Ahead of the release later this autumn, we’re delighted to share a brand new single, ‘Grace’. Set against a backdrop of ambient noise, the song is the perfect introduction to the Tuesday Faust style. Off-kilter bedroom pop with sweet murmured vocals, like a dream day voiced aloud to oneself, complete with the imperfections and rough edges of such things. Near whimsical interludes add another dimension, a playful sincerity that serves almost like a form of self-protection—a mask of carefree innocence, sitting flush to a frowning face.

When she walked away the train came
When she walked away the train came
We were going to get aboard in fur coats
You and me, we’d be only alone

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“I have carried this music inside me, like a dream, since I was fourteen years old. For twenty-four years, I struggled and failed to bring it to life, until one night I woke from a literal dream. In that dream, I dreamt of a stained glass spider. It was crawling all over the walls of my darkened bedroom. It illuminated everything it touched with a technicolor web. The room was translucent and magical. I stood in the dream, marveling, and thought to myself that we all have the right to do what this spider is doing. We all have the right to weave our own creative web. When I woke from that dream, I shook my wife awake and told her, ‘Honey, The Spider and the Spectator, it’s real.’ That moment of acknowledgment, and my embrace of the irrational, became the seed of transformation for both myself and the trio.”

With this newfound inspiration, Munkus and Co. set out to actively work against convention and tradition, operating according to no constraints—be that in terms of theme, style, time frames or any other boundaries. “The idea was to do everything in the ‘wrong’ way,” Munkus explains. For five years he did just that, experimenting with a host of instruments and technologies and allowing Sommerlad and Epp to do likewise, so that the act came to resemble not so much a band but an avant garde collaboration where any curiosity could be followed and developed. The result was a full-length album, The Spider and the Spectator.

We’re delighted to share the first single and title track ahead of the record’s release in April. Opening with discordant drum machines, the song falls into a frantic rhythm, the shared vocals surrendering to the flow and motion. Various guitar lines and loops arc across this canvas, the vocals entwining and overlapping into a network of words and phrases, taking on an almost ritualistic edge—distinct energies collected and combined, then offered toward some higher purpose.

The Spider and the Spectator will be released on Subtle Soup Records on the 20th April, so keep an eye on their website. Also, visit the Old Robes website for more information, and the band have a Bandcamp page where you can find their previous release.

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Opener ‘Bed’ sounds like a sonic time capsule from a rainy wartime evening, Williams’s voice rising from a dusty gramophone in the corner sounding both cinematic and distant. The delicate guitar on ‘Tired Mind’ tumbles as if caught on a breeze, the vocals supported by gentle coos and a tidal background hum, before the piano-led ‘The Rain Thief’. The track sounds somehow apprehensive, at least at first, as if someone is playing in a dark and empty room at midnight, though eventually settles into a more certain groove of melancholy.

The title track closes the EP, stretching over 8 minutes with gentle quite and Williams’s quiet croon. After the halfway mark the song descends into a rumbling, disonant noise, like a relentless wind battering a flat and barren landscape, the vocals reduced to just another brief echo in time.

You can get Wail now from the Canigou Records Bandcamp page. Its available as a digital download, or on cassette, which comes complete with a bonus track and an unique hand-drawn artwork. Oh and 10% of sales goes to Refuge, so what are you waiting for? Also, be sure to check out the Honey Stretton Soundcloud page for a few more tracks.

-Photo credit: Jack Goodwin-

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Second track ‘Molasses’ is as slow and syrupy as the title suggests, with its heavy guitars and the gauzy, pervading vocals, the song devolving into crushing noise rock before the close. ‘Lipstick Prick’ has another speaker-destroying opening and soft and airy wordless vocals, before hitting lulls that feel like the eye of a storm, when the song morphs into the closest thing on the release to a sweet slice of shoegazey pop. Finale, ‘Ghost’, rises from a period of almost-silence, slower and more considered than the other tracks, all slow thud of beating percussion and whalesong whine of guitars.

If all that sounds like your kind of fun, then you can get the Lazy Legs EP from the band’s Bandcamp page.

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The album kicks off with lead single, ‘Rain Days For Bad Songs’, a strong start which acts as the perfect introduction of the beautiful weird to come. In our preview we described the track (rather accurately) as “an off-kilter electro-pop song just managing to keep it’s head above a swirling noise, like a radio hit from your favourite recurring dream.”

‘Long Walk to all Sort of Places’ starts all slinky, with whispery “sshhh”s and noodly little synths that worm in from the ominous noir that surrounds the song. The whole thing sounds slightly unhinged, with an odd, unearthly atmosphere that quickly establishes itself as the signature of LYA. ‘Y U’ takes things even darker and weirder, with a steady, slow thump of percussion and background “vocals” which sound for all the world like feedback-riddled moans and screams. Even the lulls in the maelstrom have a rumbling sense of mechanical foreboding, and the lyrics are just as black: “I got those witches at my side / some things crawling as I turn on the light.” It’s genuinely unsettling, bringing to mind some of the tracks on Oh Rose’s recent SEVEN in its almost horror-level intensity (if not quite in throat-shredding yells). ‘Murder’ cools the mood with the air of woozy hallucination, the pretty dream-pop vocals delivering not-so-pretty lines. “We know you are gonna get another fire hun”, she sings. “Setting flames to light another guilty pleasure in the setting sun”. However beneath the composed vocals swirl strange cries, a thousand flavours of hysteria as heard from behind locked doors and thick walls.

