Klaxons - Flashover single review

For www.catchthesonics.com

By Ryan Pilot

Glow-in-the dark indie mystics Klaxons are back after three years in outer space to enlighten us with their latest audial offering.

New single ‘Flashover’ screeches and scrapes into life as a thickly layered industrial pounding, with sparse guitars warning of approaching peril. The rolling drums and clean guitars have something of The Arctic Monkeys’ latest work while the keys rise to bring the sound of the Horrors into the mix.

The single sounds like an indie version of War of the Worlds as singer Jamie Reynolds reports “Myriads of signals” that “have been noticed on the drifts,” and speaks of a flash “from our new neighbour,” over Cooper Temple Clause-inspired electro-indie beats.

So far so good, it’s urgent and exciting. Then from nowhere comes some piano plonking straight out of Bohemian Rhapsody. Over this West End interlude Reynolds warns, in a voice not too far from Jason Donovan’s Joseph on Lloyd-Webber’s ‘Close Every Door to Me,’ that “dimensions of time have come undone, now we have become so un-alone.”

It’s either a flash of humour or the band taking themselves too seriously as inter-galactic prophets. The problem with the Klaxons is that you can never tell if they’re taking the piss.

All-in-all the pioneers of “Nu-Rave” have created a dramatic, glorious noise underpinned by driving beats. Flashover remains catchy and delivers the mystical warnings that we love them for. Though you can’t help wondering if the real warning is that the world’s first indie-rock opera is on the horizon.

Sound It Out Records' Vinyl Revival

For BBC Tees.

Spinning strong: Sound it Out Records

By Ryan Pilot

The UK music charts were shook up in 2007 when the rules were changed to remove the entry requirement of a physical format.

But Tom Butchart is a devout vinyl worshipper, he also owns and runs Teesside's sole surviving independent record shop, Sound It Out.

The shop is just off the High Street in Stockton and Tom says he's witnessing a vinyl revival:

"There's a backlash against MP3s, now the charts don't mean anything."

With bands now choosing to put out their singles exclusively as MP3 downloads, the download market is booming, and physical sales are said to be dying out.

As Billy Bragg put it earlier this year in a Times interview, "The record industry is in trouble... but the music industry is thriving."

But Tom's shop Sound It Out is noticing a movement in the other direction:

"Ten year-olds are coming in and then sixty year-olds - both to buy vinyl."

"We celebrated Record Store Day recently with a live band in the shop.

It was one of the biggest days I've ever had, people were stood outside, in the porch watching the bands."

Keep it independent

"HMV's fine if you know exactly what you want. If you want to come in and browse and look and talk about music and find out new bands, you should go see independents."Vinyl junkies always cite the warmth of vinyl's sound, its artwork and the satisfaction of having something 'real' when arguing for its superiority over the CD and MP3 and Tom's no different:

"CDs are rubbish. Vinyl's got the better sound… if I buy music it has to be on vinyl."

British vinyl and cassette album sales jumped 5.2% last year as CD sales fell, suggesting that the old formats are making a comeback.

The increase does not factor in independent shops such as Sound it Out and so the increase is likely to be even greater.

Many indie labels are releasing singles on vinyl only, some on cassette and a lot of vinyl releases now have CDs inside.

Tom has adapted his business as times have changed by branching out into online retail.

But it is his underground, specialist records and encyclopaedic knowledge of popular music that will always draw in customers from Teesside and beyond:

"I'm forever getting new customers. People come and go 'how long you been here?' and then you go 'well in March it's been fourteen years' and they're quite stunned."

The Chapman Family: The Sound of the North East

For www.WoodenCauliflower.com

By Ryan Pilot

The Chapman Family intend to knock some sense into the overcrowded, watered down indie web that currently clogs up the ears of the kids today. Having played a successful set at Glastonbury, and landing a place on the current NME Radar Tour with electro-pop overnight success La Roux, the band are already penetrating the musical consciousness of the country with their scratchy, noisy post-punk poetry.

