“Heaven is this place” croons Midding singer Joe Woodward, enigmatic and barely audible beneath layers and layers of sludgy beats, mesmerizing keyboards and possibly some guitar (we can’t hear any but he’s strumming on one in the video so we suspect it’s in the mix there somewhere), doling out celestial overtones to some already intensely other-worldly, shoegaze artistry.
The Cardiff-based quartet formerly known as Clwb Fuzz maintain the lo-fi grunge melody of their prior incarnation on ‘And Then, They Sing’, along with earlier single ‘Anything (Until You Sleep)’ but, frisky under their new moniker, the easy tunes are trapped behind the smoky glass of some gorgeously unsettling, hazy, apocalyptic production.
‘And Then, They Sing’ was released at the tail end of 2023, on 8th December. You can find it on all of the streaming services now. Or, if you’re more of a visual kinda guy or gal, you can take a watch of the video on the YouTube link below:
Rock’n’roll collaborations don’t get bigger than this. Genuinely. Oasis were one of the mightiest rock’n’roll bands of the 1990s, if not the mightiest, and The Stone Roses could take a similar crown for the antecedent decade. There is also the great serendipitous charm that if members of Oasis had not been at the Roses show in Spike Island, 1990, then masterworks like ‘Live Forever’, ‘Wonderwall’ and ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ may have never existed. Due to these critical ponderances there’s helluva expectation riding on Liam Gallagher and John Squire’s first joint effort – so, does ‘Just Another Rainbow’ fulfil our euphonious yearning and live up to Gallagher’s lofty claim that their forthcoming output is “the best record since Revolver”?
The answer is a resounding yes – at least to the first part, the jury is still out on the Beatles thrashing bit. From the opening tones, not unlike the start of Squire’s former group’s game-changing single ‘Waterfall’, it’s clear some spectacular voodoo is at work and when Manchester’s most recognisable frontman begins belting out mind-bending lyrics about rainbows dripping on trees, his legendary pipes sounding as strong as any point in his 30 year career, it’s confirmed that we’re witnessing musical greatness. Certain folk may even call it biblical.
Taking a peep at the song’s credits, the indication is we’re hearing a John Squire crafted soundscape with Gallagher the younger on vocal duties – the best possible fuck you to his grudging older sibling (“if you won’t put our band back together then I’ll go sing for my Stone Roses hero instead” – not an actual quote), the lyrics sorrowfully musing over disappointment: “no pot of gold waiting here for me/ Just another rainbow hanging over me”, could well reflect the guitarist’s feelings about his former band’s aborted reunion and equally the vocalist’s frustration over his fruitless attempts to get his troop back on the world’s stages.
If the first part of the single harks back to ‘Waterfall’, then the second half sees the esteemed guitarist taking front of stage and exhibiting the same artistic skills that created ‘The Second Coming’, losing himself in a solo that Mr Hendrix himself would have been eager to hold aloft. And that bridge where Liam just goes ahead and lists the seven key colours of the spectrum? That’s one of the most psychedelic moments in the last fifty years of music.
This isn’t the first time members of the two Manchester superpowers have collaborated, as back in 2004 Ian Brown and Noel Gallagher got together to release ‘Keep What Ya Got’. And how do the two compare? Gallagher Senior’s creation with the controversy courting vocalist may be an understated affair that slots competently but modestly into Brown’s back catalogue, but ‘Just Another Rainbow’ has clearly been penned to move mountains and make sure the world will listen.
‘Just Another Rainbow’ was released on 5th January 2024, produced by Greg Kurstin, and is our first sampler from the duo’s forthcoming LP. You can buy the 7″ single now. You can catch it on the YouTube video below:
On his new single, ‘Officer’, Kent solo songsman Wez King finds himself chased down by the law and desperate to plead his innocence, “Tell me please, I’ve been on my knees, I’m begging you / It must be the clothes I wear, so why d’you stop and stare?”, whilst acknowledging an exasperating tendency to be forever noticed and pulled into the limelight.
To be frank, exposure and attention shouldn’t come as much of a surprise when you’re guilty of writing enticingly blues-tinged indie guitar bangers like this, King’s latest dispatch sounding as dirty, gritty and fuzzy as The Black Keys at their dirty, gritty and fuzziest or Arctic Monkeys at their Josh Homme helmed peak.
‘Officer’ was released on Friday 5th January and is available to hear on all of the streaming services. We’ve put the Spotify link for your listening pleasure below:
We adore a jangly guitar at Edge of Arcady, and Newcastle boys Bear Park provide joyous jangles in abundance on debut single ‘Betty’, along with an astoundingly addictive reverb-drenched melody. The track sees the up-and-coming trio deliver some heartening motivation to its downtrodden namesake (inspired by a harassed-looking coffee-slurping waitress character off of a t-shirt sighted by vocalist/bassist Shay Bagnall) with a disarmingly rousing rhythm and charmingly warm sentiment.
