More albums, more cherry picking through the mountain of albums that land here, more picking of the cherries, picking off the cherries, the never ending pile of demanding cherries that find their way here on a daily basis. You surely know the policy by now? We do, on the whole, only feature the albums and things we feel positive about. We really don’t have time to clutter up these already overloaded pages with negative coverage of things that do nothing much for us, there isn’t the time or space, there isn’t any need, although some times there probably is. Here’s another four or so as we hopefully start to ease through towards Spring and…
Hen Ogledd – Discombobulated (Domino) – This will be one of the albums of the year and I could just listen to Scales Will Fall on repeat all day for weeks on end, it is just such a gloriously gloriously ( gloriously) good song, it just makes me (and hopefully you) want to make art, to engage with music, to make a flag and fight for good things, oh look, I could just gush about Scales Will Fall, it is the song of the year, it probably will still be the song of the year at the end of the year, if we make it that far? Scales Will Fall does make you feel like we just might. And gallwn i fod a smartarse ac ysgrifennu hyn yn y Gymraeg, gallwn I gael pob math o bethau heibio I chi (fe ges I fy magu ar Ynys Môn wedi’r cyfan) and Time Will Tell. As discombobulated as life was in the old north (I escaped), and as marw mewn byd ôl-wirionedd or as dead as everything is in a post truth world and wherever the ceffyl du might take us (that’s a black horse to you and me) and as discombobulated as life is now, Discombobulated is brilliant.
Discombobulated is an album that really matters, it is both complex and beautifully simple, an emotionally charged body of work; inviting, engaging and right now, in a world going mad, right now we really need inviting engaging music. Right now we need bands and people like this band and these people. Hen Ogledd is “the collaborative project” of artists Dawn Bothwell, Rhodri Davies, Richard Dawson and Sally Pilkington, far more than just another band then? Hen Ogledd are full of honour, full of colour, full of folky goodness, alive with a sense of ritual or spirit or something like that. This is art as a light at the end of the tunnel, this is both warmly inclusive and wonderfully accessible and yes it is strangely good in the best of strange ways, they sound like no one else much. Oh yes, there are strange bands who we could name drop here, we could say they sound a bit like this or that, but really, do we need to? Some of it sounds like a Welsh folk club, some of it sounds like those strange musical things you heard coming from a tent you never could quite find however much you walked around that Stonehenge free festival that time. Some of it sounds like a parade, some of it will just make you smile and if you let it then Scales Will Fall will put a fire in your soul. This will be one of the albums of the year.
The Shits – Diet of Worms (Rocket Recordings) – Some kind of string of steaming unconsiousness and the kind of great big brooding riffs that a million noise rock bands have already made while their shouty man of a singer who sounds like he lives on the street and probably shouts his head off mostly at three o’clock in the morning goes on about something or other. The Shits are from Leeds via Newcastle so says the press release, well we all know that, marching on together with their shirts off? Shits indeed, all of ’em.
So what is this diet of words? Yer man who sent it in says “I feel like The Shits may resonate with you on a very serious level” and I’m not entirely sure why he would say that (or maybe I am?). The Shits seem to be a bit of a noise rock one trick pony, I mean yes, it is a damn good trick, we have kind of heard it before though, the shouty three o’clock in the clucking morning vocalist, the massive walls of brooding slow moving guitar, the delicious feedback and the wired fuzz. A dirty sound, a menacing sound, a big sound, no idea what he’s singing about, he’s in there is the glorious stew of it all, it sounds like he might have something important to say, it sounds like it might be hostile, that he might have a killing joke or two to tell us – “primal rock boiled down to its essence and flung full in your face. Using repetition, tortured vocal invective and heads-down intensity as blunt instruments, these eight tracks are an unprecedented torrent of acidic salvation” – that’s probably about right? Not sure about ‘unprecedented’ bit though; as good as this is, we’ve kind of heard it all a thousand times before, we’ve all heard bands like this opening for Headcleaner or Red Eye Express or Anorak Lovechild or Homage Freaks or Creaming Jesus at the Falcon or the Bull and Gate or the Lady Owen Arms on a million cold wet Tuesday nights, bands and venues all gone and mostly forgotten now, bands that Blinding Phil probably shouted about at least once a month – “blinding new band mate! Come and see them! They’ll change yer life” – it was always a different band and they always sounded like these Shits do and they were all always going to be blinding and they were always going to change our lives, and as brilliant as it often was for that fleeting Guinness-fuelled moment, no lives were ever changed by any of them. Last I hard of Phil he was driving a fire engine somewhere up North, now that is a scary thought! Actually this could be him in his fire engine shouting out the window at three o’clock in the morning about some blindin’ band who will change yer life and you have to come and see them! The Shits do indeed sound like they’d be one of those blinding life changing bands if you got to see then live, they sound like they’d be blinding down the Bull and Falcon, they sound like they’d be brilliant for those fifteen noise filled feedback drenched minutes, like one of those bands who’s singer would want a fight ’cause he didn’t like the review you wrote about his life-changing blindin’ noise rock band – it often happened!
