Behold the gold! Australian synth-punks screensaver return this October with an immense, brooding second album titled ‘Decent Shapes’. Loaded with simmering tension, ‘Decent Shapes’ finds screensaver exploring existence eeked out across an ever-growing trash heap of materialism and detachment.
Available on sardonic gold vinyl through Upset The Rhythm on October 20th. Check out first single ‘The Guilt’ now, a spirited call to arms for all who succumb.
After our first date with Martin sold out in the blink of an eye, we're profferring a second silver evening for your entertainment. Tickets now on sale!
A Second Silver Evening with...
MARTIN NEWELL (Cleaners from Venus)
Monday 2 October
St Pancras Old Church, Pancras Road, King's Cross, NW1 1UL
7.30pm | £15 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/V2b3e12291d8
MARTIN NEWELL (Cleaners from Venus) has at last agreed to perform some of his songs in that London. He'll be doing two sets on a guitar and a piano - and talking. You should immediately drop anything else you were considering doing and endeavour to attend.
Martin Newell is a purveyor of ingenious pop music. His music is refracted from late 60s rock only shot through with invention from the rough-and-ready explosion of DIY tape releases in 80s Britain. As a songwriter, he’s right up there with Syd Barrett and Ray Davies, capturing a peculiar Englishness that’s very much his own.
Martin started his career in music aged 19 when he joined an Essex glam-rock band called The Mighty Plod as a singer and gigged in rough clubs, pubs and colleges for the next two years. In his early twenties he joined a hard rock/prog band from Ipswich called Gypp and gigged in the UK as well as touring northern Germany several times. In 1979, he won his first record contract and shortly afterwards his first single ‘Young Jobless / Sylvie In Toytown’ was released, first on an indie label and then with Liberty Records. In the 1980s he formed the anarchic and wonderfully offbeat Cleaners From Venus, who after much defiance of music biz convention, signed to a London record company and began making proper records which were well reviewed and well-received. He began co-writing songs with Captain Sensible in 1986, a relationship which endures to some extent to this day. In 1989 he and his friend Nelson, now of New Model Army formed The Brotherhood of Lizards, were signed to make an album and proceeded to promote it, touring the record by bicycle. This led to many TV appearances and some notoriety and amusement in the media. In 1993, with XTC's Andy Partridge in the producer's chair Martin made what was to become his most successful album ‘The Greatest Living Englishman’, hailed by Rolling Stone magazine as a rock classic. Over the last ten years Martin has continued to release exhilarating albums under his own name and as Cleaners from Venus, most recently a winsome new Cleaners album called ‘K7’ was released on CD and cassette.
A highly-entertaining live act, Martin Newell performs infrequently, refusing nowadays to tour at all. He has been the subject of a highly-praised documentary film Upstairs Planet (2019) which enjoyed premieres both in London and in New York. A second documentary The Jangling Man, the director James Sharp’s intimate portrait of Newell’s life and work, premiered in London and Los Angeles in October 2022.
http://www.martinnewell.co.uk/
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Crucially, on RPG, Dent expands her songwriting and looks
towards the unreal locations of worldbuilding in video games for
inspiration. She comments, “I think the main similarity is the
importance of a song's setting/environment to inform its narrative and
textures, I'm often most inspired when out walking in the natural
landscape, in cities and travelling to places I've never been before -
the environment I'm in really impacts the work I make. While writing
this album, however, I found myself inspired by imaginary landscapes,
those in video games, paintings, etc. I was writing stories into these
unreal locations instead.
Even the songs inspired by real places, like 'The Oldest Trees
Hold the Earth', have a very surreal quality to them in the songs, like
they're being warped and turned into something not of this world. I
think that's the main difference for me in terms of the thematic content
and inspiration behind this album - I've been getting more and more
interested in balancing surreal and fantastical environmental elements
with ordinary and everyday settings.”
RPG upends the concept of the eternal return - we may be in
the midst of inevitable repetition, but we tell stories whilst awaiting
the passage of time.
