who's heard the audio bullys album then ?

I'll try to post back soon unless I'm beaten to it

there's also 'Miagi' and 'The Beginning' doing the rounds - the latter harks back to Dee Patten's 'WHo's The Badman' a little i seem to recall

hopefully they'll release 'Snow' with 'The Things' next - 'Ego War' is great but perhaps not a single...the album should be out in March/April - roll on...

SUIT TWO "I don't know, Quispian, but he seems a bit too clever, he's got opinions and things and he seems pro-drugs. An association with him might mean we sell less Corrs albums"

SUIT ONE "I like the Corrs"

SUIT TWO "So do I"

SUIT ONE "I know lets get some no-brainer no-talent idiots and get them to do something similar but less contravesial. Dumb it down a bit too so Joe CreditDetails doesn't have to think about the content"

SUIT TWO "Bonza idea, Quispian, now lets load up on rohypnol, go down the Met bar and indulge in some fcuk alcopops and date rape"

SUIT ONE "Excellent, I've not done that for a few hours . . . "

there's nothing that even hints at controversy
about the streets, any more than there was about
pulp's 'sorted..' if you were referring to the
drug talk.

dumbing down ? the met bar ? the corrs ?
christ lynskey you're sooooo '97.

Oh, Ronan, do you know how I slaved over that little skit? The re-writes, the re-drafts, the thesauri? How can you be so cruel about my very own "Paradise Lost", the greatest and most important prose of my life? All I ever wanted in my whole existance was to write a little skit about the fucking AudioBullys and my otherwise meaningless life would've been complete . . . .

I wrote the first as a knee jerk, the second when I realised when what a jackass you were being and the third when I thought I'd killed the thread.

The annotated Letts Guides about my posts are now availiable on Amazon, with introductions by Saul Bellow, Salman Rushdie and William fucking Shakespeare. A BBC video series accompanying my posts is planned for the autumn, presented by Ric Flair and features the best CGI since "Talos the Mummy".

If you could, Mr. Keating, could you tell me which one of your two consecutive posts I should read and which I should discard. I would also appreciate a bibliography on them both (be thorough please).

so a mixed bad so far, but i'll be looking out for more

WHAT'S THE POINT

(thumpaboinkableepetc)

WHAT'S THE POINT

i want the Audio Bullys to be MORE than JUST house btw, but perhaps this wont actually happen...'Intro', 'Real Life' and 'Ego War' use a shuffling electro beat rather than straight out 4/4...i want more dub and old skool rave elements if poss.

the things is ok, it reminds me of the specials ghost town (i never got the streets as the specials thing, but it makes a little more sense here).

the whole thing seems to be late nite drive hazeeee stick, blow out the smoke...

no so sure about ego war. its all ok, but may be a grower, none are as immediate as Snow though

i'm finding it all quite immediate, but yeh 'Snow' has got that brass hook that just rubber-stamps the 'This is a boomin' house track so dance you plum' vibe :)

01. Snake
02. 100 Million
03. Way Too Long
04. Real life
05. We Don't Care
06. Face In A Cloud
07. The Things
08. Veteran
09. The Snow
10. I Go To Your House
11. Hit The Ceiling
12. Ego War (with possible extra/bonus track)

so no room for 'Intro' or 'Tyson Shuffle' from the Real Life EP or 'Plugged In', 'Miagi' and 'The Beginning' from the Muzik 'Hooligan House' CD

still you can listen to some of the album tracks on it (via RealPlayer) - and 'The Things' is the new single after all

Snow is gasping for a release in time for the summer. Also I didn't notice the ludicrous inclusion of the freaks and theo parrish here 4 months ago.

There's also the inevitable bitterness about the fact that a house act like Audio Bullys has got almost as much hype as Dizzee, though this strikes me as another red herring in the great rough trade wars of 2003 etc etc.

The only remotely pure or original thing going on in real dancefloor house music is filter disco.

and yet they're so not Basement Jaxx, curious...

dirty house is basically everything being played in clubs with a 4/4 beat.

They are Basement Jaxx as soccer hooligans!

Suddenly I understand exactly why I like them so much.

It's all about having heavier beats, I think; lately I've been warming to "Don't Mug Yourself" solely because of the bombastic beat.

It's the theoretical poetry and trance-in-the-not-dance-sense-of-the-word. You know, Krautrock for red lights and speed limits.

I guess the lyrics and vocals have a huge amount to do with it, and perhaps the live shows.

