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Baby Godzilla

Baby Godzilla
‘A Good Idea Realised’
Free Download

Baby_Godzilla_Crossfire

If you have not witnessed Baby Godzilla yet and are a hardcore fan then prepare for a taste of pure quality that is out there within the British scene right now. This monstrously tight Nottingham four-piece are delivering one of the best live shows you will see out there right now, and to support this onslaught, they are also releasing various tracks from their brand new EP, ‘Knockout Machine’ for free throughout June.

Their first of four freebies is ‘A Good Idea Realised‘. Coming in at just 1.43 on the clock, this surging explosion of ferocious hardcore is served with a stabbing set of riffs, absolutely pounding drums and twin dose of serial screaming; so be mentally prepared for a relentless frenzy from the first note.

It will not be long until this band are filling venues countrywide, which is not a problem, as BG have a tendency to ply their trade in the audience as opposed to on stage. This band are absolutely awe-inspiring to see face to face but get a taster of the chaos that is spawning out there right now and download this free track today from here. If you nearby to London, note their residency shows at the Black Heart in Camden on 6th and 20th of June and 4th July. Miss these and you will kick yourself in the future.

Read more about Baby Godzilla in their Crossfire interview here.

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Features Music

Baby Godzilla interview

Photo by Carla Mundy
Interview by Zac

At the back end of 2012 Baby Godzilla released a video for the storming track Powerboat Disaster that went round the web at mach 10 leaving aural destruction to those who tuned in. Nottingham is their place of residence, a UK city that has serious hardcore history and an area that is renown for its constant frustration amongst youth culture. Their personal time bomb is set to explode in the metal scene year so we decided to get the lowdown from screaming front man Matt ‘Butch’ Reynolds on just how long it will take until they take the back doors off the UK and beyond.

This one’s obvious but how come you chose the name Baby Godzilla?

It was actually something that our ex-guitarist’s Dad thought of, it was a band name that he wanted to use in the 80s and never got to, we thought it was pretty cool and we’re shit at naming stuff ourselves. It certainly matches the ferocity of what we do, untameable and immovable. That’s pretty cheesy right?

Cheese on an 11 for sure. So, Powerboat Disaster made a big impact last year, how many weird stares from the locals came with shooting that video?

We had what seemed like the whole village come out to see what was going on, the hardest part became not controlling the 8 foot high wall of fire but keeping them all behind the camera. We’d set up a take and have to stop right away, turning expecting to see a couple of local kids that had strayed into the shot but instead finding a couple of fully grown adults having a kick-about behind us.

It looks like you are playing in an allotment, that right?

It was filmed in the overgrown grounds of a pub in a very small village in Chesterfield called Poolsbrook. We asked the landlady “can we make a 8 x 20 feet wall of fire around the back of your pub?” she smiled and said “yes” and proceeded to point out things that she would like us to torch. Maybe she had a screw loose, I don’t really know, but I made a snap decision that I like the way the people of Poolsbrook work.

Are you all Nottingham based?

Yes, we all live within 5 minutes of each other, it makes it easy to get together and share ideas.

The hardcore scene in Notts has always been really strong. Have you grown up around releases from legendary acts such as Bob Tilton, Heresy, Concrete Sox, Hard to Swallow, Iron Monkey etc or are you too young to remember such awesome bands in the local area?

All familiar names, I’d be in danger of sacrilege if I were to deny Nottingham’s strong roots in hardcore music, especially with the bands listed and Earache Records HQ being right on our doorstep. But I’d be lying if I said I grew up around those awesome releases, we’re all a bit too young really, I was busy listening to Metallica as a kid.

What’s the local scene there like at the moment and who is pulling the strings?

