Nov 29 2006
Next wednesday Another Form of Relief will be holding it’s first ever promoted gig at the Tunbridge Wells Forum. I may be a tad biased and all, but it’s fantastic line-up includes music from It Hugs Back, 4 or 5 Magicians, Beeches and The Rox. All great bands with incredibly bright futures who will be playing for your auditory pleasure in exchange for a mere five of your English pounds.
Full details are available on our Live Events page.
Nov 29 2006
How many bands do you think we’ll get over the next few years who sound just like the Arctic Monkeys? Granted there were hundreds of bands who sounded like the Arctic Monkeys before the Arctic Monkeys, but they made the sound considerably more popular than it was, inexplicable liking of The Libertines aside. Now, I don’t know exactly how long Watford’s National Heroes have been doing their thing, so it may well be that they were doing this long before the Arctic Monkeys ever hit the scene. It’s probably only now that people will pay much attention to them though.
Now, I don’t mean to write National Heroes off as just another soundalike band. If that were the case, I probably wouldn’t be writing about them here in the first place. I may as well get those similarities out of the way first though. The songs are undeniably British, all talk of London, strong accents that swagger through each song and some guitar work that ends up somewhere just this side of reckless. There are difference here though, probably thanks to their wide range of influences. You’ll hear elements of classic rock bands like The Jam and The Clash in these songs alongside the ska tinged insanity of bands like Madness. Simply short, catchy, and above all fun, songs from a band that could have a very bright future.
MP3 National Heroes - Riot Vans / CS Cans (expired)
MP3 National Heroes - Boys of Britain (expired)
MP3 National Heroes - Alphabet Circus (expired)
MP3 National Heroes - Mary Rose (expired)
Nov 26 2006
One of the more unfortunate things about mainly getting your music from the internet is that the element of surprise disappears. It’s not often that I’ll download or play a band on Myspace entirely randomly. It’s usually thanks to a recommendation or after hearing a band on another blog or something of that nature. This usually leads to having some rough idea of what to expect before you even listen to the first song. Occasionally there may be a surprise, but it’s not very often. You certainly don’t get the same feeling as hearing a song on the radio and then trying to track down exactly what it is. The one place where it does still seem possible to find something new unexpectedly is at gigs.
We travelled up to London to see Beeches play at the Dublin Castle last week (which I’ll write about in itself soon enough), where they were playing with three other bands that I had never heard of. While things didn’t get off to a great start with the really quite woeful Red! Nice Guy?. Things picked up considerably with Johnny Foreigner though, a fantastic pop punk band from Birmingham with great back and forth male/female vocals. I’d love to write about them in more detail, but the mp3s on their Myspace are pretty awful quality wise, but they are certainly ones to watch for the future.
The headline act though were a band called The Bright Lights. Unfortunately, thanks to early morning working the next day, we had to leave part of the way through their set. In the time I did get to hear them though, I was really impressed by their performance. They opened with the driven ‘Closed On Monday’, which demonstrates the power behind singer Katie’s voice perfectly. There’s nothing all that bold in any of these songs, but the catchy style and delivery should win over anyone not entirely jaded.
MP3 The Bright Lights - Closed On Monday (expired)
MP3 The Bright Lights - Rise And The Fall (expired)
MP3 The Bright Lights - Missing Out (expired)
The Bright Lights: Myspace
Nov 24 2006
Did you know that this is post 199 on this blog? No? Well it is you know. Not that that is particularly exciting given my slowdown over recent weeks. It also means that there won’t be anything special for post 200. Not because I can’t be bothered (well, a little of that), but mostly because there’s a lot of fun list type posts coming in December. All of which will be very exciting and have lots of fantastic music contained within them. Hell, there might even be an advent type thing through the month to celebrate the onset of Winterval. Maybe.
MP3 Brakes - Jackson (expired) (Johnny Cash)
A quick guide to how I can be musically ignorant: When I first got hold of the Brakes album, I had no idea that this was a cover. It had a vaguely familiar sound, but that was about it. This story actually gets worse thanks to way I discovered that it was. No, I didn’t suddenly come across the original version of it or even have some nice, musically minded person inform me of the fact. No, I discovered the fact as I was watching ‘Walk The Line’. Which is pretty awful. Both film and reputation wise. As such, I have no idea what the original version sounds like, only how it sounds via Joeaqueeniahiem Pheonix and Reese Witherspoon. Which wasn’t all that different to the version here. The important part is that this Brakes one is very good. Yay Brakes. Even if they do look scarily like Coldplay in that picture.
