MySpace Trawl

Female singers, they’re all the range at the minute aren’t they?

Over the last year and a bit, the UK has spat out quite a few of these creatures that have gone on to sell many records. And subsequently make some fat man in a suit rich enough so he can wipe his arse with £20 notes.

Most of them, though, have come from the bloody Brit School of music. This place is worse than Borstal in terms of unleashing dangerous musical predators on to the street. Frankly, we are a bit sick of one place churning out the same thing. It stops other females such as the already trawled Beth Rowley and Laura Marley a look in.

Such dominance from the same band of artists also stops top class foreign females from getting an airplay. So this is why we have to bring Lykke Li to your attention.

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Fear not, we’re not promoting stabbing and gang violence yet – we’ll leave that for Grand Theft Auto IV. Well, that’s if you believe The Sun anyway.

For this week’s musical offering, we remain in Manchester. Everyone loves Manchester; it gave us Oasis who made two decent albums many years ago. We also got a comedy grump in the form of Morrissey. The meat hating rocker has many a follower.

But those two particular artists lack a certain sound. It’s the hint of any electronics, or if you’d prefer to call them, ‘those computer-sounding bits.’ Ever since New Order got all pissy with each other, the city needs a new dominating electronic-influenced band. We may have just found one with Daggers.

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We bet you a piece of chewing gum, 17p from our wallets and a can of Fanta that you can’t name the people in this band.

Feeling confident? You probably would with the name Tim and Sam mentioned multiple times in the band name. However, our insides are soon to be turned orange as you give us cans of fizzy orange sugar water. You see, there are five people in the band. Tim, Adam, Becca, Kathryn and Richard.

But besides petty betting over worthless things, we’re here to remind you of the amazing music we’ve bumped into on our internet journey. Hailing from Manchester, a city dripping in musical history, we found Tim And Sam’s Band [TASB for short]. Their melting pot of vast musical instrumentation makes for a listen that sounds like nothing out there at the moment.

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You know when you see something, think it’s a bit dodgy and have to revisit the same thing again? Well that happens a lot to us.

In an almost everyday occurrence, we rub our eyes in amazement at the things we see and hear. From talking dogs to 20-foot-tall people. We often don’t believe ourselves, though our alcoholism probably doesn’t help us deceiver fact from fiction.

When we discovered Alan Titmash we were slightly alarmed to think that the former Ground Force gardener has ventured in to the world of electronics. Sadly we were wrong, Mr Titchmarsh is presenting bad chat shows on ITV and not making music. Still, gardencore isn’t a real genre, so there could be time for him yet.

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A band usually needs instruments to work. Or if you’re a clever sod, you can just beat box.

Not only does it look really clever, but you’ll make everyone stupidly go home and attempt to do the same thing, only to end up sounding like a bit of a twat. Amazingly, it takes years of practice to get the skill right. It’s not something you can pick up after a few pints.

However, this isn’t about finding the next generation of incredibly ace beat boxers. Instead, instruments. A traditional band uses guitars, drums, the occasional keyboard and a bass guitar. But when people choose not to do so, the result can be either horrible or enjoyable. Obviously, we’ve picked a band that falls under the latter option. After watching The Bobby McGee’s, we were suitably impressed.

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Taking two things and putting them together can sometimes produce differing results.

Once upon a time back in 1762, the Earl of Sandwich couldn’t be bothered to get off his fat arse to get a snack whilst gambling. He ordered a minion to get some food for him. Taking two bits of bread and jamming in some beef, he created the sandwich. Those things put together worked. But many things don’t. Water and electricity and technology and women are just some of the others that fail badly.Music is also full of things that shouldn’t work, but oddly do. This week’s artist is a shining example of this. Going under the name Son Of Dave, Benjamin Darvill, formally of Canadian folk rock act Crash Test Dummies effortlessly combines blues with a spot of beat boxing. Lovely.

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Yes we know, you should never judge a book by its cover, but that's what we have done. So blah to you.

If anyone wants to complain, bring it. We feel more than capable of taking you on. And if you do cause us trouble, our trusty wooden chip fork will come in handy. With a name like Child Of Hatred, we were immediately drawn to him.

Did we expect to hear music that would soundtrack fluffy bunnies whilst they went to market to buy a pound of sausage from mother goose? No, not really. In retrospect, we assumed it would be the sort of music you’d here as a group of angry magical foxes slaughtered the rabbits for their house. And we were right. Not about the animals, we’re just weird, but about some the music. 

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Some of you might be pondering this week’s choice. Why would be telling you to listen to someone who is dubbed “the queen of disco”? Has hecklerspray just caught up with this so called disco fad?

No, we are aware of this genre of music. Sadly though, our days of tight flare wearing are over.

What we do find funny is one man recording as Donna Summer. Even though Donna Summer hasn’t let him do so.

And in an even more ironic twist of luck, the style of music that Jason Forrest is releasing under the icons name is nothing of the disco sort.

Very easily put, it is quite likely to get your booty shaking and the police round for a visit if you turn the volume up loud enough. We’ll let you go blind on this one. Think of it as our Easter gift to you. Just without the chocolate.

Read more:

DJ Donna Summer MySpace

This week we’ve broken one of our golden rules: don’t include artists/band that randomly try to add us as friends.

Usually they're just rubbish and just want to boost their friend numbers to look popular. Most of the time we skip the requests of said people. But with Beth Rowley’s friend request, we even got a little message attached: “Hey, saw the music you liked on your profile and thought you might like to check out the music on my page.” We were touched that someone went to all that trouble to communicate with us. And out of curiosity, we decided to take a gamble on her music. It could have been anything - death metal, digital feedback, good old fashioned rock n roll - but alas, it was none of those. Instead we got bluesy laid-back guitar sounds laced with stunning female vocals.

Go Beth Rowley go! 

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Originally, the artist featured in this week's trawl was actually going to be lumped into a gig review.

But then we realised we’d already reviewed Underworld in October, so doing it a few months later would be daft. And we couldn’t be bothered with the random and strange abusive comments we’d probably be left. But that’s a slight lie. This briefer-than-normal trawl will bang on a bit about our live encounter with Yoav.

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There seems to be too many awards ceremonies. And they all have loads in common,like being uninspiring, dull and rigged. Allegedly.

This last month alone has seen the Brit awards reward all the people from its academy, the Grammys bore us to death with so many categories that we were amazed we didn’t win one, and the NME awards, which attempt to booze up young indie boys and the odd indie girl into doing something rock and roll, like leaving the toilet seat up and not replacing the loo roll. 

Award shows, it seems, only benefit the people who are never off the cover of Q or who are relentlessly played on local radio. Maybe one day hecklerspray will launch its own awards ceremony. But don’t expect decent trophies. Instead we’ll take some glue, foil and glitter and make a pretty figurine. In the mean time, we fight on to find undiscovered talent for your benefit. Like TV Off. 

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It’s odd what you find by mistake. Whilst looking for the remote control the other day, we managed to find a few weapons of mass destruction, five pencils complete with chew marks and a sandwich.

It wasn’t what we were looking for, but it was as a pleasant surprise. Apart from the WMDs though, we are now sprouting unusual amounts of body hair and we’ve have had the UN round for a chat over a pot of herbal tea. 

Anyway, we were recently searching Google for 'betamax' for a completely random reason, and up popped a link to the band Betamaxx. And they're ace. Yay.

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