Headlining the Belfast show are the formidable Lafaro. They’ll be joined by A Plastic Rose, The Postbox Theory and fledgling act The Audiables.

Tickets for this 14+ show are priced a bargain £4 and are available from the venue - Oh Yeah Music Centre, Gordon Street, Belfast - or on the door on the evening of the performance.

For further information check out the NIYF website.

*Photo by Gavin Millar

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DOWNLOAD: ‘LOVERS ARE LUNATICS’, ‘WEAPON OF CHOICE’, A BETTER PAUL’.
FOR FANS OF: LOS CAMPESINOS!, BLACK KIDS, OPPENHEIMER.

We previewed new track ‘Reflection In The Television’ recently, and we are promised that the rest of the album will be in a similarly sombre vein, darker even than the often harrowing debut. Guitarist Andy MacFarlane said recently, “It is a step forward from the first record, the song writing and the sound of the band has moved on from that time, which is something we’ll always try and do. We don’t want to ever stand still and make records that sound like each other.” The video for first single ‘I Became A Prostitute’ and the full track list are below.

The Twillight Sad - I Became A Prostitute from TLOBF.COM on Vimeo.

1. Reflection Of The Television
2. I Became A Prostitute
3. Seven Years of Letters
4. Made To Disappear
5. Scissors
6. The Room
7. That Birthday Present
8. Floorboards Under The Bed
9. Interrupted
10. The Neighbours Can’t Breathe
11. At The Burnside

The new Dirty Projectors album Bitte Orca has been getting breathlessly positive reviews all over the place (including from this here organ) and not without good reason. It’s a grower (i.e. it’s a bit irritating on first listen) but stick with it and you’ll be rewarded with one of the best art-rock albums of the year. The single ‘Stillness Is The Move’ is unequivocally fantastic. For a start, it doesn’t feature the divisive vocals of lead singer Dave Longstreth - instead, the alternately soft and swooping tones of Angel Deradoorian take control of a track that cribs as much from modern R&B as it does from the indie-rock idiom. Single of the year? It has to be up there. Enjoy.

BITTE ORCA IS OUT NOW ON DOMINO RECORDS.

DIRTY PROJECTORS PLAY WHELAN’S, DUBLIN ON WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 16.

(Props to DiS for the link)

Both have their successes and challenges, but it is the languid charm haunting the folk that wins, engendering the more beautiful moments to gawk over here. The opening track, a elegy to the evolutionary soul himself, speaks with maturity and humility, but the more raucous cousins, like ‘The Horizon is a Beltway’ challenge more, struggling to find footing. ‘To The Ghosts Who Write History Books’, however, is one of the most beautiful songs introduced this year. That alone makes it worth buying. Shain Shapiro

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DOWNLOAD: ‘CHARLIE DARWIN’, ‘TO OHIO’, ‘TO THE GHOSTS WHO WRITE HISTORY BOOKS’.
FOR FANS OF: FLEET FOXES (TOO EASY), OHBIJOU, NICK DRAKE.

Words by Chris Jones

Cardiff-based three-piece Future Of The Left can currently stake a strong claim to being the best rock band in Britain, with their newest album Travels With Myself And Another managing to outdo the debut Curses for raucous, hilarious, boneshaking post-punk thrills. Whisper it, but it may even be as good as the fabled mclusky Do Dallas from frontman Andy Falkous’s former life. The band’s appeal doesn’t just reside in the music and live shows though - Falkous is also as entertaining and outspoken a personality as we have in rock music these days, and Gawd bless him for that. We rang him up recently for a chat about the record, the band’s debut US headline tour and, as it turned out, a discussion of the modern middle-class Satanist.

Hi Andy, how are things?

They’re okay. I’m in my mother’s house in Northumberland. We’ve been doing some shows in Middlesbrough and Sheffield so I took the opportunity for a couple of days. She’s a childminder and she’s got loads of kids running around outside the door screaming at each other, as kids are wont to do. So yeah, it’s a real glamorous rock ‘n’ roll life.

Ah, it’s probably a nice change.

You say that, but I dunno. Rock ‘n’ roll is something I choose to do – I’m not sure life as a surrogate childminder is something that fate has mapped out for me. And if it has, then fuck fate in the ass.

Anyway, congratulations on the new album. The reception it’s been getting critically has been really good – have you been particularly pleased with how it’s gone down?

I haven’t actually been reading the reviews but I’ve been looking at the marks at the bottom. If there’s anything in the area of a personal attack, then I’d be delighted to meet the journalist face-to-face, but most of the reviews have been 9s and 8s. I’m a man who’s quite driven by statistics – I rate everything I do and everything anybody says out of 1 to 10, and occasionally with decimals if I’m feeling particularly fruity.

