In Eyeland

You may remember The Low Anthem as that band who recorded their albums in an abandoned pasta sauce factory. They specialised in rickety folkish music; songs like Charlie Darwin and Matter of Time were gorgeously affecting, and yet so fragile that you worried you'd break them simply by listening to them. That empty pasta sauce factory was a hugely important part of The Low Anthem's whole deal, lending their recordings a cavernous sound that made you feel as if you'd stumbled across a beautiful, glistening gem in a dusty corner of an old, derelict building. I saw them on the main stage at the Green Man Festival in 2011, and their performance that evening sticks in my memory for the way that, by some strange alchemy, they managed to make a large natural amphitheatre situated in the shadow of a mountain feel cosy and achingly intimate. 2008's Oh My God, Charlie Darwin was their breakthrough album, but its successor, Smart Flesh, remains their crowning masterpiece in my opinion.

After a five-year hiatus, The Low Anthem released a new album last month. It's called Eyeland, and if you remember The Low Anthem as those quiet weirdos who would hang out in abandoned buildings and sing old-fashioned songs about apothecaries and ticket-takers...well, prepare to have your preconceptions shattered.

20 Things I Hate

Inspired by this blog post. Mine's far shorter and a bit more music-specific than Fourfoot's, though. And unlike Fourfoot, I haven't bothered to put mine in any particular order.

1. People who use the phrase 'real music' (e.g. 'Now Led Zeppelin, that was real music, not like your modern electronic nonsense where all you have to do is press a button.') Please stop talking to me and go away.


2. Oasis. 


3. People who dislike Oasis 'except for Definitely Maybe, that was a classic debut'. Not it wasn't. It was rubbish.


4. 'UK tours' that don't include any dates in Wales. The bridge isn't that expensive, guys.


5. Bands who reward you for showing up to their gigs by ordering you about (e.g. 'Come and stand closer to the stage! You are allowed to dance, you know!')


6. The song Don't Stop Believin' by Journey.


7. The fact that I can't listen to a Busted album without remembering that they publicly endorsed the Conservative Party in 2004.


8. The fact that I can't listen to a Meat Loaf album without remembering that he publicly endorsed Mitt Romney in 2012.


9. My own very irritating tendency to let a musician's political views affect my enjoyment of their music.


10. The fact that you have to log into Spotify in order to listen to a Spotify playlist that's embedded in a blog post/article. SoundCloud doesn't fuck us about like this, and SoundCloud LOVES fucking people about, I'm told.


11. Hidden tracks that are separated from the actual listed track by 5 or 10 minutes of silence. Bonus hate if the hidden track is actually any good (I'm looking at you, Jarvis Cocker's Cunts are Still Running the World) because I might have wanted to put it in a playlist or a mix or something, y'know?


12. Drummers who insist on using a jillion different cymbals, toms, et cetera, even if the song doesn't really call for it (and no song really calls for it). You know what impresses me? Drummers who can take a knackered snare drum, a knackered floor tom, and a knackered crash cymbal and make it work nevertheless. Surrounding yourself with unnecessary add-ons just reminds me of that spoilt fucker I knew in high school who was given a very large, very expensive drumkit that he had no idea how to play.


13. Vinyl records. Granted, they're sexier than CDs, and maybe the sound quality is slightly better, but neither of those perks compensate for the format's many shortcomings. Vinyl costs more, takes up more space, damages with infuriating ease, and can't be ripped to your computer unless you invest in a certain piece of hardware. Oh, and you have to get up and flip the record over if you want to listen to a whole album. Nuts to vinyl.


14. The way everyone fawns over The Beatles. Never did all that much for me. Ticket to Ride is good, I guess. And I like some of the tracks on Abbey Road. But I don't see why they're still - decades later - held up as The Best Band of All Time.


15. Bands who pander to the 'real music' people I mentioned earlier and make a killing with their 'save rock 'n' roll!' rhetoric and their ho-hum, nothing-to-say rock songs that people blindly lap up because they were made with electric guitars instead of laptops.


16. The presence of Pet Sounds near the top of every 'best albums' list I've ever read. I remember listening to it a few times and just finding it so absurdly dull.


17. That moist clicking sound that you can hear on some records because the singer stood too close to the microphone and it picked up every tiny noise their mouth was making. It feels like you're pouring yesterday's gravy in my ear - please stop.


18. Band apparel nazis. 'That girl's wearing a Ramones T-shirt! I bet she's never even listened to the Ramones!' Fuck off.


19. The almost entirely meaningless 5-star scoring system beloved of so many music publications. 


20. People who start petitions just because an artist they don't like is headlining a music festival.

Smash Hits: Helen Love's Pop Scrapbook

When I was little, I had a friend named John who kept a scrapbook of all his favourite things. Its pages were filled with drawings of the Power Rangers, stats about Liverpool Football Club, pictures of his favourite wrestlers, and all sorts of other stuff like that. It was basically a physical document of everything that was going on in his seven-year-old boy brain.

Helen Love's new album, Smash Hits, came out a few weeks ago on Alcopop! Records, and brilliantly enough it seems to have been written and recorded via much the same approach as John used when he was compiling his scrapbook. The cover art is a gaudy collage of stars and guitars and goodness knows what else, with the band members pulling their coolest and most punkily aloof faces in the middle of it all.

This image is the perfect representation of what Smash Hits actually sounds like. This album is simply twelve tracks of punky cut-and-paste pop par excellence. Euphoric opener First Girl from Wales in New York samples a plethora of famous NYC artists like Chic and the Ramones, while You Can't Beat a Boy Who Loves the Ramones (they're a bit obsessed with the Ramones, this lot) features snippets from Ghostbusters and Bonnie Tyler's Holding Out for a Hero.

Review: Beneath Your City; As You Dream by Robberie

You're sitting in a pub in Sheffield. The beer is warm, all the chairs have arms, and it's open mic night. Currently crowded into the makeshift stage area (actually just a corner of the room that's been cleared of chairs and tables) is a band called Robberie, a local three-piece armed with acoustic guitars, a glockenspiel, a melodica, and a tambourine. They are certainly one of the better acts you've seen this evening - right now they're playing a song called Journeyman, which spins the story of a lower-league footballer into a moral about how you don't have to be famous to touch people's lives. The singers pull off some nice harmonies and the song goes down well with the regulars, who are probably thrilled to hear something that isn't yet another cover of Hotel California.

Robberie's short set is a highlight of the night - the two or three songs they play are fun, original, and quirky without ever being, y'know, quirky. As you head to the bar for another round, you promise yourself you'll track them down on SoundCloud, but in the end you forget to follow up on this mental note and Robberie more or less disappear from your memory.

Conosci Victor Jara? (or, A 25p Gamble)

Perhaps one of the best things about CDs is that, unlike DVDs, they don't use region codes. You can't buy a Pokémon boxset off US Amazon and expect it to work in your lousy limey DVD player, but you can go to see a folk group in Ireland or a jazz trio in Japan or a country singer in Texas and you can buy their CD and you can take it home and show everyone.

Not that that's how I came to own Consosci Victor Jara? by Daniele Sepe.

I actually bought a second-hand copy of this album from The Record Shop in Cardiff back in 2012. I had never heard of Daniele Sepe before, but I decided that the eye-catching artwork was just too colourful to pass up, especially given that they were only asking 25p for it.