Nuggets - 12 May 2008

Your Demise - Blood Stays On The Blade
By Simon T Diplock
After spending the last few years battling toilet venue tour schedules, injuries, attitudes and losing enough members to form three other bands, things are finally looking up for Your Demise. More recently the St. Albans crew have taken to stages as big as Brixton Academy, signed with the same label that look after Bring Me The Horizon and laid down this, a short and spiky but fierce and fucking powerful middle-finger of an EP. Hell, the raw rage of the title track alone is enough to convince us that this little band with bad luck could actually be the next big hardcore thing. Keep note.

Bedford Falls – Savings And Loan
By Simon T Diplock
Lovely stuff this, like The Lemonheads or Leatherface or something J Robbins has got his wonderfully grubby hands on, but only, y’know, from Cardiff. By their own admission ‘Savings And Loan’, the second album from Bedford Falls, is made up of emo melancholy and sad songs about girls, but with songs like the super-melodic ‘Slowdancing’, the fizzy, catchy spark of ‘Paperbacks’, and the touching sway of ‘Temperancetown’ on their side, it’s easy to forgive them sounding a little soppy sometimes. Sadly, in today’s fickle, mindless, and mega-money-orientated music business, the Bedford boys will have to fight hard to go far beyond the valleys, but in a perfect world these songs would be on your radio every single day. Superb.

Peter Moren – The Last Tycoon
By Lisa Holmes
As the Peter of Peter, Bjorn and John, Moren has quite a lot to live up to. Suffice to say there isn’t any whistling on this record. There is however a lot of strummed guitar and tuneful harmonica and as a rounded, multi-instrumental collection of indie folk songs this couldn’t be much more on the mark than it is. There is a distinct modern European feel to proceedings on tracks like ‘Le Petit Coeur’. This is classy and restrained album; if it were a piece of clothing it would be a Chanel smoking jacket. (Er, good to know? - Ed)

HIM – Digital Versatile Doom: Live at the Orpheum Theatre XXXVII A.S
By Simon T Diplock
Ok so they’re a certifiable success story, they’re dab hands at dramatic imagery, and it’s clear from this, their first DVD, that HIM draw devoted crowds, but none of that stops the Finnish quintet from being one of the most lifeless rock acts touring today. Lethargy looms from the off too- ‘Passion's Killing Floor’ inspiring sleepy eyes even among the band members, frontman Ville Valo drawling his dreary way through ‘Buried Alive By Love’, and ‘Join Me’ sloping out with all the dynamism of a dying animal. Mid-way through it’s clear the only excitement coming is when one of guitarist Linde’s horrific dreadlocks looks like it’s about to reach out to swallow a front-row fan or two and by show’s end even that highlight has been sponged from memory by the repetitive, grey mess HIM make. Dire.

Kathleen Edwards - Asking For Flowers
By Charlotte Otter
Kathleen Edwards is a Canadian who crafts music that often sounds more American than the real thing. ‘Asking For Flowers’, is her third album, the first to be properly released in the UK. In it she paints images of a road trip between New York and Ontario, penning a fierce, 'Crazy Horse'-ish squall about crack, murder and racism in her own back yard in ‘O Canada and an obligatory protest song in the form of ‘Oil Man's War.’ Though Edwards can count guitar and piano playing in her arsenal of skills, it is her vocals that give the most weight to ‘Asking For Flowers’; plaintive, raspy, quite masculine, her voice, sincere and aggressive, immediately sets her apart from her contemporaries.