LOTP for FACT

Quick chate with one of my favourite bands of the last few years, Late Of The Pier...

Late of the Pier’s space odyssey started in the verdant summer of 2004 under the gleaming spires and proud turrets of Castle Donnington. Since then, they’ve made the kids dance dance dance with their indescribably beautiful hair and chrome-plated squat-suited electro. The debut album, Fantasy Black Channel, is produced by Erol Alken and sounds like a ship made out of heroically gleaming metal piloted by android Knights of the Realm of Infinite Sublimity. We chatted with lead singer Samuel Eastgate in the departure lounge of Heathrow airport.

Hi Sam!

Oh hello.

So, the new album is out now…

Yeah. It was finished in March actually, and we wanted to release it right away. But that would have been a very silly thing to do, as word spreads quite slowly, and still very few people knew who we were, and those that did would have been really surprised to see it out.

That sounds almost cynical.

Yeah, I dunno. We definitely wanted it be like the first chapter of something special, like the first step of a beautiful journey. That meant people would have to buy it and realise it was out. I mean, some people and some magazines have behind us since the early days, but a lot have only recently gone Oh, hold on…

I heard that the album was recorded in one big old house?

Yeah! When we signed, we thought Let’s do this properly. It was a conscious decision, definitely. We just thought, if we want this to be good, we had better be doing this all time, so yeah, we rented this huge derelict mansion with shoddy foundations just outside Nottingham and recorded the album there. There’s something about the immediacy of living in such close quarters, being able to get up every day and just make. It was nice relying on gut instincts there. And thowing really good parties.

There’s something very “English eccentric” about that idea: retiring to the country to make this strange psychedelic work…

Yeah, I suppose there is! But we’ve never seen ourselves as a particularly English band: a lot of the music that we’re into is from all over the place, which I suppose is totally normal, isn’t it? The psychedelic thing is interesting though… A forming point for us was stuff like Revolver-era Beatles, and talking about drugs, though none of us had ever taken drugs. So I suppose what got us together was the idea of mind-alteration rather than mind-alteration. It was totally just us going into this world of our own and thinking our own way. What was really lovely a few years ago was coming to London and Way Out West, the Underage thing and all that… Seeing these kids that just got it.

F&M review for Fact

Fujiya & Miyage

Lightbulbs

Full Time Hobby 

Of all the ways to start an album, a bad joke about a rather tragic child star has to be among the worst: the song's called Knickerbocker Glory, and it's about the "ghost of Lena Zavaroni", who died of anorexia nervosa - geddit? Us neither. Anyway, it's strange that such a poor taste begins Fujiya & Miyage's third LP. I mean, few bands have traded so hard on their superlative taste: their previous album, Transparent Things had us crits gushing about its reworkings of Serge Gainsbourg and Krautrock, its tailored updating of rare italo synths and no wave elastic funk, and those influences are on Lightbulbs:there's a lovely bit of Tangerine Dream/Popul Vuh synthesized piano on the title track, and the closer, Hunrdeds and Thousands, a reprise of that horrific opening gambit is a lovely mix of restrained psychedelia. The new drummer, Lee Adams punches his weight nicely, with decent work on Dishwasher. Still, overriding the album's theoretical plus-points is a teethgrinding smugness. In combining elements from kommishe to slow funk, singer David Best's vocals are so, so deadeningly self-aware that the music is robbed of any viscerality, its heart-and-soul thrill. Through its murdering brevity, the album's taileating mixture of selfawareness and self-satisfaction... I don't know. All I mean is that a knowledge of German Oak is no substitute for a soul and Lightbulbs sounds like branded-denim adverts from the mid-nineties. It's just really, really fucking boring.

Foals FACT 7 of the year

In which I get very excited about Hummer, Foals' unmistakably brilliant single, and interview the singer Yannis, for FACT magazine
Hummer dropped in April, and – to be frank – it wiped the bleedin’ walls with us. Eight months on, it still leaves us gasping. Despite being an attempt to transcribe minimal techno’s precision and rigour to fuck-up the peculiar mixture of try-hard laziness that infects today’s dull-as-dishwater indie scene, Hummer is as sonically breathtaking a call-to-arms as rock’n’roll ever has heard. Yes, it is precise and unnervingly accurate from conception to execution, but it’s also a breathless, sweaty affirmation of youthful destruction, snotty arrogance and rhythmic raw power. Rather than the measured, perfection it was aping, there is the furious, vainglorious tumult of ideas – its drums alone bring to mind Don Cabellero, Topper Heddon, The Field, Neu, Timbaland and Fela Kuti – that only the most thrilling singles have. Just ten seconds are allowed to pass before the tugging hook snares you – this song is so desperately full of fresh ideas, impertinent diffidence and ruthless unwillingness to conform that seizes this hour, this minute, this second by the jugular before it skids, grazed, to a halt. Hummer is an obnoxious, snotty record, a song which head-butts every tepid, lazy stylistic cliché that surrounds modern indie; and that, ironically, is the most perfect an argument for independent guitar music I can think of.

FOALS INTERVIEW:

Foals have had a pretty damn good year. In summer 2006, they were a twinkle in the eyes of a set of Oxford mathrock and techno-loving student students. Eighteen months later, they’ve wowed crowds at stadiums to squats from here to Texas, dropped Kompakt mixes and had their choons played on Skins – all this at just two Transgressive singles (there’s the third, Balloons, out on 10th December) and a live EP old. To top it all, they’re received the coveted (and entirely imaginary) FACT 7” Of The Year gong for their April single Hummer. With a new, Dave Sitek of TV On The Radio-produced album in the bag, we chatted to their tea-sipping vocalist Yannis.

So, you’ve won the 7” of the year…
Yeah, we’re really surprised. We really like FACT, you’re quite discerning. We haven’t quite accepted it.

2007 went pretty well, eh?
Yeah, it was pretty wild, I guess. A year ago we weren’t yet signed, and yeah, we’ve come a long way I suppose. The thing is that it doesn’t really register when you’re in the middle of it, but it does feel like we’re getting more reactions at shows, which is weird because we only started this band to irritate our friends by trying to write pop songs and be banal. You know, show that music is about communication, not just displays of virtuosity. We just wanted to make fresh and authentic pop music.

Do you feel like you’ve done that?
We don’t know – we’re a small family and we stick together, it’s hard to see outside of that. The angst, self-doubt and criticism are still there. We’re quite agitated, so we have to keep moving.

How was the recording of Hummer, and how do you feel it matches up?
We wanted it to sound very clinical, like we were trying to be tight, not slapdash, drawing influence from every single note and piece of sound, so the overall big “sound” was constructed out of lots of little sounds working against each other. When we were recording it, we were shacked up and getting drunk, playing horseshit and making pop songs. The irony is that I don’t ever listen to it know – it’s not my favourite song. I must have listened to it 700 times when we were mastering it, so by the time we heard it finally we couldn’t tell if was good or not. We just wanted to get it out before we split up.

