Back To The Fuck Yeah

Recently we’ve had quite the selection of exhilarating rock music drop onto our desks. It’s an incredibly refreshing sound to behold, the shredding of guitars, the thwacking of drums and frontmen who stare at you like they want to tear your eyes out with their tongues. It’s only after you hear the Pulled Apart By Horses debut or the new Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster LP that you realise there’s been such an abundance of bands with no real guttural passion or electricity dominating the mainstream indie scene for some time.

Pulled Apart By Horses, a band who have been tantalising us for some time now with their live shows, have finally delivered their debut album, and what a rip-roaring adventure into incessant shrieks and ma-husive riffs it is. It’s so brutally brash in fact, that it sent our poor ad sales woman to the toilet to shudder when she was recovering from quite a nasty hangover this morning.

The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster may have been around for a while, but their new album surprised us all with its menacing hooks and thunderous hooks. I went to see them live last week and rushed to the front of the stage forgetting that I wasn’t about to see three guys and a girl on stage with keyboards playing twinkling electro music. I suddenly looked around to see lots of men with shaved heads stood around me, some with back packs on, all with sinisterly focused faces. After the foreboding rumbling of ‘Mister Mental’ kicked in and the terrorizing frontman Guy pummelled his way through the crowd like a man possessed, I soon realised, as limbs thumped me from literally every angle, and drinks exploded over my head like a Carlsberg rain shower, that I am in fact at a proper gig and should stand at the back with the grown-ups watching, wishing I had the energy to get involved like I did when I was 16 and first discovered that pushing was fun.

The likes of the new generation Vines  - Violent Soho –  are an exciting prospect indeed. After Thurston Moore came across their self-released debut album ‘We Don’t Belong Here’, he signed them to his Ecstatic Peace! label and the band are about to release their new single in the UK this month. They sound dirgey and anarchic, with just the right amount of adolescent ‘Fuck the system’ lyrical bile to make you feel like you’re in that 16 pushing faze again. Lastly The Neat, who are both totally thrilling live and on record, are by far one of 2010’s most electrifying guitar bands around at the moment, and my heart jumped for joy when I watched them give as much venomous vigour as a young Mark E. Smith might, only less embittered and less raisin-like. Brilliant.

It’s an exciting time for music once again, live, on your headphones or just to look at (The Eighties Matchbox vinyl is a spectacle to drool over. The ‘look at’ statement is otherwise redundant but fitted into that sentence). Prepare to be showered in sticky liquid and kicked in the face, the pain and discomfort is all worth it for the noise.