MySpace Trawl

Despite this feature running for God knows how long and covering all sorts of odd and colourful musical genres, we have sadly been neglecting something quite big - female solo artists. Now it’s not because hecklerspray hates women or anything.

Hell, we love women so much that Thursday afternoons at our HQ are 'bring favourite pole dancer/ female vagrant to work' time. Unfortunately, there has never been anything that has ever really inspired us on the female solo artist scene. Hooray for people like Regina Spektor and Kate Nash who are different, but they're big enough without us writing about them. Other massive female artists include KT Tunstall and - if you’re an American - Reba McEntire, but you don't need an explanation about why we don't write about them. However, we are relieved to have found a female artist with a no holds barred attitude to what she’s doing. M.I.A.

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It’s time again to dip our fingers into the world of MySpace music and try to find something of real quality. In some respects, a lot of stuff on MySpace is almost like going down the car boot sale. Tons of stuff looks really attractive, but when you look closer it’s either a knock-off or knackered. What, you mean you can’t buy a Rolex watch for £5! This is what MySpace is like.

Lots of people send us messages like “Yo dude, you may not have heard of me, but people say I’m really good and just like Oasis/Blur/Kaiser Chiefs.” It almost makes us cry when we see they're just a horrible clone of someone like Oasis with a slightly-altered Wonderwall with a slightly-altered chord arrangement. While we find a lot of bands doing the same stuff, sometimes we miss out on artists doing better than someone in the same field. Just like M83. 

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Once again MySpace Trawl is here again to help you discover the most interesting and different sounding music out there, be it a group off old men beating bits of metal off generators to people doing odd things with children’s toys, it’s all good to us. 

This week, we know you'll be as excited as us when we tell you about our featured band Turisas. Hailing from Finland, Turisas are a death metal band that serves some seriously heavy audio action. It’s not the fact that Turisas have an orchestral feel to them that makes them stand out. A metal band with an accordion and violin player! What’s next? Well, we’re not sure - but fucking hell, this band rock purely because their lead singer is called Warlord. 

Yup, while record shopping the other day, we discovered a promo with the track Rasputin on it. The music was top notch, but seriously, a guy called Warlord? That really is the shit and we give him total respect. Just listen to Turistas and appreciate the sheer awesomeness of them. Anyone who saw Eurovision winners Lordi will know them, as they both toured together a few years ago.

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Turisas MySpace Page 

MySpace Trawl returns from its brief holiday to hopefully bring you some exciting music that will make you really hip and cool amongst your peers.

We still get spammed with utterly dire shite musical crap on a freakishly regular basis that quite frankly is an embarrassment to the word music. However, we do sometimes shed a tear when we discover something that hasn’t been influenced by the other 3,563 bands that are all doing exactly the same thing. It's good to see that this week's choice band We Are Meg have some balls and are doing something different. Well, we’re sure Meg personally doesn’t have balls because, er, that would make her a him. Oh shit, this is getting out of hand. So let’s quickly clear this up from our dodgy introduction - no members of We Are Meg are pre-op transsexuals. We think. Ahem, anyway - We Are Meg are named after an irritating black cat, apparently.

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MySpace Trawl is one of the few music features not about sucking corporate cock and promoting certain bands because we’re told to.

This is one of the rare features where we sift through all the crap on the internet to bring you the best stuff we can find. For the year and a bit we’ve been doing this feature, we’ve found bands that push the boundaries or just generally produce interesting noises that makes us happy. 

This week we are going to keep it pure and simple. If you read last week's feature, you know were going crazy for post rock. All sorts of stuff is coming from across the world from England to Canada. We hadn’t found anything from the crazy world of Japan until now, but this has changed - The Retail Sectors have shown this. Simply indescribable, the solo artist who makes this stuff - Kentaro Togawa - makes us want to cry with the sheer beauty and depth of his work. Just listen to Riverside Sunshade – it’ll all become clear. 

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Retail Sectors MySpace Page

Most musical genres have roots that are easy to trace. Take hip-hop for example; the nasty white folk wouldn’t let black people in to their discos, so they went off went and did their own thing. Slowly, hip-hop grew and spread like a disease across the world and that's where we are today.  

