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.]

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?

Stole the TV ain’t the best example of its form ever committed to compressed petro-chemical, but its a fine one nonetheless. The band have played alongside notorious outfits like Bad Religion, the Adolescents, Strung Out and the Queers among others, and it’s a neat fit for them: it’s as if the 1990s never went away. It’s a backward-looking EP, sure, and could’ve come out any time in the last fifteen or twenty years (bar the production, which is as polished yet unobtrusive as you might hope), but it’s fun. Fun! We all remember fun!

My reviews of pop-punk records have ended up becoming almost as predictable as the music itself; there are few surprises in what I have to say. Still, I hope that by now I’ve built up enough trust as a reviewer to be taken at face value when I say this is a solid example of the form. It probably won’t be your favourite record, and you probably won’t remember it in six months time, but if you like irrepressible and fast-paced melodic punk rock with slick harmonies and pounding rhythm and pretty yet snotty female vocals (lead and backing!), you won’t regret your time spent with the Bombpops.

Merry fucking 2011, folks.

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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. The song’s not half bad; chock full of double-kick drumming, incomprehensibly roared vocals and the aforementioned downtuned chugging from guitar and bass, it’s not anything we’ve not heard before, but it’s done well enough, with enough variety between parts and riffs to keep things interesting.

Third song ‘Bring Me Home’ introduces backing vocals that adopt a scream/sung approach rather than the gruff, belting roar we’ve heard previously, an affectation that on first appearance is effective, although the second time it comes around it falls a little flat. Other tunes like ‘Words Without Meaning’ and ‘More to Life’ go for more of a snapshot, blasting approach, redolent of hardcore rather than metal, which helps to introduce further variety, and towards the end of the record we get ‘Revival’ which towards its end features not only clean singing but also hanging chords and waves of feedback with some lead guitar work that is very stylistically different indeed. It’s actually a really lovely moment but sounds like an entirely different band, because it’s the only time in the album that we hear anything like this – and the first two thirds of song don’t stand out.

The Prophecy ain’t really a record for me, is it? It’s a decent slice of metal / extremely brutal hardcore taken on its musical merits, and I dig that sort of thing occasionally, although I prefer extreme speed to extreme downtuning, but it’s not a record that I can engage with on any level as I simply don’t share any commonality with it lyrically or thematically. And I say that as a man who owns poetry by William Blake and John Keats. I don’t know. I don’t know why I was sent this, and I don’t know what to really think about it. Decent music, not my sort of thing, I suppose. That’s about as fair as I can be.

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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’.

One of my favourite songs, ‘Brothers’, doesn’t really sound so special on paper. Its lyrical refrain is “I’d like to tell you that it’s okay”; a simple, bland phrase by itself, but when it hits your ears – with or without backing vox – it’s a special punk rock moment. A fist-in-the-air, crowd screaming along type of moment. That may be hyperbole, but I don’t really care because given half a chance I’d be straining my vocal chords with an arm shot straight up.

Other top picks include ‘Number 13′, thanks to its cool chord progressions and fun lyrics like “dancing on a street sign / such a novel solution”, and opener ‘City By the Sea Pt. II’ from which I get a strong Murder City Devils vibe (coming from me, that is high praise indeed). There’s also ‘The Right Thing’ with its deft electro-acoustic picking and strong backing vocals; this song appears towards the end of the album and is a breath of fresh air.

Elsewhere the band test the water of different territories, as with the campfire Country singalong ’28 Years’ – not a song that does much for me personally as I didn’t grow up around the genre, but it sounds pleasant enough – and the mid-pace rocky number ‘Flyover Country’ which goes for a more soulful approach. It’s a little loose and meandering and at points the two lead guitar lines amble around as if not fully aware of each other, but it’s still got its moments.

Going back to what I mentioned above, Dan Webb contacted me about this record having read what I wrote about The Cold Beat (about a million years ago back in February); he also plays with that band. There are certainly some similarities between the two bands, although I’d not have noticed them without the connection being made elsewhere. And while I enjoyed Get Safe, I did note that it was a record that it is easy to be ambivalent about. By contrast, Much Obliged is a record I find it easy to get excited about. This doesn’t really reflect anything other than Dan Webb and the Spiders offering a lot of songs that are closer to what I love most, but that open subjectivity is the nature of a record review.

So yeah, Much Obliged. I like it a lot, despite or perhaps because of its rough edges and flaws, and suggest that you find out if you do too.

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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.

There are very few songs here that break the two and a half minute mark; many are two minutes or under, making them short and sweet, each song busting out a few good hooks and letting the lead and backing vocals mesh with them in that impossibly catchy way that the best pop-punk manages so consistently. Considering the band’s pedigree, is that really any surprise?

