Download Simon Piler’s ‘ground’ for free at:

quixodelic.com/site/ground

Here you go. First Quixodelic Record of 2012 in association with the excellent New Radish, and it’s my dear friend Simon Piler singing to you 6 songs of this-worldly folk-blues all the way from sunny Alaska. While the Daydream Generation continues to fade away and yours truly attempts to gather his bearings over the edge of the world, our interstellar lo-fi roster of acts are still obviously out there doing what they do. Neat little records like ‘ground’ are the sort of thing that makes me remember why once upon a time I loved doing this so much.

In many ways these tracks are the logical extension of ‘Lo Swing…’, stripped back to mostly just guitar and voice, more intimate and spontaneous on the ears, it features at least 5 of the very best Simon Piler songs you are likely to hear, including the epic ‘i praise homeless gods’. For all you crazy ‘KINGTIME’ fans, don’t get your hopes up – ‘ground’ is its opposite, right down to the lower-case letters. These are take-it-or-leave-it hymns to and from the wild landscapes of America and the equally wild landscapes of the human heart.

In Simon’s own words: “I had a mad weekend of it and ended up on the other side with a record album.  It was pretty crazy how all the pieces just sort of knit together and I woke up this morning with this sombre little guy neatly parceled on the computer in front of me. It’s called ‘ground’.  And it’ll be the first solo Simon Piler album since ‘theatre music EP’, I think.  The Atom Band have thoroughly departed, I guess.  Though I think that you will find they are not forgotten!”

“Mad weekend” however is a misleading concept – most of these songs it would seem have been bubbling away at the bottom of Simon’s mind for some time, and the music, lyrics, even quality of the recording are all testament to something that has been patiently and deliberately brewed (like all good dream-brews should).

Enjoy!

sydlane.bandcamp.com/album/with-your-shield-or-on-it

A couple of nights ago I felt like going out and finding me some new music, but then I remembered how I skim-listened to Syd Lane’s ‘Solstice’ from earlier this year (having still been immersed in the wonderful ‘Hypatia’ which fell from the clouds the month previous). And lo and behold, what should I find, but this…

‘With Your Shield Or On It’ – an album that (like everything she does) deserved a fanfare, but instead flew out under the radar on the wrong side of twilight. 17 new songs in the style of Syd, the voice hitting even stronger notes, the piano playing somehow even more fragile melodies, and everything sounding like it was recorded in a cathedral on the moon. For fans of previous recordings it does everything it needs to do – like opening a musical box you found in your great-grandmother’s attic, timeless tunes a la Simon & Garfunkel, but increasingly Syd, and so heartfelt that sometimes you feel like you might be intruding into someone else’s head and life.

I’ve listened to ‘With Your Shield…’ every night before bed for the last four nights and each time the lullabies keep me up towards dawn. With piano ballads aplenty it’s undoubtedly something for the softer side of your brain – my own favourite tracks are ‘He Don’t Trust’, ‘The Lost Art of Faith’ (amazing little piano coda), ‘The Men of Midnight’ (VU Pale Blue Eyes style murmurings with pure epic vocals), the haunting ‘Beautiful Sky’, and finally the gobsmackingly great cover of closing track ‘Both Sides Now’ where Syd’s voice arguably hits her finest spine-tingling heights*. Considering a previous Chansons De Geste song of hers called ‘Astride A Grave’ took several months before I realised it was my favourite song in the world next to ‘Strawberry Fields’, I fully expect sometime in the future to be floored by a track I’ve overlooked in the fog of small hour mind-wandering. This whole record shimmers with greatness, and you wouldn’t expect anything less.

In fact, if there was any criticism, then expectation might be it. As astonishing as the voice sounds, as beautiful as the combination of notes and harmonies are, there is nothing you haven’t heard Syd do before. Every record refines and redefines what she does so well and as much as you cannot help but fall hopelessly for the songs, but there’s always a part of part of me that would love to hear something different, something like a protest album, the same vision applied to the external world as she does so well with the internal world of feeling. But who am I to ask for anything like that? Just a humble fan is all. And anyway, you always get the feeling that the subject matter chooses Syd, not the other way around… so long may the songs of love and lost resound from her little faraway place in the world.

*For a far less cack-handed discussion of the song ‘Both Sides Now’ and why Syd’s version is so important, then look no further than my favourite independent music blog: thestreetlampdoesntcast.blogspot.com – Griff, Gordon, and Ray have been equally educating and amazing me for the last couple of years with their essays and musings on everything from indie-pop to discussions about depression, left-wing politics, the relationship between song and memory, and have even managed to make me re-think the 1980s as a musical vacuum. Blogs don’t last forever, so please show them some support, subscribe, comment, and keep the wind in their sails otherwise yours truly will have a lot less to look forward to reading every week. Who needs tabloid newspapers when you’ve got the Streetlamp, eh?

Download: quixodelic.com/site/impaled-peach/

It’s been a while so you know this must be important. Remember Impaled Peach and his ‘Helicobbler’ EP from early last year? 8 songs of melancholy pop goodness, oddities thrown together in the shape of a record, completely unplanned and yet brilliantly coherent. Well this time he’s only gone and done it again, but full-album length this time around, a staggering 17 track masterpiece, completely unplanned and yet… if this record wasn’t designed to fall together like this, then it really should have been.

Design is the key to describing what Ed (the guy behind the music) does. Songs are carefully crafted, odd and atmospheric, brimming with pop melodies, often intricate and bursting with good-old fashioned dark-humored soul. Heavily influenced by modern psychedelic bands like The Olivia Tremor Control, ‘Impaled Peach’ flies the same fuzzy path, but it has a much softer underbelly, kept up in the air at all times with soft 60s vocals, an orchestra of Beatle-esque guitars, and ukuleles. The word ‘Quixodelic’ was invented for records like this.

First listen I f**king loved it. Second listen I started to wonder if I wasn’t underrating what Impaled Peach has carefully crafted and thrown together in his front room. As far as lo-fi goes it is possibly fated to be one of those undiscovered gems that would have shone interstellar with the right people behind it. In the greater scheme of things you somehow feel like as many ears follow its magical trails across the skies, that it will always be one of those records you’ll proudly cherish in a lucky minority.

My favourite tracks? Oh, too many. I promise that there is not a weak song among the 17 and even the instrumental psychedelic interludes play their part. Try the undeniably epic ‘Moonless Sonata For Sun’ if you want to dip your toes in at the deep end and I’ll wager that you’ll want to go swimming around the rest of ‘Impaled Peach’ immediately afterwards.

11 out of 10.

‘Impaled Peach’ can be downloaded from Bandcamp for free and hand-made CDs are in the process of being… well, hand-made. More info to follow.

Free download: sydlane.bandcamp.com/album/solstice

Syd Lane has done it again. While some songwriters furiously vomit up hours of garbage in the hope that something, anything redeemable might happen, and others sit chewing on their guitar strings waiting for inspiration, she has been quietly amassing an increasingly awesome body of songs, honing and refining them until, like golden apples they are ready to drop from the tree.

‘Solstice’ is the second apple of a whirlwind year but three months old. Already we have seen the utterly compelling ‘Hypatia’ make all the right ripples in the deep end of the pond. Everyone I know who has heard that album says it is mesmerising, and if you missed it then please check out what the Godfathers of bedroom-indie-pop The Streetlamp Doesn’t Cast Her Shadow Anymore said about it here: thestreetlampdoesntcast.blogspot.com/2011/03/griff-says-hypatia-beautiful-brilliant.html To be brutally honest I’ve barely had a chance to digest it myself – three or four listens on the run, safe in the knowledge that together with Jason Raspa on mastering duties, she’s produced another impeccable shimmering poetic work of art, undoubtedly more polished than its equally lovable predecessors like the epic ‘It Begins In Beauty’.

The ‘Hypatia’ mastering process and Jason’s well-trained ear for detail meant that while it was still being cut and spliced, polished and diced on the other side of the Atlantic, Syd could return to and forge on with a record we first glimpsed as ‘The Solstice Sessions’ back in January 2010. With the creative hard work done, it seems that ‘Solstice’ was ready for consumption fairly quickly, and here we are, only a few weeks later with a second Syd Lane to digest. My gut feeling when I heard it was available for free dowload was that my brain just wasn’t ready for more. Songs like these should be treasured, and experience tells me that with Syd records being crammed so full of wonderful melodies and soaring vocals, it is really easy to miss songs that you can later fall hopelessly in love with (eg. ‘Astride a Grave’, and ‘Not A Poet Be’).

But here I am, listening to ‘Solstice’ on the run. I just couldn’t help myself. And yes, it is indeed another masterpiece. Frighteningly so, for everyone but Syd who no doubt is quietly building more songs from daydreams, somewhere out there. My first impressions on individual tracks are invariably wrong, but from this one I dig ‘I Couldn’t Tell Her’, ‘Simple Pleasure For The Complex’, ‘The Moon and The Liar’, ‘Their World of Fear’, ‘My Reach Exceeds My Grasp’ and… really, who am I kidding? I love this whole record from start to finish. There are no weak links in the daisy chain, the voice soars crisp and clear as it always does, the harmonies if anything are even bigger, the BJM-esque guitar carries us on waves while the piano rings out its mini concertos, and it is familiarly Syd-like… because you sense that she is slowly and surely carving out a sound that with every record is becoming more and more her own. Budge up Mr Barrett, someday someone will describe a song as ‘Syd-like’ and not mean you.

There are only so many superlatives you can throw at some artists, before they become meaningless. Awesome, it is. Brilliant, it is. Emotionally charged, yip. Catchy, yes. Epic, most definitely. Unintentionally cool, it is always that too. For those of you who are being sucked dry by life, I hope you find some space to catch ‘Solstice’ on the run like I did, and for those of you who have all the space that you need then I hope you can set some aside for both ‘Solstice’ and ‘Hypatia’… and ‘It Begins In Beauty’… and all The Loaded Whisper’s albums. The trajectory is upwards and it sounds (insert flurry of superlatives), so catch it while you can.

Well done Syd and thank you for doing what you do.

Free download: quixodelic.com/site/category/syd-lane/

2011 is shaping up to be a vintage year… Rocketships of Love, Simon Piler, Fig Mints on the horizon, possibly some Burnouts, maybe even (gulp) a Warchalking record. And now, straight out of left field with flowers in its hair, a spring in its determined step, and more magical melodies than the laws of physics deems is possible to be contained on one record, is something truly brilliant.

Of course I’m talking about ‘Hypatia’, the latest offering from the inimitable Syd Lane. The big question for me was ‘How can anything possibly top It Begins In Beauty?’ and sturdier souls might have baulked at the thought of even attempting it. Thankfully Syd’s muse is alive and well and from a couple of listens I can already say that this record could very well top anything before it. Mastered by the super-talented kindred psych-spirit that is Jason Raspa (Frogville), these fragile psychedelic ballads now glitter like a studio album, lo-fi enough to still be considered a record of and for the people, but yet you feel like this was always how these songs were supposed to sound.

It’s too early for me to pick favourites and I know from experience that Syd Lane songs creep up on you and tap you on the shoulder when you least expect them – but from what I’ve heard, why not try Saro, or Deladis, or Kate, or… shit, who am I kidding? They’re all top drawer and the record’s on Bandcamp, so just stream it from start to finish will you? Better still download it in its entirety, share it with your friends, and throw a dollar into her online hat if you feel so inclined. I know her well enough to know that the last thing she does this for is money, but a girl needs guitar strings, right?

These songs might sound like a continuation of It Begins In Beauty, but like all her previous records and incarnations (The Loaded Whispers, Chansons De Geste) you can really hear her voice grow and songwriting skills maturing into something truly awe-inspiring. The basic premise remains the same (a good song is a good song), but there are new sounds like swirling organs,or bluesy guitar, drums, or even kooky 60s kitsch-pop that defines this as a record in its own right, rather than another daisy in the chain.

Thanks for the music Syd. (Salutes).

Free download: quixodelic.com/site/lo-swing-of-the-earth/#more-708

Many things go hand in hand: I won’t waste your time by listing them here but I will however waste it by introducing you to a new combination, namely Simon Piler and the Spring. Coincidently, two of my favourite things. The latter I like because it happens immediately after that darkest of seasons. It says ‘You have survived another year.’

I like Simon Piler’s music for many more reasons, most of which I have expounded somewhere along the line. For those of you new to these parts however, let me summarise it thus – pure lo-fi, folk-thriller, imaginary dancing, epic lyrics that cut to the heart of reality in neat-shaped Japhy Ryder-esque battle-stanzas, songs that rattle on the wind, that seep into the grass, that growl like gravel and flutter like snow, songs that bake like sun, and swish like great oceans on the shore of mind. Simon Piler does all this with minimal fuss. Listening to his records is like pressing your ear to the key-hole of a cabin in the eternal woods. He doesn’t make it up for fame or fortune, and like many of us, he doesn’t do it because he has to. He does it because curiously enough, he actually has something to say to the world.

Have a listen to ‘Lo Swing of the Earth’ with your springtime boots on and tell me if I’m wrong. What he’s saying might not always be obvious, but it pounds and murmurs at something grand. Always inspirational, try ‘Song’ a mediation on death – (will my spirit fly with me? into the sweet the dry the neverending). ‘Corn Soot’, a traveller’s anthem – (if you’re moving the earth moves you, it’s a form of intimate embrace). Or the mighty lines of ‘Zoroaster’ – (when I look up the moon is full again and Zoroaster casting on a boat shaped like an anatomically correct aroused goose (in his splendid fashion) and when he smiles his crooked teeth come spinning off the silken vapor layers of deep sleep and a stern bite out of reality). These are pomes that make you feel like a middle-aged dumb version of Kerouac who has wandered with a bellyful into a new and shimmering world.

Whereas lyrically it is unsurprisingly magnificent, musically it falls somewhere between two of the GREAT Piler albums – the accessibly lo-fi experimental-folk-pop of ‘Songs From Home’, and the wonderfully experimental weird-fi off-the-wall magic of ‘KINGTIME’. ‘Lo Swing…’ is more polished than either, more gritty and bluesy, but it has its own twinkling moments like the beautiful instrumental ‘Jack’, or the supercool howl of ‘Spruce Prayer’. Is it his best record to date? Give me a few months of listening, but I’ll tentatively stick my toe in the water and say ‘probably…’

But don’t just take my word for it. Lap it up, chew it around, spit it out, kick it on, roll it into balls of dirt between your fingers, let it catch on the wind, and lie down on the hilltop, a million miles away from civilisation. Spring is almost here. And the earth swings lo.

More Simon Piler:

www.last.fm/music/Simon+Piler+and+The+Atom+Band

nickfraelich.bandcamp.com/album/obnoxious-dancing-music

Something of an honour for me this one. Nick Fraelich first appeared on the tenth and final Daydream Generation compilation at the end of 2010 and blew my socks off with the experimental folk-pop of the quite amazing ‘Meta-Song’. Away from more traditional song structures, I also knew that he dabbled in the black magic of psychedelic electronica and had heard the brilliant head-fuck of ‘Trip Tent Sound Interlude’. So when a little birdie told me that he was working on an ambient/electronic record including collaborative remixes and was looking for submissions, I rooted around on my computer and unearthed an old improvised attempt at singing a book called ‘Shubunkins’. I shipped off a two track acoustic dirge that dribbled on seven minutes longer than it should of, and within a matter of hours received a ‘Nick Fraelich Pretentious Drone Rework’ back. Pretentious or not, it’s a million times more interesting than the original and hopefully doesn’t get in the way of an otherwise super-interesting record.

‘Obnoxious Dancing Music’ has got everything you’d want from an experimental electronic and predominantly instrumental record, plenty of beats and bleeps and bloops and a kaleidoscopic arsenal of effects. It also has a genius ‘hipster’ remix of Lenn9o9n’s smash-hit ‘Alli’ – the words ‘epic’ and ‘weird’ spring to mind, and the first song of 2011 to truly punch me in the eardrums and make me grin – a remake of The Sarcastic Dharma Society’s ‘Sanyasi’.

When I was growing up and falling in love with music, guys like Paul Oakenfold and Andy Weatherall were breathing life into bands like The Happy Mondays and Primal Scream. Nick Fraelich is like one of those guys, only much weirder, and way more beautiful. Hopefully this isn’t the last we hear of him making magical Frankensteins.

More Nfrae: www.last.fm/music/Nick+Fraelich

http://cllct.com/release/icouldwalkonwaterbutidratherpartthesea

Perhaps it’s best to begin with what is one the most beautiful album titles I’ve seen in years: I Could Walk On Water, But I’d Rather Part The Sea. Let’s unpack that a second and look at what it drives at. “I could do something pretty cool that will wow and amaze and possibly frighten any passers-by, but I prefer something more difficult so I can walk through the mud while doing so.” This is why this is also the most precise album title I’ve seen in years.

What Dressed Like Wolves colluders Rick and Matt created is epigraph to growth. It’s honest, for better or worse, with a deep sense of quiet-house intimacy saturating each song. The vocals trickle in and out, drafting words of defeating events and hard-won peace. A forced subterranean element underrides this record. The songs come from a humble point, always looking up from the bottom. Ankle deep in watery emotional silt, Rick hides in the deep, trudging onward far below the surface. The waves of instrumentation lap over the vocals frequently, and the words slip into the periphery and lurk, jabbing in a phrase here and there, until the waters calm and out his voice reappears like a boulder at the bottom. Hitched over a lilting guitar hangs this light little voice. Pops and creaks and organs and the occasional drum fill the slim population of musicality. This is a fatal record, very bony and structural. It taps into the well-spring of survival, the place where the self has seen its mortality and seeks a reappraisal of former treasures. Its sparse nature and emphasis on poetics lend a developmental feel to the record, not in the technical sense, but in the metaphoric. The 4-track honesty of long takes and floor creakity-crackety add a diary setting, disconnected and sometimes contrary narratives trying to sort out their differences. There’s an ache for growth, a yearning to get far enough away from things that happened so maybe they’ll make sense, as well as a sense of struggle, an optimism wrestling with damage. The songs bear fresh scars, but in the end they constantly reaching out towards redemption, a renewal, if only enough distance could be put between now and whatever waits ahead. There’s an overarching vibe of finally not being afraid of the world, but still flinching when it swings. Plodding through the muddy bottom, the theme hints at submission: the songs know where they’re at, and know where they’re going, so there’s little gained from lamenting it.

Tracks “Messengers” and “How Bright You Burn” express the aftermath of fucking up, the parting of waters and exposing the murky bed underneath. Within “Glass and Grain” is triumph, the breakpoint that allowed water to be moved or walked on at will. Framing the constant glass-swallowing we all find ourselves participating in stands the strength of knowing how to do it, the mastery of knowing that nothing hurts forever. Contrasting is “Cancel The Sky,” which talks extensively of the push-pull of good things done versus disappointing things that insist on happening. “Redemption” carries a sense of accomplishment, a liberation in the inevitability of mud, and that the waters still part no matter what inspires them to. “The Daydreamers” finishes the record with a long dreamy expedition into soundscapes. It sets a fitting end, looking forward with renewed goals and a reconfiguration of what’s good to have, what’s right to ask for.

What Rick has written and Matt has recorded is an absolutely accurate depiction of the general coming-to-terms that strikes every twenty-something. They completely nail it in terms of the quiet times, the reflective periods when we think about the awful things we’ve seen, done, and had done to us. To be sure we all deal with those things in many different ways, and I can confirm that what Dressed Like Wolves created tells no lies and shades no elements. It’s pretty, it’s angry, it’s tired, it’s pensive, but most importantly it’s optimistic. Well done, gentlemen.

-Wainwright Wyandanch

Download it for free at: thespacebetweenthings.com

Solitary Man – Fuck. I forget sometimes how much I love music. I get so disillusioned, loving things being made on the bedroom floors of the world and feeling like somehow it inevitably ends up stuck to carpet, no matter how hard you try. Soon as Chris Hobson starts singing I begin to remember again. This guy is as good as home-brewed psychedelia gets. A thrumming stripped back electric riff with spaced-out murmured vocals kicks off the record. It’s catchy without being irritating, and odd without sounding like a pretence. Yip, you’re listening to the real deal here.

Ginger Snap – More of the same and then some. Garage lullaby with towering trees growing up through the ground all around you. If they’d stuck this on Where The Wild Things Are it would have been three times the film.

New Years Ever – It’s difficult to gauge the love and attention that went into the making of this record. I’ve known about The Space Between Things for at least two years and eventually I started to wonder if there was any point continuing to ask the question ‘When are you going to make a record?’ There were always enough tracks kicking around and they were flawless… Bare Hands, Postcard Crimes, the Songs About You EP. I guessed that perhaps the flaw of flawlessness was that there would never be a finished record, so eventually I stopped asking. And yet here I am listening to it. And so far it is flawless. New Years Ever is going to take some listening for all of the right reasons.

GCDC – Holy shit, this song is a bit special. Another psychedelic lullaby for the magic-hearted, voices and melodies swooping in around a lumbering guitar and beat. It’s funny how these TSBT songs get gummed up in your brain like chewing gum on bicycle tyres… to be involuntarily rehummed by your rotating unconscious mouth sometime in the future.

Twins – The guitar lines are so great… rhythmic shoegaze that songs like ‘Twins’ are hung around. I’m reminded of Slowdive but with more guts and the indefinite urgency of winter nights, punctuation of artificial light, always travelling, always going somewhere, a soundtrack for a state of in-between-ness, and undoubtedly unintentionally so.

Don’t Care That Much – Oh I really love this. It’s maybe my favourite song so far, guitars sound like New Order only waaaay cooler, and there’s this spinning, dizzy sense of just splitting that pervades it, the sort of thing you’d want to hear in the aftermath of an argument that never had any real purpose, everything sliding off you.

Space Disease – A curious lo-fi beat. Dylan’s ‘Desire’ in the 21st century, but with none of the theatre and much better drugs, builds beautifully into a headfuck of singing and guitars without ever trying to burst your eardrums, treading the tight-rope calculated so that it won’t snap.

This Future – Final song. Acoustic beginnings… I always love it when someone who knows what they are doing mixes the organic with the interstellar. ‘This Future’ is incredible… the buzz of chords, gentle harmonies, Velvet-Underground-esque, suspended in mid-air like you’re sat in the centre of a web strung up in space.

I won’t lie to you. I still feel weirdly estranged from music and the realities concerning what is actually possible here, but I am glad I finally got round to downloading this record. It is the sort of music that would have stopped me dead in my tracks three years ago, five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago, utterly timeless, completely different, long overdue, well worth the wait, and crafted to perfection. Polished and raw, noisy and quiet, fragile and fierce… ‘The Space Between Things’ is an agreement of musical contradictions that meet up in the middle and vanish like the melodies that drive it. It is the sound of the ghosts of tomorrow and a lo-fi psychedelic masterpiece for today.

Well done Chris.

Out Today

Download it for free at: quixodelic.com/site/category/motherbird/

Listen to ‘Blasphemy’:

Download audio file (Blasphemy.mp3)

I know what I like and I always like it. That’s why every so often I have to throw myself from the same old train to crash-land in the undergrowth of something completely different – something that pushes boundaries, that breathes poetry from the gut – something much, much darker. motherBIRD is all of those things… burning at the heart of the moonspun forest, fluttering always up ahead, out of reach, far enough away to be forever unidentifiable, mysterious, unfathomable, and impossible to catch in the jar of a few paragraphs. But I’m here, so I might as well give it a try…

I was first tipped off about ‘a really interesting songwriter’ from Sydney by the now sadly AWOL Splendid Isolation podcast back in 2008. Curiously I still feel exactly the same way I did when I first heard motherBIRD’s music two years down the line – it is unlike anything else going round… eerie and inventive electronic sounds with meandering guitars combine with a spellbinding voice, in turn carrying a blizzard of mighty words simultaneously hyper-human fragile and weirdly other-wordly.

motherBIRD is a very good musician, and a very great singer. But it is this poetry brought to life by the music that makes her such a unique and exceptional talent. Rather than the songs being mere vehicles for the words, the arrangements and the expressive scale of the voice takes the poetry to another level, where the song and the word are symbiotic and inseparable from each other.

‘How To Believe’ is a six-song introduction that won’t appear on the much-anticipated official motherBIRD release that has been carefully cooking for years rather than months, and is now finally fluttering towards completion. See thegrandcuckoo.wordpress.com for an intriguing and inspiring look behind the scenes at the making of this record. Our little demo, put together for Quixodelic begins with the spectral ‘Salvation’, full of electronic bells and muffled beats, part-whispered, part-sung vocals that close with the haunting ‘Now the devil wants to befriend me/Sends gift cards on the full moon’. As beginnings go, it is about as wonderfully strange a beginning as you can get. And thankfully, this record just gets even stranger.

More bells begin the brilliant second track ‘Blasphemy’, before distorted vocals and menacing beats kick in. On the spectrum of dark to light it is probably as dark as the record gets, claustrophobic and curiously fragile at the same time with its intricate sound effects and more prodigious lines like ‘Fly me a sparrow/Shoot it down with my arrow/Cupid got real mad/Curses the heart forever sad’.

The semi-spoken ‘Crossing Yourself Before The Fall’ is a cascade of mythological imagery and swirling psychedelic organs. ‘To the delighted delphic deity/A little spark brings a great flame after it/When it arouses a longing in anyone’ is one of my favourite lines from the record, complete with hypnotic trance-inducing delivery.

Despite being one of the most obvious home recordings, ‘I Heart U’ is also one of the most accessible with its rolling electric guitar, reverb-drenched hissing dreamlike voice, and cool chorus line of ‘I heart U for the last time’. You guess these songs were never designed to be catchy, but the atmosphere and words and moments like these will stick in your brain long after the record has finished.

Penultimate track ‘Before The Ascent’ is an experimental lullaby with soaring wordless vocals, giving way to the record closer, the beautiful, if lyrically sombre and reflective ‘Salvation’, a point of realisation with its stuttering beats, flickering electronic pulses and circumspect final lines that sing ‘Never one to fly/What a mess/I kept pretending/Child’. The first thing you’re going to want to do when ‘How To Believe’ finishes, is to go back and listen to it again to try and make sense of what you’ve just heard. It is a little bewildering, very different, quite intense, utterly bewitching, and…

…and you know what? This is to music, what ‘Twin Peaks’ is to television. Time for you to jump off your train in the moonlight and get lost walking backwards through the woods while the wheels on the track roll away in the distance.

Find out more about the newest addition to the Quixodelic collective at:

www.myspace.com/motherbirdtv

www.facebook.com/pages/motherBIRD/307871567253

motherbirding.wordpress.com/

Download ‘Sweet Home Suite’ here: http://cozyhomerecords.com/08/artists/cashew-cook/

Back on the horse so let’s start at the shallow end and see if we can still swim in the lake by revisiting this old and somewhat tasty cashew nut: Cashew Cook’s ‘Sweet Home Suite’. Written and recorded in 2006, and available as a free download from Cozy Home Records, this has always been one of my favourite musical offerings from Henry Street. As soulful and humming as home recordings can get, you can just about hear the birds squabbling in the forest trees and feel the floorboards creaking beneath your bare toes while it plays. Think easy-listening for Thoreau’s great-grandchildren: acoustics and 12-strings on the porch, banjos and bottles of home brew, with a strong bright voice a million miles removed from the super-self-conscious urban consumer-kid that most of us can’t help but become when we’re not paying attention.

Jam-packed with brilliant song-writing on tracks like ‘Morning Son’ (yeah, thanks everyone for pointing out my misspelling of that one for the last three and a half years), ‘Feeling Can Remind Us’, and ‘Into The Day’, it’s never too late to go back and revisit a record that is a rolling stone of a hit in an alternative universe where substance beats style, and expression trumps pretence. Cashew Cook embodies the idea of the free-thinking songsmith, turning his back on the internet several years ago to go and be with real people and have real experiences – commendable, if a loss to the virtual community. Talk of a follow-up in 2007 never materialised into anything tangible, so for those of us who own an original CD with its handmade bark cover, and those of you who have already accidentally stumbled over this, we’re just going to have to make do with revisiting and mellowly chewing over these songs every so often, much to the universal heart’s content. For those of you yet to discover this long lost gem – well, what are you waiting for?

Listen to ‘Morning Son’:

Download audio file (CashewCook-MorningSon.mp3)

Find out more about Cashew Cook at:

http://www.myspace.com/cashewcook

A Quixodelic Record #3 – Download it for free today!

Here: http://quixodelic.com/site/category/quixodelic-records-sampler/

An unexpected something to kick-start or wind-down your summer. ‘A Quixodelic Record #3′ takes off where UFC1 and UFC2 left off, gathering most of your favourite Quixo-urchins under one roof to do what they do best – sing their little hearts out. Month on month since we started The Daydream Generation and built our own net-label, visitors to the site have slowly and surely been a-growing in numbers. Hopefully for those of you new to this corner of the internet, this sampler of bands/songwriters whose albums are available as free downloads in our Quixodelic record store will point you in the direction of some music you might like. The thing I love most about this particular project is that as well as being talented and/or original musicians, the people behind these songs are without exception some of the loveliest folk you’re likely to meet on your virtual travels. On the right of the page there are links to their various websites, so if you like what you hear then please take a few minutes to drop by and say hello and tell them what you think. Okay, so without further ado, here are 16 paragraphs about the songs that make up Quixo-3:

THE UTICA FLOWER COMPANY – Shark Ark

Three years ago Paul Burnout, Bobby Fig Mints, Arthur Rules and I wrote the original UFC record about a secret basement beneath a flower shop ‘where revolutionary people meet and records play for your soul’. On the 1st May 2009 the Quixodelic collective turned the concept into a fictional reality, setting sail on an imaginary ship called The Mardi, and writing a book/blog of our adventures over the last 13 months. The Mardi finally sailed off the edge of the world on April 14th 2010, and the four surviving members of the Flower Company – myself, Simon Piler, Becky N, and a tundra fiend called ‘W’ were cut adrift on a weird little dinghy with ‘The Ark’ penned on its side. With nothing but some conveniently salvaged musical instruments and our frazzled imaginations to keep us going, we drifted and wrote some songs. ‘Shark Ark’ is one of them, written by Becky for the soon to be (hopefully) finished epilogue record entitled ‘The Utica Flower Company 2.0′. Thankfully we are all now safely back in our own brains.

THE REAL BURNOUTS – Get Behind The Wheel And Shift It

One of my favourite Burnouts songs of all time, taken from the legendary ‘Transparent Mirror’ record, released by Cozy Home Records way back in 2005 (cozyhomerecords.com). The first time I heard this song it was live on the radio, mad brilliant voices recounting a comical tour of Rongovia before launching into an acoustic version of ‘Get Behind The Wheel…’ There were so many things about it that made perfect sense; the catchy melody, the surreal lyrics, the feel-good energy driving it along, and the realisation that music doesn’t have to be technically perfect to be completely perfect. I hope it is as life-changing for you as it was for me.

SYD LANE – Only A Dream

**Breaking News** Syd Lane has a drum kit. For fans of her soaring, soulful psychedelic ballads this is an interesting development. Presently locked away in her castle in the sky writing and recording a new album, the word on the virtual street is to expect something epic, and if this first glimpse is anything to go by, then the word sounds like it knows what it is talking about. ‘Only A Dream’ is everything we’ve come to expect from this multi-talented poet-singer-songwriter… plus drums.

FROGVILLE – Just Like Sunday

If the download numbers are anything to go by, then it would seem that finally perhaps the world is rightly switching on to Frogville’s 2009 pop-psych masterpiece ‘A Bug-Eyed Swamp’. And so, with Jason promising a second record/six-headed monster sometime in the not too distant future called ‘MK Ultraphonic?’, now’s as good a time as any to revisit one of the highlights from the first album – ‘Just Like Sunday’ – two minutes and thirteen seconds of just kicking around in sunshine melodies and diggable songsmithery.

KALEIDONAUTS – Suspended Animation

Unreleased track from ‘I Do Not Currently Own A Spaniard (Mine Died)’. I wrote this with Jon of the Atom in early 2007 and it was dropped from the record after he decided he didn’t like his music on it. We tried remixing it again in 2008, but it still wasn’t working, and I tried to resuscitate it once more in 2009 attempting to put together the long-lost third Kaleidonauts record ‘K2′. That all said, as much as it’s a lost cause of a song, and this original version involves my clumsy mixing, people who have heard it seem to like it, so now seems like as good a time as any to finally put it out there. Sorry Jon.

THE FALLING FLOORS – Eucalyptus

Having very recently been revived from a technicolour time-capsule buried under Carnaby Street in 1966, Manchester’s psychedelic-popsters The Falling Floors are thawing out working on a 7″ single and a third album scheduled to be released on cassette through the newly formed Chamber Records. ‘Eucalyptus’ is (possibly probably) my favourite track from 2008’s self-titled debut (it’s just there are a lot of definitely definitely great songs on there), like an apple that has fallen not so far from the Pet Sounds tree, and a perfect introduction to this band for you to sink your teeth into.

LENN9O9N – I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For

Honestly, I wanted to put Lenn9o9n’s lo-fi gem ‘Nina’s Paw Got Stuck’ on here for a number of reasons: A. It’s great, B. People really like it, and C. It shows a completely different side to his predominantly synth-orientated recordings. But as always the artist knows best, so instead we have the seriously short, but also seriously brilliant ‘I Hope You Find…’ and there is no denying that: A. It’s REALLY great, B. People are going to love it, and C. It is Lenn9o9n at his electronic best.

