screeching vocals | Misfit City

Tag Archives: screeching vocals

September 2015 – upcoming gigs – Gong’s Dave Sturt and friends travel the world from Derbyshire on the 23rd; London gets more Daylight Music eclectica plus a Blacklisters/Joeyfat/Himself jabber-rock summit on the 26th

Here are details on some more interesting concerts coming up later this month. These run the gamut from soft psychedelic world-folk atmospherics to jabbering electric art-punk noise and sprechtstimme via dream-folk, caustic love songs and extended-technique art-rock instrumentals. (It was a shame to hear about the cancellation of the Charles Hayward gig in London on the 23rd – taking its ANTA, Gnob and Kavus Torabi support slots with it – but I’m sure that something similar will be rescheduled for anyone in need of their art-mash/stoner/prog/psych/metal salad…)

Dave Sturt presents An Evening of Dreams & Absurdities (Upstairs @ The Red Lion, Market Place, Wirksworth, Matlock, Derbyshire, DE4 4ET, UK, 23rd September 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.00

As part of the Wirksworth Festival Fringe, Dave Sturt (bass guitarist with Gong, Bill Nelson, Steve Hillage and Jade Warrior, as well as being half of Cipher) showcases tracks from his forthcoming solo album ‘Dreams & Absurdities’ in an evening of world-class all-instrumental musicianship featuring beautiful eclectic music, soundscapes and various field recordings from Gong tours and elsewhere. The music is “mostly mellow and ambient – somewhere between melancholy and elation.”

For the performance, Dave will be accompanied by three guests. Chris Ellis (guitar and piano) is a multi-instrumentalist/singer-songwriter/actor, an ex-member of Anglesey band Ghostriders, and an award-winning soundtrack composer – he’s also a collaborator with Dave on the Past Lives Project (which recreates the recent ancestral histories of British communities by resurrecting their old cinefilm recordings and setting them to new music). Brian Boothby (low whistle, djembe) is an acclaimed folk musician, dramatist and writer and a member of the Derbyshire mixed-arts collective Genius Loci. Jeff Davenport (drums, percussion, HandSonic pad) has worked with jazz musicians Andy Sheppard and Phil Robson, pop artists James Morrison and Laura Mayne, and currently collaborates regularly with “Silent Pianist” Neil Brand providing soundracks to silent films, as well as working in Europe and the Far East on various projects with all manner of musicians.

Up-to-date details here and here, with tickets available online from here or available from Traid Links via email enquiry.

* * * * * * * *

On the last post, I plugged a London double event on the 19th – a day with a Daylight Music concert at midday and a noisier rock gig in the evening (both events which are still about to happen as I post this). In another week’s time, history’s repeating (fortunately not as farce, though anyone familiar with the bands in the evening show can expect some twists and jabs of humour) so here’s what’s coming up on September 26th…

Daylight Music 200: Ex-Easter Island Head + French For Rabbits + Louis Barabbas, plus a photo exhibition (Union Chapel, Compton Terrace, Islington, London, N1 2UN, UK – Saturday 26th September 2015, 12.00pm-2.00pm) – free entry, suggested donation £5.00

An extra special event to celebrate the 200th Daylight Music, featuring some of the most popular acts from the last six years (643 performances by 530 different acts; 15,254 cups of tea or coffee drunk; 9,863 slices of cake scoffed; 5,003 pieces of quiche devoured) and during which we’ll be raising funds for Daylight Music in 2016.

Ex-Easter Island Head are a Liverpool based musical collective composing and performing music for solid-body electric guitar, percussion and other instruments. They have performed their original compositions solo, as a duo, trio, quartet and as a large ensemble across a wide variety of events from site-specific installation works to live film scores. They create a sensation whenever they play. If you’ve never seen musicians hitting electric guitars with mallets before, then cancel all other plans for the day and head down.

French For Rabbits hail from the remote natural setting of Waikuku Beach, in New Zealand’s South Island. Vocalist Brooke Singer expresses intimate narratives against the cast of the damp colonial cold; her voice delicately steeled against winsome guitar lines and the eerie instrumentation of her bandmates. It’s a weather-beaten dreamscape, nostalgic for warmth and hopefully lilting towards sunnier climes.

Louis Barabbas is a writer, performer and label director, best known for caustic love songs and energetic stage shows that leave you pumped up and breathless.

The icing on the cake this week is an instrumental soundscape provided by Irish singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Adrian Crowley, who (over his six-album career) has been described by the Independent as “a master of understatement” and cited by Ryan Adams as the answer to the question “who’s the best songwriter that no one’s heard of?”

