Right then, let's start with some premium STN content, Trust Fund feat. Gareth Campesinos. Their contribution to Art Is Hard's Postcard Club sees Gareth fulfil his Heaton fantasies with a version of the Beautiful South's I'll Sail This Ship Alone that transforms it from tender ballad to muscular fuzzpop. Also new on Art Is Hard, through more conventional means, are the established psych-popper Oliver Wilde and Lucky Shivers' Nicholas Stevenson (who we're pretty sure was a promising solo artist himself at one point) by their powers combined Oro Swimming Hour, Martial Arts Washing Cars being just over two minutes of a more restrained version of campfire Animal Collective, all harmonies and odd sounds. Album Penrose Winoa is out 28th July.
Hey, Everything Everything are actually now back after what seems like months of something being "impending"! You wouldn't really confuse Can't Do, from A Fever Dream out August 18th, for anyone else with the jittery elastic beats, tricksy guitar interruption and semi-cryptic lyrics in nasal, occasionally strained falsetto vocals, but it's evolution rather than revolution and ties in better with their debut than what's come since. A band who've been away for rather a lot longer, Ride, have slightly underwhelmed with their track choices thus far, but Lannoy Point, the opener to Weather Diaries, does the trick, classic floaty shoegaze to a fault with a fluid motorik undertow and Andy Bell set to 'chime'.
Here's a band we've never written about before - Wolf Alice. It's surprising given they pretty much have the kind of bases and influences we generally thrive off, but it just hasn't happened for us. Turns out all they needed to do on Yuk Foo (and maybe Visions Of A Life, out 29th September) is turn away from their radio friendly destiny and instead become Bratmobile. While we're on two minute ire and dynamism, Charmpit are two Californians based in London who deal in harmonic sparkly lo-fi garage pop, this Free The Burbs (a song they're on record as wanting Peaness to cover) from Jelly EP out 14th July. Across the self-sufficient way, part of that ever fluent Leeds DIY scene that we've featured plenty of bands from in the past, "post-punk pop party pack" Crumbs are a jittery, danceable, form that recalls the Au Pairs. Their debut album Mind Yr Manners is out July 28th. Are The Popguns spiritual parents of the scene? So Long, from the just released second post-reformation album Sugar Kisses, suggests their emotionally damaged janglepop has barely aged at all. From a slightly different place Superglu's songs aren't much longer, through a more restrained but still vital melodic indie-punk template with joy forefront on Communion Singles Club offering Welcome Home.
And now for something completely different, the post-apocalyptic industrial soul of Algiers. Inspired by the killing of Tamir Rice and the concept of injustice, Cleveland sees Franklin James Fisher deliver his best righteous fire-eyed preacher delivery over looped gospel samples and a surprising Detroit techno passage. The Underside Of Power is out Friday and might even top their stellar debut, our third best album of 2015. Meanwhile The Horrors have gone industrial on Machine, churning Cabaret Voltaire-style warped beats and synths replacing the shoegaze synths and pedals prowling around in the shadows looking for something to take on in a way their forthcoming tourmates Depeche Mode would recognise from circa 1983. Perhaps surprisingly, Paul Epworth is the man at the controls.
The Surfing Magazines are Dave and Franic of the Wave Pictures, Charles Slow Club and... a drummer, and they have an album out on 1st September. Even though Charles takes lead on Lines And Shadows the Wave Pictures influence is pervasive, at least in their laidback soulful variant and definitely sounding like that hallmark of sounding like they're casually tossing a melodic marvel off just because they can. Yes, of course there's an abrasive Tattersall solo. It's not difficult to imagine many of the records lying around in their studio are also in the collection of Ralegh Long, whose Sleeping On My Dreams commands power-pop and 1970s US radio rock for a homebrew English version of classic rock, if classic rock tended to last only 2:19. That kind of track length seems to have become this week's accidental theme.
Saturday, June 17, 2017
Thursday, June 08, 2017
STN recommends: 8/6/17
Quicker one today. The Camp extends PJ Harvey's new line in songwriter journalism, a collaboration with Ramy Essam based on the displaced refugee children of Lebanon's Bekaa Valley - all proceeds go to Lebanese non-governmental organisation Beyond Association - a deceptively straightforward strum given weight by the words and the conviction of Essam, an Egyptian dubbed the voice of the country's 2011 revolution. Nadine Shah's own politicised turn, unveiled in full on Holiday Destination come August 25th, continues on the brooding Yes Men, adopting her emotive keening to desperation at the ruling classes with low-key approaching menace.
