Oh, do you suffer for your art? Are you told it’s all a labour of love? You are not alone, but more often than not, it is a sad reality, unfortunately. The disappointment of those with stars in their eyes, the general assumption you’re a monkey, available to be hoodwinked and willing to accept peanuts for your toils, is no new thing across all mediums, but it’s not getting any easier, quite the opposite. If anything it makes you want to scream “someone’s got to say something about it……”
Enter left, Swindon alt-blues rock trio NervEndings, who on Friday (6th October 23) launch their latest single, Democracy Manifest, for if no creative industry is hit worse from this plague of con artists than the music one, they thought better than to take it lying down, and write a bullet-biting song about unrequited love, or imaginings on how the world can be a happier place. Democracy Manifest rolls through you like a haunting wake up call, it’s of the Rage Against the Machine or Levellers level of energy and bitterness, and it attacks “the dark side of the music scene.”
This belting four minutes of bluesy, riff-laden vexation is said by the band to be “a direct response to real-world theft and deceit that occurs far too often in our local music scenes,” and if I shudder with irony to say you can pre-save it on Spotify here, though I do hope the band will consider Bandcamp too, what I believe to be the lesser of evils in an online era, though I accept perhaps not the most popular; sign of said times, but I still favour it.
Active on our local scene and never without a dynamic show, NervEndings have the energy and gusto of the Deftones or Foo Fighters, so the theme is apt, as if the fury of what they witness is captured in a bottle. It’s a charging single, a welcome return to recordings for this prevalent and le dernier cri band, echoing throughout local venues.
Vocalist and guitarist Mike Barham expresses his thinking, “We all have this rose-tinted view of our own scenes sometimes and we hope that everyone is in it for the same love of the music that brings us to it in the first place. But the ugly truth is that some people just see music scenes as a way to extort people, to make a quick buck and abuse their power. We couldn’t stand for that any more.”
“I got sick and tired of watching certain people taking our younger bands for granted, people getting lost in a cycle and we wanted to give them a song to rally behind. This is our way of telling anyone who wants to get involved in making and celebrating music, in whatever form, that the abusers, the thieves and the liars will always be weeded out one way or another.”
But Mike, I’m a paranoid old hippy, getting my coat! I hope he knows what doughnut I’m referring to, and post-lockdown it felt acceptable, though the subsequent year they blagged further and I put my foot down. Resonating the Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again, they might trick me, once, but if the message in this song gets through to the guilty and causes them to think otherwise, then your excellence is done. But furthermore it stands as a warning to those who may fall into the trap, and I salute you for it.
What maybe more is, standalone, it’s the belting slice of energy and encapsulating tune, resounding the millennial underground bands with thickly applied layers dropping into calm and rising with passion and fire, we most likely need right now. Pre-save this whopper with charcoaled fries.
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