Before we get into the nasty and brutish business of Battle Of The Bands Top Trump style, it's announcement time! The fortnightly duel between David of Kowalskiy and I shall be shimmying onto a Wednesday night from now on, so set your calendars accordingly! As always you can follow the action on Twitter with #battleofthebands(insert round number accordingly).
Time for Round 8! So far in the series, aside from a draw in the opening heat, home advantage has proved invaluable. Essentially who ever has first pick of the stats, has borne out as the winner. This was true in Round 7 where I led the way with the boys from Croy, Campfires In Winter as we took victory over David's choice Toy Machene.
The ball is now back in the Kowalskiy camp as we enter into Round 8 at level pegging. For those who haven't been keeping up with the rules, you can remind yourself here. For those up to speed with everything... Let's battle!
In the Scottish Fiction corner you'll find someone who is quickly becoming our 'house band', given the amount of times he's featured on the show. I make no apologies for it, 'cause his output is both vast and impressive. It is the appropriately named for Halloweeen, Lovers Turn To Monsters.
Once again David heads north in search of inspiration, and has plumped for Aberdeen band IndianRedLopez, who were responsible for one of my favourite albums last year, 'Empty Your Lungs And Breathe'.
The action kicked off with the Band Name Scrabble Score stat, and as you've probably figured out the band with a 'Z' in their name won that fight. With a score of 27 IndianRedLopez trumped Lovers Turn To Monsters score of 23. 1-0 Kowalskiy.
Make or break time with the next pick, and David went for Twitter Follow Ratio, in honour of our battleground. It was a close call and I thought LTTM's score of 1.15 would be enough to win, but sadly IndianRedLopez pipped us with a score of 1.23. That brought the score to 2-0 and game to David.
Despite losing there's always the chance to save face with the last point. That hope turned to despair as David chose Average Age. As LLTM (a.k.a. Kyle said himself on Twitter, at least he has his youth... David won the point with a score of 28.2 to 24, sealing a 3-0 win and a whitewash in round 8.
Scores on the doors are now 5-4 to David, but I've got home turf again in two weeks time so we'll see if I can level the scores. Remember to follow us on Twitter to keep up with the action live as it unfolds. My Twitter is here, whilst you'll find Kowalskiy here. As always though, there's not really a winner or loser (that's what me and Kyle are telling ourselves anyway!) and it's about the two artists involved.
Let's start with Scottish Fiction favourite Lovers Turn To Monsters, a.k.a. Kyle Wood, who is a lo-fi singer AND songwriter (not singer-songwriter!). His simple (not a bad thing) style of recording and writing, means his Bandcamp is filled with hordes of songs, amongst which there are plenty of gems. His latest offering is a collection of tracks on an EP entitled 'This Horror Movie Is A Metaphor For Puberty'. Check out the track below and keep an eye on the blog for some more stuff from Kyle soon!
David's winners (a meaningless term surely!) were of course IndianRedLopez. Last year's 'Empty Your Lungs And Breath' was a cracker of a debut, and earlier this year they contributed a track to our Hidden Tracks feature. New song 'Break Us Both' is a great indicator of things still to come!
Took a while to get this podcast up (apologies) but you can forgive me as on this show we have a plethora of new music from the likes of Gav Prentice, Salo, Vasa and Three Blind Wolves. There's also all four of the Peenko Postcard tracks scattered across the show.
Our Aye Tunes Friday Freebies track comes from op, our Re-Mixing It Up track is a Discopolis remix of a Miaoux Miaoux track, our Featured Artists is the wonderful Withered Hand and our Classic Scottish Album is Admiral Fallow's debut 'Boots Met My Face'.
Last Saturday saw the inaugural Scottish Fiction Presents Aye Tunes vs Peenko gig go off with a bang at The Flying Duck, with great performances from The Bad Books, Cancel The Astronauts and French Wives. All in all we had a great time, and hope you did do.
And for our second trick...
We'll be returning to The Flying Duck again for another ridiculously good line up on Saturday 24th November. Here's what you can expect this time round:
Behold The Old Bear - Behold The Old Bear are a five piece from Glasgow and are the brainchild of Mitchell Museum drummer Raindeer MacFarlane, who over time have grown to a seriously good band all in their own right. We're very excited to welcome them onto the bill.
Campfires In Winter -The boys from Croy are favourites of ours, and after this gig will be favourites of yours too! The bearded four piece have posted several album demos on their Bandcamp page and are building up to a single release. Not to be missed!
Gav Prentice - Over The Wall frontman Gav Prentice has got a shiny new solo album out called 'The Invisible Hand' and if you haven't listened to it yet, what have you been doing? It's a cracking album, and Gav will be showcasing it as the gig is his official album launch.
With a line up like that you can tell it's going to be a doozy, and we'd love to see you there. Saturday 24th November from 7:30pm at The Flying Duck for all of this
and more! Once again entry to the gig gains you FREE entry to The Flying Duck's club
night 'Houndin The Streets' if you want to make a night of it!
