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Remember MySpace? Remember how much fun you had mucking around with the layout and design for it? Remember writing on people’s walls and being friends with the mysterious Tom? Remember when Rupert Murdoch bought it and the entire world stopped using it overnight.
Fun times.
Well, Justin Timberlake – who was in a film about Facebook – bought loads of shares in the flagging service and now wants to tell us all how amazing it is now going to be. It isn’t, is it?
There are some songs that just shouldn’t be covered. A lot of people would agree that Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit was one of those.
But not Miley Cyrus.
Miley decided that she was the perfect person to belt out a borderline sacrilegious version of the Nirvana classic, on her latest tour.
Nearly every week, another music conference springs up from nowhere and tries to convince us that the crop of artist playing in a disused airfield will be the acts of the future.
For the unknown bands and singers playing at these gatherings, it’s pretty much the first chance they’ll get to have people hear their music properly, and not in a horribly compressed MP3 shoved on some corner of the internet.
Don’t think of them as festivals so to speak, more a chance for A&R people and record label executives to see what talent is actually out there. One of the most diverse conferences on music is held in Austin, Texas. Gone are the days when the state was simply known for oil, executions and idiotic politicians. To honour the conference known as SXSW, here a band who hail right from the city itself, Love Inks.
Prior to Wheels, the only time you’d have thought about this object musically would be the lyrics to “wheels on the bus”, which isn’t cool at all.
Don’t worry; we’re not going to give you a 2010 dubstep remix complete with reggae vocals. Instead, we want to turn our attention to some young guns called Wheels are making sounds to please our ears.
A bunch of lads from London may ring alarm bells as thoughts of another Busted or McFly could be possible. Thankfully, we are able to report that Wheels are nothing like a hastily thrown together tubby boyband. Instead, they claw together various musical influences and smash them together to create something that isn’t a remix or a cover version of a song released about five years ago.
One of the most tedious aspects of so called “dance music” is the tedious amount of breakaway genres that will have most piss off record shop owners to no end as they attempt to categorise them.The more casual listener will be familiar with house, trance, drum & base and techno. But once chillwave, breakcore and IDM come in to play, it all gets a tad confusing.
Recently, we’ve stumbled across more acts labelling themselves under the genre of “death disco”. At first, this may seem like a Daily Mail nightmare as scores of ravers knock ecstasy pills like smarties before frothing at the mouth.
To us, discos are socially awkward affairs where boys and girls stand nervously at opposite sides of the room, waiting for someone to make eye contact or even cuddle. Read More >>>
There’s a surge in purposefully badly recorded bands at the moment, all quivering under the umbrella of ‘Lo-Fi’. Personally, we prefer No-Fi. That probably already exists as a genre, but we can’t be bothered checking in with the hipsters that haunt our daily lives. In amongst these bands are some real gems (as most of them are shit) and one of them is the very pleasing Spectrals.
Spectrals cut a sound that has a great jingle-jangle, alongside a penchant for cute little melodies and road-movie slides. It’s all held together with an echoey ambience that sounds somewhere between ’50s rock ‘n’ roll and the sound of someone recording in a corrugated iron bunker.
‘Peppermint’ is the catchiest of the tracks heard by hecklerspray, with ‘Leave Me Be’ sounding like a vintage surf 45 that’s just been dug out of the soil. ’7th Date’ meanwhile is a spooky Lynch soundtracker, which is always a nice thing.
Dinosaur Pile-Up are a trio from Leeds who REALLY like grunge. We mean they REALLY like it. They like it so much that they probably start their day with a big bowl of Grunge Flakes, and possibly a banana.
A grunge banana.
But they only like the really GOOD bits of grunge – that is the driving riffs, muscular drumming and basslines so powerful that they rearrange your organs through your ears. Read More >>>
It’s not often a band comes along that manages to be funny. Y’know, genuinely funny. We’re not talking about some kind of knowing, winking bollocks by a bloke on a piano here. We’re talking razor sharp wit and the tunes to match.
So ladies and horriblefolk, let us introduce you to the ludicrously talented Onions. They arm themselves with a kind of psychedelic rock found in the first two Super Furry Animals LPs, with a dash of XTC’s missile wordery. They’re Manchester based, not that this matters one jot – there’s no lazy Factoryisms here, rather, pop shot through an entire record collection, rather than an outright lifting of one particular band.
One song deals with the pair of arse-pains Bob Geldof and Bono, with the line: “Me, Bob and Bono in a room – I have a gun and just one bullet.” It is, as of right now, hecklerspray’s official anthem. There’s more to them than decapitating holier than thou slebs. In I Want To Be A Dancer, we have one of the best and quirkiest pop songs released in decades.
Cynicism and self-deprecation never made you smile so much. A wonderful band that’s worth catch now before they get too famous and start going wrong on ket binges or whatever it is the kids do these days.
Click here to visit Onions MySpace and listen to them with your ears