What music have you enjoyed this year?
Cornelious’ record was amazing, such sumptuous production. Yeasayer are so fucking tribal it’s unbelievable. Fuckbuttons are awesome, so are Metronomy and Cut Off Yr Hands. I know it’s a bit old, but the whole Dubstep thing is awesome, especially Burial. There’s a really cool noise thing happening in Oxford – it’s like a reaction against all these really technical bands, just like punk reacting against prog. There’s lots of bands who just don’t give a fuck and just want to make loads of noise. Timbaland is breathtaking, still. It’s like, with all these amazing things happening, why fucking bother making music that sounds like it is ten years old?

What have been the highlights of your year?
Doing an album with Dave Sitek in New York – just incredible, he’s a fucking genius, so playing and getting high all day in New York… and playing on Jules Holland was great. Generally though, it’s been playing and touring which has been amazing and not having to work a shitty job. This music is like knives; we’re making knives to cut things with, and people reactions seem good. We still love playing house parties.

What are the reactions like?
It gets very energetic. Jimmy broke his tooth one time… There’s also something that comes out when we play – people rip down and kick though walls. It’s like this weird, primal urge that comes out when we play. You see someone fucking up their house because they’re so wild, which is always odd. You’re like “Why are you hanging off your light?”

What are the lowlights?
Never having enough time to read.

Nancy elizabeth review for Fact

Nancy Elizabeth
Battle and Victory
Leaf

Nancy Elizabeth sounds like the most extraordinary hit-your-head-off-your-desk, whimpering-like–a-demented-man-child minimal folk that comes out of nowhere, like ghosts from the battle of Hastings playing samurai harps made from widow’s hair, and it’s awesome, till you realize she’s on Leaf. When you’re share a label with Murcof, Colleen, Susuma Yakota and Efterklang, that’s kind of taken as given. Still, it’s a damn good album, with the kind of imaginative folk that is giving the north-west (she’s a Wigan las) such a good name at the moment.

What strikes you about Nancy’s music is how spectacularly poised and still it sounds – unlike Seth Lakeman, to whom she is oft compared, nothing is rushed. ‘Hey Son’s’ swirling harps are played almost Satie-slow, with her voice – a soft yet throaty howl not a million miles away from Beth Orton or Joni Mitchell – ripping the fuck out of the chorus with the supreme, practiced gravitas. ‘Coriander’ is another revelation – though the key instrument is hand-plucked Thai Khim, and other instruments on Battle and Victory have similarly alien tones, from Appalachian dulcimers to Celtic harps, her music is refreshingly grounded in the music of our Scepter’d Isle. This album was recorded entirely in a stone cottage in Wales, and Christ does it show – if, like me, you occasionally like to pretend to be a medieval Welsh freedom-fighter escaping with your ragged band through the valleys while running for the tube, this is the album for you.

Reviews: Crystal Castles, Sebastian Tellier, Big Dada Comp

Here's a few assorted reviews from the last year. All Fact Magazine, would you believe:

Crystal Castles
Crystal Castles
(Last Gang)

Though their 2007 credentials stand – Klaxons and Uffie remixes, a ne’er-more-oblique myspace yelling “murder, blank looks on girls, knives” as influences and are fond of saying “taxidermy” in interviews – Crystal Castles’ debut sounds so unashamedly electroclash it’s astounding there’s no DJ Hell hidden track. Which is lovely to be reminded of: grabbing the music of the last seven years, forgetting about the real shit and running for August 2001 like there’s no tomorrow is A-OK with us. Crystal Castles is tender, escapist ragtime for an economic downswing and a seven-year-old war on terror. What makes this LP special isn’t the “sonic invasion” they push, but its control and compassion. ‘Crimewave (Crystal Castles vs HEALTH)’ is a hard-edged song, but its graceful keyboard loop is malleable rather than mayhem-lead and ‘Vanished’s sparking hi-hats and reverb-laden construction owes as much to Suicide’s plaintive thuds as CC’s aesthetic owes to Vega and Rev. When the sonic destruction-as-creation their shows promise lets rip, as it does on ‘Xxzxcuzx Me’ and ‘Love and Caring’, it’s more of a refreshing hint than a full Glasgow kiss towards noise, and while their remixes and PRs press the “8-bit chaos” button, the tone general of this eponymous debut, with its concept-driven, sexually platonic tidy electro, is closer to Fisherspooner than Venetian Snares. And nicely done it is too: Ethin and Alice could easily slip into the undergrowth, but don’t brush over them – this is a don’t-sleep album for people who need more sleep.

Various
Well Deep: Ten Years Of Big Dada
Big Dada

Thankfully, for a hip-hop label based in the UK, this greatest hits and misses retrospective, is free from the mundane aggro that makes UKHH the sick man of music. Where the Low Life stable celebrate the parochial and the insular, Big Dada’s abstract eccentricity trots the globe – French farce-core jams from TTC, King Geodorah’s DC Comics raps and Diplo’s baile funk are represented here. Of course, the two discs are full of English national anthems – Roots Manuva's 'Witness (1 Hope)' still sounds as oh-my-days heavy as it did six years ago, and Wiley’s '50/50' makes you miss him about 500 times more than listening to Playtime Is Over in full did. It’s the humour, stupid: while Jehst’s peers look like they’ve never seen an episode of Allo Allo in their lives, Roots Manuva’s legendarily self-deprecating sports day video on the accompanying DVD is a joy.
A little more weight would be welcome, though. cLOUDDEAD – the band that launched a thousand blogs – sound far easier to explain than actually, you know, enjoy, though the magnificent Boards of Canada mix of Dead Dogs is a suitably majestic piece of the British pastoral. The astonishing thing about this collection is how bleeding edge almost every song on this record sounds – New Flesh’s 'Stick And Move' sounds as much like the future as it did five years ago, which can have a strangely merciless bent cumulatively. That quibble aside, Big Dada have spent a decade proving that anti-pop hip-hop doesn’t have to neglect the party principle – for most rappers here, MC means move the crowd. These are the anthems, so get your damn hands up.

