Rarely Unable

Close your eyes. You may think Satan is singing.

Open them: you’ll see a small masked woman, with dreadlocks down to her ankles, and without vocal effects.

Close your eyes again: you’ll think of a heavy metal double kick drum set.

Open them again: a gigantic, wrestling masked man is torturing a floor tom, a snare and a cymbal, standing up, no kick.

Two people, half gear, enough to bring Hell.

This is OvO.

Other people have asked us to score their films, but we always reached a point where we realised that the freedom and conversation Claire affords (and expects from) us is not there, and then it becomes something different, making music for a purpose (money?) – something we’re well aware we have never been very good at.”

- Stuart Staples, January 2011

Calling all London based comrades, The Winchester Club are hosting an album launch gig on Wednesday 23rd March at the CAMP in Old Street. Be great if you can come along!

Here is some more information about their new album Negative Liberty (Exile On Mainstream)

Just like its predecessor Negative Liberty is a work of epic instrumental post-rock, which builds from delicate drones, looping guitar figures and field recordings, through to crescendos of layered distortion. Well structured and thought rhythms sweep around layers of guitar work and xylophone pings. The metaphoric picture of sinking into music is often used but rarely so adequately perfect as a description like it is for this album.

The deep organics and natural expression of the sounds on Negative Liberty make this an absolutely outstanding release in a field that seemed to be harvested completely.

Ultimately, this new album sees The Winchester Club starting over again with much more confidence and dedication than ever before.

Stay tuned for more news on future live shows!

Disappears have just released their second album Guider on Kranky, following their pumping debut, Lux of last year.

With a European tour around the corner and UK dates in the making, the band are on the up (and rightly so!). They have also just released this video for the opening track from their new album.

If you need more reasons to check out this band then I strongly recommend reading their recent album review on the Quietus.

Surrender to the delicious.

Annie Bandez – aka Annie Anxiety, aka Annie Anxiety Bandez, aka Little Annie – has often found herself, for better or worse, at the right place at the right time.

Chanteuse, author, actress, painter, raconteur, bon vivant and all around survivor, she was born and raised in a perfect town to run away from (Yonkers) just a half an hour north of a perfect place to run away to (New York City). She came of age at the perfect moment to be part of a gorgeous, gifted, tragic generation that was desperate for stimulation and reinvention.

She was one of those in the right place at the right time…

Annie’s musical career started at the fag end of the 70′s, in the seminal NYC art-punk scene.  Annie from Yonkers became Annie Anxiety and soon had a band, the Asexuals, behind her.  By 1982 she had made her way to London and joined forces with anarchy agit-punksters CRASS, who released her first single, “Barbed Wire Halo” on their label.

Next she hooked up with Adrian Sherwood and his posse of dub radicals, including Bim Sherman, African Head Charge, and a trio of fellow ex-pats -Sugarhill refugees responsible for the groove behind rappers like Grandmaster Flash, who were busy restyling themselves as Tackhead (Wimbish, LeBlanc and MacDonald).

Then it was down into the dark London underworld of Coil (Love’s Secret Domain), and Wolfgang Press (Queer), before returning to New York, writing an album with Antony Hegarty (Coal Mine Canary), soundtracking a Levi’s advert and hooking up with her piano partner-in-crime, composer Paul Wallfisch.  A week at Wilton’s Music Hall in London in 2008 with Marc Almond led to a month of gigs when Marc did his “Greatest Hits” road show in 2010.

And…relax

Now about the reissues…

Soul Possession (originally released in 1983 as Annie Anxiety)
Annie’s debut, and the album that clearly maps her transmogrification from Crass cohort and poet/agitator to dub diva. Co-released by Corpus Christi and On-U Sound, it’s an unsettling master stroke created in a landscape nearly devoid of female role models. A harsh, disarming rhythmic landscape is splattered with grim and grisly poetry as Annie literally finds her voice and tells tales of violently unsuccessful love affairs, automatic mishaps, and brutal modern existence. Backed by members of Crass, African Head Charge, Flux of Pink Indians and London Underground, it’s a musical stew of punk, blues, dub and electronics which was way ahead of its time.

Jackamo (originally released in 1987 as Annie Anxiety Bandez)
It was just over three years before Annie’s next album was fully formed. In that time she had become a fully patched member of the On-U Sound crew, and indeed had moved into the garden shed at Chez Sherwood. Jackamo is the result of Annie gravitating towards her earliest musical influences – Garland, Sinatra, Lenya, Piaf… and of her collaboration with On-U’s other feminine force – Kishi Yamamoto. Musical shapes were created by Yamamoto, Tackhead’s Doug Wimbish, and African Head Charge’s Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah. Jackamo is the sound of the haunted dancehall – dub groove and Caligari cabaret, matched with Annie’s brutal/gorgeous lyrical seppuku.

