Heading out of Gainsville, Florida – a fertile and artsy corner of the South East US that gave us Less than Jake, Against Me! and Tom Petty no less – and many more – this is the re-release of the debut EP from Dikembe, a slightly geeky but effortlessly credible four piece who have been kicking around the bandcamp space for a couple of years. Stylistically, I guess this is a kind of a mixed bag – floating between and above what some may call emo (clean vocals, chiming guitars, no chugging or screaming), old-school lo-fi (punk in evolutionary origin, but looser and more introspective – think Superchunk or Sebadoh), and post-hardcore (a generic term I’ve never quite got my head around, but that sees widespread usage for this sort of thing – i.e. Texas is the Reason – so I’ll just go with it).
There’s less than ten minutes of noise here, and no one track more than two and half minutes long. There’s no filler, no bar wasted – but somehow they don’t make it seem rushed at all. Full of personality, unobtrusive energy, sticky with anthemic chord structures, catchy and enduring little lyrical hooks, and instrumentally right tight as you like – this is densely packed with stuff for the purist to properly love. Whatever you go for, I reckon this deserves its audience. And I reckon they might get it too – I hear nice things being said about them right across the alt-music press right now.
One of the most endearing things about this – as well as being really rather good – is the understated and esoteric sense of humour. And if it was one thing I never took to about the works of Mascis and Malkmus (who I’m aching to compare this to although that would be to bracket this too tightly) it was their inability to laugh at themselves. The song titles are apparently all corruptions of the names of famous NBA players, fiddled about with to sound like cryptic crossword clues in Stoner magazine – or something like that. Now, this could be really arch and annoying. A marker of the strength and of this is that these guys make this almost Big Lebowski style silliness basically charming.
Quality release from a band of self-evident quality and potential. Bring it on boys. Let’s see what you got next.
Exciting stuff – the new letlive. album is on the horizon! The Blackest Beautiful will be released on 8th July and their new song, ‘Banshee (Ghost Fame)’ is available now.
Jason Aalon Butler has this to say about the track – “This song explores the tragic humor in entertainment as an industry as opposed to an art. Sonically this track was a pretty suitable representation of the record’s sonic spectrum. We also employed some elements of groove that we have always been fans of.”
You can pre-order the record from the band’s store and if you do, you’ll get this track to download RIGHT NOW. It’s the start of a new era, ladies and gentlemen. Get ready for letlive.
Still existing resolutely under the radar after a good few years of touring and recording, Only Fumes And Corpses fly in the face of convention with their latest musical “fuck you” – Selfish Act II. The record sees the Irish punks challenging not just their own musical abilities and powers of song construction but their listener’s expectations by releasing a single seventeen minute track. The release sees the band striving for longevity in their song writing, the polar opposite to 2012’s Selfish Act I which contained thirteen tracks in even fewer minutes and encompassed a staggering array of disparate elements into a selection of rollicking breakneck hardcore punk tunes. It’s refreshing and encouraging to see a band who have yet to fully assert themselves within the scene challenging themselves and looking upon compromise as a declaration of weakness; utilising unorthodoxy as an integral part of the group’s outlook and refusing to bow down to whatever pithy fad is currently being nurtured by the fickle hype machine.
Selfish Act II is all raging hardcore, underpinned by some rather ruthless drumwork with sticksman Benny deserving upmost credit for managing to keep his arms attached to his body through repeated flurries of devious fills and blastbeat workouts – cruelly denying himself any respite for the entire duration of the track. Reigning in the genre spanning intuitions of Selfish Act I, the group’s musical vision casts a smaller net than its predecessor whilst upping the intensity and brutal nature of their vast array of riffs. For a seventeen minute song, Only Fumes And Corpses aren’t keen on simply filling out time through any ambience or atmospheric interludes as would most bands undertaking a song whose length lays within the realms of prog rock territory. But once the obligatory opening wall of feedback has pricked up ours ears, the band kick into a furious demonstration of impossibly fast hardcore. The anger is still there for all to see – vocalist Momme quite clearly monumentally pissed-off like any true punk should be in these worrisome contemporary times. He rails gruffly against societal ills through thinly veiled analogies covered in a generous layer of caustic bile that will make you sympathise with his long suffering vocal chords.
