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‘Counting Pennies in the Afterlife’: track by track guide by Colour Me Wednesday

June 27, 2018 loudwomen Leave a comment

Colour Me Wednesday's album Counting Pennies in the Afterlife is out now, and who better to talk us through the track than the band themselves ... the Doveton sisters, Harriet (Hat) and Jen

Sunriser

Hat: This song is about a relationship ending, and even though it ended because of choices and mistakes your partner made the burden is still on you to remain the strong one and keep them in a healthy place mentally. Their emotions are kind of holding you ransom and means you’re not allowed to be angry and upset with them for what they did, they’re protecting their own mistakes by physically showing you how badly they’re doing as a reaction to their mistakes. The lyrics also talk about letting your guard down and feeling like you you’re usually great at reading signs and seeing things coming but you’re kind of blinded by love and the trust you’ve invested in someone over many years.

Also it’s about the sensation of feeling like you’re falling and the person that would usually stop that from happening and hold you up is the person that is causing you to fall. A bizarre feeling, which means you can only rely on yourself to feel level headed or positive again. Which is where the title ‘Sunriser’ comes from – you can’t rely on other’s actions, apologies or regrets to give you closure or raise the sun for you. The song kind of flips between feeling like you’re falling apart and then being hopeful like “hang on, I think I can do this, but I don’t wanna tempt fate”. And going back in time trying to capture the comfort of the past or make things back to how they were before isn’t what will help you feel alive again and move forward with your life. Shortly after this all happened I went on a sunny European tour with the band.

Boyfriend’s Car

Jen: This song was inspired by a dream I had, it was quite a standard post-apocalyptic Walking Dead influenced dream where the streets were empty, the streetlights were off, society had collapsed and there was a general feeling of dread but also I have to admit, excitement. It got me thinking about how often this scenario is played out in the popular imagination – the collapse of society and return to fighting for basic survival. I think as much as it is a fear, it’s also a fantasy (albeit a naive one). Burning it all down, starting over, or just us all letting go and letting it crumble, finally being free of society’s rules and for many, finally being free of capitalism.

Of course something that extreme would be awful but it’s so hard of anything less than a zombie apocalypse doing away with capitalism. I think a lot of people feel the tension of a system that isn’t working, that’s barely held together and feels like it could collapse at any moment (like with the financial crisis), but never fully does. It’s held together by the people at the bottom rung being forced to settle for less and less (including hours and hours of unpaid labour, going into debt to subsidise their low wages, and begging for scraps of government welfare) while the people on the top rung talk about ‘growth’ and what a good and efficient system capitalism is.

I worked as a shop assistant for a large high street chain, and the company memos always boasted about how high the profits were and how many shareholders they had. But every closing shift in every store had 3 or 4 workers doing an hour of unpaid overtime to get the shop clean and tidy for the next day. Of course all our labour was bought at a much cost lower than it was worth, that’s how capitalism works, but think how many companies get away with squeezing workers for extra hours that are not on their books just so their CEOs can boast about how well they’re doing and what smart and fair business leaders they are? And that’s a minor thing, relatively.

Edge of Everything

Jen: This song started as a basic song about how it feels to live on the very edge of London, in Uxbridge but then ended up being a bit more poetic. It feels like I’ll never leave Uxbridge and everyone else who lives in London is appalled at how far away it is but obviously to us it feels like the centre of the universe. But even within Uxbridge Harriet and I have felt like outsiders, being those weird vegetarian left wing boat girls, we feel like we’ve been living in this undefined marginal space for our whole lives. I think that West London is kind of erased from contemporary cultural narratives about London. It’s like it lacks an identity. But it’s not like it’s a barren wasteland, loads of cultural stuff happens and has happened here (famous films made, legendary records pressed, huge South Asian communities, Eastern European communities etc.) and a huge chunk of London’s workforce live here but it’s like… who’s gonna feel proud saying they’re from West London? It’s almost a meaningless identity.

