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Formed when Lindsay Corstorphine and Christopher Murphy of Sauna
Youth and brethren Oliver and Patrick Fisher of Cold Pumas were summoned
by northern ink-slinger Maike Hale-Jones, Marcel Wave’s
debut offering
is a walk through a smoke-filled pub with yellowing
wallpaper and all
eyes on you. |
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Something Looming is a chronicle of the death of the docklands, the decline
of industry, of the high street, of civic pride, of civilisations, of
hopes and dreams. As Hale-Jones delivers the bad news in her low, West
Yorkshire brogue, Corstorphine adds the bells and whistles via the
frantic pulsations of a wheezing Hohner organ in tandem with Fisher O’s
rasping guitar. Marcel Wave are completed by the throbbing basslines of Murphy
and Fisher P’s fervent rhythms.
There’s a sense of foreboding in Hale-Jones’ lyrics which sit at
the quintet’s core—elegiac, sardonic and piquant in equal measure. A
mixture of narrative epilogues and inward paeans, her words weave tales
across a broad thematic church. Crooked tales of urban renewal and the
voices left behind are probed in ‘Barrow Boys’ and ‘Stop/Continue’ and
are at the fore in ‘Where There’s Muck There’s Brass’ with its refrain
lamenting ‘Concrete and slate shine in the rain, cities destroyed, nothing to gain’.
A snaking, existential dread also runs through the album, stated
more obliquely in the otherwise poppier interludes of the title track Something Looming
and album opener ‘Bent Out of Shape’, and present too on the
comparatively ramshackle ‘Discount Centre’, where Hale-Jones reports ‘On a mini bus on the outskirts of Enfield, I’m losing all of my spark’.
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Marcel Wave invites the listener to dance to society’s decline, and then to later weep into its lukewarm pint. Something Looming is available to order from our webshop here and in all the best shops come Friday.
You'll also find below write-ups of our upcoming concerts for Eric Chenaux (June 28th, St Pancras Old Church) and Kilynn Lunsford (July 3, New River Studios), thanks for reading. |
 Upset The Rhythm presents…
MARCEL WAVE - ‘Something Looming’ album launch! THE PHEROMOANS THE PLAN Friday 14 June MOTH Club, Old Trades Hall, Valette St, London, E9 6NU 7pm-10.30pm | £10 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/t6d6b5967c40 MARCEL WAVE write eulogies for tragic actresses, ancient riverbeds and concrete obscenity. Their inaugural sonic instalment ‘Something Looming’ (out June 14th on Upset The Rhythm) is part trades club symphony, part itchy serenade, and part wistful lament. As their heady concoction of ‘Meades meets Pat-E-Smith meets Kirklees Borough Council’ gets prepped to be formally baptised on a dank stage near you, Upset the Rhythm and Feel It Records have dutifully stepped in to deliver its songbook to the masses on both sides of the pond. Formed when Lindsay Corstorphine and Christopher Murphy of Sauna Youth and brethren Oliver and Patrick Fisher of Cold Pumas were summoned by northern ink-slinger Maike Hale-Jones, Marcel Wave’s debut offering is a walk through a smoke-filled pub with yellowing wallpaper and all eyes on you. It’s a chronicle of the death of the docklands, the decline of industry, of the high street, of civic pride, of civilisations, of hopes and dreams. As Hale-Jones delivers the bad news in her low, West Yorkshire brogue, Corstorphine adds the bells and whistles via the frantic pulsations of a wheezing Hohner organ in tandem with Fisher O’s rasping guitar. Marcel Wave are completed by the throbbing basslines of Murphy and Fisher P’s fervent rhythms. Join Marcel Wave as they dance to society’s decline with a lukewarm pint in both hands at this album launch! https://marcel-wave.bandcamp.com THE PHEROMOANS are tenants of an unruly domain. Over the last 18 years the group have evolved from garage rock primitivists to auteurs of their own curious sound; a frothy brew of loose electronics, refractory rock and humdrum musing. Their songs are mutable, capricious, unreliable narrations, often withholding as much as they reveal. Russell Walker’s understated vocal has always been the band’s unifying focus, it is wry, unsparing and wilfully honest. Walker’s lyrics are an observational tour de force, sometimes droll, yet often tipping over into unlikely pathos. With previous releases on Upset The Rhythm, Convulsive and Alter, 2024 will witness The Pheromoans return with lucky album number 13, entitled ‘Wyrd Psearch’ (out now 1st on Upset The Rhythm). With The Pheromoans there is always a familiarity at play, only broken and reassembled, like a bygone sitcom gone rogue in your memory. This contributes to the group’s peculiarly British outsider perspective, one that shouts from the sidelines, but never goes unnoticed. https://upsettherhythm.bandcamp.com/album/wyrd-psearch THE PLAN is a continually evolving outfit which includes members who have previously appeared in bands like Wetdog, Vic Godard and The Subway Sect, Hot Silk Pockets, Mathew Sawyer and The Ghosts, Reverend Pike, and Private Trousers. Sometimes described as post-punk, they also pull from more diverse influences such as no wave, garage, psych, as well as hints of prog. Their songs often move in unexpected directions and are always pinned together by Rebecca Gillieron's sometimes defiant/sometimes soft vocal melodies. After fine-tuning new songs to completion this year, here's a chance to hear material from their new album, recently recorded by Toby Borrough's from Pozi. |
 Upset The Rhythm presents…
