English rap-punk poets Sleaford Mods Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn have their 11th LP, called “UK GRIM” out on 10th March. Following the title track a few weeks ago, you can rant now to new groovy cut“Force 10 From Navarone” featuring Dry Cleaning’s Florence Shaw.
Jason Williamson said “The track is a conversation with myself coming to terms with happiness and whether it is in fact a darker space than my negativity and depression. Coupled with that it explores the myth of activism and inaction of the majority in the UK in the presence of a corrupt government.”
“Jason, why does the darkness elope? Cross sectioned. Its not a drink and I don’t fucking smoke”
New album ‘UK GRIM’ out 10th March 23 via Rough Trade Records.
LED ZEPPELIN were on their way to becoming the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world. Embarking on an American tour to promote their new album “Houses Of The Holy” , they shattered box office records, rewriting the blueprint for rock’n’roll tours as they went. Peter Watts climbed aboard the Starship to hear tales of glorious, transcendent music – but also unsolved robberies, giant mirrorballs, cake fights during John Bonham’s 25th birthday party and motorbike rides down hotel corridors. “As the venues got bigger, they got better,” recalls one confidant. “They blasted you into the middle of next week.”
The Hull four piece have signed with Mogwai’s label Rock Action, embracing dance, ambient and experimental music, and the importance of keeping things ambiguous, The UK shoegazers bdrmm just released their second album, “I Don’t Know”, which is also their first for Mogwai’s Rock Action Records. With this one, they’ve grown beyond the standard signifiers of the genre and have figured out their own sound, incorporating elements of dance music, krautrock, trip hop and post-rock.
bdrmm have revealed details of their second album ‘I Don’t Know’, which marks their signing to Mogwai‘s label Rock Action. Check out new single ‘It’s Just A Bit Of Blood’ below,
‘It’s Just A Bit Of Blood’ comes with visuals directed by Chris Tomsett’s Innerstrings. The track will be familiar to longtime fans of the band, having been a staple of the band’s live shows for over two years. “People have liked to sing along to it before we even had it recorded, so it felt like a natural place to start,” said guitarist Joe Vickers. Bassist and keyboardist Jordan Smith explained that the song acts as a bridging point between the shoegaze-leaning sound of their 2020 debut album ‘Bedroom’, and a broader pool of influences that defines ‘I Don’t Know’.
“It’s got the first album’s sensibilities, but it does things in the way we work now, so it’s a nice jumping-off point,” he said. “We’re not putting the six-minute dance song out just yet, that can wait until release day!”
‘I Don’t Know’ sees the band embrace not only dance music but trip-hop, slowcore, experimental and ambient music. Drummer Conor Murray, meanwhile, has brought a heavy influence from his love of jazz music to the album’s beats.
bdrmm – ‘I Don’t Know’ Track-by-Track
ALPS “Alps” was written whilst on tour with Mogwai. We were driving through the Swiss Alps (hence the title) and I was inspired by a mix by Thom Yorke for CRACK Magazine. I started with the percussion and went from there. The theme of the track is one of despair. While driving through such a beautiful place, but still being plagued by the constant feed of negative news coming through from back home. I don’t think we’d ever regard ourselves as a political band, but it’s hard not to escape the constant depression that has been imposed on this country this year, and how I feel we’re all just trying to cope but are seemingly forever moving backwards.
BE CAREFUL “Be Careful” was written during the pandemic. (I said I’d never write the P word again, but for honesty’s sake). I had set up a little studio in the back of my garden and would often take myself there on evenings with numerous bottles of wine. Inspired by Portishead, and the bassline owes itself to Radiohead’s Nude, this track just came so naturally. It’s about taking care of yourself and realising when you need to change. I’ve been guilty of indulging too much and I definitely noticed myself becoming somebody I don’t like. When realising that, it felt important. Trying to be a better person is hard when you don’t know you’re doing something wrong.
IT’S JUST A BIT OF BLOOD Most people who have seen us tour will recognise this track as ‘Picky New’, essentially based on its guitar picking introduction and that it was a new song at the time. The more we played it, the more we realised it was becoming something special, and an integral part of our set. It stems from my recent mental health awareness. I’d become depressed and very social anxious, I really felt like I had changed and didn’t know who I was. I am lucky enough to be surrounded by 3 of my brothers within this band (one literally by blood) and have always been able to be myself with them. I guess it’s just about realising what you have and remembering that when you can’t see it.
