I’m already beginning to regret pushing Alt Track for the election issue of Vibrations, and we’re only one question in: which way are they planning to vote?
Pete wants to swap his vote for a shag from the Skipton Labour candidate: “She’s 21, quite a hottie, I’d vote Labour for that any day.”
“We’re not in it for the politics, we’re in it for the pussy. Put that on the front cover of Vibrations,” says Micky.
It’s not a great start, and seems about to get worse when Pete admits that actually he doesn’t know who he’s voting for at all…
“No, I mean I’m giving my vote, have you heard of GiveMyVote.org? They go to foreign countries that our Foreign Policy affects – through climate change, international trade, war – and give them an idea of where the main British parties stand. On the morning of the election I’ll get a text saying ‘this gentleman in Ghana would vote Lib Dem’, so I go and register the vote for him.”
*Phew*. I’ll level with you, Vibrations readers, I’ve been hassling to get Alt Track in the mag for a while now, simply because I think they’re a great band; that’s no secret. But when the political issue was suggested, I wasn’t alone in suggesting they’d be perfect interviewees.
Their breakbeat / hip hop / post rock output is overtly political, for a start. Either dreamily idealogical (‘One’, ‘View From A Mountain’) including Martin Luther King soundbites, or righteously furious (‘A Nation Is On Fire’): ‘product placement, whatever sells / define yourselves in html / meaningless nothing, whatever fulfils / how do you sleep whilst your brothers and sisters are killed?’. It’s a call to arms, which has also had airplay on Radio One – a rare combination, since the best of intentions can so easily come off as cheesy a la Coldplay.
“’A Nation Is On Fire’ is sort of a ranty, polemic, obviously political song,” says Pete. ”But a lot of the statements aren’t necessarily literal. There’s this one line ‘land costs lives, don’t steal, don’t lie, Gaza, who’s wrong, Darfur, too long’, it’s not me saying ‘don’t steal, don’t lie’. It’s not me telling the world how to live because I’m in no position to. I don’t have the wisdom or experience to tell anyone how to do that.”
“Yeah we were pretty young when we wrote that,” explains Micky.
How old are you now?
“19.”
But lyrics are the easy bit. Alt Track put their money where their mouths are, which is what lends sincerity to what they say onstage. Whatever pisses them off – Aldermaston’s weapons plant, the demolition of Bradford Odeon, Burma, the BNP – if there’s a counter demonstration, they’re there. If there isn’t, they’ll start one. Micky recently facilitated a series of meetings about the English Defence League’s proposed visit to Bradford when nothing else seemed to be being done to deter it. His reasons are simple: “These people shouldn’t be able to invade our city. They don’t come from here, they don’t understand it, we’ve done our best to pick up the pieces from the Bradford riots and they don’t see the positive things that we’ve done.”
Pete sees it as a logical conclusion that whatever stirs them to write, stirs them to action: “I think there’s a definite responsibility, not just as a musician” says Pete. “I don’t mean every musician has a political responsibility. Some people want to write love songs, that’s fine, that’s what inspires them to pick up a guitar and write a song. I just think you’ve got a responsibility to be true to yourself.
With us, I don’t know if political’s the right word – more just observational. We’re both vehemently anti-racist. Everyone’s a product of their environment to a certain extent. Like when we were packing the car outside Micky’s house the other day this black woman walked past pushing a pram, and there were these white girls on the other side of the street, about 12 or 13 years old, and they were going ‘Pakis, Pakis’, and she was African, firstly, which is just bad geography, and this poor woman was just pushing a pram. It makes you sick.”
Yorkshire having been the county responsible for electing the first BNP MEP, it’s a fight that needs to be fought, and Alt Track – whether deliberately or not – are aiming for (and popular amongst) the same target audience as the BNP.
“The main people who are ignored by the mainstream political parties – and the whole political system – is the working class youth, and this is the recruiting ground for the BNP, for the EDL. They can feed them figures that are completely manipulated, taken out of context, and sometimes just an utter lie, and they believe it.
