>>Nostalgia For Infinity

Even after years of listening to and reviewing music it’s great that there are still little things that can surprise or impress me – like just how much sound and intensity can come out of a three-piece lineup.

After The Fall (or Afterthefall?) hail from Albany in the state of New York, the capital city of that state – a fact which makes no sense to this non-American. Thus, I choose to believe that this example of political incoherence was the driving factor behind the band’s politicisation. Well, that or the rampant economic and social injustice that plagues the entire world, even the world’s richest, most culturally and militarily powerful country.

But this aside is a bit of a red herring, because on closer inspection After The Fall’s lyrics are more focused upon the personal political than larger, often abstract concepts. Take, for example, ‘Cents Less’: “Remember when you said ‘you have no fucking clue about this business?’ Well sorry to say I proved you wrong,where were your interests?” Break-up songs about collapsing record label relationships aren’t new but they are rare, and certainly a song that criticises ‘business values’ and lauds personal integrity and self-respect stands out.

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We Carry the Fire opens with an extensive sample from the 1938 radio broadcast of Wells’ War of the Worlds; the excerpt concerns ground zero for the Martian invasion, the small town of Grover’s Mill. All but one of the other tracks on this record are named for persons, their age and occupation.

The obvious assumption I take from this is that this is a themed album intended to focus on the lives of various fictionalised people drawn from a small town; either within the context of a prototypical SF tale like War of the Worlds or just focusing on aspects of their lives in composing a  broader narrative or perspective. It’s not entirely clear from the MP3s I have – I don’t yet have a physical copy of this release although I hope to soon. Regardless, either approach is a cool idea but unfortunately without access to lyrics it’s hard to tell what Dolcim intended, as they have never been a band with easily-discernible lyrics. So, for now, you’ll just have to assume that this could be an album with an interesting thematic edge, but it could just as easily screw it up. I have no idea, but would like to assume the former.

Fortunately it’s an excellent album in and of itself. » Read the rest of this entry «

Released all the way back in March, Daughters has already required a reputation – not only as a standout album but also as the record that broke the band which wrote it. After recording but before release guitarist Nick Sadler and bassist Samuel Walker left the band, leaving vocalist Alexis Marshall and drummer Jon Syverson with the name and a record that singer Lex claims to not be too happy with. Each member and ex-member of the band has their own take on the situation, and I’ve no desire to shit-stir, but the gist of the situation is that Lex felt that a lot of the material written by Sadler was too commercial – and once disagreements came to a head the band dissolved.

So, this album will never be gigged or toured, and wherever Daughters go from here it won’t sound like this. Which makes this album special, especially as it’s so very, very good. The first word to be used when describing it is “intense”. Some others that you might throw in are “big”, “brash”, “sharp”, and perhaps “borderline demented”. It’s a big shift away from the fret-spazzing technical grindcore of 2003′s Canada Songs and, to my ears at least, a huge leap into fresh new territory – there’s nothing I’ve heard that sounds quite like this record. Throughout, the colossal-sounding drums and the brutally low-end bass drive a rhythm that segues between the march of some sinister army and the one-two back and forth of traded drunken punches. The guitars shift rapidly between heavy chugs, squealing tremolo and high-speed fret-tapping. Topping it all off are vocals, typically delivered at a sedate pace, with a sinister edge that wraps this disturbing but brilliant package together into a ferociously weird whole.

With only eight tracks on offer it’s not a lengthy release, but all eight clock in at a decent length that’s a far cry from the one-minute blasts of Daughters’ past releases. Highlights have to include ‘The Hit’, one of many songs with a relentlessly pounding rhythm but also one peppered with sinister telephonesque voices buried in the mix of synth, squalling guitar and abrupt jerks back into chugging territory, and ‘Sweet Georgia Bloom’ which is about as close as Daughters are likely to get to writing a song you can dance to. My favourite, though, is ‘Our Queens (One is Many, Many is One)’, which boasts crazy handclaps, excellent runs along the fretboard and plenty of high-speed leaps between the top and the base of the guitar’s neck. I wish I could write and play songs like that.

I don’t know what you’d categorise Daughters as and I don’t care. It’s a superb record and you owe it to yourself to listen to it.

Official Site | MySpace | Hydra Head Records

Dude Trips collects up all of Bangers’ recorded output as of earlier this year, including tunes from their splits with Dirty Tactics and Brighton’s own Break the Habit among others. There’s 10 songs in all from this gruff pop-punk three piece who hail from Falmouth (oops, sorry guys, for ages I thought you were from Wales).

Bangers took a while to grow on me but now that they have I’m really into their style of earnest and honest punk rock. Their lyrics sound heavily autobiographical, which ranges from being surrounded by fashion-focused people (“Show me anyone whose priorities aren’t fucking dumb and I’ll show you five who’ve all got love affairs with clothes and hair”) to drinking all night with friends (“Home’s just where you stop when comfort outweighs your sense of adventure”). They’re a three-piece but thanks to some good guitar lines it’s easy to think that there’s a second six-stringer. I actually thought there was until I caught them live. Yep, I get things wrong a lot.

