THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE
ONCE IN ROYAL DAVID'S CITY
FREE DOWNLOAD

Another year and as is the tradition another wonderful seasonal offering from Thirty Pounds of Bone.
For your listening pleasure, we advise that you have a Merry and Safe Christmas!

Once In Royal David's City

APPLETOP - "BRAVE MOUNTAINS"
MONDAY 10th MARCH 2014
ARM42 CD // LP // DL [CARGO // PROPER DIGITAL]

Armellodie Records is proud to present Appletop from the dirty south of France with their new album, Brave Mountains, released on Monday 10th March 2014. 

Pierre Cristofari, Olivier Cancellieri and Nicolas Faou formed Appletop in Hyères, France in 2008. Since then they’ve released a clutch of EPs in their native land, and a well-received debut album, The City Can Wait via Parisien label Le Son du Maquis/Harmonia Mundi in 2010. 

Hereafter the band took to the winding roads of Europe, clocking in hundreds of shows and notching up tour supports with such indie-stalwarts as The Thermals, Wild Flag and The Horrors. 

The first single from the album, ‘Twenty-Five’, (released in France on shiny clear vinyl courtesy of A Quick One Records) whetted the public's aural taste-buds and set the tone for the long-player you now have in your possession. Two years in the making, Brave Mountains draws on British and American alt-rock traditions. Ten lean cuts of appetising indie rock meat!

‘Burning Land’, ‘Johnny’s Theme’ and ‘Madonna in Love’ are the sort of songs you would want to end a summer festival with, punching-the-air with the orange sun setting in the background. Cristofari’s charmingly curious phrasing – singing in his second language after all – echoing out from the stage. 

Elsewhere, songs like the sparse ‘Nikolai’ and the dreamy in-no-rush guitar lines of ‘Portland’ show the band at their most tender. Though there’s no need to approach with caution, we’re a million miles away from emo-melodrama. There is minimal doom and gloom; instead the listener is treated to a warm and affecting scruffy pop conscious.

“It’s the same old story, told a hundred times” sings Cristofari on enticing opener, ‘Headstrong’. And maybe it is, but Appletop succeed by digging under the surface of their beloved idols – think Sebadoh, Pavement, Teenage Fanclub –  and hit you warm in the gut with fuzzed up guitars, pared back production values and stick-to-your-ribs melodies.


APPLETOP - Burning Land

APPLETOP - MADONNA IN LOVE [FREE DOWNLOAD]

TAKEN FROM THE ALBUM, "BRAVE MOUNTAINS" RELEASED ON MONDAY 10th MARCH 2014
ARM42 CD // DL // LP (via A Quick One Records)

Armellodie Records is proud to present Appletop from the dirty south of France with their new album, Brave Mountains, released on Monday 10th March 2014. 

Pierre Cristofari, Olivier Cancellieri and Nicolas Faou formed Appletop in Hyères, France in 2008. Since then they’ve released a clutch of EPs in their native land, and a well-received debut album, The City Can Wait via Parisien label Le Son du Maquis/Harmonia Mundi in 2010. 

Hereafter the band took to the winding roads of Europe, clocking in hundreds of shows and notching up tour supports with such indie-stalwarts as The Thermals, Wild Flag and The Horrors. 

The first single from the album, ‘Twenty-Five’, (released in France on shiny clear vinyl courtesy of A Quick One Records) whetted the public's aural taste-buds and set the tone for the long-player you now have in your possession. Two years in the making, Brave Mountains draws on British and American alt-rock traditions. Ten lean cuts of appetising indie rock meat!

‘Burning Land’, ‘Johnny’s Theme’ and ‘Madonna in Love’ are the sort of songs you would want to end a summer festival with, punching-the-air with the orange sun setting in the background. Cristofari’s charmingly curious phrasing – singing in his second language after all – echoing out from the stage. 

Elsewhere, songs like the sparse ‘Nikolai’ and the dreamy in-no-rush guitar lines of ‘Portland’ show the band at their most tender. Though there’s no need to approach with caution, we’re a million miles away from emo-melodrama. There is minimal doom and gloom; instead the listener is treated to a warm and affecting scruffy pop conscious.

“It’s the same old story, told a hundred times” sings Cristofari on enticing opener, ‘Headstrong’. And maybe it is, but Appletop succeed by digging under the surface of their beloved idols – think Sebadoh, Pavement, Teenage Fanclub –  and hit you warm in the gut with fuzzed up guitars, pared back production values and stick-to-your-ribs melodies.


APPLETOP - Madonna in Love

Armellodie Records is proud to present Dunfermline’s Dan Lyth and the Euphrates with their new album, Benthic Lines, released as a Deluxe book (that’s right, we said book!) with CD and/or download on Monday 12th May 2014.

Dan Lyth was born in the Middle East but has lived most of his life in Dunfermline, Fife. A sound designer by day, Lyth began work on Benthic Lines some five years ago, his intention to record an album entirely outdoors. On rooftops and rowing boats, in forests and high streets, mountains and quarries, ruined churches and beaches, car parks and peat bogs. Anywhere really, as long as it was outside!

Having first had the idea while on a trip to Sierra Leone, Lyth quickly realised that it's one thing to daydream of such a plan whilst in the tropics and quite another to actually attempt it back at home in Scotland. 

“I think some part of me took perverse pleasure in the thought of having to undergo some real physical exertion to make this record. I have also always been drawn to creative work that has taken a considerable amount of effort, and recording an album outdoors whilst living in Scotland with its devious climate seemed to fit the bill.”

In an age when it seems anyone can produce an album in their bedroom, Benthic Lines attempts to re-explore the relationship between music and the environment in which it is created. What happens to a recording when you have no control over the surroundings? What anomalies and accidents may occur? And would it be possible to weave together the unpredictable sounds of these environments with more traditional performances to create a cohesive whole?

As Lyth’s fondness of field recording has grown more ambitious, so too has his talent as a songwriter. Album opener ‘All My Love’ is testament to this, merging the mythological with the reality of the uncertainties that are brought when becoming a father for the first time. The vivid imagery of ‘Four Creatures’, written from the perspective of someone living in Syria, draws upon Islamic and Christian eschatological imagery to startling effect.

The influence of Steve Reich is worth noting, from the repetitive female vocal sounds on ‘Standing Start’ to the cyclic piano and accordion patterns of ‘Super Nature’ and ‘Earth Broke Its Vow’, Lyth is the first to admit of his affection for Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. 

“A big chunk of inspiration came from Steve Reich’s work and one of the main aims of the album in terms of the arrangements was to try and make music that sounds electronic or programmed but is actually all live acoustic instruments.” says Lyth. 

Benthic Lines are the deep sea communication cables through which the world is now connected, and communication is a recurring theme throughout the record ("the cables installed along ocean floors is where we had lived too long for sure" sings Lyth on ‘How It Happened’). How our constant use of communication technology can affect our thought processes and relationships (“We shot some video, scenes that would not be shown, think what you will but the devil’s in the pixels on my phone”, sings Lyth on ‘Four Creatures’).   With recording having taken place in locations as far afield as Morocco, Australia, Turkey and Uganda, Dan is also exploring the lines of human connection and lines of ancestry.

Designed with love by graphic artist Sarah Lyth, the album arrives in a beautifully bound 60-page book and includes photos from the array of recording locations. Cover art from celebrated New York artist Matthew Cusick and an accompanying short story, Already Here, by talented Fifer Craig Rennie complete the desirable artefact that is Benthic Lines. So what has Lyth got to say for himself now that his affair with the great outdoors is almost over.

“After travelling, listening, recording and being constantly surprised over the course of the five years and four continents that I’ve made Benthic Lines, what will really stay with me is not only all the wonderful sounds we heard but also the many inquisitive, open-minded and generous people we met along the way. But it wasn’t all romantic. It’s quite hard work transporting a drum kit to a remote derelict church or dragging a piano out of a small flat. There were broken mic stands, bleeding fingers and failing batteries. And there was rain, a lot of rain.”


DAN LYTH & THE EUPHRATES - Earth Broke Its Vow

DAN LYTH & THE EUPHRATES - All My Love

ARM07
Released: Monday 16th November 2009 
CD / DL

Cuddly Shark is the debut album by Glasgow’s finest art-school hillbilly rockers Cuddly Shark. 

Recorded by Ross McGowan (Dananananaykroyd, We Are the Physics), and mixed by Scott Maple (Le Reno Amps). Encapsulating the band’s purist “plug in and play” ethos with a touch of ice cold rock’n’roll. Idiosyncratic lyricism and odd anti-melodies combined with foot down pedal-to-the-metal performances prove deadly in this trios hands.

Cuddly Shark were born and bred in the bonnie highlands of Scotland. Two thirds masculine and one third feminine, the band consists of Colin Reid on guitar and vocals, Ruth Forsyth on bass guitar and vocals, and Jason Sinclair on drums and vocals. Magnetically drawn to the rain-soaked musical hotspot that is Glasgow things have been going swimmingly for the sharp-toothed threesome.

