>>Nostalgia For Infinity

I don’t have any reviews queued for this week as I spent my spare time last weekend making a website for my band.

It’s WordPress-based since that’s all I know, but I think it’s come out pretty well. Credit where it’s due: I’m using a modified version of this theme.

Minor detail for the techgeeks: at the moment the domain name is just forwarding to a subdirectory on nostalgiaforinfinity.com, with the content framed so the domain name always displays in the address bar. At some point I’m going to try and figure out if it’s possible to have the domain properly route to the subdirectory and still look as though the site is properly hosted, i.e. links appear as  wrecktheplacefantastic.co.uk/about/ and not nostalgiaforinfinity.com/wreckthis/about/. If only they’d taught this in A-level IT instead of some twattery about business studies.

…if you can make it down, we’d love to see you there!

Time for another untimely update about my band, Wrecktheplacefantastic. I’ve not posted about us since January, when we played the first show that we were happy with and got reviewed. Since then we’ve played a bunch more gigs including a Haiti benefit all-dayer, a show supporting Ninja Gun, Break the Habit and Just Panic, and a set at Born to Lose alongside MAC and a folky outfit I forget the name of.

Ben has finally finished mixing and mastering our May 2010 demos (yup, it took a year). You can check those out here where the quality is a damn sight better than MySpace’s 96kbps cack. The recordings themselves are pretty ropey now; sloppy and slower than we usually play them now. But hey, until we do some more recording that’s as good as it gets! That said, we do have some live practice recordings that I might post up here. The quality is pretty decent all things considered.

We’ve added a few more songs to the original five (‘Bus Song’, ‘Song #3′, ‘Down With the Ship’, ‘Like Corpses’ and ‘Don’t Forget’). First up is ‘The Worst That Can Happen’, which got compared to Rival Schools (nice! Thanks! We’re not that good though!) and ‘Everywhere At Once’ which has some cool staccato rhythms and a neat offbeat post-chorus. Those two have been played live a few times; we are also working on ‘No Teeth’ (a slower piece with some simple delay effects that builds to a crescendo) and ‘Pckl Yr Lvr’ (the first complete song I wrote myself; it’s got a cool sliding chorus and is more fast-paced than ‘No Teeth’). Ben (who has written most of our songs to date) wants to focus on writing slower, moodier, more atmospheric tunes, to which end I’ve been instructed to come up with the faster punky ones… happy to oblige.

We’ve got a few more shows on the horizon, including one with our friends Colonics (June) and a second show supporting Another Day Lost (July). We’re chasing some other possibilities as well… watch this space! Finally, we’re hoping to do some more recording soon, probably going the DIY route and doing as much we can ourselves and with friends as possible. POW!

We seem to have been reviewed over at my friend Fran’s new music blog, Between the Music & Me.

Possibly a bit nepotistic as she used to drum for us and is friends with the two original members of the band, but she’s no bullshitter and notes she was “very pleased I didn’t have to lie when Ben and Shanu asked what I honestly thought!”

Read the review here.

The gig on Friday went really well; about 70 people down there in the end, maybe half of whom watched us. It’s the first show we’ve played where I was happy with my performance (I always play worse live because of nerves; anxiety?! What anxiety?) and where I believed everyone who said we played a good set. My sister and her boyfriend came up from Southampton to see us, which was super cool of them, and plenty of other friendly faces were there too. Probably my favourite remark was being told that we reminded someone of As Friends Rust and Grade. I fucking love As Friends Rust but have never consciously tried to imitate them.

Houston Has A Problem and Another Day Lost also put in storming sets; a privilege and a pleasure to play alongside ‘em.

Anyway, aside from the possibility that we’ll have another show on January 30th – a Haiti benefit at the Hare & Hounds – our new plan is to get on with writing some new songs. Watch this space. Or our MySpace.

It’s a while since I posted here about what my band is up to. In fact, I think it’s been so long that I haven’t even mentioned that we now have a MySpace page. Yes, it’s true, we finally caught up with 2004. We’re just in time for MySpace to continue its decline and watch as it becomes a swan dive into a financial black hole. If that’s not punk rock I don’t know what is.

In other news, Jake “bass” “face” Powis left the band in the middle of last year while he swanned off to Japan “for a few months”. It ended up turning into the rest of the year, and now he’s staying for 2010 as well – he’s met a girlie out there. Aww! So we replaced him back in November with Chris Watson, a stalwart of a number of bands around Brighton, presently Another Day Lost (for whom he sings). I first met Chris at the Concorde2 – who we were there to see, I don’t remember – where we found out that we both liked obscure 90s British melodic punk bands like broccoli and Hooton 3 Car. He’s a cool guy not to mention even taller than Jake, and his bass playing brings a more aggressive edge to our sound that I feel has re-invigorated our songs.

We have our third gig – ironically with our third line-up – on January 15th, where we’re opening Friday night’s punk round-up at the Brighton Hobgoblin. It’ll probably be pretty busy so no doubt I’ll be bricking it.

As for the demo which we recorded, oh last May or something, Ben is still mixing and mastering the bloody thing so who knows when it’ll be done. To be honest I’m on the verge of sticking the unfinished mixes online because he’s taking so long to get the proper versions sorted. Anyway, if we don’t have anything available to listen to come the day before our gig I’ll stick those early mixes online so people have something of ours to check out.

Big love and many boozes from Wrecktheplacefantastic!

A few weeks back my band spent the day in Studio 284, Brighton’s number one seafront-based DIY punx recording studio. I figured I’d write a little diary-style piece to celebrate our first crack at proper recording.

