fight picker

bandcamp releases from uk/europe reviewed

[fightpicker]

Les Suites Forestières, by Alexandre Deschaumes, Charles Guillaume Méla

1 track album

lightly autumnal chamber pop with breathy vocals that probably thinks itself progressive and nearer to classical with a name like The Forest Suite, but it is treading a path ridden down by Justin Hayward, Zager & Evans, The Zombies, and more. which is nonetheless to put it in solid company. if the vocal was a little stronger and some of the guitars would resist darting off in brow-furrowing solos it would stand proudly alongside those works. as it stands it is a fine effort, peaking ahead of the outro with flutters of strings. (6.5)

[fightpicker]

brief hiatus

off on holiday! some content might trickle out but should pick up the week commencing 5th June.

[fightpicker]

Virgin, by Dancehall

2 track album

a London-based indie-rock group who insist “it’s okay to be a virgin, it’s okay to be uncertain” and I think I agree strongly particularly on the latter statement! despite them having an aesthetic not a million miles removed from early U2 crossed with light shoegaze i think the strengths make this one worth a listen. the bassist is strong, adding subtle minor thirds and colours to the piledriving guitars and yelping vocals. (6.5)

[fightpicker]

Home Alone, by smnspz

2 track album

it is absolutely pathetic and simultaneously brilliant that this pair of songs recorded on an iPhone are better recorded than a lot of the stuff I have covered in dispatches to date. reconsider your aesthetics, people! sure, some of the sounds are out of the box effects but smnspz sings and plays multiple layers of an organic-sounding acoustic guitar and the whole thing comes across like a solid Tascam recording in the vein of Phil Elvrum or Khonnor. two brief summery songs, the second of which, ‘Little Bolder’, is genuinely good. isn’t technology great? (7)

[fightpicker]

From Void To Matter Volume 1, by Bolywool

2 track album

I’m continually surprised at Sweden’s knack of churning out fine summer music, given its perception as a cold winter land. And yet aside from a few luminaries it has less of a stock in bleak winter metal and more of a faithful allegiance to the universal of long grass, slow days, and pastoralist fantasy. It’s there in Dungen, Parson Sound, Fylke, The Cardigans, The Soundtrack of Our Lives, and now, Bolywool.

This release comprises two immaculately written, performed and recorded tracks that lock into this history and charge it with added enigma. Both tracks have two halves: the first exploring and yearning, the second breaking open into confidently stacked melodies and surges through space. May there be many more volumes to come. (9)

[fightpicker]

Mechanical Insect, by Ad Marginem

2 track album

o bandcamp randomiser, please free me from the cycle of Russian nerdboys who don’t leave the house enough. Mechanical Insect nearly an hour of harsh digital noise, the first half of which is monolithic and intense, giving way to a second almost identically-long track that is more tentative and crackly. i hate both of them and by now i am convinced of noise as music for people acting hard. (2)

[fightpicker]

Sorry, I'd Really Like To Help You. (EP), by Young Thymos

3 track album

Kent, the garden of England, famous for the award winning Music Hall in Ramsgate, and the birthplace of the Canterbury Scene. But local resident Young Thymos isn’t interested in noodle-brapping heady pastoral prog and rather sets control for the heart of the heart, writing gothic minor key piano-led pieces that reference and imply depression and suicide several times over the short run time. There are stylistic nods to Perfume Genius, Have A Nice Life, Angels of Light, maybe even a little Elliott Smith. There’s a previous album, I notice, called Zelfmoord. As bandcamp doesn’t have the notional welfare checking that one might expect from the label system (even if it is just an imagined label boss listening to this record on delivery and firing off an email saying ‘are you ok pal?’) then this record possibly sits closer to catharsis and anguish than something that I’d be comfortable with attempting some kind of critique of. I think rating this would be unfair.

[fightpicker]

07.05.2017, by Monofaktura

1 track album

around 18 minutes into this harsh noise track from Russian noisester Monofaktura (17 release in 2 years under this name indicates a mere pup, though his Light Collapse project has racked up 121 releases in 10 years - that’s the shit) you can feel the cells in your brain dying and your skin peeling off and the whole process of perdurance speeding up tenfold. i am genuinely interested in this noise proliferation in the former Soviet states from a sociological standpoint but hardly any of this stuff is interesting to listen to. (3)

[fightpicker]

SEN$ATIONAL EP, by DJ $TOCKER

4 track album

‘browserwave’ is a new thing on me but at a complete guess this is a kind of computer music mixed with plunderphonics from running multiple tabs on a browser all loaded with sound samples and sources? maybe it is best not to know. a lot of it sounds like the cool interstitial parts of a Wu record but without really kicking out a brilliant song.

there’s also a strong whiff of vapourwave in here too, though this music is less keen on evoking some kind of dystopian computer reality and is more keen on its own trip. it is absolutely inventive and entertaining for its duration to someone like me but some will question whether this is even music (it is, there’s a process, there’s transformation, there’s framing, there’s effort). at its best it evokes Muslimgauze but at its worst it can be like an early stab on a beats-making .exe file. (6)

[fightpicker]

Freaky Family, by Black Dough

7 track album

ostensibly Black Dough play pop music but it is a form of pop music being exploded across the galaxy, pop music being stretched in a million different directions, towards jazz, noise-rock, 70s prog, Bowie, and places between and betwixt. a sort of pop music for people who hate pop if pressed.

this kind of entre-deux music generally appeals to me because i. i think most genres are tired and used up and hollowed out and calcified and ii. hybridity is the only real authenticity that there is, no matter what anyone says, we have to join things together and mix them up to ensure survival.