Sebastian Tellier
Sexuality
Lucky Number

There are many “one moment of genius, 60 minutes of mediocrity” musicians in the world, but few are eccentric French Christ look-alikes with Air, Mr Ozio, SebAstian, and Daft Punk on their facebook, fewer who theme albums around issues of the human heart and are studio wizards with doom-prog dads. Fewer still have penned a track as “whimper like a manchild” as ‘La Ritournelle’. If Sexuality were made up of twenty-second samples, this would be as much of an instant classic as La Rit. But while none of these 11 slabs of spacey Eurosoul is without its own “wow” moment, many simply disappear away into their own faultless shimmer. It’s not until ‘Sexual Sportswear’ arrives in all its galloping, cosmic glory that Tellier does anything more than announce his unbearable relevance of being—he actually proves exciting and exhilarating for the full sweat-drenched length of a track. Much of the remaining 10 songs disappear into a vodocoder’d cosmic disco haze — an immaculately filthy bassline here, graceful chord structure there, but too often something feels missing from too many songs. This said, there is understated yet stately presence at work here, and when it a songs blasts, it fucking blasts — like on ‘Elle’s shift from cheese stomp to elegant rubber soul or on album closer and masterpiece ‘L’Amor Et La Violence’. Its heartbreaking, whispered words ebb over a sobbing, tailored synth line that builds and breaks over 5 minutes and 22 seconds of sumptuous beauty — it’s so moving that you forget to care that Seb may well have his tongue firmly between his molars. Tellier is musician to love and follow — his Sessions and Universe collections, and the multitude of remixes kicking about prove his unerring genius for style, eccentricity and melody. One day, Tellier will drop the album he has been promising for te best part of a decade. It pains me to say so, but Sexuality doesn’t feel like it.

Monkey, Don’t!
Gubbins
Manna Records

Gubbins is about getting high in a seaside town. Though Mark Robson (the wistfully troubled mind behind Monkey, Don’t!) is now settled in London Town, you get the feeling he’ll never leave his sleepy Hampshire roots. Not that that’s anything to be ashamed of: some of best recent British oddball music of the last decade (Beta Band, Super Furry Animals, Gorky’s, Field Music) has come out of toe-kicking suburban life. Coiled tedium, blissful mindlessness, stupid jokes – this’s Monkey, Don’t!’s territory. The songs drift into on another – this is an album of restless, parochial, eccentric invention. Street Of Sound has Acid House beat-throbs mixed into the Kinks’ guitars and Lalo Schriffin’s breaks – a combination that sound as natural as it would if they were all bought in a three for £12 bin at Woolies. The twee is never more than two steps away from this record, but its brilliantly clever arrangements provide enough to keep you from wanting to listen to Black Flag dead loud. Metaphor alert: like your home town, this is an album that is wonderful in its own, implacable way, and though you’ll be unbearably annoyed if you stay more than two hours, you’ll get strangely defensive should anyone take the mickey out of it.

M83 Fact interview: Dubstep for supermarkets

One of the nicer events of 2008 so far is the return/re-energising of M83. Nice to be able to have a chat with him for Fact in June of this year:

M83 was born made. I mean, if you record total-immersion shoegaze electronica with Ewan Pearson and are named after a face-on spiral galaxy receding from us at around 337 km/sec, you have to paddle pretty hard to keep praise-free. Still, his newish-one Saturdays=Youth plays its strong hand well, holding down the expansive scope of his wonderful previous albums and adding stuff like “focus” and “tunes”. Themed around Antibean Anthony Gonzalez’s rosy ideas of 80s teenage life, it sounds like the soundtrack to a film about summer rain and sine waves and buried treasure and sexually charged all-day detentions and friends with dads with yachts, and it’s pretty cool because it sounds a bit like the Cocteau Twins without being the Cocteau Twins.

How does it feel to be touring the new album?
It’s refreshing! ‘Till The Dawn was drawn how I wanted it to be – it was very noisy, very huge and very epic. It was very… dreamy. Digital Shades [] was not a full studio album, it is more of a side project – I just wanted to explore the ambient sounds that I love. Saturdays=Youth is different. It is – um – sturdy.

How do you mean?
Each time I try my best to make the album to sound as I want it to sound. It’s important to make something different. Everything should be something different to what came before.

This is a very rose-tinted look at the 80s. Is it fair to call it a tribute record?
Yes, yes! It is a tribute record, yes. I mean it’s not only a… “covers record”, a machine record. It is also very personal to me, which it is important to be. That decade, it has an identity that is close to me.

It’s certainly a genuine affection.
Yes, no… I tried to avoid irony all together. It was exactly what I didn’t want to make. There was no irony at all.

Unlike most consciously “80s” records, Saturdays… doesn’t seem at all ironic.
Many make funny sounds about the 80s, but I don’t. For me, I cannot be funny about what I love. Music is very serious for me! I grew up in the 80s, so I grew up listening to this music. It has a great drama for me, things like Cocteau Twins and Tears for Fears. It was a totally new music then, and that is very thrilling to hear, even now. They proposed a new sound. Good music to be a teenager.

It’s – uh – ironic that you chose 80s music to soundtrack your “teenage” album, isn’t it? I mean, without pointing out the obvious, you were a nineties kid.
Ha, yes! I discovered music really when I was 13, 14 – when you are young enough for love, but old enough to look around you. The first music that called me was this very brushed thing, not the music that surrounded me. You could say my first crush was on Blue Nile! That was what made me feel really special, when production just sounded so perfect.

Speaking of production, you hooked up with some interesting people for this record. What was it like working with Ken Thomas [who was behind Cocteau Twins, PiL and Alien Sex Fiend] and Ewan Pearson?
It was fantastic. It was my first time working with “producers” – before it was just me and a sound engineer, but this time I wanted to try something new and tap into his experiences. Sharing music: I love that idea, man, and I love to share music, especially with Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas. They are fully different backgrounds – the way that Ewan looks at electronic music is just so forward thinking it is unbelievable, but Ken Thomas has so much experience – he has just worked with so many of my favourite bands. As with so much, the combination is the exciting thing.

Morgan Kibby’s vocals on Saturdays work out really well, eh? How did that hook up come about?
Yes, I was very pleased to work with her. I like cinema and film very much, and she works as a singer for movie trailers [Morgan sang on the trailers for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The Lady In The Water] – a director friend actually put us in touch. I listened to her on the internet, and she sounded to me like a combination of Kate Bush and Liz Fraser. I was in love!

What effect do you want to have on the bodies of your listeners?
Oh, er… I like to drive very much, and I think of my music as driving music. So it should feel like driving very, very fast in a very good car. Or maybe in no car at all.

