Hackney four-piece Zola Blood have a busy start to 2017 lined up, with the release of ‘Islands’, a cut from their upcoming debut album ‘Infinite Games’, as well as a January live date , lets Hope for more dates now the new year is here. ‘Islands’ is the follow-up to June’s “Heartbeat” continues the band’s trademark dark and brooding electronic pop, propelled by a repetitive arpeggio and staccato hand claps, before bringing in a huge synth line and soaring crescendo.
Duncan Toothill (George FitzGerald/Little Cub) provides some extra synth work and Boxed In’s Oli Bayston is on mixing duties. Explaining the idea behind the lyrics, singer Matt said, “A friend of mine was telling me about an evening she spent with her boyfriend of the time, getting rained on all night in a tent and said in passing that they felt like an island. That imagery just stuck in my head. The track is about drifting off with someone, forgetting who you are or where you’re supposed to be ”
There’s something great about a three-piece – think The Cocteau Twins, The Clean, Galaxie 500 – and the way that irreducible nucleus takes its strength from its limitations, making a virtue of its purity. So it is with London trio Flowers, returning with their second album “Everybody’s Dying To Meet You”. Over the course of ten intensely thrilling pop songs, singer Rachel Kenedy’s ethereal vocals and Sam Ayres textured guitar are backed by the powerful, metronomic beat of drummer Jordan Hockley.
For Everybody’s Dying to Meet You the band retreated to Bark Studios in Walthamstow to work with producer Brian O’Shaughnessey (The Clientele, Primal Scream, My Bloody Valentine), a return home for Sam, who was born and spent most of his life in the area. It proved to be the perfect fit for Flowers, the sessions enabling them to capture the essence of both their dynamic live sound and their distortion-laden home demos. Effortlessly blending pop songs with noise while leaving space for more stripped back elements, the recordings strike a perfect balance between the sweetness of Rachel’s voice and Sam’s abrasive guitar stylings. Their musical inspirations, from shoegaze, C86 and New Zealand’s Flying Nun label, are now evident.
Armed with a youthful intensity and determination that shows in their songs, Flowers have succeeded in harnessing their singular magic. Exuberant and electrifying, Everybody’s Dying To Meet You crackles with confidence.
Flowers are heading to a rock venue near you soon.
25 February – MANCHESTER – Fallow Café
26 February – COVENTRY – Kasbah
27 February – LIVERPOOL – Leaf Tea Shop
28 February – GLASGOW – Broadcast
02 March – NOTTINGHAM – Rough Trade
03 March – READING – Oakford Social Club
04 March – CARDIFF – The Moon Club
05 March – PENRYN – Stuart Stephens Memorial Hall
11 March – LONDON – Sebright Arms
09 April – LEICESTER – Leicester Indiepop Alldayer
On January. 1st, 1977, Joe Strummer took center stage at London’s burgeoning punk rock refuge, the Roxy. As if presciently ordaining himself the harbinger of what was in store for the pivotal year, “1977” was scrawled boldly across the frontman’s tattered white collared shirt as he and his fellow band members The Clash stormed through two back-to-back sets, officiating both the launch of the Roxy as a cultural touchstone and the explosion of the U.K. punk movement as a whole. The Roxy was a fashionable nightclub located at 41-43 Neal Street in London Covent Garden known for hosting the flowering British Punk Music scene in its infancy. The premises had formerly been used as a warehouse to serve the Covent Garden wholesale fruit and vegetable market.
After an unsuccessful run as an “alternative” nightclub called Chaguaramas, situated in the Covent Garden neighborhood of London, Andrew Czezowski, who was then manager of the Damned and the bands Chelsea, Generation X, took ownership of the building. Initially intended as a place for his client acts to rehearse, he along with partners BarryJones and Susan Carrington pawned a number of their personal possessions, furnished the venue, and stocked the bar, reviving the haunt as the Roxy, hoping to do for London’s punk scene what CBGB did for New York. By the time the club opened Chelsea had split with members Idol and James and Towe forming Generation X and it was they who played on closely followed by the Heartbreakers fresh off the aborted Anarchy Tour.
Don Letts was the resident DJ at the club and he was instrumental in encouraging punk rockers to embrace reggae.
