>>Nostalgia For Infinity

As I sit down to write this review in mid-August, 2011, the riots that have erupted across Britain over the past week have begun to subside, the energies that drove them dissipating in the face of a coherent police response and that most British of demotivators, the weather. But the anger, social exclusion, vanishing economic possibilities, lack of faith in police relations and sense of political betrayal that initially produced this eruption among Britain’s poorest urban communities remain.

Gary McMahon’s The Concrete Grove plumbs the fertile ground of such forgotten areas, its dark tale derived as much from the existential horror of hopeless or wasted lives as the natural and supernatural forces that prey upon them.

Lana and Hailey, single mother and daughter, have been forced into a life on an estate – the eponymous Concrete Grove – which surrounds the Needle, a derelict and sinister Brutalist block of flats. The Needle pierces the heart of a community racked with poverty, desperation and accompanying social issues like drug abuse, violence and entrenched petty criminals with a penchant for cruelty. One such ambitious thug is Monty Bright, a loan shark obsessed with the history of the Grove. Monty takes an interest in Lana and Hailey, using Lana’s debt to him as leverage while he tries to understand the growing connection between Hailey and the Grove.

A few roads over, just outside the estate, a middle-aged man named Tom supports and cares for his bed-bound and clinically obese wife. Tortured by his own demons and a sense of being trapped in his own life, Tom finds himself drawn to Lana and Hailey and by extension involved in whatever plans Bright and the Grove have in store.

The Concrete Grove’s most interesting conceit is its fusion of old mythologies with present realities. The backstory describes how the Needle and surrounding estate were built over an ancient Pagan site of nature-worship. The power of the old Grove remains but it has been corrupted by the pathologies of the human community that now surrounds it. Forces bleed out into our world, and not all of them are as ambivalent as those the Pagans once worshipped.

Although the actions of McMahon’s characters may not always convince – Hailey in particular makes a few leaps of faith and illogic that I struggled with – and Tom is one of those frustratingly frustrated middle-aged characters whose internal monologue is dominated by a desire to fuck anything with a blouse and a pulse, they are on the whole a sympathetic bunch who draw us into the worlds he has built around the iconic Needle. The thematic juxtaposition on which the novel is based is maintained throughout: England’s past and present, the powers produced by suburban sickness and health, all revolving around by the ambiguous forces of nature. The novel’s conclusion reflects this state of thematic balance well, although it’s also possible to read in a much more traditional horror motif.

The Concrete Grove itself clearly has more stories to tell. By the book’s close it remains a source of substantial mystery, and the desperate poverty and anti-social behaviour that surrounds it remains unaddressed and ignored by the wider world.

384pp paperback, published by Solaris Books.

[This review originally published in Vector #268, the critical journal of the British Science Fiction Association. This version of the review precedes the published version being reformatted for printing but is otherwise identical.]

And here we are, the very last review of 2011. (I admit that to engineer this feat of scheduling I had to queue this to be posted four hours after this morning’s review of We’ll Go Machete, which I recommend you go read now if you’ve not yet done so.) It’s an emotional moment.

By the time you read this, though, I’ll hopefully be chock full of all the booze and rolling around on the floor alongside the best of times. Happy New Year’s Eve! Happy parties! Whatever! I just hope you’re having a good time and that, if you’re reading this in 2012, that you’re not still feeling the effects of whatever over-indulgence you indulged in.

And so, the Bombpops, a band brought to us courtesy of the label Red Scare Records and the city San Diego. This here is only their second EP, but they’ve managed to hit the nail on the head of the pop-punk formula already. And okay, it’s a formula, and okay, that makes it formulaic, but who cares when the hooks sink so deep and the melodies are so affecting?

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I’m not entirely sure why Mediaskare Records have sent me so many Christian metal/hardcore records to review. I don’t have a problem with Christian music beyond the segregatory tendencies of parts of that scene, nor a problem with Christianity or religion in general beyond that I disagree with it on a personal and philosophical level. From what I’ve read about Sovereign Strength online they are similarly chilled about differences of opinion, so I like that. But how on Earth am I going to engage with songs called ‘Everlasting Fire’ or ‘Last War’?

