ISIS

Sadly this is more of an obituary than a celebration, since ISIS recently declared that they would be calling it a day at the end of their current US tour. Their official statement read:

"ISIS has reached an end. It's hard to try to say it in any delicate way, and it is a truth that is best spoken plainly. This end isn't something that occurred over night and it hasn't been brought about by a single cataclysmic fracture in the band. Simply put, ISIS has done everything we wanted to do, said everything we wanted to say. In the interest of preserving the love we have of this band, for each other, for the music made and for all the people who have continually supported us, it is time to bring it to a close. We've seen too many bands push past the point of a dignified death and we all promised one another early on in the life of the band that we would do our best to ensure ISIS would never fall victim to that syndrome. We've had a much longer run than we ever expected we would and accomplished a great deal more than we ever imagined possible."

And you know what? That's cool. It is widely recognised that it is better to burn out than to fade away; and ISIS leave behind them an impressive musical legacy, having pretty much created an entire genre of music and then firmly established themselves as forerunners at the head of it. They have inspired and influenced countless other bands, they have never released a bad record, they have never compromised and they have never stood still. Bravo chaps.

Damn.

Website: http://www.isistheband.com

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/isis

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isis_(band)

Palehorse

It is entirely possible that Palehorse have a mission, and that that mission is to create the most unlistenable dirge that can be imagined. And there's a lot of evidence to support this idea. They have no guitars, instead favouring two basses turned up to 11 backed by powerful drums. Vocals are mostly delivered in the form of guttural screaming; and the lyrical matter doesn't exactly make for feel good hits of the summer. Palehorse are wilfully abrasive, noisy and unpleasant.

But that kind of suggests that they're just a bunch of talentless bastards smashing at their instruments with hammers and spitting on people; and that simply isn't the case.

They don't just try to bludgeon the listener into submission with a savage aural battering; they write songs that are far more intelligent and far less predictable than that. I'd call it post-sludge; but that sounds desperately pretentious. Pretend you never read that.

Fuck it. Here's what Palehorse have to say on the matter.

"Palehorse write and play music. Palehorse do not wear special clothes to do this. Palehorse do not have special artwork to create the right mood or ambience. Palehorse don't come up with verbose explanations about the meaning of their music. If you wish to judge the music we write based on what we look like, what we say or how we act then it's your business, but it seems a bit silly to us..."

Yeah, that sounds about right to me. The only thing I would add is that Palehorse are probably about a million times better than anything else you might be listening to right now.

Website: http://www.theaugeanstables.blogspot.com/

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/thispalehorse

Wikipedia: nope

5ive

It's not easy to find stuff about this band on the internets.

The main reason for this is that towards the end of the nineties, the same bunch of jerks responsible for the ten-ovaried abomination that is The Spice Girls decided the time was right to inflict another boy band on the world. They were called Five; except for a brief period of a year or so, when they called themselves 5ive. It was probably during this period that they sold roughly a bazillion records.

The basic upshot of this is that search results for "5ive" tend to be dominated by stuff relating to a manufactured quintet of insipid, soulless pieces of shit, one of whom won the Smash Hits award for Best Haircut three years in a row (thanks Wikipedia); and that when the boy band decided to reform a few years ago, the real 5ive had to change their name to 5ive's Continuum Research Project. Thankfully, only four of the original boy band were up for it; no-one cared, and so within a year they disappeared back into obscurity, hopefully never to seen or heard again.

That said, the real 5ive seem to keep such a low profile that even if we lived in some kind of manufactured-pop-free utopia, it would be a bit of struggle to find out about them. Making far more noise than should be possible for just two men, their earlier efforts were typically long instrumentals that sound like little more than extended jam sessions; dense walls of droning, sludgy guitar noise, punctuated by the odd psychedelic moment. The most recent record, Hesperus, is made up of shorter songs that seem more insistent, less rambling; almost as though they knew what they were doing before they went into the studio.

Fact is, it's all good. And by good, I do mean stunningly good.

Website: nope

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/thereal5ive

Wikipedia: nope