RAKTA – 4 BRAZILIAN GIRLS PLAY GOTHIC PSYCHEDLIC ROCK WITH TRIBAL RHYTHMS

+ GUSTAVE TIGER + WORMKIDS + NORMS

DEC 5  20:00 > BUDAPEST > MÜSZI > TICKET: 1000

RAKTA EURO TOUR

What if some crazy guys from the Finnish countryside (under the not so extraordinary name ‘The Achtungs‘) decide to play raw, shitty but even more intense garage punk than the good old Reatards? Well, if The Achtungs were only half as great as they are, they would still make their entry to my top punk records list of 2014 with their Full of hate LP (from Going Underground Records). Personally, I have always been fond of The Reatards but I think Jay Reatard’s songwriting skills were much more prominent on his later solo albums. So, what struck me about The Achtungs is that they preserve the overdriven garage punk sound but at the same time they manage to write really catchy songs – and by this I mean great and painful ones. In a quite thorough interview with singer Joni at It’s Psychedelic Baby he talks about the beginnings as simple as possible: ‘In the summer of 2010, I was really bored with the band I was in, Pill Poppers, and I wanted a band that sounded like The Reatards.  So, I formed one’.

It probably makes no sense to tell any more about them….in case the concept ‘great songs with a ferocious sound’ does not impress you, then why are you reading this anyway? Haha. But seriously, give them a listen. I think both of their releases have already been sold out, so we can only hope for a reissue or something… but as long as we have such great bands around, there’s no need to worry about punk at all.

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Bim Thomas, the drummer from blues punk duo Bassholes (were a main influence for The Black Keys), some years ago he makes excellent harsh blues music under the name of OBNOX. His brand new song, Infinite Trash

His latest album was released this year on 12XU Records (US)

Soul Power, debut album of Curtis Harding (ex-Cee-lo Green), member of Night Sun, Black Lips’ garage soul side project. Black Lips members took part in making this album too. Soul, 60’s RnB, easy 70s disco feeling, garage rock. I know two who flew to Seattle from New York to see him

Burger (US) and Anti-Records (EU, AUS)

Euro Tour Nov Dec

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The Miseries, dutch singer’n’songwriter Tim Knoll‘s punky garage rock band, debut single

Excelsior Recordings (NL)

4 girls from Ex-Cult, Manatees, Toxie, Coasting are Nots, synth-punk, Memphis, Goner Records, Decadence

from the album We Are Nots

New Zealander punkers Cool Runnings are touring in the US, it has been a good occasion for a new video, produced and directed by Spike Jonze…

Blister

from digital album I Hate It Here

Rock? Yes. Indie? Absolutely. Punk? Of course. Parquet Courts is a punk band, but an Exploited fan spits on it. The music of Content Nausea album is a mix of Velvet Underground and Fall under pseudonym of Parkay Quarts. It’s a Parquet Courts’ side project.

on What’s Your Rupture Records? (US). In Europe it’s available on Rough Trade (UK)

Parkay Quarts Euro Tour in Nov

Danceable noisy electronic beats by Martial Canterel, aka Sean McBride, who is one half of synth-pop duo Xeno & Oaklander. His new album bears very strange title: „Gyors, Lassú”. For the majority of the Universe: it’s in Hungarian; pronunc: diorsh, lushew; means: quick, slow. Sean is a New Yorker, he also loves our hometown, and now living in a small town in Campania, Teano. The album is about these cities, and the wanderings between these. Funny that sometimes he writes in Hungarian on his fb page.

On the cover there is a figure from the so-called Hungarian deck of card: Stüszi vadász (Stüssi hunter), otherwise Tökfilkó, which means Blockhead in the vernacular. Strange fact that on the cards the depicted characters and scenes are taken from Friedrich Schiller’s William Tell. The Swiss figures substitute for Hungarian historical heroes and scenes, because at the time of birth of card (around 1835), Hungary was one province of the Hapsburg Empire, and there was hard censorship.

One of the seven fundamental principles in the ancient Hindu scince of health is the RAKTA i.e. Blood. This has been choosen by 4 Brazilian girls for their progressive deathrock band

debut 7″ by La Vide Es Un Mus (UK), Dama da Noite / Nada Nada Discos (Brazil), 540 Records (US)

I can’t find their Euro tour dates nowhere on the net, so here are:

Tovább / Read more »

