had to do it for myself, it was time to stand on my own two feet… I felt [on

‘Lookaftering’] that they were looking after me and that to be really honest with myself I should try to do it for myself and see what happens. I had no idea if it was going to work or not but I had to try it and have a go at it.”

Still, Bunyan admits that working by herself is an embedded preference in her creative methods. “It’s a very solitary process,” she says. “I’m not very good at working with other people; I wish I were, but I just get very shy and very closed down.” She tells me that when she was put in the same room with Nick Drake, with the

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aim of collaborating, they would bring out this side in one another exponentially. “We were both too individual to actually work together.”

Since ‘Heartleap’’s announcement, the official line has been that this will most probably be Bunyan’s final record. She tells me: “When it was finished, Dave [from Fat Cat Records] came to the mastering studio and was listening to it and everybody was talking about it and how fantastic it was that it was complete. Then he [Dave] started talking about the next one and I said, ‘I’m never doing this

again.’ So he picked up on that and put it in the press release, too. So, people are asking me if this will be my last record and I say, ‘how can I really know? How can I be really sure?’ But I think it’s often the way when somebody has finished something, they think, where will I ever get that from again? It’s quite a strong and overwhelming feeling. When I finished the last song on the album, ‘Heartleap’, I thought, that’s the last song I’m ever going to write again, because that’s everything I wanted to say.”

There’s something of real beauty to be found in an artist coming to their own, natural conclusion, having their art dictate their decisions and next move instead of a manager, label or notion of a ‘career’ or money. “Well, I’m glad you think so,” she says. “It feels a little bit like I’ve got to the top of a hill. Making an album is a big thing – when I look at piles of CDs I think of all the agony that’s gone into each one. It’s a big thing to do. So for now it certainly feels like [this will be my last one].”

I note that knowing that you’ve called time on your musical career, and it marking fifty years since it ostensibly began, must cause a great deal of introspection and reflection. “Yes,” says Bunyan, “a great reflectiveness because it was like coming full circle in a way. The way I first started writing songs was just on my own in a room with a guitar with huge dreams of what I might do with these songs, and then of course it never happened and here I am at this end of everything and actually realising those dreams I had when I was very young and realising how lucky I am. I feel extraordinary that I’ve been able to do this and have had the good fortune to be able to do this. Certainly that the technology has allowed me to do this by myself in a room, not just with a guitar but with all kinds of sounds available to me that were in my head that I was able to get out – how lucky is that, really?! It does make me feel reflectively fortunate.”

This reflective approach has too changed Bunyan’s views of her early years and the ‘failure’ of her debut album. “I think ‘… Diamond Day’ to me was such a failure because nobody said anything about it back then, so all I could do was assume it was awful and so whenever I heard it – by mistake, if one of the children would put the tape on or something – I had to turn it off instantly. I couldn’t bear to hear it because it just meant failure and rejection to me, then after it came out again in 2000 and people started saying all the things that I would have

longed for people to say back then about it – because back then it was just dismissed as nursery rhymes for children, it was lightweight and all these awful things – and to have it actually understood during these times allowed me to go back and actually listen and think, oh, actually those songs are quite alright, and I think it has changed my perception of my own songs.

“Looking back now, now that I’ve come back to it [‘… Diamond Day’] or at least after it came out again, I realised how much I’d missed it and what a huge thing I’d done by turning my back on it and that’s when I realised how terribly crushed I’d been by an un-acceptance by other musicians or other people who listened. That was such a bad feeling that I couldn’t listen to music for a long, long time and that was really hard on my children that they didn’t have much music in their early lives at all and I feel really bad about that now.”

T

here’s a shyness in Bunyan that occasionally seeps through in our conversation and she still talks about coming to terms with confidence in her own songs and in her own performances, so much so that she couldn’t perform vocal takes for this record with other people in the room.

“I experimented with that,” she says.

“I tried recording a vocal when I knew there was someone else in the house or I knew there was somebody about to arrive or whatever and then tried it again when I knew I was on my own and the difference in expression, not just in confidence but in acuity of what

I was doing, was very much, so I carried on.” In fact, Bunyan’s own past and relationship to music has had a lingering effect on her relationship with her own voice. “Before I started up again, I couldn’t listen to my voice at all,” she remembers. “I couldn’t even listen to myself leaving a voicemail message. I just could not bear the sound of my own voice. It took me a while to understand it. I think I’m enjoying my voice more now, I’m not so shy of it.”

In 2006, the lead song from ‘Just Another Diamond Day’ became a hit after inclusion on a T-Mobile advert, but all of this just played into Bunyan’s initial plans of being a popular artist.

“The thing with the T-Mobile advert, when I wrote the song ‘Diamond Day’ I didn’t want it to be some little obscure song that nobody would ever hear – even though that’s what it would turn out to be – so to have it taken up by a commercial to me felt absolutely wonderful because my thoughts when I was recording with Andrew Oldham was that I wanted to be commercial, I wanted to be in the charts, I wanted to be that person and everybody said to me, ‘oh, your songs are so uncommercial’, so to have one of those songs taken up as a commercial was just brilliant. I know that it upset some people, as they felt it was this precious song that went against the whole idea of the modern world and I was sorry that I upset people with that, but for me it was brilliant and it also enabled me to send my youngest off to college in America and things like that.”

The long period for ‘Heartleap’’s creation is worthwhile. Not only is it the clear manifestation of an artist allowing herself to grow, evolve and gain confidence at a natural and

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conducive pace, but as a finished product it is truly gorgeous. Bunyan’s vocals drop-back somewhat on this album; they are less defined and upfront and more ingrained into the misty layers of instrumentation and the glowing, entrancing atmospheres that so frequently cloak it. As a songwriter she is frequently projected as being a folk artist; a traditional purist of the old-school, still locked into the dewy hue of old-time compadre’s such as Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band, and while structural and sonic similarities do occasionally prevail, Bunyan’s approach is the living antitheses of the purism and traditionalism found in such folk music.

With her first royalty cheque she bought a Mac, a keyboard and a music programme and openly gushes at the satisfaction she gets from the “fakery and trickery” she explores with making music on her computer, building music up with layers and splices. This treatment and mentality bears far more resemblance to the approach of an electronic musician than a folky. “I think I’m fascinated by the idea of replicating something that I can’t play,” she says.

I tell her that her approach is far more in the Grouper or Arthur Russell camp than it is in, say, the Linda Thompson one. “What you just said was music to my ears,” she beams. “I have never considered myself a folk musician, ever! I think because of the people who were on ‘… Diamond Day’ that Joe Boyd brought in, people who were very much considered folk people and today they are still very much in the Brit-Folk category, so that is where I was pushed as well. ‘…

Diamond Day’ was a tiny part of my life and a tiny part of my musical life. I thought of myself as a pop singer when I started out when I was nineteen. Then I didn’t understand what was happening with ‘… Diamond Day’; I didn’t hear the recordings until a year later and then I realised that it was a very folky kind of treatment, which is one of the reasons why I left it behind, as I felt it didn’t represent me terribly well. Then in 2000 when it was re-released HMV insisted putting it in the folk section! Then when ‘Lookaftering’ came out it was also put in the folk category, and when I see myself described as ‘folk singer Vashti Bunyan’ I always get a little knot in my heart – that isn’t me, really. But the problem is, how do I describe myself?

How do I describe the music? It’s so much easier to call it folk but I never ever have and don’t.”

We Are All Culpable Nottingham spoken word duo Sleaford Mods are here to remind us in no uncertain terms that modern life is rubbish… still phot ographe r: tash bright / writ e r : da nie l dy la n w r a y

Subtlety might not be Sleaford Mods’ greatest and most commonly attributed asset. Their approach is brusque, to say the least, and at its most fierce a full-on head-butt to the nose with a swift follow-up of a glass across the skull. Anger, animosity and venom is their bread and butter.

However, they are also a group not to be underestimated and simply viewed and absorbed at surface level. To see Sleaford Mods live is to witness a seething manifestation of something that bubbles within all too many of us.

Vocalist Jason Williamson spews, shouts and barks into the microphone with not a shred of inauthenticity. This is not just the incoherent ramblings of a man railing against the so called ‘system’; there is a fluidity and precision that illuminates a truly talented vocalist as clearly as it does a disgruntled citizen of this country.

Andrew Fearn, the other half of the Nottingham-based group, is responsible for the music, usually comprised of some form of a chugging, spitting beat that switches genres from song to song, from jungle to grime, hip-hop to gritty punk lo-fi.

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Together they have forged a bewildering but beguiling concoction, as Fearn tells me, sitting at Beacons Festival 2014, held on England’s Yorkshire Dales.

“We were a happy accident,” he says. “I was playing some beats at this night that was mainly a fairly motley crew of noise fans. They didn’t really like what I was playing, they would ignore me, it was just that the guy who put the night on was my mate, so I was like, ‘sod you lot, I’m just going to play my beats’, and then he [Jason] was like, ‘oh, I like your beats’. It really was two things just slapped together. Then we found similarities between us as friends as well as differences, and it was those things that made it work.”

Williamson says of the meeting: “When I first met him he was playing this brilliant music and looking nonplussed. It was a winner.”

The ‘voice of the working class’ is a label thrust upon Sleaford Mods as frequently as the usual suspects of comparisons are (John Cooper Clarke, The Fall and so on). “I couldn’t name one album by The Fall. Rein ya black heavy knit sweaters in you

‘People often don’t like it when they are confronted with something that is unashamedly itself’

fuckin fossils.” So Tweeted Sleaford Mods recently.

“People are quick to label you as ‘the voice of working Britain,’” says Williamson, “it’s bollocks. It’s just that’s the situation you’re in. I’m having no allegiance to anything. It’s just the situation you’re in,” he reiterates. “We don’t see ourselves as the voices of the working class or anything like that.”

If Sleaford Mods do represent anything, though, it’s perhaps the fact that there is no collective voice of the working class, right now. They represent, and project, the disparity, the fractured nature of Britain and the shattered ideal that there is a communal underbelly waiting to revolt. Fearn says: “British people don’t challenge the government enough; they don’t stick together enough against the Government, unlike a lot of other European countries.”

The daily slog of working life forms a great deal of the essence of their songs, yet this is hardly something the group are keen to promote either, as Williamson points out, “I’m careful not to get so proud of that, because

why would I want to be proud of fucking getting up everyday and going to work? It’s fucking shit, I’ve done it all my life and it’s a bag of shit.”

From October 2014, they’ll be professional musicians, although leaving behind the guts of Williamson’s lyrical inspiration is not something that concerns him. “Just because you leave work… I mean there’s lots of depression in everything,” he says, “you just hone in on something else.

Also,” he reasons, “you can’t base your continual output on the same subject all the time.

“But [giving up work for music] is worrying because you’ve got to pay the bills, so there’s always that temptation to accept the payroll, which I don’t want to do at all, so it’s trying to find a way of keeping us as contained as we are now. I’m aware of the fact that people find us interesting at the moment because it’s a breath of fresh air, but when that passes with the mainstream media, which it fucking will, it’s like, how do you keep making your lolly?”

There’s a harmonious personality clash between Williamson and Fearn.

The former is gnarly, tough and feisty, with the latter relaxed, jovial and stoner-like. Both are loquacious, funny and likeable, but their opposing traits are clear foundations for their successful musical pairing. Williamson is an ex-Mod. “I take the bitter essence of it,” he says, “which is what people seem to forget is what makes a Mod. It’s the bitter essence of it – anything else that dresses it up is dog shit; it’s usually spurred on by consumerism and somebody else making money out of it. That’s why I had a go at Miles Kane (Kane complimented the band on Twitter to which the Mods replied, ‘This music was born out of a hate for pretenders like you. You can either leave gracefully or I will block you’).

He’s shit; he’s absolutely fucking terrible. More magazines kept approaching me and saying, ‘let’s talk about that’, and I don’t want to turn it into a witch-hunt. I just don’t think he’s a mod – he’s not a mod, of course he’s fucking not. You’ve got this stereotype, this plastic other that people shove out – take the stereotypical example of a page three women – and they shove that out like

that’s what it’s about, but it’s not. That’s not what life is… Mod means something different to me. Take someone like Paul Weller – he’ll probably say that it means beat music or soul music, sharp dressing or this that or the other but to me it means that, in a little respect, but it also means something different, something street, something gnarly, something pure.”

Miles Kane never responded.

“Nothing at all, because he knows I’m fucking right. Either that or he’s dead hard and he’s going to clump me one night.”

Fearn’s background is more rooted in the glory days of Nottingham.

“Nineties Nottingham was like Portlandia,” he says. “It really was. It was normal to pierce your penis and so on; it was cool to be unemployed; it was the time to drop out and I was completely one of those people that slipped through the net.”

Musically, however, it’s been more electronic and hip-hop experimentations. “I’ve been an electronic musician all my life, since I was sixteen, trying to make a cool Aphex Twin album or something, or something popular in that field, and it’s come in dribs and drabs but it’s never really happened, so I suppose, in a way, nobody making that kind of music has ever come forward and started working with somebody like Jason...

