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Fierce Business On South Street

by Fret!

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1.
Hillbilly 01:52
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2.
Surf 02:53
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3.
DK 03:59
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4.
Dark As A Dungeon 07:27
info
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5.
Cowboy 02:58
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6.
Punch 02:35
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7.
Loop 02:29
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8.
Tired 01:31
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9.
Sonic 06:37
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about

Recorded live at South Street Arts Centre, Reading (UK) 18 March 2017

"No preamble, no slow-building intro: Fret! pile in with everything louder than everything else on the full-throttle set opener, ‘Hillbilly’. It’s got swagger and groove, but it sure as hell ain’t country, and similarly, ‘Surf’ is swampy, repetitive, dingy. And of course, I’m excited.

Recorded live at South Street Arts Centre, Reading (UK) 18 March 2017, Fierce Business On South Street documents a set which comprises a large number of songs from the album Through The Wound The Light Comes In, released the month before.

It captures the feel of a live show brilliantly, being raw, unsanitised, and in your face. Right now, when I’m missing gigs so badly it hurts, Fierce Business On South Street reminds me of everything that’s special and unique about that blast of sound in a confined space, with the immediacy and proximity to both the band and other people being leading factors. It’s perhaps ironic that this live recording does more justice to some of the songs than their studio counterparts, but Fret! are a band who are 100% DIY in their aesthetic, and the zero production applied to the releases to date is integral to that.

‘DK’, the first track on Through The Wound, is built around a cyclical bass riff and some churning guitar that slows to a crawl before bleeding into the lugubrious doomy dirge of ‘Dark as a Dungeon’, a downtuned grinder that which features the set’s first vocals. If you’re looking for melody or hooks, look elsewhere. Cut down to seven minutes from the 14-minute studio version, it’s still epic on every level.

They rip through nine songs in just over half an hour, with a succession of short sharp shocks – ‘Cowboy’, ‘Punch’, and ‘Loop’ are all around two-and-a-half minutes, with the penultimate assault, ‘Tired’ being blasted through in a blink-and-miss-it minute and a half. Closer ‘Sonic’ blasts in with a blitzkrieg of snare shots like machine-gun fire and it drives it all home to the finish in style and with all the energy.

The riffage is relentless, and dingy and packs the same sweaty gunge heft of early Tad, and this is so grimy you’ll probably need to shower afterwards." (Aural Aggravation)

credits

released March 28, 2020

Rob Woodcock: Flails
Cath Tyler: Thrum / La
Steve Strode: Twang

Recording by Dom
Photo by Cath
Audio tweaked around with by M.P. Wood at the Soundroom, Gateshead (UK)
Cover layout by Strode

'Dark As A Dungeon' originally written by Merle Travis 1946

Special thanks to Workin' Man Noise Unit, Ben, DoubleDotDash, Mirrored Lips

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