A Distorted Reality.

Crash Repeat’s MySpace

‘Synthesiser with a predilection for arpeggiated leads seeks like-minded vocalist and overdriven guitar for good company, good fun and maybe more.’

The ungodly combination that this Lonely Hearts ad promises is the conceptual embodiment of Crash Repeat. Trebles meet bass with no room for a middle ground: this breed of electronic experimentation has no room for middle grounds. As well as the synthesised beats, the vocal delivery serves to act as a percussive device: the staggered annunciation of syllables makes the vocals both bold in terms of message as well as their role as an instrument. Superbass is a song of huge sonic proportions: a gloriously fast-paced percussion backbone meets with synthetic oscillations pitch-bent to within a metaphorical inch of their tolerances. Spinner is a song of a dirtier persuasion: nothing is clean – distortion is king here, with even glitched overtones. The vocals truly become an instrument here: they are far too quick to be comprehensible and it is wonderful – the texture is kept thick, rich and unique. Trigger is like an 8-bit flashback: Spartan synth lines bring back memories of a misspent youth with a moustachioed rotund Italian plumber; memories tainted by the distortion and drive present here, but a present enriched by it.

This is my welcome to Birmingham’s future Aphex Twin.

The Winter League MySpace

Instrumental and minimalist music are two genres which are somewhat of a taboo in certain circles: it’s seen by far too many to be the case that music has to be immediate; music has to be loud; music has to be fast. The Winter League pretty much serve to define the veritable opposites of all of the above ‘requirements.’ Here was see progression, subtlety and low-tempo music executed with a sense of freedom which could be considered irresponsible. Nods towards Efterklang abound through their use of esoteric percussion and almost choral vocals. Even at their most monotone, the vocals are expressive beyond that of many bands/artists generally accepted to have music defined as capable of eliciting emotion. Far from one trick ponies, The Winter League also compose music to suit film, and do so with a great competency. If folky, indie-esque minimalism is your bag, The Winter League are definitely to be your cup of tea.

Website.
CTTS MySpace.

Download (Megaupload)

Rating:

A lone whisper leads into shamanic chanting in a  rhythm which is to a become a motif throughout the album: even from the fifty-five second long introduction track, it’s quite apparent that this is not to be ‘yet-another’ ‘hardcore’ album from a band of talentless hacks with more Boss DS-1s than sense. This gentle start is brutally cut short by the first appearance of Drew Speziale’s vocals at the beginning of Same Shade as Concrete: the spoken words ‘rejoice, rejoice!’ make way for the cacophony of noise that is Circle Takes the Square’s rhythm guitar tone. Male and female screaming pass over one another with little care for conventional harmonisation, but it sounds beautiful in terms of an almost esoteric passion. Guitar lines vary between the urgent and the elegant with ferocity and an almost loving care in equal measure to form a song both experimental enough and of enough traditional hardcore stock to satiate snobs and stalwarts alike.

Crowquill is a song much in the same vein as Same Shade as Concrete, with lyrical highlights dotted actross its sonic landscape: it’s status as a metasong is ensured by the lines ‘nothing’s quite so pure as the written word’ and ‘nothing so puerile as meter and rhyme’. Drew and Kathy’s vocals once again come into their own, with Drew’s harshness melding wonderfully with the relatively cleanliness of Kathy’s muted screams. In the Nervous Light once again shows CTTS’ predilection for the blending of the harsh and soft with little care taken for consistence. Around half-way into the track, a harsh, cat-like yell from Kathy shows excellently the broadest end of their hardcore influence; Drew’s vocals also show an uncharacteristic turn in this song: they take an approach of sprechgesang for a short time leading to the heaviest part of the album yet. Their musical dichotomies and lack of a gradient between heavy and light make for an unpredictable yet rewarding sonic experience.