Pitchfork style?

You see, I had that mark scheme a long time ago before Pitchfork, so I resent that implication. But yeah, occasionally I use different mark schemes. You may go A to E, old school, or you might do a GCSE mark scheme where you have an N and a U as well, or occasionally mark things in terms of degree marks. But occasionally you might have a reverse scale, where 1 is the best and 10 is the worst, so it’s important to mark things and then to make people aware of what the mark scheme is as well, so there isn’t any confusion.

Absolutely, you need to have that clarified at the outset-

I actually have a friend, him and his girlfriend sometimes mark the sex they’ve just had in terms of Kerrang!-style Ks. So he’ll go, ‘That was really good, I’m going to give you four-and-a-half Ks’. By the way, when I said a friend of mine, that doesn’t mean I’m just saying ‘a friend’. That really is not me. My girlfriend doesn’t read Kerrang! for a start.

That’s probably a good thing.

Well absolutely, it just proves she’s over the age of 11.

Will there come a point further down the line, when there’s a bit more distance from the album release, that you will read the reviews, or do you just not bother?

Who knows? I really don’t think about that any more. Like I say, if there’s an aspect of a personal attack, then I’d be very excited on a number of levels. I find that in good reviews, they get stuff just as wrong as they do in bad [ones], and it’s just not healthy to read them. We know as a band that we exceeded our own expectations in terms of making this record, our already quite high expectations. We’re incredibly proud of it and whether somebody agrees with you or how disappointed somebody is, that’s not going to add to our experience of the record at all. It’s difficult not to read them – I’m not going to pretend otherwise – it’s difficult not to know what people think about this thing that you poured so much love and attention into, but at the end of the day and in the grand scheme of things, it’s irrelevant and I’d much rather read about Richard Nixon or cricket. Or the BNP taking over Britain.

You mentioned that you’re particularly proud of this new album and that it exceeded your expectations – is there any way you can qualify that? How do you look upon it?

We were very proud of the first record we did, Curses. It was a new band and we were still unconsciously formulating what it was that we were about. I mean, no-one sits down with a pen and paper and says, ‘OK guys, what are we about?’. But that exceeded our expectations – it was far fuller and had far more breadth of vision than we would have expected. And again, without sitting down and spelling it out for each other, the key thing with the new record – as it was in mclusky as well – was not to repeat ourselves. I mean, evolution, not revolution. But I think that whereas Curses is quite a nasty, angular, almost quite slow record, this record just sounds massive. And very – to me at least – very confident and assured. It doesn’t really step outside of itself at all, whereas Curses leads you down lots of different paths. It’s kind of a winding album, more agitated, whereas there’s something more sure about this record. That doesn’t necessarily make it better, but what we wanted to do was hone what we’d already done before. For us, we would have been surprised if we’d got anywhere near Curses, because we are incredibly proud of that record, but everybody in the band at least thinks we’ve bettered it.

It does sound more focused. Maybe not if you take individual songs from each album, but if you listen to it all in one go it sounds almost more furious and intense, and there’s no slow songs.

Yeah, I’d probably agree with that. There’s no let-up at all. Again, that wasn’t the plan, it’s just the music as it’s given to us by our time in rehearsals. But yeah, Curses has a slightly different aspect to it. This record just seems to work in that more kind of direct way.

And there’s no rhyme or reason for that, it just happened when you were writing and recording?

Yeah, it just happened. I mean, for a while, we would have been surprised if we were going to write a record, like I say, which would have got close to Curses, but we wrote for ages without anything happening and then all of a sudden, within a month period, about nine of the songs just appeared. Which is what happens – it breaks the back of the process. A couple of the really self-evident good songs come - in this case it was ‘Arming Eritrea’ and ‘Land Of My Formers’ -and then the pressure had gone and the rest of the songs just came pouring out. Including the three keyboard songs – ‘Yin/Post Yin’, ‘Throwing Bricks At Trains’ and ‘You Need Satan More Than He Needs You’. Those three songs were written in, like, a day and a half. I mean, parts of them had been knocking around for a while, but those three songs just happened virtually overnight.

‘You Need Satan More Than He Needs You’ is pretty amusing – where did it come from?

