Taking time out from recording their next album with Queens of the Stone Age producer Chris Goss, the Zeppelin and Pink Floyd influenced psychedelic rockers are looking forward to playing in the UK again.

Lead guitarist Jules Shapiro said;
“We always love performing in the UK! Our first tour back in 2007 went way beyond expectations. To be asked to perform at the legendary Sonisphere Festival has really got us spinning around. Playing alongside legendary rock bands like The Cult, Iron Maiden and Iggy Pop, is really a dream come true! And to do all that in the UK, a country so influential in making rock music what it is today, is great.”

Full details of the UK dates are as follows:
28th July – Dublin Castle, London
29th July – Riff’s Bar, Swindon
30th July – The Wilmington Arms, London
1st Aug – Sonisphere Festival, Knebworth

If you are at the Sonisphere Festival be sure to check out the outstanding XtraMile artists Straight Lines and The Xcerts, who will be appearing on Sunday on the Strongbow Bowtime Bar.

Straight Lines are due onstage at around 2pm on Sunday and The Xcerts will be performing at around 7pm.

Black Moth Super Rainbow lynchpin Tobacco, returns with Maniac Meat, follow-up LP to his 2006 debut Fucked Up Friends.

Tobacco, Maniac Meat

Rumour has it that as a teenager Tom Fec had no interest in any music; nothing synched with the young man’s strange cranial waves. But then he heard The Beastie Boys and everything changed. Morphing into Tobacco, Fec started to play with old school analogue synthesisers, drum machines, effects pedals and a vocoder.

After featuring in a number of weird and wonderfully named bands, Fec found what appeared to be a permanent home with Black Moth Super Rainbow. The band’s psychedelic electronica has been honed over seven years and peaked in 2009 with sell-out SXSW shows and a fourth studio album, Eating Us, produced by David Freidman. And then Fec decided that it was time to be just Tobacco again.

“Mostly everything I’ve done with Black Moth Super Rainbow is made to be pop. And a lot of people say Black Moth Super Rainbow is bordering on hip-hop beats. So with Tobacco, I wanted to embrace my beats and get darker and sleeker with it all. I want to make you feel paranoid in a good way.”

Compared to the polished and, at times, tranquil pastures of Eating Us, Maniac Meat is a psychotic, bewildering beast, boasting two cameos from Beck and a mutant-eyed wink in the direction of Aphex Twin.

Opening track Constellation Dirtbike Head rushes in on a pounding backbeat with vocodered vocals riding helium high, pillion posturing with words of wisdom: “Don’t let the fairies clone you”. Tobacco revs six throttle lyrics in and out of gear and the track speeds and skids around a screaming synth line. As the distorted groove fizzes and fuzzes to a climax he throws down the challenge “burn all your things”. In the flame-flowered aftermath of this opening onslaught no doubt.

Beck makes his first appearance on second track Fresh Hex, the crazed, angry doppelganger of The Beta Band’s The Three E.P.’s. And Orpheus has dragged this blistered spirit to Hades, along with the opening refrain from DJ Shadow’s High Noon, letting them swelter and warp before returning back top for Beck to wax unlyrical with unfathomable intent; words shunted together, scraped and bleeding.

Throughout Maniac Meat Tobacco slips from beatbox to live drums, introducing swamped analogue synth stabs before switching to melodic pulses and electronic, harmonic waves. The results are often alarming but strangely addictive. Keep the headphones on long enough and you’ll find yourself trapped in an eight-bit psycho killer Atari game, where claustrophobic, hallucinatory voices compete with unholy, demonic rhythms.

From Aphex Twin to Air and even Jean Michel Jarre, there are plenty of sonic sign posts on Maniac Meat. But this is no cut and paste rip-off. Tobacco has his own intoxicating sound. The fuzz and static is surprisingly warm and despite the guttural exhalations, from both artist and machines, there are melodies lurking under the surface of most tracks.