With almost every song present having a broadly similar character there’s not much to say about them individually; besides which, with twelve songs rattled through in twenty-six minutes, this is a record I’ll listen to completely rather than pick out individual songs. That said, ‘Blue Halls’ has my favourite vocal refrain in “you worthless piece of shit” (who can’t get into that?) and is immediately followed by ‘New Hands’ which features odd and ace lyrics as well as some sick climbing octave chord progressions scattered throughout.

Towards the end of the album, there is a bit more variety as well – it’s an odd choice but I guess a lot of people are going to come to Perfect’s Gonna Fail expecting straight-ahead punk rock, so why not front-load that? So yeah, ‘Fishman’s Song’, the longest track at 2:51, is a fairly midpace tune (at least by the standards set before it) with a striding rather than driving rhythm. In places it feels a little meandering, but it’s held together by more memorable vocal work, and sets the scene for the more sombre ‘Cairo’ and ‘Queen Ave’, which follow.

There aren’t many surprises to be found here, but there are some really, really great tunes. The usual proviso; if you can’t stand pop-punk, this ain’t gonna change your mind, you joyless freak. For the rest of us, this is ace. Ace ace ace. Listen to it. Maybe you’ll listen to it repeatedly for a while before moving on, and occasionally you’ll later come back to it with the joy of a rediscovered album of simple, immediate pleasures. That, after all, is how pop-punk endures.

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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.

Things are kicked off with a gentle, steadily building song in the form of ‘NonLocality’: with drums that recall rather than resemble a marching beat and simple, repeated vocals – with harmonising back vocals – its rhythm has a faintly hypnotic air. Towards the songs end things loosen up a bit with delay effects introduced, including some analogue delay that goes a little crazy (which is my favourite thing about analogue delay pedals; the guitarist in my band abuses it regularly to entertaining effect).

Elsewhere ‘Canadian Club’ throws in some swagger, the guitar, bass and drums utilising a simple and gentle hook to pull you along; lead guitar is present but very spare, as with the minimalist keyboard work. The song goes off the rails towards the end, which initially seems like a bit of a shame, but once the dissolving feedback fades and you hear the band laughing with each other, it instead feels fun.

Throughout Restorations length there are plenty of warm, gentle moments; soothing rather than abrasive, atmospheric rather than immediate, convivial rather than confrontational. Certainly it touches on few of what might be considered the ‘traditional characteristics’ of punk, but you might equally note many of the offshoot sub-genres that span out of punk also eschew abrasiveness, immediacy or confrontation. In fact, describing this as “music for grown-up punks” does it a disservice. It might be better to say that punks with broad tastes are likely to enjoy this, as it is, simply, good music.

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* Oh, it turns out that Restorations’ singer fronted Jena Berlin!  So there you go, fact fans: A Fact.

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.

But whatever! Cool music, pals!

For the uninitiated, The Wild play is personal-political anarcho folk punk. They are way more upbeat and danceable and party-flavoured than other outfits such as Defiance Ohio, who always seem like they’re having a good time but look like they feel slightly bad about it. Put another way: if you like what you’ve heard on Plan-It-X records but wish it wasn’t recorded in a bin, this record is for you.

In terms of favourite tracks – I won’t bother commenting on every last track of a collection – I would have to pick out ‘Our Cities’, which sees Dianna on lead vocal duty in a fast-paced knees up with great lyrics like “we’ll swarm the gates / and smash the state / and take our cities back”; it also highlights a great tremulous edge in Dianna’s voice. Guy voxalist Witt takes the lead in ‘We Will Drive These Warlords Out’ – a song which for quite a while I thought was actually a cover of an old Mountain Goats song, although it isn’t at all – another up-tempo number with some fine mouth organ action and yet more excellent lyrics: “we’ll sing along / to a thousand old folk songs / we’ll sing along / to our favourite pop-punk songs / and we’ll wipe the sweat from our brow / and we’ll drive these warlords out”. If it weren’t for the fact that my life rarely finds me sat around a campfire with a bunch of people who’ve heard The Wild, I would describe both songs as excellent campfire singalong songs. Alas for the life of an Englishman.

There are plenty more great songs among the fourteen tracks on offer, but look: it’s a collection and you may have heard some songs before, it’s available for £donation or £free if you want to check it out, and seriously you should just listen to these songs and enjoy them. Me, I’m just glad that they released this and made me realise what I’ve been missing for the past two years. Don’t make my mistake!

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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.

From there we switch over to ‘Tangles’, which is a little – but only a little! – more upbeat, with some simple picking keeping the melody direct and uncomplicated, with gentle little flicks over the top of the drumkit, before the choruses kick in and the lush melodies and vocals lend something of a New Pornographers tone to the proceedings. And then after that there’s ‘Older Nazi Boyfriends’, definitely one of the more eccentric songs present, which recalls both 70s UK punk and US surf rock with its cheeky, upbeat tone and rhythm; at times the vocals get a little rougher, reflecting this. “That’s what you get when you don’t shut your fucking mouth,” go the lyrics, and you get the impression that, hey, someone ran their mouth in front of someone’s skinhead boyfriend at some point, huh?