SIMON PILER AND THE ATOM BAND – Space Bottom

Soundtrack from a flight to the moon. The actual moon. It took me a few listens to fall in love with this song, but now whenever I look up at the starry sky I hear the ‘Space Bottom’ accordion hum its meandering notes and everything seems just that little bit more magical. Think our very own lo-fi ‘Space Oddity’, previously only available as a loop on a wrecked Fish Rocket that fell into the void. Simon says: “I’m glad to have a chance to say hello, as I’ve relocated once again. I’m back up in the crisp wilderness of interior Alaska these days, and certainly learning a thing or two about lupine. I burned my tongue on gunpowder tea. I burned my eyes on a blood moon swinging-apocalyptic through the dusky 3 AM skies. Songs keep putting out buds on my windowsill, so I’ve been making simple facsimiles with my newly re-forged Music Journal. That being said, of course, my first and foremost energies are focused on the mixing, mastering and packaging of the second Utica Flower Company album. It’s hard for me to comment on exactly how that makes me feel, but there is certainly a component of inside-outness to it. As if someone left open the back door to my brain. An alternate EXIT. I suspect I’ll be trying a few more special re-releases from my catalogue on CLLCT. I think it’s about time to bring ‘Short Score’s Album’ and the ‘Test EP’ back up to the surface of the reflecting pool. (My page is right here: http://cllct.com/art/simonpilerandtheatomband )”

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION) – Me And My Brain

Bobby Rogan finally seems to have the balance right. While he continues to keep one eye on the Cozy Home, new record ‘Say Okay’ is brewing in the studio, and a Fig Mints album of covers has also been pencilled in for the summer. Three new songs have already been written for another record, tentatively called ‘Bad Age For The Underdog’. This track here, ‘Me And My Brain’ is an out-take from ‘Say Okay’, cut because ‘it wasn’t loud enough to fit in with the rest of the songs’. It is classic Fig Mints – astutely goofy, musically infectious, and well worth a couple of minutes of your time.

JAMES REDMOND – Lonely World

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the new James Redmond album ‘3′ so far. Considering how good it is, there’s not nearly enough of you, but hopefully this little glimpse of beat-pop will be enough to convince a few more to follow the crumbs. ‘Lonely World’ is the closing track on the record, somehow upbeat and poignantly melancholic at the same time, the sound of a songwriter at the top of his game. All I am saaaaying… is give ‘3′ a chance…

THE WHEELIES – A Question Mark of Stars

This song might sound a lot like me, but I can assure you it’s not. Salvaged from a plastic bag in a secret compartment above the cupboard in Bunkroom 2 on that imaginary ship again, it was written and recorded by a ghost in a ragged fox costume called Willoughby Toad. Like the ship, he’s long gone, but since I found the cassette, I figured I might as well put my name to it. Unlikely to ever be released anywhere else. Thanks Willoughby.

WARCHALKING – Let’s Start A Country

Too good a version of this song for it to not be available somewhere on the internet. Written and recorded for Kaleidonauts ‘Tigermouse’ album in the summer of 2008, this was Warchalking’s first take having written the words around my song idea. Stripped down from the finished ‘Let’s Start A Country’ that featured both Jane Gilmore and myself on vocals, this is the stark VU-esque version that blew me away when I first heard it. It also gives you a glimpse of what it must be like to hear Warchalking perform it live. Lucky fuckers of Cape Girardeau take note.

BRENDON HERTZ AND THE BURNT ORANGE CRAYONS – Mail From You

Put me at the pick-and-mix stand and I’m always going to start with fizzy cola bottles. ‘Mail From You’ is the fizzy cola bottle from Brendon’s 2009 contribution to ‘The Invisible Box-Set’. As albums go, ‘Sacrifice’ is about as diverse as it gets – folk, pop, funk, spoken word Beat poetry, ballads, electronica – very nearly imploding with styles and ideas. So that’s why I’m playing it safe and choosing fizzy 60s pop, a little bit Beatlesy, with brilliant frazzled vocals that are guaranteed to stick to your teeth.

FAILEDSITCOM – Cafe Oto

From Sam on ‘Cafe Oto’: “An attempt at mixing field recordings with traditional melodies. All the drum sounds (as well as the more “wobbly” synth sound) come from some recordings I made in the cafe which the songs takes its name from. It’s not great I’m afraid…”

From me to Sam: “What?! Not great?! It’s bloody brilliant. It clatters and clanks. It rolls and sparkles. Is it winter? Is it summer? Is it spring? Autumnal? Or, like the song itself, a little bit of every season in harmony? Crockery and lullabies. Coffee pots and hip hop. What’s there not to love about that?”

UBERFUZZ – Hello Satan

Man, I forgot how much I dig this song. ‘Hello Satan’ is Uberfuzz firing on all cylinders, the twin engines of Le Keux and Storer going for the jugular with a riff-led riot of psychedelic-blues. As songs go, it doesn’t get much more bad ass than this tale of walking with a devil that ‘looks like Johnny Cash’. Taken from 2007’s brilliant ‘Drowning In Honey’, songs like this are the reason why all six Uberfuzz records are essential listening for fans of fuzz.

DEAD CANARIES – Bird Peach

Last but by no means least, THE Dead Canaries masterpiece ‘Bird Peach’. Like The Beatles medley at the end of Abbey Road, or The Stone Roses ‘I Am The Resurrection’, every credible band should have a ten minute epic song like this. From boy/girl motown pop to fiddle-enhanced blues, and from Radiohead experimental guitar freak outs to its catchy rolling indie encore, ‘Bird Peach’ is an EP in itself, Jon of the Atom throwing everything – including the kitchen sink – at it. And it’s absolute genius.

http://cllct.com/art/zombiegirlfriendhospitalattackforce

Were it possible to favourite your favourites on CLLCT, then these twin towers of weird psychedelic sunshine sublimity, would certainly be up there. It takes a lot to get me to write about anything outwith the Quixodelic circle, but some things demand to be written about, and this is one of them, so I’ll see what I can do in the short space of time I’ve got to do it.

Self-professed ‘bastard child of Brian Wilson and Peewee Herman’, Zombie Girlfriend Hospital Attack Force isn’t just a mouthful, but a rollercoaster ride of sounds and songs that will illuminate your starry nights, and carry you through the shimmering heat of day. It is impossible to know where to start with these – ‘Social Anxiety Mysticism’ considered the psychedelic masteriece, and ‘Palace of The Super Gay Rainbow’ its poppier counterpart. But side by side these could easily be mistaken for a double-album. Both are blessed with the same surreal eye for killer song titles (‘The Battle For Timewarp Castaway Epicentre’ anyone?), and taking musical chances that more often than not transcend the experimental into something that is more than capable of blowing out all the bulbs in your brain.

Personally, I started with ‘Palace…’ and from the first listen, I knew that here was something seriously special. ‘I Hope’ is an acoustic-pop track lifted from the summer of love. ‘Everyday Objects Are Vampires’ is a genius little infectious melody, attempting to sound like Blur circa ‘Modern Life Is Rubbish’ and not even realising that it has overshot its mark by quite some distance. ‘The Celestial Zombie’ is pure psychotic genius. ‘Church of God’ is jaw-droppingly great. Song after song, wave after wave, riff after riff, word after word… it was relentlessly entertaining stuff. I listened to ‘Palace…’ several times over a couple of weeks and kept feeling that it was the sort of patchwork pop record that could take years to fully get, but that the journey would be worth it.

Eventually I dipped my ear-toes into ‘Social Anxiety Mysticism’ and was equally impressed. The title track  was a combination of electronic extraterrestrial bleeps and campfire anthem. ‘Oh! They’re Imaginary Stars’ was just as impressive, with its Spanish synth horns, and ‘Accidentally Watching A Light’ is lo-fi psychedelic experimental rock at its very, very best.

Originality is a difficult high-wire to step along, but whoever, or whatever ZGHAF is or are, he or they show that it is possible to revisit the past through the eyes of the future and make it sound like it belongs somewhere in the now. There are only a handful of bands/musicians not affiliated with Quixodelic that I’d love to be a part of it, but this is one of them. I’ve sent a postcard to the moon because I don’t know where else to send it, just to say thanks for these two wonderful records, and I hope by the time I’ve fixed the bulbs in my brain that there are more.

Out Today! A new album by the one and only James Lee Redmond…

Free download at Quixodelic Records here:

http://quixodelic.com/site/category/james-redmond/

Listen to ‘Weekend Train’:
Download audio file (JamesRedmond-WeekendTrain.mp3)

Every generation needs its heroes. Most of mine were doing their thing half a century ago, forging melodies, splashing paint, and building mad roads of word. It is a rare thing indeed to be able to call one of your peers a genuine hero, but for me, James Redmond is exactly that. It feels like half a century has passed since I was first pointed in the direction of Dirty Ticket with their tongue-in-cheek two-minute synth-pop song brand of musical anarchy, and tracks like ‘Sticker Book’ and ‘Inner Disco’ have happily haunted every ‘Best of…’ mix I’ve made since 2007. Since then, it’s been an honour to have played Florence to solo songs like ‘Talk’ and ‘Movin On’ (arguably my favourite song from the Quixodelic catalogue), songs that came perilously close to never quite making it out into the public domain. In fact, the gradual metamorphosis from melodic anarchist to a mature songwriter crafting lo-fi anthems has been apparent for anyone paying attention to the last two albums. ‘Lo-fi’ is perhaps misleading – self-produced, yes, but these songs have always transported me well beyond the boundaries of how they were recorded whenever I put the headphones on. These songs are placeless, and inevitably also timeless.

A hard man to reach at the best and worst of times, to suddenly hear Jay talking excitedly about a third record called ‘3′ (haha), with a couple of studio recorded tracks and an actual running order was a really good sign of things to come. There aren’t enough superlatives I can throw at ‘3′. Like a long lost record from your Grandad’s dusty vinyl collection, it is seeped in the tradition of 60s Mersey Beat, with elements of pop, folk, soul, and blues all coming together in the shape of shining pop songs. It’s a K.O in the first round of a record, an injury time winner when you’re down to ten men and even the most devoted fans have all but given up hope, a quite staggering masterclass on how to write perfect pop, heavy on emotion and light on its feet, with harmonies and melodies you feel like you must have heard somewhere before, but deep down know that you haven’t.

There are a couple of familiar tracks – a stellar reworked version of the impeccable ‘Will She Meet Me?’, the haunting grandness of ‘Tell Me’ (does anyone else make the self-recorded intimate confession song sound so BIG?), but everything else is brand spanking new. The real hits of the record include ‘Weekend Train’ (a song that sounds like it was stolen from the ‘Rubber Soul’ sessions), the ukulele-led brilliant closing nostalgia of ‘Lonely World’, and the epic ‘Sad Song’ with heartfelt lines like ‘Major to minor/The smiles turns to tears/I say goodbye to those years’. Threads of loneliness, regret, and making mistakes run through the blood of this record, but in the quiet, melodic contemplation it also sounds like a cathartic attempt at putting the past to bed, holding your hand up, and starting over. Fans of synth-pop anarchy might be disappointed at the lack of bones they are being thrown, but for the rest of us, ‘3′ runs much deeper than the small-hours drank-too-much and smoked-a-load medley’s that have gone before. Here the ghosts of Brian Wilson, John Lennon, and David Bowie shuffle in the wings while someone sings their heart out, like from time to time every one of your heroes has to.

3 stars out of 3 from Florence.

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Find out more about James Redmond at:

www.myspace.com/jamesleeredmond

download: Helicobbler

Listen to Same Mistake and Catch Us:

Download audio file (SameMistakeandCatchUs.mp3)

This record has been floating around on CLLCT for a couple of months now, so you may have already had the pleasure of hearing it. Me, I waited for a bit of breathing space before feeding it into my ears. I wanted to wait for a gap so as I could give it my full attention, really because I felt like it deserved nothing less. Of course I’d already heard the excellent and lyrically complex ‘Ilium Bromide’ on DG7, and been completely knocked out by the simply beautiful uke song ‘Psycholicopter’ on DG8 that once and for all proved that you don’t always have to deliver something cutesy and confessional with that particular instrument. Both tracks suggested that whenever a full-length recording from Impaled Peach finally emerged, that the songwriting and musical textures were going to require more than a passing listen to properly dig it.

As it is though, this 20-minute 8-song EP is less a full-length release and more a collection of original compositions, some for collaboration projects, others sung for the fun of it, gathered together and released in a hurry, and it actually can be easily dug from little more than a quick spin through it. There are textures and depth, some exceptional production techniques, simple pop harmonies, words sung with verve and harmony, and more key changes than the most burgled house in your neighbourhood. In a nutshell, there is something pretty much for everyone… pop-psych fanatics looking for a quick fix, lo-fi folk enthusiasts wanting to hear what is possible if you put enough into it, even poets with a secret thing for slide guitars and Beach Boys layered indie rock and roll.

Try and count the influences behind these songs and you’ll be there for a long, long time. Elephant 6 bands like The Olivia Tremor Control, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Of Montreal are just the obvious ones. If there’s one thing that Edward Alan Bartholomew (the guy behind the name) does exceptionally well, then it’s sucking up the sounds and styles and techniques of his favourite musical ancestors, digesting them together upon the bedroom floor, and spitting them back out in a seamless fusion that sounds quite like many things you have heard before, but not exactly like any of them. Tracks like the aforementioned ‘Psycholicopter’, or the really immense ‘Same Mistake/Catch Us’ (arguably one of my favourite songs so far in 2010) are the sort of tracks you catch yourself singing hours later. Pretty much everything you could want from several records is somehow crammed into this collection – distorted driving guitars, vinyl crackles, intricate riffs, unpredictable songs in other languages that effortlessly change in tempo without warning. On the surface you might be looking at eight songs, but actually you might be getting as many as twenty wrapped in verses and choruses and carefully crafted shifts that very rarely sound anything like their counterparts.

On ‘Helicobbler’, Ed himself said ‘I was originally planning on using most of these for a longer release, but the project has lost momentum and these songs have gradually become their own thing. I also have newer ideas to pursue and wanted to get these out of the way for a fresh start.’ To hear snippets from the newer ideas, as well as some genuinely great cover versions, and to get an insight into the making of some of the songs featured here, you can spend a few productive hours over at:

http://eabarth.tumblr.com/

It might have taken me a couple of months to finally get round to listening to ‘Helicobbler’, but then I always knew that once I did I’d be listening to these songs for as long as my ears continue to work and my appetite for melodic DIY sound adventures persists. Next time we get something from Impaled Peach I’ll be digging out my sleeping bag to spend a night on the virtual pavement with my download finger at the ready. Marks out of ten? Who gives a flying fuck about marks out of ten? This record is a little glimpse of something that might very well be genius – whatever number you want to throw at it.

Ed’s own notes on the songs:

Heels Over Head
An of Montreal fueled night turned into a groggy, lethargic morning and a wake up call from the landlord.

Head Over Heels
A foot fetish? In response to complaints about Neutral Milk Hotel’s distortion.

l’Orangerie
A place I’ve only visited with Google Maps.

Same Mistake / Catch Us
Two songs heavily influenced by Olivia Tremor Control, together at last in the same key.

Ilium Bromide
A compound produced when Paris steals Menelaus’ wife. Features at least four key changes.

Orange Thirst
Originally devised for the Colors album. Features Sam Wallinga on accordion and some prose I wrote about orange juice in high school.

Same Mistake Again
The Olivia Tremor Control influence is more recognizable here (Fireplace, Shaving Spiders).

Psycholicopter
About a girl I talked to on the phone a few times a few years ago. First song written on ukulele.

Lenn9o9n – Relining Graves

download: Relining Coffins

Listen to Alli:

Download audio file (Lenn9o9n-Alli.mp3)

From the first time I heard Lenn9o9n cover The Beatles’ ‘Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except For Me And My Monkey’ I knew I was listening to something quite extraordinary. Everybody knows that the synthesizer maimed popular music in the 1980s, but here was somebody who might actually make you rethink electronic pop music completely. Not from choice, but necessity (think a 26 year old American travelling the globe with a keyboard strapped to his back, currently alighting in Italy), with the exception of impassioned vocals drenched in precision effects, electronic beats and synthetic melodies are the exclusive body of these songs, manipulated into something that somehow sounds completely organic. In a nutshell, Lenn9o9n makes synthesized music sound not only exciting, but also credible. It is the past colliding head on with the future, drawing on the same resources as all your favourite retro psych guitar bands of the 21st century, lo-fi gone hi-fi, The Killers without The Cure, The Strokes with substance, or even the Man himself if he he’d still been around, plugging the white piano into the wall while sparks fly from his fingertips.

‘Relining Coffins’ is literally the beginning. If you move in similar circles to me, then you’ll already have been blown away by Lenn9o9n tracks like ‘Ausdruck’ or ‘I Hope You Find What You’re Looking For’… only you’ll not find any of those songs here. As the title implies, this six-song EP is about revisiting songs that were previously recorded between 2007 and 2008 and reworking them. The results are a very likeable and worthwhile introduction to what Lenn9o9n is capable of as a musician and songwriter. Undoubtedly there is much more to come, but even so as a standalone concept record, ‘Relining Coffins’ does exactly what it needs to do and a whole lot more.

Opening track ‘Aren’t We All’ is a short atmospheric intro that leads into the really brilliant ‘Alli’ – a sonic pounding song with its chorus line of ‘She’s the girl who makes the boys cry/Or at least she’s the one who likes to try’. Of the six songs, it is arguably the most recognisably Lenn9o9n – catchy and atmospheric, a dark form of pop music. ‘A Bitterness In Your Heart’ is another short lullaby with a motivational speaking sample closing it out and leading into fourth track, the wonderfully electronic and psychedelic ‘Little Bird’ combining frantic vocal harmonies and Joy Division drums. Penultimate track ‘Love is the Curse’ is a meandering synth piano tune carrying a melancholic short song. Record closer ‘Fresh Start’ is probably my favourite of the six, the intricacy and fuzz of the arrangement escalating into life behind upbeat drums, swooping synth strings and telephonic vocals singing ‘We can start again.’ Very much a record of odd and even songs, or atmospherics and anthems, ‘Reling Coffins’ ebbs and flows like a little ocean, lullabying before crashing up on the beach of your ears, and repeating the process until the final sparkling notes of ‘Fresh Start’ fade away.

Looking back, this might not be the Lenn9o9n masterpiece, especially if a full-length record materialises towards the end of the summer (as promised). But then it was never intended to be a masterpiece, more an interesting experiment of trying to make something  out of long buried tracks with new experience and techniques behind them. As an interesting experiment it undoubtedly exceeds all expectations. Tracks like ‘Alli’, ‘Little Bird; and ‘Fresh Start’ are immense bedroom anthems and so refreshingly different from everything else going on in the lo-fi music world right now; yet their immensity is not because they are different, but just because they sound so fucking good. Judging by this recent video:

you can expect to hear more than just keyboards on future releases, but for now at least after hearing this, you might just wonder if it really was synthesizers that maimed the 80s or simply the people who were operating them.

*Post-note: In no way do Quixodelic Records advocate synth-only recordings. Keyboards are dangerous machines in the wrong hands and for every Lenn9o9n there are countless 80s impersonators continuing to maim the ears of listeners today. Please exercise extreme caution if you feel inspired to follow in these electronic footsteps.

Find out more about Lenn9o9n at:

http://cllct.com/art/lenn9o9n

Long overdue, but finally here are three of Syd’s records recorded as The Loaded Whispers from pre-’Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth’. As always, they are free to download, but if you do then please take the time out to drop in at Syd Lane Music and let her know that you liked it. Because if it’s not about the money, then it’s got to be about the love, otherwise it just won’t work…

If you’re new to what Syd does then if you read on, we’ve got a brilliant guide to all of the records she’s made, written by her co-conspirator Jeremiah James. For those of you who already love her own unique brand of psychedelic-folk soaring songs then it is an equally enlightening, heartfelt and enjoyable read.

Nurturing Empty Screams

download: Nurturing Empty Screams

Sola

download: Sola

The Loaded Whispers – s/t

download: The Loaded Whispers - s/t

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Sola….

A new voice has arrived not quite fully formed but ready to lay it on the line for anyone bold enough to go with the feeling. The album was recorded on a very low quality pc mic with only a voice and an acoustic guitar late at night as people slept. This is where Syd first realised she had something to say and nothing was gonna stop her until she heard in her songs what she longed to hear on the radio. Sola like the albums that have followed holds a steady atmosphere all the way through sure of it’s own desire but nowhere near where the composer wanted to get to. It’s a collection of raw poetic songs that showcase ….Syd Lane….’s unique view of the human condition. There are some very intricate songs that I hope will one day become more whole but that like everything else is down to the inimitable ….Syd Lane….. A beautiful first shot at trying to say what needs to be said
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The Loaded Whispers….

I worked with a friend of mine to get a little studio set up for Syd in one of the bedrooms in our little home and this was the first album recorded using a piano as a midi controller for the soundcard on the pc. There are very brilliant songs here that soothe and caress at each and every listen. “Insouciance” and “Enlightened” are as loose and rocking as I could ever hope songs to be. “Bedroom window view” and “She talks to rainbows” well you listen and tell me what you think? Everything is still raw but there are glimmers of pure astral beauty that would become more fully realised the further Syd travels along her path
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Obliterate The Myths….

Sadly this record has all but been destroyed for Syd but I really love it. I think it’s a phenomenal achievement under the circumstances(which are far too boring to go into) I pray to the universe that someday Syd will return to this album and hopefully re-record the songs. This was Syd’s steepest learning curve so far and that learning had nothing to do with music or the art of recording and everything to do with empty promises and human deception. There are songs on this album that still stop me completely in my tracks in particular the way “In time we’ll return to the earth” finds it’s groove and “Nothing here is fair” brings this listener to a place I find incredibly difficult to leave. It also has one of Syd’s biggest pop anthems that has yet to be fully realised. Great album
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Nurturing Empty Screams….

Syd has now entered her very own heart of darkness and returned with some of the most guttural songs she has ever written. This record was a huge exhortation of pain fear grief and disillusion. An album that rightly deserves to be placed alongside Lou Reed’s “Berlin” John Lennons “Plastic Ono Band” and Primal Screams “XTRMNTR”. This is a fucking remarkable record bookended by two songs of desperate longing. It also contains a response to Ian Browns brilliant single F.E.A.R that really stands up to anything Syd has ever done both musically and lyrically. This was a record that showed a whole new Syd ready to battle the darkness head on and shirk no responsibility in doing so. This was a songwriter with something universal to say. It also marked a new studio setup which allowed Syd to record very quickly and keep moving as fast as she felt she needed to
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Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth….

This for me was the album where Syd became interested in pushing her songwriting wherever it wanted to go. She became more and more interested in communicating quickly and directly with her muse and the results are there for all to hear. A stunning collection of songs that are wildly disparate but hold together beautifully allowing the listener to journey with the composer/performer through the golden age of popular song as directed by the unique vision of ….Syd Lane….. I would like to state once and for all that everything Syd does in terms of recording music and writing songs is all done alone with no input from anybody else which when you look back over her 5 years of recording shows an unparalleled ability to do whatever she wants to do and make it fresh exciting and consistently brilliant. Her quality control is one of the most important things to her and she’s determined not to repeat or rest on her laurels.
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It Begins In Beauty….

An absolute masterpiece from start to finish. I still can’t believe how this album makes me feel loved, lost, scared and inspired all at once with an infinite amount of other emotions experienced as the songs wash over me. This is the work of an artist in complete control of her craft. Each song creates a world of it’s own that never excludes but rather welcomes the listener while at the same time challenging your ability to keep up with the idea’s contained within. I absolutely believe that this album will always show me that human beings only real legacy will be their connection with great art and the fact that so few people have heard this music is a real shame. “Not a poet be” and “You kept me humble” are my current favourites but these are only two of twelve reasons to weep for joy. We’re alive and where there’s life there’s hope man but you won’t find that in jobs/money/things.
________________________________________________
The Solstice Sessions….

A tantalising and intriguing peek into Syd’s ideas for her next full album. Recorded in a couple of hours on 21st December last. The date has particular significance as it’s the ancient pagan festival for the shortest amount of daylight hours in the northern hemisphere. This date was clumsily and crassly manipulated into the roman calendar as Christmas time. Listen and enjoy Syd’s songs stripped to their essential components and be ready for when they re-appear in perhaps completely different forms. Thank you Syd we are all in your cosmic debt.

by Jeremiah James

The Falling Floors – s/t

download: The Falling Floors

Listen to I Wanna Be Your Friend:

Download audio file (TheFallingFloors-IWannaBeYourFriend.mp3)

Every so often a band comes along and completely blows you away. The Falling Floors are one of those bands. It didn’t happen straight away for me. I first head from this Manchester psychedelic-pop outfit back in late 2008 when they contributed ‘If You Say No’ to Daydream Generation 5. It was a spiky, upbeat little anthem of feelgood guitar pop music, something plucked from 1966 full off ‘ooh-la-la’s’ and a melody so infectious that it was almost shameful. It hinted at good things, but it took a lot longer for me to dig around enough to find out just how good.

Arguably one of the real stand-out records from the Quixodelic Invisible Box-Set, ‘Hey! Midnight’ packed a deeper, more experimental psychedelic punch. The pop was still there, but frequently it was buried under brilliant layers of drone and backwards guitars. To think it was written and recorded in just a couple of months made it somehow even more incredible and I think that’s when the kaleidoscopic alarm bells began to ring in my brain. What Jolan and his fellow Floors are able to do is not just imitate all your favourite bands from the most immense decade of music, but to consistently produce songs that sound like they have been genuinely transported from another time and place, when things were much simpler and music was untainted with a world-weary cynicism.

The discovery of this self-titled full-length 10 song record appearing magically one winter afternoon on CLLCT was the proof that ‘Hey! Midnight’ was no fluke. If anything, this debut recording made sometime in 2008 is even more catchy, jammed with so many great songs you feel you have heard somewhere before, even though you know you are hearing them for the first time. ‘If You Say No’ is just the tip of the iceberg. Sitars zing, guitars riff, organs swirl and drums roll. Cool rolling basslines underpin every track and vocal harmonies sing songs like ‘Eucalyptus’, and ‘I Wanna Be Your Friend’ into a world that once you tune into, you just can’t leave until the very last note of the immense ‘Goodnight Sleepyhead’ rings out. Eastern tinged tracks like ‘Chambers’ and ‘Theme From Daishishi’ are musical jewels, spaced-out sounds that make you want to kick off your shoes, take some LSD, and find the nearest field or dance-floor with enough room to freak out on.

The most beautiful thing about The Falling Floors is that they make it sound sincere. If you know where to look then the psychedelic sounds of the 21st century are dime a dozen, and in most cases it sounds forced or intentionally retro. Cool for the sake of coolness. With these guys they really sound like they can’t do it any other way and are having the time of their lives while they do it. It’s the real thing… and it’s happening right here and right now. You might have missed the 60s, but if you’re anywhere near Manchester then you could do a lot worse than dropping in on a gig. However, if like me, you’re a million miles away from Manchester then a record like this has got to be worth taking a chance on.

My new favourite band of 2010 and I can’t champion someone much more than that.

Yours sincerely, completely blown away.

Find out more about The Falling Floors at:

http://cllct.com/art/thefallingfloors

download: Her Blameless Mystery
download: Of Life's Declivity

It’s not often I have to run to catch a musical bandwagon, but for this one I really had to sprint. I’ve been championing CLLCT a LOT in the last few months, but this guy and his music is a single-handed shining example why this little DIY goldmine is already outsinging corporate giants like MySpace and LastFM. It would seem that most people over at CLLCT know, and have known how great a songsmith and soundsmith FailedSitcom is for quite some time. But try googling “Failed Sitcom music” and you’ll be scrolling through page after page of homages to something involving Kelsey Grammar.

Trundling murmurs of quiet approval with occasional claps of genuine mind-blown wonderment have been steadily rolling in since CLLCT resurrected. The acclaim for the two existing EP’s, ‘Of Life’s Declivity’ and ‘Her Blameless Mystery’ may in part be to do with the fact that the guy behind them (Sam Durkin) tries to take in as much new music appearing on the site as he can. I must confess I took the slightly cynical view when I twiddled my thumbs as the bandwagon rolled by with a grin. I instantly bought the philosophy – attempting to fuse folk-pop with experimental hip-hop beats – but time was short and I couldn’t help but wonder if much of the hype was to do with Sam’s presence. I had a couple of minutes and played a song. It sounded great and I grinned back, putting my head down as the trundling passed. It took for Simon Piler to ask me while we were putting together Daydream Generation 8, ‘Obviously you’ve invited FailedSitcom?’

And obviously I hadn’t. I lifted my head, muttered under my breath ‘Ah shit Smally’, and ran. I caught another couple of songs and they were as great as the first one I’d heard months previous. I emailed Sam and thankfully he was as interesting and diggable as the music he’d been making. I downloaded both the records and was totally blown away. Take one song, any song from either EP and I guarantee you’ll think it’s good. Take more than one song and listen to them back to back and I guarantee that it will click in your brain. Take a whole EP and you’ll be hopping into your finest running shoes to catch up with the rest of us.

The philosophy is that of sound collage – seriously cool electronic beats underpinning the sparkling organic sounds of glocks and ukuleles, guitars and mad percussion. Add to this the softest of voices singing shimmering little stanzas about things someone loves and you’ve got yourself a recipe for something that will someday undoubtedly knock Kelsey Grammar off the front page of a Google search for all the right reasons.

I started with ‘Of Life’s Declivity’. Clocking in at a surprisingly short thirteen minutes, these eleven songs are a bright-eyed trip through an autumnal dream, ringing melodies over complex supercool beats, zips and zings of sound, all topped off with the murmur of soft poetics. An obvious comparison would be Animal Collective, a band I am frequently told I should listen to. But having downloaded one record and not been overly impressed, for now at least I’m happy to stick with this little EP. ‘Of Life’s Declivity’ is so together that it feels wrong to single out tracks like ‘To The Bowsprit’, ‘Mushrooms’, ‘Horse Chestnuts’, or ‘Locus Amoenus’ as my favourites. When I first heard this record and obsessively played and replayed it for the next 48 hours, I found myself wondering ‘Where can FailedSitcom possibly go from here?’ The only answer I could come up with was ‘More of the same please’.

Surprisingly and fortunately I was pretty wrong. The much loved ‘Her Blameless Mystery’ is still very much FailedSitcom, but compared to its brief, deliberate, and concisely beautiful counterpart, this 12-track EP is a glorious sonic avalanche of adventurous sound. At the time of hearing it, I didn’t realise that it was a collection of songs recorded over the course of two years, but that just makes it an accidental great record, the shifting of styles being one of its biggest strengths. Whereas ‘Declivity’ is a shooting star that melts in the sky, ‘Mystery’ is a piebald nebula of ideas engulfing your ears. Here, the robotic charm of ‘Data-Byte, Sound-Byte’ sits happily alongside the catchy ‘Matthew’, and the familiar folk-electronica fusion of the lovely ‘You Should Revise’ is not out of place on the same record as the eerily infectious closing ‘Much Like A Gherkin Creepy’. After one listen I was convinced that ‘Of Life’s Declivity’ was THE record to download. After two listens, I started to feel like ‘Her Blameless Mystery’ was more adventurous and perhaps the real accidental masterpiece of the two. From three listens onwards I have reached the only conclusion possible that both records are little classics in their own right and well worth a chance of your precious time.

So there you have it. Kelsey Grammar, if you’re reading this then feel free to quake in your google-boots. My ears are ringing and my heart is singing with the sounds of two cracking EPs as I catch my breath from the sprint. The Quixodelic Commune is one genuine and seriously talented songsmith better off. It is a privilege to have FailedSitcom on board to please take the time to download one, and inevitably both of these records. After all, bandwagons are always more exciting when you get on at the very beginning.

DAYDREAM GENERATION 8 – OUT TODAY

Free Download: 38 tracks of the finest lo-fi folk pop psychedelic electronica and ‘other’ we could find from great little bands & artists & uke-strumming urchins all around the globe in two neat zip files of mp3s. Enjoy.

CLICK HERE

And here we go again. It’s been very nearly three years since the words “Daydream Generation” jumped into my head triggering the endless quest to go out and find the very best undiscovered DIY music there was to find, to cook the songs together in a couple of sizzling zips and serve them up to you on a virtual plate, dear and often strange listeners.

For several months back there I forgot why I was cooking – the compilations were almost getting too easy to put together, feedback was fading, and it was like “So what? Another compilation?” But putting together DG8 (with the help of Simon Piler and Becky N on recruitment duties), I remembered what it is I love about doing this – discovering new music that blows me away, bands and names that people on your street are unlikely to have heard of, yet more often that not, are as brilliant, and maybe even more relevant than whatever the mainstream decides is the flavour of the month. Music is like fast-food these days – mass-produced, served up lukewarm and tasteless with a fanfare of advertising and a side order of apathy. The thing I love best about home-cooking is that it is free – not free in the download sense (although this compilation is), but free in the sense that song-writers can take chances, and make music for the love of making music, free to throw whatever they can find at the backs of the cupboards of their minds into the creative frying pan. I think DG8 was the compilation that re-ignited my excitement and like the various cooks and kooks who appear here, I’ve always loved that we can take chances with the mix. On Daydream Generation 8 you will find songs to fill your belly, and songs that will leave a really weird taste in your mouth… but everything you will hear comes with the guarantee that it was cooked with love, and not to sell something big and shiny, or make somebody a quick buck. In particular thanks to the David-esque might of a little site called CLLCT putting our 8th compilation together has been less like mining, and a lot more like walking up to a big crazy tree and plucking colourful fruit from singing branches. Many of the bands and artists featuring on this compilation have been lifted from such shimmering limbs and without that site, I’d have been back crawling through the tunnels of the fallen Goliath that is MySpace hoping to find something, anything, someone, and all the while thinking ‘all this narcissism… the world is fucked.’ We could have made a thousand compilations from what we have discovered on CLLCT – and who knows, quite possibly we will.