Produced by The Libertines’ Gary Powell, the record is the newest release from the drumsman’s own label ‘25 Hour Convenience Store’ and our first inkling of what the North East group have been busy creating for their forthcoming debut LP. If we can expect an album full of catchy indie numbers and even more compelling sugar-coated chimes, we’ll be immensely happy.
‘Betty’ was released on 8th December 2023 and comes complete with a video shot around the band’s stomping ground – from South Shields beach to Burnmoor Tennis Club. You can see the Maggie Barksby directed video below:
Punk rock is all abrasive, rudimentary tunes and sweaty grunting from the (usually male) great unwashed, right? Nah, if you’re going around thinking that then you’ve yet to have the pleasure of getting bonafide Welsh indie mega-legends Helen Love in your deprived earholes. So, to put that right, their original record label, the equally legendary Damaged Goods, have heaped together the toppest, most gleeful, tracks from the first decade-ish of the Swansea band’s career into one glorious ‘best of’ style compilation. Honestly, you’re in for a treat here.
To introduce Helen Love as a punk group is perhaps doing the full scope of their output a disservice, although with a gold-plated endorsement from the late King Joey Ramone himself, countless Ramones references scattered about their discography and a vocal adoration for the scuzziness of a fuzzbox we doubt the group would have any issues with that assertion, but away from the three-chord sphere there’s plenty of twee and glam bubblegum-pop to boot. Maybe glitter-punk is a better descriptor?
A hot blast of distorted guitar greets us from the off with the title track’s bold introduction of ‘Yeah Yeah We’re Helen Love’, providing the listener with a distinct and unerring outline of what to expect over the span of the record or even their thirty-year career: “Super Kay guitars and Casiotone, ‘Sheena Is A Punk’ on the stereo, plug in your fuzzbox, ready to play, from Swansea Bay to the USA”.
The earliest of the songs included, ‘Joey Ramoney’, ‘Love, Kiss, Run, Sing, Shout, Jump!’, ‘So Hot’, ‘Golden Summer’ and the original version of ‘Punk Boy’ (the rework complete with Joey Ramone feature comes later on), all circa 1993-1994, are as lo-fi as records get – the sound of some unsuspecting teenage pop-kids with a knack for an addictive melody mucking about with a piece of home-recording kit, splurging all of their fandom and sunny disposition out on some brightly coloured vinyl, who ended up getting a surprise, but entirely deserved, lauding from John Peel and the Melody Maker.
Even though they never really graduate from 8-track second-hand tape machine production, their songwriting goes on to become more robust with carefully crafted and concise glittering nuggets like the mendaciously gritty ‘Beat Him Up’, seeing Love come to the protectively vicious aid of a friend suffering domestic abuse, and ‘Girl About Town’s tale of a returning ex-rocker who “got signed to a record label, spent the advance on a pinball table, sold a hundred records to all our friends, now she’s back again”.
The greatest picks off the compilation come from the band’s late 90s and very early 2000s releases, a string of total punk-pop bliss a-sides and b-sides. The unmistakable tuneful synth-assault, repeating “Atari Teenage Riot” vocal and newly adopted happy-hardcore sample launches ‘Does Your Heart Go Booooooomm’s recounting of a chap who has a reckless Kula Shaker induced-breakdown but finds salvation in Alec Empire’s digital hardcore dirge. On ‘Sunburst Super Kay’ the group mercilessly mock a neighbour who took patronising umbrage at their “Woolworths cheap guitars”, chiding “Now they’re fixing window seals/ and we’ve got a record deal/ Saw them just the other day and laughed straight in their faces”. They then take that same merciless mocking and aim it at the entire Britpop movement with ‘Long Live The UK Music Scene’, ensuring everyone from Oasis to Shed Seven and Alan McGee to Chris Evans gets a bit of their taunting ire.
‘Leader Of The Pack’ pays brilliant homage to The Shangri-Las sixties girl-group classic with Helen Love’s own song featuring dirty guitars and Elton John-style rock’n’roll piano, ‘King of Kung-Fu’ potentially paying indie-lads Ash back a favour with a similarly titled offering to their own ‘Kung Fu’, after the Irish trio put out a cover of ‘Punk Boy’. Album track from the group’s debut LP proper, ‘Love and Glitter, Hot Days and Musik’, ‘Jump Up And Down’ sounds like an intentional glammed up, punked out, lipstick daubed antithesis to Technohead’s 1995 atrocity ‘I Wanna Be A Hippy’ with an unearthly refrain of ‘Wanna be a punk, wanna be a punk rocker’.
