Mugstar return to Trensmat two and a half years after their groundshaking 'Bethany Heart Star' single.

'Today is the Wrong Shape' is sprawling drone drenched FX doused instrumental metallic space rock. Its a skull caving slab of glorious propulsive relentless rhythms, dense swirls of FX & churning bass lines. A five minute trudge through dense blackened clouds of acid fried shimmer only to be blown out the other end of mega spacegroovekrautpsychness.

'Technical Knowledge as a Weapon' starts jagged and hyper rhythmic, the drum pulse and guitar crunch locked into mesmerizing loops of pulse and throb, and then evolves into a mind blowingly cyclical psychprog blowout, wrapped around a dense core of relentlessly rocking rhythms and killer heavy riffing.

The additional CD contains the two tracks on the 7" and two additional tracks - amazing cover versions of ZZ Tops 'I Got the Six' and Fairport Conventions 'Tam Lin'. There's also a beautiful abstract video by Jenny Collins to accompany 'Floatation Tank' from their first LP.

VERY limited edition package of numbered clear vinyl lathe cut 7" in full colour wraparound picture sleeve and CD with additional tracks and video.

Aug 2009, TR018.

We are pleased to announce that IMPORTANT RECORDS, home to Merzbow, Bardo Pond, Acid Mothers Temple, Cave, are to release our new album, which will hopefully be out early in the new year. Oh yeah...

Yes, this is both bands - Red Panda and Mugstar, each tackling "Tam Lin" as a tribute to Fairport Convention and based on their version from the classic Liege & Lief album.
Beautiful 10" vinyl - sound on one side and etching on t'other, in a limited hand numbered edition of 300 on Lancashire and Somerset records.

For more details and to purchase - see the Lancashire and Somerset myspace page. - In our top friends list.

The biog below this one is video footage from Mugstar's gig with Jah Wobble, Jaki Liebezeit and Philip Jeck. See Hive Biog

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGOmHpH2Uh8

Mugstar with Jah Wobble / Jaki Liebezeit / Philip Jeck / Shackleton

Jerry's picks!



MUGSTAR - "S/T"

[CD / LP - Sea Records]
>From Liverpool, England, Mugstar have released their debut album on CD & LP [each on a different label]. Right out of the starting gate you can tell we're going to be in deep and heavy space rock territory. "My Baby Skull Has Not Yet Flowered" [LOVE that title!] opens the set and is a relentlessly pounding cosmic assault that brings to mind the most intense moments of Space Ritual era Hawkwind.
"Crempog Smultron"is similar but has a more modern and sophisticated rhythmic pace that I really dig. Like a blend of Hawkwind, Circle and Godspeed You Black Emperor, if you can imagine that.

"Good Posture vs. Bad Posture" is one of my favorite tracks of the set. It starts off very different from the first couple tunes, sounding very much like a Black Sun Ensemble styled hard psych rocker. But after a few minutes it shifts gears, easing the pace with mind-bending soaring space guitars that serve as a peaceful transitional bit, before once again launching into a potent space assault that sounds like Farflung at their most intense and with an ultra heavy King Crimson-ish bass. Outtasight!!

"Subtle Freak" is one of the slowest, yet most powerful tracks of the set, starting off with a very cool combination of calmly tripping space guitars and ominous pounding bass, yet soon launching into a space rocking soundscape jam that rocks like a spaced out version of King Crimson on the one hand, but also has that power-ambient Godspeed You Black Emperor feel, and perhaps a wee bit of shoegazer drift. Absolutely fantastic.
"Man With Supersight" closes the set and is a head bashing Circle like punky post-rock, prog-rock, whatever you wanna call it feel.

In summary, Mugstar play all instrumental, 100% undiluted space rock, but with a flair for blending multiple influences from both early and contemporary eras, making them ultimately difficult to really define or pigeonhole. This will easily make my best of 2007 list.

Aquarius Records San Fransisco

Brand new 7" from UK space rockers Mugstar, who pack some serious spaced out psychedelia into these two short sides.
The A side begins with a weird drone-y chant-like whir, along with some tribal drumming and distant guitar plinks, gradually building and building, the minimal vocals transforming into some serious howling, when suddenly everything drops out, leaving just the drums and some super processed guitar strum, very rhythmic and strangely spacy, eventually the rest of the band kicks back in and locks into a cyclical angular groove, looping and repetitive, a furious grinding riff over the relentless drumming. Epic and exhausting.
The flipside is way more synth heavy, some weird sort of post punk noise rock, almost kind of mathy, a bit like a supercharged, way more metallic Stereolab, which intensifies until it explodes into wild psychedelic squalls of acid fried synths and freaked out guitarnoise