There’s quite a lot of cool stuff going on here at the moment. There’s a recording studio just on the edge of town called JT Soar and they’ve just opened their live room as an underground gig venue. They put on lots of brilliant bands from all around the world and let you bring in your own beer so there’s a huge sense of community about the place. There’s also a grass roots promotions company called ‘I’m Not From London’. They’re headed by one very tenacious and ridiculously hard working man called Will Robinson; I’m not quite sure how he does it. They helped us a lot in the early days, we owe quite a bit to Will, he’s pretty much rebuilt Nottingham’s scene single handed. To see ‘I’m Not From London’ now going from strength to strength is great. Band-wise we share a practice space with a new band called Def Bridges that I predict you’ll be hearing lots more of towards the end of the year, they’re noisy, shouty and bassy. I’m also quite fond of a band called Grey Hairs, they’ve got a really cool garage rock vibe but they mix it up with raw punk, they’re great live.

So, the’ Oche’ EP is out there, what plans do you have for releases this year and have you started recording process yet?

We’ve been writing solidly all this year so far, the original plan was to release an album towards the end of 2013, but now we’ve decided to put out an EP to bridge the gap and whet people appetites for the big debut album. The EP is going to be very thrashy and trashy judging on what we’ve been putting down of late. We just received a final master back of the first single from it and it nearly ripped open our speakers! Needless to say it carries on from where OCHE left off, it’s going to be fucking loud.
We’ll be putting out the first single with a video in a couple of weeks.

Leaving Notts in flames. Photo by Carla Mundy

Are there any albums out there you have heard recently that soundwise carry the ingredients needed to make your debut the ultimate listen?

‘IDEAS’ by Hawk Eyes is pretty much a perfect album, the way it is put together is just brilliant, the songs kick ass and it sounds absolutely huge. We listen to that a lot on the way to gigs. Other than that you can pretty much guarantee some Refused or Nirvana will get stuck on which always gets me fired up. At this very second I’m listening to …’And Justice For All’, I’ve got the bass turned right up so it sounds right. It’s getting me through a very incessant hangover.

So what about producers? If you had the choice to pick a producer to work with on your album, who would you pick and why?

I’d be very interested to see what working with Steve Albini would be like. Mainly because his whole ethos towards recording a band is very similar to ours, everything should be tracked together live. If we weren’t all together in the same room tracking live I don’t think a recording would really capture what we do. On top of that we all need to look at each when we record otherwise it would sound like a bag of spanners.

I also would really love to work with Eskil Lovstrom and Pelle Henricsson, they made ‘Shape of Punk to Come’, it’s one of my favourite albums of all time. Our buddies James Cleaver Quintet just got back from recording their second album with them, I really excited to see what they’ve come up with!

Your live shows have been lauded. How will you find the middle ground between the energy created live on tape?

Lots of space in our live room! And stuff to climb on in there too would be good. Although I’m not sure we ought to recreate what we do live to the letter on tape, we barely hit a note live. It would probably end up just being Paul Shelley playing the bass with the occasional broken guitar making an awful squeal. Pretty unpleasant!

If there was one story from that came from playing live that is still discussed as a ‘moment’, what is that and where from?

One thing that comes to mind is a gig we played at Hackney Trash Bar. The sound guy was really not into it. We played the first song and I couldn’t find my mic afterwards, so I used Paul’s. After the second song another mic went missing. At that point we realised the sound guy was just taking away all the mics one by one after each song, it was quite rude. Then he turned off the p.a. altogether. Had he just asked us to stop we would have, but he just went about it in a really antagonising way so we just kept going. we had a megaphone out on tour with us so me and Jonny took to shouting in people faces through that and We just relied on the guitar amps making noise from the stage. Generally we have a pretty good relationship with sound engineers though, we always reassure before we play that if anything gets broken it will be something of ours (drums, guitars, bones) not theirs.

Try and explain the blackout one gets from the first note of a live show. It’s one of the most surreal experiences of being in a band but can it be explained well by Baby Godzilla?

That’s a toughie because I really have no idea. From the first note all bets are off really. I literally switch off and don’t come to until we switch the amps to standby at the end of the set. I’ve come back to reality to Paul telling me that I managed to twat some guy with my guitar before, not good. My space awareness has gotten loads better though.

What is one of the most mental things to ever happen at one of your shows?

I have a bit of a habit of climbing things that are way too high. We played some festivals over in Poland and I ended up swinging from the rafters that were 20ft up. It’s okay though, I was wearing a helmet. Some guy in the crowd had passed me an old style Polish Army helmet! Brilliant country!

