NFR Setlist 20th August

What we played, why we played it and how.

THE BEGINNING >>>

Power Up – NFR Jingle
...and in the beginning there was... our Power Up Jingle, innit

Bay Of Creatures – Part One (Bay Of Creatures Demo II)
Creepy pulsing Canadian rhythmic noise merchants

Mount Kimbie – 50 Mile View (Sketches On Glass, Hotflush)
Dubstep/ambient doesn’t get more immersive or atmospheric than this.…

Mount Kimbie - Maybes (Maybes, Hotflush)
…..except maybe when you add spatial shoegaze guitars to half of it and a vibrating soul vocal hook to the rest.

Awesome Wells – I Think I Just Heard The Hens Applauding In The Henhouse (The Highs And Lows Of De Witt A Stanton, Red Deer Club)
Brighton artist who is to folk what Girl Talk is to rap. Sort of. There’s loads of samples in here that mesh into a dreamy clucking narrative of pastoral bliss. Let’s not call it FolkStep and we’ll all get along.

Black Moth Super Rainbow - Twin Of Myself (Go Team Remix)
Probably the only time me ant The Go Team are likely to get along because Tobacco and his fucked up friends provide the background drone hooks and summer shanty to start it off right.

Ducktails – Beach Point Pleasant (Ducktails, Not Not Fun)
This dude used to be in Predator Vision and now he dabbles in punked out new age flange heavy dream-drone. Only in LA man, only in LA.

Ilyas Ahmed – Some Of None (Goner, Root Strata)
And more from LA, via Palestine – heavy fuzzy buzz riffs and distant thudding percussion rolled around in the heady fog of Bay mist. It’s folk, but not as we know it.

Best Coast – Sun Was High (So Was I)
More Californian summer sweetness here from ex-Pocahaunted Bethany Cosentino – a heart bursting blur of freewheeling beach baked goodness.

Silver Bullets – Flight From Babylon (Free Radical, Stunned Records)
This sounds like the cantina music from Star Wars filtered through a lens that makes it infinitely listenable and overly danceable in a ketamine crippled kind of way.

Teeth Mountain – Untitled 1 (Live On, Not Not Fun)
15 minutes of psych drone improve from the streets of Baltimore. They’re playing with Lightning Bolt in Brooklyn on the 30th August. To all our American readers we say BE THERE. (speaking of LB, Fokka Wolfe played Colossus somewhere around this point of the night. Supercharged!)

Blues Control – Good Morning (Local Flavor, Siltbreeze)
All the best bits from dying of the Dawn of Aquarius hyperballed into one technicoloured rhythmic mantra of groove.

A Place To Bury Strangers – Everything Always Goes Wrong (Exploding Head, Mute)
The most exciting release of the year arrives in October with the release of this album – ever track is total killer Joy Division /New Order/MBV/J&MC dance beats death ray riffs and blankets of noise.

Pissed Jeans – Dream Smotherer (King Of Jeans, Sub Pop)
I WILL HELP YOU MAKE ENDS MEET IF YOU WILL LET ME GET SOME SLEEP I WILL HELP YOU MAKE ENDS MEET IF YOU WILL LET ME GET SOME SLEEP I WILL HELP YOU MAKE ENDS MEET IF YOU WILL LET ME GET SOME SLEEP I WILL HELP YOU MAKE ENDS MEET IF YOU WILL LET ME GET SOME SLEEP

Mayyors – Clicks (Deads, Mt St Mtn)
The best mud covered 12” of the year – as dirty, violent and moronic as punk rock gets.

Monsters Build Mean Robots – Psalm 57 (Nice Weather For Airstrikes)
Phew. Time for a change up and a bit of Arcade Fire inspired post-rock prettiness from Brighton’s MBMR.

Oneida – Saturday (Rated O, Jagjaguwar)
And back to the gnarlyness. Were you at this gig on Monday? Amazing!!!

The XX - Basic Space (XX, Young Turks)
This year seems to be all about ethereal gossamer ambience, from Fever Ray through Mount Kimbie and to here, The XX. Basic Space may even be it’s anthem, lyrically reducing the sound to it’s barest elements and spreading them delicately across the surface of the sound wave.

Smith Westerns – Girl In Love (Demo)
Did you want a new T-Rex? This is Jeepster for the Y2K10-gen. You want it now, yeah?

Music Go Music – Warm In The Shadows
And this is Abba retooled and reconfigured for the modern age. Smoothed down and sleeked up in all the right places, Warm In the Shadows is as disturbingly cosy as the title suggests.

Mika – We Are Golden (Jokers Of The Scene Remix)
….But nowhere near as disturbing as Mika who really is someone dangerous, mark our words. Jokers of the Scene totally destroy the music with distended bass and warehouse FX while contorting the vocals into unspeakably freaky new forms. Shudder.

Maluca – El Tigeraso (Sticky K Remix)
This just fucking BANGS – no messing around, no introduction, no respite – just a relentless beat and killer spitting from the soon to be hailed new beats queen Maluca (Dance all over M.I.A’s grave right about here)

Bone Ritual – Attend To The Signs (Demo)
Black metal doom on demo cassette. Need we say more? A bare snare speeds up to a blur, a cymbal crashes then the behemoth lurches into life. Awesome.

Teitanblood – Whore Mass / Domains Of Darkness And Ancient Evil (Seven Chalice, Ajna)
The intro and first track proper from the filthiest serpent’s-pit of roiling black/death metal ever spewed onto the Earth. This kind of music doesn’t rightly work without that kind of hyperbole

Dukkah – Nut Ward / Deu! (Night Angels Serve, Frequency Thirteen)
Just one of many artists featured on this Sheffield-based experimental/black metal/dark ambient label – Dukkah is no more, but these two tracks are two slices of genius – the first a fizzing junk-yard punk blast, the second a beat heavy spiraling freefall toward the centre of the earth. Horror in cosmia.



>>> THE END

Thank you lovely NFRlings for reading, and moreso to the people who came and enjoyed the musics in person. We hope to see you and more of you and your friends too next time (that's the 3rd September, diary fans).



MxBx