Rock solid with the minimum of fuss, Cuddly Shark songs are anarchic and free spirited. From the opening thrash of ‘Bowl of Cherries’, by all accounts a sonic fit of standing on your toes and singing right in your face, to the Pixies like donkey kick of ‘Woody Woodpecker’, an ode to all those people that peck at your head until you can’t take it anymore.  Proving they have more hooks than a tackle box the furious delivery and pace of ‘The Punisher of IV30’, referring to the Elgin post-code where the band members grew up, befits the contradictory nature of the band name as this lot can bark like a nutcase at a bus stop. Listen on and it’s clear linear songwriting isn’t on the menu with the dog-on-the-prowl nuttiness of ‘Mannybix’, and the epic 52 second ode to self-indulgence, ‘Jamie Foxx on Later With Jools Holland’.

Flexing their musical pecks the album centres around the downbeat travelling tune ‘Whiteoaks’, and the hillbilly punk of 70’s country standard ‘Boney Fingers’. Jason from the band enthuses, “How could we not cover this song when we found out it was by a guy called Hoyt Axeton, what kind of a name is Hoyt!?! Then to find out he was the dad in Gremlins I mean how cool can you get, the tunes nae bad either!”

Elsewhere the record boasts fat slabs of post punk grit with feverish rockers, ‘What Goes Around’, the Zeppelin baiting latest single, ‘The Sheriff of Aspen Bay’, and the crunching riffage of ‘12 Months’, where a year spent involuntary abstaining from sexual relations has never sounded so brutally demonic! The album draws to a close with the glorious ‘Instru-Mentalist’ and the Caledonian stomp of ‘Shakey Baby’ which wages war on political correctness with the shameless sing-along jaunt, “see the lady with the baby, grab the baby, hold the baby, shake the baby, jelly baby, got me a syndrome!”.

Brimming with punk attitude and spilling over with melodic brilliance Cuddly Shark will never have an ounce of pretentious hip fat on them. Their live shows have seen comparisons made to Husker Du, Minor Threat, Ween, Fugazi and Weezer. Yet Cuddly Shark are unmistakably their own entity, a blistering romp of rock’n’roll carnage firing as loud as they can from a post-rock cannon.

CUDDLY SHARK - What Goes Around

ARM36
Released: Monday 6th May 2013
CD / DL

I Cannot Sing You Here, But For Songs Of Where is the third full-length album from Thirty Pounds Of Bone.

The record sees songwriter Johny Lamb further explore his continuing theme of place. Split into four separate locations; (past place, the place of heritage, present place and the in between), the record aims to articulate experiences of itinerancy and second-generation migrancy.

Throughout these songs, Johny adopts, appropriates and abuses forms of traditional music, with the hybridity that has previously gained him much praise from critics.

His take on a Veesik (a lost form of Shetland song), backed by a drone built from accordion and the machines used by boat builders (of Hays Dock in Lerwick), exemplifies this.

‘Mother This Land Won’t Hold Me’, begins as an unaccompanied Sean Nós Ballad that gradually abstracts to a dense, distortion-led climax.

Elsewhere we find him buckling under the relentless momentum of touring in ‘The Streets I Staggered Down’, with no end in sight, and nowhere meaningful to go back to when the end finally comes. In ‘The Snow in Kiel’, the flatlands of Western Europe flash past him as he goes from gig to gig, never quite catching up with himself.

Johny makes no claim on any of these territories, admitting his spurious involvement with each as the songs progress. In the true account of attempting to visit his mother’s childhood home in ‘The Ballad of Cootehill’, only to find it long since demolished, he sings, ‘But I am not the man to say that we are from Cootehill.’ This song furthers the sense of dislocation in the familiar folksong theme of Irish migration, from a sense of missing home, to the sense of never having seen it in the first place.

The album closes with ‘The Wolf on the Shelf’, set against the sound of a storm beating against the static caravan Johny lives and works in. This is a love song for home, which Lamb has decided is a state brought about by a proximity to cherished possessions, regardless of where they happen to be.

I Cannot Sing You Here, But For Songs of Where features several guests including Darren Hayman (Hefner), Al Nero and Scott Maple (Le Reno Amps), Jen Macro (Something Beginning With L), Irish box player Seamus Harahan, and Laurence Collyer (Diamond Family Archive). Thirty Pounds of Bone’s song-writing reflects Johny’s opinion that the folk song must change for its time, and his idea that the unreconstructed performance of heritage is at root, only that; an empty gesture towards a past that belongs to no one living.  All of the music that weaves through his life is allowed entry into his songs, and the result owes as much to various trends in popular music as it does to folk, giving him a sound that is at once highly contemporary and trans-historical.

“A Virgin train, then a bus to the Airport, the branded jet across the Irish Sea to the third home made studio of the week, as I tie down the loose and sparse collection of musicians I need to help me make these recordings. Reading on the train takes the form of hysterical dystopian Marxism, and violent rhetoric concerning postmodernism. How strong the disagreements of theorists as the trees and rivers remain, how furious the dialogical yells as the cliffs and hills I pass stand unswayed by any argument.

I lock eyes with an uncaring crow at Newton Abbot and neither he nor the town are worried about the great sadness of late capitalism. But the debris is everywhere. And there I am, so embedded in both worlds, the landscape of woodland and rock, of arable crop and marsh, and too the motorways and hyper-markets, I play gigs understanding their role in the selling of physical and digital product. I photograph a pastoral scene on a smart phone adding a digital filter that makes the image appear to be old and analogue. Embedded in, but not wholly a part of. How could anyone be?

I know more people in the city I am going to, where I have never made any kind of home, than I do in the village I live in. That seems strange to me. I have known only one person who lived and died in the place they were born. The people I know who are the most committed verbal Marxists, are the most successful networkers and sellers of cultural artefacts. We are surrounded by paradox, contradiction and isolation, but this is not new or frightening, but simply the culture in which I have grown up.

That artworks should be full of self-reference, mockery, irony, sarcasm is hardly surprising. I wonder if the disparate band of musicians playing in different rooms at different times might constitute some idea of collective or community, even a folk? I consider that the answers must lie somewhere between reconciling philosophy on a mountain and buying donuts in a Tesco metro.” - Johny Lamb, Oct 2011

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - The Streets I Staggered Down

ARM23
Released: Monday 18th June 2011
CD / DL

Armellodie Records presents Something Beginning With L, sweet purveyors of adorably understated pop; coated in chimes, whirrs and divine melodies on their debut album, Beautiful Ground released on Monday 18th June 2011.

Something Beginning With L are a bewitching trio made up of Lucy Parnell (Vocals, Guitar), Jen Macro (Vocals, Guitar) and Jon Clayton (Bass, Keys). The band juxtaposes scuzzy electric guitars and buzzing synthesizers with acoustic fragility and electro-beats, guided into the light by the salient crystalline vocals of Lucy Parnell and Jen Macro who offer bliss-out close harmonies, melancholy and absorbing over the band’s encapsulating dream-pop.

Opening with the zoned-out burr of ‘Poster Croc’, delicate and restrained but alluring with melodic goodness, the scene is set for Beautiful Ground, a quiet treasure of a record. Recorded in Jon’s own One Cat Studios - an old converted paper mill in Brixton – and produced by the band themselves, Something Beginning With L nurtured the songs through their many guises and transformations, experimenting with the natural reverbs on offer in the hidden nooks and crannies of the old building.

“The songs seemed to evolve and change from week to week as we found our feet as a trio and experimented with Jon’s toys. It was a bit of a journey, sometimes we were stuck in traffic on the M1, but mostly it was like a road trip across America” says Jen, and it’s a trip you’ll want to take again and again.

With the uncomplicated pop proficiency of ‘Last Night's Party’, a hopeless love song based on a wonderfully romantic connection - “loose-limbed in the back of a taxi, something in his heartache attracts me” sings Macro – but alas it cannot last as both protagonists are pretending to be someone they are not in order to win each other’s affections, and ultimately, they know it. The sweet synthesizers and playful rhythm do little to soften the sadness-tinged admission that the song bows out on, “this person is not the person that I wanted you to leave with, she’s a liar, she only said those things to catch you, and now she’s gone.”

That feeling of unease - especially in one’s own skin - spills over into ‘Hobby’, with Macro confessing, “I need some hope to replace this crippling fear, are you going to deny me or are you going to give in?”. It shows remarkable vulnerability and highlights the bands talent for arranging and tastefully layering instrumentation, to transport the listener from a simple picked lullaby to a widescreen shoegaze marathon. 

It’s not all sweetness and light however with ‘Sound’ acting as a bit of a hate crusade, borrowing from the famous line by Lauren Bacall in the classic 1944 film,  To Have and Have Not – “you know how to whistle don't you Steve? You just put your lips together and...blow” – but instead of whistling for a booty call, Macro is pleading for an individual to suck it up.

‘Sound’ is also the first of three tracks on Beautiful Ground to be augmented by the titanic talents of sticks-man, Rob Ellis (PJ Harvey, Anna Calvi) who also provides the backbone for ‘Say’ – a song of desire, angular but not clichéd, disenfranchised but not sloppy, apathetic but still fierce – and ‘Mean’, which layers up adventurously, and culminates with Ellis dominating the tank-rumbling outro like an eight-armed stick-wielding ogre, dead-set on causing a bowel-shaking earthquake.

