Pop Mutations presents:
Garden Centre
+ Ex-Vöid
Sunday 19th February
The Old Hairdresser's

Advance tickets available at https://www.citizenticket.co.uk/events/pop-mutations/

Garden Centre -
Can you hear what I’m saying, am I losing you? Are we still connected? I can’t see you, the stream’s frozen.

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For years, Garden Centre’s Max Levy has been searching for a steady stream. A stream to watch sports on, a stream to glean information from, a stream to wade in. Occasionally, he’ll immerse himself shin-deep in an actual, physical stream: an activity that pulls him in closest to the hum of the universe. Living is a fractured and fractious experience. A stream is a promise of resonance, unifying our innermost being with our outside reality.

This is an album about streams.

Largely written and recorded in Levy’s ex-girlfriend’s house shortly after they broke up (and lockdown forced them to continue living together), “Searching For A Stream” is a playful meditation on the interchange between actual and vicarious living. The album’s 12 songs are populated by narrators whose immediate realities are clouded by nostalgia, superstitions; the glory and pain of other people. A train guard, who usually takes pleasure in telling jokes over the intercom, can no longer spin his pain into a punchline (he’s just seen a horrific injury on TV). A man, asleep at his desk, sings frantically and fondly about his own personally curated hall of fame. A kid interrupts an important conversation with the sound of his dirt bike.

“Searching For A Stream” hurries frantically to the surface with opener ‘Hall Of Fame’ — Levy’s voice as urgent as a sea urchin sting, percussion like a karate punch, guitar shiny and sproingy. From there, Levy spins arcane observations into pithy wordplay and prismatic narrative fodder. On ‘Chicken’, for instance — a lens flare, golden hour song — our narrator encounters a driver on a country road before engaging in a game of chicken. The song darts violently back and forth between contemplation and agitation, as our car-dodging man muses on the moment they just had, and the equally real superstitions and restrictions which altered how they experienced it.

A keen-eyed songwriter, half cynical, half childlike in his curiosity, Levy plumbs surreal meaning from life’s peculiarities and regularities. He has a knack, not unlike Randy Newman, to make his listener feel affection for the characters within his songs. The train conductor, the man asleep at his desk, the kid on his dirt bike — characters who may otherwise inspire little thought from us in our real lives — here, draw out a feeling of deep connection. A stream of resonance.

Levy has already toured extensively across the UK and abroad with the likes of Dry Cleaning and Porridge Radio (with whom Garden Centre shares members). He has also found a fan in Frank Ocean, who has playlisted Garden Centre multiple times on his popular Blonded radio show.

Searching For A Stream, however, is a clear step-up for Garden Centre. An exquisitely self-contained world which also seems to expand with each listen, Levy’s latest album proves that there is beauty in the ordinary, oft-missed details of our everyday lives. If only we could stay in the stream long enough to really feel them.

Ex-Vöid -
Ex-Vöid draw on guitar pop through the ages - The Byrds, Big Star, Teenage Fanclub - and attack it with the ferocity and economy of a hardcore punk band.

Bigger Than Before is the debut album from Ex-Vöid, the "dangerously melodic" pop group formed by Joanna Gruesome singers Lan McArdle and Owen Williams. Expanding on the “exuberant, hook-stuffed” (Pitchfork) compositions of their previous band, McArdle and Williams have written an album of solid gold power-punk tunes.

Even on more mellow numbers, the band have a way of pummeling the listener with an unhealthy quantity of hooks, harmonies and Thin Lizzy-inspired dual guitar solos.

Yet there’s also a delicacy to the vocal which brings to mind the eye-of-the-storm melodies of Bilinda Butcher which imbues the album with a kind of grounding ethereality. On tracks like lead single "Churchyard," McArdle and Williams’ voices blend and trill with a folk-like quietness while, down in the grubby engine room, bandmates Laurie Foster (bass) and Jonny Coddington (drums) thrash their way through noise jams, hardcore breakdowns and open-chord power-pop riffs