So who’s this barging past and swearing the cunting fuck out of the space where we’re queuing to get in? Five minutes later, there she is again, onstage and spinning 50% of the vocal gold as part of Peggy Sue. Their music revolves around these twin blues voices, Rosa and Katy’s similarly tuned, differently pitched tones calling up old ghosts and burnt up romances (there’s a drummer too, but he has a silly jumper and moustache combination and warrants no further mention). Even the songs that end stamping up the flames sound like laments – all is bruised, mournful, coated in dust. The interplay between the spidery dual guitars and the haunted, fraying vocals is offered under rare levels of control, hypnotising in the space between mannered and about to break. In other words: pretty fucking good.

If the Thekla crowd open their legs any wider there’ll be feet out of portholes, directing shipping. Wild Flag turn the delirious expectation into curly-toed satisfaction with as much difficulty as boiling an egg, partly through shit hot garage rock, and partly through being unbelievably, stinkingly cool. Watching this on mute would be just as good (if, you know, slightly creepy): leg kicks on the opening chords from Carrie Brownstein and Mary Timony, grit and brass from world’s-coolest-housewife Janet Weiss, Blondie-like keyboard presence from Rebecca Cole, and constant goofy grins between them all. The music they play is perfect for their peacock feathers – uptempo sass grinning on Nuggets-y, new wave goodness brings strutting, feline moves; the longer, Doors-y jams bring open-mouthed, kneeling worship and shears it of all male wankery smell. You can be all things to all people – knowledge of the band members’ collective years spent in other shit hot outfits (Sleater-Kinney, Helium, Quasi, oh, you bloody know) allows you to ascribe wisdom to their lopsided beaming, but the force that hits you like a truck tonight is the still-consuming electricity of being in a band, being free, and having stupid amounts of fun at the same time. Wild Flag play plugged in and glowing, then scarper like the best gang in town, no problem.

Like reading Stephen King and masturbating eight times a day, it’s probably best to get some things out of your system early. For all that Islet have been (deservedly) lighting those newhotblogbuzzband bulbs recently, into the national press and beyond, it’s the Cardiff band’s past lives in uberindie bashers such as Attack + Defend and Victorian English Gentlemen’s Club that gives things a sobering counterpoint. So much of Islet feels like an attempt to move beyond indie, of ideas splashed up the walls as quickly as they bubble up. If you can make a noise you can make a song, so why not cram it with cranky organ, whoops and shouts and every member smashing cymbals? Two previous mini-albums have shown no urgent attempt to replicate the kinetic nature of their live shows – imagine an exorcism of mad-eyed charmed snakes – which is fairly sensible: by stretching out and stitching together a hundred rehearsal room experiments and jam session fragments they’ve not necessarily reinvented the wheel for this debut album, but have made it pretty fun to take a ride on.

Previous single ‘This Fortune’ is a pretty good bridge between old releases and now: its dreamy organ beatdown melds the crackle of ‘Celebrate This Place’ to the haziness of ‘Wimmy’, and it kicks like a kung fu mule. It’s the high watermark two in ‘Illuminated People’s killer opening one-two: ‘Libra Man’ arrives on mechanized crunches and serpentine wisps of backing vocals before splurging on swollen layers of desert prog organ. You might see its nine minute length as some sort of statement; more likely that’s just the way it tumbled out.

Unforced personality is the dominant theme here. The three main vocalists make noises worthy of their own action figures: from choirboy weirdo (JT) to agitated meths tramp (Mark) to cooing banshee (Emma, slightly overused if we’re being scrupulously honest), they spar against the musical clamour with equal weight. On ‘Entwined Pines’ they take turns, blend together and jump in front of each other in equal measure. On ‘A Warrior Who Longs To Grow Herbs’, it’s Emma’s gig, as slow, rumbling bass makes lushly cinematic waves, pierced by a plaintive “please… come… home” refrain. For a fair whack of the album, downed tempos underpin songs that nail moods rather than circular structures: see the stop/start twinkling videogame rush of ‘Shores’, or the capsized, quiet guitar blues of ‘We Bow’. Easing off the intensity is alright when your sonic palette is thriving underneath.

