You know when you heard about the special editions with their lovely lyric books that look all lovely and have lovely endnotes and lovely essays about CLEVER STUFFS and you thought: oh noes, bcux I iz living with my four grandparents in a small house and can only afford to have one lovely lyric book a year on my birfday and then I only readz one letter at a time to make it last longer? Well Charlie, YOU NOW HAVE A GOLDEN WAY TO MAKE YOUR DAY because you can now buy the lyric book on it’s own without spending all your cash on a sexy, amazing special edition (yeah).

It’s only eight quid and it’s here:

http://corporaterecords.co.uk/Indelicates_Store/curiosities.html

We’ve also added a nice ‘Savages’ comic design Journal to the Cafepress here, if you think that;s something you’d like.

Other news: look at this – it’s awesome people making David Koresh Superstar with us:

And now go here and look at http://www.juliaindelicate.com/gallery/america:

Because Julia takes good pictures and these are some.

OK, so you know how we said that we would be releasing the third Indelicates Record in 2010? Well as you have probably noticed – we haven’t. There are very good reasons for this: for a start, we have been stupidly busy touring, marrying each other, making special editions, coming and playing gigs in your houses, reinventing the record industry and playing Xbox games.

One of the other things we’ve been busy with is spending all the money we made from Songs For Swinging Lovers on making David Koresh Superstar. Initially we thought we’d be able to rush it out so as to say that we’d released two records in 2010 and then swan about implying that all other bands were workshy – and we probably could have done that – but the thing is, on finishing the recording sessions and perfecting the mixes we decided that the record is actually a little bit better than we thought it would be – and we thought it was gonna be pretty amazing anyway. We want to give it the space we think it needs – master it properly, package it as best we can and generally kick it into the world with the best possible start.

We proved in 2010 that you don’t need a record company to be as successful making culty indie albums as you would be with one. This year we want to prove that you don’t need a record company to have a bona fide hit.

So, the kids, we announce the imminence of David Koresh Superstar.

Recorded in London and Austin with a full complement of pedal steel guitars, musical saws and percussive guns, the new record is a concept album telling the story of the Waco siege in a bitter cocktail of rebel country, luau, disco and rock opera. With a cast that includes Carter USM’s Jim Bob, David Devant and his Spirit Wife’s Vessel, Philip Jeays, Lily Rae and a full greek chorus of strapping Camdenite youth, David Koresh Superstar delves into the murky, abusive world of religious extremism, government excess, bad sex and insane logic; rewriting the greatest story ever told on the assumption that the persecuted messiah is definitively mistaken about his divinity.

It will look, basically, like that up there.

There will be very special editions.

There will be very special shows.

And this time, I swear, we’re going to shake this creaking industry to its god damned foundations.

Happy New Year

We’ve only a storage heater, so believe us we should know.

IT IS VERY NEARLY CHRIIIISTMAS, and thus time to huddle with your loved ones against the dying of the light and reflect on its true meaning. A special time when, once, a virgin went to where the ancestor of the dude she wasn’t sleeping with had possibly lived a thousand years previously in order to fill in a census form and – so bored by having to pick from ‘jew’ or ‘polytheist’ in the religion section – decided to have a miraculous sex-free baby (y’know, like Osiris) and start a religion after him for the lulz. What better time, in other words to indulge in consumerism and buy a bunch of awesome STUFF? Like this stuff, for example…

That’s right kids, we now, finally, have VINYL SFSL in stock. If you preordered it, then it’s in the post. If you didn’t because you didn’t trust us – then you can make it up to us by buying one now. You should, because we have to put the price up in the new year if we’re going to cover costs. Seriously, they are very pretty and come in a gorgeous Matte Finish, Gatefold sleeve with enough little details to gaze at that you can just look at them for hours – making them a worthwhile purchase even if you don’t have a record player. What’s more, this your last chance to buy the special edition with all kinds of bundled goodies for the preorder price of £60 w/out CD, £72 with.

http://corporaterecords.co.uk/Indelicates_Store/special.html

Second, we sold a bunch in Germany – but we still have a decent number of Be Afraid Of Your Parents T-Shirts – they are nice and make good undergarments for keeping the cold out, we have discovered.

http://corporaterecords.co.uk/Indelicates_Store/apparel.html

Third, you can now buy our poetry book ‘Words by…’ direct from lulu – if you missed it last year

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/words-by-simon-julia-indelicate/5060007

Fourth, COMING SOON – we’ll be selling copies of the SFSL lyric book and ‘Antique Lace Under Musée Glass’ a poster and art book featuring concepts, photographs and the song-by-song posters from the back cover of the vinyl individually.

