DJ Food and DK will be hitting the next Ninja Tune You Don’t Know night at The Big Chill House on April 7th.
The duo, who will using the night as a launch party for their latest Solid Steel mix Now, Listen Again, will be supported by the Qemists, Sparky and Jon Moore from Coldcut, amongst others.
The night is free is you get there before 9pm [get there early, its always popular] and then from 9pm onwards its a fiver.
We’ve just heard the mix at HQ and trust us, you’ll want to be there!
Two new videos have been made to celebrate Napalm Death’s 20th anniversary of releasing Scum.
The two videos have been put together for You Suffer and The Kill as a promo video was never made at the time of the album so these new videos represent “visual explosions” of the tracks. The video for You Suffer sees a world record get shattered as it lasts just one second!
To watch the You Suffer video, click here and to see the video for The Kill, click here.
Jello Biafra has never been one to sit back and let stuff happen and he has recently issued a public statement against his former Dead Kennedys bandmates.
The band have licensed their song Too Drunk To Fuck for the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez film Grindhouse. Jello clearly wasn’t happy about this and said:
“Some people will do anything for money. I can’t help but think back to how prudish Klaus Flouride was when he objected to H.R. Giger’s painting on the “Frankenchrist” poster, saying he couldn’t bear to show it to his parents. I’d sure love to be a fly on the wall when he tries to explain putting a song in a rape scene for money to his teenage daughter. ”
Sub Pop have just launched a new imprint called Hardly Art Records.
The imprint’s first signing is Arthur & Yu from Seattle and will see their album released in June of this year. Their sound has been described as “hazy, layered vocals that float over textural acoustics and draws inspiration from the Velvet Underground as well as the studio experimentation of Lee Hazlewood”.
This is definitely one everyone should be keeping their eye on in the future.
If I believed in karma, I’d say Australian skateboarding did something very bad in its past to suffer this month’s tragic events. Down Under has lost another skateboarder, this time the younger of the Pappas brothers, Ben.
It would seem, Ben Pappas was found dead in the river Yarra with Police suspecting suicide. However, the waters are murky as to his motives seeing as his partner was found dead only a week earlier…
Without any further speculation, our thoughts go out to all those who knew and loved Ben.
We often wonder what the world is coming to, and sometimes we don’t know whether to laugh or cry, and this is just one of those occassions.
Topshop has recently had to pull a colouring book from its shelves – Nothing particularly weird about that, but then you find out that it’s a Gangsta Rap colouring book, depicting gun toting, knife wielding maniac rappers.
Mothers Against Guns had launched a campaign describing the book as “sick” and copies were removed very quickly indeed.
Don’t colour over the lines or we’ll cap your sorry ass!
Scottish metal quintet Mendeed have recently unleashed a monster of a record in their second album ‘The Dead Live By Love‘ – an intoxicating blast of thunderous riffs, machine-gun drumming and powerful vocals that should find favour with any self-respecting metal fan.
Alex Gosman recently spoke to drummer Kevin Matthews, shortly before the record’s release.
How are you guys doing, and what have you been up to since you finished recording the new album?
Everything’s going great right now! We wrote some of the album at home, but most of it was done at a residential studio on a farm in Cornwall. We then recorded it at Rising Studios, and after it was mixed, we went straight out on a UK headline tour, which went really well.
We then went on a two-month European tour with Napalm Death, and got a much better response than we were expecting – considering we’re not as heavy as a grindcore band! It was great for the audience, because the other band on the tour were Born From Pain – a hardcore band – so it was a good, varied bill. So it’s all been relentless, with a lot of touring, but it’s been a great experience.
How long did ‘The Dead Live By Love‘ take to write and record?
The recording took roughly a month; but we’d been writing songs for it long before we went into the studio…we did a bit of writing between tours, then we’d come back and scrap songs that we weren’t happy with; but most of the ones we kept were the ones we did just before we started the recording, because we were really happy with them.
The album sounds to me like a mix of all the best elements of metal through the years; were there any particular bands that influenced you while you were writing it?
