My Last.fm chart 23 Mar - 30 Mar:  

1. Crystal Castles - 24 plays. Their album is arguably too long, and the 'hits' might overshadow some of the instrumental and less catchy tracks, but still, don't listen to Public Enemy, believe the hype.

2. Low - 22 plays. I want to do a straw poll of the number of people attending the Camden Crawl who are gutted they'll be missing Low at the Union Chapel. So far I have 1 (that's me).

3. The Jesus and Mary Chain - 17 plays. 'They only have that one song off Lost In Translation, everything sounds the same..... No I've never really checked them out properly but I don't need to, I have enough 80's shoegaze/indie bands to keep me going.... Oh, actually it's not that bad.'

4. 5ive - 13 plays. Slam Dunk Da Funk was a classic but I'm glad their stoner-sludge band is doing well too. The new album detroys.

5. PJ Harvey - 12 plays. She isn't my favourite, and still annoys me on occasion, but wow 'White Chalk' is quite an affecting album.

=5. Hot Snakes - 12 plays. A bit of John Reis worship should be in every chart.

7. A Northern Chorus - 11 plays. Late evening pillow talk music is often sountracked by Constellation bands, but ANC are a good alternative when it comes to Canadian post-rock.

=8. Cat Power - 9 plays. Another week, another chart, more Cat Power.

=8. The Dismemberment Plan - 9 plays. I wish this was just for 'Onward fat girl' on repeat but the whole of '!' is class A stuff without having to poke fun at the obese.

=8. The Rapture - 9 plays. For these tracks I would like to thank whoever it is who shares them on the network while at work, as I keep forgetting to rip 'Echoes' onto my iTunes.

Playlist: dEUS, Cat on Form, Kind of Like Spitting, Beestung Lips, all of the above

Bookmark with:
Digg	del.icio.us	Reddit
Facebook	Newsvine	StumbleUpon

Aside from making  a lot of raging death and technical metal, Sweden has had no shortage of heavy punk rock bands and those which completely nail that very 'Swedish' sounding indie rock/rock 'n' roll hybrid. The Hives are obviously pretty massive but similarly Refused, The Hellacopters, Breach, Nine and a lot more have put Sweden on the map, because I'm not really sure what else it is famous for. JR Ewing also sound like they should Swedish but they are in fact Norwegian.

The one Swedish band I could possibly be most fond of (after Meshuggah) is Seven Feet Four, who are one of those bands that fall under the 'should've been so much bigger than they were' bracket. They sounded as Swedish as they come and made that really urgent kind of post-hardcore known in bands like At The Drive In and even JR Ewing, but wrote absolutely killer songs and were generally SPOT ON in pretty much every way.

I helped put on Seven Feet Four in either 2003 or 2004 in Birmingham and they were one of the most marvelous bands I had the pleasure to watch, let alone actually put on. They split in 2007, leaving behind a ruddy great album 'Departure/Arrival' which was put out through the great Coalition Records in 2003 and an EP that came out last year.

I mourn the loss of Seven Feet Four pretty much every day, and more people should too.

Bookmark with:
Digg	del.icio.us	Reddit
Facebook	Newsvine	StumbleUpon

Two magazines reviewed a Rolo Tomassi gig I attended, possibly even more. One was Plan B, the other Metal Hammer. The gig itself was generally quite weird, as it was an all-ages afternoon show and the Underworld was full of kids (as in, literally 15 years old) wearing a lot of camouflage and New-Era clothing, and not paying enough attention to the bands but snogging each others' faces off. NICE.

Starting with Plan B (read it here), this review is quite poetic, with such phrases as 'But all along and beside the stage, thrilled and beaming and stamping and screaming, are other kids...with their cameras set to FOREVER'. I'm not really sure what is up with Plan B gig reviewers, but I like this review. It's a bit too flowery for its own good, but defends the band against the horrible heckling they received, and even compares them to Hawkwind, which is a first. I give this review 7/10. Good intentions, slightly unnecessary language.