MP3 Iron & Wine - Such Great Heights (expired) (The Postal Service)
Presenting part 17 of our 435 part series of ‘Such Great Heights’ covers, we have Sam Beam’s attempt at it. You’ll never guess what he does with it either. He slows it down and makes it all acoustic. I bet you didn’t see that one coming, did you? Mocking aside, it’s a fantastic version of an already fantastic song. Much as I love all of these covers that keep surfacing, none of them seem to hold a candle to the original. This one comes across as far more laconic and mournful, probably thanks to it being far slower, allowing the lyrics to smack you round the face far more strongly than the original. I think it was also used to advertise M&Ms. That isn’t so cool, but it’s a fun fact.
MP3 Eric Metronome - Salute My Shorts! (expired) (Rilo Kiley)
Eric Metronome is a guy who just seems to love doing covers. He’s recorded a truckload of Elliott Smith ones, and is currently embarking on a project that sees him covering a different song every week for a year. This includes covers of The Beatles right up to more contemporary fare like Bright Eyes and Sufjan Stevens. This also includes a wonderful little cover of Rilo Kiley’s ‘Salute My Shorts!’. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a lovely, reflective Blake song that has a very silly title. There’s a long story behind that title, but it comes from the song not having an actual name on the album and fans giving it this absurd thing for a reason I forget. Either way, it’s a great song, and Metronome covers it nicely without being too daring with it. It’s a safe cover, but one that his voice seems to suit perfectly. Which isn’t surprising given he covers Elliott Smith, and Blake Sennett sounds always sounds like he’s auditioning for an Elliott Smith tribute band. Not that that’s a bad thing, I’m just saying.
Nov 22 2006
Note: Must get through piece without mentioning ‘Garden State’.
I expect the majority of you reading this will already have this if you have a little interest in The Shins, along with the entire album. While the leak of ‘Wincing The Night Away’ was just about the worst kept musical secret of 2006, it’s nice to actually be able to write about and share one of the songs without the threat of a lawsuit. If you’re one of the nice, law abiding folks who hasn’t heard the album yet, here’s your very first taste of it.
‘Phantom Limb’ is the first single to be released from ‘Wincing’, and it’s pretty good. I’m going to use a qualifer like “pretty” because I still haven’t made up my mind on it, or ‘Wincing’ as a whole. It’s certainly a good song, all typically beautiful imagery and a story of forbidden love. It’s all very polished too, which is where the problem comes from. Now don’t get me wrong, I love a polished record to the point I prefer ‘Chutes Too Narrow’ over ‘Oh, Inverted World’ by a large margin. It’s just that this feels a little overdone. It’s kind of the same feeling I get listening to Death Cab’s ‘Plans’. It’s still great music, but it lacks the original feel that the earlier material gave out. Now you could turn round and argue that this is just the developing sound of a band, and it would be a perfectly valid argument. I don’t doubt that this will be The Shins’ biggest success to date, and while it may alienate a few of the original fans, I’m sure that the Garden Staters will lap it up.
Oh, bugger.
‘Wincing The Night Away’ will be released via Sub Pop Records on January 23.
Nov 19 2006
The Westfield Mining Disaster formed in early 2006 and are from that lovely place called Bristol down in the south west. They are fronted by Paul Towler, who used to play guitar for a rather important C86 band called The Haywains. This is the part where I discover how ignorant I still am of the C86 scene as I had never heard of them before, despite my recent in-roads into the genre. Still, after I listened to the Westfield CD, I went and found some Haywains material, and it’s really very good.
Westfield play simple guitar pop songs that float nicely in and out of alt-country territory. I’ve complained before about the lack of UK bands dabbling in this genre, so it’s always nice to find some willing to give it a shot. If I didn’t know better, I’d find it very hard to believe that this is a band that have only been performing together for three months. Their songs give out the sound of a band that has been perfecting it’s craft for years, not for mere months. This is most likely down to the band members’ previous experience from various other bands, but it’s still very impressive nonetheless.
