By Bro. Jo Stern, on October 17th, 2009
 80′s revivals, golf rock, twins in matching outfits, ironic jerry curls, happy glue-sniff-bleep-core phone jingles, gonzo street dance yoghurt wig-wam happenings, Sinitta…. we really do need to wipe the shit off the streets sometimes don’t we? It’s like second hand fish sex monitored by robots and Deirdre Rachid (nee Barlow). The AIDS peppered rot of cultural confetti clogging drains and blocking rational thought.
With all that in mind…. GET SOME FOILFACE… IT’S STILL HERE… AND THERE’LL BE MORE ONE DAY SOON… AND IT WON’T WHIFF OF SONIC DOG SHIT… PROMISE…
By Bro. Jo Stern, on June 30th, 2009
 In the middle of the night when you’re zoned,
Just thinking, drinking,
Sinking into another man’s sofa,
On the brink of something happening,
You’re just reckoning that this can’t be the future
As your tutor is waiting to tell you something,
Anything that will alleviate the boredom,
No-one famous ever came from Milton Keynes,
All your dreams are just puddles left from the storms,
You’re just horny,
But then again maybe it’s this pill drink.
When the summer of your days are just a blaze
In a haze of Australians dying,
Lying on your back sweaty cracked,
Double-tracked like your life is running oh so parallel
To the surprising rising of a thousand backwoodsmen,
It’s kiss and tell, it’s wishing wells,
It’s the real hell of another man’s empty cellar,
No good stories ever came from Stoke-On-Trent,
You’re bent out of shape and hating people,
You’re evil, but then again,
At least you’ve got your pill drink.
No-one erotic ever came from East Kilbride,
You’re wide-eyed and unnecessary,
This is a very, very bad thing,
But at least you’ve got your pill drink.
When there’s someone in the background of every supermarket
Shouting words like, ‘semester’ and, ‘vacation’,
You know that they’re the kind of people
Who pay for empty cartons at the end of their shop
‘Cause they’ve eaten everything,
They treat it like a day out,
They treat it like an adventure,
They invite you around their house
To watch re-runs of Birds of a Feather,
They send you video messages to your phone
Of inbreds chain-sawing the heads off pigs,
They shove both thumbs up,
Smiling.
By Bro. Jo Stern, on June 25th, 2009
 Music – like birds, spiders and Deirdre Rachid – makes the most sense when it’s free. Since long before I was born music been shackled, packaged and presented to us as shiny eye catching parcels, watering down it’s spirit and diluting it’s soul.
Spotify is my new favourite ever thing on the Internet, it’s incredible and is helping to push along the idea that – having to pay for, download and store music is soon to be obsolete, thank Jah.
A Spotify client for iPhone is almost ready, surely there will be ports to Symbian, and as our embarassingly slow-interneted country finally gets to grips with decent mobile broadband I wouldn’t be surprised if we started seeing standalone Spotify or We7 or other streamcatching boxes springing up in the next few years.
I’m currently onsite at the Glastonbury festival, it’s not exactly Free Music at 175 quid a ticket but with 700 acts over 4 days it’s not bad value. Rolf Harris is playing, oh, and Status Quo.
By Bro. Jo Stern, on June 22nd, 2009
 For those of you who haven’t visited our downloads page and are still unaware of our newly released (and first ever) EP, the magical, “Jean-Claude Naive”. I am here to remind you that as of last week our first ever batch of tunes (6 in all) are out and available to DOWNLOAD FOR FREE.
SIX FREE SLACKER ROCK TRACKS all ready to be given a new home and loved like a little doe-eyed puppy.
Don’t let ‘the man’ tell you there’s nothing in this world for FREE. He’s wrong (and always has been).
By Bro. Jo Stern, on June 22nd, 2009
 Am I alone in my pissy-panted amusement concerning Noel Gallagher and his, “THIS IS A FREE GIG“ u-turn?
Noel and his fellow Quoasis ‘tards have long since stopped being truly rock n’ roll and ‘all about the music’ – but this latest u-turn shows us what a money hungry twonk Gallagher Snr really is – posing as a man of the people one minute and then remembering he’s got a Rolls Royce and a huge millionaires mansion to pay for the next.
Just over two weeks ago, Ol’ Breshnev Brows offered Oasis fans a full refund after two major power cuts hit their opening show at Manchester’s Heaton Park.
Problems arose early on in their set, after the generators broke down, forcing the band to leave the stage for around ten minutes. After returning and launching into the plodding dross of ‘Lyla’, the generators once again packed-in half-way through (in protest maybe?). This was followed by a mammoth forty minute wait, during which the 70,000 gig-goers, who had paid £45 each for a ticket, started to get uneasy and raucous.
Sensing an air of disappointment, upon returning, Noel shouted to the crowd, “Thank you very, very much, this is a free gig – let’s f***ing have it! Anybody who has kept their ticket will get a full refund.”
