Doomed Forever

Hate and Video Games

2008-07-24T07:30:00.001-07:00

Recently I had to travel around the UK telling Currys employees how to sell a particular computer game. I need a job I care about soon.

In amongst this sea of below par, awkward and bland normal people two characters stuck out, the first was this weasley bloke who was in charge of this whole Currys roadshow, he was on my back the whole fucking time to get me to get 'the colleagues' more involved in my presentations (all the management called the drones that, as if they respected them as human beings, but they still treated them like unruly cattle and, I imagine, pay them as one would pay unruly cattle), he had beady little eyes, wore a nasty dress shirt and fucking horrible crododile skin shoes and he was passionate about his work. I hate people who are passionate about their work when their work is organizing some piece of shit touring expo designed to help morons sell washing machines.

The other character I totally drank in was this chump:

I had to work with him for a day, and he was passionate about his job too, he was pockmarked and had feathered hair and bootcut suit trousers and he had tried out for Big Brother or something and he had to run through this shit about being able to tape freeview tv on the console. He really worked the crowd with his anecdotes about being in Thaliraki and watching Hollyoaks on his PSP. He was quite a showman and clearly felt he had it in him to 'do TV'.

This bloke I work with in London came on one of these days and remarked of these people that the only thing he had in common with them was that they probably like lager too. I'm inclined to agree.

I'm such a fucking snob sometimes but I don't really care.

Bad Sex

2008-05-10T08:53:00.000-07:00

If you’re a boy, shit sexual experiences are pretty hard to come by, if sex is shit it’s still ok cos you still blow your load, which is always fun. Girls have a harder time with that stuff but if you’re a boy shit sex has to be really shit, it’s pretty funny when there’s blood or an injury and it often brings you closer to the person you’re doing it with, the shittest is when it’s just kind of grim and miserable, the kind of event that makes you wonder why you bother with sexual experiences at all.

For most people art college is usually a pretty good place to get laid, but for me it was shit for that. Prior to college I’d had a bit of a breakdown, which had shattered my self confidence and also led to me being been put on a hefty dose of antidepressants, which shattered my self confidence a second time by making me balloon in weight and lowering my sex drive considerably. I became a sort of rotund Billy Bunter/Morrissey figure, sitting in the college bar bemoaning my loneliness, not knowing where to start to do anything about it.

My drought lasted a long time, so long that I began to worry that if I ever got to do it again they would have changed it. Everyone around me was fucking like John Holmes and having threesomes and shit while I lived a monk-like, emasculating existence, it was depressing to say the least.

Quite a way into my drought, I resolved that whoever came my way, I would do, no matter who. And so it came to pass that I ended up at a house party talking a girl from my class and actually getting somewhere, the deal was that I didn’t fancy her at all, in fact she was pretty ropey, the usual fine art student fare of angry veganism, brown cords and pockmarks, fuck it, I thought, lets get this over with and get back in the game. So I listened enough about some po-faced lesbian art movement or other for her to be suitably impressed to invite me home with her, so we travelled across town to her grotty, petulia oil stinking room and she fucking leapt on me. She’d probably been as starved of affection as me because it was the kind of scary, intense, ripping and tearing shit that only fat girls and rotters think is hot but is really unpleasant when all you really want from them is to sit quietly while you get on with the shameful act (you may as well be fucking the sleeve of your favourite jacket). She was trying to make a point, I think, that leftist, serious-minded vegans had a wild, untamed sexual energy inside them, too. I was willing her to sit quietly and let me get on with it but still kind of knuckling down and grinding away with my eyes closed, but then she took her fucking clothes off and revealed her misshapen, pallid figure, twisted and hunched by years of bitter anger against imperialism, sexism and her dad or whatever. It was fucking gross and I think I saw some half-hearted self-harm scabs on her upper arms, I looked right, deep into her green eyes and realised she was harrowingly ugly, the blood drained from my dick and probably my face and I know I should have upped sticks and fucked off then, but I needed to reclaim my manhood so I soldiered on. However, the part of me that refused to soldier on was my own little soldier, he disobeyed orders by retreating back into his barracks etc etc this is an ill worded military metaphor about my dick not being hard- you get it. I figured if I got it up to a semi lob-on and gripped it at the base to trap the blood I could force it into her and think of someone attractive and a few humps in I’d be ok. The pressure was on, it had been a good half an hour of ‘foreplay’ and I started thinking that she thought I was some sort of homo because this was taking so long, thoughts of inadequacy began to plague me and certainly did not help the little chap get into fighting mode. It was over before it began, and I had one last, rather optimistic, stab in the dark (playing snooker with a piece of rope etc etc you get it) and collapsed.

I kind of thought I could feign sleep at this point, citing drunkenness and exhaustion, but I hadn’t really shown signs of either previously and I think she worked out the deal. I rolled over, pulled up my shorts and almost began fake snoring, and then I realised she was quietly sobbing. I’m a scumbag but there’s a limit. I manned up and tried to comfort her, I started talking about how my antidepressants made me ‘weird’ and I guess that was as close I was going to get to discussing the elephant in the room with erectile dysfunction. She kept crying and crying and saying she was never good at this and that no one really ever found her attractive and I kept comforting her badly while freaking out myself and then it was light and I realised she was pretty unhinged and unhappy generally and I’d actually really hurt her by kind of using her but not even being able to. I had this gut feeling of darkness, like something genuinely tragic and hurtful had just occurred. I began to panic like fuck that I was never going to be able to do it again and that my body was fucked or I was secretly gay but had repressed it so much that even I didn’t know. For a few hours that bedroom was the centre of all self-doubt and self-loathing in all of the world.

