After a long sabbatical, the Mayhem Monthly charts are back, in a slightly revamped form. As regular readers will know, the chart is based on my Spotify listening habits over the last month. But I have kept it to contemporary artists. The top three “Legacy” artists are David Bowie, George Michael, and Alice Cooper. There is a top ten artists chart and a top 5 songs chart. As expected there is quite an eclectic mix of artists including five that I saw at the Leeds Festival last weekend. The top five songs are all by artists that feature in the artist top ten, including four that I saw at Leeds Festival. The two acts at the top have never appeared in previous incarnations of the chart. The number one artist is AL BLK ERA and the number one song was “How Will I Know” by the Amazons. So without further fuss here are those charts! Click on the header of the song chart for the playlist on Spotify.
MAYHEM ARTIST CHART AUGUST 2023 1ALT BLK ERA 2 The Amazons 3 AP Tobler 4 Mothica 5 Ren 6 The Streets 7 Anchor Lane 8 Public Image Limited 9 Antony Szmierek 10 Part Bat
MAYHEM SONG CHART AUGUST 2023 1 How Will I Know? – The Amazons 2 Misfits: SOLAR – ALT BLK ERA 3 The Words To Auld Lang Syne – Antony Szmierek 4 Sleepwalk – Mothica 5 Too Much Yayo – The Streets
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Today’s second Christmas message (our 5th in all) is from AP Tobler, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who is overflowing with talent. Regular readers will know her as she has featured in these pages quite regularly. A few months back AP, who resides in San Jose, released a rather magnificent EP, ‘Alternate Vision’. Her singles have all been classy and she seems to get better with every release. Personally, I am always interested in new stuff from AP Tobler, click here to check her music out on Spotify and visit her site and get yourself a classy T-Shirt. After that take a look at the delightful Yuletide message she has recorded for the readers of With Just A Hint Of Mayhem.
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OK I know I have been somewhat slow with reviews these last few months, so as an early Christmas gift this will probably be the final singles round-up of 2021. I will focus on a collection of tracks that I really loved but thanks to life (and laziness? Hopefully not that) I never got around to reviewing. Some of these came out quite a while ago too. I plan to be much better at this in 2022. If you have sent me something to review and I never got around to it then I am truly sorry, keep sending stuff though, as I really plan to get more done next year!
AP, who has featured on this site quite a few times now, returned with the rather splendid ‘Alternate Vision EP’ this summer and this dark riff laden romp was the lead single. AP is definitely one of those rare talents that grows with every release. Click here to check out the EP on Spotify, the cover of the Hives classic “Hate To Say I Told You So” is sublime.
If Karen Carpenter had been in the Cocteau Twins rather than Liz Fraser they might have sounded like Tay Temple. This is a lovelorn torch song with bite and I love it!
A gorgeous acoustic ballad from the supremely talented Marnie Glum. A perfect fit to soundtrack a chilled summer afternoon, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it to brighten up a dark winter day as well.
A towering track from the magnificent Not Now Norman. The riffs and hooks hit you on the first listen, a band that gets better and better with every release. I am proud to be a Norminion and I am also in the video, can you spot me? 😉
A modern twist on bands like the Clash and perhaps the less in-your-face elements of Blink 182. Catchy rock at its best, I particularly love the guitars on this track. Matt’s vocal oozes class too!
This raucous garage band from Huddersfield sent me a great song, “Could I Bare” back in September, it is bloody good, but finding stuff online from these lads has proved difficult, so the video below is for an electrifying excerpt from their set supporting Skylights on their Yorkshire tour!
That delightful bunch of talented musicians released a classy Giorgio Moroderesque single earlier in the year and it comes with some incredible dance mixes. I shelled out for the CD version and it was well worth it. Click here to check out the original, remixes along with their rather ace cover of the Dame’s “Everyone Says Hi” on Spotify. I really need to see the Dead Zoo live in 2022. In the videos below you can see the band play “In The End” live.
This track shows the breadth of talent and versatility that Andy of Cold Culprits fame has. This is a real step away from his punk style that I was familiar with. “Pink Champagne” is a frenetic, edgy dance track that would sound immense over a nightclub sound system. Andy also created the rather wonderful animations in the video too.
The band launched this single 7 months ago and it is pure dirty, grungey, punky, bluesy, garage rock class. The band rock out like the Stooges on a tune that will undoubtedly rip a hole in venue roofs across the country.
For her new single “Mercury Twin” AP Tobler channels her inner Foo Fighters for some mountain shredding riffs. Once again she plays all the instruments herself and the drums in particular are exquisite. Lyrically I sense that this song is about facing the black dog of depression. I am not sure quite how she does it, but AP gets better with every release and long may it continue. The guitar solo is impeccable and would fit nicely into so many classic 70s rock tunes. If you’re not yet familiar with the immensely talented AP Tobler you need to change that right now. Check out the video for “Mercury Twin” below and click here for our recent interview with AP. You can also find this new single and her previous releases on Spotify, so click here to stream the hell out of them!