To celebrate the fantastic photography taken throughout the lifespan of Daylight Music by a very talented bunch of volunteer photographers, there will be a lo-fi photo exhibition consisting of 200 postcards on the pews of the chapel for people to take away; plus there will be a limited numbers of brochures to buy featuring all of the photographs.

More information on the concert is here.

In the evening, there’s a change of pace and milieu over in Hackney as post-hardcore rubs up against a bit of playful English Dada. I’ve got a liking for those occasions when rock music drives itself up against persistent, wayward speech and stubs its toes on it; and this gig will offer plenty of opportunities for that…

Blacklisters + Joeyfat + Himself (Pink Mist @ The Shacklewell Arms, 71 Shacklewell Lane, London, E8 2EB, UK, Saturday 26th September 2015, 8.00pm) – £8.00

Blacklisters’ aggressive, confrontational and darkly humorous performances have earned them a reputation as one of the best acts on the UK underground, drawing comparisons to the likes of The Jesus Lizard and Pissed Jeans. Their debut album ‘BLKLSTRS’ was released in 2012 to critical acclaim, landing them supports with Scratch Acid, Pig Destroyer, Future of the Left and Big Business, as well as a live session at Maida Vale studios for the Radio 1 Rock Show. Tonight’s special show is in support of their fearsome new record ‘Adult’ on Smalltown America. Produced by Matt Johnson (aka MJ of Hookworms) the album is a clear progression for the band and sees them fuse abstract art-noise with the brutally minimalist riffs that first put them on the radar.

Also playing are amorphous cult stalwarts Joeyfat, a band who’ve been defying conventions of “band logic” longer than most of us have been able to get into shows at all. Their sinewy math-inspired spoken-word has seen them share stages with the likes of Bilge Pump, S*M*A*S*H, Clearlake, Lords, Dartz, Art Brut, Trencher and Green Day, obviously. Catch them at this rare London show.

Direct from Leeds (unless they stopped off some place on the way), Himself’s shouty/talky interactive noise rock has been winning them plaudits up and down the company, including from Radio’s Daniel P. Carter who invited them to record a live session for the Radio 1 Rock Show earlier this year.

Tickets for the Shacklewell Arms gig are available here and here. Note that this is an 18+ event.

Tags: abrasion, ANTA, Arctic Circle (promoter), Bill Nelson, Blacklisters, Brian Boothby, Charles Hayward, Chris Ellis, Dave Sturt, Daylight Music (event), deconstruction, drift and float, Ex-Easter Island Head, feral snarl, free events, French For Rabbits, Ghostriders, Gnob, Gong, Himself, Hookworms, humour in music, intriguingly mixed bags, Ireland, Jade Warrior, Jeff Davenport, Joeyfat, Kavus Torabi, Leeds (England), listening to women, live concerts, Liverpool (England), London (England), Louis Barabbas, Manchester (England), men and women singing together, New Zealand, Past Lives Project, Pink Mist (event), rattlebag, screeching vocals, sprechstimme, Steve Hillage, stormy weather, the text is important, Tunbridge Wells (England), whisper to scream, Wirksworth (England), Wirksworth Festival (event)

February 2012 – EP reviews – Kabul Golf Club’s ‘Le Bal du Rat Mort’ EP, 2012 (“brutal flying bricks of riffage”)

15 Feb

Kabul Golf Club: ‘Le Bal Du Rat Mort’ EP

A self-styled “pretty young Belgian band” with a penchant for wearing carnival heads, Kabul Golf Club aren’t quite your standard hardcore punk outfit. It’s not just the occasional headgear – even on their debut EP, they butt against the limitations of the form, just as any free-thinking punk should, but not enough do. With Shellac in their lineage of long term influences (and with Lightning Bolt and Blood Brothers in the more recent set) we should expect no less.

Admittedly, they’re not reinventing everything. Singer Floky is still restricted to three degrees of the same top-of-the-lungs hardcore screech. To give him credit, he does manage to inject a little more character into it than most: mastering a tinge of despairing vertigo or the horrified yell of a man falling off the sun. But in many respects his voice is just another rhythmic instrument, its verbal interjections of frustration, resistance and bellowing introspection functioning like an additional cymbal hit or another blind-corner snarl of snaggy bass. The rhythm section of Mattes and Sweeckhoorn pin down the rest of the hardcore content – the jumps and sallies of rhythm, the brutal flying bricks of riffage.

