On Friday 4th May, P.E.T unleash their debut single ‘Tommy’ – available for free, gratis, nada, NOTHING, through iTunes, Spotify and other online streaming platforms. Bless their altruistic socks… it’s like Christmas without the snow. So, like Christmas.
‘Tommy’ is the first release from P.E.T since they formed back in October 2017. It’s somewhat of a rubber stamp of authority too, from a band who quite simply mean business.
Described as ‘Birmingham’s rising punk balloon’, P.E.T are now firmly at the forefront of Birmingham’s live music scene – with an endearing on and off stage persona, as well as some ball kickingly good live shows in their shadow. Intelligent, ferocious, absurdly funny, with a set list that pulls people into the stage like Pinhead hurling around a bunch of fish hooks on Hensley chains, P.E.T have spent the past 6 months or so kicking audiences into touch across the city.
Birmingham Review was lucky to snag P.E.T to support Rews at the Hare & Hounds on 22nd March, a mere week after they tore The Sunflower Lounge a new orifice whilst opening for The Cosmics. Throwing speaker stacks of energy at you no matter where or with whom they seem to play, P.E.T are a band who work hard, deliver on stage, and are experiencing a frighteningly promising (yet well deserved) nascent in the local music secen. And they’re just, frickin’, awesome to watch live.
But now they’re recording/releasing as well, striking two off the holy trinity of ‘ones to watch’. A strong festival season or a high-profile support tour, before you ask. So, what’s this ‘ere ‘Tommy’ ruckus all about then..?
As you’d expect, the track wastes little time declaring itself – opening with a brutally strong guitar riff and bassline, from Molly MacDonald and Rosie Jones respectively, that reminds me of bands from before these punk proteges were even conceived. Literally.
Kris Szulecki’s rolling punch drums then build up to an immediate crescendo and introduce a slight key change; ‘Tommy’ hooks you from the off, then nipple twists a small surprise to keep you interested. You get the feeling very quickly this is a winner.
Absurdly together, the production values shine immediately – laying a confident base to the ferocity of Abi Whistance’s piercing vocals. Then this is where another ‘golden marker’ (as my friend used to call them) appears. P.E.T aren’t just making noise, even if it’s well structured and delivered noise, they have something to say. And whilst ‘Tommy’ isn’t a dissertation of the nuances of shifting global trade and foreign policy, it is a sly attack. Inspired by the on-stage antics of another local punk band, who may or may not have more than cider in their system, ‘Tommy’ is a loving dig at the drug addled culture and purported bravado of exuberance.
Whistance is in your face, with the intelligence to get that close and away with it, preaching her lyrics on a background of tight musicianship. Being all church choir and tofu growing up I wouldn’t know precisely what they’re talking about, but the sense of urgency and intent on ‘Tommy’ is unassailable. I’d even be a little bit proud if it was focused at me.
The downside, for there is always a downside, is this recording is arguably too polished. There’s a slight but exciting lull, if that’s even the right word, at around the 1:45min mark where I began looking for TV sets to jettison and windows high enough to do the job properly. On stage you could imagine this actually happening, or a least a chair or two finding it’s wings. But on the recording you are left to smash screens in your mind. Which feels, for this band, like a bit of a loss of the overall P.E.T experience.
But if you can’t, then ‘Tommy’ is not a bad place to start – a punk decadent calling card from a band caught in the rising light of a seriously bright horizon. Awesome stuff. Now where’s my packet of silver Rizlas and wrap of toffee apple gone…
On Friday 4th May, P.E.T release their debut single ‘Tommy’ – available through iTunes, Spotify and other online streaming platforms. For more on P.E.T, including streaming links and gig listings, visit www.facebook.com/petbanduk
P.E.T are supporting Bad Girlfriend at The Sunflower Lounge on Friday 4th May. For direct event information, including venue details and online ticket sales, visit https://bit.ly/2IaWHnP
P.E.T will also be headlining a gig at Get the Fear in Digbeth on 12th May – with support from Dead Summers, Solsara + DJ Jacky P. For direct event information, including venue details and online ticket sales, visit https://bit.ly/2JS3FeB
On Monday 12th March, Hunger Moon release their debut single ‘Oh Friend’ – wasting precious little time for a band that only formed at the tail end of last year, ‘deep in the heart of Birmingham’s warehouse and creative quarter’.