“It’s like a quote from ‘Mein Kampf’ which Nick Griffin has quoted in some of his speeches, ‘tell a lie and if you shout it loud enough and say it enough times, eventually they’ll start to believe it’, and this is essentially the philosophy of the BNP. I was reading their election manifesto today, and if they were in power they’d retract all foreign aid, every penny we give they’d just take it back and say ‘no, it’s not a British problem’, which is quite a dangerous thing, they want to withdraw from the UN, from NATO, from the EU. They want to bring back capital punishment. It’s just an awful political system. They don’t have any of the knowledge or experience, they couldn’t run a country if they actually got thrust into it, there’s no economist who’s a member of the BNPNP who could take care of the economy, there’s no foreign policy expert, there’s none of these people, they’re just a fucking bunch of arseholes.”
True to form, gobby Pete’s fronting a Channel 4 anti-BNP campaign after applying for it when he was ‘really quite fucked’.
Pete: “I don’t remember what I wrote on the form but I got a call from a Channel 4 producer and it’s all gone horribly far out of my hands. I’m thinking I’m going to have to do it.”
Micky: “By ‘him’ he means ‘we’, and by ‘we’, he means ‘me’.
Pete: “I said to Micky ‘I’m going to need you to do all this shit; emailing, photocopying…’”
Micky: “All the substance, essentially”
Pete: “And I’m gonna to take the credit. I’m the face.”
What’s wrong with Micky’s face?
Pete: “We could be here all night.”
On paper, they could be the dullest, most pious pair of yoghurt-weavers, or a couple of bitter crusties, but in actual fact they’re a lot more fun than that, which is why they could be so dangerously effective given a platform.
For example, Pete is bursting with excitement at the news that BNP publicist Mark Collett has just been arrested over a plot to kill Nick Griffin: “I’m friends with Mark Collett on Facebook, I thought it would be funny because I think he’s a proper silly racist, and I thought maybe I could subtly mock him. So I wrote on his wall ‘you’re trying to kill Nick Griffin mate, you’re a fucking hero’, and he’s blocked me.”
Micky, on the other hand, has decided to run for Mayor of Bradford, something he’s in turns serious and then not serious about: “I’m going to demolish the Odeon, put a big pool in the city centre that nobody needs or wants, waste all our money on that. More offices, more parking, more fucking coffee shops and chain bars and pound shops. I don’t want to have to count more than a quid. Why is it only every other shop that’s a pound shop? Why not every single one?”
Playing since they were pre-teen, they’re musically mature beyond their years, having gone through several bands separately already between them, and found their niche as soon as they got together, complimenting each other perfectly, and arguing constantly. Micky plays keyboard, Pete plays guitar. Micky sings, Pete rhymes. Micky is quiet and polite. Pete is… well, not.
They’re not unusual in Bradford, where the combination of relative poverty, a reputation blighted by racial tension and a strong DIY ethic – through necessity as much as choice – has led to the growth of a thriving counterculture based around places like the Treehouse, the 1in12 and the Playhouse, which are heaving even when Walkabout was forced to close through lack of business.
Random Hand are friends, sprung from the same small Keighley scene – notably the place where Griffin gave the speech that saw him arrested for inciting racial hatred – and it can’t be a coincidence that they, too, make seething social commentary their main muse. Pete agrees: “Anyone can do an anti-racist song, but I was talking to Barney from Sonic Boom Six, and he says when he hears ‘British’ by Random Hand – you know, ‘stand up for the anthem, salute the flag’, hitting back against blind patriotism – the reason he loves that tune so much is that you can tell when they’re singing it that they’ve grown up around it, it’s a real sincere statement.
“No modern music would have existed if we’d all stuck to ourselves and our culture, we’d all be Morris dancing. It’s fucking boring. It’s disillusioned as well, you can’t go back to the 1940s, and Britain wasn’t perfect then. People say ‘during the war we didn’t have these criminals’, but millions of our young people died during the war, we were fighting a fucking war. I was talking to Captain Hotknives’ mum, she actually said this, she said “Ooo there wasn’t all this fighting during the war!”

