GIG PREVIEW: The Men, Hookworms & Sealings - Sunday 19th Feb.

...so that would be tomorrow night, Brighton town - Prince Albert.  Three bands of slightly different stripes all great enough to warrant a rare gig preview from me.

The Men, as you probably already know, play their record collection as if they invented it, kicking out MC5 jams, Spacemen 3 doped repetition, gnarly snarly attitude of The Stooges and a whole load of 90's sonic fuzz and fury fom Dinosaur Jr, Mudhoney and their like.  There's not a band quite like The Men around right now:




Hookworms are a  Leeds based trio playing a dark psych style of garage rock - loads of space, reverb, looping threads of riffs needling their way through time and space out to fizzing climaxes. Still a bit Spacemen, there's some Krauty Can influence rattling about inside the trippy frameworks of their tracks, and soem of the looser strung out Sun City Girls. 




Sealings are one of Brighton's loudest and volatile propositions, now pimped out with a live drummer their show are even more hi-octane takes on their hybridised rock/metal/punk noise.  Here's their brand new video for new track Out Cold

REVIEW: Sealings - 'Untitled' (Italian Beach Babes)

Sealings
'Untitled'
Italian Beach Babes

Buckle up for the forthcoming ep from this Brighton based band of shapeshifting noise-rock fiends Sealings. It doesn't have a title because they "usually forget about those" but it does have four tracks of incendiary raw power with just a slight enough hint of subtlety to make you prick up your ears. It also has this cover! 

Fans of the clench-fisted sludge rock spewed out from the likes of Mayyors, Twin Stumps and Rusted Shut will take succour from this but there's a sleeker, darker sensibility lurking about within the shadows of its rhythm section.

Steaming oiled pistons push this machine along, rippling underneath the fiery buzz of guitars. Opening track King Shot is is howling salvo of leads, barking and squealing across each other. The steel gets stripped back off the second track, Swag Chandelier bringing in the street-wave pulse of a beat, eerie and menacing; Suicide by way of Brighton town. Cruel World rides the same rails even harder, accelerating the tempo and summoning sheets of smoke-damaged distortion to confuse your senses, throwing in some almost clear cut lead lines towards the end which lead nicely into the final Black Hole, which is the closest this EP comes to allowing your ears room to breathe, easing off the intensity and producing a half-light melody, something approaching prettiness against the backdrop of carnage still smouldering behind it.

The release will be limited to 100 light blue cassettes and ships on 30th May. You can order HERE, listen to Cruel World HERE

and stream/dnld King Shot here:





You can download a few of their previous now-out-of-print releases from the band themselves by pointing your clicker over these words, including the split that first caught my ear and burned it right off back in '09:

My Boyfriends Dead ep (Clan Destine)

Tie Dye Tapes

Split w/Lois Magic (Free Loving Anarchists)