New music given a thorough tickling.... For all other STN business: thesweep.tumblr.com
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Tracklist: Man Without Country - King Complex
Not often an outfit manages to find a happy medium between overarching ambition and low-key microdetail, but the duo from south-west Wales are close to it. If the vocal pitch and its sentiments betray a man approaching the end of his tether, the five and a half minutes the undulating, M83-ish synth textures develop a sense of ease out of a frantic, stadium-ready chorus with nods to hip ambient IDM throughout.
Birmingham trio Victories At Sea couldn't be more like the sound of 2008 at first, as a post-punk guitar figure and tricksy drumming sounding not unlike Jack Bevan of Foals gives way to big keyboard chords and rushing chords not too far from the Cure. Eventually, though, it becomes something that fits more comfortably alongside Tall Ships and co in the way it twists outsider interlocking complexity into guitar-pop shapes and then gives the result a vigorous shake to make it sound more like a wind tunnel.
Marling's image seems to change slightly with every record, from callow youth to brunette ingenue and now world-wearied and wised up. Her voice has aged and grown richer with her, the more lived-in vocal of I Speak Because I Can now developing into something earthier and far, far beyond her years (not too far past 21). With maturity comes great responsibility towards your songwriting, and on first listen that's something she's capable too of facing up to. As with the last album it was recorded in a room by Ethan Johns, meaning it develops as it goes not in the heavy-handed Mumfords crescendo sense but steadily growing strings, multi-tracked backing vocals and Marling coming to terms with her emotions. Three minutes it breaks into a trot of west coast folk-rock of a thankfully restrained hue and then we're talking, not to mention looking forward to September's A Creature I Don't Know.
Willy Vlautin is a published novelist, one of his books being turned into a film for 2012 release, and he's brought the specifics of unfolding narrative to now ten Richmond Fontaine albums. The latest, The High Country, is out on September 5th, is a fully realised "song-novel" featuring genre hops and spoken word links, "a gothic love story between a mechanic and an auto parts store counter girl, whose secret love inspires an effort to escape the darkness of the world that surrounds them — drugs, violence, madness, loneliness, and desperation set against a backdrop of endless logging roads and the remains of a forest brutalized by logging." Right then. The advance single is merely a backwoods garage rock tale involving night terror, too many drugs and being in peril somewhere you're not sure of the exact location of.
Do you remember Jack? They were a mid to late 90s London outfit standing out for their intellectualist air, all dark suits, Bukowski references and Scott Walker throwbacks. Escapists are less poetically romantic, have a vocalist who often strays some distance from Antony Reynolds' understatement and don't employ strings but otherwise we're reminded of that band by this song's rush of emotiveness and poise. That they've been compared to Mumford & Sons, who they don't sound like, highlights the paucity of bands who actually have this sort of internalised ambition nowadays.
It's possible we haven't heard the best of Katy and Rosa (and Olly) yet, a somehow more likeable live act than on record so far. That 'so far' doesn't yet include Acrobats, though, their second album released September 12th. This first single heralds a darker hue, guitars plugged in and sentiments less airy. The harmonies remain as plaintive as always, though, and don't alter the trio's interplay
Wrexham's Polly Mackey, previously achieving some base level of success with The Pleasure Principle, plays the expansion game on the debut EP by her new incarnation, available for free on Bandcamp. This opening track, coursing with nervousness, recalls the elegaic melancholia of Beach House, with elements of shoegaze, post-punk and Howling Bells-like contained windswept panorama elsewhere in the EP, unafraid to play out its incremental swell over a longer stretch.
Tracklist: Vostok 5 - Little Arrow, Little Squirrel
Here's some indie at work for a shared cause. Vostok 5 is an exhibition of art and music relating to space travel, taking place 1st-7th September at The Outside World Gallery in Shoreditch. To coincide a CD is being put out of related songs by a band featuring Darren Hayman and members of Allo Darlin'/Hexicon, Rotifer, Tigercats and Fever Dream. This track moreover features Hayman, Robert Rotifer, two of Allo Darlin' and all three Wave Pictures, employed in an appealing countrified shuffle about Belka and Strelka, the first dogs to be sent into orbit around the earth and return alive.
