Ipswich welcomes a regional show featuring two bands from both spectrums of the noise rock world at St Stephen’s Church, Ipswich on 9 December. The gig will be headlined by These Are End Times who are making a rare appearance on stage with their atmospheric and epic soundscapes. They will be supported by local Ipswich based noise-malcontents Earth Mother F*cker (EMF) with their garage rock fuzz and fizz. It will also be one of the early events to take place at Ipswich’s new music venue to feature a fully local line-up.
These Are End Times
When that first trumpet sounds, the world will know These Are End Times – they are a mutable collective, based around Martyn Peck, with current members in Sweden and the UK. But beyond that, little is known, as they are stubbornly averse to providing information that could be used to produce a press pack. Never a band one could accuse of being prolific, they have recorded and released a mere nine songs over the last twelve years (plus a Merle Haggard cover for the antigen Christmas Album) and their musical output has now slowed to a point where it can only be documented by time-lapse photography.
Their glacial work rate might indicate they don’t necessarily believe we are living in the end of days (or that they are fashionably indifferent), but as anyone who has heard them can testify, their monolithic compositions would make the perfect soundtrack for those of us witnessing the Rapture from the ground – and what better place to experience this but from inside a medieval church nearing the celebration of the birth of Christ.
Earth Mother F*ucker
The word ‘seminal’ has been used as a stock cliché’ by rock journalists since the early 70s to describe many obscure but influential artists. But never has that claim been more exaggerated than with Anglo-American noise rockers, Earth Mother F*cker.
Active in Ipswich since 1988 without troubling the charts or achieving any degree of critical appreciation, Earth Mother F*cker failed even to profit from confusion arising between themselves and their younger, more attractive and much more popular namesakes. 2022 saw the release of IVF, a live recording taken at The Smokehouse and picked as one of 10 national representatives for the UK music scene by the Independent Venue Week organisation for 2020.
And coming off the back of supporting the Melbourne/Berlin based Crime and the City Solution, the band are putting on the final touches to their first proper studio recording which features a number of new songs sitting alongside a few old tracks given a new lease of life for a tentatively and ironically titled Do Not Resuscitate album.
Advanced tickets can be purchased from the Brighten the Corners website https://www.brightenthecorners.co.uk, along with a host of other events.