The concept is simple – to get a taste of what Leeds has to offer in an average week, I’m attending a different gig, from a different genre, at a different venue for 7 nights in a row. Can’t be that bad, right? Well, the gigs are being chosen by the editorial team, so it could go either way…

Day One: The week begins with an evening of post-rock at the Holy Trinity Church. Anna Rose Carter opens proceedings with some gorgeous piano compositions. You can hear a pin drop (or indeed a sustain pedal squeak). Conjuring up the spirit of Michael Nyman, if she lived upstairs from you, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were living in a Jane Campion film. Next, the members of worriedaboutsatan stand at either end of a desk laden with samplers, jerking around like they’re playing table football while treating us to some skittering beats and atmospheric vocal samples. One of them bobs around so much he’d probably be quite handy with a bucket of apples come Halloween. In the bathroom, some wag’s put a worriedaboutsatan stamp on the toilet roll dispenser, which might literally scare the bejeezus out of someone on Sunday morning. Her Name Is Calla end the night with some brilliantly atmospheric soundscapes, punctuated by moments of intensely beautiful melody. It does go on a bit, mind, and those pews aren’t especially comfy…

Day Two: Tonight it’s off to Oporto, where bands play inside the big window like guitar-wielding animatronic shop mannequins. Albert Ross & the Otters are a lot less rustic than some Youtube research had suggested. For the most part sounding like a less annoying Mumford & Sons, they score extra points for having a cute blonde girl on melodica. Glasgow’s style-over-substance electropop duo Over The Wall are next, but lack the tunes of fellow Scots Three Blind Wolves, who take to the stage with a drummer who resembles a Kings of Leon and a guitarist who’s a dead ringer (no pun intended) for Nick Drake. They have some good pop songs – in the vein of Idlewild or early Teenage Fanclub – including an eponymous one (which puts them in the lofty company of Living In A Box). I buy their CD, but decide in the car on the way home I much preferred them live. Ah well. Young Rebel Set are headlining, and seem to suggest silk scarves and Liam Gallagher hair-do’s are back. They’re evidently doing something right – their shuffly Coral-meets-Kooks repertoire has already found an audience that knows all the words. I almost feel a bit of a heathen to admit I’d not heard of them before.

Day Three: It’s Wednesday, so it must be jazz night. Well, jazz and other unworldly sounds at the Brudenell Social Club. Seth Cooke sits behind a bank of samplers, and probably calls himself a sonic innovator; I’d go with ‘purveyor of unlistenable noise’. Omnivore follow, and play what might be freeform-punk-freak-jazz. While dressed as cows. Disregarding little things like rhythm and structure, the three-piece run through half an hour of discordant noise with a sax parping randomly all over the shop. Acoustic Ladyland at least have a more conventional approach, so while not my bag, I could appreciate the musicianship. Definitely more punk than jazz, the bass/drums/guitar/sax combo would give the average beard-stroking jazzer a hernia. There’s some innovative looping of the sax and some sinister basslines, but most dazzling is avant-garde leading light Seb Rochford – he of the amazing hair – maintaining effortless cool as he hits seven shades out of his drumkit.

Day Four: I was meant to be seeing Ellie Goulding at the Cockpit, but alas, Little Miss Sound Of 2010 had managed to sell the place out long in advance. No big loss, so instead it’s off to acoustic night at Verve. John Newman kicks things off; an unassuming-looking fella, he’s got a great, soulful blues voice, a bit Jeff Buckley and a lot Ray Lamontagne. A song called Mr Ben is dedicated to a friend, but anyone walking in halfway through might’ve assumed it was a heartfelt tribute to the cartoon character. Pippa Lloyd follows; Sing This Love is a hooky opener: for some reason I can see it working as a Balearic dance anthem. She’s accompanied by a pianist who at times threatens to overshadow the guitar, but is effective on a cover of Adele’s Chasing Pavements. Then someone faints. Come on, it was a good set, but not *that* good (joke). Word comes through that tomorrow’s gig is death metal, so I retreat home to mentally prepare.

Day Five: In the Royal Park, someone’s murdering Firestarter on the karaoke. I wonder if even this might be preferable to the ear-pummelling that’s in store in the cellar. I head downstairs and cower in the corner. Electric Mud Generator’s guitarist appears to be teaching the bass player some notes. What follows takes the form of a not especially interesting jam/dirge that feels like it lasts 10 minutes. Oh, hang on, it actually *did* last 10 minutes. The singer/guitarist is rocking the 70s hippy look, all long hair, beard, flares and barefoot; the bass player is evidently in training, only having got as far as the long hair and socks. Year Of The Man are a more interesting prospect, with their bowel-rumbling, fillings-loosening death-metal-doomrock. So far out of my comfort zone it’s on a different planet, I still find myself nodding along (but that might just have been a minor seizure caused by the super-heavy bass). I can’t make out a word the vocalist is screaming, though I suspect it might have something to do with summoning Beelzebub from the very depths of Hell.