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 Upset The Rhythm & Cafe OTO present… BARBARA MANNING JOWE HEAD Monday 24 July Cafe OTO, 18-22 Ashwin St, London, E8 3DL 8pm | £12 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/O127c749d8ec BARBARA MANNING is an American indie rock singer-songwriter and guitarist. In addition to her solo career, Manning has been active in a number of bands, including 28th Day (with Cole Marquis), World of Pooh, S.F. Seals and The Go-Luckys!. She has also distinguished herself as an interpreter of other writers' songs. Artists she has covered include The Bats ("Smoking Her Wings"), Richard Thompson ("The End of the Rainbow"), Jackson Browne ("These Days"), Portastatic ("Through With People"), and Amon Düül ("Marcus Leid"). The idiosyncratic but rewarding Barbara Manning is a little too spiky and odd to fit comfortably in the Lilith Fair crowd, but her best work outshines those of her bigger-selling peers. Manning's artistic restlessness and her tendency to jump in and out of bands and recording situations makes it difficult to follow her career -- her discography must be one of the most confusing in all of the '90s indie scene -- but it also makes her one of the most vital and interesting singer/songwriters of her era. https://barbaramanning.bandcamp.com JOWE HEAD is a musician and artist from the Midlands of England, now living in Hackney, in east London. He started his musical career in his home town of Solihull with various school friends in 1972, a project that came to be known as Swell Maps. This group emerged in the late 1970s, are now known as pioneers of what is now referred to as the Alternative Rock or Post-Punk scene. They set up their own independent record label, and mixed Punk Rock with experimental and psychedelic sounds. Swell Maps released four singles and two albums in a brief but dramatic career, that led to them topping the UK independent charts, and influencing bands such as Sonic Youth, Nirvana, and Blur. When they broke up, Jowe joined Television Personalities. Ten years with the TVPs saw Jowe making more influential records, touring Europe regularly, and playing in Japan and the USA. https://jowe-head.com/bio |
 Upset The Rhythm presents…
CURRENT AFFAIRS THE PLAN GROSS MISCONDUCT Wednesday 26 July The Lexington, 96-98 Pentonville Rd, Angel, London, N1 9JB 7.30pm | £8.00 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/O2543ad5f210 CURRENT AFFAIRS are a band from Glasgow marrying 80s pop sensibilities with ferocious post-punk, neatly navigating the line between new wave and goth. Though Joan Sweeney (ex-Rose McDowall’s Band, Aggi Doom, The Royal We) is a lifer, Sebastian Ymai (Comidillo Tapes, Pissy, Anxiety) came from Chile via York, recently relocating to Berlin in 2021, and new member Gemma Fleet (The Wharves, Order of the Toad, Dancer) alongside Andrew Milk (Shopping, Pink Pound) were persuaded to leave London for the ‘second city’ after touring through with previous bands. However, Glasgow is the heart and hub of the band’s music, musical life and the place where forthcoming album Off the Tongue (Tough Love) was solidified and produced. Written from within the world of crumbling services, broken bonds and wounded spirits, Off the Tongue rolls off an ecstatic rage, filled with hope for you, them and everyone else. It’s a rallying cry away from hopelessness, forgiving your fears and laying them to waste. Their album holds a place for you to be angry and to be focused. In lieu of having anything else, we’ve always got each other, and an uncertain future is open game for us too. https://currentaffairs.bandcamp.com/ 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 second album, recently recorded by Toby Borrough's from Pozi, and being mixed as we write. https://theplan1.bandcamp.com/ GROSS MISCONDUCT are a conceptually foggy, bureaucratically sound landfill punk from South London. Featuring members of Killjoys, MILKY, Strong Arm and Surplus. FFO Exit Order, The Cribs, Be Your Own Pet and corporate telephone hold music. Fresh off probation, mandatory training completed and ready for synergy. EP upcoming, check out their demo now! https://grossmisconduct69.bandcamp.com |
 Upset The Rhythm presents… DEERHOOF YAMA WARASHI Monday 21 August Lafayette, 11 Goods Way, London, N1C 4DP 7.30pm | £18 | Tickets: https://link.dice.fm/Ef612b08c524 DEERHOOF have continually quested for daring storytelling and radical sounds over their nineteen boundless albums, as experimental as they are pop. Deerhoof’s most recent album ‘Miracle Level’(out now on Joyful Noise) is also their first to be recorded and mixed in a recording studio. Not because they had tired of their anarchic sound, but because they wanted to open their secretive DIY comfort zone up to something new and uncomfortable. Our research has not turned up many examples of a DIY band waiting 28 years to entrust their record to a proper producer. ‘Miracle-Level’ is an avant-garde, anti-fascist carnival, its spicy surprises whispered conspiratorially, and lit by candlelight. Sit down, let me tell you a story celebrating the infinite small wonders of existence…the miracles that spontaneously present themselves when we’re not distracted by the tribalism and manipulation of our death-driven masters…the miracles that Artificial Intelligence will never replicate. Deerhoof speak in a secret code in which hooks abound, genre is nonexistent, and magic ever awaits us. https://deerhoof.bandcamp.com/ YAMA WARASHI is the vision of Yoshino Shigihara, a Japanese musician and visual artist whose past projects include cult favourites Zun Zun Egui (Bella Union), of which she was a co-founder. Inspired by Japanese folk dance, free jazz and tribal African music, and heavily saturated in psychedelia, Yama Warashi’s songs are lyrically outlandish and charming, melodically addictive and mythical; the band name translates from Shigihara’s native tongue as “small childlike mountain spirit”. Yoshino’s new album ‘Crispy Moon’ displays a bigger sound and an understated but self-assured grandeur. You can hear it in the adorning strings that underpin Dou Dou Meguri’s outré pop, or Makai No Keiyaku’s driving cacophony of Afrobeat rhythms and chiming synth-pop that stomps right through the middle of the record. https://yamawarashi.bandcamp.com |
