Having that track or two pique my interest (incidentally, is anything other than someone’s interest ever ‘piqued’?) I was keen to hear their forthcoming single ‘Working Circle Explosion’. It’s the first single to be taken from their forthcoming album, on the ever-wonderful Fortuna Pop! label, ’Howl of the Lonely Crowd’.

It’s produced by Edwyn Collins and Ryan Jarman from The Cribs, which gives it a bit of added street cred in certain quarters.

Having listened to it a few times, I think it’s fairly safe to say that somewhere among the music collection of the wonderfully named David Feck is a copy of ‘Action, Time and Vision’ by ATV. If not, someone has been playing it to him in his sleep for a fair while, as there is more than a passing resemblance between the two.

There’s also a healthy dose of The Fall in there, which is usually a good sign, and the whole thing rocks along at a fair pace leaving me eager to hear more. Luckily there’s the new album to hear and, once I’ve listened to it, I look forward to expanding my conversations on Comet Gain with my mate.

Comet Gain have the following live dates planned:

25th May – Primavera Festival – Poble Espanyol
28th May – Primavera festival – Parc del Centre de Poble
6th June – London – XOYO (with Herman Dune)

For more information visit http://www.myspace.com/thecometgain.

Comet Gain release their new single, Working Circle Explosion on Fortuna Pop! on 23rd May 2011.

Dissidents & Dancers by The Method

With post-punk’s fragmentation into a hundred sub-genres around about 1982 there was a short-lived revival in psychedelia. You couldn’t  get the proper clothing, but drainpipe cordrouys, Levi jackets and button-downs would suffice. You might even find a knock-off pair of Roger McGuinn shades if you were lucky. After a couple of little features in the NME and The Face, the movement died out.

Except, of course, it didn’t. It was just that the High Street never latched on and the modish types continued to spin ‘I Had too Much to Dream Last Night‘ or ‘Incense and Peppermints‘ in rooms above pubs until it was time to hand on the baton to the new generation.

The sound of The Method is rooted in this 1980’s garage-fueled psychedelia rather than the 1960’s original. With close-on a further quarter century of pop culture to draw on, this Welsh five-piece brew up a cocktail that bears traces, at various times, of The Coral, The Teardrop Explodes, The Monkees, Captain Beefheart, Question Mark & the Mysterians, Echo & the Bunnymen, The Action, Happy Mondays, and a thousand others. All of which is absolutely fine with me, as is their use of a full-time horn blower.

I’m very partial to trumpet in my music, whether it be Love, Dexys, the Tijuana Brass, a groovy instrumental from Alan Hawkshaw and his ilk or the aforementioned Teardrop Explodes.

As with any psych worth its salt, the songs are guitar and keys driven and you wouldn’t get anywhere without a decent singer. This they have in Richie Hayes’ throaty and soulful, though more Ian McCulloch than Steve Marriott, vocals.

Stand out tracks are the northern soul stomper of a title track, with a riff borrowed from the Captain’s ‘Zig Zag Wanderer‘ and an exhilarating chorus that I can’t quite put my finger on, the single ‘Whip Around‘ and the Nuggets-esque punker ‘Consider This Your Warning‘.

With cover-art a supposed lost craft in this digital age, these boys have paid homage to (or is that stolen from?) the great Saul Bass (Google his delightful and iconic work for cinema) for their eye-catching sleeve.

It amounts to a promising, rather than sensational, debut. On reflection, make that highly promising, and probably worth putting yourself out to see them live.

For more information visit The Method website.

Dissidents & Dancers by The Method is released on See Monkey Do Monkey Recordings.

The Leaves

From south to east and west to west, then back again. So the cyclone went in the early sixties. It carried blues and rhythm to New York, spun across the sea, casting rare vinyl nuggets on the shore of Liverpool and, in a mop-topped whirly gig ripped back across the ocean and through the heart of LA.

