RIOT
upsetmagazine.com Editor: Stephen Ackroyd (stephen@ upsetmagazine.com) Deputy Editor: Victoria Sinden (viki@upsetmagazine.com) Assistant Editor: Ali Shutler (ali@ upsetmagazine.com) Contributors: Alex Thorp, Amie Kingswell, Chris Cope, Danny Randon, David McDonald, Heather McDaid, Jack Glasscock, Jade Curson, James Fox, Jasleen Dhindsa, Jessica Goodman, Kristy Diaz, Martyn Young, Nariece Sanderson, Sam Taylor, Sammy Maine, Sarah Louise Bennett All material copyright (c). All rights reserved. This publication may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form, in whole or in part, without the express written permission of Upset. Disclaimer: While every effort is made to ensure the information in this magazine is correct, changes can occur which affect the accuracy of copy, for which Upset holds no responsibility. The opinions of the contributors do not necessarily bear a relation to those of Upset or its staff and we disclaim liability for those impressions. Distributed nationally. P U B L I S H E D F RO M
THE BUNKER W E LCO M E TOT H E B U N K E R.CO M
EDITOR’S NOTE Some voices
IN THIS ISSUE RIOT 6 READING & LEEDS 12 H A L F N O I S E 14 T O U C H É A M O R É 16 G O D D A M N ABOUT TO BREAK 18 DOE FEATURES 20 AGAINST ME! 26 BOSTON MANOR 28 BEACH SLANG 32 TAKING BACK SUNDAY 34 EVERY TIME I DIE
36 YOUNG GUNS RATED 40 TWIN ATLANTIC 41 CASEY 42 AGAINST ME! 43 OF MICE & MEN 44 EVERY TIME I DIE 45 YOUNG GUNS 46 TRACKS OF THE MONTH LIVE 48 THE WONDER YEARS VS THE INTERNET 50. TWIN ATLANTIC
are more important than others in music. That’s just how it is. If there was a league table, that of Laura Jane Grace would be near the top of the tree. With Against Me!’s new album ‘Shape Shift With Me’ sounding more vital than ever, they’re a band who belong on magazine covers. That’s why we’re so stoked to have them on ours this month. With Reading & Leeds out of the way - and a huge review in this issue - it’s time to get down to business with some bloody huge albums dropping over the next couple of months. Twin Atlantic, Of Mice & Men, Every Time I Die, Young Guns, Beach Slang, Boston Manor and a whole bunch of others join the 2016 party this month alone. If you thought the year was winding up, think again. x We’re just getting going.
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S ALL. FROM FIREWORK READING 2016 HAD IT S T O , Y ’ K N O W, T S I T R A T E E R T S , S E L T O C O F F E E TA B WENT DOWN. B A N D S . H E R E ’ S W H AT
FIRE! ! S R E C N A D FALL OUT BOY!
ER MCDA WORDS: ALI SHUTLER, HEATH
ID, JESSICA GOODMAN, STEPH
Flames and fireworks galore, Fall Out Boy (Main Stage, Sunday) waste no time in stamping their dominance as they co-headline the final day of Reading. Nothing is done in halves. Minutes in, ‘Sugar We’re Going Down’ is whipped out to really set things off, ‘This Ain’t A Scene, It’s An Arms Race’ has fists flying in the air and throats being tested, while ‘Dance, Dance’ unsurprisingly gets people moving. Even newer radiobangers ‘Uma Thurman’ slot in with almost shocking ease. Pete Wentz talks about following dreams, letting kids follow theirs, and how that this is a moment in which the band get to live their own. It’s an iconic show for bands, and Fall Out Boy triumph while living this particular dream, they thrill and have good fun amidst the occasion of it all. There’s putting on a good show on the Main Stage, and then there’s headlining. Fall Out Boy were born headliners, with a few added fireworks for good measure.