Tickets are £6 and are available on the door on the night.
The summer of 2012 say Ayrshire three piece Brown Bear & The Bandits play festivals across Scotland, including T In The Park, as well as further afield. They were the winner of the Best Acoustic Act at this year's SAMA's and have been tipped for bigger things by many. We caught up with lead singer Matt.
Hello, how are you?
I'm great thanks, yourself?
Good thanks! It's the question everyone hates, but could you tell us a little bit
about your music and your influences?
We are a three piece from Ayrshire that draw influences from indie, pop, rock, country and folk in terms of genres and artists such as Queen, Muse, Talking Heads, Ray Charles, Fleetwood Mac and The Dave
Matthews Band
What's your song writing process like?
Its not always a set way. Sometimes I (Matt) have a song written or an
idea I take to the band. Sometimes it starts out as a jam at practice.
In general so far the songs have been written first then taken in and
worked on as a band.
What could we expect to see from a live show?
First and foremost energy! We always put everything into our
performances. We tend to play upbeat songs and try and keep the tempo
and momentum up throughout the whole set. We like to get people
dancing and clapping along.
If it were all to end tomorrow, what would you say has been your
greatest achievement?
If it was all to end tomorrow - I would say playing T In The Park was
pretty great, something most bands and I think all Scottish bands
aspire to do.
At Scottish Fiction we focus on new Scottish music, how do you as a
band view the Scottish music 'community'?
I think it's strong. People really seem to get behind you and overall
the artists we have encountered have been very pleasant. I think its
great that there are so many bands in Scotland you can see making it
and breaking through - testament to how strong the music scene is at
the moment.
What other Scottish artists would you recommend to the Scottish Fiction readers?
I'm a huge fan of Stanley from Aberdeen. Davey Horne is also
brilliant. Really into Miniature Dinosaurs from Stirling. Recently
came across Anderson, McGinty, Webster, Ward & Fisher and was really
into their stuff as well!
Thanks for speaking with us, would you care to share a joke with us?
Thanks for chatting to us!
Eh... What did the leper say to the prostitute? Keep the tip
We Are The Physics, may not actually be masters of the molecule, but when it comes to crafting fun filled quirky pop songs they've got their PhD's hanging on the wall. New album, 'Your Friend The Atom' serves as further proof of this, and contains plenty of great tracks alongside recent singles 'Goran Ivanisevic' and 'Applied Robotics'. We caught up with Michael from the band (which one? You'll have to guess!) for some Scottish Fiction style banter.
Hello, how are you?
Absolutely okay!
It's the question everyone hates, but could you tell us a little bit about your music and your influences?
We call our music 'mutant science punk rock', but that's actually just a way of making derivative music seem more exciting. It's basically just fast, jerky, springy music. We stole all our ideas from bands like Ex Models, Devo, Polysics, Brainiac, The Skids, Buddy Holly, Servotron, Mocket, A Flock Of Seagulls, Adam & The Ants and Del Shannon.
What's your song writing process like?
It's usually a case of someone having some wee embryo of an idea that we nurture until it sounds much much worse than it originally did, and that's how our songs are born. We went through a phase of writing out formulae for each song. None of us can read music or really know anything about the theory of music, so we'd phonetically write out noises and musical phrases that we wanted, then just follow the formula. They would typically read like this: Boom, boom, TIIIIING *drawing of a mountain*, sloooooooow bit, BADDA DADA DOOF, etc. etc.
What could we expect to see from a live show?
Four grown men embarrassing themselves for little or no money. We like to treat each gig as an event and our one basic rule is to never ignore the audience. We used to see so many bands just dully and dutifully going through all their songs with a pointless 'thanks' after each one was met by a polite and expected applause. Why are those gigs even happening? Nobody's getting any pleasure from it! It's like a horrible ritual where everybody knows what's expected of them and urgh. We appreciate the fact people have turned up to see us, and we won't let them go home uninterested, even if they have to stay behind for a punishment exercise.
If it were all to end tomorrow, what would you say has been your
greatest achievement?
What's ending? Us, or Planet Earth? I suppose getting to the end of time was pretty decent of us. As a band, I think our greatest achievement, apart from this interview, has been managing to be so bad for so long with very few people trying to murder us.
What have you got planned for the second half of 2012?
Our UK tour to promote our new record starts tomorrow, we'll probably have a new 7" record out in November and we're off to do some Christmas gigs in December. Then we will celebrate Christmas by eating and eating and eating, then I think we'll be off out on tour again across Europe and Russia and Japan in the new year. It all depends on how much time Michaeldrum can get off work. He's a commercial airline pilot.
At Scottish Fiction we focus on new Scottish music, how do you as a
band view the Scottish music 'community'?
