Shall we write a new editorial? Oh the endless demand and who needs a damn editorial? Let the actual music do the actual walking and the actual talking. Exact same thing again, another five (or so) slices of musical things that have passed our way recently and however you like to slice it and of course it was the price of lemons and here comes the intro, Don’t be flippant she said, how could it ever be flippant? I can’t remember why she said that now, in one ear, out the other, we have a bad attitude here apparently, no respect for those who work in the music industry, well no poop Sherlock, have you only just worked that one out? We’ve been showing (and getting) zero respect since the last century, zero flips given…

Five? There’s something rather compelling about five. Cross-pollination? Five more? Is there another way? A better way? A cure for pulling flying rabbits out of the clouds? Is there a rhyme? Is there a reason? Was there ever a reason? What do reasons make? Five more? Snake oil? Everything must go and no, we never do and the proof of the pudding is in that proof reading. When we started this thing, oh never mind, it doesn’t matter why we started this damn thing and like we asked last time, does anyone bother reading the editorial? Does anyone ever actually look down the rabbit hole or is it all just method acting? We do really try to listen to everything that comes in, we do it so you don’t have to, we are very (very) very very picky about what we actually post on these fractured pages or about what gets played on the radio or indeed what we hang in a gallery. Cut to the chase, never mind the editorial, skip this bit, there’s loads of music further down the page, well five or so pieces of music that have come our way in the last few days and what’s Wordsworth? Just the basic facts and links and those sounds (and visuals), that’s surely all you need from us?

Here we go, five more slices of music that have recently come our way, this time we start somewhere in France with more of that highwire French musical insanity we’ve come to almost expect from that country now….

1: !GeRald! – Always good ot have some fresh !GeRald! action to share and they are a band of action, here’s soemthing they just posted – “Filmed at KuBa, June 2024 in Jena (DE), an excerpt from Music for Broken Elevators, available everywhere, meanwhile here’s what we said last time – ORGAN THING: !GeRald! are back, more of that thick-cut golden shred proper prog rock of theirs, more of that high wire thing they do so so well… and before that – ORGAN THING: Hang on, holy merd (yet again), GeRald! Fire in a Madhouse, The Attack of the Giant what?! This just in from France…

2: The Eurosuite – More things that that require us ot do our thing – “Human Worth present the second single from the beautifully unhinged new album Totally Fine from London’s The Eurosuite – available to pre-order from 6th September”. Here’s the Bandcamp thing, here’s the video, we’re all part of the advertising scheme, and “we would love you to share it far and wide” said whoever said it. More under the video…

“Perhaps unsurprisingly for a band featuring members of USA Nails, Nitkowski and Screen Wives, The Eurosuite summon a feral danceable cacophony, falling somewhere between synth-punk, noise-rock and no-wave. Woozy synths with dentist drill guitars, (mostly) one handed drumming and FX drenched vocals. Produced by Wayne Adams (Petbrick / Big Lad) at Bear Bites Horse Studios, the band have taken a different approach from their maximalist output on their second LP ‘Sorry’ – do less. Where the songs on ‘Sorry’ were built from a variety of jams, band member ideas, traded demos and looped phone recordings, the 10 songs within ‘Totally Fine’ were all built and mercilessly edited from a full band improvisations, with individualism, indulgence and egos set aside to better serve the songs. By stripping things back The Eurosuite have reached their own warped vision of pop music, boiling down seemingly atonal building blocks into pure hooks that will linger in your brain for days. It’s totally fine. Releasing in full 18th October, Human Worth have pressed up a limited run of ‘Neon Magenta’ Vinyl, housed in stunning sleeve designed by Dan Holloway, with 10% of all sales proceeds donated to charity Refugee Action – standing up for refugees and people seeking asylum”. – that was the hype, we’ve only heard the one track so far, a rather fine on but only one….

3: Lark – now that’s a name we’ve not heard for a bit, in terms of the band I mean, rather think I heard an actual lark a few weeks back. We covered the London band quite a bit back there in the day, until yer man stung us over an art show and then took against us a result of said sting. Artists, musicians, bunch of fuggers all of ’em, never trust an artist! Really, I should just scrunch up the e.mail and throw it is the trash, always kind of liked the sound Lark make though

So yer abstract Lark founder and frontman (a just as abstract painter) Karl Bielik is back with that lowslung nonconforming idiosyncratic gravel-voiced thing he does, not sure who’s in his band these days, are Lark a band or whoever happens to be around and join in with painter man?. This is a track off Lark’s seventh studio album, an album expected early next year. Be Still is Lark’s seventh album and features bass from Emma Richardson (The Pixies) and the album features artwork from James Johnston (PJ Harvey/Nick Cave/Gallon Drunk), both of whom Bielik knows from the London art scene. Here’s the track or single or whatever it is, it sounds pretty much like Lark have always done, kind of like that… Here’s the Bandcamp link (rather nice film/video by Film by Charlie Bonallack and Kaz Raad, they deserve a mention)

4: A’Bear – do like that pink artwork, do like the slight menace of her sound before it goes all fizzy and sets of millions of time elctronic explosions. Do rather like this album she’s made, a rather electric electronic thing, a fizzy thing, a ditzy scene, an album called Glammy Racket that really is worth exploring from start to end. Let it grow inside you, here’s the Bandcamp. Excellent. More soon, this is a good place to be….

