Life Less Literary

Here are some of the music reviews I’ve been writing recently. Copied & pasted from Word, please excuse any crappy formatting:

The Pony Harvest
An Individual Note: Of Music, Sound & Electronics (White Label Music)
The Pony Harvest is “the electronic brainchild of chilled pastry products connoisseur and librarian-about-town Richard Bradley”. Richard’s unhealthy obsession with vintage synthesizers makes this album sound like something Add N to (X) might have come up with if they’d stayed in their bedrooms instead of playing at hip clubs. Occasionally, however, the music drifts towards something Jean Michel Jarre might play if he had a sense of humour instead of a large laser collection, but that’s really not as wrong as it sounds. And on one track – “The Worst Secret Agent in the World” – The Pony Harvest manage to reproduce the sound of the finest computer game the world has ever seen, Sam & Max hit the Road. Unfortunately it all goes horribly wrong when the piano kicks in on “Brain Medicine”, a maudlin tribute to the “Lonely Man” theme that used to play at the end of the Incredible Hulk TV series. Still, plenty of quirky synthtastic fun, and top marks for “The Planets” rhyming of “Mars” with “faux pas” and “Uranus” with “Samantha Janus”.
http://www.myspace.com/theponyharvest

The Fighting Cocks
Come and See – Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (FGZ Records)
It’s said that, seconds before you die, your whole life flashes before your eyes. The Fighting Cocks are the aural equivalent, a lifetime of music, cinema and cartoon samples clashing inside your ears, all set dancing to gabba, ragga and doo-wop beats, and topped out with sassy girl vocals and male snarls. With lines like “come on then honey, want to sort it out with knives? It ain’t a proper fight ‘till Martin Bell arrives”, London’s self-proclaimed “premiere Gypsy band” sometimes sounds like Atari Teenage Riot scrapping with Scooter in a Shoreditch alley. Then the gypsy influence comes to the fore and they sound more like Emir Kusturica chewing Crazy Frog’s legs on a rusty, leaky barge in the Danube. Plenty of high-BPM craziness, but some slow numbers too: “Love Somebody, Yes I Do” sees the Cocks play some summery jazz-tinged dancehall while “Cut Out My Heart” is Eddie Cochrane jamming with the Butthole Surfers. Whatever they’re doing, The Fighting Cocks never stop having fun. A great party album for the more brave-hearted.
http://www.f-cocks.demon.co.uk

Music Transfer Protocol Presents
Northern Sounds (Music Transfer Protocol)
This is a wonderful idea, a compilation of “Northern Sounds” featuring bands from the North of England (Yorkshire) and France (Nord-Pas-de-Calais). Unfortunately, as with many compilations based upon as loose a concept as shared geography, the tracks are diverse and a little incoherent. Most people will love some songs and hate others. Personally, I found little that grabbed me on the first listen, and it took four or five repeat hearings for the album to start growing on me.
Stand-out tracks include Scathodick Surfers’ (from Dunkirk) “Laisse Claypool Tranquille” which, as the song title and band name imply, sounds like Primus playing surf music. Sarazvati’s (Lille) “Bizness Trip” seems to owe a big debt to Radiohead, while Screaming Mimi’s (Sheffield) “Son of a Dog” sounds almost like a carbon copy of Sidi Bou Said, minus the quirky rhythms. Smokers Die Younger (also from Sheffield) play the only track on the album I was already familiar with, “S.D.Y,” and I love it as much as I always have. Four Day Hombre’s (Leeds) “The First Word is the Hardest” is a rather splendid lament which builds to a glorious crescendo over the course of four minutes. Yolk’s (Dunkirk) “Friendly MMMC” could well be the missing track from Gong’s Camembert Electrique.
The big mystery of this album is why Lille’s DLGZ Daddylonglegz’s sixteen-minute “Misplaced” was included as the centrepiece. Not that it’s a bad track –its (again) Gong-influenced psychedelia morphing into Police-style cod reggae and, finally, Galliano-style cod-funk is actually quite a listenable mix – but it would be far better if it were at least ten minutes shorter, making space for some more worthy representatives of Northern England and France.
www.musictransferprotocol.com

Crashspace

When I saw this CD’s stark blue cover with simple sans-serif labelling, I convinced myself it was going to contain some cool minimalist electronica. So I was very surprised when I put it on and heard simple acoustic guitar and multi-tracked female vocals singing a beautiful kind of Pre-Raphaelite folk music, rather similar to Loreena Mckennitt. Stirring, emotive stuff, and for a “demo of a demo” very professionally produced (except perhaps the cover).
www.myspace.com/thecrashspace

Beat Constructions

Vintage Sheftronica: analogue synths, electronic handclaps and Oakeyesque vocals. Throw in some references to the Steel City in “Blueprint (for a city scene)”: “The Wicker is changing beyond recognition” … “The hole in the road has been filled in” … “Sheffield’s back on the map” … gratuitous but great.
www.myspace.com/beatconstructions

