DZ Deathrays - No Sleep

Getting oddly priority placement in the NME year preview issue, comparisons to every other guitar/drums duo (perhaps bar Slow Club) are inevitable but the band that made your beloved writer almost literally sprint down Duke Street, Cardiff and back during the Saturday shopping crush just to catch ten minutes of their set at Swn are full-on intense and no quarter given. This is lead from their new EP out in March.

Shrag - Chasing Consummations

The first taste of Shrag's third album Canines, tentatively scheduled for May and produced by Andy Miller (Life Without Buildings, Mogwai, Sons And Daughters, Scout Niblett, My Latest Novel), works its way up with insistent subtlety through parping organ onto the sort of ungraspable skewwiff melodic sense they do so well, via a couple of bits where all the vocal tracks are piled on top of each other that briefly made us worry that we'd somehow got it looping twice on itself. Plus, strings! Unusual to hear Shrag flirt with grandiosity, but such is development.

Shrag - Chasing Consummations by Shrag

Andrew Bird - Eyeoneye

The first taste of Bird's sixth album Break It Yourself, released March 5th here on Bella Union, is quite a bit more direct, live sounding and straightforward r'n'r, with a proper pre-Beatles tinge wired to a big echoey production wall, than his chamber looped whistling folk of yore, though the indie Roger Whittaker does get a workout before the halfway mark.

Eyeoneye by Andrew Bird

Fair Ohs - Salt Flats

Released on flexi-postcard, perhaps the ultimate in that it's a format incorporating two forms of dead media, Fair Ohs' explorations into African hi-life - Eritrean Guayla, it's specified here - refracted both through bubbling indie disco and basement lo-fi take a turn for the psychedelic, slowed down, letting more air bubbles develop between the cracks and somehow even more taut than before. Alright, because of that lack of freneticism it does sound a little more like Vampire Weekend (Contra specifically) than hotwired direct from source, but not in such a way they could be accused of late-on copyage.

Salt Flats - Fair Ohs by X-RAY RECORDINGS

Gallops - G Is For Jaile

Ah, Gallops. Ever attempting to encompass the whole of motorik math-rock in one shot, their recent few demos have seen them taking tentative laptoppish steps, or at least more so than their existing releases. This, for instance, takes over seven minutes to unfold its propulsive wares, from the tricksy drumming to the constantly searching synth patterns all with airs of Tangerine Dream off on the horizon. Eventually it all disappears in a unblocked sink-like motion down a wormhole of insistent electronics. This is likely to be on their debut EP, being recorded in February with the highly fitting production work of Three Trapped Tigers guitarist/mains re-wirer Matt Calvert.

Heavy Petting Zoo - Deathproof

If Heavy Petting Zoo were from east London rather than Swansea you'd have heard far too much about them by now. Yes, it's lo-fi garage, but only the demo quality recording suggests deliberate overfuzz of their coiled spring garage, economical unshowy riffage framing Amy Zachariah's Karen O-like holler. The rest of their recordings range from messy hiss to cocksure menace, all with its own frames of reference and internalised power.

Deathproof by Heavy Petting Zoo

Story Books - Peregrine

Out of the Isle of Sheppey, Story Books initially come over like the long inevitable crossover point between careful, minimal xx nightscapes and Kris Harris' warm folksy vocals. A big guitar solo then crashes in out of nowhere like a sudden tidal wave before snapping back to the plangent, ruminative stillness as if nothing has happened yet entirely changed in a way. There's something of a more energetic Bon Iver sound (not the yacht rock bits, obviously) about how it all fits together but at heart it's very British and evocatively textured whatever it turns into.

Liechtenstein - Strange Ideas

Something incredibly effervescent about the Gothenburg femme trio Liechtenstein's approach to melding Orange Juice funk guitar in a post-punk world to the Dolly Mixture/Girls At Our Best school of girls somehow doing things differently with the same tools as the boys. Their second album Fast Forward is out next week and three years after their debut it showcases a confidence in the limberness of their playing and harmonies alike.

The Shamefaced Sparrows - Murder In The Dollhouse

"Our mother was a Ye-Ye girl. Our father was Link Wray." Yeah, that's about the size of the Dalston-based, self described "Death Pop" outfit dealing in reverbed surf garage menace with an underlying obtuse pop sensibility.

Murder In The Dollhouse (Demo) by The Shamefaced Sparrows

Bear In Heaven - The Reflection Of You

Brooklynites Bear In Heaven's last album Beast Rest Forth Mouth was described by us in another place as a band who "clearly aren't stunted for imagination, or eagerness, and there’s equal amounts of pop worthiness and stylistic reinterpretation within them" while stressing that they were still held down by their influences so far. Whether April album I Love You, It's Cool manages it remains to be seen but this is a more than decent start, nodding to AnCo's My Girls at outset before running off the steam of synths playing out pretty patterns and forthright hooks without seemingly trying too hard.

Bear In Heaven - The Reflection of You by Bear in Heaven

Mammal Club - Toward You With Lust

Since writing about them back in April Newcastle's Mammal Club have lost a member and gained a whole new field of sonic vision. No longer firing on nervous energy alone, this new track unfolds over five minutes of pounding textural build as pianos and toms build and develop a dramatic lushness. The enormous coda you'd expect never happens, instead dialling back right as you'd expect the threshold to be crossed into spaced out, circulatory interloping.

Toward You With Lust by Mammal Club

Field Music - A New Town

Second cab off the Plumb rank, there's a slight return to the freeze-dried funk of Let's Write A Book, a chorus melody half-inched from new wave and rejigged into something that'd both fit as a hook-laden classic radio staple and too sparky and just out of mainstream reach, plus some burbling and blowing of water through a straw mixed just within distracting earshot. Still failing to do wrong, then. Plumb's release party is at the Newcastle Cluny on 10th February, three days before release, with Trev Gibb's band Deerhart supporting.

Field Music - A New Town by memphisindustries

Rose Elinor Dougall - The Night

Not the first fruits of her second album yet, that's still in development hell, but The Distractions EP, three gratis full fidelity demos recorded with her titular live band soon after Without Why's 2010 emergence. She says that second full-length will be of a difficult musical hue to these but that's far from saying it's a drawer clearing exercise alone. This track has the insistent glimmer and cathedral reverberations of Mazzy Star and Treasure-era Cocteaus before bursting into shoegaze pop white light, anchored by Dougall's big vocal of yearning and hoping, before the sort of psychedelic transient noise bursts her brother Tom, on guitar here, is fashioning with Toy.

The Rosie Taylor Project - The Last Happy Writer

Leeds' Rosie Taylor Project released a great single you probably missed back in June - here it is. It's from second album Twin Beds, produced by the increasingly reliable Richard Formby and out on Odd Box on 13th February. From it comes this freely downloadable Americana flavoured, slow burning hopeful while lonesome melancholia.