L A Y M A R reviews
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If anyone has anything good to say about us you'll be able to read it here. If anyone says anything bad about us we'll instruct our lawyers!
Laymar - take you on a roller coaster ride and satisfy your adrenalin receptors. someone at one of our gigs.
ManchesterMusic.com - The Ruby Lounge, Manchester -27/11/07
LAYMAR are (on) next and they’ve
managed to effectively rewire the whole venue with a vast catalogue of
electronic equipment. Through a full p.a. the Laymar sound is rich, disturbing,
exciting - throbbing. Are these songs or we experiencing one long opus? –
it’s hard to tell, but monstrous moments of sonic brutality are broken by
measured pauses and the use of semi-classical piano sounds forced onto
electrical skewers. It’s big stuff and the shuddering, oscillating sound
effects deliver an ear damaging bonus to the band’s rather distinctive
interpretation of progressive rock. Possible one of the most maverick and
interesting bands in Manchester right now. (JA)
IN THE CITY 2007 - ManchesterMusic.com daily blog 21/10/07
MM are obvious fans of Laymar but I
personally haven’t seen them play for well over a year and it’s
big reason number two as to why we’re here. In fact we were so eager to attend
that I got the dates mixed up and we actually came along on Friday by mistake.
Stark visuals and a band dressed in black may be warning enough but it’ll
never prepare you for the sonic bombing that lays a carpet of blood soaked
sounds between your ears. Think ethereal but with nuclear triggers.
Laymar’s brooding, progressive rock combines live loops and samples,
shuddering guitars and live drums that pound away like a distant jungle
telegraph warning of impending doom. The whole thing is an orchestrated symphony
that embraces spontaneity and some sort of beautiful turmoil. Apparently
they’re playing at Ruby Lounge later for a
Time for another mad dash across town for a
rendezvous with some of the MM crew in the Bay Horse basement.
I Half the people here are faces from other local bands or underground nights,
and there's one good reason for it; Laymar.
They take an age to plug in, bits of wire and fixing tape pile high across the
small stage; there are technical difficulties, but then as Laymar probably have
more things to go wrong than the Space Shuttle we'll forgive them. Their set
starts quietly, the first sheets of analogue and digital soundscape competing
with a crowd babble, but then there's that moment when it all clicks in and the
next twenty minutes are lost to Planet Laymar. Three silent silhouettes work
their magic against a backdrop of Russian words and red light; twisting and
turning alongside the towers of beautifully bleak post-rock that strike out into
every corner of your consciousness. It builds and builds, as delay-heavy guitars
float across the icy vistas from the electronics; drums crash like the weather
closing in and deep bass trembles. When they reach the peak it's like Ulrich
Schnauss meets 65daysofstatic meets the distorted echoes of some Blade Runner
parallel universe; the peak lasts for five, ten minutes; there is no time here.
Then it all disintegrates, beautifully; there's a hole in one of the cymbals and
it's thrown into the drumkit like some funeral pyre, and... fade out. Breathe. -
CA
MANCHESTERMUSIC.com Star & Garter 29/08/07
Having read much about Laymar and their locally-revered post-rock, my sneaking suspicion was that, being “a bit of a folkie”, I would only compare them to Nine Inch Nails. In fact, while some sections had nailed the dark industrial sound, there was much more in the way of atmospheric electronica and progressively spooky soundscapes. Relentless drum beats built into the kind of musical war cry that sounds like you have armies dancing in your ribcage, with the occasional punky riff enveloped by a whirl of slightly disorientating syncopation, but it was genuinely very moving stuff. Laymar have one foot in a serene haze of synth and suspense and X-Files soundtracks, while the other marches into battle in shiny black DMs. An instrumental outfit, the only vocal was courtesy of deep Charleton Heston-type spoken word samples, enhancing the music’s gravitas even further. Enlightening stuff, and even sans vocalist, my eyes were glued to the stage. -Megan Vaughan
DROWNED IN SOUND Manchester Club Academy 20/07/07
I've known this band what for what seems
like ages now but in reality it's only just a few months. I saw them when they
supported I Was A Cub Scout - and to be honest they were far the best band on
the night. When they supported Make Good Your Escape they were brilliant but
when supporting Troubles I thought they were a bit lightweight and seemed
nervous or ill at ease with themselves and it effected their performance which
seemed very tense. They supported the brilliant Battles recently as well and
were A-OK on a night when every band would come in second best.
