Get all 4 Dragged Up releases available on Bandcamp and save 25%.
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of High On Ripple, Missing Person, Hex Domestic EP, and D/U.
1. |
Neighbourhood Watch
05:44
|
|||
|
He was looking for a fight
But didn’t want to leave his chair.
I heard him from downstairs
Screaming through the phone to the talking clock
Or Vivaldi played on Council synths
Before embarking on an argument
With a piece of lint
On the skirting board.
Oh, it isn’t red
No, it isn’t red
Sunday nights he’d come home drunk
With a fractured knee and an epiphany.
I pretended not to see
The notes he plastered one by one,
End-of-days conspiracies scrawled
Upon flaking walls
Down darkened halls.
Oh, it isn’t red
No, it isn’t red
I borrowed a hammer once
And I swear I saw his bin-bag breathing
I pointed, dumb and disbelieving
As he showed me to the door.
I don’t visit anymore.
Well, that hammer I keep close beside my bed
And I tell myself it isn’t stained with red.
Oh, it isn’t red
No, it isn’t red
LJ
|
||||
2. |
Heavy Chevy Malibu
02:24
|
|||
|
What’s those lights in the sky
They weren’t hanging there last night
The more I drive,
The dumber I get
Someone told me,
But now I forget
What's those lights in the sky
They weren’t hanging there last night
Now they’re flashing blue and green,
The wildest thing I’ve ever seen
Which punk says don’t open the trunk
Canned food, our mainline junk
‘64, open the door,
Hit the gas, pedal to the floor,
Riding high along with you,
In the heavy Chevy Malibu
What’s those lights in the sky
There weren’t hanging there last night
Sirens in the sky leading us our end
Better to die in oblivion than bend
Better to burn out behind the Chevy’s wheel
Than live down at The Man’s heel
Over the edge, living in sin
We’re the losers, who will win
Getting higher as we turn blue
In the heavy Chevy Malibu
EG
|
||||
3. |
The Jiangshi
07:46
|
|||
|
Bring me my talisman,
The enchanted ink,
Demonic forms
Rising, to the brink
Blackness has fallen
Amongst the trees
Chalk-white forms
Transpire to me
Throw rice, make coin chime
We’re now in their time
Movements non-lifelike
We be in twilight time
Raise the cover
Raise the sheet
Who dares look
Underneath
A melting monster in cine-head
Burning plasma psycho on my bed
Gripping me with claymation hands
Swarm of bees I must be dead
Who’s the zombie now?
Where's the gun, hun?
Gotta fix the generator
Poltergeist in oscillator
Bump bump bump bump
I hear you
bump bump bump bump Bump
I see you through the trees
Bring me my talisman
The enchanted ink,
None of these thing's workin…
I'm beggin' on my knees
EG
|
||||
4. |
Return of Dafthead
03:11
|
|||
|
Over corn rows / The shadow is cast
Scaring off crows / The sun reaches it’s last
At Your spring fayre
Ravens in the air
It’s your summer fate
The black dog that waits
Your doomed mythology
In the Tasseography
Sounds as scary as you think it would,
But something worse in the underwood...
It’s the Return Of Dafthead
Enforced crucifixion
With a rural affliction
Outcast and poor
A body made of straw
And your old-world diction
That frightens the children
From out of the gloaming
You can hear the moaning
Sounds as scary as you think it would,
But something worse in the underwood
Twist your head
When you’re not feeling good
It’s okay it ain’t
Filled with blood
Dig deeper,
Cut it out they said
Remove the devil
From its shifting head
But you just can’t get deep enough
So you’re still half-living inside this stuff
EG
|
||||
5. |
||||
|
Consciousness slaps Phyllis like cold water, wresting her from the dream she has every night, the one about being late for school.
Sometimes Phyllis feels unfairly hemmed-in by her own limited imagination. Dreams should be a respite, a chance to do fantastic, impossible or disgusting things, yet the rooms in her dreams all look the same as the ones in her life. And she never dreams of anyone new; only vague approximations of old classmates who never meant anything much to her in the first place, but must have wedged their way into permanent memory at just the right time. Tommy Anderson sneers at her as she bursts, red-faced, into a classroom setting that amalgamates primary and secondary and hospital into one.
