So what’s happening with the Organ website? We needed a big spring clean – we may or may not put some of the old interviews and reviews and on-line issues back up again, then again we may not. We’re here for what’s happening today, not what happened last year or what we did in 1995  - THIS IS A GOLDEN AGE OF EXCITING CREATIVE ALTERNATIVE MUSIC – LIVE IT NOW 
 

DEMO OF THE WEEK
PERHAPS CONTRAPTION – Oh, yes, grab your ears and pin them right back, either that or run for your lives whilst you keep one eye on the wrath of the mighty crustacean. We’re got a live one and she got boots. Days and days of throwing CDrs in to the demo-eater only to have the rebellious machine spit them back out double quick in a tantrum of averageness that just won’t do (that and listening to millions of bands in search of that rare Rude Staircase moment on My Space). Oh yes, it’s worth all the bad demos when there’s treats like this lurking and waiting to leap our of the speakers and grab us by the throat, to shake us until we scream with blood-twisting pleasure at the knotted note delight. This is seriously high grade tetrahedron shaped easy to listen to hard-boiled bendy pronk (and we so so like the fact that the accompanying scribbled and slightly manic note came on a torn-out piece of music paper). She got boots boots boots... Four tracks from a new band holed up in the East End of London (originally from Bristol). Tales from the cake buying hordes down the supermarket, if you don’t like it then throw it out - four slices of coloured beadness, four slices of after sundown fairground lurking where there’s an organ playing and its time to retire to the kitchen. Epic adventures and more suitable cases for treatment, all broken packaging and hang on, let us go borrow their own words, the truth always lurks in a band’s own words, here’s what they say on their My Space page – “psychedelic quirk-mongers with healthy doses of improvisation, kitchen utensils, uplifting passages and avant-irk-experiments. Car-boot drumming/fumbling and theatrical frolics included. based in London, we are frothing and eager to perform with all other musical/theatrical/artistic oddities; do get in contact. Piquant rock excursions ahoy...” – Oh yes, we have another one here for all in the pond. Four long-arse pointy pronk adventures that you need to go enjoy. www.myspace.com/perhapscontraption  or  www.perhapscontraption.com

ALSO CHECK OUT
GRIFTER – Old school blues based (stonerish) heavy rock for Clutch fans, Grifter deliver it with a no messing righteous attitude, they have the vibe right, they’re from Plymouth, you find them via www.myspace.com/grifterrock

ALPHA DISTRICT – A fine blend of impressively moody indie guitar adventure, post rock texture and mellow electro drum’n bass laptop beats fused together at Radiohead pace. Organic and electronic, warm and intelligent – challenging ideas, playing with blends and pollinating a whole bag of flavours in an attempt to do something just a little different. Four fine tracks from a new London band who may well be worth keeping a spare eye on. www.alphadistrict.com

CATS AND CATS AND CATS. Short bursts of all-over-the-shop math rock with much longer space/post-rock workouts of the Explosions in the Sky variety, the way the bass grooved behind the drums was pure Monsoon Bassoon. Their EP is available for download at: www.myspace.com/catsandcatsandcats (Phil Whalley) 

Last week's demo of the week - THE PROCESS VOID

Previous demo's of the week - all the past has been deleted (for now)

ALBUM OF THE WEEK
SUNN O))) - Black One (Southern Lord) - Darkness solidified, expressed by subsonic obsessives Sunn O))) in terms of intense, focussed low end drone. Black One, their sixth album, is ambient doom of the most concentrated order.  These are not just any old soundscapes. These are Sunn O)) soundscapes, dripping with claustrophobia, hand-carved from slabs of pure, bowel melting nihilistic bleakness. There is nothing casual or unconsidered about this sound. Be assured that Sunn O)) don't just stroll into a studio and jam. Nope. That would be just tooo easy. Example: for the vocals on Bathory Erzsebet, guest vocalist Malefic was locked into a casket, loaded into the back of a Cadillac Hearse and left with only a microphone for comfort. The results suit the genuinely suffocating vibe of the peice. Who knows what they did to come up with the rest of the genuinely apocalyptic doom of Black One; pyroclastic flows and earthquakes come to mind.  With previous albums' collaborators including Julian Cope and members of Mayhem, expect an experimental, boundary-pushing attitude behind these creations.  Sunn O))) do deserve their reputation; these slow-drawn out expressions of dread and menace have a depth and hellish beauty that others fail to imitate. Taste the difference.    www.southernlord.com