MP3 The Westfield Mining Disaster - Not Everybody Gets To Be A Rolling Stone (expired)
The Westfield Mining Disaster: Myspace
Nov 15 2006
I think when I come to look back on music in the future, it’s going to be the 1990s that I’m going to get most nostalgic about. Hell, I’m getting nostalgic about that era now already, so I can only assume that’s a feeling that’s going to get stronger with age. The strange thing is that I never really listened to music much in the 90s. My very first album I purchased on CD (’Feeling Strangely Fine’ by Semisonic) only dates back to 1998. I guess that’s when I started playing attention to ‘alternative’, but only in the “stuff that’s played on the radio” sense. It was another three or four years before I started seriously appreciating what was out in the years.
Five years on, and it seems like all of my absolute favourite albums date from somewhere in the mid-90s. Weezer’s ‘Pinkerton’, Pavement’s ‘Slanted & Enchanted’, Ben Folds Five’s ‘Whatever And Ever Amen’ and Belle & Sebastian’s ‘Tigermilk’ all come from that period. Even Counting Crows and Barenaked Ladies, no matter how close to the middle of the road they have drifted now, were putting out some fantastic material back then that I still love now. None of this is to dismiss ‘current’ music. I love a hell of a lot of it (this blog would be pretty hard if I didn’t), but the majority of albums that I’ve continued to play regularly beyond the first month all seem to date from before 2000. I don’t know why this is, only that it is.
Of course, by now I assume that I’ve found pretty much everything important from the past. Logically this should certainly be the case. I like and know my musical tastes on the most part, surely I would have found the relevant bands that fit that criteria from the past ten years. Every so often though, this turns out to be massively wrong and I discover a band I really should have known about earlier. All of which brings us to Tullycraft, a band I’ve only actually known for about a month now but should have known for years.
Tullycraft formed in 1995 and still exist today. In between they have experienced lineup changes and have released four albums. This is about all you need to know in a biographical sense. Musically they are right into the middle of the lovely genre that is twee pop (see ‘Twee’ with it’s chorus line of “you can keep the punk rock, ska, rap, beats / Fuck me, I’m twee”). It’s all so disarmingly sweet that you’re either going to adore this material or develop the urge to throw up upon hearing it, but hopefully it’ll be the former. Jangly guitars, pop culture references and brutally honest yet witty lyrics. How did I live under such a big rock that I had no idea these guys existed for so long?
MP3 Tullycraft - Twee (expired)
MP3 Tullycraft - Pop Songs Your New Boyfriend Is Too Stupid To Know About
MP3 Tullycraft - Josie
MP3 Tullycraft - 8 Great Ways
Tullycraft kindly make a truckload of further mp3s available on the mp3 page of their website. If anyone has any further suggestions for important indie twee pop type bands from this kind of era that I might be missing, leave a comment to let me know about them.
Nov 12 2006
Beeches are a London four-piece who have gone through a number of changes to get where they are. The name of the band has changed, and members have come and gone, but that hasn’t stopped the band putting out some fantastic music in their current form. While it may be easy to dismiss them as ‘yet another London rock band’, it would be somewhat foolish to do so. While some of the obvious influences are here, there’s also a healthy dose of Americana thrown in.
The stories these songs tell sometimes border just the other side of surreal, the vocal delivery often has a laconic feel not heard since the heyday of Pavement and yet somehow the songs still manage to rock pretty hard. Particularly impressive is ‘Make Your Own Luck’ where the song regularly jumps between flat out rock and more gentle interludes without either side feeling out of place. Compare this to the lazy drawl, playing and lyrics (”So I thought, same old journey once again / I am arriving whenever I get there”) of ‘Arriving Whenever’, and you’ve got a band that can effortlessly drift between a number of different sounds.
MP3 Beeches - Arriving Whenever
MP3 Beeches - Boat 97
MP3 Beeches - Swift Goodbyes
MP3 Beeches - Make Your Own Luck
All songs taken from Beeches’ 2005 album ‘Then We’re Agreed’. You can download the entire album, as well as some more songs, from their website for free. Beeches will be playing at Another Form of Relief’s live music showcase on December 6 in Tunbridge Wells. Further details here.
Nov 07 2006
The usual disclaimer: This is a political post, not a musical one. Politically apathetic people (aka the ignorant) need read no further.
Tony Blair in yesterday’s Telegraph:
The case for ID cards is a case not about liberty but about the modern world. .. I know this will outrage some people but, in a world in which we daily provide information to a whole host of companies and organisations and willingly carry a variety of cards to identify us, I don’t think the civil liberties argument carries much weight.
