TRACKS OF MY YEARS

 Don't Know Why by Norah Jones sticks to my hippocampus like superglue. In fact, the record it's on Come Away With Me may be the childhood album. It wasn't what I listened to all the time, but if I think of childhood I think of that. 

 The first CD I can remember buying is Nightmare by Avenged Sevenfold. Pretty certain it was that one. I went back and forth to HMV three days in a row with no luck until a salesman took pity on me and hid one from the next shipment for me to collect the next day. 

 I don't have any guilty pleasures! Play it loud and proud people! I guess a curveball though would have to be the track Control by Matrix and Futurebound. That is a stone, cold incredible tune. 

 Squire. They're a young Newcastle band that have the tunes and the lyrics to back up the attitude. Their newest tune Billionaire Immortality is a poignant exploration of what could end up being. The words are insane - not just to this tune but to all of them. I'm excited about what's happened for them, what's happening and whatever's to come. 

 My latest track is You from my debut EP This All Tastes Like Yesterday. It's an angry one that deals with days far in the past, but sometimes that's needed. They need to be dug up and assessed. As I type this I'm actually listening to the band Bread. If you want to listen to something that is the polar opposite of Bread, then you should listen to You. 

Dave and Dan (drums and bass), both came into adolescence in the heyday of the grunge era. For Dan, "In Bloom" by Nirvana takes the cake, while for Dave, it was "Release" from Pearl Jam's debut album Ten.

The first CD Dan bought was Master of Puppets by Metallica. Dave first bought Meatloaf's Bat Out of Hell when he was about 8 years old. His grandmother was upset because she found the front cover of a shirtless man scandalous and the word "hell" blasphemous. She had issues.  

Dan partakes in his CBD edibles, while Dave is OBSESSED with "Love Island". 

Dan's favourite new band is PUP, while for Dave it's Mitsk

Our latest track “Ashgrove” is a song about learning to sink or swim as a teenager and being on the precipice of adulthood.  It brings you back to a special age where you could get into trouble - it was even expected of you - and every day came with first time experiences - your first kiss, first pull from a joint, first time skipping class or throwing a punch. Finding the bravery to bend the rules while also trying to find yourself. Give it a spin. 

There’s a bunch of tracks that I associate with a period in my early teenage years where I felt like I was sort of interested in music for the first time, mostly all of them reasonably embarrassing and absolutely all of them likely sourced using Limewire - which I rinsed as much as my family’s sub-1mbps dial up connection would allow. Top of the pick here is probably Crazy Town’s - Butterfly. 

I don’t particularly know why I was drawn so much to this song but that intro riff is still to this day so infectious (at the time I had no idea it was sampled from a Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ instrumental jam). The video was also a staple of MTV back in the day and was pretty visually captivating.

 Songs about Jane - Maroon 5. No more questions. I think for an 8 year old that is

relatively respectable as first albums go - a solid pop album.

I don’t think there is anything glaring that I consistently listen to that I would consider a ‘guilty pleasure’, but I do think that Kids - Robbie Williams and Kylie Minogue, is genuinely one of the best songs written in the last 20 years. Oh shit, it came out in 2000? Make that 22 years.

 I am very excited about Kyoto Kyoto,

who are releasing their first EP a couple of weeks after us in February. I saw them at a Hard of Hearing Halloween event last year at The Victoria, having heard nothing about them previously, and they blew me away. It is proper technical math rock with some off the rails vocals and guitar playing.

Plate Up is in a lot of ways a track that brings together all the things we love doing whilst playing in this band: laying down thick and infectious grooves, creating melodic and harmonically pleasing hooks that keep finding their way back into your head, and bringing weird and sonically rich sounds that soak all of that up before presenting it to you on a plate to consume. Enjoy.