HTRK Records New EP

Terrible fashion pretension from about two months back unveils sounds from HTRK's forthcoming EP, currently in progress. A continuation of 2011's brilliant Work (Work, Work), this excerpt confirms the Hate Duo's position as a sort of Radiohead with a sex drive:

XXXmas for Your Body

New HTRK vid for perhaps the finest tracks off one of this year's best albums, Work (Work, Work):

Hate Rock Is so Successful

Toilet Guppies loathes music videos. This one is the same pretentious superficial-marketing-nonsense-masquerading-as-art wank, but the song will undoubtedly prove itself one of thee stand out tracks of 2011:

Download the demo version of the song here, and—not «or»—buy the album here. You won't regret it.

And if you do, you have more money than sense anyway.

Can You Take 12 Inches of Hate Rock?

350 copies only. Of the vinyl edition, that is. Of course, you could just download two of the three tracks for free (and legally) here:

HTRK: «Eat Yr Heart» [mp3, via Ghostly International]

HTRK: «Sweetheart» (Suicide cover) [mp3, via Ghostly International]

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 14: Hate Rock

HTRK: «ksext» [mp3]

A long time ago, Toilet Guppies posted a vinyl rip of «ksext», a menacingly sultry instrumental off Hate Rock's split 10" with Duke Garwood, Keep Mother, vol. 6. The levels on the rip, however, were a bit high (though not more in the red than on the vinyl release), so Toilet Guppies has ripped it anew. No need to have listeners startle every time the song comes on.

Desire is a necessarily unfulfilled state, requiring as it does something not yet had. As such there's a certain unhappiness to sex. A current of dissatisfaction—perhaps despair, bitterness or contempt even—that still carries within it a twinkling hope of fulfilment, even as it makes that fulfilment an impossibility.

This is as close as I can get to describing the emotional space that Hate Rock creates. Lust and dejection in equal measure. Hate Rock negate what they create. Or you could say they negate such a negation. (It's a chicken-and-the-egg type situation, whether the lust is sabotaged by despondency or despondency's alleviated by lust.)

Be that as it may, whether you've got a lust for life or a death wish, this music shows the interconnectedness of the two, giving you a reason to stay if you've got the latter, a dose of reality if you're feeling the former. Pleasure and loneliness, this is masturbation music.

Did I mention damn sexy?

More Hate to Come

HTRK: «Eat Yr. Heart» [mp3 via Pitchfork]

Hate Rock's forthcoming album has a release date: 6 September. Pitchfork just debuted a song off it. Sonically the band has evolved. (Shame about the lyrics.) They're doing something right when in the current art/music climate, every new release of theirs comes as a relief.

But there's no point in reviewing or promoting the song with some blog marketing press release liner note spiel. Download and listen for yourselves. Highly recommended, as always.

New Hate Rock

HTRK: «Synthetic» (demo) [mp3]

While we wait for the album currently most anticipated here at Toilet Guppies', HTRK's Work (Work, Work) (to be released in about five months' time), the band is currently offering a live album, recorded in 2008, over at their website.

Not very well known—nor will they ever be if they continue to explore, in such a stubborn manner, what most people would rather avoid, all the more so because it's always there, that hum underlying your very existence—HTRK is still the most interesting «art rock» outfit since Flux Information Sciences. But unlike Flux Info, HTRK doesn't dilly-dally with things like distracting or ameliorating humour. Their music is not the type to cowardly put on a brave face, forcing itself to qualify, always unconvincingly, «… but it's not that bad.» Or to find other ways of looking away.



You can be indifferent about many things. Most things. Sorrow and sex are not among them, which is what gives HTRK its emotional currency. While other indie bands tend their hairdos and seek out people with whom to schmooze like so many gold diggers at the yacht club, so that they may better peddle the ditties they've slapped together with a view to becoming rich and adored by the snivelling and the stupid, HTRK takes care of business. Music was made for dealing with these things—pain, boredom, desire—and not for certain people to have their narcissistic exhibitionism indulged, their desperate need for validation met or their pointlessly ambitious greed gratified. When you've lost all faith in music—when every recording artist comes across as either a scenester or just plain bland—a band like HTRK comes around, offering you hope with their brand of hopelessness.

I'm sure that wasn't their intention, but there you go. Take it as a gift. Then go buy their live album.

[The above mp3, by the way, has nothing to do with the live album. It was a free give-away, downloaded off their MySpace some months back. Although a demo, it's as good as the songs on their records (and certainly boasts higher production values than their debut). Fuck the hyperbole, it's really very, very good. One of their best. So far.]

