BROCKLEY FOREST – The Die Has Been Cast EP

brockley forest epThey’ve been friends forever; they’ve toured America; they’ve supported Honeyblood and released a couple of excellent EPs – a self-titled disc in 2013 and 2014’s ‘Second Nature’ – and yet after years of sweating it out, Bristol’s Brockley Forest are still very much an underground act.  Their third EP, 2015’s ‘The Die Has Been Cast’ not only marks a welcome return, but also showcases a much broader musical spectrum than anything the duo has committed to tape previously.

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THE END MEN – Terms & Conditions

a4225037619_10Reappearing at the beginning of 2013 after a brief hiatus, Brooklyn’s End Men made a big statement with their second LP ‘Play With Your Toys’. From that point on, there seemed to be no stopping the blues/garage rock duo, with live shows aplenty following – including a recorded appearance at CXCW – and a quickly released compilation of odds and ends filling the gap until their next studio bookings.  Released seemingly weeks after their last recordings, ‘Terms & Conditions’ picks up exactly where you’d expect, with the gravel-voiced Matthew Hendershot weaving tales of woe and drunken forboding while percussionist Livia Ranalli plays by the seat of her pants.   With such a quick turnaround of material, are The End Men in danger of burning themselves out?  On the basis of their 2015 release, it’s a case of anything but…

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KNUCKLE – This Week’s Been Hell EP

knuckle epWhen done right, the two man garage-rock/garage blues set up can be absolutely thrilling.  It represents the minimum band configuration to make a noise most effectively.  Less distorted than the US’s ¡Vamanos! but more ferocious than the UK’s most excellent Brockley Forest, Huddersfield’s own Knuckle blend garage rock and blues with a touch of stoner groove – as per 2014 breakthrough act Royal Blood, but with an element of DIY sincerity those guys lost by jumping straight in with a major label release.  The results on Knuckle’s debut EP, although fairly typical of the genre, are enthralling with a broad range of sounds and styles throughout the six tracks.

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Audio & Anchovies: Real Gone meets King Pizza Records

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Sometimes it can be easy to feel like the corporate giants are repeatedly flooding the market with expensive repackages of classic albums, hugely expensive box sets and the like.  Truth is, while we all have our “classic albums”, music fans still need something completely new to discover and thankfully, we now live in a world where there’s more music than ever before at our disposal.  So much, in fact, that much of it is in danger of being overlooked.  There are literally thousands of underground bands and hundreds of DIY labels and you often have to put in some hard yards to find them, but we live in very exciting musical times.  On the eve of the their first anniversary, a few faces from King Pizza Records – one of the US’s most no-nonsense DIY labels –met with Real Gone to give us the skinny…and, man, they had an impressive amount of enthusiasm!

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