DEMO: END OF LEVEL BADDIE The Baddies Are Taking Over
Four generous helpings of arch alt-pop-punk frolicking from a band whose lofty sense of ambition drove them to mock up their own SOURCE front cover feature on their MySpace page, infringing an alarming array of our copyrights and intellectual properties. But just as we were picking up the phone to have their legs summarily broken, we noticed two things – they cunningly called the mag SOORCE, and the CD is pretty good. They live to walk another day! (NC)
ALBUM: GRAVANZIA Doom To The Doom Man (Gravanzia)
In the old days, Blue Peter presenters would ask mums and aunties to leave the room so kids could make them a crap present. Gravanzia is perhaps the modern day equivalent for girlfriends – mere seconds into this sprawling and actually very decent prog-fest of Hawkwind and Gong-laced lunacy and the gentleman SOURCE reader will find himself suddenly very alone in the room. Why this kind of music is primarily the reserve of the hirsute male has never been clear, it’s just the laws of natural selection. We get Gravanzia, they get Grazia. (NC)
DEMO: LOFTY HEIGHTS Lofty Heights EP
Probably no one remembers them, but in the mid 90s there was a heartbreakingly twee band called Blueboy (no not the Remember Me people). This nicely put together demo sounds just like them but transferred to the country rather than pre-Brit pop Camden. You just have trust us that this is a compliment. It’s gentle to the point feyness in places but there’s no disgrace in being in touch with you feelings – this is an EP that knows the pain of just being friends. Acoustic loveliness with school band touches that makes us miss Sarah Records and old style Belle & Sebastian. (JK)
DEMO: MAN RAY SKY
Well, someone clearly got the Big Boys’ Box Of Guitar Pedals for Christmas! Man Ray Sky are traversing similar sonic territory to the leading indie lights of the early 90s; bits of My Bloody Valentine and Sonic Youth vie with modernist Radiohead-tinged arrangements on the three tracks present here. Shoe-gazing often inevitably went hand in hand with tune-avoiding, but this wraps you up in a lovely snuggly blanket of guitars and whispers in your ear that everything’s going to be alright. (NC)
SINGLE: MATHS CLASS Nerves (Gift)
What makes Maths Class so great is that they don’t look like they take it too seriously but they work their pert, young arses off nailing their complex grooves. Stop, start, pause…quick, quick, slow – it all sounds like having a out of body experience from a coke overdose. But in a good way. Nerves starts off like The Young Knives before going off the scale with no warning. Jonny Got The Jawline, about the Radiohead guitarist’s angular chin, is an all-too-fast, offbeat slice of dynamism from the off. Enjoy getting wrong footed. (JK)
ALBUM: MECHANICAL BRIDE Part II EPs (Transgressive)
We saw Mechanical Bride play before Foals at Great Escape last year and it was one of the harshest responses we can remember. Soundcheck problems lead to a long wait and an aggressive crowd who at 1am weren’t ready for Lauren Doss’ spooky music box ballads. She left the stage in tears. A better way of experiencing the gentle rawness is on this seven tracker than brings together a couple of EP and a melancholic piano version of Rhianna’s Umbrella. The fuller second EP adds more layers of intricacy and works slightly better but it all hangs together well. (JK)
SINGLE: PADMA Spacefood & Balloons (Just Music)
Mixing acoustic guitars and oscillating analogue synths isn’t necessarily a sound combination that springs to mind as an obvious gap in the musical market, but it’s an angle at least. Padma sings “if the world was a nicer place, I’d throw my drugs away,” ironically failing to appreciate it would be just a little bit nicer without his whining on about it. We like the synth though. It sounds like a Wasp from around 1978. They were black and yellow, like wasps, and made ace buzzy noises, like wasps. More Wasping, less whining! (NC)
SINGLE: POP LEVI Dita Dimone (Mumdance & High Rankin Mix) (Counter)