The dream is always dull, but Phyllis’s first instinct on waking is to climb back into it, to close her eyes tight and travel backwards into warm nothingness. The new day prods at her with birdsong, traffic sounds and life insurance adverts that scream from an FM radio, refusing to go anywhere, but she tries her best to force the dream. It almost works, but the characters look slightly wrong, their faces keep swapping and their words merge with the real-life radio jingles that rupture the air. She isn’t welcome in the dream anymore. No-one will look at her, they talk amongst themselves until she gives in, flinging the duvet aside and wondering how her own thoughts can be so much against her.
This is how every day begins for Phyllis, except for a single difference that occurs to her only once she is in front of the bathroom mirror, adjusting to today’s face:
“It’s our birthday!”
She clatters uninvited into Glen’s room. Glen, clinging foetus-like to an underwhelming dream of his own, frowns and squints in the same messy confusion every year. His sister is an irritating blur, imposing herself at the end of a creaking, neatly-made single bed that can barely take her weight and that he never saw any point in replacing. It’s the thought of this old bed, and everything it means, that makes Glen realise what Phyllis is going to say just before she says it.
“Glen, we’re 70!”
Glen feels like he’s been shot. He ducks under a pillow. “I’m going back to sleep”.
“But it’s our birthday, I thought we could go for a walk, maybe a trip to the garden centre café, we ought to get a discount there as of today…oh, and you’ve got a DWP appointment at 3.”
Glen recoils, almost slitting his shoulder on an exposed bedspring. “It’s 7am, just leave me for now…we’ll do all that, the café, fine.”
70 shared birthdays. 70 years of well-meaning smiles. Visibly bitter clowns. Identical gifts wrapped in pink or blue. Parties in fast-food restaurants with too many empty chairs. Failed teenage attempts to separate and become two distinct entities. Dousing shyness with drink. Changing the setting to the cinema or the bowling or a park at night-time but still getting it wrong, somehow always wrong and met with well-meaning smiles. 70 years of staring helplessly at the one you’re stuck with as you feel yourselves hurtling faster and faster into a state of isolation that can never be reversed. The gifts getting fewer and more thoughtless, the laughable stockpile of never-to-be-used bath salts and budget-brand cologne destined for a dusty corner in a charity shop stockroom once all of this is finally over. The two sets of wrinkled hands opening card after card after card after card, and as they read each identikit greeting from someone married and happily retired they can picture all too clearly in their shared mind’s-eye the well-meaning smiles, the well-meaning smiles, the well-meaning smiles.
"No tea then?"
"No. Thanks. Happy birthday, Phyllis."
"Happy birthday, Glen."
LJ
|
||||
6. |
Voodoo Tabard
07:29
|
|||
|
Voodoo Tabard, hard and mean
Voodoo Queen, of the school canteen
Eat it down, force it down
Voodoo dolls under your gown!
Chewing out, spewing out,
Whiteing out, psych-ing out!
At first I know I had my doubt
But this is what it’s all about
Eat it down,
Force it down,
Kinda gettin’...
Psychedelics now,
Cuboid carrots and imposter Smash
Freaking out an’ feeling trashed!
Kaleidoscopic rainbow sponge,
Psychotropical juice on your tongue
Spinning out, into shapes of chops,
Breadcrumb galaxies under dirty mops
Chucking up choppy..
EG
|
||||
Dragged Up Glasgow, UK
NEW ALBUM High On Ripple OUT NOW!
For cassette editions visit:
cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com
Thanks!
Chas Lalli
Eva Gnatiuk
Lisa Jones
Simon Shaw
Stephan Mors
... more
If you like Dragged Up, you may also like:
supported by 43 fans who also own “D/U”
go to album
supported by 16 fans who also own “D/U”
go to album
Dances / Curses
by Hey Colossus
supported by 15 fans who also own “D/U”
Great band great guitars great songs great rock great record
go to album
Twitchy, effects-heavy post-punk grooves give way to psychedelic surf-rock delirium on the Toronto quartet's dreamy-yet-doomy second LP.
go to album
featured on Bandcamp Radio Sep 15, 2015
go to album
Howlin' Banana Records offers up horn-heavy garage rock on this new LP from pop-, punk-, ska-influenced The Madcaps.
go to album
supported by 15 fans who also own “D/U”
go to album
