Loud And Quiet

So here it is, the sun-drenched ‘Marigold’. And if that’s not zeitgeist-y enough for you, you know where Idles and Sleaford Mods are.

They’re also on tour at the following places:

Bristol, Marble Factory – 31 January (Supporting Omar Souleyman)
Marrakech, Beat Hotel – 31 March
Reading, Are You Listening? – 27 April
London, Village Underground – 1 May
Bristol, Exchange – 8 May
Sheffield, Picture House Social – 15 May
Glasgow, Broadcast – 16 May
Manchester, YES – 17 May

You could look upon a certain type of Spanish hotel bar as being a slightly grim place – a bunch of pink-skinned Brits smelling of Aftersun, drinking German lager and watching the “live entertainment” advertised in reception earlier in the day. We all know it’s usually a weary local with an accordion or someone doing Ed Sheeran covers.

Family Time are a band. Two Spaniards who left London for the island of Mallorca. Once they’d set up a studio, recorded a few songs they decided to assemble a group and take them on tour. Except, Mallorca doesn’t really have a string of Academy venues to try out that material. Hence why they took it out in front of the people enjoying their all-inclusive package holidays (ATOL protected).

Check out ‘Magic Abyss Hotel’ below. The track’s on streaming services tomorrow (Friday 26 October).

Family Time play The Shacklewell Arms on 16 November, and The Victoria (both in London) on 29 November.

It was Alex Cameron who first turned us onto Jackie Cohen. Earlier this year she headed out on the road in the US with Al Cam and the crew and we got into ‘Tacoma Night Terror Part 1: I’ve Got The Blues’ – Jackie’s debut EP.

Today (October 12) she shares ‘Tacoma Night Terror Part 2: Self-Fulfilling Elegy’ a fresh collection of tracks. Loud And Quiet‘s Katie Beswick spoke to Cohen recently to hear her story – from joining Foxygen as a backing singer through to recording the majority of these early tracks with The Lemon Twigs and her husband Jonathan Rado. Recently she’s been in Virginia recording her first album at Spacebomb HQ (she’s signed to the label), so there’s more music to come.

In the meantime check out the video for the opening track from the EP below, ‘Make U Sick’. More than relatable to anyone who’s suffered heartbreak, cried so much their nose hurts and wanted to stick their head in a waste paper bin.

Oh, and she’s also in the UK soon supporting Mac DeMarco and playing a show with SASAMI at London’s Shacklewell Arms on Thursday 1 November. 

I think we can all agree that ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ is the greatest pop song of the 1980s. Still. Regardless of how many times you’ve heard it in bad parody films. Even when Simple Minds played it on Strictly last year, looking not like they did in ’85 (and they looked bad then), it wasn’t enough to crap on the song itself.

This is only relevant because today we were sent an album by Part Time – aka LA experimental pop artist David Loca – which sounds like it belongs in a John Hughes movie. We’d never heard of Loca, although maybe you have – he’s released over 10 albums already, with the forthcoming ‘Spell #6’ being his sixth “official album.”

The track below, featuring Ariel Pink, alludes to how romantically mopey the new album is, although not as much as ‘Spell #6”s opening track, ‘Before You Fall Apart’. That’s not online yet, so you’ll have to make do with ‘I Can Treat You Better’ for now. It’s still pretty good.

The rest of the album will be out via Tough Love Records on 2 November 2018. If you like this, stay tuned. Although putting you fist in the air when you do hear ‘Don’t You Forget About Me’ – yeah, that really fucks that song.

Remember when Fat White Family first turned up? The shows were a spectacle, but there was an overriding sense of unease. A sense of the wrong, the unpleasant, of their being attracted to darkness. That’s continued even if these days they’ve moved onto bigger stages.

Newcomers The Starlight Magic Hour, the Manchester/London outfit, have a similar feel. Over the past 12 months they’ve been regularly playing shows in those major cities. London-based bookers Permanent Creeps – who’ve put on shows by the likes of Vulgarians, Hotel Lux and, the aforementioned mentioned Fat Whites – are putting out their their new material. And they’ve detected a similar grim magnetism in it.

Their first release via the label is ‘Song To Bethy’, the lead single from a new EP coming out in September. They play a show at the Brixton Windmill on 14 September to mark that occasion.

The track, a Pogues-y macabre country-rock number where the main riff is one of them whistling, is officially released on digital platforms on 23 August. In the meantime, check it out below.

Photo by: Through The Eyes Of Ruby

Here’s a new track by an artist who we still have no idea who it is. We do know that Goatman is the leader of enigmatic Swedish jam band GOAT, but that’s about it. He doesn’t speak often, but when he does, it’s Goatman who speaks for the rest of the band (who might not even have names themselves), and now he’s releasing music away from the group for the first time.

Identity doesn’t really matter because that’s all part of the fun with GOAT. What we do know is that this new track, ‘Jaam Ak Salam’, was recorded at GOAT’s studio in Korpilombolo at the end of last year. There’s also an album – ‘Rhythms’ – coming out on 12 October via Rocket Recordings.

This track is good because it doesn’t really sound like GOAT. Instead it’s like a Ethiopian jazz record rescued from record store obscurity that also channels the sound of James Brown in the late ’60s. It’s a groovy number.

