“Later than planned I took myself to the tunes and right here are the highlights of the evening. To all the bands that I missed, I apologise. I’ll leave a few links to you in the notable mentions…”
Live music
“I got homework to do. I got acts to discover. I got a city that’s about to get noisy and a military-tight schedule to make… Welcome to Part 1 of Swansea Fringe….”
“So for drugs, booze and debauchery blues, all pumped out in squalor and speed, here comes all the above in abundance…”
They live in a haze of accidentally anthemic self-made and self-assured angst, where webs and threads of Bona Drag and Juju clean-jangled guitars (from Morrissey and Banshees respectively) weave like a network of nerves up and through.
“Each song sounds like a deep fear of drowning …and Every now and then, and just for a second, some sugar-dirt glimmer of sound slices through but we’re swimming in loneliness still.”
“Through mutations and lineups and 40+ years, The Stranglers are always The Stranglers; Always present, still moving, for better …Or worse.”
“40 years worth of love and half blind adoration has gathered us here to sing to hymns from ‘The Crack’; The Ruts ’79 debut album. Thick with punk’s grit and gristle and dub-reggae tricks it’s a head above pure protest thrash.”
Slung back and forth through an excess-free set… Everything’s played like it’s fresh out the meat locker, everything’s keen and still glowing.
Harsh isolation, dystopian dreamscapes, semi-connected catharsis caught up in electronic precision.
That’s the evolving sound of Blancmange 2.0; collections of stripped down half hooks, building in escalating elaborations, repeated in sheets of thin ice and cool water. This is Neil Arthur from 2016’s Unfurnished Rooms, through to 2017’s Fader and Near Future, through this year’s Blancmange album Wonderlust.
Rats on the Run 