Having finally plugged my speakers back into my amp after relocating the stereo & jettisoning the CD player (and slowly trying to flog off the discs) it’s now possible for me to play the Flying Vinyl 7”s I’ve been amassing since July 2017. I’d have heard the tunes way before now if not for the subscription label’s anti-digital stance. Not a drama as that was clear from the start. There’s something like 200 songs to be got through so let’s crack on with the first month I received.

Taking them in the order displayed on the front of the accompanying pamphlet first up is Bloody Knees with 'Not Done' and 'I Want It All' (hopefully not a cover of the Queen song). The A side actually rings a vague bell so this is probably one of the months selections which actually got a play at the time of release. 'Not Done' is well weighted, fun & crunchy with an obviously pit-inducing pace and enjoyably anthemic lyrics which are howled out for the duration. 'I Want It All' is slower & more grunge than punk so, whilst an obvious B side I can't say it pushes any buttons for me. They appear to have been quiet since the release of their You Can Have It album last October.

Next up is Mellow Gang with 'Vendetta' & 'Lagoon (Solina)'. The mention of Lana Del Ray in the booklet in relation to the vocals here is clearly apt from the off. 'Vendetta' swirls around the place in a shoegazy melange. What's being sung about? No idea. Things are even less clear on the B side, which may not actually employ full words. Reasonably pleasant but probably not quite mellow enough for successful background music. The web indicates they've had no releases in the past year.   

Bloody Knees had the first of this month's two coloured discs (translucent bottle green) and Mellow Gang's is clear. The first black vinyl showcases 'Count Me Out' and 'Heartbreaker' by Berlin's Weirdo & Co. Being unable to live without someone's love (which they would if they could) is the theme of the A side. The Pet Shop Boys have probably done this sort of thing better. Not my sort of pop. At the switch over it turns out I've played the songs in the wrong order and the A side is in fact the worse of the two. I definitely need to see if I can get anything for this either on Discogs or at the flea market at the weekend. The band's Facebook page seems to have been pretty quiet since last Spring.

The penultimate 45 from 20 months ago comes from Theo Verney, someone I've liked since first seeing him play at Long Division a few years ago. We should be on safe ground here. 'Mind Fire' doesn't have the oomph I was expecting and, whilst it's at a better than plodding pace I don't finish playing it to the end. 'Letter Down' doesn't measurably speed things up but it does have some nicely weighty guitar parts bracketing the chilled out verses. Theo also unfortunately seems to have been quiet on the release front in the past few months.

Lastly we get to Swimming Girls. Cranes initially come to mind, for the first five seconds of 'Tastes Like Money' but after that it's all pretty vacuous, calling to mind the '80s in the mainly bad way that they're recalled. Off at the halfway point. '2 Kids' has a darker quality to it but it's a bore nonetheless. A look at their online biography shows they're a rather concocted group but they do have some live dates coming up this year so you can maybe make your own mind up by seeing them in the flesh.  

Welcome to HeartSongs, our regularly scheduled (probably) look at songs and the people who write them. We spoke to Benjamin Shaw about his new single ‘Terrible Feelings!’.

“I think ‘Terrible Feelings!’ was the first song I really sat down to write for this album. And the first new song I’d come up with in what felt like a very long time. The title came first definitely (with punctuation and everything - some of my finest work I think) and even became the inspirational album title for a while, Benjamin Shaw sings… Terrible Feelings!, I still think I missed a trick there.

At risk of a lawsuit, I’m pretty sure the melody came to me while I was listening to the only other artist from my home town of Blackpool in the UK, Jack Cooper. I’m not even sure which song because I can’t pick it out now, but the melody was nothing like his (I swear). I quickly turned it off and recorded mine on my phone there and then, and built on it from there - repeating and moving patterns and found sounds on the laptop, which seems to have become my way over the years. Shouts out Jack Cooper, he doesn’t know me, but his album Sandgrown is sweet.

Lyrically, as with most of my songs, it started out as a collection of short insults about my work colleagues that I put into Google Keep whenever they come into my head. My Google Keep is substantial. And then, as always, when I sit down to try and arrange the insults into an actual song and do something creative, my own head starts creeping in and the songs quickly descend into self-obsessed artistic terror, self-pity, and in this case, Dirty Dancing references.

I’m a big fan of this song though. It felt like a turning point after having not written much for a good few years. I’d finally come up with an actual song, even if it was just terrible feelings.”

Listen to ‘Terrible Feelings!’ here

Lyrics:

Terrible Feelings!

Hey apocalypse, it's nice to know you still be trying

To lift me by the hips

And make believe like I be flying away,

you're all terrible people, with terrible clothes, go away

but I don't care, I got no dog in the race

So do me a solid, do me again and again

terrible feelings but I got nothing to say

Aw hey its you, I don't forget a face

Naw I'll do it, it's a piece of cake

ah've nothing to hide, I just wanna go home today

oh it'll blow over, everyone makes mistakes