Tobacco is more than happy to let his music do the talking….and when you possess a voice tinged with gravel-dust from the outer reaches of the universe, why not. But it makes finding out about future tours incredibly difficult. An extensive European outing is promised, so to find out when, I’d suggest keeping in touch with his Anticon page. In the meantime…enjoy the meat on youtube…

The Method Actors photo: Curtis Knapp

This is Still It by The Method Actors will be released on 22 March on Acute Records.

The next time an Oscar-loving luddite regales you with tales of deprivation and loss; all suffered in the name of art and a gold-tinged Kinder Egg toy, pop on This is Still It and relive a time when method actors didn’t pretend. Varney and Gamble may sound like a couple of second-rate chancers but together they raised a strobe-lit, spasmodic riot, with just guitars, drums and vocal chords; deprived of more band members than most and fuelled by the post-teen volcanoes of unrequited loss.

This is Still It showcases the duo’s early recordings, from 1980-1981. If you’re already a fan then this release is, by all accounts, a must; containing early ep material as well as a chunk of their debut long-player Little Figures.

If, like me, you’re new to The Method Actors, then you’ll need some gristle to add to your anti-Oscar bones.

CBGBs may be the classic, new wave, celluloid snap-shot but the breakers quickly hit further south, in Athens, Georgia. The Method Actors emerged alongside The B52s in a scene that eventually spawned REM. Throughout this compilation there are echoes of love-shacked yelps and howls, and the scratched, discordant guitar-tones of the B52s’ Ricky Wilson. But the opening track on This is Still It takes the red carpet all the way back to CBGBs. Do the Method froths and spits with the same head-rush drive and excitement of Television’s See No Evil. And on Commotion Varney’s vocals veer towards the controlled panic usually voiced by David Byrne.

The roll call of potential bastard cousins from across the Atlantic is also impressive. Bleeding is infused with the sparse, sonic suffocation of Joy Division and the whole album trembles with a knock-kneed funk that would make the Gang of Four seek anti-Blyton back-up. Yet somewhere lurks the pop aesthetic that underpinned many a buzzcocked classic. It goes back further.

It could be argued that The Method Actors have studied Beefheart and visited both the playful (Rang-A-Tang) and exotic, discordant landscapes (Pigeons) imagined by Can. There are even hints of the exasperated, angry shouts of Eugene McDaniels.

The key, however, to not pretending is an element of madness and The Method Actors have the periodic table covered. Like Pavement’s Spiral Stairs, Varney is two notes short of a conventional solo, operating – on voice and guitar – in a scale and fluxuating register that would render most musicians unrecordable.

And the hulk of David Gamble is a Dr Bruce Banner-man on drums, who has finally learnt to channel his aggression into a perpetual driving cavalcade of percussion; snare and toms snap and bellow as cymbals crash with measured abandon. For times when the emotions are frayed and all that will do is a dose of nervous tension…well, this
is still it.

For more information visit www.myspace.com/methodactors

The Pocket Gods new album: Plan Nub, Behind The Fridge

The Pocket Gods release their new album, Plan Hub, Behind The Fridge on 1st April 2010.

Following on from their previous album Lo-fi Sci-Fi, Plan Nub, Behind The Fridge sees The Pocket Gods go even more random, trashy and psychedelic with 16 tracks of pure indie pop lunacy.

It is an aural homage to b-movies, snacks and UFOs and features broadcasting legend Howard Hughes.

Discovered way back in 2005 by the late John Peel, they even get name checked in his auto-biog “Margrave of the Marshes”, The Pocket Gods continue to receive a growing cult following.
They have received airplay on BBC Radio 1 (Huw Stephens) and BBC Radio 6 (Tom Robinson). They also recorded a live HUB session for Tom’s show. They have only played 87 gigs to date including a set at the 2008 In The City, Manchester which received rave reviews.

They are fronted by , whom BBC Radio 6’s Tom Robinson calls a “wilful maverick” and aided and abetted with Mark Christopher Lee acts of randomness from Annie Moeke and Claire Lee.

