Loud And Quiet 48 – Pissed Jeans

Zero pounds / Volume 03 / Issue 48 / the alternative music tabloid

Pissed

jeans Waxahatchee / Vision Fortune / Mount Kimbie Gold Panda / Adam Green & Binki Shapiro Plus The Loud And Quiet guide to Primavera Sound

Contents May 2013

09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Welcome A note from editor stuart stubbs

09 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chaos to coutu re A new photographic book that maps out punk’s affect on contemporary fashion

cover photography Francesco nazardo

12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . si ng les & books the month’s single and book reviews, from no ceremony///, Hookworms, Keys, polica and more

12 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . g etti ng to kno w you 8 artists discuss the jobs they’ve held down to keep them in the great game of music

a g u i de to p ri mav e ra sou n d . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Contact info@loudandquiet.com Loud And Quiet PO Box 67915 London NW1W 8TH Editor - Stuart Stubbs Art Director - Lee Belcher Sub Editor - Alex Wilshire film editor - Ian roebuck

Who we’ll be watching, festival tips, Barcelona by day, spotter’s guide, catalan phrasebook and more

Advertising advertise@loudandquiet.com

V ision Fortu n e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Contributors Bart Pettman, Carl Partridge, Chal Ravens, Chris Watkeys, Cochi Esse, Daniel Dylan Wray, Danny Canter, DAVID Sutheran, DK Goldstien, Elinor Jones, elliot kennedy, Edgar Smith, Frankie Nazardo, Gareth Arrowsmith, Janine Bullman, LEE BULLMAN, Kate Parkin, Kelda Hole, Gabriel Green, Gemma Harris, Leon Diaper, Luke Winkie, Mandy Drake, Matthias Scherer, Nathan Westley, Owen Richards, Olly Parker, PAVLA KOPECNA, Polly Rappaport, Phil Dixon, Phil Sharp, Reef Younis, Samuel ballard, Sam Walton, Sonia Melot, sonny McCartney, Tim Cochrane, Tom Pinnock, TOM Warner

Favour The Brave: in love with the drone and out of love with guitar music

Adam g re e n & B i n ki shap i ro . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 End of The Road: Green and shapiro toast the end of their tour, and possibly their whole project

Mou nt Ki m b i e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 A slight return: There’s no rushing Mount Kimbie

w a x a h at c h e e . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 4 Salt of The earth: Katie Crutchfield and her confessional brand of lo-fi acoustic indie rock

gold pan da . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Moving house: Gold Panda on moving to berlin and nearly quitting music

This Month L&Q Loves Anna Mears, aoife Kitt, Liv Willars, Nita Keeler, Noam Klar, Will Laurence

P isse d j eans . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28

The views expressed in Loud And Quiet are those of the respective contributors and do not necessari ly reflect the opini ons of the magazine or its staff.

All rights reserved 2013 Loud And Quiet.

not a job: Matt Korvette discussed his hobby that is the world’s funniest smart hardcore band

ISSN 2049-9892 Printed by Sharman & Company LTD.

36 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . albums films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Deerhunter, Fair ohs, savages, hyetal, jon hopkins, no joy, small black and more

Ian Roebuck on three big movie reunions coming up this month

42 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . li v e party w olf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 swans, Laurel Halo, oOoOO, steve mason, james blake, nightbeds and more

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Idiot Tennis, Thought sport, SPot the differece, My time and The sexy world of ian beale

Welcome May 2013

There’s a story about Ringo Star, about how his mother collected him from his very first day at school. He’d had a nice enough time, but he also thought it was a one-off. When his mother told him it wasn’t, and that he’d be repeating the experience for the next ten years or more, Ringo freaked out.

I remember feeling the same way when I realized that the stunt is also pulled with jobs, only for a longer time and minus the morning break when you can eat a majority of your lunch. I was a lot older than 5 – perhaps 15 when it really dawned on me what a shitty deal employment is – but my reaction was no less childish than infant Ringo’s, typical of every other teenager faced

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with hawking CVs around temping agencies. J Mascis says it’s fear of having to get a job that’s kept him going all this time, and that is of course what the rockstar dream is all about – freedom from mundane routine and horrible bosses over lashings of cash and admiration. It’s not like anyone, ever, has run away from home to become a banker.

Pissed Jeans don’t feel like Mascis.

The wider success of their fourth album, ‘Honeys’, could be their ticket out of their day job, but it’s not one they’re interested in taking. They shirk most Hardcore punk conventions, in fact, from being down on touring to the speed that many of their songs ooze

out at. Music is a hobby to them, like baseball might be to another American.

“People who like baseball aren’t going to try to make it their careers, are they?” reasons singer Matt Korvette in this month’s cover feature, which discusses humor and misogyny in hardcore as well as keeping it a happy pastime. Pragmatism over nihilism – Pissed Jeans have a point, and ‘Honeys’ might not be the dynamic, funny, loud thrill it is had the band’s rent money been riding on it. In its honor, we asked 8 artists to share their past positions of employment that have kept/continue to keep them in the game of making music, on page 12. Now get back to work!

The Beginning May 2013

NOT MUSIC : john ford’s non audio fe ars and fantasies T V or no t T V. . .

Chaos To Couture

Words by Stuart Stubbs / Photography by Roberta Bayley

A new photographic book that maps out punk’s affect on contemporary fashion PUNK: Chaos to Couture is a hunk of coffee table literature, the size and weight of a levered paving slab, expensively and smartly decorated with spot gloss lettering and white spirographs on matte black. It’s a thing of class and subtlety; a far cry from Punk’s original bricolage dress-up and proactive, scissors-and-glue aesthetic. There’s plenty of that inside, though, as the book (a companion to a new spring exhibition at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute) looks at how disenchanted kids of the King’s Road and the East Village changed fashion forever in the mid to late 1970s.

With additional help from Richard Hell (above and of Television, The Heartbreakers and Richard Hell & The Voidoids), John Lydon and author Jon Savage, institute Curator and Chaos to Couture editor Andrew Bolton parades Punk’s aesthetic legacy here, with 200 odd pages of original ’70s photography from the likes of Pennie Smith, Ray Stevenson and Dennis Morris, printed beside inspired haute couture and high end fashion pieces from contemporary designers. I’m sure it was never the plan for Sid Vicious’ padlock necklace to be taken off by Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, or for John Galliano to produce a bondage line of parachute pants, or maybe it was. Malcolm McLaren never shied away from being a cultural conqueror after all, while Vivienne Westwood went on to become part of the fashion establishment. Either way, the look of Punk lives on now

more than its rigid beliefs, perhaps because Punk as an attitude is increasingly difficult to live out in 2013.

Flicking through Chaos to Couture, though, past the opening essays from Bolton, Hell, Lydon and Savage, which talk of what ‘dressing Punk’ meant to them, the alarming truth is that of Punk’s genuine originality and filth against the clean, re-appropriated works of the major fashion houses. The greased hair of the models feels clearly combed in, the holes in tights meticulously placed, the block lettered and stencilled T-shirts no more dangerous than the latest range at Topman. It’s probably not anyone’s fault – a runway in 2009 Paris is a very different place to CBGBs in 1976 – and although perhaps not its intent, it’s this pitting of the real deal next to the inspired that gives PUNK: Chaos to Couture its real weight, as it reminds us that the cultural revolution was more than the caricature that time has turned it into.

As Hell says in his contribution to the book: “I remember in 1976 or ’77 I saw torn T-shirts, indirectly descended from the ones our band had originally flaunted, on mannequins in Macy’s windows. It was gratifying in a way, but the point of those styles had been that they were created by who wore them. The windows were a lesson that anything associated with a desired state gets appropriated by profiteers. That’s just the nature. Part of the challenge is to stay a step ahead of them. The exercise is healthy.”

I did the BBC’s new class test. I’m in that well known bracket ‘Emergent Service Workers’ apparently, which means I’m broke but I can read and don’t think dance and theatre is a load of noncing about. It’s a pointless test (if delightfully brief), made completely derivative as it announces that each of the seven groups like to socialise with people like themselves. Isn’t that what class is – the lumping together of people who like and do the same things, together?

One thing that the other ESWs (I’ve abbreviated my class group, which I think is actually very ‘New Affluent Workers’) and I don’t see eye-to-eye on, however, is the old gogglebox.

It used to be strange to not have a TV, but somewhere along the line I became the weirdo for knowing how the Snickers advert goes. I always thought of the all-powerful television as a great unifier of people, but lately it’s been making me look like a right prick. There’s no more pointing at Mr Moustache in the pub and triumphantly name-checking Go Compare – that joke is now on me. “What is this Go Compare, John? We just watch documentaries on iPlayer and foreign films on the projector and MacBook.” I do that, too (minus the projector). I do subtitles and BBC Four; they’re what ‘Emergent Service Workers’ was founded on for Christ’s sake! But it’s too late once you’ve noted that Catchphrase is coming back, and don’t you dare pretend you don’t know what that is – we were 10.

It’s not like everyone I know has ditched their television set for books and streaming.

I’ve got one friend who actively avoids becoming mates with anyone that doesn’t own a TV, but, then, I can’t invite him out much these days. We are becoming the minority.

On a night out last month I was ambushed by the non-TV crowd as they suggested with undetected irony on my part that we “have a whole night where we just watch TV”. “What, like every other night?” had left my lips before I could notice the knowing roars of laughter at such a preposterous, kitsch idea.

We howled as they presumed I was piling on the sarcasm. I wasn’t, I was watching Deal Or No Deal out the corner of my eye.

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09

The Beginning Singles & Books

by L ee B u l l m a n

HurtLOVE

by NO Ceremony///

(NoC///)

Released may 19

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Wolves EP

by Valentina

(Greco-Roman) Released now

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Back To THE SOURCE

by Justin Velor ( B r u t a l M u s i c ) R e l e a s e d M a y 1 3

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In a double shot of 2010 cool (yes, 2010, not 2013), Manchester’s No Ceremony/// are playing the secrecy card and slinging down the arbitrary symbol trump, too. As cynically as we now greet such tired attempts at intrigue and anonymity, ‘Hurtlove’ is a debut single hard to not be instantly swept up by. This kind of ambient electronic music made for cities at dusk is hardly new hat, but there’s something delightfully understated about its shunning of grimy twostep and faux vinyl crackle for three sombre piano chords and lovestruck goblin vocals. It just needs to be twice as long.

Valentina has a fair bit in common with Jessie Ware, from the fact that she’s until now been a sweet voice for hire (most notably as a backing singer in Kindness’ live band) to a number of dance and producer affiliations, like buddying up with Joe Goddard for a club mix of ‘Gabriel’ last year.

This debut EP has some Kwes work on it, too, and Ben Esser, and is out on Goddard’s own GrecoRoman imprint, yet – and here’s where Valentina is most like Ware – it’s a pretty straight listen, partial to a piano ballad and a straining heart. Unlike Ware, ‘Wolves’’s icy soul can leave you a little cold.

Ah! Another Mancunian electronic artist keen to remain anonymous. Justin Velor can’t be blamed for this. If you’d hoodwinked Leee John of ’80s disco band Imagination to re-tread his jobbing decade as ham-fistedly as this, you’d want to keep your head down too. Of course, it might be John who’s played Velor; it’s impossible to tell. ‘Back To The Source’ sounds like Jimmy Somerville, only more disgustingly ’80s. It’s glossy and bogus and without any real hook, or at least one that you want to remember. God knows what it’s playing at. Justin Velor might be Peter Waterman.

Tiff

by Polica Feat.

Justin Vernon

( M e m ph i s I n d u s t i r e s ) Released June 10

(Too Pure) R e l e a s e d M a y 2 7

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For all its atomic and cosmic, raw power, drone interludes and classic space rock hypnosis, Hookworms’ debut album, ‘Pearl Mystic’, was short on songs that you could dance too. It’s a bit like saying ‘OK Computer’ is low on slow-jams, but it’s true, and only something worth thinking about now that ‘Radio Tokyo’ exists – a Hammond organ freak-out that sounds like Primal Scream on a strict diet of Spector Girl Groups. You can twist about to this one, get low for a muted break in the middle and shake your arms off for the second wave of animal cries from Matt Johnson. Their most fun track yet.

Justin Vernon of Bon Iver is Polica’s longest standing and most vocal fan. That’s how it is in Minneapolis – they look after their own. It’s not been misplaced local loyalty, though, as Ryan Olson and Channy Leaneagh of Gayngs return after their 2012 debut album with Vernon in tow. ‘Tiff’ is slightly less everything ‘Give You The Ghost’ was, but only slightly – autotune dialled down a notch, Leaneagh’s bruised heart a little less battered, the jazz-hop percussion less skittish. Polica are still taking android RnB to new futuristic heights, though.

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Radio Tokyo by hookworms

Innocuous Beats

by KEYS

( S t u r m U n d D r a n g ) R e l e a s e d MA y 6

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Before he formed LCD Soundsystem, James Murphy was a punk kid into hardcore. Few people heard his early attempts at making music, but in that transition from rudimentary guitars and Mark E Smith speak-sing to synthesisers and four-to-the-floor house beats, he may have sounded something like Suffolk band Keys, whose ultra bland name detracts from their charmingly slopping attempt at a DFA sound. ‘Innocuous Beats’ is terribly produced and loosely played, which is what makes it good. It frequently borders on plain homage, but its lumps and bumps make it hard to care about that.

S t e a l ing A l l T r a n s miss ion s : A S e c r e t Hi s t or y of The C l a sh B Y R a nd a l D o a ne (CuStos)

By September 1979, just 24 vile months on from its birth, punk rock was over. The Sex Pistols had split up, the Queen remained firmly on her throne and Sid Vicious was dead. The Clash, however, one of Punk’s most vital organs, were still very much alive and kicking. And they were touring America.

The band who had previously so enthusiastically assimilated the sounds they were hearing on the streets of Notting Hill and springing from Don Letts’ record collection began to repeat the trick with the soundtrack they encountered on the other side of the Atlantic. Their image began to change too. By shopping in thrift shops and army surplus stores, they created a look that is to this day still being mined for all it’s worth, mixing up fifties delinquents and motorcycle cops, Scorsese mobsters and Mississippi river boat gamblers, and looking as cool as fuck in the process. Aesthetically, it’s how we think of the band today – khaki and stenciled lettering – like how John Lennon is the guy with the beard and long hair, not another mop-top Mersey Beat urchin.

On September 21 1979 photographer Pennie Smith stood stage left while The Clash played New York. The picture she managed to take whilst getting out of the way of an extremely pissed off Paul Simonon as he endeavored to smash his Fender Precision bass ended up gracing the cover of the band’s seminal ‘London Calling’ LP, becoming one of the most iconic rock’n’roll pictures ever taken in the process. It’s an image that plays a pivotal role in Doane’s book.

America and The Clash was always going to be a match made in heaven – The States was where rock’n’roll was from and The Clash were where it was going. Stealing All Transmissions tells the story of a band at the peak of their game (but nearly skint) and the American DJs, journalists, radio stations and fans whose commitment to the band ensured that the time the group spent in the country would change both them and the American musical landscape, forever. So much for ‘no future’.

All single reviews by Danny Canter

The Beginning Getting To Know You

would be obliged to perform solo dances to Myron Floren’s ‘Disco Accordion’ at the end of sessions, one after another.

Needless to say, this and other shenanigans did not please Slave & Sax, and the job ended ingloriously with a swearing walk out. Then I went home and covered lots of Beyonce songs. And the rest isn’t history.”

Boom Bip of Neon Neon The Store Clerk

“When I was 14 I worked as a stock boy for a shop called The Bluelick General Store owned by an elderly Christian lesbian couple. The store was a division of their home and most of their time was spent in the dining room watching The Golden Girls and Who’s the Boss while smoking cigarettes.

The majority of what they sold was beer to the local factory workers and ice cream to their kids. They had a large refrigerator containing all of the beer to be stocked and I would sneak and take my first ever sips of beer. Years later I ended up taking one guitar lesson from one of the women and with a big smile she asked me what song I wanted to start with. I replied, ‘‘Fade to Black’ by Metallica.” Her response was, ‘let’s start with Amazing Grace’.”

Ra of Blue Hawaii and Braids The Midnight Baker

It can be a mucky business, funding a life as a recording artist Jack Cooper of Mazes The Deckchair Attendant

“My first job also happens to be the best job I’ve ever had. I still have time to fix that but I don’t see it changing. I was a quiet kid at school but becoming a deckchair attendant on Blackpool promenade brought me out of myself. I’d sit in the sun all day, talking to girls and skimming deposits. It was bliss. Frank Carson and his wife got a chair off me on the same afternoon as Bill Bryson... that same week I saw someone killed by a tram. Life’s rich, fucked up tapestry. I quit when I got a job at the zoo.”

Laura Lloyd of No Joy The Papergirl

“I have a great story about a job I had working in the porn industry. Unfortunately it’s still a little sensitive and I can’t really talk about it, so I will tell you about my first job. When I was 12 I had a paper route in small town Victoria, B.C. I would get up every morning at 4:30am and deliver The Times Colonist newspaper to all my neighbours’ houses. I remember

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getting my first paycheck of $86. I went straight to the bank and cashed it. As I was holding the money in my hands I remember saying to my mom, ‘This is the most amount of money I have ever held’; to this day that is still true. I quit that job when I started realising that getting up at 4:30am wasn’t worth the $86. Now I only get out of bed for $87.”

Patrick Doyle of Veronica Falls The cab dispatcher

“When I was 14 I got a part time job at the local taxi firm, taking phone calls and dispatching cabs. The office was in a caravan at the end of my boss’s garden and they paid me £1.66 per hour. I remember thinking it was cool that you could smoke in the ‘office’, until half way through my first day when I somehow managed to set the curtains on fire. My boss walked in on me stamping on them, having just pulled them off the window. It was just the first impression I was looking to make.”

