• Label Mixtape: Fortuna POP!

    Created in London in 1995 by Sean Price, or El Presidente as he prefers to be addressed, Fortuna POP! has for over twenty years been a steadfast bastion of everything lo-fi and fuzzy. The last few years have seen the label enter a veritable golden era. They’ve been responsible for Joanna Gruesome’s fuzz-pop debut LP Weird Sister, which won the Welsh Music Prize, the regional pop punk of Martha’s debut album Courting Strong, which was included in NPR Music’s 50 Favorite Albums of 2014, and records by a cornucopia of others ranging from Evans the Death to Pete Astor to…

  • Joanna Gruesome – Peanut Butter

    As a band alleged to have formed at anger management classes, Joanna Gruesome are a surprisingly jovial, albeit dark-humoured group when interviewed.  The band’s guitarist/singer Owen Williams summed this up describing the album when, he said: “This is our second record.  It is about 20 minutes long and aims to expose the radical possibilities of peanut butter.”  This tongue-in-cheek adolescence also runs through the core of the music, which displays glimpses of emotional depth but quickly resorts to bursts of noise, redolent of a teenage temper tantrum. Debut album Weird Sister was a mixed bag that threw up the occasional odd-ball…