Mayflower Madame: Post Punk From The Fjords

When you grow up and grow into the fabulous eighties you feel somehow blessed by the imaginative transition that some bands managed to work out from the mere pure rioting fury messages of Punk anarchy to some angst ridden uneasiness known as Post-Punk. During the past three and a half decades many things happened to the Post-Punk movement since Joy Division transmuted their genuine punk roots to herald not only a new sonic reality, but also the translation of existentialism into the routine of a more introspective, artistic and enlightened generation of working class young adults. Anger, despair and darkness. Such a plot against mainstream.

I only knew of Mayflower Madame’s existence since three weeks ago through David Alison from Custom Made Music who sent me some stuff to see if I was interested in publishing something about it. Of course, I was interested. I did hear the music that he sent and felt the urge to dig for more.


Mayflower Madame emerge from Oslo, Norway, and they are a four piece whose members Trond Fagernes (Vocals and guitar); Rune Øverby (Guitar) Petter Gudim Marberg (Bass) and Ola Jørgen Kyrkjeeide (Drums) crafted some delightful pure dark Post-Punk perfectly mixed with a slight touch of neo psychedelic reverberation. I could not be more well impressed. This band is stunningly good!

As I was saying many things happened in the past 35 years with a lot of come-and-go from many bands which could not stick to the Post-Punk “aesthetic guidelines” because they felt the need to get more commercial, play bigger venues and big summer festivals. Let’s be honest about it. Most bands out there no matter their musical genre seem to get satisfied just for being copycats of those who influenced them, Mayflower Madame decided that was too little for them to do so.

The band managed to create a refreshing haunting melodic sonic reality where you can spot most of their main influences like The Velvet Underground, Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Cure, The Church, Sonic Youth and The Black Angels but you cannot say that they are imitating or merely reproducing their influential references because they really aren’t. They have sewn all of them into one soundscape and that is Mayflower Madame musical DNA.


This peculiarity made Mayflower Madame gain attention from fellow countrymen which lead them to open for Night Beats and Crystal Stilts and also to play the Underwood Stage (displaying the eight most promising bands in Norway) at the 2013 Norwegian Wood Festival edition headlined by Nick Cave and My Bloody Valentine.

In August 2013 Mayflower Madame released their four song debut EP titled Into The Haze available here on vinyl or digitally recorded and mixed by Bent Bredeveien and Mayflower Madame and mastered at Strype Audio by Martin Bowitz. Early this year Custom Made Music released a limited edition cassette single available here featuring "Into The Haze" and the B-side "Confusion Hill".


After repeated auditioning the most obvious reference that rises above all in Into The Haze four song EP Into The Haze exhales insistently to Echo and the Bunnymen albums Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here with all the swirling guitars, gloomy angry bass lines and hypnotic drumming masterfully blended with quite a bit of Sonic Youth from the Dirt album in particular due to the fuzzy distorted guitars cutting the songs in the middle like melodic chainsaws if this is sounds any possible, alongside with the dense neo psychedelic haziness of The Black Angels.

One very interesting aspect of this EP resides upon the fact that due to tonal similarities consisting in some strange vocal blend of Ian McCulloch, Wayne Hussey and Steven Kilbey which results in Trond Fagernes quite good personal vocal style exceeding expectations from a performative point view giving a much richer twist to each song with vocal nuances avoiding tonal linearities so typical of those who don’t know how to build a personal singing style apart from their influences.

Mayflower Madame along with a few other bands suchlike Cockatoo, Hamsas Xiii, Desperate Journalist, Viet Cong, Vacant Lots, Jennie Vee or Clustersun just to mention a few of them are taking Post-Punk and its derivatives to the heights again, leaving the listener with a feeling of impatience and eagerness for their debut album due to be released this year.

Clustersun: The Italian Revolution

I really don’t have a convincing explanation to justify the reason why a southern European country like Italy has produced so many good post punk bands particularly shoegaze ones Metaphysics put aside Italy is definitely producing a varied and thrilling creative sonic reality which can easily compete with many of the very best that have been made in the UK during the glorious years of first shoegaze wave. Italian shoegaze offers a rich palette of bands pointing for new delightful dominions widening the sonic frontiers of the genre.

Hailing from the city of Catania in the east coast of Sicily (Italy) Marco Chisari (vocals and bass), Mario Lo Faro (guitars), Piergiorgio Campione (synthesizers, keyboards and backing vocals) and Andrea Conti (drums) long-time close friends are the core substance of CLUSTERSUN. These four friends started rehearsing by the early shrieks of 2013 but their strong human interconnection and common musical background worked out as the magic potion to get things done faster than the band could have ever expected.