But enough of all this small talk. Let’s get down to business and let the music do the talking. Without further ado allow me to introduce the 38 bands that make up Daydream Generation 8:

ADRIAN AARDVARK

Someone Else

I wonder how many of the world’s iPods kickstart on this guy? If “Someone Else” is anything to go by then the world could do a lot worse.  Belted out with unreserved punk angst, this track treads the precarious tightrope of insanely catchy and flat out insane, and manages by the skin of its teeth to make it over to the other side intact. Songs like this are rarities, stolen from the seabed of a nightmare at the shadowy end of pop, and there is no doubting the sincerity. AA+

Adrian Aardvark on CLLCT

AKRYLLIC LOVE

Smiling Today

Let’s get through this and not mention the age thing, alright? If you haven’t heard of Akryllic Love by now, then I’ll bet you my matchbox house that someday (even if you hadn’t read this) then you would have. This is the kind of song-writer that someday you’ll tell your grandkids about, and somebody you might just be hearing a whole lot more from on this Quixodelic corner of the internet real soon. AL’s contribution ‘Smiling Today’ is (as expected) a two minute slice of slightly experimental DIY pop brilliance. This guy makes the idea of expressing yourself in an originally entertaining way look easy, each song like a bubble blown down the brain lanes. The most frightening part? He’s only…

Akyrllic Love on CLLCT

ASSAULT SQUAD SAFETY SCISSORS

To try and break the fickle hearts of the romantics who wanna sing along

There’s something incredibly endearing about the whole Assault Squad Safety Scissors package. Mostly just one guy and his guitar singing really great pop songs, Oklahoma’s Andrew Allingham has an eye for really neat cartoon art, very interesting song titles, and melodies that make you stop and realise that you’ve vanished for the entire time you’ve been listening. Sometimes it feels like the world is awash with Lo-Fi bedroom pop songsmiths, but hey, that’s a good thing, right? Especially when they sound like this.

Assault Squad Safety Scissors on CLLCT

BECKY N

Coma Dream

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again just so as you know that I mean it. These compilations just wouldn’t be the same without a Becky N song. It would be like the Generation without the Daydream. ‘Coma Dream’ is taken from her second EP ‘4am Video Games’, recorded as part of the Utica Flower Company’s Invisible Box-Set project. A dark, twisting almost-spoken almost-sung tale of a poetic adventure that sounds too eerily real to be a dream, this song, with its urgent finger picking and claustrophobic intimacy is exactly why so many people can’t help but utterly dig her music.

Becky N on CLLCT

BESPECKLED EGG

Summer Fruits

Years from now, this will go down as “the DG compilation where we finally gave into the ukulele”. Leading the 4-string nylon charge is Bespeckled Egg, singing out a poem about summer fruits (and apples). It has a meandering and innocently infectious life of its own, like a small pop jazz trumpeter searching for melodies and finding them and losing them again, before whispering one of the most curiously catchy little qualifiers you might ever hear on record. Walking past the fruit stands in your local grocery store might never be the same again. *Today this has been my favourite song on the entire compilation… I’m not saying it still will be tomorrow, but it’s always today that counts.

Bespeckled Egg on CLLCT

BETHESDA ANN

Birds

Now this is a spellbinding voice. All the way from a part of Texas where apparently they have pine-trees and may or may not wear cowboy hats, Bethesda Ann has a way of singing that sounds like it belongs in another world. ‘Birds’ is one of a whole load of great songs that appear on her record ‘Everything Is Gold’, a smoky, crackling, dreamlike ballad that defiantly defies genres on the needle-strewn forest floor. I’ve heard this song about twenty times in the last week and it still isn’t losing its other-worldly charm. If you’re not mesmerized by it then I will eat my own hat.

Bethesda Ann on CLLCT

BRENDON HERTZ AND THE BURNT ORANGE  CRAYONS

Sacrifice

From Brendon Hertz’s brilliant album ‘Sacrifice’, the title track in all its melancholic reggae glory. For the Invisible Box set we crammed together 12 records and from all of them this song was undoubtedly one of my favourites. I’d love to say it is representative of Brendon’s work, but actually every song of his is different, like a genre-hopping untraceable beat poet of the 21st century so if you like this and go looking for a reggae record, then go look somewhere else. If however you’re looking for a bit of everything, then now you know where to look.

BRIAN AND THE WORLD

Song For Elm Street

Ah, this guy knocked me clean off my cloud the first time I heard him, and when he sent me ‘Song For Elm Street’ (having clambered back up to cumulus heights) it knocked me straight back off again. Some people have to battle against every gene they inherited to make something of some audible worth, but there are others like Brian (far fewer in number) who sound as if they were born to write brilliant songs. It almost makes you nervous when you stumble across someone with such natural talent, like standing at the top of a musical flume that you know will hurtle downwards forever, making it near impossible to listen to anyone else for several months. Definitely one of my favourite songs from three years worth of compilations.

Brian and the World on CLLCT

BROKEN MONO

Day By Day

As much as I love hearing something specially recorded for these compilations, I also like it when we provide a home for a long lost song. Grizzly psychedelic veteran of the DG compilations Broken Mono (you know the one I mean, cat’s head, Hendrix riffs) managed to dig up this ‘oldie from the days of 4-track’.  ’Day By Day’ is a much more traditional guitar pop song than we’re accustomed to hearing from planet cat, but it’s just as kind and catchy to the ears.

Broken Mono on MySpace

THE CANADIETTES

Both Wearing Dentures

The songs of Cordelia Hazel sound like they belong to the middle of the 1990s. It is an interesting and maybe not even deliberate way of looking backwards to look forwards. While just about every man and his girlfriend and her dog try their best to recreate the sounds and sights of the undisputed heavyweight decade of music (60s), The Canadiettes are content to strum simple acoustic chord patterns for Cordelia to sing her lovely songs over. ‘Both Wearing Dentures’ is a pretty good example of how to pack a melodic punch just by sounding like yourself, and it’s very, very diggable.

The Canadiettes on CLLCT

CHANSONS DE GESTE

Not A Poet Be

Well everyone knows what I think of Syd Lane’s voice and songs so I’m not going to bore you by telling you how amazing both are again. Instead I’ll tell you about ‘Not A Poet Be’ from the recent Chansons De Geste record ‘It Begins In Beauty’. Originally this wasn’t one of the songs that leaped out of it (in my defence that record is packed with melodic gems), but over time I’ve increasingly found myself involuntarily hearing it between my ears, the soaring notes and weight of the words… DIY probably isn’t ever going to sound as pure as this again, so love it while you can.

Chansons De Geste on MySpace

CHELSEA MARIE

The Sixth Thing That Happened To Me

It’s a feat in itself being able to not take yourself too seriously and yet still produce relatively serious songs about being. It would seem that Chelsea Marie is happy to grab a guitar, press play on the tape recorder and just let it run while she pipes out unashamedly cute little existential folk songs. ‘The Sixth Thing That Happened To Me’ is a rare moment of the sort of song-writing genius that happens when the tape runs, something so simple and yet pretty fucking profound, the sort of song that snapshots a whole generation in little more than two minutes, bursting with fuck ups and hope for the future. Keep the tape rolling.

Chelsea Marie on CLLCT

COOTIE SHOT

Bluetooths

I think this picture pretty much sums up the music of Cootie Shot, lo-fi pop on the living room floor with friends kicking around in the background. Once in a while you get a combination of voices that fit like both halves of a 2-piece jigsaw puzzle, and when Kia and Spence start harmonising over the uke’s on this brilliant little song about the corporate zombie technology that is bluetooth headsets, everything slots into place. Cootie Shot are the kind of band that should inspire everyone to learn a musical instrument and sing their hearts out about the universe around them. I don’t think I could ever get tired of listening to this.

Cootie Shot on CLLCT

THE CURIOUSLY STRONG PEPPERMINTS

Transcendentalism is Like Wow

From time to time you’ve got to take your hat off to ambition. The Curiously Strong Peppermint’s man behind the songs Jesse Miller, once said ‘I somehow have to top mid-60s-era Bob Dylan’ and as far as I’m concerned you can’t aim any higher than that. If ‘Transcendentalism…’ is anything to go by, then they’re at least on the right road. With a swirling, ringing, popping multi-coloured full band sound, this is pop music getting the full psychedelic treatment, producing something curiously fresh sounding. Taken in ample doses this sort of music is very good for getting your ears to breathe. Long may they walk backwards in this direction.

The Curiously Strong Peppermints on CLLCT

DEAD CANARIES

Karl Marx Lives In Lafayette Louisiana

I’ve spoken about this one at length in a recent review of the two new Dead Canaries offerings ‘Golden Sounds’ and ‘Modern Day Carpetbagger’. ‘Karl Marx…’ is one of the real stand-out songs of the two records, a bluesy Kinks-style surrealist anthem with Jon of the Atom drawling out his distinctive vocal, the song itself breaking into Beatle-esque sections. You all know what I think about this band and these records. Just go and download them and love it for yourself. It’s free!

Dead Canaries on MySpace

FAILED SITCOM

Mortlake

Ah time. There’s just not enough of it and this guy more than anyone reminded me of that. Just half an hour more a day and I’d have realised several months ago how amazing the music of Failed Sitcom actually is. For a long time I just considered him to be the friendliest person on CLLCT, but from the first few seconds of this song I quickly realised that he’s also one of the most talented. Living proof that it is possible to fuse folk-pop with hip-hop beats, ‘Mortlake’ is a shimmering soundtrack to a dreamlike daze with fragile and seriously loveable vocals, perfect brain fodder on a cold sunny morning staggering to the bakers and nearly getting knocked over twice. The next free half an hour I get, I know exactly what I’m going to go and download.

Failed Sitcom on CLLCT

THE FALLING FLOORS

Do You Feel Uptight?

The Falling Floors are fucking flying. I mean, if Jolan and Co keep improving and climbing at this rate over the next couple of years then we’re going to be so high up that we’re staring at the new ‘Revolver’. They were great to begin with, blasting out psych-tinted pop and roll painting by numbers little anthems… but if brand new track ‘Do You Feel Uptight’, and it’s frighteningly good predecessor (the album ‘Hey! Midnight’) are anything to go by, then you better buckle up because we’re in for a seriously bumpy ride upwards. Quick look out of the window to your left and through the clouds you will hear destination all-out psychedelic sunshine pop. Assume the crash position, because this is going to be fun, fun, fun.

The Falling Floors on CLLCT

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)

What Happened To Holiday?

Ladies and gentlemen I do believe this suggests that Bobby Rogan is recording again and for anyone who has ever listened to and loved a Figs record this is extremely good news. Rumours are the new record is going to be called ‘Say Okay’, although I may have just dreamed this up. Did I just dream it up? Hang on, let me check my email. No, I didn’t just dream it up and this toasty slice of home made pop would indicate that whatever it is he’s doing is going to be fucking great.

Fig Mints website

FOLK SINGING FATTIES WITH A TRUMPET

Trapfap

Some day Cameron Clarke will make me “An Introduction To The Various Musical Manifestations of Cameron Clarke”, but until that day I’m going to have to be content to steal minutes of more records than some collectives put together between them. This guy is really a one man song machine, and Folk Singing Fatties… is a file-sharing side project – ‘two dudes’ making great acoustic folk songs with comical lyrics (I hope) and a trumpet (apparently). ‘Trapfap’ is sung with poker faced brilliant harmonies and actually made me cry with laughter when I figured out what it is about. I’m not even sure if that’s cool. But it must be if Cameron’s connected to it?

Folk Singing Fatties With A Trumpet on CLLCT

FOXES IN FICTION

Snow Angels

Foxes In Fiction is a musical project from Warren Hildebrand, based in Toronto, and ‘Snow Angels’ is taken from a split EP he did with Glow Worm. As expected from anyone I’ve ever stumbled across based in the psychedelic capital of the world, his songs are predominantly electronic, but splashed with liberal lashings of that seemingly geographical specific sonic druggy spaced-out vocals. The results are supercool tracks like this, complimented with equally cool artwork. Well worth checking out if you like your experimental electronica.

Foxes In Fiction on CLLCT

GENERAL OGLETHORPE AND THE PANHANDLERS

Mary

Now this is a band to get excited about. Okay, so their name takes a lifetime to type, but that’s my only gripe. If this first track from their first demo ‘Mary’ is anything to go by then this four-piece from Georgia have got a bright melodic future ahead of them. The traditional drums and guitars format is given some bite and originality by the harmonic interplay of seriously amazing boy/girl vocals and a sweeping accordion that riffs away throughout. In many ways it sounds like an accomplished band who have been playing together for years, so it’s even more impressive that this is the first thing they’ve recorded together. Remember the name and if you need to write it down on the back on your hand then you might want to roll up your sleeve.

General Oglethorpe & the Panhandlers on MySpace

HANDWITHLEGS

I Hate Bugs

Now you know the world is getting weirder when HANDWITHLEGS records a pop song, but this here is no ordinary song, it is a song with a story. I’ll let him tell you it: “A few years ago J was studying in Germany and she bought a one-song CD off the street that just had this song on it, along with a photocopied insert with no information whatsoever. It’s been one of my all-time favourite songs since”. All I’ll say on this is that ‘I Hate Bugs’ is extremely catchy and it should come with a warning label. Which I why I just said that.

HANDWITHLEGS on Transatmospheric

IMPALED PEACH

Psycholicopter

‘Psycholicopter’ has grown on me more than any of the songs on DG8. I liked it from the first time I heard it, but I must have been in a rush because when I finally sat down in a quiet space and really listened to it from start to finish I was blown away by the intricate little uke melodies and understated vocal harmonies. Plus any song that goes ‘Ba Ba Ba’ convincingly at some point is always going to be a winner. Anyone who knows the guy behind the moniker (that’s Impaled without an ‘i’ by the way) won’t be surprised to hear something so poignantly assured, but for those of you who don’t then feel free to enjoy at an exponentially increased ratio to listens.

Impaled Peach on CLLCT

JAMES REDMOND

Tell Me

Here’s another guy who doesn’t need any introductions, throwing a bowling ball of melody your way. Fresh from my favourite cover on the White Christmas Album (‘Don’t Pass Me By’), Senor Redmond promised to attempt to get a new song to me by deadline day, but did. So you’re just going to have to make do with this little bowling ball of melodic magicalness he threw in my direction A LONG TIME after the deadline had passed. I’m sorry, I love a whole load of you, but I can’t think of anyone else who would get away with sending something in so late. Prepare to be a bowling pin.

James Redmond on MySpace

JOHN LUDINGTON

All The World Is Fin

John Ludington is more than just one of the most popular artists from the Daydream Generation compilations, and he’s a lot more than a simple singer-songwriter. New tracks appearing straight off recording sessions for a new record on a mountain-top are complex, surreal beatnik stories of characters, with involved guitar structures and vocal melodies that rise and fall and zigzag between the octaves. ‘All The World is Fin’ is the title track from his forthcoming record and if anything it is even more surreal, and even more complex than anything that has gone before, like how Nick Drake would have sounded if he’d run away and joined the circus in his teenage years…

John Ludington on MySpace

LENN9O9N

Ausdruck

It seems almost fitting that the guy with the coolest name in music might also resurrect the synthesizer as a credible musical instrument. Okay, I exaggerate a little (but not about the name) – the synth can be okay in doses, but to build entire songs and maybe someday a complete record out of that 80s machine of death? ‘Impossible’, I hear you say. Enter Lenn9o9n – an American in Italy who builds up layers of rhythm and synthetic sounds until it doesn’t just sound credible, it actually sounds amazing. ‘Ausdruck’ is dark and melodic, as much a composition as a song and a dangerous precedent. So remember kids: Synths are lethal equipment in the wrong hands. Listen to Lenn909n and if you can’t imagine yourself making music as immense as this, then please stick to the uke.

Lenn9o9n on CLLCT

LOGAN GREENE AND THE BRICKS

Why Am I Lonely?

And now somebody who makes country sound cool. Logan Greene is a singer-songwriter from Tucson Arizona who knows how to write a tune or two. Capable of kicking up a shitstorm of pop electrically, or strumming you to sleep in your Great Grandfather’s rocking chair, here we’ve got him doing the former, backed by The Bricks causing hippies to clumsily line-dance into one another while tripping over bongs and rushing home barefoot across the fields to dig out their Gram Parson’s records.

Logan Greene & The Bricks on CLLCT

MAUREEN SILL

Trip (to Heaven)

Taken from the record ‘In Four Hours I Will Feel Completely Different’, this song of Maureen Sill’s is one sixth of why this little record is so great. Struggling to pick a song from it, I went and downloaded all six and for seventy-six hours it was all I could listen to. These very lo-fi and very brilliant folk pop songs are the real deal – acoustic guitars strum, drums roll, and everything pushes the songs forward while Maureen sings poetic snapshots of the world over the top (and apparently without a microphone). It is put simply, a lovely and utterly bewitching listen.

Maureen Sill on CLLCT

OLD KING

Let’s Go Outside

This is the first thing I’ve heard from Manchester’s Old King and the early prognosis is very good. Okay, so anything involving Jolan from The Falling Floors is going to have some credibility straight away, but these kids are a different entity. ‘Let’s Go Outside’ is a reverb drenched shoegaze/psych track full of shuffling drums, drone/fuzz, ringing guitars, chiming bells, and deliciously drawled vocals. As they said in the business, one to watch.

Old King on MySpace

THE ORANGE DROP

Urban’s Front Yard

You’d be forgiven for thinking that we got this song from one of the three Orange Drop records of 2008, made in the eye of a psychedelic hurricane, when the world was there for the taking and anything seemed musically possible. But then they split up and went and formed new bands… didn’t they?Well actually they did, but now they’re back (woo hoo!) and psychedelic as ever. There are videos out there, and new songs emerging as the supersonic threesome/foursome start to stretch their hibernated limbs. ‘Urban’s Front Yard’ is a shiny new instrumental, and something of a shoegazer anthem. The psychedelic troubadours are back…

The Orange Drop on MySpace

PINEAL INDOLE

aHH ooOOoo HHa

A comp just wouldn’t be a comp without a shot of lo-fi psych-pop noise experimentation and on DG8 it falls to the brilliant Pineal Indole. Describing his project as ’self-indulgent’, actually this contribution sounds far from it. The brilliantly titled ‘aHH ooOOoo HHa’ is a fuzzy scuzzy lalalala-song with beats and bleeps and plenty of effects, loads of fun to listen to and the kind of thing that makes you wish you could rewind the hands of time back to the days of bong.

Pineal Indole on CLLCT

THE REAL BURNOUTS

Accused of Babbling

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any weirder… along come The Real Burnouts. Now the Burnouts are weird at the best of times, but ‘Accused of Babbling’ from the album ‘Endeavouring To Make God A Liar’ is chomping on the limits of sanity. Personally I love it. There’s nobody quite like these guys to throw you a curve ball, then a fast ball, then another curve ball, and finally swallow the ball whole and run away into the woods to never be seen again. Currently promoting the theatrical masterpiece ‘The Disinfection of Walter’, complete with puppets, psychedelic lighting and live actors at a theatre probably nowhere near you, it means a lot them taking time out to throw us a song-bone like this.

The Real Burnouts website

SEALOVE

My Life Is One Big IDK

From ‘Mondays at Sunday Creek’, this song is just one example from two albums worth of examples of the Lo-Fi pop cuteness that is Sea Love. I imagine that it must be near impossible for anyone to hate this one-girl band’s music, with kooky little folk songs and catchy melodies played on a pink ukulele. ‘My Life is One Big IDK’ is a twenty year old’s wry look back over the shoulder of life with a shrug and a grin.

Sealove on CLLCT

SIMON PILER

Kochia

Here’s a rare glimpse through the giant telescope of time at Simon Piler pre-Simon Piler and the Atom Band. Salvaged from a solo EP called ‘Test’, this track ‘Kochia’ is one of a handful of somewhat atypical not-so-experimental Piler magic. Simon himself has conceded that ‘Test’ is perhaps his most accessible piece of work, straightforward (or rather more straightforward) folk guitar song structures with the much more typical all-guts Piler vocals. Here, you can borrow the magic telescope for a couple of minutes while you listen to it, but please remember to return it to Dr Simon Piler c/o Cabin 5, The Mardi, somewhere N/W of Antarctica. Thankee.

Simon Piler on CLLCT

STOMACH ULCERS

Free

Jordan is the lead singer and guitarist in Canadian band N/A, and Stomach Ulcers is his solo project. Frequently found mooching around on old couches in the middle of nowhere solving near unsolvable crimes, when he does turn his hand to picking up an acoustic and strumming his thoughts, he does a pretty good job. ‘Free’ is a mellow and tongue firmly planted in cheek folky-grunge song about not wanting to face up to the future and about loving mooching around. I think he pretty much sums up almost everyone I knew fifteen years ago in a musical nutshell.

Stomach Ulcers on CLLCT

TUCK SON

Chakra

Michael King makes seriously interesting music. The last man onto the Daydream bus, in a fog of smoke, clutching a battered tape recorder and a grin under his arm. ‘Chakra’ is a kaleidoscopic dance of ghosts around a fire in a living room that melts away revealing ancient trees with spooky faces, while the lamp in the corner becomes a setting sun a-blazing. The whole thing sounds like a lot of acoustic instruments making an electric sound as outside in the street Tuck Son drops himself into a seat near the back of the bus spilling the grin and pressing his face to the frosted glass of the window while the engine begins to rumble. And meanwhile back in the living room the ghosts dance on.

Tuck Son on CLLCT

WEIRD RIBS

North Cave

This compilation’s compulsory electronic seven minute soundscape is brought to you courtesy of Weird Ribs aka Joseph Cox. Everybody from time to time needs a track like this in their lives – something to be to, something that makes you want to close your eyes and balance on ledges, go outside barefoot in the cold to count the stars, or simply lie there really wasted in space to breathe.

Weird Ribs on CLLCT

THE WHEELIES

Pinocchio

Well it looks like this is it for me. I’m not saying I won’t rummage around in the back catalogue for a song if we’re seriously short on a compilation in future, but hopefully that’s not going to happen and our quixodelic inbox is so full with contributions that I’ll be knocking people back rather than scrabbling around at the last minute for tracks. After fifteen (or is it sixteen?) years The Wheelies are finally no more, and this is the last song I/we ever recorded called ‘Pinocchio’. I was very unhappy when I wrote it. But I’m happy now.

The Wheelies on CLLCT

______________________________________

Okay you’ve read everything you need to read, now GO AND DOWNLOAD THE COMPILATION ALL OF IT BOTH DISCS SUPPORT THE LITTLE GUYS AND GIRLS OF THE MUSICAL WORLD – YOU WON’T REGRET IT

Thanks to everyone who helped put Daydream Generation 8 together, especially Simon and Becky.

See you all again for another sometime soon.

smally

download: It Begins In Beauty

Then from out of nowhere,  CHANSONS DE GESTE’s “It Begins In Beauty” landed in my crowded in-box. My initial reaction was ‘Oh well, if I’m really done, then there’s no harm in downloading this and digging it for fun.’ So download it I did. And dig it I did. Only I kept on digging it, and though new music continued to pour with alarming frequency into my brain through my headphones, from time to time I felt drawn back to this record, like somehow I’d been magnetized to its melodies.

Anyone tuned in to what we’re doing here surely by now knows how great The Loaded Whispers are. Chansons De Geste is the latest Syd Lane of The Loaded Whispers manifestation and instantly you’re thinking that a name change means something – upheaval and change, a new direction, or quite possibly an experimental noise instrumental record to fill a creative gap in time. But actually it is the complete opposite. Chansons sounds to the untrained ear like the culmination of what she and Jer were doing on the four previous Loaded Whispers’ releases. Where the melodies flew before, now they soar. Where once it sounded soulful, now it sounds spiritually incandescent. And before where the distinctive poet voice reached for magical notes, now it brushes the magical notes aside and bursts upwards into incomprehensible stratospheric heights of song.

On the now seemingly final Loaded Whispers record “Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth”, you could sit back and listen to Syd’s voice dancing across the sky, on “It Begins In Beauty” it seems to have somehow vanished out of sight, up above the clouds. In a weird way it’s like a butterfly in reverse – the more developed the songwriting and sound becomes, the more it sounds like Syd, confidently emerging from some cocoon as herself.

Please excuse these clumsy metaphors… it’s the inevitable by-product of the finished record, guided by the mighty muse. The songs themselves, albeit framed in this epic sound (quite remarkable considering this is a home recording project), are extremely personal, autobiographical, and philosophical – as genuine as it gets. You get the feeling that going into a big studio with a full band would kill the fragility and honesty out of tracks like “Not A Poet Be”, “Ontario Place” or “Astride A Grave”. Make no mistake – it is one thing to write a solitary timeless song and then to record it in such a way that it captures it perfectly, but it is another to write a whole record of them. From start to finish these are gut-wrenchingly beautiful words and tunes and I don’t think anyone of us will fully understand just how incredible a record it is until many, many years from now. On “Artists…” I got addicted to listening to “Sick of Writing Sad Songs”. On “It Begins In Beauty” I could get (and have been) addicted to listening to five or six of them, and expect the rest at some point to take centre stage in due course.

Don’t believe me? Well take a listen to “Ontario Place” for yourself:
Download audio file (OntarioPlace.mp3)

The gravity of this great little record was enough for me to seriously reconsider walking away from this adventure forever. It wasn’t an immediate revolution and there were other contributing factors, but these psychedelic pop ballads soaked in reverb carrying candid poetry on shoulders of song hooks gnawed away at my conscience over days and weeks until finally all that was left for me to do was say “Ah fuck it. Who am I kidding? People need brilliant life-affirming, comforting and inspiring songs to keep going and here I am sitting on a record like this…”

So bearing in mind that I’d already been sent a life-changing record from across the Irish sea and was struggling to keep my feet on the road of finality, it was something of a killer blow to receive this in my in-box a month later:

download: The Solstice Sessions

A SYD LANE solo album, recorded on the run, the bare bones of  the process behind “It Begins In Beauty’s” songs. Sure, the subject matter of these confessional hymns are sung from the same page as its older, more mature and intricate sister, but “The Solstice Sessions” is like a more playful and less self-conscious younger sibling. It perhaps doesn’t pack the same punch, but from a fan’s perspective it is a wonderful insight into the song-writing bubble, sounding less psych-pop and more folky and just as important.  Credit must go to her partner in crime, Mr Jeremiah James, maybe not such an audible presence on these recordings (though contributions to “Astride A Grave” help really make that song), yet you sense him there every step and note of the way. I’ve got a feeling that without Jer then Syd herself might be content to simply make music for the love of making music, and you and I would be none the wiser. So hats off to him.

If you’ve never heard The Loaded Whispers before then I’d recommend you work chronologically starting with “It Begins In Beauty”, because it truly is a featherweight champion of the world, and save “The Solstice Sessions” for when you’ve had your fill. If you’re already a fan like me, then you might as well close your eyes, or flip a coin and download either first. They both have a place off the beaten track, like leaves of technicolour skin, or trails of poem in the sky. I fucking love pretty much everything that comes out of the Lane/Jones studio, and I’m betting a change of direction that you will too.

Visit Syd Lane at:

http://theloadedwhispers.com and

http://www.myspace.com/chansonsdegeste

THE REAL BURNOUTS – “Fully Involved EP”

2009 may well very prove to be the year of the Real Burnout. Where all around us musicians we have loved and listened very closely to, run out of songs, pack up their guitars, slump into funks, and throw in the novelty musical note towel, on the American side of the Atlantic Ocean, in the little city of Utica, The Real Burnouts have been down in the basement cooking up records. This year alone we’ve already seen the following – two full-length records “Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane”, and “(In) A World Not Unlike Your Own”, a compendium of unreleased hits “Copious Maximus”, and word on the street is that a fourth unreleased album sits loaded up in the Cozy Home torpedo chamber, that may or may not still be called “Dark”. In fact, The Real Burnouts have been so productive that I half expected an invitation to contribute to The Invisible Box-Set to be met with a completely burned out silence.

But of course when you’re on a roll, well then there’s nothing you can do to keep yourself from keeping rolling. Commander in Chief of the band (Paul Burnout), enthusiastically reported throughout August that he was working on a masterpiece record called “The Disinfection of Walter”, and that they would be playing the album in full accompanied by actors and/or dancers at a Utica music festival. 3 weeks later I got a message to say that this psychedelic symphony had been such a success that “..Walter” was going to be re-recorded in a studio environment. “Don’t worry”, said Paul, “there’s still a week for me to write and record something new”.

And so they did. “Fully Involved” is an eight track EP, recorded in two sittings and only a few action-packed hours. At the wheel are the twin force of two of the Cozy Home’s most eminently original musicians – Paul and Bobby, and as always this creative combination throws up particularly pleasing results. You sense listening to these songs that after the two previous (and arguably uncharacteristically melancholy/introspective) albums, that there are fucking flames back leaping through the veins. On “Fully Involved”, The Real Burnouts go back to sounding like a riotous band rather than one maverick psych-poet floating around in the limbo of his own monstrous imagination. This record sounds like it took weeks rather than hours to put together, from the fuzzy pop opener “My Heart Explodes”, to the punk explosion of “Shot In The Pocket”, this is a fun, and beautifully deranged collection of songs to play. With drugged up anthems like “How Good It Feels” and the aptly titled “Drunk and Stoned” the monstrous imagination comes crashing back to earth with big riffs and equally big drums. The Real Burnouts really do sound fully involved again, and for those of you who have forgotten how excitingly different they can be on their day, then this record should provide a welcome reminder.

Song writers seem to fall into one of two hands. In one are those who can’t help but keep writing, like butterflies flitting from one idea-flower to the next, putting quantity over quality and hopefully somewhere in amidst all those rushed recordings will be something worth keeping hold of. In the other are individuals like Frogville’s Jason Raspa, blessed with the patience and determination to take an idea-flower and keep tending to it, only walking away from it when it’s grown as high as it can.

From the word go, with the swirling psychedelic guitar lines of “I Believe In You”, this is something of an all-out assault on the parts of your brain that instinctively hoover up hooks and retain them, regurgitating them at random intervals throughout your waking day. The first five songs of “A Bug Eyed-Swamp” are the equivalent of a top-heavy bombardment of melody. For those of you going into it blind, I’d be very surprised if you’re not waving the white flag of submission a couple of verses into the upbeat 90s indie-pop of second track “Just Like Sunday”. Three through five are my own favourites – “The Speed of a Crawl” is cinematic and sweeping, a sonic lullaby for the frazzled heads of the 21st century. “I’m A Bee” is comical and catchy as fuck, combining Jason’s reassuringly loveable voice singing “Collecting honey for the Queen / I love her, I think you know what I mean / There’s too many guys in the hive / She doesn’t even know that I’m alive”, with suitably bee-powered musical swagger. The vocals, like the range of guitar riffs, walking bass-lines, steady drums, and liberal helpings of effects and sound tricks that are central to the Frogville sound, are actually each but a part of the well-oiled machine, all of them doing their bit, carrying it forward, letting each song breathe bedecked in blinking lights into the muddy swamp of creation. You won’t play this record to your friends and say “Listen to the guitar on this”, or “What is he doing here?”, but you will put it on and let it play out saying “Listen to all of this”.

Fifth track “The Light You Give” is as close as you’ll get to a standard ballad form – an ageless melodic love song where “The light you give shines”. Simply put – it’s fucking beautiful. From the blistering start, the rest of the record is more of a blur of ideas and sounds. The mainly instrumental and eerily weird title track signals the end of the “song” songs and the beginning of something a little darker and less deliberate. Frogville shows that the psych-pop salvos are just a part of the bigger picture (albeit a glorious part). Equally the machine is at home producing freaky indie guitar blow-outs “Time is Growing”, druggy Jonestown Massacre-esque shoegaze funk amalgamations (”Turns to Gold”), dig up something that sounds like it fell off the edge of “Forever Changes” (”Mexico”), or do lush country drone experiments like the closing “Speed of Disillusionment”. Penultimate track “Face” deserves a sentence or two on its own. Like a lost song from 1966, think somewhere in between The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground, tambourine punctuated tunnel of stark sound and a vocal melody that sounds like something you should have heard somewhere before, but know that you haven’t. Finally available in free digital download format, this is one swamp you want to wade in right up to your bug eyes for.

PERIWINKLE PERISCOPE – “Fraises”

Is there a better band name than this around right now? There is a certain cartoon-like dance to those two words thrown together like curious bedfellows in another world. It has been a while since the debut self-titled Periwinkle Periscope album dropped through my letterbox and kept me entertained with its experimental folk songs and poetry, and was getting to the point where you wondered if perhaps it was another one-off project from one of the most musically curious (or curiously musical) households in the United States.

With a six song instrumental EP in the shape of “Fraises”, thankfully it seems Periwinkle Periscope are an ongoing concern. Written and recorded in four hours, Judy Shimmin provides much the same as the debut record offered, exploratory pieces of abstract sound building up around recurring melodies with strings that twang and bricks of percussion, until some structure forms and rocks gently in the breeze. It feels like if you blow hard enough, then this little record could easily fall to pieces, but if you resist the urge to puff up your lungs and stop, just stop and listen to it swaying, then you see it for what it is. “Fraises” (originally intended to have sung songs over the top, but released as an instrumental record because of the necessary time constraints of the box-set project), is simply the sound of someone surrounding themselves with instruments and playing whatever feels right to them. Guitars buzz and organs bellow, unidentifiable objects rattle and wooden blocks chime. This is a soundtrack from the same cartoon-like world that the words Periwinkle Periscope curl up in. The first time I heard it I was pacing the length of the Main Deck, suddenly noticing how intense everything was, how minute the detail in the most ordinary of things, like a rusty bolt, or a broken window, or a wilted flower once woven into the rigging.

Perinwinkle Periscope’s “Fraises” is a strange little record with its songs that go from A to F. It is minimalistic and at times discordant… not the sound of a classically trained musician, nor in the same ball park as it’s lyrical older self-titled sister. But above all else, it is a lot of fun to put in your ears just to see what happens. Just that little bit more clearly. Here’s hoping that G to Z will sometime follow.

Jolan tells us, “While I have three or four albums worth of material recorded, this is the first time I have set out to make a cohesive album.” It turns out that ‘Hey! Midnight’ is very cohesive, a fact which makes for a very smooth and enjoyable listen. We are enveloped gradually; ‘Frequent Dream’ approaches us in waves, like the soft hum of a distant turboprop engine. But as the plane pops over the rise, we are suddenly splatter-painted by it’s twin 20-meter paintbrushes, ‘What You’ve Done’. Immediately danceable, this song is capable of applying retrographic texture to entire landscapes. The first transition is stark, but extremely natural, and one of the highlights of the album.