For some reason the press release for this single, the alter ego of Brighton's Simon Hill, reckons it sounds like Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, which must be a version we don't have. What it actually is is further evidence of the influence of rhythmic early 80s New York disco-not-disco club beats, here with requisite sci-fi references and bleeps and some artfully bored B-girling.
Tracklist: The Understudies - Everyone Deserves At Least One Summer Of Love
More superior indiepop, here one week away from the gathering of the cardiganed clans at Indietracks. The Understudies have been ploughing a furrow of Edwyn Collins-flavoured melodic heartache for a little while now but this 7" on Odd Box might be their most fulfilled, and hence most fulfilling, exultation. Romantic and heartaching while positive in a way only young Morrissey and fey Scotsmen (see also Roddy Frame) can seemingly otherwise pull off. It's not cynical in the slightest, really, it's open minded to the possibilities and pull of the season.
Tracklist: Katie Malco - For Just One Minute There
Yes, it's a girl with an acoustic guitar. But wait up, as Malco is no folkie ingenue as her recent signing to Alcopop! proves. Now London but originally from Fife, and claiming the Weakerthans and Refused among her influences she's closer to the effervescent pop of a Nat Johnson multiplied by the bewitched too close for comfort storytelling of Peggy Sue. If you remember our admiration circa 2008 for another Scot-originating singer-songwriter, Kat Flint, Malco isn't dissimilar, running on poised loveliness with semi-concealed bite. An EP comes in October, a tour with Matt Stagecoach and Warren Attika State in August.
When they're not helping out with Indietracks, Pocketbooks are making the sort of sun-dappled field-worthy swinging indiepop with melancholia that Stuart Murdoch left behind somewhere around 1997. This first taste of September's second album Carousel pushes them onto the next level of melodic quintessence, Emma Hall sounding not too far from Kirsty Maccoll at her sunniest, delicious strings setting off the bittersweet undertow, soundtracking the sepia-tinged memories you didn't know you could still conjure up. Download for free off Bandcamp.
Tracklist 200 and... well, this isn't the Tubelord we might have expected. The first taste of both the new line-up and the new album (Romance, 10th October on Big Scary Monsters/Holy Roar/Blood And Biscuits conglomerate Pink Mist), they've put the athletic math guitars aside for a bit and turned instead to several sets of analogue keyboards and what a modern electro-indie anthem sounds like having been vaccuum packed with the guts deliberately ripped out.
The official annual STN Mercury Prize nomination predictions post
Announced tomorrow: Adele, Anna Calvi, Elbow, Everything Everything, The Horrors, James Blake, Katy B, King Creosote & Jon Hopkins, Metronomy, PJ Harvey, Wild Beasts and something jazzy we don't know. Thanks for playing.
A low-key download and picture disc only (from August 22nd) one-off while Elizabeth and co finalise an album for early 2012 release, and it's a concept single! The A-side is dedicated to Darren Hayman and features guitarist Paul Rains' drawing of him on the cover; the B-side is a cover of The French (Hayman and John Morrison)'s Wu Tang Clan with a Hayman depiction of both that band and this as integrated. As for the record it shows how even further energetic and effervescent they've got after a year of touring, thrusting forward with purpose. As often with Morris it's about the community power of music, references all sorts of classic indiepop and features a triumphant chorus of voices towards the end.
Riviere, responsible for Follow Your Heart, a peculiar beats and warp album on Brainlove last year, has been uploading some minimalist demos to Soundcloud over the last two or three weeks. This latest is largely built on nothing but louche wobbly tones, drum machine and shouting into a tin can, but when proper percussion kicks in it steadily becomes something menacing and eventually overpowering in white noise, like Suicide mid-breakdown.
Not often you hear a song that carries off synthesized handclap loops, but then if anyone was going to do it it'd be a dreampop bedroom auteur from Denmark. Mathias Anderson by name, in charge of a floating hypnotic cloud of layered synth and harmony. It's minimal, with the amount of airy echo on the nameless vocal, but when the atmospheric guitar comes in it sounds like it gains sudden depth amid the stillness.
From some godforsaken Mississippi swamp - not really, they're from Bath, but run with it for three minutes or so - the second single from Kill It Kid's September 19th-set second album sets the controls for the heart of the blues-rock sun. Chris Turpin's tormented vocal style sounds a natural match for electrified gritty, compacted riffage, sounding like he's permanently clinging onto the edge well before the carpet bombing explosion and crashing at the end.
