TUTV: Greg Dulli‘s pipes reach for the sky throughout this new standout LP. His unique rock voice is the unwearying motor of this heart-and-soul opus. And when the songs are of supreme quality, as all 10 terrific tunes here are, and your bustling band are on a raucous roll with the vitality of young wolves you end up with the undeniable best album of 2022.
2. ‘Cave World’ by VIAGRA BOYS (Stockholm, Sweden)
Turn Up The Volume: The more our world gets fucked-up the more inspiration Viagra Boys have to write absurd, hilarious, sarcastic, crazy, monkey-ish songs about
all the related mess, embedded in their by now familiar filthy punk and roll grooves.
Never a dull moment with punk rock loser Sebastian Murphy in the middle. And they
played the best gig to my ears/eyes a couple of weeks ago in Antwerp, Belgium.
Turn Up The Volume: After playing opener Clocks to the max, with its Blitzkrieg grinta, it feels like the band and I are already out of breath as you can hear on the post-explosion outro. I felt wrong, as several KO Killers (Ded Würst / The Warden / I Am Kate Moss and the JAWDROPPING missile closer No Thanks, I’m Full) follow and do your head in. Ditz is a mean manic post-punk machine. The first minutes of the slower pieces (Three / Instinct / Teeth) are misleading, halfway they explode like grenades. No rest for the wicked, no rest for Ditz, no rest for your ears.
Turn Up The Volume: Back in 2016 Crows blew my mind when they played a small club
gig in my hometown of Ghent, Belgium. A memorable one cemented in the aural side of my
brain. The immense intensity and their frenetic furiosity were no less than jaw-dropping. On Beware Believers, their high-powered passion is still intact and its sizzling sound evolved further into a mean Herculean rock machine.
Blistering hammer blows like Garden Of England, Slowly Separate, and Room 156 are already noted in my end-of-the-year list of best 2022 knockouts. And reflective reality checks like the Joy Division-esqueHealing, Moderation, Wild Eyed & and Loathsome, and the fucktastic Meanwhile have the sonic vehemence to burn holes in your stereo.
TUTV: Musically and lyrically, this 3rd LP is moony, mellow and pensive with frontman Grian Chatten becoming a modern-day crooner who touches sensitive hearts, especially Irish ones as this album is about their Irish past/present/future identity in and outside of their beloved country.
TUTV: Weirdly exciting and capriciously inventive. This new LP resonates like a Zappa-esque rock circus. A sundry potpourri of symphonic jazz-prog-rock twists and turns, building up/breaking down constructions, forth/back and vertical/horizontal saltations with head-spinning orchestrations. Welcome to Black Midi‘s hell.
. Turn Up The Volume wrote: Prepare your ears for brawny industrial bombast (No Yes More less / Veni Vidi Vici / Feed The Wound / Taranatula), nightmares in slow-motion (Limbo / Sugar My Pill / The Judas Chair), wham-bam-glam drones (Glitz Krieg / The Dark Room) and the fantastic slow-burning gospel chant of the title track. It’s all there to have yourself a merciless head-banging pig trip. File next to Rammstein’s new opus Zeit.
TUTV: The result of the collaboration of wordsmith and poetry lover Peter Doherty and French composer Frédéric Lo who wrote the music, is a sparkling thing of beauty. This is the record to play when you’re feeling lazy, and in the mood for doing just nothing but daydreaming while lying in a green field enjoying the sun. Expect romantic lullabies with violins, piano and smooth horns, sweet little pop ditties, and sepia-colored tunes that transfer you to a place far away from our cruel reality.
9. ‘All Of Us Flames’ by EZRA FURMAN (Chicago, US)
TUTV: Definitely her most complete accomplishment to date. Majestic songwriting quality. Top-level tunes in orchestration, arrangement and vocal emotiveness. Here and there songs’ structures and Furman‘s fragile voice (Train Comes Trough / Throne / Poor Girl A Long Way From Home) bring, yes, Tom Petty to mind. Un-Americana Americana splendor with an artist who’s slowly but surely finds her way as a human being on this frightful planet.
TUTV: Disco fuel for 24-Hour misfit parties in obscure nightclubs for SM fans, physically unsatisfied individuals looking for sexual healing, gangbang addicts, nudists, lost sex workers, manic David Lynch characters, neurotic Brexit victims, acid-house junks, erotic lovers, lobotomized politicians, trashmouth artists, Andy Weatherall junks and all other messed-up souls who hate reality and want to dance/party/fuck/hallucinate to stripped-down techno beats. E-tastic.
Turn Up The Volume: Check in on a Saturday Warmduscher Fever Night, ladies and gents, at the club called The Hotspot. Feel the sultry ambiance, have a couple of cocktails at the bar, dance to some banging boosters and some funky Sly Stone vibes, and go twitchin’ in the kitchen now and then.
