FUTURE OF THE LEFT - CURSES cd review

ARTIST: FUTURE OF THE LEFT - ALBUM: CURSES

It's hard to write about how fucking good this band - this record - really is. If you like to ROCK, then you really need to hear this album. If you are in a rock band - then you would seriously want to be in Future Of The Left.

Out of Cardiff, Wales, this year-old-ish alternative rock trio Future Of The Left are two thirds of defunct alt-post-grunge underground glitterati "mclusky" - with singer/ guitarist Andy Falkous, and drummer Jack Egglestone - plus Jarcrew's Kelson Louis Matthias.

Not that any band history is needed here. FOTL's debut album of 14 killer-songs, Curses, is an absolute dirty pleasure to consume. Raw, heavy-driven, quick-and-steady rolling guitar and deep-fat, bass-punch riffs abound. This is primitive galloping percussion, emptying edgy guts of into a precise collection of scorching, snarling riffs and blistering lyrics.

This is a smart and dangerous record to excite the punk, giving cred to power guitars and razor-blade lyrics. There is filthy clever cacophony and hope in the world! It is a good thing.

If you do need references, think Melvins, Pixies, Sonics, maybe Black Flagg and certainly Fugazi - to cite big-school generics. But this is a fresh album of a hundred listens. The more I listen the more I need another dose. The seemingly spastic nature of each track belies the firm song-structure and cock-sure chainsaw delivery. These lads know what they are doing.

Lyrics tell of contempt in a modern world - of bitterness and politics, of cats and bees, of tiny children, of domestic violence - all in crazed abrasive metaphorical undertones.

The use of keyboards/synth in many tracks here is refreshing and surprising - at once strange - then realisation kicks in. The electro deserves its place. Once you hear them - you get it. Like you may have gotten Pavement many years back. But hey, no that’s not right - they sound nothing like Pavement - and FOTL's usage of keys here is hard and sharp, sometimes melodic, but always warranted - stabbing you back to swampy life.

There is swagger and bluster. There is intelligence and idiocy. There is screaming brutal sardonic wit and sarcasm pushing the Future's flavours, a solid barrage of black humour and rock violence. This is post-neo-rock at its best: short, nasty, yet tasty songs, guitars and bass and noise and metronomic rocker beats pushing the melodics, testing the sonics. At the Drive-In and Jesus Lizard are perhaps embedded if you want to listen for them. This music is immediate - there is a compulsion to the drive.

Confusing, enigmatic, claustrophobic and poetic lyrics (like: "bury our bodies close to the light"; "all he ever wanted was a detonator"; "hide your dreams from capital"; "wave, wave, wave, I don't wanna wave at them"; "thanks for the tories"; "violence she solves everything"; "there's nothing like being owned, kept by bees in a jelly mold"; "your pity sets the bar so white"; "there are no bold statements in my paradiddle"; "grow into your body happily"…) feature throughout this record - leaving you kinda reeling for another spin - in search of deeper meaning. But is it there? Does it matter? Its worth it for another dash of dirge-guitar and dirt.

Curses is post-punk, post-grunge, post-hardcore and post-post-rock at its potential height. It is a reassuring conundrum that there is not a skerrick of emo in the future of the left - just neanderthally simple, sophisticated yelps amongst a backdrop of avant-garde punk. Welcome to the future folks.

Album of the fucking year - if ever there was one.

12/10

"It's about something more than three guys coming onstage and yelling ‘Rock!' down the microphone”, explains FOTL's Andy Falkous. “I wouldn't want people to see three guys onstage and think that all that brought them here was guitars and disagreements with a variety of authority figures. There can be a fuller, rounder, slightly funny picture to it”.

Curses Track listing
1. The Lord Hates a Coward
2. Plague of Onces
3. Fingers Become Thumbs!
4. Manchasm
5. Fuck the Countryside Alliance
6. My Gymnastic Past
7. Suddenly it's a Folk Song
8. Kept by Bees
9. Small Bones Small Bones
10. Wrigley Scott
11. Real Men Hunt in Packs
12. Team:Seed
13. Adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood
14. The Contrarian

Anti-Poet brings Slam to Albany

ABC South Coast WA - Features
Audio: SuperUser - WA anti-poet Allan Boyd reads a Slam style poem - ABC South Coast and Great Southern Radio: RealMedia 28k+ || WinMedia 28k+

Friday, September 14, 2007 “It’s the 21st century and I think it’s time to wake up and smell the poetry.”