“I think with genres there comes a comfort and a security,” he continues.

“When you work within a specific genre you kind of already know if it’s going to be popular and you know who it’s going to appeal to and those certain people will be convinced by it.

It’s braver to go out there and do something different.”

The invigorating element of Sleaford Mods – and what personally attracts me to this group so much – is that nobody is out of the aim of their crosshairs. Everyone is a target and nobody is safe, from the EDL to Eno; Sonic Youth fans to football hooligans; Lou Reed to Kasabian; politicians to police officers; drug dealers to Chumbawumba. This is not because they project a sociopathic hatred towards all and anyone but because they hit home the all too forgotten realisation that we’re all culpable.

It’s music that offers us a grimy,

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drug-smeared mirror to our faces – we’re all culpable cunts in the world of Sleaford Mods.

We often seek comfort, familiarity and reassurance in the music we listen to, be it stylistically or lyrically, but the Mods don’t allow you to side with them because to pledge unadulterated allegiance to Sleaford Mods would be to miss the point entirely.

“The opposite music to us is like Balearic rhythms,” observes Fearn.

“That music is like some therapy, which is a valid point – sombre music or ambient music can be a spiritual thing for some people, but this is a conscious thing. That’s the difference, it’s a conscious world and this conscious world of music has become so bland and irrelevant.”

Williamson happily acknowledges that not everyone is going to get it.

“People [often don’t like it] when they are confronted with something that is unashamedly itself,” he says.

“It’s not trying to be something else; there’s no pretence, there’s no cover up. We are quite coarse, and I think people can be offended by it – it’s because it is just that. Like, ‘well, why is he like that’ and it’s because some people fucking care, they are actually pissed off... It’s [the music industry] very fickle and people say we’re a band of the moment and I suppose we are but a lot of the best bands I’ve liked have been born out of the moment, the reaction to the environment around them.”

During a time in which any discernible sign of British youth culture seems embedded in pretending it’s the 1990s and it’s in America, there is something refreshing about the Mods, as bleak a reminder as it can often be. Sleaford Mods are the scattered chicken bones, the puddles of piss and the gloopy piles of puke that line and flood the city streets every Sunday morning. They are a grim reminder of the detrimental existence of humans as a whole – our collective, negligent impact we all have. Nobody wants to look at it but sometimes you need to.

Everything & Nothing Decoding the austere post-punk of Detroit’s Protomartyr p hotogra pher: p hil shar p / writer: thomas may

“Well at the beginning I mention my friend Dante who’s Filipino. He always has, like, off-brand electronics; I don’t know where he gets his electronics from.” Joe Casey hunches over at the picnic table that his band and I have squeezed onto for our interview. We’re sitting outside Brixton DIY venue The Windmill amidst the chattering overspill of the audience within, the dull thud of drums drifting in and out of perception as we speak. The venue’s iconic rooftop guard-dog watches on a few feet above us, its image adorning our bottles of the house-brand ‘Roof Dog’ beer.

Casey directs his gaze to the side as he draws on a cigarette, his body halfturned as if poised to leave; but the apparent aloofness of his demeanour is belied by the ease and lucidity of his conversation. The singer’s tone is that of low-key sincerity, his responses to my questions more considered and succinct than curt. “So I was thinking, like, what if one day you turned up with a device that you could just buy at RadioShack or a cheap electronics store, and it’s something that would just remove want? It’s kind of a science fictiony theme, but [I tried to] make it as realistic as possible.”

We’re discussing the track ‘Want Remover’, a particularly striking point on Protomartyr’s second record, ‘Under Color of Official Right’, released earlier this year on Sub Pop’s Hardly Art imprint. The song’s concept is pervaded by a dystopian air, evoking images of a society controlled by Casey’s fictional device, its individuals acquiescent and apathetic as concepts like progress, change, and freedom fade to little more than halfremembered ideals. So what do you imagine a world with a want remover would look like? I ask. “Kind of like ours,” Casey answers without pause. “I

don’t have a smartphone but I see how important they are for people once they have them, and how people are obsessed with devices nowadays. So I think it probably already exists; we just don’t know about it.”

For Casey, then, the contemporary anxiety towards boredom – our overwhelming dread of any time spent without activity, without connection – has led to the development of a new, more deadened way of existence. I relay to the band a remark recently made by the critic Mark Fisher: that the rapid infiltration of digital media into both the public and private spheres has created such a continuous stream of low-level stimuli that the very idea of boredom now seems utopian. “Yeah, I can see that,” Casey nods. But immediately the rest of the group – up to this point content simply to observe – weigh in to disagree, recalling their wi-fi-deprived journey from France earlier in the day. “Well the ferry was especially bad, because I couldn’t read a book or anything, I just had to stare out of the window,” guitarist Greg Ahee says, the conversation now pacing around the table. “I don’t know if it was boredom,” elaborates Alex Leonard, the group’s drummer, “I just felt like we were gonna die. Boredom and terror.”

Ahee: “Yeah: fear. Fear is probably a better word.”

There’s a brief pause of agreement before Ahee says: “But the other side, being like glued toTwitter and Facebook all the time, can be a disease too.”

It’s this fraught relationship to digital media – which finds its most potent embodiment in the perverse allure of the infinite scroll of these social networks – that’s explored with such eloquence on ‘Want Remover’.

The track’s protagonist begins by almost gleefully embracing the device:

“I’m free free free from want / I’m free free from fear”. But as independent agency quickly deteriorates into what seems like maniacal addiction and dependency, the track ends on a forbidding note: “I’m free free free from thought / and I’m free free from action / as it starts to leak / I worry about the carpet.”

‘A

re you sure they’re a band?

They really don’t look like a band. They don’t do they?” So prattled Time Out, presumably to itself, in a recent profile of the group. Given the urgency and nuance of a track like ‘Want Remover’ it’s perhaps surprising that Protomartyr’s supposed dearth of chic has been such a common point of conversation around the group. That said, it does chime, somewhat ironically, with that song’s portrait of a culture ever more in thrall to quantity and speed of information over and above quality or depth of experience.

And the group’s ‘Under Color of Official Right’ is a record that could be heard to raise a rallying cry against such tendencies. Oscillating between an especially barbed take on The Strokes’ taut melodic fuzz, early Interpol, and The Fall’s ‘Hex’-era lowend clatter, the album rages with unkempt energy as lyrical fragments emerge – abstract and mantra-like – from the airless thrash of post-punk noise. These are songs that embrace ambiguity – of tone, of meaning – at every turn.

On this point, I ask if Protomartyr’s music is exclusively depressive or despondent. “Not at all,” Ahee parries.

“To me it’s like, at least the feeling I get from it – which is again not just taken necessarily just from lyrics or just from

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music, but how it all feels together for me – it feels like a mix of uplifting, depressing, happy, sad: it’s a mix of different emotions which can’t easily be pinpointed to ‘oh this is just like downtrodden guys that are just completely nihilistic.’ It’s frustrating to me when people try to pinpoint these really specific, usually depressing, emotions onto it, or any music, but it doesn’t feel that way to me.”

And in such a rejection of onedimensional meaning, Protomartyr refrain from adopting any explicit political stance in their music, preferring instead the enigmatic, the ambivalent. For most listeners, for instance, there’s a memorable moment of realisation when the apparently rousing anthem ‘Scum! Rise!’ reveals itself, after repeated listens, instead to be a nightmarish tale of a group of children killing their neglectful fathers.

“I try to avoid it in the lyrics, any political stance, which I guess in itself is a political stance,” Casey explains.

“But I, you know, I try to write from the ground up, the closer [the lyrics] are to reality, or your day to day existence – and I find politics really don’t affect your day to day existence.

At least not writing a political song.

But if you’re talking about your day to day existence, then you can read into bigger issues, if you want.”

This aversion to didacticism or sloganeering is central to Protomartyr’s potency. The group’s music evokes the amorphous feeling – the intangible sense – of broader social, cultural, and political themes via Casey’s, largely noise-obscured, parables of the quotidian and the personal.

“Like, we have a song about one of Detroit’s mayors,” Leonard offers, “but that’s still not a politics song, it’s like a little story.” The song, ‘Bad Advice’, takes the figure of Kwame Kilpatrick,

onetime mayor of the group’s hometown, as its inspiration; but rather than critiquing directly the widespread corruption that characterised his term, Casey comes at his story obliquely. “In that song, it kinda came out of the idea, I was thinking about bad dads. I had a good dad, but there are people out there that don’t. Or just how you are corrupted by who you’re raised by. And I felt like in that case, when he was arrested on the news somebody was like, ‘oh Kwame was let down by his dad. His dad led him astray.’ And I was just kinda thinking and that’s an interesting way to talk about that. Being vague enough, that if you didn’t know Kwame Kilpatrick, you could still get from the song that’s it about people getting too big headed and then getting brought down.”

A short passage from Barry Shank’s

recent book The Political Force of Musical Beauty feels especially relevant to this point. Writing of Patti Smith’s ‘Horses’, Shank notes: “Rock’s political force does not follow from its ability to inform its listeners about the social real. Rather, this power is an effect of rock’s production of musical beauty.”

Indeed, when I mention that I’m able to understand only a small percentage of the group’s lyrics, Casey replies simply: “That’s not our purpose.”

Music, and art more broadly, does not derive its force from the careful development of theses or theories.

Instead, music – even that with words – creates aesthetic experiences that speak non-verbally, communicating abstracted ideas, tones, shades untouchable by language.

Specifically of the anger and violent imagery often erupting out of

Protomartyr’s noir soundscapes, Casey tells me: “Well with me, there’s like two different kinds of anger. You can get angry at something specific. Like some of [my lyrics] are comical; like in the song ‘Tarpeian Rock’,” – perhaps his most Mark E Smith-indebted moment – “it’s just some things that pissed me off. But usually when you’re angry, you kinda like lose yourself and you’re not thinking straight when you’re angry. So lyrics or the song shouldn’t be specific, it should just be like the loose idea of anger. It doesn’t really happen specifically.”

After a pause Ahee picks up this train of thought, arriving at what could perhaps be seen as a guiding principle underpinning his group’s approach to songwriting: “Yeah, for me, what music can do that some essay, or some other kind of writing, can’t

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do, is it can express something that you can’t really express just with words. So I think we all kind of got it that, like, Joe, alright his lyrics are saying something, but we’re also trying to express something besides just that.” But, that said, maybe the group’s reluctance to offer anything by way of concrete interpretations of their music derives from a less profound motive: “Some of the songs have really stupid meanings,” Casey confides later, half-smiling, “and that’s kinda why I want to keep them a secret. Because if I explain them, someone might be like, ‘that song’s about that?!’”

I

t’s a miserably overcast Tuesday in West London and I’m sat alongside Shura in an artsy café. She’s sifting through holiday snaps on her iPhone and making me feel enormously jealous. Glistening seas and pristine beaches whizz past as the diminutive 23 year-old gleefully parades the evidence of a sunny sojourn in the Mediterranean. “It was so fucking beautiful, some of it, honestly, it was like the Caribbean,” she exclaims in a cut-glass accent, clearly still in awe of the whole experience. “Why does nobody talk about Crete?”

If Shura has misgivings about the marketing efforts of the Greece Tourism Board, she needn’t worry about her own exposure. The halfBritish, half-Russian singer has already ratcheted up more than a million SoundCloud plays and almost as many YouTube streams, despite having released her breakthrough song barely six months ago, and still not having a record label. You won’t find her on Spotify and you can’t buy her records in the shops, but you will see her plastered all over the buzz blogs and topping the Hype Machine charts.

All this attention is for good reason.

Shura’s two solo releases to date, ‘Touch’ and ‘Just Once’, are a deftly

produced pair of retro-futuristic synth pop ruminations on the transience of love. If some of the contemporary touch points are clear (“I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t listening to a lot of Blood Orange and Solange”) the real difference here is Shura’s voice: a delicate, breathy sing-whisper that lends believable vulnerability to what are already emotionally raw lyrics.

It really does seem as though Shura has come from nowhere, too. I explain that I had a hard time finding much of her older stuff online in preparation for meeting up. She bristles slightly at the suggestion she’s some kind of overnight success story. “I feel like I’ve done a lot, though,” she argues. “I’ve been doing stuff since I was 16, so for me it feels like I haven’t come from nowhere, it was just exposure. So one day – I think maybe the first week after ‘Touch’ – it was like, ‘Okay this is a bit silly.’ It just shifted my goalposts.

100,000 listened to the song, which was more than the rest of my entire SoundCloud account put together.”

Born Aleksandra Denton in Moscow, Shura’s mother is a Russian actress and her father an English documentary filmmaker. She began playing music at a young age. “I started on a guitar and my dad taught me to

play that,” she remembers. “He would listen to people like John Martyn, Simon and Garfunkel and Bert Jansch and so that was how I initially ‘computed’ guitar music.”

