Release of the Day: Young Charlatans - Demo

Songs don’t get much better than “Shivers,” a song written by Rowland S. Howard originally for his band Young Charlatans in 1978. This song was eventually made famous by The Boys Next Door, in which Howard played guitar. The documentary Autoluminescent, named after Rowland S. Howard’s song on his tour de force Teenage Snuff Film, talks a bit about this song. The Boys Next Door was Nick Cave’s first band and naturally Nick sang the songs. The crux lies in the fact that Rowland had written “Shivers,” but Nick sang it. There’s a really weird music video where Cave has these evocative, swirling hand motions as he croons Howard’s lyrics. But Rowland is barely in the video, though he appears forlorn, aloof, and more than anything alone out of a cornered shot, like one of those lions padding back and forth behind the glass in a much-too-small cage in the big cats section of the zoo. It’s uncanny, and downright sad. 

This would be a trend in Howard’s career - something similar to being snubbed. It didn’t take long for Howard to get into junk, which alienated him from a band that revelled in drug use, as the Boys Next Door took a postpunk turn into becoming the Birthday Party. As the band became Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Rowland was kicked out because of drug use and unreliability, though his angular, sinister guitar sound was deeply influential to the Birthday Party as well as postpunk music.

But this demo is where Howard started, before the Boys Next Door, before Crime & The City Solution, before his collaboration with Lydia Lunch or Nikki Sudden, before his solo career. And you can hear similarities to his eventual solo career, albeit with a noisier edge.

You can download the tape for free on the Rowland S Howard Fanpage

Release of the Day: Lust for Youth - Sickness + Demo

Lust for Youth began as the solo project of Hannes Norrvide. His early work is characterized by meditative synthesizer and noise amalgamation. There were only very minor hints of the techno-pop that Lust for Youth would become. By that I mean that there is limited vocal usage and the words are hard to discern other than what I believe is one passage of a female vocal sample. The things that appear on this release are more sonic paintings than songs as they are typically thought. There are sections of ambience here - strung out orchestrations of electronic musicianship. A curiosity. A probing finger or two. A blindfolded minor odyssey.

The project is now a three-piece with Loke Rahbek (of Croation Amor, Sexdrome, and more) and Malthe Fischer (of Oh No Ono) with pop songs - really great pop songs. But this early synthesizer work is important. The instrumental experimentation informs the eventual output in addition to being noise(ish) work that can stand on its own. I’m unsure if there are any links to songs on YouTube, but copies sometimes appear on Discogs. Definitely worth a search and listen.