So, I've seen them four times supporting other bands but tonight was the first
time I've seen them as headliner. In between they have played the Glastonbury
festival and this must have helped because they presented themselves with a lot
more confidence than I have noticed before.
I now realise that this is a band that gives an awful lot in their playing and
that the on stage TENSION I've noticed is the lifeblood of their performance.
Harnessed properly and it's great for the show because it suits some of their
music - if it gets out of hand then it's not so great. That's the way I see it
anyway.
Other than their music the band do not engage the audience in anyway whatsoever.
There's none of this - "we have a CD for sale" bollocks or "our
next number was written by our guitarist" crap. In fact I don't recall them
every saying anything on stage and I find their silence actually endearing.
If you don't already know, Laymar play post rock. Or do they? For most people
the definition of post rock means a band copying Explosions in the Sky, Mogwai
or God Speed but this is not the case with Laymar. And it's hard to tell where
their post rock roots and influences come from - I suspect from outside the
genre. I have a collection of about 30 post rock CDs by about 20 different
artists and to me everyone of them has their own distinctive sound. I would add
Laymar to that list if they had a release for sale which rather suprisingly they
don't.
Tonight their melodic, soundscapes didn't seem to me to be as dark as they
usually do, and perhaps that's a good thing because they seemed to connect with
more of the audience than in the past.
When I think of all the excellent bands I love to watch playing festivals this
summer up and down the UK I can't help wonder why Laymar are not among them.
I've just upgraded my DIS rating to 10 because I'm their new top fan.
Recommended. Will (DIS)
MANCHESTERMUSIC.com Night and Day 20/03/07
Then it all goes black; the stage lights are switched off and a distant sonar bleeps through disembodied voices - yes, it's time for Manchester's finest purveyors of intense post-rock LAYMAR and they seem to suck the very light out of the room. Their set tonight is not so much a collection of tracks as a great symphonic structure held together with portentous tolls of piano. The bass rumbles like a slowed down dub heartbeat; death-rattle drums rise and fall around bleak synth waves and swathes of static, its three perpetrators appearing mostly as shadows, lit only by indeterminate shuddering projections and the occasional flash-bulb. The years of quietly developing around the fringes of Manchester have more than paid off; this is something truly magnificent and beautiful and towering almost beyond description. The sort of band that stops you in your tracks and makes you want to phone people up and tell them what they're missing. - CA
MANCHESTERMUSIC.com
Jabez Clegg 24/01/07
In the smaller Church Suite at the Jabez
Clegg it is perishingly cold. Things are behind schedule even before a note has
been played - apparently one of the bands has been delayed getting here.
Eventually an image flickers into life, some words in Russian light up the back
wall of this darkest of spaces. Laymar are playing with the stage lights off,
instead lit solely by the monochrome images of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship
Potemkin. This is the sound of Sigur Ros if they'd grown up in a dark
Lancastrian mill town; iLiKETRAiNS with half-heard radar signals in place of
words; beauty and decay. Ciaran Cullen, anti-frontman extraordinaire, flicks a
bleached rockabilly forelock over his tightly clutched bass, swaying, entranced
in his own post-rock chill as Colin Williams stands almost motionless at the
side, disseminating synth and guitar waves. As expansive drone-chord soundscapes
of the wordless trio seep from the speakers, shadows of the great warship and
its rebel sailors flicker behind them and the icy cold in the room feels
strangely appropriate.- CA
SANDMAN MAGAZINE - MARCH 2007 Jabez Clegg, Manchester
The freezing temperatures of Jabez Clegg only served to heighten the experience of Laymar’s eerie and ghoulish opening set. This band is totally unclassifiable and on the night they produced constant waves of menacing and threatening sounds against a backdrop of marine archive footage. Laymar are a thinking band and run totally against the mainstream grain. Certainly worth watching but do not expect this 3 piece to be easily accessible. Simon S Wright.