I'm surprised by how clean-sounding it all is, "Real Life" excepted (ironically, being the electro track) - not thuggish at all, almost prissy! I can def. see Dan's point about it being an Original Pirate Material for those who are about to dance.

I think though as I say the real difference is that Ego War is a clubbing album, a rave album or an ecstacy album in a way that Original Pirate Material isn't. Perhaps I say this just because I am a clubbing type and I like Snow more than anything on OPM, but I don't think it's projection on my part. I don't want to over do this post cos I really want to write about this album at length.

My line all along has been that this wouldn't be an album which would surprise haters, Original Pirate Material was a kind of across the board appeal and difficult to categorise. I think Ego War is coming from a clubbing/rave niche and I can imagine so many people from that background loving it.

People talk about post club albums or sounds of paranoia or whatever but that's all utter shite to me and others like me, why would I put on some non electronic music during the week as some kind of downtime. Ego War is exactly what a "post club album" should be, non mixed but with a club vibe, a fine conceptual work with character which contrasts it with the relatively faceless 12 inch culture, but not in any major musical sense.

Perhaps I exaggerate but I'm loving the album.

I suspect in some sense I'm wrong with the dirty house thing too, at least in the way I meant it. It's not a mongrel sound at all really, not in the sort of magpie way I expected from the mix. I guess an artist album and a DJ mix are different enough from scratch anyway. So I hold my hands up! It is as Tim says quite prim and proper, they certainly aren't lairy behind the production desk anyway.

It's also quite an emotional album isn't it? I mean it is thuggish in some sense, but it's more a glorious reflection on the dark side, the whole thug thing is obviously a persona but I like the implication that part of being a young man is coming to terms with that caricature and overcoming it or not.

Does it strike a chord with anyone else when I say that it seems a very MASCULINE album if not a thuggish one. Eminem talks about hiphop as a display of masculinity or whatever but I can't remember ever thinking an album was notably masculine before.

And am I the only one who absolutely loves the vocals?

I have alot more to say on this, I might even break my no free writing rule and do a piece. I think it's a personal enough like for FT. Quite excited actually!

Anyway, here's what Reynolds said on the Lo-Fi's album back in the day which sums it up quite well, and could also be applied exactly to Ego War:

"Ranging from the cantakerous B-line rumble "Kool Roc Bass" through the vandalized disco of "Blisters on My Brain" to the soiled supper club balladry of "I Used To Fall In Love" (Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes in an abbatoir), Lo-Fidelity Allstars's debut How To Operate with A Blown Mind is an oxymoronic masterpiece of "darkside big beat". It documents the normalized malaise of British polydrug culture, where clubbers no longer exalt being "loved-up" on E but instead boast about getting "messy" on a cocktail of diverse chemicals. Song titles like "Blisters On My Brain" and "How To Operate With A Blown Mind" suggest that the Lo-Fis are drawing on inside knowledge: "Blisters" sees Dave Randall gibbering about "injecting a rush/sniffing lunar dust" and "getting scrambled on one." But the album also deals in bluer modes of spiritual disarray, picking up where the Chemical Brothers and Noel Gallagher's "Setting Sun" left off --"the visions we had have faded away". Hence the mindwrecked confusion and numb despondency of "Nightime"--framed in Spiritualized-style ambient gospel backing that pivots around a desolate sample from The Three Degrees, the singer wonders "What's it all gonna mean/When audio psychosis spills from the speaker's cones/And you can hear the music tear/Tearing through your bones?". If you've spent the night partying like there's no tomorrow, what happens when tomorrow inevitably arrives? If you can't somehow integrate the blissed-out utopianism of the rave dancefloor into everyday life, you return to a reality that only feels even bleaker than before. Lo-Fidelity Allstars don't have any answers to these quandaries, with which many of their generation are currently grappling. But the band's turbulent sound and dark vision indicate a path beyond the impasses that have stalled dance culture in its tracks these last few years--what Jon Savage, writing about "Setting Sun", called an exhaustion within Ecstasy culture. "

And Ronan getting two-thirds of the way down a thread about the album without having heard it = confirmation of his place at the cutting edge of dance rockism (sorry man, I love you but it's true)

Let me just say while I'm on this thread that the Bullys were great at Glastonbury and absolutely tore the place up. Better than Mikey Skinner anyday. But then fucking Mint Royale were better than Mikey Skinner.

"will you leave with me, or will you leave with Steve"

"have you seen where Steve has been?" "well i seen him round the way if you know what i mean"

please god don't let them turn into groove armada.