RIP Sean Stewart

Terribly sad when a member of one of the by far most emotionally uncompromising and substantial new rock acts of recent years decides to end his own life. For those in or around Melbourne, Australia, a memorial event will be held on 11 April. HTRK writes (via Facebook):

A HTRK goodbye to Sean—a night of everything beautiful and strange. Sunday 11th April at The Toff, Melbourne. 8pm onwards. Free. HTRK DJs, Sean's favourite tunes, Kenneth Anger films and more. Dress in black…

RIP Rowland S. Howard (1959-2009)

Toilet Guppies is dismayed at the news of the passing of one of the all-time greatest guitar players the world has had the pleasure (sometimes terror!) to hear. Besides playing the six-strings like no one else (combining sultry sexiness with urgent violence in a way that'd surely make Georges Bataille gush with admiration), Rowland Howard also possessed a voice and singing style unlike any other—a spitting, almost regurgitating sing-speak full of loathing, dejection or lung-black humour that would've been out of tune, had tune only had anything to do with it, and which perfectly conveyed the intense sincerity he seemed incapable of not channeling while performing. His almost deadpan delivery made him über-cool, while the evident sadness just cutting through the drawl provided substance. Crucially, the humour of his words ensured he never came across—or was—pretentious. His quivering voice and shaking hands (I thought he had Parkinson's, not liver cancer) didn't get in the way of his playing one of the best gigs at All Tomorrow's Parties on Mt. Buller, Australia last January, almost one year ago.

Howard's career was, probably to his detriment (and quite unfairly), overshadowed by his earliest achievements (which were considerable), when he defined the confrontational and completely uncompromising sound of legendary post-punk provocateurs the Birthday Party (go here for a free taste):



After the Birthday Party collapsed, Howard joined Crime & the City Solution, in which he got to display a quite frankly touching melodicism in his playing. (Which people tend to forget, impostors tending to plagiarise the feedback squall of the Birthday Party instead.) Their first few releases are mostly noteworthy because of his guitarslinging, as stand-out track «Six Bells Chime» (from Wim Wenders' overrated cult film Wings of Desire) proves:



He then went on to record some typically urgent stuff with his own outfit, the now largely forgotten These Immortal Souls. One of the high points in his entire back catalogue is surely this single, from Get Lost (Don't Lie!) (still available digitally, though shamefully long-out-of-print on CD):



After disbanding These Immortal Souls and collaborating with Lydia Lunch (check out «What Is Memory», off Shotgun Wedding), Howard recorded a couple of solo albums, the last one—Pop Crimes—just out in October. He produced HTRK's latest album, this year's Marry Me Tonight. (This track of theirs, though not produced by him, bears the obvious mark of his considerable influence.) A cult legend, he never quite got the recognition he was due.

Apparently, Howard's sources of inspiration were «Hanging out with girls, smoking, fraternizing with girls, talking to girls on the telephone while smoking, smoking with girls.» May he be sharing fags with seventy virgins where there's a light…

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 6: HTRK, Team Plastique, and △

HTRK: «ksext» [mp3]
[Download disabled, due to inferior vinyl rip. New and improved rip here.]

As mentioned earlier, Toilet Guppies is an accessory to the forthcoming new club night in Oslo, △. Until one of us «discovered» funtastic electropunk cabaret sensation Team Plastique, resident DJ Sheik Yerdix entertained grandiose daydreams of getting hate rock trio HTRK to play the event, with Jonnine Standish patiently pummeling the trendies to a pulp with her slow and brutal bass drum, teaching us all a lesson:


That's not going to happen. Still, as HTRK is an inspiration their music may serve as a taste of what attitude to expect from the barely controlled chaos that is, for want of a better word, △. Hear, then, this instrumental hate rock track from limited edition vinyl-only split EP, «Keep Mother» #6. You know the feel of it, you know the smell of it, the taste of it, and the look of it; now hear the sound of sex. «ksext» may not have the hallmark decadent singing of Ms. Standish—a voice that simultaneously exudes horniness and boredom, in equal measure—but that guitar is pure swampy, sweaty lust. (I think Nigel Yang's guitar just had an orgasm.) For those of us too young to have witnessed Suicide, the Birthday Party, Einstürzende Neubauten, SWANS or Teenage Jesus & the Jerks back in their late '70s/early '80s heyday, HTRK represent a rare hope that all is not bland.

As do certain other in-yer-face artists—such as the tits-out electro splosher nudists of Team Plastique, to make their first appearance in Norway in just five days! So catch them while you can:



Sjokoladefabrikken, Oslo on Saturday 28 November, from 10pm til late. Suckers stay at home, and only neuters attend other nightspots.