ALBUM OF THE WEEK 2
CATNAP – Like riding a great big cartoon head of a shark that may not be a shark and may be a cat and whatever it is, it is definitely on wheels (and not a wooden fish on wheels) and flying over bumpy ground and look out, here comes the stairs, the catsharkhead is going down (don’t you just love Sarah Lipstick’s artwork). Catnap will grow so tall that all your institutions will crumble beneath their feet like the spineless pests they are. All spiky (with sunken eyes) and a little like The Fall but not really and there’s five tracks and they’re all so goooooooood. Fact fiends and fight fans need to know that there are four members – Jack, Carly, Paul and Ben. “Catnap can be temperamental and aggressive, this should not reflect badly on the member’s personalities”. Catnap are from Brighton and we like their spiky obtusive and proper angularness and cohesive awkward beauty and yes indeed Catnap make music that will excite you. Proper angular and gloriously good for you and they really do sound like their excellent artwork, treat your heart, it will astound you  - www.catnapmusic.co.uk / www.nost8ment.co.uk

ALSO CHECK OUT
NFD - Dead Pool Rising (Jungle) - Further (big) adventures beyond the gloriously dark Fields Of The Nephilim (and The Nefilim and Sensorium). The latest album from the now rather established in their own right BIG band led by founder Nef Tony Pettitt. It’s that great BIG vast-beyond-vast epic wasteland goth R-O-C-K sound pioneered by Killing Joke and taken on by the others you know and loved back in the day (did we say the sound was big yet?). That driving momentum, that deep voice and that clanking bass (Bob White has the perfect voice for the band, goth enough but not the goth cliché that became a bit of a tired joke a long time ago - this guy can sing ‘properly’). NFD probably are the very best ‘proper’ goth rock band out there right now (the rock bit is important, this is a big big rock sound). Devastating and detailed, both raw and polished. Front line visceral bombastic darkwave from a big goth band pushing forward - and I get the impression that they couldn’t care less what you or I think - they’re doing it, they’re doing it good, it’s about as goth rock as it can possible be, they’re ready to plant their big black flag right there in he middle of the field and you’re either standing there with them or you don’t matter an inch to their world and they don’t care what you think (we did say it was a big sound didn’t we?). www.nfd.web.com / www.junglerecords.com

RED LIGHT RIPPERS – Nobody Likes A Rat (Fading Ways) - Foot to the floor, stocked n’dropped, hot-rod racing, cool as a ’73 Dodge Charger, street-punk trailer-trash loving rock ‘n roll. You can smell the flame-burst door decals and the beer stained bowling shirts from here. Bad-ass street punks with half a foot in the land of Bon Scott, Guns n’Roses, Wildhearts and Nazareth.  Raw, delivered with just the right amount of no frills gritty in-your-face hi-energy attitude, they appear to be from Canada. If this sounds like your kind of thing then they do it damn well - they’re worth your time and the money you otherwise would have wasted on beer. www.redlightrippers.com / www.fadingwaysmusic.com

NAUSEA – The Punk Terrorist Anthology Vol 1 (Alternative Tentacles) – Ah yes, old school hardcore scuzzed as f*** New York punk rock with rusty flesh ripping barbed edges and a street-wise political bite that goes right to the bone. One of the most influential New York City punk crews ever. Raw punk, doomed metal and intense and rather bleak socio-political lyrics. Nausea were legends, they were the often imitated but rarely equalled creators – right the way up there alongside the very best (Neurosis, Amebix, Civilised Society...), and yes, a massive influence on today’s finest – without Nausea you probably wouldn’t have had fine bands like Leftover Crack or Skarp sounding quite like they do. Ferocious driving heavy punk rock featuring those do-not-mess dual male/female vocal attacks. And these 22 tracks (most of their only full studio album Extinction as well as tracks from compilations and now way out of print 7”ers) sound as violently vital and relevant today as they did back when they were originally recorded some two decades ago. Actually in these watered down compromised punk rock times they sound a hell of a lot more beautifully relevant.... if you know them then you’ll be glad this CD is in existence, if you don’t know them, then you need to.... go grab some real relentless scathing punk rock violence and creative barbed beauty. www.nauseapunk.net / www.alternativetentacles.com
 

Last week's album of the week - THE DRESDEN DOLLS / PROUDFLESH Previous album's of the week - all the past has been deleted (for now)

BRACE YOURSELF FOR MOMENTS OF JAW-DROPPING PLEASURE

There's a big bloke from Glasgow on the stage, screaming. 