WE FALL APART “We Fall Apart” is probably one of the last tracks that was written for the album. It is a nod to our admiration of Krautrock. We have always been huge fans of NEU! and Can, and I think that kind of got touched on with the first record, but we wanted to try and make something as pure as organic as it seemed they did. Stripping back the effects and trying to make it as real as possible. The vocals are about a relationship. Trying and trying to make something work and it still failing. You want it to happen so much that sometimes you don’t realise that it’s impossible. It’s important to realise that moment.
ADVERTISEMENT ONE This is another one of those tracks that was written on the road during the Mogwai tour. The piano parts were created using generative processing in the van, inspired by Brian Eno experiments with the delay line method in his Ambient series. I defined the parameters and then glued my favourite parts together into a cohesive piece that I subsequently learnt and recorded on the piano back at The Nave. Similarly, I sampled some drum recording that Conor did from the “Be Careful” sessions and reworked the takes into a 16-bar phrase, inspired by Boards of Canada and DJ Shadow. Writing for the band is something I’ve always wanted to do, yet constantly dissuaded myself from. Ryan, Conor and Joe were all so supportive and encouraging during this period so it’s appearance is owed to them.
HIDDEN CINEMA This was the final song to be finished on the record, and to be fair, it nearly didn’t make it. We started and stopped on it so many times it seemed like it was doomed, but the final week, we approached it in a completely different way and it’s now become one of our favourites on the record. This track is about reflection. I was technically homeless when I was in the midst of recording this record, and I was going through a tough time internally. Living in the mistakes that you’ve made in the past and falling into the same situations. Sometimes you don’t know when something is wrong, but when you come out of the other end, it’s good to reflect on that time to not let it happen again.
PULLING STITCHES I remember the exact day that we wrote this track. We were in the practise room, and I just started playing the first 2 chords, incorporating the bend as if I was literally winking at Kevin Shields, and Conor just looked at me like, “This is the one”. I think we finished the track on that day. It’s amazing when those moments happen, and it reminds you of why you do this. It’s so obviously the Shoegaze adoration within us.
A FINAL MOVEMENT This track has been flying around for years. When I first wrote it, it was influenced by Duster, it was a VERY slow-core, emphasis on the bending of the notes. From there, it’s taking many forms, when we performed it live, under the moniker ‘Drug’, it was definitely indebted to Slowdive’s cover of Golden Hair, but from there it’s taking a brand new route. Being avid fans of Oneohtrix Point Never, the opening chords are inspired by that of Chrome County. The way they come in just grab you instantly, and as soon as Jordan opens the track, I know the track has reached its natural home. The lyrics come from a place of understanding. It’s a very cathartic track and to finally release it, and to close the album with it, feels very special. It’s been a long journey, but it’s good to finally be here.
The new covers EP from Tropical Fuck Storm is, believe it or not, unconventional. For one thing, it’s largely a return to the guitar-centric jams the Australian collective have slowly been gravitating away from on their recorded material for fear of it being precisely what listeners expected to hear. But for another, the short collection of songs is noticeably lacking in the “Running Up That Hills” and “Love Will Tear Us Aparts” most covers records tend to gravitate toward, instead opting for the second most popular track on The Stooges’ Funhouse to have “Ann” in the title, a cut from TFS’s own most recent record, and two songs belonging to groups that may or may not be entirely fiction.
Which leaves the crowning center piece of the record, a take on Jimi Hendrix’s epic 14-minute “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be),” which the band takes on surprisingly reverently as they stretch it even further into a marathon 18 minutes. According to co-vocalist Gareth Liddiard, the Hendrix homage was “an attempt to right the recent wrongs perpetrated against Hendrix’s classic ‘Angel’ by some idiot from One Direction doing a karaoke-style ‘tribute’ for Jimi’s 80th birthday.” I think Jimi would’ve approved of this version, and I’m glad he didn’t live to see his work become American Idol–ized.
This epic single arrives ahead of the Australian group’s kind-of covers EP “Submersive Behaviour”, via Joyful Noise.
Over the past decade, numerous supergroups have risen to the forefront of contemporary music. They’re all beloved heat seekers with unfathomable chemistry, however, the one supergroup I think about most often is The Arcs. Started by Dan Auerbach, Leon Michels, Nick Movshon, Homer Steinweiss, and Richard Swift in the early 2010s, the band quickly embodied a perfect mixture of neo-psychedelia and soul. They weren’t out to capitalize on popularity with sold-out shows in big venues. They played lowkey gigs in landmark clubs across America, like The Orange Peel in Asheville and the Civic Theatre in Auerbach’s hometown of Akron.
‘Electrophonic Chronic’ is the second album from The Arcs, the band founded by The Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach and which released its debut studio album ‘Yours, Dreamily’ back in 2015. Eight years later – and following the death of one of its members, Richard Swift – a successor has been shaped out of left-over recordings from the same sessions that yielded that debut.