I’ve written about the threat the UK faces from ID cards in the past, but Blair’s commentary in yesterday’s Telegraph has made me far more afraid than I was previously. For Blair to argue that civil liberties are essentially a thing of the past that have no importance in the modern world just demonstrates how far removed from reality this man has become. There are a hundred other reasons why ID cards are a bad idea, but civil liberties are the most pressing. For a political leader to simply dismiss the concerns of anyone who believes they are a threat is at the very least patronising and at worst downright offensive.
“We” may also provide daily information to companies, but all of that is voluntary. I have never held a store loyalty card in my life, nor would I, because I’m concerned about the amount of data that can be collected on them. I’m not bothered about them though because of the key word: voluntary. I’m not forced to have a Tesco card to shop at Tesco. My wallet consists of two bank cards, a driving licence, a cinema pass and a card with my signature that allows me to access my postbox. None of these cards contain a fingerprint or iris scan. None of these cards are linked to giant cross-departmental databases where hundreds of different groups can access my information. The line of thinking that because someone gives their details to Tesco that the National Identity Register must be okay is almost too ridiculous for words.
Still, what more should we expect from this government?
This is the government that has outlawed protest anywhere within half a mile of Parliament.
This is the government that has banned protests anywhere near it’s party conference.
This is the government that will ban smoking in all public places from next year, including bus stops and railway station platforms.
This is the government that wants to ban “violent internet pornography” (for which it offers no definition), even though there is no logical case for it.
This is the government that has banned fox hunting, even though it had to use a loophole in Parliamentary law to do so.
This is the government that attempted to outlaw the “inciting of religious hatred”, again with offer any definition of what this would entail.
This is the government that has abolished free speech by introducing law that prohibits the “glorification” of terrorism, while once again offering no definition of what this means.
This is the government that wanted to detain people for up to 90 days without charge, and then accepted 28 days as a “comprimise” when it was rejected in Parliament.
This is the government that has introduced “control orders”, a way of sidestepping human rights legislation to allow the restrictions of people who have been charged with no crime.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security. - Benjamin Franklin
It’s a pretty pathetic situation when I have to look to the Conservatives to defend my civil liberties.
Yes, I’ll climb down off of my high horse for now. I’m going to keep coming back to this for as long as the threat of this ID cards legislation hangs over our heads though. It’s too important not to. But I’ll get to the music for a while again now. Here’s an (apt) mp3:
Nov 06 2006
I saw Royal Treatment Plant back in September when they were one of the supports for Los Campesinos! at their London show at Water Rats. If you had told me at the time that I would be writing about them a couple of months down the line, I probably would have laughed at you. To say my initial reaction to them wasn’t good would be something of an understatement. I pretty much decided that I hated them within the first song of their set. That may seem like a harsh thing to do, but for some reason they just didn’t click with me whatsoever. They gave an air of ‘trying way too hard’ when it came to their rocking, and their frontwoman came across as a poor man’s Madison Kellner. Feel free to Google that, I’ll still be here when you get back.
Anyway, this led to a walking out on their set after a couple of songs. Part of this was because we so desperately needed air. Believe me, Water Rats is not a fun venue to be in on a hot day when it’s absolutely packed out. All of this would have led to me not given RTP any further thought. Of course things never quite work out like that, and a few days later I received their new single, ‘Carry Me’ in the post with a nice little note. Without the note I probably wouldn’t have bothered playing it, but I’m a sucker for when bands try the personal touch so I actually gave it a couple of plays. An act which led to a somewhat shocked feeling when I found myself really enjoying it.
I’m not sure there’s a moral to this story or anything. If there is, it’s probably to not judge bands entirely based on two songs at one show. Below you’ll find two songs from their demo that was recorded earlier on during the year. Both songs are really good, and I wish I’d been able to catch them at the show. They are both full of driving guitars and some fantastic passive-agressive vocals sung with an urgency that doesn’t often seem to crop up from female fronted British bands.
MP3 Royal Treatment Plant - You Don’t Need Me
MP3 Royal Treatment Plant - Trained
I’d love to be able to post material from the aforementioned ‘Carry Me’ single here, but I know that bands need to make money somehow. As such, it comes highly recommended. I can’t say enough good things about b-side ‘Playing Dumb’, which is certainly amongst my favourite songs of the year. Man, I’ve been saying that a lot lately, haven’t I? Anyway, you can purchase it for the bargaintastic price of £3.99 from our brand new Store section. Wow, wasn’t that subtle?
