TRIPLE NEGATIVE
PRECIOUS WASTE IN OUR WAKE
PENULTIMATE PRESS | LP | £16.99
Completely in love with this record! An explosive siege of ideas, "Precious Waste In Our Wake" is the debut LP from London based three-piece Triple Negative. Ringing like a LOUD warning shot to any cumbersome emulators of classics and those whomst would obey the rulebooks of the arthritic avant-garde, passages of abstract, energetic garage-psych and a previously unimaginable range of unexplored tone and texture (both electronic and acoustic) are weaved together with sensitive, understated jumble-sale genius!!
Perhaps some local, vivacious gig-go'ers may already be familiar with these folk's increasingly frequent live performances, however none of us fools at the shoppe have actually pulled the finger out to catch them in action yet (apparently we are all too busy keeping up to date with ham-acted, scripted-on-the-bog British crime dramas - fuck sake!) but they are meant to be PULVERISING.
Only on hearing this monster LP in full now do we TRULY realise the errors of our ways - while equally as non-negotiable as their 7" single from late last year (also on the mighty PP imprint), they here get a chance to gather speed when set free to stretch their legs across a full length trip. A disorderly mind-heist from the very start, the band steer an almost formless vehicle daringly close to the edge of total destruction, the rhythms of “Precious Waste...” strengthen and decay across carefully considered, pasted together songs, with erratic, juxtaposed (and surprisingly TUNEFUL) elements working their way in and out of this idiosyncratic update on some of the finest Xpressway-style pile ups.
The delicate, dust-disturbing piano on “Nothing Is Possible” and the glass-cut basslines on “Destroy” permeate swarms of phasing drum-machine metronomy, with tape churned vocals and bouzouki cascading gracefully in every direction like a falling leaf over the creaking, bric-a-brac textures. Shamanistic levels of enchantment throughout and an ectopic groove beating at the heart of the whole album, the subtle drifts come with a poise that recalls the finest moments on that Maciunas Ensemble collection from last year or indeed the disintegrative NZ death-march of The Dead C’s “Armed Courage”, every ounce of this trio equipped with jaws capable of delivering the same level of writhing combustible haunting BITE and rhythm as This Heat.
An endearingly honest and outrageously artful sense of seemingly forgetful prowess - having played together for seventeen years (!) and only now releasing their debut album, “Precious Waste..” really gives weight to the idea that it can take a long time to sound like yourself. Triple Negative's entirely unique breed of dynamic chaos providing the thrill and bewilderment of observing that which is so close to collapse, evolve into a fully realised slab of INFINITE potential.
Favourite thing we’ve heard in ages, cannot recommend highly enough. Edition of 280.
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NO TITLE
SÄHKÖ RECORDINGS | LP | £14.99
Back in stock! Unless you're in a bad way with some heavy-handed debt collectors that favour the concrete-socks treatment, this 12” is WITHOUT DOUBT the coldest, deepest bath you should ever be taking! Submersible, armour plated drones built around a sub-zero skeleton of Sahko’s signature, almost architectural minimalism. Nearly an hour of unbeatable negative buoyancy that feels like you are floating down a seabed pipeline. Might or might not be by Kevin Drumm (genuinely no idea if that is true or not - so don’t go spreading!). Amazing sleeve and info on Greenland sharks - into it!
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JAMES RUSHFORD
THE BODY'S NIGHT
BLACK TRUFFLE | LP | £22.99Outstanding LA noir from James Rushford, who had a hand in two enduring Kye belters: Manhunter (his 2013 collab with old mucker Joe Talia) and the Food Court LP (with Talia and Francis Plagne). Actually this record tickles a that hasn’t been tickled since Plagne’s own Moss Trumpet (behave!) offering up a tour de force of contemporary electroacoustic world-building. Its mood is intense but never overwrought, delivering a good dose of the numinous, occult-dabbling decadence suggested by the incredible supine serpent-woman cover painting, but ultimately heading somewhere more pointedly futuristic, cold, metallic – organic instrumentation (piano, organ, flutes, viola, voice) ceding ever more ground to melancholic Terminator synths and bombed-out, head-crushing machine-ambience, as if Sarah Connor bodged the ol’ time travel and found herself stuck in Edwardian London, caning laudanum in a futile effort to suppress those pesky Judgement Day visions of genocidal cyborgs on the rampage and downtown LA in flames. As it happens the Australian Rushford made The Body’s Night in LA (aha!), and perhaps I’m pushing the pulp-cinematic comparisons too far when I say there are passages here that seem to take Elliot Goldenthal’s brooding, steel-grey scoring of Heat and run with it, but hey that’s how it feels right now. Rushford's stated influences show more discernment on his part than we can muster: contemporary composers Klaus Lang and Jakob Ullmann, '80s purveyors of bedroom electronics like DDAA, and the totalising nihilistic sound design of black metal. Complex, poised, meticulous, open to a multitude of interpretations (art baby!), this is just an outstanding record, the real deal, new music that explores the outer limits of medium and palette, and with depth of feeling equal to its depth of learning. DO NOT MISS.
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Beltorrr '82 West German rough n tumble, originally released on the cult Pogar label. Five track'er of raging, youthful spirited distort with the two longer tracks opening up into passages of melodic, malnourished fuzzzzzzz that feel less built for flailing limbs and more blurry, introspective zone-outs.
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PETE UM
AS YOU WERE
TIP TOP | LP | £14.99
New album from sectionable Cambridge pop-surrealist Pete Um, a world unto himself but also a standard-bearer for the kind of heroic DIY befuddlement and unflinching self-analysis that Deep Freeze Mice, Mick Hobbs, Robert Storey and the Homosexuals minted. Um’s sprawling catalogue is a beast that can’t be tamed or reasoned with, but it’s endlessly rewarding: time and time again he nails that going-mad-in-the-potting-shed-ness that is the historic, and perhaps eternal, English condition – what it is, indeed, to be a little bit ‘Fucked In The Head’ (as the title of one of the songs here has it). Where so much contemporary stuff in this vein sounds hopelessly mannered and contrived and untouched by actual real-world experience of being on the outside of ANYTHING, As You Were sounds fully free and unforced, hopelessly alienated from the thing we call society and GLAD of it, and even at its most demented and disorderly your man sounds like he’s wrenching everything he possibly can out of his primitive keyboard-and-mic set-up cos it’s all he’s bloody well got, not cos he's self-consciously imposing limitations on himself. While the influence of 80s UK squat-whimsy looms large, we’re reminded too of the synth-fuelled early-noughts art-spazz of the The Soft Pink Truth and Safety Scissors, and, more than anything or one, R. Stevie Moore – unexpectedly powerful and unforgettable songs emerging unexpectedly out of awkward, enervating loops and the more obviously pranky vignettes. ‘The Director’ is my song of the year so far, NO WORD OF A LIE: a warped, wistful sequel to Patrick Selinger’s ‘Businessman’. And ‘Ed Sheeran' is a casual takedown of the wee guitar-slinging eunuch, sure, but it’s also a long hard truthful stare at the plight of a more marginal musician: “When I was a kiddie / I wanted to be a star / I play in local venues / I guess I didn’t get that far…I don’t want no fame / It ain’t strictly pleasure / but I still gotta do it…” YES PETE xxx
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