Mutes - Starvation Age EP

And so, it continues. I welcome back theexistentialist for his second blog outing of the day. This time, he's also featuring another act I've written about before on these very pages. The spectacular Mutes...

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Mutes - Starvation Age EP

thegeneral has been kind enough to allow theexistentialist a 2^nd blog post. And once again, theexistentialist wants to talk about an artist first discovered by reading thegeneral’s blog.

Last year, thegeneral reviewed the brilliant debut EP by Mutes. thegeneral’s review can be found HERE. 

Well now, they are back with a brand new EP called Starvation Age. This is a cracking collection of tracks, and dear readers, you really ought to think about hoisting yourself over to this link on Bandcamp to buy the EP mutesuk.bandcamp.com/. 

The EP is beautifully sequenced, with each track weaving into the next, each song also manages to sound distinct and different to the previous. .

Boyish is a glorious and gentle intro that builds-up the noise level, and then unfolds into the more distorted, harder, rockier Holy Terror. The vocals are indiscernible, but are crucial to producing the disturbed and dark sound of this song. 

After a brutal opening, this melds into a soft, lilting, dreamscape. Memory Serves continues the quiet mood, adding just a hint of melancholy.

Kissing Trees has a rougher psychedelic garage sound. In fact, Kissing Trees reminded me so much of The Velvet Underground that I expected the ghost of Lou Reed to pop-up and provide some kind of vocal accompaniment.  However, the track is instrumental, which is fortunate, because James doesn't sound a bit like Lou Reed vocally :D (they are both great, just not alike, at all). 

The garage-psychedelia of Kissing Trees brilliantly leads into the title track and closing track, which is a pounding, thundering and noisy finale. An amazing way to end the EP – a fuzzy, noisy slice of psychedelic rock.

Mutes - M.P.D.G

It's been a while dear readers, hasn't it? I know, and I am eternally sorry. Thank you for all the e-mails and letters that didn't flood in, demanding to know where I'd disappeared to. It's nice to feel loved and wanted. By no-one. I could tell you what I've been up to, but I'd have to kill you - and that wouldn't be nice, would it? It might sting a bit.

Anyway, yes, I am back, after another short break and I'm ending my radio silence with an EP that I had sent to me just last week by Mutes. I was mightily impressed with it and wanted to feature them as soon as I could.

So, as I always start these posts - here are the necessaries, hoik your lapels off to the bandcamp page to have a listen to the sneaky pre-release preview track:

mutesuk.bandcamp.com/

Now, I've been lucky enough to have the entire EP to play, not just this track - however, being as that's the song you've all just listened to, I'll start there. Hands up if you were a shoegazer in the 1990s? This should, in the nicest possible way, take you back there. M.P.D.G has such a nice feel to it, spacy, distant, aloof, ever so slightly trippy and muted. It rattles along at a really nice pace, the guitars on it are elemental and rhythmic, and sort of blend in with the slightly hard to discern androgynously ambiguous vocal.

The rest of the tracks mark a slight departure, but are equally as beguiling. "Hope" - the opener, is a paean, a delicate chant, that paves the way into "M.P.D.G". It's ever so slightly haunting in it's simplicity. Then we move into slightly more trippy, ambient territory with "Port Sunlight" and "Phonophobia", again, both haunting tracks that feel as though they could seep into your brain and disturb your sleep. They're sepia toned, blurred at the edges and although they're slightly experimental in nature, they work as a nice contrast between the opening two tracks and the final song of the collection "Smother" which has a nice hook, a wispy vocal and moves back towards shoegazing again.

The tracks all have an ache to them. I know that probably sounds like rather a strange comment to make, but there's a feeling of isolation in them, a sense of everything being slightly off kilter. It's hard to explain until you've played them through a few times and come to understand how they're layered and put together, but that's how it feels. It's the sort of music you'd probably want to listen to if you were needing a bit of head-space and some time alone, to just sit in stillness.

The EP itself is coming out in full on 22nd April, via onenoteforever records - they also look after the mighty Toliesel - who I featured not that long ago on these very pages. I'd highly recommend you take some time out of your day and give Mutes a go. If it's something a little out of the ordinary you want - this new EP should be your go to.

7th May Update - Mutes have officially released M.P.D.G today, so please go to mutesuk.bandcamp.com/ or store.onenoteforever.com/album/mutes to download, like, right now and stuff.

You might also want to check out this performance of "Smother" from the EP, which is beautiful and highly recommended by me.

Mutes - Smother (LIVE)

Blast From The Past: Mike Oldfield

At thegeneral, we believe that music snobbery is quite a bad thing. If you like something, love it, listen to it with pride and don't feel guilty (unless it's Justin Bieber, in which case hang your fucking head in shame). It's the mission of this blog to try and be as open as possible to all different kinds of sounds.

With this in mind, today we're taking a trip back and having a Blast From The Past episode. The previous BFTP we featured some time ago was the wonderful, scuzzy Leeds indie-pop act CUD (recently reformed and still touring, the gorgeous bastards). Today, it's the turn of Tubular Bells hero and all round guitar genius, Mike Oldfield.

Why? This is why...

Over the last few years, Mike has been remastering and re-releasing many of his early albums. This September sees the remastered and Deluxe versions of Five Miles Out and Crises take their turn.

Crises I'll skim over - it wasn't really my favourite - though the title track has its merits. However, Five Miles Out was a very good record indeed. If you don't believe me, have a listen ^clicketh ye the linky above^.

I have reservations about the remastered works. With the Tubular Bells Deluxe Remaster there was a lot of new material, demos that hadn't seen the light of day since the 1970s and they were wonderful to hear. The same goes for the Deluxe Remasters of Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn and Incantations - all contained material that was really worth a listen and (if you're a serious Oldfield nut, like what thegeneral is...) versions of tracks that definitely needed geeking over. However, then came the new editions of Platinum and QE2 - and they started to..well...wear a bit thin...

Looking at the track listings for the new Remastered versions of Five Miles Out here and Crises here there really isn't that much to tempt. Just a couple of new tracks and not much else. thegeneral has previewed them on the old iTunes and can report that yes, they sound nice and you can tell some tinkering has gone on, but really these may only be for the very serious Oldfield completists. Jungle Gardenia on Crises, is a good track though and has a nice, typical Oldfield style. thegeneral also hopes that one day he sees fit to put a remastered version of The Path on one of his next releases as that is genuinely one of the most spooky and haunting tracks that never properly saw the light of day. You can listen to that HERE.

Anyway - for those of you who care (and let us not forget, this man gave us TUBULAR FUCKING BELLS FERCHRISSAKES) the release date for both these old new albums is September 2nd. My advice is to go and revisit the Deluxe remasters of TB, Hergest Ridge, Ommadawn and Incantations first though...