I considered at this point, I don’t know, maybe turning my life around. I have some serious issues but most things I can hold internally eat me up from the inside, but now this girl knows which means her best friend and her counsellor/therapist, probably daddy knows too, so I kind of felt that I should remedy the issue before I snowballed into some downward spiral of self-loathing at the bottom of which lies real impotence, that’s when you have no self esteem left at all, not a shred, that’s when fat girls and rotters look like babes and I would be praying for this kind of attention from some self harming spotty vegan. But yeah I guess I got through it some way, maybe not the right way but my way, little while down the line I’m able to bone skanks in stairwells of clubs whilst tripping balls on mushrooms and coke, pretty good eh? P –r-etty good.

All The Boys

2008-04-23T15:12:00.000-07:00

Stool Pigeon Articles

2008-04-23T15:11:00.001-07:00

I lost my password and fucked up my life so it's been six months since anything's been put on here.

Here are some articles I've done for Stool Pigeon, they've all been handed in really late.

This first one was just after everything went to shit

My life has hit the skids for about the fifteenth time since I left school, I’m going to need bailing out and everything’s a fucking mess. I’m losing my job again at the end of this week, last week I lost my house, and the week before my girl left me, which was shit because apart from everything else (I’m crushed, I can’t sleep and it’s all I can think about) I was going to stay with her til I found a new place. At the moment my daily routine is based around trying to not think about how badly everything’s gone; at work I bury myself in the papers and shirk as much responsibility as possible (my job is a no brainer and a joke, more on that later). Work’s over by six thirty and I pick up food and go straight from there to my buddy’s where I’m staying, take some prescription tranquilisers and watch four hours of Sky TV while he works on his politics MA upstairs until I set up the sofa bed around eleven, do some more tranquilisers and go to sleep. It should be noted that I actually passed up the opportunity to stay at a house with seven hot girls in a band on tour from Brooklyn but that place didn’t have Sky and I don’t want to talk to anyone, let alone a bunch of fucking hipster indie girls. It sounds bad, but all this is a symptom of a bigger problem.
As I write this it’s Armistice Day (this has to go to print in less than 12 hours, I have a habit of leaving things late, as you’ll understand in a bit) and I’m reminded of my family heritage. I come from a family of Naval officers of note, my grandfather died in 1951 as the Number One on HM Submarine Affray, which sank off the French coast without explanation (a book just got published about it called Subsmash, which sounds like a very sensationalist name but it’s an emergency codeword you use when your submarine is in trouble), it was a huge deal at the time, a major event that had the Prime Minister making statements outside Downing Dtreet and was all that was in the papers for weeks (Wikipedia it), he was only a year older than I am now. My step-grandfather, Captain Jack ‘Hank’ Henry (he even had a hero’s name) was in the Fleet Air Arm, shot down Japanese fighters in the Pacific throughout the war (he was only a year older than I am now when the war was over), worked with the SAS in Korea, became a test pilot for early jets, then became a diplomat in the US and met Kennedy, Nixon and Louis Armstrong. He died about two years ago and the church was completely full, which never happens if you’re over eighty unless you’re special. My grandmother obviously had a thing for heroes. Even my dad -who I’ve had my problems with over the years- went to war twice, spied on the Russians from a submarine, got an MBE and does something pretty important now.
I am the spawn of these men, and I have never done anything. After school (a liberal boarding school that my father nearly killed himself paying for) I went to art college and spent my loans on drugs, clothes and records, went to rehab, went back to college, did ok after not fucking around for the last three weeks, then worked in a trendy trainer store, did loads of coke, then got a job in ‘new media’, a good first job that I fucked up by being late, lazy, hungover, gacked out and asleep at my desk most of the time. I was then unemployed for three months until my buddy hooked me up to stand in for someone on maternity leave as a receptionist at the management company that looks after the Chuckle Brothers and Jim Davidson among others, mostly the ‘greats’ of light entertainment who had their day in the sun fifteen years ago. So for the last eight weeks I’ve spent my days doing things like looking for the correct brand of pink champagne to give to Julian Clary after his opening night in Cabaret, photocopying Gillian Taylforth’s press cuttings and putting Eddie Large through to his agent’s PA on the switchboard.
So mostly I’ve chased girls, avoided responsibility and never tried hard at anything, even stuff I thought cared about- I’m so fucking lost it’s insane. While I was doing pills all through my late teens early twenties and playing bass in the worst hardcore band you ever heard my friends where sneaking about behind my back building careers, getting real degrees or learning their instruments properly so they could tour in real bands and make a proper go of that shit. I’ve managed to get to 24 without even having my name on an electricity bill, I’ve never left Europe and I definitely never commanded a fucking submarine, I can’t even drive.
I know I’m not the only one who feels like his life is going nowhere, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll probably fall into something worthwhile eventually, it just scares me that I don’t have a clue what it’s going to be, and I literally don’t know what it’s going to take to make me try or to make me commit to anything, a terminal illness or getting someone knocked up are my two best guesses, because I can’t see it coming from deep inside. I do know a few people who have the same thing going on, like, they just don’t know, and they never have, having fun took such a precedent over everything that proper, real life is just a total impossibility, I thought I took the righteous path, as it where, but it turns out I really didn’t -as it stands now, my way of life has gotten in the way of my life. I don’t know if any of this is relevant to anyone else, maybe some of you feel like this too, maybe I’m just venting, sorry.