Interview at the Ruins is somewhat of a radical departure from the rest of the album thus far. What appears to be piano resonance leads into the playing of a single clean guitar and piano; and from their drums are introduced with the tell-tale bass-dominance of Jay Wynne’s drumming. Screaming is introduced soon enough, as well as an overdriven electric guitar: this, whilst similar in terms of instrumentation to the earlier songs, is a different sound; one more laid back and reflective. No eccentric chord sequences: just pretty lead playing amidst drone-esque chanting of ‘a murmur from the ruins echoes softly as the roots undo, and the branch becomes’ towards the end of the song. The motif introduced during the introduction rears its head again; and it’s that which makes this album special: a sense of concept. Track five, Non-Objective Portrait of Karma, carries on with the theme of not pandering to any expectation which may have resulted from the prior half of the album: Godspeed!-like drone introduces the discernible playing of a lone guitar, then bass, then vocals, then drums. The gradual increase in tempo of guitar playing is met to the beat by Speziale’s talking-come-screaming, and this synergy between vocals and instrumentation is met further by Kathy Coppola.

Kill the Switch boasts the potentially dubious honour of being the longest track on the album: it risks being called overwrought or overlong. Fortunately, it is neither and could be considered as a song of several movements: initial brutality and immediacy making may for a short instrumental interlude further moving into a passage of question-and-answer vocals from both Speziale and Coppola. The theme of rebirth put across by ‘I know it’s all been done before, I want to do it again’ is truly inspirational amidst the context of insistent drum beats and guitar chords. A Crater to Cough in sees the ultimate return of that motif in an almost post-rocky interpretation: accompanied by trebly guitars with the slightest of delay applied to their playing. This introduces an initial attack of Pelican-like playing to serve as the background for the vocal battle of both Speziale and Coppola.

This album is incredibly cohesive, if only for the reappearance the first thing you hear throughout the album; and it’s both better and worse for it. The use of such a motif allows for the conceptualisation of the album as being about the birth and rebirth of character and the quest for self-realisation, which is greta if you really want to hear an album. However, if you’re merely listening to it passively, it does bring with it the feeling of deja entendu. In spite of this, the album is still magnificent instrumentally and vocally and truly a milestone in terms of 00’s hardcore.

Jesu website
Jesu MySpace

Rating:

He’s a Brummie and has had such ridiculous labels as ‘avant-pop’ and ‘avant-garde doom’ used to describe his music of the vintage of this album, but one thing about Justin Broadrick which cannot be in any way derided is his musical diversity: to have gone from the doom/industrial metal of Birmingham’s Godflesh to the post-metal of earlier Jesu releases to the (oh god) ‘avant-pop’ of this release truly takes someone to whom remaining in a niche means nothing; someone to whom the art is everything and consistency but a crippled runner in the one-hundred metre sprint that is his sense of priority. The opener Don’t Dream It effectively ensures that former Godflesh fanatics are to feel disappointed, if not in some manner betrayed: M83-esque chanting of the phrase ‘don’t dream it’ replaces the former’s more feral fare with an enchantingly daring aplomb; and this chanting finds itself accompanied by dreamy piano amidst a sea of thick bass drums and distorted guitars.

Can I Go Now? takes traditionally electronic synthesised drum patterns and mates them with a second round of shoegazing vocals reminiscent of those of My Bloody Valentine. This hallucinogenic meld of the organic and the synthesised creates an atmosphere conducive to the best of ambiances: a laid-back feel with somehow  intellectual overtones; perfection in its ascent from this delicate simplicity to a slightly more voluptuous texture with the addition of Jesu’s almost trademark distorted guitar tone. Track three, Wash it All Away, opens with an increased sense of urgency: a greater tempo with more dense instrumentation. Here, a bassy percussive backbone guides the highs of a synthesiser into a symbiosis left undiscovered in much music: trebly tones and bassy tones combining without messiness. Two-tone guitar repetition carries this song to its end with effortlessness amongst the hazy backdrop of instrumental synergy.

A darker tone is set by synthstrings in the leadup to the chugging start of The Playgrounds are Empty: that ‘Jesu-and-Jesu-only’  tone of bastardised guitar finds its home once again in the wake of Broadrick’s wafer-thin voice; almost a shadow of itself in the chaos that is the plodding rhythm of guitar chords. The distortion is coupled with clean guitars as the song continues, with a more viscous percussive line rearing its head delicately in the bridges between verses. Dummy is a song reeking of Sigur Ros meeting Explosions in the Sky in a former industrial town: objective beauty corrupted by a the dreariness of the vagaries of life; truly, music of the people.

