Yo, Windrush The Show

Whether you like this record or not, you have to agree that Dubwiser is a corking band name.  It's a good record, though it could be a bit dubbier.

DUBWISER – THE EMPIRE WINDRUSH (self-release) 

It’s only about 20 minutes since Dubwiser’s last EP, yet here they are again, slipping out a four-tracker to coincide with Black History Month. The tracks mostly use personal histories to highlight the ups and downs of racial integration (or lack of it) in twentieth-century Britain, proving that a human story will nearly always make a point better than a political harangue. The title track focuses on a single woman sailing to the UK on HMT Empire Windrush, but your ears will focus on the fantastic horns borrowed from Birmingham band KIOKO, especially the stretching-taffy trombone. The vocal melody is unexpectedly old-fashioned and romantic – the opening notes sound as though they’re going to go into ‘It Started With A Kiss’ - and ‘Amazing’ is similarly easy to hum along to, celebrating one of those unsung female heroes every family can point to. ‘Johnny’ is just as close to home, about the father of two of the band members, who hailed from Sierra Leone and flew in the RAF in World War II. It’s a funky reggae shimmy, and if the vocal sometimes grasps for the big notes, the emotion is palpable. ‘Take Down Colston’ advocates, as the name suggests, for the removal of the statue of the Bristol slaver...which is a great sentiment, though you do wonder whether Dubwiser know this already happened!  The lyrics might not be subtle, but the track may take the musical crown, with some gritty left-hand clav lines worthy of The Wailers’ great Earl “Wya” Lindo. If we get another Dubwiser EP next month, you won’t hear us complaining. 

German Bite, Perhaps?

Really nice record, this.  I only reviewed it because one of the band is part of the team behind Supernormal, which regular readers will know is my favourite festival.

TEETH OF THE SEA – HIVE (Rocket Recordings) 

This is Teeth Of The Sea’s sixth album, and fittingly it sounds like six albums at once. Locked within these 41 minutes you’ll find alt-rock, techno, fluffy pop, EBM, a whiff of teenage metalhead guitar, and even a soupcon of easy listening. Hive mostly consists of melodic instrumental oddities, but a pair of pulsating pop monsters show themselves early on. 'Get With The Programme' pushes low-key vocals against an aggressive square wave arpeggio, Depeche Mode’s doomy tunefulness doing battle with Front 242’s shiny leather shimmy, and is followed by 'Butterfly House', a hothouse-ripe synthpop track with the slightly wry vocals of Kath Gifford (previously of such great acts as Snowpony and Moonshake). Occasional slashes of guitar could have come from INXS’s Kick, and if that’s a surprise then God help you when the sugar-coated shredding arrives half-way through, direct from a Van Halen tribute. 

'Powerhorse' couples its rough sandy textures with a sinuous synth bass, sounding a lot like a macabre reptilian version of Boards Of Canada’s 'Roygbiv', but the album’s centrepiece is 'Megafragma'. Fortunately – or tragically? - this is not a 9-minute avant-garde cover of 'Toca’s Miracle', but a hypnotic, endlessly cantering piece of Terminator dub, with gaseous billows of guitar and keys erupting and receding above a relentless train-track ostinato. It’s somehow spacious and claustrophobic at the same time, and feels longer than ice ages whilst also being far too short. 

Hive's real wild card though, the hoverfly in the bee swarm, is the trumpet. The opener 'Artemis' uses chintzy synth notes that sound as though they’re being picked up on long wave, but it’s the descending horn line that is stands out, sounding like something from James Last (imagine the joys of the albums Post-Rock-A-Go-Go, or Non-Stop Techno Kraut Party). On 'Æther' the mournful trumpet is lost in a synth miasma, and it’s a close cousin of Jean-Michel Jarre’s funereal space-sax workout, 'Last Rendezvous'. Whilst Jarre was memorialising those lost in the Challenger disaster, Teeth Of The Sea celebrate the Apollo moon landings, commissioned by The Science Museum. The track 'Apollo' closes the album, and this time dusty, fuzzy guitar is a springboard for a defiantly melancholy trumpet line, letting you know how Morricone’s 'Ecstasy Of Gold' might have sounded had The Good, The Bad And The Ugly been set in a VHS warehouse. Hive could have been a messily ornery experimental effort, but all of these very different elements tessellate like honeycomb.  

 

 

o, screw capitals, i say

This is a lovely album.  You cold argue it's just more stuff that sounds like Slowdive, but I'd argue that there's no harm in that.

SLOWDIVE – everything is alive (Dead Oceans) 

Around the turn of the millennium, a lot of musicians became obsessed with the movies. Every trip-hopper turned in a “soundtrack to an imaginary film”, and every post post-rocker pledged that their latest release was “cinematic” (it was just accepted that cinematic meant breath-taking and adventurous, whereas strictly speaking 2001: A Space Odyssey is exactly as cinematic as Carry On Emmanuel).  The new Slowdive album – only their fifth, and a full six years since their self-titled return to the studio – doesn't sound like either of the above, but does bring to mind a few film soundtrack styles in its opening three tracks.  