Around 2012, Auerbach wanted to make a follow-up to his debut solo record “Keep It Hid”. He’d just put out the Black Keys records “Brothers” and “El Camino” back-to-back, and both Michels and Movshon had joined him and Pat Carney on tour in 2010. Whatever Auerbach’s second personal project would become, he was going to surround himself with musicians he trusted. “As soon as it was me, Dan, Nick, and Homer, we did a lot of recording sessions together, just for the hell of it, and there wasn’t anything attached to it,” Michels recalls. “Then, when Swift got involved, that’s when it really felt like, ‘OK, this is a band.’ It became clear very quickly that it was its own thing.”
Auerbach’s second solo record wouldn’t come until 2017, and “Waiting on a Song” was lightyears away from what he had made with The Arcs: songs torn from the cuffs of Captain Beefheart’s Safe as Milk and the hip-hop that inspired The Black Keys’ 2009 rap project “BlakRoc”. The Arcs were making music that became unique in how so many familiar parts stacked on top of each other to make a singular sound, which came from the guys spending countless days together just laying down whatever sounds came out of their instruments.
The Arcs are special because every member of the group is a producer—or, as Michels affectionately calls everyone, “studio rats”—which has only widened their musical capabilities in the studio. Songs on their debut like “Outta My Mind,” “Velvet Ditch,” and “Pistol Made of Bones” may have fragments that fit on a Black Keys project like “El Camino” or “Turn Blue“, but it’s clear that The Arcs’ songs were gleaned by each member equally. Their second album, “Electrophonic Chronic“, is just as psychedelic as “Yours, Dreamily” was, except it’s much more harmonious and electronic.
Robert Forster—former singer-songwriter for Australian indie rockers the Go-Betweens—has released his eighth solo album. He co-produced the album with his wife, Karin Bäumler, and his son, Louis, formerly of the Goon Sax. Forster also enlisted former Go-Betweens and Warm Nights bass player Adele Pickvance, as well as Scott Bromiley and Luke McDonald of the John Steele Singers, to contribute to the new LP.
This is a record of sombre hope, stubborn joy and a steadfast buoyancy perched on a wobbly fulcrum, grief and fear on one side, grit and belief on the other. This being who it is, no one familiar with Forster’s work and in possession of their wits would bet against him and Karin landing anywhere but on the latter half of that divide. “Candle”, sparse in its way but rich and direct is, start to finish, a-brim with the doing of life. And, if we may say, what a start.
One of the songs on the album, “She’s a Fighter,” was partly inspired by Bäumler’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent chemotherapy treatment and recovery. “She’s a Fighter,” bristling with the energy and spark it deserves, also, thanks to the tight acoustic coil it’s wrapped around, rather beams with a proud and loving streak of pure appreciation, its brevity, deft punch and minimalist lyric – add “fighting for good” to that title you have the words entire – as well a ringing curl of electric each contributing to an impression of basic awe and admiration toward its subject (notably, though nearly every track conceivably fits ‘that’ narrative only “Fighter” was written post-diagnosis). As opening statement it’s a stunner even though, by every thinkable metric, the record’s just getting started. There is simply no slack to be taken up anywhere on here, a fact the next track underlines with astonishing grace.
“The Candle And The Flame” consists of 9 songs written by Robert. Produced by Robert, Karin Bäumler and Louis Forster (The Goon Sax), “The recording sessions for the album were done sporadically over six months. Sometimes just one or two days a month. As that was all Karin’s strength and condition allowed her to do. So we had to record ‘live’, catching magical moments and going for ‘feel’. And that became the sound of the album.” says Robert.
The Soft Boys were an indie rock band primarly led by Robyn Hitchcock primarily during the 1970s, whose initially old-fashioned music style of psychedelic/folk-rock became part of the neo-psychedelia scene with the release of “UnderwaterMoonlight”. The Soft Boys have turned out to be one of the most influential bands in shaping contemporary alternative music, though few are completely familiar with the quirky group’s legacy. Formed in Cambridge, England in 1976 on the heels of the punk revolution, the Soft Boys eschewed the three-chord nihilism of punk and opted for a crude version of psychedelic/folk-rock that was well on its way out of fashion, but oddly, just on the cusp of a resurgence.
The band began life in 1976 as Dennis and the Experts comprising Robyn Hitchcock (guitar), Rob Lamb (guitar), Andy Metcalfe (bass), and Morris Windsor (drums). Alan Davies replaced Lamb after only four gigs late in 1976, and Kimberley Rew eventually replaced Davies. Matthew Seligman replaced Metcalfe in 1979.