Stricken City: Mistakes happening for Fact

Stricken City, another immaculately thrilling indie band from the ACTH camp, were interviewed by yours on a blustery Brighton beach in March 2008 for Fact's new talent section:

Stricken City drift and jerk and are bright windy days and flowers in jam-jar vases. Set up in the midland's endless leafy suburbs four years ago by schoolfriends guitarist Iain Pettifer and singer Rebekah Raa, the band play tight pretty art rock. A year or so ago, perhaps in order to make the line-up sound even more like a 1930s radical literary circle based in the East Sussex countryside, drummer Kit Godfrey and bassist Espen Dahl were recruited.
Stricken City sit happily in the fine tradition of naff-town daydreaming, cankicking and stargazing: "We met when Rebekah moved to Northampton, where I'd lived since ever. I got out as soon as I could! Rebekah came to London a year later, and went to drama school before going to the London College of Fashion," says Iain. "We were the kids on the outskirts, definitely! It was an opportunity to take in a lot of music, watch a lot of films and read a lot of books: I think we both wanted to do something less ordinary than drinking in crap clubs."
Influences, in the most charming way possible, are worn on the sleeve: Orange Juice's fey 303s, Young Marble Giants' pastoral swoons, the cocky, precocious hyper-invention of the Slits slide in and out of the imagination. Ideas bounce ecstatically, fresh, clean and bright. Recalling LMC's constant retraining regime, stricken City is fresh with unlearnt intellect: "We're very, ahem, 'mistakist'. Only Espen and Kit are what you could call experienced! I learnt guitar in a week, and Rebekah has never bought a record in the seven years I've known her. It's the way we like to work: learning to play as much as playing, writing songs by stumbling on niceness. You know that that kind of extend to the production: it's been co-produced by Will from Adventures Close To Home [who signed them earlier this year], who has never produced anyone before – he's a house DJ." House is under the skin of tunes like Tak O Tak and Bardou, there like the answer; bass carrying through, both driving and delicate, with elegant vocals swanning around. "Dance music kind of seeped in I suppose: we'd always hang around at ACTH, and Rebekah always sews her clothes to late night pirate radio. We do play dance music, yeah. It's just a little too awkward to dance to."

Fact's Jong Pang feature: The Way Things GO!

Fact online feature about a quietly spectacular musical brain, May 2007:

“Hi! I am in the studio recording percussion, let me get quiet. Hi! Right! I am all ears. And head; and eyes. And mouth.” These are not my first words with Jong Pang, these are my first words with Anders Rhedin. That’s because Jong Pang is no-one: neither a collective nor a producer alias nor a band. According to the earnest and incredibly likable leader-slash-producer Anders, Jong Pang is “a brand! It’s a vibe, an atmosphere. It’s an identity, like a company – but not a corporation! It’s a not a band, it’s not a collective, it’s an idea of what a band could be. It’s not the people in it and not me. At the moment I’m the conductor and I’m looking after it, but one day someone could hold it and it would be theirs.”
Being faintly scared of all animals bigger than me, I’ve never ridden a horse bareback through an Aurora Borealis-lit snowfield to worship a God whose name is a colour not a word, but I bet it would sound like just like Jong Pang if I done. There’s a great Fischli/Weiss video of two people dressed as a bear and a rat on his myspace beating sticks over the Alpine clouds, and it’s really, really fitting because his music is just like. It’s like when you dress up as a bear with a friend at a party and you pretend to play-fight-dance like one and somewhere along the way you forget – just a little bit, for a second – that you’re human and not a bear, and you never talk about it with your friend because you forget about it a minute later but you know it was real (because it was) and so does your friend. That’s what it’s like; and once ancestral and completely new. And really fun.
After Danish indie hopes Moon Gringo drifted apart in 2004, Anders set about rebuilding his musical universe. “You know, I stopped reading music magazines, and stopped listening to indie rock. Imagine that! I cut out what I had been listening to since forever, which was like European music and American music of the last 30 years. Folk music from around the world, composers like Arvo Part and Steve Reich was what I filled my head with. It is so fucking exciting to hear this when you have been listening to the same rhythms all of your life! That was the idea behind Jong Pang: I wanted to see what Steve Reich would sound like if he was a rock band.”
Anders’ “musical trip” was focused on the pop moment rather than any ‘architectural’ follies, building immaculately one-dimensional, instant creations out of an ever-expanding world of organic instruments and foreign feelings: a kind of comfortable treatment of musical extremes, a sumptuous remapping of indie, running through Reich’s curt vocal jabs to African polyrhythmic drumming to swoonsome, engulfing shoegaze. “I love the way that as soon as you listen to [Steve Reich], a whole universe opens up, but if you just listen with one ear, it’s nothing. I mean, I always say Thanks! when someone describes me as pop: I love to dance to Friday I’m In Love. It’s the most pure, poetical music imaginable: to merge quality with underlying experimentation to create this universe.”
Universe is one of Anders’ favourite words: it comes up a lot in conversation. Is that why he ditched the band to be a producer? Don’t all great studio heads want to build and control their musical universe? “Yes! I suppose I’m a producer like Brian Eno is: I saw this fantastic quote when he said that everyone is an engineer, and I think that I like to direct music, to make every single certain thing unfold rather than take a guitar and sing a story about my life.” But Jong Pang doesn’t sound like one man’s inner visions: it sounds too ritualistic, too collective, too much fucking fun to be the product of complete singular control. Fine for some, but UK distribution-TBC debut album Bright White Light doesn’t sound like one person’s inner world, but a group’s collective imagination. Doesn’t control get stifling? Isn’t it, well, boring? “At first you have freedom, which is nice, but then there’s an element of loneliness, which is not so nice. So I wanted to share the creative process.” Like outsourcing? “Yes! Outsourcing atmospheres, so it wasn’t a solo record: it was very easy to give this record out: I was lucky to know so many talented people. Now is a bit of time when I’ve conducted it, but I could be anyone: they never have one sole emperor: it is not an imperialist way!” Anders pauses. “One day Jong Pang might be nothing to do with me. I think I realized it a month ago: if I only have absolute control, which is what happens with something perfect, it is not really perfect: even if you have 100% control, you can never really have 100% control. There will always be something that bothers you. Because you are not completely satisfied: it’s impossible! So, what is more fun is what takes more time: thinking that you could completely involve everyone into working with Jong Pang, free from ideas of it as you. Sometimes, it is like a cult: a strange indie cult.”
What’s next? “We play live at festivals, which is great: translating the studio outside with two drummers, a cellist and six singers. We are recording much of the new album with relation to the outdoors, and playing more concerts. With the new album, I don’t want to wait or linger, but you have to wait, have to be inspired. You have to gather information.”

Dan Deacon Fact interview: To get to the other side

It's kind of weird that one of the most technically gifted musicians out there (dude did a masters in in electronic music DURING his final year at music uni) is written off as a joke by many. Still, whatever. Fact Magazine, May 2008:

Between the total total total communal regression fests that splattered 2007 and the release of his maximalist electro masterwork Spiderman of the Rings, pennies started dropping. Maybe the “cuddly” chap in the sweat-drenched thrift-store tee making crowds scream about castles wasn’t a just reasonable visual/musical gag: maybe Dan Deacon’s hyper-complex, 10,000%-joy desk-set live art musical was just what this decade’s increasingly apocalyptic dog end needed. Keeping us guessing, showbusiness’ hardest-working-man is touring his ass off and taking his bumbag house live to new ritualistic heights. Wham! Wham! Wham! Wham!