Elsewhere ‘Elephant pt ii’ is a gorgeous slice of surreal melancholy - “me and my sisters at the edge of the world with our toes in blue” sings Lucy – leaving the listener in a trance-like state.

“Around 1994 my parents saved and saved and took my sisters and I to a beautiful beach in France, it could have been on the isle de ray but I can't be sure. As we arrived we parked our small red plimsolls and newly obtained, not quite fashionable hi-tech neon hi topped shoes on the sand, and we played all day in the water. But when the time came to put on our shoes and go home we discovered our shoes had been stolen by the tidal water. We will keep an eye out for our lost shoes forevermore. My uncle Roger and auntie Denise definitely kept an elephant next door.” - Lucy Parnell.

The latter stages of Beautiful Ground find that band at their most transfixing with the exquisite guitar work and effects on ‘One Knee Two Knee’ nothing short of sublime - listen close and you can hear a ticking clock in amongst the swirl of sonic jollies - all glued together by those irresistibly louche female vocals.

The intricate layering and perfectly structured quiet-loud-quiet sound the band possess are instilled in Overcoat, a song that manages to balance lyrical fragility with raucous musicianship, the choppy rhythms and squelch-blips providing a foundation for Lucy and Jen’s stunning close harmonies to rally, “I’m sat in this overcoat feeling very small, hope that I grow into it before I wear it out”, they sing as the song swells into a blissful cinematic crescendo.

“Overcoat Is about a coat I got from my nanna. She died on xmas day when I was 7, and all her presents to us were still under the tree. Mine was this burgundy and cream puffy jacket thingy. I cherished that coat, it was a bit too big but I wore it everywhere, and hoped that I’d grow into before it fell apart. So I guess it’s metaphorical as well, about becoming who I’m supposed to be before I… y’know… die ” - Jen Macro.

Not a troupe that could be accused of lethargy by any stretch of the imagination, Lucy, Jon and Jen are a diligent bunch of comrades, having all earned their stripes as part of South London noiseniks Stuffy/the Fuses, Lucy and Jen can also be found flaunting their considerable talents in The Graham Coxon Power Ensemble, the band that recorded and toured the Blur guitarist’s most recent solo offering, The Spinning Top. The pair have also lent their sweet tones in support of ex-Soft Boys front-man and esteemed solo artist Robyn Hitchcock, what’s more, Jon and Jen both performed in former Ash guitarist, Charlotte Hatherley’s touring band, and you thought you were busy…

The album draws to a close with ‘Unwittingly Beautiful’, the only song present to have featured on the band’s recently released Listed Building EP, dense and carefully constructed, the chords chime and shimmer with enduring resonance, allied to Jon’s pulsing bass line and intricate electronic percussion, abstract and eerie as a love song can be and all the more life-affirming for it.

Finishing on the largely improvised ‘73’ playing out like a dying ember with its trippy, zoned-out sounds reminiscent of those that opened the record capturing the essence of Something Beginning With L. As sweet as honey yet ominous and spooky. A pretty spine-tingling mess, a quietly shining treasure, ladies and gentlemen, Beautiful Ground.

SOMETHING BEGINNING WITH L - Poster Croc

SOMETHING BEGINNING WITH L - Hobby

ARM26
Released: Monday 24th October 2011
CD / DL

“Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” – Jack Kerouac

The Winter That Was is the third album by The Hazey Janes released on Monday 24th October 2014. 

The Hazey Janes have undergone their fair share of globe-trotting since releasing their rightly praised eponymous mini-album some 8 years ago.

They escaped the Caledonian rain and absconded to Spain to record their debut long-player Hotel Radio at the studios of legendary Spanish producer Paco Loco (Josh Rouse / Jeff Tweedy) in Cadiz. The record was met with significant acclaim upon its release in February 2006 and the band set forth, playing shows both everywhere and anywhere.  They headlined  throughout the UK, and as well as playing in support to the likes of Elbow, Idlewild and Snow Patrol the band made two trips to the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, where they showed their versatility by being able to open for both Susanna Hoffs and The Presidents of the United States of America.

With all guns blazing the band hopped Stateside again in 2007 to New Jersey, where they recorded a new album entitled Hands Around The City with esteemed producer John Agnello (The Hold Steady / The Walkmen / Sonic Youth). Unfortunately for the fan-base that the band amassed on their travels, the album has become stuck in limbo.  Somewhere between the cosmos of legality and the galaxy of small print it remains unreleased to this day, much to the band’s dismay.

In the words of Nietzsche, “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”, and so The Hazey Janes re-grouped in bonnie Dundee, chalked Hands Around The City up to experience and refined their zig-zag path from country to psych to power pop on The Winter That Was. After all, only the ideal synergy of chunky chords, wistful lyrics and lush-as harmonies can fill our sometimes depressing world with sunshine and exultation.  It is with this palette that The Hazey Janes continue to paint the big picture.

“From an early stage we made a conscious decision that this, our third record, was going to be a different experience from the last two. For a start, we would make it much closer to home than previously, but not necessarily restrict ourselves to the same room/studio. Secondly, we’d produce ourselves with our friend Robin Sutherland engineering. Having been fortunate enough to work with experienced, creative producers in the past it felt like the right time for us to be making an album on our own and bar the occasional power cut and a butterfly infestation, the process as a whole was pretty painless” - Andrew Mitchell.

Like a temporal vortex or dimensional doorway the ominous pitch-bending groan of opener ‘Cascade River Gardens’ pulls us, the listeners into Dr. Who’s famous TARDIS. Spinning us round before dropping us firmly in familiar Hazey Janes terrain, albeit with the band harnessing a new found vitality in their sound. 

The beefed up brash power pop of ‘Carmelite’ states the intentions of The Winter That Was with fervour, Liam Brennan’s unyielding rhythm augmented by Matthew Marra’s punchy, melodic bass-lines. A heady foundation on which to build, and Alice Marra’s vintage synthesizers coupled with Andrew Mitchell’s chunky guitars thrill the listener with every layer they add.  Deeply enchanting and surprisingly brisk, ‘Girl In The Night’, succinctly distils the band’s striking three-part harmonies with a healthy dollop of 80’s drive-time rock, stirring and infectious.

On consideration, Scotland has had a long-standing affinity with Stateside music and The Hazey Janes specialise in the West Coast variety not least on ‘Aspen’ - loosely based on a tale about the exploits of Hunter S Thomson - and the startling ‘You Only Stand To Lose If I Stay’ which sees Andrew delivering the most soaring of vocals.

Punching the epic button like never before, ‘Wake To Guide Love’ and ‘Southern Lawns’ find the band enriching their modus operandi with playful production and instrumentation, incorporating harps and pianos, and even bashing a mandolin with a rubber mallet - nothing like letting out some of that pent-up Dundonian aggression, even if it is on a poor, defenceless mandolin! There was further amusement whilst recording too as Matthew explains;

“The generous people at Vintage Strings of Dundee allowed us to sneak into their shop one evening to simultaneously record a few pianos for Southern Lawns. Unfortunately, a passing police car assumed we were ransacking the place. Once we explained the nature of a piano’s weight, however, they left us to it. If only we had left the tape rolling.”

The warm tones of Christopher Marra’s pedal steel guitar lends itself to the album’s most folksy country-lament, ‘The Darkness Ends’, when they are as delicate and wistful as this, the band are impossible to resist and with ‘Paperhearts’ they deliver their most affecting slice of dreamy melancholy to date with the skilled partnerships of Jenny Sutherland and Sophie Gowans on violin, viola and cello, whilst Jason and Tony Sellars on saxophone and trumpet broaden the sonic landscape with further finesse.

So more than capable of drawing out a moody atmosphere, the band turn on the Krautrock-vibes for album finale, ‘Everything Starts Again’, embracing the drone whole-heartedly with additional vocals courtesy of El Cor Duende performing their finest monastery impersonation.  Swooping and soaring with all the trademark Hazey Jane harmonies, throw in some ripping guitars and fizzed up synthesizer and you’ll want to step right back into that TARDIS and re-live the entire record again. 

Indeed it’s a timeless sound that The Hazey Janes are flaunting and so no matter how long it has taken to get here The Winter That Was shows a band that have grown immeasurably in stature during their somewhat enforced hiatus from the public eye.  Pumped full of pop vitamins like Big Star on steroids, the Hazey Janes are ready to take on the world again.

THE HAZEY JANES - Wake to Guide Love

ARM22
Released: Monday 16th May 2011
CD / CT / DL

Happy as a Windless Flag is the debut album by The Douglas Firs released on CD, Cassette Tape and Download on Monday 9th May 2011

From the northern gales of the Highlands to the peaks of Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh, The Douglas Firs is the brainchild of Neil Insh, born and bred in Aberdeen before de-camping to Scotland’s capital. A gentleman on a journey of sonic discovery with steely determination and a resolute vision to produce Happy as a Windless Flag, a beatific triumph of a record, created not by technical skill, but from a synaesthetic love of pure sound. Nurturing the record throughout its 7 year gestation the results follow themes of delusion, loss of senses, blindness, loss of youth, death and rebirth channelled through the lush and complex arrangements with fervid imagery of flags, moths and sleep.

