miguel_myriad
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Southend's answer to The Fall? Domino Records act who are causing quite a stir in the UK and release their debut in the spring.
POD Concerts presents
THESE NEW PURITANS
Wednesday February 20th
Crawdaddy – Harcourt St – Dublin 2.
Doors – 8pm
Tickets €14 (inc. booking fee) available from Ticketmaster, Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar and usual outlets. www.ticketmaster.ie
www.thesenewpuritans.com
www.myspace.com/thesenewpuritans
These New Puritans are a band of four 19-year-olds about to release their debut album, ‘Beat Pyramid’, in the spring of 2008 as the first fruit of a unique union between Angular Records and Domino Records. It will be preceded on 15th October by a double a-side single, 'Colours'/'Numbers'.
These New Puritans have done a lot in their brief time. Their debut EP, Now Pluvial , came about as a result of one intense, 24-hour session in October 2006 in the shed-cum-studio assembled by de facto leader Jack Barnett and his band – twin brother George (drums), Thomas Hein (bass, sampler), and Sophie Sleigh-Johnson (synth, sampler). Recorded in harsh, digital audio onto Jack's laptop, the EP was released on 7" vinyl in a limited edition of 500 copies by Angular Records, before being made available as a free download for a single day, and then deleted.
This is symptomatic of a band whose identity is rooted in mystery, and which first began to emerge in the form of oddly filmed webcasts and a website splattered with cryptic writings and links to pictures of boiling water and trees speeding past car windows.
In early 2007, George was invited to work with Hedi Slimane on his Autumn '07 collection for Dior Homme. A week before the catwalk show, Slimane called Jack to Paris, requesting of him the small task of composing a suitable 15-minute soundtrack. The resulting 'Navigate, Navigate' showed the band, in only a few short months, to have moved light years ahead of Now Pluvial. A collaboration in the truest sense of the word, it seemed to draw as much of the resulting press attention as did Slimane's sleek, elegant costumes.
By this stage, the band had begun to earn a strong reputation for their furious live shows – first in dingy East London clubs, and then across the UK and Europe. Onstage, clad in a neat uniform of black and gold, These New Puritans have the capacity to draw you in and knock you out in the same breath. The band's ringleader, Jack is possessed and mage-like, reaching out to the heavens for inspiration; George plays the drums with a fury that suggests, where he not behind the kit, he might need to kill a man; Thomas flits between a rack of samplers and his bass guitar in half-studied, half-manic concentration; and Sophie stands ice cold, summoning sounds from an ancient synthesizer and a miniature sequencer.
Beat Pyramid, their full-length debut, is the next phase in These New Puritans' hyperbolic progression. Recorded alongside Gareth Jones – the producer of albums by Einsturzende Neubauten, Liars, and Wire – its songs are an ever-mutating blur of brash chords, subtle details, and taut rhythms, borne of influences as disparate as Sonic Youth and dubstep, This Heat and Greek pottery, David Lynch and Dr. Feelgood, J Dilla and the 16th century occultist John Dee.
This is a band of extremes. The songs on Beat Pyramid have an immediacy that belies their complex themes: 'Numbers' is a modern pop song about medieval numerology; 'Infinitytinifni' a celebration of the melting of the polar ice-caps set to one chord and three drums; 'Swords Of Truth' a deft slab of death disco named after the terrorist cell linked with the kidnap of BBC journalist Alan Johnson, that may or may not also have been written in homage to the Wu-Tang Clan.
The first (and last) thing you'll hear, however, is a strange, dislocated voice. "We started off with just this voice; this fragment of voice saying 'I Will Say This Twice, I Will Say This Twice' – that was the mystery," says Jack. "And we thought 'OK, where can we go now?' We resolved the mystery, and that's what the album is. It's not just called Beat Pyramid, it is a Beat Pyramid ."
"This music is weightless," says Jack midway through 'Swords Of Truth', perhaps the most striking track on the album. "This music's symbolic." In seven words, he manages to sum up his band better than anyone else could – in typically oblique fashion, of course.