Tracklist: The Japanese War Effort - Summer Sun Skateboard
Also of the recently Tracklisted Conquering Animal Sound, Jamie Scott has long mined fuzzy lo-fi pop with a dark ambient heart on the side. His new 10" vinyl EP with free stick of rock (genuinely), Surrender To Summer, attempts to make out it's a hazy bedroom summer jam of the type people are always going on about Washed Out and the like as being. Thing is you don't get much of that while sequestered in Edinburgh so instead it's a hook filtered through a funnel of airy psychedelia, where vocal effects tear apart from the harmony and literal bells and metaphorical whistles decorate the back end of the mix before it drifts to a blissful end.
Bit late on the uptake with this one, it came out last week, but this is the first salvo from the offbeat psych-pop engineers' second album, not due til next year. It's available in keyboard format. No, really, they're packing a limited edition with a proper 16-note keyboard plus batteries. With a special digital download code too, it's not like they want you to guess what it sounds like or anything. Though they have hidden it inside the instrument, so maybe that option is still on. Anyway, the song? Collapsible hyperactivity in the vague shape of buzzing, richocheting weird electronic folk-pop that defies any description that reads well in English.
Specifically a collaboration involving the Pipettes' Gwenno Saunders, Vaccines drummer Pete Robertson, Stereophonics producer Jim Lowe and someone called Geoff Smith, they do pretty much sound like a group called La Decadanse should, especially if you know they're named after a Gainsbourg & Birkin duet. So that's Left Bank poise, lounge cool and seductive male-female duetting, the ye-ye enhanced by multi-tracked shimmering analogue keyboards that make some sense of the Silver Apples and Can listed influences. There's a full album on the way later in the year.
This has been hanging around for long enough for a decent amount of blog hype to spring up over the course of the first half of 2011, but better late than never and all that, and besides the video has only just been released. What we have here is a Brooklyn outfit with what must be a Brother-style bait to copyright industry lawyers of a name and a set of influences planted in various stages of cool New York clubs of the last thirty years, from ESG rhythm as master through to Lykke Li-esque (by way of Best Coast without the parasol, weed or cat) warped, vaguely psyched out pop, all with just enough enigmatic vocal echo. They may have nothing else. We all got burned on Architecture In Helsinki, after all. But for right now in this summer it works splendidly.
Well, well, well. We genuinely don't know what to think of this third single by Oxford's sonic reducers, now working with Alan Moulder. There's a lot of house and 80s New York loft parties in evidence. More than a little of that bloody 1992 europop sound that takes up the whole of the top ten that isn't white soul these days. There's a bit that reminds us of a couple of Bis singles. Why not formulate your own ideas of whether it's any good.
Since last year's City Of Glass album, the end of a very long and bumpy ride in itself, LED! have shrunk back a bit, largely because Jon has found a level of spin-off note with Moscow Youth Cult but also because they keep losing drummers. This sub-two minute piece was recorded over the summer in Bury St Edmunds Cathedral and kind of sounds like it, vocals from broken plaintiveness to choral declamation, percussion ringing like hollow valves. It's not something they'll base their second album around as such, but it's proof they're still around and still more full of ideas then most. Download it from here.
When they emerged at about the same time it was comparatively easy to group Elephant and Cults together, but there's a stillness at the heart of their second single that belies that girl group referencing course. If it isn't too misleading there's the dynamics of Bon Iver at his most elegaic by way of Beach House with the synths turned down, Amelia Rives' yearning vocal mostly backed only by electric piano - it's 54 seconds until a beat appears - leading to a seductive tranquility.
Bravo is Germany's biggest youth magazine, active since 1956, apparently noted for its sex education expertise, banned in less than decadent East Germany. Going through its frontispiece archive on the excellent Coverbrowser, we note it started with a very clean and clear single image before some time early in the 80s exploding into a riot of as many images and text banners as can be fit onto A4 size. Their most recent cover makes us despair for what we've given the world. From happier times, a dozen examples of Bravo trying to work out what its audience will go for...