Copies of Plan Nub, Behind The Fridge by The Pocket Gods are available from iTunes & other download sites and www.myspace.com/nubcountryrecords.

For more information visit: www.myspace.com/thepocketgods.

Erland And The Carnival

Erland and the Carneval’s self-titled debut has been described by Simon Tong (formerly of The Verve, The Good, The Bad & The Queen and The Shining (anyone remember them?)) as a blend of Pentangle, Ennio Morricon, Love, 13th Floor Elevators and Joe Meek. Quite a blend of psychedelic folk then, it seems.

And with song titles like ‘Was You Ever See’, ‘Gentle Gwen’ and ‘One Morning Fair’ you can certainly see the lambswool-jumpered, muddy-peasanted, 60s folk-rock psychedelia that the group, who are led by guitarist and singer Erland Cooper, are trying to promote.

In these cases, where groups are revisiting a past genre without the basis of a ‘scene’ behind them, success depends almost entirely upon whether the project comes across as natural and sincere.

It is hard to fault the group for sincerity. With ‘Love Is A Killing Thing’ (based, apparently, upon a traditional folk song and a Seeger/MacColl chorus), the candid and unpretentious lyrics are laced with a darkness and nicely underpinned by dynamical shifts and interesting synthetic sounds.

The darkness – a sort of deserted-fairground or empty-cinema darkness – is a prevailing theme on the album. Much like The Coral before them, they take the more haunting side of The Doors’ soul and The Beatles’ LSD trips – the racing heart, the warped visions and the feelings of isolation – and turn them into pop songs, such as on the great ‘My Name Is Carnival or on ‘Gentle Gwen’.

For Cooper, who grew up on the fiddle, acoustic guitar and Bert Jansch, the sound is a lot thicker than you might expect. The group sound really tight and the compositions sound very natural.

At times they slip a little into the Franz Ferdinand mode – repeating hackneyed lines for little poetic purpose, such as on ‘You Don’t Have To Be Lonely’ or ‘Trouble In Mind’, but using words from Leonard Cohen (on ‘This Disturbed Morning’) and William Blake (‘The Echoing Green’) turns out to be a masterstroke. Cooper delivers them well and the musical background onto which they are projected is original without being corruptive.

This is a lovely release from Static Caravan / Full Time Hobby, one well worth listening to. Thank goodness Simon Tong left The Shining, right?

Here is their MySpace page.

Latitude Festival: photo by Paul Wesley Griggs

Latitude Festival Music Stages
There were four main music stages at this year’s festival: Obelisk (main stage) Arena and The Lake Stage were open air, while the Uncut and Sunrise Arenas were in tents.

Latitude Festival Highlights – Saturday 25th July

Band Of Skulls – Sunrise Arena
After surviving a thunder & lightning worthy of building an ark, let alone sleeping rough in a tent, I returned to the woods on day two of the Latitude Festival to watch Band Of Skulls play their heavy, post-grunge indie rock to an enthusiastic gathering on the Sunrise Arena.

This was an early afternoon set with the bright sun beaming through the trees.  But the Band Of Skulls sound was bass-throbbing heavy, and quite literally shook me up.  Playing tracks from their wonderfully titled current debut album, Baby Darling Doll Faced Honey, including the anthemic sing-a-long  chorus of I Know What I Am and the slower, brooding, lighter-fuelled Fires.

At times Band Of Skulls lighten the mood, drop the distorted guitars and with Honest sound more folk than rock.  They may have a rubbish name but when they want to, they really rock!

Mika – Uncut Arena
Begrudgingly, I accompanied my 12 year old son to watch Mika play the Uncut Stage.  We missed the first three or four songs & entered the stage with Mika sitting at the piano playing, as it was billed, an acoustic set.  I lasted just two songs before asking my son if he was bored.  He said to give it one more song.

Just then two cannons fired a continuous stream of confetti over an audience full of young children and mothers.  Then, unexpectedly Mika climbed on a platform, possible his piano, and a full band stood up.  The show came alive with a lively version of Big Girls from his award winning debut album Life In Cartoon Motion.

