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.

Download it for FREE today

here

Listen to SET YOUR SENSES FREE from THE REAL BURNOUTS “Copious Maximus”:

Download audio file (TheRealBurnouts-SetYourSensesFree.mp3)

I was recently asked to list my five favourite bands of all time and quickly reeled them off – The Stone Roses, The Beatles, The Velvet Underground, The Beach Boys, and The Real Burnouts. Most of you will have heard of the first four, but not so many of you will be aware of the fifth. I mean this list sincerely, and include The Real Burnouts not for gimmick, nor for some kind of pretentious alternative musical one-upmanship, but simply because each of them at some stage have made music that changed my life. If The Roses ripped my head open with their indie anthems and The Beatles saved my brain with a song-writing masterclass, if The V.U took me somewhere dark I never knew existed, and The Beach Boys showed me the stratospheric heights that melody and harmony can reach, then The Burnouts showed me that there was a whole other world to discover, beyond the radio stations and shiny music magazines, happening on the bedroom floors and in the secret basements of the universe. This experimental and reassuringly original psychedelic band from Utica, New York, made music sound alive again by kicking down the doors of possibility in their grotesque painted masks and goofy hipster clothes, with twisted words and unpredictable tunes. From the first time I heard their druggy anthem “Set Your Senses Free” (as revalationary as  experiencing mind-altering psychedelics for the first time) I pretty quickly discovered that nothing was what I’d always assumed it had been, and nothing could ever be the same again. It really is an epiphany to discover that the songs and sounds that actually matter the most are rarely on the radio or television, nor do they frequent the shelves of your local independent music store, or get magically handed to you when you least expect it. The music that actually matters you’ve got to go out and find for yourself.

Whether any of us like it or not, a revolution has smashed through the heart of the music industry at the turn of the 21st century. The tidal wave of recording technology is as important a change for creative culture as the youth revolution of the 1950s were. Now it is possible to cut out the corporate middle man and go straight for the jugular of open ears. Now, the budget-less bedroom bound songwriter can record their ideas and share them with an audience on the other side of the globe within a matter of minutes. Now, the means of production in the form of four-tracks and software programmes are affordable (even free) to anyone who has something to sing about. You can design your own covers, sell downloads, or mail your own CDs. You may not make a living from it, but even in that there is a purity, honesty, and fire in the DIY recordings of this generation. Undoubtedly there always has been, but never before have we been able to capture and share it with each other so easily. I can’t speak for you, but I know myself whose thoughts and experiences I’d choose to listen to if it came to a choice between the decadent rock-star writing from a air-conditioned tour bus that eventually stops at some clinical beach-house, or the people like us who struggle and sometimes succeed, who try to make sense of the world around us from the battle-scarred terrain that is the front-line of actuality. The Real Burnouts in that sense are perhaps fortunate to find themselves in the thick of the wave that finally broke the dam, because this is the kind of band that record company executives could lose a lot of sleep over. As well as being musically brilliant, they can also be frighteningly different (the first time I heard their name mentioned on an internet forum, someone wrote “The Real Burnouts scare me”), and even to this day I’d be inclined to agree with that assessment. These guys are the unwitting pioneers of a time when Lo-Fi became not just the preserve of the sixties garage band, but a movement in its own right. They were there as wasted teenagers trading home-made cassettes on the streets of Utica in the mid-90s, and although the recordings are infinitely more sophisticated, it is still the same principle over a decade later – just a much bigger street. With podcasts and collectives, social networking sites and rapidly shifting advances that cater directly to how the artist wants to be heard rather than how the corporation wants to package a commodity, it is hard to see this revolution failing. The death knell of the vacuous celebrity has been well and truly sounded, and though the world can’t hear it yet, the heroes of a tomorrow a long way from today, will not be pretty poster puppet youths with fuck all to say, or winners of talent shows regurgitating elevator music. The heroes will be bands exactly like The Real Burnouts.

