Friday 27th June 2025
ADRA promotions and Puzzle Hall Inn present …
Sweet Williams (Spain/UK - Wrong Speed Records)
Slowcore Postrock Light Industrial feat members of Charlottefield / I’m Being Good / Hey Colossus
https://sweetwilliams.bandcamp.com/album/four-five
The Bricks
York-based postpunk garage rock feat members of Static Waves / Broken Arm / Red Monkey
https://thebricksband.bandcamp.com/album/modern-mirror
at Puzzle Hall Inn, 21 Hollins Mill Lane, Sowerby Bridge, HX6 2RF
8pm - 10pm (live music)
FREE ENTRY with donations for bands gratefully accepted. Live music done in time for trains back to Leeds / Manc.
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Sweet Williams
Thomas House has been busy in the two years since Sweet Williams' last LP.
"I got very nervous about playing live, so I stopped. Quit all the bands I was playing in, stayed at home in Zaragoza with the cat and made tunes between classes."
Tunes that grew from fragments on old tapes or came fully formed in dreams in the small hours. He was sending us (Wrong Speed Records) a fistful of new songs every couple of weeks. Nobody knew where this was leading. There was a half-joke about House releasing his own version of The White Album, until another artist close to our hearts beat him to it.
Then we realised: House turns forty-five in 2025. How about forty-five songs to celebrate?
Bringing in neighbour Carl Jehle to co-produce, the pair spent last summer putting Four Five together in long, delirious sessions, stretching through the forty-plus mid-afternoon heat into the balmy small hours. More than a hundred songs were on the table. A significant chunk of the work was completed while House recovered from emergency dental surgery - "the worst pain I have ever experienced".
The results, House says, can be taken as a whole "if you're mad enough," or as three separate LPs. "The first one's dark and dreamy, the second one's got all the short and funny songs, and the third one wraps it up. I don't wanna spoil the ending."
What's clear is that a triple LP has afforded the possibility to stretch out in directions Sweet Williams have not previously explored. Tape loops and warped, sampled voices butt up against brief, punky earworms. Influences are either worn on sleeves - PIL, The Amps, Beefheart - or nigh impossible to discern. Ever present, as ever, are repetition, space, and the sputtering growl of petrol guitars.
Four Five is a masterpiece. The perfect mix of spontaneity and obsession; of serendipity and sheer force of will. Not to mention maybe the only justifiable triple album ever made.
"I thought this might be the last one, obviously, but then again obviously not. I'm just getting started."
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The Bricks
It’s clear from their live shows that there’s a musical chemistry between the four of them, but equally, the tightness they demonstrate is the kind that comes from disciplined rehearsal.
Here, the production is just right for the band: with a sound that’s from the heart of the gothier end of late punk – think early Siouxie, Skeletal Family, but also with more overtly punk leanings at times – theirs is the sound of 1979-81, and where so many contemporary exponents go wrong is applying 21st century production values in the studio. So here, we have songs which are fiery, choppy, edgy, and the recordings convey the energy and the raw dynamism, but without sounding rough.
Lyrically, The Bricks always achieve more with less, with snappy, declarative couplets consisting of the fewest words possible and uncomplicated but effective rhymes. And so it is that the EP closes with ‘Meantime’, another songs that’s well-established and road-tested. ‘Trickle trickle… you’re so fickle’ may well not be TS Elliot or Milton, but it’s all in the delivery, and to hear Gemma belting out the dismissive flick of ‘fickle! FOOL!’ with her immensely commanding voice is enough to wither even the most cocksure and arrogant of bastards. With Guy’s magnificent weaving guitar-line and rock-solid rhythm section, it’s a powerful finale.
The Bricks have always been great, but they’ve never sounded more solid, or more confident than here.
- Christopher Nosnibor
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