Happy as a Windless Flag tackles the melee of giving in to growing old, articulately dissecting and mournfully celebrating the different ways of dealing with the maxim that life’s apropos is coming to terms with death, whilst making every effort to avoid cliche of expression. From the opening I Will Kill Again, an account of an unknown soldier’s death, sound-tracked by galloping percussion and promenades of male and female harmony, to the brass-fuelled march of A Military Farewell, which finds Insh and his band of musical companions rejoicing in the refrain, “gory, gory, what a hell of a way to die”, to the tune of ‘John Brown's Body’, a traditional marching song celebrating the abolitionist John Brown. Later appropriated and used by American paratroopers during World War II as a song celebrating death by falling from a great height, as ‘Blood on the Risers’.

Central to the record is The Quickening, a fascinating mixture of intriguing field recordings, harmonious choral singing, rolling drums, ambient guitars, fiddle, accordion and piano, with Insh’s gentle croon nestling in amongst the festivities pondering the unquestioning, blind optimism inherent in youth until it diminishes and is replaced by fear. The simplicity of the craftsmanship belies the musical complexity, bursting with atmosphere and melancholy as Insh sings, “You know how the last sad rays of daylight die”.

Recorded in various churches, bedrooms, sheds and local halls over the last 7 years Insh humbly admits, “It only took so long to record the album because of bad luck with technology, in that I break most things I own.”

Abstraction, experimentation, and improvisation are sewn into the record, with a trio of instrumentals weaved throughout;  Sepulture, a funeral march to finally say farewell to the opening tracks, Future State, a representation of cyclic birth and rebirth, and Nature and Nurture, expressive of the passage of time, and experiences gathered.

The album embraces introspection whole-heartedly with The Shadow Line - a song in three stages centred around an invisible line of adulthood from whence it is difficult to look back without saccharine longing - and on Balance of Halves, a pathetic, romantic rosy vision of everything left behind in youth. Both songs float through musical hoops so deftly, unveiling twists and turns, crunching guitars, picked harmonics, bewitching organs, and gentle brass tied together in layers of avant-garde splendour and harmonious vocals.

Grow Old and Go Home acts as a pre-cursor to the album’s culmination, a resigned acknowledgement that we all will, one day, become languid and disheartened, and eventually give up on life. Minimal but effective piano chords and loosely but perfectly positioned horns are washed in a heartfelt landscape of dots and bleeps, used to create an extremely uplifting tapestry of sound.

The album finale, Soporific acts as an acceptance of the themes that pervade the record with Insh hushly singing, “In tender youth the dread was narrow, death was distant, copse wheelbarrow, took branched extensions to the bonfire: introspection”.

“It’s kind of a lulling cradlesong, but I wanted to represent the horrific anxiety dreams and nightmares I would have during the era that I was recording it. The first section of this song was recorded, literally, under covers, appropriate because it is a song about sleep and lethargy. But it was also so my flatmates wouldn’t hear me sing. The second section was recorded in three separate churches. One of these had a horrible, oppressive atmosphere, and I hope it comes across on the recording.” - Neil Insh.

At a time when every new second in the world spawns gigabytes of data, tweets and twats, blogs and blaggers, when people can carry their entire musical collections on electronic devices barely bigger than their IQ, when multi-tasking is the new relaxing, sometimes it’s hard to focus, to take the time and actually bask in the good stuff for fear of missing out on something else or God forbid not documenting the moment.

Happy as a Windless Flag is an album to savour, to stop and pay attention. Daring, lively and tender, anyone who has ever tried to dig their way through avant-garde, post-rock, experimental or improvised music will know that it can at times be a little dry – The Douglas Firs themselves claim they would be verging on prog-rock if they could play their instruments, and didn’t like Buddy Holly so much – this record is the perfect remedy for hard worked ears, showing us that whatever tickles your sonic palette, when executed with this much care, love and attention, music can be the most wonderfully inspiring art form.

THE DOUGLAS FIRS - I Will Kill Again

ARM12
Released: Monday 10th May 2010
CD / DL

Every mother is a teacher and every father is a preacher...from forth the loins of these two professions, a quartet of star-crossed musicians take their life, spread up and down the east coast of Scotland like marmite where they lay their scene. Armellodie is delighted to present the debut EP from Scotland’s most subterranean, ecclesiastical rock band, The Scottish Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment are quiet, but like a falling bomb is quiet, like an embryo is quiet, like the sibilant steam drifting ominously above a silent culdera. They hummmmmm melodiously like a microwave, slowly incubating their songs with the full time dedication and care of a placenta.  Having debuted in 2007 with the single ‘Eyes’ - the promo video for which was picked up by MTV and played across the world on VH1, MTV2 and MTV Europe - the band then retreated into the wilderness of the provincial Scottish town of Dunfermline and are only now returning to light up our stereos.

The band is built around the dense and persuasive song-writing of David Moyes, we’ll let him explain the band’s chosen moniker, “I know all about the philosophy of The Scottish Enlightenment period through studying at Aberdeen University for 6 years and working for a Scottish philosophy history centre up there. But I really just chose it because I thought it sounded weird for a band. But I like to prance around gobbing off about it being a mix of the local and the universal, the corporeal and the conceptual, the blah and the blah. It’s just because it sounded weird.”

‘Pascal’ opens the proceedings with a tender radiance. Moyes sings over a sparse and simple arrangement, “Though I came without I will raise you”, to illustrate a leap of faith taken at the end of the line, when you can’t see anything else to do. It’s delicate and it’s fractured. A comforting place to be - to know that there is nothing else that you could have done. Peddling a concoction of sleepy rock and star-gazing guitars Pascal is gentle, subtle, and fragile, epitomising what The Scottish Enlightenment are all about.

‘If You Would Just Try a Bit Harder’ continues in a similar understated fashion, with dreamy guitars and hypnotic rhythm. Depicting an argument between an atheist and a theist, both of whom believe that the other is being deliberately sloppy in their thinking. Moyes explains, “I like to talk with people who used to believe certain things, but aren’t so sure anymore. Those people know you can totally believe something false, and doubt something true”. This imagery spills over into ‘Riverbed’, with running piano arpeggios providing the backdrop for streams of guilt to flow.

Continuing to wield that repetitive and addictive guitar line trick, ‘All Homemade Things’ is the most buoyant effort on the EP. “I woke up and I looked outside, a new car in my drive, a big house and a hot wife” sings Moyes. Everyone gets to an age where they start making their own rule, and this song is a lament for all the parental inheritance that should never be lost.

‘To The Dogs’ closes the EP in all its downbeat glory. Arguments are so often settled by scurrilous means, and sometimes when that’s what’s happening you should just walk away. The song closes with clattering drums and the beautiful sound of the Clarsach, which is a little harp.

The Scottish Enlightenment is both Scottish, ie local, corporeal, and Enlightenment, ie universal, abstract. It unites those disparate elements only the union of which can bring a real new Scottish enlightenment. Epic without ever trying to sound anthemic, the organic build of genuine emotion will bring about the desired crescendo every time.  ‘Pascal’ is taken from the forthcoming album, a trailer if you will, as we await the arrival of ‘St. Thomas’.

THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT - Pascal

THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT - All Homemade Things

THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT - To the Dogs

ARM17
Released: Monday 15th November 2010
CD / DL

Every mother is a teacher and every father is a preacher...from forth the loins of these two professions, a quartet of star-crossed musicians take their life, spread up and down the east coast of Scotland like marmite where they lay their scene. Armellodie Records is proud to introduce the arrival of St. Thomas, from Scotland’s most subterranean, ecclesiastical rock band, The Scottish Enlightenment.

The Scottish Enlightenment are quiet, but like a falling bomb is quiet, like an embryo is quiet, like the sibilant steam drifting ominously above a silent culdera. They hummmmmm melodiously like a microwave, slowly incubating their songs with the full time dedication and care of a placenta.  Having debuted in 2007 with the single ‘Eyes’ - the promo video for which was picked up by MTV and played across the world on VH1, MTV2 and MTV Europe - the band then retreated into the wilderness of the provincial Scottish town of Dunfermline, resurfacing earlier this year to light up our stereos with two glorious EPs, Pascal and Little Sleep, quite rightfully considered by The Big Issue as “clever, moody, literate pop for filing next to Slint and Low.”

The band is built around the dense and persuasive song-writing of David Moyes, we’ll let him explain the band’s chosen moniker, “I know all about the philosophy of The Scottish Enlightenment period through studying at Aberdeen University for 6 years and working for a Scottish philosophy history centre up there. But I really just chose it because I thought it sounded weird for a band. But I like to prance around gobbing off about it being a mix of the local and the universal, the corporeal and the conceptual, the blah and the blah. It’s just because it sounded weird.”

St. Thomas documents a crumbling faith, the change from believing in an omnipotent being to not believing at all, like a graph where one line traces the rising intellectual integrity and the other traces the plummeting sense of purpose and worth. Along the journey relationships between people, families, friends and lovers are pondered, how these morph and change, and how time, distance, and place can form the strongest of bonds as much as they can birth niggling insecurities. 