How are you?
I’m pretty good. Thanks for asking.

Most of your albums mention animals. Which animals are going to be behind the new LP?
The new record is about cycles, ghosts, dogs and bees. I guess it’s about me.

I heard you wanted your new work to sound ritualistic…
The last record was very much a party record and it was composed at a time when I was playing mainly loft and warehouse parties, [but] with the larger audiences and the level of crowd participation a lot of people say the show has taken on a ritualistic or religious feel. The songs on the new record reflect that sound, and it’s sort of a culmination of the early party pieces with the newer more intense, percussion-driven works.

What has changed for you in the last 12 months?
I guess things in my personal life and the way I view the world. I’ve learned that the music and art scene is really cut throat and a lot of people are just doing it for a quick dollar or for some weird desire for fame. I’ve learned it’s easy to mistake sincerity for opportunism, unless you look really hard. The scene I came up in is very much about community and friendship. I wish the larger scene were too. I think it’s getting there, but there are snakes and sharks out there.

Tell me about the Jimmy Joe Roche Ultimate Reality tour.
This tour was most likely the most fun tour I’ve been on. All the shows were awesome. It was a much larger scale tour than any of my pervious tours so it was nice to take it up a notch with the live drummers and massive projections. I wish we could of done the tour in Europe. One day.

Is this what we can expect from your next album in terms of live instrumentation?
I have gone back to working with live performers and live instruments a lot. I started working with electronics, computers and MIDI because it was difficult to find players. With the success of the last record it’s been easy to find skilled performers. Having live percussion, marimba, vibraphone, glockenspiel, xylophone, piano and drums makes the album so much fuller than if it was just electronics. I’m really happy with how it’s coming out.

What are you doing tomorrow?
Recording the sax parts.

What should we all do tomorrow?
Learn to farm, get a bike and stop breeding.

Zombie Zombie Fact preview: Schlock horror

A Fact preview of this fantastic Kosmische-horror band from 2008's early thaw:

If there's a colder moment that that bit on Assault On Precinct 13 when the kid’s song turns into John Carpenter’s keyboard line as a sniper looks through the sights, I've yet to see it. Funnily enough, Zombie Zombie have turned it into a band. They turn slasher stories and horror movies into slow-Can-inflected-disco jam epics. Less a side-project than a juvenile obsession, the duo formed around the studio spaces of Paris in the first half of this decade, fascinated equally by the horror films of Dario Argento and their Goblin soundtracks. “The music that soundtracks these films is so atmospheric. It is about creating a physical reaction as much as it is about the sounds themselves,” says the improbably titled drummer and soundsmith, Cosmic Neman, who makes the music with Etienne Jaumet, a free-jazz saxophonist, sound engineer and electronic handyman by day. Live, they are joined by Romain Turzi, Jay from Friction and David Ivar.
The pair’s rise has been pretty spectacular. Originally “something fun to do at parties”, they were snapped up by Parisian electro heartland Versatile after releasing an EP on Boomboomtchak. Last summer they were first on the bill at The End Of The Road, this month they opened for the Silver Apples at their reunion show in Paris, and well as guesting on Allez Allez and Le Blogotheque. Whether the band’s involvement with cardigan-rock heroes Herman Düne (Neman bangs their drums as well) has oiled their wheels is anyone’s guess – Neman is loath to see this band as a side project, saying “this is just fun, but so is Herman Düne. Different kinds of fun” – but some of the antifolk band has rubbed off on ZZ.
Firstly, there’s the commitment to obsolete instruments: “We use hardly anything made after 1980. With computer programs, you can do anything, so you end up playing them. With an old synthesizer, they are so temperamental that they end up playing you.” Then there’s the impressive commitment to misinformation and mythmaking: rumours of unnatural phenomena – walls have reportedly bled and strange marks have appeared on people’s bodies at their gigs – are neither confirmed nor denied.
Debut album A Land For Renegades was conceived as the soundtrack to an imaginary road movie about two mercenaries racing against the night, hounded by unseen forces. Apart from a rather daft track about a “nightclub where Iggy Pop and David Bowie’s ghosts are performing”, it’s a brilliant conception – while bits wouldn’t sound out of place on Italians Do It Better, it’s more soundstage than Studio Five-Four. As well as John Carpenter and Goblin, there’s bits of Popul Vuh’s stuff for Herzog. There’s a definite shade of Suicide’s more cinematic moments in the mix – with whom they share an absolute will to fuck us up. “To make you feel, I drum like a heartbeat. There are screams and pacings on the record. I want us to sound like fun, but fun that is so close you can feel it, you can smell it, so it makes you jump.”

Bestival 2007 review for Fact Magazine: All rise

It's kind of hard to review Bestival without reeling off a long list of its many good points, but here goes, for Fact in September 2007:

Bestival does what no amount of earnest costume drama, lame tube advert or eager yoof retrospective can: it makes you feel genuinely, honestly, a little bit proud to be British. Rob Da Bank’s Isle of White festival has been taking the logical step of recreating a dusky summer country fete for four years now, and how: it’s been voted the country’s best small/medium festival and this year, tickets sold out double-speed. You’ve probably been told how good it is. September’s event saw the world’s best tea party nearly double in size on last years. It was, in no uncertain terms, spectacular. Though still a “boutique festival,” its 30,000 festival-goers made up the world’s biggest fancy dress party, there were 14 different stages where you could be entertained, and whether or not you can call a festival that featured heavy hitters like the Beastie Boys, Primal Scream and Madness alongside the latest upandcomers “small to medium” is in dispute.
But, still… Bestival retained its small town character; this is a festival put together by people who actually really, really know what they are doing. Rob and his mates have been through the filth, godlessness and magic that marks any festival – though most sorely lack the last part of the equation. They totally get what you what you want at every hour of the day. It’s Friday afternoon, you’ve just got in, you don’t want to queue for anything, so the bars are fully staffed. After partying at the Introducing tent till the wee small hours, come Saturday afternoon, more than anything, you want to play on a Coconut Shy and drink lemonade while listening to dub. In the Bestivalley you can! Listening to Bat For Lashes and eating lemon drizzle cake lifts Sunday morning’s fuzzy brain fuzz perfectly. People stand around selling the Observer in organic cotton sacks, on Sunday. As an aside, this is brilliant – even lying in a field, having slept in tent the size of a coffin for 4 hours over two days while teenagers threaten to steal shoes while we sleep and crapping in toilets that set off ‘Nam flashbacks, we’re still middle-class. Strangers, even as friendly as the Bestival crowd, need something to talk about, so surprise guests are speculated about left, right and centre and some of the most exciting acts are on at the Hidden Disco. Where is it? No body knows! For the first two hours at least! What else do you want from a festival? How about the world’s biggest fancy dress party? 20,000 people dressed as pirates, Lego men, Amy Winehouse, jellyfish and biscuit packets, and everything in between, makes for one motherload of happy. Especially when people forget they’re in fancy dress – the sight of a Crayola crayon having a lover’s tiff with a Ghostbuster will be making me and my girlfriend grin idly at work for months. It’s weird – it’s almost like they want you to have a good time…
Not that Mr and Mrs Da Bank (husband does the music stuff, wife does the arty stuff) are obsequiously giving us what we want – there is an agenda at work here. Firstly, there’s the huge peace sign subliminally and unsubtly placed over the rig in the main arena. Then there’s the constant appeals to pick your litter up, not “poo or wee” anywhere but the loos, the biodegradable plates and the recycling bins everywhere. Your mum would be proud of this festival, but that’s awesome: your mum’s great, she makes lovely spag bol, she was right about that haircut you had in 1998 and she brought you up, so she must have been doing something right: it’s just nice to stay at a site you don’t want to burn down like LA in 1992. There’s also another agenda here with the programming – though each one of the 14 stages has a distinct identity, it’s hard to stay at the same one for more than one or two acts, so great is the musical diversity of each tent. A lovely effect is created; rather than shacking up in the Dance tent and not moving till shin splints set in, you’re gently coerced into mixing about, trying out stages and events you might never bother with. Artistic manifestos – so long as they’re kept completely deniable – are magnificent, and this extends to booking virtual unknowns main stage slots. Nathan – A & R not Guys & Dolls – Detroit played before the Chemical Brothers, and Beardyman (champion comedy beatboxer: far better than he sounds) was sandwiched between Kate Nash and The Beastie Boy’s instrument set. It’s a sweet, very appreciated idea – hearing people praise Beardyman for the first time feels like watching your kid win the egg and spoon race.
Not too surprisingly, with a festival that celebrated more than anything else crowdpleasing and fun dance music, young pup or leftfield legend, the only real disappointment of the weekend (apart from Rob failing to declare himself the messiah, or at least king of the world) was the Beastie’s decidedly selfindulgent headline set. A band whose greatest moments evoke teenage kicks more than any other should know that what every person wants to hear Sabotage played twenty times in a row really, really loud, not watch a man born in the 60s tell us that the Isle of Wight is actually the “Isle of Mike” before launching into a jazz-funk didgeridoo jam. Cheers, but… This lapse notwithstanding, the music was peerless all weekend – it was the last night of Patrick Watson’s tour, but he played like it was the last night of his life, Go! Team were revelatory, Digital Mystikz’s night bus blues were achingly beautiful, Tom Brosseau broke hearts, Buraka Som Systema were terrific, Foals predictably killed it – but the real highlights were the non-musical ones. Learning how to Mambo, chatting rubbish to strangers, the Cockney Knees Up, not getting lost once, listening to a poetry slam in a yurt and laughing at the cunningly titled Jestival all made the weekend, as much as any individual band. Comedy tent headliner Andrew Maxwell, in between howling at the moon and yelling at breakdancers summed the spirit up nicely a few week ago: “At every single festival you get a few arseholes waving national flags, even at Glastonbury, that haven of the British left, whatever the fuck that means. At Bestival, the only flags people wave are the skull and crossbones.” Bestival: the last refuge of the scoundrel.

Cajun Dance Party live review for Fact Magazine: Air violence

A curmudgeonly live review of Cajun Dance Party from Summer 2007:

Cajun Dance Party take the prize in this egg and spoon race. One of many bands heading up the Way Out West charge of tremendously exciting bands born in the nineties, CDP are feted as heroes tonight, the penultimate date of their first headline tour. Taking to the stage through the crowd to the strains of World, four-fifths of CDP plug in and play, stating on the one. There’s no time to wait. It’s straight into the opening, future anthem chords of Time Falls. After giving it a couple of minutes, Singer Danny wanders through the scrum, resplendent in blood clot inducing trousers and hand-me-down jacket, looking like nothing so much as Tiny Tim sketched by Jim Henson. Right on cue, he launches into song, a nasal whine tangled round the mic stand.
Though Danny strutted his way happily through the set, yelping into the crowd, and getting every person under 18 into a tiz, guitarist Max was the standout, the thing that lifted the band out of the “cool band” stupor into something that could, perhaps, be magnificent. Subconsciously paying homage to that age old indie set-up of slightly irritating singer / great guitarist (hmm, Suede, Blur, Stone Roses, The Verve) his winding yet acerbic, exuberant yet tighter than sewn-in jeans jam was incredible. His shout out of “this guitar’s new. The man who gave it to me is called [hammy pause for suspense]… Bernard Butler” was a sweet and unreconstructed homage. The tracks are good, clean, and fun, brilliantly arranged and professionally preformed. Very professionally – Danny’s electro-shock boogie, his cuddling of Max, his fey mumble “Brighton, we love you,” Max’s sonic youth meets Spinal Tap strutting – CDP are damn close to the bedroom mirror. Not that this is a cynical appropriation of rock history. Far from it – they are literally the opposite of cynical. Rather that this gig felt somehow phoned in, rehearsed, appropriated.
But why is that such a big deal? How many gigs do you go to when the music not the stage show is identikit, lifted straight from the annals of Britpop (urgh) history? When the music is uninspiring, over-rehearsed and copy-cat? That’s not the case with this band – CDP are make great, fun songs that, though never jaw droppingly original, are never dull. Crowd wise, how many dancey gigs have you been to only to bemoan the lack of dancing? Why does it matter when a band so full of vim go through the motions? The factor that made the other night slightly wanting is, and I’ve been trying to avoid this, age. Not just of the band, but of the audience. They could have quite easily packed out an over eighteens show, but opening it up to over 14’s (this is such an everyday occurrence that it doesn’t even have to be mentioned at ticket retailers) it’s an just more energetic, more wild, it’s less knowing, more grinning, but sets anyone over the age of nineteen as an observer than a participant. Facing the crowd rather than a face in it. Take the moshing – it is guilty pleasure, and a bit of a daft-but-fun thing to do, but for the pit last night, it was their first time slam-dancing. It’s strange watching things that you did when you were younger done by people younger and it can’t help but seem like the band are going through the motions - enacting rock’n’roll’s rituals as much as enjoying them. Even the stage invasion felt practiced and safe – it was the air guitar of violence.
Why are journalists so fascinated by the phenomenon of under-18 nights? That’s obvious: standing in a crowd of under 18 year olds and you instantly feel, well, old. Somehow, strangely, out of the club. And that comes from the band – there is an edge (or, more accurately, a lack of an edge), an energy, a certain wide-eyedness that seems both exuberant and but a also little naïve. Listen to them on CD and you’re blown away – the Guardian recently called final song The Next Untouchable, their I Wanna Be Adored” with only fifteen stone of hyperbole. See them live (at an over 18 show) and they’re just brilliant – when they were 11 months younger, I saw them in Edinburgh, and they sounded more like the future of rock’n’roll than any cynical no r/wave. See them at an underage show and all the above will still be true. It’ll still be a great party, even though the party isn’t (y)ours. Halfway through the encore, the stage got rushed. First, a couple moshers climbed on the stage. They climbed fully behind the amps, gleeful, before the entire crowd ran forward to party with the band. The older people (all journalists, as far as I could tell) hung back and couldn’t tell musicians from fans. That, all things aside, is a beautiful thing.