Ergo Phizmiz The Teacher

“In my mid 20s I worked as a lecturer in music and visual art in a small franchise of a larger college. I lasted one year. The problem was the bosses – two brothers, one who had previously been involved in some kind of slave trade, and the other of who played jazz-funk-fusion saxophone. Not a winning combination. Before long the atmosphere turned into a Kafka-esque nightmare of paranoia. One problem was the installation of a surveillance system – two cameras, one in the corridor, one in the room where I worked. Eventually I began to deliver special treats for their delectation, my favourite of which was as follows: naughty students who didn’t finish their work on time, instead of being bawled at,

Jasamine White-Gluz of No Joy The Modelling Agent

“I currently work as the senior booker at a high profile modelling agency in Montreal. My day-to-day routine includes booking models for major campaigns, editorials and runways.

Over the years I have developed many skills, which include but are not limited to: being a really good judge of women’s hip sizes, being able to get someone out of jail for drug possession so they can make it to their photo shoot on time, being able to have girls work in Japan without becoming escorts and being able to hurt people’s feelings by judging them solely on their appearance.”

Gabriel Bruce The all-rounder

“Making music does not pay rent. It’s a horrid disease that you’re willing to debase yourself for, like an addiction, I guess.

It’s a habit that you have to work to support. For the last five years of my life this has been the one steady truth. I’ve sold old books, Christmas trees, scratched records, soiled clothes, beautiful furniture and fossilised dinosaur excrement.

I’ve worked as an electrician, as a soundman, as a waiter, even briefly as a hand model. Tomorrow morning I will get up well before I’d like to and travel to west London so I can spend my Sunday preparing for and cleaning up after a child’s 5th birthday party at the toyshop I work in. The only autographs I’ve ever signed were accepting deliveries of rubber ducks and Hex Bugs. It comes with the territory. It’s what you have to do to support your filthy habit, even if every now and then you have to get punched in the dick by a seven-year-old all hyped up on birthday cake.”

Illustration by Gareth Arrowsmith – www.garetharrowsmith.blogspot.co.uk

BAND JOBS

“When I first moved to Montreal when I was 18, being an Anglo, it was next to impossible to find a decent job. I had many strange forms of employment, but my oddest job was being a midnight vegan baker, starting at 12am and going until 7am. I noticed that the girl who was training me had burns all over her arms – she later told me that at night to watch out for the oven as the outside of it gets hot and the floors can be rather slippery. I didn’t end up finishing that morning until 10am. When I got home, I remember flopping on my bed and bawling. I called the owner and quit, and, man, he was a fucking jerk, but I made sure to chase them up for the $40 cheque I would later receive. I wore my sunglasses in with a hoodie to pick it up. I still don’t really like baking vegan treats”

Spring Breakavera Sound

A Loud A

m i r P o t e d i nd Quiet gu

Next month we’ll travel to Barcelona, Spain, and Porto, Portugal, to put together Loud And Quiet 49 from Primavera Sound and Optimus Primavera Sound. There’s not much else you’ll need to take with you beyond our festival guide

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Writers’ Pick Members of the Loud And Quiet road team put the sell on their most anticipated live show from the weekend

Chris Watkeys on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

Chal Ravens on Pantha du Prince and Bell Laboratory

It’s a statement made about far too many performers, but Nick Cave was, absolutely, born to perform. His live shows are like theatre. Cave climbs inside the characters in his songs – characters that are variously violent, evil and noble – and portrays each on stage with a powerhouse of conviction and zeal. Combine this stagecraft with a body of work of such quality and volume (from before the epic ‘The Boatman’s Call’ to his latest record, ‘Push The Sky Away’) and his and this band’s performance is pretty much guaranteed to be one of the highlights of the weekend. Cave deals with the darker sides of human existence – death, murder, revenge – the subjects most people view as taboo, and he performs them with all the pantomime theatrics they deserve and demand. But the best thing about The Bad Seeds at Primavera is that this isn’t going to be a set where you sit patiently through the new stuff in order to get to the early gems from the back catalogue.‘Push The Sky Away’ recently proved that this enigmatic songwriter’s powers are yet to wane, helped by one hell of a band on stage and in the studio. This headline set is going to be something special, and fun where many others from the weekend will play it po-faced.

Campanophiles, rejoice! Hendrik Weber, the hypergifted German producer of euphoric electronic tearjerkers more commonly known as Pantha du Prince, is back with bells on. After coming close to exhausting the possibilities of twinkly ding-donging on 2010’s ‘Black Noise’ – one of the few records in pop history that can genuinely be described as ‘shimmering’ – Weber roped in an ensemble of expert ringers calling themselves The Bell Laboratory to help create his latest record, ‘Elements of Light’. Essentially a live album and truly a work of outstanding natural beauty, it features dozens of hand bells, tubular bells and even an enormous 50-ringer carillon (which they’ve thankfully been able to heave along on tour with them), plus of course Weber’s own propulsive electronics. It’s music for dancing, music for sitting, even – and this is untested, but I’m going to stick my neck on the line – music for reclining snoozily in the Barcelona evening sun. Nothing could be so unexpectedly moving, ecstatic and downright large as feeling three tonnes of brass pealing across the air and into your cochlea, squiggling through your nervous system and transmogrifying into your best big-fishlittle-fish dance moves.

Daniel Dylan Wray on The Knife

Sam Walton on Four Tet

Stuart Stubbs on Fuck Buttons

The Knife have remained as elusive as they have alluring over the years of their existence.When they are not busy taking seven-year gaps between releasing records or largely boycotting playing live, they generally can be found cloaked behind Venetian masks.They have, it’s fair to say, a sense of mystery and anonymity – and as a result, excitement – that very few other artists in 2013 come even close to possessing. Which means that on the back of the gut-churning and rather mammoth ‘Shaking The Habitual’, excitement levels are at a towering high.Their inevitable darkness-scheduled slot, no doubt veiled in a misty sea of foggy smoke, as the hell-raising, schizophrenic fury of ‘Full of Fire’ screams out into the muggy Spanish air, is enough to warrant attendance to the festival alone. Add to this the recent announcement of their intended inclusion of aerobics, dance-karaoke and live DJs to their set, and them taking the biggest steel band in Scandinavia on the road with them, and you have what looks to be an unpredictable, weird but utterly un-missable festival performance.

Last November, Four Tet sold out Brixton Academy in ten minutes. In isolation, that’s no biggie – plenty of acts on this year’s Primavera bill have done that before breakfast – but it seems more remarkable for an act who still sits definitely on the underground side of current dance music – whose last album was a self-released collection of limited-edition vinyl-only singles – and for an event that Four Tet himself brazenly promised would have “no lighting and it’s not going to be about the performance on stage”. But therein lays his appeal, especially at a festival: forget the daft multimedia pantomimes and the dodgy messianic gestures from the stage. Forget even the ridiculously over-egged build-itup/tear-it-down dynamics of the standard dance music festival slot. With Four Tet’s pulsating, beautiful and transporting live show, there’s no bullshit, no pizzazz, no self-aggrandisement or attention seeking, just a softlyspoken bloke in front of a table of throbbing machinery concentrating intently on making his music buzz and bleep with an organic inclusiveness that few of his peers even contemplate. In the extraordinary surroundings of the Parc Del Fórum, all brutalist concrete and moonlit sea, gimmicks are redundant.

The wider world was introduced to Fuck Buttons on the most unlikely of occasions – as the very first sound of the London 2012 Olympic Games.Things soon took a turn for the kitsch as Danny Boyle played one big prank on the planet, celebrating British humour more than anything else, and our refusal to explain an in joke.

The scratchy twitch of ‘Surf Solar’ provided an alien bed for snatches of heritage music from The Clash to traditional Irish fiddles, all the time lending a weird, inappropriate horror to proceedings. Really, the noisegaze duo should have performed live, but at the closing ceremony, because to see Fuck Buttons nightmare trance in person is to witness a very powerful and loud bittersweet euphoria that was quite in keeping with the end of the London Games. They last played Primavera Sound in 2010, on the RayBan amphitheatre stage at 4am. People were held up by the volume of the static wash alone, and tanned by the heat of giant, forward facing red bulbs that somehow forced your eyes open rather than closed. When done badly, 10-minute ‘songs’ made up of relentless waves of noise can feel like an eternity for all the wrong reasons. Brutal, heavy and yet oddly danceable, Fuck Buttons beat the rap.

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Catalan phrasebook 10 phrases that you’ll definitely say at some point over the weekend, translated into Catalan

Information point 5 things to remember that we didn’t once and wish we had

“I liked their earlier records a lot better” Els àlbums anteriors m’agradaven molt més.

“They’re heavily influenced by the Flaming Lips” Tenen una gran influència de Flaming Lips.

“Please can you turn it up a bit” Pots apujar-ho una mica, si us plau?

“Daft Punk are playing a secret set on the beach tonight” Avui a la nit Daft Punk fa un concert secret a la platja.

“I mean, I like the heat, but this is too hot, isn’t it?”

A veure, m’agrada la calor, però això és massa, no?

“If Crystal Castles play for more than 20 minutes I’ll eat my own balls” Si Crystal Castles toquen durant més de vint minuts m’autocruspeixo els collons.

“Pitchfork gave it 8.6. It must be good.”

Pitchfork li va donar un 8 punt 6.

Deu estar bé.

“Has Alex James even lit that thing?”

Vols dir que l’Alex James ha encès això que porta?

“It’s such a shame they hate each other” És una llàstima que s’odiïn mútuament.

“I don’t know if I can ever go to V Festival again” No sé si podré tornar a anar al V Festival.

Win Win!

The first official day of Primavera Sound is Thursday, 23 May, but that’s not the real start, of course. Things warm up as early as the Monday before, with Wednesday’s official opening party acting as the real ball-drop. In recent years it’s grown into a festival in itself, if an overpopulated one, so get there early, but more importantly, get to where it is. Unlike 2011, a trip onsite to Parc del Fórum won’t be completely wasted, with performances from The Vaccines and Delorean happening there, but you’re better off making for crumbly theatres Sala Apolo and La [2] De Apolo (found at Metro station Paral.lel, on lines L2 and L3) for Veronica Falls, John Talabot, Parquet Courts and Cheatahs.

The following day, when entering the futuro, tarmacked site of the Fórum, that big blue box building on the right is not a leisure centre. It looks like it, and the snaking line of people leading up to its door like chumps queuing for the climbing, but in that big blue box is magic. After years of streaming past it we finally realised that that’s the indoor auditorium where – always early in the evening – you can see special sets from John Cale, say, or Sufjan Stevens. This is Primavera’s daily golden ticket moment, with seats pulled from a hat earlier on the day of performance in previous years. To get in you need to apply beforehand on the festival’s website.

A little harder to ignore are the records. Stalls and stalls of precious wax. Reading Festival flogs dog collars and Glastonbury mud hats, but Primavera comes with its own record fair, situated in its doorway. All those records you can’t afford to pay the US shipping on, now’s the time to stock up. Bring a bin bag and make a statement with your hand luggage.

It’s not just Primavera that lacks the hippy ideals of Glastonbury, but Barcelona rewards with weather that Worthy Farm would consider divine intervention. For Glasto’s Stone Circle sunrise, Primavera has a spotless horizon, ocean sunset.

It’s worth getting on site early for it (around 8.30pm) before shitting your pants at The Knife.

Seven hours of fun later, all you need to do now is get back to your lodgings, so here’s the exit strategy. Barcelona’s Metro system starts at 5.00am and closes at midnight on Thursdays, at 2.00am on Fridays and not at all on Saturday. If you need to get back to the centre of town in the Metro’s downtime, there’s also a bus service laid on by the festival, but you do need a ticket for it, bought from the info point inside the gate. Don’t be the guy who queues for an hour for the bus without having a ticket.

People never see the funny side of that... well, other people do.

! Win

Spotter’s Guide Instagram the following @LoudAndQuietMag to be in with a chance of winning tickets to next year’s festival Sunglasses that are not made by RayBan Spiderman, a truly international I’m-mad-me fancy dress costume A smiling Dave Roundtree A frowning Dan Deacon The Knife in their civvies The classic sunburnt Brit Anyone sleeping at My Bloody Valentine Anyone crying at James Blake Method goths wearing nothing but black on the beach Fred Macpherson Socks and sandals The first American Apparel short shorts of the season A moustache on a man over the age of 35

13 Years of Primavera Sound

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

Unhappy with how indiecentric his current employers at Benicassim festival had become, Gabi Ruiz, along with Alberto Guijarro and Pablo Soler, conceive Primavera Sound.

The first edition of Primavera Sound takes place in the grounds of architectural museum Poble Espanyol, atop Barcelona’s Montjuïc mountain, home to the 1992 Olympic Games. 3,000 people attend the one-day event, headlined by Armand Van Helden and UNKLE.

After a successful road test the previous year, festival organisers extend Primavera to a two day event that’s less focused on DJs. Big acts on the bill include Pulp and Spiritualized.

The lineup doubles in size and includes Television,Wire, Sonic Youth,Yo La Tengo, LCD Soundsystem and Mogwai.

Despite the festival’s rapid growth over the previous three years, it’s 2004 that is considered “the first real success,” says Sober, largely due to the booking of a newly reformed Pixies. Primavera sells out for the first time and finds itself in need of a larger site.

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Catalan Band Cheat Sheet Primavera proudly promotes local talent too.

Here’s a shortcut to who’s who

Loner’s Planet Barcelona by day, quite possibly while all your mates are still in bed With the festival not starting each day until the late afternoon/early evening, one of the joys of Primavera Sound is Barcelona itself. For all the city’s beauty and vibrancy, though, the first port of call should be the beach, and it pays to pick your spot.The two biggest stretches, Barceloneta and San Sebastian (nearest tube Barceloneta on L4), are the easiest to get to but also the busiest – your enjoyment will depend on your tolerance of low-flying volleyballs. Instead, venture a mile further up the coast for Mar Bella (Poblenou on L4), beneficiary of Barcelona’s 90s regeneration, for a little less stress, a younger clientele and even, if you’ve got enough factor 50 to go around, a designated nudist area.

Alternatively, get out of Barcelona completely, where the water is clearer and the pace sleepier. Both Sitges and Garaf are beautiful little fishing villages half an hour southwest of the city on the train from Estacio Sants. The beaches there are virtually empty.

If cooking yourself on the sand sounds like hell, there’s plenty to do inland too. Nothing whets the appetite for a face-contorting, quasi-religious My Bloody Valentine noisefest like a trip to the iconic, melty Sagrada Familia (Sagrada Familia on L2/ L5) – avoid the queues and just gawp from the outside; the inside’s not even finished yet anyway. Follow that with a trip around Gaudi’s psychedelic architectural gardens at Parc Guell (a 20-minute walk from Lesseps on L3) or for something a little off the beaten track, wander up to the hidden-away Bunker (a 20-minute walk from Alfons X on L4), a renovated old civil war air-raid bunker which offers incredible views across the entire city. Stop in at the nearby Art Blau cafe. Another beautiful city panorama can be enjoyed from the Montjuic cable car (Parallel on L2/ L3).

Take it up to La Caseta, a sort of mountain terrace hideaway thing serving local beer with its incredible views.

And if that all sounds too much like hard work, simply spend the afternoon in the Raval district for dive bars and record shops. Wah Wah Supersonic (C de la Riera Baixa, nearest tube Liceu on L3) boasts an impressively eclectic back catalogue, or for the hipper end of things Disco Paradiso (C Ferlandina, nearest tube Universitat on L2) has an intimidatingly obscurist collection of everything electronic and underground. Finally, celebrate your new purchases with a swift one-euro beer and handful of free popcorn at Cassette Bar (C L’Est, nearest tube Drassanes on L3) before jumping back on the tube to the festival site.

Foscor Foscor are a ‘dark metal’ band from Barcelona.

Not black metal,mind – this is the Mediterranean, after all. Hard to pick their best number – it’s between ‘Searching a Seal of Pain (The Beauty)’ and ‘Groans to the Guilty’.

The Free Fall Band Listened to in the poky box room of a shabby flat on a road where a schoolkid got stabbed to death earlier this week,The Free Fall Band’s twee-pop cornucopia of brass and banjos and references to “turtleneck sweaters” and “stealing knickers” feels much like having your birthday fall on a Monday – wholly inappropriate. Add blazing sunshine and your fifth vodka and Fanta Limon, though, and they’ll have done a Noah and the Whale on you before you can say “fun, fun, fun in the sun”.

John Talabot

Fred I Son

Catalonia’s biggest musical export of recent years, or perhaps of any year, the mysterious John Talabot will come out from behind his tinfoil mask to bring his shadowy, sweat-shimmered take on house euphoria to the Parc del Fòrum on Wednesday and Thursday evening – or rather Friday, seeing as he’s due to start DJing at the strangely specific time of 4.10am. For those of a party-hard disposition to rival Andrew W.K., take note that sunrise is at 6.25am – when it’s over you can just put your shades on and stumble straight to the beach for a medicinal breakfast sangria.

Fred i Son es un grupo de jangle pop barcelonés.

Cheating, we know, but sometimes Wikipedia puts it perfectly. Their sound is somewhere between the soft glow of Mazzy Star and a Catalonian take on Postcard Records’ output in ‘80s Scotland. They’re also big fans of Daniel Johnston, so will no doubt be stoked to share the bill with the lo-fi legend himself.

Aliment Hailing from Girona, a town well-known to cheapskate British air travellers as being “really fucking far away from Barcelona”, Aliment peddle proper bolshy garage punk that should go down a treat with fans of Wavves, Jay Reatard and their sweaty-browed ilk.

Manel Folk-pop nice guys Manel are one of the bestknown Catalan bands around, and their debut album ‘Els Millors Professors Europeus’ – which means ‘The Best European Teachers’ – was widely lauded on its release in 2007. Their repertoire of live covers reportedly includes a version of Pulp’s ‘Common People’, which we can only hope is sung in glorious, impenetrable Catalan like the rest of their pretty, plinky output.