RAWKSTAR DEMO REVIEW: August 2006
What Laymar have, though, is three songs showing the different side to the Manchester music scene; an amalgamation of post-rock and trip hop which never trails off into tedium. If this is an example of what the band are live, then high hopes should be expected when they have the time to record in a studio. Well worth a trip to see if they're in your town, with Juvenile Whole Life their standout track in my opinion. Review by: Ben Rating: 7/10
ANGRYAPE BLIPFEST :: Laymar :: Wolf Eyes & Various Artists 01/05/06 Jabez Clegg
Laymar have technical problems, but ones which they alone seem to notice. A meticulous construction of layered synths over streaming guitars, punctuated by glorious programmed beats and ear splitting cymbals erupts in a monolithic apex of spine-tingling sound to tear the breath from your lungs and the words from your mouth. - Jennifer Allan (full text on May 2006 archive reviews, Angryape)
MANCHESTERMUSIC.COM The Music Box, Manchester 6/04/06
Running down the stairs, running late again and I can hear a sound that’s unmistakeably Laymar. Inside there can’t be more than 12 people – it’s early, and the students are away, but still it’s arresting to see this most magnificent band playing out into black space. Although if anyone can do it they can. They seem absorbed in their own world, compelled and compelling, the bassist twisting from side to side and the frontman (of sorts) standing statue still. No words are spoken, the sound is everything. And they are sounding better than ever, like a more troubled 65daysofstatic shot through with windswept melancholy. The dark shapes of spine-tingling bass and fractured electronics, the thunderclap drums, now interwoven with samples of distant voices – half heard transmissions and snatches of Eastern spiritual melody all drifting in and out. Even live vocals rarely figure these days; this is the sound of a band who have found the confidence to step further away from convention. -CA
ANGRY LEFT WING MoFo...Is Dead Artist: Laymar Title: Demo By Conor Duffy http://uk.geocities.com/alwm2003/reviews/records/laymardemo.html
Laymar
have been mentioned on this site before, when Andy N came across them at 2005's
In The City and was consequently impressed by what he heard. Now they have
decided to send a copy of their demo, three tracks recorded live during a gig
last December. Clocking in at a little under 27 minutes, one would hope that
Laymar have the musical chops to carry such ambitious feats of musical might.
Believe me, they do. ‘Swords…' meanders along at times, before kicking into a steady rhythm that drives home the track's beautiful melodies. They've been described as Mogwai meets Sigur Ros, and within thirty seconds you can understand why. Layers are laid upon layers, and even the poor sound quality can't stop the majesty of this work. Actually, it has quite the opposite effect: it makes one more determined to listen, willing the band to go above and beyond all boundaries. It also makes you sad that you couldn't stand there in the club when these compositions were recorded, as watching Laymar create this overwhelming noise (a noise no three-piece should be capable of) must have been a sight to behold.
The success achieved by bands like Mogwai and The Mars Volta show that there is room in the music world for expansive, sometimes difficult music such as this. At the moment Laymar are too poor to get into a studio and take advantage of all a sound desk has to offer, which is a travesty, as there are lots of minds waiting to be blown by an act like this.
GIGWISE http://www.gigwise.com/contents.asp?contentid=13159
(Also on 'Bloody Awful Poetry') http://jonathan-d.blogspot.com/2006/02/demo-review-laymar-live-at-tiger.html
Poor sound quality is
something that afflicts the early recordings of many unsigned bands, and
that’s never been truer than with this straight-to-minidisc live demo of
post-rock Mancs Laymar. Once you get over
the pots-and-pans drum sound though, the sheer atmosphere of opening track ‘Swords’
becomes apparent. Weird noises. Slow burning synths. The churning
bleakness of mid-80s Cure. It’s the perfect soundtrack for an alien
abduction. The three piece unsurprisingly claim Mogwai as an influence,
although there’s no sign of the Scotsmen’s overused
clean-arpeggio/squalling-feedback formula. With gorgeous Eno-esque
keyboard minimalism, Laymar can be far more inventive than that.
