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Shipping News – Flies The Fields

Excellent album of muscular, focused and intense US indie. Released on Quarterstick in 2005, this band has quite a serious pedigree – the members featuring in such groups as Rodan, Rachel’s, June Of ’44 and The For Carnation. A look at that line up gives a good indication of the sounds herein – there is a large post-rock influence, with rumbling bass and angular, repetitive guitar lines dominating fairly long instrumental passages; but there is also plenty of powerful melody, very much in the vein of Shora and The For Carnation, but mostly played with the standard band instruments of bass, drums and guitar.
There are some nicely heavy moments, too – achieved as much by considered composition as stepping on a distortion pedal: the way that instrumental ‘Louven’ builds is a beautiful example. Some of the songs occasionally explode, too: ‘Morays (Or Demon)’ is gloriously adorned by brilliant guitar lines, fractured by metal vocals and distortion a couple of times.
The building of tension is key to the success of this album – the stronger melodies are thrown into bold relief when they appear; the heavy moments appear more violentm and throughout, there is a seriousness of intent, and a sense of lurking threat amidst the sober introspection.
“We are a generation of everyday collision” is one of the lines from the magnificent ‘The Human Face’, and might well sum up this band, although that song is followed by the rather lovely ‘Untitled With Drums’, which is sweetly softened by the addition of duet vocals by Fay Davis Jeffers of Pit Er Pat. It has a similarly effective magic as the unexpected female vocals in the Shora album, and perfectly sets up the epic album closer ‘Paper Lanters (Zero Return)’, with its relentlessly heavy bass.
As I sit listening to this album writing about it, I am wondering why I haven’t tracked down all their other releases.

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Tipsy – Trip Tease

1996 album from duo Tim Digulla & David Gardner, with the help of a horde of musicians. This is a giddy and psychedelic fusion of the already-weird sounds of Les Baxter-styled exotica; mashed together with the then-current sounds of experimental trip hop and a palette of loungetastic horn stabs, vamps and not-so-E-Z casio-keyboard-gone-wrong plinky plonky cheezerama, soundtracking rictus-faced grinning flourescent zoot-suited 50s TV presenter-clowns on acid.
Marvellously executed – everything is played live by the en-suite musos, then sampled, looped, edited and generally manipulated into a freaky yet ‘seductive’ weird-out: a blend of swinging advert music for space-age fridges, bombarded with springy cartoon sound effects and twangy surf guitar. It’s all joyous good fun, but with a real undercurrent of hallucinogenic displacement, which means it could cheerfully soundtrack any party population from Eleven Mustachioed Hipsters, to ultra-heavy hair-bear bunches.

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Wrnlrd – Cperadt

Is April the cruelest month? If so, here is a suitable offering from this US black metal band. I say band – I think this is yet another USBM one man operation. It’s nasty, cacophonous, and very dense. Where a lot of the similarly spaced-out and psychedelic black metal bands go for a thin shoegazey guitar sound, this has grinding, amped up mid-range and treble riffs piled on top of one another, making for a pretty heavy sound. It sounds like there are some quality distortion pedals in use, here, and the heaviness is most welcome. This also has plenty of blasting speed, and some excellent distorted, grim and generally unpleasant vocals which merge in a muddily splendid fashion with the guitar assault. There is great use of very well executed doomy atmospheric moments which punctuate the ferocious and strange riffs, and give the album a bit of depth.

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Byetone – Plastic Star

Byetone is a recording alias of Olaf Bender, one of the co-founders of the Raster-Noton label from Germany. I love a lot of the music on this label, which is normally a kind of icy, detached electronic minimalism; sometimes even distant and sterile (and often brilliant). This, on the other hand, is a bit of a beast. Right from the off it storms in with an electro kick drum and a glorious throbbing bass. This is driven along by minimal cymbals, and punctuated with stabs of distorted harmonic noise, before a triumphant droning melody is introduced and the track rises to a victorious peak. This demands to be played loud, and is the kind of tune that makes you raise your fist into the air.
There are four mixes on here, all excellent, none of which deviates greatly from the original, which is a good thing. Sleeparchive does a characteristically excellent job, shaping it into a more syncopated techno pounder. Fellow Raster-Noton luminary Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai) funks it up a bit, cutting and chopping with clipped beats and some of his trademark high pitched noise signals. And it’s nice to see Dr Walker turn in an Air Liquide-style acid-hop version, adding some acoustic bass and swirling trippy synths in the classic mid 90s Air Liquide style.
Marvellous. After hearing this I had to buy it on vinyl.

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Odawas – The Aether Eater

2005 release on the excellent jagjaguwar label. Odawas are a west coast two man psychedelic band, with ambient, spacy, and occasionally folky overtones, making them right up my street. The songs are delivered in a tremulous tenor that gels perfectly with the music. The music is generally strummed acoustic with hand drums or simple percussion, with drums on a few tracks. A fairly simple formula that is overlaid, often overloaded with a distant hazy wash of reverby keyboards, harmonica, spangles of space synth, blasts of noise and strange found sounds. It even gets a bit ‘Dark Side Of The Moon’ with the sax and vocals drenched ‘Song Of Temptations’. It’s a heady concoction, and highly successful, as well as quite lovely. The brevity of the songs helps – instead of protracted jams, we get short blasts of hazy psych sweetness.
Odawas have had two subsequent album; ‘Raven And The White Night’, which is also excellent, and 2009′s ‘The Blue Depths’, which I haven’t heard but will confidently predict is also very good. So check them out, and buy an album.

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Do Make Say Think -Do Make Say Think

Debut album from the still-going-strong DMST – scary to think that this came out way back in 1998. I saw them on tour shortly after at the Garage in Islington – the refurb of which I still have yet to see. I don’t think I’ve heard all their output since, and the other albums I’ve heard have been decent, especially the new one; but none have bettered this. A lot of post rock albums in the intervening years are quite obviously influenced by other post rock, but this still has loads of influences from all over the shop. Like a lot of similar albums this has a strong dub element, with bass-led melodies, as well as references to post punk/industrial experimentalists; soundtracks, and prog/space rock. This music is also completely comfortable rolling along at a very slow pace, and letting the compositions unfold in their own time. Opener ’1978′ rumbles along for 9 low slung minutes before a guitar melody comes in. ‘Highway 420′, probably my favourite, is a definite throwback to the 70s – opting for a ‘Wish You Were Here’ style intro of shimmering synths which ushers in some space-country style guitar twanging; then a sax joins in, and the track becomes something like 1973 Gong stretched out to a 10th of its speed before dissolving into the ether in a blissful haze. It’s not entirely laid back – ‘Dr. Hooch’ lays down a thundering and pretty menacing groove of strident bass, with alien attack siren synths cutting though the mix to slightly fry your brain. Later on, ‘Disco & Haze’ explodes with fuzz and wah guitar.
Another refreshing aspect of this album is that it steered away from the consciously epic crescendos of a lot of other instrumental and Constellation bands; relying on great grooves, tuneful embellishment and finely recorded analogue sounds to make its case. Terrific stuff that I’ve listened to countless times over the years.

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