It’s not perfect – ‘Filia’ is pretty formless and meandering, ‘What We Done Wrong’ lapses into alt rock guitar and weird baggy drum patterns – but ‘Illuminated People’s ideas gush is confidently bloodyminded, helpfully finding gold while following its own path. As ‘A Bear On His Own’ closes things, veering from lolloping fairground bounce to chanting and rising anxiety chords, before popping like a bath bubble, the freewheeling impression left is the fun you can have, just because you can.

Do you speak guitar? Could you parse the seemingly identical layers of lofi fuzz to reveal three separate young bands tonight? Funny how tiny differences equal big outcomes: every act on this bill deals in scrappy noise to some degree but only one steps above the wash to become anything more than vaguely enjoyable scuzz. Basically, you need to away the fact that JOANNA GRUESOME ARE FUCKING BRILLIANT, and effortlessly better than openers Mowbird, whose angular zeal is fine enough, if a little unmemorable, and headliners Black Tambourines, who jitter through tight indie that arrives frayed and febrile. The latter band are like some modern day Merseybeat combo, head wobbling and ooh-ing over songs that strut awkwardly towards pop greatness but never quite get there. Their rush of breathless clattering is a benign tonic while it lasts though, and comes with plenty shy boy charm.

 So why are Joanna Gruesome so good? All their imperfections are their strengths: anything mumbled against them in the crowd gets too easily batted back. They’ve got a singer who murmers like she’s crippled with stagefright and/or boredom? Well fuck you, it’s another layer of perfect lofi guitar noise. They’re a bunch of skinny legged kids who look like they can barely dress themselves? Well fuck you, they’re the kids who’ve won through knowing no separation between DIY moshpit, unselfconscious love of music and making a racket yourself. Their version of Galaxie 500′s ‘Tugboat’ is a good calling card: verses that are sleepy, dreamy, stumbling into crashing sections that junk the choruses for howling guitar waves. JG originals are sweet too, sometimes literally: boy/girl vocals (estimated first shave date for male singer: 2017) are honeyed but not cloying, lost in six string distortion that’s a brilliant crush of wailing, stabbing notes and bullseye melody. “Twee Sonic Youth” is too trite – Joanna Gruesome are cute and rough, gangly and huggable, with rocks in their cardigans. Start stalking them now.

Tempting to think that Talk Normal were handpicked by Wire to open proceedings with the kind of awkward experimentation the latter group long left behind, but in reality (a) Wire still hide a lot of sharp corners in the pretty conventional songs played tonight and (b) Talk Normal’s racket is totally, completely great. Comprising two Brooklynite ladies (some middle aged men in the audience will alter congratulate them in a surprised manner), it’s a noise dominated by rhythm and squall rather than melody, with Andrya Ambro’s compulsive drum beat putting needles under Sarah Register’s piercing guitar and one-finger keyboard. In their starker moments they conjure up bracing no-wave heroines Ut; in the urgent call and response yells and drawn out guitar work they just sound fucking cool, like classic NY rough edges party stars. Devastating, even in grey leggings.

There’s some obvious signs of age as Wire start, though most of them are in the audience. Despite Shouty Man In Crowd, they don’t play I Am The Bloody Fly, though chucking in Another The Letter as your second song is a sweet deal; 1978′s niggling romp sounding box fresh, and unspoilt by it’s main riff being played by a session guitarist who looks he was stolen from Kurt Vile’s backing band. There’s very little played tonight from their first three albums, the ones that saw Wire ricochet from scabrous, crossword clue punk to gloriously mutated art rock in a ridiculously short space of time. This is a fine attitude, and though the bloody minded-ness is deflated slightly by playing two flipping encores, their shark-like aheadness leaves even less dazzling songs imposing and weighty still. Please take, from this year’s Red Barked Tree, thrums with dignified melancholia, thanks to an excellently stoic vocal from bassist Graham Lewis (good facial contortions too). 1988′s The Boiling Boy adds guitar layers so subtly it’s a thrill to be suddenly caught in the crashing, krauty finale. 1979′s Great Lost Single Map Ref. 41°N 93°W moves from perfunctory version to electrifying version once Colin Newman’s vocals start yowling at the song’s end. Always their presence is physical and jarring, a fact jabbed into your temples by a slowly steamrollering Pink Flag, a roll call of buried bodies set to stately explosions. Newman follows each glowering number, each minute long thrasher, with a steady swipe of his onstage iPad. They keep going, two fingers forever.