This album does sound like it was recorded pretty much live, it is rather good, excellent actually, glorious in-the-zone locked on feedback-drenched brooding wired confrontational heard-it-all-before noise rock, The Shits are really good at it. And now the review is written will I ever listen to it again or will I just put it over there with the Lemonade Hand Grenade album and the Milk album and that Kodiac tape and that great album by that band who opened for Mint 400 that time at the West Hampstead Moonlight Club, will I just put it over there with all those other blinding bands? Oh the joyless satisfaction of it all, the hammering on a pulverising garage-stinking riff and yeah yeah yeah Phil, I’ll see you on Tuesday mate, blindin’. Diet of Worms is out on April 10th, it is indeed another damn good noise rock album (damn boring album cover) from yet another damn good noise rock band…
Cheap Perfume – Don’t Care. Didn’t Ask (Snappy Little Numbers) – Now this album actually came out last year but we don’t care and they didn’t ask and damned if I do and damned if I don’t and if it hadn’t been for that Dead Pioneers thing the other day then we might never have know just how damn good this album is (better late than never). Cheap Perfume sound good, they smell good, they bite good, they’re a self-declared Colorado feminist punk band and they’re not really up for taking all the shit that America is throwing at them right now (what happens in America today happens here tomorrow, didn’t Nigel announce he was setting up an Ice-like thing over here this week? Yes but he’s fixing the pot holes and putting up extra flag poles so you’ll damn well vote for him won’t you!). Right now we all need Cheap Perfume and their energetic Riot Grrrl flavoured proper punk rock goodness, we need the way they think, the way they confront, they way they call it out, the way they bang those drums and crank those riffs, the way they shout the odds, they way they want to turn the tide and the way they make it all sound so damn good. This is so good its Bikini Kill in the 90s good, they have their own finger print though, their own take on what’s needed right now and Cheap Perfume is what’s needed right now….
“Don’t Care. Didn’t Ask is an uninhibited call to anti-capitalist revolution presented as a collection of punk rock protest songs, breakup songs and party songs. It stays true to Cheap Perfume’s signature angry-yet-melodic sound while railing against systems of oppression and America’s descent into fascism”.
Bandcamp vinyl via Snappy or Bandcamp download via the band / Facebook
Trauma Ray – Carnival (Dais Records) – This is officially an EP, it is actually around 25 minute of colour that that sounds big enough to be a rather big album to these ears. This is the band from Fort Worth, Texas, with some of their strongest, most intense and at times their most adventurous work to date, The future looks rather bright for Trauma Ray (and no, we’re not going with all that no capital letters in the band name nonsense). A follow up to their 2024 album Chameleon, this latest release will further establish the band as one of the strongest of the current crop of rather heavy shoegaze outfits. They’re sounding ambitiously big and at the same time rather graceful as they build their riffs and let their thing evolve in a rather colourful way. A healthy blend of sometimes loud, sometimes quiet metal, grunge, shoegaze and something that flows somewhere between Slowdive, Smashing Pumpkins and one of those almost post rock Explosions in The Sky type bands. Moodier this time, brooding, cerebral, dramatic, eerier, almost unsettling in terms of their atmospheres. Trauma Ray have their blend just right, it is very much about the way they blend things, about the way they put all those flavours together…
Previously…
THE ORGAN 