From here, things don’t quieten down. ‘Helena’ has unusual effects on the vocals that transform them into the high pitched whine of a buzz saw, and ‘Reply Please’ is all disturbed paranoia, with drum machine beats that sound like the agitated pulses of a delirious body, everything somehow bleached hot-red like a wobbled vision from within the throes of a fever. ‘I Got My Piano at Six’ is a haunted instrumental, all devious feedback and heavy oppressive atmosphere with weird piano that seems to ripple and quiver into the distance, while ‘Cry Me a River’ comes across oddly understated with a spare drum beat and shoegazey post-rock atmospherics, the lyrics painting a picture gaunt and crumbling, vague poetry of negative urges and self destruction. Follow-up ‘Within You’ is a schizophrenic pop track with lyrics delivered in almost robotic monotone, noise spooking the edges like a static fog, while ‘Check My Heart’ advances in a shadowy slow glide, like a flashy car coasting neon-glared midnight streets in some 80s thriller, before descending into bursts of high-pitched derangement, rain-slicked hairpin bends and cackles rising from seedy back alleys. ‘Boys’ plays like a bizarro r&b track, clanking along with a hundred textures of noise, the creepily sensual pop music that all the post-human android bars will be playing in 2116, again with lyrics that defy initial definition:

“Got me, got two tickets out, got me, got a witch inside
got a tendency to lour, got a friend I gotta hold on
hey girl – watch me

Got me, got to figure it out, Got me, got someone possessing me
got a cold heart I borrow , got an angel inside a bottle”

The album finishes with ‘Poser’, its humid breathy ambience and slow precision building and building, passing from a sense of clarity into something else entirely, something massive, too large to see or describe. The song is imbued with a sense of clear-minded determination, as if operating to a logic clear to the narrator, if not to us.

“I keep on hiding in my den as summers passing and winters sometimes
I watch my spelling how I write, if I dress in colours my heart turns beige

I got some secrets in my bag, some words might slip but not this one, not this one
Somebody said I tried, I tried, somebody said I loved I died
oh, I got it. I think I got it to late this time”

Fanpage’s music occupies a space between life and imitation, too mechanical to be described as organic yet too intuitive and mysterious for machines. It wanders a strange distance ahead of the human race, amongst a chaos born of our need for order. Love and delirium and bright white fear roil beneath the feedback, humanity kicking and twisting within a noise filled with myth and magic and dread. Terrifying and beautiful and glorious, LYA is an album for the information age, where data has exploded to incomprehensible volumes and become its own wilderness.

You can buy LYA right now via the ever-wonderful Fox Food Records, either as a digital download or on a lovely limited-edition cassette, designed by Alexander Wireen.

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‘Education Pt. 1’ kicks things off as the band mean to go on, an almost immediate squall of noise shrouding a head-bobbing shoegaze track, before ‘Fantasy Football is Ruining My Life’ leans a little more to the pop punk side of things, albeit the shrieking guitars and faraway vocals are still present. ‘Goodspeed You Solid Eggs’ is a glimmering curtain of noise, while ‘Bury Me’ fuses post-punk with the expansive nature of post-rock.

‘Remedios’ begins with sedate piano before guitars start to slide around and the whole thing erupts in a wall of noise, and ‘The Fog’ has industrial undertones, with an ominously thumping drumbeat and searing crescendo. Former single ‘Aubrey’ brings together all of the ingredients Debris Slide have chosen to work with in perhaps their most accessible form, and to my ears the band are at their best when the pop of their shoegaze rounds of the edges of the noise, or rather the noise deranges their pop songs to just the right extent.

Fluff have pressed a limited run of 100 copies of Araido, so if you want you an LP then get one now via the Debris Slide Bandcamp page, or ask your local record shop to order you a copy.

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The song, ‘Post Holiday Dead Song’ is a scuzzy lo-fi pop song that sounds like The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart meets Johnny Foreigner. It will be accompanied by Joanna Gruesome’s ‘Anti-Parent Cowboy Killers,’ a track taken from last year’s album Weird Sister, on a 7″ that has some of the best artwork I’ve seen in a long while.

You can pre-order the split from Odd Box Records here. Also, be sure to check out their previous EP, Pure // Apart, on Bandcamp.

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You can also listen the first song off of the forthcoming record, ‘Zero’:

It may be an easy comparison to make for a noisy duo but I am getting a distinctive Japandroids vibe (think if the Vancouver band played covers of emo classics). The album promises to be one to look out for, and could be the soundtrack to your summer.

You can pre-order Pilot now on some lovely coloured vinyl via Dog Knights Productions. Their debut EP, Thrash Magic, is available via Fear & Records.

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Using a variety of instruments and technology, Kohen has developed a brand of music that falls somewhere between math rock and indie pop music. Foregoing the complicated shredding of math, he develops relatively simple melodies into complete tracks using his array of instruments, and backs it all up with accomplished songwriting and great half-spoken-half-shouted vocal delivery. The result is an experimental yet accessible album with energy and focus that is very much worth your time.

You can get the album from the Mylets Bandcamp or via Sargent House.

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