Turn Up The Volume: JO-JO is the flamboyant Amazon in the middle. She sings the
blues with the vigorous vitality of eternal legend Janis Joplin (We’re Just Animals / Moon Child), she rocks her multi-colored tail off with the gusto of Grace Slick on a roll (My Babe / No More Good News / Don’t Get Too Heavy), she has the groovy guts and the glamorous looks of eccentric punkette Nina Hagen and to close the show she affects with a gripping candlelight reverie for the midnight hours (Oh Brother).
Mind you, she’s not alone. Her bang-on band The Teeth know all the 60s/80s/80s
rock ‘n’ blues ‘n’ glam ‘n’ punk ‘n’ roll classics. They back Jo-Jo with a mood-and-cadence fitting firework of Jimmy Page riffs, John Lee Hooker hooks and Slash licks. Retro injected electricity.
Turn Up The Volume: As I said several times before, Samara and Animal are
adventurous architects in sound and vision (watch the singles’ spectacular videos
below / also the artwork for their releases is always a reflection of vivid visual inventiveness).
On this new, bone-and-mind chilling, longplayer both high-tech DIY artists keep
on challenging sonic and thematic boundaries. It’s also the first time we hear poetry fanatic Samara sing instead of reciting her poetic chimeras, as on psychoanalytic
discharge Shaman and on doom-punk sledgehammer Human Sacrifice.
There are so many layers, so many different directions, so many pendulum movements and so many unexpected turns at play here that you need several spins to get a grip of their poetallica world fully. This record as well as their debut are voyages of discovery.
Turn Up The Volume said: Damon Albarn was the first name that popped up in my head when The Early Years impressed my ears on first hearing. At times I thought he was a guest singer on Vanwymeersch‘s debut longplayer, with his pondering voice and his musing songs . Check Drama I, Who Can Tell, I’m Wide Awake and you’ll find out why.
Vanwymeersh also, like Albarn, is a song architect. All lullabies, reveries, and tunes at
play here stick quickly. But with every listen you discover how rich and subtly layered the musical arrangements and feel-good orchestrations (hear that playful banjo sound on Part Of Me ) are. Then again he invites you into his sonic labyrinth where he goes left, right, and back in one and the same song (When You’re Old And Grey And Full Of Sleep / Fall From Grace).
15. ‘Carrion Repeating’ by JAMES DOMESTIC (Essex/Suffolk, UK)
TUTV: Domestic is a story-telling Cockney wordsmith, tackling politics, daily life shit, gobbling business sharks, and other related mess.
Musically anything is possible. Screechy guitars and 60s sounding Hammond organs to inflame tirades such as Itchy Itchy, Faze Out, Bean Counter and Push on Trough. Saxophone and steel drums straight from Trinidad on Mañana. Soulful female voices and Le Freak C’est Chic riffs on Never Enough. A reggae vibe with xylophone touches on Is Thay You?. Dub Jah Wobble bas on Weekend Carbs and Giblets. He just does what his ears like.
Turn Up The Volume:Dim Gray float in a universe where the poignancy and
starry-eyed melodrama of Sigur Rós and the spiritual vocality of day-and-night
dreamers Fleet Foxes become one. This heart-and-soul stirring trio reverberates
like a full orchestra. They’re cinematic pop architects working with a drone flying
up high like an eagle and showing us where the ocean meets the sky.
Symphonic pop splendour. Firmament is a shiny diamond of a record.
I really can’t say more about this multi-faceted record and its from lost soul to ‘fuck it, you only live once’ author does herself.
Koan: “This record sounds like I’m schizophrenic in a way coz there are so many mad emotions in the songs. They are all very real, which took some guts to vocalize but I’m proud that we managed to bring it all across in a raw and real way. It’s not as sexually charged as my first album.
This new album COCOON was written during the lockdown, so many emotions that were pent up inside had time and space to surface and they sure came out with a vengeance. Anger, procrastination, questions about the way we C/O-exist in this society, and some new relationship issues like jealousy, infidelity, breakups. So it’s a more grown up album with more grown up topics.”
Turn Up the Volume: A striking work of top-notch tunes, written by mastermind Scott Marsden, that get under your skin slowly but surely until you see/hear the whole picture and realize that this is one of the most gripping albums of 2022 in my book. And lots to learn about Wales’ history.
Turn Up The Volume: Liam says that he is happy with his rock formula. So nothing new? No, just a bunch of new songs from good to very good. As much as I love our kid I enjoy him the most when he’s a rock ‘n’ roll star on stage. That’s his habitat. That’s what he does best. Entertaining a crowd/choir of 50.000 in a green field. See you in Belgium in August, Liam, on a green field of course.