this Gothenburg group are the brainchild of Miranda Raeder, whose voice bestrides this music and equips what could be genre-exercises with a sense of purpose and play, wrongfooting with some oblique note choices, and impressing with a measured power. not that the band are unimpressive at all. they are all very good second bananas.

people looking for obvious hooks and 3 minute marvels should look elsewhere, but those looking to marinade in a unique mood/mode might find a lot to love across these seven lightly-sprawling songs. (8)

[fightpicker]

you can't breathe that far, by Samuel Dillon

11 track album

introspective Leeds-based bedroom indie with occasional and welcome flourishes coming from production techniques rooted in freak folk and the kind of outsider music you’d get on like Type or Fonal or maybe K in one of their summer hot flushes. songs are short and spartan but fully realised, accomplished miniatures rather than grand-scale epics. music for remembering a summer’s day spent with a fondly-remembered love. (7)

[fightpicker]

LS4 EP, by STEVIE.EH

7 track album

avant-outre-pop jams from Leeds-based (Burley? Kirkstall? Going from the postcode in the title) bedroom pop savant STEVIE.EH.

pushing at the same deranged corners where Ariel Pink goes, though I’d argue that where Pink uses lo-fi and tape hiss to smear his otherwise arena-sized ambitions, EH uses ineptitude, dissonance, and injudiciously-deployed effects. i don’t say that as a diss either. it gives the EP a delicate poise on the edge of a collapse that never comes.

as both a criticism and a positive comment, EH also has an ear for some brilliant sounds that can’t quite be incorporated or integrated more fully into the shifting sands that his songs seem to lie upon. but there’s so much happening per tune that maybe it’s a puzzle i didn’t solve yet.

i’d also suggest that the general baseline of EH’s weirdness would make songs not so aggressively mutated with effects still feel weird and uncanny and beautiful, because it comes through as much in the artist’s personality as it does with the tweaking of knobs on a console/pedal/computer screen. but this is worth a listen. (6.5)

[fightpicker]

Herpagonasyphilaids, by Herpagonasyphilaids

1 track album

this is five seconds long including a fade-out. reading this will take you longer than listening to it. as far as i can see it is the only release by Herpagonsyphilaids. it is a bold conceptual move and i for one cannot await their 48 second full-length Dysencholeratitis B. Wankers. (1).

[fightpicker]

Keller Böhlitz Ehrenmord, by Queen Unimpressed by Blue Horse Painting

3 track album

Hands down the finest band name review so far. This Leipzig-based group make lo-fi emo that veers into chestbeating rock and rap-metal of the Rage Against The Machine type, but without the hooks. If that sounds like a strange brew, it is, and no, it doesn’t work. Clearly recorded in a practice space with friends, who can be heard laughing and clapping and cheering in quiet spots, so maybe they’re not hyper-serious. Which is fortunate. (3)

[fightpicker]

the cars that ate Paris, by the cars that ate Paris

10 track album

Aside from claiming the fine East Midlands city of Leicester as their home, there is no other information on The Cars That Ate Paris or their S/T record and you know what? THAT’S HOW I LIKE IT. I think it’s the name of a goofy Australian horror film that I haven’t seen and won’t because the trash aesthetic is way more painful in visual culture than it is in audio. The Cramps at their worst are better than any mondo film ever and I will fight on this point.

Anyway TCTAP make light-hearted guitar music that skitters a pissed line between surf, garage, British psych, indie pop, and lo-fi. Not every track has vocals and that’s a shame because the female singer has nice weird lyrics and a voice that suggests someone a bit older than you might expect to be fronting a band. In many respects it sounds like a less idiosyncratic and less well-recorded version of The Fall from 2007 to 2013.

Is it any good? Yes and no. There’s not an album here, certainly not one worth £7 (compare & contrast: you can get the album by Christian Fitness, made by world-reknowned artist Andy Falkous, for £6). There’s some fat on these bones. And yet the lyrical turn of ‘Angel of Welford Road’, the haunted atmospheres of the particularly good ‘Susan Grimshaw’, there lopsided ‘Out of the Woods’ suggest there’s a proper band fighting against some mediocre ideas from within. (5.5)

[fightpicker]

Leiche 51 / Leiche 52, by Leichen

2 track album

Leichen is Russian noise artist who appears to have dropped 52 tracks in 2 track bursts in May 2017. Every track is exactly 15 minutes long. These two tracks are not identical but they are very similar: rustling static layers, grey, enervating, distant. If all 52 tracks are cut from the same cloth then it’s a stronger person than I who listens to all 13 hours. As much as I respect the bizarre expanse and commitment to aesthetic and identity, the music is featureless and dismal. (3)

edit: I should have known. since review 5 more albums have gone up. 2 tracks each. 15 minutes a side. sounds pretty much the same. might be worth keeping an eye on.

[fightpicker]

Corpsemeat Single, by Black Skull Ritual

1 track album

Stevenage. Used to pass through every now and again on the train. I think the excellent Bad Breeding are from there. Guilano Grazioli? I’m out of references.

Black Skull Ritual are probably less a band and more a couple of guys in front of a computer who like the darker stuff. ‘Corpsemeat’ is meant to be industrial and metal, but there’s a looser feeling than one would necessarily associated with the machinic. This is more like a ship bobbing up and down, lost in the gloam of a sea at night, kind of going nowhere but at the same time unsettling.

Maybe BSR could be accused of having too many ideas and not enough execution - little inserts of tropes and production styles from different genres and bands pop up in ways that don’t always mesh - and it isn’t terribly heavy at all, rather a soupy grey. But they tried. (5)