On this day (May 26th 1978): neo-psych rockers The Soft Boys released their second single “(I Want to Be An) Anglepoise Lamp” on Radar Records (backed with “Fat Man’s Son”), both songs written by lead vocalist Robyn Hitchcock; followed by the “Can of Bees” album in 1979.
A Can of Bees
The Soft Boys, like so many other underground miscreants in the ’70s, spent their formative years generating enough critical capital to earn much sought-after adjectives like “influential” and “underrated.” The Robyn Hitchcock-led band pseudo-psych rock outfit’s shared love for all things Byrds, Beatles, Dylan, and Syd Barrett was both venerated and blown to smithereens on their 1979 debut long-player, “A Can of Bees”.
More angular and jarring Hitchcock, Kimberly Rew, Morris Windsor, and Andy Metcalfe sounded positively possessed, channeling both ’60s progressive rock and late-’70s punk into an unholy guitar-driven onslaught fueled by Hitchcock’s surreal lyrics: opening a record with a line like “feel like asking a tree for an autograph” is one thing, but backing up those words with an atonal, apocalyptic blues riff is another. It’s an often brutish affair that works more often than it should, with highlights arriving by way of the pounding and addictive “Leppo and the Jooves,” the incendiary “Do the Chisel,” and the impossibly dumb but nearly perfect pop gem “Sandra’s Having Her Brain Out.”
“A Can of Bees” has seen its fair share of iterations over the years, often boasting multiple bonus cuts and conflicting track listings (the impossibly prolific Hitchcock would eventually become notorious for this with his solo releases), but they’re all more or less complete, and the material continues to inspire, even if it’s only a handful of ears at a time.
Underwater Moonlight
After recording the material that would later comprise the bulk of “Invisible Hits”, the Soft Boys recorded their masterpiece, the shimmering neo-psychedelic, one of alternative rock’s greatest albums with their 1980 ‘Underwater Moonlight’…The new line-up started fresh and recorded the album that found them trading psychedelic jams for a more straight-ahead jangle pop-guitar rock sound. The LP has become extremely influential in the guitar rock canon; bands like the Replacements, R.E.M., and the L.A. Paisley Underground scene all claimed it as a prime influence. The album launched a thousand bands, but it turned out to be the Soft Boys’ swan song. Essentially, the band didn’t change their style for the record — they merely perfected it. The Soft Boys don’t hide their influences — whether its the ringing guitars of the Beatles and Byrds or the surreal humour of John Lennon and Syd Barrett in their lyrics– but they assimilate them, resulting in a fresh, edgy take on ’60s guitar pop.
Armageddon released “Underwater Moonlight” in June 1980, and it has been released many times since. It was “A Can of Bees”‘ attractive younger sister; the dissatisfaction that many felt with our first album was melted away by the new arrival.
Robyn Hitchcock’s subject matter tends to be more explicitly weird and absurdist than his influences, as titles like “I Wanna Destroy You,” “Old Pervert,” and “Queen of Eyes” indicate — even “Kingdom of Love” equates romance to bugs crawling under your skin. But the lyrics aren’t the only thing that are edgy — the music is too. The Soft Boys play pop hooks as if they were punk rock. “I Wanna Destroy You” isn’t overtly threatening like their post-punk contemporaries, but with its layered guitar hooks and dissonant harmonies, it is equally menacing.
John Peel hadn’t previously been a fan but he played a lot off “Underwater Moonlight”.
Furthermore, the group can twist its songs inside out and then revert them to their original form, as evidenced by “Insanely Jealous.” Although the neo-psychedelic flourishes are fascinating, the key to record’s success is how each song is constructed around rock-solid hooks and melodies that instantly work their way into the subconscious. In fact, that’s the most notable thing about “Underwater Moonlight” — it updates jangling, melodic guitar pop for the post-punk world, which made it a touchstone for much of the underground pop of the mid-’80s, particularly R.E.M.
The band broke up in 1981 after “Underwater Moonlight”. Rew formed the more mainstream pop group Katrina and the Waves, so many things were calling ‘time’ on the Soft Boys. For one, Kimberley had been amassing songs since his old band, the Waves, floundered in late 1977: he had joined the Soft Boys on the understanding that Hitchcock was the singer-songwriter, but his frustration was palpable, nonetheless, at having no outlet for them. while Hitchcock went on to a prolific career with a similar whimsical, surrealistic style, forming Robyn Hitchcock and theEgyptians in 1984 with fellow Soft Boys Morris Windsor and Andy Metcalfe, who went on to tour and record for ten years.
