Outsideleft Week in Music for Ye of Good Faith

Can such a thrilling perfect pop reinterpretation, to myne ears, of the shitstory of west coat vocal rock take over the world? Should. Cameron Winter is epic at it. He leads the Geese. And now this. See him in a Hackney church hall at the end of April. The 25th is near the end. I would if I were you.

Ushering in a 5th LP, 'Charge of the Love Brigade' (although the fourth, 'A Protest Against Sound' in a protest against sound was entirely silent, still counts mightily), this a supremely accessible version of the story of rocknroll me thinks. Ian Svenonious, founder of Nation of Ulysses, the Make Up and probably many more, charts  and chats about the offers, the biz, this rocknroll life, resisting the sell out, over barely there guitars and humming synths. The synths hum the more than most and do little else while doing absolutely everything for me. As perfect a record as you will hear. If you ever wonder why you've got your shit job instead of dedicating yourself to a life of career moves — remember they don't drug test, don't even enforce their already lax mental hygiene policies, and at least you don't have a dog tag lanyard that someone will take back when you're dead to them. Escape-ism, Ian aside, they're what sounds like a band of machines for sure and probably require less onerous terms to tour. 

Superior synth and vocal item from Polo & Pan. You can either get very excited by it. Or not. Your call. Do the French just have a knack for gently swirling cinematic in scope synths? Yes they do.

It's such a beautiful thing when despite myself, I quite like something. This has great jaunty stab at making jangly guitar pop relevant again. Millions of fans can be wrong of course. But maybe this time not so much. Good-Oh. Go Monmouthshire! 

Swanning around pop music can be a delight even when you're pretty sure you've heard every element before. As Frank Carson might've said, it's the way you tell them. Float has everything a soft bluesy pop soul song might but then way more. Plumbing pleasant depths with exquisite debts.

Blamat is an anglo balearic island label intent on redefining what constitutes musical entertainment, marginally, at least. I like it. Even then they say that Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, and Hahn Rowe have produced an album that sounds like nothing they’ve released before. As a trio, "We’re coming from three different schools,” Stephen Vitiello says: "Sound art, art rock, and punk rock." He ain't wrong. It's all here whether you recognise it or not.

Now this is more like it!  I felt that their previous outing 'La Jetee' was muddily recorded and lacked something, but ÜLV have certainly redeemed themselves here with 'Your Guitar's Too High'.  We can all identify with the cringe of embarrassment we feel when we see a guitar strapped way up in the players armpit.  Let me just say 'Haircut 100' and you will instantly get my point.  Only Joy Division could really carry it off, and that was only because Peter Hook wore his bass slung really, really low as a counterpoint.  This has an absolute killer bass line and at two and a half minutes, punches you in the face, then walks out the door before you can pick yourself up off the floor.

Solid, solid, solid. Like the core of a gaseous planet. Sure the outside is all radioactive clouds and shimmering lights, but deep in there, where that throb is coming from, is a stone core drawing you into it. 

Recorded at the Volksbühne in Berlin in 2005 as part of a series of live events curated by the band, this rendition of ‘Hamburger Lady’, originally recorded for their 1978 album, 'DOA: The Third & Final Report', is now 20 years old and is taken off an 11 track live album that was part of Mute's now sold out 'TG Berlin' box set.  Mute are certainly squeezing every last drop out of archive TG material from down the years.  Every blurble and bloop is pushed out in a deluxe format to the faithful to relieve them of their cash. 'Hamburger Lady' was a creepy revelation at the time it was first issued (1978). Part industrial, part horror soundtrack, it set the standard for both in the following years.  But as years go by, it is fair to re-appraise those moments.  Do they stand the test of time?  Based on this performance, the music absolutely does, sounding every bit as unsettling as it did first time round, the vocals a bit less so (Genesis was a flat, if distinctive, singer at best).  There is zero stagecraft involved in most TG performances either, save a few of the more extreme early ones. All you get on the video here are a bunch of people standing and sitting behind laptops or twanging vaguely away at processed guitar or blowing on a trumpet, whilst a spangly skirted Genesis monotones the lyrics.  Having said that, this still brings a chill even now.

