FIVE FAVOURITES: PETSEMATARY

Oxford newcomer PETSEMATARY creates atmospheric, shoegazey soundscapes that in spite of their clear production, brood with a raw intensity. She recorded her first EP VOL I, independently, with all proceeds going to the charities Mind and Shelter.

We think one of the best ways to get to know a new artist is by asking them what music inspired them to write in the first place. We caught up with PETSEMATARY to ask her about her “Five Favourites” – five albums that have influenced her songwriting techniques. Check out her choices below, and make sure you listen to her track ‘Tall Boys’ at the end of this post.

 

1. Jeff Buckley – Grace
This album pretty much made me want to make music. There’s no other way to describe Jeff’s voice other than pure self-expression in sonic form and it’s just fucking magical to listen to. It was the first time I’d heard music that made me want to smile and cry and scream and sing and it just made me want to use my voice in the most true way possible. Singing is a really intimate and personal thing. Your voice is you and there’s not much you can do to change it, and I think that Jeff’s music encouraged me to be as true to that as possible. The album is a kind of beautiful mess of different sounds – Grace is like an orchestral and cinematic love song, whereas tracks like ‘So Real’ and ‘Dream Brother’ are dark and abstract and dreamlike, and Jeff’s voice traverses to whatever depths the songs take him. There’s a lot of darkness in the songs but also there’s this hopefulness and light which really inspires me.

2. Emma Ruth Rundle – Marked For Death
I love everything about Emma. Her songs are dark and twisted and raw and I just think that she’s one of the most powerful female musicians around at the moment. I admire that her songs are both honest but also elusive – she manages to paint scenarios that don’t need to be explicit lyrically, and that makes them all the more powerful. Her guitar work was also a massive turning point in how I approached writing. Even though I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid it has always been something I’ve felt self-conscious about or something I should always work a little harder at, and something that I have always felt I am inferior at among my male peers. Listening to Emma’s work made me realise that being good at guitar doesn’t need to mean being able to shred scales as fast as all the other guitar guys, but that you can make hauntingly beautiful and unique soundscapes through space, open tunings and effects.

On the title track ‘Marked For Death’ she has these beautiful sparse reverb-drenched plucked guitars that implode into a haze of delayed slide guitars in the chorus – this album pretty much made me want to put slide guitar on every track I make ever. Lyrically I also really admire her. Tracks like ‘Medusa’ and ‘Hand of God’ made me think a lot about female characters in literature and mythology and how they can sort of serve as a way of communicating my own experiences. I think there’s a lot of power in reclaiming those old tropes about women – the seductress, the woman scorned etc. All of those ideas are constructed as reactions to (and fear of) female power, and I feel like in reclaiming them in songwriting or any narrative they can become a way of coming to terms with your own experience. I feel power in reclaiming my own experience through that lens.

3. Elliott Smith – Figure 8
Elliott was the master of making the most bleak things sound melodically beautiful and uplifting. My favourite Elliott record constantly fluctuates, but for songwriting I always seem to go back to Figure 8. His lyrics can be both candid and enigmatic, and just in the way he sings there is an honesty and vulnerability which I find really inspiring. His songs are all feel and no bullshit, and it’s that sort of understated genius aspect which I love so much about all of his music.

The songs are vulnerable and raw but not afraid to hit where it hurts, and I think it just shows that being able to saw how you really feel is a lot of the time more powerful than dressing stuff up in metaphor. That sort of honesty opens you up in songwriting and that really inspired me in how I wanted to communicate my ideas through my songs. I love the arrangements on this album. Obviously his acoustic tracks are beautiful enough as they are but tracks like ‘Wouldn’t Mama Be Proud’, ‘Junk Bond Trader’ and ‘Happiness’ are just really powerful and dynamic to me in terms of their instrumentation.

“All I used to be will pass away and then you’ll see that all I want now is happiness for you and me” – the lyrics really are just bleak as hell yet he manages to twist them into an uplifting and harmonically beautiful track, and I guess its that incongruity between the dark and the light which makes this album and Elliott’s songwriting in general all the more twisted and brilliant to me. It’s all just so beautiful and haunting.

4. PJ Harvey – Is This Desire?
This record has so much depth and dynamic, and PJ is the mistress of dark and light and just everything to me. There’s a lot of noise and dissonance to the songs and I think they all speak to this theme of instinct and rawness which lie behind a lot of the tracks. Tracks like ‘A Perfect Day Elise’ and ‘The Sky Lit Up’ have these hazy distorted soundscapes, and PJ’s voice can go from whisper to growl to scream to ghostly wailing, and I think she’s just an incredibly powerful songwriter and performer. It’s sorta like a constant fluctuating between chaos and calm.

My favourite track on the record probably is the title track, ‘Is This desire?’. The simplicity and honesty of the words, the stripped back accompaniment and vocal are just really evocative to me. It’s my favourite record of hers because it just feels really raw and intimate, and again no-bullshit. I like the idea of these female protagonists which drive the story of the songs – Elise, Angelene, Catherine and so on. From that angle it speaks to me as a record about raw female experience, passion and desire, and I think that the same honesty in reclaiming your own desires and instinctual emotions is what inspired me when making Petsem Vol I. Desire as instinct, possessiveness and anger as instinct and so on.

5. Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream
Billy Corgan for me is one of the most important songwriters (although he is eminently memeable) and I think Siamese Dream is testament to that. It’s just one of my favourite guitar albums ever. There’s a sorta surreal circus-like feel about the songs – it’s sludgy and psychy but has a really great pop melodic feel to it. You have the spacey sleepy-eyed dream tracks like ‘Luna’ and ‘Spaceboy’, which are really beautiful and surreal, but then you also have the way songs like ‘Soma’ and ‘Silverfuck’ soar between sparse reverby guitars to heavy sludge vibes. It’s dynamic and exciting, and an album I go back to again and again when I feel uninspired or am struggling to write. The songs constantly travel to parts you aren’t really expecting. They can be grungey and dark and heavy, but also upbeat and light, all the while with fucking great vocal melodies and harmonies. Also Corgan is a gift to this earth and we don’t deserve him.

Thanks to PETSEMATARY for sharing her favourites with us. Follow her on Facebook & Bandcamp for more updates.

Kate CrudgingtonLeave a comment

LISTEN: HunBjørn – ‘Who Are We To Love’

Danish electro-pop artist HunBjørn – which roughly translates as “small bear” – has shared a new element of her musical universe in the form of single ‘Who Are We To Love’. It’s a dreamy combination of synths, distorted guitars and sweet melancholic vocals.

HunBjørn (aka Ulla Pihl) was the former lead singer and songwriter in the experimental pop band Lima Lima, but now she’s recording as a solo artist. She released her debut EP In Vacuo in September of 2018, and began growing her fan base on social media by using a messenger-bot called the “She Bear Bot”. It’s an interactive behind the scenes experience for her EP that fans could join, and includes personal vlogs about every song and the story behind it.

Now, HunBjørn is ready with a new set of stories on her second EP Next Summer. She produced the record herself and it was mixed by previous collaborator Brian Batz (aka Sleep Party People). ‘Who Are We To Love’ is the first single, and it’s a love song to the environment, written to remind us that taking care of it is the responsibility of all of us.

Combining both organic and digital synth textures, HunBjørn has created a twinkling track full of her soothing vocals. Speaking about the single, she explains: “For a long time, I had been wanting to write a song about the environment expressing my concerns about where we’re heading. But I didn’t want the song to be sanctimonious or a lifted finger. So instead I tried to express the double standards that I myself apply. I was planning to fly to the other side of the world, well knowing how big my CO2 footprint would be. At the same time I see myself as environmentally conscious person. So I’ve tried to express those opposing feelings in the song. How much is just words and how much do we really act? How much do we leave for our decision makers or even worse – for our kids?

The official music video for the song is directed by Daniel Charluck Garrelts from Karma Film. HunBjørn’s pregnant body is painted in gold as a picture of the earth, which is marred by black oil as a symbol of how we treat the earth and what our children are born into. Take a look at the footage below and follow HunBjørn on Facebook for more updates.

Kate Crudgington
@KCBobCut

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FIVE FAVOURITES: Lia Braswell (A Place To Bury Strangers)

Brooklyn’s A Place To Bury Strangers have been launching sonic assaults on the eardrums of their cult following for over a decade. Driving the trio’s sound is drummer Lia Braswell; who plays with a raw, punishing, and unpredictable style that’s best appreciated live.

If you’ve never experienced APTBS’s live show, you now have access to the next best thing: London’s Fuzz Club recorded a live session with the band last year and have released the recording exclusively on vinyl (available for purchase here).

We wanted to know more about what drives Lia to be the expert musician that she is, so we asked her to share her “Five Favourite” albums with us. Check out her choices below, and make sure you watch the Fuzz Club recording of ‘Punk Back’ at the end of this post too!

1. The Slits – Cut
When I first listened to this album, it changed my perspective of how punk music could sound. Primal, evocative, sensual but also very feminine. Something like an album that either came out of an imaginative shower or a communal dance around a bonfire, both introspective yet objective and literate. Initially, it was the album that I was searching for all throughout my angsty and awkward junior high school years, but didn’t find until after I was out of school. Then again, it might have inspired me to drop out before graduating!

2. Scout Niblett – The Calcination of Scout Niblett 
Simple, jagged, heavy. This album CUTS. It’s the inner snarky child who takes back their power and runs with it as an awakened grown up. After my roommate and I discovered that we have a mutual love for Scout, we busted out this record and started interpretive dancing to all the motions of fuzzed out guitar bends and primal drum breakdowns. This album brings so much raw emotion into an empowering force of self-affirming vigilance. Hell YES.

3. Broadcast – Future Crayon
Enchanting, subjective, expansive. What a beautiful masterpiece of subtle psychedelia mixed with dreamscapes that continue to resonate in the mind long after listening to the record. Such looseness in the drums, atmospheric bliss all around, and one of the most controlled and calming voices that graced this planet for far too short a life. It dials my heartbeat into a harmonious wake of contentment.

4. Max Roach and Oscar Brown Jr. – We Insist! Freedom Now Suite 
This is the album that makes jazz what it means to me. Historical, melodic, passionate, and rhythmic. What a powerful album. It is rich with so much history and depth. No matter how many times you listen, you still can’t break into it. You can’t break it down. It is still alive. It is still so real and raw nearly sixty years after it was recorded. This is the kind of album that should be explored in educational institutions and should remain to be one of the most prolific records ever to have been recorded.

5. Department of Eagles – In Ear Park
A bit out of left field here, but this album was pretty essential to my life when it first came out. The melodies, the harmonies, the rhythm of the album catches me in a way that not many other albums have. It evokes a melancholy wrapped up in a waltz of dreamscapes along a tired river. I will most likely listen to this album when I am sixty years old and suddenly memories that were long forgotten will suddenly appear as if they were of the yesterdays.

Huge thanks to Lia for sharing her favourites. We’ve got some listening to catch up on! Follow A Place To Bury Strangers on Facebook for more updates.

Kate CrudgingtonLeave a comment