The greatest Belgian singer-songwriter ever past away this year. A passionate chansonnier, a blues man, a rocker, a goosebumps crooner, a charismatic personality, and a one-of-a-kind live performer. I saw him about a 100 times, mostly solo, but also with his fantastic band TC Matic and one-time side projects.
Opex is his final longplayer. Vocally you hear him suffer from that deadly
disease that killed him shortly after recording the LP. I miss him, really hard.
WOLF VAN WYMEERSH, maestro of Belgian post-punk-sludge crusaders Elefant and guitarist of former power-pop idols The Van Jets wrote-recorded-released his solo debut album, baptized THE EARLY YEARS last May. A romantic record looking back at days gone by. A newborn singer-songwriter pearl.
Let’s talk with the author about it. But first as usal here on Turn Up The Volume an
interview starts with a slice of music. Time for a ride on your horse, ladies and gents…
Hello Wolf, thanks for making time
for this chat
What and/or who inspired you to look back and translate
what you saw into the songs for your solo debut longplayer?
I’ve been tinkering about this album for a long time. The title ‘The Early Years’
was a joke title for the first Waldorf record, but seemed perfect for a first full
album. The title directed the choice of the songs: I was writing new songs about
my past life and cherrypicked older songs.
Are all the songs related like families are?
I’ve never thought about it that way, but yeah, some songs = sisters/ brothers.
Some songs are literally looking back (The Hog, On A Sunday Afternoon, I Gathered
Everyone), other songs deal with relationships (Drama I, Part Of Me, Who Can Tell)
whereas some are more philosophical (Friendly is Better, Come As You Will,
Fall From Grace) and everything in between.
We are family the Wolf way
You said that some of the tunes were written in your youth.
Why did you put them away for so long? Time flies, doesn’t it?
Some songs I forgot about, others were deemed too dramatic
or personal at the time, others didn’t fit the bands I was in.
What/who triggered you to start
writing songs in the first place?
Somewhere in time, I was playing as if I was performing on stage in
my bedroom. There I was playing/improvising my first songs. I never
played a lot of covers, writing my own seemed more natural or easy.
What’s your best and your worst
memory of your early years?
Hard to answer that specifically.
Best stuff: my grandmother’s smile
Worst stuff: All of the darkness that surrounded my family.
The (silent) conflicts and tension between my parents.
Whose big beautiful eyes are looking at us, on the LP’s cover?
And why this choice of photographic artwork?
It’s my wonderful daughter Marie-Lou. My girlfriend took this super picture,
I was passing it every day as it was hanging in the kitchen and I loved it.
I knew instantly this had to be the cover of my album.
In the studio you were assisted by musicians Stijn Vanmarsenille and
Roeland Vandemoortele. How were they involved in the ‘making of’?
At first I wanted it to be a strict solo effort. But since we had started playing
live and since they are amazing players they ended up playing and singing
some cool stuff on the album.
Like cool banjo stuff Roeland played on Part Of Me or the otherworldy
arpeggio’s Stijn came up with in I Gathered Everyone.
How different is it to play/work with a band and be your own boss?
It is not such a big difference as I rely on my 2 compadres for advice.
With a little help from his friends, left and right (photo by TUTV)
What went through your mind, what did you feel, when you opened
the box with the first manufactured copies of ‘the early years’ CDs/LPs?
I felt happy and fulfilled 🙂
Thank you lord Satan, Jesus, Buddha and Elvis Wally!
Do you feel old today, Wolf?
Yes and no.
Yes: I enjoy the ‘wisdom’ that comes with aging, less doubt and mist.
A minus is that my bones are cracking and that I’m aching in the places
where I used to play.
No: My mind is still very eager and fun-loving.
What are the top priority things – musically/personally – that are
on your bucket list. The things you really want to accomplish in
your life?
There are plenty:
Music for theatre/music,
a French album,
a Dutch album,
a metal album
an electronic album in the vein of Perrey/Carlos,
an abstract noise album,
an acapella record,
etceterararum.
Is ‘The Early Years’ the start of looking to
the future years as a solo artist, Wolf?
I hope to make some more music in the distant future.
I’m brooding on some new dark songs 🙂
Thank you for this interview.
May the road rise with Wolf
and his family.
Buy/stream THE EARLY YEARS
here below via Bandcamp.
Belgian singer-songwriter WOLF VAN WYMEERSCH is a versatile musician who played/plays in several bands, but now he decided that it was time to write/record
his solo debut LP. It came out early May and is baptized THE EARLY YEARS.
Wolf: “It has become a retrospective record with songs that muse about childhood,
love or life or songs that were effectively written in my youth. In terms of sound, it is
a combination of acoustic, electric and electronic sounds.”
Turn Up The Volume named it album of the month of May: “The easy-listing construction
of his classy compositions transfers you to a place where reality fades away and makes room for melancholic memories. As I said before (several times) Wolf is a romantic at heart with a soul-stirring singer/songwriter gift (did I already mention, Father John Misty?) and a heartwarming voice. Magnific achievement.”