But who need independent thought or travel? Sit back, make yourself a cup of tea, look wistfully at rain, and let Birmingham Review do all the cognitive reasoning. Ssshhhh, there there… We’ll tell you.
But first a bit of background… Hunger Moon are the newly formed two piece from vocalist Natalie Jenkins and multi instrumentalist James Atwood, with a sound that draws immediate comparisons to London Grammar and Daughter. Their debut single, ‘Oh Friend’, had Ryan Pinson working behind the glass – with the skeleton written and rehearsed in Digbeth, and the skin produced at RML Studios in Wolverhampton. So, there’s a pretty solid start.
In the words of Hunger Moon, ‘Oh Friend is an ode to companionship, which has been the single constant within the lives of the duo over the past year throughout changes, some for better and others for worse’ and you get an immediate sense of longing, loss, or both.
Mournful yet comforting, ‘Oh Friend’ opens with an echoed guitar riff that is the linchpin to the Daughter comparison. Then after about 15 seconds, Jenkins’ vocals power though with the titular lyrics and ushering in the London Grammar comparison. This low cloud rolls across the horizon, with some ‘soft piano nuances and subtle electronics’ nudging their way in towards the end of Minute #1, before the instrumentation steps back leaving Jenkins’ vocals to introduce the first crescendo towards the end of Minute #2. A silent thunderclap… and downpour, with the emotional ebb and flow continuing in layers until the end of this nearly 5min single.
There is a beautiful proficiency to ‘Oh Friend’, with a confident subtly propelling an addictive melody. It’s not an easy sound to deliver well, and Hunger Moon have taken some bold steps down a road that is full of homage and potholes. But superbly handled by Ryan Pinson, the delicate strength that this genre requires is given its appropriate balance here. Plus, it could have been easily clipped to make it more radio (length) friendly but in fact saves the best minute for last.
As debuts go, ‘Oh Friend’ is solid introduction, managing to find a new corner of the electro/pop shadows to lurk in. The melody is rife too, which bodes well for an album of material to wrap around it – an LP we sincerely hope is on its way. But if we were to find one piece of constructive criticism, as is our job, it would be that the strength of Jenkins’ vocals can sometimes be a little, a small touch on the desk perhaps, too much in the lead. And to jump back to the two previous comparisons, one of these bands falls into this trap too, whist the other nails it perfectly on its perfect nail shaped head.
So, this is a little par for the course for the genre, kinda sorta. And having a strong asset in your box of musical tricks is one of those better problems to have. But for the first foray for Hunger Moon, ‘Oh Friend’ is cracking introduction from a band we have a sneaking suspicion have a lot more to offer over the next twelve months.
‘Oh Friend’ – Hunger Moon
Hunger Moon release their debut single, ‘Oh Friend’, on Monday 12th March – available through all major music platforms.
The shortest month of the year is here. Luckily it’s also the turning point, as life starts to push up through the thaw and Percy Thrower can start planning his planters. OK, bad example, but there’s a joke about daisies in the somewhere.
But luckily for us mortal coilers, the venues and promoters of this city are still packing a pretty heavy punch with February’s event calendar. If there truly is no rest for the wicked, then it seem incongruous that anyone got Christmas presents this year.
So, enough to keep you lovebirds busy this month – or to distract the kings and queens of singledom on that depressing light letter box day. But whether you face this world alone or together there’s always Fight Club for £1 at The Mockingbird Kitchen & Cinema (12th Feb). Cheaper than a card, at least.
For more on any of the events listed here, click on the highlighted hyperlink.Ed King is Editor-in-Chief of Review Publishing, which issues both the Birmingham Review and Birmingham Preview.
Daphne was screened in Birmingham as part of the Flatpack: Assemble project, bringing industry showcases to the city. Daphne will be further screened to the general public at mac from Friday 13th to Thursday 19th October – for direct information, including showtimes, venue details and online ticket sales, click here.
