Calories - Basic Nature

About a month ago, Johnny Foreigner did a gig in Birmingham (and also one in London but that doesn't count because I don't like London) to celebrate the release of their new album. It was a great evening, for a wonderfully small amount of money. One of the several support bands that night was Calories. They were enjoyable, and after the gig I decided to investigate their albums on Spotify. A week or so of listening to nothing else later, I'd bought this (their second and most recent album) direct from their label. It was a bargain £9.50 shipped, and here's a link to it if you're interested. But for now, pictures.

Crazy artwork. There's a lot going on, none of which I totally understand but that's okay 'cause it's pretty.

Now this is something I've never seen before. The inner sleeve (printed with more of the same little pictures from the album cover) has got a little foam disc on it for the CD version of the album to live on. I'm surprised and very impressed that a small label would do something like this, and it's a pleasant alternative to just a download code. Also, the art printed onto the CD matches up with what it covers on the sleeve, which is some quite beautiful attention to detail.

Plain black record, no surprises here. The backs of both the outer and inner sleeves are largely mirrored versions of their respective fronts, which simultaneously is quite cool and hurts my head to look at. Nice. This vinyl version of the record is limited to 500 copies, so I'm surprised they're yet to sell out.

As you may have guessed from my introductory paragraph, I really love this album. It's a noisy rock album, but with the catchy choruses of a pop record. The three-song run of You Could Be Honest, FFWD and Orchard Girls in particular is unbelievably good, and each one has the power to lodge itself into your brain for days at a time. The whole album, though, is a lot of fun and I'm excited to see what they do to follow it. Both of the band's albums are on Spotify, and also their Soundcloud. Go listen.

Frightened Rabbit - A Frightened Rabbit EP

Right. On the 31st of October, Frightened Rabbit's new EP was released on 10" vinyl. If you're a regular reader of this blog, then it should come as no surprise to you that I'd pre-ordered it and 4 days after that it showed up on my doormat. Unfortunately, it's been a bit of a busy month so I've only now gotten round to writing this post up about it. I can assure you, though, it's worth the wait. The EP is still available from Avalanche with a free badge of the artwork (which is where I ordered from - the badge is awesome) so, y'know, you should totally get it.

The artwork's lovely, yet again, isn't it? It's plain and understated, and I love the "banner" style for the band name. Top marks around.

I feel like I'm becoming a bit of a stuck record (to use a delightfully appropriate turn of phrase) when it comes to Frabbit releases, but I don't care - I absolutely love how the band's releases always seem to have consistent artwork. It's just a really nice touch, and the use of the same banner style on the back cover and the record labels fills my heart with happiness. No, really.

Before I talk about the songs, it seems only appropriate that I tell you that you, dear reader, can download this EP for free in exchange for your email address. Follow this link and then you can listen along to your heart's content. The three songs that comprise this EP have been kicking around for a little while, as it was originally released on CD while the band were touring the US and was hosted for streaming purposes... somewhere, I forget exactly where it was. Anyway, I listened to them a few times back then and quite a few more times after the free download became available a couple of weeks before the vinyl release. They're great songs, as I've come to expect from this band. Fuck This Place and The Work both, interestingly, feature guest singers and both of them fit into the Frabbit "sound" really well, although it does take some getting used to hearing another voice alongside Scott's majestic tones. The highlight, though, is definitely Scottish Winds. It's catchy, borderline celebratory and pretty indicative of what Frabbit are "about", as it were. Oh, and as with seemingly everything else the band have released, Scott has written up a track-by-track that is certainly worth a read, so find it here. This release, in case you're the kind of person who's interested, is limited to 500 and I'm glad I own one of them.

Maybeshewill - I Was Here For A Moment, Then I Was Gone

Yes yes yes oh my god yes. After months of Andy telling me I should listen to them, in May of this year I finally gave Maybeshewill a good listen and they promptly took over my heart. Post-rock is, in my opinion, the ultimate revision music. There are minimal lyrics to distract you from whatever you're reading, and the sheer majesty of most post-rock bands make even the most mundane of topics seem enormously important. So over the exam period, I found myself listening to this band an awful lot. I've been looking to pick up their albums ever since then, but only managed to get round to it until last week when I found this (their third album) for £11 on the HMV website (where I inexplicably still get 10% student discount. Bonus). Let's take a look at it, shall we?

I absolutely adore this cover, to the extent that it's probably one of my favourite pieces of album art ever. The vinyl version is actually an extended version of the CD cover (see here) and  it's just so much better. As soon as I saw it, I knew I was going to be buying the vinyl instead of the CD. Outstanding. There are no words on the cover either, which is a lovely touch.

It's a gatefold LP, but there's not much going on in the middle. A whole load of technical details and thanks etc, with a sufficiently muted background to make them readable. Fair enough.

