NoNewWaveNoFun

                                 📷 Derek Bremner Let me tell you about a small city on the North Wales/North West of England border with a big ol' history. Chester is an ancient city; the Romans had Deva (as it was known back then) as their 'Capitol of the North'. It's location was key - the walls that overlook the city allowing visibility to help ward off the rebellious Welsh from attacking. The Amphitheatre can still be visited, despite the short-sightedness of the Council, allowing half of it to be built on in the early 20th Century.  That's where the history lesson ends.  The music scene in Chester is a small, yet passionate one. The city often gets overlooked for touring shows, lying as it does almost equidistant between Liverpool and Manchester; but things have certainly improved in recent years. Venues such as The Live Rooms, Telford's Warehouse and Alexander's have continued to bring great live music to the area; the addition of  St Mar

                                 Buckley Tivoli 1995 The popular psychological convention is that the first 8 are the formative years of a child's life. It's in these years that a child experiences rapid levels of learning; their cognitive, social and emotional landscape shifts dramatically. Often in this period our preferences and fears can crystalise and shape our character and personality - it's often where we develop a sense of belonging.  For me personally, it was only when I moved to Buckley in North Wales in the late 1980s (I'm not certain exactly when, but I was small, probably 6-7 years old) that belonging became a reality. I was a British Army brat, I'd travelled with my family to various different bases following my Dad's job; from Belgium to Germany (pre Berlin Wall coming down) to Surrey, before the eventual relocation to Buckley - My Mother's hometown. It was here where my life became more normalised and consistent, wher

  Returning with a new E.P ' The Dark Arts Will Break Our Hearts', Chicago's Black Magick Marching Band create a tantalising blend of Psych and 60s Jangle Pop. Chicago native Ryan Doyle Elward took a listen. With vocal timbre a bit like BRONCHO and an overall sound that is 60s folk-rock (yes, a capacious portmanteau) first pulled through the 90s, Black Magick Marching Band here falls somewhere closer to The Byrds grafted over Brian Jonestown Massacre . There is a dynamic between the consistent format-for-every-song chord playing and the soloed notes which is eerily sedating. A mesmerizing pull of attention to something out of place, like a too well-lit spot of sun in a graveyard. And while those arpeggiated guitar parts are a little fussy at times, it is that part of the music which does well in dressing up the lyrics with optimism. A pleasant trap to disguise the conversation which pervades each track with dark themes of futility and the inescapable aspects of life and

    Green Man Festival line up The thought of going to a festival barely seemed real at the start of the summer; certainly not with the more cautious Welsh government's approach to allowing large scale events. Two test events in Liverpool, a reduced capacity Download and then a full  Latitude  seemed to show a positive summer for festivals.  However, the lack of convincing and thorough insurance policies and the fact all three test events were run by Festival Republic, ensured many small independent events struggled to get off the ground.                      📷 Natalie Wright But as England removed social distancing measures and the legal requirement to wear masks in public places, Wales held off as the Delta variant began to take hold - things looked bleak for Green Man. But then came the news that fans of the festival were waited for - The Welsh government relaxed the rules and it was on! It had a full line up(see above) and all with a month to spare.    Earlier in

T he long-awaited new album from 60s Pop enthusiast Joe Kane a.k.a The Poppermost, came out on July 30th. Ryan Doyle Elward takes us through this playful new release.   With 'Hits to Spare', The Poppermost boost flashbacks of bright orange and all other casts of psychedelic colors (well, pre-psychedelic technically), returning to an era bygone, of  Rickenbackers and biting, bare reverb.  There is a surrealness by this design, an occurrent awe and almost bewilderment to the quality of replication as The Poppermost (don’t think they but actually he, just him, Joe Kane ) are able to suspend time and place,to be for a moment transmutable in all but skin as a result of such an authentic and total reconstruction of ‘60s sound.   But out of the early part of that decade it is The Beatles specifically who are here reanimated, where for each of the album’s songs or intra-song elements there are near- Beatles equals: observe the likeness between ‘Ticket to Ri

          Future Colours I'm not going to go on about it much, in fact, we'll gloss over it. There's been a large amount of football since I last posted and England seemed to have done quite well in those matches. GOOOAAAAALLLL. In fact, they're in a final for the first time in 55 years - you may have heard.  All of this was achieved whilst embracing the works of Marx and Engels and posing a threat to the fabric of society with their symbolic knee gestures. I'm really surprised anyone from the British establishment have been going to the matches - they do realise their heads are going to be paraded on spikes down Wembley  way in the newly-named Sterlingrad,  IF the result goes the right way don't they? I'm not going to go on about it. SHHIIINNNPAAADDS.  The team have been scoring lots of goals and getting rather fortunate penalties, whilst the ever-sporting fans have been booing National Anthems, laughing at crying kids on big screens

