Music to drink tea by
Archive for June, 2011
Milky Wimpshake – Cherry Pop
07 months ago
in Videos
“Milky Wimpshake join the MTV generation!!! Fuckin sellouts!” – Pete Dale
When it comes to certain bands, there are just some things that you don’t expect from them. If you’d told me a while ago that I’d be posting a somewhat amusing Milky Wimpshake music video on here, I’d have found the idea quite preposterous. Yet here we are. After nearly two decades of churning out songs and becoming legends within the indiepop scene, they’ve finally got around to making a video. And very good fun it is too, even with it’s wanton destruction of cherry bakewells.
Cherry Pop is taken from My Funny Social Crime, which is available now via Fortuna POP! The band will also be headlining the indoor stage at Indietracks on July 30.
Playlist from Moogie Wonderland 24 June
07 months ago
in Kent Scene
Last night was our second DJing experience, and it was rather a contrast to the first time around. It was all rather last minute, meaning I didn’t have five weeks to fret about song choices. It was in a coffee shop instead of a bar with a dance floor, and given the rain and other factors, there wasn’t exactly a big turnout. Didn’t matter though as I still ended up enjoying myself immensely. Here’s what I played:
1. Herman Düne – Tell Me Something I Don’t Know
2. Belle & Sebastian – Your Cover’s Blown
3. The Hidden Cameras – The Mild Mannered Army
4. Tigercats – Banned at the Troxy
5. Butcher Boy – Carve a Pattern
6. Art Brut – Lost Weekend
7. Shrag – Hopelessly Wasted
8. Comet Gain – You Can Hide Your Love Forever
9. Heavenly – C Is The Heavenly Option
10. God Help the Girl – Perfection As A Hipster
11. Milky Wimpshake – True Love/Youth
12. Pants Yell! – Your Feelings Don’t Show
13. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – My Terrible Friend
14. Cats on Fire – Higher Grounds
15. The Wave Pictures – I Love You Like A Madman
16. Moustache of Insanity – Dinner Party
17. Allo Darlin’ – Let’s Go Swimming
18. Pocketbooks – Cross the Line
Raymond & Maria – No One Notices Your Brand New T-Shirt
0There’s several reasons to be wary about Raymond & Maria. Usually if I receive a press release about a platinum-selling, number one record, I’ll tend to recoil in horror. Granted this is in their native land of Sweden, but it still suggests music perhaps a little too mainstream for an apparent snob such as myself. I also don’t really like remakes, so recording your Swedish songs into English seems a little silly to me, even if I understand the commercial reasons behind doing so. Then again, I’ve never heard Raymond & Maria in their Swedish form, so I have no point of comparison here.
So taken on it’s own merits, No One Notices Your Brand New T-Shirt is absolutely fine. In fact, it sounds like a hundred other indiepop bands that haven’t had the level of success that Raymond & Maria seem to have had. It’s upbeat, it’s handclap happy, and of course has the inevitable slightly sweet but also gently accented vocals. It’s all rather lightweight and straightforward, but then it doesn’t seem to be aspiring to be anything more than what it is, and that’s certainly no bad thing.
The debut English language album from Raymond & Maria, Jobs Where They Don’t Know Our Names, is currently being shopped around for a label. So you’ll probably be waiting a while to actually hear it.
Guest post: My Top 5 Records That I’d Recommend To No One
17 months ago
in Guest posts, Videos
Audio Antihero label supremo Jamie takes us through five albums he owns that he simply couldn’t justify to anyone else…
All us real people have record collections. In these collections we have classics and then we have those other records. Not ‘guilty pleasures’ but records we can’t explain or justify – ones you wouldn’t play on the office stereo. Records that your friends just wouldn’t understand…
My Top 5 Records That I’d Recommend To No One
Ciccone Youth – The Whitey Album (Blast First Records, 1988)
Ciccone Youth were Sonic Youth and Mike Watt (Minutemen) plus a bit of Greg Ginn (Black Flag) and J.Mascis (Dinosaur Jr). Why wouldn’t you recommend that muscle to everyone? Because it’s frickin incomprehensible!
This album offers a couple of tracks of silence, some poetry, some ‘skits’ (‘Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!”), a few instrumentals, a rap/yelp from Thurston Moore and three cover songs; ”Addicted To Love” (Kim Gordon in a Karaoke Booth) and “Burnin’ Up” and “Into The Groove” by Madonna.
Why did any of this happen? I don’t know.
One of the things on the Audio Antihero “To-Do List” is a re-working of this album featuring the entire AAH roster. As if to say “Dear Sonic Youth, I will see your senseless indulgence and raise you one faintly illegal re-working of your most forgotten album”. Suck on that, Renaldo!
Video: Ciccone Youth – Addicted To Love
Various Artists – Judgement Night Soundtrack (Immortal, 1993)
OH BABY! 1999 and 13 years old! Rap-Metal was my education but for some reason everyone’s a total grinch about it, except for all those ‘people’ who do actually like rap-metal but I wouldn’t want to talk to any of those losers.
Anyway, this was a soundtrack to a film only I liked and an experiment on the genre/money, pairing up rock/metal artists with rappers to create something pretty monolithic. There’s Slayer & Ice-T! Mudhoney & Mr. “I-Like-Big-Butts”! Teenage Fanclub & De La Soul! Helmet & House Of Pain! Pearl Jam & Cypress Hill! Even Therapy? are on here!
My favourite is “Another Body Murdered” by Faith No More & Boo-Yaa Tribe which is terrifyingly O.G. “I KEEP LOOKIN’ AND HUNTIN’ JUST LIKE A LION! LET THE SUCKA KNOW IT’S THEM THAT BE DYIN’!”. Fuuuuuuuuck.