Heather’s Left for Dead

When you’re a DIY band everyone says that 90% of the experience is sending emails and 10% is the music. This is true, but there’s also SO much more admin and details to keep everything running smoothly and on time that no one talks about and are actually too boring to list. The DIY ethos and work ethic has been running through our blood since we started the band. But a pretty terrible side effect is not having time and space to be creative- which is why you’re playing music in the first place! This song is about neglecting the creative, carefree part of yourself- kind of like your inner child or alter ego. There was a point where band work took up so much of my time I felt like it was killing my creative side. Which I called Heather, because when people get my name wrong they call me this haha. As soon as I’d stop doing the planning side of things I’d freak out as stuff would start falling behind schedule, we’d miss out on opportunities and in turn band members would feel a bit freaked out too. The chorus is also about how female musicians don’t go down in history, they don’t make it into the ‘hall of fame’ then men occupy. They’ll go down in a small part of musical history as a niche, a footnote. So if Heather was left for dead, not many would really notice.

Exposure

Jen: This song comes from a frustration at people who have so many opportunities and so many resources but refuse to put themselves on the line – to expose themselves by doing the right thing and taking action. It’s about when men find success but put off helping to create more opportunities if it might mean sharing or giving up some of their privilege – for example within the music industry. It’s also about people who have a platform not using it to make change. And it’s also a bit about people who have amazing talents but are too scared of what people will say if they really went for it, so they play it safe.

Disown

Jen: This song is a conflicted one about having social anxiety, paranoia and shutting yourself in because of it. When I first wrote the lyrics I thought I was writing a song to someone else, but when I listen to it I feel like every line could be me nagging myself to not stay in and get bitter.

Sad Bride

Hat: I used to have reoccurring nightmares that I’d suddenly be married to someone and I feel like I was suffocating or stuck. In the dream it would either be my wedding day or I’d have been married to them for years and just was planning my way out. This isn’t a diss on everyone’s experience of marriage, just how I feel about it. And I also think about how many of my friend’s parents are divorced…sometimes I wonder if they hadn’t got married and felt that pressure if things would be different – a divorce seems like such a painful and expensive thing to go through, but no one thinks about that when they choose to swear to be together forever, a promise that seems irresponsible and unrealistic for two adults to make. The song opens with ‘it’s my big day, not my birthday’ because tradition and society dictates to us that it’s almost a rite of passage from birth that one day you will be with one person forever, so we’re giving into history and tradition by following the rules of monogamy. There’s a reference to Tammy Wynette in the middle 8 as Jen and I grew up listening to her music- particularly her classic ‘D-I-V-O-R-C-E’. Also Sad Bride likens a wedding to a funeral within the themes of the song. The title is actually named after when my dog sits behind this sheer white net curtain at home and he just looks like a sad bride dreading the big day.

Tinfoil

Hat: This song is about accidentally overrating men when you first meet them. Your brain projects interesting traits onto them when you’re chatting and you get caught up in compliments which keeps you interested. Then in hindsight you realise that in your interactions YOU were the funny one all along and they were just bouncing off you to please you and perhaps just sleep with you. Also you realise their compliments may have been a bit creepy and you’re only just coming to terms with that. The song likens this type of man to tinfoil, because they reflect your own personality back at you and they’re kind of light, flimsy and do not have much substance themselves. And they kind of blag their way through getting things because gender is on their side. This may not be their fault, but the patriarchy’s, as always. When you give into these men and spend hours talking to them you kinda feel like you’ve failed as a feminist haha, but you justify it and try to gain the higher ground again by kinda laughing about them with your friends when secretly you still love the attention from them. How embarrassing!

Entrepreneur

Hat: The song starts off talking about the feeling of being self-employed and you’re doing 5 people’s jobs at once. Which means a neglect of self-care and repeating bad habits.

Jen: I’ve been in a lot of business studies lectures for work and there’s a really unrealistic optimism (I wanna call it propaganda, really) around this new economy, the huge level of unemployment has been rebranded as an ‘entrepreneurial’ economy. Many people are excluded from unemployment statistics because they are classed as ‘self-employed’ or they were forced to sign zero hours contracts – most of these people are not making enough money to make ends meet but they are essentially on their own, free to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to do the lottery. All the ‘entrepreneurs’ listed as heroes by these business studies lecturers are the exception, not the rule, and they are not admirable people. One example being Richard Branson who was allowed to fail again and again before he succeeded because he was born rich.

Take What You Want (And Then Leave)

Hat: The song starts off talking about the dynamics between some friends. That if you do too much for someone without asking for anything back eventually they feel so guilty they’ll try and find something to be annoyed with you about. And you don’t want to have to sit there and list all the things you’ve done for them and sound petty and give into that, as that’s not why you did those things in the first place.

Jen: Then it becomes about rich Tories who seem to want to grind the country down, selling off the public services bit by bit to their mates (like Richard Branson) with no consequences for themselves because they don’t have to live here, really, not in the same way that the rest of us do.