Despite the synth-heavy sound of her recent output, it’s not entirely surprising to hear that Shura’s music has such folkish origins. In previous interviews she’s name-checked KT Tunstall as an important influence; a fairly incongruous reference alongside the more obvious likes of Janet Jackson, Madonna and Prince. In fact, it turns out the Scottish singer-songwriter probably had a more profound impact than just about anybody else on the way Shura creates music.

“I remember seeing her use a loop pedal and thinking what the fuck is that thing she’s stomping on? I want one. I want to stamp on something too! So I bought one and taught myself how to use it,” she laughs. “I was listening to a lot of trip-hop at the time, so I thought, ‘Fuck, I can do weird multi-layered guitar loops and then beat box too and all of a sudden I could make stuff that wasn’t like anything else I was listening to. It wasn’t folk, it wasn’t trip-hop; it was like this weird amalgamation of everything.”

Within Touching Distance Russian-British future RnB star SHURA and her unlikely influences p hotog ra ph e r: lee gold up / w rite r : J a me s F. Th omp s on

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Having begun to find her voice, Shura started playing shows in unfashionable areas of London like Archway and Camden when she was spotted by London-based Iranian producer Hiatus. The pair collaborated on a couple of well-received songs, of which the moodily beguiling ‘Iran Air’ isn’t too distant a cousin to her latest output. The experience was formative, if not entirely satisfying. “Eventually he would start writing top lines and lyrics and being like, ‘Can you sing it?’ and I think the reason I stopped doing it was that I thought, if you want to do the lyrics and the melody, you should sing it! Like…” She catches her breath.

“I’m not a Whitney Houston and like I’m not a Jess Glynne; you wouldn’t pick me because my voice is amazing. I wanted to do stuff that was 100% me and what I would choose to do.”

Clearly Shura’s time with Hiatus didn’t put her off collaboration altogether. Last year, she got together with another producer, Athlete front man Joel Laslett Pott, in what’s apparently a more even-sided arrangement. Shura credits Pott with piquing an already nascent interest in synthesisers and electronic music as

part of a second musical epiphany.

“Until I wrote ‘Touch’ I don’t think I really understood synths,” she admits.

“I don’t think I ever really listened out for them or appreciated them. It’s just because there were some synths lying around in Joel’s studio and I was like, ‘That is a great sound. Why hasn’t that been in my life?’ I suppose all of my life I had been making music just with my guitar and my mouth.”

Synth-laden or otherwise, none of her music would be half as interesting to listen to without Shura’s emotionally tumultuous lyrics. Sifting through the comments left online in response to ‘Touch,’ you sense that people understand that her writing comes from the heart. Complete strangers offer up advice on coping with breakups and moving on, as though the song was some sort of anguished cry for help. “Yeah which is weird because it absolutely is from my personal life

but I’m surprised…” She trails off.

“Maybe it’s because I’ve always been a confessional songwriter. Not to the extent you’ve got my whole life story, I hope, but I think I would find it really hard to make up something like that.”

Oftentimes love songs seem geared towards anodyne universality but there are pointed, specific references peppered throughout ‘Touch’ that betray something closer to home.

Couplets like: “I want to touch you but there’s history / I can’t believe that it’s been three years.” I ask whether Shura feels comfortable discussing the song’s origins. She hesitates a moment. “I guess it is what it is,” she sighs. “It was a break-up I went through. I actually think the video was very much part of the process [of getting over it]. That was a huge part – going from having a relationship, through to breaking up, through to three years later writing a song about being friends again and

“You wouldn’t pick me because my voice is amazing”

making a video too – it was part of the timeline of the relationship and something I had to do.”

Ah.Yes. The video. Three-and-a-half minutes of doe-eyed trendy types locking lips, caressing each other’s faces and otherwise getting intimately acquainted in slow motion. On paper, the whole thing sounds like a nightmarishly cynical marketing ploy, as though dreamt up by some thighrubbing studio executive. In reality, the clip is anything but erotic, instead mirroring the song itself as a sensitive portrait of love lost and found. As if to prove the point, at the time of writing the video is also lagging behind SoundCloud in the streaming stakes (although it’s catching up fast).

Besides, it was Shura herself who came up with the idea. “From the moment I’d written the song I was like, ‘I have to make this.’ I could have had a director pitch something but I just felt like I had to make this video.” So where did the kissers come from? “They’re all my friends! My twin brother is in the video actually. He’s the boy in the cap who snogs another boy…” Presumably he’s gay? “Yes. You know it’s funny, there are some comments on the video

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about there not being enough gay kisses in the video, or there being more lesbians, or whatever, so I was just like, in my head going, ‘It’s really hard to represent everyone!’”

We reach the end of our time together as Shura adjusts her woolly hat and steels herself for a shoot with the Loud And Quiet photographer, lamenting the fact that she didn’t head down the well-trodden path of the masked producer. For all the playful bashfulness in front of the camera, there’s no shortage of confidence when it comes to the studio. An album’s on the way next year and expectations are high. “I was on a blog – not reading about myself – and I saw these lists with the top 10 albums of the 1970s and 1980s. I was looking at them thinking, ‘That’s doable!’ Then I remember thinking shut up you mentalist, do you remember who’s in this list?!”

The return of Death From Above 1979: A modern day rock story of knowing when to quit, and when to have another go

In 2006, a post on DeathFromAbove 1979.com confirmed what most had already assumed: Jesse F. Keeler and Sebastien Grainger had gone their separate ways. But it wasn’t the result of a live-show implosion, media manipulation, or even a reaction to a failed album; just the harsh, honest admittance that things, and people, change.

“I know it’s been forever since I wrote anything on here…” Keeler posted. “I’m sure by now most of you assume the band isn’t happening anymore since there are no shows, no work on a new album, etc. Well I wanted to let you know that your assumptions are correct. We decided to stop doing the band... actually we decided that almost a year ago. We started as a punk band with pop aspirations and we met every goal we set for ourselves. A few weeks ago, the album finally went gold in Canada and that was the final mark I really wanted to reach. Over the last 3 years of touring, Sebastien and I had grown apart to such an extent that the only real time we spoke was just before we would play and during interviews. We both changed so much that the people we were by the end of it probably wouldn’t have been friends if they were to meet for the first time again.

It’s a totally normal function of growing up.”

Put against the unyielding primal intensity of their music – a brutal overload of pounding drums, filthy bass, and bruising bravado – it was a double disappointment.

That announcement should have been wracked with all of the anger, selfdestruction and adrenaline-purging momentum that made their 2004 debut, ‘You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine’, such a glorious emotional wreckage of an LP. It was a break-up album for boys; a blazing, raging cyclone of twisted love, carnal lust and angry confusion that worked its sweaty, sleazy magic on indie disco floors, drove workout playlists, and gave those University dorm room Dawson’s Creek moments a barracking kick in the bollocks.

But as a statement, it was so grown up; so cynically balanced; so

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You’re A Man I’m A Man photographer: jenna foxton / writer: reef younis

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‘I’m not sure what inspired Sebastien to contact me but it felt like, for the first time, I was ok with trying to do it’

unresolved. It denied the drama, defiance, and emotion that coursed through ‘You’re a Woman...’s blazing 35 minutes, not so much slamming the door on Death from Above 1979’s short life span, more pulling it closed uncharacteristically gently. There’d be no breathless second album and no more riotous, limb-flailing live shows, just the resignation of what could have been. But where the truth of the split inevitably hurt, it was the hope that killed.

Keeler and Al-P joined forces to make MSTRKRFT an essential crossover success whilst Grainger went on to release his debut solo album, ‘Sebastien Grainger & The Mountains’, and go after the normal band dynamic he craved. Meanwhile, the Death from Above legacy continued untouched and undiminished. Five years on it was re-ignited as the band posted a new message on their site with Granger writing: “So here we go. Jesse and I have been writing new songs and the only way we feel like we can make them any good is to go out and play them for people. We’re going to throw our little muscle bound babies to the lions and see who survives.We tried just jumping

into the studio, but the songs lacked spirit. They lacked life. So this tour is song CPR. There’s no way for us to do it anonymously anymore, so we’re inviting you to come along with us.

Watch us Do It. The way we used to.

The way everyone used to. We’re a band, and bands just work it out together.”

It wasn’t quite the Death from Above elephant-face bat-signal burning into the Toronto night sky, but in a career that’s largely been reduced and then resurrected by these two book-ended messages, speaking with Keeler and Grainger, it’s apparent that this isn’t about a grand resurrection or reanimating Death From Above 1979 2.0 to them; it’s about adding to the legacy they created, and doing it the justice it deserves.

“It felt like we had discussed doing the band again, separately, but never together,” Grainger tells me at East London’s Ace Hotel, Shoreditch. “For a long time there was no reason, and it was never an option or something that came up but then all of a sudden it was ‘maybe’ and the timing was, strangely, very symmetrical. We talked together in 2010, which was ten years after we met for the first time, then we

started playing in 2011, which was ten years after we started the band. It seemed right.”

“I don’t think either Sebastien or I thought at all about doing the band until he reached out,” says Keeler. “I’d never bumped into him once in all those years. I read his email and I wasn’t against the idea, which showed how my attitude to the band had changed.

I’m not sure what inspired him to contact me but it felt like, for the first time, I was ok with trying to do it.”

After admittedly growing apart, and effectively ending the friendship with the split of the band, it’s heartening to see that the dynamic is a relaxed, easy, and visibly happy one.

Despite the rigours of jetlag and the impending press grind, both Grainger and Keeler are thoughtful and forthright. Nothing seems off-limits as both speak honestly and openly about the past. It’s a refreshing approach, and I guess if there was never any genuine bad blood first time, then there’s been nothing left to fester for the last decade.

“The band was very binary,” Grainger admits. “Once we stopped doing it, then that was it, and we lived on our separate sides of the city [Toronto] and did our own things. The basis of our relationship, and the band, was a creative one. It didn’t end because we didn’t have anything left to say, it was just that we didn’t have the time with heavy touring and the travelling schedule and other pretty boring stuff,” he laughs.

“Also, at that age [Grainger 25 and Keeler 27], there’s a lot of weird personality stuff that’s happening and you’re trying to establish who you are.

Some people do that in school, or when they leave University or get a career but we were going through that quite intensely with someone else and a lot of other people. At that point, because we were making it up as we went along, there was no precedent for it, and it became, for me, like I couldn’t separate myself from everything, and as an artist this wasn’t all I had to say.

“I think that went for both of us,” Grainger continues. “We had more to say, musically, and if we couldn’t do it through the band, we’d go and do it

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somewhere else. Personally, I didn’t want to be that dude, whoever I fucking was. I was sick of the band, sick of myself, sick of the whole thing and just wanted to start from scratch.

We went away and did our separate things but the band kept going without us, so when we came back to it, we were able to see it as this third thing, this objective point we could reference and appreciate from a different perspective. We also want to honour that because it’s important to a lot of people, and important to us.”

lick back to the early-mid noughties and it’s difficult to not get doe-eyed about the bands that had an impact on music at that time: The Strokes, Interpol,TV on the Radio,Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Walkmen, and The Black Keys were all on the rise, and the likes of Metric,The New Pornographers, Arcade Fire and DFA 1979 were all lovingly lumped in together as one big happy Canadian family. But where the majority of the above fell foul of difficult second/third releases, member changes or the general apathy that involves following a band you love through the inevitable lulls and changes of direction, the Death from Above legacy remained crystalised in one 35-minute salvo and two mutant elephant heads.

“The way I’d describe it is that it’s a bit like an architect who creates an apartment building, and it sits there, and the architect’s work is done once the building’s up,” Keeler ruminates, “but it’s pretty cool to stop by once in a while and see that it’s become a home, and it’s been fixed up, and it’s being used and lived in. Being in the band, I think it all comes back to a similar point: that the band has become something that goes beyond

both of us. That it grew and created new fans in our absence is a pretty cool feeling.”

Grainger agrees. “I know how hard it is to get people excited about something and our band started and existed in a time when, I think, people had a different relationship to music, and media, and art, and that appreciation is a special thing that shouldn’t be taken for granted. I appreciate the fact we were able to create something that meant something to them, because that’s the goal – art is not entertainment,” he says. “I’ve done a lot of other stuff to varying degrees of success, and I’ve been satisfied with other types of music and projects in various different ways but there’s nothing quite like the experience I have playing in this band.

There’s a real connection to the audience and the devotion that goes both ways, and that’s not something to take lightly because we’re very fortunate to have that. And fuck, man, a lot of people work their whole lives and don’t even come close to it and we’re lucky that all those years we worked at a suicidal rate paid off in that respect.”

After getting back together in 2011, the reality of practice sessions and touring provided the perfect opportunity for Grainger and Keeler to find out if they could recapture the band’s original spirit. In many respects it was the acid test, not just for their personal dynamic but for everything from nailing the live show to potentially creating new songs, and pressuring themselves to live up to the standards they’d previously set.

