Here at Brandish Towers we are huge psych fans. From the bonkers nursery rhymes on acid tunes of early Floyd through to the dream pop melange that is The Horrors we can’t get enough of it.
Here then are our favourite Psychedelic albums of 2012. It does of course beg the question what exactly is Psychedelia?
Literally it is mind expanding music which over time has come to be associated with bands in thrall to its golden age of the late 60s.
These days it has become more of a catch all term though for bands who take mind expanding music from the past (Kraut Rock, Shoegazing, Dream pop and even a bit of prog) and give it a contemporary spin.
This year has all been about the huge success of Tame Impala. They are, however, the tip of a very large iceberg. Labels like Trouble In Mind in the US and Ample Play in the UK as well mags like Shindig and blogs like The Active Listener show just how exciting and diverse the psych scene currently is.
Here then are our favourite 15. What have we missed? Tell us in the comments. Spotify playlist below too.
The second album from Brooklyn's biggest Floyd fans, Paint Me A Dream is a wonderfully trippy listen that incorporates elements of psych, early prog and kraut rock. The stand out track, Rippled also has a whiff of The Church's epic Priest=Aura opus, while Translucent Lucy is prime Brit 60s psych pop. Only available via bandcamp (and on vinyl too) at the moment.
Ever wanted a pair of sunglasses that can shoot video? A USB based hand warming system? Or even a cushion that can moonlight as a remote control? Nope me neither. But I sure love reading about them.
Here then are 2012′s weirdest gadgets. Some are actually quite cool, others are borderline useful, but all are just plain weird.
Ok, it might just look like a black T shirt with a pretty naff design, but this is actually one of the hottest bloke gifts this Christmas. That's because that guitar print is (kind of) a real guitar which lets you play chords and strum along to your favourite rawk tunes. It even comes with a mini amp that apparently goes up to 11. If you are more Hot Chip than Van Halen there's also a drum machine kit in the range too.
Today’s Spotify playlist brings together tracks from twelve songwriters whose 2012 albums might have passed you by.
It’s actually been a pretty good year for one man and his guitar type troubadours with stunning albums from Richard Hawley, Paul Weller and the young pretender Jake Bugg. Monday also sees the release of Scott Walker’s Bish Bosch, which is likely to be as brilliant as it is, well, bonkers.
There are a few that you may have missed, especially from British songwriters, so here are twelve great albums ranging from the quirky 60s pop of Suzi Chunk through to the return of cult legends Bob Lind and Bill Fay.
The number one album is astonishing and IMO by some distance the album of the year.
Do you agree with the choices? What have we missed? Check out the Spotify playlist below. If you want the top den debut albums of 2012 go here and for a round up of the year’s best music polls check out this brilliant blog.
One of the year’s most unlikely comebacks, Fay was a feted 60s songwriter whose two albums from that era are often described as the missing link between Nick Drake and Ray Davies. Musically he is still in the same territory on Life Is People and tracks like There Is A Valley are likely to win him many new fans
We haven’t had a jumper post on this website for a day or two now, which is odd because as John Lewis email pointed out this morning it is only 29 sleeps until Christmas.
Round about now the great jumper sale begins with high street brands traditionally slashing prices in a bid to piss off people who did their Christmas shopping early tempt us to finally buy the knitwear that first caught our eye in September.
Even without the price cutting though there are however a few rather decent sub £30 jumpers that we would take a punt on, and here are five of them.
The massive downsides of cheap jumpers are 1 If they are mainly acrylic then they can be a bit scratchy to wear. 2 If they are cheap wool or wool mix they don’t tend to wash too well and may be out of shape by the time you pull the Christmas tree down.
The massive upside is that you can wear them with pride over the festive season (and in the snow that is inevitably going to hit the UK in December) and they are cheap as chips.
There was a point somewhere in the 1960s when The Rolling Stones were arguably the best dressed band on the planet. They mixed traditional Saville Row threads with flamboyant shirts, cravats and scarves better than anyone. They were the epitome of pop art cool. Check here for evidence.