ERIC CHENAUX JUDE MCCREATH Friday 28 June St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, King's Cross, NW1 1UL 7.30pm | £12 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/Pbad9db9e326 ERIC CHENAUX is a Canadian guitarist, songwriter, singer and sound sculptor. He has released seven solo albums of experimental song on the Montréal-based imprint Constellation, charting an adventurous and uncompromising path through avant-folk, out-jazz and pop composition, increasingly rooted in a unique and elemental juxtaposition of fried, frazzled, semi-improvised guitar and smooth, clear tenor balladry. He has been called “a musician like no other” by Tiny Mix Tapes; his solo albums praised by The Quietus as “stunningly beautiful, genuinely inimitable, whose reputation will only grow with time.” Gracing the cover of The Wire magazine in 2017, the feature article declared: “Chenaux succeeds in generating an astonishing array of timbres. A singer and songwriter possessed of angelic sweetness and clarity accompanying himself with largely improvised, visceral guitar textures that seem intent on undermining and obscuring his own songs. It’s the need to communicate tussling with the urge to obfuscate; lucidity versus opacity; form against chaos.” Chenaux’s first album as a singer-songwriter was ‘Dull Lights’, released on Constellation in 2006, and an acclaimed, highly original solo discography has unfolded since then: ‘Sloppy Ground’ (2008); ‘Warm Weather With Ryan Driver’ (2010); ‘Guitar & Voice’ (2012); ‘Skullsplitter’ (2015); ‘Slowly Paradise’ (2018) and ‘Say Laura’ (2022). He has featured on a range of collaborative records issued by other labels through this same span, including Okraïna, Avatar, Grapefruit and Three:four. He has performed and recorded with countless artists, including Ryan Driver, Sandro Perri, Pauline Oliveros, Michael Snow, Han Bennink, Josephine Fosterand many more. Chenaux’s forthcoming album ‘Delights Of My Life’ features Eric with a thee-piece band and will be released in May on Constellation. This new record conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind. JUDE MCCREATH is a alt-folk singer-songwriter born in Hertfordshire and currently residing in London. A former member of the popular indie-rock group second thoughts, his musical influences include Elliot Smith, Nick Drake, Plas Teg and Eric's Trip. Recent recordings were made with Yuri Shibuichi from Honeyglaze producing. Jude sometimes performs live with cello and drum accompaniment. https://on.soundcloud.com/RyZsRw253Y2vMpny6 |
 Upset The Rhythm presents…
KILYNN LUNSFORD THE REBEL THE PHEROMOANS Wednesday 3 July New River Studios, 199 Eade Rd, Harringay, London, N4 1DN 7.30pm | £9 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/qf75cce9e3be KILYNN LUNSFORD had been conceiving her first solo album since she was a young teen. Growing up in Philadelphia through the MTV era of Missy Elliot, Timbaland and the Swing Mob collective, and drawn towards its “sometimes ridiculous, but overloaded” qualities, she found herself returning to that state of emerging adulthood when the moment for a solo record finally arose. ‘Custodians of Human Succession’, released on Ever Never Records, straddles unclear boundaries between electro-pop, post-punk and the avant-garde; it delves into those liminal spaces between pop culture and experimentalism, between city and country, between verse and chorus. Written over four years, drafted during long car rides from work, hewn out first thing in the morning or last thing at night ‘Custodians'…is Lunsford’s first work since the dissolution of her former project, noise-punk outfit Taiwan Housing Project in 2021. The album itself operates like a collage, splintered and warped, each song in imprinting its own shape and colour to fashion a finished whole. Industrial-edged electro-pop a la Chris and Cosey sits shoulder to shoulder with twangling new wave rock ‘n’ roll ironies. Lunsford’s caustic lyrics embellish this further, packed as they are with a potent blood-stream of unflinching surrealism and discomfiting satire. Impacted by her experiences as Healthcare Union Organiser working through a pandemic, and as a sufferer of an autoimmune disorder with no healthcare coverage, a festering anger boils at the album’s core. Little wonder how, from all this, comes a record of commensurate disturbance, and brilliant intrigue. https://evernever-records.bandcamp.com/album/custodians-of-human-succession THE REBEL was born Benedict Roger Wallers in 1971. Since 1989 BR Wallers has recorded & hand-distributed a bewildering array of impossibly hard-to-find home-made cassette-albums, under a variety of guises. Wallers is a charismatic lone wolf in a cowboy hat and a tie whose electrified howls are too idiosyncratic to be broken down into market-oriented terms. It is difficult to sketch a thumbnail summary of a musician who has amassed a vast and unwieldy discography under a variety of names and genres: the most widely acclaimed is probably the Country Teasers, but he also moonlights as the Company, the Male Nurse, the Beale, the Stallion, the Black Poodle and Skills on Ampex, across folk, country, garage, post-punk, no wave and electronic pop. In the main part The Rebel is centred around twisted Casio drones, clanging guitar and some defiantly deadpan vocals, all thrown in the pan and pressure-cooked in Wallers' mind. Wallers has amassed a near-unquantifiable discography over the past 30 years, from scores of more or less “official” LPs, EPs and 7”s to seemingly endless self-released cassettes. https://the-rebel.bandcamp.com/ THE PHEROMOANS are tenants of an unruly domain. Over the last 18 years the group have evolved from garage rock primitivists to auteurs of their own curious sound; a frothy brew of loose electronics, refractory rock and humdrum musing. Their songs are mutable, capricious, unreliable narrations, often withholding as much as they reveal. Russell Walker’s understated vocal has always been the band’s unifying focus, it is wry, unsparing and wilfully honest. Walker’s lyrics are an observational tour de force, sometimes droll, yet often tipping over into unlikely pathos. With previous releases on Upset The Rhythm, Convulsive and Alter, 2024 will witness The Pheromoans return with lucky album number 13, entitled ‘Wyrd Psearch’ (out now 1st on Upset The Rhythm). With The Pheromoans there is always a familiarity at play, only broken and reassembled, like a bygone sitcom gone rogue in your memory. This contributes to the group’s peculiarly British outsider perspective, one that shouts from the sidelines, but never goes unnoticed. |