13 Years of Primavera Sound, continued...

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2005

2007

2011

2012

2013

The festival relocates to the other side of town, to brutalist exhibition space Par del Fórum, usually reserved for filming car commercials and little else.

A third day is added to the event for the first time.

Pulp play their first reunion show at Parc del Fórum as Primavera celebrates its tenth edition. Nick Cave berates the crowd for watching the whole of Grinderman’s set instead of going to see Suicide.

A Portuguese edition of Primavera is founded in Porto, to take place the weekend after Primavera Sound, Barcelona.

A fake lineup for the year’s festival is circulated on line, dreamt up by a fan in typical too-good-to-be-true fashion.

Minus Daft Punk, the official lineup that’s announced the following month doesn’t look too dissimilar.

w o r d s b y c h a l r a v e n s / c h r i s w a t k e y s / Da ni e l d y l a n w r a y / s a m w a l t o n / S t u a r t s t u b b s www.loudandquiet.com

c a t a l a n t r a n s l a t i o n b y A ï d a Cu n i l l w i t h s p e c i a l t h a n k s

Favour the brave Vision Fortune are in love with the drone, or at least they were until they got fed up of all guitar music, including their own experimental noise

“I really can’t stand distortion,” Austin Peru politely explains. “Guitars as well – I can’t stand guitar music at the moment; in fact I’m totally sick of it. I feel like we’ve explored it as much as we can. So with our album I feel like we’ve spent three years doing it and it’s done, now I can’t stand that as well.” Austin is still being terribly polite. He’s smiling on the surface, but you can tell he’s only just started. “You know Scott Walker said that after making a record he can’t listen to it? Well, that’s how we feel.”

Sat in a Columbian cafe in the heart of Elephant and Castle shopping centre, a diverse, almost dystopian structure that was voted London’s ugliest building,Austin and his younger brother Alex are in jubilant form, despite appearances. Perhaps that’s because Vision Fortune are just days away from releasing their astonishing debut album and can now look forward instead of back.There’s something fitting about our surrounding’s crumbling facade and fractured space that suits the subject matter – Austin and Alex feel on the brink of demolishing their past just as this 1965 built super-structure teeters between abandonment and regeneration. Having spent half a

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decade in south London,Vision Fortune have a sense of this disparate neighbourhood more than anybody. “It’s such a melting pot,” they say, “especially this place, and we love it. We’ve always played east in London but we always feel like outsiders going there. South suits us much better because we live here, our lives are here and it’s just more interesting.”

Although they’ve only been official for three years, Vision Fortune as a friendship was born in the Belgian backwater of Menen. Austin and Alex were sent abroad to study as kids and it’s there they met their future drummer, Andres Cuatroquesos. “It’s not like we were bad kids or anything and were sent away for punishment,” insists Austin. “I think it was a recommendation to our parents. God, it was boring though, going to school in a very small town in the south of Belgium.” Austin chuckles at the memory, but it must have shaped their worldly perception. It’s probably why we’re sat on a bench sussing out Columbian snacks rather than a coffee shop or burger joint.

Years later the three of them bonded once more, this time in the backwaters of south London, and it’s here

they took a step forward and became Vision Fortune the band. “I guess Alex and I have always made music together,” says Austin,“but it’s really changed from when we started out. Alex got a sampler for his birthday when he was 16 or 17 and we both began exploring electronics and drone. I think that drone thing has been ever present since.”

Alex, quiet until now (partly through his late arrival and partly due to his nature, it seems), comes alive when we begin talking music. “We’ve whittled away the notes over time,” he says. “It’s become a much more minimal set up.”

Their current incarnation – the band you will hear on the album and the band you will see play live – are a musical riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.

Deeply hypnotic, driving grooves combine with strains of psychedelia, piercing feedback and drone in abundance to create a swirling, spiritual experience like nothing on record, which makes it hard for the music press to deal with. “Yeah, I really don’t like being associated with the new revival of psych or kraut or anything like that, but I guess journalism has to give out these tags,” says Austin.

photographer - Sonny Mc Cartney writer - Ian Roebuck

So what of this album: the body of work Vision Fortune have long dispensed from their system and are desperate to be rid of. ‘Mas Fiestas con el Grupo Vision Fortune’ is finally released this month and it pushes repetition, drone and distortion (sorry Austin) to its beguiling limit, drawing you inwards with its soporific tone and masterful soundscapes.Yes, they’ve been held up as figureheads of a new movement in psych, but they’re much more into it than that.“It’s funny,” Austin ponders, “to me even when we were recording that album all we were listening to was Chicago ghetto house or German Pan records, stuff like NHK, and we were trying to focus on replicating that in a live band scenario. I don’t think we’ve accomplished it though, rhythmically maybe we have but I don’t think otherwise...” He tails off as Alex ends, “we kind of know what not to do now.”

It’s a fascinating album, engrossing yet somehow impenetrable. As each track segues into the other you’re dragged headlong on a terrifying yet uplifting journey that’s startlingly original. Only The Knife’s ‘Shaking the Habitual’ shares a similar feel this year. Sonically they’re very different of course, but emotionally they’re brothers in arms.

Vision Fortune manage to paint a puzzling aesthetic too, using a different language for a title, Roman numerals for the track listing and displaying album artwork of three middle aged salsa players staring right back at the observer.

“Well, Andres and I went to Columbia after it was recorded and we found a Salsa album and stole the title and the artwork,” Austin laughs. “That album title is like marmite though – so many people have told us it’s either the best or the worst. I kind of like it when people say it’s the worst!”

“It’s not that we don’t give a shit about how we are perceived as a band,” says Alex, “it’s just nice to engage people a little bit more so they have to figure things out.

Rather than having us three on a cover and explaining every little detail, where it was recorded and who did what, it’s nicer to have... oh I hate saying ‘mystery’, but puzzling is nice, let’s say puzzling.”

Let’s get this out in the open, the album is an unnerving experience (for this listener at least), and one that expertly trades off tension and release, something the brothers didn’t necessarily want to convey but can totally understand. “That wasn’t intended,” insists Alex. “It’s funny because in a weird way the album reflected our state of mind. It was quite an intense process for the two of us and by the end of it we weren’t really speaking. Not in a bad way like we’d fallen out, we just didn’t have to speak as we’d spent too much time together mixing the thing.”

No wonder you have trouble listening back to it then.

“Yeah, as the recording went on it got more psychological so that’s possibly where some of the darkness comes from. It’s all a bit of a blur now as it was a year ago and it was a weird couple of months.”

‘Mas Fiestas con el Grupo Vision Fortune’ is released through Faux Disx and Gringo Records, two fantastically diverse and experimental labels from Brighton and Nottingham respectively. Together with the band they call the album repeater punk that’s born out of economic uncertainty. Is this a foray into social commentary, then, from a band that on the surface like to disguise the messages they put across?

Austin is quick to counter. “No, not at all. We never consider ourselves a political band. Neither of us really enjoy bands that are overly political as well really, it’s more a general feeling.”

‘I can’t stand guitar music at the moment; in fact I’m totally sick of it. I feel like we’ve explored it as much as we can’

Again Alex steps in and carefully chooses his words.

“It wasn’t so much a personal thing we were going through, more a universal feeling. Looking at it from an observational perspective, it was something to work with and it was in our minds. It’s nice for an album to have a thread running through it. I don’t like music that’s all about me, me, me, so other people can look at this theory of economics that we put down and work it out themselves.”

Always evolving, Vision Fortune are already looking to the future but they’re digging into their past to move onward. “It seems we’ve gone full circle, to when we were kids, when it was just Alex and I.”Austin grins at his brother and Alex grins back. “Yeah, we are messing around with machines again,” he agrees. Throughout their evolution though, one thing remains the same with this particular band: their uncompromising live show has nearly always been accompanied by the bands fourth member, a strobe light. “At the time when we started it was an incredibly easy way to add a visual element to our music,” explains Alex. “All you have to do is turn on a strobe and turn off the lights. We both get bored with pretty much most bands live as visually it’s not very interesting.”

All of a sudden Alex is pretty passionate about the band’s on-stage persona, Austin too. “We’re both really interested in that side of things, the performance,” he says, “not like being rock stars or having rock status or anything, just the process. For our album launch show we had about 20 TVs all lined up on stage that reacted to sound, that’s the kind of thing we’d love to explore.”

“I’m really interested in exploring the senses,” says Alex. “I want smell! I’m interested in the sensation!”

I put it to them that the name Vision Fortune may need to change.Alex chips in with “Smelly Fortune,” but everyone agrees that ‘Mas Fiestas con el Grupo Smelly Fortune’ just looks bizarre.

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photographer - Lauren d ukoff writer - Nathan Westley

End of the road Adam Green and Binki Shapiro toast to the end of their UK tour, and quite possibly their collaborative project One late night evening in April: Adam Green is slightly tipsy and can be found with Binki Shapiro on the upper level of a Brighton venue.The pair are in high spirits on this, the final night of a UK tour to promote a collaborative album that they once thought might never see the light of day. The previous night their van had been broken into in Manchester, but that matters little as they ride the post-gig (and post-tour) high.

An hour and a half earlier on the stage below, the pair and their delicately assembled cast of backing musicians had just started rattling through a set of songs from the eponymous ‘Adam Green & Binki Shapiro’ and several of Green’s solo numbers to a humble sized, appreciative audience. Two more hours from now, when they leave the venue, they will push through paparazzi, crash out,

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wake up and discover that they’re side-characters in a Macaulay Culkin tabloid story. That’s what happens when you recruit Kevin McAllister as your guest vocalist.

“This is one of the few interviews I’ve done drunk in a long time,” says Shapiro, the LA heralding singersongwriter who first came to prominence as the cofront person of Little Joy. When Binki talks she answers any question in an increasingly free flowing, unguarded manner. Green (the floppy haired, oddball singer who first found cult fame in leading anti-folk proponents The Moldy Peaches, before going on to create a number of well received and musically adventurous solo albums), on the other hand, is in an unexpected quieter mood, perched next to her on a brown level couch. The last

time we spoke to him was for Loud And Quiet 2 in January 2009.Tipsy doesn’t cover it.

The seeds for Adam and Binki’s collaboration were sown by Green, little more than two and a half years ago.

He says: “Well, I guess I was the catalyst for it, you know? I asked Binki to do the project with me. I had thought of the idea of me and her singing together and writing together… I don’t know… We had known each other for a while, we were already friends, so... the honest truth is that I was stoned on my couch and I just thought of it.There are many great things that have been thought of that way... the difference was that I wrote this one down!

“We started writing soon after,” he says. “Binki lived about ten minutes away, maybe even less, it was really close and we went and got Chinese food, went to the wine shop and we had some conversations and the conversations became what the songs are about.”

“We lived four blocks from each other in New York,” Binki clarifies midway through Adams recollection.

At the turn of the year the creative offspring of this musical partnership at long last found its way out and entered public view. Critically well received, it is an album of Baroque-pop that was both quickly created and saw each artist move out of their creative comfort zones. It’s quite unlike what either had previously created.

“It was definitely the most fast moving song writing that I’ve ever experienced,” says Binki. “I feel like we sat together and laughed a lot, we wrote together a lot and we got a lot of things done that we are very proud of, very quickly.”

“Likewise!” Adam punctuates, swigging a bottle of lager.

“He says likewise, but I feel that Adam is a much faster writer than I am,” says Binki. “I take a lot more time and I never get anything done because I take so much time putting thought into and scrutinising things.

I admire Adams ability to get shit done and I was very much happy to be part of that getting shit done process.”

With the rawest of raw ingredients in hand (“the songs were written just like acoustic folk songs – we didn’t know what they sounded like; they were just chords and music”), the pair headed into the studio with producer Noah Georgeson to help shape the tracks they had into the pieces that Adam had envisioned back on his home couch.

“I think working with Noah, who’s done the Little Joy record with Binki and my last solo one, ‘Minor Love’, he creates a certain environment in the studio, so, obviously, he also helped – he had a big part in how our record sounds.”

It was a very loose frame that the pair had set themselves to work within, Binki recalls. “We didn’t

even really know who was going to sing what until we got into the studio,” she says. “We sort of had a armwrestling-match-slash-debate over who was going to sing what once we got in.

“I’m in this business to work with friends and keep the spirit alive of, like, having that familiar feeling, you know? And I feel that Adam and I have that with each other. Incorporating Noah and our friends that have recorded on our own other records – the Little Joy record and Adam’s solo records and what not – I feel like we are in this world to, like, have fun and keep true to the spirit of that, and keeping it in the family, which I think we’ve managed to do a pretty good job of. Our friend Todd who is playing bass with us tonight, played cello and upright bass on our record, Matt who plays guitar with us, he played guitar on both of our separate live shows – we like to keep music old school and in the family.

“I feel it’s really important for me to feel like that,” Binki continues. “You’re on the road with people and you make music with people and I’m trying not to wait for hindsight to be able to appreciate what is happening now, and I really like to keep people that I feel happy and comfortable with in my life constantly, and create things together. It just makes everything much more fun.To be able to create things with those that you love, and I love and admire Adam, I love and admire all of the people playing on our band, it’s cool. It just feels like a warmer way to live, to have that.”

Touring the record wasn’t something that either had expected. “We didn’t even really know if it was going to come out,” says Adam. “We recorded it on our own dime, we recorded with our own kroner. We weren’t really sure that it was going to come out at all. It took a year to find someone to put it out, so it sort of sat there.

It was like Groundhog Day, honestly. Every day we were like, ‘we wrote this really cool album, we hope people will hear it’, right, next. Who knows, it was very much like Groundhog Day.” When the album finally saw the light of day in January 2013, it was quick to encounter one specific comparison, to the classic pairing of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra.“People really like comparing things to other things,” says Binki,“but we didn’t have anything in mind.We were just sitting in either my apartment, or Adam’s apartment, writing these songs. There was nothing beyond just writing songs together and I feel that our voice, the tones of our voices compared to the tone of other peoples voice together, makes people think of something or whatever. I feel like it is just us.

We weren’t trying to put anything else into our music apart from what we embody ourselves, you know?

“It’s funny because Adam had The Moldy Peaches and I have Little Joy where Rodrigo and I sing all the

songs together and people feel the need to compare us to others rather than to ourselves.”

Though they were both wary of being compared to their previous musical endeavours, moving away from their past and adopting a new mindset was something the pair both had in mind early on. “I guess, something I had never done was make a self consciously adult album,” says Adam,“so, you know, it’s a very new frontier for me.” For Binki, she wanted to go the other way – to “let loose a little.”

“We found some common ground with a very mature album, as opposed to a very, very mature album,” she laughs.

Adam and Binki’s future together as a writing team remains uncertain. Tonight they end a tour that was never going to happen; tomorrow they fly back to New York.Then what?

“I don’t feel like there is anything that anyone expects us to work on,” Binki shrugs.

“We’re kind of lucky,” says Adam. “I know this is going to sound silly, but no one really expects us to do anything. I think we’re known as total fucking weirdos that people think might not be able to do whatever or would want to do whatever.”

“I do feel like it’s important to work on the projects you want to, not the ones people think you should,” says Binki. “Especially being born and raised in Los Angeles, I feel like I know so many musicians and actors who are thin and successful. They have millions of dollars and beautiful homes and all of these things, but they’re trying to find a place where they are happy, and I feel that we are happy, we’re stoked! We’re doing what we want to be doing, we have really fun shows and we laugh a lot on tour, we make enough money to be able to get by and sure, it would be nice to make a little bit more, but we are doing what we are happy doing and we make music that we are proud of and I feel so much happier for going out and performing music that I’m proud of, rather than music that I’m not proud of but is a top ten hit. I don’t know what having a top ten hit would be like, but I imagine it wouldn’t be quite as fun.

“We’re playing small clubs right now and whatever, we’re making enough money to scrape by. We’ve been fucking robbed, I’ve had food poisoning and it’s been a brutal run on this tour, but all the while we’re still having fun and laughing. Sometimes I feel sorry for people who are saving their pennies for a rainy day as we are having fun. I’m not saving my pennies for anything, I’m spending them as they come and it feels really nice.”

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A Slight Return There’s been no rushing Mount Kimbie

Three years ago we spoke to the “curious and grumpy” pairing of Kai Campos and Dom Maker. At the time they were bordering on insomnia having just finished their debut album, and on the verge of punching argumentative cab drivers.This time, on the café rooftop of their rented studio space, they’re talkative and less agitated, but no less forthright.

Click back to 2010 and Mount Kimbie were a duo in the process of gently shifting the post-dubstep mood and heading towards a tour schedule that would eventually span two years. It was no mean feat for the two former Southbank students who subsequently disrupted their studies to emerge with ‘Crooks and Lovers’, a debut that impressed as much as it perplexed.

Billed as an album born from South London’s gritty, bass-heavy heart, Kai and Dom’s hazy alchemy hinted at something deeper than the wobble-aping sets being churned out across the capital. In a divisive genre already fiercely subdivided, the depth and subtlety of Mount Kimbie’s fragmented beats and exposed dance music went against the tub-thumping aggression of the archetypal dubstep sound. But while those rough and ready elements have swarmed with accelerated bacteriaspeed, and infected further bastardisations of 2-step, garage, grime and dub ever since, Mount Kimbie’s slow return to the studio has only helped their debut album, and their own awkward place in proceedings, endure as one of dubstep’s most diffusive benchmarks.

“I think the last record has solidified its place in time probably because we didn’t put out anything so quickly after,” Kai agrees. “When we put the album out, we didn’t necessarily think there was a place for it, or that we were locked into a scene because the whole conversation normally is that electronic music is insecure about what real musicians think of it.

