Garage rock outfit Pirate Sons dropped by the Edinburgh College studios recently to record a few tracks, and they shot a session video with EdinburghUndersound.
Originally formed in New Zealand by front man Ceallaigh Corbishley. Pirate Sons began as a two piece ‘lets bang on stuff and see how it sounds band’ not really taking their musical venture that seriously. After the addition of a bass player who couldn’t (at the time) play bass, the band were now ready to take there musical careers to the next level and progress as a band.
A move across the pond to Scotland’s capital city has lead to a line-up change and with it has come the development of their unique in-your-face-energetic-fuzzed-out rock sound that is synonymous with the charismatic three piece.
Now comprising of a Kiwi, a Scot and an Englishman the band are serious as ever and continuing to secure themselves in the local scene as a hardworking, creative act and a band to certainly watch out for after a string of track releases, a video release and a bunch of reputable gig slots supporting The Fire and I, The Minutes and a recent headline slot at the Official Glasvegas gig aftershow party.
Think The Cribs meets The Black Keys before they both got a bit too big for their boots. Described as ‘buzzing’ by The List.
Check Tom, Ceallaigh and Angus out live at Broadcast in Glasgow on 08/03/2013 as main support for SOS.
Currently recording new material due for release May 2013, keep updated with their goings on at www.facebook.com/piratesons
Having not been through to Oran Mor but knowing it was a renovated church, I had a rather misguided idea about the place. I didn’t know it had a downstairs venue, so I thought I might be going to a gig plagued by uncontrollable reverb. How wrong I was. Underneath the church is a really cool space which is very rock n’ roll looking and has an equally great sound. It’s perfect for going to see an intimate gig and I L.O.V.E going to see a band in a small venue. It’s a real celebration of music; close, loud, and a great way to see bands deliver what they do, right in your face.
Arriving a little late after some excellent noodles from Wudon (535 Great Western Road, brilliant food, 5 mins from Oran Mar but I digress…), we only caught three tunes from the support band Post War Years. Looking like a mix between fourth year uni students and staff from Waterstones, this hirsute bunch’s live show hit much harder than their tracks online suggested. Great vocals from three of the band; mixed with drums, keys and launch pads (and at points two basses), this band where a fantastic support to the main act. Apart from the drummer the other three members where locked behind a mountain of equipment and visually this sometimes put a barrier between them and the audience but the tunes soared very high indeed. They had elements of Arcade Fire in the vocals and a great bunch of synth lines, beats, and guitars. What’s not to like?
You might wonder if the studio-based sound of the headline act could be delivered live(we did) but it was obvious by the excellent second track in the set, Torso of the Week (got to love the Heat referencing!) that Everything Everything can deliver their tight and varying sounds on stage with real balls. There are no weak members in the band. Both Jeremy Pritchard and Alex Robertshaw supply their bass and guitars respectively. They also switch to keys when required, back and forth mid-track. Michael Spearman is a fantastic understated drummer swapping between his analogue kit and pads to lift the band’s live sound with ease. On top of this all three supply backing vocals to help create the punchy vocals so prominent on their records.
Everything Everything are helped greatly by the additional keys player and this frees Jonathan Higgs to concentrate on his vocal and guitar duties. This worked so well. Before he was locked to one place but now he is free to roam the stage and you could see, feel and hear how much pleasure this gave him and the crowd. On stage he was obviously having the time of his life and why not? He is a fantastic vocalist and guitarist and lyricist. How often do you here lyrics like “I’m genuflecting in a penitent way”? At times he was finding it hard to wipe the smile off his face and with truly epic versions of tunes of their 2009 Mercury-nominated CD ‘Man Alive’ and the excellent new ‘Arc’. You can understand why. Moving from between up-tempo tunes like ‘Qwerty Keyboards’ to slower tracks like ‘Choice Mountain’, you are aware you are watching a band who can deliver an incredibly wide range of feeling from their music. The crowd lapped it up and it was hard to know who enjoyed it more.
Listen to their two excellent CDs and catch them live if you can.
Jonathan Higgs; even if your nephew doesn’t like your band. Feast does.
New Edinburgh band Redolent have been awful busy making music since hatching 6 months ago. Here is our current fave, but check out our youtube channel for more from these guys.
This is the second in a series about how my local libraries (Baillieston and Shettleston) afforded me a wonderful musical adventure and the huge impact they made on me. I joined them as a 16 year old because I couldn’t afford albums and borrowing from them appeared to me to be the perfect solution…which it most certainly was.
In my 5th year at high school one of the novels my English teacher selected was The Fall by Albert Camus. This was the only reason I picked up a copy of Dragnet, which had been released a few months earlier. Everything about the album was challenging but also exhilarating and liberating and, like me I’m sure it lead others to form their own groups free from restrictive ideas about song structure and musicianship.
The line-up included Mark E Smith (vocals), Marc Riley (guitar), Craig Scanlon (guitar), Steve Hanley (bass), Mike Leigh (drums). Leigh was replaced by Paul Hanley shortly after and this became as I’ve come to think, the second classic line-up of the band. It is a band discovering their sound, lo-fi and angular which I found hard to listen to at first, especially the second side but it was the wild and weird garage-like pop of tracks such as Printhead with the wiity opening line “Hey badges tinkle T-shirts mingle
Hey you horror-face!” and Dice Man that won me over to the bands radical approach.