Fact Magazine's 2007 Great Escape Review: Do You Love Rock And Roll?

2007's Great Escape in review, written in the wee small unprofessional hours before a trip to Amsterdam:

The Great Escape, is not really a festival, despite appearances to the contrary, like exhaustion, cheap noodles and tinnitus. It’s more a trade fair, where the great and the good of the UK music media pop down to the sea-side to snap up the Next Big Thing. The Kooks exploded off the back of last year’s, and a little band called Klaxons went from being, well, the Klaxons, to being the most influential band of 2006. That, essentially, is why a) there was not a truly shit band on all weekend b) punters queued for hours everywhere while smug laminate-badged delegates casually strolled in and c) tips were the talk of the town. Rockabilly-Metal band Gallows and you-saw-them-here-first Foals were the bands everyone was pretending to have seen. Less talked about (in grown-up circles, at least) but an equally dead cert is Jack – Jamie T meets Shakin’ Stevens - Peňate. Fact’s photographer was nearly torn apart limb-by-limb by a mob of sixteen year-old girls (think Combat 18 in Topshop skirts) who’d been waiting for Jack for god knows how long, and they smelled blood. Jack Penate for number 1, then: if there’s one thing to never bet against in pop music, it’s teenage girls hell-bent on ultra-violence.
Once you accept this fundamental fact about the Great Escape (that it is half hype sweatshop, half riot) you can actually concentrate on the music, man. And so much music! There is a great correspondence between the ADHD itch that 120 bands spread across 20 odd venues encourages and the agitated, jumpy rhythms so many of the bands played. Fear Of Flying, for example, are an excellent post-punk, angular, jerky three piece. If that sounds familiar, it was. A great band, but in five years we’ll say “yeah. That was 2007, that was.” By contrast, Late Of The Pier were mind-blowing, precisely because they didn’t sound like 2007 – on Thursday night they sounded like half nine on 17th May 2007. Beautiful.
CSS were a nicely riotous start to the weekend. A 200 strong moshpit generates enough heat to make Brazilians sweat, and they repaid the favour. After a quick chat with the bloke from the aforementioned Fear Of Flying, it was off for some cheap noodles and an early(ish) night. The battle was won, but the war had just begun. Friday night, the dash started.
The Hat came out on top – a smashing bunch whose rapping rockabilly meets Jackanory thing won the local types over at Sunday Best. Plus, the keyboardist Dave took time out of making a pizza to chat about the sea and ley-lines, so they are well and truly in my good books. After them were Kitty, Daisy and Lewis - the band that every mum wishes they were in. The same could not be said about either Gallows or zZz, who both caused the best bit of aggro since Stalingrad, a ruck rivalled only by the scene outside the just fucking phenomenal Foals. We knew they would destroy, but it didn’t half make us proud when they did.
Some of the best experiences are those you least expect – you could wander into the back of a pub and be blown away having seen the world’s greatest band. Music is a deeply personal thing, and experiences are most fruitful when they are unplanned. Whilst I broadly go along with these ideas, there is a the eternal risk of watching some Icelandic bint swanning around to a xylophone solo that Enya would have called “a bit naff,” as happened at Adjagas. Sometimes the ace, sometimes the deuces.
Two of the most optimistic moments of the weekend came from the hip hop side of things, for once. The chorus of Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius P’s opener might have been “hip-hop is arse”, “art” or “ours” – all of which sum up the state of play for HH this year dead-on. Spleen gave me the biggest grin all weekend not just because he won the crowd with his 175 bpm beatboxing, Bad Brains hardcore and pink tutu. We chatted backstage as he presided over his bandmate’s proposal to a punter. Seemingly unaware of the adoring (and obscene) platitudes that passing audience members thrust his way, he told me “art can change the world… I love rock and roll so much. Do you love rock and roll?”

Holy Hail for Fact's New Talent

A lovely, lovely band that I've had had the pleasure of interviewing a few times. Here's the first one though, from early Spring 2007, courtesy of Fact Magazine:

You know that bit in the Wicker Man when Edward Woodward first sees Britt Eckland, and he’s actually offended by how fit she is? Hearing Holy Hail is like that dancing to that glance. They’re the dance-punk band that is so warm, pretty, delicate, dark and different that it’s a little bit frightening.
A band that are as seductively clever as they are subtly riotous they formed eating in the clouds above the streets of the Rotten Apple: “Kevin and Cat [then with fantastically named Booty Bass band Fannypack] met at a rooftop summer barbecue in New York and came up with the conceptual ideas for Holy Hail. Matt came into the practice room one day and a week later he was playing drums in the band.” When Cat’s mate from Chicago Michal joined, HH’s rise from NY buzz to velvet, underground superstars was set. Their live shows at Trash, Adventures Close To Home and The Do Club on this side of the pond have established them as the band to bliss out the jams to live. One reason is that they have a habit of dressing up as the cast of Karate Kid, another is that they clubs “parties.” The biggest of all is that they sound like the band you and your mates wanted to be in when you were ten.
Their shit draws on all to wide a set of influences for them ever to become pigeonholed. You can hear shades of Giorgio Moroder’s tingly backbeats, Scott Walker’s darkly divine country, Chic’s black Panther disco and The Neptunes’ honeyed hip-hop vocals on their tracks. Seeing them live is like being an invited to your mate’s sister uni party when you were 16. Hearing them in a sweat-drenched club is nothing short of life affirming. It reminds you why you give a shit about music. “We want to keep pushing the envelope and keeping it interesting - surprising ourselves and writing songs we love to play and listen to. Inspiration can come from politics, love, history, southern boogie, western expansion, eastern winds and northern lights.” All Hail!