“From our perspective it was almost the other way round, like there was this inverse snobbery about us not being proper electronic musicians. We felt just as much outside of the loop then as we do now, so in that scenario, you can only really follow on your own ideas, rely on that confidence and hope there’ll be an audience for it.”

Back in 2013, the small-scale acclaim ‘Crooks and Lovers’ generated is a distant consideration for both Kai and Dom. While it’s inevitable that their debut played a formative role influencing their exploratory, chameleonic sound, Kai is keen to stress that that influence hasn’t necessarily translated into a natural continuation on forthcoming follow up, ‘Cold Spring Fault Less Youth’. “‘Crooks and Lovers’ did well in the context of where it sat, but it’s not like it was a massive global success that took years to get over,” he states. “The hooha around it is quite easy to take a step back from.

Inevitably we wouldn’t have made this album [‘Cold Spring Fault Less Youth’] if the last album didn’t sound like it did. It’s a reaction, not against it, but because of it.

In some ways we’re more confident about what we’re doing and the ideas we’re having and this gives us the time to explore things a bit deeper, and not be so

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worried about keeping people’s attention.

“The first record did us a lot of favours but at the same time we’re thinking of the new record independently and not as a continuation.The music we made on this record feels like the only record we could have made. If we finish something, it’s usually on the record. We stop a lot of ideas before they get finished and are just pretty slow at getting things done and there’s not much left over by the end of it.”

Taking a step back from writing and putting music out in favour of hitting the road was a move at odds with the duo’s previous dynamic.Away from the semi-prolific smatterings of EPs and remixes, touring unanimously allowed them to “become a better band” and definitively helped them play out their ‘Crooks and Lovers’ chapter.

It did, however, make the return to the studio slightly more difficult than anticipated.

“Stopping was interesting,” Dom begins, “we tried writing on the road but it didn’t work out and we just didn’t have the right atmosphere. But when we sat down to do it, it felt like a fresh start...” “…stopping was easy,” Kai adds. “I don’t think we’re the kind of people that need to be writing every day and it was interesting for us to just be on the road.There was definitely a period at the beginning where we’d forgotten everything and we weren’t even finishing songs or having the ideas that were getting us excited about making music, and there were a few low points, but about a year in to touring, we started trying out really early ideas and it was just a case of working out how to finish them from that.”

“You get used to being in your little bubble,” Dom continues, “and I think if we’d released something else quite quickly after [‘Crooks and Lovers’], I’m not convinced it would have been any good.”

The waiting period between records is an art in itself.

Ride the wave and that momentum can take you anywhere but rush the material and the damage could be irreversible. Out of focus and out playing to anyone willing to listen, the time lapse also turned out to be a creatively disciplined one too. As well as overcoming the low points, it enabled the pair to use the time to do what they do best: explore.

“As soon as we finished it, we knew we’d said all we could with that particular sound, and maybe even said a little too much,” Kai admits. “We knew we wanted to try other stuff, and I don’t find the new album that surprising in terms of where it’s gone or that it sounds that different. It’d be weird if we made a record just like the first one and we’d got into certain habits of where to go to and how to make it sound.That break forced us to stop those habits.

“I feel like the last record became like a cultural status or commodity where people latched onto it where with the new record I’d welcome people to listen to it and be like ‘Errrr?’ because I think that’s a good sign. I think with the last record it was one you could put on at any time but you just don’t want to be that guy making background music… the amount of people who write about revising

photographer - E lliot Kennedy writer - reef younis

to our fucking music... it’s like a back-handed compliment but I hope the new record isn’t one you’d want to revise to. We might just corner the GCSE market, giving the album away with term books,” Kai laughs.

“This record’s more of a grower purely because the ideas are more convoluted,” he says,“and it takes time to adjust to the language of it and the reference points. All in all I think it’s more of a challenging record which is what we wanted to do.”

The album in question, ‘Cold Spring Fault Less Youth’, certainly gets a reaction. Rich with the same accomplished complexity, it doesn’t hit hard initially but left to worm its way in it carries the aloof genius of its predecessor. Crank it up and the itchy scuttle of ‘Made to Stray’ goes from skittering Four Tet beat to ragga banger; the glazed melodies of ‘Home Recording’ warm like a good whiskey and the deep, world-weary drawl of King Krule’s cameos make more sense with every

reverberation. But while it makes brilliant sense on record, now that they’ve had the time to dig into its details, Dom and Kai are already focused on how ‘Cold Spring Fault Less Youth’ will come to life on stage.

“For me personally, I’ve just always felt like we could make a really powerful live show,” Dom states. “I think it’s one thing replicating the songs but live has allowed us to be creative and embellish on the ideas we have and that’s just fun. I’m glad we’re not just DJing because it feels right for the music we make.”

Kai agrees: “I think we struck a good balance taking the energy of being on stage and touring but not relying on it too much in the studio. There are a few songs we made that we’re never going to play live because they won’t work in that context or they’ll be physically impossible.We certainly don’t want to make a record for the sake of playing festivals or making a song for a small club…I think the better thing to do is to figure out how

to contextualise what you’ve done afterwards. We spent ages thinking how best to present everything because we were just playing in clubs between DJs and it just wasn’t working.”

The amount of time spent on tour has undoubtedly had an influence, but there’s also a determination to move Mount Kimbie beyond being more than DJs and more than producers. In the same way they aren’t content to set up camp in specific genres, the theme of constantly digging into the details of every element of the band dynamic is a further sign of the duo growing more comfortable and confident. Ultimately, it’s a simple desire for freedom, isn’t it?

“Yeah, definitely,” says Dom. “We’ve got a friend of ours on drums, and he’s decent on keyboards and does a bit of singing, so that’s just freed us up and allowed us to replicate the songs naturally with the live drums and the layers we might have just disregarded or sequenced…”

Kai jumps in: “…and I think sometimes when there was just the two of us, there was this sense that this was the best we could do with two people on stage. That’s not the best attitude to have because you want to be as good as anyone else and it’s not an excuse to say “oh they’re producers and they’re not meant to do it as live music”. Having the extra people means we can be more ambitious with what we want to achieve sonically.”

It’s also a desire that goes beyond simply replicating the record. Last year’s raging EDM debate eloquently (and not so eloquently) covered most of the ground but where listening to an album is an experience that can be turned on and off at will, to Kai, the live show is all about the connection.

“I think the actual dynamic of triggering samples pales in comparison to someone plucking a string,” he muses. “You can see the amount of force, the speed it’s played… it’s just something humans connect with.

Some people do stuff with technology on stage, and if you know what they’re doing it’s impressive but I don’t think that’s a very admirable goal. What’s impressive is what you’ve done in the studio and I think what you need to be doing live has to be as expressive as what you do in the studio. Having that space on either side is also important because it has to be able to go wrong and you have to be able to abuse it in some way. Anyone that’s seen us before six months ago knows it can go wrong in a big way,” he smiles.

Self-deprecating, focused and serious, it’s easy to see how Dom and Kai mirror the music they make. Sure there’s reservation and a distance but there’s an affable realism and a determination to downplay their successes so far. After the debut whirlwind, they feel like a band in control; a band as sure of their next step as they were of this one. Ducking the easy momentum was the move of a young duo unsure of what they wanted to do next but certain of how they wanted to do it.You know, quietly.

“I think with ‘Crooks and Lovers’, we felt more comfortable with it but with this record, there’s more of a risk,” says Dom. “We’ve put more of ourselves into it.

There’s definitely more on the line.”

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‘It’s just not natural to exist in so many places in such a short amount of time’

photographer - Francesco N azardo writer - David Zammitt

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Salt of the earth Waxahatchee and her confessional brand of lo-fi acoustic indie rock

The delay on the line between London and Philadelphia means that the opening few minutes of my conversation with Katie Crutchfield prove tougher than anticipated.

We repeatedly talk over each other before settling into a rhythm, and she sheepishly admits that she had forgotten I was going to call. She sounds a little hoarse but she’s in a sunny mood, eager to proffer as much information as she can. Considered in her responses, she politely but firmly ensures that her story won’t be written for her.

With acclaim being bestowed upon her from all angles since the release of her second album, ‘Cerulean Salt’, it must be strange to get all this attention. “It’s fine, talking to people and stuff, but it’s a little bit weird,” she says. “I did an interview yesterday and someone called me from Ohio or somewhere, and they called like four times and I was like, ‘Who the hell is this calling me?’

And then I realised.”

Katie takes her nom de plume from Waxahatchee Creek in her native Alabama, where her parents have a house, and it’s a worthy metaphor for a musical oeuvre that is deceptively deep. Indeed, if at first it seems like ‘Cerulean Salt’ is a straightforward affair, it’s only because you haven’t taken the time to dive into its carefully constructed dramas and astonishingly stark confessions.

On the surface, her songs reprise the lo-fi indie rock and acoustic sounds of the 1990s, finding antecedents in The Breeders, Pavement, Neutral Milk Hotel and, at their most tender, a fledgling Cat Power. However, it’s when engaging with her brutally honest words and achingly detailed visual scrapbook of personal scenes that the songs really begin to unfurl and reveal their understated power. “I had a dream last night, we had hit separate bottoms,” she sings on ‘Lively’ with a vocal delivery that’s wilfully dry, prizing wryness and subtlety over literalness and bombast.

“Part of the reason I don’t really write happy songs or really angry songs… I feel like my delivery’s sort of key,” she says. “I feel that if it was melodramatic I couldn’t deliver it in a way that wasn’t completely cheesy. So it’s on purpose, this sort of matter of fact delivery. I think that’s my style and I couldn’t do it otherwise.”

The sun slipping into the darkened bedroom in ‘Blue Pt II’, or her boyfriend’s playful honk of the car horn as he tries to hurry her up on ‘Swan Dive’, are imbued with an almost imagistic sharpness of focus. It gives the songs a personal, human quality that’s rarely seen in any of the arts, let alone in indie rock.“I think specifically for the new record a lot of the songs are pretty nostalgic,” she says. “Me depending on my senses and my memory in order to remember a specific time, I feel like that’s something that I probably do anyway; the little things that paint the picture of what I was doing, or physically where I was. I feel I need that because, you know, it’s just me writing about a thing that happened to me. And if people can put themselves in that position or relate to that then that’s really great, but I’ve used the little nuances to paint the picture for myself.”

Katie’s own creative narrative has a definite punk vein pulsing through it and her ethic is very much driven by a desire to use whatever resources she has at her fingertips at any given time. Her boyfriend is one quarter of Philadelphia pop-punks Swearin’, for example, a band that also acts as a creative outlet for Katie’s sister, Allison, since the Crutchfields’ own band, P.S. Eliot, split up.They both feature on her songs.

Katie explains:“I went to Alabama with my boyfriend, Keith Spencer, with the intention of me working on my record and him keeping me company and we ended up sort of putting them to drums and adding instruments and he sort of helped me. I really had fun with that collaboration.”

‘Cerulean Salt’, however, was a much more complex process than her 2012 debut, ‘American Weekend’; an altogether more pared-down, acoustic affair compared with its younger, more dynamic sibling’s bent for electricity. “I wrote the songs sort of in the same way,” say Katie. “I didn’t write them all in one week, but it was… like, I wrote five in a week and then I wrote two more in the weekend. I wrote them all very quickly.And then the process of fleshing them out took a lot more time and energy.We ended up recording a version of the record the same way I did ‘American Weekend’, so it was pretty lo-fi, but it didn’t transfer in the same way – with all the instruments it was too blown-out.

“We ended up re-doing the record with Kyle Gilbride, my room mate, who’s in Swearin’ with Keith.

The three of us just sort of collaborated. So it’s my songs, my lyrics, my melodies, but all of the little nuances and a lot of the fleshed-out versions of the songs were more collaborative, and I found that process a lot more fulfilling.”

Indeed, you get a sense that Crutchfield and co. have managed to create a fertile scene all of their own in Philadelphia, taking the ethic of the fabled London and New York punk communities and condensing it down into miniature. “Everything’s connected between Waxahatchee and Swearin’ and a few other bands,” Katie enthuses. “I mean, Swearin’ practise in my basement.”

On the break-up of P.S. Eliot, however, Katie wants to make clear that the project has disbanded. “We’ve [herself and Allison] never really written music together, but we’re still hopelessly involved in each other’s lives.

That transition was interesting because the three of us that were the core members for the longest time – Catherine, Allison and myself – the three of us live together now and we’re all best friends still. But we weren’t doing anything with P.S. Eliot. Our focus had shifted but the rest of the world’s focus hadn’t shifted yet.”

Katie’s begun writing songs with Keith too, harnessing a creative spirit that seems to abhor repose.

“We have a band together, just the two of us, called Great Thunder. Genre-wise it’s all over the place, and a lot of the time we write together. That’s the first time

I’ve done that with anybody. It’s fun – for me, at least, it’s completely different from my Waxahatchee. My technique in that band is to… as soon as I get a tiny bit of an idea, I put it down and make a song out of it immediately, whereas with Waxahatchee it’s a little more complex. Lyrically, it’s more personal. Great Thunder is more abstract. It satisfies different elements of my creative energy,” she says with a burst of laughter.

But writing songs – often emotional songs – with your boyfriend, isn’t that dangerous ground for unintentionally revealing thoughts and feelings best left unsaid?

“I find myself more, in that process, being like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s perfect. I knew that you thought that, and you put it down in a really eloquent way and that’s awesome’. It’s more often that than a weird confessional,” Katie laughs again.

The idea of place is extremely important to Crutchfield, too, and she’s become something of a musical itinerant in her quest to balance friends, family and a blossoming career by existing between Alabama, Philadelphia and New York. The constant movement can be a nuisance.

“I said to my sister the other day that it’s just not natural to exist in so many places in such a short amount of time. I could see eventually wanting to pare that down a little. I live in Philly but I’m in Alabama all the time and I’m in New York a lot of the time. Just going back and forth between those three places is a lot, and then when you throw touring into the mix it’s a lot of travel.” Katie pauses. “I say that it gets old, but I’ve been in Philly for less than a week now and I’m already ready to go somewhere else.”

‘Cerulean Salt’ has been picked up by London indie Wichita Records who’ll release the album in Europe this coming June. It means that a much bigger trip for Waxahatchee is on the cards this summer, and Katie’s excitement at indulging her wanderlust is obvious.

“I’ve never been outside of the country, other than Canada, so I haven’t been to any of the places that we’re going,” she buzzes. “I’ve been touring here for seven or eight years so I’ve been just about everywhere you can go in this country.There’s so much potential and I don’t know what I have to look forward to.

“I do love touring but once you’ve done it so many times, it’s so much time out of your year so it gets a little bit old. Like, I love San Francisco but do I need to go there again this year?”

Having released albums in 2012 and 2013, it would be a shame if touring commitments stifled Waxahatchee’s prolific recorded output, but she’s circumspect when it comes to her next move. “I haven’t really even started writing another record yet ‘cause I’ve been really busy and I also have other bands and we’ve been working on a couple of releases, so I think once it all starts to slow down in the Fall I’ll start to focus.” With a nascent back catalogue as perfectly formed as her own, Katie Crutchfield can take all the time in the world.

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Moving house Gold Panda never wanted to make a second record for fear that it wouldn’t live up to his 2010 debut ‘Lucky Shiner’. Here he discusses changing his mind, moving to Berlin, knowing when to quit and continuing to make personal ambient techno Every artist has a moment when they should have gotten out. Noel Gallagher once professed that his was 11 August 1996, and he’d be right about that.“Goodnight Knebworth, we’ve decided it’s best for everyone if we split up now, bye!” No ‘All Around The World’, no ‘Gas Panic’, no “Liam threw a plum at me.” Get out before you’re sussed out.

Gold Panda thinks the same about Nas, who is currently in his eighteenth year of trying to better 1994 debut album ‘Illmatic’. Skim the cream from his twelve records since and you’d still not be anywhere near close.

“Why isn’t someone saying to him, ‘Nas, this isn’t very good, mate’,?” says Panda (Derwin to his intimates). “I mean, does he think he’s making the best music he ever has right now? Does Jay-Z say,‘Check this out, this is the best tune I’ve made, it’s with Mr Hudson’? Someone should be saying, ‘hey, Jay-Z, you know ‘The Black Album’, there was some good tunes on that. Do that again!’” Gold Panda leans back into his chair and allows himself to laugh, something that he does rarely for a man so quick-witted. Next month he’ll release his second album, ‘Half Of Where You Live’, but he’s been contemplating his own Knebworth moment ever since the release of his debut album in 2010.

The last time we met face-to-face was two weeks after the release of ‘Lucky Shiner’, a record Derwin named after his Grandmother. We were at the Shiner family home in Chelmsford, Essex, where, in Uncle Mick’s office, Derwin told me how touring was getting in the way of him making another album. A lot has changed since then.The touring never stopped as ‘Lucky Shiner’ unanimously pleased fans of intelligent ambient electro. Derwin moved to Hamburg and then to Berlin where he currently lives with his girlfriend, logistically positioned within a short plane ride to whatever European club wants him tomorrow night. Finding time to follow up his debut soon became not just out of the question but something he didn’t even want to face.

“The success of ‘Lucky Shiner’ made me scared to do another one,” he says. “I just thought if I don’t have another track like ‘You’, I’m finished, and I got around that by not making another track like it. I’ve just done what I wanted to do, rather than what I thought I should be doing. Now I’ve done this one I feel a lot better about it, and with the third one I’ve got a clean slate.

“I don’t think I can take criticism very well,” he says, “and that’s why I don’t like Twitter, because people can say directly to me that they don’t like something. One thing and it gets me really riled up or I feel shit. I remember not wanting to do another record because for me – probably not for Jessie J – the last one did so well that I felt I could just leave it there and do something else.”

When I ask him what changed his mind he points at his manager Gareth, drinking coffee across the room.