Regular of Vice Magazine (and their parties) and recently our Street Style page, Mumdance has torn apart this psychedelic soul song and scattered it across post-fluro clubland. A bit electro, a bit grime, a bit rave and a bit Bmore – it ticks every box, including the one marked ‘Is it cool?’ as it falls in on itself with grinding-to-a-standstill drops. (JK)
SINGLE: PROK & FITCH Camping (Floorplay)
There’s been a rash of tracks recently that could have been played by Junior Vaquez at the Sound Factory in the early 90s. Maybe we’ve hit that point in the revival cycle now. This is perfectly decent example of that dark dubbed sound with those cut up gay vocals that went down so well but, well, we’ve been there before. Buy the X-Press 2 album instead. (JK)
SINGLE: RADIO SLAVE Grindhouse (Remixes) (Rekids)
It’s some indication of how respected Matt Edwards is that the man of the moment, Dubfire, has the lead remix on this package. The ex-Deep Dish fella provides a future-tech nightmare of doom vocals and sinister synths over minimal beats. Some people were calling it the track of the Miami Winter Music Conference but it sounds too dark for that to us. Dubfire’s mix and Danton Eeprom’s k-hole nightmare add up to 21 minutes together which leads us to contemplate just how lazy DJs are these days. (JK)
DEMO: SEADOG
Revolving around Brighton-based musician Mark Benton, Seadog make the kind of music you hear soundtracking vintage festival footage of bearded blokes dancing round campfires waving flowers and loony ladies gooning about with their painted boobs hanging out. It’s steeped in an era where Nick Drake and Neil Young records roamed the land, with beautiful and ethereal vocal harmonies that would have Elliot Smith kicking himself if he hadn’t already stabbed himself. Nice. (NC)
SINGLE: THE SPLENDOUR Money (Tinyclan)
Another month, another great single from artists formerly known as Kingsomniac, surely to be one of Brighton’s biggest exports after sunburnt Londoners on hen weekends. Money is a solid stomper of original R&B that serves as both a musical and titular extract from their debut album, The Best Way To Make Money, due in August. We would say now’s the time to get your Splendour t-shirt and wash it loads of times so it looks you were there at the beginning, but pull your finger out and you will be. (NC)
ALBUM: TEASING LULU Black Summer (Easy Action)
You’d perhaps expect an album produced by the Stranglers’ JJ Burnel to open with a bowel-loosening bass, and his famed karate skills are unlikely to encourage laundry-based complaints. The Lulus have paid their dues on the punk grandad bandwagon, opening for JJ’s lot as well as most of their surviving cohorts. They’ve imbibed quite a poppy sensibility despite the barrage of gnarly nihilism on the road, but translating this to the under 40s might be a challenge. (NC)
ALBUM: THINGS IN HERDS Nothing Is Lost (G-Folk)
This don’t-call-it-folk duo are Brighton’s acoustic outpost of Fife’s legendary Fence Collective (see also King Creosote and James Yorkson). In a musical fistfight between Mechanical Bride, Lofty Heights and Things In Herds, we’re not sure who would win – the songs here are so gentle and autumnal that we fear they’d blow away in a October breeze. This is a good thing. (JK)
ALBUM: X-PRESS 2 Raise Your Hands: Greatest Hits (Skint)
It can’t be easy programming an X-Press 2 album – it’s very much a game of two halves. First off you’ve got the big, emotional anthems like Lazy and the underrated gospel of Give It. Sandwiched against them is the often savagely tough, grumbly dub house like Musik Xpress and AC/DC. Then there’s all the remixes, both by (Missy, Fatboy, Kelis) and of (Switch, Carl Craig) them. Still over two CDs it’s all covered here. (JK)
SINGLE: VILE IMBECILES Bad Ideas (Tea Vee Eye)
We’re not sure what happened in the last year but 12 months ago the NME described Vile Imbeciles as “unlistenable unless you happen to be skinning dead women to make a catsuit,” recently changing their opinion “best thing to wash up on the Brighton shore for a while.” We’d settle somewhere in the middle of that on the evidence of Bad Ideas, which has wobbly jazz-rock guitar line topped with early 90s grunge-hop rap. The whispery Tom Waits-esque misery minimalism of Worm is even better. (JK)