Posted in Bootleg Theater on December 19th, 2016 by JJ Koczan
“Lady Freedom” is the leadoff track from London trio Bright Curse‘s 2016 HeviSike Records debut album, Before the Shore (review here). It was premiered here just before the record cam out in May, and even these months later its chorus still resonates with the driving heavy rock that became the central feature of the record as a whole, the band taking a more terrestrial approach following their 2013 self-titled EP (review here). It took me a while to get my head around that change — sometimes one sets up these expectations for where a given outfit might go — but once I did, it was easy to appreciate the straightforward songwriting they had on offer. Dudes weren’t asking for much; they just wanted to rock out and have a good time.
The vibe of their new video for “Lady Freedom” seems pretty similar. Directed by James Cox, it goes room-by-room through frontman Romain Daut‘s flat — they rock in the kitchen, living room, bedroom, and so on — as a rehearsal for a gig, pack everything up and head out. Along the way, sure enough, are some ladies on motorcycles who it seems pretty safe to assume are pretty free, at least for the afternoon of filming. The clip winds up at The Black Heart in Camden Town — on a personal note, it was a joy to recognize the upstairs space before getting confirmation from the PR wire info below that’s where it was filmed — where Bright Curse get booed off the stage only to have the same ladies step up and kick ass in their place as the song comes to an end.
What’s the lesson? Uh, ladies kick ass? Thought it was kind of a given, but nothing wrong with a bit of reinforcement for the idea, I guess.
Bright Curse are set to play Hellfest next year — nice work, gentlemen — and will have more touring besides, so don’t expect it to be too long before we hear from them again. In the meantime, enjoy the video, followed by copious background from Daut via the PR wire.
Dig:
Bright Curse, “Lady Freedom” official video
London power trio Bright Curse, who are set to play France’s Hellfest in 2017 headlined by rock superstars Deep Purple and Aerosmith, are currently celebrating a successful year; 2016 has seen their debut full-length released to critical acclaim and a relentless touring schedule has allowed them to perform for audiences in the UK and Europe. To top it off, the band has just unveiled a video for album-opener ‘Lady Freedom’.
Regarding the video’s biker theme, guitarist and singer Romain Daut explains “I started riding and following the custom motorcycle scene a couple of years ago and discovered some of the best people in the world; some of the most badass women – and that’s what I wanted in this short film; amazing ladies saving our asses! With the help of Kingdom of Kicks in Hackney and Our Black Heart in Camden, we found those girls!”
Discussing the track Daut states “Lady Freedom was one of the first songs I wrote for the album, a song about how we should respect the opposite sex, how we should embrace the fact that men would not exist without women, how we owe them our freedom…”
“We shot everything in London. It took us three days,” explains the frontman. “That was the first time Bright Curse had to act! You’ll probably notice that it was easier for some of us than others… The video was directed by James Cox without whom nothing would have been possible; the most talented director we know, he made everything so easy and smooth!”
“It was a lot of fun and I think we have a taste for it now, freezing our balls early morning, drink nothing but coffee all day, having the neighbours ringing our bell in the afternoon because they ‘would like us to find an other place to do that’ and telling them they’ll have to live with it… I mean, I’ll play music in my fucking kitchen if I want to, right?!”
Posted in Features on December 15th, 2016 by JJ Koczan
Please note: This post is not culled in any way from the Year-End Poll, which is ongoing. If you haven’t yet contributed your favorites of 2016 to that, please do.
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Of all the lists I do to wrap up or start any given year, this is the hardest. As someone obviously more concerned with first impressions than I am and thus probably better-dressed once said, you only get one chance at them. For bands, that can be a vicious bite in the ass on multiple levels.
To wit, you put out a great debut, fine, but there’s a whole segment of your listeners who’re bound to think you’ll never live up to it again. You put out a meh debut, you sell yourself short. Or maybe your debut is awesome but doesn’t really represent where you want to be as a band, so it’s a really good first impression, but a mistaken one. There are so many things that can go wrong or go right with any LP, but with debuts, the stakes are that much higher because it’s the only time you’ll get the chance to engage your audience for the first time. That matters.
And when it comes to putting together a list of the best debuts of the year, how does one begin to judge? True, some of these acts have done EPs and singles and splits and things like that before, and that’s at least something to go on, but can one really be expected to measure an act’s potential based on a single collection of songs? Is that fair to anyone involved? Or on the other side, is it even possible to take a debut entirely on its own merits, without any consideration for where it might lead the band in question going forward? I know that’s not something I’ve ever been able to do, certainly. Or particularly interested in doing. I like context.