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“No, you just make more music eventually, and I’ve done ‘Lucky Shiner’ and it did well, so I can make another one and it can do not so well; people can say, ‘well, it didn’t do as well as the last one,’ but it doesn’t matter because the last one is mine as well. I own that one so it’s fine. If you like the first one more than the second one, just buy and listen to that one. It’s mine too.”

Derwin hated Hamburg and isn’t too sold on Berlin, although he does find solace in the fact that “at least there’s no Jessie J there” – she’s a recurring gag for him whenever we talk, an irrational thorn in his side, although he’s not about to plot to cut her head off or anything.

“I have a love/hate relationship with Berlin,” he says, “which means I’ve probably gotten used to living there.

When I first moved there I hated it. It’s quite an architecturally depressing city, all those big flats. There’s something about it that I really don’t like and I can’t put my finger on it.”

Gold Panda moving to Berlin makes complete sense – the tale of a square peg that never fitted in in suburban Essex making for Techno Mecca where he can finally feel at home, be with his kind, come out of his shell.

Aside from the fact that Derwin spends a vast majority of his time in International Airspace, it was never quite like that. ‘Recluse’ is a little dramatic, but Gold Panda is the electro artist that feels too awkward to look at the crowd, let alone hype them.When fans approach him he likes to pretend they’ve mistaken him for this Panda bloke. Sometimes he physically runs away. Berlin never held much romance for him; he simply thought it would be better than Hamburg.

“I don’t care about it,” he says,“because I don’t go out enough for all the techno and house to make a difference.

It makes sense that I’d live there, but I’m not part of a scene there and I don’t go out a lot and I don’t DJ. Maybe in the album it has impacted, but I don’t feel like Berlin is in the record in terms of theme, but then I don’t know if I got into a lot of house music because that’s what my local shop was selling a lot of. Maybe by buying lots of records where I can identify the drum machine it made me want to make a record with one drum machine and a sampler, which is basically what this album is.”

Gold Panda’s local record store is OYE Records, in the Prenzlauer Berg district, where he’s been picking up warm, analogue house records that have clearly had an effect on ‘Half Of Where You Live’. It feels distinctly vintage throughout, with the deep ambience of ‘Enoshima’ and the bauble-reverb of ‘S950’ taking on dreamlike dazes free from digital tampering.The closing ‘Reprise’ – whilst no banger – is more of a nod to old school house, as a rare track that features (female) vocals that are, for the first time on a Gold Panda record, imbued with soul.The record’s top end is more instantly

gratifying in a dancefloor sense – the opening ‘Junk City II’, which breaks for a vaguely oriental piano hook before a banging kick-drum drops, and the syncopated, smart ‘An English House’, in particular.

“I’ve tried to make it a bit more beat driven,” Derwin explains, “and that’s partly because I used an 808 drum machine, which you hear all the time now, but you never hear it from an 808 drum machine.The old house stuff I’ve been buying has drum machines how they are when you turn them on and press play, but when you hear it in all the Trap stuff, all the Hip-Hop stuff, it’s all sampled and put through computerized plugins to make it super loud and super compressed. I hate all of that. I find it obnoxious and horrible, which is probably me getting old, but I want to get away from that as far as possible, and that’s why there isn’t another ‘You’ on this one.”

G

old Panda knows his electronic onions. As a teenager he found Squarepusher’s ‘Big Loada’ LP and started making Gameboy loops on a pedal with a friend under the name Olivia Neutron Bomb; a moniker worthy of Derwin’s tongue-in-cheek approach to becoming a musician. For extra laughs he rapped as Rumpelstiltskin and toyed with an adolescent project that went by the name of Kiss Akabusi. But he knows what he’s doing more than he’d like to admit. Hours in OYE and aeons in clubs have given Gold Panda the skills to know every nuance of house, techno, IDM, trance and beyond. “I thought I didn’t know electronic music,” he says, “but now I can listen to something and tell you exactly how it’s been made.”

‘Half Of Where You Live’ runs from this norm. “It feels more focused,” says Derwin. “What I like most about it is that it doesn’t sound like other UK artists’ attempts at electronic music at the moment. A lot of stuff to me sounds like a demo to [digital software] Cubase or Ableton or something. I can hear the sounds.

Everything’s so clean and polished, but my record doesn’t sound like that.” He pauses. “Maybe that’s me being crap.”

Derwin has to end sentences like that because he’s incapable of patting himself on the back. He admits that he still can’t believe the success of ‘Lucky Shiner’ is warranted, as much as it is and has been for the past three years. He’ll no doubt feel the same about ‘Half Of Where You Live’’s impending praise.“I think it’s a bit big headed to think you’re good,” he says. “I think I’m quietly good in my own way, because I can hear a track and think I know how they did that, I don’t want to do that, but I could. It’s kinda smug, which is maybe worse. God, I’m

James Blake.”

In Chelmsford 2010, Derwin told me that he wasn’t happy with how ‘Lucky Shiner’ had turned out. It was “more pop and less weird” than he’d intended it to be.

“I kind of did what I wanted to do this time,” he says.

“I wanted to make it harder and dancier but someone told me today that it isn’t.”

It feels more like his live show, I say, that’s always bass’d up ‘Lucky Shiner’’s subtle tones and poignant washes for something altogether more club-friendly.

“That was the idea,” he says, “because I’d ended up making a record that I didn’t think was a dance record, but people came to shows and danced. In turn, I tried to make it more dancey, have added songs that I think are dance tracks and people have stopped dancing. I don’t know what that’s about.”

Gold Panda’s personable approach to electronic music remains prevalent on his new record – that unnerving ability he has to make keyboards and synthetic sounds appear so human. That’s what made ‘Lucky Shiner’ the success it was, as if the place from where it came (namely his family) was too ingrained to not permeate the digital loops and chimes. Loops and chimes are here on ‘Half Of WhereYou Live’, indecently,

‘Lucky Shiner did so well that I felt I could just leave it there and do something else’

photographer - Gemma Harris writer - Stuart Stubbs

ringing, twinkling, breathing, even, like music for frozen fjords. But Gold Panda’s home life isn’t what it was. It’s been aisle or window seat for the past couple of years, his home the world rather than a quiet street in Chelmsford, Essex. ‘Half Of Where You Live’ is personal for the places of Derwin’s life rather than the people in it. It’s a globalised dance record without overtly snatching from cultures and countries to knowingly be considered a travel companion.

“Sometimes I can imagine [places in the songs],” Derwin says. “Like, ‘Junk City II’ is slightly out of tune and slightly sounds like an early ’90s Japanese B movie set in a city with a slightly foggy atmosphere.‘My Father In Hong Kong 1961’, I wanted to make a track that could be on a documentary about Asian people working too hard that was on late night Channel 4 in the ’90s or something. For ‘Brazil’, I was like, ‘I’ve been to Brazil, and this sounds like that’. And then other tracks are guided by the samples I find. I’d be lying if I said I sat down and planned it all out first.”

Gold Panda wouldn’t admit that even if it were true, no more than he would concede that he is yet to have a Knebworth moment. It might be happening now, with ‘Half Of WhereYou Live’, but it was never ‘Lucky Shiner’.

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photographer - Francesco Nazardo writer - Stuart stubbs

Not a Job Matt Korvette discusses his hobby that is Pissed Jeans, the world’s smartest funny hardcore band 28

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att Korvette’s day job as an insurance claims adjuster is up there with Marilyn Manson manning Space Mountain at Disney Land. Just as Manson cannot be expected to fetch the minimum height stick when he’s not sacrificing babies onstage and eating tapeworm, Korvette is no more cut out for tiled carpets, water cooler flannel and the indescribable hum of corporate life.That’s how it seems, at least.

There’s plenty of good humour to the music Korvette plays with his Philly-based hardcore band Pissed Jeans, but it remains as ferocious as it is fun; a heavy slurry of guitars one minute, speedy, grungy punk the next, then plain weird. Their new album, ‘Honeys’ (the band’s fourth in their ten-year history), is something of an accessible zenith, but it’s angry enough to fantasise about a co-worker dying of cancer (‘Cafeteria Food’); it’s still hardly a record for your team leader to get into.

“For me I never really considered giving up my day job,” Korvette tells me on his lunch break. “I’ve also never considered not being in a band. A couple of the guys in the band I’ve played music with since we were 14 years old; it’s been our main hobby. Like, people might love playing baseball, but they’re not going to try to make that their career. They’re just going to join leagues constantly and follow it on TV and buy baseball jerseys and play it constantly with their friends. That’s how we’re approaching music. It’s not like,‘oh, I like this enough to make it my career’, it’s like, ‘I like this so much let me do it as much as I can without having to

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worry about it providing me food to eat.’”

Korvette spent years hiding his hobby from his coworkers. He’s since quit the position he held whilst writing ‘Honeys’, an environment that inspired the monotonous chug of ‘Cafeteria Food’ but also the doom dirge of ‘Chain Worker’ – three minutes of white collar, battery-farm hell. The people in his old office wouldn’t have gotten it.“These are people where being in a band, it’s hard for them to understand what that means,” he says. “Y’know, when you’re not into music and you live in the suburbs and you don’t really do anything that’s fun, being in a band they either think you’re in a covers band or you should be a rockstar, so why are you still working here? They can’t understand the people do things for fun. Even the existence of a vinyl record would take a lot of explaining.”

Still Korvette is happy with the only setup he’s ever known. He tells me that he likes to live comfortably, and having reached his thirties there’s no longer so much honour in being broke in the name of punk rock. “If I was 23 and had a shitty apartment and lived on a couch, or lived in my parent’s basement then maybe I’d think we need to make this our career,” he says, “but we’re settled in in our lives a bit and I like being able to have expensive dinners and nice clothes, and buy records if I want to. Having a little money in the bank is nice rather than really trying to make it and doing all I can to not have to work a real job. I mean, I can’t blame anyone who would try to go for it, but that’s my personal

preference.”

Pissed Jeans have some decidedly un-punk views regarding touring, too – the most vital and noble part of hardcore life. They don’t like it, and seldom do it.

Korvette sees the whole affair as no less regimented than clocking in and out at the office, simply more unpleasant in many ways; less comfortable, certainly.

“It’s strange how touring is such a prevalent thing,” he says, five days home from a string of domestic dates.

“It’s kinda a huge pain the ass in a lot of ways. I mean the shows are great, but everything else that goes with it is kind of rough. For myself, as a fan of music, I don’t hear a record I like and think, oh man these guys better play here and go on tour – I’m happy to just enjoy that record. Every band should just stop touring at once and we should all go and see who’s playing locally, and then when we decide there’s a band a few towns over that we want to see we should get a caravan. I think the fans should do the touring. That would be sweet. All these music fans should hit the road every summer – let’s flip the script.”

In 2008 Pissed Jeans moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from the interstate city of Allentown, evidently not to find fame and fortune but rather a way of keeping the band alive. “Being a successful band is such a game of chance that if you’re trying to make it happen the chances are you’ve already lost,” says Korvette. “If you’re a good band people will probably find out about you, but you can’t just force yourself to

“People might love playing baseball, but they’re not going to try to make that their career. That’s how we’re approaching music”

be a great band. Either you are or you’re not.

“We’ve had some lucky breaks, and the Sub Pop thing [signing to the label, who’ve released three of Pissed Jeans’ four albums] was huge for us. We weren’t sending out demos or trying to get signed. They heard us on the radio and got in touch.We would never think ‘what’s our next step?’ but Sub Pop has really legitimized us with so many people, because it’s such a trusted entity in the world of underground rock – if they put out a guy playing a rubber band and farting people would be like, ‘well, I’m going to listen to this three more times, because maybe there’s something I’m missing here if Sub Pop thought it was cool. I must be fucking up’.”

Pissed Jeans must be a pretty inexpensive band to have on the books. They’re a sparing punk band rather than a prolific one.They have no desire to give up their day jobs, when they do tour they do so in their own van, and they’re currently in a cycle of releasing a new album every four years. It’s unsurprising that the band’s two forthcoming UK dates (their first in five years) sold out as soon as they were put on general release last month (the London show has since been upgraded to Camden’s Electric Ballroom venue), yet it feels as if a new appreciation for this group is due to their latest record above fears of enjoying them while they’re around.

‘Honeys’ confirms Pissed Jeans as simultaneously the funniest and smartest hardcore band around today, with Korvette barking lessons in everything from misogyny and vanity to cat allergies, Louboutin shoes and Internet

dating. The response to the record since its release in February has been overwhelmingly positive, making it feel as important to Pissed Jeans as ‘The Chemistry of Common Life’ was to Fucked Up in 2008.

“It took me a little off guard, honestly,” says Korvette, who I quickly learn is a modest guy who expects very little from the world. “I’m surprised that anyone even cared to listen to it in the first place, because we’re not the new hot thing and I feel like so much of music is driven by, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, we’ve already heard of them – what’s new?’, y’know? So then this band Pissed Jeans have been around for 10 years and people are psyched to pay attention; that gives me a lot of hope and positive thoughts. Even if people hated it, I’m like, ‘well, it’s cool that you bothered checking it out and really considered it.’

“I feel like there’s not a whole lot of other bands out there sounding similar to us at our level, who’ve been putting out records for a number of years. There’s not a lot of competition, even, and I don’t know if that’s sad or if that’s great. I feel like our bracket is pretty thin. And then there’s these songs – we worked hard on writing songs that would be pretty easy to get into. These aren’t songs that you need to hear ten times before you can understand them – generally, if you hear it once it’s a pretty easy record to grasp. Maybe we made it too easy, I don’t know, but that’s where we were heading with this one. We thought, let’s write a pretty succinct record of songs that we’d like to play live, with hooks.”

Korvette says that they purposefully set out to make a record that was “less artsy, not that any of our records are super artsy, and there’s still plenty of thought put into it everything. It’s not all like, ‘ooh ooh baby, come back to me’,” he says. “I guess as an artist you can try to push people away or you can try to make sure everyone likes it, and I guess we’ve always felt adversarial towards the listener, because I enjoy records that fuck with me, like we-dare-you-to-like-this. But I feel like we’ve moved away from that a little bit.We’ve got nothing to prove to anyone, so let’s do a record that is fun and catchy and sounds like our other records but is more distilled.”

At it’s pacier moments, ‘Honeys’ is no harder on the ear than Nirvana at their most tuneful (‘Health Plan’, ‘Vain In Costume’), the pantomimic ghoul garage of Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster (‘Romaniticize Me’, about how not to be a boyfriend) or, on ‘Loubs’ (the aspirational number about designer shoes), Nick Cave’s theatrical monster blues. Yet ‘Chain Worker’ almost grinds to holt, ‘You’re Different (In Person)’ is weighed down by twisted, pigfuck irregularity, and the sluggish ‘Cafeteria Food’ works wonders at sapping any forward momentum that remains. In the middle sits ‘Something About Mrs. Johnson’, a home-recorded instrumental relic from 1995 that the band have been waiting to sneak onto one of their albums. And because Pissed Jeans refuse to thrash out the same song, at the same pace, twelve times over, ‘Honeys’ feels longer than its 35 mintues, smarter and like no one else, save, perhaps,

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“Being a successful band is such a game of chance that if you’re trying to make it happen the chances are you’ve already lost”

for the progressive highs and lows of Fucked Up. “I feel like we’ve lucked out on shaping what Pissed Jeans is,” says Korvette. “There’s a pretty wide birth of songs that could be Pissed Jeans songs. Like, we can have a real slow creepy dirge, or a doom metal songs, or a totally simple punk song and it works for us. It’s never like, ‘woah, what are they doing here, this doesn’t work, they need to stop that!’.We’ve lucked out because since our early records we’ve tried different things and they’ve all worked out pretty well.”

orvette likes to play a game with himself when guitarist Bradley Fry turns up with a new riff to work on. He likes to pick apart its makings and call whether it reminds him of Angry Samoans, Danzig, The Birthday Party or something more doomy, like Goatsnake. Then he decides it sounds like Pissed Jeans and he gets to writing the lyrics. Lyrics – and how they’re presented, uncharacteristically high in the mix on ‘Honeys’ and 2009’s ‘King of Jeans’ – are perhaps what’s most important of all to Pissed Jeans. When they formed in 2004, “it was kind of a lark,” says Korvette, a side project to the dogmatic hardcore bands they were all playing in.“We wanted to do something that sounded purposely dumbed down as far as how we wrote the songs and how we played them,” he says. “We just wanted to have fun, let our personalities out and not be scared of doing things that other people wouldn’t do.

When we got started there were no bands playing slower punk rock. Everyone was infatuated with thrash or 1982 hardcore like Minor Threat, Negative Approach, trying to be as authentic as possible. I like a lot of that shit, but I was like,‘let’s try to be a bit more weird and creepy, but fun about it and humorous’.”

Pissed Jeans are having a laugh, and a majority of the gags are in Korvette’s words (although they did very nearly call themselves Unrequited Hard-On). ‘You’re Different (In Person)’,a pervert’s guide to uniformdating. com, features positively cute lines like, ‘So I’ll put my info up on the ‘Net / To see what kinda friends I can get / I figure it’s worth it / Self-photo – a sure fit / Poke or wink, that’s flirting / Check me out – go surfing.’ Never mind the increasingly desperate howls that are saying all of this.

‘Cat House’ then tackles that specific issue of being allergic to feline with classic punk yells of ‘Walk in / Sit down / Wet eyes / Dry mouth / Can’t sleep / Red snout / Loose fur / Cat house’; ‘Loubs’ is even more wonderfully niche thanks to its fashion referencing, ending with the lines, ‘Whatever you want, you won’t hear me say no / ‘Til I’m seein’ red / ‘Til I’m seein’ red under your heels’; while ‘Health Plan’ has Korvette sharing his tips for prosperous living as he ends every line with, ‘You wanna know my

secret? / I stay away from doctors’. Not only do Pissed Jeans refuse to burry their vocals, they print their lyrics in their liner notes too – very ‘Sgt. Pepper’s…’, not very US hardcore.

