Friday 29th October
CAMP Basement
Old Street, London.
£5
Be a part of the future.
T.M.W.R.A
The Midlands Will Rise Again. If only it had risen before.
Along with Blank & Kytt, Young Montana are throwing up reason after to reason to not head south to the capital in search of golden streets. There’s an embarrassment of riches overflowing from the centre, ideas as ubiquitous as Saturday night altercations at the Sky Dome.
Where Blank & Kytt turn to Dilla, Young Montana leans on glitched confusion, cutting and splicing like Dam Mantle but with more of a focus on the feet than artschool heads. But aesthetic differences aside, there’s something collectively stirring in Coventry that for once is more ‘special’ than ‘The Specials’. About fucking time.
DOWNLOAD: Young Montana – “Hot Heathrr”
(Photo: Sasha Borodinova)
In a billion space years time on revolving dance floors around the sun where charcoal skin and burned out eyes belie our biological history, “I Don’t Mind” still plays for hearts that skip in half time to the bloodbeat.
It gets hot up there, under the lights of the cosmos, under the lights of love.
DOWNLOAD: Dent Sweat – “I Don’t Mind”
(Photo: Erica Poat)
In cities where people still laugh at the clothes of others, difference is considered a weakness and progression measured in chain store volume, bedrooms become portals that the immediate outside cannot offer. Up in those closeted sanctuaries you discover who you are, shoulders curled forward over screens amidst the foggy dream of other worlds.
From Coventry, Blank & Kytt understand. Defying the dying embers that barely light the city’s near extinguished soul, they turn out Dilla-inspired instrumentals with such prolific and unswerving ease all you can do is kneel at the altar of the internet and be thankful for the world’s that open up when the rest of the world is shut off and shit.
If Coventry indirectly produced “Who You Are”, never leave. Escape through other means.
DOWNLOAD: Blank & Kytt – “Who You Are”
(Photo: Petercat Harris)
Today marks the release of the fourth single in our series of split 7″ records. Featuring Let’s Wrestle and Young Governor, the record is limited to just 500 copies, with artwork designed by Let’s Wrestle’s Wesley Patrick Gonzalez.
London three-piece Let’s Wrestle and Young Governor, the solo project of Fucked Up guitarist Ben Cook, first met while touring the US together in 2009. Since Ben hates touring, he barely spoke to Let’s Wrestle, and he assumed they thought he was a huge dick. But Ben soon realised they shared common ground when he saw Let’s Wrestle leave a show drunk with the drummer on the roof of their car. 15 minutes later they were in jail. Since then they’ve bonded over nothing but shared roll ups, something less common in Toronto, where Ben is from.
When Tough Love asked Young Governor to feature on a split 7”, Ben stated that the only band he’d like to share a record with is Let’s Wrestle, claiming that “they’re one of the only bands I think are quality out of the millions I have played with over the last 3 years.” A few anticipatory emails and several months later, “Crushing Nerves” and “Old Hat” are the result of that wish.
Let’s Wrestle’s contribution, “Crushing Nerves”, is an exclusive track recorded especially for the release. Featuring frontman Wes’ trademark tongue-in-cheek misgivings, it’s pop punk charged on social faux pas and bad romance. Young Governor play true to form also, with “Old Hat” displaying their distinctively melodic mod pop, one part Mersey beat, one part first wave punk.
Imagine how terrible music would be if the world wasn’t overloaded with pain, sadness, fear, longing, depression, terror, violence? I don’t even want to think about it.
Thank you, then, to Wild Nothing for drawing attention to Catwalk (it’s all in the comments) and proving that there’s still a little more to MySpace than Asian girls asking me how my day has been. I understand that that’s just their way of dealing with their overwhelming pain, sadness, fear, longing, depression, terror and violence. But I much prefer Catwalk’s approach.
DOWNLOAD: Catwalk – “Please Don’t Break Me”
(Photo: Adam Malantonio)
Girls Names recently recorded a five song live session for Imprint This On Your Mind, one of which was the cover of “Falling” that was featured on the Young & Research sampler we issued in September.
Here’s two more previously unrecorded tracks from the same session, both of which will feature in a different form on the debut album due to drop in 2011.
They were always an immaculately conceived band, but it’s on these new songs that Girls Names are truly beginning to harness that 80s shadow world of Felt and Beat Happening of which they’re so enamoured. Lawrence would be proud, if he could muster such a nonbelligerent emotion.
DOWNLOAD:
Girls Names – “When You Cry (live session)”
Girls Names – “Bury Me (live session)”
(Photo: Kyle Van Horn)
Somewhat appropriately, it’s with “Summer Black” that Weird Dreams stake their claim as poster boys for what came after London’s summer of lo-fi scuzz. And it while it trades sludge for sparkle, it aint all smiles. For all its little boy blue charm and thoughts of June through to August , there’s the suggestion that it must have been some dark summer that shadowed these bros.
In that final coda there’s the shake of winter waving goodbye to a shitty summer, a could-have-been Coca Cola advert theme tune ushering in to fade the silent night gloom. Weird Dreams know it’s not holidays we got coming. Just ho-ho-heartbreak and a melody that hangs like a million divorcees on Xmas eve .
“Summer Black”, along with other WD track “Joan”, shares a seven with two Total Slacker songs, released by Marshall Teller very soon.
DOWNLOAD: Weird Dreams – “Summer Black”
(Photo: Emily Burtner)
When I think of the future, I think of nothing tangible. Only of time and my own age in relation to it. For when I think of the future, I am always there. I am part of the future.
And I wonder, when I am in the future, will I look back in equally abstract and solipsistic ways? Will I think of the past only as a linear line of now apparently sequenced events that lead to this moment I stand in? Or will the past be attached to very real things, in all their physical glory, horror, tedium? And in all this, will the past lie to me, like the future will lie to me when one day I am not in it?
At least now I know what all this mess will sound like.
“Pound Your Town To Hell” is a somnambulist waltz through a past I have no idea whether I experienced, leading me to a future, in nearly 6 minutes time, where I’m older and filled with ideas and memories that were never mine, but soon become so.
“Pound Your Town To Hell” is one long seductive lie that can’t help but be told over and over again.
DOWNLOAD: Cloudy Busey – “Pound Your Town to Hell”
(Photo: Lieven Lahayes)
In the primordial soup of a pre-internet world, dislocation and isolation made sense as realistic consequences of geography. Where once we would have sought solutions to such perceived problems, now caught in a matrix of hyperconnectivity we can only long for a return to those ideals. To be left alone and to leave the world be, equally.
Wet Wings are from New Zealand and that’s as far away from me as I can imagine. And while the internet brings them knocking at my door, they’re trapped in a bubble that means the outside world might be looking in, but they’re not looking out. Eyes closed. Swaying. And just singing and breathing and forgetting.
Like fellow anitpodeans, The Go-Betweens once sang, the world is too big or too small. Wet Wings feel that burden in their every pulse, Bandcamp or no Bandcamp.
DOWNLOAD: Wet Wings – “Whisper Always”
(Photo: Dave Geeting)