Still, one presses on. I guess the point is that, like picking any kind of prospects, some will pan out and some won’t. I’ve done this for enough years now that I’ve seen groups flame or fade out while others have risen to new heights with each subsequent release. It’s always a mix. But at the same time, it’s important to step back and say that, as of today, this is where it’s at.
And so it is:
The Obelisk Presents: The Top 20 Debut Albums of 2016
1. King Buffalo, Orion
2. Elephant Tree, Elephant Tree
3. Heavy Temple, Chassit
4. Holy Grove, Holy Grove
5. Worshipper, Shadow Hymns
6. Vokonis, Olde One Ascending
7. Wretch, Wretch
8. Year of the Cobra, In the Shadows Below
9. BigPig, Grande Puerco
10. Fuzz Evil, Fuzz Evil
11. Bright Curse, Before the Shore
12. Conclave, Sins of the Elders
13. Pale Grey Lore, Pale Grey Lore
14. High Fighter, Scars and Crosses
15. Spirit Adrift, Chained to Oblivion
16. Bellringer, Jettison
17. Church of the Cosmic Skull, Is Satan Real?
18. Merchant, Suzerain
19. Beastmaker, Lusus Naturae
20. King Dead, Woe and Judgment
Honorable Mention
There are many. First, the self-titled from Pooty Owldom, which had so much weirdo charm it made my head want to explode. And Iron Man frontman Dee Calhoun‘s acoustic solo record was technically a debut. And Atala‘s record. And Horehound. And Mother Mooch. And Domkraft. And Spaceslug. And Graves at Sea? Shit. More than a decade after their demo, they finally put out a debut album. And Second Grave‘s full-length would turn out to be their swansong, but that doesn’t take away from the quality of the thing. There were a lot of records to consider in putting this list together. As always, it could’ve been a much longer list.
For example, here are 20 more: Swan Valley Heights, Arctic, Blues Funeral, Teacher, Psychedelic Witchcraft, Nonsun, Duel, Banquet, Floodlore, Mindkult‘s EP, Mountain Dust, Red Lama, Red Wizard, Limestone Whale, Dunbarrow, Comacozer, Sinister Haze, Pants Exploder, Akasava, Katla and No Man’s Valley. That’s not even the end of it. I could go on.
Notes
It was a fight to the finish. There’s always one, and as late as yesterday I could be found kicking back and forth between King Buffalo and Elephant Tree in the top spot. What was it that finally put King Buffalo‘s Orion over Elephant Tree‘s self-titled? I don’t know. Ask me tomorrow and the answer might be completely different.
They had a lot in common. Not necessarily in terms of style — King Buffalo basked in spacious Americana-infused heavy psych jams while Elephant Tree proffered more earthbound riffing and melodies — but each executed memorable songs across its span in a way that would be unfair to ask of a debut. The potential for what both bands can turn into down the line played a part in the picks, but something else they share between them is that the quality of the work they’re doing now warrants the top spots. Orion and Elephant Tree were great albums, not just great first albums.
From there, we see a wide swath of next-generation encouragement for the future of heavy rock, whether it’s coming from Sweden’s Vokonis or Philadelphia’s Heavy Temple, or London’s Bright Curse, or Los Angeles duo BigPig. The latter act’s punkish fuzz definitely benefited from guitarist/vocalist Dino von Lalli‘s experience playing in Fatso Jetson, but one hopes that as the years go on his own multifaceted songwriting style will continue to grow as well.
A few offerings weren’t necessarily unexpected but still lived up to the anticipation. High Fighter‘s EP prefaced their aggro sludgecore well. Ditto that for the grueling death-sludge of Massachusetts natives Conclave. The aforementioned Bright Curse, Merchant, Fuzz Evil, Atala, Bellringer, Holy Grove, Wretch and Worshipper all had offerings of one sort or another prior to their full-length debuts — in the case of Bellringer, it was just a series of videos, while Wretch had the entire The Gates of Slumber catalog to fall back on — but each of those albums offered surprises nonetheless.
It would’ve been hard not to be taken by the songwriting on display from the likes of Holy Grove, Year of the Cobra, Pale Grey Lore and Beastmaker, who between them covered a pretty broad variety of atmosphere but found ways to deliver high-quality crafted material in that. Those albums were a pleasure to hear. Put Boston’s Worshipper in that category as well, though they were just as much a standout from the pack in terms of their performance as what they were performing. Speaking of performance, the lush melodies from Church of the Cosmic Skull and classic progressive flourish were enough to make me a believer. Simply gorgeous. And one-man outfit Spirit Adrift shined, if in that matte-black doom kind of way, on an encouraging collection of modern melancholic heavy that seemed to hint at sprawl to come.
