goings-on in landan town.

Monday 24th November, 2008 at Metro

This pikcha was taken from Turbowolf's myspace. It's also a sticker. I put it on my phone, and thus now my phone is a turbophone.

Not that I usually go to Metro (i.e. avoid like ze plague), but I went with Tom to catch Turbowolf and Team Robespierre (we missed the other bands). Turbowolf are awesome, and Tom is a total fanboy, wandering around in a Turbowolf Ghengis Khan t-shirt with the biggest grin on his face when they were playing. I can see why - they're an ACE band. Firstly, they just look like a rock band. They really do. Secondly, they can all play their instruments insanely well. Thirdly, the frontman is a mentalist (PLUS, HE IS THE BEST-MOUSTACHIOED MAN EVER and hot), and lastly, they interact together and seem more like a band than people thrown together. Which isn't what I can say for Robespierre. The crowd (though small) was entirely non compos mentis and wanting more when they finished their set. They wanted to play more, cue some arguing with some guy out back, this guy said no, but the crowd got all rowdy and started screaming so they went 'fuck it!' and played another awesome song complete with screaming guitar riffs, pure violence inflicted on the drumkit and yowling and yelping and rolling around on the floor from the frontman. ACE!
Roadspierre were on next. They set up quite oddly - leaving the drummer on his own 3 meters behind them on the stage whilst the rest of the team set up their keyboards and mics on the floor in front. They started playing their set (punk, but faggier). The thing that annoyed me was that the frontman and one of the guitarists interacted so much, leaving the drummer and the other guitarist out (the poor fella!) This led me to think of them as two bestest buddies liking the idea of forming a band, and recruiting two other poor sods they can completely ignore whilst they just help them sound halfway decent. Oh well, I still nicked a badge. (They're from Brooklyn too - the only time this place has failed me recently.)

Turbowolf - Bite
Turbowolf - Power

Later at DURRR:

(I love DURRR). Video Nasties are always a bit of a laugh, but I was BLOWN OVER by These Are Powers. A three-piece band, with a guitarist having a great time jamming (jamming is the only and perfect adjective), a drummer (using a really cool piece of electronic kit), and a beautiful, tall girl singer dressed partly like a 70s bond villan and partly like she'd raided Marlene Dietrich's wardrobe. (Cue lesbo-crush). Anyway, they make music sounding like pulsating weird party noise girlishly shouted over. Oh that was terribly written. I'm just going to rely on you hearing it yourself to be honest. Hot shit.

These Are Powers - Chipping Ice
These Are Powers - Little Sisters of Beijing

NEWStuffs:
VHS Deathscene is a boy (what I know) and his computer, based in the town of LANDAN (blud!), with a penchant for squeezing out shimmering, ghostly droplets of 8-bit that reminds me of the spooky levels on Mario 64. The pumping, twisted binary psychedelia is a little like Crystal Castles on magic mushrooms, or DMT perr-aps. (No website yet, folks.)

VHS Deathscene - Zombie Trash
VHS Deathscene - Magic Box

(P.S: zombies are ace.)

In Other News...check out THIS wacky guy!

i'm making noise in the li-bra-rreeee {updated: photos finally up}

Wednesday 27th August 2008

We trotted off to see Let's Tea Party last night in a completely-impossible-to-find place called Paradise in...oh crappycrapcrap where was it. West-ish. Kensal Green. The venue was WELL PRETTY (and the bands were good too).

At first in my head I was like oh dear, we're lost in a random part of London to see an obscure indie band or something that I've never heard of and we can't find the venue and we're going to miss the band and they might not even be worth seeing, etcetera, etcetera.
But they were fantastic. People were glancing back to their friends whilst standing and opening their eyes wide and raising their eyebrows and mouthing "they're really good" to one another. Like every five minutes.

First on was this shy fellow with a mixture of an American-Anglo accent I think, who played beautiful and chirpy sounds on guitars and ukuleles and sang about putting apple seeds in your eyes when you're a dead skeleton so apple trees can grow and you won't be completely useless when you're dead because you're really quite nutritional. He was called Lofty Heights. I just wanted to put him in my pocket and steal him. Like literally. I am a klepto.