Not My Turf

Hat: This is an anti-TERF song. When we were writing the album we were saying we wanted a song about gender. But we felt like a lot has already been said, which is great, but felt like we could bring nothing refreshing to the table. Another huge problem when trying to put lyrics together about the experience of being female or non-binary is that TERFs have occupied a lot of feminist language for themselves. And we disagree with them completely, but naturally some feminist ideologies will still cross over even if you fundamentally disagree on important stuff. But the point is, that’s not our turf as our feminism is intersectional and does not exclude the trans experience. The lyrics are about spotting a TERF in feminist scenes through red flags and dog whistles in their language and how we are not on the same side as them or fighting the same fight.

'Counting Pennies in the Afterlife' is out now.

Find CMW on Bandcamp and Facebook

http://www.dovetown.co.uk/

Colour Me Wednesday: ‘Counting Pennies in the Afterlife’ – review

June 10, 2018 loudwomen 3 Comments

review by Kris Smith

As the old expression has it, writing about music is like dancing around architecture while trying to herd cats into nailing jelly to a wall [check – Ed.] Reviews are tricky things and I’m increasingly aware of how easy it is to say more about yourself than the record you’re attempting to mansplain, I mean review. Perhaps I should pen a precis of the essential information, so: “Colour Me Wednesday are a British DIY band, in the indiepop tradition; ‘Counting Pennies in the Afterlife’ is their second album and marks a musical evolution from its predecessor, 2013’s ‘I Thought It Was Morning’; this accomplished piece of contemporary female/gender non-conforming/queer art is available now from Dovetown Records” – but that safe stuff doesn’t really get to the heart of the matter.

There’s another well-worn cliche about the ‘difficult second album’. The notion is based on a group’s first long player being a summary and compilation of their writing so far, in the context of music industry pressure to provide a quick follow up, one that bands are often unprepared for; the difficult second album could be rushed, ill-conceived or stuffed with filler rejected from the first record. It could be testament to a number of factors that none of that applies here: that Colour Me Wednesday are in no rush, suffer no writers’ block, and feel no such pressure. The period between albums might have helped of course, but on the other hand none of the band are exactly slacking: they all earn various livings and busy themselves with sundry side projects. Still, ‘Counting Pennies in the Afterlife’ is a brand new set of 11 songs, all previously unreleased, mostly unknown to their live audience and showing a stylistic and thematic shift from previous records. In fact, in an era when many DIY bands are barely scraping by, this album is something of an artistic triumph.

If there are precedents for the precise Colour Me Wednesday formula I’ve yet to discover it. Their early scratchy-guitar home demo aesthetic helped link them with and to indiepop, but listening retrospectively to the likes of Tiger Trap, Black Tambourine, Talulah Gosh, Heavenly, etc.. well honestly it largely leaves me cold. Colour Me Wednesday are just a much better pop band than all that. They don’t play sloppy, don’t do the twee thing, and know how to put a tune together. ‘Indiepop’ is a broad church though, and there are/were (notably, British) bands such as the Popguns and the Sundays which brought a vastly superior skill for melody and songwriting to that scene, albeit in a slightly-formulaic/highly-polished manner. In contrast this is the first Colour Me Wednesday album that wasn’t basically recorded at home: until now they’ve been writing crossover pop tunes but playing and releasing them DIY punk style. And anyway, if the worst thing you could say about this music is that it evokes Harriet Wheeler fronting the Popguns on, say, Dolly Mixture‘s equipment, that would be just fine, because it’s not like everyone is mixing those ancient ingredients. But no: the secret to the rewarding variety in these grooves is in the fact that Colour Me Wednesday have always demonstrated an appreciation of more than one genre (pop, punk, electronica, reggae); it lifts their work above all these inevitable but frustrating comparisons.