Well, everyone was listening to different stuff, so it wasn’t like we were all influenced by one particular band. I was listening to The Black Dahlia Murder and Miasma, and learning a lot of blast-beat techniques from those guys. We were all listening to a lot of power metal too – especially me and our guitarist Steven – and more traditional melodic metal, and we were trying to move away from the more metalcore sound of our last record, ‘This War Will Last Forever‘. Although that said, I’m not sure what ‘metalcore’ really is these days, because a lot of different-sounding bands seem to have been labelled that way!
So what would you say has been the high point of your career so far?
There’s a couple of high points that really stick out for me – first, receiving a gold record for our Metallica cover at the Kerrang! Awards [they covered ‘The Thing That Should Not Be‘ for the magazine’s ‘Master Of Puppets‘ tribute album]; and also playing Download festival, because we played to our biggest crowd yet, with a massive moshpit!
We’ve also really enjoyed the tours we’ve done supporting other bands – Trivium, Avenged Sevenfold, Cradle Of Filth – we had a great time and made several new friends on those tours.
And any particular low points?
No, not really…obviously it’s hard being away from home a lot; especially if stuff goes wrong at home whilst you’re out on the road, because there’s nothing you can do about it. But, you know, we enjoy touring; being out on the road with good friends, good music and getting drunk loads – then waking up the next morning and doing it all again!
You currently have nearly 13,000 friends on your Myspace page – has that been a big help to you?
Oh, definitely – Myspace seems to get slagged off a lot, but for us it’s a very easy and handy way of getting our music out there, If someone just has to type in a web address to be able to stream or download your songs, then that’s great, you know?
Especially as we’ve been able to put a couple of our new tracks online before the album’s released. So I think it’s great in that respect, and also because it’s useful for keeping in touch with fans and other bands we’ve toured with. Plus it’s free to use!
So what are your plans for the near future, after the album is released?
Well, we’re getting some more European dates sorted out – they should be finalised soon – and we’ll also be playing the Wacken [Germany] and Bloodstock [UK] festivals. We’re also doing shows in London and Stamford in late March, and we’ll probably do a full UK tour in tha autumn, to give the fans a bit of time to get into the new album!
‘The Dead Live By Love‘ is out now on Rising Records. Check out www.mendeed.co.uk and www.myspace.com/mendeed for more info.
The Gym Class Heroes drummer has been arrested for unknown reasons.
Matt McGinley was arrested in Mexico on March 12th though it is not known why. The band released a statement stating that he was last seen in a club with the rest of the band in Mexico, where the band were due to film for a television taping.
A fill in drummer was put in place whilst the management tried to get Matt out.
Chicago is famous for many bands, – you can start at Negative Approach and Big Black, then add Shellac, Jesus Lizard, Kepone and so many more to the never ending list of cool indie rock.
The Ponys can be added to that list, especially after you hear the follow up to their most talked about Celebration Castle from 2005. Their new album ‘Turn The Lights Out’ released now on Matador has a psychedelic edge to an already swirling garage sound that should blow your nuts off in the most mellow way possible.
This release certainly shows the band at their very best with tracks such as the epic Double Vision, the incendious Exile On My Street and the grinding Everyday Weapon on offer to gratify your aural needs. These were all recorded with the additional production skills of Joe Agnello (Breeders, Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth, Witch etc and with his input, the soverall sound of this album is both dirty and most rocking.)
The Ponys are back with what can only be described as one of the indie rock records of 2007 and will be back to the UK in May to tour it. ‘Turn The Lights Out’ is released on March 19th, go find it!
The Ponys are also featured on this month’s Crossfire Indie radio show, click here to get there.
Arctic Monkeys are back with a new album and have recently announced an 11 date UK tour.
The Sheffield band, who saw their debut album become the biggest selling UK debut, will be releasing their new album Favourite Worst Nightmare on April 23rd with the first single taken from it, Brianstorm, released the week before on the 16th.
The tour dates are:
April:
9th – Southampton Guildhall
10th – Exeter University Great Hall
12th – London Astoria
13th – London Astoria
14th – Liverpool Academy
16th – Newcastle Academy
17th – Dundee Caird Hall
18th – Glasgow Barrowlands
20th – Birmingham Academy
21st – Sheffield Leadmill
22nd – Sheffield Leadmill
You can also check out the video for Brianstorm by clicking here.
For all the trimmings go to www.arcticmonkeys.com