MUGSTAR – BETHANY HEART STAR / BILKAS CRIB

(7" single on Trensmat Records www.trensmat.com )

MUGSTAR - MUGSTAR

(LP on Critical Mass Records, PO Box 1052, Liverpool L69 3ZS www.mugstar.com and http://www.myspace.com/mugstar  )

 

   Steve Pescott frothed over an earlier Mugstar single in our reviews columns around a year ago now, praising their resurrection of the saxophone amongst other things.  Wrote Steve, "I've always been a sucker for saxophones in rock 'n' roll. The advantages are fairly obvious – a booting sax offers up a different range of tonal possibilities that can really power a band along and, God I'm shallow, they're cool looking things – especially the brass glinting under the stage lights. I wonder though how its inventor, Adolphe Sax (1814-94), would feel discovering that the object in question is far more of a fixture in rock, jazz and soul than with the formally attired orchestral crowd?" - and, in an aside that is typical of the man (goodness only knows how he does it – I always envisage a room-sized card index system), he also remembered that Mugstar first came to our attention around the time of Ptolemaic Terrascope issue 30 (June 2001), when we reviewed a Fabiola / Flamingo 50 split single whose blurb sheet namedropped Mugstar along with other Liverpudlian newcomers of the moment such as Kling Klang, Ladytron and Inch High.

 

    Mugstar have kept busy touring ever since then, tagging along with the likes of Oneida, Mogwai and Acid Mothers Temple; they recorded one of the last ever sessions for John Peel in 2004, and a couple of months ago now they finally released their debut self-titled album, an LP format version of which Jason Stöll (the aforementioned tenor sax player, no less) pressed into our eager little hands just recently. Needless to say it's bloody brilliant. Imagine the Heads locked into a studio with Hawkwind somewhere in a 'Doremi Fasol Latido' time-warp and riffing groovily off one another and you'll be some way towards picturing the gnarly hybrid of tantric noise that is Mugstar. Opening with 'My Babyskull has not yet Flowered' which Steve P. described when it appeared as a single 'A' side as "an ever growing blot of transplanted Dusseldorfian motorik with the weight of Jason Stoll's tenor sax storming its way past the relentless chordage and onto the centre spot" (erm, yeah…. thanks for that, Steve!) the distinguishing moment of side 1 for me remains track 2 'Cxempog Smultron' (or so it says here) which is an utterly relentless, pounding jackhammer of a number that'd make an ideal backing track for televised stock-car racing and banger smashes, the yin to Fleetwood Mac's Formula One yang, as it were.

 

    Side 2 runs to four songs, although the closing 'Children of the Gravy' is effectively a mere outro (as if the word "mere" would ever be applicable to Mugstar). 'Floatation Tank' carries on from where 'Cxempog Smultron' left off, while 'Subtle Freak', a personal favourite of mine, feature a melody which keeps trying to become the Floyd's 'Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun' and narrowly avoids it every time with aplomb. Finally, while I've yet to see Mugstar play live – an oversight I intend to rectify with undue haste - I'd imagine 'Man with Supersight' would be the kind of closing number which wipes the floor with any band that dares to follow them. A simply awesome racket, and the icing on the already beautiful cake is that underneath and in and around all those pounding instrumental speedfreak riffs are some truly original melodies.

 

   This is nowhere more evident than on 'Bethany Heart Star', the non-LP 33rpm Mugstar single on the Irish label Trensmat records (motto: "Every noise has a note", although for some reason I keep reading that as "every nose"). There's nothing not to like about this record, from the two songs – the other being the choogling 'Bilkas Crib' which put me in mind, with it's driving beat and haunting chants, of the Man band circa. '72 at the Roundhouse (had they actually performed 'Brother Arnold's Red & White Striped Tent' in between Hawkwind and the power cut) – to the cover, a blurrily psychedelic live shot, a symphony in black and red which has a fabulously velveteen texture achieved, it transpires from talking to Stephen over at Trensmat HQ, by manually feeding the card through his laser printer at home whilst simultaneously standing by with gallons of red and black replacement cartridges. Ace. Be sure to buy the 7" version instead of the CD and make all his hard work and expense worthwhile.

 

    Forthcoming releases on Trensmat include singles by those veterans (survivors?) of Terrastock 6 AreaC and Circle, as well as a Telescopes 7" which should definitely be worth checking out. Meanwhile, Mugstar are, I proclaim, the best band out of Liverpool since the Walkingseeds. No contest.  (Phil McMullen)

We have a new 7" single released on Trensmat Records (who released the latest Telescopes record). It's limited to 219 copies so get out there and buy it now before its gone forever.

Bethany Heart Star b/w Bilka's Crib.

It has already been awarded Single Of The Week with Norman Records and Avant Rock SOTW with Piccidilly Records.