Miss World is the project of London based artist Natalie Chahal (also half of fellow PNKSLM signees ShitGirlfriend alongside Laura-Mary Carter). After self-releasing the debut single “Buy Me Dinner” earlier this year, Punk Slime Recordings are proud to announce that Miss World has officially joined the PNKSLM family and that her debut EP Waist Management is set to arrive on October 13th. Four tracks of extremely catchy garage pop that will instantly make you fall in love, combining lo-fi charms with Natalie’s ear for a melody it’s an introduction that will leave you wanting more. Stay tuned for more music from Miss World coming soon…
Miss World is set to make its live debut at PNKSLM’s annual Slime Ball weekender at The Old Blue Last in London on September 29th, playing alongside label mates HOLY, Holiday Ghosts, Beachtape and Lucern Raze.
Featuring original Fat White Family drummer Dan Lyons and organ player Chris OC from Psych Fest 2017 alumni Meatraffle, the group are set to release highly anticipated debut LP Miniature World on November 10th.
Firm BBC 6 Music favourites, with current single Where Is My Owner winning the support of Steve Lamacq, Phobophobes currently share a practice space with a score of the UK’s best bands, kindred spirits Fat White Family, Shame and Goat Girl.
After guitarist George Bedford Russell tragically passed away last year, the group following a period of reflection vowed to carry on, with Miniature World featuring his guitar parts on every track and his lyrics on single Human Baby, which features an appearance by author Will Self.
Part recorded at Abbey Road Studios with Beatles/Pink Floyd/David Bowie associate Ken Scott and mixed by Youth (The Verve, Shack, The Jesus and Mary Chain), the disc brings sleazy glam riffs, garage rock firepower and psychedelic invention together in an intoxicating mixture best sampled live and up close.
Barely out of their teens, the five-piece are renowned as one of the UKs most exciting new groups with Loud and Quiet praising them as ‘One of the most watched and crucially most talked about live bands in London’.
Updating the politically conscious protest music of the Thatcher era to the modern day, the band marked the General Election with satirical Theresa May ode Visa Vulture as a free download. A taster for their as yet untitled debut album set for release later this year, the group recently signed to powerhouse US indie label Dead Oceans (Slowdive, A Place To Bury Strangers).
With a full programme of Summer festivals including an invitation from Billy Bragg to play the Leftfield Stage at Glastonbury, Shame’s reputation as an essential live act continues to grow.
Gold Hole taken from ‘The Lick’ / ‘Gold Hole’ AA single out on Fnord.
The Left Outsides are: Mark Nicholas and Alison Cotton, a husband and wife duo based in London, England whose atmospheric, hypnotic songs echo Nico’s icy European folk, pastoral psychedelia and chilly English fields at dawn. ‘There Is A Place’ takes its inspiration from the forest, with the LP made up of new compositions as well as reworked recordings the band wrote and performed for Gus Alvarez’s film, Stand & Deliver. “In a woodland clearing lies the body of a young woman. A sharp intake of breath – she is alive. What happened last night? Into the woods she searches for answers”…
This album successfully marries the bleary narcotic dream-pop ethic of Grouper and Beach House (check out the truly stunning ‘One Step At A Time’) with the more familiar drone-folk / pastoral excursions, most of which (‘Time Makes A Fool Of Us All’, ‘The Creeping Fog’) play out like some weird Anglo-Gothic film soundtrack, but are kept in balance by a gorgeous and inspired reading of Jack Frost’s ‘Civil War Lament’.
“The brooding instrumental ‘Cry of the Hunter’ eases the listener in on a dramatic note with mournful expressions of strings, guitar, and wordless vocalizing punctuated by piano chords, the piece resembling at times a meditative King Crimson.
Built around a blunt, dead-simple guitar line, “Baby Luv” hits a different emotional note. She played solo, and her voice cracked a few times; the new studio version, adds some sheen, with quiet percussion and subtle synths, but the take is just as raw. There’s not much in the way of a melody or beat, allowing Yanya’s voice to be the focus, strained as she continually repeats “Do you like pain?” and “call me sometime” on the chorus. While the peculiar tunefulness of her timber and the bounce of her delivery remains, she explains that the song is about “suppressing your feelings and not being able to feel the normal things like joy and pain.”
Baby Luv by Nilüfer Yanya Out now via Blue Flowers/ATO Records.
