Polyvinyl/ATP
The release of Deerhoof vs Evil means that San Francisco-based Deerhoof have been putting out their genre-hopping ditty-bopping noisy beautiful schizophrenic pop for about 16 years now – for the record, that’s 60% longer than the Beatles were around. Deerhoof haven’t sold nearly as many records as the Beatles though. Even in France, where the Beatles have apparently sold less records than astigmatic Greek charity-shop stalwart Nana Mouskouri. Isn’t that something? And she’s been around even longer than Deerhoof. I’m not sure where I’m going with this. Maybe Deerhoof should get Nana to do a guest spot on their next album. Anyway, Deerhoof vs Evil, while sadly bereft of guest spots by spectacle-fancying Greek warblers, has an excellent title for a concept album, I’m sure you’ll agree. In fact,
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I have to admit I’d never heard of Disappears before this record landed in my lap, so I looked them up online. (Research, see? Professionalism and that. That’s what seperates us real professional music writer types from the blogroll masses.) A noisy Chicago four-piece, refugees from the sad decline of Touch and Go records, Disappears have found an unlikely home for themselves at glitch-(and drone – Ed.)-merchants Kranky. On their myspace the band list their influences as “Reverb Delay Drums Heavy Tremolo Feedback Guitars Repetition”, and say they sound like “Reverb Delay Drums Heavy Tremolo Feedback Guitars Repetition”. Heh, awesome. They also sell 7″ singles and RANT IN ALL CAPS on their blog.
The centrepiece of the recent All Tomorrow’s Parties documentary is a clip from a Lightning Bolt set at the festival back in 2006. The band, true to form, is set up on the floor of the venue and the crowd is jostling around Brian Chippendale‘s drumkit in a claustrophobic huddle of beards and sweaty t-shirts. In between songs, a greasy fan taps Brian on the shoulder, leaning over the floor tom to get his attention. “Ten, three!” he shouts, holding up his greasy fingers to illustrate. “Ten plus three! Thirteen!” “Ten plus three?” replies Brian, his voice heavily distorted by his skimask and ball-gag mike setup.
In which New Zealand polymath Campbell Kneale (Birchville Cat Motel, Our Love Will Destroy the World, Lugosi, Sunship, etc etc etc) sets about recreating the thunder, chaos and crushing despair of one of World War I’s bloodiest battlefields, using sub-bass guitar drones with occasional percussion and samples.
Restraint is not a word you usually associate with psychedelia. “Excessive”, yes, “silly”, perhaps, but “restrained”? Nonetheless Dos, Wooden Shjips’ follow-up to their 2007 self-titled album, is for the most part a very restrained psych record. On each of the album’s five expansive tracks the bass and drums are pared back to a hypnotic krautrock throb, and while the guitars enjoy a few overblown wigout moments – most notably the glorious degeneration of the 11-minute “Down By The Sea” – these are always underpinned and kept in check by the intense metronomic rhythm section.
From the Comets on Fire school of sunshine-and-reverb-addicted, everything-and-the-kitchen-sink meltingpot psych come Crystal Antlers, the band with possibly the most unjustly off-putting name of the year. If you’re interested, the contest for the band with the most deservedly off-putting name of the year is currently a dead heat between Does It Offend You, Yeah?, and the Ting Tings. Anyway. Despite sounding like they got their name from some internet random indieband name generator, Crystal Antlers are definitely worth a minute of your time, if this self-titled EP is anything to go by.
Israeli rock bands – I’ll bet’cha can’t name two. I’ve got a theory that countries with compulsory military service always have rubbish music scenes, because there just aren’t enough bored kids hanging around to start bands and go to gigs and buy records and scare old people and all that. The little buggers are all too busy doing press-ups, being shouted at, scrubbing toilets with toothbrushes, and so on. On the other hand, small out-of-the-way music scenes, with little in the way of overbearing history or entrenched support structures, can sometimes spawn a mutant: a beautiful snarling monster that springs seemingly from nowhere, owes nothing to anyone and follows none of the rules. This is what
2 October 2008
When you go to a show by a shirtless, rabble-rousing mob like O’Death, you really expect to see the band set up on the floor, separated from their sweaty audience by little more than a few blobs of spit and sawdust. That’s how I imagined it anyway, so it is with some apprehension that I view the venue at the Hoxton Bar and Kitchen. With a sleek black interior, expensive light fittings and a stage at least three feet higher than I had hoped, this cold-fish setting makes me wonder how O’Death are ever going to manage to forge a connection