This leaves Floky and the band’s other guitarist, Jeandana, free to charge into a wallowing thresh of disjointed, expressive guitars. It’s here that Kabul Golf Club excel, flinging around a series of wails, roars and hardware noises reminiscent of a lusty scuffle between Hendrix and Tom Morello (or between Sonic Youth and Adrian Belew). While bass and drums hold the band together, the guitars stretch it like taffy, and it’s this that provides the interest. Over the machine-gun riff and buzz-bass of Bits of Freedom they squeal and nose into places they shouldn’t go, shaking the song ever more feverishly as the pace becomes more and more frenetic.

Fast Moving Consumer Goods is a King Crimson-ish march along an atonal scale, minimal in conception, maximal in juddering aggression. Occasionally a Floky vocal becomes intelligible – “just let it go… rats on a sinking ship… wasteground… love has left, love has left.” Beyond his jerky codes the whole story is in the guitars as they scream and fold, balanced precariously on the jouncing riff like surfers in an earthquake. Floky may screech “no sense of urgency” in Minus 45; but everything in the song belies this, from the precision bounce of the ever-changing, ever-dodging rhythms to the warping screeches of the instrumental lines. Somewhere in the middle there’s even a robotic burst of Autotune, before the final collapse into chaos: a grumbling sagging bass drone, plus jingles and swerves of broken-down guitar. Even after the song’s tumbled off its own pulse to lie twisted and sprawled on the ground, an inventive fury continues to twitch the corpse.

If anything, the music gets even more frantic as the EP progresses. 5 Minutes 2 Midnight sprains its own time count, loses itself in a grinding, spasming bounce and inflammatory sprays of noise. By the time we arrive at Demon Days, it’s as if the guitars are sprawling in sheer resistance: Jeandana and Floky yank them violently off-pitch to hit the mood. The resulting trapped riff screams across the soundfield like a gutted tin can, wrapped around the ear.

Assuming that you can take noise rock, ‘Le Bal Du Rat Mort’ is full of rewarding, jagged surprises, and becomes more and more intriguing every time you replay it.

Kabul Golf Club: ‘Le Bal Du Rat Mort’
Uproar for Veneration, UVF007 (5419999105439)
CD/download EP
Released: 10th February 2012

Buy it from:
CD from Rough Trade Benelux: download via iTunes.

Kabul Golf Club online:

Tags: Belgium, glorious twitch, Kabul Golf Club, screeching vocals

Comments Leave a Comment
Categories 2012, chaos music, EP reviews, experimental/avant-garde rock, hardcore, math rock, noise, noise rock, punk rock, reviews, rock

February 2011 – EP reviews – The Strzebonsky Noizescene’s ‘I Think We’re On to Something’ (“a zigzagging wall of brown sound”)

10 Feb

The Strzebonsky Noizescene: ‘I Think We’re On To Something’

Like Death From Above 1979 and Lightning Bolt before them, Belgian punk duo The Strzebonsky Noizescene are guitarless. Throughout most of their debut EP, hollering drummer Bert Jacobs plays his kit straight off the fuzzed-up scrunch of Stijn Preuveneers’ bass guitar, and nothing else. Influences aside, perhaps they like each other well enough not to bother with bandmates; perhaps they prefer the uncluttered guttural bounce of four fat strings and a drumkit.

On some of the tracks, it doesn’t make much difference. Often the Noizescene just play like a standard punk rock trio stretching out to cover a night when the guitarist never turned up. Stijn’s chorused tone is broad, fuzzy and high-toned enough to carry the songs alone – played straight and medium-paced, The Zetea Letters easily carries the buzzing irritation and sour-chew urgency of mainstream punk. Similarly, Keep On Dreaming and You Might Think You Know Me cover many of the usual punk sentiments and moves, fanning out across a variety of styles from the straight-ahead pound-away to the side-to-side flail and choppy one-word-at-a-time yelp.

Though their Death From Above 1979 influences hang heavy, sometimes the Noizescene’s boyish shout and growl recalls the flinching swagger of the guitarless, multi-bassed British trio Monkey Boy. On There Is No Plan B, a zigzagging wall of brown sound skates forwards in alternate rushes and swung jitters while Bert takes aim at a despondent quitter: “Holding your head, you’re as good as dead… / just stay in your heaven of misery.” What the Noizescene can also bring to the table is a little of the hot-space awareness of a band that sometimes remembers that it’s a rhythm section, and one which doesn’t have to hold the time down for anyone except themselves. Street-chanting punk vocals aside, Bert and Stijn are more outrightly musical than many of their peers and they sometimes allow themselves to spread out into more interesting sounds. When it’s not covering an abrasive stamp of riff, the bass occasionally swells up and deforms as if it’s been wrapped and smeared around a giant church bell.