Short & Sweet (originally released in 1992 as Little Annie)
The real truth is that Short & Sweet was not Annie’s third album, it was her fourth. Snapped up by the major Atco after the critical acclaim surrounding Jackamo, Annie spent a lot of cash and a lot of time creating her masterwork – and then the label collapsed and buried her album in a grave of legal limbo. Annie did what all smart girls do – divorced her husband, fired her manager, and went back into the studio. Along with her faithful Tackhead compadres she set about crafting a pop album – but one which demanded that the musical form rise to her high standards – rather than watering down her own creative force to a lower common denominator. Annie is vocally wearing her most comfortable shoes ever on this album – and her lyrics draw from a rich source of anger, betrayal and realism that come from surviving a failed record deal and a failed marriage. A true tour de force.

The reissues are available through the Southern Records webshop.

Annie will be touring again in February (with an additional show in September) playing the following shows:

Photo by Malcom Riveria

Artificial Peace was formed by Pete from Red C (great band!)  along with Mike, Rob and Steve of Assault and Battery. They were solid and fast and they quickly managed to build one of the largest followings of all of the early bands. They were one of the first DC area bands to play out of town, always making it a point to announce that they were from Bethesda, a city just across the DC line in Maryland.

Ian recorded a 19-song demo with them at Inner Ear, and three of those songs appear on the “Flex Your Head” Sampler. They also released a split 7” with a band called The Exiled on the Fountain of Youth label. After Artificial Peace dissolved in 1982 Pete, Steve and Mike went on to form Marginal Man and Rob later joined Government Issue and played on their ’83 US tour.

This year Dischord are unearthing some more buried treasure in the form of a record containing the entire session that Artificial Peace recorded in November 1981, aptly titled Complete Sessions, Nov 81.  Three of these songs were initially released on the aforementioned Flex Your Head compilation but the rest were shelved when the band unexpectedly broke up after playing for barely over a year. 

Like others on the label (One Last Wish come to mind), the band were short lived in this particular guise, but that does not affect the importance of their music. This is a key addition to any completist.

Conny Ochs hails from Germany and has just finished a 6-week tour opening for Scott “Wino” Weinrich. Following the European-wide trek, Ochs is now ready to release his debut album, Raw Love Songs on the killer German label Exile on Mainstream.

Conny Ochs delivers heart-warming, emotional and honest songs, bound to a tradition and history of great acoustic craftsmanship drawn over the American continent. Conny explores the realms of what of your inner self can be once you are on your own and armed with a guitar, a banjo and your voice.

The path has been walked by many before but it doesn’t make it a worn out road. This is what it’s all about: not pushing yourself to reach out for definite goals but listen to your inner voice, realising the way being more important than the destination and deliver in honesty: raw. uncarved. strips cut straight from the soul. RAW LOVE SONGS.

While on tour with Wino, the two also found time to record a one-off Latitudes session in the legendary Southern Studios. Keep an eye on the site for more news about when that will land.



For Oakland, California’s Neurosis, their entire catalogue can be considered brilliant not only for its sonic merit but also for its need to wander from the beaten path. Rare is it that a band can make you feel the cold and hard texture of concrete while allowing you to smell the growing vine in the confines of one song. Perhaps this is the reason why so many have looked to and borrowed from their table.

Neurosis is pure emotion, in every positive or negative form. Souls At Zero is Neurosis’ first flash of true brilliance. Never before were they able to show their passions and exploratory needs so eloquently, while still keeping their musical hearth concussive and visceral. Synthesisers, acoustic guitars and other non-traditional instruments came into play, as did tribal chants and an ethereal smokescreen which enabled Neurosis to shape-shift from one musical being to another.

Neurosis’ expansion into the uncompromising and groundbreaking act that they are now began here, making the importance of Souls At Zero larger than even the band could ever know at the time. This album is the glint that never leaves your aural vision, no matter how hard you try to escape it. A catastrophic tinnitus that you hope won’t go away.

Neurot Recordings is proud to reissue this perpetual flame of a release while celebrating the band’s 25 years of brilliance. With demo version additions of “Zero” and the title track along with a bonus live cut “Cleanse III”, this updated release is the perfect portal to witness the development of underground music’s titan force. Artwork by the revered Josh Graham completes an awesome package worthy of timeless worship.