5: Gavin Friday – He really doesn’t need that much coverage from us, do like this moody new piece of music, do like the detail, the bell – “Today, Irish renaissance man”, so it says here in this press release “Gavin Friday has shared a new track titled Stations Of The Cross. The song is taken from his highly anticipated new solo album Ecce Homo. Out 25th October via BMG, the new album – which was produced by Soft Cell’s Dave Ball and Michael Heffernan – marks his first since 2011’s Catholic and was recently announced alongside it’s title track and an eponymous digital EP featuring two remixes and an instrumental version of the track”.

There’s always time for Gavin Friday around here simply because Virgin Prunes were so powerfully good in those early days, they opened eyes to a lot of possibilities, they looked and sounded exciting, challenging, they were one of those slightly strange bands, like Kissing The Pink, who just hinted that there might be something more out there. Something new is always welcome from Gavin Friday, this new piece of music certainly is this morning (and this is the first thing I listened to this morning while last night the last thing I watched was Kris Kristofeson with Sinead O’Connor and her performance of War)  

“An artist who needs little in the way of an introduction, Friday is perhaps best known as the founding frontman of cult Irish post-punk outfit Virgin Prunes, his career as a genre-hopping, award-winning songwriter, composer, actor, visual artist, and creative director has spanned four decades and has seen him collaborate with everyone from his childhood friends in U2 through to Colin Newman, Laurie Anderson, Sinead O’Connor, Scott Walker, The Fall, Quincy Jones, and many, many more. He has scored music for Academy Award nominated films such as In The Name of The Father and In America (earning Ivor Novello and Golden Globe nominations for his work on the latter), and his artistic contributions extend to visual arts, with several exhibitions showcasing his work, as well as collaborating and performing on-stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company. The last year also saw the release of the animated film Peter And The Wolf, which featured scoring and narration by Friday, as well as the recent reissuing of classic Virgin Prunes albums and EPs on vinyl.

Driven alternately by thundering electronics that recall the power of the Prunes and exquisite acoustics that reflect the beauty of his most recent solo work and soundtracks, Ecce Homo is an ecstatic and unbound expression of anger and independence, of severing oneself from stereotypes of what you’re supposed to be while also acknowledging that our hardest battles are often our collective ones. There are love songs and fight songs, reflections on loss and reveries of nostalgia, anthems for solidarity and excoriations of the powerful. Friday thinks it’s the most honest album he’s ever made; it is also his most riveting.

As with the prior single, Friday has teased the new track with mysterious posts written in Ogham – an ancient runic language that was used in Ireland and parts of the UK between the 5th and 9th centuries – alongside an image of a crown of thorns. Whereas “Ecce Homo” spotlighted the pulverising and triumphant sound of the album, the pulsing and doleful new excerpt “Stations Of The Cross” leans more into gothic, ballad territory with ambulating industrial rhythms, pensive horns, and palpitating synth work. Thematically, it is a tormented love song, centred around a relationship caught in a viscous circle. The track is dedicated to the late great Sinead O’Connor, who was a friend of Friday”.

“Ecce Homo began more than a decade ago with a surprise email from Dave Ball, the Soft Cell co-founder who produced Virgin Prunes 40 years ago. They hadn’t seen each other during that long span, but Ball asked if Friday wanted to conspire on a cover of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” for Alan Vega’s 70th birthday. For several years, they bounced ideas for other songs back and forth via email until Friday finally visited him in London for a series of studio sessions. They wrote the bulk of Ecce Homo’s music together, their interpersonal dynamic resulting in tracks that moved freely between disparate emotional ends.

Friday, though, wanted to make it all bigger, to drape the songs in the finery and grandeur he’d indulged with his soundtrack work. He did that back in Dublin with a cast of familiar collaborators including producer Michael Heffernan as he also cared for his ailing mother, then suffering the final stages of Alzheimer’s. Enraged by the rise of international strongmen but inspired by a long, loving, and stable relationship with another man after a prolonged divorce, Friday built Ecce Homo as a monument of and to his own emotions. In early 2020, he was ready to mix it when Covid-19 arrived. He put it down for two years, vowing to revisit it only when he could make a little more sense of the world. His mother died, as did Hal Willner, one of his closest collaborators, and one of his two beloved dogs, Ralf. Hard seasons, all around.

That difficult gap seemed to supercharge Ecce Homo, enhancing not only its sense of deserved indignation but also amplifying the tenderness and love that undergird so many of these songs. Hurt comes from every side here, in every possible shape, but the real core of the album is a reaction rooted in hope, in seeing the struggles of the past and the possibilities of the future through the same unified gaze. It is a stirring testament to finding comfort and strength wherever we can, to enduring in whatever way we must.

When Friday was a teenager, alienated from the Catholic church and looking for meaning, music became his godsend, his lifeline, his revelation. Or, as he calls it, “the release where I could bleed publicly.” He surmises it saved his life. Though it is rooted in so much loss, Ecce Homo advances that story of survival, of how we are always looking for what can ferry us into the next phase of our life. It is neither a happy album nor a tragic one; it is, instead, a bracingly honest thing, staring at both sides of a life and testifying to how it has been and how it may yet be.

Ecce Homo will be released on 25th October via BMG on ltd. edition transparent blue vinyl as well as a deluxe CD package featuring an exclusive 28-page booklet and bonus material. The album will be available everywhere digitally including two exclusive remixes”. Links

And while we’re here, is this a one off thing?

Meanwhile on Jubilee Street…

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