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The Volga Sturgeon Face E​.​P.

by Nathan Hall and the Sinister Locals

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  • SUPER LIMITED EDITION OF ONE!!!!!!
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    THE "VOLGA STURGEON FACE" CD EP PLUS SUPER CUTE 5" LATHE CUT VINYL WITH 2 BONUS TRACKS PLUS FRUITS DE MER CD "A GATHERING OF THE FISH" INCLUDING AN INSTRUMENTAL VERSION OF "LIKE A SETTING SUN". VOLGA EP AND FRUITS DE MER CD SIGNED BY NATHAN HALL.

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  • ONE COPY Limited Edition Compact Disc
    Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album

    Comes with a signed handwritten lyric sheet for the track "Everybody's Burning Effigies".

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about

The songs feature Stukas, psychopathic cop killers, Kamikaze Ice Road Truckers, Burning Effigies, magical Genocide reversal and wonderfully brutal revenge on practitioners of genocide, fear of time slipping by, giant white eyed stone heads of Roman Emporers on the Thames Riverbed, Catacombs in Camden Town, the astonishing power of Talismans and a general theme of fear. All set to a carnival of sound that makes the average rainbow look like a Newport Industrial Estate on a rainy Sunday (Hell on earth) and is designed to make you feel like its an August Bank Holiday and Christmas day from a secular perspective simultaneously. Confusion. If you listen carefully you might hear the word "Gadzooks". Surely no higher recommendation is possible.

Radio play approved by Adam Walton of BBC Radio Wales, and Gideon Coe and Stuart Maconie of BBC 6 music. Whether Iggy Pop will hop on board our creaky haunted vessel is less clear but we sent him a copy and a Golden Ticket for a free voyage anyway.

BLISS AQUAMARINE REVIEW OF THE EP - KIM HARTEN

NATHAN HALL & THE SINISTER LOCALS The Volga Sturgeon Face EP (The Hip Replacement)

After having released seven albums, the Soft Hearted Scientists are taking a year out to do other things. Nathan Hall has formed a new project, Nathan Hall and the Sinister Locals, whose debut EP is out now. Everybody's Burning Effigies is brilliant baroque psych-pop, with an effective arrangement based around harpsichord, strings, chiming guitar, and bubbling analogue synths. Song for the Flowers is dreamlike harmony pop, its laid-back summery atmosphere masking darkly philosophical lyrics. Like a Setting Sun combines plaintive, ethereal psych-folk with a hypnotic chug. Catacombs of Camden Town is jangly and spacey psych-pop with a pensive, brooding atmosphere which does not negate the catchiness of the tune. A superb set of songs and an absolute must for Soft Hearted Scientists fans. Find out more at their Facebook page.


GREAT REVIEW FOR "THE VOLGA STURGEON FACE" EP BY NATHAN HALL AND THE SINISTER LOCALS IN "SHINDIG" MAGAZINE - THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS PSYCHEDELIC PUBLICATION.

This is Soft Hearted Scientists frontman Nathan Hall’s debut solo offering and all things considered it’s a lovely effort. It opens with the musically gleeful, if lyrically dark, mish-mash of late ’60s psychedelia and modern day sentiment ‘Everybody’s Burning Effigies’ (from which the EP takes its title) and which gradually makes way for the musically mellower (and equally dark) chorus laden ‘Song For The Flowers’. While these tracks are attention grabbers, the record arguably peaks in the second half with the foreboding, orchestral (and at times Joni Mitchell-esque) ‘Like A Setting Sun’, which transitions to the record’s closer, ‘Catacombs Of Camden Town’, whose sudden finish leaves us wanting just a little more. In short, The Volga Sturgeon Face is a strong solo debut and well worth a listen in its own right, while simultaneously filling the void left by the sabbatical of those Soft Hearted Scientists.

Christopher James Sheridan

1320 RADIO REVIEW

Nathan Hall is something of a musical time traveller popping through the wormholes of popular music to bring back bits of this and that, safe in the knowledge that they will one day fit together in a song that makes people sit up and listen. My first reaction to his new four-track EP, The Volga Sturgeon Face was exactly that, and I was doubly pleased to hear Hall’s melodic sensibilities prioritized over everything else.

