NoNewWaveNoFun

    Campfire Social (Photo by Holly Mason) It's the third month of Lockdown here in the UK and the seemingly never-ending nature of it all has had effects of all of us. I'm sick to the back teeth of talking about it, but here goes:  Personally, I've found this one tougher than I expected. Being stuck in without much interaction at the height of winter is not what we're wired to do as Human Beings; I could feel my mental health grasping at straws. In February, I got approached by a well known Music review site to join their ranks, before realising it's model charged bands and artists to get reviewed and paid it's reviewers for little more than a few lines of good copy - In effect, payola. The fact I considered it, if only for a couple of days, did not help.  It got to the point a couple of weeks ago where I found myself on the brink of pulling the plug on this blog entirely. Something I started as a means to sharing music I love had become yet another

Is it that time of month already? Apparently so! It sneaks up so quickly on us all, I swear time gets shorter the older you get - not that I have much concept of time these days. I don't know about you, but the only reason I know it's still February is that Valentine's Day was recent and my Birthday is round the corner (*Note* It's early March for fans of buying vinyl records as presents for people they don't know..). It's not a particularly important Birthday this year in terms of it being a nice round number or a signifier of life beginning, as the last one was. Showing my age they eh? Own it Stephen.. OWN IT! Anyway, enough of the kind of middle-aged rambling usually reserved for a  LCD Soundsystem single - let's get on with the good stuff. Submissions Hold is our monthly section highlighting four of the best submissions received by the blog or that we stumbled upon during our adventures in sound. Last month we had a wonderfully mixed bag fr

                                          Something new for you here at NoNewWaveNoFun,  a slight change of medium - it's the message don't you know! Yes, we've decided to host a series of video interviews with some of the bands or artists that we've featured on the blog so far. We get to know them better, what makes them tick and what would light up their Musical Heaven or terrorise them in Musical Hell.                                             Hall of Mirrors by Cross Wires First up is the lead singer of East End Post-Punks Cross Wires - Mr Jono Chapman! Those of you who have been reading the blog for some time will re-collect that one of the first singles I reviewed was their November 2020 single ' Hall of Mirrors' after them being one of the first outside submissions I received. Here's what I made of it at the time:   Cross Wires  have managed to strike a good balance on ' Hall of Mirrors ' - especially considering the time taken to record the

    Campfire Social (Photo by Holly Mason) NoNewWaveNoFun favourites Campfire Social  return with a video for their new single ' It's Not Goodbye (To Those We Left Behind', released today. The single is the bands' first release since August 2020 single ' Awake In The Wake Of A Wave' and will feature on the 6 track ' Everything's Changed'  E.P, scheduled for release in March on Mai 68 Records. You can buy the single at their Bandcamp page below.  2019 saw the band set sail as guests of Belle and Sebastian along with Mogwai, The Buzzcocks, Teenage Fanclub et al on a jaunt round the Med - a true highlight in their blossoming career. 2020 was set to be busy year for them too with a slot confirmed for the SXSW Festival in Austin; before the obvious curtailed their plans. They'll be performing live virtually for the world's largest showcase festival between March 16th-20th.                                                .  It's Not Goodbye (To

                                                                             The word prolific is often overused in the descriptive sense; an average goal-scorer in the Premier League goes on a hot streak and suddenly they're a "prolific marksman". It's also a word that appeals to those tasked with articulating the requisite hyperbole to describe those with a knack for consistency in the creative arts.   Mark.E. Smith  of  The Fall  was often lumped with 'prolific' because he was:  a)  Notoriously vague and hard to pin down.  b) Incredibly difficult in interviews and  c) Producing album after album of cryptic, often flawed but often GENIUS, work that defies conventional categorisation.  Claire Welles is certainly an artist who can could afford a wry smile whilst reading that opening paragraph. Unlike Mark was, Claire is not so hard to track down and is much more accommodating - but what she does share with him is the consistent and challenging body of work th

It's that time of month for Submission Hold - the second in our series of mini reviews of submissions received here at  NoNewWaveNoFun HQ  . Once again, I've spent hours trawling through the seemingly never-ending submissions we get sent through the Contacts section of the blog and on our social media pages ( Facebook here ,  Twitter here ,  Instagram here ) to find 4 of the best that we've received from all over the world. Last month's Submission Hold proved to be incredibly popular - in fact it is the most popular piece on the blog so far, with several hundred views to date. The artists from Vol.1 were   sleeplore from Pennsylvania, ya from Spain (via Russia) and two from the UK - County Durham's Vice Killer and Kent's Uncool Paul.     It's all the more reason to keep sending those new singles and E.Ps to the blog, as we're willing to listen to whatever you have to offer and who knows- it could be your music getting featured next month.

                                                                                                                                                            Pushpin - Folds There's an inherent problem that repeatedly rears it's head with doing this kind of blog. Taking as many open submissions as I do, you do find the same sounds popping up again and again. Now don't get me wrong; I've always been a fan of the Post Punk bands of the late 70s and early 80s - in fact, bands like Gang of Four, Joy Division and The Fall have created some of my favourite songs and albums of the era - but bloody Post Punk is everywhere.   Band becomes successful with single based around a recycled Wire riff and suddenly everyone is in on the act - it's a tale as old as time; cynical? MOI?!?! Some of the bands who are throwing their music in the Post Punk ring have something interesting enough about them to stand out from the rest. East London's Cross Wires  are a good example (see li

       Green Man Festival  Here we go again on our own. The UK has entered it's third national lockdown in under a year to try and contain the new variant of Covid 19 and once again we find ourselves yearning for life to return to some sort of normalcy - it's even got me paraphrasing Whitesnake.  The unwelcome, but absolutely inevitable news got me thinking and dreaming of a return to my happy place. Some of you will find solace in dreaming of golden-sanded beaches with miles of coastline as far as the eye can see, swimming pools with a good book and endless top-ups of cocktails on demand; the sun burning you to a crisp with scantily-clad Europeans giving you the eye. Not for me brother.  Every year since 2015, My partner   and I spend our escapist long weekend at the Green Man Festival in the midst of the Brecon Beacons - a National Park in South Wales . We've both been avid festival goers in our youth with plenty of V, Reading, Glastonbury, Latitude, Bestival