POD Concerts presents
THESE NEW PURITANS
Wednesday February 20th
Crawdaddy – Harcourt St – Dublin 2.
Doors – 8pm
Tickets €14 (inc. booking fee) available from Ticketmaster, Road Records, City Discs, Sound Cellar and usual outlets. www.ticketmaster.ie
www.thesenewpuritans.com
www.myspace.com/thesenewpuritans
These New Puritans are a band of four 19-year-olds about to release their debut album, ‘Beat Pyramid’, in the spring of 2008 as the first fruit of a unique union between Angular Records and Domino Records. It will be preceded on 15th October by a double a-side single, 'Colours'/'Numbers'.
These New Puritans have done a lot in their brief time. Their debut EP, Now Pluvial , came about as a result of one intense, 24-hour session in October 2006 in the shed-cum-studio assembled by de facto leader Jack Barnett and his band – twin brother George (drums), Thomas Hein (bass, sampler), and Sophie Sleigh-Johnson (synth, sampler). Recorded in harsh, digital audio onto Jack's laptop, the EP was released on 7" vinyl in a limited edition of 500 copies by Angular Records, before being made available as a free download for a single day, and then deleted.
This is symptomatic of a band whose identity is rooted in mystery, and which first began to emerge in the form of oddly filmed webcasts and a website splattered with cryptic writings and links to pictures of boiling water and trees speeding past car windows.
In early 2007, George was invited to work with Hedi Slimane on his Autumn '07 collection for Dior Homme. A week before the catwalk show, Slimane called Jack to Paris, requesting of him the small task of composing a suitable 15-minute soundtrack. The resulting 'Navigate, Navigate' showed the band, in only a few short months, to have moved light years ahead of Now Pluvial. A collaboration in the truest sense of the word, it seemed to draw as much of the resulting press attention as did Slimane's sleek, elegant costumes.
By this stage, the band had begun to earn a strong reputation for their furious live shows – first in dingy East London clubs, and then across the UK and Europe. Onstage, clad in a neat uniform of black and gold, These New Puritans have the capacity to draw you in and knock you out in the same breath. The band's ringleader, Jack is possessed and mage-like, reaching out to the heavens for inspiration; George plays the drums with a fury that suggests, where he not behind the kit, he might need to kill a man; Thomas flits between a rack of samplers and his bass guitar in half-studied, half-manic concentration; and Sophie stands ice cold, summoning sounds from an ancient synthesizer and a miniature sequencer.
Beat Pyramid, their full-length debut, is the next phase in These New Puritans' hyperbolic progression. Recorded alongside Gareth Jones – the producer of albums by Einsturzende Neubauten, Liars, and Wire – its songs are an ever-mutating blur of brash chords, subtle details, and taut rhythms, borne of influences as disparate as Sonic Youth and dubstep, This Heat and Greek pottery, David Lynch and Dr. Feelgood, J Dilla and the 16th century occultist John Dee.
This is a band of extremes. The songs on Beat Pyramid have an immediacy that belies their complex themes: 'Numbers' is a modern pop song about medieval numerology; 'Infinitytinifni' a celebration of the melting of the polar ice-caps set to one chord and three drums; 'Swords Of Truth' a deft slab of death disco named after the terrorist cell linked with the kidnap of BBC journalist Alan Johnson, that may or may not also have been written in homage to the Wu-Tang Clan.
The first (and last) thing you'll hear, however, is a strange, dislocated voice. "We started off with just this voice; this fragment of voice saying 'I Will Say This Twice, I Will Say This Twice' – that was the mystery," says Jack. "And we thought 'OK, where can we go now?' We resolved the mystery, and that's what the album is. It's not just called Beat Pyramid, it is a Beat Pyramid ."
"This music is weightless," says Jack midway through 'Swords Of Truth', perhaps the most striking track on the album. "This music's symbolic." In seven words, he manages to sum up his band better than anyone else could – in typically oblique fashion, of course.