I’ve pestered the creative driving force (Paul Burnout) for the last couple of years to put a record like “Copious Maximus” together. There’s a Utican cardboard box in my bedroom containing every available Burnout record to date (most of these are available through the brilliant little Cozy Home Records). It’s a gargantuan back catalogue – from the twin giants that are “You Won’t Know Until You Find Out” and “Transparent Mirror”, through early offerings with wonderful names like “The Penis and Vagina Syndrome”, or “It’s Not All Hot Chocolate”, right through to the insanely magical “A Lull In Void”, and more recently the subtle and relatively melancholy “Post-Show, Post-Traumatic, Ultimate Mundane”, and “(In) A World Not Unlike Your Own”. With a bit of searching, a few clicks of a mouse, a well-intentioned word to the right people or a little loose change, anyone who digs this band as much as I do shouldn’t find it difficult to assemble the entire collection. The things is, that the first time I ripped through the records back to back I was struck by how many Burnouts songs were missing from them. Tracks like the aforementioned “Set Your Senses Free”, or the spiky psych-punk “Girl You’re The One For Me”, the goofy pop of “Psychological Sacrifice”, sixties-tinged anthems like “Be Right Where You Belong” and “Whenever Will I See You There?”, even the more off-the-wall efforts like the spoken “Wild Sarsaparilla” – all of them seemed to be curiously missing in action. If anything, the scale of lost tracks is perhaps testament to the band’s prolificness – barely a year goes by without a new offering, and a natural consequence of this is that some songs get left behind, fall by the wayside, or just about vanish into the aether forever. Paul himself explained where they’d gone – “to me they were all bits and pieces that didn’t quite fit on albums, and others, to me, were too good compared to other songs on albums to be used”.

Two years of pestering later and here they all are. A 34 track collection of the finest and strangest Real Burnouts recordings that didn’t make it onto the records, hand-picked from the cutting room floor. “Copious Maximus” is lo-fi home pop’s accidental answer to “The White Album”. A coherent collection of songs recorded over four years of arguably “golden age” Burnouts, like a jigsaw of several puzzles that mysteriously piece together. The psychedelic riotry of the band format (all your favourite Burnouts are represented – Luke, Bobby, Katie, Dustin, and Pat) goes hand in hand with the more introspective poetic ramblings. Alternative versions, collide with undoubted hits, drums and synthesisers burst into flame, and everybody wakes up the morning after wondering what the fuck has just happened. Don’t get me wrong – this music isn’t for everyone. It isn’t always obvious, and if you don’t get it the first time around, then chances are that no amount of working at it is ever going to get you there. But for those of you like me, who have been blown away by the honesty, originality, and pure experimental expressiveness of this band in the past, then this is a must have recording. Forty years ago today The Beatles released “Abbey Road” and just about everyone knows it. Forty years from now the chances are that The Real Burnouts will still be a cult group beyond the periphery of the canonized musical pantheon. The great records of our generation are like fleeting gems that flare for a short while before burning out in your brain, to be discovered many years later in tattered old Utican cardboard boxes. So dig well before it burns out.

Smally, 17th August 2009

Find out more about The Real Burnouts at: www.therealburnouts.com

Get more Burnouts recordings here: www.cozyhomerecords.com

Namu the Disco Whale

CYP2D6

Out Today!

Download it for FREE from our Quixodelic Record Store: here

So here’s one from left-field. For the first time here’s a record by an artist that I can’t tell you anything about. A 4-track EP called “CYP2D6″ that accidentally fell into my hands and an intense sound adventure full of distortion, samples, bleeps and things you’re unlikely to have heard anywhere before.

If you’re interested in finding out more about Namu the Disco Whale, then all I can suggest is that you hit the search engines and hopefully will have more luck than I did.

THE LOADED WHISPERS

Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth

DOWNLOAD IT FOR FREE TODAY

download it at Quixodelic Records

Every once in a while a record lands in your life and blows you away. This is one of those records – an intelligent and heartfelt collection of folk-psychedelics, with songs that will linger in your mind like ghosts long after they have played. Dublin’s THE LOADED WHISPERS are probably as great as lo-fi musicians get, combining the brilliant poetry of Jeremiah James and the unmistakeable mind-blowing voice of Syd Lane, over fuzzy stripped-back psych guitar and dancing piano keys. “Artists Use Lies To Tell The Truth” is a perfect introduction to what they do, with so many stand-out tracks that all you can do is let the record play out from beginning to end. And that really is the truth.

Find out more about The Loaded Whispers – here

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.

UFC1

Out Today

Ever wondered where to start with the 19 records we’ve released/co-released or re-released through our very own QUIXODELIC RECORDS?

