VOTE: Your New Band of the Month for April 2016

You know the drill by now; March is almost over, and that means the excellent Hercules Morse’s reign of terror as Your New Band of the Month is almost over too. It’s time for us here at Cultured Vultures to throw a few more musical gladiators into the ring to fight for survival, as you lot listen to them all and instead of a cheer, or an up or down thumb, you cast a vote in a very modern way.

It’s right at the bottom. Just listen to the music, and then click or push your grubby digits against the band you want to win as Your New Band of the Month for April. Most importantly, though, is you give each of these bands a chance and support some new music that ultimately benefits you in the process. Then cast all but one aside like they were copies of the Daily Mail that your puppy shat on, because you’re heartless bastards like that.

Decapod

‘A Decapod is a creature with 10 legs, sometimes they also have 10 arms and play progressive metal.’ So say the band themselves, and whilst it is of course a colourful play on their being a five-piece, it also speaks a lot for their music. Decapod’s brand of progressive metal really does have a lot of legs to it.

Progressive metal would be a good core description to the sound, but their intricacies weave into other territory quite frequently, confidently, and almost casually. There’s a distinct inflection of the more rock than punk influenced grunge bands, late 90s and early 00s alternative rock and metal, a stoner and desert sense of groove, even the teeniest, tiniest tastes of funk metal in some of the syncopated rhythms and riffs. Then of course there’s the spacious atmospheres. I did say there were a lot of legs at work here.

Stay Voiceless

Stay Voiceless is as much a band name as it is a promise; the inevitable end result of turning up to one of their gigs, getting swept up in the carnage and belting your throat out along to their songs until you, yes, stay voiceless – forever! It’s also quite likely you’d end up deaf too, because Stay Voiceless turn it up to 11 and then some. Basically, they’re trying to move as many sense of yours as they can.

I mean, it’s not a viable business outline for a band, but Stay Voiceless have the tunes to bring even the deaf back to their fold to feel the vibrations, and the voiceless to attempt and force sound out once more. Channelling the most raucous sounds from 80s punk, the dirtiest grooves of 90s alternative, and even the precision melodic infectiousness of your more contemporary rock bands. The sound of the house party becoming the asylum and vice versa.

Lanedecay

I’m not entirely sure why this three-piece aren’t massive yet. I’m hoping someone among you could help explain that to me. Though, I feel it’s more likely you’ll be as equally confused as I and seek to rectify that fact. I mean, it’s all here: folksy Americana, dirge like riffs, delicate guitar lines, swaying slow dance rhythms, sombre atmospheres, alt. rock stomp, punk drive, harmonious vocals, etc.

Essentially, Lanedecay sound like all your favourite American indie, alternative, and folk-rock bands from the late 80s through the 90s and even up to 90s all had an incredibly awkward and anxiety inducing orgy that somehow resulted in a baby that was equal parts all of them. Minus the awkwardness of the orgy but including all the loveliness of the music of their polyamorous parentage.

Ghosts As Alibis

I know I have a lazy tendency to go on about a band’s name, but fuck me if that ain’t a cool band name. Am I right? Conjures all kinds of ideas and imagery. If I was still able to write creatively I’d rip it off so fast and hard for a poem or a story the four-piece would feel like they’d been impregnated by the Flash. Not Superman. Everyone knows he’s a shit shag.

It’d be a right shame if the band’s sound didn’t live up to their name, which is why it’s not a shame at all because they obviously do. And then some. Seemingly freewheeling between a multitude of genres, the Cardiff based quartet actually pull off organised chaos with a technical expertise and orchestration. Able to go for the jugular via muscular riffs with serrated edges as easily as stretch out their audio space into expansive atmospheres as hit big choruses with an emphatic sense of melody. Ghost As Alibis is the sound of post-hardcore colliding with post-rock over and over again likes waves on jagged rocks.

Your Protected

“Music should be organic, like a symbiotic life form entwined with our minds; healing and helping, invoking and teaching. Mutually evolving and leading us down unforeseen corridors of thought, on adventures of mind and hope. As dark or as bright as you like we shall write in this our voiceless tongue. So enjoy, relax, accept and protect.”

I have wholeheartedly ripped the band’s own bio from their Facebook, because I’m a bad writer, but also because fuck me is that a good bio. It also helps that unlike a lot of the more creative bios bands try to pass off as representative of themselves, this one actually hits the nail on the head. This Welsh four-piece charm guitar lines like they were snakes and then proceed to weave said snakes like living, breathing thread into a most audacious and colourful sound tapestry.

VOTE NOW