Our esteemed Music Director didn't seem too fond of it (shame on him), but one of my favorite releases from the past couple of months is from three ladies known as The New Bloods who have a new record out on Kill Rock Stars called The Secret Life. Let me ask you this, dear reader. Do you like The Raincoats? How about Liliput? ESG? Are you really going to blow my mind & tell me that you, too, are a fan of the woefully overlooked Intima? Then you're a fool if you sleep on this one. Bass, violin, drums, group vocals that swing from shouted to sung - it's enough to make you cream your post-punk jeans.
Proof positive: "Doubles", from The Secret Life.
They're playing in Providence on Sunday at the great as220, so if you're Rhode Island-bound, show some love. And snag the LP when it's back in print at Kill Rock Stars (or be a chump & opt for the digital version).
Showing posts with label post-punk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-punk. Show all posts
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Monday, September 24, 2007
A Post-Punk Post.
It's no secret that I'm quite fond of 70s/80s post-punk in general, so I feel that it is my duty to draw your attention to a swell little album that was just relased & that you should make it your business to check out (and no, I'm not talking about the new Moving Units album, asshole).
The Fire Engines were a Scottish post-punk band in the 1980s who exisited for a staggering eighteen months before calling it quits. We can also blame them for inspiring & unleashing Franz Ferdinand into the world, but that's a different story. The complete collected works of the Fire Engines are now available on one convenient digital package (the anthology Hungry Beat) thanks to Acute Records, who have been consistently reissuing a number of essential & excellent long out-of-print no-wave/post-punk records on CD (I'd particularly suggest checking out their reissue of Glenn Branca & Wharton Tiers amazing 70s no-wave project, Theoretical Girls). Why should you care? For starters, the material on Hungry Beat has never been released on CD in the United States & you'd still be hard pressed to easily find it on any other format elsewhere. But the real reason that this is even worth mentioning is because this band was in-fucking-credible. A mathematical formula would look something like this: The abrasive skronk of James Chance & the Contortions + (the frenetic minimalism of Television x the dark pop sensibilities of the Velvet Underground) + the jagged punk off Richard Hell & the Voidoids = the Fire Engines, roughly. Or you could think of them as the Scottish condensation of every band mentioned in Legs McNeil's 70s punk chronicle Please Kill Me. Either way, they're good enough to overlook the fact that if it weren't for these guys & fellow Scottish 80s post-punk band Josef K, we wouldn't have had to hear Franz Ferdinand's damn "Take Me Out" song a million times over a few years ago. Highly recommended!
The Fire Engines were a Scottish post-punk band in the 1980s who exisited for a staggering eighteen months before calling it quits. We can also blame them for inspiring & unleashing Franz Ferdinand into the world, but that's a different story. The complete collected works of the Fire Engines are now available on one convenient digital package (the anthology Hungry Beat) thanks to Acute Records, who have been consistently reissuing a number of essential & excellent long out-of-print no-wave/post-punk records on CD (I'd particularly suggest checking out their reissue of Glenn Branca & Wharton Tiers amazing 70s no-wave project, Theoretical Girls). Why should you care? For starters, the material on Hungry Beat has never been released on CD in the United States & you'd still be hard pressed to easily find it on any other format elsewhere. But the real reason that this is even worth mentioning is because this band was in-fucking-credible. A mathematical formula would look something like this: The abrasive skronk of James Chance & the Contortions + (the frenetic minimalism of Television x the dark pop sensibilities of the Velvet Underground) + the jagged punk off Richard Hell & the Voidoids = the Fire Engines, roughly. Or you could think of them as the Scottish condensation of every band mentioned in Legs McNeil's 70s punk chronicle Please Kill Me. Either way, they're good enough to overlook the fact that if it weren't for these guys & fellow Scottish 80s post-punk band Josef K, we wouldn't have had to hear Franz Ferdinand's damn "Take Me Out" song a million times over a few years ago. Highly recommended!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)