But then the coolest of the lot of them, Brian, went swimming, Keef got strung out on heroin and Bill grew his hair out. And from a sartorial point of view things went downhill.
Never mind though because there was always Mick. Trouble is that somewhere around 1969 Mick’s style compass completely went AWOL. Probably about the time he wore that white dress in Hyde Park (sadly our pic agency doesn’t have that image!). Throughout the 70s and well into the 80s, he strutted across the stadiums of the world wearing an increasingly bizarre series of onstage costumes. Maybe that’s the point, they were different, daring and bit camp – just like Mick. Sadly like most of the Stones 80s output they looked pretty crap too.
So please don’t get me wrong I really love the Stones and always will, but I still take great pleasure in presenting you with Mick Jagger’s top ten crimes against fashion. Enjoy. I only wish that we could have shared this one with you too.
And if you want to read about some under rated Stones albums go here. Pics copyright PA
We talked to the gadget experts at TechDigest and Shiny Shiny as well as a few of our techy chums on Facebook and Twitter and have puled together what we think is the ultimate list of gadgets for under £200. All are on sale in the UK at the moment.
There’s no phones included, but we have plenty of tablets, gadget, audio stuff and cameras. There are also a few very cheap stocking fillers too and the brilliant gloves that control your smartphone wirelessly.
It has been around for a few years now, but if you ever need to record anything this stylish mic is the one to plump for. It is a great performer and very versatile with it. Works with Skype too.
I must admit that I have never been too fond of pink shirts but this, just in from The Daily Mail ,could change all that.
According to research by Cotton USA Pink shirt – which surveyed 1500 shirt wearers – those who favour pink, as opposed to the usual staples of blue and white, are likely to be more confident, get more admiring glances from female colleagues and earn an extra grand a year or so salary. Men who wear pink are also twice as likely to have a Master’s degree than those who favour white shirts, with one in ten pink shirt wearers having a PHD. They also apparently have a lower carbon footprint – though quite how they worked that out is beyond me.
Stephanie Thiers-Ratcliffe, International Marketing Manager for Cotton USA, says ‘Pink is a colour more men have been embracing recently and it’s encouraging that they are not afraid to experiment with brighter colours. We spend most of our days at work and it’s good for company standards, our own confidence and work ethic to remain smart, but that doesn’t mean you have to be boring.
Anyhow here are five pink shirts worth pondering over.
Classic Slim Fit Shirt with a cutaway collar and Double Cuff For cufflinks. Massively reduced from retail price of £80 (or you can pick up five shirts for £100 now)
Poplin Fabric
There was a time when the only people who would wear band T shirts were metal heads still loyal to their ageing rocker heroes, Ned’s Atomic Dustbin fans, who a decade on hadn’t bought any other new items of clothes, and Teenage Fanclub fans who’d give them a quick iron and pop them on each time their favourite Glaswegians hit their local venue
Then a few years back rock T shirts suddenly became cool in an ironic way. The Kate Moss set started wearing Ramones shirts and pretty soon you couldn’t move in Top Shop for vintage rock band shirts and disco diva fifteen year olds desperate to snap them up.
Things then got way out of hand and in parts of north London your pre school child wasn’t properly dressed without a Pistols or Clash T shirt.
One only feels sorry for those earnest aging rockers whose enquiries about Sonic Youth records to youngsters sporting the Goo t shirt were met by blank stares.
Nevertheless the band T shirt is back and is likely to remain a staple for both kids looking for cool designs and adults wanting to broadcast their musical taste.
So the other day we began arguing in the office about which is the most iconic band T short of all time. A couple of Flat Whites and bit of Facebook research later and we had a list of contenders.
Surveying the list it becomes obvious that band T shirts fall into one of four categories.
1 The classic band logo - This is the band’s whose ident is captured in one little graphic device. The band’s brand if you will and the illustration that appears on their drumkit, behind them at gigs and obviously on their merch. Band logos have included some of the finest and most iconic pop art emblems of the recent decades and not too surprisingly our list is dominated by them.
