Fuck Buttons
Gloriously intense and euphoric yet challenging and confrontational with their music. They deliver layers of noise and intricate melodies but are not afraid to drone out and create slabs of sound.
http://www.myspace.com/fuckbuttons

Alexander Tucker
A unique voice occupying his own space, this is folk with swathes of post rock and almost industrial soundscapes, woeful acoustic music all lovelorn, lost and bewildered. The vocals are delicate and broken, complemented with piano, cello and harpsichord, punctuated with darker waves of feedback and looped found sounds to create beautiful yet unsettling music, that will stay with you long after he has left the stage.

Savannah, Georgia’s Baroness blow the lid off their cauldron of hall of fame riffs on their first record for Relapse and debut full-length titled Red Album. With a sound built upon a resolute sense of purpose and shaped by hundreds of explosive live shows, Baroness position themselves at the forefront of heavy music with an epic album that is at once powerful, expressive, confident, and commanding. Red Album sees the band expand its sonic vision; colossal riffs and haunting vocals roll like thunder across epic songs spanning both the intense and the sublime. As the Red Album proves, Baroness’ formidable reputation proceeds them for a reason.
http://www.myspace.com/yourbaroness

Since this Savannah, Georgia quintet first formed in early 2001, worrying about genre limitations has never been a priority. Taking musical chances, however, always has been. While KYLESA are as heavy as any band out there, they are beholden to no one scene and no preconceived notions of what heavy music should be.
http://www.myspace.com/kylesa

Taint
Taint Of South Wales are something of an enigma. Many have striven to place their sound within a handy genre definition, only to find themselves wondering whether a band so dynamic and full of surprises can really be called ‘sludge’, or whether music so antithetical to boredom can justifiably be termed ‘post-hardcore’. Taint’s 2005 full-length debut for Rise Above, ‘The Ruin Of Nova Roma’ was a crafty beast that revelled in contructing such riddles for the listener and, of course, the critic. Pigeonholes are for pigeons, after all. It’s the purpose of great rock groups to not quite fit in.
http://www.myspace.com/taintuk

In support of releasing her new solo album on Wichita, Meg Baird (one of the clear-toned songwriters of Philadelphian sextet Espers) will be doing a handful of dates in the UK, we are really happt to have her in Birmingham.

It is a deeply personal record that very nearly never existed for public consumption. Made up of a mix of her own original material, cover versions and a selection of traditional numbers, Dear Companion is a collection of songs that are very close to Meg’s heart. “I tucked into this collection of songs as much personal coding and shapes as I could without weighing down the branches too much. I really love these songs and take them very seriously and was just trying to do a really good job with everything I had available at that time. I wanted to make something new and worthwhile, all the while harboring a feeling that all songs have already been written.”

Fans of Espers, and newcomers alike will immediately swoon to the sound of Meg’s uniquely beautiful voice and the pluck or strum of guitar and mountain dulcimer. The passion and feeling in this record is immediately apparent and compulsive.

www.myspace.com/pennsylvaniawildlife

http://www.myspace.com/sharonvanetten

It becomes fitting, upon listening to Pelican’s music, that the band hails from Chicago. When Tortoise and their contemporaries ushered in a new wave of instrumental music over a decade ago from the Windy City, it was a pastiche of genre-defying sound, simultaneously cohesive and expansive in influence. Similarly, Pelican’s songs touch on so much from the canon of rock music. Yet they have refined their own sound over the course of their career—perhaps nowhere as progressively and courageously as on their third full-length, City of Echoes.

Now, with City of Echoes, a new step in Pelican’s evolution is unveiled. However, this new album doesn’t depict a shift as much as it exemplifies maturation. Growth is in the sharpened and charged delivery, and the clarity that the band’s dynamics are finally afforded. Pelican has always reveled in textured progressions, but this new album showcases more twists and unexpected turns; songs with more of a narrative or lyrical feel. And as evidenced by the post-DC-punk influenced title track, the band’s disparate influences are urgently clear—Failure and Jawbreaker are now easier reference points, thanks to a stellar recording by Andrew Schneider (Keelhaul, Cave In, Old Man Gloom). Fans of the band’s heavier side won’t be disappointed, though, with behemoths like “Dead Between the Walls” and “Bliss in Concrete.” And whereas past recordings seemed to push forward Laurent Schroeder-Lebec and Trevor de Brauw’s dynamic guitar playing, this album finds the rhythm section of brothers Larry and Bryan Herweg more exhilarating and present than ever before. “Far From Fields,” “Lost in the Headlights” and “Spaceship Broken – Parts Needed”—songs inspired by spending months criss-crossing the country in a van—show Larry and Bryan finding exceptional new ways to drive the songs as a whole, rather than simply backing the guitar lines.

http://hydrahead.tortugarecordings.com/pelican/

With a heavy-handed approach and a sound that crashes like thunder, HIGH ON FIRE has put the power back in ‘power-trio’. Less a band than a supersonic exercise in conquest by volume and sheer heaviness, the band has burned the metal rulebook and forged a new archetype.

HIGH ON FIRE was formed by guitarist Matt Pike in late summer 1998. Formed out of the need to simply play guitar again, Pike jammed with and settled on a line-up of powerhouse drummer Des Kensel and longtime guitarist friend George Rice, who made the switch to bass to round out the trio.