How does your lyrical content come together?

I tend to write lyrics way ahead of songs actually being put together. I’ll write pages and pages of prose, I have notebooks full of absolute drivel. When we piece together a song I tend to fish through it all and pick out something on a topic that makes sense and edit the words to fit the song. It’s quite a nice way of working, it steers you away from relying on recycled clichés in your lyrics.

Lyrically, is there one particular track that you can discuss that means something so personally that you believe to be an ‘anthem’ in your locker?

However much we’d all love it, I don’t think we’ll ever be considered an anthems band, more a band that our parents say “you’ve got such lovely voices, why have you got to do all of that shouting nonsense? I can’t tell what you’re saying!” There is however a 16/17 minute long opus that we’ve written that’s intended to close the album. The whole thing is a 3-part concept based on an unwritten trilogy from my favourite author B. S. Johnson. He wrote the first book of a Trilogy just before he died called “See the Old Lady Decently”. The whole trilogy was titled so that each book’s title would make grammatical sense as a statement alone but when all together the titles would form a complete sentence. The unwritten books were going to be called “Buried Although” and “Amongst Those Left Are You”. The song itself has a lot of political themes that share an agenda similar to that of Johnson’s

There’s also a lyric in one of the new songs that repeats over and over that I love, “You’re all whores and I’m Jack the Ripper” I absolutely love some of the lyrics for our new material. As a body of work it’s definitely my favourite that I’ve written to date.

It’s definitely the year of longer tracks so far. If there was a phrase from OCHE that has meaning more than any other, what would it be ?

We have a song on OCHE called Dave Lankester, the lyrics to that are from a really nasty angry letter that I intended to send to an ex-girlfriend. I didn’t send the letter and it’s probably a good thing but there’s a lot of emotion in the song. The lyrics are hand written in the inner sleeve to the OCHE mini-album too. I was definitely a little drunk when I composed that letter.

Matt hangs out with the crowd. Photo: Carla Mundy.

When the album drops, will you be inviting the likes of Elton John to appear on it as a guest like Queens of the Stoneage?

Probably not too be honest, although if Queens wanted to guest themselves then that would be fine. We’ll probably get a couple of pals to do little guest vocal bits and pieces, there’s a track on OCHE called Thotty that has our friend from Captain Dangerous Miles, playing violin on and Ali Powers from Hot Japanese Girl guesting on vocals. So we’re definitely not strangers to having guest appearances.

So, when you get huge and become millionaires, what will be your first extravagant musical purchase?

Probably gear that works and a Dodge Charger with blacked out windows so we can ignore our gazillions of fans.

Look out for Baby Godzilla on your travels on tour with the Wildhearts in April and beyond. All can be found on their Facebook Page.

March:
Fri 29th March: Santiagos Leeds

April:
Thu 04 Apr – w/ The Wildhearts, O2 ABC Glasgow
Fri 05 Apr – w/ The Wildhearts, Manchester Academy Manchester
Sat 06 Apr – w/ Rock City Nottingham, UK
Sun 07 Apr – w/ The Wildhearts, Wulfrun Hall Wolverhampton

May
Fri 10 May w/ Eureka Machines The Adelphi / New Adelphi Hull

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Album Reviews Buzz Chart Music Reviews

Bring Me The Horizon & Draper

BRING ME THE HORIZON & DRAPER
‘The Chill Out Sessions’

With their third studio album ‘There Is a Hell, Believe Me, I’ve Seen It. There Is a Heaven, Let’s Keep It A Secret’, Bring Me The Horizon began to experiment with the atmospherics of their sound. Now collaborating with producer/chillstep artist Draper, the Sheffield based metallers have embraced this element and dropped an exquisite EP, ‘The Chill Out Sessions’.

As the name and artwork suggests this EP is a beautiful sound scape, the perfect backing track to relaxation yet it maintains elements of Bring Me’s emotional charged music.

Although Bring Me The Horizon will always remain attached to the metal scene, the direction of this EP isn’t a surprise as vocalist Oli Sykes is publicly fixated on post-rock band Worship, likewise guitarist Jona Weinhofen equally adores Scandinavian experimentalists immanu el. With immanu el reported to feature on Bring Me The Horizon’s next full length ‘Sempiternal’, the band’s development will be an exciting prospect to witness.