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Towards the end of last year, I had the honour and pleasure of interviewing a great musical talent from California, AP Tobler. Regular readers will have spotted her on With Just A Hint Of Mayhem before. She gets better with every release and I believe she has a great future in music. If my tech skills had been a little more tech you would have been reading this some weeks ago. But a failure to record properly and then a corrupted audio file for what I did record put a hefty spanner in the works, but I got it sorted and you can now read that interview below.
AP states that her biggest influence is without any doubt or hesitation Dave Grohl! She loves the Foo Fighters and Nirvana. Multi-instrumentalist AP started off playing drums and I can spot the influence at times. She plays a few instruments (drums obviously, guitar, a little piano, some ukulele, bass guitar) and next on her list to master is the banjo. She has also dabbled successfully with Harp. She has always wanted to play saxophone although she doesn’t believe she would be very good at it, but I think time will tell. On top of all that, just like Mr Grohl, AP seems like a really decent human being. Some years ago, AP attended a Jazz Camp at which one of the featured artists was Donny McCaslin the saxophonist who featured on David Bowie’s final album ‘Blackstar’. AP got to play with him, she took the congas and played off against him in a true jazz style. She believes that if she wasn’t trying to make a name for herself as a musician, she would probably be involved somehow in music production. I reckon music must be in her blood. Given how confident AP sounds when I listen to her music, she told me that one thing she is most proud of in her music career to date is having the courage to start singing. I am sure that I am not the only one who feels glad that she did pluck up the courage! While all her releases so far have been singles, she hopes to put an EP together sometime, I am looking forward to that already. Especially if there is going to be a physical release. Her local music scene, certainly before Covid was quite vibrant with a lot of singer songwriters, a lot of alt.acoustic troubadours with a pop sensibility. She would like to see a bigger metal scene develop but says that the musicians and fans are a great community.
An Arnold Palmer, which is iced tea with lemonade is AP’s drink of choice and her favourite confectionery item is a Mounds bar, which is a chocolate covered coconut bar, which sounds like what we call a Bounty Bar in the UK. She is not a big fan of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. If there was ever an AP Tobler chat show and AP could choose any guests at all, alive or dead, her first show would have Dave Grohl, John Bonham, Prince, and her Mom. Sounds like a great choice to me, I would certainly watch it. The three top things that AP could not live without are music, Mexican food, and forests. Music would definitely be in my list. I asked her to describe herself in three words and she chose hilarious, stubborn and creative. When I asked her one of my throwaway questions, who is the richest Tony Stark (a.k.a. Ironman) or Bruce Wayne (a.k.a. Batman) her first response was that it was difficult. She eventually plumped for Tony Stark as she like him better and hoped that he was richer than Batman.
AP has written some great songs, “Post Mortem” was her last single of 2020 and her new track “Mercury Twin” has just hit the streets. We spoke about what drives her to write songs and she said sometimes it her anxiety and depression. That is a classic case of turning the lows into highs and the bad into good, right? What does AP think are the best and worst things about the music industry today? The best is how easy it is to find music, especially new music. The worst thing is that the industry is still very dominated by white men. Sadly, I think the latter will take years to change. When I interviewed her AP had Soa Dreams, Weezer and Thundercat on heavy rotation. In fact, thanks to her I discovered and started listening to Soa Dreams. Like many of us during this dreadful time AP is really looking forward to the return of live music in a post COVID-19 world. That includes both playing shows and going to shows. How about ending on AP’s favourite joke? OK then let’s do it. There is a Spanish speaking Magician, and he is on to his final trick, he says “uno dos” and then POOF! He disappeared without a tres! Say it loud, you’ll love it.
COMING SOON! Watch out for a review of AP’s new single “Mercury Twin” on WJAHOM!
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AP Tobler featured in our Mayhem Virgins series a few months back, click here to check that out. She is back with a very dark, but stunning new tune, “Post Mortem”. It has a grungey blues feel to it with what I believe are some her best lyrics to date. How can you not be impressed and moved by lines like “In a labyrinth of my own demise Your cold gaze It brings me to my knees“? If you put Kurt Kobain, Patti Smith, Muddy Waters, and pinch of Planet Covid into a metaphorical blender this song is what you might get out of it! AP once again plays all the instruments herself and the video produced by TypeItDown Productions is rather tasty too! I am already an AP Tobler fan, if you’re not, then you will be after listening to “Post Mortem”.
Click here if you want to stream or purchase this future classic!
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