Facebook may be where it’s at for a number of reasons, but MySpace still floats my boats simply for the music side of things.  Well, that and the lack of irritating people you weren’t really friends with at school littering your inbox with ‘amusing’ clips from YouTube of a monkey peeling a banana with its fucking arse cheeks, but that’s a rant for a whole other day.  A friend request landed in my MySpace inbox recently from a gentleman from Sunderland going my the nom de plume of Maxwell Panther.   Jesus the recordings are rough, but there is something about them that I really like.

The growly, scratchy songs are performed in a Lou Reed meets the Wave Pictures style, with a little Mark Lanegan and even Billy Bragg thrown in.  It all sounds like it was recorded on a tape recorder at the bottom of a cupboard in the next room, but its a style I find myself really warming to.  There are many down sides to the digital revolution, not least the steady decline of the economic viability of really high quality studios to make perfect recordings of music that benefits from that kind of equipment.  On the other side, it gives people like this the opportunity to record their songs easily.  He doesn’t need the posh kit, and the world is a better place for having Maxwell Panther’s songs in it.

The songs tend to be nicely turned explorations of modern life, coupled with a dash of borderline-existentialist anxiety, although it tends to manifest itself with enough anger and confrontation to never sound at all self-indulgent.  Given that the fellow lives in Sunderland with his missus and his five-year-old I can’t see him aiming for international stadium rock superstardom, although fuck it, it’d be better than fucking Razorlight wouldn’t it, but I reckon there’s more than a few people out there who’d like this stuff.  He’s a bloody good songwriter, and I love the ultra-low-fi production.  What a pleasant surprise this turned out to be!

Maxwell Panther – A Shade Away
Maxwell Panther – Rewire
Maxwell Panther – Too Many Magazines

Maxwell Panther’s MySpace page