MySpace Trawl – The Earlies & Help She Can’t Swim
Then buzz it up
June 28th, 2007 at 15:30 by Matthew Laidlow
Bloody hellfire! It’s a crazy two-for-one special this week on the old trawl through MySpace, where we try to claw away the spam and leave you with stuff that you would be proud to put on your fruit-based mp3 player.
This week we bring you the psychedelic sounds of The Earlies and on the reverse, a faster and angrier listen from Help She Can’t Swim. This is our rubbish apology for not having one done for last week. We’re sure that tens of you spat out your milk and pelted your PC with cookies in utter shock and disgust. We sometimes do that, but only during our special moments. Both this week's bands are ones we’ve accidentally seen live at some point.
Two for one deals are brilliant; well, most of the time. Whenever we go shopping we tend to find that the student shop assistants have 'accidentally' dropped various good on the floor. Thus, giving poor people like us the chance to buy Dove body silk lotion instead of Asda’s own brand 28p stuff which is as good as smothering yourself with washing-up liquid every morning.
The Earlies have been one of the various bands that hecklerspray has seen live by pure accident at some point. We believe it was during 'The Twisted Folk' tour in 2005, when we were all younger and probably better looking. Once the others bands had taken their turn to play an alternative mixture of woozy folk which was crafted in each bands unique way, on came The Earlies. After five or six members of the band graced the stage we were looking forward to something that may contain a lot of noise and mayhem. But still more people flooded the stage. Finally, an entire football team's worth of people were in front of the audience who possibly weren’t familiar with the band.
Eleven people all onstage at once? Hmm, a lot of multi-layered sounds is never a bad thing, but maybe this lot might be pushing it a bit too far, we thought. Of course, we were wrong as usual. From our dazed and hazy memories of said gig, it was packed full of warm and pleasing songs with fragile little vocals that made the songs complete. Such a song was Morning Wonder which is one of those tunes that you can actually nod your head to without looking like a total goon. With finger-clicking basslines also being thrown in to the mixing bowl of sounds it made one hell of a tasty little song. So good that we even bought the 10” single afterwards. Who said vinyl was dead?
This track was taken from 2004’s album These Were The Earlies, which was hailed by every credible music reviewer at the time as a landmark record which oozed full on uniqueness and charm. Things went a bit quite for a long time. Almost three years passed before we got any word about new Earlies releases, but when they emerged out of the studio, they did however bring with them 2007’s hidden gem called The Enemy Chorus. More of a harder and almost darker listen then its predecessor album, but it is still full of The Earlies' trademark sounds. Breaking Point draws together traditionally western electronic sounds and then mixes it all up with sounds from Asia.
Whilst The Earlies are more of a band that can be appreciated just on record, we believe that the next band Help She Can’t Swim are much more in-your-face listen which eagle-eyed readers of hecklerspray will already be familiar with.
A bloody dog's age ago, we wrote a review on crap-sounding live band The Test Icicles, who made us wish we'd have rather spent our night at an OAP home wiping arses. They were shit, but thankfully the support act weren’t. Help She Can’t Swim took to the small stage and squashed themselves around their battered-looking gear before going head-first into a sea of fired-up songs.
But it wasn’t just a case of a few people hammering the shit out of a guitar and screaming for half an hour before buggering offstage to drink cheap beer and dodgy looking food that would probably bring on fits of vomiting and shitting in the morning. Instead of just standing around like pretty indie darlings, Help She Can’t Swim jumped, pranced, walked, ripped-up and generally bounced around the stage proving to the people who were there that they were to have lots of fun and probably try and sell a few records on the side. Which they did to us.
Such an item was the Committing Social Suicide EP, which came in a unique sleeve made out of newspaper with pretty artwork all over it. Help She Can’t Swim have basically done a fucking brilliant job of selling themselves to you. Not only do they have a full discography for all you new fans to go and buy, there's also an extensive list of videos to give you more than just the normal four songs that most bands put up on MySpace. We can’t even pick a favourite, we like them all that much. Box Of Delights begins with thrusting drums and splashes of electronics that make us want to physically pick up the person next to us and start an improve moshpit. More than likely something we’d like to do than the other person as they recover from a bloodied nose and the removal of several bits of unneeded flesh.
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