Lofty Heights - Skeleton Apples

I was listening to his music as I watched the fringes of old lampshades up on the wall move in the summer wind and a pint of Scrumpy Jack's in my hand, holding onto my boy and looking at the people seated at the tables listening to this guy's soft guitar music with these sweet, honest lyrics and it was just a perfect summer evening for me. I sound GAY but it's true. Not many people were there but it wasn't empty. It was perfect.

{Edit: Check out Lofty's myspace again. He's used my review! Cheers, Loftyboy.}

(Haha. The Let's Tea Party myspace looks like a little kids party invite and when you scroll up the balloons look like they're going up. Awesome.)

Those multi-instrumentalist bastards of Let's Tea Party will make you feel talentless. Like when you see little kids with shit-hot mad skills and you think about your only achievements in life, which include grade 1 recorder and how you came 4th at Sports Day in year five and your mum was so proud. They whip out flutes, guitars, Keyboards, Drums, Percussion instruments, whistles, traffic cones and clap their hands and stuff. They're just really inventive. It's not poppy whistley hoo-ha indie music although the singer walks around the stage bare-foot and their influences apparently include giggles and such things... But it's just awesome.

Let's Tea Party - Barcelona

Tuesday 26th August 2008

I took some photos at White Heat on Tuesday. Here are some of the friends I made:

I can't remember their names.

We saw Fucked Up too. Sick. I should see punk bands more often. The lead singer was cuddly and also a fucking mentalist. He wrapped tape around his face. It was like he was trying to be in Mummies Alive. Here he is:

There was a lot of tape going round. And crowd surfing. And jumping into the crowd from the stage. And climbing up the stair banisters. And jumping onto people. That was one of the best crowds ever. These little indie kids with their granddad's jumpers and Sebago boat shoes just all went mental. It was like Lord Of The Flies.

Fucked Up - Baiting The Public

Look at Tom's post below for their cover of Justice's 'Stress'. It's really well done! Seriously, take a little looksie.

Monday 25th August 2008

Boys Noize played at DURRR. We were so tired we were almost falling over but we just had to stay because leaving would have been the biggest regret of my life. I WANT the track list. I was like "I'm so tired I have to leave" because my eyes were closing and it was like "ok, after this song. No wait, after this one. No...just one more. Ok fuck it, let's make ourselves ill." IT WAS AMAZING. And worth feeling like you're going to collapse out of tiredness for two days afterwards.

A-Trak- Say Whoa (Boys Noize Remix)
Tiga - Move My Body (Boys Noize Remix)

PEE-ESS. You should buy their Bugged Out mix.

Wednesday 20th August 2008

I had a good night. Saw Yeasayer at King's College Union fo' FREE. I swiped a Grazia from the hotel nearby because I needed to use the bathroom and it was just there (score!) There were loads. Then, some guy just gave me a ticket for the Yeasayer gig when I was standing outside handing out bits of paper that nobody wants. They're worth like £10. (That's actually the second time someone has done that. This sweet boy at Underage Festival gave me 2 because he got stood up. Bless him.) So I left Tom standing outside in the rain, handing out flyers and drinking cheap cider whilst feeling ill to watch Yeasayer in the warm and dry for free.

Yeasayer - 2080

I have to say 2080 is my favouritist of their songs. Or maybe Sunrise. Or maybe them all. Their album is good. Everything that comes out of Brooklyn is.
Other Brooklyn artists j'taime include Saint Margaret (and Animal Collective, of course).

Yeasayer - Sunrise
Yeasayer- Sunrise (Hey Champ Remix)

Yeasayer make music like an experimental, psychedelic folk/alternative rock synth gospel at a funeral for Dracula, invoking a Satanical space-age tribal music cult initiation scene (and that isn't even nearly enough adjectives to describe it). It's just fucking strange. And am I wrong, or does the singer remind me of Phil Collins? They're what Grizzly Bear would sound like on 60 acid trips.

Yeasayer -Wait for the Wintertime

And then after that we decided it'd be a great idea to take advertisements for 'massages' and give them to anybody we found wandering the streets of Landan Tahn at 4 in the morning. I think the best one we found was for a 'New Hot Sexy Black American Transexual'. I kept that one.

In other news...Sex Pest Seal