Katie Crutchfield's second album as Waxahatchee, Out In The Storm, is approaching on July 14th, and opener Never Been Wrong bodes well in terms of upping the ante on the focused anger of someone wanting their say too much to unravel and associated laser pointed single-guitar attack, breaking free of a pop son structure in the process. You almost don't need to be told B-Boys are from New York, such is the recognisable cool quotient spikiness of their debut single Discipline, from debut album Dada out on the 16th, twisting art-rock shapes originating somewhere between Fugazi and Parquet Courts around each other uncomfortably. Finally, "a bit like Radiohead" is both an overdone description and usually an invitation to head for the hills, but it's a decent back of the hand description for Looks by Brazen Head, a hesitant, twisted piece of slow building tension in the way of OK Computer without the electronics or guitar heroics but with a piano part designed to pull the melody in a different direction from everything else. Suspiciously little made public about a band who sound so accomplished from the off, but this is more than a fascinating start.
Katie Crutchfield's second album as Waxahatchee, Out In The Storm, is approaching on July 14th, and opener Never Been Wrong bodes well in terms of upping the ante on the focused anger of someone wanting their say too much to unravel and associated laser pointed single-guitar attack, breaking free of a pop son structure in the process. You almost don't need to be told B-Boys are from New York, such is the recognisable cool quotient spikiness of their debut single Discipline, from debut album Dada out on the 16th, twisting art-rock shapes originating somewhere between Fugazi and Parquet Courts around each other uncomfortably. Finally, "a bit like Radiohead" is both an overdone description and usually an invitation to head for the hills, but it's a decent back of the hand description for Looks by Brazen Head, a hesitant, twisted piece of slow building tension in the way of OK Computer without the electronics or guitar heroics but with a piano part designed to pull the melody in a different direction from everything else. Suspiciously little made public about a band who sound so accomplished from the off, but this is more than a fascinating start.
Friday, June 02, 2017
STN recommends: 2/6/17
It's only been a week and again EVERYONE has decided to release new material for us to pick carefully through and highlight the peaks rather than foothills of.
May as well start with Arcade Fire, whose Everything Now - title track of album out July 28th, as you know - extends the synth and disco elements they grazed towards on Reflektor into a sweeping, Abba and Bowie-nodding chant of a chorus and replacement of the traditional run to the crescendo sun with a steady insistent progression to a big coda that turns out not to be the coda. And a synthesised pan pipe break, but y'know.
We next find Sweet Baboo on unusually funky mood on Pink Rainbow, from the album Wild Imagination out today. "Arthur Russell meets Robert Wyatt" says the press release, and with Stephen's delivery and the warm synth against clipped funk guitar for once it's not all that wrong, though the none more glittery rainbow-wigged model in silhouette in the window of a Rewind club solo takes some getting used to. Apparently the lyrical inspirations were Rainbow Connection and the Lovely Eggs' son explaining the Flying Scotsman to him. Another album out today is Peach, by Emma Winston's 8-bit DIY pop under the guise of Deerful. Conceptual Art traces its own path again, wistful Game Boy half-speed minimalist wistfulness. "Not everything's confessional" Winston claims towards the end having just made that sound like a lie.
Featuring members of Johnny Foreigner (which isn't mentioned in the press release so it literally is just us now), God Damn and Viv Albertine's band, Mutes might just lap all o... at least one of them with debut album No Desire, the title track of which is a magnificently sprawling juggernaut touching on noise-pop, Krautrock insistency, bludgeon riffola and cresting avant-indie, the kind of compact while stretched out thing that ultimately demands your attention. That album is out now too.
Doing things by halves has never been part of Kiran Leonard's agenda, which is why Derevaun Seraun, out 15th September, is a "piece in five movements for voice, piano and string trio" with each part inspired by a work of literature, led by seven and a half minute Living With Your Ailments inspired by Albert Camus' The Myth Of Sisyphus. (Given Leonard's previous hugely ambitious arrangements and autodidactic work we'd like to think he played all the string parts too, but that seems unlikely) It's dramatic, literate and as singular as you'd expect from him.