The music scene within which the Clash had been slowly ingratiating themselves had begun years before the fabled New Year’s gig, but it had been trammeled by censorship, and poor luck. 1976’s Anarchy Tour, wherein the band, accompanied by Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers, supported the Sex Pistols on a string of ill-fated dates, the majority of booked appearances had been canceled due the pressure of local political interests or the volume of protest demonstrators. By the time the tour had dissolved in scandal on Christmas Eve, as retold in Nick Crossley’sNetworks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post-Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975-80, almost two-thirds of the 20-odd scheduled dates were cancelled before a note had been played.
The ill-repute earned by the failed Anarchy Tour mostly plagued the Sex Pistols, however, as they headlined the bill while the Clash occupied the most modest slot, below that of the Heartbreakers. With hardly a reputation visible enough to damage, they were best positioned to recover. Sex Pistols documentarian Julian Temple, whose forgotten footage of the Roxy evening was finally unearthed for the 2015 BBC Four documentary, The Clash: New Year’s Day ’77, told the network at the time of the release, “The Clash weren’t known at all outside a very small circle, but I thought they were an incredible band in the making.”
Armed with a sharpened assortment of politically militant punk anthems-in-waiting, most of which would eventually appear on their eponymous debut three months following the Roxy gala, Temple recorded subterranean Clash rehearsals, capturing now-familiar numbers in their embryonic form. Where the Sex Pistols expressed their subversive proclivities with sneering confrontation and a manic public image (and in a sense, establishing the “punker” archetype), the Clash honed more melodic and informed song structures and envisaged a more focused and clear-cut ideological vision.
But it wasn’t the Clash’s brand of more organized and presentable subversion that was originally slated to break in the newly rebranded Roxy. As Marcus Gray put it, in his book The Clash: Return of the Last Gang in Town, “The Clash agreed to headline the 1st January 1977 Roxy opening night, thus beginning the new year with a highly symbolic act.
It was the Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, in his characteristically mercurial fashion, who pulled his clients out of the gig at the last minute as a result of the fallout following the Pistols infamous TV appearance on the Today show. Still, the symbolism of the turn of events is not exaggerated. The memorably turbulent, not to mention capacity-defying, performance was the first of a series of overtures that would propel the Clash past the perpetually embattled Sex Pistols as the U.K. punk rock hierarchy.
The Roxy’s reign, on the other hand, would be tragically short-lived: it shuttered its doors in April 1978, little over a year after its grand opening. But not before cementing its legacy by cycling through the gambit of prominent English punk acts of the era, from street-punk squatters like Crass and Slaughter and the Dogs to art-school post-punks Wire and Siouxsie and the Banshees . Despite the brevity of the Roxy’s run, the bands it hosted and movement it helped launch proved bigger and more lastingly influential than the Clash and their contemporaries could have ever predicted.
London four-piece Crows thrive in the darkness. That much has been clear since their earliest days inciting chaos across Europe alongside the likes of METZ and Slaves, it’s in the seedy, sweaty underworld of basement shows that they’ve dug their roots. Dropping back in the shadows after every hurricane outing, to date the group have kept a relatively low profile, drip-feeding immeasurably accomplished teasers like last yearssingle “Pray” before disappearing into the black once more.
‘Unwelcome Light’, the band’s debut EP, is a record unlike others. Recorded live and designed to flow as one continuous piece, it bottles that wide-eyed stare of their live show, whacks a petrol-soaked rag in the neck and sets everything ablaze. A cloudy brew of gut-churning psych nestled up against the kind of serrated, clattering noise that’d make even a factory-worker blush, it’s pudding-proof that biding their time has paid dividends.
Below the player, we catch up with the band’s frontman James Cox, to talk everything from broken bones (he punched a curtain once, and it bit back) to the current crop of British breakthroughs Crows find themselves making fitting bedfellows with.
On UK quartet Novella’s sophomore album Change of State, the plasticity behind the meaning of the title was no fortuitous afterthought. Rather, it is very idea on which the album was built. Following the band’s debut album, Land, released in 2015, the band has toured, traveling from one country to the next, and they have watched their home country of Britain change dramatically in social and political terms. Over the course of ten tracks, Novella take the time and space necessary to let the physical and ideological implications behind a changing state run rampant through themes that linger as much in topical discussion as they do in perennial reflections of human experience.
