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Fortuna POP!
Martha 'Courting Strong'
£9.99
Fortuna POP!
Martha 'Courting Strong'
£9.99
Hailing from Pity Me near Durham, vegan straight-edge pop group MARTHA have just signed to Fortuna POP! and will be releasing their new album 'Courting Strong' at the end of May. Providing energetic, impassioned pop punk, Martha are informed by 90s indie rock and Scandinavian anarcho noir. The album, produced by MJ from Hookworms, is laden with harmonies and interchangeable vocals whilst still retaining the energy and excitement of the band's live shows.
Formed in 2011 by siblings Naomi (bass, vocals) and Nathan Griffin (drums, vocals) with J. Cairns (guitar, vocals) and Daniel Ellis (guitar, vocals), Martha have fast become a staple of the UK DIY pop scene. There are many competing stories as to the origin of their band name but it's a fact that the very last passenger pigeon on earth was called Martha. When she died, the whole species became extinct.
Decamping from the North East to record the album at Suburban Home Studios, Leeds, the band enjoyed the freedom of being in the studio and experimenting with MJ's equipment to produce unexpected sounds. The process saw them opening up to new ideas and, feeling more confident in their own abilities, allowing a wider range of dynamics.
Taken from a line in the song Gin and Listerine, the album title Courting Strong is an expression that was used to describe couples who were getting really serious. There's the old cliché that when you're young you think you're invincible and that everything will last forever - the album is about looking back and reflecting on past moments in your life, past friendships and relationships, accepting the uncertainty and fragility of those things and moving forward positively.
The overarching theme of the album is 'growing up weird'. It's a semi-autobiographical story about growing up in a small town, with a sense of not fitting in but on the way finding people who share that feeling and forming really strong bonds. It's about clinging to a sense of belonging and about being proud of who you are and where you are from, as well as the community of which you are a part. It's an album for the people who stayed in their hometown, and for the people who still go back and visit.
Martha's melodic punk pop celebrates being an outsider whilst being part of a community. The album touches on uncertainty, fear and loneliness whilst exuding an effervescent sense of excitement and joy. There's darkness beneath the pop surface - but there are also songs about teenage antics, drinking, courting and having your heart broken ' everything a good indie record should have.
Tracklisting:
1. Cosmic Misery
1. Cosmic Misery
2. 1997, Passing in the Hallway
3. Present, Tense
4. Dust, Juice, Bones & Hair
5. Bubble in My Bloodstream
6. Move To Durham and Never Leave
7. Gin and Listerine
8. Sleeping Beauty
9. 1967, I Miss You I'm Lonely
10. So Sad (So Sad)
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Visit product page →Vinyl version of 'The Killing Jar':
3rd Pressing on Amber / Beer coloured vinyl shipping now.Black Moth are four super talented individuals, Harriet Bevan - vocals, Jim Swainston - guitar, Dave Vachon - bass, and Dom McCready, battering the crap out of his drums. Formed 2 years ago out of the ashes of Leeds garage rockers The Bacchae, the band were seduced by the brutal and hypnotic lure of the riff, to emerge translucent skinned and bleary eyed from their cocoon as the ferocious kick-ass heavy rock outfit that is Black Moth.
Taking a powerful chunk of influence from proto-punk acts such as Iggy and the Stooges, Motorhead and early Alice Cooper as well as a sliver of 90s grunge and stoner rock and a big dose of doom, Black Moth draw out the darker elements and combine them with the heaving riffs of heavy metal giants, Pentagram and Black Sabbath, with "hooks so sharp you could hang a corpse on them". They also look to more current acts such as the Melvins, Sleep and Electric Wizard for inspiration, though singer, Harriet Bevan, still maintains a vocal style that evokes the haunting psychedelia of Grace Slick and psych-Satanist, Jinx Dawson from Coven: the woman responsible for the "sign of the horns" in rock'n'roll.
They're also a big part of the burgeoning Leeds heavy rock scene alongside Pulled Apart By Horses, Kong, Hawk Eyes and Gentlemen's Pistols, it looks like it's about to break. Songs that the band have honed and crafted in the mighty maelstrom that is the Leeds heavy rock scene, have been rippin' 'em up live not only in Yorkshire but everywhere they've played.
Now all they needed was to be brought to vivid screaming life on record. Enter Mr Jim Sclavunos, the multi talented Grinderman and Bad Seed, not to mention the superbaaad connoisseur of the mixing console, fresh from producing the storming second Jim Jones Revue album. One of their shows was all it took.
Black Moth reminds me of my misspent youth he said. And judging by the all out assault that he's crafted with the Moth, he must have been a very bad boy indeed. The Killing Jar is their debut from New Heavy Sounds and it rocks like a bastard.
