A vision of walking around and imagining my Walkman headphones were actually giant speakers accompanying me forcing the world into dancing and performing their tasks to my music. If I had giant speakers up in the sky blasting my own music then everywhere I went people would have to listen to my music and the world would have a uniform emotion, a sort of interconnectedness. Like an unrelenting soundtrack to which everyone must acquiesce… These are my speakers in the sky.
Cause A Riot are a melodic hardcore quintet from Järvenpää in Finland who's line up features Ari Toivanen, Kaarle Ranta, Olli Rahijärvi, Petri Kortelainen & Simo Timonen. They formed in 2011, play fast paced, anthemic skate punk and write about issues such as inequality and oppression.
Red In Front Of The White And Blue is from a recent spilt single they've released with fellow countrymen Teresa Banks and it's the kind of ep that'll make you want to jump around and get sweaty.
London's power pop kings Los Pepes are back today with a song from a new album that seems to have sneaked out with little fanfare. Maybe all the much deserved praise will begin at the end of this week as that's when it's down for release on the labels Bandcamp page but as it's streaming already I'm going to post one of the tracks today.
The band line up with Ben Perrier (Vocals/Guitar), Seisuke Nakagawa (Bass/Vocals), Guilherme Rujao (Guitar/Vocals) & Kris "Killer" Kowalski (Drums) and it's fair to say that any new release from them comes with a guarantee it'll be catchy as hell. The new album is no exception.
It's titled The Happiness Programme, it features both tracks from the excellent single they released earlier this year (Want You Back/Never Get It Right) plus 10 new compositions that are equally as good.
This is an early highlight and it is called Sick And Bored...
At Your Funeral is the opening track from Saves The Day's third album Stay What You Are. It is probably their most popular track and was played tones on mtv2 back in the early 00's. Due to it being played so much I haven't listened to it for years, but the singer was recently on a Podcast I listen to discussing the song and hearing it brought back all kinds of memories.
The song was written after the singer as a young man went to hang out with a band he really respected at practice and all they did was drink and smoke, so he ended up being disappointed with the experience and saw this as the end of that relationship and having those guys on a pedestal and therefore wrote this song on the back of this.
It is the typical pop punk 3 barre chord track but they do so much to make it a great track.
Blur are an English rock band. Formed in London in 1988, the group consists of singer Damon Albarn, guitarist Graham Coxon, bassist Alex James and drummer Dave Rowntree. Think Tank is their seventh studio album, released on 5 May 2003. Continuing the jam-based studio constructions of the group's previous album, 13 (1999), the album expanded on the use of sampled rhythm loops and brooding, heavy electronic sounds. There are also heavy influences from dance music, hip hop, dub, jazz, and African music, an indication of songwriter Damon Albarn's expanding musical interests.
Out of Time is the lead single and is a bass-driven track with minimal drums and acoustic guitar accompanied by eastern and orchestral flourishes. The faint gargling noises in the intro is part of a scene from Doctor Who. It reached number five in the UK Singles Chart. Out of Time was Blur's first release in three years and also the band's first release without guitarist Graham Coxon.
In October 2011, NME placed it at number 73 on its list "150 Best Tracks of the Past 15 Years" and eighth on its list "Greatest Tracks of the Decade". They later ranked it the 499th best song ever.
The song was accompanied by an anti-war music video directed by John Hardwick, edited by Quin Williams and produced by Mike Wells through London-based production company Helen Langridge Associates (HLA). It was the first of Blur's videos to not feature the band members themselves in any way, consisting entirely of footage from a 2002 BBC Correspondent documentary depicting life aboard the United States aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on duty in the Persian Gulf. Produced and directed by Anthony Makin, shot by Brian Green and Dale Rodkin and edited by Karen O'Connor, Warship was filmed in October 2002 and premiered 1 December 2002 on BBC Two. Hardwick got the idea to use the documentary footage for the music video while watching the film. He showed the band a reference tape cut to fit the song in early February 2003. Blur decided to release it as the finished video. It premiered on 10 March.
The video is centred on Jill Ameperosa, a 24-year-old aircraft maintenance technician. After walking up to the deck, she looks out at sea whilst subtitles on the screen read, "Two days after I get home he leaves. It's just too hard. I used to love him. But you can't love someone you don't know anymore ...".
Albarn described the video as
the antithesis of the 'Top Gun' image of the American military machine. It focuses on the loneliness of somebody working on an aircraft carrier and the fact that a six-month tour of duty means that relationships break down and children go without their parents. That's the reality of it."
Commenting on the video, Hardwick explained,
it occurred to me that some of the personnel revealed in that film communicated a fragility that I felt was echoed in the song. Putting the two together was a comparatively simple task. The video offers an alternative perspective on the individuals who exist at the sharp end of government policy by portraying the armed forces as being staffed by people who have the same needs as all others."
The video won Hardwick a Wood Pencil for music video direction and Williams a Graphite Pencil for music video editing at the 2004 D&AD Awards.
This is Anthrax the UK anarcho punk band, not Anthrax the US heavy metal band. They formed in Gravesend, Kent, back in 1980 during the time that Crass were sniffing out bullshit and Maggie Thatcher was breeding a generation of voracious capitalists. They were a band that we needed back then and we still need them today.
They've just released a new album. It's their first for almost a decade, it's titled Serfs Out, and it's available from the band's Grow Your Own Records. As you might expect, they aren't happy with the state of the nation. They attack leaders ("care and compassion are no longer in fashion"), the media ("dumb it down dumb it down, vilify, throw it out there, repeat the lie") and those that enable this current shit show ("I'm so fuckin' proud of my country, I love to watch it fall from grace"). It's an album about the rich conning the poor with the help of a complicit media and it's simultaneously a great listen and a saddening one. It's about food banks, Brexit, greed and dumbing down. It's modern day life, maybe it's life as it's always been and sadly always will be.
A few of the songs are re recorded versions of tracks that have appeared in recent years, a few are new, all fit together nicely to make up one of the best albums of 2021.
The track I'm highlighting here is the one that concerns itself with little Englanders yearning for a glorious past that didn't actually exist. It's called Island Mentality...