Well wonder no more. For those of you new to this musical curiosity shop of free downloads, then why not try on The Utica Flower Company’s first ever sampler (imaginatively titled “UFC1″)? A single track  lifted from each of the records, songs I’ve been listening to far too many times since the first ever Quixodelic Record (Warchalking’s “Stratum”) burst from The Void in March 2008. Dig on the psychedelic sounds of bands like ROLLERCOASTER, THE ORANGE DROP, UBERFUZZ, CODY HIGH SCHOOL, BROKEN MONO, and ROCKETSHIPS OF LOVE, sing along with the lo-fi folk/pop of JANE GILMORE, KALEIDONAUTS, SUCKS TO LALA LAND, BECKY N, SIMON PILER AND THE ATOM BAND, THE WHEELIES, THE PLAYGROUND and JAMES REDMOND, or even try putting something genre-defying like DEAD CANARIES or WARCHALKING into your ears. And if none of that floats your boat there’s always the magic of FIG MINTS (OF YOUR IMAGINATION), or the weirdly wonderful secret and anonymous DAYDREAM UNDERGROUND. In a nutshell that’s something for almost everyone and everybody they know, and hopefully will point you in the right direction before that download-trigger-happy finger starts a-clickin’.

Just click here

to head to our QUIXODELIC RECORDS store if and when you’re ready

Oh, and if 19 free tracks are not enough to convince you to have a listen, for the first 50 downloaders we’ll be giving away our exclusive… wait for it…

UTICA FLOWER COMPANY FREE CUT OUT AND KEEP TOP TRUMPS

No shit.

And you thought a cut out paper moustache with Sgt. Pepper was cool?

Smally

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

Out Today!

Now this is exciting. Been a long time since we first heard and were blown away by River Speak English’s “Puzzle Piece” on Daydream Generation 2. A year and a half later and we’re made up to be hosting one half of the aforementioned collaboration’s debut record. “Well Under Thirty” is a collection of Bob Dylan covers by Sucks To LaLa Land’s Keith Crain – as well as being a beautiful introduction to this talented singer/songwriter, it’s arguably as great a collection of Dylan covers as I’ve ever heard. Listening to the 8 tracks featured was like discovering Bob Dylan all over again.

You can download it for FREE at the Quixodelic Records link on our site right now

& find out more about Sucks To LaLa Land at www.myspace.com/suckstolalaland

BROKEN MONO

Tulk

download: BROKEN MONO - Tulk

1 6th Age Wonder

2 Brain Hotel

3 Comming and Going

4 Dark Cloud

5 I Don’t Know

6 My Soul Moves Sideways

7 River Runs Dry

8 Rose Morning

9 Searching For Stanley

“Tulk” was recorded in about 1854 on a steam-driven PC - Broken Mono

Broken Mono on MySpace: www.myspace.com/brokenmono

A Quixodelic Record, December 2008

FREE DOWNLOAD TODAY!

(and tomorrow, and the day after that, and so on…)

The Daydream Generation digs deep, the commune swells and sounds even more psychedelic than it did yesterday, and yes you can believe your eyes, that really is the one and only BROKEN MONO you’re seeing in the Quixodelic Record store. “Tulk” is the riffing musical matador like you have never heard him before. Recorded “In 1854 on a steam-driven PC” miraculously these recordings have survived the onslaught of time and have been generously laid on a plate for your feline ears to lap up.

So what are you waiting for? Head to the QUIXODELIC RECORDS link at the top of the site and lap away…

(review to follow)

Free download

Of course we’re not the only ones out there putting together free download compilations – but of all the others I’ve found, this one stands up head and psychedelic shoulders above the rest. Yes, the good people of Your Psych Tunes are at it again, bringing you a mellow slice of wintry psychedelia. Go forth and download your little hearts out.

See Your Psych Tunes on MySpace for more info

www.myspace.com/thedaydreamunderground

Where to start with this?

It’s always been a part of the Daydream Generation’s short-lived history to orchestrate seemingly random, near-impossible, and hopelessly pointless projects. Way out beyond the periphery of financial considerations, we’ve built a maze of profiles that nobody ever finished (or was interested in), survived the technological headfuck of an online music festival, kickstarted a makeshift record label with it’s own chaotic collective, and released countless free records for you to download, compilations, Best Of’s, EPs, LPs, debut albums, unreleased features, and even compilations of compilations. So on paper at least the idea of starting a secret underground musical collective may have sounded completely random, probably impossible, and almost certainly pointless, but there was a quixodelic vibe of familiarity about us even bothering to dream it up in the first place. Without any real research or consideration whether it would actually work or not and not even knowing what the purpose of such an underground society would be, I got back on the horse and sent out a load of invitations to anyone I thought might be interested, and even a few that I suspected would not. And so The Daydream Underground was born.

