-valis Pick of the Week

Hail Voyagers! Our Pick this week is more a funeral bouquet amidst a celebration they existed at all: from Bristol, England, The Moles! In March they packed it all in to become another band, leaving us with 17 tracks to celebrate and ruminate over titled And Now It's Time To Say Goodbye Again.

Stating the end on their Bandcamp page with this paragraph: "The Moles were a band from Bristol, U.K. who released one album in 2010 called 'The Future Sounds Of Ashton'. Nobody bought it. Feel free to now get it for free in the interworld... you have our blessing. It wasn't ever going to buy the baby a new cot anyway.
And now, here is 17 more tracks that got left behind for your ears... enjoy & weep with us."

So what we are gloriously (and thankfully) left with are tracks from those sessions for The Future Sounds..., or subsequent sessions for a follow-up. That nobody bought it is our own loss. Or, as Jeff Penczak wrote in his January, 2011, review for the Terrascope: "With enough ideas for three albums, The Moles have tossed the kitchen sink at the wall and leave it to you, dear listener, to salvage the wreckage. Punk…psych…metal…, it’s in there. Just dive in with the same reckless abandon that went into assembling the carnage at hand and have a damn good time."

(Full review here.)

Of The Future Sounds Of Ashton, Brin Davies has stated: "The album began as a fantasy recording project between me and Billy [Fuller] our bass player, inspired by our love of the Rubble uk psych comps. We threw the gauntlet down and set ourselves the target of writing and recording a song once a week. It was also a useful way for me to exorcise whatever ghosts I was dealing with in my job; I run a psychiatric admissions ward. We ended up doing this for a year or so until we morphed the project into a full band [....] most of the press we received focused on the 'English whimsy tag; I've always been a bit narked by this and see it as a much more neurotic affair. It's for this reason I don't feel it necessary to do the Bandcamp thing; I'm more interested in giving it a good send off." This quote from (La) Luna blog, along with what may be a still-viable link to the album, here. Spacerock Mountain also may have a viable link, here.

Here's a track I'm smitten by from this final document:


Here's the video for their track "Fuller's Dram" from The Future Sounds Of Ashton:


To quote the band: "THE MOLES have the telepathic ability to beam psychedelic music into receptive individuals frontal lobe. This music was made by utilizing this brainbeam. PRAISE THE MOLES. PRAISE THE INFINITE. PRAISE THE NEVER. PRAISE THE MOLE."

And we do...praise Brin and Billy!!! Best wishes on your new projects!

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You can listen to the archived stream here; or, hear it this Friday, on The Dead Man's Turn Me On, Dead Man show on Live365, where it's heard every Friday at noon eastern time, as well as Mr. Atavist's Sunrise Ocean Bender show, heard every other Thursday from 11pm to 1 am eastern, on WRIR in Richmond, VA.

Note:
Adding the Pick of the Week to their show is Dogs Got A Bone out of Edinburgh, Scotland, from 10pm to midnight, Mondays, U.K. time, (adjust accordingly,) on Belter Radio. Thanks Col Chant!