I had the title for ages, so much so that we had it on a T-shirt before it was even a song. So it got to the stage like, ‘We really have to write a song with this title’. And I dunno why, but I knew it was gonna be a keyboard song. If you had a song with that title which was on the guitar, it would be serious. It sounded like it had to be a stupid electro pastiche, and we actually wrote four different songs with that title which were all okay – didn’t really excite us too much – and then musically that song came out of nowhere, and lyrically, it pretty much just wrote itself in about three minutes. Just the idea of a regular guy trying to combine a genuine love of Satanism with everyday life. Getting a babysitter for the kids… I mean, it’s all very well saying you’ve got to bring a goat to the blood orgy, but how do you then get the goat home? You know, these are the practical considerations. And what does happen if you do engage in selfsame blood orgy? Rather than end up feeling sated with the arcane lust of it all, if you just end up caring slightly more for everybody involved. ‘How was the blood orgy for you, darling?’, you know? Which I think is maybe a look at Satanism that nobody’s ever taken before.

You’ve got a US tour coming up.

Yeah, it’s beginning on July 13th and running through to July 31st, and we should also be back there in October.

The last time I spoke to you, last spring, you said you felt that you needed to tour America properly in order to get the band to the level that it needed to be. Is that still the case? Is this the first actual tour you’ve done over there?

We supported our friends Against Me! last October, and that went incredibly well. I mean, the reactions were superb. We supported them in Europe and the reactions were uniformly terrible. Their crowds were appalling to the point where we did all we could to get as many people to leave as possible. We like doing that as a band – if people are largely indifferent to you, you might as well make them fucking hate you. I wouldn’t say that’s a good way to have a career in general, but that’s the way we roll.

It’s a coping strategy.

It is a coping strategy. But supporting them in the States was a very encouraging experience. Some of the shows, the crowds who weren’t familiar with us reacted to us superbly. And who would have thought that American crowds would be more open-minded and welcoming than British ones…? It just shows that cliché and stereotyping isn’t always the way to go. But yeah, I think this band will rise or fall on its success or otherwise in the States. We’ve had the critical reaction that bands can only dream about in this country, but we’re still not really seeing the benefits or results of that in terms of crowds. It’s going to have to happen in other countries.

Why do you think that is? Do you have any theories?

It’s probably just that little bit too difficult or weird, or the humour aspect which is so relatively advertised puts people off. Let’s face it, most music is incredibly po-faced, even from individuals in bands who are very humorous and intelligent human beings, their music just tends to mine a particular dimension of their personalities. Who knows why it is? At the end of the day, it’s because we’re the band that we are, and there’s an argument that you reach the people you’re meant to reach. Myself, my ambitions lie beyond playing to 28 people in a club in Carlisle. As you would fucking hope.

It’ll be your first headline tour of America with Future Of The Left then. It must be such a different experience.

Yeah, absolutely. There were some shows on this last tour where we were treated as something of an event, which is what you want, as opposed to, ‘Ah, it’s just another band touring and getting on stage and playing’. When we play in the States and when we play in Australia, where per capita, if we were as popular in Britain as we are there, we’d be headlining Brixton Academy every couple of months. When you get treated as an event, and when you go onstage and there’s a very real sense of anticipation, I guess a lot of bands in that position would get complacent, but we apply the same work ethic we do in that kind of situation to playing to 28 people in Carlisle, and hopefully make [adopts ironic tone] something magic happen. But that’s the idea, to try and have a magic show. To go on stage believing that you could be the best rock band in the fucking world. And hopefully for the crowd to believe that they could be watching the best rock band in the world. And then to stand back and hope that the actual magic will happen, as opposed to people leaving and going, ‘You know, what, that was thoroughly bloody decent’.

You’ve got to make it happen.

Yeah, you have got to make it happen and anticipation and people’s desires to make something happen have a lot to do with that special moment. But yeah, I love playing in the States. And again, to confound expectations, American crowds are the best in terms of heckling, though they don’t generally move around a lot.

Yeah?

Yeah, lots better. Australian crowds are generally speaking the best crowds, but not at heckling. It’s just random Pommie stuff, or sports statistics they shout out, which isn’t really my favourite.

Is the US tour being built around festivals in the UK and Europe?

There’s not much in the way of festivals this year, I’m afraid. There’s just not that much going on. Really, the only big European festival we’re doing this year is Pukkelpop [in Belgium], which is good in the sense that it’s the best festival I’ve ever been to. We’ve played there a couple of times and it’s fantastic, both as a band and for the punter. It’s a fantastic festival. If you’ve ever got the time or the money I would advise going there.

I’d love to. It’s huge isn’t it?

It’s big, Pukkelpop, but not on the overwhelming kind of scale of a Reading or Leeds. But it really is fantastic. But aside from that, no, there’s not a lot going on. Which isn’t incredibly encouraging.

I imagine that’s not for the want of trying?

No, it’s not for the want of trying, really. Obviously the people that book those festivals don’t think we’re that much of a draw. They either want you or they don’t – we’re not about to get down on our knees and fucking beg for it.

