Fourteen For '14: part two

Marika Hackman



There's been talk, with her Marlingish folk bent and fashion world credentials, that the 21 year old singer-songwriter could become something big, but we reckon she (and us) would be happier with the kind of music career trajectory her sometime producer Johnny Flynn has had, much admired by critics but too sharp and slippery for the post-Mumfords chart palette. In fact if she recalls anyone it's those troubled late 90s Cat Power albums, her self-taught guitar plucking adding a rickety terrain to lyrics that seem fogged and mildly cryptic even as the darkly desired emotion cuts to the bone.




Jungle



The duo behind Jungle have revealed little about themselves, going merely by the handles T and J. The temptation to call upon our usual rule of thumb - if you're being deliberately mysterious about a new musical project, we'll assume you're Chris de Burgh and move on - is great, but that's without hearing the music. They have the capacity to become London's own TV On The Radio in more than just a very Tunde Adebimpe-like falsetto, transmitting deep soul grooves and croons through a gauze of synth layers that are part chillgaze, part Ghostpoet/Invisible-like floorshaking heavy atmospherics.




We Three And The Death Rattle



Perhaps the most cumbersomely acronymed band of recent times, Leicester's WTATDR have been attracting attention for a while now but an album is ready to go come 10th February. In that time their Boss Hog/Gun Club dark blues vindictiveness has percolated and gone metallic (but not metal). Singer and occasional theremin...ist? Amy Cooper suggests an attitude you wouldn't want to get on the wrong side of, not least as most of the time it seems seconds away from ordering someone be taken out, dealing in a dysfunctional love life mirrored in the guitar-and-drums sludge hyperventilating behind her.




Telegram



If it carries on much longer there'll have to be a special section for hirsute psych-motorik bands produced by Dan Carey on iTunes. Telegram, though, might end up the pick of them, their noisily committed, hair-flinging live show complemented by the tripped out rush of urgent crafted noise that is debut single Follow, like they've just stepped out of a late 70s New York club, through a glam wardrobe and into the Rollercoaster tour, anthemic without all that now implies, energetically punchy and aiming stratospheric like a midpoint between early Roxy Music and Toy's record box.




Ralegh Long



As with some others in this selection we've had a decent length association with Ralegh - we premiered one of his videos last year - but he's never featured before in one of these lists and the spring should see the release of his debut album, featuring members of Toy, Hefner and A Little Orchestra. A proper reminder, then, of his sophisticated songsmithery, detailed as much in melody as lyric, the same sort of reconfigurating the DNA of jazz bar MOR-tainted classic pop moves into something less tangible that Robyn Hitchcock or Paddy McAloon once thrived upon.




Martha



Given you'd imagine every conceivable arrangement of three snappy chord power-pop had been long raked over, Martha have in their EP and single's worth of back catalogue somehow found a new punk-scented way of delivering an enthralling ride. It's not just the Durham outfit's way with earworm hooks that refreshingly lack in radio-ready obviousness or the rush of Buzzcocks harmonics that marks them out but their lightly worn lyrical intelligence, social, political and historical - this track below is a fictionalized account of the last days of poet Audre Lorde, and you can invade a stage to it.




Trust Fund



Trust Fund is Ellis Jones of Bristol, sometime confidante of Joanna Gruesome and so forth, whose Don't Let Them Begin EP wears its starkest lo-fi roots as a badge of honour and its heart squarely on its sleeve. Like Lou Barlow or Elliott Smith and through to Jeff Magnum, Ellis only seemingly wants to express the darkest parts of his psyche, developing an honesty about the path most taken that's as awkward as his playing, which could be close-miked confessional or grunge-inflected full band exorcism. You get the feeling he's an ace away from producing something fully realised as greatness.

Fourteen For '14: part one

The first of two runs through this year's tips list. The usual caveats - anyone who's had a full length album out or been featured on an STN year in preview list before is disqualified, and these are not our tips for big things but those who we think are likely to do really good things over the forthcoming twelve months. This is how last year's thirteen fared, including three bands that have subsequently split up; may god have mercy on this selection's souls.