Second one:

Like the Banana Splits said, I Enjoy Being A Boy. I want to fuck and fight and see blood and sometimes I hate myself for not being man enough, and sometimes I can be cruel and hateful and arrogant and bloody-minded and pathetic, and I love doing coke and seeing dead bodies and I worry about length and girth and I’d probably fuck a fifteen year old if I knew I could get away with it. That’s how I feel about my shit a lot of the time, it’s my base masculinity getting the better of me. I get really male, not like sports and war male, more thinking about fucking and heavy revenge on my enemies male. I can really hate someone when I put my mind to it, and it really makes me feel alive. I would love to kill a man.
I spend much of my time searching for a reflection of the above ugly, childish maleness in music, because I like music reflects how who I am and I am an ugly, childish male. Real maleness in music is weird because although most musicians are men, they’re not real men, political correctness invaded music in the eighties and it’s still castrating honesty to this day, so that it’s almost unacceptable to not have a cause or agenda beyond telling the world how you feel without apologising. I don’t listen to indie music at all because of all the bookish types telling me how clever they are. Everyone in music was bullied at school, but with a lot of those bands a lot of the time you know they weren’t bullied because they were slight and didn’t like games, they were bullied because they were smug little cunts. A lot of those bands to kitchen sink lyrics, but they’re too fruity and not normal enough to sing about being normal, it always sounds so affected, that band Los Campesinos are the worst for it, awful. Cutesy little bitches. The only band that did that properly was Arab Strap, because Aiden Moffat was brave enough not to hold back, he talked about things in the most intimate possible terms, not sexy intimate, truth intimate. He talked about things that pop music doesn’t often address without dosing up with romance, like reading your girlfriend’s diary while taking a shit, borderline stalking, creeping insecurities and suspicions, horrible things. He obviously understood something that the bookish, fey indie bands never could: that life and human relationships aren’t about clever rhymes, a commitment to veganism, rare seven inches, Sylvia Plath or a vintage naval coat -they’re not about the things you’ve built onto yourself, that pop culture has made you become, they are about an interaction on an intimate level where all your lies are exposed. We all know the most immaculately turned out scenesters are usually the fruitiest dudes, the men who spend time on their hair and who have had a Stalinist revision of the past whereby at no point they were ever anything but in the scene they are in now, they’re not real men, they’re liars. If girls are down with those boys, they’re idiots because they’re not real people, they’re constructs. They check the scene manual to see how they’re supposed to feel. Arab Strap spoke about being disgusting and awful, being stupid and cruel and mindless, there was a genuine confessional aspect to what was being said, without self pity and with humour. That’s how real men tell the world how they’re feeling about shit.
That confessional shit can go too far though. The problem with Bright Eyes is he’s too overwrought to be the next Dylan, Dylan has dealt with the whole gamut of emotions over his career, we’re quite a few albums into Conor Oburst’s career and all we’ve really got from him is ‘inconsolably sad’. He trembles and wallows like he’s in therapy, it’s so humourless and it’s a bit embarrassing, like when someone you just met at a party tells you about their eating disorder way too soon into the evening. I guess some people listen to him when they’re into a girl and it’s not going their way, but then you just end up feeling like him, like it’s the end of the world. The thing is I’m as much of a fag about girls as anyone, and it usually is the end of the world, but there’s no dignity in self-pity, you’ve got to pick it up, compose yourself. I mainly play Nick Cave’s last few records for that, he’s got a million ways of telling a girl he loves her without for a second breaking down or making anyone uncomfortable. It’s like he could turn up at her house, wearing one of those great suits with an open collar that he wears, say the shit he needed to say and walk away with his head held high, even if she told him fuck off. No trembling, no wailing and gnashing of teeth, keeping it together because he knows he needs to. I don’t care if it’s his pop record, The Boatman’s Call shits on all other break up records because it’s so dignified, there’s no regret, he just accepts his mistakes and gets on with shit. Grinderman really had a handle on the seedy frustrations of manhood too.
I haven’t cited as many examples as I’d have liked, I had this whole spiel on hardcore and metal, and how if you don’t like shouting and loud guitars you’re not a real boy (buy a Cro Mags record you girls) but the point is that life is hard and you’ve got to be hard too, don’t bitch and whine and spend time on your hair because that’s not being a man that’s being a spoilt kid. My friends have developed this phrase that’s really helped me recently, it’s ‘man up’, in short: be a man, son, do what you know you need to do, not what you want to do.

Third:

Sometimes I really hate rock and roll, I think it might have ruined my life, for two decades it has distracted me from reality. I could be a banker now like all the kids I went to boarding school with but instead I’ve got sailor tattoos and no money because rock and roll helped me ignore my actual life. Here are a few examples of why rock and roll made me an idiot:
I can trace all my wayward, childish and delinquent behaviour back to when I was seven. My father taped Blues Brothers off the TV and I watched it and I think something went in my head. I was a pretty good kid before but that film turned me, like, it made me hate squares and want to kick against the pricks and stuff. The Jailhouse Rock cover at the end of the film got me into Elvis and as a reward for my first week of staying away from home aged nine I got a double cassette of his hits and a model of a pink Cadillac. I’m kind of a daydreamer and I had a Walkman with big headphones and a lot of time on my hands in the Hampshire countryside, so I sat in my room and got lost in the stories and characters in the songs, picturing Elvis and sometimes myself as the protagonist in them. I got really into the romance, I pretty much took the lyrics as documentary of love and adult life, and I think I’m still constantly disappointed that they were not.
After the Elvis years came Britpop at the dawn of my teens, I really expected teenage life to be like Different Class and the Sleeper record, but life at a single sex rural boarding school isn’t really alluded to on either of those albums, so I continued to live my life in my fucking head. I think I really believed the events on those records were realer than the events in my own life. You know when people think they should have been born a woman? I was pretty sure I had been born in the wrong body too, I felt like should have been able to walk home from school and live in a city and know girls and hang out in the park. Perhaps if James Blunt had been making records when I was 14 I would have found some music that related to the dire public school experience, but to be honest I think I just liked the sound of this other existence more.
I kind of got more and more ridiculous and less sophisticated about that shit too, when I hit fifteen the only band I cared about was Rancid, who sang almost exclusively about ‘back in the day’, hanging around on corners, listening to Desmond Dekker with skinhead girls, their fallen comrades in the great punk wars and that. The romance of it all was irresistible to me and I overlooked the highly suspect fact that although they looked like Discharge and The Exploited but with more facial tattoos, they sounded like an over-produced new wave band with false English accents, and fell in love with the pictures they painted in their songs. History will not judge Rancid or any of their ilk kindly, they will be considered to have been of no artistic merit, and their slick faux-Clash stomping will be mocked for having missed the point of the original forbearers of the sound.
They and the many similar American bands of the nineties are doomed to be aligned with the cock-rock bands of the eighties as examples of vacuous, charmless rock and roll played by opportunists. I can’t defend these accusations, it’s all true, but at fifteen I had already missed the point, I just wanted to be punk. Living the life I did, the lifestyle I aspired to, of squatting, sniffing glue and “getting hassled by the pigs” was probably as remote and fantastical to me as the mythological, Dungeons and Dragons lyrics of the metal that I gave my dorm mate a fucking hard time for listening too. I am a dickhead and rock and roll turned me into one.
I guess this last example isn’t strictly music related, but I guess you could say the show was pretty much the grunge show, but my full-on, head-over-heels first love was Claire Danes in My So Called Life. Angela Chase was her character’s name, plaid skirts and big boots and red hair over her eyes, fuck man, she was incredible. As well as being in love with her I got most of my angry teen steez from her in a constant state of self-reassessment and emotional upheaval. You’d think it would be exploitative, preachy shit, but was really well written. She had a lot of problems, a fraught relationship with her parents, low self-esteem, drug-addict friends and problems at school, and I wanted to experience it all with her, then rescue her from it and marry her and obviously bone her. The thing that held the show together was Angela’s voiceover, her inner monologue, deeply personal thoughts and feelings, these were the first deeply personal thoughts and feelings I had ever heard aside from my own idiotic, hormonal rantings (everything in my head is still like that now btw). The show was on every weekday morning for about a month the summer that I was 13 or 14 I think, and I recall the theme tune would send my stomach into knots that meant I couldn’t finish my Pop Tarts. I felt that horrible/thrilling yearn in my gut every time she appeared on the screen or her sad-sounding drawl voiced-over a montage – that feeling is love, if I feel that feeling now about someone I think first about Angela cos she’s the benchmark and will be forever. When each episode was over, I looked around at my own comfortable but essentially dull and really very un-sexy existence and felt ashamed. Real life is very immobile compared to well written teen drama. I think this was kind of a turning point cos about a week in I realised the best way to combat this sudden, ugly return to reality was to consciously ignore it, and just think about the show and Angela for the rest of the day. I was in love with a fictional character for about two years and I really think rock and roll has ruined my life. There’s a million more examples of this stuff in my adult life too, it’s embarrassing. Maybe next issue.