KINGSWELL, SARAH EN ACKROYD PHOTOS: AMIE
FRANK TURNER GETS THE PARTY STARTED Frank Turner (Main Stage, Friday) is a record breaker. He doesn’t like to blow his own trumpet, he says, but on this occasion at Reading, he’s going for it. On top of being his 1955th show, it’s also his tenth consecutive year playing the festival. And he’s running with it. From ‘I Still Believe’, ‘The Next Storm’ and ‘Try This At Home’, he doesn’t waste a moment or yelled breath in getting the crowd revved up for the weekend. SWMRS NEED NO FAMILY LEGACY It’s fair to say a certain member of SWMRS (The Pit, Friday) has something of a family history when it
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LOUISE BENNETT
comes to Reading. Really, though, that’s the last we need speak of Dad and his Main Stage headlining antics. This lot are here on their own terms, and they’re making sure 2016 goes off with a Big Bang. ‘Miley’ sends the packed front rows wild early doors, with requests for a wall of death from the stage following not long after. Brattish and brilliant, there’s not a second wasted. With every inch packed tight with fizzy melodies and 100mph power pop, the reaction is little surprise. This is what Reading is all about, after all. ALL ABOARD THE TRASH BOAT “We’ve been coming to
PETE WENTZ TALKS FALL OUT BOY’S ‘BLOOM’ “This album [‘American Beauty/American Psycho’] was an experiment to see if a rock band could, like a DJ or a rapper, put out music back to back. I think it was a success. We nearly killed ourselves doing it, because we went around the world, [but] it was good to know we could go another ten rounds right away. “This specific little run, it’s an art project in itself. We wanted to do something special for these dates that was different from Wintour, so we created this project. The idea behind it being ‘sometimes before you bloom, you have to crack through the pavement’. “So, we made a short film for it and we have a stage show that was built around it because we honestly weren’t going to come out for festivals, but then we were asked to co-headline, so we had to do something special and different.” 7
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he story of Against Me! is one of struggle and constant rebellion. Front person Laura Jane Grace has been leading the band through the fire for close to two decades and she’s got the scars to prove it. Years in the making, fraught with confusion and battling to simply exist, 2012’s ‘Transgender Dysphoria Blues’ was the sound of a band on the very edge of oblivion. It’s an album fighting back. The story of Against Me! is one of struggle and constant rebellion, but this isn’t that story. This is what happens next. “I had to destroy my life. I had to come out as transgender after years of being in the closet, then have everything fall apart, have a suicidal nervous breakdown and go on tour. That’s how you make art,” explains Laura. “You fuck up your life and then you write about it.” The soundtrack to this new tale comes in the form of ‘Shape Shift With Me’. It might be fiery and drenched in decay but it’s the Against Me! record with the most unburdened positivity. “I wanted to make people get up and want to do something. I wanted to make them say, ‘Yeah, let’s go. Let’s have some fun. Let’s have an adventure’.” Making Against Me!’s seventh album felt like “the closing of a chapter and the beginning of a new one,” starts Laura. “Although I feel like that chapter’s already closed and we’ve started another new one. But that’s how chapters work, right? We’ve read through that one.” As much as this record marks a new start for the band and they’re eager to read on, there’s a continuation from what came before. “Some of the songs were what I was working on immediately after finishing the last record in the period of the time before the band really got going.” Against Me! lost two members around the creation of ‘Transgender Dysphoria Blues’ which probably contributed to it “almost feeling like the end of the band in a lot of ways. We didn’t even feel like there was going to
be touring for that record. I was just hopeful that the record would be released.” Like they always do though, Against Me! endured. Atom Willard and Inge Johansson joined the long-standing partnership of James Bowman and Laura. “As we started going with the band, touring on the record, and as each show was happening, it just kept getting better and better. I felt really inspired by that and just started writing songs.” ‘Shape Shift With Me’ just happened. Before the new-look band really started working together on anything new, they had two days off in a row from tour and wanted to go to a studio just to see what would happen. They ended up at Ardent Studios, which is where ‘Against Me! as the Eternal Cowboy’ was recorded. “It’s a beautiful studio with beautiful rooms and in the middle, there’s this courtyard which was really peaceful and tranquil. I sat down while everything was being set up and wrote a song. It came quickly and was fun to write. We recorded the song straight away and that