We like Jamie and owe him a drink.
More stuff through the letterbox this morning which has taken a while to get listened to because we’re so excited by the wealth of Breezeblock shows suddenly available to download. Oooooooh yes.
There’s a new single from Stylus Rex due on Monday (called, ever-so-slightly alarmingly, ‘Squelch Freak’) released on the new label BijouBeats, the not-unreasonably-monikered division of LA-based breakbeat haven BijouBreaks. It is indeed freaky AND squelchy and you’re dancing feet pretty much need this in their lives.
Also on the doormat was new single from Smilex called – i’m afraid – ‘Flimsy Fickle Fashion (Fuck Off And Die)’. Uhm, lovely. It clocks in at 1:46, it regurgitates a flaccid cod-punk of the sort Towers Of London can only dream of and if you can’t guess what the song’s about, it’s about 105 seconds too long.
Thankfully, though, there was also a couple of new releases from Truck Records, one being new single ‘Come To Love’ from Popjustice favourites Trademark. It’s very Pet shop Boys-y, wondrously synthetic and you can here the leading track right here. Also in the parcel was the new split 7” between Hayman, Watkins, Trout & Lee and The Epstein, which looks very promising, yet i haven’t got the heart to tell the Truckers that i haven’t currently got a (working) turntable. i’ve also not got the heart to upload any of the tracks, so you’ll just have to go out and buy them in’t. (You can, however, get a load of Epstein bootlegs here and listen to both of their tracks on the single – ‘Black Dog’ and ‘6:06pm’ – right here so go and do that too.)
However, last and by many means least i received a new, supposedly more professional demo of last year’s 2006: The Love EP by south-coast cut-up cretin Ziggy Bollus. (It’s called an EP but lasts 45 minutes, i.e. one side of a C90, and is eleven tracks long.) i say supposedly because, although the content is plenty interesting, the sound quality is utterly horrible. The original album was released last year on Helen Llewellyn Product Nineteen Recordings but available only on cassette, which obviously bemused a great deal of people who are even starting to regard CD as an outmoded form of audio data handling. It prompted a certain Rob Da Bank to react with a great deal of format puzzlement on its arrival at Radio 1 HQ – judging by that response he might as well have received a wax cylinder or encountered a homing pigeon trying to recite the EP with a penny whistle on demand*.
Bollus put the use of cassette down to technophobia rather than nostalgia purposes and it’s plain to see, or hear rather, because in trying to convert the EP to compact disc he has, for want of a better phrased, completely bollocksed it up. The recording levels are set so far into the red that a lot of it just sounds like indistinguishable fuzzy white noise, which if you’re The Thermals or something probably works in your favour but for a plunderphonic scamp who thinks too hard it takes a great deal away from the work, especially the central track ‘The 237 Songs Closest To Me When Mary Called My Name’ that, clocking in at over 29 minutes, sounds like someone’s replaced the magnetic strip with emery paper. Oh well, judge for yourself, although if you want to hear the original rendering you’re going to have to dig out your old boom-box and start trawling the eBay of your mind.
Ziggy Bollus – 50 Seconds Of Love (radio edit)**
Ziggy Bollus – Biscuit City
Ziggy Bollus – Vitamin Dee Dee (wishpigmentation)
[Edit: You’ll be glad to hear (or probably not, after that) that Mr Bollus has assured me he is working on new material, using computers and everything.]
*actually, that’s not a bad idea, get the bugger on the phone.
**note that the radio edit is 49 seconds long. What larks.
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