‘Excuses be Damned’ is one of my top picks from Dude Trips, an anthemic opener with the chorus “We’ll make the next one better!” which I think is about fucking up arrangements with friends or dates, but which works fairly well if you apply it to playing shows and going on tour. “We got held up on the way up, but we’re here now so could you please cheer up now.”

It’s a shame that Dude Trips wasn’t issued as a vinyl release, since all of the tracks on it are available elsewhere, a lot of them on other vinyl records, and collections always feel a bit more special on the bigger format. Still, it’s a good CD that collects some great songs from one of the UK’s hardest-working and touring punk bands, and despite their disparate origins the songs fit together perfectly as an album. Plus, you can download the songs free from Bandcamp if you don’t want to buy it. There’s no excuse not to do one of the two.

MySpace | Bandcamp | Twitter | Facebook | Flix Records

Formed in 2005, Floridian folk-punk band Fake Problems released their first album in 2007. They’ve not been slack since then, following How Far Our Bodies Go with It’s Great To Be Alive in 2009. A year and a half on and here’s their latest offering, Real Ghosts Caught On Tape.

Back in their early days Fake Problems (along with other folk-punk outfits like O Pioneers!!!, One Reason and even Defiance, Ohio) were regularly compared to Against Me!, a band whose commercial success was beginning to accelerate its ascendance – with the inevitable side effect of many early fans either drifting away from the band or outright decrying their new direction. For better or worse, attitudes and fanbases were changing.

I mention the Against Me! connection because, although I’ve always felt Fake Problems are a band unusual and talented enough to stand on their own eight feet, it’s interesting to see the ways in which the trajectory of their creative development is following that of their Gainesville predecessors. Both bands began their careers with lo-fi releases that could only be described as folk-punk: simple but hard-hitting tunes, just-so production, and earthy yet provocative lyrics and themes.

(This is not to put them in the same pot; there are many key differences. Against Me!’s Tom Gabel’s flair  for songwriting developed earlier, for example, with their first album being a bona fide classic rather than simply a good record; Fake Problems’ Chris Farren has a knack for the personal-poetic that’s wildly distinct from Gabel’s early and more politicised lyrical subject-matter, and vocally Farren has a broader range and more classically strong voice, although both singers are unique and instantly recognisable.)

The second albums took a significantly different tack: Fake Problems, with It’s Great to be Alive, crammed the record full of almost every idea they could find. It’s a gloriously diverse album filled with a number of highly distinct songs, and shows how the band had taken leaps and bounds forwards as musicians. Ditto As the Eternal Cowboy, still today one of the most highly-regarded Against Me! releases. And then the third albums, Searching for a Former Clarity and Real Ghosts Caught on Tape respectively, both somewhat darker, more thoughtful and introspective – more mature, perhaps. And the connection is more than thematic, with both records showing restraint as well as exuberance in their songwriting, and holding together more obviously as albums rather than collections of songs.

And so, as much as the band or their fans (I count myself as one, of course) may hate me for saying it, the shadow of Against Me! still hangs over Fake Problems. But the analysis above is just one man’s opinion, and the product of following both bands’ careers very closely. And as I said from the outset, Fake Problems don’t need comparisons to be recognised as an excellent band.

Real Ghosts Caught on Tape focuses on the themes of disappointment and disillusionment, but does so with Farren’s trademark wit and the band’s usual sense of play. Opener ‘ADT’, for example, juxtaposes lyrics like “If home is where the heart is / I do not have a pulse” (simultaneously heartfelt and revelling in its melodrama) with a simple and hooky song that demonstrates subtle flair beneath that simplicity. It’s immediately followed with ’5678′ which leads with the fantastic lyric “5, 6, 7, 8, oh God is good but I am great’, an insincere arrogance that’s all the better for being delivered in a faux falsetto. Yes, Fake Problems are as playful and fun as ever, and the restraint exercised in the recording of this album helps bring that to the fore.

Other songs particularly worthy of mention include ‘Soulless’ with its 60s/70s party tune rhythm, ‘Complaint Dept’ which strongly recalls Vampire Weekend (ordinarily I would not mean that as a compliment), and ‘Ghost to Coast’, perhaps the most sincere song on the album and certainly its most outright confessional.

The old adage ‘ones to watch’ has applied to Fake Problems for many years, and still does, but it’s also safe to say that with Real Ghosts Caught on Tape the band have matured into something truly excellent. You owe it to yourself to give this record a listen.

Official Site | MySpace | Twitter | Tumblr | SideOneDummy Records

This will be a short review because I don’t listen to very much blues or old-school rock & roll, and that is how the Black Keys kick it. That said I still think this is a damn fine album and it has me listening to a genre that I don’t dislike but which I don’t generally find interesting enough to draw me away from other stuff. That sounds a bit like damning with faint praise but it’s the opposite… this is a cool record with broad appeal.

