... jaded 'little pony' butterflies, their rotating unicorn horns sedately worming into your head, letting all the love flow in. Your head nods hopelessly along, addicted to the side salad sounds and sweet vocals that come at you in the semi-abstracts of a different language. The landscape’s full of European cartoon animals, mad staring eyes and enormous grins, as the lyrics inflate in cloud-like pinks n blues only to burst into rainbowed tears.
EL-LAY-POO-PAY CA-CA – SU –SEN TIMPA –TAMPA – TIMPA – TOM
(a phonetic interpretation...)
...should be Toyland's national anthem. A complete joy to the ears, incredibly uplifting, even my youngest is throat warbling along.
The Soiled Comp - Heavy and saturated with plenty of hand shaped distorted waves, vocal screams, scratches hisses, layered soundscapes - sounds luvly doesn't it!!!
Thoughtforms , An Emergency, Broken Daylight and Kill Kenada - 14th September @ The Vic, Swindon
Thoughtforms were just marvellous to see a second time, starting from a freeform electric miasma of buzzing circuits and colourful sunsets, the band gathered up the sparking tail-ends into tuneful bliss.. only to abandoned it all in some gloriously spastic directions. Gnarly feedback, screams and effects eaten riffs, you hardly had time to clap before they started up another tune from the shards of the previous, even tuning up became interestingly delayed interweaves.
Charlie and Deej bending in opposites, the drums the adhesive allowing the guitars to freefall, spiral, cut; creating fuzzy quadrants of blissful distress you could just sink right into Icarus like. Mr Olivetti exclaimed it was like being 21 again, with Slowdive and Loop firmly entrenched in his memory, I couldn’t agree more…
Both guitarists sang, Deej's rich laments sounding even better than before, Charlie bringing a bit of Silver Stairs into the set when her softly spoken vocals soared across the speakers. These were slowly drowned in some superb tensile action with the show collapsing in shimmering wreckage, Charlie saying ‘Happy Birthday Cloudboy’, as the cloud of electrics fizzled out-The best birthday present ever. I can’t recommend this band enough, and with a rigorous autumnal tour ahead of them there’s no excuse not to bask in this for yourself.
An Emergency were a trio - lots of perky spikes with gloriously askew tunes. No idea what the lyrics were about – they appeared to be making them up, dedicating a few songs to Swindon. Those stabbed guitar and vocal injunctions, all staccato angles, the drums kicking the shit out of the air. These were brilliantly shiny, incredibly jumpy vibes, the whole coming across like an ambulance turning tight corners too fast. Mr Olivetti bought me their spilt single on a satisfying slab of petroleum bi-product, getting the band to sign birthday wishes.
Broken daylight – were comfort angst, Chemical Romance type vocals and tight rhythms, so loud that even the drums were drowned in places. The guitars stadium stylee, with muscle chords and rigid drums, a bit too mainstream for me and co. Paul wanted to leap on stage and sabotage the conformity, plectrum in hand. A fanatical dancer stepped in and gave his body over to the music in absurd Egyptian shapes and mimed emotion giving cubic directions to the guitar surges and drum explosions.
Kill Kenada – were like a boy band that had grown up, disinheriting their former skin for a noisy purple bruise of a sound. Like a cross between Nirvana circa In Utero (nah, more circa Bleach) and Head of David on an amphetamine rush. One of the guitarists giving out some astoundingly groovesome chunked action, riffs chewed over in lunged swings and dynamite redirections. The show ended with the lead singer shouting ‘That’s it, now fuck off home!!!’ bracketed in feedback. Superb!
Fat Layers of The Ecstatic Sleep - Panagiotis Spoulos onPhase!
The sounds here are left to your imagination, textural suggestions that define a mood, the lighting of which fingers your mind, digging into the buried, bringing a submerged library back from the opaqueness, the xeroxed surfaces that accompany this release - your only map. Shadows are chewed over in sunken drifts, encapsulated in a dense fog, the sounds gripping the extremities like starving children, dragging you further into the ominous brew.
As you attempt to decipher, the light narrows, threatening to extinguish.. fear scratches at your neck, the apertures of your eyes oceanic. Somewhere, a moonlit ribbon feeds itself through a metal cage; the structure speaks an industrial lament as knotted bones clang and clatter intermittently. Ancient murmurs of a slow metallicised pestilence abound.
Tourettes ridden puppets jangle on wire nooses, their toes tapping to repetitious oblivion, a faceless million plagued by a swarm of delayed melt, erased by a pipe cleaning DJ scraping the steel. Drones, lovely undulating drones punctured, the flow stabbed by flying debris. A wordless odour fills the nostrils and throws up sinister patterns on the insides of your skull, the ghostly archaeology of sleep.