Kimberley rejoined the Waves, added Katrina, and scored an eternal number one with ‘Walking On Sunshine’. He has also done very well with songs supplied to The Bangles. Matthew joined the Thompson Twins and then Thomas Dolby, whom he had long championed, for Thomas’s pop era. He has also played sessions for many from Donovan to Morrissey.
They were briefly joined by Rew and Seligman in a re-formed Soft Boys for a UK tour in 1994 to mark the release of a box set of their work, and then reformed again in 2001 without Metcalfe for the 20th anniversary of “Underwater Moonlight” and the release of a new album, “Nextdoorland”, in 2002. They disbanded once again in 2003.
Nextdoorland
If pop music history teaches us anything, it’s that reunions of once-great bands are a dicey prospect at best, and for every act like The Buzzcocks who were able to come back at full strength, there are two or three that never should have bothered,
In 2001, The Soft Boys’ reunion tour (prompted by the augmented re-release of their classic “Underwater Moonlight”) proved to be one of the most pleasant surprises of the year, as Robyn Hitchcock, Kimberley Rew, Morris Windsor, and Matthew Seligman let loose a crackling display of sonic energy and revisited their older material with the enthusiasm of four newcomers tearing into their set for the first time.
All in all, the band performed an exemplary live show, but when The Soft Boys announced they were going into the studio to cut a new album, it was hard not to wonder, “OK, they can still do it onstage, but will it work again on tape?” Judged against The Soft Boys’ small but estimable back catalogue,
Their first album in 22 years, “Nextdoorland“, seems just the slightest bit disappointing — while the songs are fine, there are no immediate masterpieces and the production (by Pat Collier) seems a bit too spare and efficient, not always giving the performances the body and heft they need. But give “Nextdoorland” a few listens, let it sink in, and one reaches the inevitable conclusion this is still a great band, capable of making superb music.
As a guitarist, Robyn Hitchcock has never had a better foil than Kimberley Rew, and their interplay on these songs is simply superb; after several acoustic-based albums, it’s a pleasure to hear Hitchcock play electric guitar again, and his best moments with Rew recall the otherworldly six-string symbiosis of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. And if Windsor and Seligman rarely call attention to themselves as a rhythm section, that’s one of their greatest virtues; with subtle precision, they support these performances brilliantly, and these four players are a band in the truest and best sense of the word, working fluidly as a unit rather than as four individuals.
Is “Nextdoorland” an instant classic like “Underwater Moonlight” No. The Soft Boys are still a strong and viable band “Nextdoorland” is a more than worthy addition to their catalogue, and proves that two decades apart has not diluted their remarkable chemistry.
1976-1981 (Cd Only)
Although their five-year career reaped little in terms of commercial reward, the Soft Boys ultimately emerged among the most influential and best-loved of all the early “alternative” acts, as that genre thrust its way out of the twin wombs of punk and new wave. A convoluted back catalogue — as tricky and twisted in its own way as the very best of the band’s songs — has long been one of the Soft Boys‘ attractions for collectors, and “1976-1981″ must first be lauded for so effortlessly making sense of its labyrinthine convolutions.
The Two CDs, arranged in strict chronological order, not only resurrect a pair of early singles that defy the most energetic collector searches (1977’s “Give It to the Soft Boys” EP debut and the following year’s “[I Want to Be An] Anglepoise Lamp 45”), but also haul out a wealth of previously unreleased live and studio cuts, contextual buffers around the often vast steps the band was taking in between its regular releases.
Thus, three demos recorded in Robyn Hitchcock’s living room in early 1977 pave the way not only for the EP, but also for two further songs from the same session; both sides of the “Anglepoise Lamp” single are accompanied by two further songs intended for an accompanying, but ultimately abandoned, album; and a clutch of eight live tracks, also from 1978, depict the band marching through both its own idiosyncratic compositions (“We Like Bananas,” “Return of the Sacred Crab”) and some positively iconic covers — Lou Reed’s “Caroline Says” and the Monotones’ “Book of Love” among them. And that’s just the first disc — move on, and the “Can of Bees” and “Underwater Moonlight” albums, the discs for which the Soft Boys are today most widely acclaimed, are explored in lavish detail, again with material drawn from both sides of the cutting room floor.
There is, of course, considerable duplication between this and the sundry other Soft Boys archive projects out there “Invisible Hits” is especially well represented, but the anthology’s role is not to replace, but to highlight the absolute wealth of genius contained within those five years of striving.
Two more recordings were released posthumously: the “2 Halfs for the Price of One” EP in 1981, and some early sessions compiled on “Invisible Hits” in 1983. Their first EP was re-released in 1984 as “Wading Through a Ventilator”.
The Fat Angel Sings 