Of course, the above ignores what the band itself has been telling us for years: that their original influence is the Boston indie rock of Tanya Donelly and Juliana Hatfield (more recent names that come up include Lemuria, and Sky Larkin). Perhaps it’s merely because that isn’t quite my heartland music that I hear other stuff going on but, for instance, there’s a lyric in ‘Exposure’:

I met a man like you before
He said he’d act on injustice
When the perfect moment arose
When the music swelled,

which has a pointed, searing, poetic (political) economy to it that reminds me more of McCarthy than any American groups. Similarly, ‘Boyfriend’s Car’ presents a post-apocalyptic scenario wrapped in beautiful, overlapping harmonies (complete with key-change crescendo), the car a metaphor for a system heading for breakdown, dark broodings on “unpaid labour, pain and obligation” sweetly sung:

If we all let go at the same time I know
That’s what we fear most
If we just let go

which recalls the message in the Jam‘s ‘Trans Global Express’, just as previous Colour Me Wednesday songs have recollected that band’s mixture of everyday social observation and suburban ennui. I’ve been listening to the Wednesdays for a number of years now and haven’t chanced upon any of their contemporaries who combine consciousness and melody in precisely this way, and shot through with a deeply English melancholy. You can also hear that alloy of resignation, hope, and anger – the cycle of non-acceptance – in the music of the Housemartins, Television Personalities, McCarthy/Stereolab and Comet Gain and I write this in full knowledge that Colour Me Wednesday may not listen to or care about any of those, after all, mostly male-dominated bands. They nevertheless mine a shared cultural seam.

Counting Pennies in the Afterlife acronymizes as CPITAL; you can even see a PCF flag fluttering in the optimistic breeze of the ‘Sunriser’ video, the album’s first single; yet at first glance the politics here are less conspicuous than before. Perhaps one consequence of becoming known for a song like ‘Purge Your Inner Tory’ is that every subsequent release seems superficially less didactic, but in actuality there’s a consistency in the way the band weave themes of interpersonal struggle with wider criticism of institutional structures, here and previously; they were always more Fromm than Fanon, perhaps. If that kind of talk seems overblown, consider the evidence in everything from choice of song subject to band organisation.

It’s sometimes remarked that Colour Me Wednesday ought to be a ‘bigger’ band than they are, but in what sense, and to what end? This is a group that determines its own image and direction, produces its own videos and releases their own recordings. They’ve created/curated their own world; even the logo of their own Dovetown label evokes an idealised community, its larger buildings presented as sound-system speakers, but otherwise at peace. A band that tours multiple continents and has released records in (at last count) seven countries has clearly found their audience. In fact in many ways what Dovetown has done goes to the heart of what punk was supposed to be about: not just a local hub for like-minded bands but an alliance promoting a different set of values, something probably only the anarcho-punk labels (Crass, Bluurg, etc.) actually accomplished. If you literally D-I-Y then things can take time, especially without the support networks the post-punk bands enjoyed back in what was a very different era, industry-wise. That a band can function in this way at all today, and with such prolific efficiency, speaks volumes. To paraphrase Joe Strummer on the Clash: they may not have ‘made it’ commercially, but they’ve made it in the culture.

None of which would matter too much if the music was no good. But over the course of the five years since their first album, the Colour Me Wednesday sound has retained its charm while developing and broadening in scope, furthered here by a professional production (by Matthew Johnson of Leeds band Hookworms). Back when the group started, the seeming influence of Lily Allen‘s pop-reggae breakthrough, combined with an underground (female-fronted) reggae-rock revival (the Skints/Dirty Revolution) could be heard in the song structures and vocal style of Colour Me Wednesday’s early songs. The offbeat has gone now, but that phase leaves a trace in a mastery of drum and bass, syncopation and space. The outstanding all-round skill of new percussionist Jaca Freer takes things to next level. Jen Doveton‘s voice, meanwhile, gets stronger with every release, and it’s hard to depreciate the keening, folk-ish, almost Kate Rusby-esque qualities of her vocal tone (although if I was capsule-reviewing for a magazine I might be more tempted to write: “FFO: Katie Harkin, Rose Elinor Dougall, Imogen Heap“. The final element that this album brings into fresh focus is the guitar work of Harriet Doveton and Laura Ankles, interweaving the expected crunchy punk chords and adroit arpeggios but given extra exploratory space here for texture and contrast. I’ll cut this paragraph short before I start using words like “soundscape”, but just to note a couple of examples, ‘Tinfoil’ builds slowly to a feedbacked climax, while ‘Disown’ and ‘Sad Bride’, there’s no other way of putting it, rock out.

The band then throw a complete curve-ball with penultimate track ‘Take What You Want (And Then Leave)’, which for the most part drops the guitars completely, providing one of the album’s highlights in the form of an affecting foray into indie electronica that wouldn’t be out of place on an Au Revoir Simone record.