The Falling Floors have a strength with harmony. Many of the tracks offer complicated, interlocking lines that balance arpeggiating guitars, bass, keyboards, and voice. The whole of it is punctuated by sparse percussion, mainly a sharp snaredrum and some uncannily [!!!] ferverent tambourine. I believe that natural harmonists have a good sense of musical dimension, and it is no surprise that The Falling Floors also exceed at dictating musical space. At times the album becomes soft and impressionistic (see ‘Pink Sky Over the Motorway at 5AM’ or ‘Little Bug’) other times very jaunty and full of pep; (see ‘Honeybee’, ‘Palindrome’, ‘Don’t Try’, or ‘Giving Up and Giving Way’) these tracks in particular give the album it’s remarkable 60’s throwback coloration. And ‘Where We Feel Secure’? It’s just plain beautiful.

Perhaps the most impressive quality that the album possesses is it’s forthright nature. Though these songs are adept compositions, all, I never get the feeling that Jolan and company are obsessed with the technicality of the music to the point where it distracts from the flow and overall perception of a song. Even the palindromic songs end up being extremely listenable, cohesive tracks, a tribute to the organization and planning put into the album. It’s apparent that The Falling Floors are making their recordings with our receptive ears in mind!

Now I wish they’d hand me a towel, I’ve got paint all over.

There was a time not so long ago that it looked like it might be all over for Uberfuzz. The toil of live shows finally took its toll and with each record freaking musically deeper and further out, it looked like there was nowhere left for the band to go. Actually the only place left to go was inwards – the band disassembled, leaving only singer-songwriter Paul Le Keux, with sister Kelly to provide the occasional moral vocal support. This new unpressurised environment of going back to writing and recording for the love of making music seemed to work – the five-track “As If It Matters EP” hinted that there was another side to Rugby’s most recent supplier of explosive psychedelics, a much wiser and cleaner sound, a little less synthetic with a more folky exploration of melody.

My own discovery of Uberfuzz was post-masterpiece “Drowing In Honey”, so just the idea of a new record in the works was something pretty fucking exciting. Downloading it and seeing the brilliant old school black and white guitar/moon cover and finally playing it took me way back to my teenage years wishing the train would go just that little bit faster so as I could get home and listen to the new cassette from one of my favourite bands. “An Island In The Moon” does not disappoint. The new polished and conversely more intimate sounds of “As If It Matters” are taken to the next level on the full album. Welcome additions are sitars and tablas, breathing life into the bones – lovers of psychedelia take note: when I say that “An Island…” is a little more folky by design, that doesn’t mean that it’s no longer psychedelic. Take the Velvet Underground-esque and wonderfully philosophical “Epistle to a Wayward Mother”, the spoken word effects laden title track conjuring up the words of William Blake, the vinyl scratched “Wooden” and “Rusty Shack” instrumentals, or even the brilliant sitar jam “Space Raga No.1″ – there is plenty worth smoking along to. Yet perhaps with the exception of the deftly wielded sitar, these are treasures that we fully expect to find on an Uberfuzz record. The real rub of “An Island in the Moon” is on the tracks where the layers fall away.

Both the opening and closing covers of “Farewell Angelina” and the cover of The Rolling Stones “Play With Fire” are great examples. You just don’t cover bands and songs like those unless you can bring something else to the floor. If anything, Uberfuzz somehow manage to make this Bob Dylan classic sound even more fragile, and The Stones sound even more vibrant. Meanwhile “Sip of Wild Honey” is Uberfuzz at its finest, but with a folky-pop twist, and “Summer Wine” is the sound of the psychedelic wild west happening in your living room. The trouble with a band honing their sounds and recording techniques is that sooner or later the bubble has to burst, and a point is reached at the end of the line where there really is nowhere left to go. Thankfully, it sounds like Uberfuzz have already been there, stepping off the tracks and walking out into the wilderness whereupon they found that there was still something to sing about, sounds to be explored, and hopefully people like me who will keep listening and download their records like an expectant teenager. I pull back the curtains and grin when I see that the moon looks curiously golden tonight.

It somehow doesn’t seem real that we’re finally listening to a full-length Amalfi Glow record. The tracks that make up this inaugural TAG release “On My Back Looking At Home” have been slowly amassed, like a tap dripping pearls of electronic sound until the basin finally overflows onto the bathroom floor of the earth and all that’s left to do is climb up onto the ceiling of the universe and look down at the accidental ocean suddenly pulsing and swirling beneath us.

I’m no student of ambient soundscapes, but I know what I like to hear and every pearl from project Amalfi that has splashed out from my headphones in the small hours has left me hopelessly wishing that I could pass them onto 19 year old me, head full of acid with an insatiable thirst to go SOMEWHERE DIFFERENT in my imagination. Taken on their own each pearl has sounded as great as anything I’ve heard from your Orbitals, or Orbs, or Boards of Canadas. Finally strung together though, these beads of experiment seem to find their true form side by side. “On My Back…” does exactly what it seems to have always been unconsciously stretching towards – a journey of sound. I’ve been fortunate to witness first hand El Capitan Amalfi behind the wheel, pulling white rabbit samples and multi-layered beats from the burning bottomless hat, and I can honestly say that it is a truly mind-boggling thing to observe. Even without a head full of acid.

You sense with this record that the sky is the the least of the limits for this long-standing and yet still fledgling project. Like the record itself, The Amalfi Glow is a journey still at the very beginning, pausing briefly to tie up the loose ends before moving on, home finally blinking out of sight behind it. Familiar tracks like the epic “Pagoda” and hypnotic “Mersum” sound suddenly rejuvenated in between new offerings like the thundering urgent beats of “Char-an-choola”, or the ambience of “Let Me Find Joy”. Fans of electronica will undoubtedly get what is happening here a hell of a lot more than I ever will, but if you’re in the same dinghy of inexperience as I am then you could do a lot worse than lying down beneath the basin, grabbing hold of something that resembles a paddle, and push off through the pearls. Acid or no acid.

While I sat there waiting for the grumbling and grimacing supercomputer to warm up, I heard a sound like a fly buzzing furiously against the panes of the one remaining unbroken window of the Communications Room. Initially assuming it to be an Ylfnogard, as the screen burst into life before my eyes, I quickly noticed that the buzzing appeared to have a vaguely melodic sawing swing to it. This was no fly. When I sat down in the seat my iPod must have accidentally started to play – the curious melodic buzzing was in fact Simon Piler belting out “Termination Death” in my pocket.

To review any Simon Piler and The Atom Band record in three paragraphs is asking the impossible of anyone (particularly as I just spent the first of the three babbling about buzzing). After the all-out poetic experimental dream assault of the two most recent recordings “Songs From Home” and “Heimdall”, you could say I am a fully fledged convert to the theatrical adventure of anything generated from the boundless brain of this peripatetic young poet. If anything, “KINGTIME” doesn’t just follow on from its predecessors, but ups the ante and runs away with it under your nose. This is a record of Joycian magnitude – a mythic-poetic tale of one King Narcissus, peppered with song and tales, and filled out with sometimes mad, and sometimes gentle experimental folk sounds. You can’t possibly pretend to understand exactly what is going on, but like a match to the imagination it strikes and you step away from it in flames frantically searching for the nearest puddle of reality to cool down in. With a handy printable lyric book packed with black and white words and wonderful imagery, “KINGTIME” should probably be the sort of thing we fire at teenage study groups. It is a giddy, expansive, soulful, bamboozling, and utterly brilliant multi-media seed for the barren wasteland of your addled imagination. Songs like the wonderfully lyrical “ROLL”, the absurdly infectious and utterly memorable “King TV”, the lo-fi hop of “Dogs”, the pocket buzz of “Termination Death”, and gargantuan understated “The Vulcanist” fall upon on the scorched earth, linked together and sprinkled with Simon’s running commentary, as the tale spins out in the mirror and a garden of pure imagination blooms.

Once you’re hooked on the ideas behind this music there is no going back. You can download “KINGTIME” and try to enjoy it as an artistic feat in its own right, like watching a skinny bearded stunt rider on a rickety red bicycle attempting to leap 18 car-songs from the top of a steep ramp, and toppling with a beautiful laugh to crash through the cracked windscreen of car number one. Alternatively you can do your homework, read the lyric book and track down interviews with Simon where he candidly explains the dream theory and intricate thought that goes into writing his records. The old man sings. The ash of the volcano settles on the earth. And King TV rolls out around every corner, clutching his belly with little beady eyes. This is the fabric of song that doesn’t just ring in your ears, but seeps irrevocably into the veins of your life. It’s KINGTIME!

Discovering the musical world of Brendon Hertz has been one of the real finds for me during this box-set. There’s always a sense of trepidation including someone whose music you’ve never heard in a project of this magnitude. I mean, The Daydream Generation compilations are just one song and if you go one song wrong, then it’s not such a big deal… whereas with the box-set we’re talking a whole record, and potentially a whole record of wrong songs. So even though there was a level of backing with the very credible Simon Piler describing Brendon as “the leader of The Atom Band”, I downloaded “Sacrifice” with my fingers, toes and ears well and truly crossed.

I need not have crossed anything. Twenty seconds into spoken word second track “Neo-Beat Grocery” I realised we’d struck musical oil and breathed an almighty sigh of relief. My head has been crying out for just this kind of approach – indie-beat deliberations on modern America. Okay, so there must be people out there doing this kind of thing – but in three long years of doing this, maybe only one other had been going at it from this direction, and that connection had long been lost. By the time I reached track five, the brilliantly atmospheric acoustic ballad “Jasper Fforde…”, I was wide awake and unconsciously holding my breath. “Sacrifice” is by no means a conventional record. Its identity is in the shifting identity of songs – a lot of fun to listen to, but there’s something else about it; something deeply poetic and ambitious happening beneath the patchwork surface of its multi-faced persona.

Let’s dig on that patchwork surface for a moment because it’s undoubtedly what makes this record so special. For a start, count the genres – electronica, spoken word poetry, experimental noise, psychedelic funk, acoustic folk, 60s pop, jazz, reggae, soul, timeless piano balladry, blues, and an atmospheric indie anthem thrown in for good measure. Yet far from being an intentional spectrum of sound, you instantly recognise that this is a multi-faceted singer-songwriter simply expressing himself in the most direct way possible with the content of the song and the feelings behind the song dictating the form. I really don’t know anyone who would even attempt to do something as wide-reaching as this, let alone anyone who would actually be able to do it so well and in such a short space of time. Perhaps the most surprising thing of all about such a diverse record as this, is that when it comes out on the other side it sounds completely coherent and wonderfully together. With so many styles happening, inevitably there is something for every someone. Candid and cool beat poetry aside, my own favourites are the aforementioned “Jasper Fforde…”, the raw Beatle-esque “Mail From You”, the majestic title track “Sacrifice” (would not be out of place on a Bob Marley greatest hits), the soulful piano and brass ballad “Magic” (what can I say? It’s magic, perhaps my favourite of all the songs), and the melancholic poetic intensity of “Life’s Match”.

If you’re looking for something different then you’ve come to the right place. “Sacrifice” is different from start to finish, like the mix-tape of a love long lost, only with one guy singing his heart out and speaking his thoughts throughout. The musicianship is first class, the voice that carries the songs is ambitious in range and trembles with genuine human emotion, and there’s just enough self-defacing humour tucked away amidst the patchwork folds to keep it from sinking beneath the quicksand of introspective no return. Finally I exhale. 5 kaleidoscopic patchwork stars out of 5.

Becky N’s follow-up to her Two Wheels EP, 4am Video Games, definitely has the signatures of the songwriter’s touch. The lo-fi recording, the sparse arrangements, and the simplicity that is soft to the ear are all here. In fact, this EP may be even sparser than Two Wheels. Most of the songs are cut back to guitar and voice, with some overdubs. When you listen to the new music from 4am Video Games, however, there’s a new element to many of the songs.

Walls of repeating chords on downbeats add drive to songs like “Overgrown” and “4am Video Games”. This adds a sad, droning element to the songs making them perfect for ominousness but also for meditation. I took this EP out for a spin on my bicycle late during a recent fall evening, and it seemed to fit alongside the brisk autumn air well. The darkness of the night combined with the minor sounds of the album and the blinking of traffic lights seemed complementary to Becky’s tone on this release.

Although the dichotomous guitar riffs on “Coma Dream” make this the standout track on the album, the song also shows off a unique sense of timing, lyrical stylings, and the finger-picking of Becky N. Though the overtones are of sadness, Becky N still shows a quirky side on “Sweetie”, which starts off with a guitar part reminiscent of nineties grunge-rockers. The lyrics twist this into an interesting love song, ending abrubtly with the lyric “where’ve you been all my life”, leaving the listener with some kind of longing.

All in all, this album shows a new side of Becky N. It may be a darker, more brooding side, yes, but also something that is searching and hoping. It is this aspect of the album that made this reviewer want to do a lot of soul-searching while listening to 4am Video Games. This album gets one highly-recommended moonlit bicycle ride; listen to it at 4am or not, but this one definitely lends itself to nighttime excursions.

HANDWITHLEGS – “One More Excuse”

Handwithlegs’ contribution to the box-set “One More Excuse” was like the missing piece of an unintentionally technicolour jigsaw puzzle. We’d covered just about every genre known to man (with the exception of Death Metal) and all that was missing was something heavy, something pulsing and dark for the

mad side of midnight when proceedings run away from you and you find yourself locked into some ugly, downwards spiral of drugged up lunacy. If you download this record then be warned – it is LOUD. It is capital letters LOUD. Guitar-like synths fuzz and hammer, drums roar like pounding waves, and there is a sense of absolute claustrophobic urgency to every song. Where I come from, people don’t make music like this. It terrifies them.

This isn’t to say that Handwithlegs is not in the business of writing songs – think Manic Street Preachers “Holy Bible” for the structure and riffs that keep this five track EP burning from start to finish. Yet it seems to have a lot more to do with experimentalism and the deliberate pursuit of a particular sound. If your ears aren’t bleeding by the end of the fifth track then it would seem that the record hasn’t quite done the job. Vocally it’s in stark contrast to previous HWL records – the words still buried within the frenetic squall of sound, but there is a rhythm and starkness to the part-yelled, part-sung lines that brings a new energetic thrust to the music.

Every spectrum needs a dark side. Yet at the same time there is something chaotically fun about “One More Excuse” – both instrospective and exhibitionist at the same time. It doesn’t just sit in the corner. Nobody tells it what to do. It bites your hand off with a grin as if to say “Well what do you expect? I’ve got fucking sharp teeth”. This may be an attempt at making more of a “rock” record, rather than an experimental noise soundtrack, but from where I’m standing it sounds a lot closer to fuck-it-and-see ethos of punk. And punk is good thing. What’s that you say? Ah shit I can’t hear you, my ears are bleeding.

SHINE SHUT – “The Decision”

This album is short, but I’ll admit that it evokes a strong curiosity in me. One could say that it is alluring. May I offer a definition? Allure: to attract by the offer of something having real or seemingly real value. To clarify this word-variable, we’ll need a more specific definition for value. Value: meaning; force; significance. I’ll have to select ‘force’ when considering ‘The Decision’ because the album’s meaning is well past my means of determination. Perhaps that is Shine Shut’s aim in the production of these recordings! Are they to be breathless, airy and ephemeral graspings of idea? This much is possible to estimate from my listening. A portraiture of dynamic life, wrought in chaos. A thematic groundwork concerning consciousness is difficult to signify, I think.

So we are left with force. And no petty leaving; the album grinds and flexes as we are subjected to varying tensile pressures of circuitous, stomping energy. ‘A Build’ is almost swamp blues – it wildly brandishes a dark, inoculated wind across it’s marching ground. There are deep ideas here, that is true, but I am struck at how short of a time they are left to develop! The drop-off droning portion of the song could have been elaborated to great effect; at it’s current pace there is a hurried quality that it carries. And so my curiosity wells up again – is this a story of gestation, or simply of birth? We certainly are not meant to digest the full course of a complex decision, here. Instead, I think, we see only the critical moment of absolute choice; that irreversible waypoint of self-description.

At other times, the album is softer, almost restful. ‘Shelf’ is reflective and even cheery. ‘Is That My Soul?’ seems to offer a speculative resolution of the darker portions; and it’s very tongue speaks-broad in a short, granular breath. Shine Shut calls ‘The Decision’ dream music; an undertaking to which I believe I can claim myself kin. Though we dream musicians may offer the widest spectral output of resultant music, we have one unifying quality that is unique among musical motivation of all kinds. We strive to describe and qualify space. ‘The Decision’ is a good reminder that though the spaces encompassed by the dreaming mind may be extremely complex, they are possible to reconstitute through our wakeful understandings of sound. This is the undertaking of a dream musician, difficult though it may be. With every study of feeling that we grasp at, and every sound we practice making, we become a little more thorough and clear in our descriptions. And so, in the end I am left with my curiosity. And my speculations. And ponderings. That is alright with me.

Thank you, Shine Shut.

JAMES REDMOND – “Dig Deep”

It is the dying seconds of one of the greatest football games of all time. The Champions League final of 2005, Liverpool v AC Milan. Having been three goals down at half-time and all but resigned to losing, Liverpool mount one of the most unbelievable come-backs we have ever seen, bringing it back to 3-3 and taking the game into extra time. The Italians surge again, peppering the Liverpool goal with wave after wave of attacks. At the centre of the Liverpool’s defence is one Jamie Carragher, by no means a footballer who will appear in the annals of world soccer history, but a player who wears his heart on his sleeve and gives it his all, throwing himself into tackles, heading the ball off the line, and marshalling his fellow troops. Carragher clears the ball with another last ditch header and goes down with cramp but the game goes on, the Italians picking up the ball and lining up to stick it in the net. With the camera focusing on the prostrate defender, the Scottish commentator leans into his microphone and urges him to “Dig deep son. Dig deep”. A hobbling Carragher picks himself up off the ground and hobbles in agony into the fray again to rise above the Milan strikers and clear the danger.

Not only is Jay Redmond the Jamie Carragher of the music world, but he is also a very hard man to get hold of when it’s backs to the wall and flying by the seat of your pants time. In fact, he is so hard to reach that he might as well be written into the “Encyclopaedia of Mythical Creatures” beside Big Foot, the Loch Ness Monster, the Abominable Snowman, and the fire-eater of Atlantis. His entry reads: “James (Lee) Redmond; scouse troubadour and purveyor of perfect pop songs”. There is no profile picture, just an aerial snapshot of some white trainers (presumably belonging to Jay). For half a year I’ve been fortunate enough to play the part of his personal archivist, collating a combination of new songs and lost tracks salvaged from old 4-track cassettes, buried beneath the thick dust and hiss of time. Everything he’s sent my way has been immensely lovable – painted with the same infectious brush of melody as previous collection “Too Much To Think”, all the while the bones of the record solidifying and taking shape.

Everything is in place. All he has to do is come up with a title, tell me which songs to keep, and in what order they should go. I email him a week before the box-set deadline day and get no reply. With three days to go I message him again, explaining we’re reaching a critical juncture like the scene in Father Ted when the priests are stuck in the lingerie section of a department store and are trying to escape via a fire exit without being seen. The day before the box-set goes live I email him one last time with the Jamie Carragher story. 24 hours after the deadline has passed I hear a muffled shout that seems to be emanating from behind a rack of giant granny pants. It says “Smally, please can you put the tracks into order for me, and call it DIG DEEP…”

THE OCTOBER TERMINUS – “The October Terminus”

Rob Levy doesn’t make enough records. It’s only when he does that I remember how important previous incarnations have been – Travel Labyrinth, External World, Platinum Limb, Sentic Forms… the list goes on and on. Here, in his latest form – The October Terminus – we find a seemingly one-off project from the undisputed master of the experimental song. This self-titled record was written, recorded and mixed over three days with specific constraints concerning how many tracks could be used (6), how many takes could be taken (1), and length of songs (2 minutes 24 seconds). The results are a staggering 28 track collection, musically experimental, full of notes, organic beats, and rattling sounds behind an undisputed abstract lyrical behemoth.

Rob’s own explanation of how the words were written is mind-blowing in itself – “The lyrics, composed the day before were written using a partial aleatory batch technique in which partially-random rhythm plans structure the random choice of words. The chaotic poetry is interpreted and reworked into meaningful stories. The chaotic, rhythmic stories served as the basis and inspiration for the aformentioned improvised composition of songs…” I had to re-read that several times when I first saw it to get any inkling as to what this actually means. You may now take a few seconds yourself to re-read it before we continue.

This seemingly Burroughsian artificially altered language-scape creates the perfect compliment to the Jim Morrison style poetic shamanism of the songs. I always feel like Levy projects sound like they were recorded out in the desert, under the blazing white circle of sun, with vultures revolving and the shimmering heat of exhaustion fogging up the eyes. However, “October Terminus” is no drug-induced shock verse, it is more like a scientific form of holistic human brain re-wiring. There is a mighty fine line between these tracks being enjoyable for the playfulness and textures of words combined with repetitive woodwind and plinking blocks, and this being a soundtrack for some self-imposed psychosis of pure abstraction. Either way, though if you’re anything like me then even if it’s the latter, then sometimes it is fun to put your own head through the grinder and piece it all back together on the other side. After all, I think you’ll find that records doesn’t make enough Rob Levy.

THE WHEELIES – “A Scientific Study Of Cloud Shapes”

I’ll let you make your own mind up on this one.

DOWNLOAD IT NOW FOR FREE

Just click right here

Not 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, or 14, but 15! brand new Quixodelic Records for you to love or loathe. Genres range from folk-pop to psychedelia, and from electronica to experimentalism. With that many records there surely must be something for everyone.

Contributors to the box-set include Uberfuzz, The Falling Floors, James Redmond, Becky N, Frogville, Simon Piler and The Atom Band, The Real Burnouts, Brendon Hertz and The Burnt Orange Crayons, The October Terminus, The Painted Shuts, The Amalfi Glow, Periwinkle Periscope, Shine Shut, Handwithlegs, and The Wheelies.

For a for review of all the records go here

There is so much good free music floating around on the internet that it sometimes feels if you know where to look, that you might never need to buy another record again. But every once in a while an album comes along that is worth putting your hands in your pockets for, and Frogville’s “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” is one of those albums. For the price of a packet of cigarettes you can have yourself 11 tracks of psychedelic pop home brew, songs that stick but not as sickly sweet as bubblegum, lo-fi bones but with a shiny studio feel to the skin, and experimental without losing sight of the raw solarized melodies that underpin it.

Song writers seem to fall into one of two hands. In one are those who can’t help but keep writing, like butterflies flitting from one idea-flower to the next, putting quantity over quality and hopefully somewhere in amidst all those rushed recordings will be something worth keeping hold of. In the other are individuals like Frogville’s Jason Raspa, blessed with the patience and determination to take an idea-flower and keep tending to it, only walking away from it when it’s grown as high as it can. I first heard about this New York band back in June 2007 and spent the next year and a half trying to get a Frogville track on one of the Daydream Generation compilations. The first time I finally heard any music was an album of demos in January of 2009 that confirmed a hunch I had that this was the best band we never featured. Now, six months and a crash course in audio mastering later, “A Bug Eyed-Swamp” is grown. The Daydream Generation compilations might now be but ghostly soundtracks of the past, but the regret that we never got a Frogville song onto any of them is at least alleviated somewhat by the brilliance of this finished record.

From the word go, with the swirling psychedelic guitar lines of “I Believe In You”, this is something of an all-out assault on the parts of your brain that instinctively hoover up hooks and retain them, regurgitating them at random intervals throughout your waking day. The first five songs of “A Bug Eyed-Swamp” are the equivalent of a top-heavy bombardment of melody. For those of you going into it blind, I’d be very surprised if you’re not waving the white flag of submission a couple of verses into the upbeat 90s indie-pop of second track “Just Like Sunday”. Three through five are my own favourites – “The Speed of a Crawl” is cinematic and sweeping, a sonic lullaby for the frazzled heads of the 21st century. “I’m A Bee” is comical and catchy as fuck, combining Jason’s reassuringly loveable voice singing “Collecting honey for the Queen / I love her, I think you know what I mean / There’s too many guys in the hive / She doesn’t even know that I’m alive”, with suitably bee-powered musical swagger. The vocals, like the range of guitar riffs, walking bass-lines, steady drums, and liberal helpings of effects and sound tricks that are central to the Frogville sound, are actually each but a part of the well-oiled machine, each doing their bit, carrying it forward, letting each song breathe bedecked in blinking lights into the muddy swamp of creation. You won’t play this record to your friends and say “Listen to the guitar on this”, or “What is he doing here?”, but you will put it on and let it play out saying “Listen to all of this”.

Fifth track “The Light You Give” is as close as you’ll get to a standard ballad form – an ageless melodic love song where “The light you give shines”. Simply put – it’s fucking beautiful. From the blistering start, the rest of the record is more of a blur of ideas and sounds. The mainly instrumental and eerily weird title track signals the end of the “song” songs and the beginning of something a little darker and less deliberate. Frogville shows that the psych-pop salvos are just a part of the bigger picture (albeit a glorious part). Equally the machine is at home producing freaky indie guitar blow-outs “Time is Growing”, druggy Jonestown Massacre-esque shoegaze funk amalgamations (“Turns to Gold”), dig up something that sounds like it fell off the edge of “Forever Changes” (“Mexico”), or do lush country drone experiments like the closing “Speed of Disillusionment”. Penultimate track “Face” deserves a sentence or two on its own. Like a lost song from 1966, think somewhere in between The Rolling Stones and The Velvet Underground, tambourine punctuated tunnel of stark sound and a vocal melody that sounds like something you should have heard somewhere before, but know that you haven’t.

Truthfully I don’t know what you can do with five dollars these days, but there can’t be many things you can buy as worthwhile as Frogville’s “A Bug-Eyed Swamp”. It’s an instant shot of soulful pick-me-up and harmonic cool-me-down in equal measures, and a fine, fine debut album from someone who makes studio recordings sound just about obsolete. More importantly, it’s a little help towards maintaining a 4-track recorder apparently on its last legs. You might have to wait two more years for the next audio chapter, but if “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” is anything to go by then it’ll be well worth the wait.

Find out more about Frogville and buy “A Bug-Eyed Swamp” here:

www.myspace.com/frogville

Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth

Syd Lane from The Loaded Whispers says there are two kinds of music – “That which moves you, and that which doesn’t”. I challenge anyone to tell me that the music she and poet partner-in-crime Jeremiah James make doesn’t fall into the former category.

From the first song I ever heard (“Easily Loved / Easily Hated” on Daydream Generation 6) I knew that this was very special music, but nothing prepared me for just how mind-blowingly great a full-length Loaded Whispers record would be. It was a weekday and with an early morning working start I was planning on being asleep no later than midnight when I first downloaded “All Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth”. My intention was to listen to a couple of songs before I drifted off. In actual fact from the moment “I’ve Got Sunshine” magically burst into my ears utterly stunning me to the pillow in amazement, there was no way I was drifting anywhere until the last notes of final track “Up The Shore” had rung out.

The composite elements of this self-recorded Dublin duo are actually quite simple. Syd Lane has one of the most incredible voices you are likely to ever hear, gliding and soulful, carrying hers and Jer’s words over stripped back tremelo electric guitar or shimmering piano melodies. At the root of it all is simply great songs – heartfelt without being mawkish, and cool enough to carry even the most charged of emotional content to a different stratosphere in your mind. An instantly recognisable breeze of sound blows through the recording moving it in the same direction, so even though a whole handful of genres are toppled like dominoes (psychedelic folk, piano pop ballads, Pixie-esque guitar, country-tinged folk blues, and 60s acid rock & roll), it’s the consistency that kills you – that feeling that the flawless songs surely at some point much reach some kind of logical conclusion and snuff out. But no, even as the playful (and damn brilliant) Carpenter’s nod right at the very end makes you grin, The Loaded Whispers are still whispering away from you.

Stand out tracks? Oh where do I begin? “I Got Big Dreams” is beautiful and poignant and timeless, could have been written in any of the last five decades and been loved by any of its generations. “Tell Me How” is almost like hearing Nico hitting high notes – so good that it appears (quite rightly) twice on the record. “Eidolons” is a feisty boy/girl duet full of fire barely concealing the laughter below the surface. “Charlotte” is the kind of song that someone would have sold their own Grandmother for to put in Marianne Faithful’s mouth in 1965. “Suicide In The Trenches” is a lyrical heavyweight synchronised to perfection in Syd’s voice. And if I had to pick a favourite of all the songs it would probably be “Sick of Writing Sad Songs” – I don’t think a day has passed since I first heard this record when I haven’t gone back to it at least once, with it’s rolling majestic piano and understated explosive melodies. Some days I’ve listened to more times than I can count on my fingers and toes.

So there you go. If you haven’t heard The Loaded Whispers before then now’s your chance – I can vouch from experience that “Artists Use Lies…” is as great an introduction to a genuine talent as you are going to find this year. And if you already know about them, then I’m sure you will have been nodding your head in agreement through these clumsy paragraphs where I’ve attempted to convey just how great a record this is. Sometimes when you discover a band whose music you love you get an insatiable urge to go out and find every song they’ve ever recorded and gorge yourself over the following weeks and months and hopefully years of your life. In this instance though, I feel completely different – I want to savour this one, give it weeks at least to go back to it again and again, hear things I didn’t hear the first twenty times around, and re-hear the things I’d happily hear twenty times more. Listening to it now as I write this I still feel as stunned as I did when I first heard it on the wrong side of midnight. Long may the wind of song whisper.

You can download THE LOADED WHISPERS “All Artists Use Lies To tell The Truth” for FREE at our Quixodelic Record Store!

DEAD CANARIES

Something Else

DOWNLOAD IT FROM THE QUIXODELIC RECORD STORE FOR FREE: here

Full tracklisting:

1 Going For A Ride

2 The Pump Got Caught In My Trouser Leg

3 Something Else

4 The Shortest Hour of the Day

5 Song For #6

6 Kim’s Unfinished Ride Home

7 Doli Lemon

8 Something

9 Nothing Else

10Vindaloo Was Her Name

11 Don’t Mess With The Gear Box So Far From Home

12 Tim’s Bajo Story

13 The Hoborchestra’s How & When

14 Nothing

15 Who Knew?

16 Black Hole

(C) + (P) Dead Canaries

A Cozy Home Record, 2009

This much anticipated follow-up to 2008’s brilliant “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things” is available to download from today from our little musical curiosity shop. “Something Else” has been available for a couple of months over at Cozy Home Records, but we know how pressed for time your average surfer-collector is, and this record is that great that we collectively decided to host it here as well. I’ll save babbling on about it here and instead just post a review I wrote a while back for a magazine we just couldn’t get off the ground:

I guess you’d have to live with and probably even sleep with the new offering from Dead Canaries for a month before passing serious judgement on it. But as it happens I don’t have a month, and even if I did I want so badly to stand in its corner and shout about how great it is after only a handful of listens, that I don’t think I could wait that long. It was with the same excitement that I bought the long-awaited second Stone Roses album that I eagerly followed the breadcrumbs back to the Cozy Home record store where the second Dead Canaries record “Something Else” was waiting for free download. It never even crossed my mind that I’d be as disappointed as I was when I first heard “The Second Coming”, simply because Jon of the Atom and his musical friends seem to have been chemically inoculated from making a bad record. From The New Wave Dirt to JOTA solo projects and onto last year’s critically-acclaimed underground Dead Canaries debut “Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things”, it’s been an upwards audio trajectory, conversely going irretrievably deeper into the rabbit hole of musical possibility. Whoever said that there is nowhere original for guitar music to go has obviously not been fortunate enough to stumble over the same  aforementioned breadcrumbs.

The Psychedelic Gods said “Let there be sound”, and there was sound.

Triptacular, primal, headmelting, sonic melodies that brought them to their knees beneath the holy strobe of kaleidoscopic colour. And The Psychedelic Gods heard it was good – so very fucking fine – but after several triptacular, primal, headmelted, sonic hours of said melodies, they could no longer hear themselves dream and commanded the sound to stop. And stop it did.

But then, as they closed their drug-heavy eyelids weighed down with cosmic visions, they heard something within the thick folds of silence, just a guitar and a voice entwined in The Void. The guitar was acoustic, with uncut strings that rattled magically together, rolling out beautiful and simple lines lifted from faraway days when girls wore flowers in their hair (and some men did too). The voice was simply beautiful, young and gently carrying the timeless wordstreams of one Bob Dylan. The Psychedelic Gods heard it was good and kept their drug-heavy eyelids closed, and as they collectively began remembering, smiles broke out like old black and white flowers on their faces.

Now I’m no Psychedelic God, but that’s pretty much how I feel whenever I listen to Sucks To LaLa Land. As a singer/songwriter, Visalia’s Keith Crain effortlessly loads his songs with promise – here is the unmistakable sound of unconscious raw talent, finding its feet and growing all the time. Cover versions are perhaps an essential part of this process, the study of great songs, dismantling them and singing them again for fun. Even more amazing, is that Keith somehow makes other people’s songs his own, born again in the eardrums, yet armed with the minimum of tools. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still holding out for the first collection of original songs, but in the meantime these eight cover versions of Dylan classics will keep us ticking over expectantly. As an introduction to the sounds of Sucks To LaLa Land, Dylan and Crain are a perfect fit – legendary words of the past reppearing in the present, sung by a brilliant brand-new voice. This isn’t a lazy re-take with a postmodern production twist craving thirty minutes of listening time and fifteen minutes of fame, it’s an unintentional free tribute to an old master that accidentally becomes a bedroom floor testament to a rising star.

Okay, so Dylan isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but arguably his biggest stumbling block has always been his voice. Bob Dylan was a poet rolled into a songwriter – it logically follows that even the most ardent cynics could potentially find something to love on this record with a different voice behind the wheel. There is no guarantee that the best hand-glider makers make the best hand-glider pilots. Keith Crain is undoubtedly one of the best hand-glider pilots I know – he doesn’t take chances, he just… well he glides doesn’t he? And it’s a joy to behear.