Is it really five years since Sammo Hung packed it in? Christ, maybe it’s more. Frightening how quickly time goes by. Heck have come and gone, too; they set the bar unsustainably high by supporting the Fall within minutes of forming, or something, and their sporadic and excellent gigs are all that’s left of them. ‘Emits Rays’, Jemma Roper’s debut solo release, is thus the first record of her inimitable talents in half a decade. Fortunately, it’s well worth the wait.

I say inimitable, and in many ways it’s directly recognisable as her. There’s few more imposing voices to be found, and here it coils around the songs much as it did in her old bands. Strident and broodingly romantic against the martial drumming and swooping bass of ‘We Crawled To The City’, luminous and yearning on the gorgeous, pulsing PJ Harvey-does-the-Knife rush of ‘Russian Owls’, it’s essential to the album’s appeal.

On some occasions the continuation is pronounced. ‘Our Powers Are Matched’ survives from the Heck days, but it was never this fun; here it’s reborn as fantastic retro-futurist glam, a stride through John Carpenter’s neon New York streets with a giddy rush of chattering beats and galloping rhythms. If Austra weren’t such portentious goths they might enjoy themselves like this. Elsewhere, Emits Rays feels like a sleek, confident take on common musical threads of recent times, be it the throng of Kate Bush acolytes or the gothic synthwave of Zola Jesus. Yet whereas much of this delivers mood over melody or meaning, shrillness over subtlety, Roper’s poised vignettes get the balance between obliqueness and accessibility spot on, with a sense of pop fun, adventure and thrilling possibility.

Producer Luke Taylor (Love Parry III / Face + Heel) is a perfect foil for the album; it sounds fantastic, crisp and dynamic. The fuzz guitar winding through ‘The Great Depression’, guiding the vocal as it rails and struggles against the whip-crack rhythm, the gloriously liquid new wave guitar line on ‘Our Powers Are Matched’ and the rumbling bass underpinning ‘Russian Owls’ and ‘The Rolling Pin’ are examples of the broad, modernist palette used to flesh out the skeletal, exploratory songs sketched out at Jemma’s solo gigs. The closing ‘Thanks’ most closely resembles these more intimate versions, with stark, plangent guitar and echoey, minimal percussion. It’s an intimate and spooky closer to an album that promises great things. The studio allows her to manipulate the ‘J.R.’ templates into something rich, haunting and supremely effective.

Emits Rays is available from http://jemmaroper.bandcamp.com/.

Funny to think of the Truckers when they started. They’re an unshakable Cardiff totem now, one that crams a small venue at Swn each year with people happy to see them a twelfth time and miss other new bands for; early gigs (first one supporting Lightning Bolt lest we forget) saw them as something of a scrappy power trio, sole surviving member Hywel marshalling two geezers from SKWAD to make a weighty brew of fret-tapping and party math rock dynamics. Even in Incarnation#1 it was a winning recipe – slippery post rock too joyous with melody and invention to be mentioned next to most of that genre’s main shakers. Songs were rejigged and rearranged for each gig, mutating on past steady line up changes (Incarnation#2 with iceman ben on guitar and hairy cellist Ollie is a personal fave) and odd periods of inactivity. Seems almost weird to think of the current line up – with ex-Jarcrew and Leave The Capital dudes bring bass heft, keyboard sheen and religiously observant drumming – in terms of stationary stability, but the twin facts of a settled band and definitive album versions of (sometimes years old) songs makes if fairly unavoidable, no matter how illusory.

Pretty happy to report then that ‘Accelerated Learning’ is pretty great; a debut album that fizzes with confidence and buries weird noises and melodic gems under deceptively shiny surfaces. There’s some brilliant moments: opener ‘staynicegetradical’ pulses with urgent drums and fluoro synth hum, buzzes, breaks down and builds up beforespitting out a solitary vocal line at the death. More breathless fun for ‘Awesome Tapes From Africa’, the tropical fan favourite that isolates the perfect sunkissed, five-note guitar riff, isn;t quite sure what to do with it, but has brief, balmy fun dancing around it anyway. The 2011 version is sugary without being saccharine, and the videogame bleepfest that slowly mutates back into the song’s original riff is a nice touch (and not bad for a track that essentially opens with a drum solo).