Plain black vinyl, with some fairly subtle labels. The back cover holds little more than the tracklisting, but the visual effect of it is spoiled slightly by the massive white bar with the record label details on it, but I'm really just picking hairs here. Beyond that cover, nothing else really matters.

I'm not going to beat around the bush, I love this band and I love this album. Maybeshewill lie towards the heavier end of post-rock, but incorporate synths and occasionally (though not on this album) some speech samples. So they're a bit like if And So I Watch You From Afar and 65daysofstatic had an illegitimate love-child (if you're a fan of direct band comparisons). I'd like to tell you some highlights of the album but honestly, it's just consistently excellent. The 6-track run in the middle of the album from Red Paper Lanterns to Farewell Sarajevo could be an album on its own and would still be worth as much money as a full album. This is, without a shadow of doubt, one of my top albums of the year. You can stream the entire thing (and both of the band's other albums) from their record label's Bandcamp or on Spotify, which I obviously think you should do. In two months' time, I'll be watching this album being played in full live in Leicester (accompanied by Andy, no less). To say I'm excited is somewhat of an understatement.

Tubelord - My First Castle

As I mentioned in my previous post, I recently bought both versions of the new Tubelord cassette. Yesterday I received an email from the band containing a download link for the songs, which was hugely appreciated and means I can now write about them. Excellent. The cassettes were a fiver each, and are available via the Pink Mist store if you're interested.

The cover is good, if a bit weird. The pastel colours soothe my head, but then I've no idea what's going on above the castle. Is Pinocchio dead? What is Mickey doing? I'll leave these questions open.

What is a nice touch is that there's a tiny version of the band's new logo in the middle of the castle. Subtle, I like it.

Cassettes don't please me too much aesthetically (especially in comparison to records), but the solid colours of both of these are excellent. The cases matching is a nice touch, too.

The tracklisting for these two tapes is slightly unusual. The A-side of each consists of 3 Tubelord songs. First of all we have My First Castle itself, which is an astoundingly good song. Catchy and poppy, it's a pity it's been released a couple of months too late to be a huge summer hit (as I genuinely think it could have been). It brings a smile to your face and although it's a lot more synthesized and radio-friendly than the band's older material, after a few listens it's difficult to care. Ellie Barge, the second track, is much more like the Tubelord of old but with the added synthesized elements of the band's newer songs. It's great. The third track is called Death, and is a fairly uncharacteristic slow(ish) song. It's my least favourite of the three but isn't too bad. There are 6 tracks on the B-side of each tape. They're not songs though. They're poems. Three people contributing two each. I don't know a lot about poetry so I can't really comment in depth on any of the poems, but they're enjoyable and I like that Tubelord were willing to try something a bit different with this release. It'd be better on vinyl though...

Three Trapped Tigers - Route One or Die

This past Wednesday I went to see the magnificent Tubelord in Birmingham in what was one of my favourite gigs in a long while. At the merch table there were a few Tubelord things for sale (including the band's new single on cassette, which I bought both versions of and will post about once I've found a way to listen to them) and also a record box of various Pink Mist releases. In that box I spotted this album, one I've been looking to get for a long while, for the lovely price of £10.

This cover is amazing. It's very distinctive and bright and I loved it from the moment I saw it. There was a t-shirt of this design with the pre-order of the album but it had sold out by the time I saw it, which was annoying. It's also worth mentioning that the album comes in a plastic outer sleeve with the little title label on, which I appreciate a lot.

The paper inner sleeve has this on the front, which looks nice, and recording information and thanks on the back. I like it.

The back cover's got a weird repeated-style font going on. The reverse of the inner sleeve has the same effect. It looks pretty cool, but can be kind of hard to read. Black vinyl, but with absolutely lovely labels. Since Blood and Biscuits is only a small label, it doesn't make sense for them to pay lots for hosting of the tracks and include a specific download code with every copy of the record. Instead, they've very cleverly put all of the albums tracks as a private set on Soundcloud and printed the link to this on the A-side of the label. As anyone who has read this blog before will know, I think records (albums at least) should come with a download code, so credit to Blood and Biscuits for a good way of doing this.

There's a reason I've been after this album for a while. It's spectacular. TTT are an instrumental band, but a very electronic one at that. They're quite heavy but there's a lot of melody in the album. Elements of post-rock and sounds that border on chiptune blend together beautifully for 43 minutes of absolute joy. One of my albums of the year so far, for sure.

It's also worth noting that the album has produced two wonderful videos. The first, for Noise Trade, is a gorgeously-animated affair about hearts and robots. I don't want or need to explain any more.

The second, for Reset, might be my favourite video of all time. It features Matt Berry, of all people, as some kind of world saviour acting against an evil space alien trying to destroy the earth. Exactly. It's 7 minutes long but absolutely worth watching.

Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

I'm pretty late on this one, even by my standards. The only other Arcade Fire album I own is Neon Bible, which is a solid album but never grabbed me all that much. So when this album came out and wasn't on Spotify, I felt no rush to go out and buy it. Last weekend however, my dad and I ventured into Head in Leamington and they had the 12" for a tenner. He offered to buy it for me, and I'll never say no to gift vinyl.

The cover's not bad. Very lo-fi, with a fair amount of film grain and some light leaks up the right side. Lovely. There's 8 different versions of this cover for the CD version apparently, but I'm not sure whether there are any variants to this (the UK & Ireland) version of the 12". Discogs mentions alternate covers for the Europe and US versions, but not for this one, so I'm going to presume this is the only one. Upon seeing them all, it's my favourite of the 8 though which is nice.

Double LP, so it's a gatefold. The inside is fairly sparse, with only a small logo in the bottom right on top of an extended version of what appears to be a photo of the same area as the picture on the front. This means that all the song information and lyrics are printed on the dust sleeves, which is super-cool and actually makes a lot of sense. The lyrics are very readable on the white of the dust sleeves whereas they might not have been overlaid on a picture.

The labels are nice and subtle, continuing the lo-fi nature of the rest of the artwork, and the back cover is the only place apart from the spine that features the album title. The gold text used is far shinier than my poor camera skills could capture, and it looks really good. Here comes my problem though - no download card. It annoys me quite a lot that this record doesn't come with one. This isn't some bedroom label release, this is the new album from a fairly massive band. It will have sold thousands of copies on vinyl at an eye-watering release price of £18. I don't understand why they couldn't put one in, and I resorted to downloading the album from Mediafire so that I'd have a copy to listen to. Morally I think I have the right to do that, but I know it's a bit of a dubious area.

To bring things back onto positives, the album is really really good. I know most of you are probably already aware of this, but it took me by surprise somewhat. I don't think I need to go into that much detail about it, but if you've never listened to it then maybe you should. Arcade Fire are arguably the "indie" (for lack of a better word) band of the moment, and they really stepped their game up after Neon Bible. If they keep going at this rate, the next album will be phenomenal.

Biffy Clyro - Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies

Time to resume the Biffy spree. Living Is A Problem Because Everything Dies (henceforth referred to as LIAPBED for simplicity's sake) was the second single to be taken from Puzzle and peaked at a respectable 19 in the UK singles charts. It's one of the band's more well-known songs and as such gets played live with unerring regularity. I picked up both versions of the single for a measly £2.50 plus shipping from ebay last year, which was a total bargain.

Okay so as with Saturday Superhouse, we have two slightly different covers for the two different versions. I am, unsurprisingly, a big fan of this. The artwork is fairly nice and, as with every release from this album, definitely has the feel of a Storm Thorgerson piece (I don't think I mentioned last time, but he did all the artwork for the Puzzle and Only Revolutions releases. Awesome stuff).

Lovely coloured records. The blue is particularly nice. This time there are pictures of the band inside the gatefold sleeves. They're alright. Not much I can say about them, in truth.

More seemingly pointless numbering. These numbers are low though, so my brain likes them. I don't understand either.

Music-wise, both versions of the single have a radio edit of LIAPBED as their A-side, a radio edit that cuts out ALL of the weird long intro to the song. I love that intro, and thus really dislike the radio edit. The blue version has a track called Loneliness as its B-side. Loneliness is one in a long line of slightly off-kilter Biffy songs, with its jangly guitars and strange lyrics (chiefly, "I have a secret to tell, shit looks like chocolate to me") including some that are ripped directly from other tracks on Puzzle (a theme common to a lot of the B-sides from this era). Indeed, the red version's B-side (the wonderfully titled "Kittens, Cakes and Cuddles") has the word "loneliness" in its chorus. KC&C is a more straightforward Biffy song, but is still pretty good. Unfortunately, my rips of both songs are pretty poor so I don't listen to either as much as I arguably should. A shame.

Crywank - James Is Going To Die Soon

A guy I know called James started writing acoustic music a little while ago, under the unusual moniker of Crywank. He recorded an album about a year or so ago I think, and now it's been released on a limited run of tapes. I bought one. Here it is:

Yeah, Javier Bardem! The release of the tape saw 13 different covers done of various white males, with 4 copies of each cover done. I chose this one because Javier is an absolute badass. All of the covers are black and white and look really good, you can see a picture of them all here.

Cassettes aren't as nice to look at as a lovely record, but this is all white with no writing on it at all and looks neat. It also came with a little folded lyric sheet, which is nice.

The music itself is pretty good. Some heartfelt acoustic music with pretty good lyrics in parts. The recording quality isn't the best, but it does the job. The entire album is up for free download here or on a pay-what-you-want from Bancamp here, and I encourage you to at least give it a listen 'cause the first 3 tracks are genuinely awesome. If you're really interested, there are still a few of the cassettes available here for the lovely price of £3.50 including shipping. Rad.