“What we think of as the reunion tour was just us playing a couple of shows then playing a few more as more people got interested,” Keeler

explains. “After we’d been everywhere once, we didn’t want to play over and over again without having new songs, so we started recording, ourselves, in a studio we had access to in Toronto, and decided it wasn’t right. We needed to go and tour like we did for the first album because those songs were formed and shaped on the road, and we wanted to get to that place again.

We wanted to make sure if we were going to do another record, it wouldn’t cheapen anything.”

On the road, and firmly on the comeback trail, it didn’t take long for the dynamic between the two to click once again. But instead of settling into old roles too easily, the emphasis, this time, was on pushing old boundaries (and bodies) from the outset.

“We kind of got into our own roles, then at the same time broke free of them,” says Grainger. “We worked with a producer this time, so we were more critical of the music and what was best for the song, whereas before we strictly acted on instinct. Now that we’d set a precedent we had to ask ourselves: ‘is this right? Is this cool? Is this the band?’”

“I think at first we were also both curious to see if we were able to do what we did in the past,” Keeler smiles.

“There were times when I’d try and imagine the song in my head and have no idea how to play it in the ten years since my hands had done anything like that. There were also times I’d just pick up the bass and start doing it, and watch my body play the song. It was a really strange thing because my hands were doing things faster than I could think to do it!”

The hard result is ‘The Physical World’; DFA 1979’s second album set for release next month. To them, it’s not the physical proof of their return,

‘The band was very binary. Once we stopped doing it, then that was it’

rather a direct continuation of their sound (albeit five years later); simply the band’s second album.

“I’ll speak for myself here, but there were things about the first record that I always wanted to change,” Keeler asserts. “Normally, you aim to get it next time round and this record corrects all kinds of things I wasn’t happy with on the first one. But it’s also created a whole new set of things that I want to outdo. It’s tough! Al-P said, ‘a record is never finished, only surrendered’, which is pretty pessimistic, but I feel like that’s the truth. Maybe I’m just always unsatisfied, but I like having an unreachable goal.”

Now a decade after their debut release, and now that they’re older and wiser, I ask them if they think the new album stays true to the original ‘punk band with pop aspirations aesthetic’ that outlined ‘You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine’ so defiantly.

“Yeah, I still see it that way,” Grainger agrees. “We came out of a hardcore scene in Toronto’s suburbs but I think it’s a very vague term where it’s not really a genre of music, more like an ethos. We didn’t really fit in hardcore but I think we were more

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punk, and I read something in the Everett True Nirvana biography where he defines hardcore as lifestyle and punk as fashion, and in that sense, I think it’s very much true. If punk is fashion we’re sometimes wearing those clothes, musically.”

“We were in punk bands and the hardcore scene at a very interesting time,” Keeler continues. “It was when everyone was trying very hard not to sound like everyone else and it was incredibly important to be different in some way. For years of being this band, it was becoming an uphill battle, and I think after a while of existing that way, you get into this mindset of that you’ve either got to prove something or say ‘fuck you, this is it’ and just bang it out. We always existed on the fringe but it was so funny because sometimes we’d be in a list in Time or some magazine about the Canadian scene and we’d be thinking ‘what the hell are we doing on that list!?’ We were only on that list because we were from Canada.

“It’s sort of empowering to feel like you don’t fit and in terms of the concept of pop aspirations, and it’s something I know I only learned recently. There were times during the

mixing on the new record when I was worried that we sounded too pop, and then Dave [producer] turned to me and was like ‘Do you know what pop sounds like? Have you heard the radio recently?’ and I had no fucking clue, no idea whatsoever. So I spent a couple of hours every once in a while putting the radio on and being like ‘Oh my god, I get it.’ He laughs. “I thought we’d lost the plot a little.”

Inevitably, ‘The Physical World’ is a follow-up that pulses with the relentless energy of ‘You’re A Woman…’ but also comes with a distinct polish. It’s still loud, brash and identifiably Death From Above, but ‘Always On’ drives straight with an AC/DC sound and ‘White is Red’ shows a softer side that steps away from the 100mph sound of their debut. It’s an example that helps underline the band’s determination to push their sound further.

“There were some things I feel were a little more deliberate,” says Grainger, “but I also think that the form of the band is so specific with the instrumentation, the way Jesse’s bass sounds, and the way that I play; it’s a form and we’re able to explore pretty freely within that form because it all comes out sounding like the same fucking band.There are some instances, like the first track on the record, ‘Cheap Talk’, that logically felt like the opener because it’s reminiscent of the old stuff – it’s almost a tribute song to this band.”

“We wanted to put ‘Cheap Talk’ up front because that was where we stopped, mentally,” says Keeler. “I wrote that bassline in 2005 and it was the last song we never got around to finishing. Other than that, I think there would have been all kinds of questions we asked ourselves now that we didn’t back then. A song like ‘Government Trash’ is so Death From Above (fast

and with roots in thrash and doom rock), but when we were working on that song, if we’d done that in 2003, we would have been like “this bassline is too nerdy”, or we’d worry about whether it was too complicated or whether we were going prog or something. These were all the kinds of things we’d put a stop to, not because they were bad but because we were worried for whatever reason.”

“A song like ‘White is Red’ (the record’s respite – a mid-tempo, nostalgic love song of teenage pregnancy and the open road) never would have existed before, if only because Jesse is playing bass chords he’s never played before,” Keeler continues. “I don’t know how it was in the UK, but in the ’90s in North America, it seemed like bass chords were kind of a thing in indie rock. We were right up against the ’90s, so the proximity to that would have made it sound kind of tasteless if we’d tried it then but when Jesse played that part right in front of me, it sounded so good. If he played that song as an arpeggio, as we might have in the past, it would have sounded a lot more Death From Above but it’s good we can let each other do that stuff.”

Keeler: “I’ve found it to be really helpful working on the new record because there’s this bull’s-eye of what we want, how we wanted it to feel, so the band has this target, and we were cautious of what makes sense and what doesn’t make sense for the band, and try and expand the boundary of what the band was. So if we’re going to go fast, let’s make it faster, if it’s going to be a little more accessible, let’s go in that direction and push the boundaries of the band a little further out and see if it makes for a more interesting record. I think it did and I’m pleased with it.”

ny second album comes with pressure – particularly after a definitive debut and decade wait in between – but it’s something these two don’t seem bothered about. Perhaps living with the legacy of the band, and having the confidence to return to it, creates its own healthy fear, but there’s a genuine sense that ‘The Physical World’ would never have seen the light of day if there wasn’t an unshakeable belief in it.

“We’ll take the attention!” Keeler laughs, “but it’s something we’ve been thinking about. The analogy I make all the time is that it’s like looking at David Bowie’s career through the ’70s. If you look back at it in terms of historical perspective, we absorb all those records at once, so you could be skipping around ‘Ziggy Stardust’, ‘Hunky Dory’, ‘Heroes’, but through those periods, these were massive shifts for him musically and we see it all at once. So like when people listen to the ‘Young Americans’ record now, they’re not thinking he said ‘fuck you’ to all his fans by making this, they just see it as part of the body of work.

Eventually everything will just get judged based on its individual merit and not on the circumstance. In time, I think we’ll get that and maybe I’ll be able to listen to my own records without picking them apart and wanting to change things.”

It brings us onto their own expectations for the lifespan of the band and whether the future of DFA 1979 goes beyond this release. After waiting for so many years, I ask if this was to be their last album, would they see it as definitive and would it provide the closure their debut never could?

“I have great expectations! Giant ones!” Grainger beams. “There’s no other way to proceed in rock’n’roll; you have to have supreme confidence.

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With special thanks to Miranda bar at Ace Hotel London

That’s the way it is and that’s what makes bands great. It’s the way I feel, and the way I’ve always felt, and it’s why when I stopped feeling like we were the best band, we stopped being the best band and broke up. I’m always looking to the future and that’s what the hardest thing about this is right now. I know that you’re very selfaware of the question but in no other area of my life do I look back and reminisce and contextualize. I’m not a glory days dude, and we’re kind of forced into that position but there are some people who do that and they’re the type of people who don’t move forward. It’s like the high-school football star or whatever. It’s not a bad thing but it’s funny because we’re both not nostalgic at all, and this phase of the band felt nostalgic and felt like we’re a fucking tribute band. The only

reason it works now for us is because it feels like a new thing and this just feels like our second record.”

“No-one has asked this but it makes a lot of sense,” says Keeler. “I don’t know if after a certain amount of time if I could say this was all there is and that this is what the band was. I think now the band is a living entity and think there’s still growing to do. I have more ideas and as long as I have new ideas, then it would be hard to say.

Eventually we’ll stop, we don’t know when and I guess at that point I’ll have to accept what was there, was there.

I’ve been down that road already and if this was the last record we had to live with, I’d probably be just as frustrated with this one as I was with the last. I think the factor of time and value is created by scarcity, so in our absence, suddenly it took on this greater value.

Maybe people will hear this record with a different appreciation but maybe there are people hearing this record who are thinking ‘what the fuck is the big deal?’” he laughs.

It’s difficult not to view ‘The Physical World’ as anything but a big deal. For Keeler and Grainger, it marks the next logical chapter in what could have been forever delayed and they’re proud and excited of what they’ve created. For the rest of us, however, it’s a second record that embodies much more than just the 11 songs housed within it: it’s closure and confirmation crammed into another ferocious 35-minute detonation we thought would never exist. So for those who recklessly lost their minds to the scuzzy tempo of ‘Going Steady’, snaked to the sleaze of ‘Romantic Rights’ and shredded their throat

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caterwauling to ‘Pull Out’, being in this position, a decade later, is an unexpected triumph. And when ‘Cheap Talk’’s time-warped bass riff kicks in, and the wild thrash of ‘Government Trash’ sends you bouncing off the walls, just take a moment between voluntary concussions to remember that hope is a beautiful thing.

Reviews / Albums

06/10

SBTRKT Wonder Where We Land Y oun g T u rks B y Joe G oggi n s. I n sto res Se pt 22

On reflection, it’s probably fair to say that SBTRKT came out of nowhere when he dropped his self-titled debut back in 2011. Roughly a year earlier, when I saw him open for Holy Fuck in front of a half-full (to be generous) room, there was no real suggestion that the fairly unremarkable dubstep set that he delivered would have been refined and reshuffled to such a degree that he would deliver the genre’s outstanding album of 2011. Even his now-iconic mask looked a bit silly that night, its enigmatic quality stripped away by the sunlight beaming through the venue’s skylight. Now, of course, it’s synonymous with the forwardthinking brand of electronica that defined that breakthrough LP. What’s most striking about this follow-up, then, is the fact that SBTRKT – or Aaron Jerome – hasn’t

really strayed enormously from the formula that worked so well for him last time. Given the rapturous critical acclaim he’s received – as well as the not-unimpressive commercial response he was afforded – Jerome would surely have had no end of offers in terms of potential collaborations, but he’s largely stuck with the same supporting cast from ‘SBTRKT’. Jessie Ware, now one of the genre’s stars in her own right, delivers another superb turn on the gorgeously mellow ‘Problem Solved’, whilst Sampha – for all intent and purpose Jerome’s righthand man – is again on hand to lend his silky tones to a handful of songs, pick of the bunch being the title track, on which he croons over a choppy beat and an increasingly diffuse instrumental backdrop.

Elsewhere, Jerome has included a couple of new hookups with mixed

results. Caroline Polachek of Chairlift provides a neat turn on ‘Look Away’, although it’s really Jerome himself who steals the show on that track, with an eccentric, minimalist backdrop blending juddering percussion with snatches of piano and dramatic, screeching synth. ‘NEW DORP. NEW YORK’, meanwhile, features Ezra Koenig of Vampire Weekend, but flounders after a promising start when he suddenly descends into spoken word; it doesn’t help that the instrumental on the song is at once one of the album’s messiest and least interesting.

The album’s closer, ‘Voices in My Head’, serves as a stirring reminder of how good Jerome can be when he reaches full flight – sonically ominous despite using little more than an off-kilter beat and a rudimentary piano loop hidden deep

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in the mix, it’s bolstered by the appearance of A$AP Ferg, who’s unusually stunted style of delivery fits the song’s unorthodox time signature neatly; he comes across like Ol’ Dirty Bastard on tranquilisers, and that’s precisely what the track needs. It’s on the dark, foreboding tracks like these – the superb link-up with Koreless, ‘Osea’, is another case in point – that Jerome’s skill and intelligence really come to the fore. That taken into account, ‘Wonder Where We Land’ is kind of a muddled effort overall.There’s plenty of fine individual moments, but no real cohesiveness to the sound of the piece as a whole. It’s as if Jerome was caught in two minds as to which direction to move in after the success of album number one; there’s little of the authority and confidence with which he pulled off that album on display here.