Born of A Star single comes the first week in April on adventures close to home recordings w. remixes by Shir Khan and Bondo Do Role.
Big Guns EP coming out on Kanine Recs in the States around the same time, remixes by Rory P and Dave P / Adam Sparkles.

Chrome Hoof for Fact

"Chrome Hoof's doom disco feels space" was the title of this, the first band preview I did for Fact, from way back in January 2007:

“Our twelve foot tall ram got caught in our Disco Ball during one gig.” Bouncers had to wrestle him free, which they weren’t best pleased about,” says Chrome Hoof bassist Leo Smee. Making it possible to write sentences like that isn’t the only reason that the Hoof will destroy everything, but it’s up there. The real reason is that they play the most horrendous doom metal with glistening disco-funk soldered on. That and they sound like MDMA Valhalla live.
Leo, bassist with Death/Doom gods Cathedral, started playing warehouse parties with his brother Mylo on drums about five years ago. They had both been massive fans of funk and disco for years, and yearned to play the sort of music that they’d been digging for so long. They also wanted to have fun live with as many people as would fit on a stage. First to be recruited was Chloe, the Bassoonist. “I met her on the street, and started talking to her about her instrument, and told her she should play with us. That’s how most people joined: I scared them on the street.” Before long, the beast grew and grew into the twelve plus member’d behemoth it is now.
The stage show eats every other band alive. Besides the aforementioned 12” ram, there are street sweepers, robots and day-glo monks, all combining to produce the most amazingly stupefying (and stupid) live show since Funkadelic. “Dressing up’s very important. The visual sense, it gives a band an identity, and its been lost over the years, I think. It’s basically having a right laugh, and some people’ll get, and some won’t. It’s creating a visual story, something that people can go away and talk about.” I tell him, slightly over-excitedly, that the Hoof will rule the world one day. Then I ask how they would change the world. He thinks and says “play one note that starts a tidal wave that engulfs the world. And make it more interesting, with better stories. Yeah, that’s about it.”

Beyond Zade EP out on Rise Above records, album out in the summer

www.myspace.com/chromehoof

Foals live for Fact

A piece of wide-eyed hyperbole from Feb 2007, an online review of the first Foals headline tour. Yeah, they were really, really good:

Bliss it is to be alive, and to be young is very heaven: Foals are the revolution. Soon the knife-sharpeners will call us liars, but we know what love is. Their set was more than a great set by an-up-and-coming myspace b(r)and soon to have the hype-rug pulled. It felt like the stuff that might, one day, maybe, be legendary.

Fair enough, an arty band with a set of clever influences and a set of clever haircuts were never going to do badly in Brighton – Death Sentence: PANDA sold out the other week, for God’s sake. The crowd, however, was more than the usual scene kids and record-shop workers – old ravers, this dubstep producer I vaguely know, even (shock, horror) some boring-looking people were down to pack the place out. The sense of anticipation, man, you could feel it. When Foals came on stage, Audio screamed. We were dancing to the soundcheck.

They destroyed live, by the way. The second the sound check faded, they blasted into some hi-NRG spidery afrobeat that made the kids say “yeah!” Yannis (yelping, guitars, channelled charisma) jumped off the stage against the barrier and avoided getting smacked by Walter (bass-lines, strutting). At the end of the song, he said “what is this fucking barrier about?” only to spoil/emphasis the rockstar cliché by following it with “if anyone wants to come up, we’d be cool with that.” The banter was tightly pitched and perfect. By the time Hummer’s “QUIET HEARTBEATS” chant started, every person that had been dragged to the gig by their mates were in love. A few people have cussed the boys for sticking to the Bloc Party line, but, basically, fuck them. This band pack more ideas into a three minute record than I ever learnt in school, and at the end of the day the mark of a great band is making you need more songs just like the one before – not playing a set of handbrake turns. And, whisper it – they're young, stupid and bright enough to walk the beaten path of disposable pop and precocious rock and snotty punk, and they're just about fast enough for it to sound blissfully NOW. At the breakdown of Balloons they raise their hands into the trance shuffle – it’s fitting, and euphoric.
This was their homecoming, after all.

This is why they deserve every inch and blog post and friend add. A lucky few were there at the off, seeing them tear apart squat parties and make girls dance. They’re the smug ones. In these diagonal days, when a band’s first single is the difficult second album, when there’s ten passably amazing music experiences available a week and one genuinely thrilling one a year, Foals are a revelation. A fist pounding, swaying, jumping revelation, for the simple reason that they torch every last-week notion in the way that new rock music always has done.

This is why the Foals are the band of 2007. They are not consciously revolutionising rock: they are simply playing the music that they dig as they see fit, and are unashamed of who they are. They know that there is nothing strange about being into indie and dance music, nothing out-of-sync with an iPod playlist that jumps from Don Cab to Timbaland, nothing contradictory about digging hands-in-the-air techno and knowing who Kurt Vonnegut is, nothing novel about making adventurous, high-concept music that’s closer to Steve Reich than Razorlight that the proverbial milkman could whistle along to. Where Foals set themselves apart is by taking this formula (pop + abstract + guitar + brains) and playing it so naturally, so assuredly that it hardly seems strange. Which it isn’t, when it comes down to it. Why the Klaxons have dated so badly (can you imagine a time before Gravity’s Rainbow) is that they sounded like a novelty band when they were just playing an absurdly natural mix of music, like a kitchen sync drama with canned laughter.

This is why Foals absolutely destroy. Believe, they are Cool (that's what Arena will be telling you in ten months) but their studied charm is both furiously worked and genuine and shy and barrel-chestedly confident. That’s why you got people dancing on the stage three minutes into the set. It’s why people yell in the faces of bouncers who tell them, politely, to get off the stage. It’s why Foals felt like whatever the fuck rock n roll was supposed to feel like. It’s because Foals are ours.

We want a band that delivers that the things I’ve rambled about, but without any pretensions, without any knowing winks or smug spot-my-references. We want a band that feels it. That doesn’t need a pat on the back for liking grime. That gets where we’re coming from. That can get on with the job of moving 300 heard-it-all-before Brightonians. That grabs today, this minute, this second in a chokehold. A band yells in the face of (the) Zeitgeist “THIS IS HARDCORE!!!” One that makes us dance and say “YEAH!!!”

Snottily charimastic singer Yannis, equal parts Che Guevara and Hugh Grant, was dancing and yelping, unaware to the manic energy of the stage rushers when the music cut out. The spider’s jazz punk ended and a quick apology, laughing rather than fawning, was issued like a manifesto: “This has happened every single fucking night of the tour. Hold tight!” They calmly twiddled knobs and jangled nerves. Driving bassist Walter, who looked like the Student Union Paul Simonon, span round on his heels as soon as the drums started to twitch into life, at once glorious and unaware and worked. And beautiful. And triumphant. Foals are now!