While Plan B make a good effort, Metal Hammer were clearly watching another gig all together, and asked someone who hasn't heard a lot of music to write the review (if you really must read it, it's here). Apparently Rolo Tomassi 'sound like a billion bands all at once', which is as well-thought out and in-depth as this review gets really. The reviewer's description of each band member in turn is bizarre, using the phrases 'Frankenstein youth', 'ridiculously cheery indie-child' and my favourite, a 'half-naked drummer who lurches from amazing to rubbish with ridiculous verve'. Where to begin with that final statement? Since when did taking your shirt off become notable? Are you saying some of his drum parts were good, and then he just suddenly became a bit crap every now and then? Apparently the vocalist sounds like Max Cavalera and Dani Filth (look them up non-90's metal fans), which means nothing, so you might as well just throw in references to any heavy metal singer you care to mention. I give this review 1/10. I am baffled by music journalism sometimes.

Playlist: The Ladies, Fuck Buttons, Nation of Ulysses

Bookmark with:
Digg	del.icio.us	Reddit
Facebook	Newsvine	StumbleUpon

San Diego is the spiritual home of emo and hardcore and while that's all well and good, it's plain ridiculous how everyone in every band then goes on to be in 5 other bands, making it somewhat difficult to remember your punk rock credentials. Here's a handy guide which should solve all your problems whenever you can't finish the phrase 'I love that band! Didn't they go on to be in....'

1.) Clikitat Ikatowi - This band alone make me need to buy a new record player., as 'Orchestrated and Conducted' is amazing beyond any constraints of what post-hardcore/emo should be about. Members went on to be in the Black Heart Procession and Thingy, who are of course one of Rob Crow's many past and present bands. However, stepping back in time, members had previously been in....

2.) Heroin - Heroin hold quite a stately position in the San Diego family tree, as they are probably the daddy of all emo/hardcore bands for a lot of people, but for me they'll never be as good as the bands they spawned, including the above,  Antioch Arrow and...

 3.) Swing Kids - One further towards the hardcore end of the scale, members read like a who's-who of arty hardcore, including someone from Unbroken and someone from Sweep The Leg Johnny (incidentally, Yannis from Foals' favourite band). Their discography is probably my number 1 essential San Diego purchase, released on frontman Justin Pearson's 31G label, who is currently a member of...

4.) The Locust - This band might have become the byword for 'sassy kids in tight trousers playing spazzy music' but it's not that crass. Bassist Justin Pearson is basically the king of San Diego and with his aforementioned 31G record label pretty much rules the roost. The Locust went on to partake in Holy Molar, Cattle Decapitation and...

   5.) Some Girls - When American Nightmare changed their name to Give Up The Ghost and cheesed a lot of people off, everyone should've stopped getting so antsy about it all and moved on to Some Girls anyway. More sassiness, the band included Pearson back on bass, Wes Eisold (of GUTG) on vocals and a guitarist from local post-rock band Tristeza.

...and this could go on for ages but I need to start going through my Tristeza back catalogue now.

Playlist: Every San Diego band. Ever.

Bookmark with:
Digg	del.icio.us	Reddit
Facebook	Newsvine	StumbleUpon

To introduce Foals as an exciting new band would be like saying ‘check out this really hip new website called Facebook’. They really don’t need any introduction, do they? The Oxford 5 piece have been topping ‘new bands to look out for’ lists for about three years now and have created a hype both amongst the discerning music fans and the mainstream press. The general media perception of the band seems to go between being overexposed and far too serious Uni dropouts, and the afrobeat saviours of UK indie rock. It’s all been said about them, and it’s all getting a bit tiring. And they haven’t even released their debut album yet.

So the prospect of interviewing them was an exciting yet awkward one; what else can you possibly ask the band who seem to have been spoken about for years and are now slapped across every music magazine on an almost weekly basis. Whether they prefer Pantera or Slayer, surely?

Jimmy (guitar) and Edwin (keyboards) arrive at the MSN offices with suitcases ready for tour and an unfazed approach to the large glossy building. After getting excited about the free juice and things on the walls, we begin...

Are you fed up people beginning every interview talking about you being ‘Oxford drop-outs’.

