swinging from the 7" shelves
Stars As Eyes’ Important Youth Movement takes us (tenuously) from pre-punk to the real thing. It’s actually a fairly dark bit of electronaica, but it’s built on a relentless, one-chord guitar line and has some safety pins and a few Japanese girls done up punky on the front so close enough. The guitar’s eventually joined by some distant feedback, a slow,
Charlottefield’s Picture Diary, coming from the fiercely independent Fat Cat stable, continues the journey with a stop at more or less every station. Post-Punk for a chat with Ian Curtis; Grunge to drop in on the Dinosaur Juniors and their many, many offspring; then Post-Rock for an all-night lunatic bender with Mogwai and GSYBE!. Emerging bleary-eyed the following morning, they’re pleased to find they have enough choppy guitars, woebegone vocals and big, spine-tingling crescendos for all, packed into a fairly tight song structure. Good to see, and doubly so since Fat Cat’s commitment to DIY music culture is one of the most satisfying sights around at the moment. www.fat-cat.co.uk
I don’t relish calling anything pure crap, but sadly Rubicks' split A-side Midas/Move Away ends the journey on a low note. The pale ghosts of Sleeper and Dubstar haunt their fantasy of a Bjork-fronted New Order, and this lacks even the meagre lyrical saving graces Weener and Whatshername afforded us. If you still think a chorus is a bit where you turn the guitars up louder and sing one or all of the words from the title over and over again, you should not only buy this but join the band. That, at least, will prevent you forming another equally bad one. Sorry – on the upside it’s cut on really nice, heavy vinyl but I doubt that anyone other than me considers that a mitigating circumstance for a 7" release. Till next time.
11/07/02
Off with her head! Party politics took a beating on both sides last week: while Mags Thatcher’s effigy stood decapitated after a highly amusing – sorry, reprehensible – assault in a London gallery, Noel Gallagher put an emphatic end to his support for New Labour with the implausibly bitter album track Little By Little. Ever ready to go one better though, veteran beat manipulators Coldcut have opted to damn the whole sorry lot of ‘em by releasing ReVolution, which takes not a single prisoner as it romps through Westminster shouting, swearing and shitting on the seats. It’s a typically Coldcut affair, a solid chunk of beats, scratching, thudding guitars and cleverly-placed samples that does the job, if anything, a little too easily. Scores major points, though, for coupling some old-skool 303 squelching with an MP saying, “this is the acid test.” There’s a whole website devoted to their current ‘Manifesto’ if you’re interested – www.guiltyparty.cc.
Gaily circumventing such workaday concerns are They Came From The Stars I Saw Them, who according to Black Marker Man in HMV Oxford Street are the new Beta Band, and who suggest, on Authentaustic, that we throw away our record collections on the dubious grounds that taste is pointless. Obviously radical futurists to a man, TCFTSIST resemble the Beta Band only in their ‘relaxed’ approach to song structure and their obvious weakness for arsing about; I doubt that a deadpan vocal about irony, postmodernism and the 21st Century set to wilfully simplistic guitar, bass and drums can show you anything you didn’t see between nineties one and five, but it may be your cup of tea. It’s slightly funky and fun enough, while the flip is a nice down-tempo instrumental. BMM assures me it’ll be a collector’s item, so you could always pick one up and not open it. www.isawthem.com
Meanwhile since David Holmes, who is more popular than he’d probably want to know round here, has us fans living off an admittedly top-notch mix album we’re being forced to plunder the output of his new label 13Amp for a fix. Currently it comes in the form of The Vendetta Suite, whose debut Mercurial takes its cue from his last album proper and shackles garage-rock guitars and female vocals to a modern dance sensibility. It’s not half bad, but the reverb-drenched vocals are so overwhelmingly prominent in the mix that the most important bit – that ragged, ballsy beat that made recent Holmes tracks like Sick City and There’s Gonna Be A Riot unstoppable – gets drowned out. It’s such an odd production quirk that it can only be deliberate, so top marks for trying to sound different but a slap on the wrist for actually sounding like Electrelane through a very long revolving tube.
Room for one more, then, and it’s one of the weirdest. ColorZoo’s album 7” Tales From Black Pig Farm soundtracks a comic revenge poem about a heartbroken farmer, inter-species brain transplants and accidental cannibalism with eight tracks that veer between electro-funk, Kate Bush-style warbling and childlike instrumentals. It’s presented in a hermetically sealed paper envelope and comes with a pull-out card featuring the poem in full and a bit of artwork. Pretentious, obviously, but the whole package is bizarrely evocative. It’s like revisiting the TV you watched as a kid with the sick sense of humour you’ve developed since. Those that like their music straight up and down-to-earth (Northeners, then) should avoid, but anyone who likes the idea of owning a psychotic episode of Jackanory should enquirie further. Enjoy.
www.the-echo.com/
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