For the last few years, the London based label Bad Elephant Music has been truly flying the flag for independent prog rock acts. They’ve made a name for themselves by releasing and helping to promote albums by The Fierce And The Dead, Sanguine Hum, Fractal Mirror, Jem Godfrey, The Gift and many other underground bands.
Tag Archives: rock
Rubies & Rudders: The Real Gone Sampler 2020
It’s that time of year again when Real Gone takes stock of all of the great music that’s been sent our way over the last twelve months. Changes in how people consume their music has meant shifting from providing a free download to offering an album length stream, but the variety and quality of the new music remains very high.
Real Gone’s End of Year Round-Up 2020
By the end of 2019, few people would have suggested we’d live through a year any more devastating than 2016. That year, famous musicians seemed to be dying on a weekly basis. 2020 had even more of a drastic effect on the music industry with a global pandemic putting a halt on gigs and forcing various small, grass roots venues to close their doors forever.
On the plus side – and you always have to look for a positive, even in the most dire of circumstances – a dramatic change in circumstances has forced musicians to change their way of working. For those with home studios, it’s meant we’ve seen an increase in output. We’ve even been given unexpected albums – right at the end of the year, there were surprise releases from Paul McCartney and Taylor Swift and various other interesting albums were put together remotely. …And as we take stock on a terrible year, it seems that the gift of recorded music has been one of our only constants: 2020 may have been an absolute bastard in so many ways, but we’ve all found new music to love.
THE AUTUMN KILLERS – Acoustic And Autumnised EP
The Autumn Killers may have been new a new name on the rock scene for 2020, but the band’s core members were already veterans of the UK rock scene. Vocalist Rob Reece had previously been a member of Swivelhead, 91BC and his eponymously named Reece, and guitarist Duncan Richardson had twenty years experience as a session musician. You’d think, given the amount of hard yards the duo had already put in, that their debut EP ‘Dance Floor Mayhem’ would have sounded like the work of a professional band. Unfortunately, its songs – in addition to being hampered by a demo quality production and a drum machine that sounded like a plastic tub being hit with a stick – were plodding, uninspired and hopelessly clichéd. ‘Chains’ – a song about “a relationship that felt like being in chains” – chugged along as if a bunch of beginners were experiencing their first studio booking and hammering out an old Black Keys tune in a lumpen manner; ‘I Don’t Mind’ attempted something of a groove, but ultimately sounded like an average pub band paying tribute to the 90s and, worse still, the title track failed to garner any real excitement, sounding like a plodding version of The Cult with no real passion. At its best, the EP could be called unpolished; at its worst, you might even find it falling somewhere between boring and terrible.
THE ARTHUR BROTHERS – Nine
What would happen if you took some of the moodier aspects of Doves, the slightly alternative leanings of Arcade Fire, the grandiosity of U2 and a dual vocal that occasionally disarms the listener by featuring one voice sounding like Robbie Williams? Chances are, you’d end up with something that sounded something like ‘Ninth’, the opening track from ‘Nine’ by The Arthur Brothers. As far as first impressions go, it’s really striking – a reminder that adult pop/rock need not be bland. Better yet, although the track features elements of all of the above, The Arthur Brothers don’t really sound like a blatant copy of any of them. Here is a band who’ve somehow, against the odds, taken a lot of familiar sounding things but used them in such an inventive way, they rarely sound like anything other than themselves. ‘Ninth’ spends its five minutes wisely and fairly concisely; despite wedging at least three different ideas within the one track it never sounds forced. From a listening perspective, whether you choose to be absorbed the deep drum track, the echoing guitar lines or find yourself caught up in a great vocal melody that eventually descends into a simple wordless hook, there’s always something interesting going on. By the time the climax is reached where the band manage to weave complex harmonies in and out of a moody groove that sounds somehow like ‘AM’ era Arctic Monkeys, you really get the feeling that the gloves are off with regards to style. This is an album that promises so much, right from the start.