Of all The Fall albums I’ve listened to, over time this is my favourite. It’s rough and I found out later that it was recorded in 3 or 4 days, but for me it demonstrates the essence of The Fall, raucous and uncompromising determined to mine their own musical path. My excitement about the album lead me to see the band at the Tech when they came to Glasgow in tow with another great band The Cramps which is one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to.
The next time I saw the band was at The Plaza in Glasgow, this time supported by brilliant Edinburgh band The Scars. By this time I was well and truly one of The Fallen!
Thisisfeast is delighted to announce the signing of Callum Easter as Fridgemaster. We are working with him on three new tunes and are super excited to be working with such a talented artist. We will keep you posted and up to date with Fridgemaster and his developing career right here.
THE POP GROUP – FOR HOW MUCH LONGER….DO WE TOLERATE MASS MURDER?
From Wiki
“The Pop Group were a British post-punk band from Bristol, England, formed in 1978, whose dissonant sound spanned punk, free jazz, funk and dub reggae. Their lyrics were often political in nature.
Formed by Mark Stewart (lyrics, vocals), Jon Waddington (guitar), Gareth Sager (guitar), Simon Underwood (bass) and Bruce Smith (drums, percussion), they issued their debut single, “She is Beyond Good and Evil” on Radar Records in March 1979.
Their debut album Y, was produced by Dennis Bovell to critical acclaim but low sales figures. Although it did not chart, the album’s success was sufficient to convince Rough Trade to sign the band, but not before more line-up changes, with Dan Catsis replacing Underwood on bass.
The band’s career with Rough Trade commenced with what is possibly their best-known single “We Are All Prostitutes”, which featuring a guest appearance by free improviser Tristan Honsinger on cello. This was followed by the release of their second album, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? in March 1980, which included a contribution from US proto-rappers The Last Poets.
The photo on the cover is the famous photograph, “Two Gypsies” by André Kertész.”
This is the first in a series about how my local libraries (Baillieston and Shettleston) afforded me a wonderful musical adventure and the huge impact they made on me. I joined them as a 16 year old because I couldn’t afford albums and borrowing from them appeared to me to be the perfect solution…which it most certainly was.
I first came across The Pop Group’s second album in the racks of Shettleston library. I was subscribing to both NME and Sounds at the time but it was only in retrospect as I flicked through past copies that I came across photographs and interviews of the band which made me more aware of their interests and approach to music. It was more to do with the strange mixture of the band’s name combined with the album’s title and sleeve artwork…alarming, mysterious and confrontational. Then there was the track titles such as Forces Of Oppression and Feed the Hungry….I just had to hand over my library card (it didn’t cost anything to borrow music then) take it home and listen.
WOW…for someone who only a year earlier had been a huge fan of The Jam this was intense! It was an aural assault but exhilarating, challenging and just like nothing I’d ever heard before. To my youthful ears, the heady brew concocted by Bruce Smith, Gareth Sager, Mark Stewart and Dan Catsis was a revelation on all fronts musical, lyrical and artistic. To my mind there has never been a better opening track to an album than Forces Of Oppression. With its opening chants and unrelenting groove the band creates their own ‘cold sweat’.
Thisisfeast likes to listen to lots of new music so we were keen to have chat with Battle of the Zoo members Aymen and Mark.
Thisisfeast: Tell us a bit about yourselves…
Aymen: We are called Battle of the Zoo and we are releasing a free EP. We have been finishing off our artwork, and just sort of trying to find roots to release it, like our website, Facebook, and other social media things that people tune into.
Thisisfeast: What’s your music like?
Mark: I suppose we play stuff that we kind of like, and what we would like to buy ourselves; which makes it kind of easier to do and make it far more enjoyable and pretty good fun. For our style it’s hard to explain. We can sit down and do a track that is completely different from one we have done before. But we will really dig it, enjoy it, get into it and see where it goes, and it might end up on the album or on a download. That’s the way we are going to attack things, instead of hitting the same genre or style all the time. A lot of the tracks are really different and I suppose that’s because we like a lot of different styles of music.
Thisisfeast: How long have you been working on your tunes?
Mark: We have got up to 30 tracks we have been working on over a while which we have been whittling down to this 4 track EP that we are going to give freely away. We want to follow it up pretty quickly with a main single with a couple of tracks, and then an album. Over the last while we have been sussing out tracks we really like. We have been trying them live and seeing good responses from crowds which has really helped us choose what’s coming out first, and what’s going to make the album. We have played a couple of live gigs with all the kit, running sequencers, hitting off trigger pads, keyboards, running Reason and Aymen doing all the vocals live. We have been working hard on that to help fine tune, but we knew which ones worked and it’s kind of been confirmed by the crowd.
Aymen: We wanted to test drive some tracks and we played a gig in a place called the 3rd door in Edinburgh, and did one at Liquid Rooms in Edinburgh with Simian Mobile Disco
Thisisfeast: That all sounds good. On another tip, I heard you got a remix with Paul Weller, how did that come around?