I remember reading about this at the time and thinking what a top bloke Noel must be and how maybe I was wrong to think that 99% of his musical offerings post-Definitely Maybe were complete and utter bobbins. I think I even thought briefly about going back and re-assessing “Be Here Now” (“maybe Marilyn Manson is right when he says it’s amazing”, I momentarily brain farted stupidly).
But no. Like Lennon and McCartney after The Beatles split, shrunk laundry, preparing a brew only to realise the milk is off and lesbians without tongues – it was all just a big pile of nonsense.
Two weeks have passed since that gig and twenty thousand people have now tried to get refunds. But Noel can’t believe it. Not only that, he thinks they’re, “cheeky c**ts” for taking him up on his offer!
Writing on the official Oasis website, Noel blathers, “It seems that around 20,000 of you have asked for a refund from that night at Heaton Park!! 20,000!! So you were genuinely disappointed? I don’t recall seeing a 20,000 gap in the crowd. Cheeky c**ts! Tsk ..some people.”
Call me, Jean-Claude Naive but I reckon it’s probably got something to do with the £900,000 bill he’d have to foot if he was true to his word – the slack-mouthed spunker.
Here’s hoping he catches AIDS and dies… I mean the flu and feels a bit rough… or a bad cold and needs a lie down… ahhhh… actually I quite like him… good luck to you fella… you’re great… you always have been… you’re lovely…
Noel Gallagher, eh? He’s a smashing bloke – really down to earth and sound and that…
By Bro. Jo Stern, on May 6th, 2009
 Has anyone ever really fully defined the term, ‘slacker rock’? For me it involves a loose, laid-back approach to alternative music mixed with what used to be called a ‘college rock’ sound. The proponents of this sound were bands like Pavement, Modest Mouse, Grandaddy, Built to Spill, Swearing at Motorists and Guided by Voices, who emerged in the early 1990′s. These bands took genres like shoegaze, garage rock and psychedelia, mixed them all together and spat out their findings. Sonically this loose collection of bands tended to be born out of a lo-fi approach to music (who needs expensive instruments and slick production sounds?) but ended up being more about a wonky approach to classic rock, mixed with lashings of tongue in cheek humour and surrealism – the classic albums of that genre and era being Pavement’s ‘Slanted & Enchanted’, ‘Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain’ and ‘Wowee Zowee’, Modest Mouse’s ‘The Lonesome Crowded West’ and Grandaddy’s ‘Under the Western Freeway’. If Pub-Rock was meat and two veg, Slacker-Rock was bacon and egg ice cream.
So, what’s Post-Slacker-Rock and who are it’s main proponents? Well, for me, Post-Slacker-Rock is a new extension of the old Slacker-Rock approach and aesthetic. If anything it blends in an even greater number of genre’s and styles than Slacker Rock and benefits from a new age of cheaper, better quality production equipment and from the diversity of music now available to the modern listener (due to the rise of the download).
I think Foilface are Post-Slacker-Rock – direct but surreal, poetic but immediate and sonically varied. Other bands that fall under the very loose bracket of Post-Slacker-Rock include Cymbals Eat Guitars, who hail from Staten Island, New York and offer a proggish take on slacker-rock, with brooding soundscapes, odd dreamlike lyrics and the classic quiet to loud take on alternatve music that builds and builds before taking off. Suckers (also from New York but this time, Brooklyn) belt out a late-Pavement meets I’m From Barcelona kind of sound, mixing lots of expansive sonics, including horns, lazy choral vocals and shout-a-long choruses as well as drone-ish and shoegazey moments.
It’s not all New York based though. There are also a couple of Australian bands who fall under PSR genre moniker. Quarter Acre and Sounds Like Sunset both hail from Sydney and where Quarter Acre opt for a better produced take on early Pavement, Sounds Like Sunset pull in influences like the Jesus & Mary Chain and Ride to summon up a shoegazey take on proceedings.
There’s also Hockey, a Canadian band whose, ‘Too Fake’ single got a fair bit of airplay on both sides of the Atlantic. Where the other groups have a very authentic and at times soup-thick take on the genre, Hockey head at things from a slightly glam-rock inspired angle and have a bit of a stadium sheen to their sound. Not quite as experiental but very accessible nonetheless.
Recent music seems to be cleaning up it’s act and climbing high as the world economy flounders. Maybe hard times yield great music or maybe it’s just a coincidence. Either way post-slacker rock rules. Try some.
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80′s revivals, golf rock, twins in matching outfits, ironic jerry curls, happy glue-sniff-bleep-core phone jingles, gonzo street dance yoghurt wig-wam happenings, Sinitta…. we really do need to wipe the shit off the streets sometimes don’t we? It’s like second hand fish sex monitored by robots and Deirdre Rachid (nee Barlow). The AIDS peppered rot of cultural confetti clogging drains and blocking rational thought.