For those of you (like me) whose lives were explosively altered and reconfigured by Bob Dylan when you were well under thirty, there is plenty to get excited about. It’s hard to tell if the song choices are pure gold, or whether raiding the Dylan back catalogue is inevitably going to produce results, or even if it’s just that Keith could turn his attention to anything and make it sound that way (check out Daydream Generation 4 for a diamond acoustic version of Radiohead’s “Creep”). Songs like “All I Really Wanna Do” and “It’s Alright Ma” sound suddenly alive again, like hearing them for the first time over. Elsewhere, “Love Minus Zero”, “He Was A Friend Of Mine”, and “Song To Woody” incredibly sound as if they were written for Sucks To LaLa Land to sing.

Curiously for an artist, Keith himself is on the money about his own record saying “Well Under Thirty is a tribute to Bob Dylan. If you like Bob Dylan I’m sure you’ll like this album. If you hate Bob Dylan I hope I can at least show you how powerful his songs were and are. I don’t sing like Bob Dylan. Nor do I play the harmonica. It doesn’t matter”.

The Psychedelic Gods opened their eyes at the end of the record and blinked beneath a canopy of circus stars they’d made together many milleniums ago. “What was that?” they asked in unison.

“Sucks To LaLa Land” said a passing hand-glider maker.

“It’s great!” they blew, motioning for the hand-glider maker to press play again.

And he duly obliged.

Download “Well Under Thirty” for FREE at the Quixodelic Record Store link above

Find out more about SUCKS TO LALA LAND: here

Smallie Wheelies

& Paul Burnout.

The first time I finished listening to My Own Personal Summer of Love, I said to myself, “This is not an album made by experts.”

The second time I listened to it, I realized, “No, it is an album made by people.” And right then, I realized it was exactly what I wanted.

With each additional turn in my CD player, I love the recording even more – In no short part for the emotional weight it carries. The songs are saturated with sorrows, but not dour. At best, they are reflections of change and mental struggle – the gentle, restive ballad ‘Delphi’ involves the suicide of a friend, ‘Raskolnikov’ personifies living clouds of dark dream in terms of Dostoyevsky’s greats, and ‘What A Waste’ (my personal favorite) sings like a deliberate, majestic march to the grave. The rolling, repetitive songs wash a full polyphony of phrases over the listener; each wave punctuated with that familiar, reedy, Scottish tang. After a while, it’s hard not to sing along.

At times the rhythms are truly spectacular (see ‘Casablanca’) as underwritten by Paul’s steady and expressive drumming. Every tune has a different texture: the stage-setter, ‘At The Bus Stop’ is laced with tinkly bells, and ‘Elephant Teapot’ fizzes like a wind-up toy turning circles. As is to be expected from a Personal Summer of Love, some of the songs (mainly ‘Animals’ and ’66’) channel a throwback, psychedelic vibe – chock full of fuzzy guitars and antiphonal, echoing harmonies. Though it’s apparent that the musicians have a deep respect for The Sixties, it is also true that they relive the standards of the decade in a starker, worried light. In the title track, Smallie sings, “It was the summer of love and I was so broke I walked everywhere and the world was weight on my mind so I cut my hair.” If Love is all The Painted Shuts need, then they certainly seem wary of it.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that this album, in reflection, captures the present as well. The dream-like fog of the recordings makes it easy to overlook the emotional significance and immediacy they contain.

This is new psychedelics.

In other words, it’s a problem concerning bread.

The taste and texture of homemade bread may be shocking after eating bleach-white pre-sliced for your whole life, but the homemade deliciousness of this album is beautifully strange enough to make anybody come back for a second helping. The joy of small imperfections and raw, real emotion contained in each earful is truly sustaining. And, maybe, just maybe, this catchy revolution will rip through your brain.

Simon Piler

Seriously, just do yourself a favor and download this album from Cozy Home Records, already!

www.cozyhomerecords.com

“Artists who seek perfection in everything are those who cannot attain it in anything.”

- Eugene Delacroix

The boundaries of home recording equipment have been removed for quite some time. Long gone are the days of four-track cassette machines and bouncing; the art of scotch-tape over the protection tabs on Michael Bolton tapes given as gifts from far removed relatives because the store was closed seems almost lost. Digital interface, non-destructive editing, primitive pitch correction, and a galaxy of on-board effects at “reasonably affordable” prices makes analog craft boxes seem archaic and knucklish. The mix tape is gone, the mp3 era as arrived, and the wake created a great wind that set the lo-fi dream ship to sail into the great abyss we call “The Island of Forgotten Toys.”

Or so it was thought.

The latter half of this decade has seen a rejection of this silly idea. While digital recording is nifty and allows for a palette far beyond the capacity or need of many modern musicians, its missing the charm, the soul of tape hiss and natural distortion, the blood of bobbles in the takes, the mistakes that make a song human, the warmth that makes a song honest. This is not necessarily a new idea. Guided By Voices did it way before anyone thought is was cool. Lately bands the likes of the Black Lips and Wavves have been poking out of the mire and grabbing the affections of many purists and old-schoolers. For every group noticed for doing something “new” there always lies a subculture that understands the principles as well or better than the flagships that give it awareness. Fig Mints (of Your Imagination) is a shining example of a band that not only has had a solid grasp of this new ‘old’ sound, but have been at it for several years, culminating to this record, “Exercises in Futility”. It’s from this frame of reference the title is apt.

On the surface this album is unbridled and unkempt. Things are slightly out of tune or minutely out of key. Instruments are pegged and microphones are flattened out by the immensity of the sounds that pummel them. This is the future, ladies and gentlemen. Like track 2, A Change of Season, this record is the sonic equivalent of skipping class with your friends and mocking the world as it toils around you. Its unbounded and focused, yet is fenced by morals and codes that culture seemed hasty to forget. These songs call for normalcy in the midst of hurry, with the understanding that often the express route to normalcy can include a level of self-medication, most clearly represented in the opening track, The Well-Worn Road. What may be most striking about that particular song as well as the rest of the record is its consciousness. The Fig Mints are well aware of what they’re doing, much to our benefit. We are all entrenched in a field of voices, and “Exercises in Futility” sets up camp and is perfectly content to stay where it is and wave to the passing cars.

This is not a complicated record. The songs are ushered and unrelenting, moving like freight in the night. Guitars are towing ever further, yet are not overpowering. Even the solos are conservative and well shaped while commanding and necessary. The understated and restrained rhythm section plants its grooves like furrows in black soil, emerging from its toil to bomb the universe into bending at its every whim. All the while the vocals talk you through, calming and inciting, and always in the drivers seat. The range of the album is great, yet cohesive. Its tantric nature easily takes the mood from darkly introspective (Strung Out Sentries) to warmly reflective (the Stooges-esque My Days At University). The movement of the record as a whole resembles the behavior of a house party. At first all talk is intimate and the ideas are big, the songs are pointed and relaxed, often without drums. As the room fills up, songs like Undead Idea Mines convey a letting go, an acceptance of our own weirdness and the weirdness of others. Further down the line, as the room gets looser, the vibe descends into a lo-fi fuzz fest of whirl and rock and roll, particularly with Don’t Stay There and Its All I Can Do (To Stay Awake).

Down and dirty Ariel Pink kids will love this record. Black-shirted rock kids will love this record. Literate post-secondary astronauts that have learned to enjoy poverty will love this record. “Exercises in Futility” is eerily relevant and strongly appropriate for its time and season.

Wilford Benevolus
Junior Rock Analyst and Amateur Spokesperson for the League of American Wheelmen, Intl.

For more info on “Excercises In Futility” go to: www.cozyhomerecords.com

Out Now!

Here it is! Two years, two states, one retrospective outtakes EP, and five relocations after “Hugs and Smiles” hit the virtual shelves, Fig Mints are back with “Exercises In Futility”!

At the moment, the album is available only through mail orders for $8. Suffice to say, it’s worth it. The songs are his best yet, and it’s been reported that Bobby is only interested in breaking even with the money that he spent putting it out, so show some love and email bobby@cozyhomerecords.com for info on how to buy a copy, or just send your name and address with the payment to:

The last time I felt this way about a debut EP was when Ride dovetailed harmonic white noise into my fifteen year old head like some new configuration of sounds for my life. Then it was the introspective wall of shoegaze, now it is something resembling ghost psychedelics, an intricate tapestry of familiar instruments heard through the tunnel of an aural kaleidoscope. With “Songs About You”, The Space Between Things finally begin their ascent into the wider public consciousness, while giant storm clouds of praise no doubt jostle for position in the wings. This is what musical free-climbing sounds like, scaling the dark face of the universe, a one-man team of musicians with songs as profound as the sounds he produces. Ideas balance on the ledge of melodies, precariously beautiful and intricately menacing.

There is no pomp or calculated swagger about Chris Hobson or the music he makes, everything is about simply being as the four tracks feel their way forward collectively, yet each one is immense and sure-footed in its own right, cascading, ambiguous, explosive, and understated. “Liquid Thought” pulses and murmurs. “Love’s On The Run” is TSBT at its majestic best, travelling over bass and guitar lines while the earth pauses immobile in sudden snapshots outside your window. “Moving For Protection” is arguably the highlight, fusing electric and acoustic forms with haunted jaw-dropping melodies. Closer “NYC Lights For Her” oscillates and peels away like layers of a dream… in the vicinity of My Bloody Valentine, only these songs are ultimately like nothing I’ve heard before. Comparisons are useless and trivial – all you can do is stand back and listen as it leaps across the precipise of possibilities, digging the details and seemingly infinite strokes and touches in search of some impossible sonic perfection.

But for a first offering this comes frighteningly close to some shimmering ideal. After all, self-recorded records are supposed to be clumsy, are they not? Minus the overt blemishes of fluffed notes and human hiss, “Songs About You” sounds somehow other-wordly and sophisticated, testament if anything to the rigours of mixing and mastering it has been subjected to. And I’m led to believe that this is but the tip of the iceberg (or foot of the mountain depending which way you want to look at it) of a vast body of unreleased work, making it all somehow even more exciting. All that’s left to say is I hope that you love it whoever the “You” of the title is, hit from Toronto in a spectral daydream vanishing into the gathering clouds stacking up beyond your shining upturned eyes.

You can download “Songs About You” for FREE (Yes, FREE!) at:

www.thespacebetweenthings.com

or check out their MySpace page at:

www.myspace.com/thespacebetweenthings

*for a further fix of TSBT why not download Daydream Generation 5 and Daydream Generation 6, featuring “Bare Hands” and “Postcard Crimes” respectively…

In an imaginary back bedroom somewhere on your street, Simon Piler and The Atom Band are hunched around a whirring tape recorder that accidentally captures some process of song. The completed record – “Songs From Home” – is a collision of ideas coagulating to form a wonderfully lo-fi compound of sound. Dylanesque bluesy guitar-led folk runs effortlessly into experimental synthetics, random instruments pipe up long-lost melodies and samples of sound texture sputter on in the background. And all the while Simon Piler sings, intelligent heart-felt poetry, the underbelly of America, politically astute, emotionally aware, and unconsciously different. As compounds go, it is the kind of music you hold up in the palm of your hand to the setting sun, temporarily wondering what it is yet knowing implicitly that you don’t just really like it, you feel like it matters much more than any of the polished gems of records that rattle together wrapped up in crumpled critical lists in your oh so heavy 21st century pockets.

It’s far too easy to approach a recording like this where the technology of presentation sometimes sounds if not an afterthought, then definitely deep down near the bottom of the list of priorities. Not everyone enjoys the peculiar flavours of home-brew, content to stuff their shopping trolleys with gallons of corporate nectar, but everyone should be made to stand up and salute the poet who scratches in capital letters the word CREATIVITY first and foremost, allowing everything else to form a disorderly queue after it. You’ve got to expect something to get trampled, right? As it happens, for a lo-fi experimental record, “Songs From Home” rushes down the throat of your ears. It might arguably not quench the unquenchable thirst for a song to end all songs, or a record to end all records, but it is undoubtedly twenty-five minutes of listening time that flies by well spent and a worthy introduction to the prodiguous output of records and videos on Simon’s MySpace page. In particular, the beautiful stripped down gentle guitar and vocal combination on “Muse” (“When i die they’re gonna throw our constellation / they’re gonna throw our stars into the sky”) and the protest closer “Constituent Rock” (“And what I’d like from presidents is forest thick and wild/However it is more likely I’ll be treated like a child”) are clear indications that crafting timeless songs bubbles close to the surface of the Atomic pie cooling on an imaginary window sill of an imaginary back bedroom on your street. You should grab a piece while it’s still hot and feed your headbelly.

Download it for free here:

http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/simon-piler-and-the-atom-band-songs-from-home/

Find out more about Simon Piler & The Atom Band here:

www.myspace.com/simonpiler

Smally

DISC ONE

THE HOBORCHESTRA – Editable Text

I can’t think of another band I hear as many great things about as I do The Hoborchestra. “You should hear the new album, it’ll blow you away”, “Cool, The Hoborchestra are on DG6, I love that band”, “Tim Kotch is my favourite songwriter” and so and so on. Of course I’m already a believer and these words are wasted on me, but I thought they’d be a worthwhile resource in explaining how well thought of this music is. “Editable Text” is their latest offering to the Daydream cause, with it’s tag-line of “Would you maybe like to come visit, I know you’re sick, but it’s Monday night and there’s good public television”, its a meandering, folky-pop song, instantly diggable for it’s wonderfully understated and vividly recognisable human warmth and fragility. Also it’s well worth hearing right to the end for some ad-libbing on the art of learning the clarinet. I fully expect to hear more good things soon.

www.myspace.com/thehoborchestra

www.b3nson.net

SUCKS TO LALA LAND – Cure For The Common Cold

To throw up a Bob Dylan comparison in the first sentence of this write-up would be an unfairly heavy load to heap upon Sucks To LaLa Land’s Keith Crain, but it’s regrettably unavoidable. For a start like the freewheelin’ songsmith of old, Keith’s a young troubadour, perhaps still learning his trade, with songs stripped right back to the bare bones of a beautiful voice and a finger-picking guitar. In a simple twist of fate Sucks To LaLa Land’s fondness for churning out exciting Dylan covers in recent months hasn’t gone unnoticed, but here we’re treated to something original, and like a young painter under the watchful tutalage of an old master, it would appear that the influence is rubbing off nicely. With a song like this, the potential combination of one (if not the) best vocalist to have ever graced the DG compilations, and a maturing mind conjuring up Dylanesque song-adventures is truly an ear-watering prospect. So stay tuned.

www.myspace.com/suckstolalaland

DEAD CANARIES – Who Knew?

Like some musical superhero the addition of real live drums is the equivalent of bestowing special powers through some magic potion on the Dead Canaries set-up. Men, women, children, and especially animals openly wept with equal measures of joy and confusion at the beauty and ingenuity of this year’s relatively drum-free “Crital Mass” album – so one can only speculate as to the aftershock of their next offering if “Who Knew?” is anything to go by. Melodically riotous, unanticipatedly noisy, catchy and effortlessly cool like some nodback to the 1960s Mod-era, this song is arguably one of the finest 3 minutes to have been born from the bowels of the Dead Canaries laboratory to date. With rumours of a new album sometime soon you should expect more of the unexpected – and let’s face it, you wouldn’t expect anything less from this band would you?

www.myspace.com/deadcanaries

www.cozyhomerecords.com

Download DEAD CANARIES “Critical Mass” at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

THE PLAYGROUND – Songs For Jennifer

I feel sorry for the flies in Mixmastermigity’s home “studio” because there really can’t be anywhere safe for them to land. Picture a circus world of kazoos and guitars, of handclaps and gadgets and you’re getting the idea. Where most bands bust a gut flogging a style to trademark perfection, this guy seems determined to rip through every genre going (and have some fun while he’s ripping) – we’ve heard Dylanesque Highway 61 folk, Beatlesque distorted pop, slacker Indie Rock, and now with “Songs For Jennifer” we’ve got a slice of unrepentant electronic soul. Drum patterns and computer layers of sound take the flies to someplace else altogether as they buzz around loved up through a fog of smoke and their own confusion. With a debut Playground album surely going to make a break for cover soon, I can honestly say that I don’t have a clue what comes next. I wouldn’t even write-off some kind of death-metal-hip-hop, I’m just happy to be one of those flies circling in an invisible ring around the big tent roof buzzing on whatever comes next.

www.myspace.com/mixmastermigity

www.cozyhomerecords.com

Download “The Playground” EP at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

INVASIONS – Helpless Magic

The psychedelic capital of the world (Toronto) pulls another great band from it’s seemingly bottomless magician’s hat. Invasions sit comfortably at the edge of the swirling psych vortex, just dipping their toes in and pulling their own pop faces while they’re at it, oblivious as to how special this music actually is. “Helpless Magic” is upbeat and full of swagger, with a melody that sticks like bubblegum to your boots, guitars like uncontrollable dogs licking your face, drums jumping up and down on your back, and a vocal delivery of totally wasted cool. There’s only one thing I can possible say to sum this song up – “It’s magic…”

www.myspace.com/invasionsmusic

THE FALLING FLOORS – If You Say ‘No’

If this had been 1965 instead of 2008 then The Falling Floors would be the kind of band that would have surely had rabid record executives salivating in the wings of their every gig, ready-made contracts rolled up in their sweaty hands. Within a matter of months this Manchester band would have been sitting pretty in the Top 10 alongside now legendary names like The Beatles, The Kinks and Ken Dodd. But as it happens, of course it’s 43 years later and the brilliant “If You Say ‘No’” must be content (for now) to shine prettily on an obscure Indie music mix-tape. But go and listen close enough and you might just be able to hear behind the “ooh-la-la’s” and the gobsmackingly great tune, the sound of young girls sobbing and the pitter patter of saliva at the edge of the stage.

www.myspace.com/thefallingfloors

SAUVIE ISLAND MOON ROCKET FACTORY – Another Suicidal Continental Sled

I think I fell in love with this song instantaneously. Once I’d gotten over the mouthful of a band name and song title, there was something charged and highly original in the structured chaos of the music, the psychedelic slide riff, chugging bendy electric chords, walking bassline, and schizoid jazz drums, but the more I listened the more I found that it was actually the song itself that elevated it to the creamy head of great tunes in my musically saturated mind. “Another Suicidal Continental Sled” is the kind of song that songwriters dream of writing, something that could probably be framed by any combination of instruments and still come out sounding like one of the best things you will hear this year. If anybody can figure out if and where I can get my hands on an acoustic version then feel free to let me know. As well as being a favourite of Sauvie Island live shows, I’m told that this song was also a favourite of a friend of the band who tragically took her own life. So I guess regrettably this one’s for her.

www.myspace.com/sauvieislandmoonrocketfactory

JANE GILMORE – Where’d You Go, Mr. Sunnyside? (demo)

It’s not a great secret how highly I rate Jane Gilmore as a singer/songwriter, and in many ways she epitomises what the Daydream Generation is all about. Where some bands have the luxury of recording studios to play in, and some home-recording artists have top quality technology at their fingertips to bring their songs to life, there are others who are simply content (or forced) to make do with what they’ve got, grab a guitar, press record, and sing for the sake of songwriting. A track like this might still only be at the demo stage, but it goes on to tick every box a lo-fi gem should – highly autiobiographical, alive with brilliant phrases & melodies, gutsy and beautifully raw. Jane Gilmore yet again delivers a masterclass on how to be yourself by dreaming of dancing in forests and baking in the Midwest. On the stage of a daydream it’s not where it’s going, but where it’s at that really matters.

www.myspace.com/janegilmore

Download JANE GILMORE “Knowledge Is Dangerous” at the Quixodelic Record store above.

WILD SMILE – Technicolor Breeze

Let’s face it – anyone who has the tehnical know-how to build a song around a Beach Boys surfing drumbeat like that knows exactly what they are doing. Casey Hardmeyer (Wild Smile) serves up “Technicolor Breeze” on a bed of harmonies, a song for the summer of youth, full of twee hippy keys, a gentle voice that verges on shoegaze, and of course those drums. At worst it’s easy listening loaded with innocent cool, at best it’s two and a half minutes of unmined pop psychedelia like a super-colourful pale wind on your happy upturned face.

www.myspace.com/caseyhardmeyer

TWISTED GIMLET – Far Far Far (You Are Invincible Now)

“Far Far Far…” begins life as a trippy spiritual lullaby concerning the benefits of sleep with a solitary solarized vocal in the dark above a distant swirling organ. In itself that would have been great enough, but halfway through the song explodes into a funky 60s rhythm section that ushers the song to a higher level still, the dreamlike intimacy of it’s beginnings melting away like a series of colours down the barrel of a kaleidoscope. Throw in a fucked up band name and if the spark of curiosity is not a full-blown inferno between your ears then I can only assume we must be listening to different songs. Soon as the heat from this track cools down I’ll be tracking the scorched earth back to its origins and demanding to know what other weird concoctions Twisted Gimlet has been cooking up.

www.myspace.com/twistedgimlet

ONE UNIQUE SIGNAL – Dismemberment

There’s always one song on every Daydream compilation I find myself crossing my fingers for, hoping you can hear what I can hear. One Unique Signal sit unflinching at the darkest end of shoegaze/psychedelia, very nearly toppling over into something resembling an experimental effects driven punk-rock-noise project. “Dismemberment” taken from the brilliant 3-song EP of the same name is full-throttle from the moment the key hits the ignition. Noisy, layered, menacing, magical, the sound of kicking through things in a frenzy of feedback and you know what – why the fuck am I crossing my fingers? This song and this band are brilliant.

www.myspace.com/oneuniquesignal

BECKY N – Rest

And so the unthinkable very nearly happened. Since July 2007 whenever the compilation rallying call has been sounded, Becky N has been there on the front line with her clever guitar lines, kooky accordian, microphone tied to hair and poetry flowing. And with DG6 I was made up to hear from her again, this time with “a disco song” called “Yellow Days”, and as always the song was subtly brilliant. Only with a couple of weeks to go she changed her mind, said the song was rubbish and forced me at ten and a half thousand mile gunpoint to remove it from the compilation. Thankfully on the very last day I was looking for songs, she produced “Rest”, and thankfully again it’s what she does best – picks up a guitar and sings more melodic fodder for a growing army of admirers.

www.myspace.com/beckynnnn

Download BECKY N “Two Wheels” EP at the Quixodelic Record link above

THE GILLS – Ghosting

Having graced DG5 with the brilliant “To How We Feel Down”, here’s another of Ryan from Sleep School’s musical projects. I’ve been fortunate enough to hear the record that “Ghosting” was taken from – an 8-song record, dark, melodic and majestic called “Engine Note”, and was given the priviledge of hand-picking my favourite track from it for this compilation. After 3 weeks of listening to the record and changing my mind a dozen times over, I eventually picked the immaculate “Ghosting”, revved-up comparison-defying shoegaze-pop with fire in it’s bones, as atmospheric as it is accessible, as full of feedback as it is melody. Another couple of days though and I may have just changed my mind again, “Engine Note” is that good.

www.myspace.com/thegillsthegills

SIMON PILER – Big Arc Blues

The main question about Simon Piler is “artist or musician”? The answer is probably a lot of both. I might have been dreaming again, but I’m pretty convinced that the email that accompanied this song described how it was made “with bicycle parts”. How this is possible, or even if it is true, I honestly don’t know. I’ve listened for bells and a foot pump, but I really can’t hear much further than the bluesy-folk ferocity of it’s vocal line. There’s no doubt though that “Big Arc Blues” sounds nothing like anything I’ve ever heard before – rather than other-wordly, it’s so weirdly great that it can only be human and very much of the earth, mechanical, functionally expressive, and as curiously unconventional as music can get.

www.myspace.com/simonpiler

BROKEN MONO – Now The Sun Is Golden

Sometimes I think the man with a cat’s head and an ear for 60s psychedelic guitar riffs is just playing with my mind. He says about this song “oh, and this one’s got a riff on it”. A riff? This resembles quite possibly one of the greatest understatements of the century – “Now The Sun Is Golden” doesn’t just start with a riff, it snarls into being with a loping electric gathering of rain clouds, chords and notes that would have been worthy of Jimi blasting the skies wide open. “Now The Sun Is Golden” is Broken Mono at his finest, psychedelic, supersonic, call it what you want. They say that when Hendrix was born the moon was blood red, and when Broken Mono was born “absolutely nothing happened”… well I think maybe it’s happening now.

www.myspace.com/brokenmono

VAGABOND STORIES – Dressed In Dreams

All the way from Germany, another lesson in how to craft a perfect psychedelic shoegaze sound. Bittersweet beautiful vocals wrapped around a Brian Jonestown Massacre-esque arrangement, and the very best thing about this song is that it is still only at the “rough-mix” stage. Lord only knows how great it’s going to sound when it’s finished. Vagabond Stories promises loads and I’m sure will be a name you’ll be seeing over and over again in future months, in the meantime I’m feeling rather pleased with myself that we managed to squeeze them onboard the Daydream bus at the very last moment – the compilation is darker and more shimmering with their presence.

www.myspace.com/vagabondstories

THE BAREFOOT KID – Waiting For

Some songs are so laid-back that you feel like you should be tilting your head horizontally to hear them properly. It’s partly that wicked little slide guitar line that punctuates The Barefoot Kid’s “Waiting For”, like some odd rowing boat bobbing up and down upon the sea of acoustic sound. But it’s equally as much to do with the vocal take, a barely audible drawl, the murmur of a daydream waiting for something to happen. All you can really do when faced with a song like this, is to lie back, close your eyes and let the ocean take you wherever it wants to go. And you’re certain somewhere deep down in your brain that if you were to peek over the side then you’d surely find the name “Syd” inscribed in spidery psychedelics on it’s odd bobbing side.

www.myspace.com/vileandthevain

KALEIDONAUTS – Let’s Start A Country

There must be some kind of unwritten rule somewhere out there concerning writing a review of a song you’ve been involved in, so for once I’m not going to say why it ended up on the compilation instead I’ll stick to the cold hard facts. “Let’s Start A Country” is from the second Kaleidonaut’s album “Tigermouse” released not so long ago through our very own Quixodelic Records. Originally written by me, it was re-worked and re-drafted by Warchalking, and finally was given a touch of vocal sophistication by Jane Gimore. I think what it’s about is pretty self-explanatory.

www.myspace.com/kaleidonauts

Download KALEIDONAUTS “Spaniard” and “Tigermouse” at the Quixodelic Record store above.

THE SUGAR SKULLS – She’s Supernatural

The Sugar Skulls are pretty special for a whole range of reasons. For a start the two artists who make up the ranks are geographically poles apart, Mexico and Glasgow to be precise – the fact their combined sound strikes a note of such eerie harmony just goes to show that it’s not where you’re from, it’s how you feel that matters more and more these days. Individually, Celina O and Al Hotchkiss are pretty damn amazing at doing what they do best – Celina with her own brand of truthfully sweet and profound beat poetry, Al with his unnerving ability to craft desert-drenched psychedelic vistas of hallucinogenic guitar cool. Put the two together and you get truly brilliant tracks like “She’s Supernatural” (which incidentally I picked because it shows a whole other side to the combination than “Is This Your Vehicle?” as show-cased on DG5).

www.myspace.com/theesugarskulls

www.myspace.com/yourpsychtunes

UBERFUZZ – As If It Matters

“As If It Matters” is the title track from the most recent EP from planet Uberfuzz. If you rake around on the site you should be able to find a full review of the record – or better still you can advance straight to GO and go download the entire EP for free from our Quixodelic Record store. This track’s arguably the most immediately accessible of the 5 songs, a rolling, pop-rock-psych fusion of ideas, strobe lights blinking in the background. Part-Spacemen 3, part-Velvet Underground, and many parts something you probably haven’t heard anywhere else before, it all sounds like these guys can make songs like this in their sleep. Long may that continue.

www.myspace.com/uberfuz2

Download UBERFUZZ “As If It Matters” EP at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

Disc Two

THE SPACE BETWEEN THINGS – Postcard Crimes

So if you haven’t yet checked out Toronto’s The Space Between Things then now’s your chance. I can’t understate how amazing this guy’s music is – for months I’ve been tuned in as he breathes out song after song on his MySpace player, and to date I’m yet to hear anything disappointing. “Postcard Crimes”, like “Bare Hands” on DG5 is an absolute work of genius, psychedelically perfect, abstract, beautifully produced and as catchy as a winter bug. I mean for weeks I was singing this tune involuntarily in my head, never quite hitting those brilliant notes. As a curious aside for Indie music geeks, I figure it’s worthwhile mentioning that this track also features The Invisible Mouth on bass – so if ever there was a collaboration that was bound to work then this was it. And man did it work.

www.myspace.com/thespacebetweenthings

ROCKETSHIPS OF LOVE – Why Couldn’t I See?

Daydream Generation 6 should probably go down in history as “The Paul Le Keux” compilation because it’s got this guy written all over it. Rocketships of Love is the mastermind behind Uberfuzz’s pet side-project, highly experimental, predominantly cover-versions, and rooted in whatever sounds he can get out of a synthesizer, I always heard this music as a way to let off steam and cut loose and see what was possible (in contrast to the Uberfuzz ethic of creating as close to near perfect space-age-psychedelics). Originally we were going to go for the infectious instrumental “Stylophone” from the Rocketships debut album, but after hearing the record for once I put my foot down about using a particular song. A Spacemen 3 cover version, it’s more like an explosion of technicolour sound, the perfect symmentry of the cool boy/girl vocals, the volleys of feedback, and the whole thing elevating your brain to places you’re usually only lucky enough to dream about. Side-project it might be, but fucking amazing it most definitely is.

www.myspace.com/rocketshipsoflove

THE LUCID DREAM – The Twilight End

At the risk of alienating a whole compilation of egos (though I try my very best to avoid involving anyone like that and fingers crossed we’re ego-less again) I’m going to come right out and say that The Lucid Dream are the most exciting band we’ve got on these two discs. By exciting I don’t just mean the music, but also the potential impact that they might have on the future of music. A few months ago I was lucky enough to hear a handful of songs from this Carlisle psych-outfit that blew me away, where dirty Iggy-style fucked up rock & roll walked hand in hand with shoegaze brilliance such as we’ve got here with “The Twilight End”. It’s been a long time since I heard anything as immense and atmospheric as the early Verve singles – but I’ll stick my neck out and suggest that this even surpasses that. For a few years people have been talking about the UK psych-scene breaking into the mainstream, and finally perhaps here is a band who have got all the credentials (and the songs) to tip it over the edge.

www.myspace.com/theluciddream08

THE LOADED WHISPERS – Easily Loved/Easily Hated

Another gem from seemingly nowhere. Stephanie Lane and Jermiah Jones are Dublin’s The Loaded Whispers, a collaboration soaked in poetry and lushly dense psychedelic soul sounds. The brilliant “Easily Loved/Easily Hated” is undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg, with hints of The Brian Jonestown Massacre or Mazzy Star, but at the same time wonderfully unique and straight to the point – don’t just take my word for it, go follow the crumbs back to their MySpace page and band website where you can download a load of mp3s for your listening pleasure. That’ll be one of my very first stops when I finally get this compilation out from under my feet… a dose of The Loaded Whispers to counteract potential future winter blues. Ahhh.

www.myspace.com/theloadedwhispers

WILLIAM CARPENTER – Grey Dawn

From the forthcoming album “William Carpenter Sings”, “Grey Dawn” is just another example of how great a songwriter this guy undoubtedly is. There’s something about people who are able to write timeless songs – either you can do it with ease, or you can spend your whole life trying (and failing). William Carpenter falls guitar in hand into the sparsely populated former category, folky philosphical tunes with catchy melodies, everything sounds original and yet so familiar that you can’t help but dig it immensely. This Christmas I’m simply putting “William Carpenter records” on my list – the drums can wait, my clothes can be holey for a few more months, and I’ll gladly sacrifice the idea of a digital camera in favour of an extended play of this music if the melancholy glimmer of “Grey Dawn” is anything to go by.

www.myspace.com/williamcarpenter

THE REVOLUTIONARY PATRIOTS – Lights and Drums

Sometime during DG5 I got sent this song by L.A’s The Revolutionary Patriots and thought it was great. So great in fact that I promptly visited their MySpace page and stumbled over the genius acoustic howl of “Glass Daughter”. I must have listened to those two songs back to back for over an hour trying to figure out which I liked the best and eventually had to refer it to a third party (Mrs Smally). She prefered “Glass Daughter”, messages were sent, and thus “Lights and Drums” lay dormant in my inbox for several months. From the moment I got it into my head to do a 6th compilation I had this song in mind for inclusion. A frantic flurry of emails in the days prior to the compilation going out and at the 11th hour I got an ok from the band to use it, but that they had some new songs they were recording and wanted to go back and redo this one. By this point we’d circled way past the 12th hour into something resembling pure panic. Whereas “Glass Daughter” was an instant hit in the musical mainline vein, “Lights and Drums” had been a slow burner ascending to an almost unbearable addiction of ritually playing it last thing before my bed every night over a 2-week period. It’s a song that will stick with me for life, and even more frightening when I later heard the quality of the newly recorded songs. The moral of the story I suppose is: approach this band with caution as music doesn’t come labelled with health warnings and addiction is highly possible – Dr. Smally.

www.myspace.com/therevolutionarypatriots

JAMES REDMOND – History

There are of course many sides to the music of James Redmond – pop comedy, psychedelic experimentalism, ska racket-making, sci-fi spoofs, motown lampoon… I could keep on going… but I think this here is the side of his music I dig the most. “History” is all about the song, bristling with Liverpudlian melodic charm, so great that you barely even notice that it’s simply a guy and his guitar home-recorded for fun. It would have been a complete travesty if this song had been left to fade away on a cassette at the bottom of some drawer somewhere (which by the sounds of it, it very nearly did), so it’s with equal amounts of relief and pure listening pleasure that we’re proudly featuring it on the compilation. Makes you wonder what other magic might just fade away in that drawer doesn’t it?

www.myspace.com/dirtyticketband

Download JAY REDMOND “Too Much To Think” at the Quixodelic Records store link above.

