Fuzzo - Brigadier Ambrose

But when did the mercury begin to rise for Brigadier Ambrose? Well, it all started not so long ago, just 30 miles from Old London Town in a suburban sprawl by the River Medway. Come with me…

Returning home to The Medway Towns, after a 13-year hiatus, I breathed in the salty river tears, looked skywards to the stunning Victorian architecture and bruised my nostrils with particles of rotting kebabs lining the street, from Rochester to Chatham. I sighed with a resigned happiness; it was good to be back.

But within days I’d heard the same smacked-face story: “The towns are a dive, full of chavs, rubbish castle, stinking prospects. Dead or dying. Modern life is rubbish.” A very English pessimism. And then I was introduced to the music of Chatham’s Brigadier Ambrose, a very English band.

Early singles shone lights on the night ladies straddled on New Road, painted flesh torn pictures of post-pub violence, picked at the nit-wit proprietors of gel-angled hair and magnetised the airwaves with garage-pop sonics. Two and three minute vignettes told with wit, verve and often a wry wink.

See the video for early single Decembered

Mostly ignored in their home town, Brigadier Ambrose lit fires in the eyes of notable musical luminaries including Alan McGee, Stuart Maconie, Mark Radcliffe and Huw Stephens. BBC sessions and festival slots followed and still Chatham slumbered. Boo! Wake up Chatham; it’s time to get fuzzy.

Released digitally in November 2009 and on CD in March 2010, Fuzzo follows in the footsteps of great English guitar pop albums, records that blur the lines between first and third person, between the mundane and the fantastical and between ideals and reality.

In 1968 The Kinks ignored the mind-expanding platitudes of their peers and wrote an extraordinary album about a village green society that was falling apart. The remnants of that society – decency, respect and a sense of innocence, as well as pomp and class divisions – have stoked the flames of some of England’s brightest, wittiest and inventive bands for the past 40 years and with Fuzzo, Brigadier Ambrose are carrying on that tradition.

The intro Wurlitzer swirl on album opener Mind Reel hints at the circus-act hoax that can be modern living; all preening and posturing with little substance. What follows is a five-song opening salvo that gives XTC’s classic White Music a run for its money, in terms of breath-snatching, fuzzy-pop brilliance.

Mischievous chord changes and time alterations blow a mallard-sized puff of smoke in the direction of Blur’s Modern Life is Rubbish; none more so than on Uh-Oh, which beautifully reflects the discordant uneasiness of Oily Water.

Musically, Brigadier Ambrose are lithe, able and playful, jumping from one hook to another, subtlety altering tone and texture without stunting the flow of the arrangement; a skill Syd Barrett displayed wonderfully on The Madcap Laughs but a potential banana skin for mimics and fakers.

Brigadier Ambrose’s lyrical intent, at times, also brings to mind Mr Barrett. A flash of a story whips into the next as the montage is built. But unlike Barrett the misanthropic glint in this band’s eye is more sharply focused. Not that Fuzzo is an idiot-friendly rant or tirade. But as Dave Goggin sings on Yours, Danube Song, “ It’s not like me to make a fuss but I’ve been getting rather cross with things.” Small talk, the self obsessed, mindless menacing, fat heads and slim-fit jeans. They’re all on the list.

Fuzzo is on the Mercury long list and on 20 July we will find out if it’s on the short list. An album that is packed with insight, dry wit, dazzling song-writing – and one that can be so uplifting, despite its melancholic airs – should be. But however this particular chapter of the story ends make sure that Fuzzo and Brigadier Ambrose are top of your list.

The band have no live dates planned at the moment but visit the Brigadier Ambrose website for updates.

Listen to Helium, from Fuzzo

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…

Field Music

On Let’s Write a Book younger Brewis brother, David, takes the lead, turning the pages back to the early 80s with the smooth precision of a talcum-footed northern funkster. The staccato intro hints at a Tangerine Dream sequence, before snapping into focus with a drum and percussion track that cranks the head forward into a glorious, neon-tinged groove.

Brewis’ high-range vocals and the interspersed synth washes point to Prince; while Beck’s midnight vultures preen and glide. In the pantheon of discarded brat-pack movies there lies a forgotten gem that traded pumped-up goonery for considered, rational action. Let’s Write a Book is the soundtrack.

