Record Label: Blang Records

Download Album: Monthly Journal

Our Rating:

Thomas Truax’s penchant for inventing peculiar mechanical instruments, such as a bastardised gramophone horn called the ‘Hornicator’, and ‘Mary Poppins’, whose components include spoons and a motorcycle headlight, have played no small part in the fact that he’s regarded as a steampunk musician.  But while this is something that immediately comes across when you can see his creations, it’s much more difficult to pin down a steampunk sound.  Maybe Truax is hoping to distract listeners from attempting to do so by imposing the conceit of Monthly Journal: its twelve songs were written and recorded at the rate of one a month throughout 2011.  Consequently they combine personal feelings with reflections on globally significant events.  As the year advances he seems to get into the swing of the project: early on, the line ‘It’s only January, and maybe things are really just beginning’, is a bit heavy handed, but subtler tracks like ‘Free As Fireflies In May’ work well.  Finally, ‘Family & Friends’ manages the rare trick of acting as a Christmas song that can be enjoyed all year round.  As might be expected of a record that has had such an unusual gestation, Monthly Journal is uneven, but there is charm in its eccentricity.

Record Label: Universal

Download Album: Ringo 2012

Our Rating:

On the cover of his seventeenth solo album, Ringo is portrayed with a star-shaped shadow.  This might indicate that he’s trying to reinvent himself, leaving behind the old Ringo Starr and heralding the arrival of the new Ringo 2012, or perhaps turning his back on the stardom he enjoyed with The Beatles.  But even a cursory listen to the album makes it clear that this is not the case.  He’s at his most wistfully retrospective with ‘In Liverpool’, in which he looks back at the heyday of his career.  But the whole album is similarly nostalgic in its tone – and is hardly forward looking in its musical style.  A role call of illustrious collaborators that includes Dave Stewart, Van Dyke Parks and Benmont Tench helps to keep things sounding sleek though, even if there’s no deviation from a standard blueprint.  A couple of covers – of the classic ‘Rock Island Line’ and Buddy Holly’s ‘Think It Over’, and some re-recordings of songs from early on in Ringo’s solo career – pad the album out pleasantly enough, but it’s the new songs that sounds sharper.  Ringo 2012 might not mark the reinvention that its title may imply, but certainly isn’t without its moments.

Winter must be nearing it’s end, as we have some of the first festival news of the year already.  The Camden Crawl has announced initial details, and are promising the best Crawl ever.  The full line-up, including over 250 acts, will be released soon but, in the meantime, we know this much:

Death In Vegas are headlining an opening night party at the Koko on 4th May, topping a bill that beings with four still to be announced acts, and ends with a special edition of the venue’s long running Club NME night.

Early bird tickets for the Crawl weekend  - 5th and 6th May – have sold out, but weekend passes, and tickets for the opening night party, are now on sale.

As ever, there will be a ridiculous amount of live music, comedy and spoken word, performing arts, and other fun and games.  To name just a few of the curators, visitors can expect to be hosted by the likes of Artrocker, Drowned In Sound, Moshi Moshi, Rockfeedback, Rough Trade Shops and Summer Sundae.

We’ll have more details as and when they are announced, so keep watching this space.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION 

Opening Night Party at KOKO:  Friday 4th May 2012 * 5pm – 4am

Camden Crawl Weekend: Saturday 5th & Sunday 6th May 2012 * 12pm – 4am both days

TICKETS: »  Opening Night Party @ KOKO £20.00

»  Weekend Ticket  £67.50

»  VIP Weekend Ticket £150.00

** ON SALE NOW **

Tickets available from the following outlets: 24 Hr CC Hotline 0871 2200 260 / See Tickets 020 7403 3331 OR buy online: www.thecamdencrawl.com 

VENUES: Abbey Tavern | Barfly | Black Cap | Black Heart | Camden Gardens | Camden Head | Camden Rock | The Cuban | Dingwalls | Earl Of Camden | Electric Ballroom | Enterprise | Grand Union | Heroes | Jazz Café | KOKO | Monarch | Purple Turtle | The Roundhouse | St Michael’s Church | Underworld | The Wheelbarrow

Record Label: Model Citizen

Download Album:

Our Rating:

Although nobody with a brain larger than a raisin actually believes that the world will end in 2012, the music press is for some reason full of claims that this year will signal the death of the guitar band.  A wave of new bands dressed in appallingly trendy jumpers are challenging this in a variety of novel ways, but Irish three piece The Minutes take things back to basics with their rugged rock ’n’ roll, and prove that you don’t need to do anything achingly innovative in order to refute rumours of the guitar’s imminent demise.  Their debut album Marcata is defiantly brash and perfectly paced, with nine songs and three Morning Glory style instrumental interludes that demonstrate the clout of six properly handled strings.  The songs are all gloriously potent, but ‘Black Keys’ stands out as an absolute steamroller of a track, while the swagger of ‘Fleetwood’ and the fat feedback-heavy fuzz of ‘I.M.T.O.D.’ – reminiscent of Black Rebel Motorcycle Club – are also highlights.  Who gives a shit if guitars are passé?  Rock ‘n’ roll might not be anything new, but it’s impossible to argue with a band who do it this well.

The Social might be operated by Heavenly Recordings, but tonight’s show is a City Slang double bill, with labelmates Dear Reader and Laura Gibson getting together to launch their new albums, which were both released a week ago.  The place is cosy in the extreme – the kind of place where encores have to follow on from the main set without a break, because the drummer can’t leave the stage without dismantling his kit – and as such it’s an ideal venue for the two singer songwriters to introduce the audience to their latest work.

Dear Reader, the musical project of South African-born Berlin-based Cherilyn MacNeil, is first up.  MacNeil, who performs the whole set from behind her keyboard, is accompanied by a band who struggle to fit all of their instruments on the stage.  They all seem to be multi-instrumentalists: violin, accordion, mandolin and trumpet are all employed, while the bass is passed around between them at various points.

The new Dear Reader album, Idealistic Animals, is a kind of musical bestiary: each track has the name of an animal, which is then used as a jumping off point for exploring more expansive themes and, ultimately, for examining MacNeil’s loss of religious faith.  There are no references to this inverted Damascene conversion tonight, however.  The instrumentation and occasionally baroque style means that an almost Arcade Fire level of grandiosity often seeps into the performance, but MacNeil seems content to focus on the small quirky details.  Thus the songs about animals are presented as nothing more than songs about animals.

Idealistic Animals isn’t the first time that MacNeil has used something drawn from nature as a starting point: this is proved by the highlight of the set, a rousing rendition of ‘Great White Bear’, taken from her 2009 album Replace Why With Funny.  Dear Reader conclude with ‘Monkey’, which climaxes with MacNeil repeating ‘You can go home now’.  But the prospect of Laura Gibson means that few are inclined to do so.

Gibson’s set is very much in the spirit of the album launch.  A couple of older tracks are thrown into the mix, but tonight is all about showcasing her new release, La Grande, and she plays every song from the new album.  She begins with the title track, and then moves onto the more delicate ‘Milk-Heavy, Pollen Eyed’: a superb way of starting the set, but one that left me concerned that she was using up La Grande’s finest tracks rather quickly.  However, her performance of the rest of the album is a reminder that La Grande is comprised almost entirely of songs of equally great strength, and so the quality of songwriting never lets up.

There are a few incidents that make Gibson’s set feel rather shambolic.  Early on, she forgets to move her capo and briefly plays her guitar out of tune.  Then there are lengthy backstories to several songs, and a lengthy hesitation while Dear Reader’s Cherilyn MacNeil is fetched to contribute harmonies to ‘Feather Lungs’.  But Gibson and her band take the minor mishaps in their stride, and ensure that things which might easily be considered annoying are instead almost charming.  But if these accidents must somehow be redeemed, then Gibson’s finer moments, such as her acapella performance of ‘The Rushing Dark’ with backing vocals provided by the audience, suffice in themselves.

Record Label: Domino

Download Album: Ester

Our Rating:

The trend for mixing a 60s pop vibe with 80s production values takes a darker turn with the release of Trailer Trash Tracys’ debut album.  There is a hazed out sense of unease in Ester’s emulsion of unthreatening melodies and dirty sonic mire that calls to mind Ariel Pink watching David Lynch films.  Indeed, the influence of Lynch’s collaborator Angelo Badalamenti has been widely ascribed to the album, and it’s impossible to refute this: not only because ‘You Wish You Were Red’ sound like a lo-fi version of the Twin Peaks theme, but also because the same bassline resurfaces in closing track ‘Turkish Heights’.  The prominent bass resonates throughout Ester, while flanged guitar notes resound in a weird orbit around the record’s pits and troughs.  This is no doubt the effect of the non-standard solfeggio scale that Trailer Trash Tracys apparently tuned their instruments to.  The resulting atmosphere is compelling; however, there is a dearth of tangible songs: the stronger melodies of ‘Dies In 55’ and ‘Candy Girl’ all too often find themselves buried in excretions of fuzz.  But while a few tighter hooks would be welcome, Trailer Trash Tracys deserve credit for pushing the C86 revival towards its inevitable mutation into shoegaze.

