After all the time I spent cranking out reviews on this site, I’m not intending to deep-six it; it’ll stay here, and maybe I’ll pop in every once in a while when I have something to say about music or a specific record or show or whatever. But from this point forward I have to accept that TDP is pretty much mothballed for the foreseeable, and when it picks up again it will largely be an outlet for personal and critical ramblings about music rather than reviews, objective or otherwise.

In other words: if you’re waiting on or hoping for a review, you’re probably bang out of luck. I’m still open to offers of new stuff to listen to, but – as explained on the contact page, which you should use to get in touch with me on matters musical – I make no promises to listen to anything I’m sent, let alone write about it.

Well, unless the Pitchfork editorial people start answering my queries any time soon, that is…

Thanks for reading. –Paul R

Aaaaaaaaanyways, Blakfish split up for some reason or another (my suspicion is that when you put four hyperactive young nutcases in a single tour bus, tempers are bound to fray), and †HYMNS† are one of the projects that have grown, mushroom-like, from the corpse thereof. †HYMNS† are a drums’n'singin’guitarist twopiece (which seems to be one of the more popular band formats of the moment), and as such their tunes are a lot less busy than those of Blakfish, though they’ve retained their knack for deceptively simple melodies that get jammed in your brainmeat very easily. To get yerself a taste, here’s the video for “A Punch To The Temple”; it’s not the most distinguished video ever, but it does at least get away from the “film the band rocking out in some tiny room strewn with broken stuff!” thing*. And the song’s pretty good, too.

Good, eh? The first proper †HYMNS† release will be a live DVD called Revelations, due out late next month. Guess “the album” really is a dead format after all**. You can tell they’re hipstercore to the max because they don’t have a website, they’ve got a Tumblr, and Tumblr is blates the replacement for MySpazz***.

[ * I'm one to whine, aren't I? Heck, I cut my musical teeth in the early Nineties, where the apogee of alternative cool was the "film the band using grainy out-of-date Super-8 stock while they're staring at their effects pedals in a huge deserted factory somewhere outside Goole!" model of music video production. Kids these days, don't know they;re born, etc etc etc. ]

[ *** That's right, I was hating on hipsterTumblrs before the hipsters even started using Tumblr. That's just how metahipster I really am. ]

Interestingly enough, this is pretty much a modernisation of the deservedly notorious Steve Albini essay, “The Problem With Music”, which is close to two decades old by this point, but contains pretty much the same set of warnings. Perhaps if the internet had been as ubiquitous then as it is now, it might have been more widely read and acted upon… but then again, the human mind’s capacity for refusing to believe anything that might shatter an aspirational dream never ceases to amaze me. I think the days of record labels wearing the trousers in the music business are pretty much over, but I’ll not be surprised to see a new strata of businesses based on the exploitation of muso naivete.

It’s a fine thing to be a dreamer, folks – hell, that’s pretty much a condition of entry to musicianhood. But just remember that anyone who says they can sell you your dreams is to be treated with extreme caution.

Snakes have their uses, but they have to be held at arm’s length.

Typographical conundra aside, iLiKETRAiNS are still making gloriously gloomy vocal post-rock, and their latest release is called “Sirens”, the video for which – if I’m grokking the narrative correctly – features a rapey old barfly getting his just desserts. Erm, in a boat. Well, it is a Ulysses reference, after all. Here you go:

Furthermore, there’s a remix of “Sirens” by Honour Before Glory (which is one of the chaps out of defuct Leeds lot ¡Forward Russia!, so I’m told), and you can download it from here FER NOWT, as they say up that way. Probably. Anyway: a free tune from a good band. Take it or don’t.

And if you get a chance to see iLiKETRAiNS play live, then do so, because they’re excellent (and I’m not just saying that because my old band supported them once).

And if you get the chance to speak to them after a show, then do so, because they’re a bloody charming bunch of chaps

And, in the name of being honest, I’ve lost my enthusiasm for writing detailed reviews for their own sake; I remain convinced I produce better work when I write about things I’m genuinely interested in (be that in a positive or negative way), and I’ve encountered very little new music in the last few months that has made me think “whoa, this needs talking about!” This isn’t entirely unprecedented, either; the run-up to festival season tends to focus on promoting live appearances rather than new releases.

That said, the old certainties and traditions of the record industry apply less and less down in the trenches of the odd, independent and unconventional… and that’s definitely where I feel more at home these days. (I know, I know, I’m such an elitist.) And in a lot of cases the most I want to say about a band or record is “hey, listen to this” – not to endorse or praise as such, but to acknowledge some group of someones doing something interesting. Or odd, or terrifying, or cute, or…

And so, a new category of posts at TDP: “drive-bys”, of which you may consider this the first. The band in question are Leeds louts Floppy God, and their album is called Pips; it rattles through ten songs in not much more than twenty minutes, and its jagged and elastic bug-eyed take on post-punk (in the original and canonical sense of that much-misapplied genre label) is equal parts surreal, energetic and acerbic. Best of all, the whole album is embeddable from its Bandcamp page, meaning you can fill yer ears with it right here.

So what are you waiting for?