Jonathan
Deamer
UNPEELED MAGAZINE (Jan06)
"THE
NOT SWEDISH DILEMMA
A
poor recording of a decent band who could become a good one. Laymar are
difficult to position, let alone market, extended instrumentals never did Yes
any harm, but they started life covering Chuck Berry (I have ‘that’ ep) and
that pretty much covers the Laymar dilemma. They need people to appreciate and
buy their material, but the gigging route is pretty well closed as they go for
swelling, building, dense rockscapes. Same position that Radiohead would have
been in with their last album if they weren’t already known. So, this band are
chin-strokingly interesting and occasionally violent on the guitar front, but
they’re not friends with Mogwai and they don’t come from Sweden, bummer.
Check www.laymar.co.uk
and see what you think.
ANGRY LEFT WING MOFO (Oct 05) http://uk.geocities.com/alwm2003/history.html
/05 - Andy N
(extract) We ended up in the Star & Garter on Sunday Night and watched a local group called Laymar who certainly played a very loud almost Science Fiction sort of set which almost sounded like Mogwai playing a set of instrumental Joy Division cover versions. Excellent.
To conclude, perhaps the quality was slightly down on last year's material, but this was caused, in part I feel, by "In the City" themselves announcing things a good week and a half later than they did last year and leaving me less time to discover quality acts, but when it was good (for example Isobel Heyworth, iLIKETRAINS, LAYMAR or The Fronts) it was good, good stuff sometimes even bordering on the amazing but sadly when it was bad (Take your pick from any number of others listed and dozens of acts literally we heard while walking past Dry Bar, Night and Day, The Castle etc), believe me it was bloody awful.
No doubt, as always I will be there again next year but it would be a change also to hear something else but Oasis/Stone Roses sound-alike (or just as worryingly - David Gray/James Blunt copyists this year.) As some of the better acts I have heard this year proved, being different really does pay.
MANCHESTERMUSIC.COM Star and Garter, 21 April 2005
"impressively, the band still comply with their slightly gothic, progressive set pieces. It gets rather intense in places, but once they get their gargantuan machine to move along to the electronically enhanced soundtrack, it becomes quite a mesmeric, head crunching experience. It's brave, experimental stuff, that takes inspiration from Mogwai's well thumbed handbook, but creates a rather Mancunian urban landscape (Chameleons, shades of an uber heavy Joy Divison and plenty of heavy references from the likes of Nine Inch Nails and Tool). It’s a learning experience for the listener, but well worth subscribing to, as Laymar may actually be just one step ahead of the game. JA
GIGWISE Night & Day, 31/03/05
Think Manchester, think High Voltage. The night is as consistent as the rain, and as loud as the name suggests and tonight it’s throbbing…just like our battered old ears.
Laymar initiate the tympanic destruction, but they do it with grace and aggression in equal measure and its fucking stunning. Imagine taunting and berating Sigur Ros till the frustration and hostility of Masssive Attack emerged from their delicate soundscapes and you’re someway to making sense of Laymar. With front man Colin Williams letting loose a guttural whale of pant shitting proportions and a bassist that displays his bass little below the neck, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stumbled on a weird hardcore/jazz outfit, but thank fuck Laymar are far removed from any such suggestions. Broken beats, building to a wild flailing anarchy has never been as melodic and extravagant as this, and it’s with great regret that Gigwise see the lads shuffle off. - Daniel Pratley
MANCHESTERMUSIC.COM Night & Day, 31/03/05
An eerie chill descends on an already heating Night & Day. Maybe they’ve actually got the air conditioning working. Maybe it’s something else. Onstage a trio, near motionless, young, dressed in uniform plain black. A tremor of bass and a synth sound that send shivers down your neck, like the desolate New Order in that interlude between the end of Joy Division and the dawning of their disco age. Within fifteen seconds Laymar have me completely absorbed in an instrumental track so evocative that pictures start forming in my head of floating pan-shots across distant icecaps and Northern Lights. Vocals, when they come, are understated – half drenched in the mists of their darkly beautiful sound – and still they don’t move, don’t speak, barely even look up. They don’t need to – they know their music speaks for itself. The pace is shifts only slightly but different textures work their way in and out – chimes of guitar; sequenced percussion, all threads in a greater fabric. Like all great bands it takes me some time to sink back to earth afterwards. By Cath Aubergine
HIGH VOLTAGE
MAGAZINE
High Voltage @ Night
& Day, 31/03/05
It's not easy for Laymar, with the type of music they attempt they really have
to move the margins of innovation forward. Some people might argue that it might
not even be possible for the avant-garde to make it in the music industry today.