New York City is a world of shadows, thieves and con men, its chilling concrete landscapes are a fitting filmic backdrop for the aural futuristic pleasures of NOIR, a band whose deep electronic rhythms fuel darkened beats that conjure stark cinematic images from yesteryear merged with the cold machinery of the future. Conceptualized by vocalist Athan Maroulis, veteran of the pioneering electronic industrial act Spahn Ranch, NOIR is a sensuous electronic return to form for Maroulis, who also fronts dark cabaret legends Black Tape For a Blue Girl. The result was the 2013 critically acclaimed release Darkly Near. It all sounds like revealing his deepest inner thoughts transposed into electronic grace, musical poetry and simply finesse. NOIR’s latest release RE:MIT:TENT offers 20 remixes of songs from Darkly Near featuring a disparaging list of names from all over the electronic music field including ManMadeMan, Assemblage 23, Dead Voices On Air, Ludovico Technique, Decoded Feedback and many others. (Metropolis Records, US)

A read along 7” book/vinyl called ‘What Did the Hippie Have in His Bag?’ Internationally renowned sleeve artist and illustrator Nick Edwards (4AD, XL) went wild with Cornershop’s Tjinder Singh’s quirky lyrics & together they have created a wonderful world of mountains, spacecraft, dragons, Kurt Vonnegut… needless to say this is not your everyday journey. Original, Colourful, Educational, Singh-alongable, Memorable, Funkyful, and of course Collectable. (Ample Play Records, UK)

SCIENCE FICTION PARK BUNDERSREPUBLIK

West-German home recordings from the 80s. Compiled by German sound futurist Felix Kubin. This eccentric compilation features 25 rare and mostly unheard tracks by bands like Plastiktanz, Neros Tanzende Elektropäpste, chbb, Holger Hiller and Pyrolator, as well as several one hit wonders by the rural tape label Pissing Cow Tapes.

In Germany especially, that neurotic country whose dark Nazi past and subsequent East/West division filled its closet with skeletons, the electro-industry’s advance falls on fertile ground. The four-track tape studio becomes the medium of the collective unconscious; becomes the embrasure, the lighting rod and the magnetic witness to the fears of an imminent nuclear war. They are eruptions out of the crater of a society that had reached a deadlock during the so-called German Autumn with its failed RAF movement. Everyone was waiting… But for what? For the end of the world, approaching via an insane arms race? A new youth movement? A new kind of ice cream?
In their freshly established home studios the protagonists practice the new underground music, the “undirected aggression of liberated sounds”. Everything that isn’t nailed or riveted down is used as an instrument: baking trays, cartons, room lamps, toys, wooden flutes, whistles, cans, trays, record players, televisions, a doorbell, a telephone. Out of the living rooms of the nation drones an obsession with noise, sparing not even the children. (Finders Keepers Records, UK)

The debut LP of The No Tomorrow Boys (<< listen!) from Portland. Wild’n’frantic rock’n’roll. Sounding like the rabid love child of Little Richard and The Cramps with a healthy dose of Rip Off Records garage gunk shot straight to the jugular. (Hound Gawd Records, Germany)

Dark Entries and Honey Soundsystem (US) present Patrick Cowley and Jorge Socarras „Catholic” 2LP. Featuring over 80 minutes of music, never before released on vinyl, this compilation contains two bonus tracks not on the CD.

Perhaps one of the most revolutionary and influential people in the cannon of disco music, Patrick Cowley created his own brand of Hi­NRG dance music coined „The San Francisco Sound.” He moved to San Francisco and met Jorge Socarras in 1973. Patrick, who played drums, guitar and keyboards, provided the perfect match for Jorge’s vocal talents. Between 1975 and 1977 they recorded an album’s worth of material. In 1979, the duo would re­record some of the “Catholic” songs with Patrick’s newly accumulated equipment.  “Catholic” is a genre­bending concept album that ranges from minimalistic proto­techno to synth­driven post­punk, pre­dating the dance punk acts LCD Soundsystem and The Rapture by almost 30 years. Influenced by Tomita, Wendy Carlos, the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music, “Catholic” fills in the gaps between these artists and preempts bands like Talking Heads, Units, The Human League or Chris & Cosey. Patrick forges his unique electronic sound from his collection of synthesizers, modified guitars and self­constructed equipment while Jorge’s vocals go from hypnotic to camp, singing about gay love juju and tackling classics by Donovan and Stoller & Leiber. Soundclips

Electro-punk Swiss one-man band Urban Junior is moving somewhere between Quintron and Digital Leather (he said: D.A.F. meets The Sonics).

„Stehaufmannchen” and „Jetz” from his new concept album „Dr.S & Mr.P”

on Voodoo Rhythm Records

Story: Mr. P(rimitive), hyperactive, apathetic, addicted to sex, vice and full attention is being hunted to death by Dr. S(ensitive), his inner voice. Of course Mrs. L(ove) is involved on Mr. P’s Hellride to insanity.

Mr U. started his music career as a member of pop group HNO in the early 2000s. He has turned himself inside out in 2005 with his first album Music For The Asses.