E - Yes. It’s not strictly true; two of us went to Oxford and I dropped out before the band, so it wasn’t anything to do with that.

J – Yannis did drop out for the band...

E- He wasn’t really into Oxford for the same reasons I wasn’t into Oxford, so he was looking for an opportunity to do what he wanted to do and leave.

Do you think there’s been a bit of a switch from Oxford intellectuals to being a self-confessed pop band who seem to want to downplay their intelligence? Similarly with the change from the (2 of the member's previous band) Edmund Fitzgerald to Foals?

J- We don’t wanna take it too seriously, I mean we do take ourselves seriously….

E – But I really don’t think it’s that conscious? For Yannis’ and Jack’s part they wanted to make something less serious than the Edmund Fitzgerald because they weren’t that popular a band and they weren’t going to get that popular. They kinda got sick of their music and they were so self-referential. For want of a better word it was just like hardcore and Yannis just wanted to play around more.

The Edmund Fitzgerald recordings are actually getting released now. Doesn’t a cynical part of you just think that’s to cash in on Foals’ success?

E – (Laughs) They’ve been talking about releasing it for ages!

J – There are a lot of people that like the Edmund Fitzgerald and don’t like Foals. They just want to get the recordings out because they hardly released anything. There’s all this stuff that’s really good so they should just release it.

The Foals sound could be described as a very ‘now’ sound, do you think that you’ve found your stride with where you’re at now or is it still an ongoing and evolving process?

E –Not at all. Once we’d finished the album all we could do was listen to the flaws and think about what we could’ve done differently.

J – We’re still trying to play the album live so we’re still finding our stride in that way, but we’re definitely not set in our ways at all.

E – We’re already writing new stuff and it’s pretty different.

The live Foals experience is completely different from the recorded version, is there a division in how the band prefers to be perceived?

J – They’re totally different, there are pluses and minuses for both. Touring can get kinda old ‘cos you’re not doing anything new, or creative really when you’re playing live. You’re just running through the songs, and it’s fun, but right now soundchecks are the only time we get to write new stuff.

Touring for you now is totally different to how it used to be. Do you miss the days of playing house parties?

J – I romanticise all that now but at the time it sucked a lot of the time. It’s totally different now, I mean all our gigs are sold out, and we get a rider and a tour bus.  And we have a lighting engineer!

E – We’ve got this massive crew now, a guy who sells t-shirts, a sound engineer, a lighting engineer…

J – We’ve got our own tech now.. we had practice the other week in Oxford and all these people turned up and one started untangling my cables. I was just like ‘dude, don’t worry about it it’s ok!’.

E – So we’re still settling in to being a studio band, ‘cos we’re still really young and it’s a lot easier to play live. To take that into a studio is really hard and we didn’t really do anything in a studio we were really happy with until we went into one with Dave Sitek. He taught us how to be comfortable and how to make a band sound good.

Was it you guys who approached Dave Sitek (of TV On The Radio) to produce the album?

J – Yeah, we made a hitlist of producers and approached them.

E – We wanted a producer who was going to bully us into making things sound how we wanted them to sound. We had two singles come out before this album that we really weren’t happy with.

How are things with Sitek now? (Foals famously decided not to use one of his mixes.)

J – It’s a little shakey and I think his pride got hurt quite a lot ‘cos he thought he’d done a really good job.

E – Maybe his mix will resurface in 20 years and be hailed as a long lost masterpiece.

What’s the deal with future albums and your label, Transgressive?

E – We have a four album deal, the typical one where they decide if they want to pick the next album up or not. We’re definitely doing a second album with them.

It’s hard to imagine four albums sounding like Antidotes. Where do you think it could go?

J -  I really like what we’re doing now, things are getting pretty cosmic at the moment. In the studio we were smoking a lot of weed and playing around with all these really shit gadgets that make cool sounds. I was thinking about this last night and thought it would be really cool if we could experiment with sound itself. We could write songs where the guitars are plugged straight into the amps and everything is clean. And have month long practices with the absolute basics, like how we used to, otherwise we’re going to get lost in the cosmos.