So you’ll have something to spend your christmas money on.

Also, watch out for NEWS v soon about David Koresh Superstar – which I swear is the best fucking album you haven’t heard in existence.

Merry Merry, and Happy Shopping

Mainly, there really are few things more irritating than journalists and theorists who swoop in on events after they’ve already gotten going in order to cherry pick the images that best support whichever narrative they seek to discover so as to compose flowery and simplistic hymnals  for money. I don’t want to do that. The Kids don’t need pop musicians, poststructuralists or columnists to tell them what they think and history would do better without its glorifying bards. Glory serves no one and congratulation is best kept private. I won’t be writing any fucking folk ballads about the battle of Millbank or the huddled, kettled masses yearning to breathe free – however tempting such a course might be. I might be able to convince some people that I was performing a valuable service to the cause by indulging myself in that way – but I would be fooling them if I did. Songs like that are always for the singer first. Writing like that is always for the writer.

This>>

“There go my people. I must find out where they are going so I can lead them.” - Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin.

But I don’t think, having released Jerusalem this year – very specific in its target as it was – that we can just stay out of it completely, so, this is what I think about the Tuition Fee protests (a reserved whoo! with a sprinkle of yay! – in case the following paragraph makes you think you’re going to have to write me hatemail). It should also make some of the lyrics to Jerusalem clearer, if anyone was having trouble…

crosspost from facebook

I think there are lots of argument to be had about tuition fees.

I, for example, have always hated the slogan ‘education is a right not a privilege’ – it IS a privilege that could, one day, be a right and that shouldn’t be forgotten. I can’t find a way to join the dots between the deeply unedifying experience of students that I had at university and the people I know who seem permanently excluded from the benefits that lesser minds enjoyed by virtue of their class. I believe in education for its own sake – but I saw little of that happening at the university I attended – the level of CV building, imaginationless trope parroting and sheer uncriticised self-indulgence were things that disgusted me. I don’t know how you pay for it. I don’t know if fees are the cause of the career-focussed lack of rigour (as I’ve seen convincingly argued by Stewart Lee among others) or if they are a necessary symptom of a duller march of generations seeking pathways to the meeja. I don’t know if people are so put off by the quoted figures that they never read the bit about paying it back later – or if they, in fact, are rather better informed but know that an extra tax on £21,000 a year is not so vanishing a deal as people who’ve never had to budget for buses imagine.

I don’t know. It is obviously a toughie. As such, and as with every other cut that somewhere, somehow, some day will fuck up someone’s life it deserves a better justification than that sneeringly offered by the chancellor and heavy heartedly sighed out by the deputy prime minister.

It is no new thing to make political hay from the educational background of the government – but in its failure to properly convince people of its increasingly brutal agenda, the coalition has behaved exactly like the shower of public school tosspots that they are. It isn’t just that they’re too privileged and rich to understand about the price of flora – though that is part of it – it’s also the debating society thing.

Debating is not the same as arguing – you win nothing by being right or moral, you win by affect, by being best at sewing up your own logic and knowing when to deploy effective tricks. In Osbourne’s case it is the imperiously sharp point of information – an arch little rhetorical dagger that can be pulled out and used to slice the opponents hamstrings before he knows what’s hit him; with Clegg it’s the wde-eyed appeal to a decent common rationality; with Cameron, it’s a good natured expansion of the arms to establish intellectual dominance of a discourse, inviting an opponent in so as to make his presence conditional on the power of the inviter. They are different tricks, but tricks they are – as shallow as vapour. There is no moral weight behind them, nothing that does anything for those unschooled in their method but exclude them from the realm of valid opinion. You’ve been beaten, is the message, defeated by prefects, able in the rhetorical arts – how could you possibly object?

But arguments won by debaters are not won beyond the awarding of points. Winning is not the same as convincing, and when you haven’t won any kind of election by standing on a policy you’re enacting: you don’t have a mandate to do it –  no matter how many style points you won by or how proud your parents are.

