I've been jobless for a couple of months now because I start at the University of Sussex on Monday 4th October and I decided to give myself a bit of time off before my shit-for-brains hits the Higher Education Fan. I've not done much besides spend an awful lot of money, but I have been working on the second Me With Others album, 'Don't Accept, Be Broken'. It's shaping up to be a nine-track, roughly forty-five minute album with bass, percussion, a lovely warm-sounding Fender Jaguar, piano, Wurlitzer organ and, as promised, creamy full-fat vocal harmonies. My old computer died a few months back and I lost a lot of old recordings, but I now have a brand new laptop with a shitload of pirated software for recording, mixing and artwork purposes, and I hope to have the record wrapped up in the next couple of months. Definitely before Christmas. It'll be out by Spring. Maybe. Probably not. Anyway, here's the front cover:
The sketches and text are from old declassified Top Secret military maps of Europe from the early 1940s. For every feature represented by a symbol on the map, they have these little illustrations of what the feature would look like on the ground. Everything from a quick-set hedge to a water level gauge to, er... a "prominent tree". I thought they looked lovely and so now they're the artwork.
No update would be complete without something to do with music, and there are few excellent shows coming up in Brighton this autumn/winter. I'm very much looking forward to Polar Bear next Tuesday at the Komedia. If you don't know them, they are an excellent five-piece jazz group, very distinctive in their quite laid-back vibe and especially the involvement of both drummer Seb Rochford (of Acoustic Ladyland and the F-IRE Collective) and Leafcutter John on live electronics. It's the latter that really sets them apart though; Leafcutter John's interjections are tasteful digital tweaks and effects pedals, and he manipulates not only his own sound sources but the instruments of other band members as they are performed. They aren't particularly improvisational either, so the restraint and awareness is visible onstage. Here's a great clip of them performing "Tomlovesalicelovestom" from their third (self-titled) album:
November also sees the return of the inimitable Dillinger Escape Plan, touring their latest record 'Option Paralysis' with Rolo Tomassi. I don't have 'Option Paralysis' yet but I did pick up Rolo Tomassi's latest, 'Cosmology', which is a very solid record, if perhaps lacking the immediacy of their debut full-length 'Hysterics'. And there's a bit that sounds so much like like The Mars Volta that I can't imagine anyone hearing it and not saying "This bit sounds almost exactly like The Mars Volta". Anyway, it's been eight-and-a-half years (!) since I last saw Dillinger kick the shit out of the Mean Fiddler so I'm very much looking forward to it. If they don't play "Black Bubblegum" I'll confront Greg Puciato myself and call him a pussy. Except I definitely won't because he is terrifying. Here's a couple of videos from those two bands. First is the new(ish) video for Rolo Tomassi's 'Party Wounds', just in case you're not already in love with Eva Spence enough.
And Dillinger's second video from 'Ire Works', the aforementioned "Black Bubblegum".
I've heard that some 'purists' have been less than kind about this song, but let me register my opinion here that they're full of shit. Ben Weinman and Greg Puciato have a great skill and instinct for song construction and they've managed to apply that to some of the most challenging extreme music around. This song is produced in a more 'pop' style: there are few actual riffs, it's not at all guitar-led until the bridge towards the end (where the discords remind us we're still dealing with Dillinger Escape Plan here), and it's unapologetically chorus-centred. But not only is it catchy as fuck, it also seems perfectly in accordance with the band's expanded musical personality - an identity forged mainly through Greg's efforts to break out of the 'screams-only' pattern established by original vocalist Dimitri Minikakis. Their ability to write and produce songs like "Black Bubblegum" as well as tech/hardcore stuff is not only rare but an extremely hard-won distinction achieved through taking big risks. I can only assume they credit their fans with intelligence and eclecticism, and they don't do anything by halves. The Dillinger Escape Plan fucking rocks.
Not too dissimilar to Rolo Tomassi, there's an Italian band called Inferno that I've posted up here before. They seem to be recording a new album at the moment, which is very cool indeed. I hope they get themselves an attractive invitation to come and play in the UK sometime soon. Here's a short video montage of them doing pre-production demos.
This band is great because they sound like they're having an enormous amount of fun making music. The songs are mostly short, tightly constructed, alternately mathy and straightforward in all the right places, and the keyboard sound is really quite distinctive. Their hardcore punk influences are very clear too, which helps them avoid seeming po-faced and 21st-Century-wanky-squiggly-supposedly-groundbreaking-mathcore-trendy. As you can see, I have officially abandoned all prospects of becoming a music journalist.
