Thursday, July 3, 2008  12:05 am 

Some more mr. Lo-fi

We made a drunken deal in Primavera Sound, and it’s on, so welcome Sssamuel Strang getting down first, the curmudgeonly Spanish one plays the harmonica pensive at the back.

The sound of monotony swamping your skull, Graffiti Island are not typical. Brought together through a mutual love of the deranged dilettante Jan Terri, their bludgeoned lo-fi is the sort that’d have even Calvin Johnson turning his nose with frontman Pete Dee’s vocal a coarse narcotic, one dragged from a LA suburb through Dalston high street, wading its way through a swamp of comotose reverberating basslines.

Though they’re yet to release a record (a 7” is due through House Anxiety in coming months) there’s plenty to set a jaw round. ‘Mountain Man’ is from a while back now, something no ointment can treat, rabid and pent up with carnal desires, the sort of output you’d expect from an outfit citing Meat Puppets beside The Pastels. Self-loathing mongrel pop.

Graffiti Island- Mountain Man

Sic Alps are another of those American bands to blip from time to time in 20JFG’s radar with the gusto of those who don’t give a fuck, and tonight we are definitely buyin’, their U.S. Ez (Siltbreeze, what would we do without you?) finds them straddling the thin line between disjointed noise of the sort you’d dance to just fine if someone smashed your knee with a bicycle chain, and spaces of melodic genius which have always belonged to the crazy and the illuminated.

You might ask for proof and we lay ‘Gelly Roll Gum Drop’ at your feet, this is the same sort of fucked up blues of Rolling Stones circa Exile on Main St. , our beloved Royal Trux or even Electric Eels shedding a tear in the midst of a shitstorm of distortion (Girl…), music unselfconciously beautiful and rightfully raw, usually to be found at the back of the bar surrounded by a cloud of smoke, a conclave of empty bottles of liquor and the shadow of a broken heart shining above like a Kirlian aura of the damned, bless ‘em they always come up with the best songs.

Sic Alps- Gelly Roll Gum Drop

labels >> Graffiti Island, Sic Alps, Sssamuel Strang

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Wednesday, July 2, 2008  12:01 am 

The arrival of the summer pt. 3

With a hefty bag of peyote in their possession, a hysterical horse, and a shamanic drummer in tow, CocoRosie rode in to town on neon unicorns with one of the summer jams of last year, managing to destroy only the best parties with their rainbow coloured, animalistic B-Girl banger of a tune. Not long after they arrived to summon all spirits to the dance floor, the Cassidy sisters packed up their box of broken toys and retreated to a cave by the sea where they whiled away their winter days immersing themselves in the righteous sounds of R. Kelly and SWV, tinkering with some magic music boxes, and experimenting with Snoop‘s talkbox.

CocoRosie - God Has a Voice, She Speaks Through Me (Removed by Request)

No sooner did they feel the sun return, they emerged to bestow upon the world another summer jam that’s all kinds of goodness. Synths sigh back and forth at one another, Balearic guitar lines weave in and out of an unrelenting clap track, and Bianca trills away as if she’s “Believe” era Cher, had Cher ever spent a decade lost deep within a vast woodland. Somewhere in the world, beneath the lights of the Aurora Borealis this is playing on a loop at the most blissed out block party to ever hit a glacier.

Remember that really, really annoying song The Cha Cha Slide? The one that in the fearful minds of those who never venture to the gym soundtracks every torturous aerobics workout ever, wherein some guy basically updates the okie cokey tune over a limp-ass 90s house beat, and implores everyone to move their legs in and out, and clap, and slide around, and basically do all kinds of retarded crap? Well DJ Chip, one of the kings of Chicago juke remembers, and he’s done a wonderful thing and turned that “song” in to a sublimely ominous piece of voodoo trance nastiness that re-imagines the novelty dance for a time when all Hell has broken loose, and people have been forced to live in the dark passages that lie beneath the cities they once owned.

DJ Chip - Chicago Juke Slide

Chip’s voice, riding synth tones that sound like a futuristic warning siren alerting all of some creeping, impending danger, mysteriously echoes forth from all directions out of the blackness that drowns everything, intimidating all who hear it in to sweaty submission. The Percolator never sounded so brilliantly doom laden. Expect a chopped and screwed death disco rethink of Crazy Frog to emerge at some point in the future.

labels >> cocorosie, dj chip

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Monday, June 30, 2008  12:05 am 

Cowboys

The image of Snake Plissken advancing stealthy down the mesas, sliding in between the small flows of life that flourish in the desert at night like a shark tracking down the scent of his prey in the air so still, desert foxes, coyotes and wild dogs staring on his wake like a visitation from a world even more feral than theirs, all of this while the sun starts announcing its arrival with lines of blood-light in the eternal horizon is one that 20JFG would pay dearly to see.As it is, the soundtrack for that potential scene will have to do, but then, what a fucking soundtrack this is.

