Sunday, January 31, 2010

Honour bound

No, we've not given up hope just yet, just got behind with some stuff. Later on this week there'll be a splurge of new Myspaces and stuff, and various other things will be powered up over the coming days and weeks. But for today before the first month of the year elapses, something very interesting emerging from someone whose previous work was no creative slouch.

It's a couple of weeks short of a year and a half now since ¡Forward, Russia! breathed if not comprehensively their last, then their last before an extended comatose state. In that time Tom Woodhead has become a producer to the awkward (I Concur, Minnaars, Talons, Cats & Cats & Cats), Katie has we think gone to further education, Rob has died (no he hasn't) and Whiskas... well, he was never going to lounge around waiting for awkward math-disco-punk to come back around, so he joined Duels, helped out Wakefield anti-folkie Mi Mye, started a fine blog and started up his own project, which has just recently started playing live in band form.

Honour Before Glory, brought into being with the aid of various I Like Trainsters and Duelsismus, vibrates and reverberates with fractured atmospherics digital and otherwise, at the core of which lies heartfelt, wracked songwriting that glows even as everything around it lifts into the stratosphere. M83 would be the closest reference point, but without the recently overbearing nostalgia angle or so much deference to MBVisms. Maybe Ride after a course of Spencer Krug records would be more accurate, so that you can't help feeling that were he from Toronto rather than Leeds Whiskas would have been corralled into Broken Social Scene long before now. Three tracks stream from his homepage, one can be downloaded via Bandcamp, while Steve Lamacq, a man we once saw ending up crowdsurfing to ¡FR! mostly against his wishes, is giving away another via his blog. This is going to be well worth keeping an eye on.

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