London trio Fever Dream are releasing their new album ‘Squid’ this Friday (29th September) via AC30, and we’ve got the first play of the latest of its tracks titled ‘Heads Will Roll’ .
‘Heads Will Roll’ is a swirling storm of a track, with barely contained reverb mixing with washed out vocals. Straddling the line between shoegaze and grunge, it’s an intoxicating blend.
The band are set to play an album launch show at the MOTH Club in London this Friday (29th September) to celebrate the release of ‘Squid’.
Proper Ornaments is the project of James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls) and Max Oscarnold (Toy, Pink Flames). The band germinated slowly from their friendship, which began when Max distracted James from shop-keeping, as his then girlfriend attempted to steal shoes. Max was freshly arrived in London from Buenos Aires; helped out by Andrew Loog Oldham as it happens, to escape a drug-lead implosion of a previous band and a family member’s plan to have him sectioned.
The chance meeting blossomed into an epicurean riot of luminous highs and cold, dismal crashes that conversely produced music that was very well ordered and faintly angelic. It was so much deeper and more refined, serious, simple and affecting than anything suggested by the bare facts – a guitar band in East London, ten years into the infancy of a millennium that had so far freighted those five words with plenty of horrendous mental associations.
They released a single on San Francisco’s Make a Mess and an early E.P. with London’s No Pain in Pop in 2011 – then a collection, “Waiting for the Summer” (Lo Recordings) in 2013, which bore the influence of past UK guitar music: The Beatles, Felt, Durutti Column, Television Personalities, Teenage Fanclub – framed by West Coast psychedelia and sunshine pop. Tape recorded and unpretentious in all sorts of ways, it seemed bound to slide around the sides of a snow globe-like mainstream, into that ambivalent fate of being a bands’ band: Real Estate, Woods, Crystal Stilts, and Metronomy solicited them for support slots.
Debut LP “Wooden Head” came out in July 2014 and was heard more widely. Perfecting the unique slant of their previous work and polishing it, the album crackled with hints of something majestic behind what could at first be heard, a secret sotto voce world inside. It was as quietly sly and mercurial as it was driving and accessible, and its masterly crafted simplicity drew extensive critical praise. The sweetness of the record, unless you took to a certain track with the lyrics, in fact belied their circumstances. They were living in Whitechapel on slender means and debauched psyches, crawling through the remains of homelessness, unemployment and divorce. Unpredictable, violent acquaintances that were occasionally made band members orbited and crashed. The album was made in a whirlwind of chair-breaking, knife-drawing chaos.
James and Max started out writing the follow-up in January 2015. On “Foxhole” they’ve sliced away a whole stratum of their sound, removing some distortion and lowering the frequency of plectrum strokes to allow more nuanced, piano-led ideas to emerge. The title isn’t a reference to Television’s jaunty proto-punk record but seems to be more of a dark, protective interior, a head space sketched out on “Jeremy’s Song.” While their particularly recognisable production style (a bright, frozen counterpoint to the airless mixes one encounters more often) remains, three things stand out as likely reasons for the shift in mood. By the time they got around to recording again in James” bedroom in Finsbury Park that Summer, the instability around the recording of “Wooden Head” (and the five years before) had slid into a deep and seething acrimony. Second, they both bought pianos. Third, when the band, with Daniel Nellis and Bobby Syme joining on bass and drums went to record at Tin Room in Hackney in June, the pinch wheel on the 8 track machine was broken and somehow no one noticed. All but one recording, “Frozen Stare,” was hopelessly warped, so they went and did it all again from scratch back at James“.
“We ended up doing the whole thing there as the atmosphere suited the direction of the foxhole and we were more comfortable working on it in our own time,” says James, “We wanted to move in a slightly different direction from “Wooden Head,” away from the distorted guitars and into a more peaceful area.”
The mechanical blow out that had wasted weeks of their time and money coincided with a thaw in their friendship, and by the time they were re-recording they were both being treated conspicuously gentler by life.
“That’s why the record has a laid back, conversational, not imposing or anxious feel in my opinion,” Max says about their rapprochement, “There’s also the technical limitation of doing it on an 8 track which gives the songs a more sparse sound.”
