Tuesday, March 05, 2024

New sounds: 5/3/24

agosto - NASCAR
Yeah, let's get the Spanish language one away first. Actually, between the song title, the band name (Spanish for August) and their entire biography reading "maría y nacho" we can tell you the square root of bugger all about them or this even with translator use, so let's instead luxuriate in the intricately insistent guitar that drives it on, the pleasingly buzzy keyboards that push it on further and the central vocal harmonies combining to give the impression you've heard something like all this before, maybe in the late 00s, but can't quite place it.



The Baby Seals - Vibrator
Ah, now this is firmer ground, if in theory only. The Baby Seals are a trio from Cambridgeshire who we hadn't heard from since a 2017 EP of big fuzzy hooks and songs called things like My Labia Is Lopsided But I Don't Mind. That's a very long time to disappear with nothing else to show for it but there's an album finally due on April 19th, entitled Chaos, and a crunchily shouty, trashily punk-fizz single that as you can likely tell already is as free from personal lyrical taboo as before.



Dana Gavanski - Ears Were Growing
Dancer - Bluetooth Hell

While they don't really fit together musically we make no apologies for returning yet again to these two having already written about their upcoming albums - Gavanski's move towards Cate Le Bon-esque quirkiness invading atmospherically twisted indie-folk, Dancer's adventure playground of entangled Life Without Buildings-indebted post-punk angularity - many a time and oft as they seem like they're really going to be something. Gavanski's LATE SLAP is out April 5th, Dancer's 10 Songs I Hate About You 15th March.





Maruja - The Invisible Man
There's been a lot of this Windmill-adjacent experimental indie meets jazz improv inspiration recently and Manchester's Maruja seem intent on breaking out of the underground through sheer force of personality, Harry Wilkinson's poetic intensity examining personal experiences of the mental health crisis as all around shift and try to keep up, wavering all around the melodic line.



M(h)aol - Pursuit
Some - hi! - say nothing good comes out of a band changing frontperson once established. Well, here comes new challenger. No sooner had Dublin's ferociously uncompromised feminist punks M(h)aol released a well received debut album and their 'Ghost A Post-Punk Boy Today' tote bags become a festival staple than singer Róisín Nic Ghearailt, already establishing herself as one of the great onstage talkers to boot, left. Their first track without her has drummer Constance Keane taking over vocals and lyrics, narrating a walk home while being followed ramping up through lyrical repetition and a creeping big noise undertow, bassist Jamie Hyland's work with Gilla Band sounding to the forefront.



mui zyu - the mould
The solo project of Eva Liu, singer from art-garage trio Dama Scout, the spectacularly titled album Rotten Bun For An Eggless Century received a good amount of praise on release pretty much exactly a year ago for its skewed pastoral electropop drawing chief inspiration from her Hong Kong roots. Its successor nothing or something to die for, out May 24th, tries to work out the world and existence around her, this track playing with the several meanings of the title, lyrically anchoring the existential debt amid playful electro beats and found noises.



Vanishing Twin - Life Drummer
The now-trio have quietly racked up an enviable experimental catalogue over the last near-decade which continues with a new Sub Pop Singles Club 7" lyrically adapted from a chapter from The Listening Book by W.A. Mathieu, Cathy Lucas declaiming an inventory of engineering invention over pumping electro-kosmiche insistently driven by percussive MVP Valentina Magaletti (an avant-garde composer in their own right and also member of noise-post-punks Moin)



YEAH, OBVIOUSLY THEY'RE JUST AS GREAT BUT YOU KNOW WHO THESE ARE ALREADY:
Arab Strap - Allatonceness
Julia Holter - Evening Mood
St Vincent - Broken Man

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