In spite of this, the Noizescene need extra elements to really pick up the music, which becomes more interesting when they have something or someone to play against. In Cult Of Personality, their sparring partner’s the bristling ghost of Richard Nixon. The band plays against and around a defensive snippet of the beleaguered President facing a convention of newspaper editors just as Watergate was unzipping and unravelling him. “In all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service,” grits Tricky Dicky. “I welcome this kind of examination, people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook. I have earned everything I have got.” Meanwhile, The Strzebonsky Noizescene work away noisily like a squad of intrusive builders, wobbling the scenery and spoiling the shot. Mockingly, they sing back at him – “Let me build you a cult of personality – / you will love me, nothing to doubt here… / The point is to listen and don’t ask why / all the worst is missing.”

While neither Bert nor Stijn own up to playing them, the addition of hooting, squirting cheap-synthesizer parts open up the Strzebonsky noise even further. On When The Curtain Falls their conventional slam-along of fuzz bass and chuffing drums is draped in minimal post-punk keyboard padding and then overtaken by a cheeky bombastic keyboard line which wraps around it like a brightly coloured cable round a pipe, while the band run junk mail snippets through a speech synthesizer. In the final track – The Strzebonsky Ravescene – the band go enthusiastically dance-punk, remixing themselves into a stew of driven chemical beats and a host of wasp-like analogue synths. For a band pushing at the form, it sounds like the way forward.

The Strzebonsky Noizescene: ‘I Think We’re On To Something’
The Strzebonsky Noizescene (self-released – no catalogue number or barcode)
Download-only EP
Released: 4th February 2011

Buy it from:
Bandcamp

The Strzebonsky Noizescene online:

Tags: Belgium, Bert Jacobs, screeching vocals, Stijn Preuveneers, The Strzebonsky Noizescene

Comments 1 Comment
Categories 2011, alternative rock, dance-punk, EP reviews, post-punk, punk rock, reviews, rock

July 1999 – album reviews – Cay’s ‘Nature Creates Freaks’ (“red-hot gravelly tones”)

6 Jul

Cay: ‘Nature Creates Freaks’

On a quick listen you might be tempted to put Cay straight into the femme-noise box, however much you thrill to them. There’s the loose-wired slangy racket of the two guitars, the American-styled punk roars of instruments and voice, the general “let-off-the-leash”-ness of this album. Not least, there’s the striking vocal and visual presence of Anet Mook up front; defiantly anti-glam but compelling the attention anyway, ripping the frets out of her guitar and scorching her vocal chords with her flammable yell.

There’s also the album’s clutch of rackety singles. The mixture of pattering, jangling drag-racer suspension and blazing gasoline riffola in ‘Better Than Myself’; the pure punk venom of ‘Princes and Princesses’ which all but drags a friend out of the comfort of collusion, spitting and chiding (“perverted decent little thing, I hate your guts cos they don’t exist”) prior to burning away with her down the road as if trying to rewrite ‘Thelma & Louise’ as guitar flare. The violence of ‘Neurons Like Brandy’, which feeds off a familiar Nirvana-ish alternation of quiet and loud, but sped up to a unnerving back’n’forth flick between stroke and punch; all to display the swerving of a love shot through with pills and booze, bonds and walls, focus and absence… of contradictions that won’t hold, but won’t break easily enough.

Not that the album tracks give much away to the singles, either. ‘Reasonable Ease in Chilled Out Conditions’ leaps around its cage with enough aggression to punch out my speakers, and possibly my lights too. Cay attack the song as if they’re trying to singlehandedly relaunch punk in a shower of crunching bass and Uzi drum slams. Here, Anet sings like a suave skinning knife: her harsh, vicious slurs crack like a whip, and she chews words like gum. “And all the snow will melt away, / another week’ll come to stay, / to help you pull your little scam… / ‘Cos in the end you’re leaving like a sound!“ To be honest, I don’t know what the fuck she’s on about (cocaine madness, perhaps) but when Cay can fire it fifty miles up into the air via ten million volts of guitar I don’t particularly care.

There’s enough unleashed rage here to satisfy the grrlpunk board, though the fact that the other three Caypeople are men might brand them, to anyone drawing up the passports, as more Blondie than Bikini Kill. Yet… there sounds as if there’s more to Cay than just a femme-fronted burst of punk power which’ll burn itself out in a sorry gulp of lost fuel in a year or two. The truly compulsive thing about Anet’s voice isn’t the anger; it’s the permanent note of astonishment that cuts through those red-hot gravelly tones. It’s a yelp of instant reaction to anything (whether it’s introspection or copping an insult). It makes her someone who’s always on, always with the nerve to jump back or jump in.

