Black Moth Super Rainbow's frontman, Tom Fec's (aka Tobacco) second solo album 'Maniac Meat' is an industrial, gritty, aggressive behemoth, laden with vocoders and synths. This is dance music to mosh (or fight) to – with looped, heavy bass riffs that wouldn't be out of place on a Part Chimp album or similar. Maybe this is stoner hip hop? Sludge dance?
If you’re going to call your band The Amazing you’ve got to be pretty confident that you can follow that up. I mean, they haven’t called themselves The Average, The Mediocre or even, God forbid, The Feeling, but The Amazing. That sets expectation pretty high right from the kick off, doesn’t it?
‘Apparitions’, the first full lengther from Chicago’s Light Pollution, falls in to very zeitgeisty territory, sitting as it does comfortably between the electronic noodlings of Caribou, the eccentricly harmonious Grizzly Bear and the epic, emotionally wrought song space of Arcade Fire and Besnard Lakes. Is this ‘chillwave’? Frankly, I have no idea these days but the result is a hugely engaging set of songs perfect for summer listening.
The Sword are awesome. This is a statement of fact. Yes, they only really have three songs; the one that sounds like Black Sabbath, the one that sounds like early Metallica and the one that sounds like Black Sabbath being covered by early Metallica, but that doesn’t matter because they do it so very, very well and so very, very loud and in the intimate confines of Camden’s Barfly that translates in to an intense experience of epic proportions.
May saw the Echoes And Dust DJs released from their darkened room and out in to the world of gigdom. They mostly behaved themselves and the inaugral Sunkan Dymonds night was widely regarded to have been a rip-roaring success, £500 being raised for Macmillan Cancer Care in the process. The result of all such breathless excitiment has been that we've hardly had a chance to pen to paper this month, so here's a few things we missed but deserve an honourable mention:
This month's magnificent seven from the Echoes And Dust turntables:
So, it was with equal measures of excitement and trepidation I slipped the new album 'Fever' by Sleepy Sun into the CD player. Their debut 'Embrace' made it to my album of the year and so their new offering had a lot to live up to. Could it blow me away or would it result in a shrug of the shoulders and a 'meh'?
April, meant to be a month of spring sunshine, summery showers and cherry blossom. What have we had this year? Volcanoes, hail storms and general elections.
All feels a little end of days if you ask me and adding to that sensation comes this apocalyptic sounding record. ‘We Are A Unit’ (Brew Records, April 12) from Castrovalva is twenty seven minutes of absolute adrenaline charged insanity. In less than half an hour this Leeds three piece crash through twelve tracks of thumpingly heavy but tight as fuck funky craziness.
With a stated aim to emulate Lightning Bolt, the sound of "Here Come the Hurricane" falls somewhere between that and (at times) a kind of instrumental Big Black, with a healthy dose of shoegaze and space rock thrown in for good measure. It's more linear and progressive than the most 'sonic punk-jazz-spaz-out' aspects of Lightning Bolt but comparable in the use of squelchy, dirty bass and drums. And nothing else. Just solid repetition, delay and looping of those two instruments, producing a sound so huge it belies the one-man-and-his-8-track-in-a-bedroom setup that spawned it.
Matt Bentley is a singer songwriter hailing from Leeds (where else these days? It seems like every other CD we’ve reviewed recently has come from Leeds) and plying a quirky, upbeat type of melancholia, if that isn’t too much of a contradiction. Think Iron & Wine or Noah & The Whale.