Download ‘The Chill Out Sessions’ for free here.

Words: Emma Wallace

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Album Reviews Music Reviews

We Are Lost Boys

WE ARE LOST BOYS
‘Life’

[Wolf At Your Door Records]

There is always something great about having lyrics describing everyday battles delivered to you in a matter of fact fashion, and that’s what We Are Lost Boys do so well with their latest EP ‘Life’. This is gritty British pop-punk laid bare for all to see with lead single ‘T.W.O.T.W’ epitomising the style they are aiming for.

But the issue with We Are Lost Boys is their lack of individuality; they couldn’t sound any more like Lower Than Atlantis if they tried. The transparent nature of their lyrics would come across as beautifully honest if it wasn’t for the blatant comparison to the work of their peers.

It’d be harsh to criticise this EP completely just because it’s not particularly unique… ‘Life’ is a great attempt, We Are Lost Boys just need to focus on carving their own way otherwise they will always be in the shadows of more established artists.

Words: Emma Wallace

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Album Reviews Buzz Chart Music New Releases

Peace’d Out

Peace’d Out
Peace’d Out
[Siren Records]
www.facebook.com/peacedoutmusic

Vinnie of The Movielife / I Am The Avalanche fame has unveiled his new project with this first self-titled EP. And it’s an altogether more raucous affair than his past endeavours. With Steve Choi (RX Bandits), Casey Deitz (The Velvet Teen) and Roger Camero (No Motiv) completing the line-up, Peace’d Out unravel in cascading riffs and angry vocal outbursts. There’s barely even a hint of pop punk here as this collection of musicians channel the likes of The Dillinger Escape Plan to create a collection of exciting and unpredictable tracks that appear to almost career out of control whilst actually maintaining a carefully judged tightness of musicianship that’s impressive and admirable.

Far from being merely an intensely noisy affair, Peace’d Out have experimented with sounds making this a far more exciting ride than you initially expect.‘White Pyramid’ alternates simple synth interludes with driving riff-fuelled grittiness. The twists and turns are what really make this debut release.

It’s a five track assault on the ears that announces the band’s arrival in the world with no holds barred. Certainly a thrilling introduction and one which leaves us hoping and praying that this isn’t a fleeting experimental outing into the world of the more noise-filled music for Mr Caruana. Who knew he had that scream in him?

Words: Sarah Maynard

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Buzz Chart

Tweak Bird

tweak_bird

The mighty Tweak Bird are back with a brand new EP titled ‘Undercover Crops’ scheduled for release on October 29th via Volcom Entertainment.

Featuring 7 brand new songs the ‘Undercover Crops’ E.P. was recorded over a long weekend in June 2012 with Toshi Kasai, who alongside Dale Crover, produced and recorded Tweak Bird’s previous two releases, 2008’s Reservations EP and 2010’s self-titled LP.

The band are currently supporting the Melvins on tour across the US and hope to be back in the UK soon for live shows. Until then, Download their new track ‘People’ for free as a taste of what’s coming on this incredible new ‘bubblegum stoner rock’ EP and await a new video coming very soon.

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Album Reviews Buzz Chart Music Preview Reviews

Proxies

Proxies_Lost_Tapes_Volume_II_Dead WeightProxies
Lost Tapes, Volume II: Deadwieght

A little while back we bought you an introducing interview with a band we find very exciting. That band is Proxies. Their latest release, Lost Tapes, Volume II: Dead-Weight’ explains why we see such potential in this young band.

Opening up with ‘Deadweight, Veritas’ vocals seductively dance around a repetitive, slow-tempo clean guitar riff whilst electronic atmospherics are absorbed into your ears making for a sensual yet eerie start to the EP.

