Throughout the 90s and into the 2000s, there was a label named Org. It had a simple, no bullshit ethos, released singles / EPs / albums by bands on a release-by-release basis and packaged its singles in neat, handmade card sleeves in runs of 1000. The label released music by the likes of Cay, Sea Nymphs, Latch and Stoopi and it was awesome. It’s not entirely clear if or when the label vanished into the ether – around 2010, it seems, but it was a cool place to find new music.
The reason for this short digression is that a new label has arisen that, in many ways, is the natural successor to Org. Buzzhowl Records don’t mess about with the commercial nonsense you anticipate from labels. Instead they value the personal touch in an increasingly digital world and they sign bands that make music that matters. It may sell (it may not), but Buzzhowl seem far less concerned about this than the fact that great music is getting the promotional boost of being on a label at a time when getting your voice heard is increasingly difficult.
The label’s first broadside was the 10/10 compilation, Buzzhowl Volume 1 and it features ten awesome tracks that do a pretty fine job of laying out the label’s manifesto in sonic form. If you’ve not checked it out, kick yourself (hard) and click on this link.
Right… now that you’re back (you did click on the link, right?), it’s time to check out the label’s first stand-alone release, a four-track, twelve-minute EP from Don’t Try whose track (I’m so wry) featured on the compilation. Opening with Elvis is dead a sub-three-minute art-punk mishmash of cruelly distorted bass, super-lo-fi percussion and snaking guitar lines, Don’t Try are everything bands like The Hives promised to be and yet never delivered upon. Reminiscent of the late, lamented Urusei Yatsura, Elvis is dead is one of those frantically cool songs that would have had the NME frothing at the gills if we still lived in a time when the NME had any sort of journalistic integrity whatsoever, and the tinny-drum-box-meets-the-sex-pistols-buggering-the-fall noise of The Tomorrow Show is no less intense. It may not make Buzzhowl a million (it should, but that’s another story), but it will leave you sweaty and exhausted having bounced around the room for the entirety of its mercifully short, three-minute duration. Losing out again takes a cue from the Butthole Surfers with its semi-spoken, distorted vocals and atonal guitars whilst the EP concludes with the creeping bass-lines and no-wave noise of Breathless, a track which Don’t Try aptly describe as an opportunity for them to “do a Slint”, even as they craftily ape the bass line from Pulp’s A.F.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E amidst the churning guitar noise and arcing feedback.
Lyrically intelligent (the tomorrow show cleverly co-opts a John Lydon interview to comment on the current state of celebrity obsession), musically literate (the band use and abuse what they will to craft their uniquely compelling vignettes) and bristling with punk attitude, Elvis is dead makes good on the promise of the compilation track and hints at great things for a future full-length. In a world of Pro-Tool scrubbed, Disney-sanitised corporate rock, bands like Don’t Try and labels like Buzzhowl are more important than ever – get in on the act, because this is awesome. 9