‘Heather’s Left For Dead’ shows the band’s grasp of dynamics at its fullest: one of the album’s most immediate songs is also the shortest; its first bridge cuts back to a second verse with the chorus held back until half way through the track, after which the instrumental segues into a breakdown and reprise gilded with layered vocal harmony; the song never returns to a full version of a chorus that many a band would be tempted to milk to death. Colour Me Wednesday make their point and move on; we’re kept wanting more. Hey, other groups! This is literally How It’s Done. Are you listening? Well, are you, punk?

In retrospect, while their brilliant debut album ‘I Thought It Was Morning’ contained numerous notable new songs, it was also in some ways a slightly mixed bag, including older material dating back to the group’s student era. ‘Counting Pennies in the Afterlife’ is in contrast a more consistent, maturer work, as well as both a more steeled and hopeful statement. ‘Sunriser’ is as such the perfect opener, waving goodbye to failed relationships and invoking a new start; other lyrics pick apart the problematic behaviours of multiple (male) antagonists and authority figures. The songs, the band and the sound hang together for the full Dovetons’ Half Hour and once more I’m only left wondering what a band with this much talent and creativity will do next.

'Counting Pennies in the Afterlife' is out now.


Find CMW on Bandcamp and Facebook

http://www.dovetown.co.uk/

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Politics and Music

LW Politics & Music – Part 4: Jen Doveton (Colour Me Wednesday)

April 16, 2018 loudwomen Leave a comment

by Kris Smith

The media regularly bemoan a lack of politics in music, compared to a mythic 60s/70s/80s ‘good old days’ – only to salute as an exception the occasional gobby indie-boy band trying to kickstart their career with some token rebellious rhetoric. Meanwhile, every year there are more fiercely-politicised, intelligent and committed activists working hard to build the DIY feminist punk scene, far from the plaudits and pitfalls of the spotlight. In this new series of interviews, LOUD WOMEN meets them and asks them some of the questions that the music industry won’t.

#4 Jen Doveton (Colour Me Wednesday)

What made you decide to use (some of) your songwriting to express political viewpoints?
I’m not sure whether all political musicians think in this way but I think it’s because it feels like it’s something that isn’t being said, so it’s something I feel like I want to rant about. And it feels like a topic that is important enough to play to people over and over.

Do you use songs as tools to put across prefigured messages – or is it more that you self-express in general through music, with politics just one aspect of that?
I am always going on political rants anyway, but to be a song something has to have an emotional core, to me. That’s why it’s going in a song rather than an essay or something else.

Is the function of politics in music to affirm views within a reciprocal social group, or convert – or at least converse with – a wider public?
We hope we’re saying something people haven’t heard before but actually, when we started the band we were a group of fairly isolated left wing kids in a tory London borough and it came as a surprise to be preaching to the converted (once we found our crowd). I think hearing someone confirm or express how you already feel is really good for your mental health so it’s just as worthy to speak to people who share your views as it is to present a persuasive argument to people who might not agree in the wider public.

Explicit or ideological politics is a rarity in music, even most punk/DIY scenes: is that something you’re conscious of, and does it matter?
I am conscious that it makes some people bristle. Either they don’t like [us talking about] politics or they don’t like the over-earnestness of political music. People are much more comfortable with political satire (i.e. topical panel shows and sketch shows) than with political music. But that might have something to do with most satire being a bit toothless, does it really challenge people’s beliefs? Does music? I don’t know.

Do you see yourself as part of, and drawing influence from, a tradition of politicised music/art?
Yes I suppose I do, but I don’t know what names I am supposed to drop here. I studied fine art and political art felt deeply unfashionable at the time. So I felt like I would never fit in to that scene, cos I saw political issues everywhere. That’s why I turned to DIY punk, and zines. I definitely see myself as part of the radical crafts movement, if that’s the right term. I was made to make zines/handmade cd covers. Being a politicised artist for me means, obviously, being broadly left wing but also having a community-based consciousness. So you’re creating stuff that can be really personal, because of who you are, the personal is political but you’re also aware of the larger community. I’m aware of the space I’m taking up, aware of how it impacts the scene and aware of how I can collaborate with others. In a way this seems incompatible with what we’re being told about being an artist. We’re brought up thinking being an artist is very individualistic and naval gazing. We’re taught about larger than life icons without learning properly about the complexities of the community that built them, who influenced them. I feel like I learn more about being a DIY musician from activist traditions and community-building than from any artistic or business tradition. I guess my head is more in the process than the output when I’m thinking about your question.