E – We want to take ourselves back to the really stripped down version of us by just playing clean guitars by ourselves in a small room. And being really disciplined, keeping the songs as short as possible and take those into a studio where we know what we’re doing and decorating the songs that way, rather than trying to find a tune under a cloud of delay. We need time to do all that, and hopefully we will have time.

It’s an interesting way to evolve, as you often get labelled as one of the newest and most exciting bands in the country right now. Does it still feel exciting to be making this music? Are you still perceived that way?

E – I can’t really tell and I try not to think about it too much.

J – We don’t really know where we’re going either and I find that really exciting.

E – I still stand in a practice room and watch Yannis and Jack bounce off each other and I feel excited.

Your success could come down to the fact you’re essentially an easy band to listen to, and you can be marketed and have your songs on the radio, so it seems to have opened up the way for other more interesting UK bands, yet there’s still a lot which can’t get to that same level and the mainstream pres is still dominated by tripe. Do you think that’s the case?

J – Do those bands want to get bigger?

E – I think that for some bands like Youthmovies, because their songs are the length they are they’re not going to get the kind of exposure we’ve had and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it’s just a true thing. When we get compared to terrible bands that we’re not like at all, they don’t have access to the other bands because they aren’t getting exposed. It makes us look like arseholes, well not arseholes but like we’re different? But we’re not, we come from this scene with all these bands but the difference with us is we have shorter songs. (laughs) that’s not strictly true… I don’t want to be too cynical about it, we pride ourselves on writing pop songs and that’s a really difficult thing to do.

J – And write weird pop songs. That’s what we want to do with the next album, go completely whack but then write the perfect pop song.

Do you ever get frustrated or annoyed with some of the bands you get lumped in with now or have to share a stage with?

J – No we never get frustrated with it. We went to the NME awards the other day and I don’t think we’ve ever felt so different.

E – Not even different in a good way!

J – It was just like we totally didn’t belong there.

In lots of interviews you mention the stress and pressure you feel from being in this band, is that a problem?

E – There’s a danger you can start reacting to all that and start working in the wrong direction. I think there was a time last year when we were kicking against the press and hype and being quite rude, but I think now we’re more settled and focused.

J – It all happens regardless of what you say..

Will all the crazy stuff like the NME cover, appearing on Skins, the Burberry campaign (drummer Jack is appearing in one of their ads) just keep carrying on and carrying on or will it get to a point when you have to think STOP! and you can't take any more of this crazy hype?

E – If it carries on for another year we will all have mental breakdowns, but it happens in quite controlled bursts because of PR.

J – It’s amazing when bands disappear! You wonder where they’ve gone and it’s just ‘cos their press campaign has stopped, and then hey presto they’re back on the front covers again.

So do you still get on as friends and people with each other?

E – More than ever. We find it funny and enjoyable. Fundamentally, it’s all good. Sometimes we focus on the criticism we read but really, we’ve done really well and you can’t get away from that. So we’re really excited.

Enough seriousness, Battles or Don Cab?

Both - Battles!

Slayer or Pantera?

J – Slayer

Pixies or Sonic Youth?

E – Sonic Youth. I don’t like the Pixies!

J – The Pixies!

Youthmovies or Dananananaykroyd?

J – Youthmovies! I remember seeing them at Truck about five years ago before Foals or anything and thinking they were superheroes!

E – Dananananaykroyd, although I do love Youthmovies.

----

You can find out more about Foals at http://www.wearefoals.com/. Their debut album 'Antidotes' is out on 24th March, with single 'Cassius' out now. They're currently on tour and playing the Astoria on Monday 17th March. See you there, I'll probably be dancing.

Playlist: Carissa's Wierd, PJ Harvey, Los Campesinos!, Off Minor

Bookmark with:
Digg	del.icio.us	Reddit
Facebook	Newsvine	StumbleUpon

Last.fm Announcement

Charts Trouble

Bookmark with:
Digg	del.icio.us	Reddit
Facebook	Newsvine	StumbleUpon