It’s not even as if Mediaskare are an exclusively Christian label. But for some reason they sent me four records to review before I announced that I was wrapping up my music reviewing, and three of those four records had obvious Christian themes. The Prophecy isn’t even the most overt. That goes to Creations’ The Gospel - similarly difficult review coming soon!

Anyway, moving past that, The Prophecy kicks things off with ‘Darkest Sin’ and forty seconds of faintly sinister noise before something as heavy as shit kicks in. Seriously, these guys play with everything downtuned to a severe degree, so if you like heavy, dark and loud sounds, then you’ll find something to like here. » Read the rest of this entry «

Dan Webb and the Spiders hail from Boston, and formed in 2009. Since then they’ve wasted little time, recording three full-length records, toured Europe and the US Midwest and East Coast, and shared stages with one of my favourite bands – The Sainte Catherines - alongside other punk rock luminaries such as The Slow Death, Thousandaires, Lemuria and The Dopamines. Much Obliged is their third album.

Biographies! What a fine way to start a review they are.

I’d not heard of these guys before they contacted me with a review request, but I’m damn glad they did: rough-edged but tight melodic punk rock with gruff vocals, sing-along choruses and sweet chord progressions that deliver their payload in under three minutes are pretty much the definition of ‘my thing’.

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Oh boy. Sometimes it’s hard to know what to write about a record because you could so easily sum up your thoughts in a single sentence.

That sentence: if you like Dear Landlord, Off With Their Heads, Banner Pilot and The Soviettes then you will also like this.

Dead simple huh? Gateway District features current or ex-members of all of these bands as well as The Salteens and Rivethead (who I’ve not heard) and play awesome fast-paced hooky punk rock music that recalls all four bands in that sentence above, with vocals that recall either The Soviettes and The Epoxies (despite not, as far as I can tell from half-finished Wikipedia pages, actually featuring a female singer from either band). From this side of the pond, Caves are also a good reference point for nailing down those lead vox, with The Vibrators surely being a more classic influence.

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The press release for Philly’s Restorations’ self-titled LP paraphrases reviews of an older EP, stating that the band make music for “grown-up punks”. This is kind of amusing. Firstly, old punks don’t die. They just smell that way. Secondly, punk’s not dead, but Reagan is. Thirdly, “grown-up” is a child’s phrase, surely?

But it is also a pretty fair description, in some ways. Restorations are identifiably emerging from a punk rock tradition, even if their music spreads its wings more broadly than these origins might allow. Perhaps it’s just in the choice of chords, or the guitar tone, or the gruff lead vocals that remind me, somehow, of a wearier, more relaxed Mike Hale from Gunmoll – or perhaps just any No Idea singer with a whiskey & cigarette tone and a love of country*.

Regardless, the eight songs on offer here are restrained, drawn-out, and aim for a very textural approach – by which I mean their strengths are teased out of a song’s whole fabric rather than derived from killer hooks. Still, we’re not straying into full-on post-rock territory; there are instrumental moments but plenty of vocals throughout, and the songs are mostly structured around traditional verse-chorus patterns.

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Cool kids, and uncool kids too, may be familiar with Atlanta’s The Wild. They’ve been kicking around for a few years now, touring pretty hard around the US in the process (“We are five friends having a great time playing music together… We all feel the best when we are traveling together and getting to see old friends, making new ones, jumping off of high things into water, and playing music every night”).

I’m a fan of the donation-based label Quote Unquote Records and first came across The Wild via their site, in the form of their self-titled EP. I freely admit that I don’t remember much of that (it was over two years ago, dudes) but fortunately all is well, because A Collection is – you would never have guessed this, I know – a collection of assorted recorded tracks from the past few years. It includes everything from the self-titled EP, songs for their splits with Pedals on our Pirate Ships and Run, Forever (reviewed here) and a smattering of other tunes from live sets and sessions.