Tarana

This album comes with a parental advisory warning: “lyrics using meaningless syllables”. More succinct, and more appropriate, would be the warning which used to appear on Stock, Hausen and Walkman CDs: “Parental Guidance: Pointless”. Tarana consists of Rob alone, who for 50 minutes plays his violin and sings meaningless syllables over the top, feeding the whole lot through an echo chamber to make it sound as though he’s performing in an Indian temple. This album must sound awesome when you’re stoned. For the rest of us, the novelty soon wears off. This is Tarana’s 68th album (their first was recorded way back in 2002); one for completists only.
www.tarana.org.uk

Nste – Back to Basic

“With your long blonde hair and your eyes-a-blue, my god will watch over you” sings Nigel Stewart. Adolf Hitler said something similar, and look where it got him (though admittedly that was in the days before Myspace).

When Nigel (Nste to his friends) writes in his sleevenotes “I’ve waited many years to write these songs. Up until now the time and the place has never been right…” I want, for his sake, to be able to share some of the magic he’s obviously feeling right now. Sadly these are mediocre ditties from a singer/songwriter who’s no great shakes at either singing or writing songs.
www.nste.co.uk

Vertigo – Gypsy Rose

Vertigo sound like my first band. Vertigo sound like everyone’s first band. Power chords and Black-Sabbath riffs: all well and good when played by Black Sabbath, but here they’re tossed off limp-wristedly and everything merges into one dull ache. To top it all, the singer sounds like he’d rather be doing anything else other than singing. Some advice for Vertigo: rehearse more, gig more, live more, come back in two years.
www.myspace.com/vertigouk

Damn Skippy – Gloriously Shambolic

Damn Skippy’s four-track offering is seldom shambolic and entirely glorious. Chirpy, punky ska, what it sometimes lacks in polish it more than makes up for in energy and fun. The band list Madness and The Specials among their inspiration, but the music has more of the party-like feel of Bad Manners. Non-ska influences are also skilfully worked into the mix: “Woah Is Me” benefits from a touch of early Pogues, and “Fashion Parade” sounds like Inner City Unit at their Punkadelic best. With their duelling brass, cheeky backing vocals and infectious rhythms, Damn Skippy are a perfect party band. I’m sure their gigs are a trampolining sea of movement, with nobody able to stand still for long, and I shall definitely be checking them out soon.
www.myspace.com/damnskippy

Atoness – every.day.is.food.tech.day

This CD comes with a warning to reviewers “you may want to skip track one, it’s not our best representation”. That first track, “Icebreaker”, is a scream-fest which sounds very much like the Boredoms “Acid Police”, and turned out to be my favourite track on the whole CD. Which probably tells you more about my own peculiar tastes than about Atoness, as the rest of the CD is mint. Sounding a bit like an electroclash version of McLusky, Atoness mix angry rants with perfect beats and create a sound that’s all their own. As the CD progresses, the tracks become mellower, more introspective, and to my ears a little duller (well, nothing can quite live up to that first track), until finally grinding to a halt with an untitled song about elephants and sadness. But even Atoness’s dull songs beat most bands lively songs. One of Sheffield’s very finest, see them soon before they’re big.
www.atoness.com / www.myspace.com/atoness

Cool Canasta
Lynch mob

Cool Canasta play proficient, soulful AOR which, though unlikely to set the world alight, comes across rather well on this excellently produced demo. Some clever lyrics too, especially in the title track. Unfortunately these are delivered in a trans-Atlantic style at odds with the Don’t-Get-Fooled-Again-again content and the fact that the band hail from Sheffield, Rotherham and Worksop. The West Coast vocals are slightly more home singing of a Deep South road trip in “Lost in the Swamp”, a track which took me back to my childhood with its guitar riff cunningly filched from Wings’ “Band on the Run”. This, along with the Bowie-inspired name, the Steely Dan name-check and hints of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, give a fairly good idea which decade Cool Canasta draw most of their inspiration from.

Cannibal Sunset
10 Original Songs by Ed Reid

I can’t understand what it is I like so much about Cannibal Sunset. It’s not the vocals which tread a narrow path between drone and whine. Nor is it the drum machine, rarely a good accompaniment to indie guitar music. Nor the rest of the instruments, all of which Ed Reid handles competently but without virtuosity (although his frantic rhythm guitar and Nuggets-style soloing are sometimes exciting). It’s definitely not the way the bass notes create stomach-churning dissonances and the songs stumble towards shambolic inconclusions. Even the CD cover is a little suspect. Yet somehow Ed Reid is an idiot savant whose songs make me pogo around the bedroom with joy. I couldn’t stop playing this CD, and each time I forgave more of Reid’s transgressions. To paraphrase one of his songs “when he sings out of tune, your heart comes alive”. I would love to hear him once he has a proper band behind him, though whether he’ll have the courage to go out and find them remains to be seen as for Reid “life is better in the chatroom, where nobody can hear you cry”.
http://www.myspace.com/cannibalsunset