Beardyman [Interview]

Imagine you’re a beatboxer. You’re pretty good, so you enter the UK Beatbox Championships. You win. You eat, breathe, sleep and sweat beatboxing for a solid year before returning. You win again. Things get a bit crazy. A comedy video you made in a kitchen gets uploaded to YouTube (as freshly purchased by Google). In time, it will attract over 5 million views.

Over the next several years, you take solo beatboxing as far as it can possibly be taken. You play underground comedy clubs, TV shows, festivals. Your YouTube presence grows. You begin experimenting with live looping technology, battling not rival MCs but inefficient circuitry and user interfaces in the name of getting the ideas in your head into other people’s earholes. You find yourself in a studio, recording an eclectic collection of tracks that takes in everything from dubstep and hip-hop to almost every international folk music style recorded by history. Your debut album gets released; it sells nicely.

Finally, you hit on a pair of serious problems. 

TMMP’s Top Albums Of 2014

The “death of the album” has been declared many times in recent years – but nonetheless, musicians keep making them and are showing no signs of stopping (and thank God for that!). Almost a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, there still exist bands and artists capable of composing immersive, engaging, and fully satisfying collections of songs that stand up to repeated, unshuffled listens. Here are fifteen of them.

TMMP’s EPs & Tracks Of 2014

I have a very strong emotional attachment to many of the releases listed below. Choosing this list was exceptionally tough; I’ve been fortunate to discover some incredible bands and artists over the past year, and it’s safe to say that outside this list lie a great many immense tunes that can be found via a quick browse through TMMP’s archives when you’re done with this lot. However, the following choices are the cream of the crop.

Beardyman [Live Review – KOKO, London, 28/11/14]

On the walk from Waterloo station to Camden, I passed at least three busking beatboxers. The faces were different, but the acts were the same – a combination of robot impressions, oppressively generic beats, and faithful and flawless impressions of a variety of non-percussive instruments. By the time KOKO’s dramatic facade came into view, the novelty of solo beatboxing had more than worn off; London was beginning to feel saturated by Beardyman wannabes.

Beardyman – ‘Distractions’ [Review]

In an age of instant gratification, where everyone wants everything yesterday, dropping a sophomore album over three and a half years after your debut can be an anxiety-provoking event. It can be argued that music fans are more fickle than ever, easily susceptible as we all are to distraction and immediate amnesia – and under such conditions almost any musician could reasonably expect the world to have moved on over the course of forty-two minutes, let alone months. However, Beardyman is no standard-issue artist.

Reeves Gabrels & His Imaginary Friends / In Tyler We Trust / Bypolar [Live Review – The Boileroom, Guildford, 6/10/14]

Although Bypolar and In Tyler We Trust gave decent showings and played their hearts out, this show was definitively all about Reeves Gabrels & His Imaginary Friends. Bypolar have improved significantly since their support slot under DZ Deathrays, and In Tyler We Trust offered a ton of hard-rocking energy twinned with the occasional flamboyant display – but it was clear from each support’s tentative and uncertain experimentations that both acts are still testing the water and building their confidence. Reeves and his über-solid band, on the other hand, are old pros at this sort of thing – and, as you’d expect, it really showed here.

Father Figure – ‘Heavy Meddlers’ [Review]

I was first introduced to this album by Falsense – and now, let’s just say that I owe him a lot of drinks. I already spend much of my spare time listening to fusion and prog bands – many of whom have been written about in this very corner of the interwebs – and my standards have been driven consistently upwards by the outstanding contributions that have already come my way. Nonetheless, Father Figure meet (and frequently exceed) those standards with a borderline terrifying effortlessness.

OMSQ – ‘White Suit’ [Review]

Long-time TMMP favourites OMSQ describe themselves as “The hallucinated journey of our tribe”. If that sounds cryptic to you, just wait until you hear White Suit.

Dani Rosenoer – ‘Basement Jams 2 EP’ [Review]

As we saw last December, Dani Rosenoer thinks differently. So, for this review, so will I. I’m going to attempt to sum up each track on Basement Jams 2 in a single sentence. Let’s see how it goes…

Matt Stevens – ‘Lucid’ [Review]

Now, this is what it’s all about. Serious musical eclecticism is one of my favourite things in the world; it’s why I love bands like Falsense, Signals, EaglePrawn, and The Fierce And The Dead (the latter being Matt Stevens’ home band). It’s also why I love Steve Vai – and although Lucid is rougher around the edges than Vai’s trademark productions, it is no less masterful.