Things Vice sent me in the post

2008-04-23T14:53:00.000-07:00

Here's all the reviews I've done for Vice since September, I don't know if any of them got published I haven't seen the magazine in a long time.

Shipwreck
Abyss
Deathwish

Dense, negative hardcore like Integrity, Ringworm and that kind of thing. The problem is the lyrics are so vague, flowery and generally sixth-form-poetryesque that it’s hard to relate and get fucking angry like the singer is. Hardcore should be about real shit.

6

Pixelh8
The Boy With the Digital Heart
Hidden Youth Records

This is all programmed on Gameboys or something, some of it is actually pretty moving and sad and some of it sounds a bit like ‘Showtime’ era Dizzee beats. However, it’s still the musical equivalent of wearing a NES controller belt buckle or wearing a t-shirt that says ‘All Your Base Are Belong To Us’.

5

Tusk
The Resisting Dreamer
Tortuga/Vice/Hydrahead/ADA

Some prog metal bands get into perfection and want to sound exactly like the ocean or a planet, but this is kind of loose and rocky and you can tell they’re still just fallible men with instruments who like boozing, which makes them infinitely more likeable than nerds with clipped goatees who don’t smile when they play.

8

Los Campesinos
Hold On Now, Youngster…
Wichita

Remember Bromhead’s Jacket and Artrocker Magazine? Singing in English accents and wearing polo shirts with ties? All that was shit but popular three years ago, and these boring, smug students missed the boat so they’re just shit.

3

Our Brother The Native
Make Amends, For We Are Merely Vessels
Fat Cat

This is pretty decent post rock with singing bits like Twilight Sad or a less screamy Circle Takes The Square, which is all well and good but guess what? They’re only fucking 17! When I was 17 I thought Rancid were revolutionary socialists and massive skate shoes were the bee’s knees.

8

Envy
Abyssal
Rock Action

This is so dense, emotive and powerful that it’s kind of a good explanation as to why young men get so into hardcore that they just end up awkward, autistic vinyl nerds who will never know true love.

10/10

VietNam
VietNam
Kemado Records

What’s not to like about country rock done right? This sounds like Wilco with the guy from the Jesus and Mary Chain singing. Yeah that’s right, it’s really good. I don’t understand why they would admit to having the same producer as Maroon 5 in their press release though, seems like the kind of thing you’d want to keep quiet.

8/10

Grizzly Bear
Friend EP
Warp Records

I’m having a rough time emotionally at the moment, not proper hard times or anything -I still have my health and I sort of have a job- it’s girl problems and shit. Anyway, this record, in all its shimmering, snail’s pace, miserable glory, has had me in the foetal position all afternoon. I'm a little fag.

7/10

Jesu
Lifeline EP
Hydrahead

This is not metal anymore but metalheads still love it cos they think Justin is a genius and should be allowed to do whatever without anyone complaining how what he does sounds more like shoegazing stuff than industrial grind these days.

8/10

Prefuse 73
Preparations
Warp Records

Why did I get sent so much Warp stuff this month? Some of this sounds like music for car adverts and some of this is pretty emotive. It comes with a bonus disc that sounds like the score to a really sad film, which I actually like more than the main disc.

6/10

Joe Lally
Nothing Is Underrated
Dischord

Joe Lally’s bass parts were one of the main reasons Fugazi were so interesting and cool, this is kind of like the quieter songs on the last few Fugazi records but with a singer that can actually sing, I don’t know if that’s better, just different.

7/10

The Weirdos
Destroy All Music
Bomp!

Rock and roll is never going to look as much like a threat to civilisation as much as it must have done in the late seventies. Why is everything so boring now?