Gal Gal’s space-age arpeggios act like a post-rock estuary in preparation for the open seas of gargantuan songs about our place in the universe; Earth Angel reverberates with the sound of star-gazing guitars and sleepy rock hitting the crown of a big stone church. Named in tribute to Marvin Berry and the Starlighters – Marty Mcfly fans take heed - the song details groups of people encountering the unknown and greeting it with fear, not realising it’s the very thing they are there to seek, or celebrate, like a surprise party, when the guest of honour arrives and gets duly attacked as an intruder.

As Plato acknowledged “the unexamined life is not worth living” and The Scottish Enlightenment is only too happy to attest this on Taxidermy Of Love, where choral hums and the beautiful sounds of the Clarsach provide the foundations of a prayer song, authored by someone who feels unable to change themselves, looking for some divine stuffing with lines like, “Make what cuts you need, slit the torso side, like curtains part the skin, take out the crap inside, fashion lungs of steel, program the heart to care, a mind that will not wander, and paint it like I can bear.”

Mountainous crescendo-oeuvres unfurl with punch-the-air guitars and propulsive drumming on Little Sleep and Necromancer’s murky space-rock, a twisted love song in which the song’s persona loves someone despite everyone believing they are dead; they believe that they will awake. Are they the sole faith-keeper, resolute and sacrificial in their love? Or are they, like, mental?

At their most fragile on Pascal and The First Will Be Last, the band strip back to the bare essentials: slow tempos, conversational voices, powerful lyrics, and minimal instrumentation. The emotional heft is breathtaking with Moyes at his most confessional on the latter, a sad tale of the son of manse turned apostate, a mantra for struggling with personal demons - “Bible in hand, I changed my plans and it fell on the floor, I still went to church with anger and mirth, I taught Sunday school and my cup was full, my spirit is blackening fast”.

Elsewhere on The Soft Place living donor transplant surgery is pondered with characteristically understated melodies atop a mélange of tumbledown drums, subtle tremolo guitars, funerary cornet and heavenly glockenspiel, and on List Right, we are treated to a waltz of sorrow where low frequencies rumble and a menacing piano resonates with stirring effect like something out of a dark version of Death on the Nile.

Beautifully observed and unnervingly honest My Bible Is provides a triumphant conclusion to the record with ambient textures, eerie tension, and the organic build of genuine emotion when faced with believing something false, and doubting something true. Given the scarcity of genuinely affecting music nowadays it’s a milestone that should elevate The Scottish Enlightenment to the highest ranks of Scotland’s gifted breed of songwriters.

“On a human level the truth is that I saw Church to be filled with the best of things and the worst of things - just like any other group happening really. And the loving, compassionate, self-giving people I know from Church makes me wonder why it is they seem to have a different core to them than I do. And the small minded people make me wonder how they can be so long on the earth and not have learned better. But if anything, this song is supposed to be a level headed realistic account of what Churches are, and what religion is. As such, I don’t expect it to chime with either Richard Dawkins or Keith O'Brien. The main problem with writing songs about big ideas is you inevitably sound like a knob when asked to talk about them. You write the song so you don't have to talk about them. Scunner.” - David Moyes

St. Thomas is an intensely rewarding and poetic triumph from a band that has resolutely pursued its own unique vision and grown immeasurably in stature as a result.  It's a rare thing to have an album as lyrically provocative as it is musically intrepid; Lingering long after the ghostly instrumental coda Cogito has vacated the stereo. It’s delicate and it’s fractured. It has one foot in this world and one foot in some supernatural place. It’s heavy, powerful and evocative and for those of us who have lived any kind of life with all its misgivings, moral dilemmas, emotional crossroads, regrets, and loves it is a record that should be cherished.

THE SCOTTISH ENLIGHTENMENT - Gal Gal

ARM18
Released: Monday 6th December 2010
CD / DL

Sailing gleefully under the radar and occupying his own trans-century time-period, Thirty Pounds Of Bone is one man, multi- instrumentalist Johny Lamb with a treasure-chest of storm-tossed laments and lullaby wig-outs to bedazzle.

Armellodie Records is proud to present Method; an album that seeks to explore the folksinger’s contradictory status as an outsider, often recording and touring alone, a situation seemingly at odds with folk’s suggestion of community. The result is a record fraught with geographic dissatisfaction, heartbreak, ghosts, isolation and drunkenness. Sitting uncomfortably somewhere between auto-biography and allegory the songs take in real life events and fantastical narrative concerning relationships, the dangers of being eaten by the dead and the difficulties of communicating when at sea.

The son of an ordained clergyman, Johny Lamb was initially raised on the Shetland island of Unst; he’s always been fascinated with the sea and the fisheries. His favourite books are Moby Dick and The Tin Drum. As a child he was once in hospital for so long that they made him go to school there, and as a result he now only has one functioning kidney. He has lived all over the British Isles, and has toured extensively throughout Europe. His life revolves around folk music and he believes strongly in innovation and change in traditional music rather than preservation of repertoire, as “a museum piece cannot be a ‘living’ tradition.”

The songs on Method engage in the folksong’s relationships to place, love, drink and localised mythology. From the opening pulsating rhythm of Crack Shandy In The Harbour, an absolutely true account of a time spent in Plymouth working for a racist café owner where narcotics anonymous had their meetings - 'Crack Shandy' was the family argot for heroin and crack smoked together – to the banjo-led How We Applaud The Unhappiness Of The Songwriter, which quite rightfully pokes fun at the peculiar exchange of the soul-bearer and the audience - “What can I sing? What tunes with poems in? And then take a bow for loving no one now”.

A melting pot of traditional influences is apparent and on All For Me Grogg, Lamb re-interprets a traditional forecastle song made famous by the Clancy Brothers amongst others, in this guise however it owes more to the dreaminess of Sparklehorse and the intimacy of Will Oldham.

Terrifically organic and intricately layered songs like The Fishery and Island’s Ode To Itinerant conjure themes of loneliness and geographic isolation with startling effect, the former with reference to the cod-fisheries of the 19th century explodes with face melting polyphonic harmonics and Spiritualized-esque distortion, the latter more delicately with a mournful cornet refrain accompanying a tale of leaving behind one’s past.

Lamb’s admiration of the ladies and partiality to the drink couldn’t be better eulogised than on A Lesson In Talking, a rousing accordion jaunt that amuses to no end with a proverbial tale; man meets whisky, man loves whisky, woman leaves man because of whisky, man learns lesson and tries to convince woman everything will be fine if she drinks as much whisky as he does. It’s a theme that surfaces once more on Darling with noble declarations of intent to do things properly “this time”, which of course doesn’t happen and the whole hideous cycle repeats until we expire with waves of distorted drunkenness.

Elsewhere Lamb takes us on a trip to the wilds of the Irish grasslands on Ghosts in the Grass, recounts the penitence at the bottom of the bottle on Crutches, and on the plaintive and beautiful kiss-off, Where I Used To Live, Lamb’s tender vocal resonates a story of a man leaving home for somewhere he hates and thus retreats into a delusional imaginary landscape excluding the wretchedness of his real life. There he meets a wonderful girl but in doing so has to reckon with his, her, and the land’s status as hallucination.

Method is Thirty Pounds of Bone’s second album. The first was cast onto our shores in 2006, the bold, innovative and beautiful, Homesick Children of Migrant Mothers. Met with great critical acclaim from the national press, Lamb has since spent his years travelling, playing, collaborating with other musicians and reading the works of James Herriot almost every day and once managed to get J Mascis to concede that All Creatures Great and Small was indeed, “pretty cool”. With the exception of a small collection of traditional and original sea shanties that appeared on Berlin-based label Woodland Recordings, Method is the first new material from Thirty Pounds Of Bone in almost half a decade.

Thirty Pounds of Bone draws equally from British and Irish traditional music and popular culture resulting in a sound at once as fascinated by distortion as it is by traditional instruments, seemingly appropriate to Lamb’s distain for the sterility of the studio, Method was recorded in four days in a bedroom in Harbertonford, South Devon. Johny Lamb plays all of the instruments on these recordings. For now he lives and writes by himself in a static van on the Lizard peninsular in West Cornwall. He can often be found in or on the sea. Although he is frequently accused of being unapproachable after performances if you do ever cross his path, make it a double.

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - Where I Used To Live

ARM10
Released: Monday 24th May 2010
CD / DL

Armellodie Records is thrillered(!) to present a ghoulish tune-wielding trio emanating from the bowels of central Scotland, Super Adventure Club, and their new album Avoid Zombies.

Twisting and turning like a shaolin monk, throwing melodies and riffary like deadly throwing stars, matching each digression with zen-like focus on memorable hooks.  By day they are Bruce, Mandy and Neil. By night they are the deadly spazz-jazz ninjas known only as Super Adventure Club.

If you are one of those avid music lovers that feel so inclined to fit everything you hear into a neat little musical box, possibly so you can employ the use of hierarchical tree charts and Venn diagrams to describe the exact specific classification of a bands chosen genre, then Super Adventure Club might fry your brain, just a bit. You can’t doubt the chops on these Zappa-esque wah-wobbling zombies.

From the opening ballistic post-hardcore attacks of Hip Hop Hot Pot Pot Noodle, a tale of endurance, quips and circumstance. When our lovable super club found themselves squatting in an over crowded flat that Kim and Aggie wouldn’t dare tread for fear of catching chronic-waster-disease. There’s only really one question they could ask once the deluge of marijuana smoke had cleared, “What happened!?”

