Wednesday, March 25
KASMs album & free download.
The KASMs debut album will be out on May 11th and it's called Spayed. So we hear. One track off it is called 'Male Bonding' and is downloadable here - it's a sort of demonic chant which, in off-the-wall journalese, sounds a bit like the villagers from 'The Wicker Man' attacking the Slayer tourbus. (But good.)
Monday, March 16
THE BIG HORRORS UPDATE.
Alright, here we go. The new Horrors single is called 'Sea Within A Sea', it's eight minutes long, and it's bloody good. Download it for free from http://www.thehorrors.co.uk/ by clicking on the band's name and pressing 'go' at the top of the screen. The video (also on the website) is a live performance with psychedelic projections filmed with The Jesus and Mary Chain's Douglas Hart (video artist for My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream, The Stone Roses, etc.).
The Horrors will also be touring the UK and USA in May and June - again, dates are on their website. Finally, they are booked to play on 23rd March at Rich Mix, Bethnal Green - exactly a year after their last live appearance, and already sold out by the look of things.
The new album, 'Primary Colours', is out on May 4th.
Friday, March 13
Horrors album: NME take the lid off.
We're not going to debase ourselves by linking to the page (we'll copy and paste instead) but everyone's favourite music-themed gossip magazine have unpacked the new Horrors album in a sort of preliminary way. The first bit of exciting news: it's got a name, and that name is Primary Colours. (Well, black and white were getting boring anyway.) The second: its last track has been tipped as a first single. (Possibly this is what the countdown on the band's website is pointing to.) Here's what NME had to say about the ten tracks, some of which have already been heard live, in their inimitable 'ironic namedropping genre-invention' style:
Sounds good to us. One final confirmation: it is, as rumoured, due for release in May. Start saving.Mirror's Image
Beginning with a low, ambient, throb that’ll make you check you haven’t stuck ‘Music For Airports’ on by accident, after a minute of gentle pulsing it kicks in with an impossibly sultry Mary Chain bassline, big Cult drums and Faris’ declamatory, goth vocal booming “walk on into the night” before a ‘Killing Moon’-ish guitar solo (really) shoots for the heavens. We are definitely not in Shoreditch anymore, Toto.Three Decades
Ominous, doom-laden bass and clattering drums are swept up by a banshee wail of synth and swoony MBV-style guitars. Gothgaze? Shoekraut? Who knows, but it’s amazing.Who Can Say
Geoff Barrow’s cavernous production is amazing, Faris' clean, shriek-free vocal cutting through rumbling, droney bass over a steadily driving beat as a high, sweet synth line like the ghost of lost love coos miles above, with the only trace of the band they used to be in a tambourine-kissed Shangri-Las spoken word mid-section.Do You Remember
This one is again more shoegazey, with a gothy groove like very early Stone Roses, or Echo And The Bunnymen at their slinkiest. The romanticism of the lyrics is another surprise, Faris earnestly crying “I will cross the ocean, I will be with you soon”.New Ice Age
Probably the scariest of all the tracks, this dark psychedelic dirge recalls Bauhaus via the rabid aggression of Killing Joke, ending in a wash of funereal organ.Scarlet Fields
With a throbbing bassline oddly reminiscent of U2’s ‘With Or Without You’, this is romantic and shoegazey, with screes of MBV/Sonic Youth guitar textures, as sweet as they are scouring.I Only Think Of You
With that BOOM-boom-boom-chick ‘Be My Baby’ beat so beloved of shoegazers the world over, this is a doomy ballad from the edge of obsession, Faris booming “you know if I lose you I’ll go mad” like a young Ian McCulloch.I Can't Control Myself
An unstable psychobillyish cousin of Spiritualized’s 'Come Together', as sexy as it is psychotic.Primary Colours
The most upbeat and traditional of the tracks, this has something of Interpol-via-Asobi Seksu about it, but much, much cleverer than that.Sea Within A Sea
What a choice of comeback single - an eight-minute Spacemen 3-meets-Neu! odyssey of ominous motorik rhythms, Faris’ mournful incantations and an expanding starfield of synths.
Neils Children LP date.
Quick note: Neils Children have firmly scheduled the release of their LP X.Enc. for 11th May. The album, their first full-length effort, is on the band's own Structurally Sound label. Read our enormously in-depth interview with John Linger for more.
Thursday, March 12
Offset Festival 2009: dates.
Our favourite festival of 2008 has announced its return to Hainault Forest Country Park this year. Offset 2009 will run from 5th-6th September and is a compulsory event for anyone and everyone who likes to watch interesting bands without being crushed by topless dickheads (although I believe they have a special stage for that kind of thing as well). Early bird tickets and, presumably, a line-up of sorts will be available soon. Until then, get a weekly taster at Buffalo Bar from the 24th with performances from Factory Floor and a secret guest at the inaugural Offset club night.
Sunday, March 8
The Horrors return - but when?