These four songs are among his best to date.

I also like Halls’ way with words, and his beautifully obscure lyrics bundle along in the wonderfully hooky opener Everybody’s Burning Effigies. For all I know, it’s been at the bottom of drawer for ten years, but it sounds like a phenotypic example of Hall’s most satisfying songwriting. It also has what is known in the trade as a ‘killer chorus’.

On Song for the Flowers he celebrates plant succession in a choral-heavy tribute to the might of flower power. It also wryly looks forward to the end of nature-crushing civilization, and contains many of the veiled melodic references that he uses to mask whatever has inspired him to write his songs.

Like a Setting Sun bounces gleefully along but the vocal is too deep in the mix to hear lyric on the chorus properly. “I look for you, were you looking for me?” pops through in a repetitive refrain that is more like a literary litany than a conventional lyric hook.

The arrangement and the instrumentation recall Foxtrot-period Genesis at their very English best, while the strings create a delicate wash of pastoral imagery.

The meandering melody of Catacombs of Camden Town offers the clearest vocal to lyric balance, and so it should, for it seems to be Hall reminiscing about a catharsis of some kind. On this song, he demonstrates some of the compositional traits that make some of Peter Gabriel’s songs so interesting. It turns here and there into unexpected alleyways, but it’s always able to guide the listener back to the heart of the song.

I cannot say what the title of this EP might mean, other than it reads like the title of Dr. Who episode that didn’t make it past the production meeting. The most important thing to say about this rather bizarrely titled collection of tunes is that you will find yourself humming them six months from now, but you will be quite unable to remember whether you first heard them yesterday, or whether they are something from much further back in your memory.

These are also the songs that those who are familiar with the output of the Soft Hearted scientists have been waiting to hear from Nathan Hall. I just wish it had been an album-full of them.



HARMONIC DISTORTION REVIEW

Soft Hearted Scientists' frontman releases solo EP.

It's difficult to think of a contemporary band as prolifically good as Soft Hearted Scientists. After seven LPs (and nary a bad one among them) the band are taking a year out to re-charge their collective battery. That's not to say they won't be making music. Frontman Nathan Hall has already enlisted a bunch of pals to back him on his debut solo EP. Ladies and gentleman say hello to Nathan Hall & The Sinister Locals.

Fans of SHS will not be disappointed, this new outfit ploughs a similar furrow. The same astute, subversive worldview that characterised the best work of the SHS is present throughout this four song Extended Play. Wide ranging references, with equal portions of absudities and insights have always been hallmarks of Hall's work and here is no exception. But there's always a point to be made, be it with lyrics intent of taking revenge on the perpetrators of genocide, lamenting the passing of time or anaylising existencial crises. Clever stuff. No slouch with the music and textures either. Gentle neo-psych one minute, baroque pop the next before bursting out some ideas-packed prog the next. Neat work.

BUZZ MAGAZINE REVIEW JUNE 2017
NATHAN HALL & THE SINISTER LOCALS ****

The Volga Sturgeon Face EP (The Hip Replacement)

First solo outing for Soft Hearted Scientists frontman Hall and co, and another wild voyage into his chock-a-block, ever-intriguing mind – war and murder past and present, Tempus Fugit all over the prettiest music! Psych-pop, folk and prog with layered vocals and Beach Boys-ish harmonies, keyboards, harpsichord and what sounds like a calliope, strings, electronic gizmos and more. RLR

credits

released April 30, 2017

Nathan Hall - guitars, keyboards, electronics, vocals
Michael Bailey - bass guitar
Frank Naughton - drums, additional electronics, production
Spencer Segelov- drums on "Everybody's Burning Effigies"

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Nathan Hall and the Sinister Locals and Soft Hearted Scientists Cardiff, UK

The music mixes psychedelia with baroque touches, and analogue electronics and seeks to create the same confusion of the senses that a prime Beach Boys track does. Is it summer or is it Christmas? Neither. Its both simultaneously. The lyrics walk the dark side of Sunny Psychedelia Street and know that all is not well with the world. Burning effigies and suicidal Ice Road Truckers all feature. ... more

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