Zed Penguin – Four Track Mind EP
There’s a lot of talk in the media at the moment about the death of rock ‘n’ roll and whether or not this year will see some sort of rebirth of guitar music and so on and so forth.
The whole debate seems to centre on the wrong subjects, for the most part, not least an awful lot of needless hot air about the NME featuring a band called Brother on their cover who are not very good, have achieved little, and are by all accounts an unspeakable shower of cunts.
All this talk about the coming year is kind of beside the point, if you ask me, and this is something of a non-discussion to begin with. Music moves in cycles, obviously enough, and we’ve been through times when intricate folk dominated the conversation, to the last few years where more unusual blends of electronica have dominated.
Inevitably, no matter how interesting a particular direction the zeitgeist happens to be exploring, people and bands will inevitably get bored and move onto something else. As with all things fashionable, this tends to start with a persistent series of whispers, before suddenly becoming an avalanche of the obvious.
When you look at some of the stuff the ultra-hip London indie Tough Love Records was releasing last year – Male Bonding and Girls Names, for example – it seemed obvious already that the fashionable love of lo-fi which so dominated the last year was bringing, along with the often rather tedious Chillwave bands, a healthy new bunch of raucous guitar bands to the fore.
Since I moved to Edinburgh I’ve haven’t seen a lot of guitar bands – in the rough-as-nuts garage sense – that I have really thought much of, but there are a couple of quite promising ones I’ve come across recently which suggest that this might be about to change.
Zed Penguin is not rough in the ear-splitting, death-by-moshpit sense, but the guitar sound is unrefined and fantastic. The amp is homemade apparently, and the sound that comes out of it is bloody gorgeous. It reminds me of a slightly less explosive relation of Waylon Thornton & the Heavy Hands, which I reviewed recently, and growls along really nicely.
This is a simple little EP, four tracks recorded on a four-track, and available to download from Bandcamp for £1.50. I was sufficiently impressed with it the first time I heard it that I invited Matthew to play at a Toad Night more or less immediately – he’ll now be sharing a bill with Louis Barabbas and the Bedlam Six on the fourth March at Henry’s Cellar Bar, and I am really looking forward to seeing this stuff live.
Zed Penguin – This Town
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“Four Track Mind.” Clever name.
Yep. Needed a drum roll, that one.
i like the intention of this…..think i’ll go and buy the ep and see if it’s any good likes.
jesus, i’ve just watched the Brother interview video over on the nme site……..words fail me……maybe mainstream music is just dead…fullstop….period…..fact.
I could live with that, myself. I remember having a conversation over Christmas with some pals lamenting the loss of that shared experience – knowing that everyone was listening to the same thing at the same time and had the same albums in common at certain times.
That struck me as irrelevant, personally. Partly because I am a curmudgeonly fucker, I couldn’t care less about other people, and partly because having moved around so much I am not all that used to having common backgrounds with people either, so it’s not something I’ll lament the loss of, personally. They seemed to think it was important though.
i guess it’s what you call mainstream, some uber cool ambient noise fan would at my itunes and call me a mainstream mor twat (and yeah Dylan that may be down to the fact i’ve got some Bon Jovi). However i’ve given up talking about the actual music i love at work/family/non music inclined friends, as the faces are blank, and i feel like some obscure muso twat, even when i mention bands like Arcade Fire or The National……it’s weird world i tell you.
anyways, you should check out Anna Calvi and/or Jonny with those 2 2011 has kicked off in fine style.
All that’s well and good chaps, but are Brother any good?
not from what i’ve heard, maybe if you like the charmless side of late britpop then you’d like them
Chutters, me liking Beirut and Tapes ‘n’ Tapes when I first started the blog caused the same blank looks amongst my colleagues. Then I discovered the blogosphere and found out that within certain circles I was massively mainstream. It was an odd experience, because I wasn’t reading blogs at the time, so who knows where I absorbed those influences from.
Do you like Bon Jovi, Chutters?
Beirut to headline End of the road, are actually booking the bands for this festival Matthew?
I wish. Timber Timbre and Perfume Genius to play too – now there’s a couple of Toad Sessions I’d like to snag.
Rock and Roll will exist as long as people want to hear it. If no one wants to hear it, it won’t exist, but no one will care.
For scuzzy garage try Spectorbullets. Really. They are good.