The Monitors have published a piece on some of the most exciting 'noisier' bands around at the moment:
Hey Colossus, are just about to release their seventh album on Rocket Recordings, and have been an entity since 2003. Lead track ‘Sisters And Brothers’ sounds like Nick Cave on a particularly bad/awesome acid trip (depending on how you hear it). Two thirds Hey Colossus still live in London, and Thompson informs me that their physical locations have little influence on their music.
“When I read about artists being inspired by their surroundings I think they’re talking total balls… you’re inspired by the people you meet, the things you listen to, what you read. You’re not inspired by the 329 bus to Camden, in the same way we’re not inspired by the endless fields and flooding of Somerset.”
However, he does admit that two tunes reference their location, ‘The Drang’ and ‘There Ain’t No Love In The Mallet’. He precedes that with a description of his first drive to rehearsal after he’d left the Big Smoke:
“I moved here eight years ago, having lived in and around London all my life. About a week after living down here I drove across the levels to a rehearsal – in another band we were doing at the time – and was terrified of the space… it seemed endless… My dad still says “I like to exercise my eyes”, meaning “see further than the next massive building.” And having been surrounded by massive buildings all my life, that drive almost made me move straight back to London. Whatever the opposite of claustrophobia is, in that moment, I had it.”[It’s ‘agoraphobia’, in case you were wondering - Ed.]
Hey Colossus singer and guitarist Tim Farthing muses on what got him into the noisier side of things. “I think I assumed a lot of the noisier bands I first liked – Killdozer, Big Black, Shorty, Buttholes – were rural bands. Wrongly, as it turned out. But they all had that crazed-backwater-moonshine thing going on that I definitely responded to as a country lad. But mostly it was (and still is) the racket.” When I ask if there’s any way the genre (as loose as my description is) has entered mainstream culture, he asks: “Are they still selling Burzum T-shirts in Sports Direct?”
Read the rest of the article here: Monitors
Also worth mentioning there is a double page feature on Hey Colossus in teh latest issue of Narc magazine, more info here: Narc
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