10 Toy - Toy
Are Toy shoegaze revivalists? If so they do some very interesting things with it, taking direct from the manicured noise MBV source rather than mere airy dreampop and throwing in a range of similarly psychedelically sourced influences - insistent motorik beats, forcefully swirling countermelodic synth, primal urge noisenik crescendos. They've already overtaken proteges the Horrors in that regard, throwing themselves headlong into the rainbow kaleidoscope of portentous effects pedal noise, spacey/doomy drones and soaring atmospheric waves at length, some of which build and build while barely seeming to ever resolve. It's not even really po-faced, merely seeing what can be wrought out of aural prisms of psych-attack.
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9 Beth Jeans Houghton - Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose
Houghton was filed among the folk revivalists on arrival but it's clear now her scope, in both influence and projected sonic field, is far wider, more ethereal and eclectic. Houghton's voice can soar operatically or settle into matter-of-factness against a symphonic gallop that often heads over the top without going OTT, an angelic eschewing of mainstream kook that packs out songs without overdoing it so it feels more like plaintiveness with the edges brightly coloured in, feeling ultimately effortless for all the detail worked in. That this is her debut and was written three years ago bodes for a potentially special career staying one step ahead of comparatively staid trends.
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8 Lone Wolf - The Lovers
It's too easy to call Paul Marshall the yang to former tourmates Wild Beasts' yin, but they share strands of DNA - the aim to put as much heightened emotion and varispeeded propulsion into each track from as little overdrive or melodrama because he understands the importance of the silences, the influence of Peter Gabriel and Talk Talk's latter albums, the undertow of delicately harsh electonics. Marshall's warmly bruised voice tells tales of internalised pain and the confused psyche amid clockwork percussion and delicate guitar picking, providing plenty to get lost in and just as much to pick out upon repeat. A stylishly detailed and impressive change of tack.
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