It’s the duo’s highest-charting album; in its first week of release in mid-May it sold about 73,000 copies. They’re evidently not a band who need smalltime bloggers reviewing them, but fuck it – I reviewed Deftones the other day, didn’t I? And, obviously, I’m reviewing music out of a desire to share cool stuff that I like. Get on it!

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For a few years after the release of the seminal White Pony in 2000, the Deftones were one of my favourite bands and could do no wrong. Then, inexplicably, they dropped off my radar and I failed to pay any attention to what they were doing – right up until 2008, when bassist Chi Cheng was left in a coma by a car accident.

Diamonds Eyes is the band’s first release since the accident, from which Cheng is still recovering – Sergio Vega (of Quicksand fame) fills bass duties in his absence. As I’ve never heard 2003′s Deftones and have only listened to 2006′s Saturday Night Wrist a few times, and White Pony was such a departure from the 90s albums Root and Around the Fur, it’s White Pony that is my chief reference point here.

The most immediate and obvious thing that strikes you is how much more proficient the entire band is. Carpenter’s edgy guitar shifts easily between understated minimalism, vast chugging power chords and dischordant shrieks. Delgado’s work on synth and keys is the glue that holds Diamond Eyes together, often subtly so but always integral. Cunningham’s drums often sound astonishingly laid back, gentle even, but when the moment calls for intensity he can deliver. But it’s Moreno that leaps out at you: his vocals have improved immensely in the past decade – the emotion that he sinks into his shrieks and roars and murmurs is what makes these songs really deliver.

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At the beginning of the year I made hyperbolic noises about how great this band’s last EP was, and further how great their first album was. An album they wrote when they were eighteen, the lucky foetus-faced bastards. And now here we are, three years on from the release of ‘A Lesson in the Abuse of Information Technology’ and just under a year on from ‘Hold On, Dodge’.

What’s immediately obvious is that this record is a lot closer to ‘Hold On, Dodge’ than that incendiary first release. As on last year’s EP the songwriting is a more mature, measured and sophisticated affair. The album boasts some fantastic vocal harmonies and the trademark dual guitars, chuggy power chords from one Menzinger complementing intricate and deliberate lead work – which, happily, never strays into masturbatory territory.

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90s power-pop/college rock revivalism seems to be on a bit of an uptick at the moment with great bands like Cheap Girls and Failure’s Union rocking awesome melodic rock styles. I’m also occasionally reminded of Weezer… good old Weezer, not shit new Weezer, and with less irritatingly tweenie lyrics. Sundials are walking a similar path though they’ve got a more upbeat sound. Despite this they don’t shy from tackling darker subject matter in their lyrics.

This free download EP opens with ‘Names That Matter Most’, a very mildly country-flavoured tune about a girl… well, of course. It’s about falling for someone and wanting to get to know them better than not at all, a pretty common refrain for power-pop!

Most of the songs on here focus on memories, such as ’It Stands a Ground’ which features the chorus line “I called up my friends to buy me drugs when I was young / these memories protect me from remembering anyone”; a wryly observant tale of misspent youth. The song breaks down for a bridge that, for a moment, focuses on a darker memory, before returning to its more upbeat recollections.

‘Fox Hunters’ is another highlight, a fast-paced tune with jangly hooks and a lot of charm. As far as I can tell it’s about hunting and tradition and, perhaps, is a metaphor about the innocence of youth being confronted with something unpalateable: “it’s tradition don’t you know / it’s taxidermy in your room / you said we always let them go.”

If you like to rock to heartfelt poppy tunes with great harmonies, you could do worse than downloading this. There’s a nostalgic and backward-looking attitude to the record that befits its retro styles, and Sundials rock with aplomb.

Official Site | MySpace (recently abandoned) | If You Make It (free download) | Facebook

I’ve not reviewed Bomb the Music Industry! on NFI before, although I did reckon last year’s Scrambles was the second best album of the year. That aside, it feels difficult to review a band that you’re so outrageously fond of without just spewing hot, exciting love all over the place. But! The idea behind Adults!!! (surely wins most ludicrous title of the year if nothing else) is that it was recorded in five days, so here is a short review that I wrote in five minutes. It would probably be more in keeping with the spirit of the record if I spent five hours on this review but I don’t have the patience for such an outrageously pointless conceit.

So! First up, Adults!!! is more ska-centric than either Scrambles or 2007′s Get Warmer. It opens up with ‘You Still Believe In Me’, which could almost be an Arrogant Sons of Bitches (Jeff Rosenstock’s old ska-punk band) song, driven as it is by brass, rolling drums, and simple hooky chords. Right after that you have the faster-paced ‘Planning My Death’ ska-punk tune which is characteristically tongue-in-cheek, light-hearted but dark: ” I’ve been planning my death ’cause I wanna have a really good death. I want heroism, mystery and courage.”

Lyrically the entire EP reads like is a snapshot of where Jeff is at in his life right now: “I used to be an awesome listener. But now I just drift in and out or get pulled away by beats and measures like I don’ t have a choice but failure and running from a brighter future.” » Read the rest of this entry «