8/10

Saviours
Cavern Of Mind
Kemado

It’s such a shame that someone invented the phrase ‘hipster metal’ because it makes me feel guilty for really, really liking this.

8/10

Figurines
When The Deer Wore Blue
Strange Feeling

Figurines can really sing -like the Beach Boys in fact- so why are there so many boring jangly guitar passages? They should get a lovely orchestra with violins and really tug on our heartstrings.

7/10

Black Mountain
In The Future
Jagjaguar

If I wrote for Q magazine I would call this proper rock music. This is almost totally flawless and has bits of Wilco, Sabbath, PJ Harvey and Jesus and Mary Chain in all the right places.

10/10

New Reviews

2007-09-12T14:51:00.000-07:00

This is everything Vice sent me to review. I hope one or two of them get published.

Dirty Projectors
Rise Above
Rough Trade

Re-recording Damaged as warbling, arty folk isn’t a good idea. The lyrics work in the context of fighting the cops and eating dogfood on tour, but if they’re sung by a smug ex-Yale student and his clever, sexy girl mates, it just sounds like they’re making fun of it all.

Dylan Donkin
Food For Thoughtlessness
Wall Of Sound

If you liked Jack Johnson, you’ll love this!!!! Also, this joker was in that band that Jason Newsted got kicked out of Metallica for playing in, not that I was into Newkid but now we have that guy with the fucking braids who plays a fretless five-string. Fuck Dylan Donkin, he’s poisoning music.

Subhumans
Internal Riot
Bluurg

Doesn’t everyone in their late forties complain about call centres and the declining standards of TV? A crust-punk Saxondale, and I guess for that reason not entirely un-likable, but probably better off getting their 80s stuff, eh.

The Things
Wild Psychotic Sounds
Big Neck Records

Cool garage rock from Ireland, I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t like this, real simplistic and menacing and full of creepy Hammond organ. Also, they’re true to the original ‘Nuggets’ garage rock spirit in that they look like heavy-set lunkheads from a small town who like to party and don’t care about the rules.

Torche
In Return
Robotic Empire/Rock Action

This is ex-members of Floor and Cavity doing crisp, enormous sounding, slow and VERY HEAVY riffs like their old bands, only it’s a bit less businesslike and a bit more sexy- there’s more swagger, you know? Mastodon and Isis learnt a lot from these guys’ old bands, so this is worth getting.

Suicidal Tendencies

2007-09-09T10:19:00.001-07:00

Dirty Money

2007-09-03T01:38:00.000-07:00

So many hardcore kids are fucking boring. They're all mildly autistic, pedantic record collectors or childishly territorial pretend gang-members. To use an two Americanisms, they're either nerds or jocks, and hardly ever the devil-may-care, wiseguy badasses they'd love to think they are.

It's good that there's exceptions to every rule I make up in my head, otherwise I'd think I controlled the world. Dirty Money are the exception in this case, a London band with a scouse singer (you can hear the accent on the recordings, I'm told the girls love it) who play a gnarlier, uglier kind of tough hardcore than the regimented Hatebreed-style stuff everyone in the world must be so fucking sick of by now. It's kind of like Cro-Mags and Integrity played by skinny boys on a budget, it sounds smart and cool as well as violent and heavy.

The good thing about Dirty Money (and a few other bands on their label, Dead and Gone Records) is there's no fucking stupid, old-hat agenda going on, they're not super-positive douchebags in Chain Of Strength shirts or dark, arty douchebags in Jacob Bannon art print shirts either, they're singing about their actual lives and I don't think they think hardcore is the only way. It probably helps that their singer is some big graffiti writer up North and so obviously has interests outside of limited seven inches and being "nailed to the X" (he definately isn't), and I think this is the kind of hardcore normal people who don't spend their lives milling about in youth centres or searching ebay for shirts could get into.

You see, I reckon the thing with proper, good hardcore is that it's so brilliant and amazing and cathartic that I don't think it should be just for the girlfriend-less anal-retentives or the fat thugs, it should be for anyone who's ever been pissed off or wanted to vent spleen about anything. You know how anyone can go to a rave, no matter what music they listen to in their bedroom? Hardcore could be loose like that, less vegan currys and scene politics and more actual rage and universal themes, it shouldn't be this dry ghetto with loads of rules, it should be available to anyone. I'm not saying let the hippy girls and tory Etonians in like the raves have, I'm just saying that if more people were in on the vibe the world would be a better place.

www.myspace.com/thedirtymoney

Southend On Sea

2007-09-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

I was so sure I was on holiday, but apparently it's more like the Morrissey song when you live there. Playing records to people who really go for it is a good time. I played at the Kool Kids Klub (www.myspace.com/thekoolkidsklubuk).

Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen
This is the coastal town
That they forgot to close down
Armageddon - come Armageddon!
Come, Armageddon! Come!
Everyday is like Sunday
Everyday is silent and grey

Hide on the promenade
Etch a postcard :
"How I Dearly Wish I Was Not Here"
In the seaside town
...that they forgot to bomb
Come, Come, Come - nuclear bomb

Everyday is like Sunday
Everyday is silent and grey

Trudging back over pebbles and sand
And a strange dust lands on your hands
(And on your face...)