Long term fans, especially those stuck mentally dancing to old Clwb sets, may find ‘Accelerated Learning’ a touch too heavy on the vocals. It’s true that on ‘Brace Yourselves For The Secrets Of The Juggernaut’ and ‘… In Garnant And Ammanford’ they sail a little too close to those of current yelpy trend bands in tight trousers; results elsewhere are much better though. ‘Dear Malcolm Sullivan I Hope You’re Alive’ is knotty and melancholy, slow-throbbing with three separate killer hooks, while ‘Psycho Billy’ is a great earworm chorus repeated endlessly amongst handclaps and squawking sax. ‘Person For The Person’ shows the album’s permanent lightness of touch best: the underrated oldie’s collaged robot samples buzz constantly over tiptoe-ing guitar; after a hundred listens its hold on you is total.

‘Accelerated Learning’ is pop music shot through with experimentalism, unafraid of shoving in a burbling, squelchy instrumental that sounds like a bedroom Emeralds (‘Down And Out…’ is brill btw) in the same hour as a quiet little guitar doodle (‘Ballad#2′ is, you know, alright). Closing number ‘The Choir Song’, with piano, strings and heartbreak coda, could have been painfully wet; as it is, it has a minimalist gothic intro, an overheard conversation at the end, and makes a brilliant virtue out of its awkward beauty. ‘Accelerated Learning’ stamps big ownership on the past and present, and makes the future look pretty grand too.

OK, so hands up all those who thought this fine thing would ever see the light of day? Pah, ye of little faith. Five years or so down the line from their tantalisingly brief early sets, and two years since it was recorded, Power Grab arrives. That it does so as a budget-priced download-only release, rather than the deluxe double-vinyl, gatefold sleeve with Rhodri and Bernie in Kiss make-up edition it deserves, is a brazen indictment of the times we find ourselves in. Small beer, ultimately, though, as it manages to do the near-impossible; neatly capturing the precision-tooled playfulness of the most memorable RHLH gigs (Swn 2008, Clwb with Islet in 2009, Green Man 2009, Norwegian Church with Rangda in 2010… choose your own), cherry-picking their best moments to date and leaving you unreasonably eager for a swift follow-up.

The template for the album’s carefully-positioned peaks is a carefully constructed bed of simple yet crushingly effective riffs, bass and rhythm parts overlaid with insidious lead guitar and powerhouse drumming. The joy of those sporadic, brilliant live shows, captured so well here, is in the thrill found in subtle variation and the playful creativity with which they tease and stretch the core ideas into supple new shapes. You know them, even if you don’t think you know them. ‘The Capgras Delusion’ is a monolithic, magnificent opening shot, its enormous, serpentine riff and its jerky, Battles-y sibling writhing in and out of a squalling morass of guitar noise. Shuddering, propulsive kick-drums marshal it to a conclusion that’s both a thrill and a disappointment; like the inimitable ‘Stanislav Petrov’ and its triumphant, lumbering core riff, it could go on for twenty minutes and never outstay its welcome.

The trick is repeated on ‘Coincident XY’, another crushingly simple riff that builds and expands in all directions for a full four minutes. ‘Bugatti’, meanwhile, is its gloriously gonzoid peak; if a song could ride horseback through a burning village, this would be it. Relentless, irresistably catchy, with a gorgeously plangent, proggy middle eight, the album’s first true vocal is so perfectly timed it’s unreal. Muscular, lofty and thrillingly effective, this is RHLH in excelsis – visualise them swapping instruments, piling loop upon loop with dextrous glee, and you’re grinning uncontrollably.

What you do get from their Breaking The Magician’s Code-style deconstruction of the songs live, though, is an understanding of the breadth of inspirations and styles they call on. Always eschewing the by-numbers orthodoxy of a lot of post-rock, the mathy pounding of Trans Am or Maserati looms large but there’s far more besides. ‘Nub City’ is muscular and punchy, recalling Shellac’s mastery of dynamics and space. Multiple loops fold in and out, nut-tight and aggressive, before they’re blasted to the four winds as the band ‘play’ the muted riffs on circuit-bent home technology. ‘The Teignmouth Electron’ is all parched, bluesy riffing and insistent pummelling, evoking Kyuss or even Led Zeppelin. Hoary rock classicism in less capable hands, here the dextrous touch and muffled, foreboding vocals are a joy. It’s that magpie creativity that effortlessly lifts them above their peers; the manipulation and distortion they subject the loops to, the instrument-swapping, the confluence of styles with Ratatosk’s anguished vocals and slow-build orchestral scree and Vito’s delicate, expansive post-rock. Some of Power Grab‘s finest moments are in these departures, be it the snaking guitar solo and swirling noise of ‘Ferdinandea’ or the closing ‘Darvaz’, subtle, stately and evocative like ’90s lost greats Billy Mahonie or Rothko. There’s a second album on the way early next year, they reckon; grab this, and everything else they do, with both hands.  Hopfully, with the next one, you’ll actually be able to do that.