LOVE KNOT – Tonight You Belong To Me

Sometimes bands get involved in these compilations through random bulletins I post looking for kindred daydreamers who want to get involved, sometimes we feature people we already know who are making great music, but sometimes someone gets involved and I can’t even remember how it happened. A year and a half ago we featured a song by Indian Givers called “Until We Have Faces” that was quite possibly one of the most kookily amazing things I heard in all of 2007. One half of these  (Ricky) later contributed to DG3 with a cover of “What A Wonderful World”, and now the other half (Rebecca) is back with a cover of “Tonight You Belong To Me” (does anyone know who wrote the original because I for one don’t have a clue). And once again its one of the most kookily amazing things I’ve heard again all year, lo-fi folk-pop brilliance and a voice that hits heavenly notes “just for fun”. Amazing eh?

www.myspace.com/lovetheknot

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION) – Pinky’s Valentine

Well a DG compilation wouldn’t be a DG compilation without Bobby Rogan on board would it? As always, “Pinky’s Valentine” sounds typically Figs – crashing drums and guitars, spikey vocals and harmonies, and a killer melody that leaves you grinning from ear to ear. The track itself was written by and features one of the Cozy Home’s most talented individuals (Jenny Penny) as well as backing vocals from Electric City Subway’s maverick frontman Pete, and together the three create a shambolically loveable rogue of a take on it. You can download for free records by all of the above at www.cozyhomerecords.com - well worth a visit and your listening time, however biased I might be.

www.myspace.com/figmints

Download FIG MINTS”The Passionate Misunderstanding”  at the Quixodelic Record store above.

CODY HIGH SCHOOL – Sunshine, Girls, and Drugs

Well if this is anything to go by, then be prepared to be blown away by the new CoDY High School record that rumour has it is in its final stages of being put together. You would have thought that after the intensely admirable musical free for all that was “Baddest Fastest” that this band would have been taking some kind of extended vacation from the rock & roll lifestyle their songs capture so well… but the truth is far from it. Gil De Ray and friends go back to doing what they do best (in fact they somehow manage to go back and do it even better) with the genius “Sunshine, Girls, and Drugs”. Rarely has guitar wizardy sounded so necessary, as the track goes off like a fire-cracker in your hands, and there’s an electronic feel behind the Stones-style rock & roll frenzy that even seems to add to the depth of the CoDY High School sound. Bring on that new record.

www.myspace.com/codyhighschool

Download CODY HIGH SCHOOL “Baddest Fastest” at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

RIOT OF THE CENTURY – You’ve Given Me Something I Can’t Give Back

Manchester’s Riot Of The Century are surely destined for bigger and better things. Their sound falls somewhere in the vicinity of 21st century indie rock & roll, full of youthful enthusiasm and swagger, each component of their 3-man set-up working in perfect tandem to produce something loaded with energy and style. You can easily imagine how songs like “You’ve Given Me Something…” could potentially go down a storm in a live-set up, and equally should it ever be recorded in a full studio, because somehow you sense that the galloping hookfest crescendo of this track deserves the kitchen sink of production toys to be thrown at it. Describing themselves on MySpace as sounding like “beardless indie”, I’d not be at all surprised to see their name splashed across the music papers someday.

www.myspace.com/riotofthecentury

WARCHALKING – Steady The Hand

I had to work to get this song on here. The heady days of Warchalking’s second album “Stratum”, and the birth of Quixodelic Records seems a long long time ago. But in actual fact, this track and that record are only 6 months old and we’ve packed so much into the last half year that perception of distance in this instance is askew. “Steady The Hand” has never been too far from my most played list on my iPod since he finished that record, with it’s menacing, yet harmonious acoustic underbelly and the explosive vocal fanfare of its chorus (“steady the hand boy it’s gonna get worse for you…”). So in the off-chance that there are late-comers to this particular adventure I figured it would be a useful sign-post to you to go and download that album for free at the Quixodelic Record store., and a reminder about how inspiring that record was and still is.

www.myspace.com/warchalking

Download WARCHALKING “Stratum” at the Quixodelic Record store link above.

THE REAL BURNOUTS – Listen Inside

I think you either get The Real Burnouts or you don’t. It’s the only logical explanation I can come up with to explain why they’re not one of the biggest bands in the world. Let me just explain to you what I “get” from their music – for a start there’s the fact that there’s nothing else out there quite like it, Paul Burnout takes a unique look at the world through his magic glasses and translates what he sees back to the rest of us. Sometimes it is uncomfortably great listening, sometimes it is pure psych gold, almost always it is spontaneously unpredictable, and sometimes still he beams back a song like “Listen Inside”. Beneath a lo-fi acoustic shell there sleeps a monster of an idea where words stick out of the void like arrows and the lullaby evaporates into an epiphany of understanding . You can take the slow train of multiple effects, the fast train of a genius melody, or else you can hitch a lift on the back of beautifully weird bands like  The Real Burnouts.  The destination is the same, it’s just that it’s up to you how you get there…

www.myspace.com/therealburnouts

www.cozyhomerecords.com

THE GREAT VALLEY – Ugly Animals

I’ll be honest, not many bands and not many songs leave me feeling like Dylan’s Mr. Jones, but The Great Valley and “Ugly Animals” are one of those bands, and one of those songs. Can it be possible that there could exist within the same timeframe and running parallel to each other a feeling of something so right happening, expressive, ambitious and entertaining, and a feeling that something is horribly wrong, like a figure at Halloween who somehow looks just too real. Diamond Mouse and The Big Dipper make music from Kennedy’s Garage (if such a place exists) – think Twin Peaks with even more exotic drugs and a ferocious appetite for sucking every last possibility out of limited technology. I don’t know what’s happening here, but fucking hell I like it.

www.myspace.com/kennedysgreatvalley

www.kennedysgaragemusic.com

MOTHERBIRD – June

As much as I love my folk-pop, shoegaze-psych, and lo-fi poetry, there’s always a part of me that looks forward to the weird “other” sections on the DG compilations. And at the heart of this alternative experimental and chaotic universe you’re pretty certain to find the Motherbird of weirdness, flying barely visible through the fog of bewildering minutes. That such bewitching and calustrophobically unusual songsmithery can come from someone who to speak to is above all else very fucking funny, makes it even more extraordinary. “June” is another example of something from the black motionless ocean of the unconscious brain, poetic fragments and jagged guitar structures crissing and crossing like two threads of a web being spun in your eardrums. You’ll struggle to find anything more coherently weird than that.

www.myspace.com/tanjavu

GHODBANE – K.E.T Fear

We’re talking Ketamine and not Key English Tests right? Return to the underground universe of Ghodbane, sounds from the edge of civilisation. For a moment before I first listened to this I experienced a wave of trepidation, no doubt owing to the author describing this track as some “serious oddness”. But when it played I actually experienced an almost contrary sense of alert calm, the multitude of noises and effects lapping at my head like waves of colour. Ghodbane himself refuses to divulge the instruments and non-instruments that he got these sounds from, and actually for that I’m glad. To me, this is how it must sound out beyond the periphery where we abandon not just our own sense of comprehension, but also our trumpets, and guitars, and pianos, and voices.

www.myspace.com/ghodbane

www.myspace.com/splendidisolationpodcast

ROLLERCOASTER – Put Your Faith Back Together With Mine (Ubercoaster Sessions)

There are several bands/artists who haven’t missed a single DG compilation from the first time they contribute, but there are only 5 individuals who have contributed to every compilation from Volume One, and Rollercoaster’s Helter Skelter is one of them. It’s easy to take Rollercoaster songs for granted – you know they’re going to be great before you hear them, you know they’re going to be part-psychedelic, part-gospel, part sound-exploration, and you know that you’re going to be carrying the tune around in your head for days after you hear it. But consistency can be a wonderful thing – where some bands spray songs wildly like bullets from a machine gun hitting targets they never even knew were there and completely missing others, Rollercoaster is something of a psychedelic sharpshooter. He knows what works, and you know what works, and needless to say “Put Your Faith Back Together” with it’s ascending platforms of sound from the tremelo bottom to the soulful top hits the mark first time and every time you hear it thereafter.

www.myspace.com/rollercoasteruk

Download ROLLERCOASTER “From Darkness To Light” at the Quixodelic Record store link above

THE GROSVENOR SUITE – Too Good To Be True

This song first appeared on the DG radar as the closing track of Uberfuzz’s “As If It Matters” EP, but with a little bit of hindsight it quickly became apparent that this song was a whole lot more than it was intended to be – in fact it quite possibly could be the beginnings of a psychedelic supergroup. When I first wrote a review of “Too Good To Be True” I described it as “Arthur Lee’s Love walking in on the Screamadelica sessions”, and it still sounds pretty much exactly like that a month down the line. The individual components are Scott White of Elfwoodprattali and Tin-Town (vox/guitar), Milky White of Regal 360 master sound technician (bass/programming), Kelly Le Keux the sometimes amazing voice of Uberfuzz and Rocketships of Love (synth/vox), and of course Paul Le Keux of Daydream Generation 6 (haha) (no doubt has a hand in pretty much everything). And all I can say is please let this be the start of something as special as its beginning, all the ingredients are there and space is the very least of its limits.

www.myspace.com/thegrosvenorsuite

DANIEL LAND AND THE MODERN PAINTERS – Within The Boundaries

For a change here’s a band name you might be familiar with even if you’re new to the Daydream Generation compilations. Normally I’m 100% behind the unsigned, bizarrely unchampioned and relatively unheard, but if you can’t break the pattern for something this special every once in a while round here then where can you break the pattern? Championed by Sonic Cathedral and Northern Star Records, lauded by the NME and the Guardian alike, I sort of feel like I don’t even need to be saying anything about why you should listen to this. Oh fuck it, I’ll say it anyway. When I was 17 there were bands like Slowdive and Chapterhouse and Ride and My Bloody Valentine that made music like nothing before – ethereal, elegant, cool, intelligent, layered and experimental. 15 years later and nobody really seems to be making music like that anymore – or at least not with the same natural ease. Daniel Land and The Modern Painters would seem to be the exception to this pattern – “Within The Boundaries” begins like the sonic waves of early Slowdive before 30 seconds of bewitching, incredible singing kicks in and blows your mind. There, that should do it.

www.myspace.com/danielland

ALLAN DOUGLAS AND THE TRAGEDIES – Riverside

So I really hope you made it this far through what is undoubtedly a jungle of compilation, because we saved something really special for the very end. I once wrote that “Riverside” on it’s own was worth the price of Allan Douglas’ “Lipstick Pickup” – and though not strictly true as that’s one record packed with diggable goodness – it’s still true that this song sticks out like a solitary star in a sky of possibility. Beatlesque in it’s orchestral ambition, Beach Boys-esque in the complexity of it’s harmonies, “Riverside” is a giant epitaph of a song, profound, full of poetry and fire, hauntingly beautiful, kaleidoscopically intricate, and a burning example of the heights that this songwriter and this band are capable of scaling. It’s an absolute honour to spin a track like this on one of our humble compilations – I honestly can’t give it any more kudos than that.

www.myspace.com/allandouglas

Some messages read like a kick in the nuts. 3 months ago one such message landed with all the swiftness of a precision size 10 in my inbox from Paul Le Keux, chief alchemist of one of Rugby England’s leading neo-psychedelic lights Uberfuzz. In a nutshell he explained why after several neon years and a string of exceptional records the band was calling it quits, hanging up the guitars and strobe-lights and ambition for furthr musical escapades. I guess with hindsight the underlying reason must have been that which commonly eats away at most excessively creative brains before finally exploding in an uncontrollable urge to tear everything down – namely the age-old beast of burn-out. When I finally undoubled myself from the comprehension of what I’d just read I promptly emailed him back to thank him for the untimely kick, express my disappointment and suggest that from what I’d heard before that this was hopefully but a temporary blip since music was so blatantly “in your blood”. The thing that bothered me most was having played catch-up with the Uberfuzz back catalogue it was glaringly obvious that record by record here was a band that was rapidly growing in stature with a quite remarkable upwards trajectory – the sound blazed steadily brighter, the songs grew mightier by the month, when they were doing their loud Vietnam soundtrack riff-driven thing they were quickly edging into Kurtz territory, and when they spun their bright-sided space instrumentals the combination of melodies and arrangements were taking you further out each time.

Thankfully I was on the money about the music and the blood thing, because with the memory of the aforementioned boot in the balls still crystal clear in my mind, Uberfuzz are back. The upwards trajectory shows no sign of fading, the sound is brighter than ever, the songs are as mighty as anything gone previously, the riffs smell like tanks rolling into ravaged cities, hash and flowers intermingling in secret underground nightclubs, and the luminescent internal space-explorations are simply too fucking great for me to successfully put into words. As much as I prefer a full-length record to sink the teeth of my ears into, here is one 5-song collection you really should make some space in your head for. “As If It Matters” jump-starts into action with it’s title track, prototypical Uberfuzz, another alchemical fusion of rock & roll, pure pop and blues, alive with synths and fuzzy guitars, vocally a stone’s-throw from Spaceman 3, The Velvet Underground, and early Verve. In the context of the 5 tracks it’s a happy middle ground, somewhere in between the riff driven tracks and the psychedelic lullabies. There’s no doubt that everything Uberfuzz touch these days is pure sonic gld, but its by far the “safest” of the songs, gently easing you into a record that quickly peels apart into a schizophrenic world of sound. 

From “As If It Matters” in you can cut this record in half. “Evil Kiss” and “Crush” are honed dark electric guitar heavy monsters of songs scorching everything in their way, whereas the closing “E-Waltz” and “Too Good To Be True” are melodic signals on the horizon, blowing electrons around in your brain down unmapped neural avenues. And though the ubercool black rock& roll face has undoubtedly got its place in the overall Uberfuzz family portrait of styles, its the latter two that got me really excited about this EP. “E-Waltz” is instrumental brilliance, at once acoustic and electric like the perfect soundtrack to some psychedelic shuffle of love on the dancefloor of an imagination when everyone is far too wasted to really be moving at all. Closing “Too Good To Be True” is not only this record’s pearl, but historically will perhaps be remembered as the birth of The Grosvenor Suite band, sounds a lot like Arthur Lee just accidentally walked in on Primal Scream’s “Screamadelica”. A real melting pot of sound, clever guitar hooks, Scott White’s angelic multi-delayed vocal rendition at the centre of a dreamlike whirlwind. It’s Uberdelic Ubergenius. Or words to that effect.

Having burst through the blip and emerged on the other side apparently sounding rejuvenated and as up for it as ever before it somehow makes “As If It Matters” matter much more than it would have done if this had simply been another record in chronological sequence. Such a seemingly close call highlights the fragility of even the most impressive and innovative bands – you just never really know when a record is a “last record” and that’s as good a reason as any why you should snap this up now, play it to death until the songs are as embedded in your brain as they are in the songsmith’s blood. Yet somehow I don’t think this will be the last transmission we receive from planet Uberfuzz, and with rumours abound that a sitar has been recently acquired, you can probably expect (but not take for granted) that the trajectory will continue stretching for the skies on the rip of this latest offering.

Download UBERFUZZ “As If It Matters” from the QUIXODELIC RECORDS link at the top of this site. 

Listen to “Evil Kiss” from the EP:

Download audio file (Uberfuzz-EvilKiss.mp3)

JAMES REDMOND – Too Much To Think

And this is how the world works. A guy from Liverpool writes some songs that somehow and somewhy and someway or another eventually come together like some crazy jigsaw puzzle of a record. This collection appears on some humble and oddly obscure little indie website, dedicated to discovering and championing gems of undiscovered bands and musicians who more often than not are simply writing and recording songs for the love of it. The record is available someday in a hazy fanfare of enthusiasm and genuine music lovers around the world download it out of curiosity and love what they hear. Many of them will carry these songs with them through their entire life, and some songs may even trickle down through the generations. Some other day the website fades or implodes and we move on and before long for some inexplicable reason we finally begin to go the way of the dinosaurs, a little kid in an underground cave singing “Les Dennis playing tennis on Ben Nevis” softly under his breath. The surreal brilliance of the words are long lost and nobody remembers where the songs came from or even who sang them in the first place, but the melody hangs like shapeshifting clouds in the great big sky of time.

The guy who wrote the songs is of course James Redmond and the record in question is “Too Much To Think” – 8 songs salvaged from a hard-drive, captured at various points on his travels in various forms, and puzzled together upon the string of a download like multi-coloured juju beads. This is fucking infectious stuff – James Redmond might be just another voice in a long tradition of great Liverpudlian songwriters who endear you immediately with timeless bluesy-pop melodies, but the more you listen the more there is to love. Self-recording for the love of singing a song affords the songwriter a lot more rope and the ability to try and swing a little further than their distant commercially-recognisable and infinitely richer cousin showboating by numbers at a mobile phone festival near you now.

This record swings as far as it can and lets go just because it can. The template for the songs featured is to write catchy experimental pop songs that must clock in under two minutes. As a result “Too Much To Think” clocks in at a furious blink and your ears might miss it 18 minutes. In this case the intentional brevity can be a good or bad thing – on the one hand it leaves you wanting more of the same, but on the other it’s like watching a legendary sprinter poetically bursting down the home straight, breaking the tape in a blur of colour. Thankfully most of us have repeat buttons and there’s a lot of ground being covered so you’ll not get bored if you let it run for an hour or two. Stylistically it’s less the big budget glam of Disneyland and more like a fascinating nocturnal world of some strange travelling 60s fairground, songs stick out like halls of mirrors or dancing bears, one minute mock cinematic Motown (“Wires”), the next minute Arctic Monkey-style ska (“Jamaica House”). It’s part electro comedy (“Ben Nevis”), part profound unashamed lo-fi songsmithery (“History”), the insanity of “Inner Disco” sitting beautifully side by side with one of the catchiest pop songs you’ll ever hear about a Panini football sticker album from the Mexican World Cup in 1986 (“Sticker Book”). “Too Much To Think” from start to finish flies by the seat of its pants and takes you along with it grinning a grin that you can’t quite decide if its friendly or mental, but either way you know is very, very special indeed.

Some of you may know or be able to deduce the historical context of some of these songs when you read the credit notes on the sleeve, and about The Fang’s involvement with great bands like Dirty Ticket, The Sweetcorns, and Tramp Attack. But collaborations and names aside, hopefully it will deservedly show Jay’s own songwriting talents to a wider audience. Like he says in his notes, the world really does seem to be bursting at the seams with music these days and sometimes as a musician you feel truly grateful that anybody would take the time to download a seemingly obscure record and give it a chance. But with this record it seems perverse for it to be this way around – the artist thanking you for 8 songs that could quite conceivably still be stuck in your head 20 years from now. So roll on up, the circus has just swung and landed on your doorstep, it’s time to dance like a robot across your kitchen and marvel at the twisted nature of fate while whistling your way to work in the morning in the middle of a riot.

Last night in a fleeting moment of evolutionary foresight I pulled my 4 year old son quietly aside and like some speccy Scottish Indie version of Christopher Walken in Pulp Fiction I said “Son, I want you to take this CD. It’s not a family heirloom and I didn’t stash it up my ass during the Vietnam War, but it’s still very, VERY special. It’s called Too Much To Think by a guy called James Redmond and thousands of years from now our ancestors are going to be singing these songs in caves under the ground, so you should keep it somewhere really safe”.

He took the disc in his little hands and asked me “Is James Redmond real?”

“Yes” I said, “I think so”.

And then he asked me “Is he hypnotised?”

“No” I said, “…no I don’t think he is”.

“Does he eat beans?”

“Listen, just put the disc somewhere really safe for now, it’s important” I said, and watched him amble off, clutching the future with a look of total bewilderment on his face as he proceeded to unceremoniously dump it in his lego box. Because this is just how the world works sometimes, no matter how hard you try to change it into something that it really should be.

You can download “Too Much To Think” from the QUIXODELIC RECORD STORE link at the top of this page.

Listen to “History” from the record:

Download audio file (JamesRedmond-History.mp3)

It is 1968 again. Pink Floyd and The Beatles have just been killed in a head-on high-speed collision of colour on your doorstep as you watch like a child from the safety of your bedroom window. You do not understand it, but a tiny droplet of orange breaks free from the technicolour wreckage of sound and seeps into the earth by the roadside. Many years pass, your hair grows, you hide a bong in a shoe-box beneath your bed and listen to loud psychedelic rock music. Outside your window a great orange tree has grown from the ground, its orange leaves glimmering in the orange sunlight, the orange shadows it casts stains everything it touches, rocks, insects, cars, and people. The orange people leave orange footprints on the pavement and in turn everything they touch changes colour too, they kiss in various shades of orange, hang orange curtains from their orange houses, and listen obsessively to a strange record called “The Orange Album” by a band called The Orange Drop that nobody can find.

Once in an orange moon a band comes along that blows your brain clean out out your skull with the sounds they are making. Today to me the moon looks like a great tangerine suspended in the bright blue sky of dawn, and The Orange Drop are that band. Re-inventing 60s psychedelia with a 21st century twist of experimentalism, “The Orange Album” is their second album of the year – bursting at the seams with supersonic guitar riffs, beautiful kooky singing, mighty drums and bass, a Beatle-esque risk-taking dance between styles (who would have thought rhythm & blues piano would lead so well into a tabla?) and digital mind-altering tricks of sound, it is the fanfare of a gang of young musical magicians discovering just how brilliant they really are. Where most bands struggle beneath the weight of self-doubt, The Orange Drop blatantly know that they are onto something and effortlessly sweep you up on the wave of invincibility with them. Take the opening “El Intro Del” with it’s country/druggy-rock prelude and the cackling “I sure hope you’re ready for the ride… woohoo, here we go!”… you just can’t say that sort of thing unless you’ve got a record of aces concealed up your sleeves.

It’s a sprawling, melodic, and mightily impressive record from the word go – the Their Satanic Majesty style medley of sounds (guitar solo frenzy, electronic intermissions, reverberated garage-psych underpinning it all)  of the opening track gives way to the supersonic “Retrogenerica”. Anyone who has heard the Daydream Generation 5 compilation surely couldn’t have missed this one. Think 13th Floor Elevators, a Rebel Rebel guitar, verging on surf, churning up the pop, digging on the past, burning into the future – its one of several highlights no doubt, and yet The Orange Album is more than just a collection of songs that peak and fall. In the hallucinogenic world of The Orange Drop, it’s as much about hedonistic experimentalism on tracks suck as “Alive (The Ken Song)” and “DMT Overdrive” as it is philosophically assured great songwriting. Like “Retrogenerica” I personally prefer it when the song takes centre stage and the ensuing madness escalates around it, but I wouldn’t argue with those of you who prefer their sounds a bit further out. Song-songs like “The Myth Of Sisyphus”, “Children’s Garden” (dig this for an apocalyptic vision of tomorrow – “Nuclear zombies are flopping around/They’re eating all the cigarettes they find on the ground”… genius!), and the gorgeous (I hate that word, but it fits) “Holding The Sun” are The Orange Drop at their catchiest and most accessible.

“Retrogenerica” aside, the stand-out track for me is “My Girlfriend Needs An Exorcism” – since downloading it, it’s rapidly risen to the top of my most played list on my iPod. A comically beautiful ode to a possessed girlfriend, the soundtrack to that Beatles and Pink Floyd car smash, a dancing piano, vocal harmonies from the bright side, and some of the coolest counterbalance of lyrics you have ever heard. Try ”What are you thinking?/Will you stop blinking?/With the puss inside your pretty eyes…” or “She’s got it bad/Satan is her Dad”.

The most exciting thing about The Orange Album is that it sounds like the beginning of something truly amazing (assuming the driving creative forces don’t go and get lost like Brian Wilson out beyond the periphery of reality). It’s a great album on its own, and perhaps even more stunning with its hi-fi sound that it was self-recorded – makes you wonder if the sands of relevance are running out for recording studios and producers – but it leaves you with the unmistakeable feeling that there is more to come. And when it does, well I just don’t know if my brain can take it. I’ve been seeing and hearing in orange for days now – it grows from my feet up and I can see where I’ve been in the night, fluorescent footprints in the garden, up the stairs to the window, the shadow of an orange smile etched into the rain stained window pane, the wreckage of tradition burning in the street below, and the future closing in quickly.

You can download THE ORANGE ALBUM for FREE

at the Quixodelic Record STORE link at the top of this site

or find out more about The Orange Drop at www.myspace.com/theorangedrop

FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION)

The Passionate Misunderstanding

If record reviews were personality contests then anything from Fig Mint HQ would be greeted like a long-lost Beatles album, recorded in a sunkissed LSD-obliterated Bermuda triangle of a fortnight in the summer of 1967. And on the Quixodelic underground “The Passionate Misunderstanding” should be afforded the same treatment… roll out the red carpet, download it for free, make a little space in your life, hang onto your headphones and disappear down a tunnel of time, way back to before it even started. But we all know it doesn’t work like that – the old cliche about good guys finishing last was seemingly written about songwriters like Robert Richard Rogan, the brains behind a name that began as a piss-take of himself, but stuck for the best part of a decade thereafter. The truth is, if there is a red carpet then it’s a ragged one – beer & vomit stained, threadbare in places, half-rolled up in a stinking backstreet of urban America. And yet, like a resplendant punk beatnik guitar-wielding troubadour, if you peer through the darkness of your own head, you can vaguely make out the silhouette of “Pinky” staggering bottle in hand on the carpet’s remains, perpetually flying beneath the radar. Perhaps more than anything, the reason I love Fig Mints records is the way it deals with the desolation and confusion of just being here through the songs, through the tangled guitar riffs, with bittersweet and comical words that you instantly recognise as the universal badge of intelligent bewilderment.

“The Passionate Misunderstanding” is something for the curiosity collector inside us all, documenting a time pre-Figs, when the music was nameless, and finding it’s feet while trying not to drop the bottle. 7 tracks ripped from almost-forgotten spools of tape recorded between 1999 and 2005, it is as raw and ragged as the carpet I’m imagining it walks down, but for anyone who has been lucky enough to catch any official Fig Mints records released in the last 5 years, it is well worth your attention. Make no mistake – if you want an introduction to Bobby Rogan’s particular brand of music, then head over to www.cozyhomerecords.com where you can download the brilliant “Bad Choice Brigade” or the equally impressive and most recent recording “Hugs & Smiles” for free. But if like me, you’re wondering how it all began, or simply just wanting some more Fig Mints on your iPod then “Misunderstanding” intentionally misses the spot and rolls off down the road behind you.

“The Passionate Misunderstanding” kicks off with the prototypical Fig Mints “War In Space”. There is an umistakeable sound that runs through the veins of any Figs records – like a compass of pop, punk, indie rock, and experimental folk with a needle that spasmodically wheels around the face, stopping for a moment here, before wheeling around to there. Reassuringly, you never know exactly what you’re going to get next, but at the same time you know that it’s going to be somewhere on that compass face. What I think I’m trying to say here is a Fig Mints record without a “War In Space” wouldn’t be a Fig Mints record. Think punk-pop. Or pop-punk. And smile at simply neat lines like “Of all the human race you’re the only one that I would like to save…” while you’re thinking. 

Next stop for the needle is the distinctly lo-fi “Front Porch-Cars Passing”, a dual acoustic recording that is exactly what is says it is – an experimental few minutes of instrumental guitar lines, switching between grungey chords and atmospheric folk licks all the while the Utican traffic rumbling by in lo-fi space. It sounds as chaotic and unplanned as a jazz trumpeter, and gets better and better with every passing second until it closes on a curious bar of seemingly accordian-esque notes. “Misunderstanding” is mathematically heavy on the non-vocal side with a whopping 43% of it being music only – but the other two instrumentals are perhaps two of the high points. “Light 100s” is my current favourite track of the 7, verging on atmospheric psychedelic rock it takes a riff and runs with it building in a crescendo of frenzied guitar squalls, whereas in stark contrast “Requiem For My Puppy Dog” is a breezy little electro/acoustic ditty hinting at the direction of jingle-jangle folk-pop that comprises some of Fig Mints finest later recordings. The instrumental side of this record is really no surprise if you join the dots and trace the development from musician/guitarist discovering and finding their way as a singer/songwriter, and frames a curious glimpse at such a transition. That perhaps the most endearing quality of more recent recordings (the lyrical connection of the words) is absent for much of “Misunderstanding” in the context of this record being such a snapshot, is forgiveable, and actually pretty damn enjoyable.

The record is made up with “What A Day” (the most recognisably Fig Mints track on the record – a chugging acoustic/electric drawl, with a catchy melody, Beck-esque in its delivery), “My Dreams Are Boring” (more of the same, an electric beat and a deadpan delivery that pulsates with digitalised “oohs” and “ahs” like tiny insects), and closing track “They’ll Be Here Soon (Full Moon)”. As a record closer it’s worth the admission price alone – oh shit, yeah it’s free – well, if there was an admission price then that track would be worth it. Here comes the sound of a recognisably Utica-style experimental madness – backwards guitars, tapes fizzing, voices screaming inexplicables (did I just hear someone yelling something about “dodgy ball”?). It is the soundtrack of mispent, beautiful hallucinogenic youth – too many drugs, too much drink, too much thought, much hilarity, alive and prickling with the electric NOWNESS of it, like listening to your own worst nightmare and waking up many years later to find out someone actually recorded it on the other side of the world.

So there you have it. “The Passionate Misunderstanding” is the sound of the artist stretching on the start-line before taking off on a neverending sprint to a finishing line nobody knows exists. If anything, it’s a timely and slightly eccentric reminder of why you can’t wait for the next chapter from a songwriter who is producing “one song a month” in a blacked-out bedroom somewhere, getting on with it, goofing with friends when he can, slowly digesting the absurd world he inhabits so that he can later regurgitate it in the shape of songs and observations, with great guitars and drums to keep it simple, and give it momentum. Beyond that it’s a neat and strange little record in its own right, with a compass needle that goes haywire pulling recordings that never found a place to be from spools of tape and pasting them together on the cutting floor of hindsight. The silhouette is singing to you, an upstairs window opens and someone hurls a slipper down into the street below with a shower of insults concerning time – but what does the silhouette care… the tune he is drunkly trying to whistle is timeless and the red carpet rolls out in the shadows beneath his feet. Long may the carpet keep rolling.

You can download “The Passionate Misunderstanding” from the Quixodelic STORE link at the top of this site FOR FREE

Or find out more about FIG MINTS at: www.myspace.com/figmints

BECKY N: Two Wheels EP

Before I tell you why I love this little record and why you will love this little record, let’s get the lo-fi issue out of the way. Many years from now with a daisy-chain of shining records behind her, Becky N’s swelling army of admirers are going to follow it back to where it all began and dig up “Two Wheels”. An accidental collection of four songs recorded on either side of the planet by a poet with a portable microphone tied to her hair, this record electronically crackles and hisses with 21st century basement bootleg distortion – digitally remastered to iron out as much of the creases as possible, and dressed in effects, if audio-purity is high on your agenda then you’re barking up the wrong musical tree.

However – and this is a mighty big HOWEVER – if, like me, you can hear past hiss and whirr to the heart of music and the song itself, and if you dig the living, breathing atmosphere of lo-fi (a door slams in the background, a chair creaks, hair swishes, a cricket cranes his head to listen) then you’ll quickly hear why so many folk love Becky’s music. The unfortunate thing about it, is that the why it’s so loveable is as intangible as a daydream. Trying to define it, or put it into a box of convenient genre-titling is near impossible – it’s a bit folky I guess, a bit pop, lyrically simple on the surface but blatantly hiding layers and layers, verging on existentialist in the being of lines like “You wrote me a letter from across the swimming pool”, or “Salt tipped tongue tastes/Air full with yellow/Crinkled sand and/A gust under earlobe”. But ultimately it all comes back to the fact that despite it being all these things, it is always that something else, that “other” that makes it really special.

The songs might all be painted with the same Becky N brush, but each one exists in its own right as something worthwhile. The quirky ode of “Pink Flowers”, the colourful landscape of “The Patches”, the sublime and quite brilliant songwriting of “Don’t Ask Me Again What I Dreamt”, and finally the oh so simple melodic yet catchily stratospheric closing “Autopilot”. In fact as the most recent song, “Autopilot” is an ear-watering glimpse at where this could potentially go given some decent recording equipment and really much more of the same behind it. It is a song that sticks in your head like vapours of gum, the cool switch into the magical “I have dreams of wasting away…”, like something from the late 60s, harmonic and other-wordly, and singing like it is purely from a love of singing songs, unpretentious and pretty damn beautiful.

Do I really need to say anymore?

Listen to “Autopilot” from BECKY N’s “Two Wheels” EP:

Download audio file (BeckyN-Autopilot.mp3)

For more info about Becky N visit: http://www.myspace.com/beckynnnn

Download “Two Wheels” for FREE

from the STORE link at the top of this site.

And so finally a Rollercoaster record for us all to play. I’ve been holding out for this one ever since “Slide It On” first exploded between my starving ears sometime in early 2007 and thankfully, the wait has been well worth it. Before I get into writing this up let me just promise you that I’m not going to resort to the obviously lazy rollercoaster analogy – even though the 7 tracks that make up “From Darkness To Light” sound like some oscillating musical adventure-ride, swooping from sonic space footstompers to symphonic druggy superballads in the blink of a song, looping the loop of raw punk-motown and climbing to fall on decidely Spiritualized-esque electronic waves of arrangement. Oh shit, I just did it didn’t I?

“Slide It On” was my first hit of the enigma that is Helter Skelter’s own brand of head-melting indie pyro-psychedelia, and at the time I remember thinking “well, I can’t imagine it gets much better than this”. Surprisingly, it doesn’t just get better, it grows like a technicolour splash of acid on blotting paper, pirhouetting out in opposite directions, exploring potentials of sound without ever compromising the song at the heart of it all, and thoroughly putting each style to bed before stretching out towards the next possibility. “From Darkness To Light” catches fire with the sparky pop rhythm & blues of “Space Rockin”. I’m thinking Elvis on mushrooms in a strobe-lit basement, highlighting Rollercoaster’s ear for king-killer melodies. The track leaps back and forth between tripping out of a star-spangled jumpsuit into the shoegaze fuzz ecstacy of its “space rockin got me down on my knees” chorus.