Day Six: I have the evening off – hurrah! I think I’ll need it too. However the day isn’t gig-free, as I’m off to an in-store at Crash Records. With the best will in the world (let alone a will that’s being seriously put to the test this week), it’s hard to say Double Muscle do anything other than shout over noisy guitars. But each to his own. I head back upstairs to flick through CDs. A bad idea as it turns out, as I find the Leisure Society’s album for a lot less money than I paid for it ten minutes ago in HMV. Bah, lesson learned. The white-walled venue downstairs in Crash is a useful space but feels quite soulless; Bilge Pump put on a fantastic show nevertheless – there’s a lot to be said for matching intricate musicianship with clever and witty lyrics; this lot really are the thinking man’s art-punk-DIY-noise-makers of choice.

Day Seven: I’m off to the Adelphi to see a selection from the second day of The Cuckoo’s Fest. The upstairs room has been done up for the occasion, and the atmosphere is fantastic. Hope & Social – complete with Butlins uniforms and 3-piece brass section – quite frankly own the stage. They encourage a level of audience participation befitting a much bigger band, getting the crowd to join in at every opportunity. The five minutes spent fannying around attempting to ‘summon the spirit of Rod Stewart’ could arguably have been better spent though. Ellen & The Escapades have a tough act to follow, and starting with the downbeat Run may not have been the best choice. The set soon picks up with folk-pop masterclass Without You, and continues to offer up the kind of gems that justify the band’s upcoming Glastonbury appearance.
Of course, this exercise has merely scratched the surface of what’s out there seemingly every night of the year, but it’s nice to know so many bases are covered in Leeds. As for me, I’m knackered and need some sleep.

If the ultimate ambition of the average band is to get a record deal and go on tour, The Lodger have quietly achieved a level of success on another scale altogether. Yet having toured in various countries and released records on a dizzying selection of labels, they remain under most people’s radars. Maybe it’s because this isn’t music for haircut hipsters, rather classic-sounding indie-pop for people who swoon over Belle & Sebastian and Go Betweens records, appealing simultaneously to the unlucky in love and the eternal optimist.

The band, comprising singer/songwriter Ben Siddall, bassist Joe Margetts, guitarist Tim Corbridge and ex-Somatics drummer Bruce Renshaw, are renowned for their perky pop melodies and Ben’s deadpan lyrics that seem unafraid to cast him as perpetually down on his luck. The kitchen-sink dramas played out in the songs are a key factor in the band’s charm, the tales told being the kind that Mike Leigh turns into films and David Nicholls turns into books. It’s a similar ballpark to that inhabited by Stuart Murdoch, so perhaps a lot of the Belle & Sebastian comparisons stem from the lyrical obsessions? “For some reason I am quite obsessed with what it feels like to be 16 and discovering love and relationships for the first time,” says Ben.

Not a Leeds native, Ben grew up in Pontefract. “It’s an odd place,” he says. “If you try and do anything out of the ordinary, you’re seen as a bit of a freak. If you say you’re an artist, people just laugh at you. This is maybe why I didn’t take it seriously until I came to Leeds.”

He started early in life; inspired by his uncle’s collection of new wave and punk records, he learned his first chords at 7 and wrote his first songs soon after. Not for him the world of the Top 40 and Smash Hits: “I was listening to John Peel and buying the NME when I was 9,” he recalls. Drummer Bruce, with whom he shares a house, laughs as he claims to have not known what the NME was even at the age of 15.

Ben’s relocation to Leeds in 2002 led to him forming an early incarnation of The Lodger and writing what would become a string of increasingly memorable singles. Songs like Let Her Go, Watching and the power-pop rush of Many Thanks For Your Honest Opinion very much defined The Lodger’s musical template. Their debut LP Grown-Ups was released in 2007; bittersweet songwriting at its finest, it appeared to perfectly capture the post-student experience in bite-size diary entries, with all but a small handful of songs conforming to the magic 3-minute rule of pop.