As we get down to the bottom of the list we find Pennsylvania ambient heavy post-rockers King Dead. Their Woe and Judgment was released digitally last year (2015) but the LP came out earlier this year, so I wasn’t quite sure where to place them ultimately. I know they got some mention on the 2015 lists somewhere, but while they’re an act who’ve flown under a lot of people’s radar as yet, I have good feelings about how they might continue to dig into their sound and the balance of bleakness and psychedelic color they bring to their material. They’re slated for a follow-up in 2017, so this won’t be the last list on which they appear in the next few weeks.
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Like I said at the outset, putting out a debut album is a special moment for any band. Not everyone gets to that point and not everyone gets beyond it, so while a list like this is inherently bound to have some element of speculation, it’s still a worthy endeavor to celebrate the accomplishments of those who hit that crucial moment in their creative development. Hopefully these acts continue to grow, flourish, and build on what they’ve thus far been able to realize sonically. That’s the ideal.
And before I go, once again, let me reinforce the notion that I recognize this is just a fraction of the whole. I’d like it to be the start of a conversation. If there was a debut album that kicked your ass this year and you don’t see it here, please drop a note in the comments below. I’m sure I’ll be adding more honorable mentions and whatnot over the next couple days, so if you see glaring omissions, let’s have ’em.
London trio Bright Curse release their debut album, Before the Shore, May 13 on HeviSike Records. It’s among the most awaited debuts of the last couple years, the band having made a striking impression with their 2013 self-titled EP (review here) and subsequent Shaman single (review here) while cycling through a couple shifts in lineup that have brought guitarist/vocalist Romain Daut and drummer Zacharie Mizzi together with bassist Max Ternebring for the seven-track/43-minute LP, which was produced by the band and J.B. Pilon at Rock of London Studios with mastering by Jaime Gomez Arellano at Orgone Studios.
Topped off with striking artwork by Adam Burke, it’s also a release that dramatically repositions the group from where they were three years ago stylistically, swapping out the heavy psychedelia of their EP for a more clear-headed approach driven particularly by Daut‘s vocals and a spirit of modernized-sounding classic heavy rock that recalls the clarity in the production of the latest Kadavar without aping that band’s methods otherwise. Bright Curse‘s material is more flowing, more gradual, less directly playing to pop traditions, but a focus remains on songcraft, the bulk of the tracks running in the five-to-six-minute range, with brooding closer “Earth’s Last Song” longer at 8:29.
A rampant emotionalism ties the songs together, from opener “Lady Freedom” to the Graveyardian melancholia of “Candles and Flowers,” but moods nonetheless vary between them, and from front to back, Before the Shore moves smoothly through its course, flourishes like the spoken sample in “Cheating Pain” and the organ in the penultimate highlight “Northern Sky” adding to the context overall. And though they’ve grown into a more straightforward-sounding act overall, Bright Curse still find room to offer a jammy sensibility in the swinging solo section of “The Shore” and in the bluesy leads of semi-cultish centerpiece “Walking in a Graveyard (Bloody Witch),” which are offset by the album’s most fervent stomp, Mizzi‘s snare punctuating the natural but not vintage tones of Daut and Ternebring as Daut pushes his voice toward and past the breaking point for not the first time.
His stepping forward as a frontman becomes a defining characteristic of Before the Shore, and the command shown in either the quiet stretches of “Cheating Pain” and “Earth’s Last Song” or the more brash thrust of “Lady Freedom” and cowbell-inclusive swing of “Candles and Flowers” is not to be discounted in terms of the overarching impression the record makes. Listening back to the EP, Daut gave a strong vocal performance there as well, but the context was different, the tones surrounding thicker and more encompassing, whereas the crispness in the presentation of Before the Shore really gives him the space to shine in his delivery, somewhat indebted to Magnus Pelander in cadence but continuing to develop in identity as well.
That’s not to take anything away from the chemistry of Bright Curse as a whole, who’ve clearly spent the time since their first outing refining their approach. That shows itself throughout Before the Shore, whether it’s the catchy hooks of “Lady Freedom” and “Cheating Pain” or the more patient builds of “Northern Sky” and “Earth’s Last Day,” which takes a more linear turn where earlier cuts like “Walking in a Graveyard (Bloody Witch)” ebbed and flowed.
The plays in structure and what Daut, Ternebring and Mizzi are able to execute within them, particularly when taking into account that this is their first full-length, remain impressive, and while I’ll allow that part of me misses the psychedelic vibe of the EP — part of me always misses the psychedelic vibe — the flow they conjure here is palpable between tracks and goes a long way toward showing where their progression is headed. It’s a positive direction, and in the interim, Before the Shore marks the arrival of a band clearly ready to stand themselves out from a crowded London heavy rock scene, which, though it’s been a while in the making, means it got here right on time.