Karen Sheridan's Slow Skies project seems to be a lot more upbeat than it once was these days, not entirely giving itself to abandonment given the melancholia at the heart of Sheridan's voice, but Dancing is about forgetting everything in the joyous moment driven by handclaps and developing with the aid of subtly triumphant horns into warm exuberance of a kind. Brooklyn's Big Thief are a guitar band by definition, signed to Saddle Creek for Capacity out June 9th, but Mary is a stark piano ballad engineered for what seems to be maximum emotional sparsity, Adrianne Lenker's vocal closeness matched by the run of personally charged memories and imagery, pain and empathy.
We've been waiting for the spectral Nordic pop of Anna Of The North to make it to album stage for a while, and that finally lands on 8th September. Title track Lovers shows a lot of those route-one post-XX/London Grammar electropop types that show up on the weekly Spotify playlists where they're going wrong, utilising drum pads and glacial synths much as they all do but coming at it from a direction that's both more assured and icier, maybe emotionally emptied out.
And finally, forwarding the Australian indie resurgence, Melbourne's School Damage are exemplars of the kind of falling apart DIY bubblegum punk-pop that traces its lineage through those 1978 7"s via Swell Maps through the more ragged end of the Scottish and Australian celebrated early 80s scenes, running on charm and effort. Plus the song is called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down, so full marks there too.
May as well start with Arcade Fire, whose Everything Now - title track of album out July 28th, as you know - extends the synth and disco elements they grazed towards on Reflektor into a sweeping, Abba and Bowie-nodding chant of a chorus and replacement of the traditional run to the crescendo sun with a steady insistent progression to a big coda that turns out not to be the coda. And a synthesised pan pipe break, but y'know.
We next find Sweet Baboo on unusually funky mood on Pink Rainbow, from the album Wild Imagination out today. "Arthur Russell meets Robert Wyatt" says the press release, and with Stephen's delivery and the warm synth against clipped funk guitar for once it's not all that wrong, though the none more glittery rainbow-wigged model in silhouette in the window of a Rewind club solo takes some getting used to. Apparently the lyrical inspirations were Rainbow Connection and the Lovely Eggs' son explaining the Flying Scotsman to him. Another album out today is Peach, by Emma Winston's 8-bit DIY pop under the guise of Deerful. Conceptual Art traces its own path again, wistful Game Boy half-speed minimalist wistfulness. "Not everything's confessional" Winston claims towards the end having just made that sound like a lie.
Featuring members of Johnny Foreigner (which isn't mentioned in the press release so it literally is just us now), God Damn and Viv Albertine's band, Mutes might just lap all o... at least one of them with debut album No Desire, the title track of which is a magnificently sprawling juggernaut touching on noise-pop, Krautrock insistency, bludgeon riffola and cresting avant-indie, the kind of compact while stretched out thing that ultimately demands your attention. That album is out now too.
Doing things by halves has never been part of Kiran Leonard's agenda, which is why Derevaun Seraun, out 15th September, is a "piece in five movements for voice, piano and string trio" with each part inspired by a work of literature, led by seven and a half minute Living With Your Ailments inspired by Albert Camus' The Myth Of Sisyphus. (Given Leonard's previous hugely ambitious arrangements and autodidactic work we'd like to think he played all the string parts too, but that seems unlikely) It's dramatic, literate and as singular as you'd expect from him.
Karen Sheridan's Slow Skies project seems to be a lot more upbeat than it once was these days, not entirely giving itself to abandonment given the melancholia at the heart of Sheridan's voice, but Dancing is about forgetting everything in the joyous moment driven by handclaps and developing with the aid of subtly triumphant horns into warm exuberance of a kind. Brooklyn's Big Thief are a guitar band by definition, signed to Saddle Creek for Capacity out June 9th, but Mary is a stark piano ballad engineered for what seems to be maximum emotional sparsity, Adrianne Lenker's vocal closeness matched by the run of personally charged memories and imagery, pain and empathy.
We've been waiting for the spectral Nordic pop of Anna Of The North to make it to album stage for a while, and that finally lands on 8th September. Title track Lovers shows a lot of those route-one post-XX/London Grammar electropop types that show up on the weekly Spotify playlists where they're going wrong, utilising drum pads and glacial synths much as they all do but coming at it from a direction that's both more assured and icier, maybe emotionally emptied out.
And finally, forwarding the Australian indie resurgence, Melbourne's School Damage are exemplars of the kind of falling apart DIY bubblegum punk-pop that traces its lineage through those 1978 7"s via Swell Maps through the more ragged end of the Scottish and Australian celebrated early 80s scenes, running on charm and effort. Plus the song is called The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down, so full marks there too.
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