Pulse: New Music You Need #14

youth man band

Brunel

What happens when four Plymouth based musicians who have played the circuit as a part of numerous bands in their time get together to get serious and take things to the next step proper? Well, Burnel is what happens, if before the four individual parts that make up Brunel became significantly more unhinged, on account of their slogging it around, before getting together.

Piecing together the shattered sound fragments of explosive and influential legends of 80s and 90s alt and punk, like Jesus Lizard, The Birthday Party, Drive Like Jehu, and Shellac, spinning it through some goth rough and tumble, then just stomping all over it with some noise rock, the band make a ruckus that is wholly their own.

JPNSGRLS

First things first, it’s pronounced ‘Japanese Girls’, which was more missing vowels than I was anticipating, having been pronouncing it Japan’s Girls to myself inside of my head – where most of my pronunciation happens – but that was stupid of me because I was adding a possessive apostrophe where there was none, and who says ‘Japan’s Girls’ unless there’s like a person called Japan, and who are they to own women?

Anyway, moving swiftly on, JPNSGRLS are in fact a quadro of male chaps from Vancouver and not a band of Japanese Girls and they were catfishing me all along, but it was worth it to discover their knackered guitar lead not quite indie, not quite rock’n’roll, not quite punk, not quite pop, but a little bit of each of those in the same way The Strokes were.

 

Youth Man

We’re visiting ‘sunny’ Birmingham again here, but this lot a little bit more honest about it, if the title of last year’s debut EP, ‘Bad Weather’, is anything to go by. They proclaim themselves to be the loudest live band in the UK, which is quite a claim given that Motorhead are still doing the rounds from time to time.

However, on record it’s not the volume of the noise they’re making, but the noise their making. The trio could be described as punk, but that really doesn’t quite do justice to the uniqueness and unpredictability of the sound baby they’ve given birth to here; erratically flicking between loud and quiet, fast and slow, melody and noise – experimental post-punk, abstract art rock, experimental indie, wild eyed noise pop, no wave, fuck knows?

Whatever they veer between and create over all, it’s something to pay something to pay attention to, and it’s really hard not to, especially with Kaila Whyte shredding her throat out like it was nobodies business.

 

Darwin & the Dinosaur

What does a diet of Pot Noodles, tea and biscuits, a passion for Thrice and Fleetwood Mac, a member who was an extra in every Harry Potter film, the completion of Google, an addiction to Theme Hospital, semi-professional Subbuteo, Red Arrow dreams, horse pulled world records, and a passion for writing letters to WWF legend Jake ‘The Snake’ Roberts make, aside from a writer so lazy he paraphrases a band biography?

It makes a bunch of liars is what it makes, or a band who don’t take themselves too seriously, though the two need not be mutually exclusive. Either way, or both, it makes Darwin & the Dinosaur is what it makes; a four piece who, when not taking the piss, put together an anthemic blend of passionate post-hardcore, intricate indie, pop punk that swings both ways in tandem, and rather rambunctious rock.

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