There’s a stately sequencer at the beginning of shanty - capitals are verboten on all track titles here – it’s time to get all nostalgic for early ‘90s electronica credits and Designers Republic chic - which very much resembles something from one of Tangerine Dream’s mid-80s soundtracks. This is overlaid by a blanket of guitars, some reverby vocals curling like mist on a moor, and a rhythm that edges towards being groovy but which is played with such funkless froideur it could have been what High Llamas had in mind when they named their 1998 album Cold And Bouncy. The track is light and airy, but somehow still quietly epic, like a Bond theme made from candy floss. 

There’s a cosy yet sombre atmosphere to prayer remembered, an instrumental which is all glistening guitar and breathy pads across a rock solid but a wholly unaggressive rhythm, and it’s like a reticently gothic cousin of a big celluloid heartstring-puller from 30-odd years ago, such as Eddi Reader’s Nobody Lives Without Love from Batman Forever (and no, we didn’t expect that this would be a connection we’d be making either). alife, however, is an echoey emotional dream-pop beauty, and sounds like a song from the closing credits of a John Hughes knock-off teen comedy playing in an air hangar – it even has a sudden unceremonious fade, as if there are no more stylists and legal advisors left to name onscreen. If a lot of shoegaze is a rich luxurious chocolate truffle, then this delightfully fluffy tune is a pocketful of Fun-Size Milky Ways, and none the worse for that. 

Not every track comes with the air of OSTs past, however. Lead single kisses is a cheery mid-paced pop breeze which has a little New Order in its understated vocals and nearly jangly guitar, whereas skin in the game is only a few dozen effects pedals away from late-80s literate pop (imagine Black if they swapped their espressos for milky tea with three sugars and some MDMA). The album’s high points are very different. andalucia plays is a hushed countryish paean of the sort which a lovelorn Midwesterner might strum to himself in the dusty back room of a Texaco, which is smothered with blissful 4AD guitars and lucent first-rays-of-the-dawn synth notes. Even better is chained to a cloud which is built on a bright pointillist synth arpeggios that could have been nicked from old Frankie Knuckles classics like Baby Wants To Ride or Your Love (as nicked by The Source & Candi Staton for You’ve Got The Love) and which blossoms into a ball of noise with a lovely contrast between the clinical precision of the drums and the  warm blurriness of the rest of the song. 

Slowdive’s discography stretches back 33 years, and there’s not much on this album which will raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with their previous work, as it falls somewhere between the fuzzy glow of 1993’s Souvlaki and the dispassionate chill of its follow-up Pygmalion. But everything is alive is joyful listen regardless, taking the cloud tunnel bliss of the best shoegaze and adding some pure pop pleasure. Cinema for the ears?  More like dream visions for the soul. 

 

 

Forty Sense

This might not have been the greatest day of music I've ever seen, but it's the sort of thing that should always be celebrated.

FORTY YEARS OF PROMOTION, PRODUCTION & PERFORMANCE, ITS ALL ABOUT THE MUSIC, Port Mahon, 2/9/23 

This event is part of a month-long celebration of local promoter Osprey’s career spanning 40 years onstage, at the mixing desk, or at the helm of multiple gigs. There’s palpable love for the man himself on display from today’s punters and performers, and this reflects Osprey’s greatest trait as a promoter: passion. There are legions of successful musicians who got their first break at one of Osprey’s nights, as he took a chance on some nascent promise, and there are other acts to whom Os has stayed loyal for years, even if they’ve never picked up a following. Every healthy music scene needs this sort of supportive underpinning, just as much as it needs hip young gunslingers and breakout successes, and with that in mind this review will highlight acts who may not have had much previous coverage in this magazine (and if you need to know that he didnt, Beaver Fuel, The Foam Heads, and Matt “Charms Against The Evil Eye” Sewell are worth your time we prescribe Nightshifts passim, stet).  

The garden hosts a surprisingly varied roster, and starts strong with uke-slinger Bill Frizzell. His runaway -jalopy run through the top 10 singles from 40 years ago is unpretentious fun, but his musical setting of diary extracts from his time building Australian railroads in the 70s is brilliantly funny and dramatic: a one-man Edinburgh show surely beckons. Nash also has a playful approach to covers, mashing up contemporary pop culture tunes with a bit of hip-hop and a bourbon-blessed blues growl, but Paul Lodge makes him look predictable by comparison: the garden might have the vibe of an open mic night, but how often do you see people setting words by Nietzsche, Wordsworth, and a 12-century visionary abbess to delicate Dylanish music at your local? 

Tiger Mendoza is a name well known to Nightshift readers, of course, but how many times have we seen Ian de Quadros barrel through his tunes with only a trusty acoustic? Even shorn of their electro-hip-hop settings his songs stand up and his voice proves to be strong enough to take the spotlight...also, weirdly, he does the second cover of the day of ‘No Diggity’ - the Blackstreet revival starts here, we guess. Ben Jacobs deserves praise for turning in two sets of fluent, assured songs, but our favourite new find is The Station, a Newbury trio whose high-energy romp-pop falls somewhere between The Jam’s socially conscious concision and the fringe-flicking sensibilities of early Gene. Finding yourself in a small room, tapping a foot to a band who look like they’re having the time of their lives might not make the headlines, but captures the spirit of an Osprey event. We're looking forward to the fiftieth anniversary already.