Nobody dares move
He's quite clearly In the zone, but that's ok because the other three musicians are in the zone too... that slightly glazed look of concentration, craftsmen at work.  The big guy is hunched over a piano, but instead of crumbling it to smithereens in his hands, he carefully, delicately plays a chord, followed by another and then a couple more. For some reason this succession of sound makes everyone feel cold, and lonely, and (im)mortal. 

This is too perfect.  To start: Lapsus Linguae seriously rock. With that pleasure comes a whole layer cake of others: they rock straight-ahead, they rock with progressive complexity, they've captured riffs out of the ether, riffs that other bands don't dare to even dream about and after all that, there's stuff for the brain and heart.  Oh, and it's done without the condescention or fake intellectual posturing that certain other bands bring along to their attempts at cutting edge rock.  For Lapsus Linguae, its done as if it is as necessary to them as breathing.  They look good too.

We know them by their Lapsus names: Raga Wu, sublime drummer; Magaloof Taylor, wiry guitar angst; blissful apprentice T-Bone The Magnificent (proud replacement for Gunthor Hunter, who 'left to draw numbers on his face with felt penz') and the big bloke, Penelope Collegefriend. Mr Magaloof and Mr Collegefriend collaborate on the songwriting and the dense, beautiful wordplay: shades of biting, random humour, the bleakness and crass futility of consumer culture dissected with more surrealism than sneer, and not a little compassion. The music a just match: Tourette's-like excursions into METAL! for it's own sake, amongst gorgeous piano developments... really, really soulful, relevant, deep-cutting piano composition, not some throwaway classical tack-on.  That at least, is what we've heard so far: an EP and their mini-album, You Got Me Fraiche. 

What we get tonight, aside from Nashnul Bakeoff (the one with the screaming and the fearful piano end) is new, new new... not having heard a note before, it sounds even denser, and certainly heavier. Looking around the packed Bull & Gate, at an audience largely of previously converted but also a bunch of awestruck teenagers from off the street or somewhere, I see a lot of open mouths. We can't take our eyes off what's going on onstage. Aside from the t-shirt uniform and the occasional unrehearsed between-song histrionics, Lapsus Linguae don't need much in the way of props, not when you have Collegefriend and Taylor's vocal interplay, instrument swapping and unfeigned emotional ferocity. There's one stand-out moment where they enter a passage of absurdly complex dual-vocal dual-instrument counterpoint that makes it difficult to listen to The Mars Volta ever again without going 'pah!'  - whilst underneath, their desperate, bleak energy keeps it alive, immediate, accessible.  This is new work from the long-awaited album, crafted, concentrated, boiled up in some rehearsal studio bunker of the grimmest north, finally unleashed. We're privileged. 

There’s a whole world of ‘proper’ music out there - the twentieth century composers, the living ones who few of  us who didn’t go to music college even register - is filled with the most incredible stuff. But for most of us it’s been hard to know where to start in an often intimidating scene.  Thankfully, as people get increasingly into adventurous sounds, that world is leaking out via word of mouth and the internet, absorbed by all kinds of bands.  Lapsus Linguae are already there... These contemporary classical influences aren't tacked on, but are intrinsic, effortless.  That surreal but savage humour, aggressive energy without bullshit or fakery, is absolutely natural, absolutely unpretentious, whatever you might assume from this ham-fisted attempt at a description. Desperately trying to avoid a cliche about northern grit, now: surely that’s because they come from Glasgow and not Guildford.  Metal posturing and Satie.  The dialectic of devil horns.  And neither the brains or the brawn is ironic.  They don’t need to hide complex thought - fragile, vital  observations and feelings that can’t be marketed, can barely be described - behind irony.  Or preposterous wordiness without meaning. They’re trying for more than just being in a band... Lapsus exists because a rock band is the only way to express it.  It’s just a Lapsus Liguae beast, creating, being there.  Brain food. With heart. Dig in.
www.lapsuslinguae.co.uk
 

Last week's single of the week - GREENSPACE

Previously - all the past has been deleted (for now) 
 

PAST ISSUES -

ORGAN 151 - Out in print now, 40 pages A5 APRIL Organ

ORGAN 150 - NEXT LIFE, CRETIN, HAWNAY TROOF, SYMMETRY, GREENSPACE, DRUGDEALER CHEERLEADER, LAST PARTY, ALEX WARD, BURNT, INTENTION , TRACTOR SEX FATALITY, THE DRESDEN DOLLS, PROUDFLESH, THE GHOSTS, SPEED THEORY, EL TOPO, THE CULT WITH NO NAME, THE PROCESS VOID, 

all the past has been deleted (for now)