The coalition policy has no mandate – no one won that election – no one who needs convincing is convinced – the debate has not been had anywhere but among the snotty echelons of the old etonian debating society that backroomed itself in charge. I’m out of the country and I don’t know exactly what I think about fees – but the demonstrators have my solidarity if they want it. I believe they can break this debating society coalition and force an election, requiring these stately proposers and able rebutters to take a break from buttering crumpets over the fires of their parliamentary skill and try to actually convince a majority of the country to genuinely support something.

Keep it up, The Kids, cause blow me if it isn’t starting to look like it’s working.

S.I

Incidentally, if you’re in a band or are a singer/songwriter or a not-really-a-singer/songwriter or a guttural-wailer/songwriter or are a performance poet or a reader-out-of-odd-little-stories then we’ll be writing and promoting these roundups on a fairly regular basis – if you think we’d like what you’re doing, please use the site and send us the link somewhere (facebook/twitter/skywriting) and we’ll give it a listen.

So first up, released today is this Song Of The South tinged oddity from Laurence Owen from his six tracked ‘Yarnripper’ E.P.

If that (and indeed almost everything else) is a little too middle of the road for your taste - this offering from The Far Queue is awesome:

Wob has been producing fantastic impassioned anti-folk since long before anyone decided to dress it up in a floaty dress and brand it on the tube. There’s a whole back catalogue to explore on the site, but this – from 1996′s ‘Friends in the Night‘ EP and now reissued on Corporate Records – is as good a place to start as any:

Lastly – and belatedly, as we were too busy promoting ourselves to go on about her when she released it – if you haven’t bought Lily Rae’s album then you really really should because it’s fucking amazing:

Peace out kids. X.

Released 2008, Weekender Records

Reissued 2010, Corporate Records

Buy Now (Download)

Buy Now (CD/vinyl)

Tracks

1. New Art Theme

2. The Last Significant Statement To Be Made In Rock’n'Roll

3. Our Daughters Will Never Be Free

4. Better To Know

5. Sixteen

6. Julia, We Don’t Live In The ’60s

7. Stars

8. New Art For The People

9. Unity Mitford

10. …If Jeff Buckley Had Lived

11. America

12. Heroin

13. We Hate The Kids

– NEIL GAIMAN (Author of Coraline, The Sandman Comic series)

“Neo-Brecht/Weill theatricality? Check. Profane razor strop wit? Check. Irreverent misanthropy? Check. Scathing socio-cultural critiques? Check. Acid sweet indiepop songcraft? Check. Meet the fabulously unfashionable, unfashionably fabulous Indelicates.”

–ROLLING STONE

“The Indelicates are political punk musos attempting to bring the poetry back into pop”

– THE GUARDIAN

“It’s impossible to overstate how much music today needs The Indelicates; in our darkest hour, hope may yet be at hand”

– THE FLY

“…this is intelligent, poetic indie-rock. In other words, it bears no resemblance to The View, The Fratellis, or any other examples of that kind of nonsense”

– ARTROCKER

“Stunning.”

– NME

“Unashamedly intelligent bands with purpose and agenda are thin on the ground. This is why the indelicates have been my favourite new band in every end of year poll I’ve been asked to complete in the last four years, but that is not enough. They are going to become the answer to every question put to me; Favourite film? the indelicates. Favourite book? the Indelicates My view on the American Primaries? The indelicates How many sugars in my tea ? the indelicates. Until they get the recognition they deserve.”

– EDDIE ARGOS, ART BRUT, in MUSIK EXPRESS

As well as the usual print media, The Indelicates début album was heavily blogged, as well as being in the top 10 of many of the January 2009 ‘best-of 2008′ lists. Some of the choice reviews are included below, as well as print clippings, and some of the German Reviews. The Indelicates have also been on the cover mount CDs of Clash magazine, Musik Express in Germany, top ten in the Indie Chart in Austria, top 40 in the UK Indie Chart, and featured in New York’s Village Voice a number of times.

“American Demo is powerful, angry, funny (yes kids they do have a sense of humour) poignant, honest, thought provoking, at times incredibly moving, and utterly brilliant. At the end of the day (sporting cliché alert) what more can you ask for from pop music? The Indelicates tackle challenging subjects with a lightness of touch and a subtlety, which, at times, make the Manic Street Preachers tendency for heavy-handed overwrought bombast appear about as consequential as a 2 Unlimited single. They have certainly raised the stakes, and posed the question- can this album be bettered in 2008? …I can say, hand on heart it really does deserve the accolade “ F**king genius.”