Last Friday it was launch night in his (and mine) hometown of Ghent, Belgium in
a cozy club for a cozy performance. I’ve seen Wolf playing countless times with
the bands he was in, but this was the first as a solo entertainer. Just like the album
this gig is one to cherish.
And just like on the album, Wolf and his two playmates created a warm, mellow atmosphere. But the tone and drive were much rockier than on record which
was received with euphoric screaming by the clap-along crowd.
The greater part of the set, of course, consisted of gems of the longplayer, supplemented with three beauties (Not To / Friendly Is Better / Queen Of Mire)
from his romantic 2021 EP Songs Of Light And Shade all served with grace, with
charm and with a big heart. Wolf is here to stay.
Picture this
Wolf is wide awake
And on synths… Stijn Vanmarsenille And on guitar (and vocals here and there)… Roeland Vandemoortele
And on guitar (and vocals here and there)… Roeland Vandemoortele
Wolf:“It has become a retrospective record with songs that muse about childhood,
love or life or songs that were effectively written in my youth. In terms of sound, it is a combination of acoustic, electric and electronic sounds.”
(photo by Julian Hills)
Turn Up The Volume said: Damon Albarn was the first name that popped up in my head when The Early Years impressed my ears on first hearing. At times I thought he was a guest singer on Vanwymeersch‘s debut longplayer, with his pondering voice and his reflective songs . Check Drama I, Who Can Tell, I’m Wide Awake and you’ll find out why.
Vanwymeersh also, like Albarn, is a song architect. All lullabies, reveries, and tunes at
play here stick quickly. But with every listen you discover how rich and subtly layered the musical arrangements and feel-good orchestrations (hear that playful banjo sound on Part Of Me ) are. Then again he invites you into his sonic labyrinth where he goes left, right, and back in one and the same song (When You’re Old And Grey And Full
Of Sleep / Fall From Grace).
The easy-listing construction of his classy compositions transfers you to a place where reality fades away and makes room for melancholic memories. As I said before (several times) Wolf is a romantic at heart with a soul-stirring singer/songwriter gift (did I already mention, Father John Misty?) and a heartwarming voice. Magnific achievement.
Singles/clips: The Hog / On A Sunday Afternoon / Friendly Is Better
Wolf:“It has become a retrospective record with songs that muse about childhood,
love or life or songs that were effectively written in my youth. In terms of sound, it is a combination of acoustic, electric and electronic sounds.”
References: The Beatles ‘Revolver’, Blonde Redhead ‘Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons’, Goldfrapp ‘Tales of Us’, Armand ‘Een Beetje Vriendelijkheid’, The Good, The Bad & The Queen ‘The Good, The Bad & The Queen’, Portishead ‘Third’, Radiohead.
(photo by Julian Hills)
Turn Up The Volume: I want to add Damon Albarn (with his solo records) to the aforementioned references. At times I thought he was a guest singer on Vanwymeersch‘s debut longplayer. Check Drama I, Who Can Tell, I’m Wide Awake and you’ll find out why.
Vanwymeersh also, like Albarn, is a song architect. All lullabies, reveries, and tunes at play here please your ears instantly. But with every listen you discover how rich and subtly layered the musical arrangements and feel-good orchestrations (hear that playful banjo sound on Part Of Me ) are. Then again he invites you into his sonic labyrinth where he
goes left, right, and back in one and the same song (When You’re Old And Grey And Full
Of Sleep / Fall From Grace).
The easy-listing construction of his classy compositions transfers you to a place where reality fades away and makes room for melancholic memories. As I said before (several times) Wolf is a romantic at heart with a soul-stirring singer/songwriter gift (did I already mention, Father John Misty?) and a heartwarming voice. Magnific achievement.
Singles/clips: The Hog / On A Sunday Afternoon / Friendly Is Better
Wolf about the record: “It is a personal retrospective record, the album contains songs written in my youth and new songs that look back. While finishing my father died and that also colored the plate brightly. Musically it has become a kind of kraut-singer-song patchwork blanket.”
“A kraut-singer-song patchwork blanket?”. I have no clue what he means with
that. But I’m a sucker for the sound of words. Like with weird descriptions
of something/someone that just sound crazy, cool and cryptic.
Lead single THE HOG confirms what we already loved about his 2021 EP Songs Of Light And Shade. Vanwymeersh masters the art of writing smooth, instantly appealing songs
you can play any time of the day.
His crooner voice, the easy-listing construction of his compositions and its graceful orchestrations transfer you to a place where reality fades away and makes room for
sepia-colored memories. As I said before Wolf is a romantic at heart.
Here’s why…
(Stylish b/w clip directed by Anton Coene)