Reviews 09/10

Goat Commune Ro cket

By DA n i el Dy l an Wra y. I n sto re s S e p t 22

The arrival of Goat was projected with so much mystery – be it conceived genuine or manufactured – that regardless of the group’s end output, the whole concept was already sold on a lot of people.

Couple this emergence with an exploding psych resurgence and you had a perfect storm of happenstance, luck and a bunch of masked, supposed voodoo practicing, knifewielding folk from rural Sweden, ready to hack you open a new third eye. However, Goat quickly overcame any accused gimmickry thrown at them, as they delivered musically.

Their debut album was not only exciting and bustling with life but as anyone who has seen them perform

will testify, they are also one of the most exciting, engaging and engulfing live bands of recent years – an experience as visual and physical in its execution as it is sonically crushing.

Goat don’t seem too concerned with all the pressures that come following their out-of-the-blue success and have instead created a follow-up record that oozes with confident, natural progression and succeeds in being both a continuation and evolution of ‘World Music’.

They still know how to hammer the shit out of a wah-wah pedal successfully and are still wonderfully adept and in-tune with creating songs that can float breezily and

dreamily as frequently as they can summon the powers that be with intensity and ferocity.

The otherworldly female-led vocal chants still define and drive much of the wobbly guts of their output, but other vocal aspects have risen to the surface too, such as on ‘Goatchild’, where they sound like they have raised Jim Morrison from the dead for one last outing. Trippy spoken-word vocal introductions on ‘Goatslaves’ (which quotes Native American wisdom) and ‘ToTravel the Path Unknown’ further cement the fairly well-rooted influence of Funkadelic (specifically the ‘Maggot Brain’ LP) but it also seems their intent to further drive home the

genuine spirituality of this music being expelled.

Like their debut, this album spans the globe, rooted in American music as firmly as it is African, thus entering into ‘Commune’ as an album is just that – it is to enter into something; it is a space – a world – in which to inhabit; a place in which rituals, meditations and trances are to be reached, consumed and absorbed.

Goat would have you believe that this is a spiritual awakening, an inside peak into tribal practices and unique ancient rituals – and some of this may well be true – but that would risk overlooking the hypnotic yet intuitive force of the music on display.

After seven singles, a couple of EP’s and countless flippant comparisons to any number of female recording heavyweights tossed her way (Feist, Erykah Badu, etc, etc.), Jillian Banks’ debut album comes served with a generous helping of old-fashioned hype. Indeed, lest you hadn’t realised you were anxiously awaiting its arrival, ‘Goddess’’s press release will helpfully remind you that this collection is, of course, “waited upon with bated breath.”

Stripping back the bluster and

the bloatedness (it clocks in at almost exactly an hour, or 76 minutes if you plump – pun intended – for the inevitable deluxe version) and the jarring teenage poetry (See ‘Fuck Em Only We Know’), this is a decent debut that would be bolstered still by a bit of focus and a less precious approach in the cutting room.

While its team of eight producers means that Banks can showcase her undoubted vocal talents, it ultimately makes ‘Goddess’ feel more like a pitch than an album.

It’s is at its best, and its most coherent, when Lil Silva’s smattering of UK Funky intertwines with the gentle electronic pop of Orlando Higginbottom, making the acoustic ballads overseen by Tim Anderson feel all the more tacked on, while the influence of Al Shux, who has (quite clearly) previously worked with Lana Del Rey, turns ‘Drowning’ into an outrageously blatant ‘Born To Die’ pastiche in its execution, delivery and subject.

0 7/ 1 0

Banks Goddess H ar ves t

By Davi d Zammi tt. In sto re s S e p t 9

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Albums 06/10

0 8/10

07 /10

07/ 10

Avi Buffalo At Best Cuckold

Haley Bonar Last War

Sinkane Mean Love

Lia Ices Ices

Sub pop

M e mp h i s Ind u st ri e s

C i t y S l an g

J a gja g u wa r

By Chr is Wa tkeys . I n store s Se pt 8

B y J am es W est . I n sto re s S EPT 2 9

By J o e Gogg i ns . I n sto re s S ep t 1

B y D a i s y J o n es . I n sto r es S ep t 1 5

You’ll likely know Avi Buffalo from their supremely radio-friendly 2010 single ‘What’s In It For’ – a summery, indie-pop gem, which was played on heavy rotation. At their core is the youthful Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg, and a talented and creative individual he certainly is; on ‘At Best Cuckold’, his high-pitched, slightly delicate, gently delivered vocals raise echoes of Elliott Smith – but a sort of stable, happy, fulfilled Elliot Smith, in possession of an angst-free and cheerful soul. Thus ‘Two Cherished Understandings’ washes over you like a warm breeze on a summer’s eve, melodies floating through it like twinkling stars, with just enough quirks to keep things interesting, while elsewhere ‘Found Blind’ ticks the punchy indie-rock box. But does the world need Avi Buffalo, or is their well-crafted, strongly written, nicely produced music destined to just drift into a quiet corner of the collective musical consciousness, elevate and warm a few souls, and gently slide away? On the strength of the pleasant-but-a-touch-dull ‘At Best Cuckold’, the latter is the far more likely outcome.

‘Last War’ may be the first Haley Bonar release to reach this side of the Atlantic, but the South Dakota songstress is far from a doe-eyed newcomer. Since being spotted as a teenager by Low’s Alan Sparhawk, Bonar’s been on an artistic adventure that has earned her wide-spread affection, not least from Justin Vernon and Chicago multiinstrumentalist Andrew Bird, and such prowess oozes through her fifth LP. ‘Kill The Fun’ sets the tone from the top, a rousing slab of skewed country that thuds along like The National at their stirring best, whilst ‘Bad Reputation’ echoes the same driving rhythm, with Bonar’s impressive vocals flitting between a ghostly coo and a Stevie Nicks-ish seductive slur. It’s not all sky-facing sonic soundscapes, though – the quieter moments here are among ‘Last War’’s most special (‘From a Cage’, ‘Eat for Free’), with Bonar’s lyrics given licence to roam above the more minimal arrangements. The latter’s delicate strum, in particular, lifts a page from the aforementioned Bon Iver; a breezy word-hanger that is one of many alluring highlights.

It’s not too surprising, given his long history of collaboration as a talented multi-instrumentalist for hire (he’s played with and for Caribou, Yeasayer, Of Montreal and Eleanor Friedberger), that on both of Ahmed Gallab’s previous albums as Sinkane he came across as an individual bursting with musical ideas connected only by the fact that they were all so obscure, so niche. He’d channel funk one minute, some obscure Latin influence the next, and then suddenly settle back into more typical dance territory before diving into something else entirely, but he struggled with sonic cohesion, something he’s done a better job of with ‘Mean Love’. This third album doesn’t swing quite as eccentrically between styles, instead opting for a sound that blends funk and pop with Gallab’s unusual, high-pitched soulful vocals. Standouts ‘Yacha’ and ‘Hold Tight’ showcase his flexibility – both underscored by groovy basslines, they’re by turns boisterous and mellow, but the real breakthrough here is Gallab’s success in proving that he can rein in his experimental side.

Lia Ices third album opens with a track that sounds suspiciously like what might be played on the twelfth day of a hippy festival to some swaying nomads. There is campfirelike percussion, jangling acoustics and the odd burst of melodic chanting. So far, so vom-inducing.

Later on in the album, in ‘Electric Arc’ there are even (what sounds like) panpipes, which are by their very nature inexcusable. Plus, the fifth track is called ‘Magick’, with a ‘k’. However, once this visceral, knee-jerk reaction subsides, ‘Ices’ reveals itself to be a rather beautiful and experimental creation. There is nothing passé about these songs and her mysticism is far more Florence Welch than Camden Market. Through the dreamy layers are glimpses of indie and electro, pleasingly knotted together with a seventies rock sensibility, with splashes of later Kate Bush. Amongst the bewitching textures here, it’s not hard to see why the California-based singersongwriter has been slowly mesmerising even the most begrudging of skeptics.

2009 doesn’t seem that long ago, but music has moved on since Jamie T’s critically lauded ‘Kings and Queens’: despite its elemental charm and propensity for introspection, it somewhat lacked the maturity anticipated for his follow up to 2007’s ‘Panic Prevention’. Still, Jamie Treays’ trajectory was heading in the right direction, but his rocketing success was halted by personal crisis; a perfect catalyst for any comeback album.

With ‘Carry On the Grudge’,

Jamie T’s words pack a darker, more contemplative energy, yet it reintroduces the bold distinctiveness of Jamie T’s voice. Here though, the vocal likeness between him and Alex Turner is more palpable than ever, and unlike past efforts, displays more vocal aptitude in terms of singing ability, with his usual MC discourse often replaced by melodic refrains.

Both musically and lyrically, it’s a leap forward, and it perhaps veers into more profound territory, but by

no means suffers from oversentimentality, with the ramshackle urgency of ‘Zombie’ and ‘Rabbit Hole’ containing all the prevailing hallmarks Treay has become known for, along with his proclivity for melding punk, rap and two tone triumphantly.

There’s a progression here that is nuanced enough not to alienate any fans of Jamie T’s past work, and while it’s a tried and tested formula, it’s also the 28-year old’s most balanced record to date.

0 7/ 1 0

Jamie T Carry On The Grudge Vi r g i n

By H ay l ey Scott. I n store s Se pt 29

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Reviews 08/10

0 8/10

07 /10

07/ 10

Simian Mobile Disco Whorl

Perfume Genius Too Bright

The 2 Bears The Night Is Young

Blonde Redhead Barragan

An it

Ca ro l ine

S o u t he rn F r ie d

K o ba l t

By Sam Wal ton . In sto re s Se pt 8

By Dai s y J o ne s . I n s t o re s S e pt 2 2

By Sam Wa l t o n. I n s t o re s S ep t 2 9

By H en r y W i lki n s o n . In s t o r es A u g u st 1 8

If Simian Mobile Disco’s last record, ‘Unpatterns’, found them unsure of whether to experiment with brave new sonic directions or refine existing ones, the knowledge that their latest was recorded live on two modular synths in the middle of the Californian desert over just three days might provide an inkling of which path the duo chose. And within seconds of the opening track commencing, with undulating sine waves and barely a shred of dancefloor bombast, that hunch is confirmed. What follows is an hour of featherlite, widescreen daydream music full of absorbing electronic flourishes that recall The Orb and Boards of Canada, and even when the straighter beats do drop, as on the motorik ‘Calyx’, there’s enough movement and dislocation to maintain the attention. ‘Whorl’ doesn’t push boundaries in the same way as Holden’s and Luke Abbot’s recent adventures with analogue synths – at crucial points it lacks the textural heft that could make it truly great – but nonetheless it feels like a worthy addition to that canon: it’s woozy, gauzy and engrossing stuff.

Tainted love, lustrous, lilting vocals and yearning lyrics – ‘Too Bright’ could feel like a Lana Del Ray album.

But what differentiates Michael Hadreas aka Perfume Genius from his chart-topping contemporary is a boldness and directness that’s quickly becoming distinctly his.There is something almost confrontational about his lyrics. “Cracked, peeled, riddled with disease,” he sings in ‘Queen’, the second track on this third album. It’s a song he’s described as being inspired by “gay panic” and the sheer power of knowing that by simply existing, one can make another feel uncomfortable. The rest of the album is an equally unique listen.

Combining ballad piano and minimal electronic rhythms with bursts of offkey weirdness, Hadreas uses conventional structures and makes them strange. ‘Grid’ begins with pulses of lo-fi bass against the singer’s almost theatrical vocals, before being injected with discordant shouts and chants that sound as if they’re coming from a broken radio.

It’s a brilliant third effort from an experimental Perfume Genius, shrouded in a sticky pop disguise.

The 2 Bears’ (Raf Rundell and Joe Goddard) follow-up to their fondly nostalgic homage to ’90s house and South London bacchanalia is cut from the same earnestly optimistic and intensely likeable cloth as its predecessor, with the exception that in addition to the wide-grinned nods to Frankie Knuckles and Brixton soundclashes, it also contains two of the most perfect, bodily addictive pop songs you’ll hear all year in ‘Angel’ and ‘Not This Time’ – the latter with a credible claim for a place among the all-time greats.

Combining soaring hands-in-the-air piano house with downtrodden lyrical melancholy is no new trick, but across those two tracks the duo perform it so flawlessly that the results feel timeless. Unfortunately, the early appearance of those two spectaculars in the running order is rather the undoing of the rest of ‘The Night Is Young’: the album’s middle third features a flurry of entertaining songs desperately in need of an editor, and while things recover towards the end, one can’t help but be tantalised by the earlier greatness.

Nine albums in and Blonde Redhead offer a gentle reminder that they are still here, with new record ‘Barragan’.

After a slightly unexpected opening – the title track a sort of Spanish tinged lament with a flute accompaniment that’s part Vashti Bunyan part Valerie and Her Week of Wonders – the trio pick up from where 2010’s ‘Penny Sparkle’ (their third and last LP for 4AD) left off.