2 The classic album cover - Oddly there aren’t as many of these in the list as you might think. In fact if you peruse any list of the great albums of all time you’ll find that many near the top like The Beatles albums for example, have not been widely replicated on T shirts. The ones that work well tend to have designs that are either black and white or two basic colours. So Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures looks great on your chest, whereas Ziggy Stardust less so. I think The Smiths may have got lucky here. Morrissey famously designed most of their single and album covers or rather appropriated them from 60s films. For reasons of taste (or maybe even budget) they were almost always two colour affairs that look great as T shirts.
3 A logo taken from an album cover – This works occasionally. Think The Stone Roses whose debut album sleeve was covered in lemons – the exact same fruit that became the motif for their most iconic T shirt.
4 Something utterly off the wall that the band ends up championing – see number two.
Anyhow, here then is our list of the ten most iconic rock and roll T shirts of all time. It was close but sadly Ned’s Atomic Dustbin didn’t quite make the cut.
As worn by hipsters across the planet. One wonders how many of them are on nodding terms with the album from which the print is taken - Goo.
The image is a Raymond Pettibon illustration based on a paparazzi photo of Maureen Hindley and her first husband David Smith, witnesses in the case of the "Moors Murders" serial killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, driving to the trial in 1966.
A few years ago retro gadgets seemed like quite a fun idea. Oh how we chuckled when we saw that iPhone case made to resemble a 1970s Motorola brick. And yep I loved all those games consoles styled like ones I had a few decades ago yet stacked out with contemporary processors and graphics cards.
Somewhere along the line though it all went a little too crazy. Now every gadgets site has a bonkers array of iPhone cases designed to look like ancient devices and music players that take their style cues from a few decades ago. And sad to say that an awful lot of what is being produced is, whisper it, not that great.
So finding 10 retro gadgets that are actually quite stylish as well as being rather useful too proved to be quite a tough task,. In the end we gave yup at 8, so if you do know of any others we can use to pad out the list let us know in the comments.
Links to the various products are included under the pics.
Crosley is a brand that definitely gets it in that it excels at producing high quality design-led reproductions of classic electronics products. This, the Collegiate, is a small-ish Dansette style record player that has an aluminium grill speaker a leather handle and USB connectivity. It plays singles, albums and 10inch discs. It is available in several colours and you can buy one in the UK from Urban Outfitters
It is almost the end of the year so time to start compiling those best of 2012 lists, and to kick things off we thought we ‘d take a look at the best debut albums.
There has been an explosion of great new guitar bands this year. From Alabama Shakes in the States through to Sweden’s bizarrely monikered Goat, the new breed are playing intelligent, tough but catchy pop songs, often rooted in the past but given a very contemporary spin by mixing and matching musical genres and trends.
Here then is our top ten. In no particular order. They are all available on Spotify. And you can hear a selection of the tracks on our playlist under the image.
Everyone's new favourite purveyors of Americana, The Alabama Shakes southern fried soul is one of the most exciting sounds of 2012 and in I Found You they might just have released its most perfect single
Until about five years ago Cashmere jumpers were the preserve of ladies who lunch, golfers and tourists looking to take home something suitably pricey and Scottish (which they had invariably bought on London’s Regent Street !?). But then something very odd happened. Stores like Uniqlo and M&S began to sell Cashmere knitwear at prices that mere mortals could afford and soon pretty much everyone was clamouring to own at least one Cashmere jumper.
The reason why Cashmere wins out is that in knitwear soft wool rules, and it doesn’t come much more luxurious or gentle on the skin that cashmere. And the reason why it used to be so pricey is that it comes from Cashmere goats and it takes two or three goats to produce a jumper’s worth of material. Also processing the fibre into yarn isn’t easy or cheap.
What has happened in the last few years is that the centre of the Cashmere universe has shifted from Mongolia and Turkey to China which has emerged as the world’s top producer – hence prices have fallen. There are still some environmental issues about Cashemere production but you are probably reading this to score a cheapish jumper for Christmas so lets not go too far into them now.
Here’s the list of links of the jumpers we have covered, now hit the gallery to see the pics.
