£4.50
Avaliable on 500 limited edition vinyl and via iTunes. 7" comes with free download code!
Tracklist: (A) Mazes - (1) Farewell Summer (2) Messenger (AA) Eagulls - (1) Possessed (2) Mystery
This release came about in a funny kind of way. Mazes had been booked to play Beacons festival just outside Leeds in July. Mother nature had other plans and decided to flood the festival site, leaving the organisers with no choice but to cancel the festival. They ended up playing a benefit show put on by the awesome Brudenell Club up in Leeds. On that bill were Eagulls. The band got to see 3 songs before they had to split back to London but in that time knew they had to put out a record with Eagulls ASAP.
Mazes had been jamming a Wipers cover at practice for a while and heard Eagulls did one live too. So seemed like the perfect way to combine the bands on one release.
This release see’s Mazes crank out a fuzzed up new track ‘Farewell Summer’, in Jack’s own words: “Farewell Summer... like the Ray Bradbury novel... To me there's nothing depressing about summer ending because it just means everything's going to start again soon. Metaphor and analogy are the lyric writer's devices of choice dur. This song came from a riff of Jarin's that we worked up in our rehearsal room... I tried to write a Cyndi Lauper chorus or something; like The Goonies song. We were all pretty smitten from the start. It doesn't necessarily feel like a new direction or anything, but more the culmination of everything we've been doing so far.”
’Messenger’... We've been 'jamming' this out for ages because it's super simple... it's perfect though...a perfect song. That's why we ripped it off for 'Most Days'. We THOUGHT we ripped it off but the timing's all different. ‘Most Days’ is more like LA Woman by The Doors. Wipers, to me, are a perfect band like the early Beatles or Ramones...completely fully formed in every way.
Eagulls are that band on the brink of coming out of Hardcore Punk and discovering melodic indie rock, just as Dinosaur Jr, Sonic Youth and Sebadoh did 20 years ago. ‘Possessed’ is contender for my song of the year as well as ‘Mystery’ by Wipers.
"First things first: Eagulls are absolutely brutal. If you’ve seen them live - and you’ll remember them if you have - then you’ll know that they’re one of the most thrilling, visceral experiences around at the minute, managing to be both ramshackle and ridiculously tight in the same breath. Labelled as hardcore and punk by lazy journalists, both have had their influence on their sound but the band manage to embellish upon both.
Perhaps the true difference is that they manage to capture all that bile on record where many of their supposed peers have failed. Debut cassette Songs of Prey is now so rare that it’s talked about in hushed tones, mp3s of those early recordings eventually leaking through to every in-the-know blog on the internet. The follow up 7” through Not Even Records, ‘Council Flat Blues’, was similarly snapped up by an increasingly rabid following.
And still, they carry on. Despite the fact that singer George freely admits he can barely remember most of his own gigs, despite the fact that they openly seem to court animosity with the crowd, despite the fact the venue is always coated in sweat and beer once they’ve finished one, they carry on, getting ever more intense. The themes remain constant, with anger at the idiots that surround them, sour memories of growing up on estates and the futility of the constant cycle of getting wasted - but the crowds keep swelling. Any band these days can get a bit of hype, but Eagulls are a band that are doing it on their own terms - utterly, violently, relentlessly.