A level of frantic immediacy is maintained throughout much of the self-titled track, speed injected into their playing whenever the pace begins to slack – everything careering towards cataclysm via a brief two-step friendly excerpt complete with cheeky pinch squeal for good measure. The closing minutes foreground the guitarist’s abilities. Fingers dance across the frets, apparently never keen to linger on a single chord for more than a second, instead digressing into spasmodic tremolo-picked twenty-notes-per-second runs. It’s scrappy as hell, but a million times more listenable than any Dragonforce fret wankery.
It’s disorientating at first – seventeen minutes of continuous screaming and intense hardcore clattering appears a little hard to digest. After a few listens however, structure becomes tangible and there’s a realisation that there may even exist a deceptive chorus amongst all the hell-bent ferocity. Together with the first part of Only Fumes And Corpses Selfish Act series, the Irish punks have more than proved their competence and much needed desire to suggest alternatives to homogenous hardcore and its tired clichés. If justice were always to prevail, Selfish Act II should be the release that lifts Only Fumes And Corpses from obscurity and into the hearts and minds of the multitude of pissed-off kids across the country.
A Few Things We Might Agree On (A Few Things We Might Not) is the debut full length from Gloucester hardcore punk lot Still Bust. Following their debut EP Pile O’ Knives, a full length record seems like it’s been a long time coming. Upon first listen, it’s not actually that hard to believe that Still Bust have been sitting on this one for about a decade. Debut full lengths, usually released far earlier within a band’s life cycle, are normally like the beginning of a long-term romantic relationship; it’s all still new and exciting and you still go and make out with each other in public places, but there’s nothing solid behind it. As time goes on, that begins to wane and you get the ‘sophomore slump’, that second record that sounds like you’re really trying but really, you’re together because it’s comfortable. No, the ridiculously long titled A Few Things We Might Agree On (A Few Things We Might Not) really sounds more like that third record, when you accept that you’re stuck with each other, but you know how to push each other’s buttons, and actually, it’s pretty great.
It starts out like every great hardcore record should – with a bang. ‘If You Don’t Like Video Games (You Probably Like Other Things)’ is bombastic but despite its frenzied nature, still has plenty of melody punctuating throughout before leading into a catastrophically discordant breakdown. There’s more gold to come, and Still Bust’s rough and ready approach is tempered with an intelligent, philosophical and sometimes downright mental approach to their lyrics, like in ‘Physicist At A Funeral (Godless Thoughts On Death)’. There’s enough gang vocals to satisfy the tuffest hardcore fan and plenty of frenetic riffs and wacky time signatures for the more discerning listener – tracks like ‘This Box Is For Standing On (But Look At How Big It Is!) have it all. There’s gloriously irreverent flashbacks to a simpler era in ‘Ball (Sac Magique)’, a 45 second blast of hardcore madness. It ends like every great hardcore record should as well. ‘Be Optimistic (Said The Mayfly)’ is a dramatic statement of intent, fading out into crackling static and a killer breakdown. If you weren’t into the record nine tracks deep, by the tenth, you’d be clamouring for more.
There’s times when it feels like Still Bust are apologising for something though. Self-deprecating song titles comparing themselves to Rise Against aside, there’s moments in the album that undermine their otherwise brilliant approach. Tracks like ‘First World (Band) Problems’ go on for far too long and prevent the band from achieving a clarity and fury that they’re more than capable of. However, even moments that fall flat, like the extended vocal-only tirade in ‘Physicist At A Funeral’ that doesn’t know quite when to finish, are brave attempts at transcending the stereotypical punk formula. Lest we forget, fortune favours the bold. For every tiny failure, there’s at least two massive triumphs. Quite simply, A Few Things We Might Agree On (A Few Things We Might Not) was worth the wait.
