The EP by the SE London multimedia collective has all sorts of flagrancy with darker styles going on, tracking through dubstep, math and electronica to find new ground, on this highlight from the forthcoming Counter Balance EP strutting vocally and searching out the murky sample-aided netherworld underneath.
The King Is Dead, released third week of January, seems to have no driving concept story at all. You're slipping, Meloy. Peter Buck's on this, which is why it sounds like Fables Of The Reconstruction and a bit like Buck's other employer Robyn Hitchcock's the Soft Boys. Dear lord, can you fix a proper, uninterrupted, within reasonable distance of us (or at least at a festival that cares) Decemberists UK tour for some point in 2011?
The Big Star-reappropriating, huge Spector-invoking, Darren Hayman video-cameoing first proper single (a double A side with Bubblegum, which was added ages ago, but if you insist...) from next year's fourth album, thus far shaping up to be Simon, Jenna and whoever else is in the band this week's career highpoint. So obviously they're splitting up just after its release.
We don't know if it was us that broke the news through Fortuna Pop! that POBPAH had been working with Alan Moulder and Flood on next year's second album, but we'll claim it was for the time being anyway. What that means is something slightly more pop-Cure, slightly less drowned in fuzz, but still recognisably their rain during the sunshine.
A flute straight out of Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs' best sample disc, and the rest of it's pretty akin to their humanised electronic pop music, given a very sunny (timely, then), very English feel. Spot the reference in the video to Half Man Half Biscuit's 99% Of Gargoyles Look Like Bob Todd.
From a tremendous, stratospheric album called St Thomas which is out on the 15th, a religious confession as well as a confession about religion, converting from fragility to strength in ambition.
It's not a promising name for a band, although you can at least guess where they aren't from. They're part of The New Floatiness to be filed alongside Still Corners, this all minimal aereation and poise before turning tail and launching into an all-out extended finish that teeters on the edge of indiepop chaos theory falling apart.
Not Ross from the Futureheads on vocals, despite the visual evidence. Having been out of sight for two to three years they return having stripped emo-before-it-became-emo-as-it's-now-known down to its component parts and reassembled it with loose energy replacing overcareerism.
After fifteen years erstwhile Field Mice leader Bobby Wratten is bringing his fragile, panoramic indie dreaming to a close at least in this guise.
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