Supple Hope starts with the helical, almost hypnotic swaying of trebly guitars with only the introduction of an addictive bassline serving to disrupt their cyclic beauty. Vocals, once again, lie at he lower end of the audible spectrum and are very much used for their instrumental timbre rather than their lyrical content; and it works deliciously. These build to a climax Godspeed You! Black Emperor would be proud of by the four minute mark, and slowly fade to fragile ambiance once again soon after. Tiny Universities suffers from the complex of almost being Saturdays = Youth era M83 by numbers, and it really does lower the tone of the beauty of the song; especially given the very apparent amount of care which had gone into it.

Luckily, the end of the album is saved from unfavourable claims of emulation of other artists by Plans that Fade, a shoegaze-meets-post-rock-meets-electronica song which is something all of its own. Trance inducing and mind-unwinding, its simplistic guitar lines create the perfect atmosphere for work or play, and borders upon an experience of a spiritual nature. This song is truly a peak in the work of Broadrick and in Jesu’s back catalogue. Though th album may repeat itself in some of its sections and themes, each song is a piece of musical mastery large enough for any such feelings to be overcome by the sheer awe felt in the presence of the exposition of Broadrick’s genius.

From their very inception, most bands walk that most treacherous tightrope: balancing, on the one hand, their ideas and preconceptions of what they want to sound like, and on the other, the vocabulary of how to define that sound. So it is, once again, with a heavy heart that I have to whine about the misuse of the label ’screamo’ amongst the populace at large. Astro Reality are to screamo what Hawthorne Heights are(/were, ha) to emo: a travesty of mislabelling and essentially a bastardisation of a genre most radically different to its diluted ‘followers’.

However, a history lesson isn’t what this article is about: even if their sins of woefully inadequate genre nomenclature are to be forgotten, the music itself exposes doubt as to the validity of their self-professed status as a band. They state that they ‘want to be known across the land for being unique and keeping it Astro’, but any prior illusions you may still have about their uniqueness in the sea of their ’screamo’ (inverted commas are important) peers are dispelled as soon as you hear the first chord in any of their songs. As for ‘keeping it Astro’, I’m not nearly well informed enough to know what that means: the cool kids are probably laughing at me right now for that.
Warranty, their most recent musical foray, shows the instantly recognisable chug-chug of a distorted electric guitar and the most dire screaming I have ever heard, even in a band of this perversion. The screams are not the light accentuated growl of the likes of Tim Kasher or Geoff Rickly, nor are they the visceral-yet-high-pitched wail of Billy Werner: they’re something all together more weak, a cross of the two styles as unwelcome as a 20 year old at a Conservative Club, and just about as out of place amidst the pop-punk riffs and hackneyed lead parts.

Listening through the rest of the tracks on their MySpace, one cannot help but get the feeling of deja entendu (and no, not the Brand New album. That work is holy and should not even be sullied with a mention here), and that is because, in all sincerity, the songs do sound the same. Guitars? Distorted, with crispy overtones. Bass? There. Drumming? Keeping time in the most dull ways imaginable. Think ditchwater, mixed with Jimmy Carr’s humour: shit, plain shit. Vocals: dual and completely out of harmony. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.

There’s a limited school of thought (only on certain sites on the Internet, granted) that Casey Calvert’s opiate, citalopram and clonazepam fuelled death was due to the realisation that he had, almost single-handedly, destroyed a once great genre and ruined its name for the good many years of copycat bands to come. I sincerely hope that this band follow his lead, and just give up on music or find an original niche: I have no doubt of their instrumental ability. I just abhor their shitty music.

A Note: the band have split up since this was written. I’m not too bothered.