Massive thanks to Right Hand Left Hand for providing us with a track-by-track guide to the album.  Part studio diary, part history lesson, always entertaining.  They’re not all about cycling, you know…

1. The Capgras Delusion

This is a name for a mental disorder, in which the afflicted is convinced that a friend or loved one as been replaced by an identical imposter. Closely related to the Cotard delusion, in which the patient believes they’re already dead. This song is quite chaotic to play – the drummer’s riff alongside his mental drumming, the guitarist building up other riffs one note at a time, soloing, muting and finally screaming into the pickups.

2. The Teignmouth Electron

The name of Donald Crowhurst’s boat – he, along with 8 others, took part in the first non-stop round-the-world boat race in the 60s – only one finished. The race has informed a number of songs for RHLH and Ratatosk, and the story is expertly told in the documentary film Deep Water. A bit more of a rock swagger to this song, the guitarist attempts a Josh Homme impression on guitar and vocals, while the drummer manipulates time itself. The lyrics are taken from and inspired by Crowhurst’s journals, written after he’d lost his mind.

3. Stanislav Petrov

Stanislav Petrov – a man who refused to panic when his Russian computer systems showed that nuclear warheads were on their way to the USSR. He recognised it as a computer glitch, and so the soviet missiles remained unlaunched, instead of heading westward. This is the first RHLH song – it’s almost our theme song. One riff and a whole world of possibilities.

4. Jerry Fuchs

RIP Jerry Fuchs, drummer of Maserati (among others) – one of the only instrumental bands I have any time for these days. We were both big fans, and Inventions of the New Season is one of the great instrumental rock records.

5. Bugatti

We love Maserati so much we ripped them off and called it Bugatti. An unyielding, swaggering, pillaging beast of a riff, that gets more unpleasant as the song goes on. The drumming is so good here, the guitarist doesn’t have to do that much.

6. Ferdinandea

A slower, more contemplative song, which is basically one long solo. Ferdinandea is an occasional island in the Mediterranean. A volcano erupts – Ferdinandea forms – Ferdinandea quickly erodes to leave a submerged volcano again. After erupting in 1831, it was the subject of a conflict between the British, French and Italians before it disappeared a few months later without a resolution being reached. In 1986, American bombers mistook it for a Libyan submarine and bombed it.

7. Coincident XY

Is a way microphones are set up. Our second ever song – we spent so long in rehearsals playing this and Stanislav, we realised out first gig was coming up and we didn’t have any other songs. It even has some lyrics, decrying hipster twatheads who maintain that Tweez is better than Spiderland, when that’s clearly fucking nonsense. People who maintain that On Avery Island is better than In the Aeroplane Over the Sea have a stronger argument, but are still wrong.

8. Nub City

Along with ‘Capgras’, it was among our first songs written with multiple loops that built up through the song. The muting section at the end was made possible thanks to a chap called Bien, who made the pedals for us out of used records.

The town of Vernon, Florida (subject of a film by Errol Morris) was notorious for having a huge national percentage of insurance claims on lost limbs, many of them believed to be deliberate – as a result, it became known as nub city. We became obsessed by this story. If I may, an article sums it up better than I can:

L.W. Burdeshaw, an insurance agent in Chipley, told the St. Petersburg Times in 1982 that his list of policyholders included the following: a man who sawed off his left hand at work, a man who shot off his foot while protecting chickens, a man who lost his hand while trying to shoot a hawk, a man who somehow lost two limbs in an accident involving a rifle and a tractor, and a man who bought a policy and then, less than 12 hours later, shot off his foot while aiming at a squirrel.

