Emerging #4 - Hazel English, Peaness and Smoking Trees (and The Pre New)

Time for a quick look at some of the new and emerging music that's caught my ears and imagination this month…

First off the bat is the Australian-born but Oakland, California-dwelling Hazel English whose debut Soundcloud appearance "Never Going Home" is unexpectedly compelling. Like an aural representation of a faded sepia photograph, "Never Going Home" is a beautifully foggy song, filled with Boards of Canada-esque wobbly synth sounds but a down-home folky melody. The lyrics themselves appear to be tinged with nostalgia and yearning but also breaking away for the future, and indeed the song pulls precisely the same melodic stunt - this is classic sounding songwriting being towed straight into the present.

It's completely impossible to say whether Hazel English has any other work like this hidden away, but this is an exceptionally promising start.



I discovered Chester's Peaness through the ever-reliable and long-standing "Sweeping The Nation" blog, and while they have arguably the worst new band name of the year so far, their debut offering "Fortune Favours The Bold" affords angsty teenage vocal harmonies and sharp and peppy indie melodies. More to the point, they appear to have seriously developed songwriting chops for ones so young - "Fortune" is riddled with the kind of nagging yet crafted catchiness most bands take years to master. If this were the late nineties and John Peel still had a late-night radio show, they'd be potential candidates for a Festive Fifty place.



The appearance of Los Angeles' Smoking Trees on this blog may seem like a fix as I'm sure there's already been some backwards-forwards linking between "Left and to the Back" and Sir Psych's blog, but in truth they're an obvious shoe-in for us anyway. Latest recording "Home In The Morning" is evidence of why even the hardest among you nostalgia-freak readers may find a lot to love - it's raw but psychedelic and a brilliant aural approximation of an early morning stoned head-fog, two minutes of reverb-heavy bliss.



Finally, The Pre New have their roots in both World of Twist and Earl Brutus - the latter of whom are one of my favourite groups of all time - and have already had one album out, 2012's fantastically biting "Music For People Who Hate Themselves". Therefore, they don't really qualify for this section of the blog as new, emerging artists, but their new LP "The Male Eunuch" is out TODAY and all the signs are it's going to be a step up from their last effort.

Preview track "Photographic" below combines eighties synth pop with a creeping 21st Century menace and takes the purity of old Brutus tracks such as "On Me Not In Me" and raises the grit up a notch.

Lazycame - Yawn

Label: Guided Missile
Year of Release: 2000

Following the dissolution of The Jesus and Mary Chain in 2000, William Reid popped up again unexpectedly quickly with a new project he called Lazycame.  This initial release "Yawn!" was oddly like early McCartney in its basis, although not in overall sound.  Just as everyone's favourite cheeky thumbs-aloft Scouser returned looking slightly bedraggled and bedroom studio-bound for his initial lo-fi works, so too did Mr Reid come back with something which sounded like a smorgasboard of sounds waiting to be fleshed out.  The rush-release appeared to many fans to offer two things - value (the final track "Commercial" is 43 minutes long and consists of a lot of ideas meshed together) and a relieving statement of intent.  There's a sense of "down but not yet out" about the whole project.

Still though, the rambling experimental nature of the first track "Drizzle" must have jolted everyone at the time, and the release is also notable for featuring an extended version of "Male Wife", originally found on Earl Brutus's "Tonight You Are The Special One" long player.  This always was credited as being a joint Reid/ Sanderson track, so it's possible that both parties got to use it in their own marginally different ways.  The Brutus version is a short sharp shock, whereas the Lazycame version extends the scattershot mayhem out to five minutes.

JAMC eventually reformed, of course, and Lazycame got put on the backburner, largely to be forgotten by all but the most hardcore fans.  I still think that throwing out an hour's worth of music on a small indie label for the price of a single was a brilliant way of settling a new project down, however, and if only other ex-members of bands would be brave enough or generous enough to go through their chrysalis stage in a similar way.  Mentioning no names, of course.