The Free Software Foundation, as part of their Defective by Design anti-DRM campaign, have undertaken something of a festive approach to their latest efforts: they are in the process of producing a ‘35 Days against DRM’ series of articles, no doubt a nod to the ubiquitously understood ‘12 Days of Christmas’. Whilst noble in and of itself, the entire effort falls down when they suggest that the most inanane of efforts be attempted in order to compaign against DRM: a boycott of the iTunes paid service. The concern for DRM being a niche concern as it is, what do the FSF really hope that this call to arms of the very small number of interested parties that it has within very limited demographics can accomplish? The best that they can hope for this that MC Chris’ label realises that sales have died for a day, and such niche artists may move to a DRM-free distribution method. This won’t change anything worthwhile, unfortunately: the biggest digital music distributor in the world won’t be held back by the readers of the 300,000th most well-read (according to Alexa) website in the world – the fact is simply that most people don’t care about these limitations.

It really does pain me to say this, especially with my fervent distaste for DRM methods, but it’s here to stay for the time being: every new medium has its own DRM methods built in, be it HDTV or Blu-ray. Of course, the ingenuity of those who would not wish to be encumbered by such draconian restrictions on their use of the media which they have purchased will always eventually triumph over the efforts of the media conglomerates: just as BD+ was cracked in a matter of months the first time, it will be again with this new revision.

I’m my three or so years of interest in photography, I have never fully understood the attraction of any of the traditionally ‘lomographic’ cameras: be it the Holga, Diana+ or the Lomo LC-A mentioned in the title. To an extent, I can understand the Diana’s and the Holga’s appeal: it’s cheap and it’s something a little different to have fun with – the fun to be had lies in the cheap construction, and that’s the entire point of the ownership of such cameras. The LC-A, however, is a different beast entirely.

With worldwide distribution rights bought from LOMO plc, the Lomographic Society possesses the monopoly over a product which was designed to be a ‘people’s camera’ in the Soviet Union. This camera which was designed to be ubiquitous is sold for £180+, and what do you get? A metal bodied though still cheaply-made and refurbished USSR throwback designed to be faulty. The fact that the vignetting of the lens is marketed as a benefit is completely and utterly offensive to anyone with an sound understanding of optics: the entire point of having a frame to fill with a lens is that the frame is filled, not cut off by bad optical design.

As for the concept of people taking snapshots with crap cameras: that is something I have no problem with. The lomography lot, however, have found a marvellous way to market their overpriced wares: a set of ‘golden’ rules for their practice; a set of rules which by their very nature require you to spend more money on film. And of course, the only way to get the ‘best’ results is to buy their heinously overpriced expired film; because, you know, the light leaks just aren’t enough for completely and utterly degrading the picture which you are taking.

Lomography’s Golden Rules

1. Take your camera everywhere you go – this is a rule that I like, I’ll concede: take more pictures, you’ll improve in the craft.
2. Use it any time – day and night - this makes sense,  taking more pictures leads to less focus on photographic gear and more pictures. It’s another than I’m a fan of.
3. Lomography is not an interference in your life, but a part of it – and here the downward spiral begins: there must be few phrases which could make out the ‘art collective’ to be a cult as this one.
4. Try to shoot from the hip - no, hipsters: you are not Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yes, he did shoot from the hip, but he had an innate sense of what would work in terms of composition: most people with Holgas probably can’t work out focus and composition mentally.
5. Approach the subjects of your lomographic desire as close as possible - now things start to get a little too One Hour Photo for my liking: this is pretty close to stalking. Again, it’s a method of keeping those who would fall into thefold of the Lomographic Society as loyal customers: there’s no such thing as a telephoto lens for these cameras, so telling these people that close-up is the only way is going to prevent their questioning of there being ‘another way.’ They also espouse rhetoric of of close-up shots being the only way to capture natural emotion in people: I’d argue that a 135mm lens from across a street is more likely to capture natural expressions given the impossibility of the subject seeing you and reacting to your photography.
6. Don’t think - yes, let’s just shoot, shoot and shoot without thought for artistic composition and spend all of our money with the Lomographic Society on more film.
7. Be fast – ah, I like this one: I don’t like to miss moments of what could be great photography.
8. You don’t have to know beforehand what you captured on film – ‘no, because you can always buy more from us.’
9. Afterwards either – I’ll agree with this one as well: the mystique in photographs can add to them. A little bit of abstract is alright.
10. Don’t worry about any rules - WHY PUBLISH THE PREVIOUS NINE, THEN. This is, by far, the least agreeable one: if you want to take (objectively) good photographs, you have to pay at least some reverence to, no matter in how fleeting a measure, the more traditional rules of artistic composition.