The follow-up appeared a mere 12 months later. Life Is Sweet had a more polished sound, and it was clear the dreaded second album syndrome hadn’t struck. I suggest to Ben there appears to be a clear thematic lyrical progression – having dealt with emotional relationships for the first time on Grown-Ups, Life Is Sweet rejoins him a short while later having found a place in the world. “It doesn’t need intellectualising,” he counters. “It’s basically someone in their 20s writing some songs, documenting what it was like to be me at that particular time.” Single when writing the debut and in a relationship for the follow-up, it’s not so much life imitating art, more life informing art: “It’s not that there’s a considered progression – it’s just kind of what happened to me.”
The first album came out in the UK on Angular Records, a London-based label run by bassist Joe, with the follow-up released on Leeds’ own Bad Sneakers. An American deal was done after Slumberland Records’ founder Mike Shulman purchased an early Lodger single from the band’s website. “I just cheekily emailed him back and asked if he’d be interested in working with us,” says Ben. The label had been dormant for a few years: “My getting in touch made him start it up again.” Slumberland has since gone from strength to strength with bands like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart and Crystal Stilts, with the US release of the new Lodger album on the horizon.

The band’s sound has worked in their favour Stateside. “There are a lot of anglophiles out there that really like the British accent and culture,” says Ben. Enduring lengthy drives while touring the States, some shows were evidently better than others: “We played a gig in a saloon bar in Wilmington, Delaware, where everyone had a mullet,” he recalls. “It was like Twin Peaks – very bizarre.”

Even further afield, The Lodger struck a deal with Fabtone in Japan, who’d suggested the band’s sound would go down well there. “We played some shows, and it was amazing,” says Ben. They were even made to feel like real pop stars. “We signed autographs,” laughs Bruce. “It was a bit of a dream. I thought Jeremy Beadle might jump out at any moment.” Their Japanese fans are certainly dedicated. “We played at the Library in Leeds a year or two ago,” recalls Ben, “and a woman came all the way from Japan to the gig. I didn’t know what to do with her. Should I sit with her for the entire night? I felt responsible for the fact she’d done something so ridiculous.”

The schedule to release an album every year came a little unstuck at the beginning of 2009, when sessions for a third LP didn’t work out. Most of the recordings were shelved, but four songs were taken to producer Alan Smyth, who’d produced their first two albums, to work his magic. These appeared last summer on the I Think I Need You EP, which came out on Spanish label Elefant. “Not a lot of labels would have wanted to do a one-off single,” says Ben, “but luckily Elefant were running a 7” club at the time, featuring one-off releases. I thought it’d be a curious thing to do.” The EP is a gem, its title track ranking as one of the finest Lodger songs to date. Not that a lot of people will have heard it, without access to Spanish MTV: “There was pretty much no promo in the UK, but people who wanted to know about it could find it.”

The new album, Flashbacks, was produced by Richard Formby, fresh from working on Wild Beasts’ Two Dancers. Musically it’s evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and existing Lodger fans certainly won’t be affronted by anything – with the exception perhaps of the mildly unsettling feedback that slips in and out of hypnotic opener Back Of My Mind. Ben’s compositional process, however, is changing: “More and more now I’ll record a few sections on a computer and then move them around within the song. It’s getting more complicated – I’m trying to think less about jangly guitars, almost taking that out of the equation, thinking about the fact that other things have to have a featuring role.”

The instrumental palette on Flashbacks has been bolstered by additional brass and strings. So what next, an orchestra perhaps?

“I don’t want it to get that big,” says Ben. “Besides,” adds Bruce, “we can’t fit them in the basement.”
Being able to fit in the basement may well be a prerequisite for the next album, as Ben’s decided to produce it himself at home. Is it a case of having reached a point where you trust your own instincts enough?
“I’ve watched Alan Smyth and Richard Formby at work and I’ve picked up an enormous amount about how to do it,” he says. Formby impressed with his ability to make things sound more ‘realistic’: “I want things to sound like they’re actually being played by people rather than being quantized.” Increasingly inspired by the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs, Ben’s also taken with the idea of “rampaging through different genres, doing whatever you think is right at the time.” As a starting point, a b-side on new single Have A Little Faith In People consists of a vocal over layers of Casio keyboard, quite a departure from the typical Lodger sound.
With Joe now living in London and Tim in Berlin, the mechanics of the band have naturally changed. “We’re collaborating over the internet,” says Ben. “I send them tracks, they record their parts and email them back.” The geographic differences have led to more sporadic bouts of band activity; the album launch gig in April being their first Leeds show since the end of 2008.