“These days you see this half-assed compromise where bands will write the lyrics up but they’ll scribble them in a diagonal pattern,” Korvette notes. “It’s like, ‘yeah, I guess you could follow them if you really try hard, but no one is going to’. It’s stupid. But in terms of the actual words, bands will know they can faithfully say life is shit, cops suck, humanity’s fucked, let’s go get a drink, fuck you. Y’know, you can safely run around in circles saying any of that and no one is going to say, ‘stupid lyrics, man’, but no one will ever care either. I mean, maybe there’s a lot of vocalists who don’t have anything to say, or don’t really want to say anything. I think a lot of people are kind of shy – they want to be in a band but they just want to follow the footsteps of being in a band, they don’t want to do their own thing and see if people like it.

“I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the studio where there’s a punk record being made and the producer says, ‘let’s listen to the vocals only’, and it’s the most hilarious, crappy thing, and you just hear someone going, ‘aghahh! agh-ahh! agh-ahh!’” he blurts. “It’s embarrassing if you’re the singer, with people there laughing at your screams.As tough as some punks like to pretend they are, people can be sensitive and they’re embarrassed when they hear that stuff, and they just want their vocals to get mashed up in the rest of it. I feel like you’ve got to get passed that if you want to do something cool. Even if you don’t want to bring your vocals all the way up you’ve got to not be so timid. My advice is to just get over it, y’know. Don’t be ashamed of what you’re saying.”

Korvette is used to being called funny. In life, he’s always seen it as a half compliment.“You’re either hot or your funny,” he says. “Here I am always wishing to get hot. It’s like when you’re a freshman in high school and it’s like,‘say something nice about everybody in the class’ – I had thirty funnies. Fuck!” You can be too funny, though. Remember Bloodhound Gang?

“Oh, I agree,” he says. “You don’t want to be pointlessly joking, there’s got to be some kind of rationale behind it. I just think I can’t approach anything without being sarcastic or absurd about it. It’s just in my personality; it’s not like I put on a special hat for writing my lyrics.”

Beneath ‘Honeys’’s humour, which can in fact be easily missed or ignored if you take the tracks at brutal face value, there’s plenty of sobering clout. ‘Cat House’ aside (it really is just about being allergic to cats), Pissed Jeans take the righteous edge off by serving up what they’re wanting to say with a side of silliness. But anxiety, paranoia, rage ¬– they’re all in there, kneaded into the dough of this fun-not-dumb punk album.‘Male Gaze’ is no laughing matter, though. A violently lurching track that straight up apologises for misogyny in punk rock, it’s a subject that Korvette is particularly passionate about.

“Punk is definitely very much a man’s world,” he says, “and I feel like more guys need to address that rather than waiting for a woman to bring it up when she’s

being treated poorly.

“I feel like most men accept their reality as everyone else’s reality – they’re like,‘hey, I went to college and got a good job, why didn’t everyone else? Why are these people complaining?’ But it’s like, hang on, maybe you had it easy; maybe when going to shows you didn’t have to worry about being hot, so that someone wouldn’t judge you. Being a guy, you really don’t have to worry about that, because it’s all just other guys there. I mean, you want to look good, but who cares, you still have the same power no matter what.”

Over the past ten years, Korvette has seen just how sexist the hardcore scene can be, on an ugly, overt level, and in terms of an institutionalized misogyny that so many people have come to not expect but accept. He’s guilty of it too, and says so in ‘Male Gaze’ – ‘I’m not innocent, I’m guilty / I’m not innocent, but I’m sorry / It’s just the male gaze, it’s in me, I know it / I feel it all around me / I wish I could destroy it.’

“Pissed Jeans has always had a good female presence as shows,” he says. “I’d be psyched it if was only females who listened to us, because then all these stupid guys would have to come to the shows because it’s where all the women are.

“One thing that really makes me shake my head is how so many people can’t fathom that a woman would like to hear guitars doing feedback and someone screaming. Like, it’s not like that’s a specifically male thing to enjoy, but so many people can’t get that, and women end up feeling bad because they’re like, ‘no, a boyfriend didn’t make me come here’. Anyone can like any art, and there are plenty of guys who don’t like guitars feeding back. It’s such a weird thing, and we’re like, ‘hey, we’re Pissed Jeans and women like to listen to us, because they like how it sounds, they think we did a good job recording it and they like the songs.’ All these punk bands play for crowds where it’s 90% sweating guys trying to jump on them, and it’s like play to an audience of women and you’ll realize what a waste your life has been.”

Korvette’s lunch break is over for another day, and those insurance claims aren’t going to file themselves.

Before he goes, though, I ask him if he thinks the success of ‘Honeys’ could tempt Pissed Jeans into quitting their day jobs.

“It totally is a hobby,” he insists. “We’re not trying to preach the gospel of Pissed Jeans to the world.We’re not like, ‘Holy shit, we’re the most important band, everyone’s got to hear us, we’re groundbreaking and essential.’ I feel like we’re just a good band, and I think it must change things [when your band becomes your job], because you get more scared and you’re then making decisions based on survival rather than what you really want to do. Like, if Pissed Jeans rocks up on a Doritos bag, y’know, urrrrggh,” he sputters. “You end up doing some things that you’re not proud of.”

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Al bums 08/10

Fair Ohs Jungle Cats (Dream Beach)

By Austin Laike. In stores May 27

Deerhunter Monomania (4AD)

By Amy Pettifer. In stores May 6

07/10

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Marcel Duchamp, the godfather of everything we understand as abstract and avant-garde, once said that art is either plagiarism or revolution.

He also got hold of a porcelain piss pot, scrawled his name on it and set it in a gallery, thus giving birth to the concept of the ready-made and the power of artistic intention in raising the mundane to the status of the sublime.

“Avant-garde” is a phrase that Deerhunter brainchild Bradford Cox bandies around a lot in interviews, but on this fifth record his formalist intentions have gone a step further, treating a musical genre like a ready-made and making the quick and dirty sonic edges of ‘nocturnal garage’ his own proverbial graffiti laden urinal.Trying on its throttling pants for size, the twelve tracks navigate the machismo of neon junk yards, leather jackets and “nite bikes”, while an exaggerated southern snarl sings strutting delta blues about being “a poor boy from a poor family”.

There are songs on three chords and vocal posturing that makes ‘Monomania’ an oddly fascinating performance of the kind of rock music that doesn’t think twice.The stuff that’s stuck in the middle, the ‘Monomania’ that’s bonkers for those one dimensional ideas;

“everything is the same as it was / But now there’s nothing left to change,” Cox sings.

A recent US TV outing saw Cox transformed into an androgynous, snake-hipped, trash rocker; a mess of black hair, animal print and blooded mouth, spitting his way through the repetitive whiteout of the album’s title track.

It’s convincingly awesome but also points to the fact that this whole pantomime might come over better in the visceral flesh than it does on record, at least a quarter of which (‘The Missing’; ‘Sleepwalking’) gives way to the kind of melodies and dreamy webs of driving sound that have hitherto made Deerhunter exquisite.

Maybe the record would be better without these moments, these silvered cracks with something more familiar and listenable behind them. Maybe that would make it a more fully formed object – an unapologetic thrash heap monument to ‘La Vie Anterieure’ – to quote the description of Punk in the final track’s title.

‘Monomania’ is an ersatz concept album that needs its context of one record among many to make sense. Like Duchamp, the band seem hell bent on embodying contradictions in a bid to shake out of any habits that have become easy or safe; ideas, band members and identities constantly swirling in revolutions.This is a study of something gone before, a sonic relic so ingrained in the cultural fabric as to be rendered commonplace. Perhaps all that’s left is to stick it on a plinth and look at it another way.

Sometime between 2011’s debut album ‘Everything is Dancing’ and now, London trio Fair Ohs changed their Twitter handle from Like Paul Simon, but y’know, punk to LET’S FUCKIN GO. It says a lot.

‘Jungle Cats’ begins with ‘Green Apple Milk’, a track that’s African hi-life gone basement punk and true to Fair Ohs’ age-old quest of jollying up the hardcore scene with coastal rumble tumble and aquatic references. But it’s followed by the gnarled squall of ‘Citric Placid’, which has more in common with DFA dance punk than a roughed up Vampire Weekend, until its monster rock breakdown, that is. ‘Cayman Brac’ takes the charge further, a cowbell away from Radio 4 - ‘like The Rapture, but y’know, tropical’. But again Fair Ohs play on where they would have previously started the next track about islands and beaches.The pace is drained, and they finish the track off with something altogether different; a shimmering prog groove. It’s the trick of the album – starting with one track and finishing with another – and it’s how ‘Jungle Cats’ feels like a progression all over.The band are wholly recognisable as themselves, and tracks like ‘Ya Mustafa’ and ‘Mayan Flex’ feel like they were probably conceived soon after we saw them last, but there’s also smart detours into Indian pysch, hungrier playing throughout and an unrivalled sweetness on ‘Silver Jade Mountain’ and the closing ‘Salt Flats’ and ‘Mountain Bombs’. Fair Ohs’ debut album was widely underappreciated, perhaps due to its simplicity, and on the face of it ‘Jungle Cats’ could meet the same fate, only it’s not simple at all, just very accessible.

They’re not the same thing, and propping up the hooks are punk and pop complexities they should be credited for.

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Spectrals

Still Corners

Husky Rescue

Scout Niblett

Vision Fortune

Sob Story

Strange Pleasures

The Long Lost Friend

It’s Up To Emma

(Wichita)

(Sub Pop)

By David Zammitt. In stores May 6

(El Camino)

By Reef Younis. In stores June 3

(Drag City)

By Amy Pettifer. In stores May 20

Mas Fiestas con el Grupo Vision Fortune

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores June 3

Just as GIRLS were once lauded with comparisons to Elvis Costello, the band’s Chet “JR”White is now producing others with an overwhelming flavour of the same man. Spectrals’ modern day bohemian popularity has always been something of a dichotomy as so many of its musical reference points come from groups and artists deemed unfashionable dinosaurs since before Louis Jones was born. So it is with some sense of refreshment that the Leeds-born singer still doesn’t give a shit and continues to make music that sound like Nick Lowe because he damn well wants to. A clear sucker for pop structure and earnest sentimentality in equal bounds, this is a tender record at times, and – perhaps surpassingly, considering the tone of his previous work – the lap steel-coated, country-drenched ballad ‘Sob Story’ may even be the knockout of the album.

On this, their second album, London shoe-gazers Still Corners sharpen their focus and double-up on synths as they move toward a sound that’s fully electronic. If their debut drew on the sultry jazz-pop of the ’60s,‘Strange Pleasures’ jumps two decades ahead, aligning itself quite forcefully with the digital excesses of the 1980s.The result is a record that sits somewhere between the Cocteau Twins and OMD, marrying breathy vocals with sugar-coated synthpop hooks.

However, several gems aside,Tessa Murray’s throwaway coquettish refrains become tiring; seeming to lack any tangible meaning, while the melodies and rhythms begin to bleed into one another.Yet the real problem is that it just feels too self-conscious. It’s so impossible to dodge the signposts of ‘Strange Pleasures’’s stylistic indebtedness that it comes off as forced, referential and, ultimately, empty.

In our desperation to worship any errant UV and finally shift the inclement indecision of spring, Husky Rescue’s fourth album is a neat little microcosm of the current climate.Typically purveyors of ambient pop and quirky folktronica, here they throw up a few short, sweet blasts of sun-kissed optimism in the Aberfeldy plink-plonk of ‘Mountains Only Know’ and the frisky brass parps of ‘Under Friendly Fire’, but the playful melodies and ragged marching band momentum soon give way to an uneasy gloom.

The title track buzzes into a warped mash of phasers, skewed falsetto melodies and modem crashes, while ‘Colors’ jitters with malevolent intent. Along with the fragmented industrial clash of ‘June’, they are the darkest distractions of the album’s eight tracks, dialling jagged frequencies and breathy, hushed vocals that give ‘The Long Lost Friend’ an unexpectedly cold front.

The press release that came with this album was so full of purple prose that it hasn’t left much for me to say. Perhaps I’ll do what it should have done and give you the bare facts – a much better way to introduce a record that is about nothing if not getting to the point. ‘It’s Up To Emma’, Portland based Scout Niblett’s sixth album in twelve years, is a spartan romantic epitaph, largely selfrecorded in the UK. Nine tracks chronicle the bruises of a relationship gone bad and are given fearless space amid growling voice and wounded guitar, reminiscent of PJ Harvey’s equally fearsome ‘Dry’. She sings about ultimate revenge before a cover of ‘No Scrubs’ hammers home her singular resolve. Of her own work it most resembles 2001’s ‘Sweet Heart Fever’, except the sweet heart is now a broken one. Oh, and it’s scarily good. The end.

(Gringo/Faux Discx)

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores May 13

Some artists, when making their debut album, are so keen to make an indelible impression, so eager to have their voices heard and their stamp imprinted on the world, that they lose perspective whilst doing it.

Vision Fortune appear to be a group who are acutely aware of this mistaken tendency.Their debut is tantalisingly restrained and thought-out; paced, spaced and atmospherically imbibed within a carved-out world of ambience that they have created for themselves to exist in.An underlying anxiousness floats twitchingly throughout the record, creating a drone-ridden, barren, almost nocturnal tone and presence to it that sits in wonderful paradox to the album’s cover.

Clearly keen to not subscribe to convention (they also ditch words on the track titles) ‘Mas Fiestas…’ is as subversive as it is submerging and it is utterly enthralling as a result.

Small Black Limits of Desire (Jagjaguwar)

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores May 13

05/10

Small Black have felt like they’ve been on the slide ever since the release of their eponymous EP in 2009 – the highest and first palpable watermark of US chillwave.

Just a year later, as the Brooklyn then-duo released their debut album, we were gorged on electro romanticism, yet for those who were willing to put in the time ‘New Chain’ proved to eventually get better with each futuro-nostalgic listen.The same might be said for ‘Free At Dawn’, which somewhat stubbornly refuses to divert from chillwave’s great checklist.Toro Y Moi left feather light vocals and Casio tones like these alone long ago; not Small Black, it seems. Simultaneously they feel out of fashion and oddly unique for it, like a guy in a Von Dutch trucker’s cap. On tracks like ‘Proper Spirit’ and ‘Sophie’ the notable increase in the band’s fidelity reaches ‘The Immaculate Collection’ era Madonna, but it’s hard to even fall for these instantly. If ‘New Chain’ was no whirlwind romance,‘Free At Dawn’ feels like a record you might never truly fancy.

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Al bums 06/10

08/10

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Charlie Boyer & The Voyeurs

The Pastels

Brazos

No Joy

Tim Burgess

Slow Summits

Saltwater

Wait To Pleasure

Oh No I Love You More

(Domino)

(Mexican Summer)

By Josh Sunth. In stores now

(O Genesis)

By Hayley Scott. In stores May 20

When a band needs to qualify a new release with: “We are making this music for ourselves.” you can be pretty sure their LP is going to end up somewhere on the spectrum between self-indulgent and sublime, and with track names as obtuse as ‘Uhy Yuoi Yoi’ it could be easy to discard ‘Waiting To Pleasure’ prematurely. Not really straying from the bleached-out soundscapes of their debut, but having smoothed some overdriven edges and turned up the vocals, what No Joy have actually arrived at here are more hooky, popdriven shores. Shoegaze and all its offshoots are often greeted with scepticism by those not in the fanclub, and tracks like ‘E’ are still all feedback and overdrive and sheer grandiosity, but the likes of single ‘Lunar Phobia’ and ‘Hare Tarot Lies’, with their haunting vocal refrains, are as catchy as they are close to the sublime.

The remix album can go one of two ways – surpass the original or flaunt a redundant attempt to revive it. In this instance, Burgess’ cohorts breathe new, inspiring life into his 2012, second solo album.‘Oh No I Love You More’ sees a continuation of Burgess’ tendency to forge out fandom-turned-friendships, with the likes of Lambchop vocalist Kurt Wagner, Factory Floor, Hatcham Social and Seahawks lending a distinctly different edge to proceedings by imbuing each track with alluring, electronic interjection without any inordinate, sonicmutilations of its companion. From the hypnotic swirl of Django Django’s take on ‘Anytime Minutes’ to The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s marching, psychedelic transformation of ‘The Doors…’ each track is an enduring musical metamorphosis.

The result? a gloriously permutated prelude to ‘Oh No I Love You’ that eclipses the original work.

By Stuart Stubbs. In stores May 27

By Daniel Dylan Wray. In stores May 27

(Dead Oceans)

By Sophie Coletta. In stores May 27

Charlie Boyer sings like he’s about to burst into tears. Proper cartoon baby, head-back-and-wailing kinda stuff. He used to do this with clunking post-punk trio Electricity In Our Homes, who’d proudly and difficulty clank away like it was day one of being in The Velvet Underground. Now Boyer has a band that are clearly trying to mess with the mainstream.The Voyeurs have a freeform, psych jam thing going on that’s far more accomplished than the musical capabilities of EIOH. Plenty of tracks here patently stomp while just as many feature an overworked Doors-ish organ. Really though it is all very 6Music and probably a bit too tortured for Radio 1. Boyer’s voice sees to that, delivering highly suspect lines of forced weirdness like “I love my toes when they say so” and “The cat takes a gander at the goose”. God knows who it’s meant to be for.

As if they haven’t been mentioned enough in the same sentence in their career already, but the return of the Pastels brings back feelings greatly akin to those when the Vaselines returned in 2010 after twenty years off.There is a palpable feeling of apprehension; could a group so of its time, so heavily rooted (or labelled) to a musical period (and the youthful minds and bodies that occupied them) really come back as though nothing has changed? Well, the answer is – much like with the Vaselines, too – a resounding yes. ‘Night Time Made Us’ brims with a textured warmth and tenderness. It’s devilishly well produced, a far cry from the shabby but fun formative years of the group. It’s cloaked in grandiose but gingerly balanced strings, fluttering flutes and plush, silken vocals. It’s just a really simple and beautiful pop record when all is said and done – a welcome return.

