Archives for posts with tag: Mark Jasper

Cold Pumas.jpg

Mastering Cold Pumas “The Hanging Valley” on Faux Discx and Gringo Records.

Recorded and mixed by Mark ‘Mug’ Jasper at Sound Savers.

“The long-awaited follow-up to 2012’s best-in-show ‘Persistent Malaise’ offers at least 33.3% of its buffet to shimmering, inward, mulch-heavy ballads — ‘A Change of Course’, ‘The Shaping of the Dream’, ‘Murmur of the Heart’ — showing a sensitivity that inevitably does nothing for the craft beer revolution. If truth be told, the remaining 66.6% threatens to look equally indifferent when served on a wooden board or beside a miniature stainless steel plant pot of hand-cut triple-cooked fries, but such is life. 

These songs are mostly about discouragement and the black dog, the tepid whines of self-inflicted unemployment, the repetition of life’s repetitions, the creative dormancies of romantic contentment. Disappointingly there lies no outward mention of pop-up launches, sides of ‘slaw, chakra schools, the urban woodsman or an allusion to an artisan approach. 

Across its 38 minutes, the ‘The Hanging Valley’ instead covers such further peripheral subjects as the imperceptible bow towards the thirty-something honours list, the vacuous, rising diphthong of the inner-city commute and the suppressed rush of blood towards vainglorious internet smear. 

‘Now a quartet of fraternal pedants’ whimper the band’s dusty social media accounts in reference to the twilight addition of Lindsay Corstorphine on the bass guitar, ‘cascading down the woodwork, slapping the pegs’ as he goes, dear reader. In truth The Hanging Valley owes us much to Corstorphine’s ample stringmanship as his encouragement toward loosening the conservative shackles of olde. Certainly a weakening of the old guard has taken place somewhere, the gamut of emotion ridden more obliquely and less shamefully now. Ballads stare teary-eyed out of windows towards rain-swept rivieras, vocals and guitars have pulled themselves gamely out of the reverb-soaked hollow and those ‘for the rockers’ — ‘Slippery Slopes’, ‘Severed Estates’, ‘Fugue States’ et al — no longer grasp for the safety of the halfway house but aim for the stars. ‘More sherberta tambourine’ they cried in the studio, and more sherberta there was. “

Buy it here!

 

Vertical Slump

Mastering Vertical Slump “Ruined Value E.P” on Icecapades Records.

“Vertical Slump are Simon Marsham (guitars, vocals), Andrew Milk (drums, vocals), Ed Shellard (bass,vocals) and Peter Simpson (synthesizers), a quartet of time-served hands at the DIY foundry who are/were also involved in (amongst others) the bands Shopping, Gloss Rejection, Omi Palone and Circuit Breaker.

This collection of songs was recorded in February of this year at Sound Savers studios with Mark Jasper, and follows on neatly from where a cassette E.P of early demos left us, released earlier in 2015 through Mïlk Records.

In collaboration with Mark, they have produced a fully formed and insistent record, oozing with confidence and vigour. It is four tracks of galloping, compelling post-punk wherein vocals are gulped with ardent intensity; guitars jag and agitate across the mix, veering from the sweetly melodious to the darkly dissonant, while basslines rumble and lope hand-in-glove with sparse and sympathetic percussion. Keys change, amps squawk, and tense locked-in cadences give way to silvery, sweet-spot choruses.

Mastered with an added slice of punk grit by the evergreen Daniel Husayn at North London Bomb Factory, these recordings can be seen as both a pulsating introduction to a band, and a persuading proposition of what’s to come in the future.”

Buy it here!