Tracklisting:
1. The Articulate Dead
2. Blackbirds Fall
3. Banished But Blameless
4. Spit Out Your Teeth
5. The Plague Of Our Age
6. Chicken Shit
7. Blind Faith
8. Plastic Blaze
9. Land Of The Sky
10. Honey Lung -
Visit product page →A continual seller ever since release in April 2006, demand for Burial's roundly praised debut has rocketed following a swathe of superlative appraisals and high rankings in the various year-end review sections.
With the DJ in mind, optimum sonic integrity has been maintained by removing the CD version's beatless opening and closing tracks, and the remaining 11 tunes have been re-sequenced and re-cut to allow those 4 that have until now not appeared on vinyl to be presented in newly-mastered 12-inch-standard audio across the first 2 sides ('Wounder', 'U Hurt Me', 'Spaceape' and 'Prayer').
With both the 'South London Boroughs' and 'Distant Lghts' EPs now out of print and likely to remain that way, this limited edition two-wax pack offers the only way to get your Burial fix in club-ready configuration, but it won't be around for ever as the ever-elusive producer is near to completing his next opus, at which point this changes tense from present to past. Advertising to run in Observer Music Monthly from 18/03, and still very much in stock on CD right this very minute.
Tracklisting:
1. Untitled
2. Distant Lights
3. Spaceape
4. Wounder
5. Night Bus
6. Southern Comfort
7. U Hurt Me
8. Gutted
9. Forgive
10. Broken Home
11. Prayer
12. Pirates
13. Untitled -
On saleVisit product page →
Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
A continual seller ever since release in April 2006, demand for Burial's roundly praised debut has rocketed following a swathe of superlative appraisals and high rankings in the various year-end review sections.
With the DJ in mind, optimum sonic integrity has been maintained by removing the CD version's beatless opening and closing tracks, and the remaining 11 tunes have been re-sequenced and re-cut to allow those 4 that have until now not appeared on vinyl to be presented in newly-mastered 12-inch-standard audio across the first 2 sides ('Wounder', 'U Hurt Me', 'Spaceape' and 'Prayer').
With both the 'South London Boroughs' and 'Distant Lghts' EPs now out of print and likely to remain that way, this limited edition two-wax pack offers the only way to get your Burial fix in club-ready configuration, but it won't be around for ever as the ever-elusive producer is near to completing his next opus, at which point this changes tense from present to past. Advertising to run in Observer Music Monthly from 18/03, and still very much in stock on CD right this very minute.
Tracklisting:
1. Untitled
2. Distant Lights
3. Spaceape
4. Wounder
5. Night Bus
6. Southern Comfort
7. U Hurt Me
8. Gutted
9. Forgive
10. Broken Home
11. Prayer
12. Pirates
13. Untitled -
Visit product page →Of all the artists past and present who claim to let their music do their talking for them, Burial is one of the elite band of whom this truly is the case. In fact, so reluctant is he to engage with the cult-of-personality hoopla that surrounds almost every modern producer and musician of merit, that he remains a genuine recluse; he has never appeared live, only one obliquely-angled publicity photograph is known to exist, and the number of interviews he has given can be counted on the fingers of one hand.
Yet despite this, his music speaks loud and wide, and the world has been listening ever since his 'South London Boroughs' EP debut on Hyperdub in March 2005. His eponymous album, which began life as a low-key release in May 2006, is now widely regarded as the benchmark release of the ever-widening dubstep genre, picking up unanimous critical acclaim along the way, and ending the year heavily featured in many 'best of' polls. Now Burial returns with 'Untrue', a new record of weird soul music, which lovingly processes spectral female voices into vaporised R&B and smudged 2step garage.
Vocal lines are blurred, smeared, pitched up pitched down and pitch bent until their content is cast adrift from their original context and they whisper their saccharin sweet nothings into the void. The album continues with the debut's crackle-drenched yearning and bustling syncopations, haunted by the ghosts of rave, but also reveals some new Burial treats with a more glowing, upbeat energy.
Kicking off with the skittering 2step syncopations and vocal science of 'Archangel', 'Near Dark' and 'Ghost Hardware', before long it descends into a space of radiant divas and ambience. Where 'Burial' first was humid, suffocating and unrelentingly sad, 'Untrue' is less sunless. Many of the tracks are so sweet, they become toxic, underscored by the almost geological rumbles of growling basslines.
Unlike the overpoweringly melancholic prevailing mood of before, Burial's sound is now better defined as a downcast euphoria typified by the epic, muted optimism of the album's last track 'Raver'. Forget central heating¦ the radioactivity of this album is all that you'll need to keep you warm this winter. 'Untrue' is available as full 13 track digipack CD, including recent underground hit 'Ghost Hardware', and 9 track DJ friendly double vinyl set, from which some of the beatless pieces have been edited.
Tracklisting:
1. Untitled
2. Archangel
3. Near Dark
4. Ghost Hardware
5. Endorphin
6. Etched Headplate
7. In McDonalds
8. Untrue
9. Shell Of Light
10. Dog Shelter
11. Homeless
12. UK
13. Raver
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