Singer/guitarist Matt Pike previously played guitar for the pioneering metal band Sleep. (the other two members went on to form OM).

http://www.highonfire.net/

Qui – http://www.myspace.com/qui
The Los Angeles trio is Paul Christensen on drums, Matt Cronk on guitar, and David Yow, who joined the band last year, doing what he does best. If you’re a Scratch Acid or Jesus Lizard fan, Qui sounds like a grungier sampling of both, with a little psychedelic stoner rock thrown in.

Beestung Lips –  http://www.myspace.com/beestunglips1
Spewed up from the murky depths of Birmingham at some point in mid 2006, Bee Stung Lips is a four-headed hideous beast, with blood-shot eyes and tentacles stretching far back into the Midlands music scene.
Chewing on notes from The Jesus Lizard, Hot Snakes and Oxbow, and then spitting them back out, with additional nods to literary giants such as Charles Bukowski and John Fante, they create a provocative mixture of wilfully abrasive noise and viscera-shredding rock ?n? roll. Howling, anguished, and convulsive vocals tussle with rapid-fire drums, riotous guitar and blistering bass lines, before collapsing into a chaotic heap, breathless and foaming at the mouth.
Fiercely intelligent, yet unashamedly reckless, Bee Stung Lips possess an irrepressible addictive fury along with an abundance of technical aplomb. Rapidly garnering a sizeable reputation for their infamous live performances, they are currently rampaging across the UK in a whirlwind of chaos, phlegm, and bare flesh.

Bound by hatred, disgust and despair, MOSS create the heaviest and most tormenting extreme doom in existence. An expression of horrific bleakness and mind-numbing desolation through otherworldly odes to madness, H.P.Lovecraft, and altered states.  Despite the use of extreme bass frequencies, Moss features no bass guitarist. They are on Aurora Borealis Records

http://www.myspace.com/cthonicrites

10-piece Danish ensemble Efterklang, a band whose name translates literally to “after-noise” but more loosely to “reverberation” or “remembrance.” All of these translations are in one way or another appropriate descriptors for the wondrous music created by the group, which settles beautifully into an open area somewhere between the elegant minimalist orchestrations of Max Richter, the electronically-enhanced chamber music of Rachel’s albums like Systems/Layers, and the more contemplative moments of Godspeed! You Black Emperor.

The most obvious characteristic that separates Efterklang from these other artists is their extensive use of vocals to augment their spacious orchestral sound. The band are signed to the British The Leaf Label.

Among our key contributors is Karim Ghahwagi a filmmaker who has made a vast number of collage films for our live shows and a video for Swarming.

http://www.myspace.com/efterklang

Throughout their six-year career, this Japanese quartet has ascended consistently in both popularity and critical acclaim. But still elusive is the successful translation of their powerful and violently beautiful live performances to their recordings, until now. This band isn’t heavy like Black Sabbath. They’re heavy like Beethoven.
http://www.myspace.com/monojp

Someone whos wielded an influence on the estimable likes of Neurosis and Ministry and even Korn, living legend Justin Broadrick (Godflesh, Final, Techno Animal, et. al.) brings us his most intensely personal offering to date in Jesu. Combing a wounding groove with a soul-wounded clean-tenor, Broadricks latest muse burrows deep into the corpus and then starkly paints with repose and resignation. Enigmas never rest, and neither does Jesu.
http://www.myspace.com/officialjesu

Formed in October 2003 Mothertrucker is Charlie Butler (Guitar), Tom Moffat (Bass), James Davison (Drums), Chris Scrivens (Guitar) and Bruce Goodenough (Guitar) from Birmingham in the UK.

With influences coming from a wide range of bands like Black Sabbath, Kyuss, Mogwai, Tool, Slint, Red Sparowes, Pelican & Isis; Mothertrucker blend together the harshness of metal, the ambience, texture and lulling nature of post-rock, the groove and rolling rhythms of stoner rock and the gruesome dark feelings of doom with the aim of fusing all this into one as a truly cohesive sound.

http://www.myspace.com/mothertrucker

Acid Mothers Temple & the Melting Paraiso U.F.O. (and subsequent offshoots) is a Japanese psychedelic band founded in 1995 by members of the Acid Mothers Temple soul-collective. The band is led by guitarist Kawabata Makoto and early in their career featured many musicians but by 2004 the line-up had coalesced with 4 core members and frequent vocal guests.

The band have a reputation for phenomenal live shows and releasing frequent albums on a number of international record labels, as well as the Acid Mothers Temple family record label which was established in 1998 to document the activities of the whole collective.

http://www.myspace.com/acidmotherstemple

Einstellung
 
Einstellung’s sound is one of mesmerising power and hypnotic beauty. They are part krautrock and part psychedelic indie noise-pop – with a touch of the heavy metal heritage of Birmingham, their home city. Einstellung’s “powerkraut” sound is the product of a meeting of minds between guitarists Andy Smart & Andrew Parker (ex Sally/Katastrophy Wife) with Si Rider (ex Grover) drums and Steve Hough (ex Cable Regime/Godflesh) on bass.
 
Einstellung’s appeal is an unhurried approach and use of tension/release. Songs teeter then finally explode into electric walls of overdrive. Despite a lack of vocals Einstellung’s shows are captivating and extremely loud. The band clearly relishes the noise they produce together, their enthusiasm and energy cascades from the stage.  Live shows are infrequent – catch them at every available opportunity.
 
www.myspace.com/einstellung