If you’ve yet to delve the glorious depths of Field Music (Measure), don’t take this single page as chapter and verse. The double-album library is packed with references to the past. The rock-operatic scope of Quadrophenia. The weird and precise lines consumed on Roxy Music’s For Your Pleasure. King Crimson. Talk Talk. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The index would make a weighty tome on its own.

But shut the front cover and it reads Field Music, a carefully crafted, progressive space, where the rocks are honed and clean, pop socks are carefully arranged and the animals march to their own, idiosyncratic time signatures. Put the books aside for a while, open up and explore a world of wit, charm and fine, fine music.

And if a new single isn’t enough, Memphis Industries will be reissuing the brothers’ two solo albums – Peter Brewis’ The Week That Was and David Brewis’ School of Language album Sea From Shore – packaged together on 21 June.

Field Music will tour the UK from May onwards, swelling to a four-piece, with Kev Dosdale on guitar and Ian Black on bass.

Live dates:
20 May 2010 – Liverpool Sound City, Masque Loft, Liverpool
26 May 2010 – Concorde 2, Brighton
28 May 2010 – Exeter Phoenix, Exeter
29 May 2010 – Dot to Dot Festival, Bristol 30 May 2010 Evolution Festival, Newcastle
31 May 2010 – Dot to Dot Festival, Manchester
03 Jun 2010 – The Musician, Leicester
04 Jun 2010 – Guildhall, Gloucester
05 Jun 2010 – Wilde Theatre, Bracknell
26 Jun 2010 – Glastonbury Festival, Somerset
30 Jul 2010 – Eastleigh Music Festival
31 Jul 2010 – Camp Bestival, Dorset
22 Aug 2010 – Green Man Festival, Wales
10-12 Dec 2010 – ATP presents Bowlie 2, curated by Belle & Sebastian

Visit Field Music’s website to keep up-to-date with gigs and even explore the band’s studio.  

It looks like the video for Let’s Write a Book is not yet available, at least not on Youtube. So here’s the video for the first single from Field Music (Measure), Them That Do Nothing.

Trust Me I’m A Doctor

The Blizzards have enjoyed enormous success in Ireland over the last few years, winning two consecutive Meteor Awards for Best Live Act in 2008 and 2009 and are now set to conquer the UK with their bold and ballsy guitar led pop anthems.

The band are looking to build on the success of their debut UK single Buy It Sell It, which caught the collective attention of Dermot O’Leary, MTV and Spotify amongst others earlier in the year.

Trust Me I’m A Doctor is the second single to be taken from the forthcoming album Domino Effect. The single bears all the trade marks of The Blizzards success in Ireland.

The Blizzards – Trust Me I’m A Doctor

Following multiple sold-out Irish tours, a stunning appearance in July on the main stage at the Oxegen in front of 60,000 fans and recent opening slots for AC/DC and Oasis at Slane Castle, The Blizzards bring this huge crowd-winning set to V Festival this summer on August 22nd/23rd.

This Summer Night has Robert Wyatt’s beautifully warm and original, at times wonderfully frail, vocal delivery and is a worthy addition to a list of past collaborations Wyatt has worked on.

The single comes with a great remix which immerses the late evening, sun setting easy listening pop of the single with the analogue bleeps and squeaks of a Hot Chip accompaniment.  I am loving the remix and listening to the new single reminded me of Robert Wyatt’s amazing performance on The Old Grey Whistle Test performing Shipbuilding in 1982.

This Summer Night is due for release on 20th October.

