Free Swim

You can generally tell who was last using the kitchen in my house by the station that the radio is set to.

The Pixie tends to go for Absolute 80's/90's, a dizzying array of forgotten hits that by and large smash all modern music into sequinned dust.

The Frenchie is more of a Jack FM kinda guy. Nice and safe and mostly harmless.

I like BBC Radio 6, a station with so few listeners that it has no target demographic and hence tries to please nobody. The neat thing about that is that they usually play stuff that you've never heard before; and even if it's a bit shit, it's still better than the mundanely familiar. Sort of.

And every so often, you'll hear something that you've never heard before that is really quite splendid - like Free Swim, for example. As far as I can tell, Free Swim are a London-based indie band consisting of at least one person. They have a number of EPs that can be downloaded for free from Bandcamp. Each seems to tell some kind of story; for example, Dennis is about "A budding bromance... inadvertantly derailed by an undeniably lovely girl girl called Sophie Buttercup", while Two Hands is OK is the tale of a man who decides to graft an extra pair of hands to his chest so that he can deal with paperwork more efficiently. Yolanda the Panda is about a panda.

It's all very smashing and whimsical, and utterly the sort of thing that I shouldn't like at all.

Website: http://freeswim.bandcamp.com/

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

Wikipedia: nope

All Pigs Must Die

All Pigs Must Die are a band composed of fellows that play in other bands. The traditional term for such an outfit is supergroup.

The trouble with this term is that it kind of has an all-stars vibe to it; there is an implication that each of the aforementioned fellows is already a world famous virtuoso in his own right, and their combining of talents is the kind of earth-shattering event foretold in Sumatran prophecies and heralded by the death of planets.

Which is almost bang on, except that pretty much no-one has ever heard of the bands that these guys usually play in (Converge, The Hope Conspiracy and Bloodhorse). So supergroup perhaps isn't quite right...

But mundanegroup makes them sound kinda boring, splendidgroup sounds sarcastic and prettycoolgroup is a bit non-committal.

I'm going to go with fuckingsavagefacepeelinghardcoremergeforthekillgroup.

Website: http://shirtsanddestroy.com/all_pigs_must_die

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

Wikipedia: nope

Lafaro

These noisy bastards are single-handedly responsible for making my housemate Dom believe that he didn't like And So I Watch You From Afar.

A ridiculous concept, clearly. But as the opening band for their fellow countrymen, Lafaro were so loud that my Dom's delicate ears were annihilated; and he spent the rest of the gig with a pained expression on his face, whimpering about the noise.

This is possibly more indicative of my housemate's desperately low volume threshold, rather than Lafaro's thunderous output; but there's no denying that these guys smash out some pretty hefty riffs.

Maximum rock, minimum fucking about.

Except for all the fucking about.

Website: http://www.lafaro.co.uk/

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

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lafaro

Blak Nite

I first stumbled across this chap a few months back, when the good people at Holy Roar records were kind enough to chuck in a free Tangled Talk label sampler with a load of stuff I'd ordered. There was a whole bunch of cool shit on there, but Blak Nite stood out mainly by virtue of being a great dirty spike of electronica sticking out of a swirling mass of hardcore.

Naturally I forgot about it almost immediately, until some absent-minded trawling through the internets revealed that Blak Nite had released a 10" remix album during the summer. It is of course very splendid indeed; a dark slab of glitchy, sinister electronica that doesn't resort to the sort of dubsteppy wob-by-numbers that seems to be all the rage these days.

Behold!

Website: http://music.tangledtalk.com/album/versionen

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

Wikipedia: nope