If XOYO or Old Blue Last ever book me to DJ I’ll probably just pump this album on shuffle until hipsters crucify me on an upside down American Apparel ‘A’. I’ll be a Nu-Martyr. Fred Durst will write a rhyme about me. S.O.W.O.R.T.H.I.T.
Video: Faith No More & Boo-Yaa Tribe – Another Body Murdered
Type O Negative – The Origin Of Feces (Roadrunner, 1992)
Oh ‘90s major labels…you truly are the gift that keeps on giving! The sophomore effort from pseudo-goths Type O Negative was a fake live album where the band re-recorded and miss-titled songs from their debut and play intentionally badly whilst argue with a dubbed audience who loathe them. The ‘gig’ even gets interrupted by a bomb scare…It’s nonsense.
But in all the “what?” and “why?” it packs more punch that it ought. Plus, I never expected a song called “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else” to carry any significance to me…but life has its twists!
RIP Peter Steele.
Video: Type O Negative – I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else
Tomahawk – Anonymous (Ipecac, 2007)
“Original arrangements inspired by Native American material from the late 19th century” from members of Faith No More, Jesus Lizard, Helmet, Battles & The Melvins. Supergroups-are-weird-you-guys!
This rhythmic, spooky and furious music is destined to confuse or irritate most people you know. It somehow found its way into my father’s life and he complained that it was ‘endless’.
I don’t know if I would play it backwards.
Video: Tomahawk – Song of Victory
Henrietta Collins & The Wife Beating Child Haters – Drive By Shooting EP (Texas Hotel, 1987)
Post-Black Flag, Henry Rollins came to England to start afresh. He recorded the seething “Hot Animal Machine” but all the rage and resentment that flowed couldn’t match the perversely illogical “Drive By Shooting EP” that followed.
It opens with a ‘60s pop parody about going out with “the gang” to embark on a killing spree (“it might be your sister or it might be you!”) but that’s relatively tame compared to what follows. ”Hey Henrietta” shows Rollins having an unnerving conversation with himself about murdering his racist father and raping a policewoman; “Can You Speak To This?” places him as the protagonist in a Sabbath-riffed tale of meeting a woman who produces her husband’s severed head and encourages him to speak to it; then a glimmer of relaxing familiarity comes and goes with “I Have Come To Kill You” a re-working of Queen’s (immeasurably tiresome) “We Will Rock You” in which Rollins offers us freedom and salvation…because he has come to kill us.
Next to the ‘gags’ about raping a policewoman (erk), “Men Are Pigs” is easily the most uncomfortable moment. He encourages women to thank and please their men by using their mouths – and then…
“CUT IT OFF! THE WHOLE THING! DO IT TONIGHT!
PUT IT IN AN ENVELOPE, SEND IT TO ME:
ROLLINS, P.O. BOX 2461 REDONDO BEACH CALIFORNIA 90278 USA!
MEN ARE PIGS, YEAH!
Ladies, no one understands you like I do.”
Video: Henry Rollins – Men Are Pigs
No sir, they don’t make them like this anymore. If you own no records that you’d recommend to no one then I feel sorry for you, son.
Jamie is the one man machine behind the mighty Audio Antihero label. You know, the place that put out the Nosferatu D2 record I go on and on and on about. Since then, the label has put out quality releases from Benjamin Shaw, Jack Hayter, Wartgore Hellsnicker and will release the new EP from Paul Hawkins and the Awkward Silences in the near future. To celebrate this, the label will be putting on a launch gig at the Brixton Windmill on July 1, featuring three of their acts and the lovely David Cronenberg’s Wife. You should come.
Evans the Death – Threads
07 months ago
in Videos
Well this is really bloody excellent. Evans the Death have been floating around the indiepop scene for a little while now, building themselves a great reputation in the process. I finally managed to catch them at the Odd Box Weekender last month, where they were one of the highlights of the weekend. Newly signed to Fortuna POP!, their debut single Threads is loud, fast, and messy, and really, what more could you want from a band? So good.
Threads will be released on July 4 via the mighty Fortuna POP!
Tigercats – Banned at the Troxy
0
You ain’t seen nothing yet
We’re gonna get bigger than national debt
So proclaim Tigercats toward the end of their sprawling new single, Banned at the Troxy, and it may just be true. The evolution of Tigercats has been an odd one. Forming from the ashes of the mighty Esiotrot, the band has quickly risen through the London indiepop ranks from go-to support band to a band capable of selling out gigs as headliners in their own right. Their earlier releases were focused more around three minute pop songs, but Banned ups the ante to cross the five minute barrier, and doesn’t even come close to outstaying it’s welcome. It builds, jangles, builds some more and ends in a controlled chaos of noise, all without ever losing it’s sense of fun. Which is demonstrated by the wonderfully whimsical video below:
B-side Skydiving (below) is just as interesting in itself. A much more downtrodden, sullen affair, it manages to run on for nearly four minutes with only two lyrics throughout. From most bands, I’d find this to be a rather frightful prospect, particularly given how trite those lyrics could have ended up sounding: “Where do you go when you fall apart / Into my arms and into my heart”. Yet four minutes of this somehow works and ends up being the most mature thing the band have recorded thus far.
The Banned at the Troxy 7″ picture disc is out now on the lovely WeePOP! Records. If, like me, vinyl isn’t your thing, it’s also out on download places that aren’t iTunes. If, like me, that isn’t your bag either, you’re just too damn fussy I suppose.
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