Ass- Escape from NY (Main Title)

Ass’ ‘My Get Up and Go Just Got Up and Went‘ is the sound of John Fahey looking at the skies with the eyes of some kosmische sorcerer, and then reporting back slow and furious battle between constellations.

It is RVNG OF THE NRDS time again, so get ready for something good.

Wade Nichols, alter ego of one of our favourite edit wizards out there steps in the ring of fire in the new 12” that these defenders of everything that is good and beautiful are putting out. In this occasion the source of joy are three ridiculously awesome edits of AM radio classics, so far we have identified two of them, America’s ‘A Horse with No Name’ and Canned Heat’s ‘Wanda Rode Again’, here you have the latter, where the mournful country blues one-two one-two of the original is skilfully transformed into a barnyard stomper racing metronomic through highways of loneliness to show us an epic western landscape covered in white clouds like the hands of god were stretching to comfort us, somewhere in between Bill Calahan’s demesne of despair and Black Mountain’s Appalachian hut, frankly incredible stuff, get it here.

Wade Nichols- Wanda Rode Again

Oh, and if you are in Scotland this week, you could do waaaaay worse than go to this

labels >> Ass, IGETRVNG, Wade Nichols, xxjfg

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Friday, June 27, 2008  11:25 am 

Eerie letters from the new

Welcome to my house! Enter freely, go safely, and leave some of the happiness you bring! … I am our Lady of Shadows, and I bid you welcome to this palace of darkness and dust, Gorgo, Mormo, the moon of a thousand faces always shines yellow and malevolent upon its spires, a wraith awaits around every corner and a gypsy curse lies hidden behind each door ready to spring like a bloated spider from its secret trap, our beds are soiled with the blood of virgins, and if you stare through the windows you shan’t see the dreadful and nebulous landscapes you crossed to arrive to these steps, but inconceivable dimensions of madness and lust with which this palace communicates, a gift from forces beyond your understanding earned through the undertaking of a thousand perverse deeds, this is the stuff that nightmares are made of, but then are they not sweeter than the dirge of that grey reality with which most mortals have to contend?

I see you look unsettled, it does take some time getting accustomed to the darkness, here, I’ll leave you in the hands of the Children of the Night, they will help you feel at home, listen to them, what music they make!

Fan Death sound like a black cat with iridescent emerald eyes fucking around with a mouse prior to its cruel, playful but intensely focussed dismemberment, oh, and disco, that string motif that kicks off ‘Veronica’s Veil’ grabs us by the pink lapels, hurls us in the centre of a dancefloor and impales our flesh with a merciless swarm of arrows so that we can become the late 70s NYC equivalent of St. Sebastian as painted by il Sodoma, taken to a quasi-religious ecstasis by the incandescent brilliance of the music engulfing us, black like sin and sweet like salvation.

Writing a exultant disco song about a legendary relic used to wipe Jesus’ blood and sweat during the Stations of the Cross strikes us of genius, as is the way in which they create an alternative night vision to that of our beloved Italian stars Glass Candy, perhaps more muscular and upbeat, tracing the path of progressive masters Cerrone or Rinder and Lewis after they got lost in the crimson halls of Helena Markos’ Palace, just check out the rest of their stuff and understand why they might well be our new favourite band.

Fan Death - Veronica’s Veil

Gatekeeper should have hailed from Haddonfield, Illinois, all cramped muscles, tension and the paranoia of a nebulous hallucination forever dancing in the periphery of your vision, their icy synthetic progressions unfurl in front of us like black pillars of smoke raising in the desolate streets of an empty suburban landscape from which everyone disappeared one spring night, TV still on, dinner cooling in the kitchen table, swings in a garden creaking ever so slightly, we still wonder what happened.

Or a silver blade held by a velvet fist cast in iron essaying a message of pain in the vertebrae of your spine, but not quite willing to deliver it yet, it’s all dark shit, dark the way we like it.

As it is they come from Chicago, which suits us fine and makes sense inasmuch their music has something of the Warehouse, just listen to ‘Mirrors’, which comes across like some sort of nightmarish scenario where Nitzer Ebb jacked Philip Glass studio during the recording of the Candyman soundtrack to inflict upon us one of the most gloriously macabre pieces of synthetic horror music we have had the pleasure to enjoy for a while, we can imagine such tableaux of carnage to these sounds! Sweet!

