Montreal band Pottery's first LP, Welcome to Bobby's Motel, comes out April 10th on Partisan Records and Royal Mountain Records in Canada. Here's single Texas Drums Pt I & II from the album.
Hailing from across Canada and the UK, Pottery consists of core writers Austin Boylan and Jacob Shepansky, along with Peter Baylis, Paul Jacobs, and Tom Gould. "Initially bonding over artists such as Orange Juice, Josef K and Devo," their PR lit reads, "the band creates a sound that combines eclectic traces of post-punk, pop, and dance music, forming an unusual atmosphere that envelopes audiences. While often shrill and jarring, Pottery's songs simultaneously engage listeners into a hypnotic state. It's this dualism that binds them together, uncovering harmony within discord." Cool.
Pottery have played Atlanta before, including an October 1 date at 529 and at Paste Studios.
I like the new wave/post-punk sound of the British band Shopping. They've apparently been around since 2012, but I've only become aware of them now due to the release of their latest album All or Nothing. Of course, the title of the single For Your Pleasure bought a whole other genre of music to this boomer's mind.
Here's another Shopping song to clarify that the spiky style of their For Your Pleasure is more representative of their sound than the Eno-produced glam-rock of Roxy Music's For Your Pleasure.
Speaking of Roxy Music album covers, I recently learned that the models on the infamous cover of Roxy's Country Life were Constanze Karoli, sister of Can guitarist Michael Karoli, and Eveline Grunwald, who was Karoli's girlfriend. The model on the cover of For Your Pleasure was Amanda Lear, who reportedly was a mistress of Salvador Dali and Brian Jones of The Rolling Stones before having affairs with both Brian Ferry and David Bowie.
Anyway, the band Shopping has nothing to do with porny 70s album covers, other than the very oblique association of the title of their song For Your Pleasure to a Roxy Music title.
Fantastic! Imagine how excited I was to find that seminal British post-punk band This Heat are back together, and not as This Is Not This Hear but under their original name, and have apparently released a new single, Deeper.
Well, imagine all you want because that wasn't the case. After listening to the song thinking "this doesn't quite sound like This Heat," I realized that This Heat is the title of a track by a Chicago band called Deeper.
After the initial disappointment fell away, I listened again and actually came around to liking the band Deeper. This Heat might be a confusing title for a song, but they also once recorded a song called Pavement that doesn't have the post-punk sound of This Heat (or This Heat), but has a more indie/alt-country sound, like, well, you know.
This Heat is from Deeper's forthcoming LP Auto-Pain. In addition to This Heat, the album also includes a song titled The Knife. As previews of The Knife are not yet available afaik, there's no telling if it sounds like the Swedish electronic band.
Andy Gill at Terminal West, Atlanta, March 15, 2015
Musicians die - often it feels like all the time - but this one hit me really hard. Andy Gill, guitarist of the pioneering post-punk band Gang of Four, passed away yesterday.
GOF (the original Only Band That Matters) were one of my favorite bands for decades. During their late 70s/early 80s heyday, I was particularly attached to their music, and if they weren't hands down my favorite band at the time it was only due to the simultaneous existence of The Au Pairs. I had every Gang of Four LP and EP released at the time.
According to Brian Eno, Jimi Hendrix was “the first properly electronic composer,” because he was the first to think of what he was playing in terms outside those of the instrument he was holding:
"He thought of what was happening with the floor pedals, the mixer, the speakers, the tape recorder. He thought consequentially, and his sound really is his music - whereas it's theoretically possible to distinguish sound from music (in terms of notes) in the playing of other guitarists. He was the first person to humanise an important part of rock technology, in other words."
The same was even more true for Andy Gill. To Gill, the electric guitar wasn't necessarily an instrument to produce certain notes or chords, but rather just one in a series of devices that can make any number of curious sounds that could be played, not with, but opposed to all the other instruments in a band. As such, Gang of Four's music, while harnessing punk's intensity and energy, was most decidedly not punk rock and could only be called "post-punk," a genre GOF pretty much established as a new musical idiom.
Check out Gill's bracingly original guitar work in the song Anthrax:
My favorite Gang of Four song, though, and not coincidentally, one of Gill's most masterful performances, is To Hell With Poverty. Please play this song as loud as you possibly can (it doesn't make much sense at lower volumes).
After Gill's air-raid-warning-like opening statement, that insistent, driving bass line, and the feral, almost tribal, chants, are there more appropriate lyrics for the Trump Era in America ("In this land, right now, some are insane but they're in charge. To hell with poverty, we'll get drunk on cheap wine!")?
We'll miss you, Mr. Gill, and thank you for sharing your gift with us.