Unsure of which way their demographic will turn, Bravo put the Pistols on the cover and give away a Kenny poster (18/8/77)
An unnecessarily pecs-baring Telly Savalas acts as distraction from the unnerving fact Bravo is attempting to plug The Exorcist to kids (22/5/75)
(Actually it might have been for Airport 75. In fact Blair was on Bravo's cover three times, the next time just as smiley on a bike being promoted as a big young Hollywood star, then in pursed-lips close-up actually for The Exorcist II. A bit later, here she is being out-acted by some of S Club 7)
Cliff as medallion man, Kiss' autographs and for the kids, a Doris Day poster. All human life is catered for. (6/12/79)
Rick Parfitt. Hi, frauleins! (1/6/78)
A man called Gazebo throttles a kitten (9/2/84)
A horribly crowded cover and an attempt to launch Springsteen as an international dreamboat (5/6/85)
(Speaking of dreamboats, this comes in the wake of a period in mid-1983 where in 23 weekly issues nineteen featured either Nena or Kajagoogoo on the front. If there's one thing Bravo likes more than its home grown international successes, it's available himbos with soft hair. Speaking of the former...)
Falco recreates the Frank Hovis farting sketch from Absolutely (13/2/86)
Jason Donovan perpetuates German stereotypes (10/8/89)
(Wonder how Corey Haim's album for plants got on)
Melinda Messenger's secret past revealed (2/4/92)
(This of course is the semi-legendary Army Of Lovers, without whom the course continental Europop would have turned out quite differently. Chap on the right seems to be channelling Prince and Paul King simultaneously)
Strange that this look seems to have been airbrushed out of the band's history (29/12/94)
(That's not the most flatteringly designed trophy in magazine history, is it?)
Boy band formation desires mixed with rampant Anglophilia leads to this bandname (19/10/95)
New adaptation of Madness Nutty Walk prototyped; designer remains unaware of British capacity for sexual visual innuendo (2/10/02)
Another from the quietly emergent Birmingham community, Eat Y'Self Pretty deal in the kind of jittery art-rock you thought had been sucked dry around 2008. Hi-hats rush in one arrythmic direction, rapid staccato guitar runs take off like bottle rockets and Steven Beeston adopts a stentorian vocal style unheard since about 2005. They're far more So Many Dynamos than Funeral Party, let's put that on the scales now.
Tracklist: Paul Hawkins & The Awkward Silences - Gomorrah
The child catcher of anti-folk-rock, Paul Hawkins has found the most appropriate of new homes in Audio Antihero, who release The Wrong Life EP on 1st August. This taster has something akin to an 80s FM radio chorus, AOR hook and backing vocalists in place, though nothing delivered in that voice could ever be radio-friendly for long and it's more Prefab Sprout subtlety than MOR schlock. It's 'just' about a broken relationship but in that lies a world of drawn Biblical comparisons and moral uncertainties.
Sweeping The Nation Presents..., our live arm hosted at Leicester Firebug, returns from a long hibernation tomorrow from 8pm with Wake The President, supported by Evans The Death and LookiMakeMusic. Add yourself.
Been meaning to write about Sheffield's Oxo Foxo for a while but all that was up on her Soundcloud for ages was covers and experiments. Now that's changed, we can. With loop pedals, strings and whatever stringed instruments come to hand she builds up fragile soundscapes full of swirling peaks and eerie troughs, complemented by the most delicate of voices harmonising with itself. Reference points lie in the usual places for etherealities - Bjork, Kate Bush, Glasser - but such dreamscapes are of her own volition.
According to the venue, Summer Westival is "bringing the whole community together". Some ambitious ideas about family friendliness, as you'll see, but West End Centre in Aldershot is going for it on July's fourth Friday and Saturday, putting down grass inside and inviting fancy dress and "hands-on arts activities".
Dananananaykroyd In fairness, if any band is going to bring the whole community together in perhaps a more physical sense than intended, if not exactly prove most amenable to the kiddies of Hampshire, it's Saturday night headliners Dananananaykroyd. We've seen some disappointment regarding There Is A Way, but we've also seen them live very recently and can confirm that for sheer balls-out energy, wrecking ball riffage and patent dual ridiculousness upfront there is still nobody in Britain to touch them.