Tracklisting:
1. Drizzle
2. K To Be Lost
3. Who Killed Manchester
4. Male Wife
5. Commercial

Download it Here

The Deceptive Christmas Singles 1995

Label: Deceptive

Year of Release: 1995

Limited edition Christmas singles put out by indie labels seem to be a guaranteed annual occurrence, and - for all their rush-recorded flaws - are actually a charming addition to the season. In a world where people get themselves in a stew about the Christmas Number One, it's a pleasure to witness labels putting out music in a limited format without even feeling a tinge of panic about whether the vinyl will even trouble the number one spot on the seasonal independent charts or not. Cynics with Scrooge tendencies may point towards the collector's market for why these discs make excellent gifts, but the reality is most of them haven't really increased in value that much (with the exception of The White Stripes "Candy Cane Children" effort, which I own, but never bought expecting it to end up being such a collectible).

Deceptive - a now-defunct label partly run by BBC radio DJ Steve Lamacq, for those of you who need reminding - launched several of the things at once in 1995 like festive frisbees into the little record shops everywhere. All of them were essentially frivolous and very enjoyable additions the catalogues of the bands in question, including cheeky cover versions and off-the-cuff oddness.

Snuff - Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads

Snuff were naturally no strangers to bizarro cover versions in the first place, having previously treated us to their artistic interpretation of the Shake n Vac advert tune, but their minimalist approach to the theme from "Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads" takes the despairing original and puts a punkish spike up its bottom. Whereas the version by Highly Likely was quite mournful, almost in a post-Richey Manic Street Preachers way (no, really), Snuff manage to create a tearing tune, and even crowbar a reference to Chucklevision towards the end.

Collapsed Lung - Connection

Hip Hop inspired Harlow boys Collapsed Lung, on the other hand, opted to take on their labelmates Elastica by releasing a version of "Connection". Perhaps one of the less successful releases of the bundle, "Connection" is interesting enough, but it's a questionable fit stylistically. At not one point do you wonder why Elastica didn't explore this musical territory in a bit more depth.

Earl Brutus - Single Seater Xmas

And where would we be without the Brutus? Single Seater Xmas was the only 'true' Christmas single of the lot, but was a tremendously strange effort even by the band's usual standards. Consisting of jingling bells, Formula One racing noises, Art of Noisey sampled vocals, and some outright peculiar bass guitar noises, it's possibly the oddest single they ever released, but none the less interesting for that. It also managed to peak at number one in the Christmas Chart Show indie chart that year, doubtless causing a lot of casual viewers to wonder what on earth was going on as a still picture of the band gently shimmered left and right across the screen for ten seconds.

Spare Snare also released "Wired For Sound" as the fourth limited edition single that year, but I don't have a copy - if anyone does, and they'd be kind enough to do the honours, please let me know.

Download the Rest Here

Earl Brutus - (some of) the Post-Deceptive Singles

We've already covered Earl Brutus' independent label years on here, (and here) and as ever, there's not much I can add to my original assessment of the band. For me, they were a beacon of hope in the late nineties as British alternative guitar-based pop and rock largely began to congeal into a syrupy, nostalgic mess. They sounded unlike other bands, pulling in Krautrock, techno, unholy slabs of glam rock and punk into one bundle, and coming up with something that sounded new and enticing.

If their earliest years consisted largely of material which was quickly recorded and the aural equivalent of a quick smack around the chops, their Island material sounded more considered (with the exception of one or two tracks) and none the worse for it.

The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It

Year of Release: 1997

Tracklisting:

1. The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It

2. Midland Red

3. The Scottish

This single was the first out of the major label vaults, and sounded brilliant from the screeching collision of angular guitar riffs and mechanical skidding noises at the start. "YOU ARE YOUR OWN REACTION!" the band screamed in the chorus, and created a lyrical list single which, far from being a list of grievances or commandments a la Scroobius Pip's "Thou Shalt Always Kill", was Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start The Fire" gone to la-la land. "TV Chefs - Quiche Lorraine Attitudes" they sneer disapprovingly one minute, then state "Hair Design By Nicky Clarke" the next.

Quite berserk and quite brilliant.

Come Taste My Mind

Year of Release: 1998

Tracklisting:

1. Come Taste My Mind

2. Superstar

3. Nice Man In A Bubble

4. William, Taste My Mind

Follow-up "Come Taste My Mind" is no less absurd lyrically, beginning with the information "I wear the clothes that make you cry", but is rather more formulaic than its predecessor, being a straight-ahead glam stormer the band tended to specialise in, rather than a track which skidded all over pop's Formula One racecourse before crashing in flames halfway round the circuit. Some music critics predicted a hit, but even at their most simplistic, the band were clearly too much for Mr and Mrs Woolworths.