Why were we there? We wanted to record a three-track demo for two reasons: firstly, so that we could acquire a new bassist once Jake heads off to spend three months in Japan, and secondly, to try and convince promoters to give us more shows. Sans bassmonkey that second point might prove tricky, but hey, we’re thinking ahead.

Unfortunately I don’t have any mixed and mastered copies of the recordings as yet. We ran over the slot we’d paid for by a couple of hours and still didn’t quite get everything done. The only really problematic bit of what we got was in the vocals, which aren’t great. Ben (singer and lead guitarist) is planning to re-record these but it may be a few weeks before this gets done. Some of the guitar and drum parts were also a bit sloppy, but the drums don’t matter since we were playing to their rhythm anyway. It’s just the guitars, really, which are occasionally slightly out during the faster parts where both Ben and I are palm-muting. I’ve always sucked at palm-muting really fast. Still, fingers crossed this can be ironed out in the mix, and hopefully then I’ll be able to at least get some vocalless masters to put up here soon so you can check those out.

I took my camera down with the intention of taking some photos but ended up not bothering. It turned out to be way more fun to drink and listen to / play music. Who knew? So anyway, I turned up later than everyone else as I had to work the morning, but when I arrived we were still getting the drum tracks down. Jack has only been drumming – with us and at all – for about four months, and thanks to Jake skipping town we’ve not practiced as a band in the last two. So, it figures that those would take a while, but eventually they were done. Then Jake mocked us all by recording all of his bass parts in the first couple of takes. The bastard.

Ben got his guitar parts down in about an hour, including setup, and then it was my turn… I took about two hours, most of which was spent on our fastest and most complex song, ‘Like Corpses’. The final recording of it wasn’t perfect but it was about as tight as I was going to get it in the circumstances. Fortunately, after spending an hour repeatedly trying to get that bastard perfect, I went back to my favourite song (‘The Bus Song’) and nailed a perfect take. Woohoo! Fortunately Austin, 284 recording chap and he of Flatpig, convinced me to play with his Les Paul which was a damn good call. It is a nice guitar and for the first time I want something to play instead of my Epiphone SG.

The vocals took a while to get going since the first pair of headphones Ben tried were screwed up in a weird way: the recording came through fine, but his own vocals were entirely inaudible. So the first few takes were pretty bad! They got better once we switched out the ‘phones for another pair, but we didn’t have time to get them spot on as we had just 10 minutes to get some backing vox down for ‘Like Corpses’ (which has a three-headed shout at the start of the chorus) and ‘Down With The Ship’ (which I do some backing gruffness on during the chorus, and which Jake busts out his finest scream crunk screeching for the bridge). As luck would have it I got the broken headphones so couldn’t hear myself, but apparently my policy of “if in doubt, max the gruff” worked out.

It was fucking good fun and honestly, I can’t wait to get writing more songs and get back in the studio… it’s a helluva lot less pant-wetting than playing live, hahaha.

Yes, we have another show. A mere five and a half months after our first! The world of rock & roll is fast-paced and demanding, and many get left behind. But not we: we have seized the reigns and are clinging firmly to the frenzied horse of punk rock.

Okay, actually, our drummer quit right after Christmas, we took a couple of months out, and we found a new drummer in March/April. We’ve had about a half dozen practices now and everything is going well, so when we got offered the chance to play with Chillerton and Cheap Girls we jumped at the chance. Actually, I like Chillerton enough that I had a little jaw-drop moment when I heard. I must’ve listened to their side of the split EP with When All Else Fails a hundred times.

Anyway, we’re on first, so I’m guessing that’ll be at about half seven, eight-ish. After us is Kept By Casino (who were Jalopy), then Chillerton, and finally touring US band Cheap Girls.

We play melodic rock with a sort of punky edge. Lots of harmonics and octave chords. We like that. I’m not sure what Kept By Casino play, but I’ve read “too indie to be punk; too post-hardcore to be indie and too punk to be post-hardcore. Fans of McLusky take note!” MySpace page is here. Chillerton play melodic hardcore / gruff pop-punk in the vein of No Idea, but with a South Coast spin. Cheap Girls play power pop that’s reminiscent of Smoking Popes and the Lemonheads. It looks like being a varied, fun line-up, plus it’s £FREE! So do come down and check it out. And if you like what is fed to your ears, bung some cash in the donation bucket so that the tour can afford petrol and food.

Click on the flyer thumbnail to see a bigger version. Facebook event page here, Last.fm event page here.

[ P.S. I'll be getting back from ATP the same day as this gig, so I will be hilariously hungover and tired. I am sure that this is a recipe for Inevitable Good Times. ]

My band, Wrecktheplacefantastic, has its first gig next Friday 28th November. In case you don’t know the lineup, it’s Ben on lead guitar and vox, myself on rhythm guitar and shouting, Jake on bass guitar and screaming, and Fran on drums and not making vocal chordy noises. We play slightly punky melodic rock music – not sure exactly how to define it so why not come see us, then tell us what we are…

The gig itself is The Offcuts’ album launch show, where they’ll be releasing their first album ‘White Horses and the Unicorn’, which from what I’ve heard so far will be a fucking masterpiece of weird, spazzy, jazzy hardcore punk. Seriously, these guys rock. Also playing are the Rolo Tomassi-esque Charlie Uniform November Tango and the very very loud Bunny. If you’re on the Facebook, there are full details here.

If you want to have a listen to the bands:

The Offcuts | C.U.N.T. | Bunny

We don’t have any properly recorded material, soz. At least, nothing with real drums.

You can buy tickets directly directly from me, or Rounder Records / the Punker Bunker. They’re £4 in advance; alternatively, it’s £5 on the door.

Would be great to see some friendly faces out to show us support – for most of us it’ll be the first time we’ve played in front of a crowd. But if you can’t make it no worries – there will be other shows!