The syncopated tango pop of ‘Lady M’ and slowed down strut of ‘Cat on Tin Roof’ couple soft, spider web vocals with stripped back and a subdued guitar that has your head bobbing and lips tentatively pouting.

‘The One I Love’ drifts into chamber pop territory while ‘No More Honey’ is like a skewed Deerhoof track, only less schizophrenic. It’s a somewhat unimposing album and at times drifts into intangible dream gaze, though like that quiet kid at school, it bears a confidence and maturity that others lack. Sleek and stylish throughout and benefiting from production duties from Drew Brown (Lower Dens, Radiohead), ‘Barragan’ sees the band sauntering with a sound truly mastered.

You get that feeling that a lot of people have got alt-J wrong, on account of their class (middle, and unfashionably white), their origins in the Home Counties, all that business of having a triangle for a name, their genuine disregard for fashion (both in image and the music they make) and, perhaps most unfairly of all, the runaway success of 2012 debut ‘An Awesome Wave’. To some, a guitar album that became as ubiquitous as that simply adds up to Mumford & Sons or Coldplay, whilst ignoring

that alt-J have achieved all that they have on a modest indie label and with tracks that never really should have made it to radio.Their plan was never so crass; it just so happened that Fearne Cotton liked them and could tell 5 million people a day.

Nothing has changed for ‘AllThis Is Yours’; a collection of poised folktronica that is all the making of this band, with dabs of hip-hop, dustbin lid drums, the odd yodel and the group’s trademark a capella vocals. There’s a pastoral interlude

in ‘Garden Of England’, what sounds like an old Badly Drawn Boy film score in ‘Arrival In Nara’ and moments so quiet (‘Warm Foothills’, ‘Pusher’) that they almost stop altogether.

‘Left Hand Free’, convincingly aping ‘Thick Freakiness’-era Black Key, might well be uncharacteristic in its brazen hook, but on a record that also samples Miley Cyrus with little fanfare, alt-J really are more considered than their adoption by the general public lets on.

08/10

Alt. J This Is All Yours I n f ec ti ous

By Joh n f or d. I n s to re s Se p t 22

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Albums 05/10

0 8/10

08 /10

06/ 10

The Juan MaClean In A Dream

Os Noctambulos Corsica Garden

My Brightest Diamomd This Is My Hand

The Growlers Chinese Fountain

DF A

Ev il H o o d o o

As th ma t ic K itty

Fat Cat

By Ree f You nis . In sto re s Se p t 15

B y Da n ie l D yl a n W ra y. I n s to re s S e pt 1

By Jam e s F. T ho m ps o n. I n st o r es Sep t 1 5

B y Jam es W es t . In s t o r es Sep t 2 9

The first proper The Juan Maclean album in five years (and his fourth in total), ‘In a Dream’ marks the latest evolution of one of DFA’s longestserving stalwarts. After the bits and pieces stop-gap of 2011’s strictlydigital release, ‘Everybody Will Come’, this new LP has a more coherent vision, even if it is a longplay version of a Sunday trawl through Ikea. A combination of subdued ’80s beats and Nancy Whang’s indifferent vocals, it’s a big departure from the lively techno, and acid-tinged work, of 2009’s ‘The Future Will Come’. Where ‘A Place Called Space’ promises a marauding, Giorgio Moroder disco odyssey, ‘I’ve Waited So Long’ feels cold and detached; when ‘Charlotte’ threatens to get lively with some nifty handclaps, ‘A Simple Design’ spins with the vivacity of a broken glitter ball. Billed as the ‘Nancy Show’, Whang’s vocals lack the boisterous edge that made her previous turns stand out, and coupled with cowed production, and a devastating lack of energy, it would take a hell of a fire to get this disco started.

Os Noctàmbulos, while distinctly in the camp of ‘retro’, manage to cast a wider net than most. The smoothrounded production nods as frequently to fifties RnR licks as it does the more honed, pristine sound of ‘golden age’ British and American rock, whilst also taking in countrytinged flavours of groups such as Big Star and the Flying Burrito Brothers.

A gentle undercurrent of psych carries the records pace, ebbing and flowing, weaving between the hypnotic and the upbeat garage-surf propulsions. Whilst there are plenty of explosive moments, the record feels less focused on scrappy, ramshackle ruggedness and more focused on controlled, well crafted and masterfully recorded songs, allowing the Them-era Van Morrison vocal growls to tear through and elevate above the music. Craggy DIY production methods favoured by many similar groups are ditched in favour of making a record that sounds like it comes from a time when largescale recording budgets were still a commonality, creating a record that feels effervescent and gutsy yet considered and poised.

Marching bands and indie rock might make for unlikely bedfellows but Shara Worden doesn’t seem to care.

The Detroit-based singer, multiinstrumentalist and Sufjan Stevens associate has spent the best part of a decade restlessly navigating through pop’s more esoteric reaches, bringing to bear her musical background in classical, jazz and the avant-garde along the way. Picking up where 2011’s artfully cinematic ‘All Things Will Unwind’ left off, Worden’s fifth release recalls its predecessor’s lush arrangements but is a much more immediate affair.

From the marching drum intro of ‘Pressure’ through to the mid-tempo groove of ‘Shape’ and rolling rhythm of ‘Resonance’, ‘This Is My Hand’ is a study in the possibilities of percussion. All the more ironic that the most powerful instrument on the record is Worden’s larynx, then; her soaring operatic range glides above all, particularly the chilly synthesised highs of otherworldly closer ‘Apparition’. The result is an astonishing climax to an LP on which the other nine tracks don’t quite scale those heights, but get pretty close.

If the brilliantly crisp jangle of taster cut ‘Big Toe’ wasn’t enough of a clue, Dana Point’s psych-snarlers have had something of a makeover on their fourth LP. Somewhat in keeping with their “Beach Goth” selfsynopsis, ‘Chinese Fountain’ feels very much like a member of that monochrome subculture stripping the black eyeliner and sprucing up in a suit for a distant relative’s big day.

The cavernous licks and quaint honky tonk-isms that you’d expect still permeate each of the 11 reverbladen tracks here, but The Growlers’ new studio gloss sees Brooks Nielsen’s dry musings bubble to the surface as the record’s chief lure.The results are not all gravy, however, and without shrouding his words in the band’s early lo-fi mystery, Nielson’s gravely groan is often over-exposed; ‘Black Memories’, in particular, meanders rather aimlessly, like the languid internal monologue of a grouchy old bar fly.

Luckily, the more lackadaisical offerings are interrupted by the occasional burst – something that lifts the whole listen into pleasurable territory, just about.

For a band so avowedly beholden to American indie, it’s something of a surprise that Mazes waited so long to pack their bags and head across the pond to record. For their third album, the London trio temporarily decamped to upstate New York and teamed up with Parquet Courts producer Jonathan Schenke to deliver these 32 minutes of lackadaisical alt-rock.

Following on from the lo-fi krautrock eccentricity of last year’s ‘Ores & Minerals’, it’s a major

disappointment to hear how the threesome have sanded down all of the jagged edges since then.

‘Wooden Aquarium’ proffers perfunctorily serviceable indie rock and precious little else.

Mazes are clearly capable of turning in some solid hooks and big choruses; the breezy power pop of songs like ‘Stamford Hill’ is testament to that much. On the other hand, ‘Explode Into Colou(r)s’ and ‘Vapour’ are complete non-entities, aimlessly floating across the album’s

surface like the flotsam and jetsam of indie past.

Elsewhere, things take a turn for the irritating; front man Jack Cooper’s reedy vocals still take some getting used to, which begs the question of why the record kicks off with ‘Astigmatism’, the song on which he’s most obviously exposed.

Ten tracks later and the more pressing line of enquiry is why Cooper and company bothered getting into the recording booth in the first place.

05/10

Mazes Wooden Aquarium Fa t C a t

By James F . T h om p so n. In sto re s Se p t 8

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Reviews 08/10

0 6/10

08 /10

07/ 10

Interpol El Pintor

The Vaselines V For Vaselines

Suicideyear Rememberance

Barbarisms Barbarisms

S of t L im it

Ro sary

S o ft ware

C o n t r o l Fr e a k Ki t t e n

By C h ris Wat k eys. In sto res Sept 8

B y T ho ma s M ay. I n s to res S ep t 2 9

By D avid Z ammi tt. I n s to res S ep t 2 2

B y To m Fen wic k . In s t o res Sep t 2 2

Since around the mid-noughties, Interpol have been a band who, with each passing record, we’ve longingly hoped would succeed in nailing that seemingly elusive return to form.

2010’s self-titled fourth album was just not it; so will this, their first effort since the departure of bassist Carlos Dengler, deliver? The answer is a resounding and joyous yes. Opener and single ‘AllThe Rage Back Home’ has an icy, dreamlike opening before launching jarringly into thoroughly unexpected punk-pop, an odd but exciting juxtaposition. But further into the meat of the record, we rejoice, for here is the fire, the ice and the fury. ‘My Desire’ sees the band fuse passion with cool detachment via a flurry of jagged hooks, while ‘Anywhere’ is concussive, bludgeoning and enveloping, the epicentre of a dangerous storm.

After a hiatus in which we feared the further waning of their powers, with ‘El Pintor’ Interpol have once more delivered that vein-deep thrill of iceblasted New York noir rock, which was once their alluring trademark.

Still very Interpol, it’s a viciously good return to form.

There’s something vaguely unsettling about the ageing of twee.

Or, more precisely: twee’s staunch refusal to age. Since reforming in 2008, Glaswegian duo the Vaselines have picked up exactly where they left off in the late-80s as if stuck in some surreal not-quite never-never land where naivety and immanence are clung to ever more tenuously. Not that Kurt Cobain’s favourite songwriters have lost it by any stretch: ‘V for Vaselines’ bounds along with sprightly boy-girl harmonies and lyrics awash with inane-yet-charming couplets, even if things have gotten a bit more powerpop than strictly necessary. It’s just that these songs of innocence feel constantly haunted by the experience they anxiously repress, the record’s erasure of dissonance resulting in a simplicity not only tragic and artificial but also a tad bland. That said, glimmers of hidden depths do surface if only fleetingly: “it went wrong too many times / missed cues, forgotten punch-lines” goes the wistful closer. See, if twee agreed to age, things might get a lot more interesting.

If Suicideyear, aka emerging Baton Rouge-based producer James Prudhomme, had dropped ‘Remembrance’ a couple of years ago it would have been quickly leapt upon and filed as a shining example of that thankfully abortive attempt at a microgenre, Witch House. Luckily, it’s 2014 and we can enjoy this for what it is; a sumptuous 8-track collection of shimmering synth-pad soundscapes, soaring arpeggios and razor sharp, syncopated hip-hop beats, which demonstrates from start to finish that Prudhomme possesses that uncanny knack of breathing emotion into sounds produced by machines. Recent forebears include Balam Acab and Holy Other, and tracks like ‘Caroline’ and ‘Daniel’ draw on that same textural and structural palette as they build slowly, moving gradually forward before off-beat drum machines burst into life like fireworks. Elsewhere, Suicideyear marries ambience and abrasiveness beautifully, while ‘U S’ and ‘I Don’t Care About Death Because I Smoke’ tap into the recent bent towards hiphop-influenced electronic bombast.

If you’re looking for an album to ease the slide from late summer to autumn you could do worse than reach for Barbarism’s self-titled debut. The brainchild of Stockholm based American Nicholas Faraone – alongside collaboratorsTom Skantze and Robin Af Ekenstam – the group’s sound is pitched somewhere between the playful jangle of Jeffrey Lewis and the off-kilter wisdom of Guided By Voices.The result is an LP that overflows with bittersweet and eccentric ideas, as Farone’s scratchy vocal floats in and out of focus across dreamy guitar-led melodies. Farone’s ex-pat position sees him reframing Americana from afar with a wideeyed frankness; his visions made real in a series of bittersweet and wistful odes to friendship, loneliness, love and pizza eating child stars, while his lyrics hold a lilting innocence and wit that belie their intent, such as on ‘Gaudy Falsetto’, which is built around the soft refrain “I fingered you like a brilliant guitar with dirty strings.”The result is a fine debut; a captivating slice of lo-fi wonder that shines like a gem shimmering in a pool of darkness.

The DIY anti-pop of Half Japanese is essential amateurism, especially when it takes happiness and joy as its predominant focus.

On ‘Overjoyed’, the group’s first album in 13 years – their fourteenth since forming 1975 – Jad Fair (the longtime founder member and lead vocalist for nigh on 40 years) and band approximation is like an infantile grin with missing teeth; upfront, unashamed and convinced in its course. For much of the LP the band are engaged in buoyant

hyperventilation, collectively punching the air as if recreating their own Breakfast Club ending for lovelorn washouts.

Influences are traceable but Half Japanese’s victory is still their own.