Once the hard part of getting on the horse was out of the way it quickly became apparent that such a society without a coherent philosophy or purpose would drift away like the Maze before it, so I turned my attention to conjuring up some kind of “mission” that would hopefully unite the secret anonymous members of the underground. After a few seconds I settled on the first thing that came into my head, the idea of a collective record of instrumentals from as many of us as possible, each recording under a pseudonym, anything goes, the madder the better, “a record of sounds that run like paints on a Jackson Pollock painting” I think I said. In my mind I imagined a psychedelic/experimental journey of ideas, textures, sounds you’ve never heard before, and sounds you’ve never heard together before, colliding and captured on a single disc…

…and two weeks later here we are. “Into The Ewigkeit” is everything I imagined and a bit more. From your armchair to a wild west showdown, from the robotic sounds of subterranean secret basements to snake-infested Iowa, from Paris to fuzz, from handclaps to glockenspiels, and all the way to the skies of World War II – it is a dark record, thick with the fog of ideas, and quite possibly the first chapter of a great adventure into the unknown.

And so about the people who have contibuted to making this record I really can’t tell you a thing. I don’t know how many contributors there are, or even where they are from, very occasionally I recognise a sound that I’ve heard somewhere before but for all I know the tracks that make up the first ever Daydream Underground release are from the same person operating under 16 different pseudonyms. Whether this is a global project or 16 people that just happen to live on my street, or your street… your guess is as good as mine. I don’t know whether these are people I know from previous DG compilations, or if they are new to all this, and I don’t even know how to find them to say thankyou. But for what it’s worth, here are the founding members of the secret musical society:

LOUIS LA WAYE & THE OH OOH OH’S

OH NO NOT THAT FUCKING LLAMA AGAIN

THE PURPLE OHM EATERS

ARMCHAIR SUPERMAN

FINKBRAU

JIM PINE

LANKIE & THE SEVEN SCARED LADS

DIP

OLD MEN USE CANES

NEBULALA

SHORT PANTS IN WINTER

JONNY BALLS

THE WAY IT IS

THE CRYSTAL MONOLITH

and

GLOWHEEL

So head to the QUIXODELIC RECORDS section at the top of the site, click to download, stick it on your iPod or burn it to a disc, and please remember to strap yourself in because the ride could be a little bumpy and then some.

If you like what you hear please check out our MySpace (link above) and if you want to get involved in any future underground projects then check out the following link:

http://www.groups.myspace.com/thedaydreamunderground

Secretly yours

DQ

]]> http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/the-daydream-underground-into-the-ewigkeit/feed/ 2 http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/review-uberfuzz-as-if-it-matters-ep/ http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/review-uberfuzz-as-if-it-matters-ep/#comments Tue, 28 Oct 2008 23:59:17 +0000 smally http://daydreamgeneration.com/site/?p=190

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)

UBERFUZZ As If It Matters EP

OUT TODAY

With DG6 just about ready to go I’m sure those of you who frequent this site are busy twiddling your download fingers and wondering what the fuck to do with yourself until it arrives. Well twiddle no more – thanks to Paul and the rest of the UBERFUZZ team we’ve got the pleasure of hosting the latest offering from Rugby’s more recent in an acclaimed tradition of psychedelic space rock & roll.

“As If It Matters” is a 5-track ride through foot-stompingdruggy anthems, synthesized lullabies and damn fine bluesy pop songs. So fill up your ears while you can and download it for FREE from the QUIXODELIC RECORDS links at the top of the site.

Find out more about Uberfuz2 at: www.myspace.com/uberfuz2

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)

 Out Today!

JAMES REDMOND – Too Much To Think

So this one here is pretty damn special for a whole number of reasons, including the historical context of the record, the many technological hurdles we threw ourselves through to get it together for you, and of course the sheer genius of the songs that make it up. Those of you familiar with previous DG compilations are perhaps aware of who Jay is and what he does, but seeing as it’s been over a year since we last heard from him it’s likely that for the majority of you this is going to be something of an eye-opener.

The 8 songs that make up this unique collection not only clock in under a breakneck 20 minutes, but they overflow with comedy, tragedy, and staggeringly great pop-folk melodies. With a little help from some friends, it’s got names like Dirty Ticket, The Sweetcorns, and Tramp Attack written all over it, but what you hear is 100% James Redmond.

Do yourself a favour and download it for FREE today from the QUIXODELIC RECORDS link at the top of the site.

As promised here’s something pretty fucking cool & then some for your weekend. Quixodelic Records is proud to present the latest in its short-line of collective musical adventurers, BECKY N and her debut TWO WHEELS EP.

Fans of the Daydream Generation compilations might be familiar with the songs, but thanks to our resident gangsta engineer Bubbasmooth, they’ve been given a bit of an audio shoe-shine. While I continue to try and fathom why so many people (including myself) love Becky’s songs so much, you can download it for FREE from the STORE link at the top of the site & hear for yourself.