Manchester's Absurdist Prog Pop explorers  Legs on Wheel are back with their new 'Idelia' E.P; three tracks that straddle multiple genres. Ryan Doyle Elward  guides us through it.   ‘ Milktop Mandy’ opens Idelia E.P with incipient psilocybin affective, an unfurling dream surging into a 70s prog-rock collage; a careening freakshow caravan destined for adventure, and thus an anomaly compared to the remaining material from Legs on Wheels’ latest release, since the next two tracks don’t sustain the same sort of pace and direction in an exploration of the hot sonic landscape under the guidance of a rather puerile narrative as established in their antecedent. ‘ Move Closer ’ is smooth, cool tones from mouth to mind with a basis of funk for the body in a way that is Steve Miller Band , that is Steely Dan . For some these are jams, but for another majority, songs of the kind elicit little more than a shrug.                                     Legs on Wheels Funk/jazz

Pop can be a dirty word to some people; especially those of us who've willingly jumped head-first onto the murky depths of Rock n' Roll's sordid waters. I'm not going to deny, I certainly had that attitude when I was younger and was obsessed by the lure of Punk Rock revisionism. Strangely though, perhaps due to some mellowing with age, Pop has become much more interesting to my ears - and seemingly - much more subversive. An artist that can be considered to be producing such subversive and interesting music is ya. ya is the work of Anna Akopyan, who is originally from Russia, but is now based in Spain. I first heard ya during the early days of the blog and was intrigued by the eclectic nature of her music; we featured her on our first  Submission Hold  section soon after.  Releasing her debut album ' CHANGE UR BODY' in January, ya has produced a new video for a track that is one of the highlights of the album:  'Movie' - it's a song that

              Vice Killer - Alone, In This World E.P I'm not entirely sure I'm convinced by the concept of an 'Addictive Personality'. I mean - I have one if you're going by the true definition - but I don't think that definition is as set in stone as it seems. I read ' The Psychopath Test ' by Jon Ronson several years ago and that provided me with the inspiration behind my thinking. In the book, Ronson explores the nature of how Psychologists score psychopathy on a spectrum on which we all score; perhaps raising the possibility that can change throughout life. Is it possible that addiction has the same type of spectrum? Why am I asking this? Well, I've just given up smoking. I haven't had a cigarette in over a month now, and if truth be told I don't miss it. The only time I'm tempted is if I have a drink and that's not a regular occurrence now either; perhaps my propensity towards addiction has shifted.  I'm probably

   Mondo Trasho - Pure Trash By now, it's entirely possible that we could of all re-written the lyrics to  Ian Dury's  sardonic classic  'Reasons to be Cheerful'  over and over again - and that's just since the turn of the year. Uncertainty has entered into our lives again just as it looked like the corner had been turned without the need to look back, new variants of Covid threaten to de-rail the full scale opening of UK P.L.C once again. For music of course, this continued alternative version of ' Groundhog Day'  could completely ruin the entire summer. Festivals are dropping one by one again, despite the successful pilot events in  Liverpool,  with the lack of tangible Insurance policies making it increasingly impossible for the independents to have a safety net to fall back on; indoor live venues watch on with baited breath. Thankfully, new music keeps coming out, whether or not it can be played live without social distancing.  Mondo Trasho 

  With their 'Live From Toad Hall' E.P arriving on June 4th, Ryan Doyle Elward  listens to the current single ' Bring Out Your Dead'  and give us his thoughts.   The latest single ' Bring Out Your Dead' from New Zealand based Horror in Clay is in many ways a shimmering memory of  My Bloody Valentine's ' Loveless' or  ' Souvlaki' by Slowdive . Steady, droning lyrics float on big and washy fuzz, finishing off with a broadcast bit that’s at once both sobering and yet further trance inducing. That’s all to say: they’ve forgotten nothing and then some in their recollection of the shoegaze-days atmospheric and that soundscape for a mind adrift. Horror in Clay confounds expectations with their new single, given that it is in such stark contrast to their 2019 self-titled E.P, which was resplendent in its bleakness. Full of tracks truly intoxicating in their unease, the album is jarring and composite, binding adjacent genres like the stitch work