Kicker’s Quarterly – April 2016

Been a while, huh? Well, without further ado let’s turn our attention to the musical…

And on the agenda for today we have twenty points that need your serious consideration. First to be hoist up the flagpole for our proud brother salute is the Magic Circle Express, with a funky St Lucian take on Calypsoul from 1977 (possibly). Check out the squelchy keyboard riff of band leader Arthur Tisson over the top of what I am reliably informed is double time drumming. From the slightly less exotic Birmingham, but with a distictly exotic Swedish label release come The Castillians with one of many great garage punk mod stomps from this year’s You & Me LP. Our pals at Fruits De Mer have also released their first batch of new records of 2016 (with the second due any week now) and have put out a new album by the wonderful The Chemistry Set – The Endless More And More – that psychs up its prog influences and has me vibrating and smiling in an unseemly manner. Another favourite label, Upper Class Recordings, have been bringing us interesting music all the way from Canada throughout this millennium and a sampler I picked up recently included the fantastic Girlsareshort, who go like this…

More psych next with The Orgone Box, whose Centaur album is one of those masterpieces that seem to have been so unfairly overlooked by the masses. Their self-titled effort is also excellent and here’s a track that should convince you to delve further into their back catalogue. A recognised big hitter next with Throwing Muses and probably my favourite track from The Real Ramona, which will have you ahyaaanyaaaoww-ing for the rest of the day. A more subdued mood is offered up on the Home Cinema collection by Emma Kupa; an artist I have regrettably only seen playing live through a window standing on tiptoes (me, not her). That needs to be put right as a matter of urgency as does my not having caught the next band in the flesh. The superbly monikered (take that, Chorizo Garbanzo!) Sauna Youth have an offshoot band called Monotony, I believe, but here is the song of that name from their Distractions LP that is anything but. Speak Kindly Of Your Volunteer Fire Department may well be my favourite Robert Pollard album title; it finds Bobby Pop and guitar hero, Doug Gillard at their most powerpoptatstic and here getting a little hot under the collar. That takes us up to a track that featured heavily in all of the TTW DJ sets that were mostly played to an empty room way back in 2015. The Big City Nights Band, for it is they, came to my attention via prolificity’s own Graham Repulski and really should be heard by more people. So, check it out here and tell a friend.

Now, despite appearances to the contrary at the aforementioned DJ nights, Fast Cars were right in telling us in 1979 that The Kids Just Wanna Dance, and they are right right now. Similarly, if you’re still in need of sagacious advice, look no further than I, Ludicrous, who, on last years’s Dull Is The New Interesting, gave us more reasons to be full of cheer than you can shake a rhythm stick at. Our Scandiwegian pal, MMS, has been all over these pages under various guises in the last few months and here he’s back as This Heel with a paean to the hard of thinking taken from his accurately and romanly numbered This Heel II collection – apparently that’s his cool looking old man on the cover too. It’s all in the genes, obviously. Ultra cool is the fabulous Lady Lex, who put out her Is This Love album last year. By all accounts she got this record released after walking in to the label’s shop and singing along to a selection of singles. She’s also related to Keith Moon. Now, that is cool. The best band ever to come out of Luxembourg is Monophona. A big call, I know, but one effectively supported by the band’s Blackonblack (one word) release. You may recall us playing The Hill on a previous podcast, well, here’s another excellent example of their creepy acoustic electronica. Also, rather shadowy, ahem, are psychedelicists Shadow Folk, who hail from New Scotland and starred on the Active Listener Sampler 22. They very much sound like this…

Chile Barnaby Kersey. Kole Warren Stacey. Johnnie Brock Hobson. Yes, I have been randomly generating names as inspired by the best track by far on the latest Wilco LP, the one named after that film. Have a go yourself and let us know how it goes. Don’t, for god’s sake, tell us anything that relates to the next track though. The band Spunky Onions presumably used a form of random generation to get their name, but like the gentlemen they are, don’t name names on the wonderful How I Lost My Virginity – a song that I feel should really be played back to back with Wreckless Eric’s Whole Wide World. Instead it leads us onto another fine portrayer of the messier side of relationships, Malcolm Middleton, who, it should be noted, has an eagerly anticipated new album due for release any day/month now, but here he is with a beautiful track from 2014’s Waxing Gibbous, which is an astral, rather than primate, reference. And rounding things off this time, we have a pick from Tex that takes us to Boise, Idaho and The Very Most, who are Wond’ring, and also possibly wand’ring. The stars. Til next quarter, …