Vice v7n9 Record Reviews

Sliimy
Paint Your Face
Perezcious Music

0 Frankmusic, Miley Cyrus, Rye Rye. With an endorsement track record like that how was the first record on Perez Hilton’s own label ever not going to be a stone cold classic? The fact that the record in question is made by a genderless gnome with less testicles than Mika who appears to have stolen Macy Gray’s wig should also come as no surprise.

Perry Nutkins

Monotonix
Where Were You When It Happened?
Drag City

7 Have you ever seen Monotonix play live? Imagine if Lightning Bolt and Hella got together to do a pub rock band. But way smellier. I swear my t-shirt still smells from the time someone pushed into the drummer guy. Do they not have showers in Tel Aviv or something?

Bruce Grobelar

Hudson Mohawke
Butter
Warp

3 How did a label that defined at least three different eras of British electronic music end up releasing so much spineless piffle? I blame guitars. Before Maximo Park and Pivot got signed a so so, middle of the road album like this shoe-in for creative agency waiting room muzak would never have cut the mustard at Warp HQ. And while I’m here: what is going on with the sleeve? It likes like a psychedelic Dairy Milk advert James Bond title montage. Phew the Warp 20th Anniversary box set just landed on my desk. It’s OK guys, all is forgiven. I love you again.

A Guy Called Arthur

Harvestman
In A Dark Tongue
Neurot

8 Not quite as cast-in-stone-forevermore perfect as any Neurosis record you’d care to think of but Von Till could probably fart “The Star Spangle Banner” and I’d lap it up. You know big Steve is apparently an elementary school teacher when he isn’t making music? I’d cower behind my textbook for an hour if he were taking me for double maths. The guy basically looks like a cryogenically frozen Viking berzerker.

Alex Petri-Dish

Wojtek Godzisz
Wojtek Godzisz
Tigertrap Records

8 Gather round children. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin. A long time ago in a place called the early 1990’s there was a band called Symposium. Looking back they weren’t particularly good but I would have fought you if you’d said anything different at the time. I wanted to get their logo tattooed on my wrist and the lyrics to their song “Fizzy” engraved on my headstone. In the decade and half since I have occasionally been fairly glad that neither of these things ever went past the point of vague fancy. However, I cannot quite convey how happy I was to get the debut solo album by Symposium’s bass player and general lynchpin through the letter box and be pleasantly surprised that he appears to have morphed into some kind of Moondog character and that the music that he has chosen to make since those heady days sucks in nowhere near the same galaxy of awfulness that Hell Is For fucking Heroes find themselves in. In fact it’s really rather good and bizarrely has Alexis from Hot Chip on it.

Average Man

Black Boned Angel
Verdun
Riot Season

9 If you like things that sound like Corrupted, Asunder or the universe being chained to a medieval rack and tortured into nothingness then this might just be for you. I am guessing that the title refers to the First World War battle. It would certainly have made a chillingly accurate soundtrack to those hellish nine months.

Birchville Brat Motel

Shit & Shine
229 2299 Girls Against Shit
Riot Season

9 Wow. Shit and Shine still sound like they are playing their cacophonous racket through equipment that might have broken at some point in the late 1980’s by bludgeoning sound out of it through sheer being really angry all the time-ness and, as ever it couldn’t sound better than just about anything else I’ve heard this month. Or year.

Circle Jams

Pens
Hey Friend! What You Doing?
De Stijl

8 If you’d have told me when we ran a piece on Pens a while back that a year later they would have an actual record out on De Stijl then I am not sure what I would have done. Not believing you would probably have been involved at some point though. Well stone me and my lack of belief because here is just that and these 14 tracks sounds just as fresh and chaotically cathartic as the band did the first time I heard them. Except I think they have learned how to play their instruments just a teensy weensy bit.

Jammin' Johnson