“There was another man who took out insurance with 28 or 38 companies,” said Murray Armstrong, an insurance official for Liberty National. “He was a farmer and ordinarily drove around the farm in his stick shift pickup. This day – the day of the accident – he drove his wife’s automatic transmission car and he lost his left foot. If he’d been driving his pickup, he’d have had to use that foot for the clutch. He also had a tourniquet in his pocket. We asked why he had it and he said, ‘Snakes. In case of snake bite.’ He’d taken out so much insurance he was paying premiums that cost more than his income. He wasn’t poor, either. Middle class. He collected more than $1-million from all the companies. It was hard to make a jury believe a man would shoot off his foot.”

http://www.sptimes.com/2007/09/02/Life/Dismembered_again.shtml

9. Darvaz

Woah, the drummer is on guitar, and the guitarist is on drums! Our first experiment with proper instrument swapping (the drummer has always been nifty enough on the guitar to coin and perform several RHLH riffs, this is the first time the guitarist took his place) produced this tune. To me, it sounds like late 90s post rock, which is when the genre still meant something and was genuinely original. So yeah, we like it.

Darvaz is a region of Turkmenistan that experienced a mining accident in 1971. A drilling rig collapsed into a cavern, leaving a large. To avoid the discharge of poisonous gas they set fire to it, hoping it would burn up in a few days. 40 years later it’s still burning, and it’s known as “the door to hell” – which is where we leave you.

What do you want from a debut album? It’s often said that a first album, like a first novel, acts as a record of everything the author has done up to that point, the culmination of years of slow and steady evolution. Which is fine up to a point, but presumes the inclusion of styles and features a band has shaken off, left behind in the process. It’s already dated if it dwells too long on its gestation period, and Fanatical Love succeeds so well because Kutosis focus so sharply on the band they are now, and the band they might yet be.

It doesn’t hurt that the album positively roars off the blocks. Poised for the 60-second duration of the sleight-of-hand opening sound collage, they come out swinging with the killer one-two combination of ‘Salton Sea’ and recent single ‘Shadows’. The former briefly, blissfully, renders Exit_International wholly unnecessary, its shuddering, elastic bass and furious yelping reminiscent of early Mclusky. ‘Shadows’ is the clearest sign yet of their full-blooded pop skills, whipsmart Les Savy Fav art-punk that doesn’t waste a single second. Followed swiftly by the taut, efficient noise of its flipside ‘Skin’, another killer chorus sharpened to bleeding point by Rory Attwell’s crisp production job, the opening salvo serves as an expert repurposing of what we already know Kutosis do well; fat-free garage punk shorn of swagger and machismo and peppered with insistent hooks.

For all the thrills in the relentless first act, it’s the variations that reward most on repeat. ‘Battle Lake’ arrives on a monolithic bass-heavy groove, and the tempo shift and use of space and dynamics are utterly striking. Attwell’s hand is sensed on the tiller here; the metallic, see-sawing guitar stabs and falsetto bridge vocals recall another of his clients, recent Joy Collective guests Cold Pumas. Here, and on the closing ‘Breeders’, Kutosis are exactly the kind of muscular, effective noise-punks his old band Test-Icicles might have been if they didn’t act like such dicks.

Whatever you expected of them, a two-part dubbed out instrumental probably wasn’t it. The shoegazey guitar shimmer, bone-rattling bass and echo-heavy drums recall Ride, of all bands, circa ‘Leave Them All Behind’, no bad thing indeed and typical of a promising breadth of intent across the album’s last section. The results – the moody, brittle anthemicism of ‘Lights To Lead Us’ and the harsh sheet-metal guitars and clanging tension of ‘Miniatures’ – are icily foreboding, the lyrics darker in tone and speaking of emptiness and exhaustion. It’s carried by a production job that might have failed a lesser band but complements their ambition superbly; nothing feels tokenistic or a lead-booted attempt at gravitas. It’s still the simple things that make Fanatical Love work best, though; the beefed-up up low-end for maximum Death From Above danceability, the flawless sequencing and pacing, the indelible hooks. They’re not taking the straightest, simplest route, that of the one-dimensional punk band with a few fag packet social commentary lyrics. The simple things nailed, the next stage marked out; they’re far more than that.

Ian, Jim and Ben from Kutosis kindly put together a track-by-track commentary for the album for us.  Synch your eyes with the CD, DVD or both and enjoy it in real time!  Like a director’s commentary, except without all the dull bits where they talk about lenses and that.

1. #asongtostartarecordwith

We wanted to start the album with a short burst of strange sounds rather than a normal song. It’s like a gateway to the rest of the album. One minute of processed sounds played on the bass, along with cymbals, toms, white noise and feedback. The video for this song was made by Ellen Campesinos and features a brief cameo from Adam Chard, who’s designed the artwork for the album, playing a dead body.

