This Blasted Heath

 I'm in the best band you've never heard of.

 Obviously, I think that, otherwise I wouldn't be in it. I'm a busy man. I don't want to waste my time or yours. 

I'm not saying we're the best band. There are some good bands about and, really, its a question of taste. Your mileage may vary. And do you really need another middle-aged man, probably in a black tee shirt and a beanie hat, telling you, definitively, the best bands EVER? They're wrong. And it doesn't matter what band they say is the best band, because the action of them saying it changes the outcome, like bouncing a photon off an electron and ruining its day. It's the Sunday Observer effect. 

But you have never heard of us. That's the hill I'm desperately trying not to die on. We're a discreet outfit, like thermal underwear. We're hidden, occult. Chthonic. That's okay. We come from a time when telling people about your work was absolutely not on. Not cool. Infra Dig. The post punk rules still applied. Singing correctly? Enunciating? Being in tune? C'mon. Playing well? Nothing flash. No solos. Production? Never heard of it. Telling people about your band? Better not. It's rockist. Those were the rules, flushing out the competent, the committed, the skilled. You could be an artist, sure, but craft was utterly suspect. 

When we, me, Ben, the man who does all the instrument noises - I only do the singing noises - first started this band, it's called Ebbing House, we quietly dropped most of those fundamentalist post-punk rules. I can sing. Ben can play. I write very good lyrics. Ben's production is layered and rich. You can understand most of what I'm saying. We like noise, but we also like quiet. I like writing pretty things and Ben likes destroying them, and that seems to be the basis of our style. But it is a style, and style is in itself, quite post-punk, but we've added substance which is not, necessarily. We are betraying our ludicrous code of aesthetics in every way, including telling people we made this record. 

Ebbing House has a twelve track album out. It's called This Blasted Heath. Blasted Heath was Ebbing House's original name, until we discovered there were literally hundreds of bands called Blasted Heath. So we changed the name to Ebbing House. There are no bands called Ebbing House. Well. One. The album is available to download, or on CD or, for the techno perverts, a limited edition cassette tape. Very limited. Five. 

It's a very good album. There are themes. It's rooted in the earth of old, weird England. Ben does lectures on mythology in darkest Essex. I write odd stories and once made a film about an Irish sea demon. Turf is our turf.

 Rough Magic is the anatomy of ritual. Winter Conversations is troglodytic, the bone-deep memory of millennia of shivering human beings clinging to each other for comfort. The Gods in Colour sees the monochromatic deities slumming it in the British Museum crying out for the war paint they used to wear. They're not interested in being pale and interesting. The Island of Doc Tomorrow is a heart-sick love-song for a nation that dearly loves presenting all of its worst aspects to the world. England is old, it is small, it is dark and cold and wet, it is complicated, it is evil, and beautiful and wonderful, and so are it's people. We're English, and being English is complicated when you're seeing Farage and Tommy Robinson present the country as a racist, bigoted, philistine bolus of wankers. It IS that, but it's also so much more. There are wonderful people doing great things, but BBC news doesn't think they're box office. 

Twelve songs. Twelve different ways to be Ebbing House. There's range here. We don't sit still. A Bunch of Fauves is a pop rock bildungsroman. The Map is Not the Territory, is a helter-skelter state of the nation address. Caution: it contains a swear. The Gods in Colour quotes Byron even as it shimmers and shimmies beneath the mirror-ball. Poor Mouth is a cosmic journey that barrels along through the infinite, inky reaches of space, while Eddie and the Boys is a glam-rock stompathon about petty crime and stone-tape theory. The Suitors reimagines the Odyssey years before Christopher Nolan did, and pitches it as a brutal thumping at the fists of a former pop star, and All Passion Spent is a quiet seaside retreat in the company of frail old man who is "slender as parings of cheese". Putting The Brute In is a black-hearted aural assault, where The Island of Doc Tomorrow is an elegy for an angry island. 

Twelve songs, twelve different ways to be Ebbing House. Consistent. Diverse. Funny, angry and sad. All at once, all the time. The best band you've never heard of. Except you've heard about them now. You can buy the CD (or the extremely limited edition cassette tape) here: 

https://ebbinghouse.bandcamp.com/album/this-blasted-heath

What's with all this late-life exhibitionism? Normally our first instinct on completing work is to shove it in a drawer and tell no one. Could it be early onset dementia, or a latent kink, exposing ourselves in public. After all, I'm writing books, exhibiting paintings. Speaking in public. Ben has joined a proper band that tours, and people have heard of. What's changed? 

It's the music. We think its good. We would like people to hear it. It's worth hearing.