Ben sees Flashbacks as completing a trilogy, and this, coupled with a move to the suburbs from his previous base in the student heartland of Hyde Park, suggests a fresh start next time. Whether lovelorn songs about failing to get the girl morph into tales of late night drug binges in LA remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: “It won’t be me moaning about relationships,” he confirms.

A surprisingly warm Wurlitzer ushers us into the album on ‘This Is War’ and proves to be the perfect accompaniment to Paul Marshall’s warm, smoky, dark vocals – a moody Gerry Rafferty. Though picky guitar does appear on later tracks such as ‘We Could Use Your Blood’ and ‘Keep Your Eyes On The Road’, there is a lot more besides: swooning strings, booming drums, jagged electric guitars and demented piano. Musically, it is as rich as you could want it to be.

As well as being musically rich, it is stylistically varied too. ‘Dead River’ is country, western and proud, ‘Soldiers’ is old English folk, ‘Devil and I (Part 1)’ is a waltz… no, a dirge. Each style is carried off with confident aplomb in a series of appealing sorties.

Though it’s a quality release throughout, there are clearly two stand out tracks, ‘Keep Your Eyes On The Road’ and the titular ‘The Devil and I’. ‘Keep Your Eyes…’ throbs with life, its pounding beat and relentless yet shifting melody that builds to an ecstatic song and dance of a more post-punk ilk. At the other end of the scale is ‘The Devil And I’, a downbeat waltzing anthem with unsettling key shifts, massive reverb and a triumphant/defeated howl at the world. One catchily hummable, the other heartbreakingly gorgeous.

If any criticism could be levelled at the album, it would be at some of the lyrics that occasionally lapse too far into the adolescent or absurd (‘I’m a cough drop on a hill top’) I say occasionally because for the most part his beautiful, mercurial voice overcomes this stumbling block. Surely a reputation worth hanging onto.

Rob Wright

Burning Hank have been making music together for less than a year, so the release of their debut album ‘Seriously, it’s getting us down now’ is no mean achievement. In that time they’ve also made an appearance on BBC Leeds’ Raw Talent, so it looks like they’re going places, and having listened to the 12 songs here, it’s not difficult to see why. We have spade loads of pop sensibility, tinges of dry humour, irreverence, music hall slapstick and a bit of politics, coming together in a slightly ramshackle collection of kitchen sink indie-folk which gets better with every listen, and will bring a smile to the face of all but the most ardent of Daily Mail readers.

Vocal duties are shared throughout as ‘Cake’ kicks off proceedings with a swipe at the ruling classes. ‘Worried About Coop’ is a tribute to cult series repeats on daytime TV, in this case Twin Peaks. ‘Birthday’ turns the traditional anniversary rhetoric on its head and into a skilfully worded ode to the avoidance of various amusing ways to be killed. The 47 second ‘Modern Medicine’ warns of the perils of drug use and closing track ‘Earthquake’ pokes fun at the seismic activity that struck the north of England in 2008, implying that we all slept through it.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing them live.

Mike Price

Quack Quack are an experimental super group of sorts built around Neil Turpin’s faultless technical drumming, Richard Morris’ energetic keyboard playing and Stuart Bannister’s primordial bass and this album captures them at their most progged up and jazzed out. Time signatures are cast willy nilly over ever looping and shrinking riffs, upheld by a strong pulsing undercurrent of subsonic gymnastics. That’s the muso version. For us mere mortals; it’s like listening to Emerson Lake and Palmer play children’s theme tunes for programmes that don’t and never could exist.

For instance, take the bouncy synth trombone and tickly synths of the animal porn track, ‘TocH’. Not likely to make Cbeebies. Or ‘Cakes are Easy’, an ice cream truck loaded with psychedelics. Hmmm, Nickelodeon will pass. What about the suicidal Billy Joel figure on ‘Three’, one hand toying with a pistol, the other with the keyboard. Right, CBBC might buy that…

My overplayed point is that this is challenging, difficult music, with extended jazz/prog noodling that could wind you up – if it wasn’t that it was so damn familiar. It might be the krautrock element, might be the touch of Brubeck or could be the really silly names (‘Phonehenge’, for goodness sake) but I like to think it’s the ghost of Ron Pickering, calling you across the ages to a shared childhood that never was. Away you go!
R
ob Wright

Actually, it’s not just the vocal gymnastry of Leemun Smith that has made Castrovalva 2.0, it’s the whole new badass attitude. From Anthony Wright’s dirty, evil, distorted bass and Leemun’s vocodered screech smothered over Daniel Brader’s naked, nervous beats on the intro you get the idea that something nasty is going to happen – and so it does, as ‘Pump Pump’ explodes like a puddle of volatile bile aimed at the trendy music tourist – that voice pitches schizophrenically, spewing a torrent of filth while the bass hammers it home with a riff worthy of These Monsters. You can feel the spittle.