By the time it reached the pacific edge there was blues, rhythm, folk, pop and star-spangled freedom strewn in its wake. The universe-bound youth seized the tidal yo-yo, sought residencies at the Go-Go and forged some of the mind-melting foundations of American psychedelia. For The Byrds, The Doors and Love this was their time, a time they made timeless. But, in the wake of any cyclone there is debris and, Sunset stripped, The Leaves withered and fell, just a year after tasting the chart-tipped rays of success.

The band started as a rhythm and blues party band but hit the big time in April 1966 with a fuzz-wigged version of Hey Joe. Hip and tripped on this high, with a Whiskey residency and faithful hearts in the city of angels, they recorded All The Good That’s Happening. It A-bombed as fingers hovered and, when founding member Jim Pons left to get happy together with The Turtles, the band died.

However, All The Good That’s Happening is, in part, a fantastic testament to all the musical good that was happening from 1965 to 1967. Opening track Twilight Sanctuary reflects the close-knit harmonies and country-folk-tinged airs that gave wing to The Byrds. While One In The Middle is a R‘n’B standards work out…and great fun.

 This isn’t a testament, however, to why The Leaves fell. Third track in, On The Plane, has the haunting progressions and chilling lyrical tones that powered Love’s Forever Changes. Like Arthur Lee and his charges, it’s documented that The Leaves dabbled with nature’s resin. The influence of which can be felt with giddy-slept ears on side two of All The Good That’s Happening.

With None Shoes chops and jangles with litho-cut intent, while Codine is musically as clear at the rising sun but wrapped in the midnight claws of self-abuse and lament. The album closes with Lemmon Princess and its sinister opening command, “Play.” Wonderfully confused, ambiguous and sonically fried, the track is close to the Mad Hatter’s tea party edge of British psychedelia . It hints at what may have been had the LA waves not been carrying the portents of political unrest by the time The Leaves released their sophomore album.

Buy now direct from Cherry Red Records

Listen to Lemmon Princess

Garage Punk Rockers The Lords of Altamont

Garage punk rockers The Lords of Altamont return with a new line up and a new album, Midnight To 666, released via Fargo in the UK on the 30th May.

Jake ‘The Preacher’ Cavaliere, Shawn ‘Sonic’ Medina, John ‘Big Drag’ Saletra, plus new addition Harry ‘Full Tilt’ Drumdini (formerly of punk psychobillies, The Cramps) are arriving in the UK for a headline show at The Garage in London on 30th March.

It’s been over a decade since The Lords Of Altamont emerged from the depths of the Los Angeles garage scene. Evoking the feeling of psychedelic influenced 1960’s biker mayhem.  Their collective black hair, greasy boot-cut jeans, and custom denim jackets have always given them a “we’ve come for your daughters” presence, but it’s their ultra cool delivery of loud, steady, garage punk that has set them apart from the pack.

With the volume relentlessly cranked from start to finish, The Lords create an almighty, raw noise and highlight The Lords of Altamont ability to weld blistering fuzz-soul with catchy, hook-laden melodies.

The Lords of Altamont – Save Me (From Myself) promo video

The Lords of Altamont UK Date
30th March – The Garage

For more information visit www.lordsofaltamont.com.

the black angels

The Black Angels have unveiled an amazing and disturbing video to accompany their latest single Haunting at 1300 McKinley, which will be released on Blue Horizon on March 28th.

The track is the latest to be lifted from The Black Angels third album Phosphene Dream, which was released in September 2010 and with famed producer Dave Sardy at the helm is their most focused and forward thinking effort so far.

Haunting at 1300 McKinley has the feel of an early lo-fi, British sixties rhythm and blues track fused with fuzzy psychedelic guitars, representing the leaner more urgent side to the band on their latest album.

The video to support Haunting at 1300 McKinley is bound to court controversy, shot in black and white in Paris it is incredibly dark, mysterious and unsettling.

The Black Angels – Haunting at 1300 McKinley

The Black Angels believe in ghosts. They believe in them because they lived with one, at 1300 McKinley, the house they shared from 2004 to 2007 in Austin, Texas. “We’ve also seen several on Civil War battlefields and at the Alamo,” boast the band. “At Gettysburg we heard rifle fire and cannon fire. We saw old lanterns dangling from trees in the distance. Up a tower, we saw a Union soldier slam his face against one of the windows; blood splattered everywhere and one of his eyeballs was dangling, then he disappeared.”