Martin McNulty Crane of Brazos comes from a long line of remarkable patriarchs. His great great grandfather was an orphan who taught himself law, became Texas Attorney General and fought the KKK. His great grandfather was a lieutenant in World War I. His granfather was an airline pilot who brought his family up in Iran. His dad is a scientist.You’d be forgiven, then, in thinking young Martin had created something a little more vivifying with his second album.

The intentions are there, with the Brooklyn-based trio immediately constructing a profusion of vivacious melody with tambourineinfused opener ‘Always On’, Crane’s vocals chirpy and wholesome in their delivery. But it soon becomes tinged with a wearisome mediocrity that makes it sound like the kind of album you would find soundtracking a city-centre café that sells packaged sandwiches for over four quid.

Clarietta (Heavenly)

Jon Hopkins Immunity (Domino)

By Sam Walton. In stores June 3

09/10

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As producer of the last two Coldplay albums, Jon Hopkins has experience in the epic.Thankfully, though, while his fourth and most electronic solo album yet is over an hour long, it’s a million miles away from the plastic, stick-on epic of his stadium rock employers.

Indeed,‘Immunity’’s substantial scale is comfortingly organic, with rich foundations under its considerable peaks as well as achingly beautiful, subtly textured lows that aren’t afraid to stretch out their echoes and creaks, distant sub-bass throbs and glitching cracked vocals.

That said, while definitely a headphones-friendly record, ‘Immunity’ isn’t without its bangers either – opener ‘We Disappear’’s 8-bit future garage is addictively meaty, and ten-minute centrepiece ‘Collider’ justifies its length with a gorgeously squirming rhythmic build. Perfectly paced, intelligent and ultimately just incredibly beautiful, ‘Immunity’ feels like a grand statement from Hopkins – a sort of humble masterclass in how big records really should be – and what a magnificent statement it is.

06/10

Savages Silence Yourself (Matador)

By Chal Ravens. In stores May 6 This time last year, after just a handful of tiny gigs, Savages’ live shock and awe tactics had generated a level of clamorous hyperbole virtually unheard of since Britain’s indie A&Rs first sniffed ‘The Modern Age’ EP. The serrated, airless clatter of ‘Husbands’ and ‘She Will’ – both present here – promised much from a punk band able to balance raw and intense performances with a considered art-rock-meets-no-wave aesthetic. So it’s no small disappointment to discover that the four-piece have turned heel and created what is in fact a deeply conventional rock & roll album, one that wears its post-punk sonic signifiers like spiky accessories yet fails to engage with the radical artistic sensibilities that underpinned that most fertile of genres.The dirty thrills of ‘Husbands’ and ‘City’s Full’ have been wiped clean in the re-recordings, while the monochrome dramas of ‘Strife’ and ‘Waiting For a Sign’ hammer on relentlessly like a speed-freak Hedda Gabler, weighed down by bloated low-end dynamics. It’s not all dull – the skittering racket of ‘Hit Me’ is faithful to the volcanic derangement of their performances and gothic torch song closer ‘Marshal Dear’ breaks apart the suffocating, grey-on-grey atmosphere with the simple addition of piano and reed instruments – but aside from these occasional flickers of experimentation,‘Silence Yourself ’ seems like an opportunity wasted.

07/10

College

The National

Secret Diary

Trouble Will Find Me

(Invada)

By Josh Sunth. In stores May 6

(4AD)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 20

Back in 2011, while the film critics were all fawning over Drive, their musical counterparts were similarly enraptured by Cliff Martinez’ brooding soundtrack to the film. Saturated with colour and effortlessly sleek synth droning, the opening half was where College neatly slotted in, and ‘A Real Hero’ was both the statement of intent and the centrepiece that the whole thing seemed to hinge on. Of course, ‘Secret Diary’ embodies the same sleazy night-driving and neon echo, only with fourteen songs to sprawl across and a far more relentless aesthetic – so much so that the synths on each track here can seem all too anonymous alongside each other. Luckily for David Grellier, though, he is skilled at what he does, and in feeling around for the ultimate 1980s America synth-pop throwback he’s produced a set of songs – particularly the luscious, spiralling homage to The La’s ‘She Never Came Back’, and the tense, rising futurism of ‘Desire’ – that have given a slick and stylish sound to nostalgia.

In the three years since the release of ‘Boxer’,The National have indisputably become an arena-sized band, their commercial successes now commensurate with their critical acclaim. Are they now writing music with the aim of justifying that status? Opener ‘I Should Live In Salt’ is a typical National slow-burner, one that never quite catches alight, but smoulders to a simmering close.

The single ‘Demons’ is torch carrying, downbeat lyrics hidden in cathartic chords, while ‘This Is The Last Time’ ends in a swirl of strings and sadness.To listen to this record is to be swept into a shimmering, monochrome world; a world of chiming, exquisitely painful beauty.Yet in places you get the uncomfortable feeling that the band are now writing to a formula, with echoes of previous songs resonating a little too loudly.The album is consistently very good and the song writing consistently better, but that moment of soul-shifting emotion, that moment the National have been so adept at creating, is missing.

08/10

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Al bums 07/10

Hyetal Modern Worship (True Panther Sounds)

By Reef Younis. In stores May 20 Commonly touted as one of the young heirs to Bristol’s ‘Purple’ throne, if there’s one thing David Corney has always delivered, it’s depth. Perhaps more of a prince in ideology than execution, his slide from beatific dubstep funk towards the sultry side of synthwave helped turn out breathless debut album,‘Broadcast’, and the retro styles and sprawling cinematics he journeyed through on that LP have endured. But where that set hit loud and crisp with clipped percussion and occasional busy urgency,‘Modern Worship’ feels much more of a slow jam.With its drizzling synth, interstellar space signals and sweet binary bleep, it’s a collection melted down by high production values and clinical sequencing that neither drops nor pops. It’s a cautious variety that glides instead of jilts through styles, with Corney’s gilded touch the silent driving force behind the falsetto velvet crush of ‘Four Walls’, the heavy M83 sighs of ‘This City is Ours’, and the jagged melody on standout effort,‘Jam the Network’.That measured balance also lets tracks like ‘Lovers’ hit with a Miami bounce and 8-bit breaks, the psychedelic skitter of ‘Northwest Passage’ steam like a New York street, and ‘Cloud Bridge’ cast a neon-glaze over a shimmering city skyline. More silky than spectacular, then,‘Modern Worship’ is another creeping triumph, and a pitch-perfect set that plays out beautifully.

05/10

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Mount Kimbie

Dirty Beaches

Cold Spring Faltless Youth

Drifters/Love Is The Devil

(Warp)

By Sam Walton. In stores May 27

(Zoo Music)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 20

When Mount Kimbie’s debut LP was released in 2010, just as the dubstep that had informed their early EPs was entering the mainstream with unapologetic gusto, its restless subversions of the genre and woozy, darting palate felt pleasingly independent. Unfortunately, three years on and in the context of a second album, that same trait now appears slightly aimless, like a band trying on different hats out of distraction rather than any greater creative drive.That’s not to say ‘Cold Spring Fault Less Youth’ doesn’t have its moments – ‘Made To Stray’ is a wonderfully taut, skittering piece of electronica whose elegant ripples, hisses and moody vocals show exactly what Mount Kimbie are capable of. Similarly, the opening ‘Home Recording’’s fractured funk sits classily between D’Angelo and Disclosure, making for a genuinely modern-sounding hybrid. Elsewhere though too many tracks build slowly and patiently towards utterly anticlimactic endings, which makes ‘Cold Spring…’ an ultimately frustrating, fidgety experience.

This is the fifth album from nomadic sonic magpie Alex Zhang Hungtai – an unconventional musical tapestry weaved from samples, lost sounds and electronics.

Weighing in at a hefty hour and a quarter, it’s billed as a double album and Zhang has clearly been unafraid to give himself the room to realise his vision.There are moments of immersive power here – ‘Night Walk’ is a sprawling, echoing tunnel of a song, while the relentless groove of ‘I Dream In Neon’ sits under indistinct vocals that sound like they’re sung through a loudhailer from the bottom of a well. But the squally bleeps of ‘Woman’ do nothing but shred the nerve endings.This is not a record you can listen to lightly; it demands your full attention and sometimes it’s difficult to tell whether you’re actually enjoying it. It is undeniably compelling, though, and often hypnotic.We should be glad that there are artists such as Dirty Beaches out there, standing on the fringes, operating outside the bounds of convention.

07/10

06/10

04/10

06/10

Har Mar Superstar

Majical Cloudz

The Baptist Generals

Bye Bye 17

Impersonator

(Cult)

By Sam Cornforth. In stores May 6

(Matador)

By Sophie Coletta. In stores May 27

Jackleg Devotional To The Heart (Sub Pop)

Sean Tillmann’s alter ego Har Mar Superstar is hard to take seriously.

If Philip Taylor’s ‘Pantsman’ idea from The Apprentice had taken off, then I am sure Har Mar would have been a cheap option to do the modelling – thankfully it didn’t, but the pants are still very much on display. Sean has ditched his electro-infused sound on ‘Dark Touches’ though, instead opting for circa 1970’s Sam Cooke soul style, which gives a chance for his wonderful set of pipes to shine.

Throughout ‘Bye Bye 17’ his glorious croons hit the jackpot and are complemented by flurries of funk that are enjoyable if you don’t get a lingering image of the pop star bouncing around to the grooves in his underwear.Yet while these soulful songs may merit attention, ultimately it is the joker’s persona that is stealing the headlines yet again, which begs the question if that will ever change.

“The happiest songs all end with a smile.This might end with a smile.”

So laments vocalist Devon Welsh midway through piano thumping outro track ‘Bugs Don’t Buzz’ on the Montréal duo’s latest album. It’s a hopeful sentiment, perhaps even verging on ironic, particularly as much of ‘Impersonator’ despondently drags itself through a darkened tunnel of grim and gloomy confessional tangents, to the point where you feel like you have to apologise for your prying when it’s all over.Welsh’s reaching-forthe-Prozac vocals alone are not entirely problematic here, but combined with producer Matthew Otto’s hollow clouds of sound, the whole thing becomes aurally introverted.The rolling waves of textured tones and smudged chords seem too understated to give any sense of oscillation, and the whole thing becomes a little bit oversaturated, a little bit overbearing.

06/10

07/10

Adventure

Andrew Wyatt Descender

Weird Work

By Hayley Scott. In stores May 20

(Carpark)

By Sam Cornforth In stores May 20

(Downtown)

By Chris Watkeys. In stores May 6

For a career spanning 15 years The Baptist Generals haven’t exactly been prolific in their output, with this album being their first since 2003’s ‘No Silver/ No Gold’. Here they retain the same rudimentary genre-defiance of its predecessors – still too coarse to be country, too fierce to be folk – and although their organic 4-track tendencies are eschewed for the slightly more embellished 8-track, the band’s authenticity and grit is still intrinsically clear. Instrumental opener ‘Machine En Prolepsis’ is an off-kilter paragon of acoustic guitar-driven melody that coalesces with erratic, synthesised blips.

Elsewhere sporadic touches of rousing strings and melancholic brass add plaintive warmth to the often irksome cacophony caused by Chis Flemmons’ vocal squall. Still, ‘Jackleg Devotional...’ lacks the cohesion needed to make their 10 year repose wholly worthwhile.

Baltimore based electronic magician Benny Boeldt struck gold on his last album, ‘Lesser Known’. His ’80s synth pop soundscapes were hooktastic whilst still looking to break new territory as it also marked Boeldt’s vocal debut, which caused for some euphoric sing-alongs. It appears that his delivery can’t have met his high standards though, as all vocals have been deemed surplus to requirement on ‘Weird Work’, which is constructed upon an 8-bit pulse that can be both challenging and rewarding (see tracks like ‘Alone’, which sounds like a futuristic transmission from a parallel planet).There are recurring surprises here too, yet the intriguing course that ‘Weird Work’ sometimes takes is never enough to mask what is truly missing – the most important and effective instrument of them all, Benny Boeldt’s voice.

Andrew Wyatt is a serial collaborator, having previously worked with the likes of Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars, but this is his first entirely solo project.

Understated, it’s not, recorded in Prague with a 75-piece orchestra.

But this is no sprawling, overlong epic – it’s nine short, exquisitely tailored songs, filled with strings and Wyatt’s smoothly delivered vocals.‘Harlem Boyzz’ is the sound of an old-school crooner singing a pop song over a warm, Richard Hawley-esque backdrop.‘She’s Changed’, meanwhile, is like a Bond theme tune, all sweeping violins and drama. Albums such as this, with its straightforward structure and conventional nature, stand or fall on the strength of the songwriting, and Wyatt’s is richly realised.There are few thrills here, but the record seems bathed in a soft, warm glow, through which Wyatt’s talents shine brightly.

Laura Marling I Was An Eagle (Rough Trade)

By David Zammitt. In stores May 27

09/10

I can say without a shred of hyperbole that, at just 23, Laura Marling is already exhibiting the assurance of Carole King and Joni Mitchell in their pomp. Here she leads her brand of contemporary folk down wonderfully unexpected paths, bestowing 16 acoustic buds upon us that unfurl with each listen; their ornate chord structures rising and falling in sumptuous cadences around which Marling wraps her sinuous, graceful vocal lines. At 16 tracks, it’s sweet in the vein of Newsom or Apple, but its nuances mean that it never feels long.Whether it’s the menacing blues of ‘When Were You Happy’, the irrepressible, electric organ-toting roots rock on lead single ‘Where Can I Go?’ or the Led Zep neo-folk of ‘Breathe’, there’s enough to hold even the most wandering of attentions. Simply put, Laura Marling’s precocious star shines brighter than ever on this record and if the popular penchant were still set on folk, ‘Once I Was An Eagle’ would cement her superstardom.

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Live

Swan attack

Daniel Dylan Wray sees if a man can stomach two consecutive live shows from Michael Gira’s Swans

swans Mouth to Mouth Festival, London, Koko 04.04.2012 Swans, Leeds, Stylus 05.04.2013

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In November 2012 I felt sensations stemming from sound that were like no other I had ever experienced. Swans played at Sound Control in Manchester, a fairly small club with low ceilings and not a great deal of girth to it.

Within this relatively enclosed, tight space Swans spewed forth a ricocheting tsunami of sound that physically altered me, irreversibly: it knocked me backwards, swaying me back and forth on my heels like a shaking geriatric in a rocking chair; it seeped through my skin and shook the core of my bones until they ached; it hammered my chest with all the force of a million pounding hearts and my throat clasped, tightened and seized up as though it were retracting in self preservation. It felt like I had some jacked-up lunatic running around my insides, playing in my body as though it was a giant funhouse, pulling, twisting and jumping on whatever organs, passages and other vital innards they found lying around in there. It was one of the most powerful and empowering musical moments of my life.

Leaving that show I was confronted with two contrasting emotional states: one was the rollercoaster mentality of ‘I want to go on again’, the other was that of complete physical depletion, so weary and drained from the encounter that I feared what would happen if I had to do anything other than sleep.With this in mind, I set out on a little experiment.

What would it feel like to put yourself

through that two nights in a row? What varies show-to-show? Are they even capable of playing a bad show? Would the culminating sensations haemorrhage and explode or would it be like scoffing too much acid, you reach a certain saturation point and after a while it just can’t get any more intense - you’ve hit your wall. I set out to find out.

Day one is the Swans-curated Mouth-toMouth festival with Grouper opening the day’s performances at 5.30pm.With the doors only being open for half an hour, the crowd is a humble one, eerily occupying what feels like about a single percentage of the Koko’s castle-like height stature. However, what looks like a performance that might be imbibed into the background chats of people greeting friends, ordering drinks and generally settling down for the day, soon becomes an utterly transfixing set. Dripping in the usual ambience of her work, it is a dream-like atmosphere in which Grouper’s barely audible vocals float as though they are being transplanted from another dimension.The set enflames and ends with a surge of sound and escalating, intensifying volume, Liz Harris scurries under her little table, fiddling with effects units like a child hiding under a school desk as gigantic bomb-like sound explosions fill the air.

Xiu Xiu plays a notably reserved set. Jamie Stewart sits cross-legged, playing solo and acoustic, accompanied only by a tape-loop of

birds twittering and singing throughout.The whisper-to-shriek intensity he can often exude is shrouded by just his intimate, breathy vocals today. Some moments flow and flurry gracefully while others jar. It’s a short burst of a set and then he’s gone, making way for Ben Frost to ignite the place.

Gushing forth a throbbing fury of spitting electronics backed by two robot-precise drummers – complete with occasional percussive assistance from Swans’Thor Harrris – Frost is utterly electrifying.“I feel like I’ve had all the drugs in the world” my completely straight friend turns to me and says with eyeballs so wild and induced he looks like he may have had some of another planet’s, too.

Unconsciously he moves further towards the stage bit by bit. I watch him as he is physically being pulled into Frost’s sonic vortex. As their performance blows out in all the ravaged and escalating ferocity it has maintained throughout, it does the unthinkable: it gives Swans some serious competition in the head-fucking department.

Mercury Rev’s Cinematic Silent Sound Tettix Wave Ensemble take the tempo down a notch as they soundtrack a film. It chugs with looping, hypnotic and Germanic propulsion, building in constant swirls throughout.While often feeling somewhat or altogether out of sync with the movie, it does find its feet and come the end the two marry wonderfully.The

01 & 02 Michael Gira and Swans 03 Ben Frost 04 Mercury Rev All photography by Roy J Baron at Koko, Camden, London

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pace reflects a well thought out line-up, one that has been varied in tone, pace and atmosphere throughout the day but has built up perfectly to the main event: Swans.