Stagecoach That's not to say some aren't trying. Athletic gear including headbands, crowd excursions (their mandolin usually ends up around someone else's neck by close of play) and absolute electrifying energy allied to off-kilter post-grunge/Weezer power-pop are what you get, and you'll be glad of it.
Hold Your Horse Is We seem to be developing an archetype. Hold Your Horse Is play taut, tense, pummelling broken riffs and math-gone-grunge with some ferocity and no short amount of tightness, with the confidence of a band who already have a live record to their name.
ALSO: So presumably the Friday headliners are more palatable to an all ages audience expecting fun for all? Erm, no, it's Johnny Foreigner. One of them will swear in front of children. Several times. (Both headliners are also playing the ace Off The Cuff in Birmingham 22nd-24th July, as are Tubelord, Shoes And Socks Off, DD/MM/YYYY, Brontide, Tall Ships and Talons) Also there are Kid Carpet, Knifeworld, Freeze The Atlantic (two thirds of Reuben), Ellen And The Escapades, Our Lost Infantry and The Xcerts, plus an acoustic stage starring Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell.
Calendar: 22nd-23rd July Tickets: £10 per day via WeGotTickets: Friday, Saturday
There's a few artists getting their early 80s New York club sound funk on at the moment, a tricky thing to pull of when Tom Tom Club lies on one side of the dividing line and Madonna's Lucky Star on the other. Doing her Cristina with this Irish outfit is one Annie Tierney (hence that name), who some time in the middle ages (1998-99) was frontwoman with Chicks, who some may remember from glorious post-Kenickie cartoon pop-punk and an aborted attempt to record an album with Royal Trux producing. A Moroder-like beat pervades, the guitar is pleasingly squonky and the cool quotient is freeze-dried. Their album is out in Ireland at the end of the month.
Tracklist: Thomas White - That Heavy Sunshine Sound
A fourth Electric Soft Parade album is imminent, but that's no reason for White to slow up on his questing path around clasically melodic indie's limits. His own third album Yalla!, written and recorded over two weeks in Dahab, Egypt, hasn't got a firm release date yet but all the tracks are being previewed on White's YouTube account. Here's a representative sample of its Warren Zevon-recalling acoustic lament with McCartney hints.
As mentioned the week before last he's touring with Ralegh Long, so we might as well show you the dates:
15th July Bristol Mother’s Ruin (free) 16th July Brighton Hand in Hand (free afternoon show) 19th July London Buffalo bar 20th July Oxford Bullingdon Arms 21st July Winchester Railway Inn
They... they might just have heard some My Bloody Valentine in their lives. The three-guitar Nottingham noisesmiths who feature former members of Six By Seven and Echoboy among others have found that same balance between headfuckingly loud, cresting and surging pedal noise (complemented by the video's visuals, it has to be said) and Katty Heath's wistful, blissful vocals.
So far 2011 in album terms has been one of those years where we can name our top three so far, but make a mid-sized list and we'd be struggling to nail it right down to the specific larger number. Nevertheless, here's 26 (one per theoretical week, see) of the best full lengths that this year has offered so far.
And before the end of the year we're expecting/aware of/hoping for albums from... A Classic Education, Bat For Lashes, Beth Jeans Houghton, Cat Power, Chad Valley, Clock Opera, Dog Is Dead, The Fall, Fanfarlo, Fixers, Future Of The Left, The Horrors, Hymns, Internet Forever, Islet, Jens Lekman, Johnny Foreigner, Laura Marling, Let's Buy Happiness, Los Campesinos!, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Slow Club, Standard Fare, Still Corners, Summer Camp, Thomas White, Trips And Falls, Trophy Wife, The Voluntary Butler Scheme, Wake The President, Wild Flag
A couple of years ago there was a Leicestershire band called Project Notion who we loved, coining the term 'math-folk' to describe their jazzy languidly expansive writing plus dual tapping. Indeed we tried to put on at our first ever gig, only for them to disappear a few months before. Now three of them have re-emerged, relocated to Bournemouth and taken up a sound necessarily more acoustic but no less intriguing. Restless, intricate and with Tori Maries' lovingly floating vocals over the elliptical sound. Now, stand back, it's an embed from ReverbNation!