As if by specific design to refelect the title of the collection, from “Space Rockin” the record dives headfirst into the spectacularly poignant and experimentally ambitious orchestration of “I Guess U Sold Your Soul To Rock N Roll” – a track that would be a blisteringly fitting end to any great record. It is a beautiful example of how the Rollercoaster sound is built like a fragile tower of organs blown apart by bullets of effect boxes, and 3-chord guitar lines – the jagged other-worldly theremin-fuelled final couple of minutes of the song are simply and breathtakingly cool as fuck.

From here the only way is back up again into the majestic multi-delay white light assault on your senses of the aforementioned “Slide It On”. Here’s a true story for you about how I felt when I first heard it: see, I used to work a really terrible job. Walking up to the front door in the mornings I had something resembling the funeral march playing in my head, shuffling inside and taking up my position in the great grey unstoppable machine. That is until the morning that I walked in listening to that song. From the first wave of guitars I felt an indescribable urge to kick the doors in, snort a line of coke under the nose of the snotty receptionist, burst down the corridor carried on the white sonic light of the song, leer like a devil in the face of my idiot boss, before picking up my pc and hurling it through the window beside my desk for kicks. That song had somehow created an overpowering illusion of invincibility that up until that point I’d only felt listening to the Stones “Street Fighting Man”. Of course I didn’t because I am a nice, sensible lad. But I guess when it comes to music like this, it’s the thought and the feelings that count.

The influences are of course worn openly on its sleeves. The newest thing about it is the combination and arrangement of sounds in search of great songs, but lovers of the Jesus & Mary Chain, Spaceman 3, and even to a lesser degree Primal Scream might not necessarily be able to see where the ride is going, but they will know exactly where the it is coming from. (Shit, done it again). Fourth song “I’m Gonna Cry All My Tears Away” is the perfect example - a little bit of all 3 of the bands above coming together to produce a country-tinged track from the beatific gutter, some melodic hymn of keeping on. Then here comes “Shake It Up”, a firm favourite in my house this summer perhaps only out-played by The Kinks “You Really Got Me”. From the same shade of the spectrum as “Slide It On”, fuzzbox riffs, waves of wah, and a chorus to kill for. At gunpoint I’d maybe say that this is my favourite of the seven songs, and definitely the one that has grown on me most over time, but it would be quite conceivable to imagine that anyone out there who downloads this record could have any one of the tracks as their favourite, so consistently great it is from start to finish.

“From Darkness To Light” closes with the mantra-like blissed-out rising “Can U Feel It?” – a 21st century laser guided melody that shone on a previous Psyilocybin Sounds CD, and closes with Helter’s personal favourite song, the poppy, roughed-up dreamers anthem entitled “Dreambabydream”. It’s surfadelic, like 60s motown just gate-crashed the Elvis basement and tore it all up with a smile.

And so the wait was worth it. If this is a long-overdue debut record, then it is a staggering start to something you feel just can’t get much better but could easily keep on going, rocketing on riff-waves, curving into space jams, surfing on solid songs and taking your brain to the exact place it wants to go. “From Darkness To Light” doesn’t need the Daydream seal of approval – it’s your loss if you don’t download it. But I’ll guarantee if you don’t and listen hard enough you’ll hear the sound of those of us who were lucky enough to get onboard as the ride burst out from the shadows, grinning and screaming, grinning and screaming, grinning and screaming…

Listen to ROLLERCOASTER “Shake It Up”:

Download audio file (Rollercoaster-ShakeItUp.mp3)

see http://www.myspace.com/rollercoasteruk for more info

If you spend as much time mining the Internet for new music as I do, then you’ve surely noticed that Canada’s Toronto is rapidly becoming the new capital city of the Psychedelic revival. It would be of no surprise to me should curious social historians later discover that the water had been peppered with hallucinogens, or that the mushrooms being sold in Toronto’s supermarkets were of the magic variety. Go have a listen yourself – band after band emerging into the light of a brand new day to blow your mind, and at the centre of it all the name “The Hoa Hoa’s” (pronounced Wah Wah’s) is a recurring motif. Recently signed to vibrant new independent label Optical Sounds (www.opticalsounds.com), you’d be forgiven for wondering whether this band are truly Torontonian by design, or in actual fact beaming back songs from a decompressed reverb chamber on the bright side of some strange undiscovered moon.

I’ve got to confess that I was rooting for this one even before The Hoa Hoa’s debut album “Sonic Bloom” fell through my letterbox and was rushed like I was a kid at Christmas straight into my hi-fi. The thing is that not only for the last year through snippets of songs I’ve heard here and there have I fallen head over heels for their unique sound, but I@ve also been fortunate enough to have exchanged sporadic emails and am as equally bitten by their attitude. Every message from Hoa Hoa HQ reads like some candy-coloured explosion of words and ideas swooping on a rollercoaster of enthusiasm for what they are doing, and where their music fits into the bigger picture. Now, where once talk of a magical European mystery tour sounded like the stuff of daydreams, over time they have been edging towards it as a reality with equal measures of gutsy determination and beatific grins. The attitude and the songs are one and the same thing – completely infectious. You don’t have to love a band to love the music they make, but likewise you can love a band but grimace uncontrollably (despite your best intentions) when their records play. So when this thing starts I’m doubting that I’ve ever wanted a record to be so good before.

Thankfully it’s not that good. It is fucking great and then some.

Anyone lucky enough to have heard The Hoa Hoa’s live recordings – or luckier still to be geographically within touching distance of their gigs – will not be disappointed. “Sonic Bloom” is alive with the same raw swagger – a head-melting concoction of elements like the swinging sixties, “Anemone” era Brian Jonestown Massacre, wall of reverberated production, pulsating waves of guitars, quirky keyboard riffs, great driving drums that underpin the whole thing, and a deadpan vocal delivery that grows and grows on you like some long lost friend. The resulting brew is a distinguished sound-flavour that swamps the record in their own colour of paint. If you’ve heard The Hoa Hoa’s once, then you’ll know it is them whenever you hear them again.

“Sonic Bloom” is a 15 track full-length debut brimming with gems of songs and would-be psych anthems, kicking off with the brilliant “Yellow Jacket” and rarely taking the foot off the gas from then on in. How can you help but smile at opening lines like “You’ve got a yellow jacket/but you’ve got nowhere to wear it” or the weary comical delivery of “It doesn’t make a bloody difference”. In fact, “Yellow Jacket” epitomises how I hear this band – first listen: pretty damn good; second listen: “oh yeah, actually this is fucking great…”; third listen and I’m unconsciously singing their tunes under my breath wherever I go for days.

So do you want to just go and buy this record now or are you going to make me list all my favourite tracks?

For those of you still reading I suppose let’s take the next logical step and go to track two – “The List” – a thumping VU White Light/White Heat-esque spin-off loaded with Joy Division guitars. The first time I heard this song I thought it was pretty fucking weird. A year later and either I’m getting weirder or my first impression was completely disorientated because “The List” is simply a great song, garage-rock, rolling, explosive, hinting at rebellious punk vibes bristling away below the surface. After “The List” and then the slightly slower paced “I Saw You”, is “Landing On The Moon” with its supercool battlecry of “How does it feel?” and sublimely frantic guitarwork. Together with the brilliant melodic “Lazy & High”, “Landing…” is my favourite of the tracks that I’ve not heard before. Elsewhere “Going Down” sounds like London in the groovy days of Jimi Hendrix but with darker drugs and a lot more reverb. Closing tracks “Circles” and “Happiness…” are fitting, slow sonic ballads to wind the journey down (“the best trip yet” as the band sing on the semi-acoustic tale of implied sexual innuendo that is “Bottles”). And finally of course there is “New Love II” – a shimmering psychedelic work of pure gold and coming together of all the aforementioned elements in one probably record-defining five and a half minute bite-sized chunk. If the radio stations don’t pick this thing up and run with it then… well then fuck the radio stations. As long as we know it exists then everything’s gonna be alright, right? Oh man, I forgot to mention “Mixed” as well – wicked guitar-led riotry – see, I told you that you should’ve just gone and bought the bloody record at the end of the last paragraph.

And so it comes to pass – “Sonic Bloom” does exactly what it says it is, capturing an aurally kaleidoscopic group in their enthusiastic infancy, with petals of great songs unfolding in the sun of your brain like the Hoa Hoa flower they take their name from. It is a very hip, very great record, and as loveable as the personalities behind the music. That it captured the imagination and kicks off an equally exciting prospect as Optical Sounds so that it can someday sit beer-stained and scratched amidst the most loved and played discs in your music collection is not just good news for a ravaged and top heavy music industry, but bonafide proof that sometimes the good guy and the right band comes out on top.

I love The Hoa Hoa’s.

And The Hoa Hoa’s probably love you II.

Listen to The Hoa Hoa’s YELLOW JACKET:

Download audio file (Yellow Jacket.mp3)

Find out more about The Hoa Hoa’s at: www.myspace.com/thehoahoas

Find out more about Optical Sounds and BUY SONIC BLOOM at: www.opticalsounds.com

JANE GILMORE

Knowledge Is Dangerous

Out Today! Download it for free from Daydream Generation Records…

3 years ago I’d fallen into an apathetic musical hole. The records that were gathering dust on my shelves were the same records I’d loved and been playing since my teenage years – Dylan, The Beatles, VU, The Beach Boys, The Kinks, The Stone Roses etc. Occasionally I bought a contemporary much-lauded album, but even if I liked a couple of songs then the longetivity would be consigned to a couple of months in between even thinking about playing them again. Discovering the internet and with it the world of self-publicized home recordings was more than just a musical shot in the mainline vein, it was like discovering a door in the darkness at the bottom of the hole, and opening it to find a whole new world of music hiding behind it. It isn’t a case of elitist snobbery that got me hooked on the Quixodelic fix – it was simply the case that there is so much amazing music getting made on the bedroom floors of the world, and barely enough time to discover all that, let alone have a listen to the NME’s latest plaything. Potentially home recordings have always connected with my brain more than any polished studio recording ever could – here are very real people with very real thoughts, generally writing songs for the love of making music, ideas untainted by the corrosiveness of the dollar. So it’s in that context that the first full length record release by Jane Gilmore is about as exciting and important as it gets in the Quixodelic universe. I’ve been looking forward to “Knowledge Is Dangerous” ever since I first heard Jane Gilmore singing on the Kaleidonaut’s record at the start of this year. It is an anticipation probably resembling that of a 15 year old girl hanging on the next Beatles offering in 1964.

I can’t tell you a great deal about the biographical beginnings and background of Jane Gilmore – where she’s from, what she does, and who she really is. It is as if she wears a deliberate cloak of mystery, like some protective film of distance that allows her the extra space to push the boundaries of her autobiographical style of songwriting further than most of us would (even if we could). The truth is though, that you don’t really need to know where she’s from, what she does, and who she really is because “Knowledge Is Dangerous” says everything you really need to know through it’s songs. To dig any deeper would feel like trespassing where you’re not supposed to be.

Let’s put this into perspective: Jane Gilmore is a low-fi singer/songwriter and this album is a collection of home recordings that were made throughout 2007 and 2008. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but for those of you who love your mid-60s folk and the female singers of that golden age, then this record is a must have. Considering how talented she is, the chances are that she won’t be a self-recorded musician forever – but that might not necessarily be a bad thing. “Knowledge…” may be accidentally low-fi by design and lack of options, but I can’t imagine it making such an impression in any other way. So for fan’s of low-fi it’s a classic, but even for those of you who prefer a more polished sound there are a load of songs and 3 great reasons why you should download this record.

The first reason is quite simply the voice. Jane Gilmore can sing and then some – complex harmonies, constantly beautiful, sometimes seemingly improvised like a jazz trumpter searching for notes and perfect melodies. It’s a shining young voice that you could happily listen to all day long and right throught the night. Secondly there’s the words. A voice without the right vehicle and you might as well not sing a thing, but if this record at first glance seems to be about the voice, then with a little bit of listening you’ll soon hear that it is equally about what the voice is singing. Lyrically it’s dense and at times hyper-personal – more the observational-emotional feeling of Beat poetry seeking truths than the abstract-conceptual world of druggy art. The range of words and themes and ideas is so staggering that I could easily fill this entire review lifting some of my favourites. Whether it’s the cutting and surprising ”I’m sorry I won’t be your bitch anymore/I guess its more my style to be a back-stabbing whore” on Et Tu, Brute, or the humorous portrayal of female peers “they only know romance in terms of Orlando Bloom” on It’s A Shame, whether it’s a smile in the face of sadness “I’m going down in a submarine, not a hearse” on Priorities, or insightful Aristotelian word-play “I’d take the harshest truth over the sweetest lie” on the brilliant closing title-track, it feels like snapshots of thoughtstreams, sections of stories, carefully woven poetry, and all of them collide and suck you in and keep you mesmerised. The strength of the lyrics is made even stronger by the fact that the vocals are not buried under an ocean of effects. Under normal circumstances I’m a big fan of the voice as another instrument and as such like to hear what can be done with just the right amount of compression, reverb and other assorted distortion electronics. But here, the absence of manipulation really works – the poetry of the lines are starker, more intimate, more audible and thus somehow more real. Nothing gets lost, nothing is for show, and every word seems to matter at a very primitive level.

Finally it’s the magic of the songs that makes “Knowledge…” so important. There are so many good ones and a few really great ones. In fact so great are some of them, that it seems like a strange choice to kick the record off with a cover version – albeit an alternatively fashionable and brilliantly done cover of Neutral Milk Hotel’s “Holland, 1945″. My own favourite picks are the bluesy pop of “Home Again”, the vocal acrobatics that carry “Monday Is Love, Tuesday Is Want” , the aforementioned closing track “Knowledge Is Dangerous” (a wistfully incise and poignantly perfect ending), and the brilliantly understated and intimate “Priorities”. I can’t stop there without briefly mentioning second track “This War” – a song that will no doubt generate Joan Baez flashbacks all round. It’s a brave statement, not in what she is saying, but actually having the bottle to record it. Peace songs in the 21st century have the horrible tendency of sounding twee and artificial, but Jane Gilmore seems to approach her song subjects like she does her singing, taking chances, and even the most cynical of cynics surely can’t help but feel the sincerity of a line like “I don’t like to be political/I want to keep these thoughts to myself”. There is unquestionable brilliance in being able to express what so many of us think and feel, but can only get out in the form of some clumsy pastiche of the hippy era.

“This War” is one of the rare occasions that “Knowledge Is Dangerous” speaks in a universal genderless language. By in large – and undoubtedly by the virtue of its autobiographical nature – Jane Gilmore songs have a distincly feminine feel to them. From a man’s perspective it is a unique glimpse into the engine room of a complex female brain. Does it make things any clearer? Probably not. If anything it somehow manages to make women seem even more complex and confusing – assertive one moment, fragile the next, tears of laughter, and laughter to hide the tears. Just like a woman, the record as a whole is a beautifully complex sum of parts, sounding like a magical scrapbook of song that you find under somebody else’s bed. And the greatest thing is that it won’t always sound like a scrapbook of song, but it will sound more and more like a scrapbook of bonafide internal history with every passing day. Record companies can throw money at bands to fill stadiums and sell t-shirts, and fill cash registers, but it is records like this that will someday fire the imagination of sociological sound historians curious about this generation, what makes us tick, what got us scared, and what put smiles on our faces.

I’ve said probably more than enough about how and why I love this record so much. If I haven’t convinced you by now to go and download it (for free) then nothing will. The worst thing about reviewing records you feel so strongly about is that it is impossible to do justice to them no matterhow hard you try to put that feeling into what you write. Truthfully though, if there isn’t something to love about a record then I won’t even think about putting pen to paper – and if you haven’t got something good to say about someone’s labour of love, then simply don’t say anything at all. Sure, there’s a degree of objectivity in taste (irrespective of what philosophers or folk with bad taste would have you believe) but there’s also a big old grey area of subjectivity and because of this, there will always be someone to suggest you give a record a spin. So here I am in that big old grey area of subjectivity – I’ve given you objective reasons for why “Knowledge Is Dangerous” is so important (the voice, the words, and the songs) and all that’s left for me to say is subjectively I love this record and maybe you might subjectively love it too.

Download Jane Gilmore’s “Knowledge Is Dangerous” at the DGRECORDS store/link at the top of this site, and if you dig it enough then please donate a little of your hard earned cash by clicking “donate” and helping an artist who has agreed to put their music out for free. Unlike most sites where you can download music, the Daydream Generation does not take a percentage, every penny goes directly to the artist. Which is how it should be after all.

Find out more about Jane Gilmore at: http://www.myspace.com/janegilmore

or listen to “Priorities” from “Knowledge Is Dangerous”:

Download audio file (Jane Gilmore - Priorities.mp3)

*For now there is a temporary technical glitch with the “donate” button at the DG store, but we’re working to fix it. If you’re determined to show some love though you can still find a donate link on Jane Gilmore’s MySpace page. Cheers.

THE RED PLASTIC BUDDHA

Sunflower Sesions

He has heard a lot of music in the last two thousand years, shaved skull, dark skin, big grin kicking down some cloudy Chicago back street in cool boots. A splinter of sunshine bounces back off his spectacles giving the impression of a man with white light mirrored eyes. He is listening to The Red Plastic Buddha’s “Sunflower Sessions” and smiles at the irony of the name: guitar riffs from a better age fill his ears to the brim, a west coast sound that topples dominoes of memory, and he is tumbling back through decades and sensations… a big old field, kids barefoot dancing.Chicago’s The Red Plastic Buddha are blessed with a big sound that gets blown up out of the earthly stratosphere by it’s equally big production, yet at the same time it somehow sounds but a stone’s throw from its alternative roots. In fact “Sunflower Sessions” released through Spade Kitty Records has you hooked within the first 10 seconds when the “1… 2… 3… waarrgh!” of opening track “Forget Me Not” screams out from your stereo. Combined with a cracking riff lifted right out of the mid-1960s, you’ll struggle to find a more infectiously sincere beginning to a record anywhere else.Thankfully the flying start is just a tiny fragment of what’s to come. In fact, one of the most interesting virtues of The Red Plastic Buddha is that they are a little bit of a lot of things. “Forget Me Not” is the perfect example – it sounds like a retro psychedelic pop song played by a modern alternative rock band. The finished picture treads a tightrope between technicolour light and technical dark and carries you on its shoulders effortlessly to the the other side. It’s a positive form of musical schizophrenia because it intelligently and emotionally appeals to both halves of your listening brain that need pleasing. For every inch of Beatlesque pop harmony on the killer chorus, there’s an equal measure of virtuoso guitar feedback to keep you on your toes. “Forget Me Not” sets the tone for ”Sunflower Sessions” by its ambiguities. The Red Plastic Buddha may appear on he surface like a polished sunshine psych band, but rather than pitching tent in any particular camp this collection of songs seem to reflect an accidental and commendable urge to burn through every credible guitar genre there is, like pied pipers at the gates of dawn. If this is the child of early Pink Floyd, then there’s just as much stadium Floyd in the gene pool too.The transition from “Forget Me Not” to second track “Rollercoaster” is the musical equivalent of someone drawing a black cloud of curtains across the sky. Swirling hammond organs, jagged Velvet Underground guitar, pounding drums, Jim Morrison vox, and has a xylophone melody ever sounded so menacing? By the end of the song, you’re not just curiously hooked, you’re happily strapped in and going nowhere until the journey reaches its logical conclusion. So where to next?Paradoxically the sun is out again on the catchy as fuck ”Clouds”, rolling like Tim Burgess fronting Canned Heat. Then you’re somewhere else altogether during the complex lovelorn ballad “Kerosene” when it suddenly becomes apparent that what this band are so brilliant at doing, is revisiting the sounds and ideas of the past and putting it in a thoroughly modern context. Feelings rise from the belly mirroring the mantra of “I watch you burn… I never learn” as the song races to an explosive finish.If it ended here then I’d be able to write this up as a pretty damn decent and diverse record to dip in and out of down the years, but perhaps predictably The Red Plastic Buddha save the best for last. “Over and Over” is both a songsmith’s song and something you’d expect to catch in the corner of your ear on a mainstream radio station. I’m talking credible mainstream here – a song of substance, reminiscent of Teenage Fanclub at their finest, back to The Byrds, and another staggering guitar crescendo to top it all off. It’s an exclamation of song at the end of a sunflower sentence – fragile, melodic, and very, very cool.The Red Plastic Buddha check so many boxes that you’d be forgiven for stopping and wondering how genuine it all is. Great band name? Check. Songs that sound like they were written in the 1960s? Check. A big modern production that put the songs in a frame they deserve? Check. Maverick, smiling frontman and creative mastermind in stripey Kinks trousers (Tim Ferguson) on the record sleeve? Check. Psychedelic enough? Check. Rock & Roll enough? Most definitely check. Pop enough? Probably definitely checkmate. It almost seems too good to be really true. But if you’re wondering then you should go back and listen to the songs and in particular the lyrics – the wrapping paper might be kaleidoscopic, but tear open the box of “what’s this all about then?” and when all is said and done “Sunflower Sessions” is a very human record that deals with primitive emotions like the breakdown of relationships, aspiration, apprehension, and love, love, love. That it happens to tick all those boxes is a groovy combination of luck forged by the raw unconsious talent for fusing styles and exploring possibilities. The bottom line is that this is a great little record with something for everyone, and songs that will put a smile on your face whenever you hear them for a long, long time.OMListen to “Forget Me Not” from “Sunflower Sessions”:

Download audio file (The Red Plastic Buddha - Forget Me Not.mp3)

post show post traumatic ultimate mundane

Every revolution needs an army. It needs its foot soldiers on the front line making music for the love of it. It needs its Generals behind the scenes, strategically shifting computer files into place so that when the big waves breaks we are ready to surf it all the way. And it needs its figureheads. The Real Burnouts have been heroically putting out albums from a basement in another dimension for over a decade. You can’t emulate them because you are never quite sure what you have just heard. You can’t second guess them either because they are already ahead of the game and out of sight. And you definitely can’t compare them to anyone else, because this is music made on its own terms, building its own box and singing along inside of it.

But put a gun to my head and I’ll call it “Psychedelia”. That sea of sound treading a mighty fine line between pretence and liberation. You can cut the genre with a knife. On one side you have the kids who grapple with a presence, learning from and trying to advance what has gone before. On the other you have isolated occurrences like this – music that just doesn’t belong anywhere else, where kaleidoscopic imagery leads the charge and the rest just seems to fall into place effortlessly behind it. The Real Burnouts are one of those rare breed of bands who aren’t trying to be cool, they simply just are one of the coolest things you could ever accidentally discover. Of course there’s no guarantee that you’ll “get it” – the first I ever heard of them was on a music forum, where someone had posted “these guys scare me”. Make no mistake, anyone familiar with the great and accessible songs that litter their MySpace page such as “Set Your Senses Free”, “I Put It Down”, “Burnin Up My Mind” or “Mother Mother Mother” would be mistaken to think that these are representative of the body of work. They are but the edge of the rabbit hole. It’s when you dig a little deeper then that’s when the fear kicks in.

“Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane” is the amazing title for their latest offering. It’s been a while since “A Lull In Void” was made for the ill-fated Cozy Home box set in December of 2006, and given the historically prodigious output from planet Burnout, it only seemed like a matter of time before a new record would fall from the sky.  Make no mistake though, fans of previous sprawling musical schizophrenic masterpieces “Transparent Mirror” (2005), and “You Won’t Know Until You Find Out” (2006) are in for a surprise. On the flipside, genuine Burnout fans who have grown to expect the unexpected, would be disappointed with anything less. If you’ve been switched on this last year then you might have sensed the direction the record was travelling. Well let me tell you, that if you think you knew what you were getting, then most likely you’d have been wrong. Surprisingly, only one of last three contributions to The Daydream Generation compilations, “Adreneline Hormone” appears on the album. There is no sign of either the sixties-NY-art-scene “Whenever Will I See You There?”, or the mind-blowingly comic slice of strangeness that was “Wild Sarasparilla”. Nor is there a place for arguably one of their catchiest songs, the pop brilliance that was “Psychological Sacrifice (I Think I Look Pretty Good Without One)” which appeared on a previous Your Psych Tunes compilation. Instead of the patchwork insanity of the last 3 albums, it would seem that they have finally succumbed to making an album that coherently runs from start to finish, with a shimmering brilliance of songs seemingly designed for what’s left of your head on sunny Sunday mornings, dust swirling in the rays that flow between the gap in the curtains you’ve drawn on the waking world.

The biggest criticism of “Post Show” is that at 9 songs long, that just when you are getting sucked in and acclimatizing to structure and sound, that it is over. First listen it’s a pretty good record that happens without ever truly setting you on fire. Second listen it’s a fucking great record that runs so much deeper than you first thought. Third listen and you’re well and truly stuck down the aforementioned rabbit hole. The formula is simple: understated electric guitars, great drums, and a vocal/lyrical hook. The equation generates a pop melancholy that works wonders on songs like the opening “I Do Not Want What Another Man Has”, or on “Adreneline Hormone”. By that third listen you finally hear the great songs rising to the surface like old friends – the pop-psychedelic of “I Think I Found The Way Down” , or the druggy simplicity of “Forever Change Me”, and arguably the finest moment on the whole album, the kookily amazing “Until You Know Who Came Along”. The only time the guard slips and the continuity breaks revealing the old Devil-Levelled Burnouts is on penultimate track “I See You” – telephonic leering vocals burning holes in your ear-drums.

Reviewing a record by a band like The Real Burnouts is probably about as complex as it gets. It would be far too easy to hang this one on situational hook of “maturity” like some inevitable growing up record. But at the same time it is unquestionably more of a complete “record” than what has gone before, and for those of you expecting another fix of prototypical Burned Out audio insanity, well then I’d recommend you look elsewhere. But if you want to hear an album treading the edge with pinpoint words like “I’m stumbling through the solar system just getting stoned” and “I hope I die before I grow mould”, then this one’s for you. If anything, as its title subtly suggests, “Post Show…” is the sound of the morning after the night before, an introspectively mellow daze of words and melodies. In both meaning and texture it is a 30 minute snapshot of what’s going on inside the mind behind the music – the elusive Paul Burnout – who sings you songs from the very bottom of his brain. And as he does, you can clearly visualise him in the box of a basement, lost behind the drum-kit with a smirk on his face (see “The Story Of The Real Burnouts” on You Tube for essential viewing and evidence). A year on from “A Lull In Void” and retrospectively that album suddenly sounds like it was some kind of charged pinnacle of madness, punctuated with great and often disturbing sounds like that pull you in all directions, some miniature masterpiece that leaves you wondering if this music is low-fi by design or necessity. Yet at the time I remembered feeling like it was just about too insane to comfortably digest. With “Post Show…” you know that the sinking-in period could possibly take as long, but that when it does that you’re going to go back to this record again and again and again.

Every revolution needs an army and with bands like The Real Burnouts on our side, we might just stand a fighting chance.

You can download POST SHOW POST TRAUMATIC ULTIMATE MUNDANE for FREE at http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

Or find out more about The Real Burnouts at http://www.myspace.com/therealburnouts

When I was a kid there was a cartoon on TV called “Mr Benn”. He was the quintessential suburban British man, pleasantly non-descript in his bowler hat and High Street suit. To escape the monotony of his uneventful day-to-day existence, he frequented a fancy dress shop where “as if by magic the shopkeeper appeared” (complete with a purple fez). Mr Benn would select one of the many costumes – a spaceman, a knight, a roman soldier – and would step through the changing room doors into alternative worlds of each costume and invariably the epicentre of incredible adventures. Now you’re probably wondering what the fuck this has to do with a Tofu Delux record? Well, let me tell you – I’m Mr Benn, and Tofu Delux are the shopkeeper (minus the purple fez I think).

I was minding my own business, hustling together the latest Daydream Generation compilation when a track called “Spin Spin Extend” landed in my mailbox. I’d never heard anything like it before – a dreamy reverb drenched construction stacking interstices of instrumentation and harmonic spacey vocals like a psychedelic teetering tower of sound. So much did it fire the fuse of curiosity that I followed the vapour trail of colour back to the Cozy Home Records store and downloaded “Bear Claw” in its entirety, and perhaps unbelievably for FREE.

“Spin Spin Exend” is a pretty decent snapshot of what to expect from the full-length record, but thankfully it’s by no means the only point where it peaks. In sticking with the Mr Benn metaphor, if this album was a costume then it would be a technicolour jumpsuit glued togther with wild bird feathers, weird flashing LEDs, and colourful frayed threads. The world you enter through the changing room door of your headphones is one of kaleidoscopic brainscapes, textural, explorable, and easy to get lost in if you feel like disappearing into your own mind for a while.

To get the full story of Tofu Delux you need to rewind a year to early 2007 when a message from Cozy Home HQ asked me to check out their latest band. The songs on their MySpace page were good and bristling with possibility, but they didn’t quite live up to the reputation of the “Barret-esque live shows that blow you away”. Fast forward a year to the present day and it’s like comparing a blossoming stalk to a crazy big fruit tree. I’ll let you walk the rest of that analogy home yourself.

It’s tricky to pick out highlights on such an adventurous project that is so obviously meant to be heard as a whole, rather than a sum of parts. “Bear Claw” is full of songs (even song titles) that cut through styles and ideas as often in the thick of the action as the transitional spaces inbetween, running into each other, imitating each other, fading and bursting like mad kids under a winter sun. For every great “song” song such as ”New Years Day” or “Children In Color” duly dipped in the effects bucket and hung out to dry, there is a healthy spattering of atmospheric instrumentals, or a sonic explosion like the brilliant “Trail Way Path”, and sinister orchestral soundtracks like “Mauk Boz” or “Centipede Wakes The Sun”. It might be a diversely rich album of musical textures, but at the same time it’s a big old melting pot and a seamless adventure of stages in flux that like I said demands to be devoured whole rather than in tasty bite-sized chunks of individual song.

Listening to “Bear Claw”, not only does it blink like a neon sign to show that all is well with the future of music, but if you listen close enough it’s possible to make out the unmistakable potential of a new young sound growing up from the ground. This is the kind of album that will inspire it’s peers to try and push their boats out a little further and take chances with their songs. It’s roots are firmly planted in the guitar experimentation of the 1960s, but it draws on the technologies of the present, fusing the two into something electronically psychedelic and organically chaotic. Here is a place where synthetic strings go hand in hand with drum & bass beats, where samples loop around unidentifiable flying objects of sound, and where choirboy singing soars across random bursts of backwards strangeness. Components that on paper should have nothing to do with each other interlock, mixing like oil paints and explode in your ears.