I think, in honesty, we've never really felt any part of any community, not even as a Scottish band. Scotland produces some brilliant music and it's great to have that heritage, but we've never felt accepted by any musical scene or community and, in fairness, that's good - we don't really trust flag-wavers. Scenes and communities are usually about spotting similarities between bands and people in bands and heralding that as a good thing, but we've always preferred bands who sat on the fringes. The good thing about Scotland is that it does produce such diverse bands, it's a shame that there's got to be a 'scene' surrounding it for it to do well elsewhere. Scottish bands pouncing on other Scottish bands for having any success is a bit of a shame, but I can understand that their nationality being the only thing that unites them isn't enough. Although, we all know how tough it is to get out of Scotland to do gigs, so it feels like should applaud those who do rather than scorn them. There's quite an insular attitude to some of the bands who'll do Scottish tours but rarely ever go south, whereas our whole shtick was to get out and play the rest of the world as soon as we could. Scotland's our home, and it's an amazing place, but there's a whole world out there; there are a lot of bands who just stick touring Scotland, grow a huge loyal home fan base, but couldn't fill a toilet past Carlisle. By all means, bring more tours to Scotland, tour Scotland more, but don't limit yourself to one country like a creepy tribe. It's the first rule of good genetics - spread the musical genes across the world. This is starting to sound like we're promoting invading countries aurally. And we are.
What other Scottish artists would you recommend to the Scottish Fiction readers?
I reckon every Scottish band is bigger than us in Scotland, so they should probably be recommending us. There's the lovely We Were Promised Jetpacks, of course, PAWS, Ex Wives, Divorce, Hivver, Miss The Occupier. I remember I heard a band a few years ago called The Videos on that thing called MySpace, and they were amazing - I think they'd split up by the time I found them. But we shouldn't forget some of the bands who came and went who didn't get the recognition that they probably should have like Invisibles, Take A Worm For A Walk Week and Astral Planes. Oh, and Bis.
Thanks for speaking with us, would you care to share a joke with us?
In case you don't know, or you're sitting on the fence, on Saturday 27th October (this Saturday!) Scottish Fiction join forces with Jim from Aye Tunes and Lloyd from Peenko to bring you the first in what shall hopefully become a regular occurrence.
It's no secret that I love female vocals, see Rachel Sermanni, Amber Wilson, Julia And The Doogans, so TeenCanteen, an all female four piece band from Glasgow (and beyond) are right up my street. They have got a wonderful '60's surf pop vibe, with great vocal melodies. Their live set at Doune The Rabbit Hole was a highlight of the festival for me, and the track 'How We Met (Cherry Pie)' is one of my favourites of 2012. We caught up with Carla from the band for some Q&A.
Hello, how are you?
Happy and thank you for asking.
It's the question everyone hates, but could you tell us a little bit
about your music and your influences?
We make pop music with 4 part girl harmonies. It's a little bit DIY, sometimes very sad and sometimes very happy. We've had some people say we are twee and some people say we are girl-punk. I like to think we fall somewhere in between. I'm influenced by the girl group sound (1957-63) and my favourites are The Cookies and The Chantels but we all like different music and it all feeds in.
What's your song writing process like?
All the songs start out with just me and my keyboard and are usually musical reactions to something I've done or seen. I record a video of me playing the song and then email it to the other girls. They then come up with their harmonies and parts and then we all come together in the rehearsal studio and put it all together.
What could we expect to see from a live show?
We love playing live. Sometimes Eugene Kelly plays guitar with us and sometimes Duglas T. Stewart sings with us. We never know what's going to happen which makes it fun! I wouldn't know what to tell people to expect as we've only been playing live for 5 months so I don't really know what to expect myself. But that's what makes it exciting.
If it were all to end tomorrow, what would you say has been your
greatest achievement?
If it ended tomorrow then we could say that over the last five months we have met some amazing people and enjoyed developing the band to what we are at the moment. Our greatest achievement hasn't happened yet. We're anticipating it.
What have you got planned for the rest of 2012 and into the new year?
We have our gig at The Poetry Club in Glasgow with Stevie Jackson supporting us on October 27th - http://teencanteen.brownpapertickets.com/. Then we'll go back to the recording studio. We've just written a Christmas song with Eugene that we are performing at the Queens Hall in Edinburgh in December with a few shows lined up prior to it. We're just going to keep writing and recording and playing live.
At Scottish Fiction we focus on new Scottish music, how do you as a band view the Scottish music community?
Helpful, supportive, enthusiastic, endearing and charming. It's really quite wonderful to be able to work with people you have grown up listening to.
What other Scottish artists would you recommend to the Scottish Fiction readers?
We love BMX Bandits and are so excited about their new album 'BMX Bandits in Space' coming out! I also think that Sacred Paws are excellent and would love to play a gig with them. I managed to catch them at Doune The Rabbit Hole and thought they were one of the best new live bands I had seen in years.
Thanks for speaking with us, would you care to share a joke with us?
How about a video? Here is Duglas singing our song Fireworks to a puppet: https://vimeo.com/26535622
