House Vs. Hurricane need you to buy this album. Forget pirating, borrowing and ripping from a friend’s CD or any other method that doesn’t involve your cold, hard cash ringing through the Austrailian six piece’s collective bank account. Mind you, they’re not after some inflated sales figures or a dollar sign confirmation that they’re not wasting their time, they just desperately need the pennies to at least rent the trial version for a new synth sound. For a band constantly placing their keys at centre stage, they’ve somehow forgotten to invest in anything other than what sounds like a flimsy, plastic keyboard the Early Learning Centre’s music section would be embarrassed to offer up for sale. Claiming their music as “progressive post-hardcore” and “cinematic hardcore”, House Vs. Hurricane bumble out a sound that combines the worst parts of From Autumn To Ashes, Enter Shikari and Chiodos that is as exciting as it is representative of the prefixed sub-genre they claim to belong. There is nothing on offer here that isn’t shot through absolutely every other below-par “post-hardcore” band apart from an even blander sense of self-convinced satisfaction in their homogenised, cul-de-sac songs.
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The first sixty-nine seconds of l’esprit de l’escalier are the blood clot before the brain haemorrhage. Try to stand in its way for the following 15 minutes and you’ll be ripped to shreds. This is progressive hardcore at its sharpest with jaw dropping guitar work, snap wristed, bone blast drumming and the furious vocal cluster bombs of lead singer Steve Watts. This is no tech demo. You won’t be touching yourself to the sound of some self indulgent, poodle haired guitar heroics. Dig your nails in deep and hold on tight. You won’t have the lungs left to admire the scenery.
Throats’ latest self-titled EP is a difficult beast to judge. It does so much right in terms of angry, raging noise making and apparent teeth ripping brutality yet there is something a miss at the heart of all the commotion. The windmilling elephant in the room is Converge’s No Heroes, an album which was surely a massive influence on this 17 minute six track bombshell. Along with the frantic screams, flesh stripping beats and howling guitar reliefs, the doom laden, overhanging darkness that fills every facet of this release marks the EP as a child of its father.
After building a fearsome reputation on the back of their bruising and brilliant live performances, Pulled Apart By Horses release their self-titled debut full length onto an expectant world in the hopes of ripping a big, beautiful hole out of 2010’s summer.
We begin with Back To The Fuck Yeah as it patters into life. Its an odd choice for an opener that doesn’t quite connect until the chorus kicks in. Once it drops however its a struggle to stop yourself being sucked into its stomping, scuzzy charge into lightspeed. Its the sound of party crasher recollections; of vomit ridden t-shirts telling tales of epic adventures and hazy memories from nights gone by. The scene is set for an album made for the summer months’ late nights to get up to no good with.
Leeds: the home straight on Pulled Apart By Horses’ latest sprint of shows across the country. This wasn’t any old homecoming however. This was to be the launch of their brand spanking new debut self-titled and, with the help of a few friends, the Brudenell’s favourite adopted sons aimed to throw one hell of a prodigal’s party to celebrate.
First up were Blacklisters, the result of Daughter’s blistering noisecore, the spleen slicing angst of early Glassjaw and the venom and intensity of Converge thrown into a mincer and fired down the throat of frontman, Billy. A razor sharp display of quick witted, broodingly smart hardcore built on brains and brawn.
The Leeds stop of La Dispute’s short stay in the UK almost never happened. Salvation came with a venue change from Royal Park Cellars to The Well saving the band’s only northern date.
Due to technical difficulties with the guest list, the events of Curses’ set are a mystery. As you can only review what you’ve actually seen, I can only describe their set as a live rendition of their songs, played at volume to an audience within a room. Check out their myspace or head down to a future show to see Curses; the band that got away.
Second on were We’ll Die Smiling who took to the stage looking to vindicate much of the growing local hype surrounding them. Unfortunately, their set was an incoherent mess. Each song sounded as though it had been written with an old, jerking lottery machine filled with screamo cliches rather than any clear ideas, thoughtful structure or flow. Their efforts lacked any sense of direction or intention with any possible meaning lost in a sloppy, shapeless smudge of hap-hazard banality. On the vocal front, their whimpering and whining down the microphone sounded more like a stubbed toe rather than anything meaningful. Tonight, We’ll Die Smiling, sounded like kind of band that give their attempted genre a bad name, sounding exactly how a populist tabloid pastiche of screamo might. Theirs was a set lacking in intelligence, meaning or thought.