I hope to God that someone from the Lomographic Society is reading this and just thinking ‘yeah, he got us right.’

Door underarm, and with a new lock in what must have been amongst the flimsiest of plastic bags I have ever had the misfortune to have been given, I made my way back to the car in sleet commensurate to the mood at hand: the precipitation a mix of the particulate excitement of liquids and the more reserved decorum of the pseudo-solid masses therein; it perfectly followed my fear of and parallel longing for what this intruder may have been. A kindred spirit, perhaps? More realistically, just an opportunistic vandal with a penchant for underwear. I kept on coming to the same conclusion as the lock burred its way through the fraying strands of the bag constituent of environmentally-friendly, but useless for the purpose for which it was designed, biodegradable condensation polymers: was too well organised for an opportunist; it was intended. I really did have a playmate.

Another car journey which was to prove all too long: my hands trembled with the intense excitement of a new player in my game; one with the understanding of what I was, with no reservation in their acceptance of what I was. It was the same feeling which had filled me from the initial realisation, and had begun to consume me to the point of a yearning for this stranger; this wonderful stranger.

Arrival, and the fitting of the new door began. Misplaced screws widened drilled holes for hinges; hinges which were thus to be fitted in a manner not parallel to the doorframe; a door which was further to be fitted to the hinges in a manner not straight – a single mistake catalysed by a sense of complete and utter confusion; of excitement; of longing; of sheer uncontrollable desire for the possibility of understanding leading to each further step’s accuracy being limited: it was a microcosm of the nature of life itself. How workmanship meant nothing to me, though: I needed evidence of my instinct, proof of my fellow traveller on a path infrequently followed. Lock fitted; door closed; barrel turned: tight and a little too much force was required to, but it would do. It would have to do.

Just as I went to return to my own flat, Tanya called me in that impenetrable husk of hers:

“I apologise for my rudeness earlier: you’ve been so helpful. Come in for a drink.”

A flash of the cleanest of white hopes appeared to me: as she prepared my drink, I would have at least the smallest of opportunities to search for the evidence I so desperately craved. Naturally, my acceptance of her offer was inevitable, and I walked into her dank, damp, unkempt ‘abode’, if such a lavish term could be applied seriously to such a place. The most depressing part of all of this is that she’d actually cleaned up: clothes now had homes once again, and her personal order was restored; but the flat as a whole was still an example of the most candid of fetid homesteads. It was, in a way, something perfectly reflective of her: all of these flats were sold as pristine showhomes, furnished and tidy; the very ideal of yuppie perfection. Tanya had had her days of beauty and her youth of consumerist fantasy; but she became bitter and disaffected with the entire matter. The smells emanating from her home had gradually increased in the extent of their appalling vigour as this process had continued: watching her intrigued me, as her physical decay really did occur in perfect accordance with her mental. Once full cheeks had diminished into the sunken cheekbones of a starving whore; just as any sense of my respect for her privacy was to degenerate into flagrant mooching.

She retained that ever-so elegant casual air, even in spite of her overt disturbance. She looked jaundiced now: her previous grey shading making way for a yellow accentuated by the warm cast of thirty-pence lightbulbs. Lock shattered; door splintered: her mood was made instantly explicable by the drama played out by her surroundings.

“Wha… what’s happened?”

Of course, my lack of aptitude in the perception of the painfully obvious had not failed me here: it was startlingly apparent that her flat had been broken into; her drawers rummaged through; and her belongings strewn everywhere, latching onto whatever would catch them. Jumpers on the hung paintings, coatstand and ridiculously oversized television;  one pair of jeans on the bedpost and several others strewn across the floor with a perceptible lack of care; but the underwear was far more orderly in its relocation. That isn’t to say that it was neatly laid out in folded piles, but there was far more to it than the pseudo-random launching of clothing in all directions. It was just women’s clothes; women’s clothes following what could almost be diffusion patterns, with not concentration being the factor in where everything moved to, but rather the proximity of pieces of clothing to genitalia: it was the vandalism of the sexually frustrated.

