Skip to main content

Shareholder – Five Mile Throwdowns (Know Your Enemy)

“Who doesn't/Emotionally Connect/To Music?” declaims Sandy Milroy in his observations of Daisy, a young woman who downloads the latest Adele album, midway through the nine minute epic that is It is Morning, the finger-jabbing slow-core centrepiece of the second cassette release by Milroy's Shareholder project as a full band. This follows on from Shareholder's previous band-based cassette, Jimmy Shan, that followed a slew of long out of print releases by Milroy in his solo Shareholder guise.

As a member of sludge-noise auteurs Muscletusk as well as siring Shareholder, Milroy has long been a key figure of Edinburgh's cross-pollinating avant-noise underground. In the last couple of years, however, by introducing vocals to the power trio that Shareholder has become, there is a more focused intent to the guitar, bass and drum clatter that lets rip over seven tracks like the bombs released from the war plane on the cassette's front cover collage.

With fellow travellers Grant Smith, also of Muscletusk, and Graham Stewart, aka King Rib, providing battering ram style ballast, Milroy's caustic poetics lash out with sarcastic barbs, including those aimed at the aforementioned Daisy. As 'Something Falls Out Of The Back of Her Head/She'll Have to See to it Later', what initially sounds like frustration at the disposability of commercial pap takes a more menacing turn. This is compounded on the instrumental insistence of Theme from Hashtaggart.

While the template for such urban grimoires aren't hard to spot – Dragnet and Room to Live era Fall immediately spring to mind – Milroy and Shareholder's brand of wilfully opaque and relentless belligerence is at times even more pummelling. This is especially so on a version of Our House, which takes Graham Nash's 'ode to countercultural domestic bliss', as the piece of Me Generation bubblegum was once described, and invests it with a withering disdain that borders on contempt in a bittersweet but thrilling assault course of refreshingly uneasy listening.
www.shareholder.bandcamp.com

Product, November 2016

ends

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ron Butlin - The Sound of My Voice

When Ron Butlin saw a man who’d just asked him the time throw himself under a train on the Paris Metro, it was a turning point in how his 1987 novel, The Sound Of My Voice, would turn out. Twenty years on, Butlin’s tale of suburban family man Morris Magellan’s existential crisis and his subsequent slide into alcoholism is regarded as a lost classic. Prime material, then, for the very intimate stage adaptation which opens in the Citizens Theatre’s tiny Stalls Studio tonight. “I had this friend in London who was an alcoholic,” Butlin recalls. “He would go off to work in the civil service in the morning looking absolutely immaculate. Then at night we’d meet, and he’s get mega-blootered, then go home and continue drinking and end up in a really bad state. I remember staying over one night, and he’d emerge from his room looking immaculate again. There was this huge contrast between what was going on outside and what was going on inside.” We’re sitting in a café on Edinburgh’s south sid

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) 1. THE STONE ROSES    Don’t Stop ( Silvertone   ORE   1989) The trip didn’t quite start here for what sounds like Waterfall played backwards on The Stone Roses’ era-defining eponymous debut album, but it sounds

Big Gold Dreams – A Story of Scottish Independent Music 1977-1989

Disc 1 1. THE REZILLOS (My Baby Does) Good Sculptures (12/77)  2. THE EXILE Hooked On You (8/77) 3. DRIVE Jerkin’ (8/77) 4. VALVES Robot Love (9/77) 5. P.V.C. 2 Put You In The Picture (10/77) 6. JOHNNY & THE SELF ABUSERS Dead Vandals (11/77) 7. BEE BEE CEE You Gotta Know Girl (11/77) 8. SUBS Gimme Your Heart (2/78) 9. SKIDS Reasons (No Bad NB 1, 4/78) 10. FINGERPRINTZ Dancing With Myself (1/79)  11. THE ZIPS Take Me Down (4/79) 12. ANOTHER PRETTY FACE All The Boys Love Carrie (5/79)  13. VISITORS Electric Heat (5/79) 14. JOLT See Saw (6/79) 15. SIMPLE MINDS Chelsea Girl (6/79) 16. SHAKE Culture Shock (7/79) 17. HEADBOYS The Shape Of Things To Come (7/79) 18. FIRE EXIT Time Wall (8/79) 19. FREEZE Paranoia (9/79) 20. FAKES Sylvia Clarke (9/79) 21. TPI She’s Too Clever For Me (10/79) 22. FUN 4 Singing In The Showers (11/79) 23. FLOWERS Confessions (12/79) 24. TV21 Playing With Fire (4/80) 25. ALEX FERGUSSON Stay With Me Tonight (1980) 1. THE REZILL