Wet Leg have abandoned the Chaise Longue that helped them win a shelf of awards in 2022-23, and taken to the boxing ring. Here on the canvas they don't want love, they "just wanna fight!". It's not the most convincing of switches and begs the question as to whether the subject of this new ire is also the owner the aforementioned casting couch. Whichever, 'Catch These Fists' bounces along nicely with a hummable dischordancy that harkens back to The Raincoats and early Devo - never a bad thing. Will it be sufficient to reboot a career kept on hold during 2024? Their new album 'Moisturizer' due out in July should answer that question. 

If there was such a thing as Dance Goth (there probably is, I'm sure), then The Birthday Massacre will be sitting at the top of that particular tree.  It is unusual to describe Goth fare as uplifting, but The Birthday Massacre, despite their name, are exactly that.  This is not your usual dystopian sub HM, or gloomy Cure copyist, style of Goth.  This is at the Evanescence end of a genre that is actually harder to define than you'd think.  This has balls aplenty, but tempered with a sense of beauty at the same time, and has a soaring anthemic quality that lifts it above the crowd. Nice.

Voice of the Beehive were one of the great should-have-beens of late 80s/early 90s pop. Jonathan Thornton looks at what went right... right here

This rain and the passing of a birthday weekend makes this aging hipster long for the exquisite melancholy of his squandered youth, and the brilliantly-monikered Dutch Interior emerges from the self-induced fog with a cortado, an unsolved NYTimes crossword and freshly snuffed candle of a record. Also, maybe a heating pad. Every once in a while a sweet guitar lick flares out, but mostly, the vibe is dispensary waiting room excellent.

Were I not so authority-defiant, I'd join Alabaster DePlume's cult. Shave my head, prepare meals, clean his saxophone. This new album doesn't quite have the self-help tape zeal of 2022's "Don't Forget You're Precious" - a track that splits open even my heart of stone to the burbling stream of hope - but the vibe is there. Chant and swoon groove as his wavery lines float like a plastic bag in an alley updraft. It is ecstatic and internal, even a little creepy at times. I'd write more, but I am to be made clean with this list of chores. (Slight bow.)

I love you all, you know that, but I don't love you for what you are. I love you for what you're not. The standard by which good Folk should be measured.

I was writing, oh sometimes I do, and looked up a the VU meters on the amplifier as this was playing. Dylan's complex, delicate, difficult lyric is such a burden on my creative state. Sixty years old this one. I don't know whether Bob Dylan could have listened to sixty year old recorded music when he was writing this... You do the math, you check the 1905 tech.

South London post-punk rabble rousers The Sound are in fine form here with one of their best.  The fact that they never gained the reputation or success of close contemporaries U2 (who even ripped off the song 'Fire' from them) or Echo and The Bunnymen, having neither the haircuts nor the will to compromise, is as tragic as Adrian Borland's demise jumping under a train at Wimbledon station. Fun fact:  I have recently come into that very wooden sided synth sitting on the top level of their keyboard stand in this video. Or so I am told.

If all you know of WIRE is their classic late 70s releases which all but defined the parameters of what came to be known as 'post punk', you have catching up to do.Their 21st century releases are no less ground breaking, genre defining and dammit, bloody catchy too. SEP, the second track on their 2017 album Silver Lead is the kind of song that it's next to impossible not to - at the very least, aspire to leap around to. Had it been released in the early 80s it's difficult to imagine it not having remained in the indie chart for months, if not years. In short, the perfect pick-me-up after having listened through the whole of Palmyra's excellent, but definitely 'downward looking' new LP, Restless. 

Band name: Satirical reference to 'the music business'
Band members: Seasoned LA based folkies who c 1965 tuned in to the nascent psychedelic scene and through various iterations turned themselves on to making "music with fuzz and fangs" - both well evident here.
Result 1: Two albums, and a handful of singles on which they declined to compromise sufficiently to become the next Jefferson Airplane.
Result 2: Singer and main creative force Sean Bonniwell dropped out music, sold all his possessions and took to the road in a camper van, leaving TMM's best tracks (such as this uncompromising anti-love song) unreleased  until the 1980s. 
Dark indeed.