Nocastle
Compilation
(Cassette, Altered States Tapes, Grog Pappy, 2011)
If you were hoping to maintain the (rather fun) notion that Newcastle bands exist in their own gloriously weird vacuum, then just ignore the awkwardly iconoclastic name of this release and feast your eyes on the contributors: Stitched Vision, Reunion Sacred Ibis, Cock Safari, Alzheimer Blanks etc etc. If this amounts to a scene, then none of them are talking (though in reality, they mostly do) but they're feeling roughly the same thing. Newcastle groups excel at the kind of doggedly-unpretentious but unwittingly affecting sounds that makes otherwise unpalatable music transiently fascinating to the dilettante, and totally transcendent to the well-versed. Are they all just rubbing off on one another? Are all the lesser known names here (World of Trouble, Shitxsfmcrudd) only good because they adopt, via some sonic osmosis, the charisma of their better known brethren? The truth is blurry. What you have here is music so heavily entrenched in a post-post-millenial dread, a sense of humoured uselessness and despair, a sense of deep and honest disenfranchisement, that it transcends the horrid “talentless-hacks-with-effects-pedals” image that noise has duly adopted since it's brief fling with a more mainstream audience back in the mid-'00s. No one (generally speaking) is ever going to give more than two shits about noise music, but if for some reason they did, this compilation is world class. Snap this up immediately for a drab evaluation of this epoch.
from: In-Frequencies #5