Though not my style of music, I certainly appreciated the effort Mika was putting into the performance, as he leaped all over the stage, orchestrating the audience in clapping along in time with the up tempo beat.

To end the set, Mika made himself visible to all once again, this time sporting an American Indian headdress and playing a trashcan which was tied to his chest like a big bass drum. Whoops and screams, mainly from the mothers rather than the kids made for a great atmosphere and reminded me that, after all we were all here to enjoy ourselves.  And for his part, Mika put on a great show.

Doves – Obelisk (main stage) Arena
Of all the artists playing Latitude this year, it was Doves I was looking forward to seeing most.  When at their best they make perfect alternative pop songs that make me smile and want to swing my arms around in a state of happiness; and that’s exactly what I did.

Like Pet Shop Boys the night before, Doves remarked on what a beautiful festival it was and how it was great to see families in the audience.  The rain stayed away as Doves played songs from their current album, Kingdom Of Rust as well as old favourites like The Cedar Room, Pounding as well as the Motown beat sounding Black & White Town; and before making way for Grace Jones, finished a wonderful set with a perfect rendition of There Goes The Fear, complete with a familiar live Latin-style percussion finale.

Before thanking the audience and wishing them a good weekend, bass player and main vocalist Jimi Goodwin prematurely introduced the headline act on the Main Stage, by saying “…and heeeeeeeeeere’s Grace!”

Spiritualized – Uncut Arena
I confess that I am not that familiar with Jason ‘Spaceman’ Pierce and in all honesty hadn’t given Spiritualized the time due to not liking Pierce’s previous band, Spaceman 3.  So it was with no expectations that I agreed to watch Spiritualized in preference over the Grace Jones show, which I knew was going to be exciting, flamboyant, and full of costume changes and a great live spectacle.

The Uncut Arena filled to capacity and looking around the audience it seemed that a large majority were big fans eagerly awaiting something special. Maybe they knew what to expect.  But I had no idea.  Dub reggae played until the lights dimmed to the delight of the audience.  I could feel the anticipation grow as a few pushed further forward towards the stage as if to get closer to the main man – Jason Pierce. After all, I think I’m right in saying; Spiritualized is simply a vehicle for his musical ideas.

The band started with a slow, grinding, buzz guitar noise.  Constant, heavy but in no way rocking as Pierce nonchalantly murmured the lyrics of Amazing Grace.  It was enough to grab my attention and make others whoop and cheer as the sound was left to drop a decibel or two before the second track burst in, all guns blazing.  Everything and I mean EVERYTHING had instantly been turned up to 11 and the strobes were having their own epileptic fit, let alone causing one!

Still the song was slow, grinding with a buzz guitar that filled the air like we were all crammed into a telephone box.  The sound was deafening but strangely not too loud.  I can only explain the music as being like a very slow version of My Bloody Valentine at their best. This was great.  This was something very special.  So special that I wondered if all Spiritualized gigs were like this, or I was witnessing one of those shows, like the Jesus & Mary Chain North London Poly “Riot Gig” I will be able to say “I was there!”

The songs weren’t familiar to me.  But they were to those around me.  The music was mostly a slow burning psychedelic alternative rock.  At times twisted, archaic prog rock elements; always self-indulgent and trippy.  But then there were clear moments of Gram Parsons / The Byrds alt. Country and even a soft thrash that reminded me of Ace Of Spades by Motorhead (Come Together) rather than Pink Floyd’s Us & Them.

With my unfamiliarity I made a few of my own reference points to reminiscent sounds I could hear drift in and out.  Mazzy Starr, The Stooges, My Bloody Valentine, Pink Floyd, Gram Parsons & The Byrds and also black gospel music.  I don’t wish to offend anyone who holds Spiritualized in high places.

If you are reading this and you are now thinking of going to a Spiritualized gig then I have probably spoilt it for you because you are now going to expect a live show to blow your mind.  But I can honestly say in the past 25 years there haven’t been many performances that have left me feeling quite so speechless.