3 days!! 3 effin' days - that's all it took for this bunch of drug addled explorers of sound to come up with this album. 3 frickin' days!!!!
We are deeply saddened to report the death of Duncan Symonds last week after a mercifully short battle with cancer.
Duncan was the driving force behind Orwell Music and sometime participant in both Floss and Madox Ford. He was an astonishingly talented musician, occasional contributor to these pages and good friend to all of us at Echoes And Dust, amongst other things, but above all else he was one of the warmest, fun and just all-round nicest guys you could ever hope to meet. He will be sorely missed.
Well, 2010’s got off to a turbulent start what with the arctic weather and the sad death of our friend, and sometime contributor, Duncan Symonds. It’s not been easy to get back to the computer and think about the music. So, to kick off the year we’re going to take a last look back in to 2009 and round up the last few stragglers from November and December.
So, it's that time of year again. The votes have been counted and verified, Dan's Complex Scoring Algorithmtm has been applied and the reults of the Echoes And Dust Albums Of 2009 poll can be published.
All of us here at Echoes And Dust would like to wish our readers a very Happy Christams and all the best for 2010, what is sure to be another great year for music.
Over the next week we will be compiling our top albums of the year, as well as eating turkey and quaffing ale, so if you would like to submit your own top 10's then send them to echoesanddust@hotmail.com and we'll name check all those who contribute.
As we drove the car through the Butlins’ gates we got that familiar tingle of anticipation, here we were again, and then we saw the queue to check in... and then we saw the other queue, the one for the My Bloody Valentine wristbands, the one that stretched back and back and back in to the distance in the dripping rain and realised that, just for once, ATP had got something rather wrong. Surely there must have been a better way to dole out these wristbands, especially as in the end it didn’t really seem to matter which night you got a band for?
I love albums like this, the ones that arrive unheralded and unknown but turn out to be gobsmacking. Yet another product of Leeds’ overactive music scene, Itch are eminently well named, making what is ostensibly raucous indie music but with something of an unsettling edge, just slightly twitchy, off kilter and well, Itchy. Not the most prolific of folk though these guys, ‘Illusions Of Grandeur From A One Trick Pony’ is their second album, coming something like ten years after their debut!
Hailing from Bristol, but eschewing the traditional ‘Bristol Sound’ in favour of a power rock / grunge kind of thing, come The Chemists. A muscular five piece not afraid to wear their influences on their sleeves, these guys write massive rock songs built to fill stadia, even though they are still playing small clubs, but on this evidence I suspect they won’t be for long.
Like many fans, I have been waiting in anticipation for this album for a while now. Hopes were high but the sensation has been tempered with the knowledge that we might end up with something akin to ‘Rosenrot’ which never really satisfied.
Ten down, two to go. Unbelievably we are already down to the damp, scraggy end of 2009 and it’ll soon be time to start compiling those end of year lists and thinking about who we are going to put the kiss of death on for next year, meanwhile here’s some of what October had to offer.