Hey everyone Ruby again hope you're all good!

 

Busy busy this week as I have to let you know that Late of the Pier's new album is up and exclusive for all to listen to on Myspace :) Saw them at Great Escape Festival they're pretty good! Have a listen anyway let us know what you think!

 

Ruby @ Charmfactory x x x x

Hey everyone Ruby again hope you're all good!

 

Busy busy this week as I have to let you know that Late of the Pier's new album is up and exclusive for all to listen to on Myspace :) Saw them at Great Escape Festival they're pretty good! Have a listen anyway let us know what you think!

 

Ruby @ Charmfactory x x x x

 

I havent listened to it yet - but I guess it will be like the albums by Klaxons and DIOYY? - very hit and miss...

I've bought this album today & I love it.

 

In short it is everything that awful Klaxons Mercury Music Award winning album should have been.

 

Proof that the genre of indie is not dead, despite Conor McNicholas' best efforts. :lol:

I've bought this album today & I love it.

 

I was thinking of getting it, but prefer DIOYY? and might wait till its about £3 and get the Dawn Of The Dead single on whatever various formats it will come out on - it probs the best track on the DIOYY? album...

 

btw following your spot on verdict on the new Simple Miiiii...sorry I mean the new single by Keane....pbv the LOTP album has been playing in all the record shops today and so I've heard Space and The Woods so many time...but who would you say it sounds like...

 

 

...if its not Gary Numan??? but someone from late 70/early 80s who sounded like Numan but wasnt....that who i guess it sounds like!!?!?

 

DIOYY? - Dawn Of The Dead

The Late Of The Pier Album is probably one of the 10 most musically adventurous albums I've bought that have been made in the last 20 years.

 

Musically, to compare it to the awful Klaxons is quite frankly insulting it. Listening to this incredible album at various points reminds me of a giddying array of artists such as Brian Eno & early Roxy Music, Tubeway Army, Duran Duran, Frank Zappa, David Bowie, Sparks, Todd Rundgren, Buzzcocks, Yes, Muse, Marillion, Radiohead, Kraftwerk, Peter Gabriel era Genesis, The Prodigy, Aphex Twin, Talking Heads, Television, Adam & The Ants ..... I could go on and on and on...

 

As if to prove the point one reviewer & two very different opinions:

 

Late Of The Pier, Fantasy Black Channel(Parlophone)

Simon Reynolds The Observer, Sunday August 10 2008

*****

After overseeing albums by the Long Blondes and Mystery Jets, DJ Erol Alkan has apparently retired from production following this third record. It's not hard to see why; Fantasy Black Channel is a tour de force comprising glam, techno, and rave , all of which he twists into unimaginable shapes. It's hard to see how he or they could spin a more definitive statement.

 

vs

 

Klaxons, Myths of the Near Future

Simon Reynolds is intrigued by the boldly uncool nu ravers who aren't afraid of grandeur or melodrama - or Greek quests

Simon Reynolds The Observer, Sunday January 21 2007

*

If you find any hoop-la about nu rave mystifying and can't understand why anyone would even want to hark back to the days of glowsticks and gurning anyway, just visit the site http://hardcorewillneverdie.com/ and check out the archived rave footage. An eruption of madness on a mass scale, rave was the last blast of full-tilt futurism in mainstream British music. No wonder that new bands looking for nourishment have turned to the early Nineties, especially now that post-punk's retro seam has been mined to exhaustion.

 

Attracted to rave's Dionysian daftness and euphoric fervour, the Klaxons pay homage with their name (those air-horns tooted by E monsters), covers of old skool anthems like 'The Bouncer', and the title of their prettiest tune 'Golden Skans', named after a spectacular light-machine touted on rave flyers back in the day. What's mystifying is why the group draw so little on technorave's sonic principles. Rather than samples, synth-stabs, and programmed beats, they use indie-rock's guitar/bass/drums, occasionally chucking in a noise that sounds like a 'rave alert' siren-riff from some '91 ardkore anthem, but mostly sounding like a rowdier, more rough-hewn take on Franz Ferdinand's dance-punk. Or like Panic At The Disco! actually at the disco. It's this emo-like quality of feverish melodrama that connects the Klaxons to rave's E-motional hysteria. That, and the fantastical lyrics, which come across like Baby D's 'Let Me Be Your Fantasy' meets Frank Herbert's Dune, all treasure, grandeur, adventure, vision-quest. 'As Above So Below' trips out to imagery of 'galloping galloping beams faster/joining together and still faster.'

 

What's endearing about the Klaxons is their lack of cool (pure rave, that) and their confusion. You get the sense they don't know exactly what they're aiming for, and the resulting mish-mash of crude energy and unfocused ambition leaves the listener gloriously befuddled. There's a queasy but enjoyable not-quite-rightness to songs like 'Atlantis To Interzone' and 'Gravity's Rainbow' that comes from the band using the wrong tools for the job - trying to build a non-rock music using bog-standard rock instrumentation, struggling to make their shaky indie voices soar and ache like hypergasmic house divas.

 

The best thing on Myths of the Near Future is the most aberrant-sounding: 'Isle of Her', with its Greek mythology-inspired lyrics about seafarers rowing across the Mediterranean in search of some kind of paradise. It sounds like nothing you've ever heard, and in that sense is truer to the spirit of '92 than any meticulously accurate homage to rave.

 

 

More interestingly I first heard of Late Of The Pier due to a well known comedy act championing them.

 

This same comedy act (named after Smash Hits nickname for Britain's Greatest female artist) superbly ridiculed The Klaxons (who of course won the 2007 Mercury Music Award for album of the Year, and won NME's 2007 album of the Year as well) despite making tuneless album and having difficulty playing live:

 

Klaxons - Golden Skans (live at the Nationwide Mercury Prize 2007)

 

 

The Mighty Boosh - Eels

 

It's a fantastic album. Superb. No weak song on the album in my opinion.

I bought it today. It's yet another fantastic album from 2008.