Pick Up Sticks attempts to bring a touch of sanity to the proceedings with its hip-swinging groove gleefully referencing Steve MacQueen and Dustin Hoffman, “Papillon is building a raft!” The song is a call to all those who think their dead end job, or greyish expanse they call home is the be all end all. Hell bent on being grown ups, when a year turned into two years turned into ten years. Some who’ve never stopped dreaming, and some who have clearly forgotten all about life’s rich tapestry.

Lead vocalist Bruce Wallace is equally at home wailing like an unhinged lunatic, not least on Nosferatu where the band put the foot-down and provide their own unique critique of F.W Murnau’s 1922 film of the same name, Mark Kermode eat your heart out - “that’s a fake nose I can see it from here, and those joke-shop plastic fangs make you look like Alan Carr.” He’s also a master of the doleful Scottish croon on My Other Brain, arguably the most idiosyncratic song about thinking with your cock and the trouble it can get you in that you’re ever likely to hear.

Not ones to shy away from topical issues, Shiela’s Stabiliser Wheels, is a harmonious lament about sexism towards men in modern society, presented with a brief counter argument from a woman. Super Adventure Diplomacy.  Mandy Clarke takes the lead in the bands freeform-comic-book-romp SAC Attack, listing those chores one must not forget to do, like phoning your mum, making the tea, or feeding the cat but most importantly, one must always remember to avoid zombies!

Sticks-man Neil Warrack describes the albums pen-ultimate number and only instrumental, Think Like A Fish, as “an audio depiction of the dangers involved with ‘think-driving’.”  The band clearly revelling in following this ear-drum workout with a rhetoric warning on the pearls of Pointless Self Indulgence in all aspects of life.

Since their conception in 2007, Super Adventure Club have not only toured with Future of the Left, Danananakroyd and Japandroids but have also taken their blistering live show from Inverness to Cork to Bordeaux, and many hotspots in between. The band are regularly joined onstage by the horse-headed Johny B (this is not a joke - the man really has a horse's head), whose help has ensured that a clutch of well received shows have garnered a cult following all over the UK and into Europe. Not to mention ringing endorsements from Vivian Girls, Artrocker Magazine, and Vic Galloway (BBC Radio 1).

In George A. Romero’s 1968 film Night of the Living Dead the cause of the zombie epidemic is believed to be from high-level radiation brought to the Earth from the Explorer Venus probe. We can only assume that the Super Adventure Club with their unique brand of unconventional and intelligent pop were exposed to these deadly emissions as well, and my God why couldn’t we all have been!

SUPER ADVENTURE CLUB - Pick Up Sticks

ARM35
Released: Monday 4th February 2013
CD / DL

Armellodie Records is proud to introduce Scotland’s Galoshins with not one, but two brain-popping EPs for your aural pleasure.

This is EP2 released on the same day as EP1. Both EPs were released on separate vinyl-replica CDs in digipacks. Limited to 50 copies each.

Surely the finest trio of grizzly-cheeked rockers ever to roll their amps out of Gourock, Inverclyde. Mark Macphail (vocal/keys), James Eyland (vocals/guitar) and Ruraidh MacLeod (drums) are the impenetrable, Galoshins.

Together with Iain Macduff - unofficial fourth member and studio guru – the band has been following their own esoteric and single-minded path since their formation in 2009.

With their furiously buoyant whirlwind of psych, prog, freakbeat, aggro-pop, whatever-it-is, the band originally come to the attention of Armellodie Records in 2010 and were invited to perform at the label’s own ‘Barmellodie’ monthly residency club night in Glasgow. The ball was set in motion for Armellodie to release this double-whammy of EPs, documenting 11 of the group’s sonic adventures to date.

Recorded as separate entities in July 2011 and April 2012, EP1 and EP2 complement each other, whilst documenting the band’s many muso-tentacles.

Moving from wonderfully jarring dischordia to sublime poppiness - sometimes in the same song - Macphail’s whirring organ and stream of lyrical musings pepper the EPs like slippery eels, just eluding you but leaving traces of goo in your ears.

With Eyland’s spiky guitars and MacLeod’s bombastic drum-flurries, Galoshins can be a feral proposition. Yet no matter how frenzied or hectic things appear, each and every song is besieged with hooks so that even the most casual listener can keep swinging.

GALOSHINS - Get Me Out Of This Hole

ARM41
Released: Monday 2nd December 2013
CD / LP / DL

Third (and sadly final) studio album from “Glasgow’s most deliriously imaginative trio” (The List).

If you are one of those avid music lovers that feel so inclined to fit everything you hear into a neat little musical box, (possibly employing the use of hierarchical tree charts and Venn diagrams to find the exact classification of a band’s chosen genre), then Super Adventure Club may fry your brain. With brusque self-confidence and stupendous musical chops Super Adventure Club stand proudly in the revolutionary vanguard of contemporary experimental music. Into the breach they go, taking with them an ever-present sense of humour and sense of the absurd.

Since their conception in 2007, Super Adventure Club have toured their blistering live show from Inverness to Cork to Bordeaux, and many hotspots in between. The band is regularly joined onstage by the horse-headed Johny B (this is not a joke - the man really has a horse’s head) whose help, or hindrance, has ensured that with a clutch of well received shows and the release of two critically acclaimed albums (2009s Chalk Horror! and 2010s Avoid Zombies) the band have garnered a cult following all over the UK and into Europe.

"On their previous album, Super Adventure Club recommended avoiding zombies; now, alas, they’ve become one, with Straight From The Dick arriving posthumously following the trio’s decision to separate earlier in the year. But like a late reel hand grab from the grave, their third album delivers one final (and wholly enjoyable) shock to the system, ensuring that, should the hiatus prove definite, their twisted noise will be sorely missed. 4/5" - The Skinny

Straight From The Dick sees the triumvirate – Bruce Wallace, Mandy Clarke and Neil Warrack – maintain their zen-like focus on memorable hooks and surrealist lyrical imagery. From loungey hip-swinging tales of culture shock (‘Hablo Espanol’), freakish ear-drum workouts (‘Fuck The Pop’, ‘9 Times’), Zappa-esque spaz-jazz (‘Dog With Two Dicks)’, and giddy brain-melting wrong-pop (‘Turns Out My Brain Was My Other Brain’), the band parley with idiosyncratic pop, and parade their ninja-jazz-rock mojo with glee.

On album centrepiece, ‘Between a Sock and a Hard Place’, Wallace sings about people who have fallen in love with things that are not human. Selvi Kumar dedicated his life to a dog after killing another dog. Lee Jin married a pillow of an anime character. Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, 54, whose surname means Berlin Wall in German, wed the concrete structure in 1979 after being diagnosed with a condition called Objectum Sexuality. This song is a perfect example of not only the band’s contagious and slightly deranged sense of humour, but also their enviable ability to pen a tune.

"…a tight collection of wondrously daft songs anchored by the kind of intricate math-rock rigour which normally comes with compulsory po-face. Songs about dogs with double appendages and men falling in love with pillows sit comfortably alongside methodical musicianship – a band worth celebrating 4/5". - The List

A celebratory record, tinged with sadness as Wallace sings on finale ‘Bossa Novice’, ”If I’d done half the things I’d planned to have done, there’d be a lot more done, and it wouldn’t make a difference to anyone.” A fitting sentiment, as on the eighth of August this year, Super Adventure Club played their final show to a sell-out crowd of sweaty devotees in their hometown of Glasgow. With Straight From The Dick the band is cementing their status - North of the border at least – as one of the most innovative and exciting bands to come from our shores. Being a posthumous release, Straight From The Dick is set to shroud the band in its own enigma. Here’s to the legacy!

"Having called time on their musical endeavours, at least in this guise, back in August, the group have managed to sign off in fine style and can rightly look back on the records and live shows of the last five years with a deserved sense of achievement. Hopefully their complex song structures, boundless energy and vitriol won’t be missing from the scene for too long." - Muso’s Guide

SUPER ADVENTURE CLUB - Turns Out My Brain WAS My Other Brain

'Overcoat' is taken from the album, 'Beautiful Ground' available on Armellodie Records from Monday 27 June 2011.

“Overcoat is about a coat I got from my Nanna. She died on Christmas day when I was 7, and all her presents to us were still under the tree. Mine was this burgundy and cream puffy jacket thingy. I cherished that coat, it was a bit too big but I wore it everywhere, and hoped that I’d grow into before it fell apart. So I guess it’s metaphorical as well, about becoming who I’m supposed to be before I… y’know… die ” Jen Macro.


SOMETHING BEGINNING WITH L - Overcoat

Last Night's Party is taken from the album, Beautiful Ground, released via Armellodie Records on Monday 27th June 2011.

A hopeless love song based on a wonderfully romantic connection - “loose-limbed in the back of a taxi, something in his heartache attracts me” sings Macro – but alas it cannot last, as both protagonists are pretending to be someone they are not in order to win each other’s affections, and ultimately, they know it. The sweet synthesizers and playful rhythm do little to soften the sadness-tinged admission that the song bows out on, “this person is not the person that I wanted you to leave with, she’s a liar, she only said those things to catch you, and now she’s gone.”