The Black Angels were recently being named Band Of The Week on RollingStone.com and the last few months have been a phenomenal period for the band. As well as sold out tours across the globe, they’ve notched up a Letterman appearance (and a Conan O’Brien slot is due in May), performed on the Jim Jarmusch-curated stage at New York’s ATP and appeared on UNKLE’s new album on the track Natural Selection. Another Black Angels/UNKLE collaboration, With You In My Head was included on the smash hit Twilight Saga: Eclipse Soundtrack.

The Black Angels will perform with Queens of the Stoneage at Rolling Stone magazine’s SXSW party on March 16th, and have many other performances planned for that manic week in Austin.

The band are also looking forward to hosting the fourth installment of their annual music-and-arts festival, Austin Psych Fest, which runs from 29 April to 1 May 2011. Fast becoming the premiere destination for psych lovers, this year’s bash will see performances from Spectrum, Roky Erickson, Crystal Stilts, Crocodiles, The Fresh & Onlys, The Growlers, Cold Sun and tons more.

“The original idea was just to throw a party and invite the bands that we liked,” they say. “With something like SXSW or ATP you never get to see all the bands you want to see, so we’re being a bit selfish in a way and bringing them all to our place!”

The Goldberg Sisters

Perhaps best known for saving Private Ryan in the Hollywood blockbuster movie, actor Adam Goldberg is the man behind The Goldberg Sisters whose self titled album will be released on April 11th.

The Goldberg Sisters is the latest moniker for Adam’s musical output, he has previously released material as LANdy but has changed the artist name to avoid copyright infringements with a famous Brandy manufacturer.

The Goldberg Sisters is an album which encompasses everything from psychedelic to the “psychotropic” and explores themes from the depressing to the negligibly, less depressing, and it is Goldberg’s lofty ambition that this new album will put a wiggle in your step and a shot of adrenaline in your arm.

There are of course no sisters in the band, Goldberg explains; “I wanted to be in a sister band because there are a lot of cool sister bands lately, so I was basically trying to jump on the bandwagon. And I have two half-sisters whose last names are Goldberg. They don’t appear on the record, but they are there in spirit.”

You get the impression that Goldberg is his own man and his music too is about as unique as it gets, he manages to build his music in unfamiliar territory and clearly has a taste for the perverse- choosing to shoot the video for the track Shush on an iPhone, in one take.

The Goldberg Sisters – Shush

If you like Shush, get the free download of The Goldberg Sisters track Don’t Grow, here.

The Goldberg Sisters self titled album, tracklisting:

01. The Room
02. Mother Please (The World Is Not Our Home
03. Shush
04. Don’t Grow
05. You’re Beautiful When You Die
06. Erik Erikson
07. Third Person Blues
08. The Difference Between
09. The Skin Of the Patriot (Blame It on Your Youth)
10. The Heart Grows Fonder

The Goldberg Sisters brand new single Shush is released on March 28th with the self titled album to follow on April 11th.

vivian girls

On their third album Share the Joy, Brooklyn’s Vivian Girls continue to sharpen and refine their transcendent mix of garage thrash, girl-group warmth and infectious pop sensibilities.

The trio’s vibrant blend of guitar noise and melodic sweetness has already made Vivian Girls one of America’s most celebrated and influential young bands, and has helped to spark a wave of similarly-inclined female-fronted acts who’ve followed in their wake.

Cassie Ramone and ‘Kickball’ Katy Goodman are joined by new drummer Fiona Campbell in the latest Vivian Girls line up which delivers their most memorable songs and most focused performances yet.

Their new tunes successfully venture into challenging new musical and lyrical territory, reflecting the band members’ developing instrumental rapport and their far-reaching musical influences, while retaining the raw immediacy that originally endeared the group to its fans.