With Blood Brothers defunct, Fear Before not shaking anywhere near as oddly as they used to and The Murder Of Rosa Luxembourg all but a faint speck lost to the dust clouds of the near past, who can you turn to for a dose of melodic, spazzed-up hardcore fit for LSD trips on spinning teacups rides? Duck Duck Goose are your new sheet of blotting paper.
Take this band at name value at your peril and open wide for one almighty sucker-punch to the chops. Off Yourself is a work of addled over excitement and attention shredding joy made by men of demented intentions and crazy eyed abandon. With their snarling bass lines, meandering, jazzed up guitars, pounding drums and howling, wailing yelps and screams, Duck Duck Goose spit out round after round of spectacularly unstable hardcore that takes a bite at anything put in front of it. The entire track listing drips with more reckless energy than a fired up hooker stuffed full of Semtex and chilli powder.
Metal is a strange beast. At the same time both an entrenched institution and an escapist counterculture, it thrives off it’s own in-house nostalgic dogma, traditions and conventions whilst demanding a sense of progression and competitive camaraderie from its artists and followers alike.
Wales’ finest, Bullet For My Valentine, have forged a career through an understanding and awareness of their genre that, coupled with shades of that ever-so-accessible Cardiff sound, has fired them to both commercial success and accusations of generica. Fever is no different. For the initiated and interested it’s another effort built on the thrash of old and the post-hardcore revived riff metal of now. Those not so sold on the idea will find the same band that released the unintentionally comic deadpan seriousness of “Scream Aim Fire”.
Forget male vocal choirs. The dominant sound emanating from the welsh valleys in recent years has been post-hardcore pop acts hoping to emulate the mainstream success achieved by Lostprophets and Funeral For A Friend. Kids In Glass Houses are no different. Dirt is an album that seeks to continue this burgeoning tradition by following in their countrymen’s footsteps step by step.
Following on from 2008’s well received debut, Smart Casual, the band have toned down the harder, riffed up moments of their first release in favour of a more inflated take on their tamer, commercial pop-rock side. Dirt is built around the vocal talents and lyrical hooks of Aled Phillips who plays the role of the rasping and wailing, girl friendly focal point as needed. Behind the front man is a band that’s shed whatever bite and venom they may have had in exchange for a far more rounded and generic sound. The results are effective if unspectacular. This is Kids In Glass Houses consolidating their position and playing it safe with a batch of songs ready for the radio and tweenager bedroom walls across the land.
Third Eye Blind return from a six year hiatus since 2003’s “Out of the Vein” and you’ve got to wonder why they bothered.
URSA Major sounds like a Nickelback fan’s take on 30 Seconds To Mars with some horrifically chedder choruses and embarrassingly poor lyrics that kill off any sense of atmosphere or believability that may have threatened to take hold. Lead singer and songwriter Stephen Jenkin’s choice of words are dire ranging from the hilariously literal to the sickeningly generic and awkwardly forced. He struggles to barely contain himself whenever the air turns a giddy shade of blue. Make no mistake, Third Eye Blind are not some fourth wall winking, satire act this is just extremely poor writing.
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Presentation Ideas
As we all know the presentation that we are getting marked on takes place on the 2nd December.
Plan:
1. Go through the group,...
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Green screen work for the show.
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Photos from our first day of filming.
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Production Schedule (first draft and subject to change)
Hello Friends, here are the notes for today’s session as well as the following week’s plans...
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PARADIGHMOND PICTURES CREW
Greg Johnson: CMT
Tracy Mathewson: TAP
Emma Prendergast: TAP
Ben Parcell: DMT
Yi-Wen (Evelyn) Lin: TAP
Tim Dorning:...
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19) A Muso's Guide To Leeds
Muso’s Guide, 25/08/2010
Leeds can be argued the best city in the UK for music. With Manchester or London, the sheer...
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Indian Summer - Aren’t You Angel
For their third recording session, Indian Summer entered a real studio for the first time and...
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this isn’t a ‘real’ cover; I didn’t even know there was one (there are a few different versions of Indian Summer’s discography on CD and,...