Record Label: Six Shooter Records

Download Album: Whitehorse

Our Rating:

Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland married in 2006, so any sense of surprise evoked by their decision to team up as Whitehorse stems not from the fact that they have recorded an album together, but that it’s taken this long for them to do so.  The material they’ve released as solo artists shows them to be artistically well matched – both tend to go in for rootsy songs whose subject matter generally focuses on drugs, alcohol and heartbreak.  They don’t stray far from that territory here; Whitehorse certainly don’t have to worry about succumbing to matrimonial soppiness.  The album’s combination of tenderness and grit is it’s great strength, but the weakness that’s hard to overlook is its brevity.  Only eight tracks are included, and once you’ve discounted the ephemeral bookends ‘Eulogy for Whiskers’ (parts I and II), you’re left with just six.  There is a pleasing diversity to those songs, though: ‘Killing Time Is Murder’ is the bluesiest, while ‘Passenger 24’ deploys a rock’n’roll stomp to great effect, and the folk element is provided by ‘Emerald Isle’ and ‘Night Owls’.  Although it doesn’t feel quite like a full album, this is nonetheless a welcome sampler of what Doucet and McClelland can do when they combine their talents.

Record Label: DFA

Download Album: Clay Class

Our Rating:

It was perhaps inevitable that Prinzhorn Dance School’s second album would be more accessible than their prickly debut, a record that consisted entirely of sententious lines being shouted over minimal post-punk instrumentation. But Clay Class goes so far as to offer, in the likes of ‘I Want You’ and ‘Crisis Team’, compositions that can be interpreted as actual songs, with guitar, bass, drums and vocals operating in unison, and to a tenable rhythm. The sound remains sparse, bleak even, but since this is reflected in wintry lyrics – ‘Skinny trees, naked in winter, Britain in bloom’, Tobin Prinz half-sings on ‘The Flora and Fauna of Britain in Bloom’ – the result is a cohesive mood that ensures the album remains engaging throughout. Elsewhere, as in ‘Usurper’, the focus is more existential. Lines like ‘I will replace you, he will replace me; to the vulture it’s agriculture’, show that Prinz and his musical partner Suzi Horn have swapped pretention for piquancy. If Prinzhorn Dance School’s first album was a way of setting the tone, preparing listeners for the challenges that the band pose, then Clay Class marks the point when everything comes together, with skewed humour, idiosyncratic attitude and, most importantly, the music itself interlocking perfectly.

Photo: Dietrich Ayala

About four years ago the Los Angeles hardcore punk band The Bronx decided to try something a little different and started playing mariachi songs on the side.  Hardcore and mariachi certainly aren’t two styles that have much in common on the face of it, but since hardcore punk began in California, and around thirty percent of LA’s inhabitants are Mexican, The Bronx’s surroundings are likely to have been influential in their decision to cross genres.  The mariachi side project may have started out as a bit of fun, but by 2009 it had spawned an album, Mariachi El Bronx.  Earlier this year they released their second mariachi record, also called Mariachi El Bronx (all three of The Bronx’s hardcore albums are called The Bronx so this love of eponymy is not new) and embarked on their first headline tour under their Mariachi El Bronx alter ego.

The Bronx’s frontman Matt Caughthran commented in an interview that ‘it’s the punkest thing in the world’ for The Bronx to release a mariachi album.  His punk ethos is evident in their take on the mariachi genre: mariachi songs often have romantic lyrics, but Mariachi El Bronx deviate from this by singing about jail time in ‘Cell Mates’, dead-end jobs in ‘Slave Labor’ and infidelity in ’48 Roses’.  Their attitude is altogether more punk too; I’m pretty sure that most traditional mariachi musicians don’t punctuate their between song banter with the word ‘motherfucker’ quite as often as Caughthran does.

