N E W T H I N G I N C A R T O N S

post-punk socialism vouchers barbarism

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TORY BRITAIN IS A MISERABLE TERROR-WORLD

Tory Britain is a miserable terror-world. 1 million people in the 5th richest nation on Earth rely on food banks. Those who can’t stomach the shame go hungry, I’m sure. The most vulnerable are despised by the slightly less vulnerable, by the lumpy, sallow men and lumpy, sallow women that muddle around exurban retail parks, blearily drifting in and out of those enormous windowless warehouses. Our NHS is sold off piece by piece to make money for people who already have all of the money. A smiling, 2 metre tall cardboard policeman crosses his arms in the magazine aisle of a Home Bargains. A drunk, strong man with a sanitised version of a 1981 new-wave haircut is racist to a Pakistani man in a strip-lit chip shop. An inner-city A & E unit closes and is swiftly replaced with an ugly, plastic tower for the kind of stupid, wealthy young professional that gorges on ‘posh’ burgers during the day and spills £20 cocktails at night. The sky is three versions of the bad type of grey. Most of your family and all of your friends are on anti-depressants. The friendly men who talked about animals on television are child molesters. 13 year olds vote for UKIP in their school elections. The disabled commit suicide to avoid becoming a burden on their families due to deep cuts in social care. The parents of dead soldiers have to pay the bedroom tax to keep their child’s room as a memorial, or they have to move to Stoke. There is nothing good on TV. There is nothing good on the radio.

"Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." - Bertolt Brecht

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:(

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thanks wikihow, i'll file this away with everything else i've gleaned about criminality from Ross Kemp's stony monologues and the entirety of morrissey's solo work

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ALTERED IMAGES - I COULD BE HAPPY

so i recently found out that clare grogan who sang for altered images was in both Red Dwarf and Father Ted. what the fuck. the red dwarf crew kinda look like a bit like 'a certain ratio' i guess

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THE HYPOTHETICAL PROPHETS  - PERSON TO PERSON

french coldwave 1982

"fancy" music

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Hotel Picadilly, 1972.

Hollings Campus, 1960.

Hulme Crescents, 1972-1994

Brutalism tries to face up to a mass-production society, and drag a rough poetry out of the confused and powerful forces which are at work.

---- Alison & Peter Smithson, 'The New Brutalism', Architectural Design (April 1957).

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LEFT: MY FRIEND SAM [1991-] 22 Y/O MANCHESTER BASED HISTORY GRADUATE, UNREPENTANT BOARD GAME RUINER AND SHAWARMA ENJOYER. SAM DEVELOPED AN ACUTE HATRED OF 'REGGAETON' WHILE LIVING IN SPAIN FOR 6 MONTHS. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

RIGHT: JOHN CORNFORD [27 December 1915 – 28 December 1936] ENGLISH ANTI-FASCIST, POET AND COMMUNIST. GREAT-GRANDSON OF CHARLES DARWIN. JOHN CORNFORD JOINED THE INTERNATIONAL BRIGADES IN 1936 AND ULTIMATELY GAVE HIS LIFE FIGHTING FASCISM IN SPAIN

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‘Vain’ is, I think, another word which Richard Herring became fixated on and which I now find hugely useful. When we first lived together in London in the late eighties, on subsistence rations unknown to today’s credit-card laden generation of would-be artists, Rich would, for example, accuse me of being ‘a vain man’ if I had a sausage with my baked beans, rather than just eating the naked beans alone.

- Stewart Lee, That's How I Escaped My Certain Fate

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GYM BOYS DESTROY A SCOUT TENT

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WEEKEND - NOSTALGIA (DEMO)

If not for your overfamiliarity with the work of post-punk captains of industry Young Marble Giants (because you have wasted so much of your life hunched over a keyboard, staring at a screen, listening to stupid useless music for no reason), whose frontwoman Alison Stratton provides the softly sweet, half-spoken vocals on this record, you’d be hard pressed to figure out when it was released. This ethereal, devastatingly melancholic demo was recorded all the way back in 1983, but there’s little here to suggest that it’s not a sad and pretty little lo-fi shoegaze/dream-pop release from the last 5 years or so. There’s none of the tacky ‘Hey Ma, look! Digital manipulation! Panning! Sparkle!’ production that tried, and often succeeded, in ruining or nearly ruining a lot of promising post-punk and new wave in the early 1980s (looking at you Aztec Camera - Hard Land, High Rain). On the contrary, it sounds as good and raw as it sounds remarkably ahead of its time.  

While Nostalgia certainly draws heavily on the sparse, minimal- yet-ultimately-still-a-pop-song aesthetic that characterised Colossal Youth, the use of space takes on a decidedly different character in this proto-dream pop context. Stringy, scratchy defiance and fretful energy has given way to elegance and emptiness, and this is a track that aches and wheezes with regret and missed opportunities. A blinking guitar hooked up to a tape delay just about manages to keep everything from falling apart while a wind instrument I cannot (and will not embarrass myself trying to) place squalls mournfully throughout - a wistful melody that wants nothing more than to resemble feedback, always threatening and hinting at discordance yet only very occasionally mustering the courage necessary to veer out of tune, managing to do so for no more than an instant before fading away entirely. Doing her level best to hollow out a good a third of your stomach, Stratton’s delicately understated, sadly matter-of-fact delivery somehow actually heightens the sense of ghostly, entrenched melancholy rather than acting as the counterweight as you might expect. Although I kinda hate using the term ‘depressing’ to describe music, because it’s thrown around all over the place by idiots and hacks and it signifies basically nothing at this point - this song is depressing…in a good way.  Nostalgia is at its roots just a remarkably atmospheric, beautifully put together phantom of a pop song. Although I’ve not listened to much else by Weekend, what I have listened to has been really terrible in comparison, so don’t bother with it. Definitely bother with this, though.

  RIYL: Young Marble Giants, Grouper, The Red House Painters, Carissa’s Wierd

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I recently built this mural for my housemate Sam. Needless to say, we are both huge big fans of the ITV Network - especially its world-class roster of comedy and entertainment programming.  All this viewer can say is: Keep it up, ITV!

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TROUBLE BOOKS - NIGHT OF THE PELICAN STREET SWEEPER

Trouble Books, the Cleveland based indie-pop-meets-drone duo write gorgeously melodic, stripped-down experimental pop songs. Layers of mossy synthesisers twinkle, crackle and whirr, complimenting soft, earnest boy-girl vocals and the interplay of delicately picked guitars.  Perhaps the best thing about their earthy compositions is that, while their songs are unabashedly warm and comforting, they never once stray into dull ambience or aimless hiss. Their best release, The United Colors of Trouble Books (2008) is consistently about as aesthetically and texturally pleasing as, say, drifting off to the sound of the rain in a moving car while anonymous red, orange and green lights blink and refract through the tiny pools of water that briefly coalesce and then dissipate on the window pane.

RIYL: Evenings, Carissa's Wierd, pretty music.