Track Of The Day: Screaming Toenail – ‘I.O.U’

Having blown us away with the impassioned magnificence of their live show at The Finsbury last December, and with performances for the likes of Decolonise Festival and Afropunk Battle Of The Bands under their belts, anti-colonial queer punks Screaming Toenail have become firm favourites here at GIHE and their message is more resonant now than ever before.

Oozing a seething energy as a whirring tension builds with jangling hooks, new single ‘I.O.U’ asserts that we are worth so much more than our wages, and that we don’t owe our bosses, landlords, or this racist government, anything. Propelled by an impassioned cathartic rage and swirling magnetism, its raw, angst-driven power immerses the listener in its striking, empowering message. As front person Jacob repeats the refrain “I owe you nothing” with a fierce intensity, you’re left – fists-clenched – ready to come together in solidarity and rise up against the forces seeking to oppress us.

Screaming Toenail really are one of the most important bands around at the moment; and tracks such as ‘I.O.U’ and accompanying single ‘Sever’ showcase their vibrant spirit and raw emotion perfectly, highlighting how necessary voices like these are in the fight for justice.

Download ‘I.O.U’ and ‘Sever’ on Bandcamp now:

 

Growth, the upcoming new album from Screaming Toenail, is out 28th July.

Mari Lane
@marimindles

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Re-Covered: Sally Anne’s Favourite Illustrated Albums

If you’re anything like us, throughout Lockdown you may have been seeking refuge in some of your favourite records, perhaps rediscovering some old classics along the way. So, for this new feature, illustrator Sally-Anne Hickman re-imagines her favourite ten albums of all time by painting their covers in her own unique style, using watercolours.

Check out the last of Sally-Anne’s choices below!

PJ Harvey – To Bring You My Love
PJ Harvey is a storyteller. This album is a macabre mix of chilling tales told over an unnerving organ and bluesy guitar. Harvey uses biblical imagery in her lyrics, she sings of the dry earth and hell, managing to somehow show a vulnerability in her strong raw vocals. The album is a display of her song writing mastery, PJ Harvey unleashes musical theatrics and melodrama and proves that quiet is just as powerful and disturbing as loud.

 

Sally-Anne Hickman
@sallyshinystars

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Five Favourites: DEHD

Set to release their new album later this week, Chicago’s DEHD have been impressing us this year with a series of gritty singles. With a raw edge, brooding basslines and sultry vocals, they create instantly infectious indie-pop, and we can’t wait to hear the album in its entirety.

We think one of the best ways to get to know a band is by asking what music inspires them or influences their writing. So, we caught up with vocalist Emily Kempf to find out her “Five Favourites” – five albums that she loves more than most. Check out her choices below, and keep your ears out for DEHD’s new release on Friday.

Broncho – Double Vanity /  Bad Behavior
I’m obsessed with Broncho, I think they are a perfect band. I can put them on in any place with any group of people and they just fit in. They are the band everyone wants to know – like a secret you find pride in knowing about first and can’t wait to tell your bestie. If I could marry music I would marry Broncho.

Emily Sprague – Water Memory
I’ve listened to Emily’s ambient masterpiece Water Memory more times than maybe any other record. The amount of times I’ve tucked away in the corner of the tour car with Water Memory in my headphones is countless. It’s my go-to to feel calm, to feel safe, to fall asleep or to mediate with. It’s a beautiful peaceful sweeping record that brings you somewhere far far away and then all the way back home again. It just washes you right out.

Jah Wobble & The Chinese Dub Orchestra
A special choice, several years ago this was a record I originally picked for its cover at random in a record shop in Seattle. It’s best listened to while laying on the floor alone or with a pile or friends. Make sure to have either a ceiling fan or the windows open wide to invite a light breeze. This record is to be listened to with intention – and buckle in, it will soothe and surprise you.

Sibylle Baier – Colour Green
This is a record to cry to, a classic cry album for sure. Her melodies and lyrics and lilting breathless voice make you feel like you’re all grown up and alone in a cottage someplace cold and quiet, with snow on the ground. She’s a secret tear on the pillow late at night when no one’s paying attention. Beautiful and heartbreaking and worth every second.

Sunglow – Hog Heaven
Daniel is a mastermind producer of playful, inspiring soundscapes that energize and incite. I have been a fan for a while and also could put on any of his records to shift a mood in the room instantaneously. It’s fun, fresh and pure freak mode. Don’t shuffle! Play in suggested record order, the songs are all “holding hands”.

Huge thanks to DEHD for sharing their Five Favourites with us! 

Flower Of Devotion, the new album from DEHD, is out this Friday 16th July via Fire Talk. Watch their latest video for ‘Month’ here:

Photo Credit: Alexa Viscius

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Track Of The Day: The C33s – ‘Harpurhey Hostility’

Surf-rock doesn’t always need a beach. For Manchester three-piece, The C33s, the genre that grew out of the Californian coastline is perfectly suitable for their rattling takes on contemporary life. In latest single ‘Harpurhey Hostility’, turning their collective eye on the area of their home town named “the worst place in England” in a 2007 headline by the Manchester Evening News. Throwing the genre’s snappy guitar lines in with a blast of Anglo punk lyricism gives the band’s observations on deep-seated urban decay all the power it needs to be stuck in your head for weeks.

Dogs bark, a siren wails and a dirt bike engine revs – as introductions go, this one’s about as uncompromising as the song that follows. There’s no gentle lead-in for ‘Harpurhey Hostility’; it’s straight into the riffs, slamming into top gear, replete with a few quintessentially surf yelps courtesy of drummer Judy Jones, who takes lead vocals here.  There’s no verse-chorus-verse either: just twelve lines sung either side of an instrumental section. That being said, there’s an appeal to the sparseness of the lines – reflecting the setting of the song, and its video – and the mentions of local politician and Harpurhey councillor Patrick Karney and “wasps instead of worker bees” are a fond ribbing of Mancunian sensibilities. Pleasantly raw as it develops, the track reveals it owes as much to garage as it does to surf, with kicking bass and blamming drums that only lull slightly to allow for a trigger-finger lead guitar solo, before kicking back in for the song’s final twenty seconds. And, after the music echoes out, it closes out with a magnificent vocal snarl – what else?

The accompanying video opens with a quote from one-time Harpurhey resident, and literary explorer of society’s disenfranchised, Anthony Burgess: “It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil”. It’s a fitting choice – a defiant and seemingly contrarian statement about human nature under pressure, much like the track that follows it. The narrative of the video features three Harpurhey residents, and their activities, culminating in a lager and crisps-fuelled revel. That too, seems a conscious choice by the band (who cameo, offering a fag at a bus stop), almost as if to say that those three people could be them, or anyone, if born and raised in a hostile setting, living off their wits. Fortunately for us, Judy, Cav and Ste play music instead.

John McGovern
@etinsuburbiaego

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