Gatekeeper - Mirrors

In a city that never sleeps where the icey rain washes away the blood from a thousand slayings of the innocent, Diamond Vampires work at nite, lit by the dark side of the Moon. They lounge in the penthouse of a monolithic citadel that towers over the blue glass and granite landscape, they’re pale vampirian flesh as cold as the brushed steel of the synthesisers that hum and click in a obsidian refrain of maddening mid tempo terror.

Its Friday nite in the city and all hell will break loose past the midnite hour. But until then, Diamond Vampires begin the chase for the blood of the innocent by constructing musical crystals from the frozen liquid in the stratosphere that then rains down rhythmically onto the phosphorescent spires of the unholy churches chiming a deeply malevolent beat, punctuated with slow motion attacks from the shadows by pan-dimensional creatures.

Diamond Vampires - Friday Nights

The day draws in and the violence from the previous nite is left encased in crystalline structures, the faces of the victims twisted, wide mouthed and bug-eyed in the last moments of terror. To escape the piercing burn of the sun, Diamond Vampires have retreated to the basement where they conspire with a coven of cosmopolitan witches to bring about sheets of rolling thunder and daggers of jagged lightning that will dance across the city with static discopic energy.

Diamond Vampires - Hungry Wives

Disco with a horror edge will always prick up the ears of your 2OJFG acolytes, and we thank the gods that Diamond Vampires have only just begun constructing the sound of Chromatics synths recreating the sounds in Ian Curtis’ head and then cross-processing it with the most potent strains of space disco viruses and recording the whole thing in black and white underground tunnels.

labels >> Diamond Vampires, Fan Death, Gatekeeper

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Thursday, June 26, 2008  11:12 am 

Get real!

Vivian Girls’ S/T album  encapsulates all that made C-86 great, that fortunate connection between Spectorian Pop and Post-Punk lo-fi, topped up with a good dose of cavernous feedback which makes us think of the ‘Girls in the Garage‘  compilations, i.e. teen turmoil unfurls over a spanking 60s psyche beat, natty!

This is an In The Red affair after all, but it wouldn’t be out of place in the distinguished catalogue of Sympathy for the Record Industry, just check out the awesome ‘Alright This Time Just The Girls’ pts. 1 & 2.

Somehow in between the angelic melodies of Love is All and the charismatic raucousness of Mika Miko or Times New Viking, with a pinch of B52s, ‘Tell the World’s’ conjunction of chugga-chugga take no prisoners rhythm and reverb drenched instinctive incantations cast in a shadowy voodoo bedroom (that’s what this music is for) is the kind of song I would have put in every single cassette mixtape for a friend back in the 90s when I used to wear stripy tops. As it is, I am putting in this erm, ‘virtual’ cassette mixtape for you guys, because I heart you.

Vivian Girls- Tell the World

As you well know, we have been keeping an eye on Abe Vigoda, smiling delighted as they ride the skies in a rhythmic walkaround full of jaunty melodic pirouettes , well, we have their ‘Skeleton’ album now and the promise is fulfilled, all those hits you have already danced to like crazy in the discotheque are included, as well as a few tunes we hadn’t heard yet, all of ‘em upholding the proud heritage of supreme nerdy masters of jangly discoid post-punk Talking Heads with illuminated & fierce spirit.

This is party music which is both passionate, intelligent and good natured, kind of twee, but in the right way. It makes Vampire Weekend sound like the second-rate ska act they are without even trying because it’s not about that, the Paul Simon’s ‘Graceland’ reference is truly valid for these kids, not plain wishful thinking.

They plant the seeds of a tree and the tree grows and its leaves spread towards the sun and the sun rains a shower of light upon them in the same way in which we stretch our fingers to touch something pretty, so that shadows of strange species of bird with wild eyes and colourful plumage flying up high in the sky, and free, can be projected upon the ground to dance jittery over the patch of luscious green where we stand, as we said, smiling, sweet, sweet!

Abe Vigoda- Dead City/Waste Wilderness

&&&

We mentioned Times New Viking above, well, they have teamed up with the excellent folks at Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction to bring us some t-shirts which are ace and true (hippies are the new punks, punks are the new avant garde, and new wave hippies should listen to Psychedelic Horseshit), get them here before they run out! (the Paper Rad ones are also well sweet, of course)

labels >> Vivian Girls, abe vigoda, xxjfg

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