The Ivy Wire #2; or, what, you don’t want to find Atlantis in your bedroom?
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Stealing photographs of Atlantis, even when you’re scrumping through Google’s laxly patrolled orchards, is not the easiest of tasks. Fortunate for us, then, that we were tipped off by John’s label about his passion for Bulgar women, and found him kicking around somewhere above the streets of Seuthopolis, which can just about pass itself off as sunk for now, until someone comes to dig it up. There’s something of London-based popniks Upset! The Rhythm and the new curiosities it retrieves in that old photo of the submerged city, hanging as it does in constant suspension between the surface and the deep, man-made well that drowned it six decades ago. Pop! Not pop! For you! No, actually, you can't have it; you're not having it. Skewed, awkward tunes course boldly through blood rhythms and, despite his and Seuthopolis’s Jesus complex, John Maus is alive and off on one again.
Download: John Maus – ‘My Whole World is Coming Apart’ / Album review: John Maus - Love is Real
John Maus @ MySpace / @ RCRD LBL
Yes, Maus’s implorations are heavy, deathly even, but seeing him live reveals the desperate zeal for life of a lonely, strung out city fail, ridiculous stepping and fleeiing arms, but dark caffeine eyes that don’t give passage to the mirth/horror/delight emanating from a bemused audience.
‘My Whole World is Coming Apart ’ is his call to arms, a track that revels in the glee of a life spent rebounding time and again off the barriers of polite society; each rejection sending Maus’s attempts at pop flying off on strange tangents, ploughing furrows head-down ‘til he finds himself alone in a field at the edge of town and, as if that wasn't alarming enough, a full-blown idiosyncratic. Synths flutter like edge of town leaves, but they’re brave and decent like Bowie’s ‘Big Brother ’.
Worryingly, Brighton's The Sticks are something of a fall from grace, their lurching like runts at odds with Maus’s shoulder-pads-in-a-nuclear-bunker strut.
Still, the sense of struggle remains, even if it is more weary and lagged out and bitter, stalking at a distance and out of time, like if the speccy one from Stand By Me fell asleep after a heavy night’s drinking, woke up in 2008 and proceeded to scream in its face until it was finally, finally over. Hear what that might sound like below.
Download: The Sticks – ‘On the Sea’ / Album review: Hands on Heads, The Sticks - Split 10"
The Sticks @ MySpace / @ RCRD LBL
More pastoral climes now, as we lay down with Soiled Mattress and the Springs (ho ho) and get burned to death in a sunflower field (oh no).
Yeah, their sunny pop may sound charming and bright and breezy at first, but there’s more than meets the eye imminent in ‘Tidal Wave’, as the small-time gangsters wringing necks in out-of-season Skegness turn horrified faces towards the killer surf a mile or so offshore. Vengeance, scum. This is the popnotpop revenge of Silent Type and the Spods.
Download: Soiled Mattress and the Springs – ‘Tidal Wave’
Soiled Mattress and the Springs @ MySpace / @ RCRD LBL
Now that Skeggy’s dead and buried it’s got a real shot at greatness, transformed into a whispered myth, a drowned playground of shit fairground rides and chippies laying in wait for resuscitation. Skegness as new Atlantis, hear a common tragedy in London’s U!TR-patroned dotted outposts, bands that will stay forever submerged, away from the lure of cheap champagne, pink limos and kebabs, sharing the limits of Achilles’ heel with the mythical city and all its Bulgar brethren.
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Download: No Age – ‘Neck Escaper’ / Album review: No Age - Weirdo Rippers
You’ll have heard this already, no doubt, but Randy Randall and Dean Spunt’s skewed pop transcends tragedy, with lyrics that hint at finding a body that’s spent days hanging behind a locked door, shit piling up, “smells like someone died ”. Cut him down? Dig it up cry baby, Atlantis’s only real problem is that for the moment it’s underwater.
Feature: Label Profile - Upset! The Rhythm
- Kev Kharas