I have the pleasure today of hosting the premiere of “Lady Freedom,” which you’ll find below, followed by Bright Curse‘s latest European tour announcement.
Please enjoy:
Stoked to finally unveil our whole upcoming European Tour, in support of our debut album “Before The Shore”, out on May 13th on HeviSike Records! It kicks-off in less than a month! Who’s coming!?
20.05 (F) Lille | El Diablo (w. Space Fisters) 21.05 (F) Caen | Le Bocal 22.05 (F) Bordeaux | Void – Make It Sabbathy (w. Space Fisters) 23.05 (F) Tours | Puzzle Pub – CRYPTE (w. Space Fisters) 24.05 (F) Nantes | Scène Michelet – CRUMBLE FIGHT (w. Space Fisters) 25.05 (F) Paris | L’Espace B (w. Space Fisters) 26.05 (NL) Amsterdam | The Cave 27.05 (D) Cologne | The Odonien 28.05 (B) Arlon | L’Entrepôt 31.05 (F) Strasbourg | Mudd Club (NEW SHOW) 01.06 (F) Dijon | Deep Inside 02.06 (F) Lyon | Les Capucins 03.06 (D) Karlsruhe | Bistro KA 07.06 (CH) Geneva | L’Usine – Kalvingrad 08.06 (F) Reims | L’Appart Café
Posted in Whathaveyou on March 17th, 2016 by JJ Koczan
London-based heavy rockers Bright Curse unfold a patient heavy psychedelia as they give the first sample of their forthcoming Before the Shore LP, but “The Shore” isn’t without a corresponding sense of build. Been looking forward to new Bright Curse basically since their 2013 self-titled (review here), and though they offered up the single Shaman (review here) last year, they’ve had a bit of tumult to get them on the path to signing to HeviSike Records for Before the Shore, lineup changes and so on, but whatever got them there, I’ll be excited to hear more when/if should the opportunity arise.
The PR wire brings EU tour dates, album details — no art yet; also interested to see what they have in store for that — and the stream of “The Shore” for instant-gratification-type enjoyment:
BRIGHT CURSE sign to HeviSike for release of Before The Shore album | Announce EU tour and stream/share new song
New album Before The Shore by Bright Curse is released on 13th May via HeviSike Records
Formed in London in 2012 out of the expatriated ashes of French psychedelic rock band Soul Manifest, Bright Curse is a band that requires little introduction to anyone that has kept a close ear to the underground in recent years.
This May, the trio – featuring guitar player and vocalist Romain Daut, drummer Zacharie Mizzi and newest member Max Ternebring on bass – will follow up on their 2013 self-titled EP with the release of their full-length debut, Before The Shore, on HeviSike Records. Another rising star and staple of the subterranean/heavy-psychedelic set that has been making a noteworthy name for itself of late with releases from Dead Feathers, Prophets Of Saturn and Elevators To The Grateful Sky.
Recorded and produced by the band with J.B Pilon at Rock Of London Studios and mastered by Jaime Gomez Arellano at Orgone Studios, Before The Shore dives headfirst into the deep and darkened sea of brooding rock ‘n’ roll. Still riffing epic spectrums of dark and light but trading in the extended jams and out-and-out sounds of space rock, doom and metal found on their Bright Curse EP, for a more measured, and ultimately stunning approach. An approach that brings with it the hypnotic soul of David Gilmour-esque guitar solos, blustering Iommi riffs and stirringly effective Deep Purple key sections. All of which pull Bright Curse up through the surface at a rate of knots and out into the open waters of contemporary rock ‘n’ roll greats such as Graveyard, Kadavar and Colour Haze.
Having played live with the likes of Earthless, Naam, Mars Red Sky and Pentagram at festivals such Glad Stone Fest (France), Up In Smoke Fest (Switzerland) and more recently Desertfest (London), Bright Curse hit the road next month as part of a co-op tour with France’s Space Fisters (see dates below) ahead of the release of Before The Shore on 13th May 2016 through HeviSike.
Bright Curse: Romain Daut – Guitars, Vocals Zacharie Mizzi – Drums Max Ternebring – Bass
Live Dates: 20 May – El Diablo (w. Space Fisters) – Lille, France 21 May – Le Bocal – Caen, France 23 May – Make It Sabbathy (w. Space Fisters) – Bordeaux, France 24 May – Venue TBA (w. Space Fisters) – Nantes, France 26 May – The Cave – Amsterdam, Netherlands 2 June – Les Capucins – Lyon, France 3 June – Bistro KA – Karlsruhe, Germany 4 June – Venue TBA – Cologne, Germany 7 June – Kalvingrad, L’Usine – Geneva, Switzerland