Another clean guitar lick invites the listener into an already established fan favourite ‘Trojan (Inside Your Chest)’. Here Proxies really begin to shine. A pounding kick drums ups the tempo just before a ridiculously catchy bridge and chorus take hold. Again with ‘Masquerade’ the band nail ‘catchy’ with perfect song structure. The track reflects a similar style to early, Panic! At The Disco (think ‘Time To Dance’ taken from ‘A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out’). In fact, it could be said Proxies are one of the first bands to display the same amount of ingenious pop/rock and electronica crossover appeal since Panic!.

Proxies have begun to refine a sound that is as accessible as a mainstream version of Enter Shikari, late Pendulum and something undeniably unique. They’ve even managed to capture a bit of radio friendly dub-step in there which is oh so fashionable at the moment. With a bit more beef put into the riffs and production, Proxies will have it spot. This band will take over the hearts of teenagers everywhere.

Words: Emma Wallace

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Music Music News Preview

Gnarwolves Announce a Trio of Shows


As well as having a sick band name, Gnarwolves dropped a cracking EP earlier this summer entitled ‘CRU‘. We really rate these guys and after an awesome performance at Hevy, we totally stress that you should head down to one of their recently announced shows as support to The Story So Far. The dates are as follows:

OCTOBER
01 MARGATE West Coast Bar
02 COVENTRY Kasbah
03 BOURNEMOUTH Sound Circus

Read our full review of ‘CRU’ here.

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Album Reviews Buzz Chart Music Reviews

Adolescent

Adolescent
Golden Halls [EP]

It is very hard to try and pinpoint music with blanket terms such as Down Tempo, some people may even refer it as Post-Dubstep, but I find that hard to believe. The likes of Four Tet have been making this eloquent genre around the same time as Dub-Step came out, in the late nineties. That statement may offend some people, but the matter of fact is, this is no competition. And I’m not comparing Mr. Parish to Mr. Hebden either; I’m just trying to give a little scope on this sub genre of electronic music that can be as slippery as an electric eel. It’s a style of music I generally find hard to connect with but the atmospheres created are second to none and they usually send me into some kind of dream like induced stupor, however that is not to say that statement is derogatory and that I don’t enjoy it.

Alex Parish A.K.A Adolescent is a Brighton born producer who on his debut EP is only twenty-one (oh the irony) and it is a well thought out package. I found it very easy to work to; music to me has different purposes and this serves well as great background music. From the art work to the samples, Parish pieces together an ethnic worldview catalyzed through his musical soundscape. From the foreign quire sample in Golden Halls Pt. 2 to the word play in the track names such as Hangshai. It is apparent that a back to basics, minimal characteristic, influences his style. There are some intricate moments on the EP, for example the piano on K:TV is fazed in and turns the heavy synth on. This is synchronized with the beat and makes for a nice feature. I found it hard to tell in the arrangement of the song where the Wu Tang sample from Severe Punishment fitted in, but that says to me that it is mixed in incredibly well.

You could find it in the chilled out bars of Brighton or you could understand it from the multi cultural markets and the global understanding that is practiced in and around the streets of Brighton. On the other hand, it could just be that he has a good imagination. Whatever Adolescent’s influence is, this EP is a really good start and I wish him all the best.

WORDS: ASH MOORE

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Album Reviews Buzz Chart Music Reviews

Gnarwolves

GNARWOLVES
CRU

(Tangled Talk / Day By Day)

gnarwolves_cru

Pop-punk in the most old-school of senses (well maybe not the *most* old school, but not the namby pamby new-school), Gnarwolves’ debut EP is packed with short, sharp nuggets of riotous goodness. Barely stepping over the punk-rock two minute marker with this sextet of tracks, the slightly gruff vocals are earnest and rousing. You can imagine them inciting a drunken singalong of the highest order.

Despite being short in length, there is nothing throwaway about these tracks. Rather they’re anthemic and heaped with raw emotion. In a good way. Guitars rollick along to a joyous drumbeat until ‘Community, Stability, Identity’ breaks things up with a decidedly slower pace, starting off with an eerie sense of quiet and then crashing into a full-on onslaught of instrumentals; it’s reminiscent of something off Weezer’s Pinkerton.

The perfect marriage of party and poignancy is achieved on this EP which harks back to early Saves The Day and Hot Water Music with a dash of something a tad more modern. A cracking debut.

Sarah Maynard