experience, that’s the template we wanted.” The song may not have made the cut but from there on out, the band set about capturing what was happening as it happened. The idea that “it all has to feel that easy,” became crucial. “I don’t want it to feel like I’m slaving away on some big process.” While this was all going on, Laura Jane Grace was also finishing her memoir ‘Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout’. “The book was all about looking back and being reflective, this album had to be immediate and in the moment. This is what I feel right now, this is the idea right now, let’s go ahead and capture that. There weren’t many roadblocks when it came down to it.” ‘Transgender Dysphoria Blues’ was plagued with the sort of bad luck that saw a tree come crashing through the roof of Against Me!’s studio, destroying it. This time around though, the band “got lucky with a lot of things.” With the group scattered, Atom in LA, James in Florida, Inge in Sweden and Laura now in Chicago, they needed a new base camp. Turns out Marc
Hudson, the band’s front of house engineer and tour manager also has a studio in Michigan. That’ll do. “We’d just be practicing in between tours and we’d just say, ‘Why don’t we just go ahead and record something. I’ve got a song idea, let’s go ahead work on it’. Everyone’s there and everyone’s going to participate and it just continued.” Because of how it was created, ‘Shape Shift With Me’ feels open. Despite the band carrying over the energy from their ever-improving, always brilliant, live show, making this album “definitely felt like a parallel universe. The studio is in the middle of nowhere, just in the woods. And it has windows, which is nice and means you don’t feel trapped in this box. In the winter, there’d be snow all around and we’d be looking out the windows and seeing the bleakness of snow covered fields. That’s the total opposite of being at a show that’s crowded with people or being crammed onto a tour bus. It had an influence on the record.” Against Me! has always been a reflection of Laura’s life. “I don’t write fiction,” is the long and short of it. ‘Shape Shift With Me’ is a record bristling with the desire to find intimacy set against a backdrop of a world that seems intent on tearing itself apart. “It is a record about falling in and out of love in a lot of ways, trying to figure out what that means as a trans person dating, examining gender and power roles and power dynamics in relationships and what influence gender has on emotion. What influence testosterone has on emotion versus oestrogen on emotion, but it’s definitely set against a crazy world too.” Starting with ‘Pro Vision L3’, a song named after airport body scanners, and finishing with a song about driving home from tour, the whole record is a trip. “We were trying to make sure every emotion was covered. You start out in the airport, you’re going through the body scanner, you’ve got foreign language coming into your ear and you’re a little disorientated. Then you’re off. Romance, lust and falling in love, there’s the good, positive emotions, and then there’s the
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All Guns Blazing T H E PA S T F E W Y E A R S
H AV E N ’ T B E E N T H E E A S I E S T F O R YO U N G G U N S , B U T W I T H NEW ALBUM ‘ECHOES’ THEY COME OUT SWING ING. WORDS: ALI SHUTLER.
RATED TWIN ATLANTIC GLA
Red Bull Records
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he homage to Twin Atlantic’s hometown doesn’t muck around. At all. Seconds into snarling opener ‘Gold Elephant Cherry Alligator’, the foursome are cutting ties from their hunt for the perfect songs on ‘Great Divide’ and going wherever the hell the journey takes them. This began as a toss-up between two sets of rough recordings: ones that sounded like Twin, or ones that sound like a new, interesting thing. They opted for the latter, and they’ve ended up with one hell of a result. ‘No Sleep’ is a headbanger about, well, 40 upsetmagazine.com
not getting any sleep (and an added cause of this phenomenon if played at the right time), while ‘Overthinking’ equally hits the nail on the head content-wise. ‘You Are the Devil’ is sharp, ‘Whispers’ is a soaring epic, and the swagger of ‘I Am Alive’ is going to be a welcome addition to their sweaty sets. ‘Mother Tongue’ strips it back to say farewell with a look at home and identity: the unsurprising case study? Glasgow. It seems odd to say a band could and perhaps should need to be reinvigorated after the astronomic heights of ‘Great
Divide’, but that album got them so wrapped up in doing it ‘right’ that something needed to be shaken up for them to go forward at full speed. Hit reset. Scrap preconceived notions. Start from scratch. When they shifted their focus from being perfect, Twin Atlantic instead found a way to strip the polish but make something far, far better. It’s a belter of a rock record – fun and full of surprises. With edges ragged, it’s an era of the band that cuts the crap and simply has a good time. Heather McDaid
Q+A
CASEY
and we’re proud of that.
WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT ‘LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH’? It’s definitely a record that we’re all very proud of, it’s something that we dedicated a lot of our time and energy into producing, and I think the finished product portrays that well. As best as I try to avoid the cliché, some of the songs on the record are heavier than we’ve ever gone, and then at the other end some are lighter than we’ve ever gone. As an introductory record, it feels like a decisive display of our musical diversity.
YOU HAD A LINE UP CHANGE EARLIER THIS YEAR: HOW HAS THAT IMPACTED UPON THE BAND? Yeah, Scott decided to step down as bassist and Adam joined the band on a permanent basis. To be honest Scott had said for a long time that he was unable to commit to anything full time or long term, and we were just riding it out to a point where he made the decision on his own terms. Fortunately, there had been quite a few shows previously that Scott was unable to do and Adam had filled in for, so it was a very natural switch out for us. We definitely gel very well with Adam, we’ve all known him for years through previous bands, so it didn’t have any huge immediate impact on the band. I think moving in to the next record it will play a much bigger part, because Adam has already started bringing a new dynamic to the writing process. It’s exciting.
AND WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO SELF-PRODUCE? Madness apparently. Everyone in the band has always had a very heavy personal investment in what we do and the way we do it, so we felt that the only natural way to go into creating an album would be to do it ourselves. I’m not sure if we’ll take the same route next time. It was a huge learning curve, not only about the level of our ability but also the way we work together as a group, and I do think we need that outside perspective to change our opinions slightly sometimes, but on this occasion it definitely made the album what it is,
HOW DID YOU TEAM UP WITH HASSLE RECORDS? We were actually introduced to them through the studio that we recorded the album drums at, Monnow Valley in Monmouthshire. The owner of the studio, Jo, is good friends with Wez from Hassle, so she decided to set us up with a meeting. We were always very sceptical about label involvement, myself especially, so we were definitely looking for a very specific fit for the band. After a few meetings with the label though, we really felt that they shared the ethos and outlook we had for the band, and it all went smoothly from there.
S O U T H WA L E S N E W C O M E R S CAS EY RE L E AS E T H E I R AMBITIOUS DEBUT ALBUM T H I S M O N T H : VO CA L I ST TO M W E AV E R C O N S I D E R S H O W T H E Y G OT T H I S FA R .
WHAT’S THE BIGGEST THING YOU’VE ACHIEVED DURING YOUR SHORT TIME TOGETHER? It’s difficult to say. I think we have a fairly warped perception of “success” because it’s never something we’ve measured ourselves on. The third show we ever played, at Underground in Cologne, was the first time I’d heard anyone audibly singing along to our songs, that was huge for me. Gaining the trust and investment of people like Hassle and Avocado was incredible, and seeing people online comparing us to our peers is unbelievable too. I think the fan interaction we’ve experienced has been the best thing though, the level of support and encouragement we’ve received in such a short space of time is like nothing any of us have ever experienced. ALBUM RELEASE ASIDE, WHAT ARE YOU MOST LOOKING FORWARD TO BETWEEN NOW AND THE END OF THE YEAR? The Being As An Ocean tour at the end of the year with Capsize and Burning Down Alaska is going to be amazing. We’re already good friends with all those guys so it’s going to be a really fun tour. Our headline shows around album release are going to be cool too. It’ll be strange headlining, but we’re looking forward to it. Aside from all that, we’re working on some pretty ambitious plans for next year, so seeing how all that comes together is really exciting. P
CASEY
LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH
Hassle Records
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South Wales crew Casey have a certain something about them. Many bands go to extremes - brutal and in your face, or deep and meaningful. This lot aren’t for sticking to a single path, though: they’re punching hard and deep in all senses. Lead track ‘Ceremony’ shows it well. By vocalist Tom Weaver’s own admission, it’s about “realising an extensive period of emotional oppression and manipulation has been suffered under the guise of a sincere relationship”. No dumb shuffle here. It marks out a stunning debut with real heart and soul. ‘Love Is Not Enough’ is a crushing emotional whirlwind capable of levelling the field. Stephen Ackroyd
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