So yeah, previously The Wild had for me always fit snugly into a “cool band, don’t really care” sort of bracket. You know, that sort of perfectly acceptable music that you enjoy while you’re listening to, but it never sticks with you and once the record finishes you never play it again and you forget it exists. Until you come across the band’s name again and go, “oh yeah! That shit was cool. How did it go again?”

So there I was digging this album a lot more than I had any of their previous stuff and thinking “wow! These dudes got really good! This is rad!” And then I learned that it was a collection of stuff going back some years, and then I felt like the idiot I am. It pretty much just goes to show that my opinion should not be trusted, at least until I’ve listened to something half a dozen times or more – which is the case for pretty much all my reviews these days, for what that’s worth.

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Remember a few years back when two-piece rocks outfits were all the rage? Of course you do! We had Blood Red Shoes, No Age, P.S. I Love You, er… Tenacious D. And before that the White Stripes, the Black Keys, and Death From Above 1979 (who loved it so much they had to come back again).

Tenuous intro is tenuous. There’s no real connection to be made here; two-piece bands are nothing new and have been a staple of rock music for… well, for about as long as rock music, probably. It’s just that I don’t have much info about The Atolls beyond that they hail from Glendora, California, and their hometown is probably not named after the Rilo Kiley song.

Okay, check this: they formed sometime kinda recently, I’d guess, as this self-titled and self-released EP is the first and only record listed on their various websites. And these guys have done the band thing before, though I’ve no idea who with: it shows in how deliberate these songs are. There’s a decent bit of variety here: the first tune, ‘Low Tide’, is a four and a half minute indie rock whopper, and light on the indie (man, what an increasingly useless word that is as a descriptor!). The closest comparison I can come up with is that this fairly bass-heavy and dirge-like song has a little bit of a the National vibe to it. It’s a bit miserabilist (“People drown in less than a foot of water”) but has some lush and mournful singing over it, with delicately picked notes making their way carefully through the choruses.

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Both shoehaze and post-rock can be funny things. At times they can strike you with tremendous force, with alternately minimalist or convoluted compositions somehow contriving to carry huge emotional impact. At other time you can listen to something and find it perfectly enjoyable but have effectively nothing interesting to say about it.

So it is for me with Present No Fiction, Fear No Tense by Early & Often.

It opens somewhat courageously: the first nine-minute track begins with three and a half minutes of cassette tape recording. It sounds like a street preacher addressing a crowd, although I admit I’ve not managed to follow the thread of his address thanks to the ambient noise and low quality of the recording. Still, this environmental distraction and noise – and the lone, desperate voice at the centre of it, striving to be heard – may be exactly what the band had in mind when they used the sample.

Once the song ‘Under the Phase’ emerges from beneath this, it’s a drawn-out, minimalist and slow affair, reminescent of early or mid-00s Radiohead at their most restrained and dirgey. The song grows and fades in volume and intensity throughout its duration, at times almost entirely silent for a few bars, with emotional vocals gently and earnestly sung over the top. Lyrically I have a strong sense that there is a profound sense of loss at the heart of this song, and for that reason I want to be careful with my criticism, so I will simply say that the somewhat opaque lyrics make it difficult for me to find the song as intense an experience as it is for Early & Often.

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Following on from last week’s review of Hound’s We Will Never Sleep EP, here’s the second offering from Seoul-based Realize Records: The Letter from Private by Velvet Coast. As with Hound I don’t really know anything about Velvet Coast themselves; for both bands I tried to google up a little information to try and provide more context, but unfortunately couldn’t locate any info.

The Letter from Private - I think we’re missing a second definite article there – is an album constructed around a theme. The details, alas, escape me, as I’ve not got access to the lyrics and whilst I can make out snatches of the English vocals that’s not enough to really make it clear what each song is about, especially as quite a bit of it is in Korean (as one would expect).

Still, it’s a reasonable assumption to make from the title, cover and song names – as well as the intro track which is entirely composed of samples of gunshots, bomb blasts etc. – that it’s a personal take on the horrors of war. From the song titles it looks like each track essentially focuses on different aspects of an individual’s psyche in such circumstances, which is an interesting approach that I don’t think I’ve heard done before.

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