Larky/ Teenage Opera

Label: Fruition

Year of Release: 1999

Tracklisting:

1. Larky

2. Teenage Opera

3. England Sandwich

The single "The Universal" followed "Come Taste My Mind", but is still available on iTunes in all its two-CD with extra B sides glory, quite astonishingly. This, however, isn't. After the band were dropped by Island, their management company Fruition decided to have one final stab at getting the band's material the respect it deserved, and released the double A-side "Larky/ Teenage Opera" without any major backing. To be honest, it's a fine double-header, "Larky" being a list of comedy catchphrases and advertising slogans sneered out over glam chords, complete with the chorus of "You won't live forever".

"Teenage Opera" resembles Blur's "Song 2" in places, but is so replete with peculiar samples, muttered phrases and clicking rhythms that it's like listening to that song through some peculiar kind of vortex. Meanwhile, the official 'B side' "England Sandwich" is a marvellous cut-up of prim, dispassionate British television samples set to Iggy Pop riffage.

There's little doubt in my mind that Earl Brutus were completely unique, and whilst it's sometimes hard to envisage quite where they would have gone if their recording career had continued from this point, Nick Sanderson and his friends certainly left a hell of a legacy before he died last year.

Please click on the titles to download the singles.

Earl Brutus - The Early Singles (Well, most of them...)

Since uploading the last set of Earl Brutus mp3s some entries ago, I'm both stunned and reassured to discover that they are the second most popular reason people come to this blog from Google (See if you can guess the most popular reason. It's not hard). It's surprising because whilst they had a hardcore army of fans throughout the late nineties, their records never sold in staggering quantities even with the might of Island's marketing muscle behind them for their second album. It's reassuring because, of course, they frequently made some of the best music of the latter half of that decade - warped, demented, occasionally ramshackle but always invigorating krautpunkrock records with whopping great glam rock beats tacked on, rather like furry dice to the windscreen mirror of a mud splattered Volkswagen stock racing car.

At a time when a lot of bands were frequently prissy about their work, they reminded us that sometimes spontaneous, messy chaos is at the root of a lot of good rock music. And so it proved - the first album "Your Majesty We Are Here" was written and recorded in two weeks flat, and still sounds a hell of a lot better than most albums that year which had huge budgets. It shames the major players to such an extent that when they signed to Island, I (wrongly, as it turned out) fretted about their material losing its edge.

The main thing to bear in mind when listening to these pre-major label singles, then, is that the B sides probably aren't going to be a good introduction to the band for newcomers. In the fortnight "Your Majesty..." was put together, it doesn't seem as if there was a lot of meat left on the bones to dish out to the singles buying public. For the most part - and with one or two choice exceptions - these are instrumental curios or rum little doodles which aren't up there with the band's best. The A sides, on the other hand, are largely different from the mixes on the album and sound as fresh and brutal as ever.

Two things in particular you should pay attention to are "Bonjour Monsieur", the second single from the band which never made it on to the album, and is up their with some of their best material, and the utterly ludicrous "Flash Versus Tarkus" mix of "Life's Too Long" which uses dialogue from the film "Flash" to rebuild the single.

Missing from this download set, I'm afraid, is the 1993 single mix of "Life's Too Long" backed with "Valley of the Slimkings", which I've never seen a copy of anywhere - if anyone can help or enlighten me or even upload the damn thing, I'd be grateful. Also, completely unlisted on the Wikipedia discography is the limited edition 1995 Christmas single "Single Seater Xmas", which I also don't have a copy of, and also seems to have been absent from second hand record store shelves for as long as I've been looking. Still, that was available as part of the download for the "Your Majesty" album some time back, and you can't have everything...

For further information, click on the "Earl Brutus" tag at the bottom of this entry.

Bonjour Monsieur (b/w "On Me Not In Me")



Label: Royal Mint
Year of Release: 1995
Source: 7" vinyl rip

Navyhead (b/w "North Sea Bastard")



Label: Deceptive
Year of Release: 1996
Source: 7" vinyl rip

Life's Too Long



Label: Deceptive
Year of Release: 1996
Source: CD single

Tracklisting:
1. Life's Too Long
2. I Love Earl Brutus (Introducing Shinya)
3. Motarola
4. Life's Too Long (Flash Versus Tarkus)

I'm New (b/w "Like Queer David" and "Mondo Rotunda")



Label: Deceptive
Year of Release: 1996
Source: 7" vinyl rip

http://sharebee.com/bb21fb27

>> YouTube Update <<

Just a quick flick through the YouTube videos for some of the artists I've mentioned over the last month...