The amorphous structure of Peter Mackie Burns’ feature-length directorial debut perhaps owes something to its origins in a 2013 11-minute short, Happy Birthday to Me. But there’s something oddly compelling about Daphne’s resistance to following cinematic convention, as though, much like its title character, it refuses to be pinned down and made to stick to a single, clearly defined course.
Cinematography by Adam Scarth feels as restless and detached as its subject, both moving passively from one scene to the next, apparently without much sense of where they’re going. And though some inevitably will, viewers aren’t asked to sit in judgement on the character or her story but merely to observe it.
Self-obsessed, single and spiraling steadily out of control, the misanthropic Daphne is almost as unlikely a ‘hero’ as you could imagine. Though she makes a show of independence, her spikiness is little more than a mask for her unwillingness or inability to take control of the life through which she drifts, instinctively ducking out of any encounter where she detects a whiff of change or serious commitment. Because she hasn’t thought of anything better to do yet, Daphne continues to meet up with old school friends she doesn’t really like, stumbles around in a drunken, drug-fueled haze, lives off takeaways she’s forgotten that she ordered and occasionally hooks up with strange men in whom she has no interest.
But when she witnesses a stabbing in a corner shop and stays to save the victim’s life, well… not much changes, actually. After the event, she takes up the offer of counselling, but not because she’s feeling particularly traumatised by what she’s witnessed. In fact, it’s the complete lack of an impact the incident has on her that makes her acknowledge that perhaps there’s something up. As she says to the therapist in a moment of uncharacteristic honesty, “I haven’t felt alive in a long time.”
In conversations around the film, there’s been a lot of emphasis on Daphne’s gender, whether in the form of comparisons with BBC Three’s Fleabag or in accusations of misogyny levelled at critics passing comment on her ‘likeability’. But while Daphne might be part of a new wave of women in film depicted with more unflinching honesty than we’re accustomed to, she’s certainly not the sort of character who’d see herself as any sort of feminist trailblazer. In fact, she largely fails to see herself as anything very much at all.
Arguably it’s this that makes her seem so resonantly real, but perhaps also is at the root of her sometimes being such uneasy company. Though Daphne’s dialogue is often cutting and she is someone who manifestly refuses to give a shit what anyone else things of her, it’s not so much anything she actively says or does that makes her difficult as it is her total inertia. It’s hard to decide what to make of someone who so clearly doesn’t know what to make of herself. This fragmented sense of self is visually indicated from the off, with a striking image of her descending an escalator beside a wall of mirrored strips that dramatically shatter her shifting reflection. That said, Daphne is so far from being unloveable that a bouncer who kicks her out of a club where she’s been misbehaving is enamoured enough to chase her down, ask her out and then decline her knee-jerk offer of casual sex in favour of pursuing something more meaningful. We see, too, that her friends and family are willing – determined even – to put up with her and remain in her life despite her self-destructive attempts to push them all away.
But quite apart from how her fellow characters respond to her, if you’re intellectually smug enough to laugh at her declaring Slavoj Žižek a “doughnut” as she chucks aside a book that she’s been reading just for fun; or at her revelation that she always thinks of Freud when doing coke, (and let’s face it, if you’re watching this film, you probably are) it’s almost difficult not to find her rather charming, spikiness et al. Then there are her magnificent, enviably spontaneous put-downs. “You, sir, are a fabulous cunt,” she says to bouncer David as she staggers away from him.
Daphne also breaks the mould of the gritty, social realist style of cinema it adopts. Rather than focusing on the disenfranchised working class such films are usually designed to champion, Mackie Burns singles out a member of the expanding modern-day precariat as his protagonist. As a well-educated and possibly once fairly well-off 31-year-old (when she remembers), she could serve as a sort of cipher for the instability and disillusionment of the millennial generation, promised a seat at the feast but fast discovering she’s been left with only table scraps.
At the same time, there are hints that she’s merely treading water above a darker underbelly of urban life, which threatens to flood into her world at any moment. For one thing, there’s the homeless man on the corner she knows by name, and for whom she makes up sandwiches at work. Then of course, there’s the lad who panics and stabs the owner of the shop he’s trying to rob in front of her. He tries to rob Daphne too, but tellingly she’s got nothing on her person he deems worth stealing.
