Description

IRMA VEP is the on-going, evolving main vehicle for polymath musician Edwin Stevens and on his latest album Embarrassed Landscape, due 3rd April via Gringo Records, the project has reached a zenith. Primarily recorded in Stevens's adopted home town of Glasgow over two days with frequent collaborators Ruari Maclean and Andrew Cheetham, Embarrassed Landscape is an album that breathes in a fetid skip full of millennial dread, self-effacing anxiety and doubt before exhaling it as heartbreaking songs and ecstatic abandon. Built around the skeleton of Stevens's songwriting and fleshed out with loose, virtuoso playing, it's a body of work that could have been the anxious songs of an over-thinker but rendered here Embarrassed Landscape revels in a kind of un-selfconscious confidence. Indeed, various tensions through out the album are constantly revealing. Lyrics are riven with poetic, crushing self-analysis and absurdity only to be performed against a backdrop of trance-rock music skewered with Stevens's own instantly recognisable guitar playing, a style free and full of fire. Songs wring nuggets of uncanny truth out of prosaic, every day activities while sounding like Rolling Thunder Revue era-Dylan. Songs that seem hewn from some unspeakable personal pain are laced with a disarming streak of black humour, massive, world-ending psych jams that harken to Vibracathedral Orchestra's wall of sound dissipate into tender songs that deserve to be picked apart and cried to. Tension needs release and here the release needs tension. To celebrate the release of this new album, Irma Vep is going on tour with Soft Walls.
https://irmavepirmavep.bandcamp.com/

SOFT WALLS (Dan Reeves of Cold Pumas) released his third album 'Not as Bad as It Seems' last year on cassette, now it's been picked up for an LP release by Part Time Records! The album kicks off with 'Misperception', which comes across as a bit Deerhunter via Spacemen 3. A steady drum beat, a simple guitar melody, and Indian raga inspired keyboard drones. For what is essentially a one-man band, Soft Walls comes across as surprisingly lively (even amidst all that lo-fi scuzz). That is largely down to the drums which despite coming out of a machine, when rendered through a dodgy 8 track, can easily pass as someone churning out a bit of motorik. Soft Walls also have amazing records available through Tough Love and Trouble In Mind.
https://softwalls.bandcamp.com/

Description

199 Eade Rd,

Harringay Warehouse District,

Haringey,

Greater London,

England,

N4 1DN.