When you finally resurface on the other side of “Bear Claw” and hang your trashed jumpsuit back up on the rack, the first impulse is to go back and hear it all over again. With a little time and dust, the adventure becomes more familiar, the paths of the journey more negotiable, but still you feel like there are things you have missed that somewhere in the future you’re going to love hearing. And soon as that familiarity kicks in you find yourself telling as many people as you can about it, all the while at the back of your mind wondering where else Tofu Delux can take you…

You can find out at http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

or listen to the new DG single “Spin Spin Extend”:

TOFU DELUX – Spin Spin Extend

Download audio file (Tofu Delux - Spin Spin Extend.mp3)

or find out more about them at http://www.myspace.com/tofudelux

The Utica Flower Company is not a florist. Its more a transatlantic, transcendental shipping company, hauling sunshine by the cubic ton from shore to shore. As a dare, I recommend reading their myspace page ( www.myspace.com/theuticaflowercompany), as the description is quite possibly the most accurate translation of how a record sounds textually.       The company was established only a year or so ago as a result of writers block.  The product stems from four different sources exchanging sound files and absolutely having their way with them.  Four gardeners, fourteen tracks, do the math.  This proto-60’s psychedelia hook-fest is relentless in the pursuit of color, scent, and arrangement.  Its a modern exercise in lifting Velvet Underground weights with pop rock/hip hop loop form and pose.  Vocally layered deep and instrumentally thick, it sweeps through the aisles of flora, bumping and rubbing and thinking dirty thoughts the whole time. ‘Sha-la-lee’s’ are dropped with near-reckless abandon, and heavily effected rounds hang like vines in the ether.       Big, straightforward rock tunes like “Only Robots Don’t Like Music” and “She Comes Around” punctuate the record, anchoring its heady themes found in “The World’s Smallest Invention”.  Explorations in heroin rock “Dead Flower” map the shady corners of ‘White Light/White Heat’.  Simple stem axioms sprout leaves and petals on “Crash & Vanish”, blooming into Oasis-huge soundscapes.  Groove factory “Desolate Location” ropes out to ground and root this collection of skyward-bound plumes.  “Look At You Run” is possibly the clearest example of the Mama’s and the Papa’s sunny California influence.  The capstone “Jars of Sunshine” ends the record on a fat rock note.  An end to the tour of the factory floor.       The perpetual vastness is the strength and weakness.  While the melodies are sprawling and complex, any strong lyrical movements are buried within dense layers of instrumentation and back line voices.  There are no anthems.  Its gorgeous but inedible.  As an ambient album, that’s what should happen, but its hard not to wish for handles to grasp.  No pints will be drank to these songs, but these songs will play while pints are drank.       As summer approaches, the Utica Flower Company opens wide the doors of nature’s emporium with this self titled debut. They’ve crafted an essential sunny day album, opening the windows wide and letting the fresh breezes in.  Clear a space on the table, this one’s a centerpiece.Review by BarneyYou can download THE UTICA FLOWER COMPANY for FREE at http://www.cozyhomerecords.com

You really shouldn’t be able to just walk into a record store and purchase an Uberfuzz album. You should be made to go knock on the door of the Devil himself and get down on your knees for it. This is a band who bring back songs from another dimension altogether, as much a collection of alchemists as musicians, turning melodies and experimental effects into pure gold for your poverty stricken mind. Down here in reality the pen drifts across white paper miles and I look down at the torn brown envelope rubber-stamped “Rugby/England”, then to the collection of discs spread out on the floor and I try to decide which one to tackle first. They deserve to be catalogued chronologically from beginning to end, seems that anything less would be to somehow cheat you out of what you’re missing. It’s just one of the multifarious pitfalls of being a miner of daydreams, when you hit that pocket, that vein of light in the dark and it opens out into an auric cave of undiluted electricity, bursting at the seams with untapped sounds that you have to puzzle out the best way to get the most out of it. So I reach randomly for the most recently dated, wrap the cans around my head and hit PLAY.”Drowning In Honey” is arguably Uberfuzz’s most accomplished offering to date – released in 2007 (more info at www.acidray.com). It could easily be argued that here is a band who missed the boat. In music’s modern dark age of the mid-1980s the coolest and probably only shining light was the sound that crash-landed on our planet in the shape of Spaceman 3. A heady fusion of gospel, blues, electronica and good old fashioned rock & roll, it was an exciting, experimental and dynamic shift of direction, developing in spite of, and completely separated from its immediate environment. If that ship really did sail then you can think of Uberfuzz as the beautiful bastard child left behind on the shore, spawned from the simplicity of melodies, the complexity of the arrangement, and the harmony of both. If fashion is near the top of your political agenda then you’ll be stuck there at that door on your knees forever, but if you’re up for some mind-blowingly great songwriting set in sonic landscapes to get completely wasted listening to, then you’ve come to the right place. As a good friend of mine said when I first played him this record “Hey – this sounds like Acid…”The album begins with the architectural behemoth of “For Lovers of Sleep”. At 13 minutes and 27 seconds, it’s not for those you with short attention spans, but for the rest of us there’s plenty of time to lie yourself down on the bonnet of a car beneath the stars looking up to melt away completely. As much as it’s is a great way to kick-start a record, extreme-Uberfuzz pushing the limits of carefully fused electric and organic sound to the limit, actually in the context of what they’ve done on their various albums to date, it’s something of a curve ball. There is the overwhelming sense at the end of it that the 13+ minutes could easily and lovingly been pushed for the entire length of the album without the band breaking sweat, and yet somehow it’s not the transcendental noise explorations that elevate what Uberfuzz do – in fact it’s when they put this philosophy into motion behind the “songs” that the mechanics ends, and the chemistry begins.If the jigsaw of your head was thoroughly dismantled by the end of “For Lovers of Sleep” then it is about to be smashed back together by the outstanding “Hello Satan”. A foot-stomping, turbo-charged rolling hymn to an encounter with a devil who “Looks a bit like Johnny Cash” (haha). This is supersonic Blues at its finest. And there’s the real rub of Paul Le Keux and his alchemical crew – the sound might be out of this world, and the musicianship and production might be luminescent, but it’s the songsmithery that really gives the band its impetus to connect on a very human level. Take the beautiful fragility of songs like “Hypnotise” and “Soul 2″ for example, and compare them to the fuzzed up riotry of “Positive Connection” and the brilliant closing “Love Implosion (Exploded)” – from another dimension, yes, but one-dimensional – most definitely no. Whereas “Hello Satan” would be the perfect soundtrack were it physically possible for someday somebody to run into the centre of the sun, I dare any of you to put “Hypnotise” on your iPod or mp3 player and go for a walk around your local town. Even a simple tree will never look the same again while that lullaby plays. In fact, I dare you all to go a step further, load that song up on a ghetto blaster and walk through the city streets with it roaring out from your shoulder. Fuck only knows what might happen as Matt Storer croons “You walk through life without a scratch, I wish I had your grace…” Perhaps for 7 beautiful minutes the world would stop dead in its tracks.So if you twist my arm then I’ll agree. Uberfuzz did miss that boat that was sailed into space by their ancestors two decades ago. But the orphaned sound of melodic electricity grew up in its wake, wrote some riffs, switched on the strobe lights, kept their heads down, and built their own boat. The tradition passes down to another generation, “Drowning In Honey” is proof that it is alive and well, and it’s not too late for you to sail out across the honey pot with them to sometime dive on in.Listen to “Hypnotise” from “Drowning In Honey” here:

Download audio file (3-23 Uberfuzz - Hypnotise.mp3)

Find out more about UBERFUZZ here: http://www.myspace.com/uberfuz2

 …

CODY HIGH SCHOOL “Baddest Fastest”

will be available to download for FREE at the dgRECORDS link at the top of this page on 24th April 2008.

but in the meantime… 

Listen to the new single from Cody High School “It’s About Time (We Got Together)”:

Download audio file (CodyHighSchool-ItsAboutTime.mp3)

Who are, or what is, Dead Canaries? More, and less, than a band, Dead Canaries is a multi-musician project. “Anyone is welcome to contribute anything,” was Jonathon Fink’s steering philosophy. Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things is a transatlantic collaboration between Fink of Jon of the Atom, Smally the Windmill Chaser (Steven Small of The Wheelies and captain of The Daydream Generation), Chelsea Hogan (of Dirty Spoons w/Fink), Jane Gilmore, Meghan Geiss (of New Wave Dirt w/Fink), Aldonza Lorenzo, Linzi (Mrs. Smally), Old Kinderhook, Dan Pardee (of Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned), and Tim Kotch (also of Sgt. Dunbar and the Hobo Banned). I’m not entirely sure whether or not any two artists (the Smally’s excluded) were in the same room at the same time during the recording process, but with Fink at the helm the collaboration has resulted in an intriguing, intelligent, and downright beautiful 53 minutes of surprising melodic juxtapositions and richly textured layers of sound.

The album opens with the songs for flying things, which have an airy, layered, light feel about them – full of bells and intricate guitar work that jingles like twinkling stars or wind up music boxes. On repeated listenings, some of the songs of flight have a slight Eastern, opium den, trippy feel. After a brief, musical intermission that explores inanimate and immobile objects, Critical Mass takes the listener into the world of crawling things, where the bells and melodies of the flying things’ songs give way to the click-clacking sounds of clocks and heavier, more prominent guitar work, grounding the latter set of songs in the territory of crawling things on time-bound terra firma. The record is made whole with a “Song for the Swimmers,” for the aquatic among us, and then it comes full circle closing with “Norman & the Dragonfly,” a tune that unites flying things with crawling things.Critical Mass is deeply visual, as though it was composed as a film score. It also causes a bit of acute synesthesia in its listeners – sounds have colors, moods, and even actions associated with them. “Crows Over King Street” feels like what a scene of the regal black birds circling and perching on a ledge at the moment of someone’s final breath would sound like. Maybe it’s the eerie addition of what sounds like a Theremin that brings on a somber tone – or it could just be my overactive imagination. “Lamentations of a Penguin” is a lovely little waltz of a song that easily lends itself to visions of the flightless birds bemoaning their condition. It’s sad and beautiful like a waltz can be.The crawling things have their own visual soundtrack too. “The Spider’s Song” is an intricate piece that weaves a web of classic rock, with guitar work that sounds like it could be a lost track from an early Neil Young album. “It’s a Crab’s Life” evokes the scurrying about of a crab, at first peaceful and plodding about its domain then ending in a mad dash to outrun a trapper and avoid becoming dinner. Does the crab win? You’ll have to listen and decide for yourself.Other exciting tracks for me include “Tree Sloth Finding Food” and “Moths At the Bug Zapper,” even though they are completely different. “Tree Sloth” is a mildly cacophonous spoken word piece that briefly calls to mind that “Sunscreen” spoken word/song that Baz Luhrmann performed a while back blended with Mark Renton’s “Choose Life” monologue from Trainspotting (probably because the selected text was read by Small, a Scotsman). I’m not going to ruin the coolness or fun of the song here by revealing what is being read in the background. Again, you have to listen and learn.Addendum: Since writing this review, I have developed a ridiculous fondness for “Crickets Chirping (Thank My Stars),” a lovely little waltzy, country-psychedelic tune if such a genre exists. Actually, that’s the rub — the whole album is one lovely work altogether that makes picking out single songs sort of like choosing your favorite kitten in a litter.Finally, “Moths At the Bug Zapper” is another tune that makes use of the basic waltz timing, but here it is a love song instead of a lamentation. Chicks will dig this tune, and college radio stations would probably choose it as the first single (though “Crickets Chirping” and “The Spider’s Song” are also singles contenders). “Moths” is pure loveliness.One of my favorite aspects of Critical Mass is that a lot of thought was put into song titles, the order of the songs, and the overall structure of the record. Critical Mass is a whole work, and, similar to a novel in its narrative structure, it offers the listener a sense of resolve to record’s tension.The album is a complex, exciting, and bold musical experiment. Sure it can be enjoyed casually while doing stuff, but it shines when you take the time to sit back and actively listen. The layers begin to shift, and the lightly fuzzy psychedelic tone gives way to thoughtful vocals. The more I listen, the more I hear, and the more I enjoy Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things.Written by Jonathon Fink, Tim Kotch, Robert Levy, Steven Small, and Brian Wilson, Critical Mass: Flying Things Vs. Crawling Things can be filed under folk/psychedelic/rock/wonderfully other worldly.Available for FREE download, so get clicking.Tara Nicole Brown

First things first, The Bordellos are one of the newer bands and friends of dg with a song on dg4, “My Ex-girlfriend,” a lovely little lo fi number.Listening to Meet the Bordellos was the first time in a while that I was bowled over by a record from a band I knew nothing about other than digging the handful of songs on their MySpace page. It might just be my favorite record of 2007, and most definitely among my most frequently listened to.The Bordellos come from St. Helen’s, a small town in Northwestern England that is oh, so conveniently situated between Liverpool and Manchester, a legendary crossroads of popular culture and musical influences and history. It would be easy to say they are a punk-pop band in the vein of The Fall, The Wedding Present, or even The Pixies, and they are—they are every bit as exciting, rousing, and inspired as those bands. However, the Bordellos are a brilliant anomaly in that the lyrics are wrought with a distinctly British sense of humor, wit, and a gleeful embracing of smut—and there is no denying main vocalist and lyricist Brian Shaw’s northern English accent—but the music has an experimental/psychedelic rock groove about it, reminiscent of the Velvet Underground’s best moments between Reed and Cale. It simultaneously caresses and snarls, seducing and repelling at the same time, only making you want it more. I imagine that I would have stumbled across the Bordellos playing some New York City lower east side bar on a sweaty summer night circa 1975, sounding cool before it was cool.It’s difficult to choose stand out tunes on a record like this where each song has its own story to tell, but if pressed for a response a few of my favorites include “Hooked,” “That’s My law,” “These Boots Are Made or Stalking,” “Broken,” “On How to Be Dumb,” and “Brook Street.” “Hooked” is a love song with a, erm, hook [very bad pun, I know]. The lyrics capture the sentimental reveries of the early days of love: “There is the bench where we sat on the night we first fucked/High on vodka and laughter, first throes of love.” But relationships always become more complex than we expect: “Whatever will be, will be, and may come to pass/You go fetch the matches and I’ll light the gas./We live together, in love forever,/ we’ll die in each other’s arms,/ cause darling we’re hooked.” Now, imagine all this wrapped up in a Serge Gainsbourg inspired French pop song. It’s pretty fecking perfect.I don’t know how the band produced “That’s My Law,” but it kind of sounds like two different songs playing at once, with introspective lyrics that are almost more spoken than sung over both layers of music. Closing with the haunting command, “Don’t make mistakes that I have made/Now, that’s my law,” the song is just cool.On “These Boots Are Made for Stalking” the music grows and builds, slowly and rhythmically to a satisfying frenzy, much in the vein of TVU’s “Heroine,” while the lyrics build in a similar fashion as a stalker declares all the ways in which he’ll be as close as possible to his beloved: “I’ll be the leather seat in your car/I’ll be the padding in your bra/I’ll be your tampon/I’ll be your champion.” It’s a fun, funny, crazy song that is most definitely for adults only and that highlights Brian Bordello’s mad gift for rhyming lyrics filthy euphemisms.“On How to Be Dumb” is the longest song on the record, and one of the most haunting. Echoes, samples, and layers of sound create the perfect swirling sensation of falling and succumbing to influence. “We all sing along on how to be dumb…”There is attitude to spare and an almost cocky edge to the songs on Meet the Bordellos, yet the album never reaches a full-blown arrogance, it never becomes self-indulgent. Instead, the listener finds a self-effacing humor and cynical, rock & roll guitar swaggers that try to hide the Bordellos’ tendency towards self-doubt and their romantic, lovelorn leanings. Don’t let that fool you – this is a band that wants to make you move, they want you to have a good time when listening to them, and trust me, you do! More than making your hips sway and shoulders shimmy, the Bordellos demand that you admit that the best songs are the ones without a happy ending, that melancholia is romantic, and that bittersweet is beautiful.Meet the Bordellos defies any real attempt at categorization. It rocks, it rolls. It’s pop, punk, and psychedelic all at once. It’s bluesy and gritty, and it’s dynamic and experimental. Unconventional, underground, and eclectic, the Bordellos somehow manage to synthesize all that has come before them and produce something completely original and compelling. They make me smile.The Bordellos are Brian on Vocals/Guitar, Ant on Vocals/Percussion, Gary on Bass, and Dan on Keyboards/Percussion/Vocals. Meet the Bordellos, on Brutarian Records, is available all good record stores in the USA and from amazon.com, ebay.com, and northernstarrecords.com.Tara Nicole

First thing’s first – let’s get straight down to business. You can pick up a copy of Allan Douglas’ “Lipstick Pickup” here at CD Baby: http://cdbaby.com/cd/allandouglas At $12 you’re going to have to dig deep into your pockets, but there’s at least one song on this record that is worth every penny or cent of that cost – a song that deserves a place in every comprehensive catalogue of great music. It seems somehow wrong to start a review at the end of a record, but the 6 or so minutes of final track “Riverside” demands to be written about at the beginning. It’s a truly epic ballad wrapped around the line “Jesus Christ I’m left alone”, painfully haunting and playfully melodic, carrying you like a kite on a magical melodic wind. There are songwriters out there who struggle for lifetimes to write something as great as this. “Riverside” originates from the same place as Pet Sounds, with shades of the Beatles and a guy with a beautiful voice front stage singing his guts up for you. After the initial stunned wonder I felt when I first heard it, I’ve listened to that song frequently ever since and the magic just simply doesn’t fade. So with “Riverside” out of the way, anything else on this album that’s even half as great is truly a bonus. Biographically I can’t say that I know a whole lot about the Allan Douglas behind the songs, but at the same time the history of how this record came to be is really irrelevant. Everything you need to know is worn on the sleeves of the 11 songs on the album. “Lipstick Pickup” is a lot of things: soulful, energetic, classical and melodically adventurous, at times an almost painfully bold insight into somebody’s mind, and all the while carried along on the crest of music that sounds like a artist backed with a brilliant band all pushing possibility to the limit. Take the acrobatic sixties-soaked pop brilliance of “Starburnt Child” for example – the second song in, and a masterclass in songwriting. It’s the kind of arrangement that would probably stop the ghost of Brain Wilson dead in his tracks. Here’s a song that was probably quite justifiably voted the best track from 240 minutes of music that we put out on The Daydream Generation compilations in 2007, and further evidence that “Riverside” far from being a lucky shot in the dark. Ok, so you can download it for free if you rummage around in the rubble of our website, and as such it doesn’t necessarily eat into your $12 well spent. But at this stage we’re only two songs in with a lot more ground to cover. “Lipstick Pickup” gets off to a flyer on the brilliant “Brook Street” where an ordinary tune about an “ordinary day” gives way to grandiose Beatle-esque accapella harmonies. For an opening track it’s like the trundling of the rollercoaster on its way up to the first drop, and with the crafted shift there dawns a feeling that you could really be in for some ride. With the aforementioned “Starburnt Child”, then the Byrdsian pop of “Lonesome Desperate Love”, and the string-infused riff-led magic of “Angelina” following in swift succession, I challenge anyone to deny that here is a songwriter and musician who has something truly remarkable to contribute. In fact, the only real objective criticism I can offer is that when this album really works and goes beyond what most self-published artists should rightfully expect to produce, that you get too much a taste for it. Between “Starburnt Child” and “Riverside” there are really good songs (see title track “Lipstick Pickup” shades of “Forever Changes”, and the beautiful “When Time Began”), and flashes of genius – but you get the impression that there’s more to come, loftier heights and unmapped territory to redefine. From a distance, it is an album of two halves – on one side, gutsy guitar led American rhythm & blues with solid hooks and ideas; on the other, the orchestrally ambitious songs that really frame the songwriting and carry what Allan Douglas does into something far from ordinary. 

This album has been around for a while but it’s not too late for you to get on board. For a mere $12 you can buy yourself a one-way ticket to a sublimely retrogressive pop-art album that doesn’t sound out of place amongst some of the more elite records in any record collection. Whether “Lipstick Pickup” turns out to be a one-off masterpiece – for it certainly sounds like somebody pushing every button in their creative armoury – or a sign of things to come, remains to be seen. But I’d be willing to stake a whole lot more than $12 on the latter being the case.

You can find out more about Allan Douglas & The Tragedies at:

http://www.myspace.com/allandouglas

New single: BIG DUMB AMERICAN

From the album “Stratum” – listen to it or download it for FREE from Download audio file (Warchalking-BigDumbAmerican.mp3)

 Between you and me, I have been trying to write a review of “Stratum” by Warchalking for a couple of weeks and this is the first time I have even attempted to put pen to paper. I’ve been listening to the album for a while now – maybe even as far back as a month ago that it first landed on my pc, albeit in a much less shiny unmastered state. And truthfully, I’ve been hooked on those ten incredible tracks ever since. So you would think that by now, surely knowing the songs like the back of my own hand that I’d simply be able to turn up and effortlessly trumpet their existence. Only it isn’t as straightforward as that. Here I am, sitting staring at the notes that I’ve enthusiastically scribbled as I went along, now reading back like some black and white textual abstract printing error. Therein lies the two main reasons why this trumpet is so tricky to blow – the sheer complexity of the record, and the struggle I’m having to define it contextually. Trying to write something that does justice to these songs is like chasing the end of a rainbow. How I feel about it is always shifting, redefining itself, and just when I think I have something to finally pin it on, I realise that it’s merely a trick of the light.

So if we’re going to begin anywhere, then let’s begin at the surface and work our way down: “Stratum” is a pan-dimensional experience rather than a simple adventure for your ears.  Despite its roots being in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, it is much less a product of modern America, and much more a reaction to it. As its title suggests, here is a collection of songs that are positively subterranean by nature – the sound of the American underground and with a little bit of luck, quite possibly a sound of the future too. The far-reaching scope of each track is mirrored enigmatically in the heady depths of the album – there are serious layers everywhere you look. Here is home-recorded multi-multi-tracked music, vocal tracks and harmonies overlapping guitar parts overlapping more guitar parts. Stripped down hasn’t sounded so sonic since Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But make no mistake, this is a long way away from the hippy naivety of the 1960s – “Stratum” mixes the colours up beneath the earth and when it rips up like oil from your speakers the picture it paints is as dark and poetic as it is bright and melodic. Like I said, this is a complex record.

Of course you don’t have to dive in so deep. From the opening acoustic pop of “I Know Your Name” to the closing upbeat paradox that is “As We End”, there are enough songs to carry this as simply a really good record to stick on and kick back to. As anyone who has been lucky enough to grab a copy of the Warchalking untitled debut album can testify, this guy has an unnerving ability to put a surface sheen on some dark matter. You only have to listen to both “Diving Bell” and “Acts of Medicine” on previous Daydream Generation compilations to see what I mean. Ultimately “Stratum” is more of the same and then some. The layers may be finer and more concise like some kind of sculptor who is mastering the trade of making pinpoint shapes and shadows, but the continuity is there for anyone who loved what he was doing before. So again there’s the complexity of the thing – that you can take it at face value and really enjoy songs like the acoustic-indie-rock “Steady The Hand”, or the magnificent sprawling sonic blast that is “Song Of Place”, or you can let yourself get sucked in, find yourself irretrievably engulfed in the words and sounds that roll away beneath your feet. While on the subject of lyrics, I guess I might as well deal with them here. There is a staggering army of phrases and ideas flying around across the landscape of this thing. At times they can sound so complicated that it seems to reach a level of surrealism easily marvelled at, but very difficult to connect with. On the flipside there is the counterweight of poignant lines that flicker and stick in your brain – “we get lost so easily”, “why you so scared boy? /so many got it worse than you”, “jammed between the meaning and the phrase”, “won’t you breathe for me” – I could keep going, but hopefully you get the idea. Listen to it close enough and you’ll see that this is no psychedelic world of thought-stream prose; it’s dark and complex observational poetry, intensely personal and objectively detached at the same time. If this record has a great strength other than the melodic stack of voice and chords, then it is undoubtedly its wonderful web of lyrics.

It seems almost ridiculous to pick out stand-out tracks on such a consistently good album. But if you held me at gunpoint then I’d have to reluctantly point towards the aforementioned “Steady the Hand”, and the riff-driven politik of “Big Dumb American”, featuring in the Singles section on our website. Aside from both being just damn fine songs in their own right, taken in context with the rest of the album, these are the staggering testimony of just how expansive one man and a guitar can sound. Beyond them though, you can’t ignore tracks like the commercially potent pop of “The Warning”, the U2-esque (when they were semi-credible) “Pray We Get There Soon”, or the haunting brilliance of “First Responder”.

Finally back to that notebook of mine. You know I never looked at it once while I typed this up. For me at least, the code remains uncracked and I retreat to a juncture where this record remains simply a great collection of songs that I can happily play whenever there is void. The simple truth is that with “Stratum” you really can go as deep as you want to go – the writing is on the wall for you to follow, and it begins with a big symbol written in chalk, looks a lot like a “W” inside a circle. Where it goes I guess, at the end, is up to you.

“Stratum” by WARCHALKING was released on 19^th March 2008

for FREE download exclusively by Daydream Generation Records

and it’s an absolute honour to launch a makeshift record label with an album like this

 You can download the entire album by visiting the dgRECORDS link at the top of this page.

The Real Burnouts”Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane”2008 Cozy Home RecordsI know Paul Burnout personally. As a matter of fact, I consider him to be among the very small handful of people that I consider to be good friends. This is why I’m reluctant to review his new album. As I listen to it now, though, I think “Ah, fuck it. He deserves his due.” So here it is.For starters, the name of the album pops out at you and demands your attention before you even put the disc on. As stated before, I’ve known Paul for a while, and from the many times that I’ve seen him after a show, I’d say that “post traumatic ultimate mundane” is the best way to describe the general mood of the whole band after stepping off of the stage; Paul having rendered himself voiceless and all Burnouts without exception exhausted from their all-out performance and disappointed with getting ripped off. Again.The album starts with the traditional Burnouts sound:  An electric guitar tuned askew and plugged directly into the mixer, achieving a dry, jangly sound that is unique to this band. As the other instruments come into the mix, it’s quite apparent that Paul has been paying close attention to production, and deftly utilizing his new setup of eight recording tracks as opposed to four. Guitars swirl and drums pop crisply with cymbals washing perfectly in the mix. A living testament to the fact that tape recording is far from dead, Paul gives us a reason to lift up our Tascam machines and sound the call to battle against all that is digital. The thing that I enjoy most about the Burnouts, and have since the beginning, is the honesty in the music. No metronomes, no cut and paste editing, and many times entire songs consisting of take one from each track. Mistakes are made, and sometimes obvious, but these little goofs ultimately amount to the crown jewel of each track, boldly and proudly proclaiming that human beings really can make good music. And it doesn’t have to be perfect to be brilliant.Lyrically, Mr. Burnout again proves why his music never disappoints. The most lyrically introspective album since “Transparent Mirror”, Paul hits us with bits of 20/20 hindsight like “starry-eyed and full of pride/I should’ve known how it would go/I should have just stayed home” and tongue-in-cheek references like “I hope I die before I grow mold” in the song “I Don’t Want What Another Man Has”. The single “Adrenilene Hormone” (typo intentional), which has been featured  on the Daydream Generation Vol. IV, begins with a wonderfully dreamy bit of guitar work, tapping the fretboard to give the song a popping, chiming foundation for Paul’s uplifting brand of quiet psychedelia. One of the few lighthearted songs on this album, it’s a touching tribute to love as a drug that many have attempted, but few have really succeeded in making interesting. The song “Superficial Touch” may become Paul’s latest sleeper hit, while my personal favorite track, “I See You” is an obvious goof. Mostly improvised, it showcases Paul’s gift for coming up with psychedelic pop weirdness at the drop of a hat… Or roach or empty can of Utica Club, or whatever he may feel like dropping at any moment.In conclusion, buy “Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane” by The Real Burnouts. But only if you like dreamy melodies, shoegaze song structure, and an all around good feeling after listening to an album. And who doesn’t like that?-Monty Leuthausen

Post Show Post Traumatic Ultimate Mundane

available at www.cozyhomerecords.com sometime soon

If you haven’t yet heard, or heard about Washington’s The Shivas, then the chances are that sometime soon you’re going to. Nowhere does the old cliché that sometimes you have to go backwards to go forwards fit better than describing what they are doing musically. Here are the sounds of the past, but somehow so obviously the sound of the future that it is impossible not to be blown away by what they’re doing. Wearing their influences blatantly on their young sleeves, The Shivas conjure up the spirit of old legends like The Velvet Underground, The Doors, The Beatles and Syd Barret, and they conjure it up so well that when you play their new album “Where Have You Gone To” it’s easy to finally forget that nostalgic ache for a time when music truly mattered at the deepest levels. Suddenly it’s possible and still relevant for those sounds to be resurrected at the beginning of the 21^st century. What The Shivas have done is to wipe the slate clean and go back to a juncture where we quite possibly took a wrong turning, and then taken off from there. What they’ve done even better than that – as is such an easy trap to fall into – is to avoid it sounding like a clumsy pastiche, and to convincingly make this music sound new and invigorating and important all over again.Fans of the various Daydream Generation compilations will be familiar with a handful of songs that appear on this, the band’s debut album due for release through World In Sound Records in March 2008. Here you can revisit the mod-funk celebratory jam of “Big Man”, the VU inspired psych adventure of “Peele’s Perfume Garden”, and the blues-folk anthem that is “The Ballad Of Grant Whitney”. And where often songs lose the spark of originality that made them magical low-fi demos when they translate to the big record, The Shivas have stayed true to the original fire, clearing them up and making them even bigger, rather than engineering the soul right out of them.Led by the multi-talented singer-songwriter-guitarist Jared Wait-Molyneux, together with fellow band members Colby (Jared’s prodigal drumming younger brother), Griffin Taylor (hip psychedelic basslines), and Eric Shanafelt adding the unique sound of congas that really gives the band an edge and a distinctive sound, “Where Have You Gone To” is a frighteningly great debut. Partly that fear is down to the collective age of the band (looks like it can’t add up to much more than 80 years between them) and the almost perverse maturity of the sound that they produce. This is music made by musicians and appeals as much to the technical purists, as it will do to the kids who will inevitably spill onto the dancefloor to freak their hearts out when the band strikes up. But it’s also frightening because debut albums just really shouldn’t sound so completely flawless. Song after song as the Jim Morrison-esque vocals urge you back to an era of peace and love, and the tribal psychedelic sounds of sitars and bouhrans and djembes ring out, you find yourself wondering where can this band go wrong? There is brilliance written all over the sheer range of the record – in the folk-pop kookiness of “Ode To A Tea Set”, in the sonic guitar driven “Love”, the blissed out “Butter Sun”, in the negotiation of the obligatory protest anthem that is “The War Song”, and right down to the kaleidoscopic sitar loaded cacophony called “Sit Anywhere” that closes the album.When I first stumbled across The Shivas while putting the first Daydream Generation compilation together, I saw the words “Grunge is dead, Psych is back” on their MySpace page. Aside from the fact that such a simple line read like a beacon of possibility from such a young band and was in such stark contrast to the seemingly neverending pages of angst-ridden nihilistic emo kids I was wading through, the most exciting thing about it was that here was a band that genuinely had the songs and the sound to back up the potential. A band that were not just blindly following, but sucking up all the coolest sounds from the last 50 years worth of music and making it happen again in a completely new way. Jack Kerouac once urged “do not seek to follow in the footsteps of your forefathers – seek what they sought” and The Shivas seem to embody this notion. Acclaimed records of the mid-to-late 1960s were as much an experience as a collection of songs – “Where Have You Gone To” starts from where the old road ended before forging its own way with mind-blowing melodies into unmapped and untapped territory. Unlike established contemporary underground Psych bands such as The Brian Jonestown Massacre and The Lovetones, The Shivas are unquestionably a band with not only an album worth of great songs but further they have a whole lot of time ticking firmly on their side, and for that alone, they deserve your attention. From their You Tube videos and recorded live performances such as the one we heard at the Dreamstream festival back in November last year, you get a genuine sense that they are actually connecting with their peers, influencing minds, and gathering momentum everytime those congas begin to roll with the chords kicking in. If there’s ever going to be a revolution in mainstream music back to the sounds of substance over style, and of poetry over profit, then it will be bands like The Shivas who are going to be in the vanguard of this change.So if you love your psychedelic rock & roll go and buy this album. If you love The Doors circa 1968 then go and buy this album. If you dig White Light/White Heat then go and buy this album. If you like rolling congas and hypnotic guitars then go and buy this album. If you were too young to live through the Summer Of Love then you should go and buy this album. And if you want to hear what the beginning of a revolution sound like, then you really should go and buy this album.THE SHIVAS “Where Have You Gone To” is available to buy at:http://www.theshivas.com/from 10th March 2008

For such a likeable guy, Gavin Piercy, the songsmith and frontman of Glasgow band The People has the unnerving sound of a musical prophet when he sings his carefully crafted songs. He once candidly confessed that he was resigned to their music remaining in relative obscurity, by the simple fact that they didn’t sit comfortably in any one specific scene, or make music by numbers intended for commercial success. The flipside of course is that by pursuing the vision, and making expressive music on their own terms with the quality of songwriting and musicianship behind the band, that there is every chance that The People could really create something truly timeless. The possibility is there, and it is irrespective and perhaps partly because of the unlikelihood of their unique sound being immediately recognised by the kids of today, or the mainstream music industry. So it is with the weight of all this potential and an element of nervous anticipation that I approach their full-length second album, “Desire, The Devil and The Ghost”.Released in August of 2007 almost 3 years after their eponymous debut album came out through Scottish independent label “Hijacked Records”, album number two is a clear labour of love and heartache. Whereas the 6 song debut of 2004 only hinted at the heights the band were capable of achieving, here we have a work that sounds and feels bigger, more majestic, and goes even deeper into some of the darkest parts of the human experience. He’s right of course, it is virtually impossible to pin The People to any particular genre – their sound being a carefully crafted fusion of styles, where folk rock & roll blues burns with a twist of modern cynicism, positively Dylanesque circa “Blonde On Blonde” at times, but ultimately something else that great records should be – something that defies sentences.When The People first burst onto the Glasgow music scene almost a decade ago, they sounded like they’d been schooled by The La’s. You couldn’t help but be impressed, but somehow it always seemed like you were listening to the unfinished article, a band learning their trade in the process of finding their own sound. But right from the outset of this album, with the brilliant harmonic drive of opening track “Until The Heavy Rain” it’s pretty obvious that all that’s changed. Musically they have matured beyond recognition – the song arrangements are more complex without being gratuitous and benefit from excellent studio production. Bassist Simon Graham, and guitarist Craig Moyes add Byrdsian harmonies over Piercy’s trademark growling vocals, and overall the album plays like a considered fusion of dark guitar soundscapes and simple great songs well worth the three year wait. Influences flicker throughout – “Until The Heavy Rain” is reminiscent of the sound The Beatles had when they were doing Abbey Road, “Frontiers” is Arthur Lee’s Love revisited, starkly contrasted with songs like “Snake” and “The Tempest” which are brutally menacing in sound, impenetrable poetry snarling from your speakers. In a nutshell, “Desire…” is a deep, dark, journey of an album that will probably leave you feeling emotionally exhausted by the time you reach the tenth and final song “Saviours and Stones” – a beautiful pop/folk ode that could easily be The Band reborn in the 21st century.Curiously, two of the 3 stand-out tracks are the anti-thesis of the dark, complex melodies and mood that runs like blood through the album, while the third is possibly the darkest of the lot. The bleakness of “Black Roses” is total – a lyrically foreboding and structurally complex song that grows and suffocates. It’s not an easy listen, but it’s an amazing piece of work and ultimately demonstrates what this band are capable of when it comes to capturing the darkest of feelings. At the other end of the spectrum from “Black Roses” lies “Two Roads” – an anthemic folky sing along you can imagine yourself wailing along to when the little pub doors are locked and somebody gets a guitar out from behind the bar. Heavily painted with a country twang it’s the song you would most expect to hear on your radio or connecting with a wider audience. And finally there is “Adeline”. Track number 4 is the song that songwriters struggle for lifetimes to write, a haunting acoustic lament about love lost, acknowledged by Piercy as one the simplest songs on the album, yet also perhaps “Desire, The Devil and The Ghost”s most accomplished and epic two and a half minutes, a marriage of melody and melancholy. As timeless as great songs inevitably are, you can’t help but feel that “Adeline” will always be there, and should always be there, buried at the bottom of drawers to be discovered by your grandchildren, or played on headphones when you watch the sun coming up with tear stained cheeks.It’s true that it’s much easier to market and sell music that follows fashion, than it is to sell unfashionable greatness. But whether they know or it or not, The People have produced a stunning record that deserves your attention. While the ghosts of Bob Dylan, Arthur Lee, Lee Mathers, Howling Wolf and The Band look on from the wings, “Desire, The Devil and The Ghost” moves out into the world on its own terms, playing on in the darkness, as fine an album of soulful heartache as you could possibly hope to hear.Smally

You can buy a copy of this album at the following link:

http://www.resonancestore.com/hijacked/

“Until The Heavy Rain” features on The Daydream Generation: Volume One – see DOWNLOAD section at the top of our site.