In counterpart, there’s the detail work performed by Nicky Oloffson, Cay’s deceptively quiet-mannered guitarist and lateral thinker. He brings the odd noises, the jazz-chords that slip questions in; the art-textures that clink and keen in the mix, the sweet strums and battered song-sighs that break up the heat-blasts. Cay might have more of a chance of a commercial breakthrough than most – there’s an arresting hookiness balancing their controlled chaos – but there’s clearly an art-rock band evolving inside this tight, powerful metalcore package.

As well as the usual punky suspects, Cay’s love-list includes the evolving, protean King Crimson. This is a good sign, and explains how they can pull off such a wondrous effort as the album’s title track – a beautiful mix of punk power-chords, an ecstatically bruised and revelatory vocal from Anet, and a long moment when the rock rolls aside to reveal a heartfelt swathe of inner-space guitar melodies. On the rougher end, it also explains the parade of tempo-chopping riffs on Senseless – skirting points from ‘Purple Haze’ and ‘Larks Tongues in Aspic’ through to Nomeansno and fully enraged hardcore punk, with a slam of alarm bells.

And then there are Anet’s lyrics, which dodge gesture politics or party rhetoric (of either kind). Most of the time they’re both simple and opaque. There’s some ragged individualism, some slippage between connections and independence. More often, though, they’re a discombobulated and shifting matrix of ideas, truths and motivations (with a hefty sprinkling of drug talk and quarrelling). They show life as it tends to appear to the over-curious – suspect; tenuously woven together. Something blurred by the changing loyalties and dependencies of unsettled lives where there are more questions and rejections than there are answers.

On the country-ish billow and scrub of ‘Come Out’, Anet is certainly questioning, though she’s questioning no-one in particular unless she’s trying to put a face onto the forces of chance. Cay seem to accept the unreliability and conflict in human flux… and unusually, they even accept their own. In the middle of the colossally aggressive guitar screams and sardonic vocal squalls in ‘Reasonable Ease in Chilled Out Conditions’, Cay slip gently into a embracing strum while Anet sighs “when we both come down, when we’re both worn out, / that’s where we should meet…”

A moment of unlikely grace, but then Cay are a band with unexpected depths.

Cay: ‘Nature Creates Freaks’
EastWest Records, 3984277462 / 3984277461
CD/vinyl album
Released: 5th July 1999

Get it from:
Bandcamp (CD or vinyl best obtained second-hand)

Cay online:

Tags: abrasion, Anet Mook, Cay, ever-so-slightly prog, feral snarl, listening to women, London (England), Mark Bullock, murmur to wail, Nicky Olofsson, not what it seems, screeching vocals, stormy weather, Tom Harrison

Comments 2 Comments
Categories 1999, album reviews, alternative rock, garage punk, grunge rock, hard rock, punk rock, reviews, rock

Search

Misfit City

September 2015 – upcoming gigs – Gong’s Dave Sturt and friends travel the world from Derbyshire on the 23rd; London gets more Daylight Music eclectica plus a Blacklisters/Joeyfat/Himself jabber-rock summit on the 26th

February 2012 – EP reviews – Kabul Golf Club’s ‘Le Bal du Rat Mort’ EP, 2012 (“brutal flying bricks of riffage”)

February 2011 – EP reviews – The Strzebonsky Noizescene’s ‘I Think We’re On to Something’ (“a zigzagging wall of brown sound”)

July 1999 – album reviews – Cay’s ‘Nature Creates Freaks’ (“red-hot gravelly tones”)

Archives

Calendar

Blog Stats

Recent Posts

All Categories

Tags

Top Clicks

Search

Follow Blog

Blogs which Misfit City follows:

Search

Misfit City

September 2015 – upcoming gigs – Gong’s Dave Sturt and friends travel the world from Derbyshire on the 23rd; London gets more Daylight Music eclectica plus a Blacklisters/Joeyfat/Himself jabber-rock summit on the 26th

Share this:

February 2012 – EP reviews – Kabul Golf Club’s ‘Le Bal du Rat Mort’ EP, 2012 (“brutal flying bricks of riffage”)

Share this:

February 2011 – EP reviews – The Strzebonsky Noizescene’s ‘I Think We’re On to Something’ (“a zigzagging wall of brown sound”)

Share this:

July 1999 – album reviews – Cay’s ‘Nature Creates Freaks’ (“red-hot gravelly tones”)

Share this:

Archives

Calendar

Blog Stats

Recent Posts

Category Cloud

All Categories

Tags

Top Clicks

Search

Follow Blog

Blogs which Misfit City follows: