#Joyzine

[bandcampsnoop]

4/27/24.

On January 1st we posted about Audio Antihero's release from Nosferatu D2. While that band is no more, the Parker brothers are still making music as My Best Unbeaten Brother (Croydon, England).

At the time I mentioned how Nosferatu D2 reminded me of a cross between The Wedding Present and The Fall. My Best Unbeaten Brother immediately made me think of these comps, but this new band's music tends to be a bit more melodic.

"Slayer On a Sunny Day" is one of 15 tracks on the compilation "20 Years of Joy Vol. 2". This compilation celebrates the 20th anniversary of the blog/radio station Joyzine. While there isn't a traditional physical release, there is a card with a download card available. I've listened to this compilation and really enjoyed a lot - most notably My Best Unbeaten Brother and Sergeant Buzfuz.

Audio Antihero will be releasing "Pessimistic Pizza" in digital format at the end of June. Hopefully Jamie will find a way to make a physical release.

[slashdementia7734]

[musicblogwales]

Track By Track: Tom Emlyn 'Rehersal For The Rain: Scardycat, Vol 2

Swansea Singer-Songwriter and Storyteller 'Tom Emlyn' has released his latest album 'Rehearsal For The Rain: Scaredycat, Vol 2 and will be released digitally, on Cassette alongside a short story called 'Phosphoresence'. The album is available now from Bandcamp.

We've been honoured for an exclusive Track by Track of the album.

Following the release of his recent single 'Double-Crossed', Welsh singer-songwriter Tom Emlyn releases his new album 'Rehearsal For The Rain: Scaredycat, Vol.2'. The self-produced record is his fourth solo effort in the space of two years, continuing an impressive streak of creativity and inspiration.

Tom Emlyn's fourth album in two years,Rehearsal For The Rain: Scaredycat Vol. 2is a self-produced, powerful, fully realised creative statement.

In summer 2022, Tom released his debut solo album ‘News From Nowhere’, a bittersweet love letter to his hometown of Swansea, described by Adam Walton (BBC Radio Wales) as a record of “undoubted brilliance, eloquence and energy”. It has been positively received, with airplay and support from Radio Wales, BBC Horizons, R.E.P.E.A.T. fanzine, God Is In The TV, and Joyzine, among others. Tom’s second album ‘I’ve Seen You In Town’ followed quickly– a more mellow, acoustic affair which was also well received. He also released the ‘Scounger EP’on Bandcamp last February.

His latest record follows hot on the heels of Return Journey Revisited: Scaredycat Vol 1, which was released in May 2023. In the same vein as the first volume, Rehearsal For The Rain gathers up lost fragments from years of songwriting and making music.

Featuring recent single 'Double-Crossed' with its tender vocals, introspective lyrics caressing a daydreaming guitar motif, and lo-fi percussion it explores the darker side of self-reflection to a stripped back Velvet Underground-inspired groove. The album is a dreamlike, lo-fi psychedelic bedroom pop journey, with elements of prog, blues, indie and alternative folk."Peripatetic musical genius" - Adam Walton

Track By Track: Tom Emlyn | Rehersal For The Rain: Scardycat Vol 2

Fire On Fairwood Common

If you travel from Swansea along Gower Road, through Uplands, Sketty and Killay, Fairwood Common is the first part of the Gower Peninsula you'll encounter - a rugged, wind-swept heath dotted with gorse and abandoned airstrips. This is the oldest song on this album. Originally I wrote it when I went away to university. It was meant to be a song about leaving home and the way that things shift and change while you're away. A coming-of-age kind of song. I came back home for a visit and the Swansea Evening Post  were reporting a huge fire on the common, although I don't think they knew whether it was an accident or intentional. Probably some bored teenagers messing around. It seemed a destructive and uncanny image that was fitting for the changes I was going through.

The recording originally dates from 2016, a time when I was playing in a more prog rock style, which is explains the mellotron and the bouncy Jethro Tull-esque middle section. I added heavier, darker fuzzed and flange guitars and the chaotic Korg Monotron synth much more recently. When I originally wrote the song, there were many more lyrics painting the picture of domestic change, but it served the song to strip them away and just have the direct simplicity of 'there's a fire on fairwood common / gorse bushes burning in the dark / there's a fire on fairwood common / and I'm not home.' 

The original lyrics were just too on the nose, I think. Here's a sample; 'I've been home for a day, and things are changing / petrol shortages and mortgages / my pets are all dead, buried at midnight / childhood pets, adult silhouettes.' It works better as a more abstract, open song, allowing the sweeping warble of the synth to take the lead. This stripping-away of weaker lyrics is something I did a few times on this album.

2. Hall of Mirrors

Another song with a long history. The recording dates back to 2017, but I added some heavier guitars doubling what I played on the bass when I tried to record it originally, which gave it the grounding it was missing for a while. I envisioned the song originally as "sci-fi skiffle", whatever that is, although it's got a heavier feel to it now. I wanted to write something carnivalesque, a song that deals with the ways we can be reflected in the internet and social media, like a grotesque funhouse attraction. We're all reflected in the screens of our black mirrors, but they reflect and distort back onto us as well.

There are some interesting sounds in the recording, including saxophone on the outro and flute by Swansea musician Felix Subway. The Korg Monotron synth makes another appearance, and there are some bleeps and swooshing noises which were made by a smartphone app that created glitchy electronic sounds. The percussion was added recently. We recorded it all in our flat in Riverside, Cardiff. Instead of using a drumkit, we just added every percussion instrument we had to hand - djembe, triangle, bongo, kick drum, cajon, snare, cabasa, vibraslap, claps. It added a lot of weight to the track.

There's a mention in the lyrics of a certain Swansea music venue which was just an incidental throwaway at the time. However the venue has more recently gone down the misinformation/ antivax/ right wing rabbit hole. An interesting incidence of a lyric becoming more apposite with the passing of time, and more appropriate to the theme of the song, funnily enough.

3. Kafka  

The recording of this was all done last year, but the song has been around for much longer. A fairly standard blues affair, I've come back to the lyric many times but always given it a new arrangement, appropriate for the circular nature of the words. This final version is a satisfying garage-rock vamp; I'm really happy with the super-distorted lo-fi harmonica, recorded with a Bullet mic, and the overall gritty, angular production. It's got a poppy structure that just feels right. I layered two drum takes over each other to make it extra chaotic, and Evan played a funky bassline. I also used the Bullet harmonica mic on vocals all over the album. At the end of Kafka, you can just about hear a radio broadcast coming through my guitar pickups as the song fades out.

4. Rehearsal For The Rain

Another song which originally had more lyrics. Here's a sample; 'time is a waitress / and my table is served last / but after all it's just a reminder / the guitar is still in the garden / swollen and warped, the keys won't turn'. I think it works a lot better with a very spare and sparse approach. It's almost an instrumental now, with only four words - 'rehearsal for the rain'. I think it was called 'rehearsing for the rain' at some point, but it didn't really sing as well. I don't know what it means. Performing for nobody, or your audience only being the natural world, or something. Maybe the rain itself is just a rehearsal for some future cataclysmic flood.

I put a bit of phaser on the cymbals for a nice washy effect. The track overall has a really cinematic feel. I think it takes you on a dreamlike journey, moving through 4 different sections that feel melancholy and celebratory at the same time. The warbly Casio synth in the middle is really nice. We overlaid cymbals in the middle and used timpani sticks. The electric guitar tones were done with a tiny solid state Vox amp.

5. Chemical Road

This tune is from the same 2017 sessions as Hall of Mirrors. I originally wrote this when I was sitting on a bus going through Morriston in Swansea. I saw a street sign that said 'Chemical Road' and it made me contemplate how strange and toxic-sounding a name that was for a place for human beings to live. I started thinking about post-industrialism and decay, and it turned into this kind of dreamlike, fragmentary kitchen-sink drama about two romantically-entangled characters separated by the mundanity of their surroundings. I like the image of 'an orange river flowed', which is really something from my childhood memories.

All the chords in the verse are 9th chords, which gives it a lovely open jazzy feel. At one point there was a sax solo in the middle, which has been deleted.

While I was recording the song in the YMCA in Swansea, some children were playing outside. We stuck a microphone next to the window and recorded the sound of their laughter. At some point, though, the file was lost.

There's no proper drumkit on the song, only toms.

6. Llangennith (intermission)

An ambient instrumental based around guitar harmonics with different delays applied. I did think it was quite long, but cutting it down would take away from the meditative repetition of it all. There's some interesting sounds including some keyboard chords placed in a random order. My ex-girlfriend built me a diddly-bow, which is like a primitive one-string slide guitar. It created some interesting textural effects with a bit of processing, sounding almost like a windchime at some points. Llangennith is a beach in North Gower where I used to work in a beach cafe for several summers - the same subject as my short story Phosphorescence which I'm releasing along with the album. I thought it would be nice to have an intermission on the record, a bit like the intermission in Monty Python and the Holy Grail or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Another cinematic touch. A chance for listeners to go and grab a coffee or beer in-between the more fleshed-out tracks. It's fitting that the track is named after a period that was an intermission in my life, in a way.

7. I Don't Want To Be A Rockstar

This lyric was based on my memory of my school leaving assembly. The teachers made a cheesy leaving video in which they all mimed to the song 'Rockstar' by Nickleback. It's an exploration of that - rejecting the general prescribed idea of success and more specifically of musical ambition. This song was originally called Rockstar as well, but I thought it was a bit bland. The new title 'I Don't Want To Be A Rockstar' might sound a bit negative, but if you listen to the lyrics, the other half of the title is 'I Just Want To Play My Guitar', so really it's a rejection of the rockstar image and mythos in favour of just being a musician and a craftsman, playing music rather than pursuing a self-destructive myth. Although I probably still do want to be a rockstar, admittedly. It's a self-deprecating and ironic title. 

Recorded in lockdown, we added drums more recently. My drummer Jack said the song sounds like a band being forced to play a song. We ended up deleting all the drums except the ridiculous Nirvana-esque heavy middle section, which comes out of nowhere. I think he played it like that originally as a joke, but it made the song much better.

8. It Came Back To Me

Inspired by the Kinks, this was another lockdown project. Musically a bit complex - every section is in a different key, following on from the section before, which took a while to figure out structurally. It's an abstract Southwalian drama, inspired by looking out across derelict rooftops and tenement buildings, imagining the dreams and interior lives of the people that live in them. Lyrically, it deals with maintaining the fragility of your innocence in a decaying world.

9. Double-Crossed

Written in lockdown, this was a Velvet Underground-esque groove. The lyrics were sparked by realising I'd never walked down a cul-de-sac near where I grew up, even though it was just over the road. It made me wonder about the people that lived there, and their internal lives. So close, yet so far away. This, combined with some of my thoughts about the isolation of lockdown, became a brooding, thoughtful, poetic tune. It's a song about betraying yourself - there's a double meaning there. Betraying yourself in the sense of stabbing yourself in the back, but also giving too much of yourself away or exposing yourself. The song is a confessional, epic ballad with some glam rock undertones.

10. Somewhere There's A Dry Shore

This was meant to be a proper song with lyrics, but the only words I ever wrote were 'walking down the M4 / when the sky begins to pour'. I couldn't get any further than that for some reason, so rather than force it, I decided it worked best as an instrumental. It was inspired by the chords of 'Hesitation Blues' by Dave Van Ronk. Originally recorded by Dave Milsom for Death Monkey records, it's a fitting end to the album. Like the closing credits of a film.

Buy 'Rehearsal For The Rain: Scaredycat, Vol 2 Here

[nedison]

Aviatrix - The 3 Clubmen (2023)

RED ALERT! New Andy Partridge / Jen Olive / Stu Rowe collab just dropped via Joyzine and it is STUNNING!

Build butter bridge for the aviatrix Made like a bird out of canvas and sticks...

[henrivaxby]

October

Icons of Elegance recently released an EP called October to celebrate 20 years as a band!

Following the first single Friday, the songs Pieces and Celebrate have been super well received both on streaming platforms and on state radio in Finland. There's more to come as this EP forms the first part of a full length album due to be released next Spring.

Have a listen below and if you want to know more about it, read this lovely feature over on Joyzine.

[welovelofi]

Том Емлін створює щирі, бурхливі пісні; вигадки та темні жарти, які пронизують до кісток. Його нинішня сольна робота відображає альтернативний ландшафт Саутвалії, галюциновану спільноту, взяту з психогеографії та місцевої історії. Його спостережливі, поетичні тексти та прості мелодії 60-х років, написані пішки та в автобусі, досліджують, що означає належати до місця: гіркоту, любов і гумор. В окремому міститься універсальне, і захоплюючі пісні Тома Емліна унікальним чином досліджують особливість і особливість людського досвіду. Нещодавно він випустив свій дебютний сольний альбом "News From Nowhere", гірко-солодкий любовний лист до свого рідного міста Свонсі, описаний Адамом Уолтоном (BBC Radio Wales) як платівку "безсумнівного блиску, красномовства та енергії". Він був дуже позитивно сприйнятий завдяки трансляції та підтримці Radio Wales, BBC Horizons, R.E.P.E.A.T. Fanzine, God Is In The TV і Joyzine, серед інших. Зараз Том проводить свій альбом у турне з енергійними, інтимними, відданими сольними виступами по Уельсу та за його межами, а на 2022 та 2023 роки заплановано інші релізи.