Everyday is like Sunday
"Win Yourself A Cheap Tray"
Share some greased tea with me
Everyday is silent and grey

William Kurt has this to say :
"The world of "Everyday is like Sunday" takes place in the town that wasn't bombed. Life seems to be imprisoning and dreary without the freedom and excitement that fearing the bomb had previously brought. The lines "Trudging slowly over wet sand/Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen" seem to clearly show this transition from freedom and joy to a duller, more miserable world. It seems as if the protagonist was formerly running joyously naked along the beach, as would be expected of the protagonist in "Ask", but after the fun is gone, he returns to find that his clothes have been stolen, leaving him naked and alone on the beach on a cold grey day. The rest of the song seems to be describing the walk of the protagonist hoping for the bomb to drop to put a quick end to things. Then the "Strange dust lands". I feel that what this 'strange dust' is is pretty clear: it's the dust from nuclear fall out. While the sudden flash of a nuclear bomb will eliminate your life in a quick and brilliant flash, nuclear fall out will slowly give you radiation poisoning, leaving you with a long painful death. That's also what I believe the 'greased tea' is. The grease give the image that the tea is tainted and sickly; basically it's radioactive tea, polluted and dirty, leading to a slow miserable death.
Overall the entire song is much like when someone says 'life is long'; this is never viewed as something positive, as opposed to when someone says 'life is short'. A short quick life means that one can do whatever one wants and can ignore all the consequences, but a long life is full of responsibility and consequences for every action."

urgh. I had a good weekend anyway. The folks down there are smart and they know how to have a good time in the face of adversity.

Norman Rockwell

2007-09-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

2007-09-02T09:25:00.001-07:00

All The Old Reviews

2007-09-02T08:36:00.000-07:00

Acid Mother’s Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.
Myth Of The Love Electrique
Riot Season

I’m about to begin working at an advertising firm, it’s a proper job, nine to five. I’ll probably have to work late a bit and I’ll probably not be able to go out on weeknights too often. I’m going to have to give up taking as many drugs as I do now as well, even working at a trendy sneaker store is hard enough after a gram of mdma two nights previously, I sell people Air 180s and want to cry, or if I’ve been doing coke I whisper obscenities under my breath at tourists who ask for European sizes and punch the stock room walls because I’m all raged up and I can feel it in my chest. This is all fine when all you do is serve cunts with expensive footwear, but I’m going to have a desk and responsibilities, I’m going to have to communicate ideas and answer the telephone politely. I have to stop misbehaving, grow up and knuckle down. I used to think I’d always want to fuck around and that I’d never get a proper job, I thought I’d be like the man in the Bill Hicks routine who jacks in his job to get up at noon, smoke weed and learn the sitar -and I’ve more or less done that in the past- but I’m not so into being a wasteman anymore, I want structure, routine and a decent living wage. Here’s what it is: I fucking love money and possessions, I want a big house and I want to make my parents proud for a change, be a respectable human being. I used to listen to Crass.

Acid Mother’s Temple probably don’t care what their parents think or care about cash and that, they play tripping-balls space rock and that’s their life, I bet they love it and they’re all best friends, and they don’t have insurance or mortgages and they have loads of people in loads of countries who’ll do anything for them, put them up, feed them and let them stay as long as they want. I don’t know but they probably all live together on a farm like Crass except they’ve got a sense of humour and their music’s not shit. This is fucking good music, retrogressive with a twist of fuck off we do what we want, moogs and feedback are involved in a big way and everything’s twenty minutes long. There’s a freedom and a questing spirit, that sounds completely ridiculous but I’m not even joking, it’s wild, it sounds like wizards casting spells in a storm AHAHAHAHA I’m not joking though. I am into the inlay too, all these old longhair Japs goofing around, they know how to live. When I get to forty-five I bet I’ll have a mid life crisis like Kevin Spacey in American Beauty and do bongs, listen to this and fuck an eighteen year old cheerleader. Hopefully I won’t get shot in the back of the head.

Shit And Shine
Jealous Of Shit And Shine
Riot Season

I pretty much try to fuck every girl I meet, I’m really into proving my worth as a man. It’s not because I love sex, it’s because I need the validation, both from the girl, my peers and myself. I actually hardly fuck any of these girls, most of the time I just take it as far as establishing that if I wanted to fuck them I could, then I realise that actually fucking them would have consequences so I back off. This behaviour stems from a course of antidepressants I was prescribed about four years ago, they made me fat and killed my sex drive, I didn’t so much as touch a woman for two years, it was the worst thing ever. It took me a while to lose the weight and even longer to regain my confidence, and after a few false starts I got back into the swing of things about eighteen months ago. Now it’s this thing where I have to make sure everyone including myself knows I’m not a fat, sexless loser anymore. I tend to go for posh girls at parties in the East End, I’m a posho myself but I wear a lot of Nike and have a baseball cap and Reebok shoes so I occupy a mental space for these girls where I’m not too far removed from them but still a bit naughtier, like a cuddly bit of rough -that’s my niche. The whole thing -even the sportswear- is about reclaiming and affirming my masculinity, but as well as all that, some girl this summer really fucking screwed me over so now I can add my desire to exact revenge on all of womankind into this bubbling cauldron of insecurity, testosterone and self-loathing. What a creep eh? What a nasty guy. What a hateful little man.

Being a man is full of this, you might have a dick but you’re really just an arsehole, you have to come to terms with it. Admit that on some level you want to fuck and fight and see blood and that sometimes you hate yourself for not being man enough, and that sometimes you can be cruel and hateful and arrogant and bloody-minded and pathetic, and you love doing coke and seeing dead bodies and you check the length of your dick with a ruler and you’d probably fuck a fifteen year old if you knew you could get away with it. It feels good when you admit it all to yourself, like a PC weight has been lifted. This record is full of all these masculine honesties, secrets and embarrassments; testosterone let loose without remorse. It is sort of part power-electronics part drunk Melvins, full of clipping bass amps, awful electronic drones and primitive drums. There’s all these nasty barely audible samples about black men being arrested or someone saying ‘fucking wanker’ or something about someone being gay but you can’t really make it all out, like these horrible little grumblings from deep in your foul little male mind that you’re not really sure you think. There’s a lot of mindless thunking and brutal violence too: remind you of anyone’s inner monologue? Yes, yours. The best bit is one dumb riff that goes on for thirty minutes, which is like arguing with your girl and just going on and on and on even though she doesn’t really care but you’re just talking and shouting to prove a point that is actually a pretty stupid and ignorant point. Being a man is terrible.

