A one-man mosh pit : Big Jeff on the art of surviving lockdown
Famed Bristol music fan Jeff Johns is staging a virtual exhibition of his paintings inspired by his love of live shows
Jeffrey Johns with some of his paintings from Big Jeff Johns – Welcome to My World. Photograph: Ania Shrimpton
Jeffrey Johns with some of his paintings from Big Jeff Johns – Welcome to My World. Photograph: Ania Shrimpton
JessicaWrigglesworth
Thu 18 Feb 2021 06.24 EST
Last modified on Thu 18 Feb 2021 11.04 EST
At the outset of the first lockdown, Big Jeff developed a new habit. He would time his daily outing to coincide with a livestream gig, and as he walked through the empty streets of Bristol, he would watch the birds “reacting” to the music playing through his phone. One evening it would be the soothing folk rock of This Is the Kit, the next, Moor Mother’s confrontational spoken-word poetry. The type of music didn’t matter, as long as it was live. “If you can’t be at the show,
Patrick Clarke
, February 2nd, 2021 10:02
LICE speak to Patrick Clarke about their ambitious new album WASTELAND, a rebuke to the inadequacy of modern post-punk songwriting, and the inspiration of Italian modernism, Brian Catling and William S. Burroughs
Photos by Rowan Allen
LICE formed over a shared attraction towards extremity. At first, they found it in early post-punk music, bands like Bauhaus and The Birthday Party that were the logical next step from the respective alternative rock upbringings of guitarist Silas Dilkes, bassist Gareth Johnson and drummer Bruce Bardsley. The genre was completely new to frontman Alastair Shuttleworth, who had been raised on a diet of “standard issue canonical indie fare” as well a “fascination” with Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark. “Discovering that early post-punk music, it was an incredibly extreme and transgressive, dark, caustic musical language that felt very strange and alien,” he says on a Zoom call. You can hear its in
Wasteland: What Ails Our People Is Clear
Will Ainsley
, January 15th, 2021 09:09
Lice provide a much needed stiffener in the midst of all the murk, finds Will Ainsley
Lice’s new record
Wasteland: What Ails Our People Is Clear has a musical language built less around chord, melody, or kick drum, and more alloy, rivet, bolt, or hinge. The arrangements seem welded together. The unholy churn of ‘Arbiter’ groans under its own weight. The heavier songs boil and seethe with grand, stentorian missives about “pernicious sexual neuroses” delivered with a kind of frenetic, impish jeer. Vocal cadences at the start of ‘Pariah’ lock into the grinding snare pattern like the mechanical chug of a jackhammer about to run out of batteries, backed by a sheet-metal guitar line trilling like a pneumatic drill. Lice even had a noise machine purpose-built for the record, it’s percussive snicker running around the edges of the tracks ‘Conveyor’ and ‘Espontaneo’.
Contributed
Music never really needs a rhyme or reason to be made. Sure, you can release two albums in a year to show that youâve evolved ( cough Taylor Swift cough ), but it kind of just feels like a marketing ploy. Or a crazy band from the UK can come out of nowhere with a concept album that blows your socks off.Â
LICE, not the itchy one that digs hair and scalps, have burst into 2021 with a weird, beautiful and absolute ripper of a debut album, âWASTELAND: What Ails Our People.â The songs inhabit a strange, Kurt Vonnegutt-flavored landscape filled with hookers, shapeshifters and tricksters. The young four-piece is made up of self-described satirists, and while the lyrics can be tongue-in-cheek, the music is serious business.Â
My favourite novel is Kurt Vonnegutâs The Sirens Of Titan.
Aside from his use of humour to make compelling (and heart-breaking) statements about the âusefulnessâ of life, I think Vonnegutâs genius here lies in the brevity he affords his really good ideas â of which there are a constellation.Thereâs a three-page aside in which he casually explains that Stonehenge was built by humans under the telepathic influence of a distant planet, just to send reassuring messages to a robot stranded in a broken ship on Mars; viewing Stonehenge from above, the robot reads the arranged shapes in his home planetâs language as âthe parts are on their wayâ.