You might as well go somewhere where you’re appreciated.

Somewhere where people are actually going to be excited to see us. We’ll be back and we’re going to do a fuller British, European – including Ireland – tour in September, including the two dates which were cancelled in Belfast and Dublin. Which is good and everything, but the ticket sales for the Belfast and Dublin shows were so low. I don’t even want to tell you, they were so low. Literally, I had three times as many messages and comments on Myspace from people saying they had bought tickets than had actually bought tickets. People like to be outraged even if they haven’t anything to be outraged about.

It was kind of worrying. The shows were cancelled by the promoters so thankfully it was taken out of our hands. But the attendances for the rest of the tour were pretty good. More than people were expecting. We had 550 in London, which was fantastic. It was a really exciting night. The best show was Manchester Academy 3, the old Hop & Grape.

Finally, obviously the record leaked and you had to set-up a pre-ordering system [where fans could pre-order the album and get the mp3s straight away]. Have you sold as many pre-orders as you thought you might?

I don’t actually know how many we sold. I have a feeling it’ll be a depressingly low amount [laughs] so I’m sure if there’s any good news, somebody will let me know. I think, really, the pre-order thing should’ve been in place regardless of the record leaking or not, and it’s probably the way most bands will go from now on. In terms of the leak in general, writing that whole blog was just a question of giving people our perspective on it rather than judging people too much for it. It’s human nature – people will take what they can for nothing. But yeah, it was incredibly disappointing, like somebody holding your birthday party without you. And the amount of love and attention that goes into a record, at the very least people should indulge you the ceremony.

And the burden of blame is on the people that leaked it rather than the people who downloaded it?

Don’t get me wrong, the people who downloaded it still have to be aware of the consequences of their actions, but the burden of blame Is definitely on the people who leaked it. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to find those people and make examples of them. I think it would be quite an entertaining thing if you could identify the person who had leaked it and string them up in the middle of the street or something. If bands were able to take on the people that leaked their album with weapons in a gladiatorial combat, then maybe people would think twice about leaking records. But it’s a little too much of a prescriptive, fundamentalist, Middle Eastern state’s way of dealing with problems.

And you don’t really want to go down the fundamentalist route.

No, I don’t want to go down that route until I actually do have absolute power, which is as far as I can tell a couple of months off. Yeah, it’s a complex debate, and I think I’ve discovered how to win it – to accuse everybody who is a proponent of free downloading of being middle class.

How’s that winning the argument?

Well, for a start, people hate being called middle class, especially in the environment of rock music, where people have been pretending to be working class for as long as anybody can remember. Because it is an incredibly middle class way of looking at things – [posh voice] ‘Oh, art should be free’ – I’ll tell you what, all these people who are brave enough to go up to middle class indie-rock bands and say their music should be free, they should walk up to the Wu-Tang Clan and say it. Let’s see how committed they are to that fucking premise!

So next time, once the record’s mastered, will you do it this way immediately?

Yeah, and release it as an illegal download full of viruses.

In all seriousness though?

Yeah, I think it’ll have to be. I think people have done it already before us, and it’s just going to be the model isn’t it? Especially when the leak’s come out so far in advance it’s completely ruined any momentum the record had.

TRAVELS WITH MYSELF AND ANOTHER IS OUT NOW ON 4AD

WWW.MYSPACE.COM/FUTUREOFTHELEFT

Next comes the petulant stomp of drums and the belly-down bass slither of ‘Align The Planets’. ‘Do What I Say’ presents a wholly different challenge, bristling with shrapnel edged menace as frontman Steven Robinson draws upon the breadth of his Matt Bellamy-esque range. And, just when you think couldn’t possibly push it any further, they loose ‘These Times We Stand’ and spark a veritable rampage. Colin Robinson thwacks the drums with brute fury, bassist Mark Williamson seems set to dislocate something or other and Steven stands, eyes rolling into the back of his head, and lets out larynx shredding howls. Those down the front are reeled in by the sense of euphoria emanating from the stage and before we finish ‘Plan A’ will find our frontman in a crumpled, steaming heap on the floor. In a word, awesome. Virginia Arroyo

1. ‘We Were Aborted’
2. ‘Cheat On Me’
3. ‘We Share The Same Skies’
4. ‘City Of Bugs’
5. ‘Hari Kari’
6. ‘Last Year’s Snow’
7. ‘Emasculate Me’
8. ‘Ignore The Ignorant’
9. ‘Save Your Secrets’
10. ‘Nothing’
11. ‘Victim Of Mass Production’
12. ‘Stick To Yr Guns’