So you you have set your heart set on the type of bike that Eddy Merckx used to spin around the Alps on in the 70s. Well you clearly have taste. There’s no denying that older racing bikes from the 60s through to the 90s have a tad more style than lot of today’s racers and consequently they have become much sought after.
The trick thouguh is to make sure that the bike you buy is vintage gold rather than a crock that will fall to bits within weeks of you buying it.
We asked Phil from Love Bikes London to take us through what you should look for when buying a vintage racer.
His top tips are
1 Make sure you don’t buy a nicked bike
2 A little rust and wear and tear is ok, but you need to check to see if the bike has suffered any serious damage
3 The most important part of the frame. If that ok you can rebuild much of the rest of the bike,. If that’s gone move on
4 20-30 year old wheels are fine. But if they look a little worn probably best to replace them
5 If you are not too hot on cycle upkeep make sure you are friends with someone who is like, off the top of my head Lovebikes London.
16 days into Movember 2012, and taches up and down the land are starting to look like Basil Brush’s tail. Mo maintenance ain’t easy but, for a prostate cancer bashing worthy cause, men up and down the land are persevering, battling through the bedtime rebukes of their partners and the back-of-the-bus jibes from school kids.
Thankfully, Gillette have spotted that a few of us might need a hand keeping our facial fluff looking respectable, and have opened up their “The Best A Mo Can Get” pop-up babershop at 10 Newburgh Street, just off of London’s uber-trendy Carnaby Street. Offering free trims for all Mo Bros that pass through its doors, Brandish took our most hairily-blessed Mo Bro Perrie down to have his impressive lip-wear touched up.
With pro barbers on hand to offer tips and tricks for the best Mo maintenance, as well as complimentary drinks and luxury hot towel shaving experiences, Perrie’s mouser went from droopy to Dali-worthy in minutes.
With the shop decked out like a 1940s members club, complete with leather furnishings and games rooms, the barbers used Gillette’s Fusion ProGlider Styler, a 3-in-1 styling tool “based on performance driven design”, to get the job done.
Offering a precision edging blade, it let the team trim the loose waves of Perrie’s lip locks, with an ergonomic grip that prevents the line from slipping when perfecting the “Craig David Chin Strap”. Sporting blades said to be thinner than a surgeon’s scalpel, the Fusion ProGlider Styler gives the closest shave this side of a cut-throat, according to Gillette’s expert grooming team.
Blasting out choice cuts from Curtis Mayfield’s Superfly album while the bantering barbers slashed away at errant stubble, The Best A Mo Can Get barbershop has real attitude, and is definitely worth a visit from any Mo Bros struggling to keep their facial manes in check.
Gillette will be doing their part to fight prostate cancer during the Movember campaign in other ways too, aiming to donate £100,000 to the cause through sales of their Movember stamped products.
Gillette’s The Best A Mo Can Get barbershop is open to all members of the public, with a special late-night opening planned for November 22nd. There will also be a number of events including intimate DJ sets, cocktail nights and whiskey tasting sessions across the month. Check www.facebook.com/GilletteUK for more details.
Made from Pure Wools, Mohair Wool and Polyester Blends, these have a straight slightly narrower leg 16.5 inch bottoms.
Adams of London
One of the likely big trends in women’s wear for next is year monochrome black and white. Think Bridget Riley, op art, stripes of varying lengths, maybe a bit of dogs tooth too.
Chances are that the mod monochrome look will also have an influence on menswear too, which is good news for the heritage brands who t are always selling 60 influenced clothes. Here are few items that are likely to be (coughs) bang on trend next year.
There is a bit of trend in comedy jumpers this season. You only need to check out River Island’s selection to see how prevalent they are. If you want knitwear that doesn’t have to be teamed up with paper hats and plastic cracker jewelry that you can wear all winter long then check out this lot.
These are our favourites of the season. All classic jumpers. All very stylish and a little more conservative than our last selection.
Here at Brandish Towers we are huge psych fans. From the bonkers nursery rhymes on acid tunes of early Floyd through to the dream pop melange that is The Horrors we can’t get enough of it.
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