I spend a disproportionate amount of time on Facebook. I can’t help it, I’m a member of the internet generation. In between stalking random people that I’ve never met (to decide whether or not I would care to meet them) and raging at Candy Crush Saga, I like to flick through my news feed to see what all the different bands I’ve started following are up to. And you know what most of them are doing? Posting thirty second teaser trailers for four minute videos.
That’s what Parkway Drive did for their latest video. Parkway Drive are a successful metalcore band from Australia with a very attractive frontman and they sell out venues. For me, the teaser trailer is a pointless exercise. It didn’t showcase anything about the video at all, just showing a few performance shots. Here’s the video:
There’s nothing overly special about the video, really; it’s a performance video, where everyone is a bit dirty. At least Epitaph had the good sense to release the teaser just a few days before the actual video, therefore not losing any hype generated in the mean time. But see, this is where Parkway Drive and the vast majority of my timeline differ; Parkway Drive are well established and extremely popular. The other bands have barely got their first demos out of the stable. If you’ve never even released a song, don’t post up a trailer that’s comprised of twenty per cent of your first unknown music video! Trust me – nobody cares unless you’re yet another one of Trent Reznor’s projects. The same goes for posting snippets of songs online. The best way to preview one of your releases is to post up a complete song, rather than ten seconds of each, smooshed together to a montage of terrible press photos. Come on, bands of Facebook – you are better than this. I know you are, and I want to believe in you, but this is like when you go to a restaurant and they give you complimentary bread – in this scenario, the bread is stale and some kind of weird multigrain that you’d never normally consider eating, and you’d much rather be chowing down on the delicious meaty steak (or delicately balanced mushroom risotto, if that’s more your deal) that is your new song.
There’s a few bands out there doing it right. AFI, for example, if you’ll forgive my total and absolute bias. AFI are potentially releasing new material in September. It’s not even totally clear that’s what’s happening. So far, they’ve released three videos. One follows Davey walking down a corridor wearing the most badass jacket I’ve ever seen, accompanied by a voiceover of him speaking some potential lyrics which sound darker than anything he’s written since Sing The Sorrow, until he enters a practice room where the rest of the band are waiting. Davey takes the mic, the music’s about to kick in when it fades out and all we know is SEPTEMBER. Ohhh, baby. The other two are weirder than Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham’s little murder family in Hannibal right now. Numbers chanted over images of circles and girls and people with their heads wrapped in sheets. If you’re a fairly hardcore AFI fan, you might remember their short film Clandestine and the number of theories that then became attached to the lyrical concepts of Sing The Sorrow. (If you aren’t and you don’t, it’s worth listening the album from Bleed Black onwards, not ignoring the bonus track, which then puts The Leaving Songs in order and follows concepts about a cyclical nature of life and death. It’s kind of creepy. And awesome.) These videos are creating a total frenzy amongst AFI fans and a significant amount of WTF from everyone else, all of which is extremely useful publicity, and because AFI are a very well known band, it works.
This isn’t to say that an unknown band couldn’t pull of something like this, because it’s intriguing. It’s potentially a little bit pretentious and a little bit of an ego stroke, but you’re in a band. Take those self-indulgent teaser trailers, cram them where the sun doesn’t shine and play around with something a little more crazy. You owe it to yourself and your fans (or your potential ones, if you’re yet to have any) to stand out from the crowd and try something different. So before you click ‘upload’ on that thirty-second preview of your reasonably ordinary music video, think – the best of your act can’t be showcased in thirty seconds. Unless you’re Limp Wrist, and then your best songs can always be showcased in under thirty seconds because the whole thing usually is. But chances are, you’re not, so show us the whole fucking video.