Recorded over the period of a few months in the Victorian bedroom studio of James Hoare (Ultimate Painting, Veronica Falls) on an old 1960’s 8-track, this set up forced Novella to utilize an economy of sound on Change of State. They discovered that there’s beauty in simplicity and restriction as nothing could be gratuitously added or subtracted with the click of a mouse. It lent, what the band call a little Joe Meek magic to the process, and what could have been an added pressure instead gave way to instinct: “The best songs we wrote were written towards the end of the sessions, when we had too little time to think too much about them”
Reflective, the songs wash over you as they delve into topics weightier than they seem upon first blush: stand out track “Change of State” references freedom of thought and those who seek to restrict it. Brooding with tinges of psychedelia, “Thun” touches on birth and the freedom of movement, which is mirrored in its almost motorik thrust. With deftly deployed subtlety, the album revolves around themes of conspiracy theories, elections, sound mirrors and the disillusioned texts of Murakami, JG Ballard and Kurt Vonnegut. The album’s cover, a linocut made by singer and lead guitarist Sophy Hollington, was inspired by Paul Nash’s war paintings.
However, in what may in fact be the ultimate comment on our time, it is entirely possible to enjoy all the ethereal swathes of textures, gentle melodies and energetic bursts that Change of State has to offer without ruminating on any of the elements that inspired it. Change of State may be product of its time, but the music is, more than anything, timeless.
Listen to The Invisible’s new album, Patience, and what you will feel most strongly is the band’s sense of “joy and gratitude for being alive.” The experiences of Dave Okumu (guitar, vocals), Tom Herbert (bass & synthesizer) and Leo Taylor (drums) since the release of their last album, Rispah, both individually and collectively, mean that the group “have gained a deeper understanding of the value of life,” and a mission to communicate that to the listener. On Patience, they achieve these aims with a kind of effortless transcendence.
From the opening bars of the wonderful “So Well”, (featuring their friend and collaborator Jessie Ware), the feeling of joy pervades the record. Although the group have worked on this record with Anna Calvi, Rosie Lowe, Connan Mockasin and Sam Shepherd (Floating Points) as well as Ware, the sense of collective excitement and pleasure in music-making is what holds sway. It’s an album which hints towards the London soul of Ware, but combines it with the experimentation of the LA beat scene (where Dave Okumu went to write many of the songs) and the raw funk of D’Angelo.
Everyone of course knows just what wonderful musicians The Invisible are. They’ve played with just about everyone from Adele to St Vincent, Grace Jones, Britten Sinfonia, Jack DeJohnette, Roots Manuva, Jamie Woon, Hot Chip, Zongamin, Gramme, Yoko Ono, Beck and many others. In addition, Okumu has produced Jessie Ware, Anna Calvi, Paloma Faith, Kwabs, Lilly Wood, Eska and Rosie Lowe and was the recent Musical Director for the acclaimed Gil Scott-Heron Project: Pieces of a Man project as part of the Convergence Festival at London’s Roundhouse.
What’s easier to forget in between albums is just what beautiful, life-affirming music they make. Shortly before the release of Rispah (itself a heartfelt tribute to Okumu’s dead mother), Okumu was electrocuted while playing with the band onstage in Lagos, Nigeria. It’s possible that only the intervention of Herbert, who pulled his guitar off him, saved his life. This personal sense that the band have of deliverance has lead to Patience, not least their sense that they are “the luckiest men alive.”
Joyous without losing any of its intelligence or compositional rigour, the record takes its title from an unfashionable but profound idea — that, if we want to solve problems we have to be prepared to work and to wait rather than expecting instant results. It was an idea clarified when Dave found himself playing in Paris only a week after the gun attacks which ripped through the city on November 13th 2015. On his way home he read an interview with the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield in which he talked about a realisation that could only have come to him in space: “What started seeping into me on…seeing all the ancient scars, was the incredible temporal patience of the world.”
The Invisible’s first album was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize, their second was described as “incredibly uplifting and moving” (Vice), but it’s Patience (as you’d expect, if you understand that good things come to those who wait) that stands—so far!—as the uplifting pinnacle of their remarkable career.