From that point there is no let up, but this filth is unnaturally seductive – Leemun never croons, but occasionally his voice slides into a chocolaty parody of Billie Holliday, luring you in on ‘We Don’t Go To Ravenholm’ and ‘Triceratops’ before grabbing you by the hair and slamming your face repeatedly into the coffee table. Fortunately, these seductions are rare and you can mostly brace yourself against the psychotic brutality of ‘Thug Life’, the sodomisation of Bad Manners by King Crimson on ‘Hooliganz R Us’ (and a fleeting mention of Pogs) and the three-legged race of primal scream therapists of ‘Outlawz’.

They’ve also taken a few of their older tracks, ‘Ravenholm’ and ‘Bison Scissor Kick’ and Leemunised them, though ‘Bison’ is a bit cut and paste.

In short, this is a furious album that will crush bones but also split sides – it’s funny, deliberately so, but that doesn’t soften or diminsh it – it sharpens it. Not the prettiest of things, but two blokes good, three blokes nasty!

Rob Wright

Instrumentation is sparse, with Wynn’s picked guitar and banjo supplemented by near ambient bass and percussion touches from producer Sam. Wynn has a cracked, husky voice that hints at rather than resembles the likes of John Martyn, Jim White and, yes, Bob Dylan. But the intonation is oddly clear and precise with a few idiosyncratic tics that help to give him an individual sound.

But it’s the intensely vivid content of the songs that make Wynn sound so authentic. It’s almost like country blues is the only format that could adequately express his life.

And what a desperate, blasted thing that life seems to be. Drink, drugs, despair and disappointment suffuse every song and you wonder how anyone could survive such a life. For example, the chorus of ‘Listless Dreams’ goes “Futures bright/Futures coming/Futures falling out the back door screaming/So come and have another round/Grab a bottle drink it down/Hide your head from the sun”, which is typical of the sentiments expressed in many of the songs, with couplets or even single lines (“Here comes your lovers loveless fist”) leaping from a song like a slap in the face.

Of course, Wynn’s songs could be more reportage that memoir (“So here’s memories and pictures I dug up for you/If they hold stick em in your purse”), but he sounds like he’s lived it all and that, really, is Wynn’s greatest achievement with this deeply impressive set of songs. And it’s not all bleak. The very articulation of despair and desperation through music can act as a purgative, shaking a defiant, if possibly drunken fist at the troubles life can throw at you.

Steve Walsh

I thought that it was just another middle of road record, with no depth or passion. However after several plays without having the compulsion to skip any of the tracks, I realised it had grabbed me from within.
The album is recorded in a raw manner (no auto tune here) but played and sung with the confidence and poise of an artist who has found his own artfulness and is comfortable within it. Recorded with a single microphone onto a tape recorder doesn’t diminish its appeal, in fact it enhances its allure. If an album should be used as a template for music students so they could understand, how to arrange, produce and record without having millions of pounds worth of equipment, this is it.

It’s difficult to distinguish which are the outstanding songs on this album, the selection and arrangements of the tracks are flawless – from the opening track, ‘St. Jude’, to the last, ‘Lullaby’, you are taken on a journey of sophisticated wit and charm, accomplished through wonderful melodic harmonies.
The only critical word that I can say about this album is that it is only 32 minutes long, leaving you wanting to hear more. It’s a pleasure however to review such a talented artist. Robin James I salute you!

Puru Misra

There is a problem though. The problem is that the album never lifts off like Explosions In The Sky. There is no development or dramatic movement that might build a crescendo or carry a theme and keep your ear moving on. Unlike Minus The Bear or Wintermute, they don’t tease you into dancing or offer any vocal commentary either. It really is hard core: nothing-but-the-guitar playing. There are nine clever, decorative and attractive programme pieces instead. It just cries out for guts and soul. It demands more crazy maths and less careful arithmetic. And some of the very well played passages tease my memory with where I first heard them.

Sam Saunders