What even is Leeds? I have never understood it.

Of the other places I've lived, I understand York, it's where the university is built round an artificial lake (or used to be) and the town is all Olde Worlde touristy, you can walk around on the old walls, there are nice green spaces, and there's decent bike infra now.

And I understand Edinburgh, it's Home and where people live efficiently but expensively in mid-rise tenements that cover a huge area with roughly even density, and there are cool safe people all around, and you can't really cycle without risking death but you can walk around okay if you've got some time and are reasonably fit. It's absolutely unliveably infested with tourists for like a month a year but the rest of the time it's the coziest place I know.

But I was just born in Leeds one day and spent the majority of my life here and I don't get the place at all. It feels like such a random collection of buildings without any real identity or theme in my mind. There's kind of half assed cycleways except where (and when) there aren't.

The layout is totally chaotic and seems to flip randomly from nice quiet back streets to car sewers to parks to car-filled high streets to motorways to industrial estates to the pretty canal towpath to stroads, high rise to back to back terraces to semis to yuppie flats that look like cruise ships. (Mid-rise is notable by its almost complete absence, as far as I can tell, which is just another thing to hate about the place as far as I'm concerned.)

The people feel vaguely threatening (probably a holdover from my school days, to be fair, I find Leeds accents kind of low key menacing even now) but some are nice but in ways I can never really relate to like I can with nice Edinburgh people. And it's not, like, an old castle town or a major port or a tourist town or anything, it's just... a city? That is in Yorkshire I guess? That's about the only identity my mind can find for it. That one city in Yorkshire with the weird name, where I happened to find myself when I first gained consciousness on this earth. It has never made sense to me.

#Leeds #LeedsUK

For #GrindayFriday this week we have new powerviolence/grind EP 'Done In' by GIVE OVER from Leeds, UK. This is a brutal, wild, intense EP - there's cool riffs and breakdowns all over the place. I dig it. Been playing it pretty regularly the last few days.

https://giveoverleeds.bandcamp.com/album/done-in

#grind #grindcore #powerviolence #pv #GiveOver #Leeds #LeedsUK #LeedsBands #UKBands #UKGrind #UKPowerviolence @vanessawynn @HailsandAles @guffo @flockofnazguls @brian

I understand that @HailsandAles has dubbed it #WhiplashWednesday and at first I wasn't sure if I was going to listen to much metal today, but who am I kidding.

A KILLER grind (powerviolence?) band I discovered thanks to @Easydor that I've had on all afternoon (seriously, EVERYTHING they've done is GREAT) that I won't even save for a GrindayFriday is the super weird ONA SNOP from Leeds.

If this doesn't give you whiplash, I don't know what will.

https://onasnipsnop.bandcamp.com/album/intermittent-damnation-3

#metal #grind #powerviolence #OnaSnop #Leeds #LeedsUK #LeedsMetal #LeedsBands #UKMetal #UKBands #grindcore #weird #psych @vanessawynn @wendigo