As the band take to the stage, Michael Gira begins the bellowing repetitions of ‘To be Kind’ that marks a birthing point for a complete two-hour plus submersion into his world. As Gira outstretches his arms and gently flaps them, they move as though he is about to take flight, take off and ascend into the skies.

It’s a fitting metaphor for where we are all about to be taken. Often too much unnecessary (but acceptably and occasionally unavoidable) focus is placed on the volume and physical affect that Swans music has, as though it is what the group solely or wholly embody; it often overlooks their majesty in the art of building.

Swans can increment the pace and texture of their music in such minimal, careful constructions that the swelling, breathing compositions often bare a frightening resemblance to the power and precision of classical music, with Gira very much the furious, arm-flailing conductor. Do they create eye-bulging, bowel-moving, palm-sweating, heart-stopping moments of brutally intense sound that hammer with all the force of a wrecking ball to the temple? Yes, in heaving, choking bounds, so much so your teeth will fall out. But find another so-called ‘noise’ band

whose focus on percussion is as great as theirs and… well… you won’t, apart from maybe Boredoms, who win by sheer volume.

Swans are creating bulging, intensely cinematic soundscapes as open and vast as a desert – a land filled with inordinate space but all coated in endless texture and presence. For two hours the intensity, intricacy and enjoyment levels all continue to reach new peaks. Aside from the easily definable spring-loaded pounce of songs like ‘Coward’ and the opening ‘To Be Kind’, occasionally the song structures – the beginnings and endings – are difficult to work out at a Swans show (‘The Seer’ seems to have almost wholly incorporated ‘No Words/No Thoughts’ into its sprawling thirty minute epic now but it’s not a credited song on their set list from tonight) so often it becomes an evening of moments, of bits and parts extracted from a much, much larger picture. One hair-raising moment comes when the slide of Thor Harris’ trombone blasts out at such a thunderous volume that it has the intensity and fearsodden power of all seven apocalyptic trumpets firing out in piercing unison. At another stage Gira delightfully breaks into one of his free-form Damo Suzuki moments. “Do you understand!?” he screams, the intonation ever familiar. “Do you understand?” he screams once more… “I’m a garbage man!”

He howls franticly with a coarse abandon that

Lux himself would no doubt approve of. And just like hearing the gargled screams of the dead, tonight has been utterly transcendental.

As we move onto the second night, truthfully, the sound just isn’t as good in Leeds.

The perfect balance achieved in London had meant feeling the drums throttle your ribcage, vibrating them with the clout of an angry elephant’s foot-stomp; you could hear the percussion flutter with the power and grace of several church bells ringing and you could hear the sound of jaw bones cracking as they smashed into the grimy, beer-soaked floor.

Leeds has the drums and percussion drowned out somewhat, the force of the guitars heavy with the dread and strident intensity of an air-raid siren. Interestingly, what is fundamentally a mixing error does offer an inverted vision of the group, one almost askew with its own desires and intentions – their sound in the hands of someone else and not entirely themselves, the power balance is altered. It’s far from awful, in fact it’s still largely sublime, it’s just the desire to feel the thwack of Phil Puleo’s drums and Thor Harris’ gong is agonisingly insatiable at times.

Similarly structured and paced to the previous evening, it’s still remarkable how much wiggle-room the band has within the space of the same song. Even when the Cramps nod rears its head again, it still packs all the punch of complete surprise and

uninhibited passion that it did the night before.

The manifestation of Swans live in this current incarnation, and them being called “the world’s greatest live band”, is a result of their perfection of a form of precise spontaneity, structure and routine. As they tear through their only pre-reformation song, ‘Coward’, Gira whispers with menacing, almost playful malevolence, “Put your knife in me/Walk away”, which, when coupled with the physical, replete exertion that the group visibly go through night after night, is a phrase that almost acquires a sacrificial twist. Gira and Swan are offering every ounce of what they have on stage.

My aim was to try and avoid focusing too much on the physical affects this experiment would have on me, but truthfully, it fucked me so hard it’s unavoidable. I left the second show at 11pm on Friday. I could do nothing all day Saturday day and night. Until Sunday morning my ears rang with the constant, shrill intensity of a fire alarm going off.The ear/balance alteration created an unrelenting feeling of nausea that left me bled, battered and largely immobile. By Sunday it had simmered down to the nonstop blowing of a steam whistle in both my ears. On Monday it had lowered to a gentle wind careering around my head. Only

by Tuesday, did my hearing return to normal. I eagerly await my next Swans show.

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01

Live 01 Laurel Halo Photographer: Roy J Baron

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James Blake

oOoOO

Steve Mason

Laurel Halo

Night Beds

Heaven, Westminster, London 09.04.2013

By Sam Walton

Birthdays, Dalston, London 25.04.2013

By Danny Canter

Village Underground, London 11.04.2013

By Chris Watkeys

XOYO, Shoreditch, London 25.04.2013

By Sam Walton

The Hope, Brighton 14.04.2013

By Nathan Westley

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Stylistic slipperiness has become something of a calling card for James Blake. Having dabbled in funk-flecked UK bass on early EPs, dipped his toe into singersongwriter waters for his debut album and then blended the two expertly for his latest (and best) record, half the joy of watching him perform is finding out what’s next. And by tonight’s showing, that’s dancehall, albeit a skewed, melancholic interpretation that would perhaps feel more at home in Kingston, Surrey, than Kingston, Jamaica. Accordingly, hard-clapping syncopated snares add a deeply satisfying reggaeton grit to crowd favourites ‘CMYK’ and ‘Limit To Your Love’, while new track ‘Digital Lion’ makes the most of its distant, lonesome air horns to coat Heaven in a forlornly warm dub fug. But while Blake pulls off the genre experiments delightfully with his now-trademark bowelshaking sub-bass and self-sampling wizardry, he saves his most astonishing trick for the encore.

‘Voyeur’ begins as an almost conventional love song and mutates via thumping kick drums, cowbells and acid keyboard licks into a rich, throbbing techno monster. Its climax is utterly unexpected, impressive and seductive, and when this almost peacocking demonstration of talent is succeeded by the closing cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘Case of You’, it’s hard not to admire Blake’s musical restlessness, especially when done with such elegance.

There’s a lot of alcopop hair at this rare oOoOO live show – reds and yellows and blues, and of course black black black: the committed goths who first fell for Chris Dexter’s ominous electronics and early Tri Angle releases. Everyone seems happy (or happily miserable) to see oOoOO preview material from his forthcoming debut album proper, but there’s a distinct difference between his material of old and new. Although pegged as a parent of witch house along with the likes of White Ring and Salem, Dexter’s early tracks were less cartoonishly occult than many others. His new tracks have evolved further, stripping out any vocals, be they twisted or low-battery-slow, as oOoOO tonight delivers a bass-heavy set that’s more Trap than it is Drag.

The volume vibrates the nostrils, and maybe something else for the couple grinding to my left, as Dexter appears to be a SpaceGhost Purrp short.These beats would be perfect for the Floridian rapper and his shifty, backroom hip-hop.

Where at a Trap show the BPM keeps the room bouncing, though, oOoOO’s new hybrid of two progressive (hip) genres is kept at a tranquilised pace. People slowly start to lurch, but no one has their hands in the air. It’s quite like anything else from a man who enjoyed some early hype but has since been stepped over by Haxan Cloak.There’s life in oOoOO yet, as he refuses to stalk the ground he was responsible for creating.

Steve Mason is clearly in an emotional, celebratory mood tonight. His recently released album has rightfully won critical plaudits, this not inconsiderably sized venue is completely sold out, and he seems if not overwhelmed then definitely overjoyed at this renewed level of success. Opener ‘Lost and Found’ – relatively restrained and gentle on record – sounds huge this evening, powering out into the dry ice shrouding the Village Underground’s tall brick arches.

The sound in this venue is superb, crisp and powerful, and it seems as if everything is conspiring to make this as much a party as it is a gig.

Mason’s tunesmithery is such that the single ‘Oh My Lord’ sees the rare sight of soundmen dancing, maybe because this is indie-pop as it should be: upbeat, celebratory and riddled with hooks.The man himself cuts an unassuming figure onstage, but spends a fair bit of time between songs indulging in Thatcher-bashing. He clearly retains a cultish following of Beta Band fans, and even when indulging in some plodding, Elbow-esque anthom-mongery mid-set (‘All Come Down’) the energy flowing from the audience makes it feel like something special. An explosive encore of ‘Fire’ confirms what we already knew – Mason has tunes big enough to fill a stadium; we feel lucky to witness them here, compressed into a few hundred square feet.

Those who came to Laurel Halo last year via her furiously original, often abrasive but oddly moving debut LP might be forgiven for not recognising the woman who takes the stage tonight in a Phil Collins t-shirt and a wash of white noise, already spine-jacking to a beat in her head: at no point during her hour-long set does she play a recognisable track, and even her album’s trademarks are entirely absent: there are none of the strident, interlocking vocals, washes of blissed-out synths or burbling bass; the serpentine melodies that have defined her recorded work are entirely absent, as are indeed any attempts at interactivity or even audience nod. Instead we are offered a performance of creative, mesmerising and occasionally utterly confusing primordial electronica, and the ensuing claustrophobia and thrilling disorientation, not to mention downright eye-popping surprise, is as close to one of Halo’s calling cards as tonight will get. About a month ago, while she was rehearsing for this small series of European dates, Halo wrote on Twitter, “I feel like making some fuck you in the ass techno now #getthelube #hot.”Tonight’s end product is no way as straightforward as that mission statement would imply, but as brands of fuck you in the ass techno go, Halo’s primal, beguiling and furiously intense interpretation certainly commands attention – and the only sensible option is to bend over and take it.

The fact that a framed gig poster of Adele is hanging on the wall of the The Hope’s tiny, intimate, upstairs live room acts as a casual reminder that even the world’s largest acts don’t go straight for Madison Square Gardens. Having spawned an album in ‘Country Sleep’ that has caught the attention of critics and music fans alike, the Winston Yellen-centered Night Beds currently have a whiff of excitement and hope cloaking around in this bustling room tonight. Stepping on stage with little fuss,Yellen leads a highly expectant crowd through a set of rich, Americana-focused, heartbaring songs.The acapella of ‘Faithful Heights’, sung in such a focus that the hub-bub of background chatter instantly stops as soon as the first words ring out, soon gives way to the Ryan Adams-lite country rock of ‘Ramona’.While comparisons to the ex-Whiskey Town frontman may prove to be a regular occurrence (they’re not unfounded, to be fair), there is a rich wealth of material that diverts far enough away, too, like the skipping soul filled beats of ‘Borrowed Time’ and ‘Cherry Blossoms’, both stamped with a distant echo of Jeff Buckley’s wrenching croon. It’ll be some time before Yellen’s picture is up there beside Adeles, but tonight he can probably think about banging up a tack or two in preparation.

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film

C I NE M A REVIEW

By IAN ROEBUCK

In Fear Director: Jeremy Loverling Staring: Iain De Caestecker, Alice Englert, Allen Leech

08/10

Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Before Midnight

Together again Nothing, not even a romance, beats a movie reunion What makes us whimper, what really makes us melt into melancholy more than puppy dog eyes or average pizza is an on-screen reunion.They can even be celebratory, such as the almost-but-not-quite Seinfeld reunion on Curb Your Enthusiasm, or jocular and brash (think John Cusack’s Grosse Pointe Blank or Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion).Whatever shape a reunion takes it never fails to leave us in tatters.That’s why this summer must be approached with serious cinematic caution. Sure, nostalgia can leave you with goosebumps, but it’s a cruel mistress, one that’s on the lookout for a spot of grey and hairy ears.

I’m talking all kinds of films of course. A reunion can come from any corner, the first being Before Midnight (June 21), the third instalment from Richard Linklater of his gloriously romantic series following Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) across Europe on their tale of lifelong love. At turns both heart breaking and heart-warming, each film’s wistful tone strikes an emotional blow more so than your average rom-com.We first met the chipper American and the sharp young French woman on a train to Vienna where they flirted like mad and talked all night.The picture’s ‘will they won’t they’ feel harked back to Hollywood romance of old but looked forward at the same time; a dialogue-heavy film never felt this feather light and sanguine.

Before Sunset was just as bold. Nine years later the two meet in Paris, each in new relationships, but their burning desire for each other still lingered. As we toured the City stopping off at Shakespeare and Company, strolling by the Seine, we just knew this would be another reunion that would leave us bedraggled. Linklater left us hanging and we’ve waited another nine years to discover Jesse and Celine’s fate.

Before Midnight reunites us with the couple holidaying in Greece, very much together but there is trouble in

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Paradise.The trailer promises more talky, walky romance but with a healthy dose of marital strife thrown in.With a trademark ambiguous ending almost guaranteed, we’re just glad it’ll be another nine years until our weakened souls rendezvous with Jesse and Celine once more, After Midnight, no doubt.

Surely a musical reunion would make the heart soar like no other, though, and Shane Meadows Stones Roses doc Made of Stone (June 5) is designed to do just that.The Staffordshire born director who brought us A Room for Romeo Brass and Dead Man’s Shoes has always stuck close to his musical roots and when the opportunity came to document the resurrection of his favourite band he jumped at the chance. A 16 year absence can leave a hole in any heart, but when a band strikes as deep a cut as the Roses this is one emotional restoration.Their on stage comeback continues to be warmly received, primarily due to the bands devoted following, and the film will no doubt be greeted the same. Meadows explores the Roses preparing for their three day sell out gigs in Manchester last year and the trailer promises to capture some of the halcyon glow that these live shows brought to the nation. I’m teary already.

This final reunion should leave you less of a wreck.

A celebrated working relationship reunited for a second time, this could be a cinematic treat that reaps reward in the future. Ryan Gosling has admitted he needs a break from acting, saying he’s “lost perspective on what he is doing”, but before that comes Only God Forgives (May 22), a Thai-set crime drama from Nicolas Winding Refn that looks to continue his penchant for stylish ultra-violence that was so successful in 2011’s Drive. It’s an early front runner for the top prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and with a beautifully gut-wrenching, gulp-inducing trailer it seems this is one reunion that won’t leave us moping.

“I’m going to sit here and you’re going to drive,” says Rutger Hauer’s delectable creation John Ryder in The Hitcher. It’s a line that swirls menacingly around our minds throughout Jeremy Loverling’s Sundance premiering debut In Fear. A home invasion movie relocated to a car is a neat and tidy premise and this dreadinducing terror that lovingly trades on Hauer’s 1986 classic, along with elements of Duel and Deliverance, is a nerve-jangling treat.

We’re passengers on Loverling’s terrifying journey as a young couple in the first throes of a relationship embark on an adventure to an Irish music festival.

Beautifully shot on Bodmin Moor with some highly inventive camerawork from DOP David Katznelson, it’s scary in a very British way.With petrol running low and light fading fast, their trip transforms into a tense and taut fight for survival and a metaphysical exploration of fear itself as an unknown tormentor becomes their puppeteer. Intimate moments of discovery quickly become claustrophobic nightmares as Tom (Iain De Caestecker) and Lucy (Alice Englert) gradually descend into panic and desperation in the confines of their car.There’s some stomach-twisting and original work at play here, particularly in the opening hour as the scene is set.

Let me tell you, once you’ve seen this film relieving yourself in a roadside hedgerow will no longer be an option.Whilst the introduction of a third character does add depth and narrative curve to a splendid opening, some of the trepidation of the trip is diluted a little and the scares ebb away as the ending approaches, but this is a minor teething point and what lifts In Fear above other low budget genre movies is Loverling’s intriguing methodology.To induce the same feeling of anxiety on his actors as his audience the script was withheld by Loverling and the plot concealed throughout filming – as we witness the horrific events unfolding so do De Caestecker and Englert. Grisly stuff and it runs through every reel of film.

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Impress your friends by listening to the Loud And Quiet issue 46 mixtape only at www.loudandquiet.com Featuring this month’s featured artists

: www.loudandquiet.com news / songs / past issues

party wolf idiot tennis Game. Set. Twat.

thought sport In the heads of baseball fans 5 3

1

Greg ‘The Veg’ Wallace

IDIOT

John Torode

Good chef

FAME

Bad chef

“I like that”

MOST LIKELY TO SAY

“... well that’s because you’re a greddy pig. It’s shit”

“Think I’ll skip the pudding, cheers”

LEAST LIKELY TO SAY

“Sorry, was I eating with my mouth open just then?

Currently rocking the tortoise without a shell look

IDIOT POWER PLAY

Dates Lisa Faulkner, so wet she’s 90% lettuce

GAME, SET & MATCH

Christ, John! Close your mouth!

MY TIME Diary of a somebody

4

2

1. Haribo Tangtastics!!!

2. JESUS CHRIST! 3. Urgh! Is it on me?

4. Oooo, that is lethal!

5.What’s happened? Has someone trumped down the front?

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE Just the one

Another very naughty week for me, boys and girls.Talk about Britain’s Hardest Shop, fuck me, Sainsbury’s is no bed of blow jobs.

You go in that place and it scrambles your nut.The veg and fruit are all inside the fucking door – what fucking genius thought of that? Don’t get me wrong, apples and pears, fucking lovely, but they’re soft bastards, ain’t they, they can’t be at the bottom of your basket.Then there’s all the kids in there – they’re all off their fucking lids, shouting and pointing, sketching me right out, all they way up to a checkout that was mugging me right off. “Please place item in baggage area”. I fucking have! Look! It’s there, you fucking toilet.

No, mate, not for me. It’ll stick with Lidl.

Not exactly what I meant when I said we should get shit-faced

50

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

Spot The Difference answer: That’s right, Jools has lost a button on his shirt.

Photo casebook “The sexy world of Ian Beale”