Word has it that the new Horrors album is finished, mixed, named, and has already landed on the desk of the NME editor (just next to the bulging envelope inscribed with 'will this do? Liam x'). Now a date has surfaced - one that we can't confirm in any way, but which does seem likely - for the release. If you want to believe everything you read, pencil in 4th May. (What seem more unlikely are the reports of a single being released on the 17th March, but you never know.) Keep your ears to the ground...
Monday, March 2
CHANGE, RETURN… SUCCESS? Neils Children: the X.Enc. interview
2009 marks ten years since they formed in Harlow, but perennially progressive post-punks Neils Children are only now gearing up to properly release their debut album X.Enc. Last year they scrapped their Pop:Aural LP due to controversies between the band and their studio, and released two killer singles - 'Reflective/Surface' and 'I'm Ill' - and now they’re finally ready to unleash a full-length blast of their distinctive melancholy indie-punk onto an unsuspecting world. We spoke (exclusively, as luck would have it) to John Linger, guitarist and vocalist, to ask him about where Neils Children are and where they’re going next.
‘We have always been a band who have thrived on progression,’ states Linger. Those who have been following the Neils Children saga over the past decade, who have seen the progression from Mod-inspired freakbeat to snotty psychedelic punk to a more melodic post-punk sound in recent years, won’t argue with that – but there are always those who crave for the past. ‘Some of our fans have been a bit behind us in terms of how we develop our sound and criticised us for changing our sound, but they don’t understand that if we continued writing 'I Hate Models' type songs four to five years later, we would be criticised for that too. The album is tougher in places, with a much more direct sound.’
‘I Hate Models’, the band’s 2004 commercial peak, has been something of an albatross around Neils Children’s necks, and there’s still the occasional request at their live shows – ignored or mocked, of course, since they’ve gained a reputation as a band dead set against self-nostalgia. Surprising, then, to hear the reappearance in their set last year of a few songs which had long been missing, presumed dead – 2006’s cover of ‘Lucifer Sam’ by Pink Floyd and, most astonishingly, ‘Come Down’, the single that introduced the band to a wider public in 2003, aired at Offset Festival, 2008’s most public outing for the band. Linger explains: ‘I think the way some of the newer songs sound made us re-evaluate some of the older material. We know that the older material is very powerful, but to us as artists, lacks certain elements which we have developed since… I think the fact that we played those songs for years goes some length at helping people realise why we wanted to distance ourselves from them. They are great songs, but the newer songs are even better, and next to some of the tracks from the new album, the older tracks make a lot more sense to us.’
So, with that in mind, the band present X.Enc., due out in March. The title is taken from an experimental sound collage single from the late 1970s – ‘it’s supposed to be interpretive, so people can call it what they want to. We feel it had a mysterious nature to it, but there is also a correct meaning and pronunciation to it... answers on a postcard’. Linger describes it as ‘both a step forward and a look backwards’, and says that the convoluted abandonment of Pop:Aural (originally scheduled for May 2007 and finally officially terminated in March last year) had an important impact on the new project. ‘We realised how we wanted to present our music to people. The fact that we decided against releasing the album helped us look upon the way we had recorded the songs, and have a different approach to the way we recorded X.Enc. We wanted to make the album harder, but not lose the melodic quality to songs which we had developed.’
The track listing is different to that proposed for Pop:Aural, and includes some songs which have been in the live set for a year or more, and some which are yet to be heard. ‘The songs written after Pop:Aural had a much different sound, and we wanted to make a complete sounding album. We knew where we were heading by knowing what we didn’t like about the scrapped album, so it was a case of saving some tracks from that sinking ship, whilst using the album to mainly showcase the new material. It was a balancing act.’
The band seems to have got away with the act so far, managing to write new material, salvage old songs, and record the album in isolation over the course of the year. ‘We can proudly say that X.Enc. was recorded by us and us alone, except for 'Reflective/Surface’, which was recorded in Paris with a producer called Arnaud Bascunana. We recorded the remaining tracks in an industrial unit in Cheshunt, our home town. I mixed the album myself over the course of a week or so. We really benefited by recording in isolation. It added to the tougher sound of the record. It pissed down with rain most days we were recording, and you can hear the rain on the metal doors in some of the quieter bits.’
Just to emphasise this DIY stance, the band decided to release the album themselves as well. They’ve created the Structurally Sound label to put out not only X.Enc and last year’s 'I’m Ill' 7”, but also releases from other bands, possibly including something from Chichester’s Disconcerts, managed by John Linger. But why found your own label when there are hundreds out there already? ‘I guess it was due to the experiences we had with labels in the past,’ explains Linger. ‘We have worked with some great people, and some… not so great. We just wanted to take control of what we released and when we released it. Brandon starting Modern Pop Records [the label owned by Brandon Jacobs, Neils Children drummer, has released music by Strange Idols and Electricity In Our Homes] influenced us as well, and the whole DIY thing is very much a part of our ethos.’