So says Alan Boyd, a West Australian performance poet who was in Albany to run workshops ahead of the local heat of the National Poetry Slam.

The Sprung Writers Festival invades Albany this weekend, with the Albany heat of the National Poetry Slam just one of the many events on offer. The slam encourages people to present a poem to the audience in less than two minutes.

Even though he’s running workshops in poetry, Alan calls himself an anti-poet.

“Poetry perhaps is an old art form and many people think it’s irrelevant these days,” says Alan. “If that’s the case I say I’m the anti poet and that poetry is relevant, and it’s in our faces every day, in our ears as we listen to the radio and you see it in the street you see it in advertising and you see people and hear people making their own poetry."

He says there has been a renaissance in performance poetry.

“If you think about performance poetry it predates written history,” says Alan. There’s no mystery about what makes a performance poem, he says. “Once you take the words off the page then it becomes a performance poem.”

“It’s about performance, it’s about theatre, making the use of the stage, engaging the audience and making people part of the performance,” he says. “A lot of academics dont like the idea of slams or performance poetry because it’s too entertaining.”

Alan describes the Slam as “poetry for the people”. Even the judging is democratic.

“The performers are judged by randomly chosen members of the audience,” he says.


In terms of what it takes to be successful, Alan says “rehearse, rehearse, rehearse”.

“I suppose it’s just a matter of being confident in the work that you’re going to present,” says Alan. “That means knowing your stuff, rehearsing it, recording it, pacing it, understanding things like enunciation and delivery, making the use of the space and things like that. It’s just generally taking away some of the nerves because I think that’s where some of us trip ourselves up. The more you practice and the more you’re in tune with your work, the more confident you are and the better performance you’ll give.”

ABC RADIO - WA SOUTH COAST
http://www.abc.net.au/southcoast/stories/s2033499.htm

cunthamma

poetry is a cunt-hammer:
an opera of a thousand languages

this microphone a brutal baton

there was movement at the station
as the word had passed around
that the poetry is federated,
unlike this desecrated political square
a sacred mental contortion
of vulgar victorian proportions
the syndicated concrete sound
of poetic patchwork distortions

this holy space is a box of football poems,
torn from the grass tar,
the cobblestone, enamel-stained streets,
these rabid aussie rules
etched like a histrionic community bloc party
- an 80,000 year-old poetry slam

this rampant, random, riotous bleeding art of melbourne
- a tattered mosaic of cracked and peeling layers
on layers on layers on layers of meaning
like a sky-scraping stanza as a backdrop border
reflecting the brown cloud light

and we're inside the belly of these 21st century mouments
to a post-modern helmet a hammer to smash the state
- and he said: i beg your pardon the fuck up

and jas h duke is my godhead,
remembering the war in vietnam.

i remember the war in vietnam

here the streets tell stencil-postered stories,
the remnant words and meaningless dates
faded like neologistic scaffolds of nations,
a pencilled genocidal century of

federation federation federation

this movement at the station like kevin sheedy
is a fucking president of poets,
reeking, speaking, seeking the words to shape reasons
to build structures into this dictionaryof me

this stolenwealth remedy,
a thick river of dirt and ancient stories
an indigenous smoke ritual
in this city of bulging recitals of

poems and poems and poems and poems.

in this overloaded theoretical melbourne sun
- the residue of irish spring and piss
bouncing off walls - the old walls, the new walls -
and your body like a letter to queen victoria

and my flaccid cock is not a mirror but a hammer to shape it
and yet here, i'm federated federated federated
and this federation heart
a bold and pure tonic of movement
at the station the station the federation

written and performed on: august 17, 2007
by "the antipoet" at the overload poetry festival 2007
at edge theatre: federation square, melbourne

---

Notes: “Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.” Bertolt Brecht. And that word Cunt" is a classic aussie slang, well used in melbourne by many poets. It is at once a beautiful and complex word, meaning so much and so little - yet shocking beyond utterance - a perfect poem.

The repetition of: "i remember the war in vietnam" is an homage to Melbourne's greatest sound poet: Jas h Duke. Check out his remarkable works at the links below:
MP3s
Sound Poetry
A sketch by A Biographical SketchThalia
And Google Jas H Duke for more...

GLITCH SUNDAY 12 AUGUST

The Antipoet hits Melbourne this Sunday 12th August

West Australian poet, Allan Boyd (aka the Antipoet) arrives in Melbourne this week as part of the 2007 Overload Poetry Festival. And he's ready to play!