The EP wraps up with ‘Something I’m Not Supposed To Do’ which slips back into the dreary-yet-catchy approach of ‘Low Tide’, though it manages to be slightly unsettling in a way that reminds me a lot of parts of Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ (an over-referenced song, sure, but I think it’s the first time I’ve ever done so on NFI). ‘Something I’m Not Supposed To Do’, though, builds steadily, becoming more and more tense, the music bound to the unspoken misdeed of the song’s title. And about three minutes in – yeah, then it just gets awesome, in a way that [CHEAP SHOT AT OTHER BAND REDACTED] while I enjoy this song. It builds really nicely, you feel me?

The Atolls spends too much time in dreary territory for it to be a record I’ll regularly slip on, but thanks to the impressive range it manages in just four songs – including that cheeky, proto-surf-punk number which might sound out of place if these guys weren’t in complete control of their sound and style – means it’ll be sticking around in my collection.

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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.

The second track is ‘Interval XXI’, which is 32 seconds of vocals and keys sampled and tugged about in a glitchy, dischordant fashion. I’m not sure what the intention is with this other than to be jarring. If it is that it’s an odd choice because ‘The Feast’ follows, and with its first minute dominated by the glockenspiel ‘Interval XXI’ seems to make little sense. Still, ‘The Feast’ may work better than ‘Under the Phase’, firstly because it grows steadily – with long minutes of restraint - toward an effective and powerful climax, and secondly because the lyrical imagery is more vivid and its sentiment more clear.

‘Interval XVII’ sounds like items being unloaded or poured; I can hear zips, things landing on porcelain, indistinct voices. I admit the source has me stumped, but as the almost indiscernible trip-hop beats beneath are slowly drawn out and the samples are crushed together into a noisy whole the intention becomes clear. This interval works better on its own merits and also serves as an intro for ’False Victories’, which blends unusual beats with more of the same minimalist keys and ethereal vocal style. Much the same can be said of ‘No Fiction’, although this song enjoys far more musically active moments including a suitably intense, noisy finale.

I can’t pretend that I found Present No Fiction, Fear No Tense the emotive experience it obviously hopes to be; why I can’t exactly say, but perhaps a predilection for complexity or intensity over minimalism and an affinity with more direct, translucent lyrics goes some way toward explaining. Similarly, although a few neat musical tricks did tickle me, there were few moments I found genuinely memorable – perhaps because of that same lack of emotional resonance. So while I would not describe this as a bad EP, I can’t say I thought it a particularly good one either. Your mileage may, of course, vary.

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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.

Compared to their labelmates Hound the most obvious difference is in the vocal styles; although Velvet Coast also have a second vocalist who uses the gruff, guttural roaring style, their lead vocalist genuinely sings. The first thing I want to say about that is the juxtaposition between the two vocalists works really well here, and I imagine is why the band have been described as “a combination of both emotion and power” (that’s the only thing that Google found for me). It sounds very different to but is conceptually no different to the singing/screaming style now used by a ton of hardcore, emo and metalcore bands.

The second thing I want to say is that the lead vocalist reminds me a bit of the singer from Baby Little Tablets, who play a very different style of music but who are one of my favourite bands, so the comparison is definitely a compliment!

The first of four songs is ‘Private’ makes me think most of early 00s nu-metal; intentional or not there is a strong vibe there from the chuggy metal riffs built around a more traditional rock structure to the combination of vocal styles. There’s a decent groove here, though, with the band eschewing the snappy, stompy, abrasive style of the nu-metal outfits of that era. I imagine the similarity is, in fact, a coincidence. Anyway, ‘Private’ is a reasonably affecting song, with the melodies and the heaviness of the song working together as well as do the dual vocal styles. ‘Isolation’ uses much more layered vocals and there’s actually a third style here with higher, strangled-sounding vocals being introduced to the mix, although these death-ish vocal styles are still married to some simple, driving melodies.

‘Clown’ is an odd title given the album’s theme, but there are many ways in which that could be understood – I’ll not put words into anyone’s mouth though. Musically it’s actually a bit more upbeat than the others, if only via the more laid-back vocal line. The bassist seems to get a bit more to do here – elsewhere he spends most of his time following the root notes which must get a bit dull – which works well, and the guitars bust out a few nice harmonics here and there. ‘Clown’ is followed by ‘Misery’, which actually falls a little flat for the same reason that the other songs work: it appears to be aiming for an emotional and dirgey tone, as born out by the intro, but once the full band kicks in the structure and riffs are little different to what has come before.

All told The Letter from Private is actually pretty good and I’d recommend a listen if you like something that manages to simultaneously be very traditional and quite different. Hopefully the band can continue their efforts to experiment more and get a bit more variety into their riffs, which I think would help more unusual songs like ‘Misery’ to really breathe.

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