Is there a pressure that comes with being known as a political musician? And is there a balance to strike between work on the one hand, and fun and self-care on the other?
I feel like men have it easier when it comes to politics, they’re less likely to be told to ‘stay out of politics’ for a start. Being a woman and being read as quite young, it’s really intimidating to express a political opinion, particularly online where a man, usually from an older generation, is always ready to pop up to tell you to ‘stay out of politics’, or to try to correct or “mansplain”. And going ahead with writing now, I do feel like there’s a pressure to be able to encapsulate a lot of the political issues going on right now in my music. But sometimes I just feel like writing song after song about how fucking suffocating winter is. All I really want to do is watch netflix and eat pasta. Harriet and I are the types of people who are very task-oriented. We don’t set aside time to socialise and you have to force Harriet to relax. I’ve lost friends, I think, because I don’t make time to invite them round or do relationship maintenance. I have to tell people now, if you want to be my friend you just have to invite yourself round. I’ll cook for you, and I’ll probably give you some merch to package up or you’ll have to sit there while I make CD covers. Being in a DIY band, there’s no line to tell you to stop working, cos you’re working at what you are passionate about and it’s entirely self-propelled. There’s also a huge burnout cycle where you push yourself too hard on tour, have to be ‘on’ in terms of socialising every night and come home and get ill and beat yourself up for not being able to bounce straight back into work or into a social life. I’m not sure how to remedy this because most of my friends are exactly the same, they’re in bands and we only really see each other ‘at work’.

As with most traditions, what we think of as political or “protest” music has previously been white-male dominated. Have things changed?
The pocket that I’ve found myself in definitely doesn’t feel male centred. But it has to be said, that is not a very profitable or high-status pocket. It doesn’t feel like that long ago that I felt that I would never feel at home in the punk or rock or indie scene because I could or we could never compete with the ideal of what a band should look like. A bunch of white men, anything else would be an exception, novelty, or a bad emulation of what people expected to see. I’m not sure how much society has progressed, but I know we’ve moved out of that crowd so we’re not exposed to it as much. There has been more criticism of white-male dominated music scenes in the mainstream press – like in the case of calling out male-dominated festival lineups – which is promising. If you’re asking whether political and protest music in particular is white-male dominated in its own right, aside from the fact that most of the arts are – I don’t know. Anecdotally, white men seem to get more praise for what I see as fairly obvious political statements and mediocre creative output than people in other demographics. People aren’t always aware of their prejudices and give more time and consideration to white men in general in all fields, it seems. I think in terms of activism, some people think that being a good left wing activist is about being passionate, loud and angry. Maybe that idea does stem from the same ideas that make toxic masculinity so toxic. Most long term political activists aren’t fuelled by anger – I don’t think anger is a sustainable state of being.

How do you view the contemporary music industry as a whole?
I see it as very streamlined to create the most amount of profit for the smallest amount of effort. The radio stations, magazines, TV shows, festival bookers are all told who to play/promote/book by the handful of major labels and their subsidiaries. No one else gets a look in apart from this small top tier. The talent-show TV format (which I love, don’t get me wrong) gives us the vague, background idea that it’s a meritocratic lottery – that deserving young kids are plucked out of obscurity and it’s a beautiful thing. In the real world, anyone who isn’t in this top tier – getting regular radio play etc. – is forced to undersell themselves and work for basically nothing. There’s no one to regulate for when they are short changed or fucked over and they have to rely on the personal, individual patronage of their fans to survive and succeed. The internet has made it infinitely more possible to reach fans and cut out this middle man of mainstream media promo, which has guaranteed its own obsolescence by being such a gated industry.

What are the primary political issues we face, in the UK and globally?
The normalisation of fascism? Maybe everyone took for granted that nazi=bad and forgot to keep hammering that point home. Or maybe it was hammered home too narrowly? Because people are failing to recognise nazis when they are out of the context of grainy footage of 1940s Germany? Or they don’t understand what’s wrong with platforming fascists because they’ve been placed on an arbitrary/bogus spectrum which makes them the equal and opposite number of the only people willing to oppose them, the ‘far-left’? I dunno.

Colour Me Wednesday's second album is available now to pre-order from their own Dovetown label:
http://www.dovetownrecords.com/

https://colourmewednesday.bandcamp.com/

https://www.facebook.com/colourmewednesday/