On Sunday 12th August - at the Glitch Bar and Cinema, North Fitzroy - Boyd will be joined by Melbourne performance poets, Ashley J Higgs and Jezza PA Speelman in a one-off experiment of sound, visuals and vocal collaborations.

A collaborative blend of performed poetry, vocal effects-processing, live laptop sonic-manipulation, rock-drumming and random visuals, Boyd will perform a brand-new batch of works for Melbourne audiences.

Since 1996, Allan Boyd's unique performance style has earned him a cult-reputation across the country. Borrowing from sound-poetry, the last-poets, hip-hop culture and informed by Australian politics, his acerbic words both entertain and engage.

His 2004 "Antipoet Manifesto", written as Emerging Writer in Residence at Fellowship of Australian Writers WA, has been republished in various countries including the US, the UK, Bangladesh and Oman.

A seasoned performance poet, musician, sonic collaborator, the Perth-based 40-year-old artist, labourer and web-designer, fronts two original independent bands in Perth and presents the weekly political-activist program "Perth Indymedia" on community radio station RTRFM.

Boyd says he is ecstatic to visit Melbourne again. "I'm ready to spit some hot sonic actions into the Melbourne winter. This will be my third trip to Melbourne for the Overload Festival," says Boyd. "I love it. Melbourne culture is inspiring. I'm looking forward to working with some old and new friends and collaborate whole new poetic experiences. Let's invent some paradigms..."

Allan Boyd's long-time friend, WA cellist and poet Kevin Gillam - together they form Perth indie-band "MiteyKo" - will also be in town to play a set at Federation Square on Friday 17th August and read poetry. The pair will also perform at Dante's, Fitzroy on Wednesday 15th August.

More information about Overload Poetry Festival:
http://www.overloadpoetry.com

paddling

paddling

under the stark imperfect structures, the halogen glare, we gather to kill the states of industrial gauge dispossession. the black sky a rigid scar of Christmas, a fence in the barbed wire sea.

here brother you have the right to perpetual desertion, disparity, dysfunction for certain, you and yr family in the wet salt face, the constant nauseous rumble of a diesel toxicity - the fossil peak drowning in a bat shit mountain, a shattered dreaming, a tattered cloth, a photograph of sisters lost.

and the roll roll roll as the nights heave closer to the excised zone - yr neck deep in jargon, a slight of the razor hand, and they slash n slice into race, they turn people into gates of words. our messages lost in the hegemonic trail of glass and fire. a tragedy in one foul act an outright victory, a cousin on ice, on fire on fire on fire...

and this week the riot is funded - the nearest broken computer, a missing key on a calculator - and I'll see you later, he said, his face crooked with rage.

and the batons in yr back as you approach the doors, the pack thinning to trickles, the horses high and hostile. and they spilled over the metal in droves, scaling the bloody walls, the children tossed to running doctors and lawyers and mothers and brothers and sisters and fathers.

and the setting desert sun, the thin orange dust in yr teeth. the star maps of this journey, this paddling farce to reach an open sea, to reach an open door, a concrete crack.

and in the bitter forests of 5000 islands we sing as the ripple of oar to ocean tears a new path, the rainbows chased us to the ridges, to the fences the fences.

---

performed at Kulcha, Fremantle as part of the "paddling for refugees" event hosted by Project Safecom... (See: Perth Indymedia Feature - More...)

BACKGROUND: In mid July 2007 Simon Keenan and David Corlett (freelance writer and author of Following Them Home: The Fate of the Returned Asylum Seekers) will embark on a sea kayaking journey in and around Australia's 'excised zone' - those parts of Australia's north (including Christmas Island, Ashmore Reef and almost 5,000 other Australian islands) that have been legislatively cut off from the migration zone in order to prohibit any asylum seeker arriving there from applying for protection in Australia. Asylum seekers who are found in the excised zone can be forcibly transferred to Nauru or elsewhere where their applications for protection are assessed in a system without an independent appeals mechanism and which is not subject to judicial oversight. Nor do such people have a right to independent legal advice. There is compelling evidence that this system has led to the return of asylum seekers to situations where their human rights have been violated. Some have been killed. Those asylum seekers found to be refugees have no right to be resettled in Australia or any other country and can wait for extended periods of time in limbo while their resettlement is negotiated between governments. Excision and its denial of access to Australian territory and the onshore protection determination process remains one of the key outstanding issues in Australia’s response to asylum seekers... Read More