The early CD pressings of this have a bonus CD of their vinyl only release ‘You’re Lucky To Have Friends Like Us’, which is like ‘Jealous of…’ but with more live instruments, a sample from Countdown and a pretty jokes cover of Do It Again by the Beach Boys done in French, badly. There is a relentless sloppiness and a very black humour at work with Shit And Shine, I reckon that to fully ‘get’ them you might have to be the worst person in the world, but as it turns out, we are all that person once in a while.

Au Revoir Simone's new album

About three Saturdays ago I had to go to this working class London suburb called Carshalton to take some photos of a really low-league football match and interview some fans for my work at this advertising and research company. The day didn’t start well, I woke up late and I was really hungover, and I kind of wasn’t in the mood for doing anything work related, I’m not even in the mood to do work related things at work, so this weekend shit felt like an imposition. It took my buddy George and I far too long to get to Carshalton from South London, we had to change on a bunch of over ground trains and wait around at one station for about half an hour. These kids on the platform opposite to us were screaming and yelling and really pissing me off and kick-started my coke comedown rage and I ranted at George about the state of humanity for most of the half hour wait, I think I really bummed him out. The other thing was that we were supposed to have met my other buddy Ben at Carshalton station half an hour before we’d even set off, so I genuinely felt like a total cunt for being so late, it was hot and sticky and I hated myself a bit.

When we finally got to Carshalton we found Ben in a really fucking hard pub nursing a pint and looking scared. He’d had a four year old girl coming to talk to him and sit opposite him for ages while her pikey father eyed him ominously with the definite look of a Sun reading nonce-lyncher. Ben was uncomfortable. We made him stay for another beer though, and I asked for directions to the football ground from some men at the bar, I couldn’t have sounded more like someone who was not from the area. They gave me very confusing directions and one of them made a comment about us looking funny. We left real quick and spent half an hour walking around trying to find the football ground because I hadn’t paid attention to the directions at all. We found it in the end but the match was pretty much over, we took a bunch of photos and Ben and George started about missing the Tottenham match, they hadn’t met before today and it was good that they had some common ground I guess. This was kind of the point the day turned around and started to be fun, suddenly we were a unit in this weird little town, miles from civilisation. We started joking about what we were going to say in the interviews that we decided we were going to make up, and things started falling into place. When we left the game the fear had gone a bit and it was starting to feel like an adventure, and as we were just about to retrace our steps and head for the station Ben was like ‘nah, lets go this way’ and we started walking into the unknown just for fun.

We found a newsagent and bought some ice creams and kept on walking and chatting in the sun, and we came across this really big, well kept park that was lovely except for NF graffiti all over it, and so we bought some fucking beers and sat in it. I hadn’t really seen Ben properly for a few years until about a month before this trip, I mean, I’d seen him around but he’d always had this girlfriend who didn’t like me, so we hadn’t really talked for about four years, so it was great to talk to him again, he’s a funny bloke and we’ve got a lot in common. Plus, George is my oldest friend, I’ve known him since I was four, he’s this weird lanky posho with a heart of gold and he’s pretty much game for anything and really witty. It dawned on me at this point, about halfway down my first Stella, what great company they were and what a nice time we were having. We drank a bunch more beers and talked about a load of things, we covered a lot stuff, mutual friends with interesting problems, childhood anecdotes, ex-girlfriends, boarding school japes, the worst bands we’d ever been into. It was fun as hell, and when one of us went for a piss behind a NF tree and came back with a massive Super Soaker that some I guess some kids must have abandoned it was like someone had planned it, we chased each other around with it for a while and I swear I haven’t laughed that much for years.

When we got up to leave we’d been in the park for four hours, we walked for ages more and found the station again, Ben found some coke left over from the night before and we all did a bump each then our train came, we were heading back into town as the sun was beginning to set, and I kind of realised that we were better friends now than when we had been at the beginning of the day, I looked out of the window, I was happy drunk and a bit high and I was kind of thinking about my new girl too and this kind of warm, positive melancholy came over me, all three of us kind of grinned at the same time and I guess we all thought the same thing, like, this was great, this is great, life is good. This record is kind of like that moment after that day.

Wiley
Playtime is Over

I used to work in a warehouse packing flyers to be distributed to public spaces around London, and it was nice work, methodical and calming. What happened was there was a list of boxes that we had to send out to different destinations, there were a few types of box, like one type of box for artsy places that we’d have to fill with flyers for plays, galleries and classical concerts, or for children’s libraries we’d put in flyers for zoos and fun museums etc etc etc, and there were lots of numbers and letters referring to different types of box and a brilliant stacking system relating to the order things would be delivered in, it was all very satisfying and organised. I could have worked there forever, I just brought in a few cds every day and listened to them and got on with it all. It was just enough to do so you were never bored, but just little enough that you could concentrate entirely on the music playing or your plans for the evening. However, the problem with doing stuff like working in a warehouse or even JD over a summer or just after you’ve left college or whatever is that you have to endure talking to people who will actually be there forever.

Listening to thick people’s opinions is a fucking nuisance when all you want to do is daydream and count the hours until home time. That’s kind of what spoiled that job for me, there was this dumb rudeboy there who just chatted shit all day about the drum and bass he produced and how he was actually very influenced by System Of A Down, the reason it was sometimes reasonable to carry a gun and how his school had had a vendetta against him for some reason or another. It got so fucking boring that I had to quit. The funny thing about this is that this bloke said he had been forced to leave his last job because there was this really boring stupid bloke who talked too much, about how his music was going to make it, how he used to be a gangster but now he’s making a go of it as an upstanding citizen and about how he could get along with anyone and all these other boring ideas that he had about himself and how he wanted to be perceived. The bloke who bored the bloke who bored me was actually Wiley, and that has coloured my opinion of his music since then. He just makes me want to make an excuse about going upstairs to check the rota with Colin or go to the toilet for the seventh time in the afternoon to take a little breather from the barrage of idiocy. The problem with grime is that much of it is made by people who didn’t even make it to year eleven and so are desperately inarticulate, both generally and emotionally speaking, so it’s often extremely embarrassing to listen to. This is kind of excusable when they’re all eighteen and silly, but Wiley is a man in his thirties doing songs with ‘txt spk’ titles. I know he’s the originator of the sound etc etc etc rah rah rah and the music’s ok on this but I just can’t take what a dumb fuck he is, it’s literally killing me.

