SCHOOL DISCO – Denton Rock (2023, LP Copper Feast Records/Krautpop!) 

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Copper Feast Records/Krautpop!

Format: LP, Album, Limited Interplanetary Crumble Edition, Black and White Swirl Vinyl, 100 copies

Format: LP, Album, Limited Edition, Smokey Colored Vinyl, 100 copies

Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition, Digipack, 100 copies

Release Date: 15 Sep 2023

School Disco is another exciting, interesting, phantasmagoric band that comes… guess from where… Yes! Brighton! So far, they have released “Mongolian Disco Show”(CDR 2017), ”School Disco” (LP 2019), and “Head’s Still Here” (LP 2021) and I’ll have somehow to punish myself for not being aware about them earlier, you see I ‘discovered’ them just recently, with their latest LP album “Denton Rock”. Usually, School Disco is a 3 piece band but for the recordings on “Denton Rock”, they became a quintet. So, School Disco are Rory Lethbridge (Guitar / Vocals), Elliot Standford (Guitar / Vocals / Keys), Laur Underwood (Bass), Harry Heyes (Drums), and Tim Girdler (Studio Bass). Their label’s (Copper Feast Records) Bandcamp states: 

“The boys are back! Brighton’s ever-changing garage-psych powerhouse School Disco return with their latest offering Denton Rock. Recorded in Manchester through 2022, the record features their ever-present songwriter-in-chief Rory Lethbridge back on vocals and guitars, with a new line-up of musician pals around him. Strap in and enjoy the ride!”…

I also need to mention that the LP album is a collaboration between 2 record labels, Copper Feast and Krautpop! Records. “Denton Rock” consists of 9 tracks in total, 5 of them on the 1st side and the rest 4 on the 2nd side of the LP album. The opener “Kings” (which is also the song that introduced me to School Disco), is a song that after listening to its first seconds you can easily be disoriented, you may think, right another boring Neo-Prog song/band… BUT! As the track slowly evolves, numerous trippy multicolored psychedelic Prog layers unfold, flooding the place with some fantastic surrealistic progressive PSYCHness that inevitably results in the burning of your brain cells, also the incredible keys add a magnificent 70s Retro Prog atmosphere… “Feelings Coming” is quite a heavier tune, fuzzy with a garage-punky kind of industrialized futuristic attitude, Psych flirting of course… “Through Dimensions” is a cool rhythmic Neo-Psych track, kind of garage-y with a tremendous alternative surfy feel! This is frenzy Brighton Psych-o-Garage-a-Delia! The band lows the decibels a bit with “Victory Day”, a kind of a Proggy balladesque tune with a fancied electric guitar solo reminiscing the Classic Rock bands from the British 70s… Side ‘B’ opens with “Crying Beasts”, a Rocker, impregnated with the necessary doses of Psych, of course, there’s the “usual” mind-blowing freak-a-delic middle section where the track transforms into a jazzy-flirting psychedelic piece of a colored roller coaster with a “distant” Sax sound and a deranged rhythm section, but incredibly enough the band succeeds to return into its previous Heavy Rocker state… Wow! “Master Of Disguise” is a mid-tempo subterranean Psych-Rock tune, emerging with a dark cold feel of isolation, maybe because of the faraway distorted-kind-of vocals… “M.O.M” is a cosmic futuristic Psy-punker becoming quite heavy at times while “Planets Crush” is another heavy Psych-Rocker, fuzzy, distorted, quite rhythmical though, leaning extremely dangerously towards PSYCH as the track unfolds, a track that flirts in equal doses with Space-a-Delia and 70s-inspired Prog Rock… Eventually, the album comes to an end most fascinatingly with “Cloudy Shores”, a ballad that comes straight out of the Vertigo Progressive years of the early 70s, an amazing tune, sentimental, and acoustically trippy! What an ecstatic psych-ROCK album! There’s NO lack of psych-energy here! An album that made the list of my personal best albums of 2023! (check the list here) I also have to say – after a discussion with some friends – that it’s pretty possible the name of the band – SCHOOL DISCO – to prevent you from getting in touch with this album, so please do remember this: You can’t judge a book by its cover… if you do so, you will be disappointed…“Denton Rock” surprisingly, is a monsterly prodigious Psych-Rock album! TimeLord Michalis  

Tracklist         

Links

Listen/Buy through SCHOOL DISCO Bandcamp
Visit SCHOOL DISCO Facebook