THE KOOKS US TOUR DATES

09/30 – Baton Rouge, LA – Varsity Theatre
10/02 – Dallas, TX – House of Blues
10/03 – Houston, TX – Meridian
10/04 – Austin, TX – Antone’s
10/05 – Tulsa, OK – Cains Ballroom
10/07 – St Louis, MO – The Pageant
10/08 – Des Moines, IA – People’s Court
10/09 – Madison, WI – Barrymore Theatre
10/11 – Chicago, IL – Riviera Theatre
10/12 – Cincinatti, OH – Bogarts
10/14 – Columbus, OH – Newport Music Hall
10/21 – Seattle, WA- Showbox SoDo
10/22 – Portland, OR – Crystal Ballroom
10/24 – Sacramento, CA – Empire
10/25 – San Francisco, CA – Warfield Theatre
10/27 – Anaheim, CA – House of Blues
10/28 – Hollywood, CA – Hollywood Palladium

For more information visit

www.thekooks.co.uk
http://www.myspace.com/thekooks

There are only a few well documented accounts of feral children – wild youth raised by animals outside of normal rules of society, though there are plenty of knife-wielding joy riders that only just have their toes inside society!

These Feral Children found roots in Boston, then Washington before relocating to the more appropriate Seattle.

Jeff Keenan (vocals, percussion, guitar) and Jim Cotton (vocals, bass) allegedly played their first songs to a horse:

“We played grunge on acoustic guitars to the horse on the farm next door.” Keenan recalls.

Maybe you can understand why they moved to Seattle!

The debut album from Feral Children, Second to the Last Frontier has arrived, and its been every bit worth the wait. All four songs on the recently released free EP are included, along with 8 other truly absorbing tracks which make for a great debut.

Feral Children have been busy making a name for themselves with wild, bloody and chaotic live shows across the USA and Scott Colburn has done a fine job as producer of the album in capturing some of the archaic energy.

The closest this sounds to anyone else is an Arcade Fire on heat!

I can hear traces of Nick Cave, The Birthday Party, Dinosaur Jr, Mercury Rev and dare I say Bob Geldof and The Boomtown Rats lurking in corners, like ghosts from the past. But what comes out of the speakers is something new, very distinct, alive and kicking.

Hopefully it won’t be long before Feral Children venture across the water and show the UK what all the live fuss is about.

If you have already heard how good they are, go to the official Feral Children MySpace page. If you know how good they sound, chances are you have already bought this album.

Second to the Last Frontier by Feral Children is released on Sarathan Records.

In the meantime, here’s the official promo video.

The Verve - Love Is Noise

The new album from Tricky is a true return to form.  Knowle West Boy spans many genres, and covers Tricky’s musical career to date.

The album starts with the bluesy pop song Puppy Toy but is packed with different genres and rhythms.  Each track offers an insight to Tricky’s various moods and musical influences.  The fantastic single Council Estate is reminiscent of the post-punk ska energy of The Specials, while Joseph comes with a much more subdued, contemplative Tricky.

Tricky employs the services of session musicians and undiscovered vocalists to help deliver his powerful songs and finds Tricky in a reflective mood as he returns to his roots and finds solace in an autobiographical album of great individual songs, and an even better collection of 13 new tracks.

If Knowle West Boy was a series of paintings it could be viewed as a series of self portraits, capturing separate moments in one man’s life growing up in Bristol, soaking up sounds and thoughts from various music and life experiences of one black man’s struggle growing up between cultures, in a melting pot environment.  The result is the best Tricky album since his debut, Maxinquaye in 1995.

Knowle West Boy was recorded in Los Angeles and London and is released on 7th July on Domino Records.

The following was written by Tricky in April 2008.

Knowle West Boy was recorded in London and LA. It was initially recorded over a year ago in London. But I wasn’t really happy with the writing. Some of it was just too generic. So I brought it back here to LA and rewrote everything. It’s totally self-produced apart from a couple of tracks that were co-produced by Switch. He definitely livened up Council Estate. He’s a good guy.

Knowle West is where I was born. It’s a white ghetto. I didn’t know what racism was until I left. My family’s mixed race, so we don’t see colour. I grew up on a council estate more as a white kid, but with Jamaican roots. But all of us there had something in common… we were poor.

I realised that I’d never written anything for these kind of people. I met a guy in Notting Hill who told me his songs had got him through being in prison. That’s amazing… but I’d never deliberately written anything for people like him, and me, and the people I grew up with. Like School Gates… that’s the true story of my girlfriend getting pregnant when she was 16. And that’s something every kid can relate to. Everything on that song is true. Council Estate… that song is the upbringing me and friends had. That’s why the album’s called Knowle West Boy. I mean… Coldplay’s all very well. But it all gets a bit whiny. I wanted lyrics like The Specials and Blondie and Banshees songs I loved as a kid, that someone like me can relate to.