HTRK

On the first Godflesh mini-LP from 1988 there’s a picture of the band in front of a grim building site, they look really ugly. They were a pair of rotten crusties, they hated mainstream society, they were from a poor part of Birmingham and one of them played on ‘Scum’ by Napalm Death. I bet the pair of them fucking stank and had all the social graces of the people Sting brought over from the Amazon. Presumably there was something genuinely menacing about them then, like there was about the hardcore kids in America in the earlier eighties, it wasn’t art school or high fashion then, it was rank and it was threatening.

These days all the art fags and hipsters like ‘extreme’ music, or at least it’s all about being into it a few years ago, like they’re saying ‘I was angry and dangerous before I became so self-effacing and articulate’. It’s a ploy to get laid, they want to tread the line between primitive, angry young man and well-read chap who knows about expensive suits and wine. I think it’s about covering all your bases. The thing is that’s a totally reasonable thing to do and I have totally done it in the past, but it’s completely negating any danger involved in the music if all these middle-class gaylords who went to private school (me and my friends) are into it. That’s right, I admit it, I am destroying hardcore, black metal, doom and industrial music for the people who really mean it. All of it is becoming gentrified, and the joke is that a lot of the bands seem to be helping too, they all shout at us that we’re trendy cunts when they come and play the Old Blue Last, but we love that, cos we all think we’re not and that they’re talking about everyone in the room except for us. If they hate us why do they fucking play there anyway?
So HTRK is just gentrified Godflesh, there’s a picture of the band in the sleeve and they’re all topless (even the girl!! Wow!!) and they’re all skinny and pretty and it looks like a Terry Richardson photo and one of them’s actually drinking red wine. The music’s fine, industrial and grim I guess, but whatever, you know? If people get into this then what to we have left to be scared of?

The Young Gods
Super Ready/Fragmente

Don’t you love how gracefully New Order have aged? They’re patrons of the arts, dress smart and neat, write books and enjoy family life and football. Plus, they make pretty sophisticated, relevant music that refers as much to their heritage as the present musical climate. I hope I’m like that when I’m old, like, I haven’t lost touch completely and retreated into my old person ghetto, but at the same time I’m not going to clubs or surrounding myself with young friends that I try to talk to about the good old days and how ecstasy was stronger back then. I reckon Bowie is the latter and Alex James might end up as the former. The Young Gods are neither I suppose, they are old though, and they don’t wear nice suits like their industrial buddies Einsturende Neubauten who are of a similar age, they wear chokers and collar-less shirts like the bloke from Celtic Frost, so I guess they look kind of old-guy-trying-to-stay-rocking, but that can be forgiven. Dignity is a difficult line to tread when you play in a rock band in your forties.

I guess this record’s too dignified, as in AOR dignified, as in, “what-the-fuck-how-are-you-in-the-same-genre-as-Throbbing-Gristle” dignified, as in -and this is the kicker- as in, “oh shit this sounds like U2” dignified. I’m sorry, I wanted to like this, I thought this would have a badass sophistication and brutal midlife crisis trauma like the Grinderman album, I thought maybe it would teach me something about getting old and remaining venomous and hard, but this totally sounds like U2. You know the U2 video with the swirling desert that goes 3D and Bono’s there in his glasses? That’s the song this whole album sounds like. The guitars sound the same, the voice sounds the same, it’s exactly the same. Genesis P Orridge might not have any dignity but at least that’s cos he’s a man in his forties with fake boobs who fell out of a window, this record just makes me think about beanies. They must have just got carried away with the production, or maybe they have never even heard U2 (they’re Swiss, maybe they don’t have U2 in Switzerland). I thought this was going to be a dark record, but it’s really, really, boring.

Once I saw a ghost. I really did, in my friend’s house when I was fifteen, it’s this big house that was a hospital for soldiers in the first world war, and we definitely saw something, a sort of figure a few feet ahead of us, we were totally sober and it was definitely there. At the time we weren’t scared but when we got down the stairs we looked at each other and just freaked out, it was really weird. I told my girlfriend this whole story at 3am when we were staying at my mum’s house in darkest rural Hampshire and we’d just watched the Exorcist on my laptop in bed, we both got really scared and had to sleep with the lights on. No one has ever managed to put that horrible, creeping fear of the uncanny and the unknown onto record properly. That’s the kind of shit industrial bands should be striving for as they reach their autumn years. Come on.

CocoRosie
The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn
Domino

This is rotten and boring. The twee emotional smugness of the liberal middle classes is why muggers love us, I seriously want to jack my own phone most days. Surely if you wanted real sad songs sung by girls you’d get Nina Simone or Ella Fitzgerald records, this is fake sadness, and there’s fucking rapping in French. This is music for pricks, I don’t care about it.

While I was listening to this my housemate came in my room to give me a copy of the first Sepultura album Morbid Visions, the jewel case clearly used to belong to a Cypress Hill cd cos it has a sticker with “Number One in the USA! ‘Insane In The Brain!’ ‘When The Ship Goes Down’ and the never before available ‘A to the K’ and ‘Hand On The Glock’” written on it. As an object it’s a little window into my housemate’s past. His dad brought up loads of his old things this weekend, including photos of him with long hair and old Body Count concert tickets. He’s from deepest, darkest Wales, he’s got a Moomins tattoo and he builts shit with his hands at work. He does not give a shit about music like this, he was raised on Sepultura, free parties and weed. Now he likes Andy Weatherall and real folk music. He is fucking real and he does not give a fuck. When I am being a faggot about something he calls me up on it. He would not stand for this nonsense for a second.