This seemed… familiar. Memories came back to me. This reminded me of myself: a focus on the clothes, with a certain care paid to the more personal of garments. He was undressing her with clothes off to begin with: the clothes which come off first had been flung furthest. Could it be that I had someone close to my heart to close to my home?

“What do you think happened? Someone’s broken into my home and destroyed any sense of order which I had in my fetid homestead.”

Taking into account her complete and utter lack of understanding of (or will to use) colloquialisms, English being an unfortunate second language in her eyes, she sounded quite impassioned and somewhat annoyed at my question.

“Is anything missing?”

“Well, no; but that’s not the point.”

“Don’t fret. I’ll fix your door and you can get to getting things back in order.”

She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t noticed the order to her chaos: I may still have the chance of finding a new playmate, if not a protegé voyeur if the sloppiness of this operation was anything proportional to his inexperience in his, our art.

Woodworking never was a strength of mine, so the concept of any repair of the door was out of the question; but the drive to Focus for a new door and lock was more than enough of an excuse to contemplate what had happened and what it meant for me: if I was right, I was no longer alone. I no longer had to hide my more socially reprehensible act. I no longer had to act alone: I could gain an enabler in my activities; someone to facilitiate and inspire me. The premature yet inevitable splintering of rotting lignin and cellulose had afforded me such a possibility in opportunity.

This was not down to chance: this was down to some wonderful, divine cause.

A botched installation of a light fitting sheds its red-filtered light over this entry: my entry always to be accompanied by the elegant paroxysm of irises contracting and relaxing relentlessly to find their new area of comfort in this weakest of electric lighting. Polyvinyl chloride trays reflect varying hues and saturations of reds back at me, to gradually shift into focus when my eyes eventually adapt to these new surroundings. Everything in this room is unnatural, forged by the hand of man: perfect in its inorganic nature; perfectly synoptic of this room’s purpose.

6 o’clock comes, and my head is back in the office: 15 minutes of work lost to the wondrous siren song of the careless fancy desired such that it approached trance. The return to the reality of my still being and hour and a half from my dimly lit refuge hits me with a force which could only be surmised as ‘crushing’. I leave; I had to leave: the journey is all that now matters. Home is all that matters, and it’s close to a crippling hunger at this moment. Never mind: right turns and traffic lights will distract me from longing for the comforts of home.

Time: that inalienable but oh-so human of constructs. Arbitrary measures of quantities which are not real; quantities which just measure that passage of events in the grand scheme of things: a second is nothing real; a second is an idea. Time just makes things seem further away: there are six traffic lights on the way home, each of which could hold me up for a maximum of thirty seconds: that’s three minutes, bringing my total journey time up to ninety-three minutes, assuming the best of conditions otherwise. One hundred and eighty seconds, essentially wasted. Pointless. To be quickly forgotten. Why can’t people move faster? Why can’t people have the common sense to look before crossing? Why can’t people take a little risk?

If I didn’t measure time, things would just take as long as they took. Things would be simple. Things would be more relaxed: the distinction between haste and speed would be an empty one.

To my delight, everything goes well; and I’m outside home in what is probably a personal best time: it’s seven twenty-five in the evening. Tanya, The Russian Neighbour, is waiting in our shared hallway: my mind races as to work out what it is that she wants, in spite of my all-consuming desire to be inside my apartment, viewing the end result of my work. She pulls me to one side in that typical way in which she always does: the sidewards head-tilt causing her fringe to fall from her eyes, an action performed in unison with a purr always hinting of a faux-desperation. She is a manipulator if nothing else; but her calibre with regard to this is something that is truly incapable of being criticised.

“Hey.”

It wasn’t just the purr which sounded desperate anymore: she looked frail, almost grey in spite of basking in the throw of this dreadful tungsten lighting: even the warm colour cast of the light was insufficient to put even the slightest of colour on the ever sagging skin under her cheekbones; the most gaunt of cheekbones. It was impressive to see this strong woman reduced to a wreck: stress truly is a destroyer of man and woman alike.