The influences and music category sections of a groups Myspace page can be utterly confusing. The next time we find a rock band describing themselves as ‘Healing & Easy Listening’ we swear they will be getting a throttling. Brighton band Masks however are utterly safe from our wrath. With a description of ‘Experimental / Shoegaze / Industrial’ and influences stated as Fuck Buttons, Health and Crystal Castles, Masks are bang on. These instrumental cover up kids are exponents of exactly what they say on the tin, or rather the web page.
The duo that is Masks purvey dramatic, throbbing noise - the sound of pounding 3am blissful armageddon or drug fuelled sci-fi sex perhaps. Whatever it is, Masks do it very well. With their track Forever Dancing (video below) Masks take a guitar loop that displays a remarkable similarity to Elephants by Warpaint and then add layers of fuzzy guitars, keyboard stabs and Viking longboat drums to create a glorious circuit bending orgy of sound. Tribal Fangs (which you can stream and download below) is a brooding, beckoning soundtrack with the possibility of violence bubbling under the surface. We like. A lot.
Masks make the music of our favourite nightmares. If you’re in the UK and going to Truck Festival in July you can catch them there. They also have dates in London and Brighton shortly after that.
Masks Tribal Fangs by MASKS
2 comments:
We've got them playing at Audio at the end of next month (I assume that's the Brighton gig you refer to?).
They defnitely fall the right side of psychedelic, but like all music of this type I find it a little resultless. Either that or it's my fault coz I start to daydream rather than actually keep listening.
On a separate note, I see you've started using Soundcloud. You rarely used to have a playable, downloadable track available, so what's the thought process here? Do you only upload the Soundcloud players if it's the artists or if they're cool with it, or would you upload them without consent? I always knew you held quite a moral high ground about that sort of thing, so I'd like to hear what you have to say...
Hope to perhaps see you soon at either Toro Y Moi or Wild Nothing, or, knowing you, both.
All the best
Mike
Yes I've started using Soundcloud - on the basis of consent as described below.
1. If the artist has given me direct consent then I will host on my own soundcloud player if they agree.
2. If an artist or their PR company has already posted a track on their own Soundcloud player (for example the Masks track here) then they have effectively given consent if they have made the track public and available to share. (In exactly the same way as if an artist puts a video on You Tube and makes it available for embedding on others sites). In this case I am happy to post. This leaves the control in the hands of the artist - if they don't want the track heard anymore they can remove it from Soundcloud themselves / or make it a non-public track so that it can't be embeded or if they no longer want people to download the track they can change this option.
3. Also by using Soundcloud you avoid the risk of any PRS type action as recently experienced by Irish music bloggers - I see that Nialler 9 for example has moved to using Soundcloud after the recent issues with IMRO. Although such action hasn't happened to bloggers except in Ireland, who knows what the future may hold ?
On another note, as for those gigs, alas it now looks like I won't be at either - the pressures of other social life outside of music may mean that I won't be at those now, although I have quite a few Brighton gigs coming up soon in between festival action.
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