It’s been a while since Vulnerable came out in 2003. I didn’t know it had been five years. I thought it was three!

The first two years I was living in New York. I was just… hanging out. I’d kinda got a bit fed up with it all. Album, tour… and then your year’s over. My life had become a cycle of albums. And I’d settled down but suddenly it had all got a bit crazy again.

I started hanging out with some Jamaican cousins of mine who live in The Bronx. And I immediately noticed that no-one there knew who I was. We used to just hang outside this Jamaican food shop in Manhattan. One of the guys, Rod, is on this album. And we used to do Jamaican chatting to each other. Then we’d go to a club or a bar and just rap over music.

So a year turned into two, and then turned three, and then I came to LA to do some work for Jerry Bruckheimer, for a few different films. He’s an incredible guy!  Three months turned into six months in a hotel, so I thought I might as well get an apartment. I kinda got stuck in LA! I was doing the same things I’d been doing in New York… partying, to be honest with you.

LA hasn’t affected me at all… I’m still totally me. But one thing LA can do is mess you up and fuck you up more than New York or London. I’ve seen people move to LA and within a year they’re tore down and burnt out. If you don’t stay focussed you can get into big trouble here. And I nearly did. You don’t really wanna be in the studio when you can be on Sunset Boulevard drinking Saki! Within a few months I knew everybody here. There wasn’t a club or party I couldn’t get into. It just turned into one big party.

So I had to move out of Hollywood. Then I started the Brown Punk label with Chris Blackwell. And I directed a movie called Brown Punk – The Movie. That’s finished now but it took about a year.

It’s not like I didn’t wanna do an album as well. I spent a year trying to get a deal, to be honest with you. And I had some really terrible meetings. Really, really bad meetings. Really quite comical. After one particularly bad one I went to see Chris Blackwell in London. And I said, “Chris… maybe I’m gonna have to come out on Brown Punk.” But he said it’s not good for an artist to be on his own label. And I agreed, but it was getting to desperation time. Chris says, “Listen… go and see Domino”.

He set up a meeting so I thought he and Laurence Bell were friends. Me and Laurence had a great chat, then we meet again, we’re both interested. So I ask, “How long have you known Chris?” And Laurence says, “I don’t”. I ask, “Well, how come I’m here?” He says, “I don’t know.” It was perfect. I signed to Domino.

The bands Domino are breaking are not totally conventional. Arctic Monkeys and Franz Ferdinand may sound poppy and have great songs, but they haven’t made it in the traditional way. And this is perfect for me because, with this album… I’m lucky enough to have my own sound, but with this album I wanted to do a track like Council Estate, that rips off The Specials but takes ‘em into my world. And like Puppy Toy, which is a blues song.

When I was a kid I always wanted to be in The Specials. I dreamed I was onstage with Terry Hall. With this album I thought… I make music. I have the opportunity to be The Specials on one song, and Tom Waits on another song, and Howlin’ Wolf on another song. Past Mistake, though, is more like the old me, a track that people would expect from me. Coalition is me wanting to be a hardcore rapper. So all my dreams come true on this album. ‘Cos I’ve always been a wannabe!

I needed an English label to do that, and to bring me home. Epitaph was a great label for me. But they had no presence in England. This is my home country. I’m moving back soon, and I wanted to make an English album.

There are lots of singers on this album. I don’t really consider myself a vocalist. I can’t carry a whole album with my voice. It’s just being realistic. I can’t sing. And I love working with female vocalists. A lot of my lyrics are from a female point of view. I wish I could sing like Janis Joplin or PJ Harvey. But I can’t. So I need – need – a female singer to help me.

There’s a girl called Alex Mills, who’s on my Brown Punk label. She sings on Puppy Toy. She does the spoken word bits, too. She’s from Leeds. The reggae vocalist on Bacative and Baligaga is my boy Rodigan from New York… one of the guys I hung out with in The Bronx. Seven years we’ve been friends, and he inspires me. Baligaga is a made-up word… don’t ask me what the fuck it means! Bacative is Jamaican slang… if someone has your back, you’ve got ‘bacative’.