So, with the whole project under the watchful eye of the Children themselves, this time nothing (hopefully) will go wrong, and the world will finally see a full-length Neils Children album. What next? ‘We will be playing shows around the country and also in Japan and Europe. We want to keep releasing new material as it comes, so we don’t become stale and so we keep people up to date with how we are developing our sound. There will be an X.Enc. album launch in London in March... it will be special.’ Details are under wraps, but pencil something in your diary for the 16th. For now Neils Children are keeping themselves busy with have concerts booked in Italy, France, Germany, Wales, and Sheffield. Those who cling to the band’s past might have to revise their views, because Neils Children are doing their best to forge themselves a future. Whether they’ll get the exposure that they’ve skirted so narrowly for so long remains to be seen.
‘We have always been a band who have thrived on progression,’ states Linger. Those who have been following the Neils Children saga over the past decade, who have seen the progression from Mod-inspired freakbeat to snotty psychedelic punk to a more melodic post-punk sound in recent years, won’t argue with that – but there are always those who crave for the past. ‘Some of our fans have been a bit behind us in terms of how we develop our sound and criticised us for changing our sound, but they don’t understand that if we continued writing 'I Hate Models' type songs four to five years later, we would be criticised for that too. The album is tougher in places, with a much more direct sound.’
‘I Hate Models’, the band’s 2004 commercial peak, has been something of an albatross around Neils Children’s necks, and there’s still the occasional request at their live shows – ignored or mocked, of course, since they’ve gained a reputation as a band dead set against self-nostalgia. Surprising, then, to hear the reappearance in their set last year of a few songs which had long been missing, presumed dead – 2006’s cover of ‘Lucifer Sam’ by Pink Floyd and, most astonishingly, ‘Come Down’, the single that introduced the band to a wider public in 2003, aired at Offset Festival, 2008’s most public outing for the band. Linger explains: ‘I think the way some of the newer songs sound made us re-evaluate some of the older material. We know that the older material is very powerful, but to us as artists, lacks certain elements which we have developed since… I think the fact that we played those songs for years goes some length at helping people realise why we wanted to distance ourselves from them. They are great songs, but the newer songs are even better, and next to some of the tracks from the new album, the older tracks make a lot more sense to us.’
So, with that in mind, the band present X.Enc., due out in March. The title is taken from an experimental sound collage single from the late 1970s – ‘it’s supposed to be interpretive, so people can call it what they want to. We feel it had a mysterious nature to it, but there is also a correct meaning and pronunciation to it... answers on a postcard’. Linger describes it as ‘both a step forward and a look backwards’, and says that the convoluted abandonment of Pop:Aural (originally scheduled for May 2007 and finally officially terminated in March last year) had an important impact on the new project. ‘We realised how we wanted to present our music to people. The fact that we decided against releasing the album helped us look upon the way we had recorded the songs, and have a different approach to the way we recorded X.Enc. We wanted to make the album harder, but not lose the melodic quality to songs which we had developed.’
The track listing is different to that proposed for Pop:Aural, and includes some songs which have been in the live set for a year or more, and some which are yet to be heard. ‘The songs written after Pop:Aural had a much different sound, and we wanted to make a complete sounding album. We knew where we were heading by knowing what we didn’t like about the scrapped album, so it was a case of saving some tracks from that sinking ship, whilst using the album to mainly showcase the new material. It was a balancing act.’
The band seems to have got away with the act so far, managing to write new material, salvage old songs, and record the album in isolation over the course of the year. ‘We can proudly say that X.Enc. was recorded by us and us alone, except for 'Reflective/Surface’, which was recorded in Paris with a producer called Arnaud Bascunana. We recorded the remaining tracks in an industrial unit in Cheshunt, our home town. I mixed the album myself over the course of a week or so. We really benefited by recording in isolation. It added to the tougher sound of the record. It pissed down with rain most days we were recording, and you can hear the rain on the metal doors in some of the quieter bits.’
Just to emphasise this DIY stance, the band decided to release the album themselves as well. They’ve created the Structurally Sound label to put out not only X.Enc and last year’s 'I’m Ill' 7”, but also releases from other bands, possibly including something from Chichester’s Disconcerts, managed by John Linger. But why found your own label when there are hundreds out there already? ‘I guess it was due to the experiences we had with labels in the past,’ explains Linger. ‘We have worked with some great people, and some… not so great. We just wanted to take control of what we released and when we released it. Brandon starting Modern Pop Records [the label owned by Brandon Jacobs, Neils Children drummer, has released music by Strange Idols and Electricity In Our Homes] influenced us as well, and the whole DIY thing is very much a part of our ethos.’
So, with the whole project under the watchful eye of the Children themselves, this time nothing (hopefully) will go wrong, and the world will finally see a full-length Neils Children album. What next? ‘We will be playing shows around the country and also in Japan and Europe. We want to keep releasing new material as it comes, so we don’t become stale and so we keep people up to date with how we are developing our sound. There will be an X.Enc. album launch in London in March... it will be special.’ Details are under wraps, but pencil something in your diary for the 16th. For now Neils Children are keeping themselves busy with have concerts booked in Italy, France, Germany, Wales, and Sheffield. Those who cling to the band’s past might have to revise their views, because Neils Children are doing their best to forge themselves a future. Whether they’ll get the exposure that they’ve skirted so narrowly for so long remains to be seen.
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