Another band coming to Brighton this year is the legendary Swans, who will also be playing at Supersonic Festival in Birmingham in about three weeks time. I've been to Supersonic the last two years running and it's fast becoming one of my favourites. It usually happens in July but they held out longer this year in order to procure Swans as the big name headliner. I, however, will be missing Swans in favour of what is sure to be one of the most exciting sets I've ever seen: Hallogallo 2010. This is a new band with Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley and Aaron Mullan from Tall Firs, put together by Michael Rother of Neu!/Harmonia fame to play Neu! material that hasn't been perfomed in over 35 years. You may be aware that I'm a bit of a Krautrock fan, so this is about as awesome as it gets until they find a way to bring Michael Karoli back from the dead. And Klaus Dinger for that matter. Here's the awesome 'Negativland' from their first (self-titled) album (1972). [Stick with it, it changes gear and rocks the fuck out after a little while.]
The festival has a great pedigree and so predictably the rest of the lineup is pretty fucking sweet too. Of particular interest to me are Eagle Twin, idiosynctratic doom weirdos on Southern Lord, Alan Dubin's post-Khanate project Gnaw, the reformed Godflesh, original drum 'n' bass residents PCM, the always manic Melt Banana and Aaron Spectre's vicious Drumcorps project.
However, three other artists deserve a special mention. The first is Napalm fucking Death. What else really needs to be said about Napalm? Well, perhaps that the first extreme metal song I ever really clicked with (not counting the Cannibal Corpse bit in 'Ace Ventura') was "Necessary Evil" from their fantastic 'return-to-form' record 'Enemy of the Music Business' (2000), and I've never looked back since. Were it not for that song on a Kerrang! Magazine sampler (April 2001 by the way), my life would be very different indeed. Okay, it could very easily have been much better, but there's just as much chance it might have been worse. Or at the very least, a lot quieter. And quiet is fucking lame. Anyway, they've basically had the best ten years of their existence since that record, the first of a run of five totally ripping, brutal, gauntlet-throwing albums that bring the intensity even to bands like Converge (okay, not live but on record at least). They'll be playing a hometown show on a very eclectic bill, and they're headlining on the Friday night. Should be an absolute fucking belter. Here's a video of them playing "On The Brink of Extinction" at Wacken 2009:
A late addition to the lineup is a band I've been aware of for some time but never bothered to check out - Chrome Hoof. I must have been put off by the sparkly imagery, but then again they're ATP-approved and that's usually a good sign. Someone once used the phrase "disco doom" to describe them to me but I quickly erased that horrible prospect from my mind before it had the chance to really sink in. Then later someone told me that Leo Smee was behind it, and he's pretty cool. He is I suppose better known as the bass player from Cathedral and (occasionally) Firebird, and he seemed nice when I met him at a Khanate show a few years back. So I checked them out today and apart from noting they're a perfect band for Supersonic, I can't really work out what to say. I mean, it certainly is funky, and there's some great vocoder shit going on... I don't know what they have to do with 'heavy' music though, but then that doesn't really matter at all. Perhaps when I get there, presumably pissed, and forget the 'heavy metal' connections via Leo Smee, I will be convinced one way or another. Very interesting band though. Sort of like Guapo doing Chromeo covers. Fucked up.
An then there's Ruins. That's right... fucking Ruins! I'm not sure why, but this one was a real surprise. Yoshida Tatsuya is the man behind this project - he plays drums and vocals behind/on top of some very strange prog/Rock In Opposition/mathy madness (the number of forward slashes here denoting the depth of my confusion). He's collaborated with virtually every reputable figure in the Japanese underground and has been active for over twenty years with Ruins, which is now just a solo project. His drumming is superb and the compositions are utterly insane, usually traced back to the influence of Magma but far nuttier and more frantic even than that. He does sing in a made-up language though, which probably accounts for half of the Magma reference. Here's... something or other by Ruins:
If you go to their unauthorised MySpace site you'll see a track called "Hard Rock", which is a very dense medley of classic rock tunes. Some Hendrix, Led Zep, Deep Purple. Try and spot them all. It's fun.
Hopefully among my next posts will be a full Supersonic review and pictures, maybe even a video montage or something pointless and time-wasting like that. I actually did a half-hour video montage of last year's festival but it was too large to upload anywhere and then my old PC died, taking with it an awful lot of porn and bad smells. Let's hope I get it right this time.
