Today was good. I went to meet my mate Paul in the pub in town. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a year so we’d some catching up to do. There’s something I like about the gaps in relationships. They’re a form of time travel. When I meet someone close to me who I haven’t seen for a while, the conversation flows from where we last left off, the time and distance travelled, from past to present, disappears in a flash.
So it’s a bit like I’m living in a Douglas Adams novel which is probably why this month’s musical musings feel like they’re all rooted (not in a ‘Little Richard’ way) in either some other time or some other place but equally, they’re part of the right here, right now.
We Three Kings. ‘Momma Said’.
It’s got a very immediate guitar riff at the beginning, which the bass follows note for note and the chorus has a strong vocal hook. For large portions of this I found myself either head nodding or foot tapping and I almost came down with a chronic dose of mid-air drumming, so I guess I must’ve enjoyed it. I won’t do that labelling thing and attempt to genre-ise it because I always think doing that’s bollocks and no matter what anyone else chooses to call it, music is music is music. ‘We Three Kings’ have everything in all the right places but with a refreshing absence of hipster beard & long hair. Well done. https://wethreekings.bandcamp.com/releases
Delta Howl. ‘Reach The Shore’.
Honestly, I’ve been singing this all week and repeatedly breaking into spontaneous line dancing routines in my kitchen & performing involuntary ‘Rich Hall’ impressions to my dog. I want to pull on cowboy boots, a Stetson, sit on my porch with (aforementioned) dog and my car and my ‘MK47 hunting edition automatic rifle’ and wear gingham and whittle, as I chew tobacco, gossing in a spittoon through a clay pipe and strumming my guitar, yodelling a lament about my wife leaving me, while my wife (called Mrs Ingles) leaves me, driving off down the dirt track followed by a cloud of dust. No wonder it’s called the ‘Black Country’ where Delta Howl hail from https://www.deltahowl.com/epk
Amazing Planes ‘Lost in Translation’.
I’m still somewhat in awe of the great digital revolution and the DIY aspect of bands making their music available online to hear for free. I was able to listen to the whole of Amazing Planes ‘Lost in Translation’ album on ‘Soundcloud’. It is an extremely well put together record & I enjoyed listening to it. I’m not going to break down the album into the sum of it’s individual parts but talk about the work as a whole because it really is a hybrid of familiar sounds & styles & ironically I guess, (after singing the praises of digitised music) I kind of wish I had heard this on vinyl. Their sound is very stylised but then the band describes itself as ‘Garage Rock’ so I guess what you see is what you get. ‘Lost in Translation’ is, Amazing Planes, second album. Their first ‘Broken Spokes’ was also posted on ‘Soundcloud’ so I listened to that as well & t’is most enjoyable too. https://soundcloud.com/amazingplanes