SOMETHING BEGINNING WITH L - Last Night's Party

Armellodie Records is proud to present The Taxidermist, the fourth full-length album from Thirty Pounds of Bone, released on Monday 23rd March 2015.

ORDER VINYL NOW: http://thirtypoundsofbone.armellodie.com/album/the-taxidermist

Where Johny Lamb’s first three albums - 2006’s The Homeless Children of Migrant Mothers, 2009’s Method, and 2011’s I Cannot Sing You Here But For Songs of Where - all relate heavily to place and itinerancy, rooting themselves (sometimes unconventionally), in folksong, The Taxidermist marks a partial departure from Johny’s previous works. Retaining all the hallmarks that made those other records so special, The Taxidermist is still unmistakably a Thirty Pounds of Bone record, but this time round the ratios have shifted somewhat. 

There are love songs and death songs, as Johny mixes acoustic folk-like songs with distortion smothered Shoegaze, analogue synth, and Salvation Army type brass. It’d be a push to say this is Thirty Pounds of Bone gone pop, but musically there’s a change of focus, and on The Taxidermist we find Johny at his most wistfully romantic.  

Lyrically, there’s an underbelly of the not-quite-right here throughout The Taxidermist.  Whilst never explicit, the themes, characters and contents of these songs seem to flirt with darkness. Whose eyelids are being filled with clay on ‘The Glass of an Iris’? Why is money being tied to thighs on ‘Ribbon’? There is robbery (‘Pasganger, Or The Wagon’), revenge (‘The Expelled’), and resentment (‘All Your Sons’), blood (‘Two Birds in the Brine’), death (‘Before I’m Done’), and regret (I’ll Go Too). But there is atonement, remorse and tenderness too. This is a sentimental record.

Johny plays everything on these recordings, which were made in a cellar somewhere in West Cornwall. After reading a book about taxidermy, Johny recognised parallels between taxidermy and the process of recording. The fixing in time of performance, or more the manipulation of performance to suggest something extra real, hyper real, more than what can be achieved in the flesh. This record comes from that idea, while at the same time resisting the potential to use modern technology to achieve that ‘beyond reality’ sound common in modern recordings. There is no software instrumentation. There are no edits or drop-ins, the instrumental and vocal parts you hear are complete performances. The rough edges and even small mistakes have not been airbrushed out. These recordings are densely layered, each take being a small part of the whole, never to be rendered by an ensemble.

The Taxidermist is available on LP and download from Monday 23rd March 2015 on Armellodie Records.


THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - Ribbon

Armellodie Records is proud to present The Taxidermist, the fourth full-length album from Thirty Pounds of Bone, released on Monday 23rd March 2015.

Where Johny Lamb’s first three albums - 2006’s The Homeless Children of Migrant Mothers, 2009’s Method, and 2011’s I Cannot Sing You Here But For Songs of Where - all relate heavily to place and itinerancy, rooting themselves (sometimes unconventionally), in folksong, The Taxidermist marks a partial departure from Johny’s previous works. Retaining all the hallmarks that made those other records so special, The Taxidermist is still unmistakably a Thirty Pounds of Bone record, but this time round the ratios have shifted somewhat. 

There are love songs and death songs, as Johny mixes acoustic folk-like songs with distortion smothered Shoegaze, analogue synth, and Salvation Army type brass. It’d be a push to say this is Thirty Pounds of Bone gone pop, but musically there’s a change of focus, and on The Taxidermist we find Johny at his most wistfully romantic.  

Lyrically, there’s an underbelly of the not-quite-right here throughout The Taxidermist.  Whilst never explicit, the themes, characters and contents of these songs seem to flirt with darkness. Whose eyelids are being filled with clay on ‘The Glass of an Iris’? Why is money being tied to thighs on ‘Ribbon’? There is robbery (‘Pasganger, Or The Wagon’), revenge (‘The Expelled’), and resentment (‘All Your Sons’), blood (‘Two Birds in the Brine’), death (‘Before I’m Done’), and regret (I’ll Go Too). But there is atonement, remorse and tenderness too. This is a sentimental record.

Johny plays everything on these recordings, which were made in a cellar somewhere in West Cornwall. After reading a book about taxidermy, Johny recognised parallels between taxidermy and the process of recording. The fixing in time of performance, or more the manipulation of performance to suggest something extra real, hyper real, more than what can be achieved in the flesh. This record comes from that idea, while at the same time resisting the potential to use modern technology to achieve that ‘beyond reality’ sound common in modern recordings. There is no software instrumentation. There are no edits or drop-ins, the instrumental and vocal parts you hear are complete performances. The rough edges and even small mistakes have not been airbrushed out. These recordings are densely layered, each take being a small part of the whole, never to be rendered by an ensemble.

The Taxidermist is available on LP and download from Monday 23rd March 2015 on Armellodie Records.


THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - The Glass Of An Iris

Armellodie Records is proud to present the debut release from J. Lynch, the new alter ego of veteran songwriter and misery enthusiast Johny Lamb (Thirty Pounds of Bone).

Here, he has lost the guitars in favour of modular and semi-modular synths, old Casios and phone apps, working with layer upon layer of barely controlled noises, drones, squeals and sequences which he has painstakingly shaped into concise and sort of neat and tidy art-pop songs.

While the songs are made with synthesizers, it would be a stretch to call this synth-pop. The songs are dense, wonky, distorted, sometimes lo-fi, and always sad. J. Lynch reflects (through layered, vocodered and awkwardly pitch-shifted vocals) on his shortcomings as a husband and father, his political weaknesses, his tawdry addictions, Samuel Beckett, and the decline of non-human species. In doing so, he somehow finds both benign resignation and righteous anger, all wrapped up in a melodic, rich, ghostly and fuzzed noise that seems to owe as much to John Grant and Sparklehorse as it does to Wolfgang Reichmann and John Foxx (we also have it on good authority that a lot of Kanye was listened to while this record was made. Like, a lot).

Truthfully, J. Lynch doesn’t really know what this music is, but it did get made, and there is something sincere, something broken and something new within it. Somewhere….

‘extended play’ is released on limited cassette for Cassette Store Day on Saturday 13th October and via all major downloading and streaming services from 26th October 2018.

J.Lynch

J. Lynch - Camier's Song

J. Lynch - I'll Wait (It's Fine)

J. Lynch - Three Motives For Kidnap

J. Lynch - Woodwork

J. Lynch - Bereft

J. Lynch - I Wish

Thirty Pounds of Bone's annual Christmas sing-along...
FREE DOWNLOAD - I Have A Dream
Merry Xmas.

I Have a Dream

Thirty Pounds Of Bone - I Have A Dream

TRAPPED MICE - NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS 
*FREE DOWNLOAD SINGLE* 
TAKEN FROM THE ALBUM "WINTER SUN" 
OUT ON MONDAY 5TH NOVEMBER 2012.

Scurrying in between the cracks of Edinburgh’s genteel high society and the stink of its sordid underbelly are Trapped Mice. A five piece made up of Lucie Miller, Barry Jackson, David Friend, Brian Pokora and front-man Ian Tilling.

Together they have crafted Winter Sun in living rooms and bedrooms across Scotland’s capital. A debut album steeped in the chilly themes of longing, confusion, and a creeping sense of dread at the slow march of “progress”, all tied up in one big melancholic noose.

From the opening accordion driven motif of ‘An Ending’ and into the brazen ‘Cancel Shift’, the songs on Winter Sun take in real life events and divine narrative concerning relationships, integrity and the good fight for artistic credibility.

There’s a sense of a slightly knowing smirk behind some of the tried-and-tested themes of the album, namely heartbreak and abandonment. Be it on the wonderfully exposed ‘Dance While Winter Cries’ or the masterful, ‘Mona Lisa’, it’s hard not to be drawn in by Ian Tilling’s heartfelt lyrical muses, each song unwinding with perfect precision as a prose poem, fantastic songcraft and bared-soul performance.

With elements of the rustic tones of Okkervil River, the humour of Morrissey and the angst of Bright Eyes, this album should appeal to anybody who loves powerful songs performed with abandon. The characters are illuminating, as on ‘Hermit Point’, inspired by a man in the North of Scotland who refused to sell his house to Donald Trump to make way for his coastal leisure development. He is imagined as an old man, in a crumbling cottage by the sea, pondering what may have happened had he sold up. In ‘Quiet Place’, a middle-aged couple embark on a sordid voyage of sexual rediscovery set to some kind of scuzzy avant-folk accompaniment.

As the album plays on, it becomes increasingly obvious that Winter Sun is a glorious anthology of short stories, each one memorable, meaningful and double-edged - that is, an occasionally rusty, serrated edge. When asked about ‘Cameraman’, Tilling drolly replies, “Yeah! A spoken word track with more death and misery! Fuck it, why not?”

At its most stirring on the likes of ‘Night of Broken Glass’ and album kiss-off ‘Demons’, Winter Sun is wistful, poetic, and intelligent, There is nothing clichéd or fake. It is direct from the heart, no bullshit. 'Tis a beautiful creation, but fragile; so tip-toe towards it, lest it shatters.

TRAPPED MICE - Night Of Broken Glass

An absolutely true account of a time spent in Plymouth working for a racist café owner where narcotics anonymous had their meetings - 'Crack Shandy' was the family argot for heroin and crack smoked together.