In any case Laymar know they don't want to write the next 3 minute pop song.
Tonight they seem to be in good spirits. The size of the Night and Day stage
gives the drummer Dave enough room to move freely to and from his kit. And, they
are fantastic musicians. Bass player Caj is one of the most impressive musicians in Manchester. Hopefully they can keep plowing the difficult path
they have chosen, even if it means spending resources on more laptop gizmos to
create a more unique sound. 4/5 - Yvonne Lloyd
YOU can find all sorts on Oldham Street on a Thursday night; drunks, vagabonds, waifs, strays, and any number of bands on the road to glory.Night & Day is a busy weigh station on that particular trunk road, and Manchester new wavers Laymar got proceedings at this High Voltage show underway. Laymar immediately stand out with their desire for a touch of style in a world where studied crackhead chic is all the rage. - Mark Richardson
MANCHESTERMUSIC.CO.UK
‘Laymar
have been a diamond in the rough for too long since they formed just over three
years ago. After a change in line ups and recent surge of more shows and a new
found power the band feel deserved of more attention, and its glaringly obvious
the band deserve it if you have seen them live’
YOOFS MAGAZINE
" a soundscape of white noise at times, a beguiling and pleasing melody when needed; overall an exhausting but exhilarating listen. They generate an amazing full sound. The music they play is music I think will grip and excite a lot of people who hear them"
HIGH
VOLTAGE "Manchester's
live scene has improved dramatically over the last year but a lot of
the newer bands aren’t major label material. So independents in Manchester are
going to be really important in helping great bands like Laymar come
through."
MANCHESTERMUSIC.CO.UK Three
piece Laymar, grab distorted guitars and polish them into loud/quiet anthems
that are one part grunge, one part nu-rock and a final part comprising of simple
punchy melodic guitars. The singer has a distinctive, accurate voice,
underpinning the whole plot, supporting it in its driven, grating sounds. A bit
too long, but pretty compelling. “She Never Smiles” embraces the rock and
roll lo-fi ethic. The verses are sparse and as a result interesting, but the
breaks somewhat muddle this up, but all is not lost. This still gleams, with any
promise here being easy realised.
UNPEELED MAGAZINE
made our demo March
2003 Single of the Month. This is their review:-
Laymar "Product Of A Daydream" (White Label)
I know as well as anyone that what the world doesn't need right now is another
dose of radiohead-revisionism, but Laymar offer an armour plated and ****ing ace
version. It's all taut, wired, sparky and spunky stuff, more hooks than a fleet
of long-liners, real melodies, powerful and well constructed songs that are as
brainy as they are brawny. This is more like an album from a big name outfit
than a demo from a gang of lads. They have a site at www.LAYMAR.COM and if there
are any downloads go for the sleazy Americana chug of "She Never
Smiles".
LOGO MAGAZINE: "think Kurt Cobain fronting ‘Ummagumma’ era Pink Floyd and you get some idea of their sound. “What?” I hear you thinking “there’s nobody else out there that sounds like that”, and that’s true".....Suzie Q
PURE RADIO 87.7FM. Radio DJ John Curley took a liking to our demo and played tracks from it over a period of four weeks in June 2003.. "This band have really got a different sound".
MANCHESTERMUSIC.CO.UK "though tiptoeing their way into their set rather meekly, when it does erupt (and believe me, it can) it sounds quite colossal"...."they profess lorry loads of potential".