Heavy Petting Zoo



The Swansea outfit have a clear live focal point of their in-house dancer Jon, whose freeform flailings may make him the 10s equivalent of Wojtek from the Blue Aeroplanes. Behind him, and very much up front on record, is an equally compelling presence, singer Amy Zachariah, whose lustily fulsome commanding complements a raggedly direct surf-inflected garage attack. Having stormed their set at Swn festival - Huw Stephens, Jen Long and NME's Laura Snapes among those spreading its word - they self-released a single in October and should hopefully play their first proper gigs outside Wales soon.




EXPENSIVE



Primarily known as half of back bedroom folk-popsters the Middle Ones, Grace Denton's latest incarnation (with Pete Shadbolt and Matthew Cheney) takes the electro-pop and R&B production tropes and squirrels them away in a dark corner. Their take on electronic melody seems hand crafted, densely layered with arrythmically subtle beats and not being averse to taking the rutted path less travelled, attempting to keep hold of its melodic agility while flowering from tense development into something air-filled and colourful, Denton's vocals equally capable of dreaminess and rawness alike.

Secrets in the Moss from EXPENSIVE on Vimeo.

Blessa



If you can tell a band by the company they keep, that Blessa's recent single Between Times was produced by MJ of Hookworms should give you a fair idea. Not that they share the shoegaze blur of many of the bands he associates with, the Sheffield quintet crafting a cleaner sound where reverberating guitars are present but only a subtle part of a sophisticated jigsaw pattern built around finding the space between such strident elements as searching basslines, insistent beats and Olivia Neller's skylarking vocals, pitched somewhere between Veronica Falls' scuzzy melodies and Howling Bells' lost highway intransigence.




Shhh...Apes!



They don't sound like that name suggests, nor like the previous Cardiff scene associations of frontman and creative fulcrum Mark Foley (of Manchasm fame). Their EP The Shape Of Apes To Come instead paints delicate landscapes of ambient folk and Americana-influenced subtleties that stretch out and evolve into shivering emotiveness, achieved through delicate multi-instrumental layering, outreaching vocal harmonies and ebbing electronics. Low fans will find much to admire in its cinematic qualities that lift, coast and find new depths to explore on every listen. And if that's just for the introductory six track EP they could be heading somewhere special.




Plastic Animals



Another Edinburgh band brought to our attention by the indefatigable Song, By Toad label, Plastic Animals describe themselves as "atmospheric punk sludge rock" which makes them sound like the Melvins, ie not like what they do sound like. What they've developed into over three EPs over the last two and a bit years is electronically embellished, carefully layered hypnagogic pop shape formers that's been bundled into a helicopter travelling across a misty landscape, Deerhunter-style dreampop with the tremelo arm taped down, melodically lucid in creating far seeing atmospherics out of chiming lo-fi hypnosis.




Beaty Heart



The Peckham trio have been around for a while - we first wrote about them in May 2011 - but their development into the level of confidence in pulling off their sort of deluxe arrangements has been notable, culminating around March when their Dave Eringa-overseen debut album Mixed Blessings is released. They may touch on the hi-life fad of a few years ago but their stock in trade is percussive, harmonic overlapping post-freak-folk of a Panda Bear stripe, yearning sounding vocals rubbing like sandpaper against hallucinatory warped psychedelia loaded high with arrythmic drumming of various indigenous types.




Fire Island Pines



You don't really get a lot of luxuriousness in modern indie-pop, whether that refers to the delicately literate jangle of a Felt or Animals That Swim or the crumbling Victorian halls melodramatic splendour in decay of Jack or Gallon Drunk. Cornwall sextet Fire Island Pines are the best candidates we've heard for a while, their swooningly languid melodies and detailed trumpet laced lushness almost betraying Anton Rothschild's less than confident, clouds in front of the warm sunshine sensitivity lurking behind such budget sophistication, if his half-murmured half-crooned delivery hasn't suggested such already. An impending album is promised.



Seven more tomorrow!