First up, here's the rather basic promotional video for David McWilliams' "Days of Pearly Spencer", undoubtedly one of the best flop singles of the sixties. It was re-issued three times, but only Marc Almond could actually take it into the top ten...



I was also thrilled to learn yesterday that some kind soul has put more Earl Brutus videos up on the service, and here's "The SAS And The Glam That Goes With It":



Other videos for "Navyhead" (shot in Portsmouth of all places, although blink and you'll probably miss it) and "Life's Too Long" can be found here and here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Fb96TzPpso & http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7YA-frg2tw Thanks to Simon from Sweeping the Nation for pointing all those out.

And finally, Microdisney with "Birthday Girl" on the Tube, being introduced by Ivor Cutler ("Heh, look at that, 'We Hate You South African Bastards', isn't that perfect!"):

Nick Sanderson RIP

I am incredibly shocked to learn of Nick Sanderson's death. Some of you may be familiar with his work as a drummer for The Gun Club, Clock DVA, World of Twist, Freeheat or the Jesus and Mary Chain - but I'll always cherish him most for his role as the lead singer of Earl Brutus.

I would probably have remained ignorant of the band if I hadn't taken a chance gamble on a bored, rainy day in South London in early 1997. Pissed off with most of the new CDs I'd purchased which critics had mistakenly referred to as "modern classics" (they were usually lifeless, tail-end-of-Britpop duds) I decided to buy the first CD by any band who I'd read a review about, derogatory or otherwise, who sounded as if they might be interesting rather than mindlessly derivative or commercial in a knowing, cowardly way. In the end, I plumped for a copy of "Your Majesty, We Are Here" by Earl Brutus in the Clapham High Street Our Price, largely being enticed by the bizarre tales I'd heard about the band and the humour which seemed present in the sleeve design.

This is one of the few times in my life I've ever impulse-bought a CD by a band without having heard anything at all by them, and in these Internet "preview before you buy" times, it's unlikely I'll ever do it again. It would seem in this case, though, I was right to trust my instincts. The noise the CD contained sounded exactly like all the descriptions of the band I'd heard, and exactly the way you'd have expected the band to be from their cover art. It was the work of people who had swallowed a wide range of influences and burped them back out again - it was repulsive in a punkish way, and in love with its own filth, but also witty, wise, and adventurous as well. It sounded like Kraftwerk, The Fall, The Prodigy, The Glitter Band, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Art of Noise, Depeche Mode and Can put through an industrial mincer... and by that very process, ended up sounding like nothing else on earth.

Live they were fantastic, treating the audience to spinning garage signs with "Music" written on one side and "Chips" on the other, a shouting Japanese man who would hurl insults at the audience in broken English, and Nick himself, who always seemed like a brilliant, debauched lead singer.

I had the pleasure of interviewing him once, although the magazine I was doing bits of freelance work for at the time never ran the final piece, and I've unfortunately since lost the original document. I do remember him as being an amusing interviewee though, who was happy to indulge my more ridiculous or bland questions with good grace. He informed me that he despised the late nineties music scene and that his main inspiration came from "motor racing" and, at a push, The Manic Street Preachers. Otherwise, he declared it was all "useless end-of-the-millenium weary bollocks".

All the information online so far seems to point to the fact that he had lung cancer and lost his battle a couple of days ago. I always wanted Earl Brutus to be recognised as a completely original, forward-thinking band within their lifetimes, in the way that perhaps overlooked sixties bands like The Monks have. It seemed only fair to me that they should get some pleasure in return for the material they gave their small but dedicated army of fans. For me personally, it was music which restored my faith in the idea that rock and roll hadn't come to a dead end and could still go to some weird and wonderful places. Nick Sanderson will now clearly never get to see the band getting wider acclaim, but it shouldn't stop us from listening, marvelling, and maybe (in some cases) learning. He's left behind a hell of a legacy for us to admire.

Or, in short: Rest in peace, Nick. You were fucking brilliant.

