On Sundays was Weekender, a guide to new bands, new songs, new releases and general newness - that will be back from next week with a wholly refreshed look. On Saturdays, though, came The Weekly Sweep, twenty songs we were in admiration for at the time. The problem with that a lot of the time though was some of the selection never changed, so it'd get clogged up with the same old links. Playlist Additions, as the name suggests, is different, and not just because there were 200 Weekly Sweeps posted and that seems a good number to retire the tag on. No song will, unless something interesting/major occurs, be written about twice, which means we can equally highlight different album tracks and bring a broader sweep (sic) of new songs to the reader's attention.
Because it's been so hectic with new posts recently there's a lot of new music we're not totally up to speed with, so a full suggestion of what to look for will be unveiled over the next couple of weeks. These twenty (old habits die hard, but it won't be twenty every week) will more than do for now, though:
It's looking like a banner year for indiepop, and ukelele-touting Aussie Elizabeth Morris and co have put one out of the ballpark with their self-titled debut, out on the 14th. Singles aside, the centrepiece is this yearningly subdued, beautifully imagery-laden ode, with slide guitar, to hanging around Swedish lakes.
The single from their fourth album of "Dadaist pop", more beatific and Balearic than the last couple but still from some other place entirely, is We Work In Bars, which is on their Myspace. Our favourite off Well Done Europe is this, unspooling tight wound grooves with a set of disconnected self-referential aphorisms and the least party-like "let's party!" maybe in recorded history.
Their live set brings whole new dimensions to hit and miss, drifting from heights to stages past even White Lies and towards The Departure. However as far as first-album-Editors-with-Isn't Anything-by-the-stereo goes this is pretty promising.
Everyone, and we include Daniel O'Donnell in this, is doing Afrobeat these days. What Club 8, one of the many bands of Swedish scene scion Johan Angergård, assign it to is the swirling retro-modern organ and still small voice not of calm of a Camera Obscura (whose producer Jari Haapalainen is behind the desk here)
Amazing. It's got a children's choir *and* a sax solo on, and yet it still sounds great in a Mystery Jets-do-Hot Club de Paris with huge harmonies way. They're from Nottingham and this debut single is out on Monday.
Wherein the brothers Brewis put aside their usual studied poise and make like a Mackem digi-Prince, to some degree, plus a vibraphone solo.
Still no vocals, still plenty of idea what they're doing even if it just sounds like a bunch of electronic sounds. The build is quite something, the electronics pulse like rarely, the drumbeat at the start is borrowed from LCD Soundsystem.
Yes, there is. Talking of instrumental terrors, also dual-drumkitted also-celebrated for their live set also-quartet not-also-Cardiffians Islet's Celebrate This Place EP, out a week on Monday, has been rarely off our mp3 player. A primally motorik No Wave statement of purposefully awry intent, it's music to weave through a crowd smashing a small tambourine to.
Maybe it's connected to the recent success of his longtime running mates Mumford and Marling, but voice and lyrics aside (which are quite important as far as a song goes, we appreciate) there's something less rustically English about this first taster from Been Listening, out on Monday, than A Larum (a title drawn from Shakespeare, but one that's only just been pointed out in our presence is also an anagram of 'Laura M') Still warmly very much his own man, though.
You don't really need to be told who brought this project into being, do you? Even looking at the band's attire in that live clip would give you a hefty clue. Sonically, it's a Nashvillian cousin to She & Him, vocal timbre inclusive. You'd never guess she's from Oldham, let's just say that.
More fuzz-Buzzcockian than the Dalston noise-pop scene they emerged from, Nothing Hurts certainly doesn't give you time to get weary of their melody under glass approach. This one nods to the Minutemen and sounds nasty under the rim.
Go and download it.
In the case study of Erickson you hate to use words like 'cracked', but his first album in fourteen years is rutted, occasionally distorted and purposefully noisy country rock of excellence and no little emotion.
We've talked before about this, but it's always worth revisiting the cover of the February 2009 edition of Rock Sound publicising the Shred Yr Face II tour, given that Rolo Tomassi were third on the bill. Yet strangely the designers weren't overly keen on giving priority to the frontmen of Fucked Up or The Bronx. Cosomology, while still very much of the baffling post-screamo genre, is a very difficult beast to pin down, virtually turning into sci-fi prog (and giving Eva Spence's secondary cooing vocal style a fair airing) while never actually being The Mars Volta.
Been out for a few weeks but the video to the Cocteaus-meets-Bernard Hermann-meets-narrator urgently in need of assertiveness course has just appeared, which is why it's in here. Cuts off just as the expansive coda really gets going, though.
From someone leaving girl group sounds behind to eight people taking them on with gusto. Could have picked most of Loveless Unbeliever in truth, but this one gets the nod as a) it was a proper lightbulb moment when we found out the title, b) judging by the size of the home town crowd in the live clip they need a quick leg up and c) it swoons like nobody's business.
Third single from pedal-friendly beardy iconoclast Will Vaughan is the most pop he's been, which obviously is pop by few other counts, especially against such desperate lyrical reassurance/critique. Apparently Frank Skinner has played his work.
Contains welcoming hints of all of his previous projects - the warped acoustic-led songcraft of the Beta Band, King Biscuit Time's languid beats, Black Affair's rhythmic vocal mantras. At least he's in apparent good health and definite good form now anyway.
Elizabeth Morris' second appearance, as a newly hired hand as Amelia Fletcher's previous attempts at broadening the Talulah Gosh-Heavenly-Marine Research lineage end up back where she started, that is to say indiepop girl group joy, only far more so. Also: stand up drumming.
This month's Wave Pictures release is an EP version of their European album, along the acoustic lines of If You Leave It Alone rather than another opportunity for Dave Tatte
rsall (whose solo album we're still awaiting) to go off on a postmodern soloing frenzy.
1 comment:
Love the Chapel Club and Steve Mason tracks!!
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