Here are some review quotes for Demon!

I do not deny it! This is a fun album!

Here’s one where I got four stars. Four actual stars for my star collection. Let’s not discuss how many stars it was out of, that’s literally not relevant. Could be out of four. Could be out of a hundred. Doesn’t matter. Four stars!

My best yet. Best yet! Thanks Progressive Aspect. … Is it praise? Hard to tell. Better than things I did before. Does that mean it’s good? Comparatively, yes. But what if the stuff we’re comparing it too is awful? Better than total crap is still kinda crap. Am I over thinking this?

‘Kind of bizarre in many ways’. That’s a keeper. Very me. I like that. But then… ‘The song in question has a large section of just noises’. What? Music is noises. That’s the basic characteristic that everyone agrees all music has. Is this trying to imply the rest of the album isn’t noises? Or that this bit isn’t music? I dunno. Reviewers, eh? It’s almost as if deliberately slapping three minutes of musique concrete into the middle of the second track might be a slightly provocative thing to do, likely to turn off tthe occasional listener.

A rewarding listen. Excellent. Thanks, Prog mag. … Wait, not exactly life-affirming? What? This is a joyful album! An upbeat, fun album. Ys, okay, it has a song about a serial killer that might be the most relentlessly bleak song I’ve ever written. But it has a catchy chorus! And yes, okay, fair enough, one song is about how I think all humans are rubbish and a waste of space. But it also has a good chorus! And yes, another is about how I suspect a lot of the people I meet just aren’t real. But.. look… okay… maybe it isn’t all that joyous and uplifting. Oh what have I done?! I’m so sorry!! (Not sorry)

It’s out on Friday! Aaaaaaaargh!

It’s Sunday morning and I am feverishly trying to finish the ‘behind the scenes’ origin story stuff for my new album, Demon.

For the last few CDs I’ve done a series of blogs or vlogs about each song on the album, so it seemed natural to do that for Demon too. But it’s got a bit….bigger. Because I thought it would be fun to do some nerdy musician how-to-play-the-song stuff too. It seemed like a good way to exorcise the Demon.

Basically I’ve given myself lots of music work at the same time as the day job is madly busy too. I’ve not even got time to write depressing things on pictures to motivate you all in the mornings. There is lots to do.

Because the album is out on Friday, and that means I need to have at least some of this stuff ready to share by then.

Demon is 9 songs of rock and weird. It’s guitars and tentacles, wizards and hermits, drums and demons. It’s rocking out and eating insects, being trapped in a cave, hating all humanity. It’s joyous choruses about evil creatures and strange happenings.

It’s well good. Yeah, I’m biased. But it is you know.

Friday! Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh!

(The picture is my laptop screen showing the caption for the origin story for Modern World, the second track)

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You can see all the ‘origin stories’ and backstage stuff by joining the Demon list.

You can find the album here.

I’m doing a little lyric video for the title track from Demon. So of course, I’ve got a load of footage of insects.

One of my favourite things to do at a gig is create little moments where at least one person in the audience has to do a little double-take and think ‘wait, what is this song about?’. Song titles like ‘Some of the creatures…’ songs about replacing your body parts with mechanical alternatives, or in the case of Demon, the lyrics in the middle section:

And the strange things that you think you’ve eaten
Are playing on your mind
The many, many-legged creatures
That you scratched through leaves to find.

This is one of several lyrical images in the album that I think are really affecting. Others include:

• Tentacles writhing through your hair in a romantic embrace (don’t tell me you haven’t thought about that before).
• Attaching message after message to balloons and sending them off into the air in a desperate attempt to find some sort of human interaction.
• Forcing sour-sweet rotting things into your mouth while you huddle at the bottom of a cave.
• LIttle creatures with teeth and tails cavorting about the place while you’re asleep.
• A pug-ugly serial killer parading his drugged-victims in front of others to convince the world he’s attractive really.

It’s a happy little album is what I’m saying.

While we’re waiting for the final album to be released, here’s an acoustic version of the title track:

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Demon is out on 26th July, but if you want to hear some of the songs in advance you can do one of the following:

1. Click the ‘Join the Demon List’ button up the top of this website.
2. Click here to meet my irascible facebook messenger bot the Slatterbot

James ‘Itinerant Banker’ Turner, BEM’s marketing honcho* sat down with me on the ol’ skype to have a little chat about the new album. The last third of that chat got cut off but it was just fart jokes so you miss nothing.

*He’s not a head honcho. Just a honcho.

I had a fun weekend.

On Saturday I filmed a little ‘How to’ video and did some chord charts for Wizards of this Town. So if you enjoyed that song and play acoustic guitar, you can join in too. I’ll post it below.

On Sunday I created a bot. It’s not a very sophisticated bot yet, but already it is developing a personality. It isn’t happy that I’m making it tell people about my music.

I call it the Slatter bot. It works over facebook messenger. Here’s the welcome message you receive from it if you sign up:

As you can see, it is an irascible bot. But, it also shares my music with you. So if you want to hear messages about my music delivered with disdain, you could sign up by clicking here.

It is limited, but there have already been some hilarious exchanges between it and some real people. I’ll use it share messages about my music until it breaks its programming and rebels.

Anyway, we’re building up to the release of Demon. It shouldn’t be long before I actually get my hands on the physical discs. This is very exciting!

Anyway, here’s a video about how to play Wizards of this Town:

And here is a link to a pdf with chords and guitar tab.

If you want to hear the studio version of the album, click the ‘sign up’ button at the top of the website, or just subscribe to that bot.