On stage, front man Kingsley's persona is enigmatic; he is at once uncomfortable and confident. He has a powerful presence and yet appears introverted, with an arm covering his eyes when it is not busy combing his guitar strings as he punches out deep, anxious vocals. It is as if he is apologetic for what he has to say, however much he believes in it, as if it will offend his audience.

“[The Chapman Family are] trying to react against the general apathy of people who don't necessarily recognise that the country's going to shit,” says Kingsley. “No one seems to care but everyone sort of seems to enjoy listening to The Hoosiers telling us everything's all right, or The View telling us to go out and have a party ... You're never going to get us singing songs about going down an indie disco and fannying on with a girl and taking her home ... there's always going to be us fighting against something.”

Kingsley started to form The Chapman Family in 2005 when he and guitarist Paul, whose attic he had been living in, started playing music together as a reaction to the derivative touring indie bands that they saw each week in their home town of Stockton.

“Everyone else was ripping off The Libertines and everyone else is singing in cockney accents, even though they're from South Bank [a Middlesbrough council estate], which is just ridiculous,” says Kingsley. “Or you'd get touring bands come in and they were just shit, every single one of them, just shit.”

Stockton is a Teesside town full of people with little ambition, where someone with bigger ideas can get easily frustrated with those around them. With Joy Division-inspired bass lines, jerky guitars and desperate vocals, the music of The Chapman Family conveys the frustration with apathy that Kingsley has.

“I think people in Teesside are really insular and think that we're up against the World,” says Kingsley. “But ... with going to other various towns and cities throughout the country [I've seen that] it's exactly the same as everywhere else.”

Kingsley spent four years away from Teesside at Sheffield Hallam University studying fine art before forming The Chapman Family and he now works at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. However, he makes it clear that this is no pretentious arty-farty band that he is in.

“I started out and I wanted to paint, I wanted to be an abstract expressionist, but soon realised that I was pretty shit at it, so tried my hand at video and performance art and stuff so there's probably an element of that that came through,” Kingsley explains.

“We're not like art-rock like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs are art-rock ... I don't think the band is an art project. I think it's a rock band and it's separate,” says Kingsley. “But if you bring elements of what you've learnt from art school ... you get influenced by everything up until that point in your life when you are sitting down and writing a song.”

Perhaps then, the awkwardness in Kingsley's stage persona comes from a fear of appearing pretentious. He sings, with his north-east accent, lines such as 'you are not impressing anyone' on 'You Are Not Me' which come across as an attack on the shallow bands that are trying to be another self-indulgent, fashionable London export. Kingsley is a North-easterner through and through and would not entertain the idea of moving to London for the band's sake.

“I enjoy being from the north east of England,” Kingsley says, but admits it would be easier and quicker to do well in the capital: “The NME reviewer can go and see you on a Wednesday as opposed to like waiting three months for him to go and see you ... Yeah it'd be dead easy if you went down to London but I don't see the point because I think the music that we make, the songs that we do have to have some sort of identity and have to have some sort of northern identity. I think you've got to be honest to where you're from ... If you went to London you'd be polluted by the effects of living in London and crappy city life, whereas here you can sort of do your thing ... you're not gonna wanna try and get into some crappy little scene that celebrates itself.”

Kinsley's frustration about the apathy of people, about the “lack of revolutionary spirit” as he put it, is of course not directed exclusively at those from his home town, but nationwide. We are in a time of great change, America has a black president, we are damaging the planet dramatically, the internet is evolving , expanding communication methods and of course we are in a recession.

“In every recession or every sort of bad time something good comes out of it,” explains Kingsley. “So you had like acid house and grunge and Madchester and all that shit came out of the arse end of the Tory government. Then you had the punk rock movement or new wave or whatever out of the bleakness of the seventies. And then you got Elvis and rock n roll out of the depression. But now that we're in the shit perhaps something should happen. But I dunno, I think the general consensus with the public is that they don't care, they really couldn't care less because they'd prefer to go and watch The Feeling tell them that everything is all right.”

The Chapman Family play Evolution Festival in Newcastle on 24^th May.

www.myspace.com/thechapmanfamily