Themes of their previous work have been picked up again and honed. The sense of being overlooked and isolated, inevitable change and drift particularly set in terms of age, predominates. Undercutting the feelings of forward movement are ones of a gnawing permanent stasis and confusion wrought by memory. It’s a sombre but also more direct and open effort, from its first number “Back Pages” (“See me on the back page/of last year’s modern age”) onwards.
If “Always There” was the most melodically fluid but dimly lit point of the first record, there are another half album of songs here at least that are as strikingly gorgeous and unsettling. “Memories,” “Just a Dream,” “Frozen Stare” and “When We Were Young” are in this mould, as is the icy, slightly devastated goodbye that closes the record “The Devils,” filled out with piano reminiscent of Big Star’s “Third” or Lou Reed’s “Berlin” and cracked double bass. What was in evidence in two of their earliest songs – “You Still” and “Are You Going Blind?” – an understated, poetic play of moral sensitivity against a callous distance, of warmth and hostility, has reached its most sustained expression yet and gives their pop moments of a haunted love song quality along the lines of Del Shannon, Lesley Gore or Roy Orbison.
“Bridge by a Tunnel” and “When You Wake,” on the other hand, share in the breezily abstracted character of 2014 single “Magazine,” the later laying a sardonic (non)apology – “I know you know, things could’ve been different/but they’e not” over careful daubs of slide guitar. “Cremated” is also guitar-lead, and reaches an early apogee of morbid oblivion baiting, while “1969” is a really perfectly recorded grand sweep of sound that recalls Serge Gainsbourg and “Harvest”-era Neil Young.
Proper Ornaments hold the attraction of seeming to not try very hard at all and achieve something outstanding nonetheless. Quite apart from our attachment to laziness and chance which make this seductive, textures of dappled drums, softened-out guitars and vocal harmonies that slide along as effortlessly as this, any evidence of conscious construction spirited away, are in themselves totally ecstatic to listen to.
New London three-piece Oh800 write songs about internal freak-outs, feeling like a kid in your 30’s and getting ripped off. Oh800 have previous. The band feature former members of The Duke Spirit, Oh Ruin and MemoryMaze, each a musician fanatic in their own right.
Bonding over a shared love of decayed early 80s New York underground – think CBGBs, ESG, 99 Records – the group bond these with a defiant attitude. The results are pretty intriguing. Oh800 will release their debut album on Infinite Jest later this year, with new single ‘Character Building’ already out there.
It’s a torn and tattered offering, with the band grabbing those influences and sluicing it through an acerbic, deeply British viewpoint.
South London upstarts Shame have shared a brand new single. Titled ‘Concrete’, frontman Charlie Steen explains the track as: about someone who’s trapped in a relationship and they’re being pummelled into surrender.
The video and song is called “Concrete.” Musically, its passionate, stuttered guitar and call-and-response reminds me of another U.K. band – Gang of Four from 40 years ago. But Shame’s music feels vital, with 19-year-old Steen and bassist Josh Finerty screaming at each other, revealing the inner dialog of the song’s main character.
Charlie Steen said that “Concrete” is sung from the perspective of a lounger, an observer. “It’s a flâneur’s perspective on the psychological and emotionally draining effects of a doomed relationship – a moment where all of the worries and thoughts one might feel within this entrapment are isolated and embraced – a moment where the futility of reasoning is accepted.”
The video breaks down the wall between fiction and reality as Charlie Steen leaps off of a treadmill to join SeanCoyle-Smith and Eddie Green on guitars, Charlie Forbes on drums and Josh Finerty on bass.
London singer-songwriter-producer Wildes new track ‘Ghost’. The track finds Wildes pouring her heart out and it’s basically pretty epic, haunting and classy. ‘Ghost’ is Wildes’ third release following the singles ‘Bare‘ and ‘Illuminate‘ and is lifted from her forthcoming debut EP that’s due on her very own label Hometown Records – so that’s something to look forward to it.
Initially written and recorded in London town, ‘Ghost’ was finished up in Yorkshire in an isolated studio slash Lodge by the sea, which probably goes some way to explaining the mood on the finished song. Here’s what Wildes had to say about the track:
It’s a song about the effects a past lover has on our future selves. Their words haunt us, and we long for their memories to remain after they’ve gone. Even the smallest moment with them can shape who we become.
Wildes will be hitting the road in October opening shows for indie darling Isaac Gracie. Catch her as Support October 10th Venue 2 @ Hare & Hounds (Birmingham, UK) *
The Fat Angel Sings 