Lucky enough to have muso parents listening to The Beatles and Pink Floyd rather than to the mainstream Italian music this true gang of four friends became curious about new music and this curiosity made them discover The Velvet Underground and further on a bunch of bands influenced by VU.

Suddenly the gang of four from Catania was listening to Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine and Ride but also Joy Division, New Order and The Cure. One easily understands that after all this intensive learning under the influence of such bands the gang of four friends would want to start a band with a crush for post-punk, psychedelia, krautrock, dream pop, noise rock and shoegaze.

So it is not surprising at all that once they emerged as CLUSTERSUN that their sound worked as an invitation to a sonic canvas in the shape of a wall of sound where brush strokes reverberate psychedelic dream pop shoegazed melodic textures. Soon after first rehearsals the band self produced what would be their debut single Be Vegetal included in the 2013 Summer Sampler post-punk, psych, garage and the indie alternative compilation released by Custom Made Music, the highly respected American indie label run by Dave Allison, which has an impressive artist catalogue where one can find among many others bands such like Ceremony, Ringo Deathstarr, Dead Leaf Echo and Peter Hook & The Light.

The year of 2013 proved to be quite crucial to the band since it marked their signing with Seahorse Recordings the Italian indie label run by the legendary Paolo Messere leader of seminal Italian underground band "Blessed Child Opera" who also mixed and masterly produced CLUSTERSUN highly acclaimed debut album “Out of Your Ego”.

The album features eight nicely crafted tracks: Hipgnosis, Meteors, Be Vegetal, Planar I, Nebula, Floating, Planar II and Clustersun. All the songs denote a simple, classic but effective dark drumming beat design, backed by cohesive syncopated bass lines sparing room for the edgy cold, glassy guitars and the fat analog synthetizers, all of this topped with melodic vocals perfectly fitting the overall urban post punk psychedelic mood of CLUSTERSUN.

“Out of Your Ego” offers the listener a very pleasant and stimulating aural experience because when you have years of music in your ear drums, it’s only inevitable to dig not for comparisons, but for influences and sometimes you find stuff that even the musicians do not perceive as an influence though that is not the case with CLUSTERSUN for they clearly acknowledge their sonic roots. We’d say they managed to fuse The Cure (their most notorious influence) with MBV and Ride adding to this recipe some aspects of Pink Floyd, and details of Siouxsie and The Banshees, Joy Division and even Faith No More (the synthesizer in Planar I is so Midlife Crisis).

CLUSTERSUN blend psychedelic soundscapes with shoegaze and post punk through noisy melodies going from chorus-delay atmospheric ambient to fuzzy-reverb-distortion this makes Out of Your Ego an ingenious, beautiful, poetic and excellently produced album. What a brilliant work! The year of 2014 was a landmark in CLUSTERSUN's career because of their brilliant debut album although 2015 has also begun quite well with their participation in the superb Revolution - The Shoegaze Revival curated by Shauna McLarnon (of Ummagma) and Marc Joy (of Lights That Change) who have teamed up with the UK’s Ear to Ear Records and Indonesian label Gerpfast Kolektif released last February.

Jennie Vee: Post Punk Diva

Let's be clearly prejudiced about the fact that beautiful nostalgic blondes confessing that they are influenced by bands such as The Cure, Jesus and Mary Chain's, The Smiths, Sisters of Mercy or Echo and The Bunnymen at pre-adolescent age least with a crush on record labels such like Creation or 4AD are hard to find.

Jennie Vee the stunning Canadian musician born in a desolate mining town north of Ontario presently a New Yorker by adoption fits the profile perfectly.

Her gorgeous first EP titled Die Alone released last September demonstrates the ambition of redefining post punk through a bunch of guitar driven captivating songs in a honey dripping voice blasting painful melodies filled with words of melancholy and isolation.

Early this year she released the anthemic single Never Let You Down in anticipation of a most awaited debut album expected to be out throughout this year.

Check out Jennie Vee's music here and support her for a continuing successful career.

Pinkshinyultrablast: From Russia With Love

Almost of a sudden from St Petersburg tedious indie scene emerged a visionary noise gaze band, fronted by some sort of a russian Elizabeth Fraser.

The band members Igor, Lyubov, Sergey, Rustam, and Roman reunite under the name of Pinkshinyultrablast honouring the title of an Astrobrite's album.

Mostly influenced by the spirit of British bands like Ride and Lush their influences are much wider than that spanning from electronic to krautrock.

Last January marked the release of their awaited debut album Everything Else Matters.