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Single reviews www.tastyfanzine.org.uk This is totally ace! Chapter 24 sound like they just make it up as they go along with a gloriously chaotic sounds complete with strug-out wacko female vocals. 'Albatross Candyfloss' seems to unravel to the point of no return then suddenly drags itself back together with a whiff of audio smelling salts before cruising back off with another verse. Weird space synth guitar effects too. How brill is this? The answer is just a little bit less brill than Chapter 24 and the 'Hep Cats' which lurches along on a catchy guitar hook but is wholly underpinned by the reliable bass. It's not immediately obvious that vocalist Claire actually knows the words and that this is not some kind of freeform creation. And they pick their set list from a tea pot on stage. Chapter 24 you have made my night!
www.subba-cultcha.com With the rock ‘n’ roll playfulness of Be Your Own Pet at their stomping best, mixed with Love Is All’s Post-Punk skronked out jittering dub eulogies, Chapter 24 tred a thin line between dance ability and perverseness, both equally as exciting as the other and a guaranteed floor filler regardless! One’s to watch, with my one eye! www.2-4-7-music.com Chapter 24 sound like the Banana Splits before they sold out. Put it another way – imagine running up to your toy box and finding nothing but guitars and drums, grabbing what you can and writing your first song whilst jumping around on a bouncy castle. The Corby foursome’s debut single is spiky, rock-a-billy-indie, raucous and fun and even psychedelic in parts. It’s the deliciously uncommercial end of the brit scene. Too happy to be punks, Chapter 24 pogo on regardless, more Zebedee than Johnny Rotten – and that’s a good thing. www.toxicpete.co.uk Chapter 24 sound like a coming together of numerous, madcap, musical influences from Captain Beefheart collides with Velvet Underground, Siouxie & The Banshees meets The Psychedelic Furs, Daevid Allen's Gong going head-to-head with Zappa's Mothers Of Invention - and so on!! It's raw and energetic and it works. It may not be one for the purist but if you like a bit of spice and adventure, like a walk on the wild side, then give Chapter 24 a listen. Frenetic, staccato, nu-punk; brash but exciting, risky yet compelling. Chapter 24's 'Candyfloss Albatross' flies in the face of contemporary pop culture, kicks sand in the face of rock generality and spits squarely in the eye of designer bands. Chapter 24 talk the talk and can also walk the walk. Don't expect regularity and consistency of tempo here coz these babes aint into any straight and narrow time signatures, conventional rhythms and run-of-the-mill melodies. Oh no, Chapter 24 do it their own way - and do it annoyingly well!! And, just to prove that 'Candyfloss Albatross' isn't just a one off Chapter 24 lay down more of the same with 'Chapter 24 And The Hep Cats'. This is addictive stuff. It's great to hear a relatively young outfit taking risks like this, pushing the boundaries and coming up with something wondrously innovative. Good on 'em too!! I really enjoyed this piece of work and look forward to seeing just what Chapter 24 will do next. If they are given a chance these kids could certainly make a difference! www.highvoltage.org.uk Emerging from Corby and being influenced by the Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd and Velvet Underground, Chapter 24 prove they certainly are an eclectic bunch of indie pop troubadours. www.ukmusicsearch.co.uk Sounding like the Arctic Monkeys by way of Pink Floyd and a dash of the bash street kids, Chapter 24 are a 4 piece hailing from Corby, making a spiky pop racket. With debut single ALBATROSS CANDYFLOSS, they do the whole spiky indie guitar thing and jab out the usual jagged riffs, skittery drum beats and bulging bass lines, whilst singer Claire sounds like a teenage cross between Polly Styrene, Kim Gordon and Siouxsie Sioux, spitting out the words with a mix of punk rock contempt and ice cool indie pop suss. As the song descends into a psychedelic haze of random guitar noise and chaos towards the end, Chapter 24 swiftly defy the usual categorisations and evolve into something a whole lot more intriguing, a trick they repeat on the equally whacked out psychedelic punk of CHAPTER 24 AND THE HEP CATS.