Daphne doesn’t give us any easy answers, but the clues to the residual sense of self the title character still possesses are there to hunt for, littered through the story like a trail of breadcrumbs or scrapped leftovers from whatever concoction she’s been devising in the kitchen. On one level, the film might be considered a dark romantic comedy that comes in too late to fully flesh out one affair, and finishes too early to allow the next to blossom. But perhaps surprisingly, Daphne isn’t entirely without ambition: at the restaurant where she works, she asks chef Joe to make her his sous, only to be dismissed completely out of hand (“It’ll ruin your life”) and not for the first time, it seems. She’s clearly interested enough in the idea to spend her free-time testing recipes at home, admittedly only to wrinkle her nose and bin the lot, but the drive is still there. That she doesn’t press the matter further is mostly due to her complicated relationship with the chef himself, a married man with whom she’s clearly mutually in love.
Unsure how to deal with those feelings, she seeks solace in meaningless sex, while holding potential boyfriend David at arms length. Her view of love, as a deluded human attempt to impose meaning on a random universe, is reiterated often enough to sound as though she’s trying to convince herself, and when David calls her bluff on it he unexpectedly exposes real vulnerability – Daphne suddenly flees the scene like a frightened rabbit. Blink and you might miss it, but it’s also her serious decision to quit the job after Joe ‘fesses up his feelings that heralds the beginning of possible change on the horizon.
Meanwhile, she’s also determined to alienate herself from the one reliable figure in her life; having refused chemotherapy for an aggressive cancer, her mum has instead discovered faith and mindfulness, something which naturally frustrates her daughter. Then there’s the fear and self-doubt Daphne is contending with – in particular, her anxiety over not feeling enough about the man she saved to go and visit him. It takes her therapist to suggest that perhaps just doing something is sufficient, and enough of a feeling might well follow after.
Emily Beecham’s skill is in being able to subtly convey all this, without really saying a great deal that’s to the point. Scriptwriter Nico Mensinga’s razor sharp, bone dry dialogue is hilarious but also constantly evasive – it’s down to Beecham to present the character’s pain without ever soliciting our pity. The performance is at once distant and intimate, cold and moving, laugh-out-loud funny and rather tragic. Daphne lives and breathes through Beecham, lingering on in the mind long after the credits finish rolling, so much that you almost expect to meet up with her in your local pub, or maybe on the train back home.
Emily Beecham is backed up by a strong supporting cast as well, with Geraldine James as her surprisingly vivacious, terminally ill mum, Nathaniel Martello-White as a cheerily optimistic David, and Tom Vaughan-Lawlor as Daphne’s jaded boss and soulmate Joe, who similarly can’t quite work out how his life has ended up like this.
The unsung fifth main character in the film is London itself – a suitably messy and complex companion for Daphne, one vividly captured by Scarth. At times, the camera hones in on the squalor of poverty in England’s capital; at others, it hovers in a sky filled with gleaming clouds and glistening skyscrapers reaching out for something more. The film showcases the rich diversity of London with all its teeming masses, as well as the profound loneliness and anonymity of living there. One particularly striking, slightly hazy birdseye view has the cold, unsympathetic eye of CCTV surveillance, with Daphne staggering past faceless crowds and traffic blurs to create a dizzying, disorienting effect.
Refreshingly then, Daphne is a film that actively resists the conventional cinematic trope of turning points and inciting incidents that change a character’s life for good, instead preferring to just let stuff happen. In real life, epiphanies are generally a long time coming, even if we tend to remember them otherwise after the fact.
Like Daphne herself, the audience is required to sift through the mundane paraphernalia of everyday existence to find the meaning underneath, if indeed there is any. It might not fall in line with standard storytelling techniques, but Daphne is a skillfully drawn character study that provides plenty enough meat to chew on for its full 90 minutes, and long thereafter.
Daphne – a film by Peter Mackie Burns
Daphne will be screened at mac on from Friday 13th to Thursday 19th October. For direct information, including showtimes, venue details and online ticket sales, click here.
