It is a strange world, but not that different from the one we live in , think about it. Mutant kids of the digital age dig ceremoniously in the fertile soil where the corpses of their gaunt ancestors were buried still cradling their steel gueetars and harmonicas. Upon touching these bones, a mass download of crackling messages from another world occurs, and haunted by dreams of vast expanses under the sun, coruscating roads and golden fields, wind-kissed skulls of sacrificial heifers resting in the rich soil, they are inspired to create. Something is won in translation because we still need country epics to soundtrack our struts down avenues of cold concrete, under the gaze of invisible vultures perched from the roofs of the high rises, these are our very own mesas and our dust bowl, this is the sound of our loneliness, our hunger and our longing. Timeless shit, bring it on.

Another glorious forthcoming Woodsist release, this time by Meth Teeth. The album is called ‘Everything went Wrong’, which is the ultimate truth we all take to our graves with the expression of a flustered schoolchild to whom the logic of a simple equation has just been revealed*. It all sounds as full-bodied, rich and alive as ‘I Was Wrong’, weird punk horse being broken in an underground corral. You get kicked in the face. You lick blood from your lips. It’s all good.

Meth Teeth-I Was Wrong

Sic Alps just released on triple vinyl the rather mammoth ‘A Long Way Around to a Shortcut’ on Drag City, which is we believe the right place. This is a compilation of the diverse mutilated limbs and viscera wrapped in yellowed newspaper which our favourite San Francisco zombie cowboys have been lovingly dropping on their lazy pilgrimage across pressing plants, DIY venues and lounge sofas all over the USA. ‘Making Plans’ is an excellent example of what’s in store for those who visit this psychedelic ghost town: doomed stomping and mangled melodies laying waste to sound levels like the charge of the heavy metal brigade, or a love song so creepy it could have been penned by fucking Genesis P-Orridge.

Sic Alps- Making Plans

Ducktails are travelling somewhere different, but Wishes, included in their latest ‘Landscape’ album in Olde English Speeling Bee comes from the same place. It sounds like one of those electronic experiments that you can find hidden at the back of a Byrds’ re-issue, you know, an unfinished ode of reverb and painful reverie crafted with memories of misdeeds and muisunderstandings, over which a sweet guitar melody glides hopeful like that little red bird in the Lisa Marr Experiment song. So beautiful in its unfinishedness.

Ducktails- Wishes

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* David Simon came up with that one.

There are some things which are just awesome and make us feel happy to exist, exhibit one, finest purveyors of trampling down the dusty streets of a western town under a dazing stroboscopic sunset, almost falling but not quite falling, swirling and fumbling like Bonnie and Clyde just about to have their outlaw torsos pierced by a volley of bullets or wasps from hell on the final comeback tour, this is, beautifully damaged rock and roll music Sic Alps take Throbbing Gristle’s eternal ballad of romantic damnation ‘United’ and turn it into a barnyard stomper which comes across like a nugget delivered sweet & passionate from the lo fidelity storm of the 60s british invasion while paradoxically- but not really paradoxically, listen to the inane sex-robot chanting and stomping of the Troggs- retaining the detached vibe of the original, poisonous flowers open up tantalisingly slow in the emerald sand of an alien planet orbiting around the imploding red dwarf of a fucked up, yet unbreakable, love.

Sic Alps- United (Throbbing Gristle Cover)

We bought this one sided 7 from Important Records after listening to it at the one and only Art for Spastics.

Mr. Andy Auld tells us that No Age have covered The Urinals’ Male Masturbation recently and we say, ‘a-ha’, well, it makes a lot of sense inasmuch the perfect ramshackle of these seminal Californian punks surely contains inside its rattling heart the seed of much of that damaged pop wave music that the feisty stalwarts of the 00′s US invasion are constantly delighting us with, if you need any proof just check out the two gems we are posting below, ‘Black Holes’, which again revels in the swirling spiral tides of 60s psychedelia over the unstable wooden planks of a dank no wave cellar, say like the Electric Prunes having had too much to dream last night after watching the Evil Dead trilogy, and a few servings of cold pizza, and ‘Ack Ack Ack’, an anthemic piece of modern dance dada bounce music with an apocalyptic killer riff that buzzes like a shark-faced P51 mustang being flown by a furious squad of psychotic angels inside your parents’ bedroom, tally ho kid.

The Urinals- Black Holes

The Urinals- Ack Ack Ack Ack

The sound of monotony swamping your skull, Graffiti Island are not typical. Brought together through a mutual love of the deranged dilettante Jan Terri, their bludgeoned lo-fi is the sort that’d have even Calvin Johnson turning his nose with frontman Pete Dee’s vocal a coarse narcotic, one dragged from a LA suburb through Dalston high street, wading its way through a swamp of comotose reverberating basslines.

Though they’re yet to release a record (a 7” is due through House Anxiety in coming months) there’s plenty to set a jaw round. ‘Mountain Man’ is from a while back now, something no ointment can treat, rabid and pent up with carnal desires, the sort of output you’d expect from an outfit citing Meat Puppets beside The Pastels. Self-loathing mongrel pop.

Graffiti Island- Mountain Man

Sic Alps are another of those American bands to blip from time to time in 20JFG’s radar with the gusto of those who don’t give a fuck, and tonight we are definitely buyin’, their U.S. Ez (Siltbreeze, what would we do without you?) finds them straddling the thin line between disjointed noise of the sort you’d dance to just fine if someone smashed your knee with a bicycle chain, and spaces of melodic genius which have always belonged to the crazy and the illuminated.

You might ask for proof and we lay ‘Gelly Roll Gum Drop’ at your feet, this is the same sort of fucked up blues of Rolling Stones circa Exile on Main St. , our beloved Royal Trux or even Electric Eels shedding a tear in the midst of a shitstorm of distortion (Girl…), music unselfconciously beautiful and rightfully raw, usually to be found at the back of the bar surrounded by a cloud of smoke, a conclave of empty bottles of liquor and the shadow of a broken heart shining above like a Kirlian aura of the damned, bless ‘em they always come up with the best songs.

Sic Alps- Gelly Roll Gum Drop