The delight’s almost unimpeachable; a kind of low-rent love. Though it’s rarely one-dimensional. On ‘Do It Nation’ a hijacked megaphone seems to be the method of amplification; bellowed are demented, static-strewn squalls.

Sonar-like echo and reach inflects

the guitars on ‘Meant to BeThat Way’ and ‘Brave Enough’ breaks the expected mould with infectious, polyrhythmic percussion. Here, delight is expansive.

With raucous ‘self-help’, strange, cartoonish romance, and occasional experimentation, Half Japanese attain a ramshackle joy, antithetical to a clinical, emulsified currency and wholly genuine. This is what happiness sounds like for the messy and vanquished; bedraggled but authentically jubilant.

0 7/ 1 0

Half Japanese Overjoyed Joy f u l N oise

By Tim Wilson . In sto res Sept 1

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Albums 08/10

Karen O Crush Songs Cul t

By T om Fe nwi ck . In sto r es Se p t 9

As softly intoned lyrics drift over the scratch of a guitar and the hum of a tape machine, it’s clear Karen O’s highly anticipated solo debut will feel anything but expected.

Constructed from a series of bedroom recordings made around 2006 and 2007 – and finally finding their way to our ears through Julian Casablancas’ record label – ‘Crush Songs’ revolves around a series of infatuations that swept the New York chanteuse along during a period in her late twenties. And it strays away from the brash, angular, post-punk of her day job frontingYeahYeahYeah’s, holding a tone more reminiscent of her recent, Oscar-nominated ‘Moon Song’, albeit with more startling

unpolished edges.

With an unabashedly lo-fi sound, the album supports itself with little more than an acoustic guitar and the occasional assistance of a drum machine. Most of the tracks stretch little over sixty seconds in length, with only the soft undulation of ‘Beast’ daring to approach the threeminute mark. It’s a brevity that allows for deft movement between the forlorn pathways that love’s injustice lays; switching between the dispiriting fallout of breakup on tracks like ‘So Far’ and ‘Visits’, to the bittersweet desire for a love that’s just out of reach on ‘NYC Baby’ and ‘Body’. ‘Day Go By’, meanwhile, forms a sweet and somewhat bluesy

ode that sees O hunger for love as she yearns: “I really need my fix ‘cause you got me so sick/I know I’m burning for you.”

It’s O’s effortless vocals – highlighted by her spartan canvas – that allow her to breathe life into these laments with hypnotic pathos, and it sees her deliver some of the rawest lyrics of her career through the wistful confusion of tracks like ‘Native Korean Rock’ (“You can’t throw punches when you’re sitting on your hands”) and ‘Rapt’, which summarises the album’s entire concept with brutal simplicity: “Love’s a fucking bitch”. It’s a curt sentiment that distils the emotional tumult of a broken heart and draws

strong comparison to the songwriting of Stephin Merritt.

These songs resonate with a sound of pain, loss and distant hope that never feels less than genuine, their brief running time saving O from wallowing too long in self pity, although it’s this same brevity that occasionally leaves songs to sound half sketched, ‘Sunset Sun’ and ‘Indian Summer’ feeling like rough demos that would benefit from further development or simply removal. And so there are those who might initially view ‘Crush Songs’ as experimental self-indulgence, but given the time and space to grow it flourishes into a poignant document of pure heartache.

You have to give it to Weezer for naming the first song to be heard from their ninth studio album ‘Back To The Shack’. After years of disappointment, it would have provided a glimmer of hope for even their most disillusioned fans.

Lyrically it hits the mark too, full of promises old fans will want to hear as the chorus goes: “Take me back, back to the shack, Back to the strat with the lightning strap.” Later Rivers Cuomo sings: “Rockin out like it’s ‘94”.

Unfortunately, put in context with the rest of album, though, it is more of a grand marketing master plan to sell a bunch of records than a genuine attempt from the band to come full circle.

Inevitably, it may not be the raw and emotional sound of 1990s Weezer, but it is also a whole lot better than the painstakingly cringe stuff Cuomo and his band have served up in recent years.

‘Eulogy For A Rock Band’, for example, is a charming ode to retiring

rock bands that sits alongside some of the group’s most melodic moments, while the ambitious closing three-piece-suite of ‘The Waste Land’, ‘Anonymous’ and ‘Return to Ithaca’ is a more tasteful experiment than ‘We Can’t Stop Partying’, their 2009 collaboration with Lil’ Wayne.

Ultimately though, that title looks like it’s going to come back and bite them, because ‘Everything Will Be Alright In The End’ simply doesn’t live up to it’s reassuring name.

06/10

Weezer Everything Will Be Alright In The End Isl and By sa m c or n f orth. In sto res sep t 29

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Reviews / Live

Øya Festival Tøyenparken, Oslo, Norway 0 5- 0 9 / 0 8/ 20 14 wr iter : C h r i s Wa tke ys Ph oto gr aph er : Ste ff en Rike nb e rg

Hanging over the entrance gates to Oslo’s Oya festival are these words, in gigantic lettering: ‘Scream until you like it’. An admirable proposal, and perhaps there ought to be a subheading: ‘Here, there be beautiful people’.

Wandering around Toyenpark – the grassy, hillside festival site two metro stops from Oslo’s centre – one can easily determine the ratio of local punters (very high, very beautiful) to international visitors (very low, and of varying attractiveness).

Oya is a huge affair, with a capacity in the region of sixty thousand, yet with no campsites it feels much more intimate than that.

Toyenpark is a truly beautiful place for a festival, arranged around a

natural amphitheatre, from the highest point of which the city and the hills beyond are in clear sight.

And running around the feet of the punters, at regular intervals, are beautiful, golden-haired Norwegian children, gathering up empty beer cups and trash as if we’re in some kind of enchanted Disney utopia; you don’t get that at Reading.The line-up this year once again puts Oya in the upper echelons of the European festival circuit – of the four nights, Wednesday and Thursday are headlined by international big hitters Queens of the Stone Age and Outkast, while ‘local’ heroes Royksopp & Robyn and Todd Terje head up Friday’s and Saturday’s bills.

But it’s a little further down the bill where things get more interesting.

Janelle Monae’s set on Friday is pure, energy-soaked show-business – here is a woman who has taken the frontman soul of James Brown and added a lot of glamour, a ten-piece band dressed in matching white suits, and some surprisingly strong tunes to produce what is possibly the set of the weekend. It may err on the side of style over substance as the set goes on, but what style; amongst the po-faced dance and the wheyfaced indie (Conor Oberst is also on the bill), Janelle Monae is a force ten blast of fresh air. Which gives Outkast a tough act to follow. So up step Big Boi (above) and Andre 3000.

They play the hits, of course, and all

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of Oya duly shakes its drunken ass like a Polaroid picture; ‘Ms. Jackson’ is huge, timeless and brilliant.

Elsewhere Deafheaven’s fusion of black metal with layered shoegaze, along with a singer whose voice sounds like a caged Velociraptor, and who acts onstage as if he truly despises every cell in your puny body, makes for an entertaining set, and meanwhile Royal Blood inject some properly raw, fuzzy rock’n’roll vibes into proceedings.

Oya is a blast, and once the bands are over there are dozens more shows to be found in the city’s clubs.

But a note of caution: Norway’s eyewatering expensiveness doesn’t stop at the festival gates. Pack a lot of cash.

Reviews

to be one of the most anticipated, and Portishead, who take the festival’s main slot, Beth Gibbons’ pained and heartfelt vocals soaring over the groaning guitar of Geoff Barrow, whilst powerful images flicker on the large screen behind them.

With an equal love for all things new, La Route also mixes in a healthy amount of little-known but largely exciting bands that have been scratching beneath the surface recently and doing their upmost to obtain wider recognition from festivals larger than this one, but perhaps not as enchantingly set as in Saint-Malo’s ancient walled city.

From the primal and aggressive Perfect Pussy, where singer Meredith Graves (pictured) scissor kicks her way through a no-holdsbarred performance of pent-up, frantic hardcore, to the dulcet, laidback country twang of Angel Olsen, to the forever louche Americana of The War On Drugs and the house grooves of Todd Terje, La Route Du Rock is in some ways a home from home for a British attendee, yet you’d be surprised how much more appreciative it feels just across the Channel.

La Route Du Rock St. Malo, Brittany, France 13 - 16/ 0 8/ 20 14 wri ter: N at h an We stle y Ph otog raph er: Nico la s Jo ubard

Originally set up by three music fans intent on bringing artists that would normally head to the clubs and venues of Paris to a new region of France, La Route Du Rock is a Brittany based festival that prides itself on being a three day long celebration of resolutely indie culture. Over the past 24 years, it has slowly earnt itself a reputation for being a festival that is not solely focused on bringing in a heap of internationally known household names, nor a vast pick’n’mix selection in the hope that some of it sticks, but rather it concentrates its efforts on delicately selecting a sonically diverse line-up that is small yet perfectly formed.

This year’s edition once again sees a deep interest in American and British bands, playing host to a set of long established acts such as Slowdive, whose woozy set proves

FKA Twigs Heaven, London 3 1/ 0 7/ 20 14 wri ter: Matt h i as Schere r

Grumbling Fur Corsica Studio Elephant & Castle, London 12/0 8 / 2 0 1 4

Protomartyr The Lexington, Islington

Slint Old Market, Hove

1 5/ 0 8 / 2 0 1 4

1 2 / 08 / 2 01 4

w r i te r : stua r t stu bbs

w r it er : To m F en w ic k

Detroit would be a tragic city even in the poorest of countries. That its continual, spectacular neglect comes from the US Government, then, gives its townsmen a lot to be pissed about – pissed and then utterly despondent, as the ruin of Motor City is left to rot. Protomatyr’s grey post-punk sums up the slog of Detroit life in a surprisingly mesmerising way for a blue-collar group of average Joes that resemble a Hold Steady keen onThe Fall rather than Springsteen. “Shit goes up, shit goes down,” blurts resigned singer Joe Casey through ‘Maidenhead’. He slowly circles the stage like a guy who was laid off two weeks ago and has been walking the streets ever since. He mutters to himself off-mic and smirks every now and then. The shit-fi guitar grates. Protomartyr don’t need to thrash to deliver their genuine disappointment.

Slint fans come in threes; the hardcore who bought their debut, the latecomers who discovered them during their reformation and the newcomers drawn in by recent reissues. Hove’s Old Market plays host to every variant of this demographic; a sea of unkempt beards and plaid shirts. What the band lack in back catalogue, they make up for with visceral power, wringing every last drop of sound from their proto post-rock. The set consists of ‘Spiderland’ in full, with additional highlights from ‘Tweez’.

‘For Dinner...’, ‘BreadcrumbTrail’ and ‘Nosferatu Man’ heave with taught power, while moments of quiet tension in ‘Don, Aman’ and ‘Washer’ tingle the spine.Audience interaction is minimal, but it’s a shyness that allows the music to speak for them at even greater volumes; and on this blustery August night it roars.

wri te r : Pe te r Y e un g

“The last time I was here I saw James Blake,” FKA twigs announces breathlessly mid-set. “I wondered – how does he fill this place? And now I did it!” Tahliah Barnett speaks very differently to how she sings – sweetly, even awkwardly. There is nothing awkward about her performance, which is controlled and sparse but just accessible enough for people to keep straining to catch a glimpse of Barnett’s dance moves. Her look is part Cleopatra, part Robo-Geisha, and her sound – crunched out by a three-piece band – is a pre-climactic drone, with occasional synth arpeggios and her vocals providing a crutch for when the soundscapes threaten to become too abstract. The songs off her debut album, ‘LP1’, are already better than 75% of what James Blake has ever recorded – with a bit of luck FKA twigs will surpass him.

It’s no surprise that Grumbling Fur have named their new album ‘Preternaturals’, because alongside tracks such as ‘Lightinsisters’ and ‘Pluriforms’, only a technical, evocative vocabulary like this can be used to describe the band’s seemingly transcendental output. In Corsica Studios’ dark and dystopian surroundings, Alexander Tucker and Daniel O’Sullivan’s gargantuan pile of compression and effects pedals worked like a paganistic Large Hadron Collider producing dollops of raw psychedelia. An accompanying “furchestra” of Daniel Pioro on viola da gamba and Liam Byrne on viola, as well as a brief appearance from Tim Burgess after his support slot, brings greater density to the duo’s haunting harmonies: chuntering percussion, gliding synth, mutating visuals, fluid orchestration, and ultimately, restorative catharsis.

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Live

Beacons Festival Skipton, Yorkshire 0 7- 10 / 0 8/ 20 14 wr i ter s: Dan i el D yla n Wra y & Jo sh Sunth Ph otogr aph er : Ta sh B rig ht

For four years now Beacons Festival has been cursed with storms, but the impressive diversity of its lineup – patching together the best new guitar bands and electronic artists around – has kept punters hooked.

This niche position (I mean, how often can you see Dixon and Daughter at the same place?) and its modest size, has also meant that it’s one of few festivals at which familiar faces pop up in the crowd.