From The Von Pip Musical Express: http://vonpipmusicalexpress.wordpress.com/2008/01/12/the-indelicates-american-demo-review/

“American Demo blows away all the indie bands claiming to make a difference and say something that counts; this is one of the only records this decade that really deserves to count.”

From ‘RoomThirteen’                http://www.roomthirteen.com/cgi-bin/cd_view.cgi?CDID=7588

“This record is vicious. It sits in the corner of the pub, performing character assassinations on you and all you hold dear. And you let it get away with it because it is beautiful. “

From Music Towers

http://www.musictowers.com/news/reviews/albums/album-the-indelicates-american-demo/

“Flitting ferociously from bitterly spat criticisms marred with hostility and hatred to spine-tingling lulls adorned with ardour and affection, the diversity and uniqueness of this epic debut album is beyond measure.

From Noize Makes Enemies

http://www.noizemakesenemies.co.uk/2008/04/indelicates-american-demo-album-review.html

“Look at that cover. Are Simon and Julia painting a line between us, the consumer, and they, the artistes? Are they separating themselves from the rest of music? Are they suggesting American Demo paints them into a corner? All three would fit the tone of an album that sees no reason to make secret its intellectualism yet never ends up hectoring. That Simon’s voice is a pretty much exact cross between those of Luke Haines and Carter USM’s Jim Bob is entirely fitting, being as his and her lyrics work on the same qualities as those – angry, pop culture decrying, thought provoking, fairly conceptual, leavened with scabrous wit. Every detail you read about their history, all poetry slams and polka dots, seems to fit perfectly into the mock-didacticism they exhibit. The Indelicates  album was… given full marks by reviewers who are driven to write in a style you won’t see anywhere else in their output. That’s what they do to people, because they sound important.”

From Sweeping The Nation

http://sweepingthenation.blogspot.com/2008/12/sweeping-nation-albums-of-2008-number_20.html

“Most obviously, The Indelicates recall The Auteurs, and Luke Haines in all his many misanthropic guises. Less obviously, but accurately, in that they constantly question the cliched conventions of the rock medium while happily using its greatest strengths (also cliches), and in that they always bite the hand that feeds them (but only after making damn sure they get fed), they recall The Sisters of Mercy, The Sex Pistols,The Psychedelic Furs, early Manic Street Preachers, and the John Cooper Clarke of ‘Beasley Street’. They’re the latest twist of the knife that began turning when Dylan first asked ‘how does it feel?’ and which continued through Johnny Rotten’s ‘ever get the feeling that you’ve been cheated?’, via not only the self-conscious artifice of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but also the voracious, politicised self-empowerment of post-punk and riot grrl, yet without the paranoia and self-righteousness that ultimately resulted in said scenes being forever marginalised and impotent…”

From Hell Is For Hipsters

http://hellisforhipsters.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/the-indelicates-american-demo/

“‘We Hate The Kids’, quakes like the cup of water in Jurassic Park as the Tyrannosaurus Rex approaches, and the climax is breath-taking…This is an important album – nothing and nobody will convince me otherwise.”

From Playlouder

http://playlouder.com/content/16630/the-indelicates-american-demo

“Corrosive performance poetry and pop music passion, this is an album on immaculate themes. American Demo really is the aesthetic arm of the outsiders, and The Indelicates right now are pretty much unbeatable.”

From Music OMH

http://www.musicomh.com/albums/indelicates_0408.htm#

• David Koresh Superstar (2011, Corporate Records)
• Songs For Swinging Lovers (2010, Corporate Records)
• The Book Of Job: The Musical – Original cast recording – (2010, Corporate Records)
• American Demo (2008, Weekender Records)

Singles/EPs

• Ill (Corporate Records/Snowhite)
• I Am Koresh (Corporate Records)
• Something Goin’ Down In Waco (Corporate Records)
• America (Weekender Records)
• Sixteen (Weekender Records)
• Julia, We Don’t Live In The Sixties (Weekender Records)
• The Last Significant Statement To Be Made In Rock’n'Roll E.P. (Sad Gnome Records)
• We Hate The Kids (Sad Gnome Records)

Books

• Words By Simon & Julia Indelicate – Corporate Books – June 2009
• Songs For Swinging Lovers (inc. lyrics, essays and q&a) – Corporate Books – November 2010
• David Koresh Superstar (inc. lyrics, essays and q&a) – Corporate Books – May 2011

Downloads and Rarities

• The Recession Song