With a sound and presence like no other band in the world, Weedeater stand apart from all others, both live and on their recordings. Their unfiltered and unrefined energy surges uncontrollably through the band and anyone who bears witness to their live show. Spite and deep resentment somehow fuse with comedy and maximum volume to produce an indignant, vomitous (both figuratively and sometimes literally) performance that is forced upon the willing yet hapless crowd. You are instantly swallowed whole by both Dixie and Shep’s nearly indistinguishable monster bass and guitar tones, and you are absolutely beaten to a bloody pulp and scared for your life by Keko’s crazed, yet amazingly potent bashing of his kit; with sticks that look like tree trunks turning into a splintered mess by the end of every song. Pure, unabashed, musical violence in every form. It’s real, and it’s dangerous, and it feels so damn good.

After 2007′s critically acclaimed and now classic release, “God Luck and Good Speed” had been toured to death around the world, the boys finally took some time between the mishaps and mayhem of 2010 to write and record their 2nd album for Southern Lord and 4th full-length CD/LP, “Jason…The Dragon”.

Recorded and mixed once again by the legendary Steve Albini at Electrical Audio Studios in Chicago, and mastered once again by the equally as legendary John Golden at Golden Studios in southern California, “Jason…” continues the legacy that has culminated over nearly 15 years of the band’s existence into something truly unique and masterful.

Once again, we are dragged through the mire by three of the finest dirge merchants in the world, and the songwriting is just as ingenious as ever and seems to start just where “God Luck…” left off, with “Hammerhandle” kicking things off in an oscillating groove that builds and falls and then eventually melts into “Mancoon”, a ripping tune that spans themes from homemade dynamite to true tales of human bite wounds and other guttural warnings that are surely not meant to be taken lightly. The band returns to their swampy roots via acoustic bass and banjo with the album’s closer “Whiskey Creek”, and they venture into totally new territory with the hook-laden, driving force that is “Homecoming”. Dixie’s solo performance on “Palms and Opium” sounds like a narcotic jam that he and Dean Ween had at a private nitrous party on a deserted island; the track was inspired by and written during the blissed-out visions Dixie had while laid up on pain pills for a month after blowing off his big toe with a shotgun in early 2010. We don’t need to go back there again, do we? Seems like we just did. The masterpiece is of course the album’s namesake, “Jason…the Dragon” which takes the listening doomernaut on a slithering journey though a sludgy world of viscous, black molasses riffs that are punctuated by cannon drums and some of the album’s most memorable lyrics.

With a full headlining tour of the US planned for February and March and a European tour shortly thereafter with a stop at Roadburn and more dates to be announce soon, the band is rearing to take 2011 by storm and there is a horde of rabid fans ready to hear their newest offerings.

Track Listing:

1. The Great Unfurling
2. Hammerhandle
3. Mancoon
4. Turkey Warlock
5. Jason….the Dragon
6. Palms and Opium
7. Long Gone
8. March of the Bipolar Bear
9. Homecoming
10. Whiskey Creek

Across Tundras is Tanner Olson, Nate Rose, and “Big” Jim Shively. Brewing heavy, psychedelic jams in the hills of Tennessee, Across Tundras seamlessly meld classic rock, folk, country, psychedelia, and doom into songs that defy classification and transcend genres. But when the band aren’t rocking out they are hard at work weeding their organic produce farm in the rolling hills 10 minutes North of Nashville, selling their produce at the local markets and restaurants, running around with their 3 friendly pitbulls and jamming in their studio at the back of their house.

The past few years has seen the band have multiple, successful full US tours and extensive gigging in the Southeast US region with bands like : Wovenhand, U.S. Christmas, Sourvein, Cough, Royal Thunder, Zoroaster, Dark Castle, Sea of Bones, Battlefields, Junius, Caspian, Earthride, Minsk, Bloody Panda and Stinking Lizaveta.  Coming home from their amazing Western USA tour with all sorts of inspiration, they instantly began writing their new album “Sage” which I for one cannot wait to hear.

“There aren’t many American metal bands that tap into their country’s deep cultural heritage quite like Across Tundras have over the span of four albums. The geography, the history and the traditional music all feature prominently on their records, whether on the dustbowl doom vibe of 2006’s Dark Songs of the Prairie or 2008’s haunting, understated Lonesome Wails From the Weeping Willow. Their newest, Old World Wanderer, marks a return to the band’s heavier side, a seamless blend of Neurosis, Crazy Horse and the Anthology of American Folk Music.” Adrien Begrand – Decibel Magazine

Listen to them right now at their last.fm and find out more on their facebook page!