Last year, after more than a decade, the Too Pure Singles Club came to an end. It’d been a ride – more than 120 releases, including early recordings by the likes of Pulled Apart By Horses, Bear Hands and Drahla.

Loud And Quiet’s Dom Haley charted the story of the label before it closed its doors in November 2017.

But that label’s indefatigable spirit lives on. Today sees the launch of Dipped In Gold Recordings. It’s not a monthly subscription club by Too Pure, instead sharing the most exciting new sounds they come across.

This fresh chapter begins with a release from Mush. The Leeds four-piece share ‘Gig Economy’ – four minutes of addictive, scratchy, lo-fi art-rock. It comes out on 14 September. Hey, if you like it, you can even pre-order it now.

Photo by: Fred Galluci 

Well, that was fun. The past two years Adrian Flanagan (Eccentronic Research Council) and Dean Honer (All Seeing I) spent time turning their originally fictional band The Moonlandingz into a tangible, touring circus. Sometimes their shows saw Johnny Rocket (Lias Saoudi) where earrings made out of a loaf of bread and other times stuff a waterproof poncho up his bum. It was highly entertaining.

But for the moment – at least – The Moonlandingz are back in their box, and the duo have a new project to play with. Enter: INTERNATIONAL TEACHERS OF POP. Which also includes (sometimes) vocalist with The Soundcarriers and Whyte Horses Leonore Wheatley.

They’re calling it “nerd disco”. They only started making music at the beginning of this year – the trio came together at a Circuit Bending workshop in South Yorkshire (where Leonore teaches music). Their first show was supporting Jarvis Cocker at a show in The Devil’s Arse (a cave in Derbyshire, proper name Peak Cavern).

You can hear their debut single ‘Age Of The Train’ below. A groovy love letter to our beloved rail network – y’know, before it turned into an expensive, shambolic mess.

It’s out on Desolate Spools/Republic Of Music form today (12 July).

INTERNATIONAL TEACHERS OF POP will also play the following live dates:

The Social, London – 13 July (get free tickets)
Somerset House, London – 15 July (supporting Roisin Murphy)
Bluedot Festival, Jodrell Bank – 20 July
Green Man, Crickhowell – 16 August
Electric Fields, Drumlanrig Castle – 31 August

Ian Svenonius has spent enough time in music – more specifically punk rock ‘n’ roll – to know what it is. Know how it works. Know that if you don’t have some fun with it and its familiar tropes you’ll quickly go insane. After “a lifetime in the trenches” playing with the likes of Nation of Ulysses, The Make-Up, Weird War, XYZ and Chain and The Gang (there’s more) and writing a number of books (try Supernatural Strategies for Making a Rock ‘n’ Roll Group for starters) last year he went solo under the name Escape-ism. He announced the project with the instructively titled debut ‘Introduction to Escape-ism’.

Now, it’s time for Stage Two. On 7 September Escape-ism will release their second album ‘The Lost Record’ on Merge. The engaging myth of the ‘lost record’ continues to gain traction – those albums often initially overlooked or never released gathering dust in someone’s tool shed to one day be discovered and gloriously celebrated as an excavated classic. Escape-ism say they’ve done that but just cut out all the faff in the middle – all the decades, and the waiting. Basically just cut to the chase with a classic.

In an accompanying essay announcing the release Johnny Sincere (ahem!) writes:

“The process a record has to go through to be “lost” – and then found again – is arduous. It’s also quite risky, since most lost records are really just lost: tossed aside and forgotten forever.

So, when Escape-ism – the most exciting group in the world – announced its new and highly anticipated release ‘The Lost Record’, it created a commotion. For some, it seemed unfair for Escape-ism to jump ahead of the usual protocol and not go through the degradation that a historic “lost record” suffers: the endless time spent in a bin in the basement or a remote warehouse. Unshipped, unloved, unappreciated.

But for Escape-ism, it seemed easier to circumvent the rigmarole and just get on with it.”

‘The Lost Record’ is being previewed by this new song ‘Nothing Personal’. Ian explains:

“It’s a super-8 movie filmed by Alexandra Cabral and featuring Zumi and Ariana Papademetropoulos. The song and video explores the moral system underpinning capitalism, and visually contextualizes it as another aberrant and sinister cult ideology.”

Escape-ism have also announced a UK tour, they’ll be calling at:

Moth Club, London – 13 September
Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow – 14
The Crescent, York – 15
The Peer Hat, Manchester – 16
TBA, Margate – 17
The Rose Hill, Brighton – 18

Photo by: Alexandra Cabral  

It’s literally just over a year ago that audiobooks wrote ‘Hot Salt’. Almost to the day in fact. As the duo, Fine Art student Evangeline Ling and music producer David Wrench, explain in our recent interview feature the song came to them on the longest day of 2017. “We just wanted something we could dance to on summer solstice,” offered Wrench. “It happened by accident, we just said, ‘oh, we’ve written a pop song.'”

It’s a really good pop song, and now it’s one with a really good video. One where the twosome mostly dance in a field, but somehow make it infinitely more interesting than that sounds. To be honest, it’s not unlike audiobooks’ infectious live show which is a total, unbridled blast.

audiobooks released ‘Gothenburg EP’, they debut EP, back in April on Heavenly Recordings.