“It’s cleaner and more hi-fi than the previous records,” Cassie says of Share The Joy, which the band recorded at Rear House, the home studio run by Jarvis Taveniere (of the Brooklyn combo Woods), who engineered the album.  “The sound is more open, more free.  I think that this album really shows our strengths as musicians, and shows us melding together musically.  It’s more psychedelic and less shoegaze.  There’s also a lot of organ on it, which is new for us.”

Share the Joy’s musical and emotional depth is reflected on The Other Girls and Light In Your Eyes, each of which clocks in at over six minutes.  The former song manages to encompass hammering hardcore, Beach Boys-esque melodic bliss, Neil Young/Nirvana-inflected guitar frenzy and ethereal harmonic drone, while the latter closes the album on a triumphant note of surging sonic uplift.

Elsewhere, Dance If You Wanna and Take it As It Comes rank with the band’s most intoxicating pop confections, while Lake House and Vanishing of Time maintain a thoughtful, introspective tone that may come as a surprise to those who’d had Vivian Girls pegged as a lo-fi garage outfit.

Cassie Ramone reflects on the latest album;

“Share the Joy has the most diverse batch of songs of any of our albums, I feel like these songs are more expansive; a lot of the themes and lyrics are less direct than other albums.  These songs focus a lot on the themes of alienation, reconciliation, identity, and trying to figure out what really matters in life.  It’s a dark album, but unlike our first two albums, it has a happy ending.

“Our music continues to get more and more defined and developed, but it’s never going to be completely polished. A thing I like about our band is that we seem to mean different things to different people.  Another thing I’m proud of is that, while a lot of people may have initially heard about us through internet buzz and things like that, I think our audience likes our music because it’s honest and because we mean it.  I think that people can pick up on that.”

The Vivian Girls album Share the Joy is released on April 11th through the Polyvinyl label.

In the meantime you can download the track I Heard You Say for free as a taster for the full album.

Vivian Girls will be resident on the Bruise Cruise in Miami during the last week of February and will undertake a month long tour of the US in April.

UK dates are promised with details yet to be confirmed.

This clever and ambitious animated psychedelic trip is directed by Adriano Gazza, keeping a watchful eye over the work of animators Joseph Rufián, Laura Henry and John Angless with extra camera work from Ryan Pierce.

The perfect accompaniament to Amplifier’s artistic vision, here is the video:

And so to Syd Barrett’s artistic zenith – for it is Syd’s – the truly jaw dropping ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ by The Pink Floyd.

This is an album that picked popular music up and threw it light years ahead of itself using a 4 track tape recorder. Within these 42 minutes of progressive pop music are various rooms to be explored – the creativity in its production; Syd’s jaunty, angular guitar style; the sound effects; the vocal phrasing; the concurrent narrative of Syd’s health and relationships – but it is the inspirational songwriting that makes this record great. These songs still sound like they are from another planet.

To immediately dispel any naïve 1970’s related Pink Floyd thoughts to unconverted readers, this album’s jewels are its 8 animated pop songs – pop in every way you can imagine, achieving both very happy and very sad emotional reactions. Generally three and a bit minutes in length, Barrett’s charming pop gems are a genre of their own – songwriting as viewed through a very different lens, albeit looking at the sun. Structurally, these songs are non-conforming – the undeniably catchy ‘Flaming’ was released as a single but doesn’t really have anything you’d consider as a verse or a chorus; ‘Scarecrow’ operates like a wound-up toy, gradually spiralling away into a pastoral, elliptical orbit of its own choosing. ‘Bike’ is often the gloryhunter’s choice, languishing as it does in Beefheartian rhythm and eccentric, wild lyrics but it is surely ‘Matiilda Mother’ that steals the show.

With its sinister fairytale story and widescreen harmonies, ‘Matilda Mother’ is the defining moment of 1960’s English psychdelica, launching off into Technicolor whilst tightly tethered to intense childhood memories to get you back home safely. Only the 9 minute ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ can be described as difficult, but it’s a challenge you’re happy to rise to – an edgy and eerie soundcape of Binson-infected Farfisa and ball-bearing Telecaster, it is the perfect accompaniment to a Hammer horror film never made;  a Barrett pop song stretched and transformed to an altogether more frightening beast.

