While we’re on the live tip we need to shout out this LP from Housewives. Coming to us as some sort of three way label split between Blank Editions, Hands In The Dark and Negative Days, Work is their first full length since the debuted with a self-titled cassette back in 2013.
With makeshift instruments and a lo-fi recording style that sounds like a microphone taped to the roof of a barn, the LP captures a raw and live spirit of punk days gone. It’s as unorthodox in sounds and structures as it is unique, but the South London four piece make it work with a wall of guitars and a bone-shattering kit leading the way.
Perhaps not sounding like anything else we’ve picked up recently is why Work has been on constant rotation of late. It’s addictive listening, with so much going on you need a couple of listens just to get proper handle.
One Soundcloud track below from the album below and press release underneath that. Grab the record from the usual suspects or straight from the bandcamp page here: https://housewivesband.bandcamp.com/album/work
Work is the debut album by London based Housewives.
Work was recorded and produced with the help of Alex Townend (Vision Fortune) on a remote farm in the French countryside.
Using de-tuned and home-made guitars basic song structures were formed and then added to with recordings made using found objects; machinery, agricultural equipment and construction materials intermingled with field recordings of the surrounding area.
An electric fence from from the surrounding farmer’s land prevented a clean signal to the amplifiers resulting in no guitar or bass parts being recorded at the farm.
The focus of the recording process was turned towards creating layers of percussive and instrumental parts; drum parts were recorded from the bottom of a disused silage tank (Autarky), church bells recorded from the closest village (Half Step) and the architecture of the farm captured by creating feedback loops from the ambient sound of the surrounding farm buildings (Fig. 1).
These compositions along with the remaining instrumental parts were assembled and finalised in Townend’s South East London studio.