>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Yet another band that I’ve come to pretty late, American Steel were originally around between the mid-90s and 2002, at which point they started writing dance-rock tunes under the name Communique (I’ve not heard them so I’m going on what I’ve read). In 2007 the band decided to play as American Steel once again, releasing ‘Destroy Their Future‘ on Fat Wreck. Reportedly it was something of a fusion between classic AmSteel and Communique’s ouevre. By contrast, ‘Dear Friends & Gentle Hearts‘ is beery melodic punk rock, dare I say pop-punk, with colossal hooky melodies and impressive songwriting chops. Yet the band’s influences stretch rather wider than just their 90s and 00s punk contemporaries. Plain is not simple, folks, and it’s evident that American Steel have set out to produce a top-notch pop album.

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Del.icio.us links for September 20th through September 27th:

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Del.icio.us links for September 13th through September 18th:

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Originally published in Vector at the beginning of the year.

October, and a storm is coming. A travelling lightning rod salesman arrives and alerts two young friends to what he senses on the horizon. Throughout the town, others feel the tension in the air. Something is coming. And that night, 3 am, that something is come. Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show: a travelling carnival, promising rides, freaks, wonders and delights. But Will and Jim watch the carnival arrange itself outside town, and what they see unfold that night is not the rosy funfair that the townsfolk find the following day. Soon enough the carnival folk, the twisted slaves captured by Mr. Cooger and Mr. Dark over their timeless centuries, are led by their masters in a hunt for the boys who alone grasp at the truth. Alone, that is, but for Will’s reclusive father Charles, a man half-lost in his own past.

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I was going to finish and post my first piece of Friday flash fiction in a while, but that’s no longer going to happen. So, in its place here are some rubbish band-based haikus a few friends and I wrote to amuse ourselves on a slow Friday afternoon.

WARNING: they’re rubbish.

1 point for each band you can guess. Points don’t mean prizes.

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I moved away from Essex eight years ago and as good as swore to never return. Grr! Place of teenage upbringing! Shitty county full of yuppie values I do not share! Source of much angst and rage! Of course I’ve been back there since, albeit for the stag do and later wedding of a close friend, because these sort of geographical vows rarely mesh with pragmatic reality. But my point is that I really don’t like Essex, and it takes a lot to tempt me back there.

Offset festival is based in Hainault Forest Country Park, or at least a big field in the middle of it, and is not far outside of Romford and accessible by tube. I could convince myself that this means it’s actually Greater London, a totally distinct area from Essex, but I would be as full of shit as those impassioned vows I made. Yes, Offset is in Essex, a fact underscored by the repeated chav invasions. On the Sunday night a gang of about twenty local tracksuited youths took over the security tower, after failing to topple it, and the security company went home. Fan-fuckin’-tastic!

The lineup, though, looked awesome, and at £55 for a weekend ticket it was a snip. Five stages over two days was surely an antidote to boredom, and there was enough variety between those stages and their acts that most attendees wouldn’t have to bemoan too many clashes. So far so good. » Read the rest of this entry «

1. Baby P.

2. Gordon Smart (everything “written” by).

3. “Political correctness” (get a clue, or at least look it up on Wikipedia).

4. How the British economy is recovering (shut up bankers, you are despicable liars).

5. Faux-controversial puff pieces about waning artists and actors designed to promote their latest attempt to arrest their decline. It is miserably transparent and rarely even offers self-righteous amusement. Quit it.

6. Dan fucking Brown.

7. The Labour Party (if your name is Polly Toynbee).

8. Princess Diana / Jade Goody / anyone else ever described as a people’s princess (stop pandering to the grief athletes you sick fucks).

9. The Wire (yes, it is amazing, but for god’s sake stop using per-episode fansquee as content).

10. The phrase “couldn’t make it up” (opinion pieces and comments, thank you very much).

Further, anyone who uses the phrase “bonkers Britain” will be summarily hung, drawn and quartered without trial.

Feel free to post your own entries in the comments. The mainstream press can be amazingly rubbish and it’s nice to vent, snark, sneer and otherwise hop up on a moral hobbyhorse about it, so do join me.

John W. Allison’s fine and long-running surrealist comic published its last strip on Friday, after an unbroken seven year run. Seven years! It makes me feel old just writing that; I must’ve been reading Allison’s work for a decade now. He’s not done yet, of course, and has a new comic starting in just over a week. This new comic, as yet unnamed, will apparently feature a few familiar Scary-Go-Round characters (alongside, one assumes, Allison’s trademark art and charming dialogue). It could be a fairly simple reboot; place some established characters into a new setting and scenario, introduce new characters and ideas, doing so under a shiny new name. Allison has remarked a number of times that a long-running plot-based comic can ultimately become alienating to new readers, who find it difficult or impossible to catch up on everything that has gone before, even when stories are deliberately written to avoid readers requiring prior knowledge. With this in mind the death of SGR and the birth of something new makes a lot of sense. It’s also something the artist has used before, in bringing to an end the more conventional plots and characters of English office-ish sitcom-ish strip Bobbins. The break allowed Allison greater freedom to explore different possibilities, including experiments in artistic style: over the past eight years Scary-Go-Round has switched between hand-drawn and vector art a number of times.

While I’ll eagerly read anything Allison puts out (and like many a sad-act who emotionally over-invests in fiction, must admit to being a little in love with some of his characters – testament to their depth and vibrancy), there’s a little sorrow involved in seeing Scary-Go-Round put to bed. It’s a comic that I’ve been reading solidly for some time now, longer than almost any other webcomic I follow. I didn’t pick it up at the very beginning, despite having been a fan of Bobbins, as I wasn’t a fan of the vector art used in a demonstration strip (I vaguely recall something about a werewolf, involving new characters Tessa and Rachel). It was a few years before I came back to storylines that had only grown more off the wall – spies and supervillains, cups of tea and volcano hideouts, midget vampires and deranged small-town mayoral candidates, “saucy” Aleister Crowley and robot diplomats – all held together with the peculiarly English glue of star Shelley Winters, her best friends Amy and Ryan, and a revolving cast of characters jettisoned or retained based on how interesting their storylines turned out to be. Allison’s characters have developed rich personalities, and it’s their interactions with the surreal town of Tackleford (or, indeed, eastern Europe, the world of the Undead, the bottom of the sea – wherever their adventures take them) that make the stories a delight to behold.

John Allison will be posting things to his blog this week to fill the gap between SGR and his new project, which is lovely because so far it has included a sort of good-bye and thank-you followed by an FAQ that answers a few questions which many readers will have been curious about.

Time for another upcoming gig round-up for Britain’s drugs death capital!

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I didn’t catch this story unfolding on Friday night, but I did spot it on TV in a pub in London yesterday and what little I managed to gather looked positively heartwarming. Turns out those impressions were correct – the, uh, collective might of the fascist English Defence League was broken in Harrow, mainly thanks to hundreds of impassioned Muslim youths taking to the streets alongside anti-fascists, the Left and impassioned locals. Not even the riot cops stationed to protect the (legally sanctioned) EDL march were enough to keep it together. Absolutely fucking brilliant.

Lenin’s Tomb has full details, photos (including the one I nicked for this post) and even a bit of video. The Guardian has a brief and sober report which skimps on the detail you’d need to actually understand what happened.