LIVE TRANSMISSION

November may be a strange time to put on a festival – in this country at least. Australians may beg to differ. But that’s what The Preservation Society has decided to do: put on a music festival. And it’s happening in Rochester. This weekend (25-27 November 2011). It’s called ‘Live Transmission’.

Don’t worry. You won’t need your wellies, a tent or sleeping bag. It’s all indoors.

To mark the occasion, the record label has made an album’s worth of material available via the joys of Soundcloud. There are 11 songs to download comprising the ‘Live Transmission’ album.

And the great news is they’re all free.

Some of the bands and artists are far from strangers to this site. Stuart Turner and the Flat Earth Society, Lupen Crook and The Flowing have had varying degrees of coverage on RockKent.com. But that leaves various other bands and artists as yet unmentioned on these pages.

Artists on The Preservation Society’s roster are not exactly the chirpiest of musicians. If you’re looking for carefree, bubble gum pop, you couldn’t have come to a wronger place.

Lupen Crook’s sparse ‘Where the Crow Flies’ is typically forlorn and world weary, coming as it does from the gloomy, yet excellent ‘Waiting For the Post-Man’ (‘where I’m heading I could do with some light’ runs one mournful line).

Similarly, you couldn’t expect anything less than bitterness and no little angst from a song called ‘Where’s My Machine Gun’. The Singing Loins’ song of that name is a bilious, bellicose rant against hypocrisy, dishonesty and corruption (‘drop down dead you graceless piece of shite’) sneered out over a mad psychedelic keyboard, ska rhythms and thundering relentless drums.

Or then there’s Theatre Royal, whose ‘Sycamore’ is an account of numbness and confusion following a break up. It’s accompanied with searing guitars and drums bashed to within an inch of their lives to help hammer the horror home.

While, for the most part, the album features singer-songwriter artists, alt-rock and indie-folk bands, the trend is bucked briefly early on with the appearance of Kids Unique, a hip-hop meets trip-hop act from Medway. Their excellent ‘Lab Conditions’ appeared on the ‘ME3’ compilation album earlier this year.

Their offering for the ‘Live Transmission’ album is equally gritty. ‘After Hours’ is the sound of urban gloom and dismay. Vulnerability and emptiness pervade the track. It captures the sense of fear and worry that can grip you in the night beautifully.

Elsewhere, the mood is slightly less bitter and twisted. But it hardly moves into hedonistic floor filler territory either. The Flowing’s ‘Cast Away’ dances around like a

Flamenco dancer through the ears with dexterity and panache. It’s a song of love and heartache over a relationship’s end, but ‘Cast Away’ is hardly the bitter rage of ‘I hate you’ you might expect of The Flowing’s label-mates.

But the sense of glumness and misery is never too far away. Even in the wordless piece from Upcdownc. ‘Monumental Mood Shift’ is a typical grandiose, intense and panoramic track filled with pounding rhythms, chugging guitars and meandering guitar solos.

Clocking in at just under seven minutes, it’s got plenty of space to breathe and explore different styles and textures. The result is a characteristically sprawling piece conveying emotions from anger through to sadness and even something approach glorious ecstasy.

Other songs from the album feature a blending of angst ridden US Punk with early 90s rave sounds (Go-Zilla’s ‘What Would You Give?’), fast paced Arctic Monkeys influenced indie from Dead Lovers and heavily distorted megaphone antics (the excellent Broken Antler’s ‘Mirror Mirror’), along with a riot of blues from Stuart Turner and the Flat Earth Society (‘Twilight Birds’ from this year’s ‘Weekend Hearts’ EP).

The ‘Live Transmission’ makes for an impressive introduction to some of the great acts currently doing the rounds in Medway and the surrounding areas. If you can get to the festival, go. And if not, this excellent album will form an excellent record of what you’ve missed.

Did I mention it was free?

Download the ‘Live Transmission’ album here.