Essentially the project of multi-instrumentalist and producer Demian Castellanos, The Oscillation was formed in London in 2006 with the release of the debut seven-inch and Rough Trade Records ‘single of the week’; ‘NewWay To Feel’ on Bee And Smoke records. Drawing inspiration from The Cure, Loop, Can, The Durutti Column, PIL, Spacemen 3, Popol Vuh and Chrome, they’ve since gone on to release three critically acclaimed studio albums; ‘Out Of Phase’ (2007), ‘Veils’ (2011) and ‘From Tomorrow’ (2013). Over the last few years The Oscillation have also appeared on several highly rated compilation albums and provided remixes for the likes of Simian Mobile Disco, Telepathe, Nick Nicely and most recently the Fat White Family.
The new long player ‘Monographic’ sees the multi-talented Castellanos, who sings, play bass, guitars and synths on the album, joined by Valentina Magaletti on drums in what is without doubt the band’s most accomplished and outstanding set of songs to date.
The Oscillation are set to embark on several dates in the UK and Europe with a band line up that sees DemianCastellanos (guitar/vocals) and Valentina Magaletti (drums) joined by Tom Relleen (bass) and Cathy Lucas (keys).
The Third Sound’s new album Gospels of Degeneration shows a shift in style for the group, having toned down the shimmery psychedelia in favour of something a little cleaner. That’s not to say this is a barren sounding album at all, it’s still hypnotically layered with country-kissed reverb, and retains those itching guitar riffs that will keep whispering through your mind for hours after listening.
Founded by Icelandic frontman, Hakon Aðalsteinsson – an ex-member of Singapore Sling who are often hailed as founding members of the new psych sound – The Third Sound came into being in Rome in 2010 and have since relocated to Berlin. Since forming, The Third Sound have enjoyed the support of Anton Newcombe, who released their self-titled first album, on his label A Recordings, and chose the group to support his band The Brian Jonestown Massacre on tour in Europe. He also provided the studio for recording their second album The Third Sound of Destruction and Creation which was released on Fuzz Club in 2013. Most recently they’ve shared members with Anton Newcombe and Tess Parks’ band, which led to Parks’ appearance on the single “You Are Not Here” from this new album. What began as somewhat of a solo project by Aðalsteinsson, the new album sees The Third Sound stretching its definition with deeper levels of collaboration between band members and the influence of a new character in its story, the city of Berlin.
The group’s sound has been described as “ebbing between light and dark, dream and reality, pop and experimentalism” and “ranging from hypnotic soundscapes to tweaked out and fuzzed up numbers.” In a recent premiere on Clash Music they were described as “lynchpins of the psychedelic underground.”
Saint Agnes as a band are a a stomping, snarling piece of psych rock, there’s an electricty running through the band, an indefinable chemistry which draws on the spirt of Jim Morrison’. The excitement is building, speculation as to what the title means grows and Jon is deciding which cowboy shirt to wear. The band are playing their last headline show of the year on December 8th at the Oslo in Hackney, London.
You can grab a copy of our new single on limited edition vinyl. Featuring a-side “Merry Mother of God Go Round” and an exclusive b-side cover of Nine Inch Nails’ We’re In This Together Now.
Saint Agnes:
Kitty Arabella Austen – Vocals, guitar, keys, percussion
Jon Tufnell – Vocals, guitar, harmonica
Ben Chernett – Bass and baritone guitar
Andy Head – Drums and percussion
Merry Mother of God Go Round recorded at Soup Studios, London
Engineered by Dave Holmes
Shame, five 19-year-old’s building their reputation as one of the best new live bands in London, are already cemented following tours with The Garden and Fat White Family and shows with The Fall, King Gizzard before heading off to Pitchfork Paris – not bad considering they hadn’t even released a single.
‘The Lick/ Gold Hole’, then, is their much anticipated official debut, a clattering one-two knockout of a double A-Side bursting at the seams with punk energy, but with the patter of the Streets, the spittle of Mark E. Smith.
Produced by Local Hero (Dan Foat and Nathan Boddy), ‘Gold Hole’ will not join up with the already be familiar ‘The Lick’, as Shame prepare their assualt on your exasperated ears.
Gold Hole taken from ‘The Lick’ / ‘Gold Hole’ AA single out 7th December on Fnord.
The Fat Angel Sings 