Bear Claw are a drums + 2 basses band from Chicago. I really enjoyed previous release, Slow Speed:Deep Owls from 2007. 4 tracks are up on bandcamp from their new album! It was once again recorded by Steve Albini and mastered by Bob Weston. Not surprisingly, it sounds great.
Bear Claw’s soon to be released album “Refuse This Gift”. Out on Sickroom Records October 2010. Select tracks have been put up for streaming fun.
About a year ago or something, I mentioned Tall Ships, I think with references to From Monument To Masses. On their debut EP from May (on Big Scary Monsters) the reference still goes, but even though I can hear so many similarities in the sound, the absence of FMTM’s political themes makes it a totally different feeling. With a debut EP like that, who needs a full-length? I mean, all 4 tracks are wonderful, and this autumn they’ll be out touring UK with Maps & Atlases and Northern Europe with 65daysofstatic. So that’s nice. And I think it’s a shame to compare them with contemporaries like Battles and Foals, which is just typical press-release bullshit. This band is cut out to ride their own wave, if they continue the path of playing around in the uncharted depths between post-rock, indie, math, story-telling lyrics and movie-samples.
Tall ships – Vessels (from the first EP)
Remember when FMTM released On Little Know Frequencies and added lyrics, and it fitted perfectly and we thought “why didn’t they do that before!?”. Okay fuck the references.. this is Tall Ships showing off a different dimension than the other tracks on the EP.
Tall Ships – Chemistry (second EP, released on Oct. 25)
Although it sounds very soft and Foal-ish, I’m hopeful for some more of the powerful melodic progression and playfulness that the previous EP carried to an extend that made it one of my favorites this year. The same track is used in the video below, featuring a collage of all pictures taken during the recordings.
Copenhagen math-rock nerds Obstacles are touring Germany and East Europe at the moment. Debut full-length Dividual is coming out on PlayRec, September 20th. Listen on myspace and check if they’re coming to a town near you.
UPDATE! Band says:
We are sincerely happy to announce that our debut album DIVIDUAL is going to be released at Play/Rec on September 20th 2010.
Dividual is the product of over a year’s hard work with writing, touring and recording. And we can truly say that we are proud of this record!
We especially want to thank Jakob Reichert Nielsen for his effort and patience while recording and mixing this album. We are really happy with the result.
We also want to thank the guys at Play/Rec for releasing the record, Alan Douches for mastering and Patrick Ringsborg for providing the artwork.
Since the record in its final form didn’t make it to this tour, we’ve made a limited sneak peek CD-R edition, only available at the shows on this tour. So, if you want to listen to the record before it comes out on vinyl, you can purchase it cheaply at our shows around Europe.
Room 204 is an instrumental noise-rock duo from Nantes. 14 minutes. 8 songs. Each song is so packed, it becomes journey where time has no meaning.. maybe content-wise this feels more like 2 hours of music. Or maybe I’d put it like this: It plays really well on nonstop repeat. Shellac should listen to this record. Albini would want the cover signed.
So after spending a good month with this album, I’ve grown younger, wiser and happier.
Room 204 - Balloons
Kythibong, 2010
In just 10 days, on August 15th, the new Alarma Man will be released on Sinnbus Records!! Love Forever was originally set to be released a long time ago. Back in January 2009 they told us that the mastering was taking a bit longer than expected. But they’re back and waiting to kick ass all over Northern Europe on their Live Forever tour (tour blog here).
So the album We Recruit from Swiss band Ventura is out, and a 7″ on which they recruited / scooped David Yow (that guy who’s in The Jesus Lizard) is also out. Ventura’s style is hard, slow and potent.. a good environment for Yow. At first site it does look like an odd project.. why is Yow hanging out with 3 young guys in Switzerland? Musically it makes a lot of sense. During his visit in Lausanne, this short was made:
After the demise of Mclusky one of the two bands risen from it’s ashes was Future of the Left. Singer/guitarist Andy ‘Falco’ Falkous and drummer Jack Egglestone recruited Jarcrew’s Kelson Matthias for bass and there it was, a band that kicks even more arsch than Mclusky. But after 5 years and two albums, Kelson has decided to quit the band.
Is this the end of FOTL? Thankfully, no. Falkous on the FOTL website:
Future of the left is still a band, a thing, the centre of our unremarkable lives and continues, if anything, with more effort and furious pride than ever before.
For the time being Steven Hudson (Kong/Oceansize) will be taking over bass. But there is more. FOTL have recorded a few new songs with a fourth member. On the website Falkous writes he was making songs for a side project but “it all ended up sounding so perfectly like where Future of the Left should have been going that it seemed ridiculous to not combine the two.” He has yet to reveal who the fourth member is but his roles are “to play guitar and act like a fucking maniac.”
We’ll have to wait and see with these changes mean for the music of FOTL. But the last big change worked out pretty damn good.
More info at http://www.futureoftheleft.com
Manchasm by Future of the Left
Future of the Left -
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Apparently a little 6-man band from Connecticut made a self-released EP last June, put it on bandcamp for free and pressed 100 copies, that deserve selling out.
The sound is tight at times and shows off a big, but well-timed and balanced group, at other times a bit more like a jazz-jam. They sound similar to their contemporaries from Antarctic and Enemies and their predecessors in Pele, embracing a light-weight sound with charismatic, playful instrumentation. The cool new thing about Fugue, is that they have a broader palette of instruments than most bands in this genre, where often the most appreciated skill is to get the more out of lesser instruments and band members.
It’s 17 minutes packed with driving melodies and explosive outbursts, but nonetheless doesn’t seem too calculated, as they embrace enough genres to be both entertaining and emotive.
Fugue - Ancient Glass EP
self-released, 2009
I was actually ordering the new Imperial China when I thought about making something from the shipping costs in the Socket Records store. So I picked up bldngs’ debut EP and that should not go unnoticed! The sound is happy, trippy, techie, instrumental.. awarding patience with the same amount of freaky, joyous eruptions.
Here they are playing some stuff they wrote after the EP…
Btw… Bth Pttrns nd bldngs rmvd thr vwls nd thy bth snd grt! S th cnnctn?
buidings - endless (EP)
Socket Records (Washington DC), Summer 2009
Sorry that I’m late with this… PTTRNS are from Cologne and have had a few songs out on a 7″, 2 splits and 2 casettes. Their sound is a musical alloy best described as DC post-hardcore, funkier and more fluent than for instance Q and Not U ever were, even on “Power”. And a bit out of time, akin Pit Er Pat. I heard the 3 tracks from People I Adore 7″… it was promising.. didn’t totally catch me, but nonetheless I found myself putting it on once in a while for a year or so.. and after putting PTTRNS into rotation again, I decided that they must’ve released something new by now. The band was doing small releases for 32 months before finally releasing Science Piñata this April. I’m still waiting to hear all of it, but whatever… I trust what I’ve heard.
Long time no speak. But not for no reason: we just finished mixing our LP with the awesome Guido Lucas at Blubox Studios. It‘s really good. It‘s called SCIENCE PIÑATA and it will be out on Altin Village & Mine Records on April 1st. Recording was difficult and tiresome – Benjamin and Daniel both fell ill in the process so we had to get Sting to lay down some bass and that guy from Arctic Monkeys to play the remaining drum parts. However, Guido is a wizard and edited it all. You probably won‘t be able to tell the difference. Get into it!
PTTRNS - Science Piñata
Altin Village & Ursa Major, April, 2010