The final Earl Brutus single "Larky/ Teenage Opera" is available here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=1NBN9586

And my original blog entry about "Your Majesty..." is still online (with the download of the album seemingly still intact) here: http://left-and-to-the-back.blogspot.com/2008/05/earl-brutus-your-majesty-we-are-here.html

Earl Brutus - Your Majesty... We Are Here

Year of Release – 1996
Label – Deceptive

When the NME came up with the idea for the “skunk rock” genre in the late nineties, the whiff of desperation rather than skunk must have been quite strong in the offices at Kings Reach Towers. Invented as a neat label for a bunch of bands who all consisted of slightly potato-faced, frequently unshaven men who were occasionally known to incorporate dance beats into their work, it really could have applied at any point in any decade. Would the KLF have been part of skunk rock in the eighties along with Mark Stewart and the Mafia, the Happy Mondays and Renegade Soundwave? Is Super Hans’ band in The Peep Show “skunk rock”? Did skunk rock eventually just get swallowed into Hoxton and Shoreditch, becoming a place rather than a concept? These are precisely the sorts of questions absolutely nobody is asking at the moment, which proves how much the vague “genre” caught on.

You could sympathise with the journalists at the NME more than usual, though. The post-Britpop landscape was a rather desolate place, filled with weary string-laden ballads and post-rock, and not much else which would appeal to their thrill-seeking readership. Skunk rock lumped together a lot of bands who created lively, slightly anarchic culture clash noises, even though as scenes go it seemed to feature very few bands to begin with, and didn’t collect many more candidates along the way.

Earl Brutus had already released the debut album “Your Majesty We Are Here” long before the time the NME had decided to categorise them. Supposedly written and recorded in two weeks flat, many critics at the time commented that it was an album which seemed to grab everything it could across decades of pop music. One Loaded critic even had an exceptional moment of clarity when he wrote that it consisted of “Whoopsy country to Kraftwerk sounding baloney and turning into gothic glam rock”. Indeed, whilst news that it was written and recorded in a fortnight didn’t stun me when I found out, it’s raw in a spontaneous, energetic, and occasionally frightening way, rather than raw in a ramshackle way. For as much as Earl Brutus wanted to portray themselves as punk incompetents, the truth is that most of the members had served elsewhere and even earned their stripes with session work, the lead singer Nick Sanderson having once been the drummer for The Jesus and Mary Chain (making them the only band I can think of who have had two drummers who then went on to become lead singers elsewhere).

The single “Navyhead” (featured here) was an excellent pointer for the album’s content. A greasy, sleazy, swaggering little disc, it sounded like pub glam rock being performed by an all-star ensemble of every angular punk band who had ever signed to Rough Trade in the early eighties, whilst somebody else made squelchy techno noises in the corner. Other tracks managed to reference seventies and early eighties electronic experiments, novelty pop, and new romanticism. “On Me Not In Me” sounds for all the world like a “Speak and Spell” era Depeche Mode tune, with lyrics partly about the loneliness of Harvester Restaurants. Even that song bursts into an Elizabethan instrumental break for no apparent reason, though, so anxious is it to explore other conflicting territories.

For all this plundering, the record managed to sound like nothing as much as itself in the long run – Earl Brutus sounded like the result of a lab experiment, producing a creature which looked demonic and frightening and seemed like little else on earth.

Aside from their recorded output being decidedly out of whack with the period, their behaviour was the cause of music press curiosity. At various points, the band:

· Used a spinning garage sign with “Music” written on one side and “Chips” on the other as a stage prop.
· Got a Japanese fan called Shin-Yu to join and shout angrily in his native language at concerts.
· Insisted that if they ever got on Top of the Pops (which failed to transpire) they would arrive on stage on horseback with fireworks blasting everywhere.

The sleeve for “Your Majesty We Are Here” was a rum affair, too, consisting entirely of blank pages in the CD booklet after Chat magazine refused to let them use a photo of theirs. The picture they wanted to run consisted of a girl crying as her mother lay drunk on a bed sozzled on whisky. It was originally used to illustrate a true life story article entitled “Mum Wanted Me Dead”. That they considered this to be the best image to describe both the title of their album and the music contained within probably says more about them than any write-up ever could.

The blistering follow-up album “Tonight You Are The Special One” is probably the superior and more finely honed piece of work, but this is available for under a fiver on iTunes, and to be honest you should all be encouraged to line the band’s pockets in any way you can. “Your Majesty…” is still a glorious piece of work, however, and has long been out of press. You can download it for free for a limited period below. It certainly beats paying eighty pounds for a collector’s copy on various auction or sale sites, and that’s for sure.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=9Y9FQKBJ