Wow, Just Wow! New Johnny Foreigner Choons!

Great news folks! Brummie noisemakers Johnny Foreigner have released three new, well almost new, tunes today in anticipation for their forthcoming album Grace And The Bigger Picture, which is out in October.
Everyone should have heard the lightning speed Feels Like Summer already and alot of you will have Camp Kelly Camp, mainly because I posted it on funfunfun about a month ago, But Wow, Just Wow is brand new to me.
It sounds like many other Johnny Foreigner tracks. Lots of yelping vocals,driving rhythms and guitar strings pulverised and pinged all over the fretboard in a gale of crunchiness, but there's something a bit different. The band sound a bit down. There's a melancholy and a loneliness that wasn't apparent on Waited Up Til It Was Light. The trio seemed to have grown since then, wearied by the road maybe, and if they find the right mix between this sadness and their usual frantic euphoria then I can't wait for October to roll around.

Johnny Foreigner - Wow, Just Wow

You can get the two other tracks from the JoFo website

AXTXTXIXTXUXDXE

If you want some scuzzy, lo-fi, noisy goodness you don't have to search across the pond, that's wasting energy. Some of the scuzziest, lo-fiest and noisiest noise is coming straight out of Nottingham in the form of Lovvers. I posted about them back in 2007 and since then they've been tearing venues up all over the places in support of last year's Think EP, which got great reviews.
Their next offering is OCD Go Go Go Girls, their second full length due out on August 10th and from it is AXTXTXIXTXUXDXE. It's garagey and gooey. All the parts sound as if they're sticking to each other, like rush-hour, train passengers on a muggy day, and nothing can be clearly defined but that works to the track's advantage in my opinion. I'm a lover of Lovvers

Lovvers - AXTXTXIXTXUXDXE
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Also it's Blur week on funfunfun after their epic, emotional and excellent set at Glasto on Sunday night (Weren't they good?) and because I am going to see them on Thursday!!!!!!! So excited. I've love them since I was 9 and this will be the first time I'll have seen them live. So I'm gonna try and post something Blur related everyday.
Don't Bomb When You're The Bomb was recorded and limitedly released in 2002, just after Graham Coxon left the band. It doesn't sound like the same Blur that I grew up with but that's one of my favourite things about the band; they can produce things that sound so different.

Blur - Don't Bomb When You're The Bomb

The Bronx @ ULU

I forgot how crazy hardcore fans can be.
This was a post ATP show for The Bronx and having already performing under the guise Mariachi El Bronx earlier in the night to a rapturous reception (the review of this will be in funfunfun zine #2, out soon...hopefully), I was worried that the band might be a little bit weary. Oh how my fears were instantly quashed as soon as Matt and the boys took to the stage. I wasn't prepare for the onslaught from the band and the crowd.
Seemingly fuelled by the kineticism of the rowdy audience below them, the band flew straight into They Will Kill Us All (Without Mercy) followed by Shitty Future and the baying masses went feral and I was stuck in the middle. Arms flailed as the pit grew and swelled like a living organism, chewing up people and spitting others out at the opposite side of the venue.
Like the pit, The Bronx feed on this energy and give a performance to match it. Vocalist Matt beat his chest or punch the air with every breakdown and sang/screamed his fucking heart with every member of the audience. The way the band have mixed old-school rock with hardcore elements really creates a fun and lively atmosphere with the guitarists surely loving the high velocity chords as well as the fiddly high lead parts.

I thought the crowd surfing and general pit antics couldn't get any more frequent when they played White Tar and Past Lives but when they kicked into Knifeman, from their most recent release The Bronx (III), I realised I was wrong. Crowd-surfers whizzed past my ears and avid fans bounced off each other metres away from me. I was tempted to join in, to relive my teenage days of unrestraint and bruising but my older self stopped me, mainly due to having an expensive camera over my shoulder.
The band were egging us on. They wanted us to become more unruly. They needed more sustenance to keep this electric set going with all the aggression, passion and vitality they could muster. With stage-divers taking over the stage, each one welcomed enthusiastically by Matt, the band closed the set with the first song they wrote together, Heart Attack American, and as the throbbing audience strained their voices as one to join the band in this farewell, I thought about this being my first hardcore/punk in years and how I should come to more like it as this gig was one of the most exciting, visceral performance I'd seen in ages.
Come back soon The Bronx. I'm waiting.

The Bronx - Heart Attack American

You can view more photos of the gig on my flickr.

Eureka Brown

Its not often that I stumble across something on Myspace that has such an instant impact on me but when I first opened Eureka Brown's page and the first notes from ¡Digitalia! stampeded from my speakers I knew I'd found something special.
I think it was the drum sound on the title track that did it. It sounds like someone hammering an oil drum and it gives the track a mechanical feel but the rest of the instrumentation is so warm and tropical that the contrast creates a unique tension.
Their album ¡Digitalia! is ten short bursts of fuzzy and beautiful pop which all seep into one another to create a constant stream of psychedelic space-waves that washes over you in twenty short minutes.
Due the duo's love of file-sharing (I think that's what ¡Digitalia! is about) you can download the album for free from their myspace, along with their first album Future Vision Of The Digital Universe.

Eureka Brown - ¡Digitalia!
Eureka Brown - Mystical Crystals

Cheatahs

Cheatahs are the solo project of Canadian born, London-living, guitar/vocalist in Little Death, Nathan Hewitt. He creates his distorted, spooky and slightly awkward pop songs all on Garageband in his bedroom and they have such a gorgeous edge to them.
Some Powers feels worn, like your favourite hoodie that has holes in the cuffs and you wear only when you want to be really cosy. The sound that Garageband gives Nathan's acoustic guitar is full and scuzzy like a scribble with thick felt-pins. There's something haunting in the vocals. They are very melodic and melancholic and the contrast between that and the fuzz of the instruments lends the track an off-kilter quality.
I can't wait to get his debut 7" out on Young & Lost Club on 30th June

Cheatahs - Some Powers