Joseph is one of two songs I’ve named after the tune’s lead singer. I met him outside a food shop in LA. He was a busker. Problem is… I’ve lost his details. I have no idea where this kid is now. So I called it Joseph so, hopefully, he hears it somewhere and gets in touch. ‘Cos I want to work with him again.

The same sort of thing has happened a few times on this album. The female voice on Bacative, for example, is this Spanish girl who I don’t really know and who isn’t really a singer. And Veronika… she’s a friend of mine from a really good band in Italy. And she wrote that song, not me. But I changed the music. So, again, I named the track after her.

The singer on Past Mistake and School Gates is my French-Moroccan ex-girlfriend Lubna, who I’ve just had an horrific break-up with. It’s funny… me and Lubna wrote Past Mistake when we were just turning from good to bad. One day much later we were in bed listening to it and we realised that it was about us going horribly wrong. It’s like we knew it was going to happen.

Cross To Bear is sung by an Icelandic girl called Hafdis. The song’s inspired by Scorcese’s The Last Temptation Of Christ and I just thought her voice would be great because its kinda innocent. I thought she’d be good at playing Jesus. Not everybody could get away with that.

And Council Estate is just me. It’s the first single I’ve ever done with just me on vocals. I couldn’t whisper that song. I had to come out of myself and do a loud, screaming vocal. I wanted to be a proper frontman on that one.

I covered Kylie’s Slow because I love that song. And the video is one of the best fucking videos I’ve ever seen. It’s sexy as fuck.

I was really conscious about my lyrics this time around. I find it easy to write lyrics… I’m blessed. And I really love doing it. But sometimes when something comes easy you get lazy. I’d reached the point where I was just… rhyming. So I really focussed on writing songs that mean something.

This album could make people uncomfortable. It’s a jumble of thoughts. When I first came into the public eye in the mid-’90s I was misunderstood. People think I’m a hardcore, dark guy. If you meet me, I’m quite a funny guy. I’m clumsy, I make fun of myself all the time. But that’s not how I’m perceived. But I don’t regret anything. I take full responsibility.

I’m so excited about Knowle West Boy. I feel like it’s my first record all over again. I just want people to hear it, I wanna talk about it, and then I just want to get out there and tour for a long time. But I’m not sure this record would have been so exciting if I hadn’t spent those years in The Bronx, being anonymous, having to queue for the club like everybody else. I realised that I’d started to take this incredible life as a musician for granted. I needed to be taken down a peg or two.

Now, I’m feeling like a kid again. That’s why the album’s called Knowle West Boy. This is where I’m from.

Tricky, April 2008

Film Noir – I Had A Very Hapy Childhud

I Had A Very Hapy Childhud (their spelling) is an exceptional debut album from French band Film Noir. It is one of the indie pop / indie rock albums I’ve heard for some time.

The14 track album starts with the razor-sharp juttering guitar of It’s Goodbye, that lives somewhere between the rhythm of Orange Juice and the aggressive speed of The Wedding Present.

On various tracks I am reminded of The Charlatans, Libertines, Dirty Pretty Things, Radiohead and The Strokes.  What a combination!

There is also traces of vaudeville and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band in The Thief Is In The Tree and The Dog.

Fabulous tracks such as The Strokes-like Shooting Game and An Accident are perfect pop songs; as are the Libertines / Dirty Pretty Things sounding CNN.  But don’t think that I am referring to other bands in a condenscending way.  These are songs that need to be heard by as many people as possible.

The music is tight and fresh while Oan Kim vocals are the perfect accompaniment. Another favourite track is the lighter-fuelled Radiohead-esque Red, Purple & Blue.  Forget The Killers.  Get into Film Noir and help make them as popular as they deserve to be.  A wonderful, perfect album.

Film Noir are Oan Kim (Lead vocals, Gtr, Keys), Alexandre Choiselat (Lead Gtr/Vocals), Erwan Jaffre (Bass/Vox), Assen Tzankov (Drums).

If you like the aforementioned artists, I am confident you will love this album.

To learn more visit official the Film Noir website

Listen to Film Noir