In their mariachi incarnation, The Bronx expand to twice their usual size, due to the addition of a violin, two trumpets and an extra guitar.  I say guitar, but the instruments being strummed on stage are in fact a little more unusual; the traditional stringed instruments such as the guitarrón (which fulfils the function of bass) and the five-stringed vihuela are out on display.  The band’s costume are authentic too; they wear the charro outfits of traditional mariachis, thought they don’t bother with the wide hats.  This is probably a good thing, as on the fairly small stage at Kings College they would probably end up banging their brims together.

Caughthran is keen to stress the authenticy of what Mariachi El Bronx do, assuring the audience at one point that they watching something entirely real and true.  But he needn’t have bothered, as this comes across unmistakably in the music.  The musicianship is such that you can easily feel you’re being serenaded in Guadalajara, and although you might not draw such a conclusion from listening to The Bronx, Caughthran’s singing is really suited to the style.  The tracks from their most recent album come across as more noticeably mariachi, with the instrumental ‘Mariachi El Bronx’ (yet more eponymy…) being one highlight.  The strongest performance, however, is ‘Norteño Lights’, during which guitarist Joby J Talbot swaps his guitar for an accordion, and support act Tim Kasher joins the band to demonstrate that he too can play the vihuela

While typical mariachi music might have a certain appeal as a window into another culture, it can be rather staid, and the funny hats aren’t necessarily enough to keep you entertained for very long.  What’s so good about Mariachi El Bronx is the way that they so adeptly take the music of the mariachi tradition and make it appealing to a totally new audience.  Their records go some way to achieving this, but it’s in their live performances that the transition really comes across.  A significant chunk of the Kings College audience decamped post-gig to the Rhythm Factory in Whitechapel to hear The Bronx play some hardcore at a midnight show, and that pretty much sums both the versatility and the sheer energy of this band.

The noise begins even before the band come onstage, a couple of minutes of cascading feedback, a tremor that anticipates the impending earthquake.  It’s not a subtle sound, but no one’s complaining: when you go see a group called Amplifier, you expect a certain degree of volume.  The band begin with some voracious strumming; two guitars and a bass working in unison to produce a huge build-up.  They open with the epic sprawl of ‘Forever And More’, the closing track from their latest album, The Octopus.  On the record, this track works almost as a comedown, but it’s also an effective way of easing into the gig.

Amplifier have gone through various difficulties with labels as the record industry has fallen on hard times, so The Octopus is entirely self-released, and comes across very much as a labour of love. It’s an epic double album, and its titular cephalopod seems to have become a symbol for the band.  It is displayed behind the band on stage, and two more slightly smaller octopi hang on either side.  The band themselves wear black shirts and ties that bear the octopus logo.  Add to this the merch sported by the band’s fans, and the effect is almost like standing a sea bed while dozen’s of eight-limbed creatures swim around in the murky waters

The music stretches and reaches out like tentacles too, as Amplifier layer riff onto riff and deviate into expansive solos.  They bring the groove with their second song, the older track ‘Motorhead’.  This song has no connection with the eponymous track typically belted out by Lemmy and Co., but it does share with it some pretty fearsome heaviness.  With ‘The Wave’ we’re led into another sprawling epic that showcases the band’s musicianship.  It’s gloriously bombastic, with frontman Sel Balamir declaring, ‘I’m gonna climb inside of my time machine, into another dimension.’  The groove is then reprised with the heavy riffing of ‘Interglacial Spell’.

The title track from The Octopus gets a huge response from the audience when Balamir announces it, and proves to be a highlight of the set.  The bass riff that holds the song together is even more dominant when it’s played live by Neil Mahony, but as the track builds towards its climax each instrument involved sounds just as powerful.  ‘Golden Ratio’ is another standout, alternating between fast-paced shredding and funky riffs.

Twelve songs are played in total: that might not sound like a lot, but bear in mind that Amplifier play drawn out prog-inflected tracks that twist and turn, and its impossible to feel short-changed.  Nonetheless, there was a desire for more from both band and audience.  A club night at Islington Academy meant that Amplifier played an early show, so it was over by ten o’ clock. ‘We’ve played for an hour and a half and we’d like to play another hour’, says Balamir before the final track, ‘But we can’t, because there’s a disco.’  He follows this with, ‘Let’s here it for the disco’, to which the audience responds with a chorus of boos.  Amplifier’s decision to self-release The Octopus and take a more uncompromising route with their music was never going to be free of risk, so it’s great to see everything coming together so successfully when they play live.