Band: DITZ Who: Unbridled post-punks from Brighton, UK (where everybody is
in a band).
New album: NEVER EXHALE.
It’ll show up 25 January 2025.
Pre-order info here.
It follows their blistering debut longplayer The Great Regression that came out in 2022.
Press info: ‘NEVER EXHALE’ is the sound of a band that hasn’t stopped for a breath.
DITZ have toured relentlessly since the release of their first album ‘The Great Regression’. The songs that form their newest offering were written across Europe, often on off days and in borrowed rehearsal rooms.
It could be said that the band treat recording and release of music as an afterthought. Often playing songs live years before their release, tweaking them as they go. The songs on the final record may change before they are ever heard as part of the album.”
New album artwork
So far, we could absorb two preview tracks.
– TAXIMAN –
. – SPACE/SMILE –
. LIVE
Live the band is a mean raging drone machine fronted by charismatic voice/face Cal Francis. Last Sunday I saw them for the 6th time and my ears are still buzzing.
Sonic City Festival, Kortrijk, Belgium – 10 November 2024
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.
Band: DITZ Who: Post-punk gang from Brighton (UK)
that hit the scene back in 2015, fronted
by the charismatic Cal Francis References: Gilla Band, Shame, Metz, Crows, Lice
(Photo by Turn Up The Volume – Leffingeleure, Belgium, 10 Sept 2022)
Only last November I discovered Brighton‘s metallic punk misfitsDITZ when
they played a bulldozing gig in my hometown of Ghent, Belgium that blew my ears
off. Last March they released their flabbergasting debut LP The Great Regression.
A contender for album of the year on Turn Up The Volume‘s list. And last Saturday at
the indie-fantastic Leffingeleuren Festival in Belgium, the Brits made lots of people
(who never saw/heard them) drop their jaws. Lots of flabbergasted faces, during and
after, with a ‘what the fuck was this punk-blitzkrieg attack all about’ grimace on their faces.
I’ll give you 5 reasons why DITZ should be your favourite
headliner at the final festival of festivals on Doomsday.
(Date TBA)
1. Their live wall-of-trash-and-crash sound breaks every law about decibels-levels. It’s beyond aural belief, but also scary, earth-shattering, and balls-and-brain-breaking, most
of the time. Don’t you love it when you can feel music really physically as if your body gets electrocuted? I do. It makes me feel much livelier than just being alive.
2. The demonic guitar duo of Anton Mocock and Jack Looker produce an amount of kick-ass electricity (not cheap these days) that make roofs/walls of venues tremble. Their non-stop chainsaw riff blasts are VERY FUCKING LOUD.
3. The rhythm section of Sam Evans and Caleb Remnant batters with a bad-ass
HERCULEAN VEHEMENCE. Perfect for an Armageddon battle of bands.
4. They’re big fans of Fugazi, At The Drive-In, Metz, Flipper, Black Flag and
other mean noise machines that I want to see on Doomsday Fest.
5. Last but not least there’s the psychotic vox and venue-filling presence of Cal Francis. He doesn’t really sing, he rants. He doesn’t look, he stares. He despises homophobes, I want to be who I am haters. capitalist criminals, and other related scum. He’s the bugaboo in Kate Moss disguise. He’s the perfect she-devil to front this perfect devilish band at the final festival of all festivals.
I rest my case and I’m ready for the
umpteenth spin of The Great Regression
“Themes of insecurity and gender pop up a lot over the course of the album, as well as lots of references to the human body breaking and being harmed in unnatural ways, although there’s no one overarching concept, simply because the songs have come together over such a long period of time. The title is not so much a reference to society going backwards, but more the band’s penchant for childish jokes. “Sitting in a van all day can get silly,” laughs Cal (frontman)”.
More info about this special vinyl edition on Dinked
Louder Than War says: “The Great Regression is about as strong as debut records get. Channelling all of its rage, sarcasm and scorn into a taut, well-honed package it’s both a
brutal assault on the senses and a window into the raw talent and unique worldview that makes Ditz one of the most interesting bands on the current UK punk scene.”
Full review here. Score: 8/10.
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.
Keywords: Frenetic forcefulness, blistering British bluster, fuck Brexit fierceness,
exorcistic vocality, 10 KO killers. One of the best 2022 albums (so far)? You betcha!
Joe Talbot (Idles): “DITZ are the best band in Brighton, if not the world”.
Singles/videos: I Am Kate Moss / Ded Würst / the Warden
– I AM KATE MOSS –
“About the separation between your visual and personal identities,
particularly within the context of masculinity and femininity”.
– DED WÜRST –
“A ferocious mix of Gilla Band, Foals and a lyric bemoaning
the moral quandary of minimum-wage employment.”
– THE WARDEN –
“A song all about being too intense, ironically set to an intense
backing somewhere between Deftones and Mogwai.”
Band: DITZ Who: Post-punk gang from Brighton (UK)
that hit the scene back in 2015 References: Irish turbo Gilla Band
and louder than war Canadians Metz
Alcopop!Records: “Even though the various lockdowns slowed the band’s
momentum for a while, they turned the situation to their advantage, using
the downtime to fine-tune this incredible debut… Abrasive but accessible,
The Great Regression is set to be one of the most important British guitar
debuts of 2022.”
Joe Talbot (Idles): “DITZ are the best band in Brighton, if not the world”.
Singles (so far shared): Ded Wûrst / The Warden / I Am Kate Moss
– DED WÜRST –
Nasty sledgehammer bulldozing from start to end…
. – THE WARDEN –
Front(wo)man Cal Francis: “It’s about the separation between
your visual and personal identities, particularly within the context
of masculinity and femininity”…
