A couple of recent albums for you, there’s a stack of them that we need to catch up on, here’s jsut a couple that have been demanding our time recently….

Silicone Values – How to survive when people don’t like you and you don’t like them (SDZ) – Out on the same label as the recently mentioned US band The Sheaves. Silicone Values are from Bristol, seems all these releases gathered together on one album are actually from 2024 although if you had to force us then we’d guess late 70s or maybe just into the 80s?  There’s a rather wired rather home made feel to all this, a positive DIY punk vibe, there’s a touch of Magazine’s Shot By Both Sides in a song that just went past, there’s a track called Spirit of The Age that isn’t on this album that isn’t a cover of the Hawkwind song, it don’t half rip it off though! What we’re saying here is that this is that original, some of it might be borrowing just a little too much from back there at the end of the 70s but then they say that this is disposable music and I do kind of like it. They sound like a classic seven inch single band from back there, they sound rather a lot like TV Personalities or maybe Alternative TV or TV Smith’s Explorers or some other random punk band with TV in their name, it gets a little sale old same old be thee time we get to the thirteenth track Stuck on Repeat and as good as it all is in small seven inch doses and he’s got a short attention span. Fifteenth and final track is something called I Do Not Like Change, he keeps on singing the same line about not liking change, you kind of start to suspect this is some kind of AI produced tongue in cheek set cynical smiles… Bandcamp   (or find all the singles, although it looks like nothing ever came out physically)    

Tintoretto – Tintoretto (Expert Work/American Handstand) – Here comes the bluffed bit of historical context, hey, I’m not from Milwaukee, I was busy dealing with Camden noise bands in the 90s, I missed the demise of Managra in early 1998 and three out of the six members moving on to start their own project , a new band called Tintoretto. We’re told Tintoretto “reflected upon the more gloomier aspects of indie-noise. Highly influenced by bands like Hoover, The Crownhate Ruin, June of 44, Slint and The Last Crime” and that the Milwaukee band were “accompanied by ballads that dealt with death and an extensive knowledge of art history”. Seems Tintoretto didn’t last long and following a brief tour of the East Coast and the release of their self-titled debut EP on Highwater Records a year later, the band called it a day during their second US tour. Over here their existence didn’t register with us, it was a time when albums, singles and demo tapes from bands who sounded a little bit like this were arriving via the Organ post sacks on a weekly basis, mostly from the US and mostly overshadowing the excellent English-based bands like Scissormen, Homage Freaks, Anorak Lovechild, Milk, Kodiac, Red Eye Express and dozens more who were spending most of their time in the backrooms of Camden pubs here in London – actually that was probably a few years earlier and by ’98 we’d already heard too many of these so called US Noise bands and we were probably all off with other things. We’re told that before Tintoretto called it a day, a four song CD entitled The Sound Of Someone You Love Who Is Leaving was released and then four more songs were posthumously released in 2000 on a compilation CD entitled A Four Way Stop, released on 404 records. Members went on to play in Call Me Lightning, Hero of A Hundred Fights, Murder In The Red Barn, Haymarket Riot, Zebras, and Fuiguirnet and I guess these names mean far more in their US homelands where they probably have no idea who Anorak Lovechild or Red Eye Express were.

Apparently Tintoretto meant enough for Expert Work Records to reach out to them in 2021 about releasing their back catalogue on vinyl. The original recordings were found and the re-mixing progress started, the band were unhappy with the recordings and decided to reform and re-record their entire output. An attempt to breath fresh life into the songs, and capture them the way they meant to twenty plus years ago. “With accomplished recording engineer, Shane Hochstetler (who happened to be the drummer) behind the recording console they were able to capture the songs and make them sound better than they ever had. Many delays, and almost two years later, the recordings are done and will finally see a vinyl release from Expert Work Records and American Handstand records right here and now in Summer 2024”.

Actually this self-titled Tintoretto album came out last week, or maybe the week before? Weeks are running together here and there’s a bag load of half written reviews and head peckers and couldn’t they think of something to call it? Always think self-titled albums are a bit of a cop-out, the album itself isn’t though, I’m not familiar with the original recordings, these new ones have the right feel, they’ve clearly capture it, their art is flowing. Their art is very much flowing, we’re not talking Italian Renaissance painting and it is more the 90’s noise school that the 18th Century Venetian school and yes they are to be both admired and criticized in terms of the speed with which they do this, it is raw, not too raw though, there is an unprecedented boldness to their brushwork, an energy in their painting and yes we could call it ‘il Furioso’ (Italian for ‘the Furious’), this is work characterised by muscular chords, dramatic gestures and bold use of perspective, in the Mannerist style maybe? Do like Tintoretto, so like the style and the identity that does emerge as you pay more attention, not just another band or painter, they should have called the album ‘il Furioso’, there should be more bands sharing their names with Italian Renaissance painters, I wonder what he’d make of a noise rock band from Milwaukee Wisconsin who get a bit mathy in a bold muscular kind of way, I think he’d like the way the riffs stick with you after a handful of plays, he’d appreciate their slightly jagged edges and the cut of it all, the urgency, the freshness, the now. Yes it does sound like they were right to record these tracks again now that they’re older, wiser and here you go, here’s the Bandcamp, go explore (sw)    

and while we’re here