Live Reviews Chapter 24 have songs called The Song That Dies Too Much and Say Thankyou To The Camels to give you an idea of what side their toast is marmaladed on. They are two boys on guitar and drums and two girls on bass and singing and they were recommended to me by Yasmin of Les Natrels when we needed someone to support at late notice. I'm very grateful to Yasmin as Chapter 24 made a lovely noise and were exceptionally delightful. I loved the set from start to finish, I heard all sorts of stuff in there from guitar riffs that sounded like The Libertines and The Who to delivery that reminded me of Elastica without the slapability factor. Visually you have Claire the singer in a fairy outfit with a shimmering ball determining what song came next by picking them out of her teapot that she brought along. The teapot was very appropriate cos you really would like to live next door to them and invite them round for a cuppa. Mel holds the bass guitar as if she invented the instrument and the 2 lads spent most of the set grinning from ear to ear. They really enjoyed themselves, in fact more than any other new band I've ever seen. They have not been around for much more than a year but they displayed a maturity and range of tunes that some bands will never find. I'd keep an eye out for them if I were you. Friday 11th February at All Manna, Kilburn www.allmanna.co.uk
Chapter24 are the opening band on this ungodliest of Monday nights in this back room stage during the pub's main room quiz night, so there's many a free pint winning hopeful wishing the band would keep it down for the clips round. They are ten years younger and ten years of forward-thinking beyond everybody else on the bill tonight, and are well worth catching a chill and a hangover for on a January night. They made an impression under pretty difficult conditions. I think I once saw Peter Duncan construct a more powerful PA system from a cornflakes box, elastic bands & lollypop sticks back in 1986 on Blue Peter than the one on hire tonight. It's hard to hear the singer clearly, but it doesn't really matter. She stomps around like a red-haired Nico, or stroppy teenage Eleanor Friedberger, shouting words grabbed from a porcelain teapot by her monitor before every song. Like her band mates, she's a little uneasy with the crowd stares, but you can tell she's a few more gigs and a couple of vodkas away from something special. The band plays like The Who circa 1966 gone AWOL, the guitarist's tight & clipped rhythms lead, the bass player is using every ringed finger on her left hand to drive, and the ashen-faced drummer is setting the whole thing on fire. One song even starts off like 'I Can't Explain' before going off into its own fractured trajectory wonderment, set firmly in their own now. This is a band not yet fully formed, but they are on their own charted trip, and always on the verge of cartoon chaos or static crackle breakdown. All they need is a connection with the audience, as it's still a little like spying on a band practice, so self-enclosed are the four. When they get the confidence to open up and share themselves with the whole room a bit more, you might be hearing a lot more from this bunch. Review of Rockin' Horse gig in Blank Stares & Cricket Claps www.bsacc.co.uk I found myself liking Chapter 24 despite myself. They play the skittish, angular, spiky, post punk pop thing and they do it well. I may well be alone in thinking that all the bands who make this music should be amalgamated into a 45,000 piece travelling musical collective to save me the trouble of having to see them all the time as support bands. People who are well old like me may remember a similar phenomenon during the late nineties, when oafish dimwits would don camouflage fatigues and wave a tambourine about in a slack jawed fashion and pretend to be Oasis. But Chapter 24 are young and fresh faced and energetic and coy and sweet enough for me to start rooting for the plucky little blighters. They bring to mind the Long Blondes as the female singer sways awkwardly and bare foot around the stage, stopping only to pick songs at random from a (lovely) teapot located front stage and politely announce them to us. Star of the show is undoubtedly the whizzy guitar player who is brilliant. He twangs and buzzes and slides and whirrs away in an entirely melodic but elegantly laconic fashion. When I'm feeling curmudgeonly and belligerent, which is always, I tell people musical competency is the enemy. It turns out I was wrong. Arse. Review of gig at Carpe Diem, Leeds I think it's a safe bet to say that Chapter 24 are fans of Sonic Youth and The Throwing Muses. Their songs are based around repetitive spiky grooves complemented by all manner of messed up guitars, yelping vocals and shifting time signatures. If I closed my eyes I could almost be listening to Dirty or The Real Ramona, but then that's not necessarily a bad thing. Some of the vocals are intentionally all over the place but instrumentally the band are tight and driving. Drums and bass provide a solid backing for the deranged guitars and although the band wear their influences on their sleeve they are full of energy and thoroughly entertaining. Given that they all look about seventeen, this is a band who can only get better and better. Demo review I mistakenly reviewed the old ep that Chapter 24 sent me so being the obliging types they are they've sent me a copy of the new one. Maybe next month there'll be a third one, maybe this is all a ploy to keep appearing in these pages every month. So long as they keep sending me their barmy take on garage psychpop I don't mind. This ep shares 'The Song That Dies Too Much' and 'Cucumber Alley WC2' with the previous ep so that just leaves 'Albatross Candyfloss' and 'Say Thank You To the Camels' to look at. 'Albatross Canyfloss' is vintage Chapter 24 but is less derivative than previous offerings. It's spiky, funky and unselfconscious. It's business as usual until the chorus which is one of the silliest things I've heard in ages and glorious for it. I haven't heard a bass guitar being abused like that in quite some time. Tight, atonal and breezily confident it's funky daftness of the highest order. The song spirals towards an ending which sounds like scene from Dawn of the Dead as the band create an unearthly choir of voices for a few seconds for no reason other than they thought it would be entertaining. Which it is. I was getting worried as 'Say Thank You to The Camels' is quite straight until a minute and a half in when it has a quirky break down before getting back to business and then dropping into a big thank you speech to the camels over a bit of carnival surf guitar. Chapter 24 are a band which don't take things too seriously which is incredibly refreshing. Each song drags you along behind a speeding truck over suburban streets filled with speedbumps, puddles of oil and broken glass. If you have to swerve occasionally to avoid hitting a runaway dog that's all part of the fun.
Review by Paul Binnon for Sandman Magazine Reviews of our first EP - The Intrepid Travelling Circus EP Bratty garage punk is what initially comes to mind on opening track 'The Song That Dies Too Much' which blatantly pinches from The Who's 'Can't Explain'. Nothing special it would seem but then a minute and a half in and Chapter 24 belt us in the face and unleash a guitar wig out that Thurston Moore would be proud of. It sounds like the guitarist's playing with his feet. 'Intrepid Traveller' jumps about all over the place and features more dissonant guitar frolics and cheeky funked up bass whilst 'Cucumber Alley WC2' is part jazz ballad, part mournful funeral song with nasty guitars, naturally. In what I'm now recognising as Chapter 24's trademark style, two minutes in and the mood changes again and leaps into driven twisted pop mode not unlike The Real Ramona era Throwing Muses. Closing track 'Here Come the Edins' is jaunty, straightforward and - yup - features some odd guitar licks and head-twisting shifts of tempo. This ep teems with ideas as the band manically shift mood, tempo and style. It slaps you in the face before delicately stroking the back of your neck. The songs may sound random and full of arbitary shifts, but Chapter 24 are a band with a plan, and I want in on it.
Paul Binnon
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