One of its more conspicuous regulars is William Doyle, aka East India Youth, who has been bumped up to the Noisey tent on the strength of his debut LP ‘Total Strife Forever’.

Being a solo performer somewhat limits the amount of that record’s lush electronica that can be recreated without his laptop’s assistance, but after an unusually straight-laced opening salvo – during which a handful of his slower tracks feel a bit small – Doyle hits his stride, phasing out his vocals into a towering wave of electronica. (JS) Action Bronson later enters the Noisey tent to all but close it like a wrestler approaching the ring, pouring water all over this head and blowing it out like a whale through its blowhole. The heavy throbbing bass rumbles through the air and Bronson’s flow is solid. He seems intent on turning his performances into parties and he brings a sense of humour with him, having his DJ simply stop backing tracks dead and start playing wedding dance-floor classics like ‘Come on Eileen’ and Phil Collins’ ‘Sussudio’. The crowd seems to lap up with fervour.

Bronson closes on his latest, and great, ‘Easy Rider’, suggesting that the best may still be to come from the giant ginger rapper from Queens, New York. (DDW) If you could bottle opening day festival excitement, though, it would probably sound like Dan Snaith playing his canny, infectious Caribou single ‘Can’t Do Without You’, which runs rapturous circles around a crowded RA tent. Although, as Caribou, he’s renowned for indieleaning electronic music, as Daphni, his focus is trained almost solely on the dancefloor – the Canadian DJ phasing through jazzy rhythms and sly changes of tempo with the sort of skill that only comes with considerable experience. (JS)

It’s something that Jon Hopkins knows about, who tops the bill on the Loud And Quiet/Last.fm main stage on the Saturday evening. The unassuming opening synth of his techno masterpiece ‘Open Eye Signal’ fading in just two songs into his set, accompanied by the release of dozens of glowing bouncy balls onto the crowd, might possibly be the single most euphoric moment of the weekend, and the dance stalwart’s agility on the kaoss pads makes for a rich live show on the whole. It’s in the set’s latter stages, however, when the pace fails to slow even for a second, that he leaves too much of the crowd behind. (JS) In the list of ways that Beacons is a relative polar opposite to Glastonbury – the festival that all British outdoor events must legally be compared to – the strength of their Sunday lineup is perhaps the most prevalent to a clientele here for the music. If you needed an excuse to stay for the death of the festival, it’s in the bands themselves.

That doesn’t apply to all, of course, and certainly not Speedy Ortiz, whose drummer seems intent on making shit, awkward joke after shit, awkward joke, which creates an irritating, stilted air to their show.

Still, on top of that there’s something that just doesn’t quite come across today; something feels a little hollow and workmanlike. (DDW)

For all that their ‘scraggy, cumstained, degenerate bunch of reprobates’ image does for them – which is a lot – The Fat White Family have done a remarkable job of turning their live musical experience into an antithetical, aesthetic-squashing force. Yes, they look like a cider-gulping park-bench collection of tramps, but my word have they gotten tight. Seeing the Fat Whites ignite, as they do this evening, is a joyous and explosive experience. There’s an almost selfrealising state of functionality to their performance, in which they themselves are starting to realise how good they’re sounding, which of course only adds to the fevered ferocity and intensity of it all. (DDW) The weather on Sunday is pretty grim at times, with The Fall’s set on the L&Q/Last.FM stage even being cut off midway through due to hurricane winds. The following Neneh Cherry seems hell-bent on reinstating the flow and energy to a festival site though, with a chunk still closed due to storms. Along with her band, RocketNumberNine, Cherry plays an electronicallycharged and soul-drenched set.

Throbbing synthesisers and crisp drums aid to project her bounding energy and soaring vocals with wonderful results that completely ignore the gales and rain. (DDW) It’s left to Darkside to close

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Beacons 2014, who have a very specific image and style, which they’ve cultivated for all their live shows (this, it turns out, being one of their very last). For two hours Nicolas Jaar and Dave Harrington are reduced to silhouettes stalking a bare stage, brewing up moody atmosphere and Americana from the very first strum of the guitar. But it’s the wonderfully deep textures of Jaar’s vocals – especially when tossing and turning on ‘Paper Trails’ – that slowly fill out every space in the main tent, making for a low, claustrophobic coda to another superb Beacons. (JS) Many festivals seem to lure you in with their musical line-ups and then you find yourself stuck in a field with overpriced bland food, bland beer and inadequate provisions. Beacons, however, seems to have genuinely thought about and considered its attendees and curated a festival intent on creating an engaging, enjoyable experience for them, not just creating an inescapable environment aimed at hoovering up money; from a great beer and food selection to a bustling arts field down to the dull yet vital details of providing plenty of – usually clean – toilets. Given its still relevant infancy, Beacons really is fast becoming a festival to challenge other, larger, weekend events throughout the UK.

Cinema

A History of Avant-Garde Cinema in Ten Movies

by Darren Chesworth

Exploding Cinema: A radical, DIY movie club N e x t S h o w : 2 6 / 09/ 2 01 4 The C inema Museum , Lo nd o n .

01.

Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1895) - Lumiere Brothers It’s impossible to imagine how unsettling films were for the first audiences, especially when they were shadowy versions, drained of colour and sound. So when audiences saw the engine approaching they didn’t know whether they would be run over, or whether the ghost train would pass right through them.

02.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929) – Dziga Vertov Working in the nascent USSR, Vertov passed a death sentence on films that aped theatre and novels, that were scripted, and that made us forget we were watching a movie.

Instead his ‘experiments’ were wholly cinematic, employing slow and fast motion, multiple exposures, freeze frames, etcetera. The result is that 85 years later, Man with a Movie Camera looks as dizzyingly inventive as ever.

03.

Un Chien Andalou (1929) – Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali Bunuel and Dali’s one rule for Un Chien Andalou was that they would accept ‘no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation.’

The resulting film is nightmarish – not least the famous shot of a razorblade slicing through an eyeball.

But disturbing society, whose rationality led a few years earlier to the horrors of WWI, was the point.

04.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) – Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid This haunting film from husband and wife team Deren and Hammid, has a

looping structure, becoming increasingly complex as the viewer is drawn in. It is surreal and, for the most part, wholly subjective – as though we were in the head of the main character (played by Deren).

The film was a major influence on future generations of American underground filmmakers.

contrariwise to the ingratiating, hyperactive mainstream. (Eight hours of Empire, or eight minutes of Keeping up with the Kardashians?

Tough call.)

05.

Dog Star Man (1961-64) – Stan Brakhage

The 1970s saw certain underground filmmakers, such as Le Grice, associated more with the fine art tradition than with the world of cinema. Berlin Horse is a looping image of the titular animal, together with an equally looping soundtrack

by Brian Eno. It is strangely emotive and beautiful and wouldn’t look out of place as a Turner Prize winner.

One way in which underground cinema was more honest than mainstream cinema was in reminding the viewer he was watching a film, rather than reality itself.WhileVertov emphasised the filmmaking process, Brakhage went even further and emphasised the very film stock. He scratched and painted directly onto the celluloid, creating hypnotic, abstract, often beautiful imagery in the process.

06.

Scorpio Rising (1964) – Kenneth Anger A film with a pop music soundtrack is so ubiquitous today as to pass unnoticed, but in Anger’s Scorpio Rising the effect is far more arresting.

The ‘story’ of a biker gang is told in Anger’s usual inimitable style, complete with homoerotic and occult imagery and themes. The outcome is visceral and makes pop culture appear menacing, and subversive.

07.

Empire (1964) – Andy Warhol Underground cinema has never been much interested in story, butWarhol’s Empire – eight hours continuous footage of the Empire State Building – takes this eschewal to its extreme.

As well as freeing art from the subjective, and therefore compromised, artist, the film stands

08.

Berlin Horse (1970) – Malcolm Le Grice

09.

Blue (1993) – Derek Jarman Underground presupposes an establishment to be underground to, whereas by the 1990s every politician and footballer posited himself as a rebellious maverick. Blue highlighted just how accepting the ‘mainstream’ had become to the strange and poetic. Based on Jarman’s hospital diary and narrated over an unchanging blue screen, the film was simultaneously broadcast on Channel4 and BBC Radio 3.

10.

Film Against Film (2005) – Duncan Reekie Reekie is as opposed to the previous generation of art filmmakers (for their obscurantism) as he is to Hollywood. In this witty, clever, and iconoclastic work he takes the torture/brainwashing scene from The Ipcress File and manipulates it so that British spy, Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) is forced by his Soviet captors to watch Malcolm Le Grice’s Berlin Horse and James Whitney’s Lapis.

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Exploding Cinema is an underground film/video collective with an extraordinarily democratic ethos (turn up to a meeting and you’re in).

For 23 years they have been putting on monthly (or so) screenings – housed in disused factories, pubs and social clubs – in which anybody can contribute work. A typical (atypical) night includes about twenty films/videos ranging from super8 home movies to mobile phone footage.

‘Underground’, of course, suggests an opposition to the ‘overground’, and it’s true to say that any attendee expecting the latest Brad Pitt blockbuster is going to be disappointed. But this is no pofaced, academic, avant-garde movement.The largely low/no budget fare includes documentary, experimental, stop motion animation, kitsch drama, filmic DIY, and manipulated party political broadcasts. And while the content of the films can be anti-establishment, you are as likely to see an iPhone version of ‘Snog, Marry, Avoid’, as you are a tirade against the mediocrity of mainstream media.

The difference is that Exploding Cinema is both multimedia and communal. As well as the films there are psychedelic slides and looped super-8 projections, filmmakers discussing their work, and live bands and cabaret.

But what makes the movement truly radical, and what prevents it from being appropriated by the mainstream, is that the filmmakers control everything, from production to exhibition. They do not require grants, commissions, or advertising money; they do not have to kowtow to galleries, multiplexes, or broadcasters. In a world that treats the individual as a passive consumer, Exploding Cinema shows it’s still possible to control one’s own culture. www.explodingcinema.org

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Party wolf idiot tennis Game. Set. Twat.

POP MYTHS Who makes this shit up?

1. Raised Eyebrows Ok guys, this is a man living with a monkey. That equals daily surprises, like when Bubbles tipped Michael out of the top bunk. It’s going to take its toll.

2. Pinched Nose ‘Nasty’ Nick Bateman

IDIOT

Lance Armstrong

Dopey dickhead from Big Brother

FAME

Dopey dickhead, shoulders, knees and toes

“I’ve made a mistake”

MOST LIKELY TO SAY

“I’ve made a fortune!”

“Sorry, I’m unable to appear in panto this year ”

LEAST LIKELY TO SAY

“Sorry”

“Live by the sword, die by the sword”

IDIOT POWER PLAY

“Livestrong”

Oh c’mon! We all doped with Lance back then!

On the Bad tour, Michael put a clothes peg on his nose to see how it felt. Busy with rehearsing, he forgot to take it off for 14 months.

3. Thinner Lips Michael’s a singer, right? Using his lips almost every week. Is it so hard to believe they’d lose weight?

Some people thought that Michael Jackson had plastic surgery in his lifetime (seriously), but when you think about it, it seems pretty unlikely that a guy that busy would bother. I’ve done some digging, spoken to some fans who own Michael’s records, applied some logic and studied the above photograph.

It’s all very simple, really. PW

GAME, SET & MATCH

crush hour Finding love in a hopeless place

4. Bum Chin After the Bad tour Michael swore to never touch another peg again.

Sadly, he relapsed in 1992.

5. Whiter Skin After Pepsi set fire to Michael, he needed to moisturise heavily.

Could it be he forgot to rub it in?

Celebrity twitter

To the girl who picked up my Chicken Kievs when my shopping bag split on the 29, 2 of them, 2 of us... The Foodie

George Osbourne @GoregeousGeorge57

To the hot blonde who pointed out the phlegm on my back at Moorgate, I’m so going to get my work mates back tomorrow. Lol Man with phlegm on his back

George Osbourne @GoregeousGeorge57

To the man who looked me up and down and kissed his own teeth at me at Kilburn station, yes, yes, a thousand times, yes!

Sarcastic Sally

George Osbourne @GoregeousGeorge57

47m

.@MayorBJ HUH?!!! Over your head??? Fuck. Off. : Reply

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That was mad! Managed to drink 3 bottles of champagne from the ice bucket in an hour. Please give generously. : Reply

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About to do the #icebucketchallenge. Wish me luck!!! : Reply

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3d

Yikes! Guess who’s been nominated for the #icebucketchallenge?

Wibble, wibble, hah, blurgh, blurgh, yah. Hah Hah, plob plob.

Sex? The Mayor of London

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( HAAA! That’s hilarious!

Where did you find that?!!

( Annnd...

Open your eyes!

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) I know!

I got it in Gap. I never wear navy!

Disclaimer: The representations of the persons herein are purely fictitious

Photo casebook “The unfortunate world of Ian Beale”