Taken from the album 'Method' released via Armellodie Records on Monday 6th December 2010.

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - Crack Shandy in the Harbour

A free download from Thirty Pounds Of Bone. Merry Christmas!

Thirty Pounds Of Bone - S.A.D

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE
HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS
FREE DOWNLOAD

Ah, another year and another festive offering from our folkin' hero Thirty Pounds of Bone. Dive in and Merry Christmas!

Thirty Pound of Bone - Have Yourself A Merry Little Xmas

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - HOME FARING
FREE DOWNLOAD SINGLE
TAKEN FROM THE ALBUM 'I CANNOT SING YOU HERE, BUT FOR SONGS OF WHERE'
RELEASED ON MONDAY 6TH MAY 2013.

The son of an ordained clergyman, Johny Lamb (aka Thirty Pounds of Bone) was initially raised on the Shetland island of Unst; he’s always been fascinated with the sea and the fisheries. He has lived all over the British Isles, and has toured extensively throughout Europe. His life revolves around folk music and he believes strongly in innovation and change in traditional music rather than preservation of repertoire, as “a museum piece cannot be a ‘living’ tradition.”

"Home Faring" is the first song to be lifted from the new album, 'I Cannot Sing You Here But For Songs Of Where', the follow up to 2010's 'Method'.

The new record sees Johny further explore his continuing theme of place. Split into four separate locations; (past place, the place of heritage, present place and the in between), the record aims to articulate experiences of itinerancy and second-generation migrancy. 

The album is released on Monday 6th May and is available to Pre-order on CD from http://thirtypoundsofbone.bandcamp.com/album/i-cannot-sing-you-here-but-for-songs-of-where.



THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - Home Faring

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - THE TRUTH OF THE MATTER
FREE DOWNLOAD SINGLE
TAKEN FROM THE ALBUM 'I CANNOT SING YOU HERE, BUT FOR SONGS OF WHERE'
RELEASED ON MONDAY 6TH MAY 2013.

The son of an ordained clergyman, Johny Lamb (aka Thirty Pounds of Bone) was initially raised on the Shetland island of Unst; he’s always been fascinated with the sea and the fisheries. He has lived all over the British Isles, and has toured extensively throughout Europe. His life revolves around folk music and he believes strongly in innovation and change in traditional music rather than preservation of repertoire, as “a museum piece cannot be a ‘living’ tradition.”

"The Truth of the Matter" is the second song to be lifted from the new album, 'I Cannot Sing You Here But For Songs Of Where', the follow up to 2010's 'Method'.

The new record sees Johny further explore his continuing theme of place. Split into four separate locations; (past place, the place of heritage, present place and the in between), the record aims to articulate experiences of itinerancy and second-generation migrancy.

The album is released on Monday 6th May and is available to on CD and download from http://thirtypoundsofbone.bandcamp.com/album/i-cannot-sing-you-here-but-for-songs-of-where.

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - The Truth of the Matter

YIP MAN - EVIL DOPPELGANGER
SINGLE OUT: 30th OCTOBER 2020

“I’m going to stay young and beautiful but I’m going to play hard,” sings Nero, over a bed of scuzzy guitars, spacey-synths, down-tuned vocal harmonies and percussive rhythm. It’s an unashamed slice of guitar pop, deceptively simple and hook-laden. The lyrics are an intriguing mix of juxtapositions as Nero explains, “it’s about that internal struggle that we all face, the good and evil that exist inside of every one of us.” The song builds to an emotional and revealing high before collapsing in a haze of white noise and digital distortion. Evil Doppelganger is the first single to be taken from Yip Man’s forthcoming third album, ‘Cock of the North’, due for release in Spring 2021.

Yip Man - Evil Doppelganger

KILL THE CAPTAINS - DISCO NAZI
FREE DOWNLOAD SINGLE

Taken from the album  “SOUNDS MEAN”
Released on MONDAY 12th AUGUST 2013
ARMELLODIE RECORDS – ARM38
180-GRAM 12" VINYL (WITH CD) & DIGITAL DOWNLOAD
DISTRIBUTION BY CARGO / PROPER DIGITAL

Armellodie Records is proud to present "Sounds Mean", the second full-length album from Sheffield’s best kept secret, Kill The Captains.
 
Leon Carter (Vocals, Guitar), Ric Booth (Guitar, Vocals), Giles Robinson (Bass) and Paul Collins (Drums) are the honourable Captains. "Sounds Mean" sees the band ramp up their brand of new-wave pop and suspense-filled rock’n’roll with shout-along choruses, fizzing dual-guitars and propulsive rhythmic skulduggery.
 
Following on from 2010’s well received debut ("Fun Anxiety"), on "Sounds Mean" the band take to exploring such themes as dance floor puppet masters, sado-masochistic rumpy pumpy, corporate greed and - shrouded in geo-political metaphor - love.
 
The album bursts opens with a bee in its bonnet. Picture a glutinous rich man in a Michelin-starred restaurant. Let's say he’s an investment banker (they're evil aren't they?) stuffing his face on course after course of perfectly sculpted pan-continental cuisine.  He’s picking the bits caught in his teeth with the frail bones of a pensioner who lost their life savings as a result of the financial collapse he created. Throw in a smattering of Dick Dale and a pinch of Marr - that's ‘Umami’.
 
Hot on its heels is ‘Refutenic’, the album’s meanest slice of thrumming basslines, rumbling drums, thrashing guitars and spat out prose. There's a new guy in town, and Kill the Captains don't like the cut of his jib. Not one bit. Despite what everyone else thinks about this silver-tongued cavalier, the Captains won't be having any of his nonsense.
 
Fusing indie-laced XTC-ness with chugging krautrock-esque goodness, ‘The Trial’, demonstrates the band’s imaginative, left of centre intelligence and enviable way with a tune. Leon Carter wryly announcing; 

“Your prescription is ready make your way to the waiting room. Your feedback is valuable we'll swipe your loyalty card.  It was tested on animals, with near matching DNA.  If you have a reaction, use the survey to have your say. See you next time, enjoy your medicine, it will cure your contempt if you do what you're told.” 

A satirical musing on conveyor-belt consumerism, easily digestible products channelled straight to the mouths of sloth-minded consumers. Unchanging bass and driving drums reflect the relentlessness of the machine. 
 
Progressive in nature, ‘Share the Load’ blends Leon Carter’s distinctive and piercing vocals with melodic guitar-lines to create a real sense of tension, before exploding with duelling guitars and spine-tingling bass lines. Ambiguous in its lyrics, it can be read as a devastating power struggle between superpowers, or as a love-song cloaked in a geo-political metaphor. Either way, the outcome is mutually assured destruction. 
 
The album’s lead single, ‘Disco Nazi’, is a bass-driven stomper with an insistent beat that will get even the rhythmically challenged amongst us grooving. Sometimes whatever you do is never quite enough to satisfy the dance floor puppet masters, with their dance-floor dictatorships, sending out dictats to a room full of bodies who would happily dance without the extra encouragement.  As the beats pump and the grooves swell, the tail grows like a Nokia snake chomping an unending supply of pixels. 
 
Elsewhere, ‘The Taking Of’ - a song about loss - provides the album with its most affecting piece - down-tempo and world weary.
 
‘Nowbiter’, however pummels home a fierce excursion in schizoid jangling power pop with svelte, progressive guitars married to a buzzing bass line. 
 
Ending the album on a high note, ‘Safety Words’ puts the ‘’umph’ into triumph with a sensitive musing on the confusing politics of lusty, sado-masochistic rumpy-pumpy. Kill the Captains could never say no to the noose – so long as it’s not tied too tight!

Addictive and enthralling, "Sounds Mean" is the perfect accompaniment whatever your mood, whatever your circumstance. Released on 180-gram 12" vinyl and download from all good record shops and download services from Monday 12th August 2013 via Armellodie Records. 

“…like hitching a ride with The Strokes after they've necked a truckload of psychotropic drugs, careering along majestically before taking several odd little melodic detours - thrilling and disturbing in equal measures.”
MUSIC OMH

“Gorgeous chord changes, chunky basslines, and chugging guitars. Absolutely scrumptious” 
SUBBA-CULTCHA


KILL THE CAPTAINS - Disco Nazi

Thirty Pounds of Bone's annual treat.
FREE DOWNLOAD - Lonely This Christmas
Merry Xmas.

Now That's What I Call a Miserable Christmas

Lonely This Christmas

THIRTY POUNDS OF BONE - Lonely This Christmas

<p class="sideheader2">FIT ABOOT IT?</p>


Armellodie is a tiny wee independent label, stable, collective, R.O.C.K consortium, based in but not exclusive to Glasgow, Scotland.

To describe it neopolitan style, it's a chocolate slab of leftfield rock, a strawberry layer of ice-cold indie and a vanilla scoop of the avant garde. 

Armellodie’s position is missionary, we always finish on top. Only the finest chops musically, lyrically and egotistically will satisfy Armellodie’s strict A+R policy. 

Success doesn’t drive us; we thrive on our underdog status.

If you wanna get in touch then <a href="mailto:info@armellodie.com">drop us an e-mail</a>.



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