2. Salton Sea

Salton Sea is a place in California that was a holiday destination for the rich and famous in the 1950s. It’s since become largely abandoned and desolate. A big thank you should go to Dan Barnett of Samoans who as well as transporting us to and from London for the album sessions provided some understated backing vocals to balance all the yelping in the chorus. Our friend Lt Meat made an excellent video for this song, pieced together from hundreds of long exposure photographs.

3. Shadows

As soon as we wrote this song we realised it was going to be the single. It’s got lots of different sections but still adds up to three and a half minutes. Normally songs that sound like single material are written really quickly but we took a bit more time with this one, starting with the chorus and working ‘outwards’.

4. Skin

This is a song about finding your sense of place in an unfamiliar city. It’s got a spoken word part at the start of the song which is a combination of different phrases and sentences we took from a magazine and put together. We shot the video for this song with Tom Betts who runs the Movie Maker nights at Chapter Arts in Cardiff. He had us running around Cardiff dressed as spies which was enormous fun.

5. Battle Lake

It feels wrong picking a favourite song on your own album – it’s like a parent saying they have a favourite child – but this one really stands out for us. It starts off very structured with a lot of space between the instruments and ends up being satisfyingly messy and noisy.

6. House Sounds

House Sounds is a song about getting desensitised to things you once found exciting. ‘The party never ends!’ refrain is more jaded than joyous. The title is taken from an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which we’re big fans of. The video was made by a San Francisco based collective called Dreams For Dead Cats. We’re extremely grateful to them as they volunteered to step in and make this video at very short notice.

7. Devo

This song is our personal homage to Devo. Channel 5 used it in their trailer for the new season of NCIS. It’s never a bad thing to have a song associated with a naval criminal drama.

8. Islands vs Oceans I

Islands vs Oceans is an instrumental we wrote which we broke into two parts for the album. It ushers in the darker final third of the album. The video was directed by Bafta award winner Matt Brown and a bunch of his very talented friends.

9. Lights To Lead Us

This was the biggest departure we took compared to the other songs we had written for the album. It’s our first five minute song, and we were aiming for a shift in mood from the start of the album. The video, directed by Jason Marsh, is very disturbing but in the best possible way.

10. Miniatures

We demo’d this song before we’d written most of the album. We didn’t think it quite fitted in with what we were doing at the time but some of our friends who heard it made us see it in a different light. We re-worked it a bit and now can’t imagine we ever considered not including it.

11. Islands vs Oceans II

Err, Islands vs Oceans round two! The bass gets dirty, the guitar goes weird and the drums get massive. If you play Lights To Lead Us and Miniatures really loud, you can actually hear Islands vs Oceans in the background. Try it!

12. Breeders

Unlike Devo, Breeders isn’t intended as a homage to Kim Deal’s band of the same name. We became Twin Peaks obsessives around the time we wrote this song. It starts with some evil sounding keys and gets more disconcerting from there. Dave Roberts and Nic Britz of Dangerous Doug Films made a great video for this that really complements the music.

With Fudge Wilson and Scott Andrews’ voices duelling with the same committed ferocity as their fat-stringed axes, this is 33 minutes of kissing, groping, fondling, dancing, grinding, screaming and shouting that’ll make you feel like, well, you’ve just been to an Exit_International gig. Listen to it on a banging set of speakers or headphones and you can really appreciate the time and effort that the band and their producer Carl Bevan have put in to making what could have been a limited sonic palette as diverse and interesting as possible. The answer: effects pedals. Lots of them. Vocal effects, bass effects, more bass effects, and different micing of drums and percussion all combine so that when Andrews sings ‘I’m hearing voices’ on the aptly named ‘Voices’, you believe him – because you are too.

‘Voices’ is one of the stand out tracks, but you could pick out any number of ‘My Mouth Is Your Mouth’, ‘Bad Ass’, ‘Bowie’s Ghost’ and ‘Chainsaw Song’, all of which take the tight economy of Girls Against Boys and ally it to the frenetic what’ll-they-do-next hysteria of Blood Brothers. They’ve got choruses too. The type that hook into the fleshy bits around your hips then shake them like sinister groovy puppet masters.

They may share their name with a pro-euthanasia website but, really, don’t do it. Have a listen to this monster of an album instead – you’ll be up and about in no time.