Aymen: We sent our demos away to some labels. We ended up meeting someone who works for one of the record label. We gave him the demos, basically he was asking what we were up to, and he liked the stuff we were doing. We sent him some original tracks; we had a few chats and strong meetings with him; just some good general conversation from these guys in London, sort of bigger label guys. Off the back of that they asked us if we would be interested in doing some remixing. So from there they sent us the stems for Paul Weller next single. Bearing in mind they told us, it was more than likely that they were not going to accept it. But we finished it, they liked it and Mr Weller had it played to him and he liked it too. From that we have been asked to do some other remixes, but at the moment we are just trying to concentrate on our own stuff.
We have been given access to the new tracks from Battle of the Zoo. Have a listen to them and next time your see their name, go check them out. Enjoy and look out for the ‘FK the DET’ E.P out on Monday the 5th of November
Now in its second year EH1 Live has gone from strength to strength, showcasing some of the country’s finest unsigned talent.
Feast started the day the Electric Circus with the fantastic Gold Lions, their set didn’t start the festival gently but kicked it right in the teeth, ripping away the early Sunday cobwebs with their searing, relentless blues rock/garage sound.
They have been described as a Scottish White Stripes but that’s just lazy journalism, sure the homage to Jack White is apparent, but these boys rip apart the rulebook and batter it with blistering fever.
‘1000 Ships’ and ‘ Elsie’s House’ were particular highlights, all energetic energetic fretwork and pounding vigour.
The Gold Lions simply deserve to be, the gem of the day!
Next up was troubadour Jack Rowberry
who belted out the tunes, with his backing band adding extra depth to his acoustic craftmanship.
The hotly-tipped The Machine Room’s set was unfortunately marred with technical difficulties, but the band soldiered on delivering an interesting indie pop set in which they flit between swapping guitars and keys, there’s a good buzz building up for the band and hopefully bigger stages beckon soon for the band.
The Modern Faces are a true festival band, full of bravado and rock and roll swagger, smashing the hype with a ‘Mon Then’ snarl.
The Dunfermline five piece delivered each stomping track with energy and passion. Their anthemic brand of britrock should easily equate to masses at the festivals. Definitely a band going places.
The Stagger Rats were excellent, and in true Stagger Rat style they were a member down but delivered a superb set which the heaving Liquid Rooms lapped up, especially stand out harmonious pop single ‘Fuzzy Fuzzy’ which had the local crowd in rapture.
Each track is consistently interesting, jumping from sweet melodies to gypsy guitar riffs. The Stagger Rats are an asset to the unsigned Scottish scene.
The Ok Social Club bounded on the stage and blasted their way through their hook driven, glossy spiky guitar pop set with vigour delivering tracks such as ‘The Late 90’s’ to the bouncing packed out crowd.
All in all EH1 was an incredibly well organised affair, but more importantly, it showcased some of Scotland’s more diverse and exciting talent.
Furthermore, to all the doubters that disagree that there is no Edinburgh scene or Scottish bands who are not good enough to break, you couldn’t be further from the truth, which the EH1 boys highlighted with a right good festival!
Fortune Promotions has decided to use this Opportunity to take part in this years Oxjam Takeover for the first time, we have decided its our time to do our bit for charity by hosting a one night unsigned festival showcasing Scottish talent. The event is to raise money for Oxfam and it is our goal to raise £800 for the night. The event is called Oxjams Fortune’s Unsigned Festival with Fortune Promotions. This event is taking place in Edinburgh between Bannermans Bar and The City Cafe hosting 18 of the finest unsigned bands from across scotland (Dundee, Glasgow, Falkirk and Edinburgh) including Aperture, Sonic Hearts Foundation, Kung Fu Academy, Fuzzy and the Peaches, The Directors, My Electric Love Affair, In A Dollhouse and Jen & The gents, all for £7 a ticket thats 0.38p per band now who can argue with that tickets are available from Ticket Scotland. The event will be taking place on Friday the 19th of October at 6pm with The Dirty Suits kicking things off. All of the details are link below ( set times, bands taking part and locations of the acts)
EH1 Live is back with an almighty bang, showcasing some of the very best unsigned Scottish bands, this year’s festival takes over Edinburgh on Sunday 16th September with over 40 unsigned acts playing at the the Liquid Rooms, Cabaret Voltaire, Electric Circus, Sneaky Pete’s and Whistle Binkie’s.
The eclectic line up includes tipped for the top The Imagineers, Davey Horne, Modern Faces and headliners The Phantom Band.
The one day events also celebrates the capital’s fantastic live scene with local heavyweights The OK Social Club, The Stagger Rats and troubadours Jack Rowberry, Greg Pearson and Callum Beattie.
Feast will also be looking forward to catching Leicester’s The Lysergic Suite who are by all accounts fantastic live, a heady mix of driving synths and psychedelica, and Edinburgh’s The Gold Lions who will definitely get you in the festival mood with their blend of dirty garage-blues.
The lineup highlights some of the very best in unsigned talent, and all for a mere £18, and we’ve all got a Monday holiday as well!