As a female folk musician myself, it’s always exciting to hear how other young women in the trade are leaving their mark. It’s also the first time I have come across Wildwood Kin’s music, but upon checking out their website prior to listening to the album I was impressed to see they had reached the final four of the BBC Young Folk Musician awards, as well as left awash with good words from respected names in the industry. These two sisters and their cousin appear to be grabbing the folk world by its Aran jumper and giving it a good shake.
My fault, then, for researching Wildwood Kin before giving their debut album a listen. But I was slightly surprised, and dare I say disappointed, to find that Turning Tides isn’t the hollering crème de la crème of female folk I was anticipating.
With their gorgeous Joni Mitchell-esque appearances and a name like Wildwood Kin – a nod to their folk inspirations as well as their familial connection, I imagined Turning Tides would be more acoustic, organic and experimental. However going into the studio proffers an opportunity to develop your sound and explore the possibilities of the music you create; Wildwood Kin made the decision to move away from their folk roots, nurtured in small venues around Devon and Exeter, and pushed forwards into realms of synths, electric guitar and atmospheric production.
It would be wrong of me to pooh-pooh a piece of work that clearly had a great deal of time and love poured into it, purely on the basis that it isn’t the folk music I was expecting. Indeed, their use of harmonies is commendable; all three voices blend together perfectly and create some beautiful melodies that do still bear the traces of a traditional origin and draw an obvious comparison with The Staves, though more pop. These vocals are demonstrated best in ‘The Valley’, the album’s penultimate track, where there is a lot less of the studio production, reverb and atmospheric frills that dominate the rest of the LP.
That’s not to say that the other album tracks on Turning Tides aren’t worth a listen. ‘Warrior Daughter’ has a driving rhythm and the organic sound of the clapping adds to the track’s dynamism. The lyrics too are positive and uplifting, a theme that runs throughout the album, harking back to the ladies’ gospel and worship music inspiration. ‘Steady My Heart’ also has a little more guts than some of the more saccharine songs, whilst the title track makes great use of a double bass to cut through the atmospheric, dreamy effects to offer a possibility of something more raw and powerful.
Turning Tides is an apt name for an album that shows a brave retraction from the old and an embrace of the new. It requires guts to change your sound, and I take my hat off to Wildwood Kin for taking that plunge. Despite not being the folk music that their past led me to expect, Wildwood Kin have created an debut album of sweet melodies and soft pop anthems that, whilst not breaking any great boundaries and doing anything wildly radical, are easily listenable and well-constructed.
I still feel the passion that was present during the song-writing process has been somewhat stultified by the addition of synths and heavy reverb, causing some of the tracks to blur into one another and keeping the raw climax that they seem to be building towards frustratingly out of reach. I would be interested to hear Wildwood Kin completely stripped back to acoustic guitars, drums and their haunting voices, which really are their best selling points and need no great embellishment.
‘Taking a Hold’ – Wildwood Kin
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‘The Valley’ – Wildwood Kin (from The Clockwork Owl Sessions)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve6tmAmu7mM
Wildwood Kin release their debut album, Turning Tides, on Friday 18th August – out via Sony Silverstone. For more on Wildwood Kin, visit www.wildwoodkin.com
Words by Ed King
As you’d expect, the track wastes little time declaring itself – opening with a brutally strong guitar riff and bassline, from Molly MacDonald and Rosie Jones respectively, that reminds me of bands from before these punk proteges were even conceived. Literally.
And whilst ‘Tommy’ isn’t a dissertation of the nuances of shifting global trade and foreign policy, it is a sly attack. Inspired by the on-stage antics of another local punk band, who may or may not have more than cider in their system, ‘Tommy’ is a loving dig at the drug addled culture and purported bravado of exuberance.
There is a solution though, in fact there are two coming up – P.E.T are playing at The Sunflower Lounge on Friday 4th May, supporting Bad Girlfriend, and then headlining their own free party at Get the Fear on Saturday 12th May. And if this is in anyway your cup of snakebite, I strongly suggest you go and check them out live.
Words by 