[cruel-nature-records]

A great write up of Tibshelf ‘Understander’ from Ioan Humphreys for @joyzineuk

“Across the 8 tracks, Tibshelf allows himself free reign to experiment, improvise, and simply re-write the rules of experimental music, cut up method and splicing. A surprisingly laid back and utterly joyful album from start to finish. Highly recommended.”

Available now https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/understander

[frenchforcartridge]

Joyjoyjoyjoy

WE’RE BACK! French For Cartridge are out of hibernation - at least temporarily.

When Joyzine asked us to contribute something to one of their 20th Anniversary compilation albums we couldn’t say no.

“Joyjoyjoyjoy” with its found-lyrics about maps is our tribute to Joyzine and more specifically Paul Maps - the man behind it all - who is not just a tireless supporter of new independent music, but also one of the nicest people in show business.

Copies in the form of a beautifully designed birthday card + download can be purchased from Bandcamp. If you buy both volumes, you’ll get tracks from the likes of Deerhoof TEKE TEKE A Place To Bury Strangers as well as us.

All proceeds go to HOPE not hate.

Mastered by Andy Baldwin.  Photo by Auwyn. Words, music, noise, mix and everything else by Catherine and Henri.

[aptbs]

Happy Holidays! Thanks to the always supportive @joyzineuk for this awesome label profile of the whole @Dedstrangerecords roster including tracks from A Place To Bury Strangers, @data.animal & @we.are.jealous, @lunacylunacylunacy, @plattenbau_berlin P& @wahtogether for Day 15 of their Advent Calendar: https://joyzine.org/2021/12/15/the-joyzine-advent-calendar-24-days-of-free-music-downloads-15/ (Link In Bio) #dedstrange #joyzine #aptbs #aplacetoburystrangers #dataanimal #jealous #lunacylunacylunacy #plattenbau #wahtogether #family (at Berlin, Germany) https://www.instagram.com/p/CXhePzMpCOu/?utm_medium=tumblr

[pineygir]

Happy #Advent! && Day 1 = free Piney download here “Everybody Knows It’s Christmas” @joyzineuk #AdventCalendar get it now & #MerryChristmas https://joyzine.org/2021/12/01/the-joyzine-advent-calendar-1-24-days-of-free-music-downloads-from-our-favourite-bands/ #freedownload #musicaladventcalendar #joyzine #indiemusic #christmasmusic #pineygir #diyartist #womeninmusic (at Christmas Land) https://www.instagram.com/p/CW7-TBwMumh/?utm_medium=tumblr

[thenebulaworks]

JJ Burnel Nadine Wood photography #jjburnel #thestranglers @stranglersofficial #stranglersofficial #progressivepunk #punkrock #lifetimemusic #progressivemusic #musicicon #nadinecwood #womenmusicphotojournalist #musicphotographer #musicphotojournalist #womeninphotographyinternational #womenphotojournalists #nme #joyzine @joyzine

[cpmusicfoto]

To Hell With Good Intentions @ Hoodoo's

To Hell With Good Intentions @ Hoodoo’s

Joyzine, the online independent music mag, and punk rock duo Frauds, have been promoting the music scene in Croydon with regular events at Hoodoo’s in Matthews Yard, in Croydon’s old town. There is a slowly burgeoning arts community building in the much disparaged south London town, whose claim to fame is Kate Moss, as impoverished artists and musicians are forced further away from the central…

[jonhoel]

I wrote an essay about one of my favorite albums, A History of Sport Fishing, by Thee More Shallows, which is celebrating its twentieth anniversary next month. Check it out over on Joyzine.

[3-6-9musicpr]

VELVET STARLINGS

‘...a swaggering rock ’n’ roll cocktail that goes down easy.’ Buzzbands L.A. ‘shot through with vintage riffs and wailing hammond...’ Joyzine

[cruel-nature-records]

Big thanks to Joyzine for featuring exclusive tracks and videos from Distant Animals and Omnibael on their Advent Calendar. All in support of Help Musicians