Arctic Flowers - Procession

Gloomy anarcho post punk goth stuff. Fairly simple mid-paced tom heavy drumming, bit of reverb on the guitars, woman half singing miserable lyrics. They've got a bit of a knack for subtle hooks and keeping the songs interesting. Yeah, it's a dirge but it's not a bland, unlistenable dirge.

There's been a bit of a revival of this kind of stuff in the past few years. The forgotten bit of the early 80s where the anarcho punk scene bled into goth. I'll be honest I didn't even know about it until this stuff started coming out. There's a fairly detailed article about these news bands and their influences here - http://souciant.com/2012/08/the-year-goth-punk-broke/

I know my MRR reading friends have been raving about this lot and it seems justified. Definitely makes a nice break from what seems to have been an endless onslaught of d-beat from the punk scene.

Also, really cool that they've made digital available. Most of their contemporaries who are dogmatic vinyl purists unfortunately.

Update: Yes, let's have a postscript on this. I've just bought the FLAC of this. I listened to it. I liked it. I'd downloaded one of their previous efforts for free and quite enjoyed it. I was happy enough paying what worked out as about £3.50 for a 12" worth of music. I did this while I had Soulseek running and also downloading something else from mediafire.

I was also checking out other stuff from that Year The Goth Punk Broke article. That Dekoder band sounded interesting. There's no way of hearing their album online. They've got some demo stuff up and that sounds alright. The only way of getting the music is to buy the LP. I'd be paying way over £10 just on postage. And that's for something I haven't even bloody heard.

And that's the whole point I keep trying to get across about why it's a good thing for DIY bands to offer their music digitally. Dogmatic vinyl purism actively denies the vast majority of people access to your music. That isn't 'punk'. I don't mean that it denies me access to the music as if it's some horrific burden on my existence. Yeah, I'm fully aware that it falls under that horrendous (& actually quite offensive, when you think about it) phrase "first world problems".

There's a small chance the LP might turn up in a distro at a punk gig I might attend at some point in the future. But it's a small chance. Even then, unless I'm friends with you or you have a superlative history of putting out awesome records, I'm not going to buy something I haven't already heard.

Maybe I'll notice Dekoder on a blog with a mediafire link at some point. Or maybe a friend will rave about them and I'll be reminded that I thought I should check them out. Alternatively, I could have listened to them tonight, really enjoyed them, bought their music and banged on at my mates to check them out as well.

I dunno, it just reminds me of when I first managed to track down a copy of Maximum Rock n Roll (one with Misfits on the cover from 1995 i think). Some of the stuff sounded awesome. Walked into my local indie record shop and tried to order some stuff but they couldn't get hold of the stuff as it wasn't distributed. I bought something on Epitaph/Fat Wreck instead. Thing is, now labels and bands don't need to go with a big distributor. A couple of minutes work (and a bit of time for the music to upload) and they've got instant global distribution at no cost whatsoever with virtually every penny going to them from sales.

This rant is getting kind of rambling so I'll finish up. Just seems that Arctic Flowers way is the better approach. And their stuff is still on vinyl and going through all the usual diy punk rock channels. It's all win-win.