It all went downhill from here, of course – the Barrett downfall is well known, whilst Pink Floyd morphed into a horrific and systematic music machine; dull, bitter and pretentious. Barrett’s legacy though is a good one – through Julian Cope, The Fall, Blur, Radiohead, Beck and The Flaming Lips, his influence has shaped much of the more progressive side of popular music in the last 40 years.  2010 has been another great year for music, with popular music again genuinely looking to push new boundaries (Janelle Monae is but one example) – let the lesson from the 1960s be to look forward.

An album with the legend of ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ by The Pink Floyd is possible again but only if you’re willing to try something new.

David Goggin works on behalf of record companies and performers for the music rights licensing company PPL and has recently begun lecturing to university students in London on music industry matters. He owns and manages the independent Brigadier Records, who are distributed through Universal and is a member of the band Brigadier Ambrose. Their debut album ‘Fuzzo’ was entered into the 2010 Mercury Music Prize.

howlin' rain the good life EP

The sensational Howlin’ Rain bring their personal brand of melodic groove orientated psychedelic rock music to the UK tonight in their first shows in almost two years and as a bonus the band have announced the release of a new EP called The Good Life.

Imagine the Allman Brothers/Grateful Dead with a harder edge made for this century and you are close to capturing the pumped up swirling electric sound of Howlin’ Rain. They will be performing at The Garage in London tonight, with the equally brilliant Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo, this is a very rare treat indeed, trust me.

Howlin’ Rain will share the same stage as Rangda in Leeds and Manchester before finishing their short UK tour in Minehead and then off into Europe.

Ethan Miller of Howlin’ Rain apologises for this release not being the long awaited third album that we are all waiting for and says that the long player should be ready by summer/autumn 2011.

Instead The Good Life EP is a three track set taking up 20 minutes of play time, not ones to short change the customers this band, and the EP is available digitally via iTunes now.

A limited edition 1,000 copies are to be pressed on beautiful heavy vinyl presented in  a silk screened sleeve designed by Bay Area psychedelic artists Alan Forbes and David D’Andrea and printed at Monolith Press in Emeryville. The vinyl will be released on Birdman Records in January or February.

Ethan Miller says;

“After almost two years of pre-production work with producer Rick Rubin for our next album we found ourselves with an over abundance of material and an increasing gap of time between the forecast release of our next album and our last record “Magnificent Fiend”. On the eve of hitting the studio and beginning to record #3, Howlin Rain took a week to step into a studio and complete this mini album or EP. It was envisioned as both an introduction to the forthcoming full length due in 2011 (the songs are exclusive to this EP) and as a piece that could stand on it’s own in HR’s catalog as a trilogy of songs that present their own unique journey and sonic arch.

After such extended rehearsals and pre-production work we were interested in taking this opportunity to try and produce high quality recordings and performances off the cuff and against the clock that could capture a blend of immediacy and sonic intrigue.

All three songs were tracked in one evening live in the same room at Lucky Cat Studios in San Francisco by Trans Am’s brilliant Phil Manley and taken back to Louder Studios to be overdubbed and mixed by Tim Green in a handful of days. From the time we set up at Lucky Cat to the time the EP was completely mastered and ready to go was a week and a half. In the midst of a journey to complete an album that will have been years in the making, the Good Life EP is a catharsis of immediacy for us blasted down from a long highway, a postcard from the outer regions where we’ve been navigating now for a lot of moons.”

UK dates:
07-Dec UK London  Garage  w/ Wooden Shjips & Moon duo
08-Dec UK Leeds Brudenell  with Rangda
09-Dec UK Manchester Islington Mill  with Rangda
10-Dec UK Minehead ATP

Couldn’t resist this little taster! This is an old track recorded live in 2008.

Howlin’ Rain – Dancers At The End of Time