SUPER Furry Animals-influenced Boltonian pop troubadours Merchandise will release their new album, For The Masses, on Monday.

To celebrate they will be playing the Octagon theatre bar the same night, with support from Moore Marriott and Alex Hulme.
Five years in the making, the band promise that For The Masses will “bring a skip to the beat and a smile to the face.”

The 13 songs on the album include the soon-to-be-released single Lies Like These, plus the darker-tinged Prescription and Enemy.

The core of Merchandise’s collective revolves around Brad B. Wood and Conrad Astley, and live shows are performed on acoustic guitar, mandolin, melodica and cajon… though from time to time they will recruit friends and “rock out” a little. In a gentle manner, mind.
Tickets to the launch night cost £5, with a limited number of tickets free to under 26s. To book, ring the Octagon box office on 01204 520661.

The album is released on the band’s own Cityscape records, and distributed through Universal.
Support act Alex Hulme will be showcasing songs from his EP, The Wood. Just 19 years old, Alex has grown up with music. His grandfather was an opera singer, his older brother Laurie is in Manchester band Beat the Radar (signed to Akoustik Anarkhy) and his cousin Ed is in fellow Manchester band Working for a Nuclear Free City (signed to Melodic).

Alex’s prolific live outings have recently seen him perform at Liverpool Sound City and Sound Control in Manchester, with gigs booked at Blackpool’s Tommyfest, Silverdale Concert for Haiti and Garstang Summer Acoustic Festival.
• Cityscape presents For The Masses launch gig at the Octagon, Howell Croft South, Bolton, on Monday. Tickets £5. To book, ring 01204 520661

Original Article : http://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/leisure/boltonmusic/8195345./

Our good friend Minnellium popped his thoughts about the album up on his blog. Having done a remix for us and being a mate might make him a bit biased but if folk are saying nice things, I’ll take it :0)

Minnellium Blog:

“Five years in the making” makes any album sound epic, doesn’t it.  Merchandise are a friend-of-a-friend band that have become just a friend band now.  Brad asked me to build the Cityscape Records website some time back, then I shortly after rebuilt the Merchandise website.  Along the way I got to listen to their music and things grew and grew.  I do enjoy their poppyness lots…

I’m lucky enough to be – in some sort of VIP way- in receipt of a pre-release of the album ‘For the Masses’ that will be coming out in June, and thought I’d tell you all that it is well worth the wait.

Putting two fairly anthem-like tunes up fron in positions 1 and 2 (‘Listen Up’ and ‘Sometimes’) is a smart move. You start buzzing straight away. Still getting used to some of the new tracks but all satisfy in their own way. ‘Prescription’ and ‘Enemy’ are certainly not the happy-go-lucky type of track that the beautiful ’sometimes’ proves to be listen after listen.

Great work Brad and Con – everyone buy this in June and help Bolton’s best kept secret become Bolton’s best known band.

Click the tiger to visit Indie Pages!

Merchandise: Listen Up! (7″, Cityscape CITY-S-009)

Okay okay, this single is available on CD as well, but the CD doesn’t come on white vinyl, now does it? Regardless of the technical implications of pressing a CD on vinyl, you just don’t get 7″ diameter CDs. Merchandise are like Baby Bird’s cheerier brother, like the Badly Drawn Boy knock-off act it’s okay to like because they’re about fifty times better. They do accomplished, layered pop music with one foot in the ‘literate, dour Northerners’ camp and the other in the one that says ‘we’ve got beards, but we’re fun and approachable’.

Simon Minter

Merchandise’s new single arrived with me yesterday and seeing the cover, that familiar toon style of illustration and the brown/orange thang is really starting to stamp the Merchandise brand on all that they do. When a band starts to become a brand, things start to feel more cohesive and as a result things start to get a bit more exciting in some way. It should be avbout the music but if pop music was just about the music we’d be in a very different place.

Listen Up! is the follow-up to Sometimes – one of those catchy tunes from 2008 that still weaves its way into my head frequently. It’s a clever, confident track that doesn’t do very much. This makes it good… for me. Poppy to the hilt, it uses a lot of repetition (”You were my world wer – wer – wer world”), and has catchiness written all over it. It’s going to be another one of those naggers that keeps popping into my head in the spring of 2009.

http://www.minnellium.com/listen-up-by-merchandise

Looking forward to Merchandise’s album coming later this year – five years in the making.

If you love yourself some lo-fi pop, (and really, what are you doing here otherwise?), you’re gonna be bowled over by the latest 7″ single from Merchandise. The band hails from the lazy tongued shores of the UK, and brings to mind a more emphatic and punchy answer to The Boy Least Likely To.

Two songs abound here: the bouyant “Listen Up!” and the slightly more melancholy “Lonesome Beauty”. It’s truly one of the most addictive singles that have ever graced the hallowed halls of RetroLowFi HQ, and we’re not just saying that because of the delicious looking white vinyl it’s pressed on, either.

Really. Seriously, take a listen to “Listen Up!” here.

Then buy it from Cityscape records!

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 08, 2009

Sunday Goody Sunday

Merchandise

Genre: Indie / Alternative / Pop

From: Bolton and Manchester,

United Kingdom

Bolton pure popsters Merchandise have a new single coming out towards the end of the month.

‘Listen Up’, the follow-up to the well received single ‘Sometimes’ (see video below) is a nice little taster for their forthcoming album ‘For the Masses’. However it’s overshadowed by the b-side (which is becoming an increasingly archaic term in these days of downloading) ‘Lonesome Beauty’ a seductive summer smoothie indebted to the seriously underrated Pale Fountains, Love’s ‘Forever Changes’, Burt Bacharach and The Lotus Eaters.

Showing their versatility the aptly named ‘The Sunday Song’, provided courtesy of the Devil, sounds like The Dandy Warhols if they’d been born in Bolton.

Go Try

MP3 – Merchandise – The Sunday Song

If anyone from the IFPI or Blogger is reading this track is linked direct from the Merchandise website

Go Visit

Merchandise – Myspace// Website

Label – Cityscape Records // Cityscape Records Myspace