Some musical genres, though, don’t really have original roots that can be traced back to a founder. Post rock is such a thing; it comes from all over the world, has a strong underground following a fuzzy beginnings. Even though it’s probably our ignorance, we've yet to find a strong British act that rivals some of the better foreign post rock artists. Guess what? We think we’ve found one in Codes In The Clouds.

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Thursdays are when our bins are emptied and also when the council tend to shout at us for not separating our glass from our plastics. Unless you’re into recycling this is as thrilling as watching your Uncle Ben’s microwave rice cook.

However, something much more interesting and almost sexually arousing is our MySpace Trawl feature. We separate the gash from the good and guarantee to bring you musical acts that are different and interesting. This week’s artist could almost be confused for either an overpriced shampoo or a dodgy beauty salon that operates in a grubby council estate. Head and Neck Session are fortunately neither of the above but produce music that dots around the genres of ambiance, hip hop, jazz and electronics.  

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All rubbishy pop music is released on a Monday and isn’t very exciting. However Thursdays on hecklerspray is Trawl day, and full of good music! Hooray! Although we have to literally sift through all of the rubbish to bring you the goods. Boo!

If it wasn’t boring enough to click through various MySpace pages, people are sending an ever-increasing amount of messages to our inbox telling us they're the shit. We don’t have the heart to them that they are just shit. Today, we are going to introduce to Crystal Castles who are an '8-bit terror duo' who come from Toronto, Canada. Yeah, Canada! The country does produce other music acts apart from Celine Dion and Bryan Adams. And the difference between Crystal Castles and their fellow Canadian counterparts is that they're actually good.  

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Hecklerspray - dear old Shawn Lindseth in particular - hasn't stopped blathering on about It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia since we first clapped eyes on it. In these dark, post-Arrested Development days, It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia stands out as one of the best sitcoms around.

Apparently there's a new season of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia on the horizon, which is all well and good if you're into the whole 'waiting' thing, but we're not and we want to see something now. Luckily, the people behind It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia have slapped a brand new pre-season episode of the show onto MySpace where you can watch it a solid month before anyone else. And you probably should, because it's a particularly funny episode. We're not going to start spoiling surprises for you, but rest assured that this MySpace episode of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia contains scenes of Danny Devito being funnier than Danny Devito has been for a long time. When he's sober, at least.

Watch the exclusive MySpace It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia episode now 

Yay yay hooray, it's Thursday today! Significantly, Thursday doesn’t really stick out as an exciting day although, slowly but surely, we are attempting to make it the day when people will scramble to their computers. Our MySpace Trawl feature usually hits the interweb at around this time, bringing with it tasty music morsels. 

We’ve said it time and time but this poorly thought-of feature is designed to expand and broaden the mind of the music fan who is mostly subjected to top 40 chart music. In our minds, there’s so much more out there, and we aim to bring this to you. Looking at all of music’s various styles; we’ve decided to look at the sometimes horribly dubbed genre known as “dance” music, and more specifically some bloke who calls himself Nathan Fake.

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It’s OK! You can stop pressing refresh on your browser - our weekly look at all the strange and wonderful goings on in the world of MySpace is here.

We literally sit down and listen to shedloads of stuff each week to pass on the good stuff to you. We’d like to think we cover all styles to cater for everyone, from folk, electronic, stuff we can’t categorise and rock. Today, we are going down the rock road to bring you The Locust. But calling them 'rock' is a very loose label to tag them with. It’s more 'experimental rock with lots of random bits and pieces thrown in for good measure'. This is going to be a case of people thinking “Ooh, someone is doing something different, so I won’t listen,” we just know it. 

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MySpace Trawl is the feature where we attempt to educate you about music that is doing something a little bit more different and exciting then the run of the mill toss that gets played on radio and TV. We attempt to discover the acts that are totally spanking new or ones that just need a bit more exposure. 

This week we trek over to America to serve something up that isn’t country or hip hop. Because we all know that is what Americans only listen to. If we can describe their music, we’d have to say that Animal Collective dip into the confusing-sounding style of psych-folk and noise-rock. Yes it sounds confusing, but it's fun. And we like that.

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