And this all takes the collection neatly up to its latter era with the band’s 2004 piece-de-resistance, ‘Debbie Loves Joey’, a transposition of punk’s most iconic coupling (Blondie’s legendary Harry and the oft-mentioned Ramone) onto an innocuous 1980s pair of loved-up kids who fall for each other on the bus after a school disco, set to short, sharp jabs of guitar fuzz and jubilant Casio keyboards.
Few bands embody the DIY spirit, with their pritt stick anime and Nintendo magazine collage artwork, and the, now tragically largely lost, pastime of weaving about Camden High Street and Soho’s Berwick Street record stores searching for out-of-print day-glo 7” singles moreso than Helen Love and this revisiting of the initial part of their career masterfully captures everything that made them so special from the off, with delicious buzzsaw riffs, original girl power, cutting humour, lazer guns and glitter balls still firmly in place.
Thanks to our readers for continuing to check out the site through 2023. We’ll be back on the other side of celebrations with a load more new music recommendations and reviews from South Wales and beyond. Merry Christmas, you lot!
The countdown to the release of album number four, ‘All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade’ is hotting up for The Libertines and to close off the start of their 2023 comeback year the garage rock four piece’s latest record shows off their tender proclivities. Largely regarded as an erudite punk group, it’s the band’s more overtly melodic moments that help raise them above their peers and ‘Night of the Hunter’ serves only to elevate them further.
With the title inspired by Charles Laughton’s 1955 film of the same name, the song acoustically narrates a revenge-murder scene, the law-loathing protagonist making one last phone call to his lover as the blue flashing lights arrive, whilst a lone theremin performs a haunting excerpt from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, the listener unsure whether the chorus’s plea of “Don’t blame me, it’s the world that made me” is coming from the character still or the fast-and-risky-living band themselves.
‘Night of the Hunter’ was released on Wednesday 6th December 2023 and coincides with the Libertines takeover of Margate this weekend (9th and 10 December), performing shows and sets at the town’s Lido, bandstand as well as in their own venues The Albion Rooms and Justine’s.
We weren’t prepared for a snazzy cabaret jazz piano and saxophone foray to meet our off-guard ears when we got stuck into The Slackhead Incident’s latest track, but that’s exactly what we were greeted with, amongst some britpop Pixies-type tuneage and fantastically nimble bass guitar gymnastics.
Three singles in and the Glasgow post-punkers have evidenced already in their fledgling career that they don’t go by the conventional tune-makers handbook, with ‘Turtleneck’ taking things further into the realm of the unorthodox. Barked lead vocal non-sequiturs get placated by coo-ing backing vox, jangly guitars bounce artfully all over the shop and just enough of a tune takes off before the entire thing collapses into a merry series of drum breakdowns and astral keyboard noises. Glorious utter madness!
There are few better ways to make a worthy cause heard than to put a powerful message to music. Port Talbot indie-folk singer/songwriter/all-round person who makes things happen (see Shiny Vinyl) Jackson Lucitt has joined a long tradition that runs from the most poignant of protest songs to political punk rock in order to bring attention to the proposed closure of large parts of his home town’s crucial steelworks and the devastating impact dealt to his local community.
‘Save Our Steel’ opens and ends with humble but earnest spoken pleas direct from the mouths of proud steel workers, Lucitt crafting a poetic love letter to his own community, deftly communicating the symbiotic reliance of surrounding industry on the town’s historic metallurgy and his overwhelming fondness for individuals he calls friends and family who pour their hearts into their work, over simple but wildly affecting acoustic strums.
‘Save Our Steel’ was released on 28th November 2023 via Shiny Vinyl Presents and supports an effort by workers and trade unions to reverse the proposal to shut down large parts of the Port Talbot steel works, costing the loss of jobs for thousands of people in the town and other cities across the UK threatened with the same. There’s a petition you can sign right now to help the cause.
You can take a listen to ‘Save Our Steel’ on the Spotify link below:
Down in Brighton, Gaffa Tape Sandy are keeping the garage-punk-rock flame burning brightly and on latest single ‘Split’ they’ve distilled the whole primal, sweaty, exhilarating experience of their live gigs into a succinct two minute ferocious cracker of a track that’s all incendiary, scratchy guitars and fierce melody.
Guitarist Kim Jarvis and bassist Catherine Lindley-Neilson duel it out in barked vocals on the record’s chorus with the insistent command to “Find out what they want then split”, letting the remainder of the song descend into an effervescent mass of perky rhythm and delinquent-spirited energy. Simply a gleefully punkish pogo-er’s dream.
‘Split’ was produced by George Perks (Wargasm, Enter Shikari, Skindred) and released via the legendary Alcopop!records on 28th November 2023. You can take a listen on Spotify at the link below:
Edge of Arcady 