Saturday, June 19, 2010

Playlist additions 19/6/10

  • Bear Driver - Wolves [Myspace] [YouTube (live)]
    British bands always do different things with cool American influences, so while you can tell this Leeds set have been listening hard to Broken Social Scene, Neutral Milk Hotel and Wolf Parade but they bring their own exuberance, call and response shout-outs and stickability

  • Dirty Projectors - Stillness Is The Move [Myspace] [YouTube] [Spotify]
    Being re-released next month for some reason. Hey, who are we to question? We do query, having heard Amber Coffman's guest vocal with Rusko, whether that vocalising style works so well outside the Longstreth matrix of avant-tropicalia, because against his beats it just sounds like a minor Carey

  • Everything Everything — Schoolin' [Myspace] [YouTube]
    Didn't get into this as immediately as their first three singles, but this first take from their August-due album proved nagging away, more falsetto art-pop stomp with R&B rhythms and cryptic lyrics the video animation tries its best to keep up with. Not going to be as big as some reckon, but that was evident from the kickoff

  • Fanfarlo - Fire Escape [YouTube] [Spotify]
    If they keep releasing singles every few months maybe one of them will take off. Here's hoping

  • Islet - Iris [Spotify]
    And, at one mini-album track's remove, the video to We Shall Visit, also from Celebrate This Place and colloquially known as "the one they do at the end of the set where they're all drumming". They're all over the net, these



  • Pulled Apart By Horses - Back To The Fuck Yeah [Myspace] [YouTube] [Spotify]
    As Refused fanboys, they'll appreciate that is surely that actual shape of punk to come. Playing End Of The Road Festival in September. What?

  • Screaming Maldini - Secret Sounds [Myspace] [YouTube]
    Another late video for a single release, although we duly praised the mini-album it's plucked from at the time - stop/start, all over the place pace-wise, guitar pop as Mobius strip



  • Shuttleworth feat. Mark E Smith - England's Heartbeat [YouTube]
    Being lauded as the alternative classic World Cup song for this year, although actually not even Mark E's most direct song about football. Somewhat bouncy, though, and Smith's put aside that worryingly gurgly voice he's adopted of late and is back spitting non-sequiturs against the rhythm. Stoke fans don't like it, especially not the really confused one

  • Spring Offensive - Abacus Rex [Spotify]
    The EP this is on first came out in March, but it's being reissued (physical copies bound by rope) and we've only just got hold of the record by this intriguing Oxfordshire band. It's not a greatly inventive or individual album but it's something insidious, tense and dramatic in scope a la a less dizzy Youthmovies, intriguing in its storytelling - this song is loosely about Alan Turing

  • The Strange Death Of Liberal England - Flagships [Myspace] [YouTube]
    More post-coital and less post-rock. More Fanfarlo and Talking Heads, at any rate. Maybe more Arcade Fire, but everyone gets that these days. September is ETA for what the description calls "the long awaited debut album", which will be a shock to anyone with Forward March

  • Thomas Tantrum - The Last Kiss [Myspace] [Soundcloud] [YouTube (live)]
    Back! Megan Thomas much less yelpy than before and sounding quite at home amid sliced to the bone Long Blondes-when-they-weren't-down-the-disco nu-new wave

  • Tokyo Police Club - Bambi [Myspace] [YouTube]
    New album Champ doesn't quite keep up with its own razor melody new wave ambitions apart from short stretches, most of all the insistent coming once and again of the melody with more pronounced electronics that prove more welcoming than most of their attempts at decoration

  • We Are The World - Foot Follows Foot [Spotify]
    Lady Gaga's a fan, apparently, of LA's dystopian synth-beat collective, taking on The Knife, as many have noted, but also something of the clanking raggedness of MIA productions plus metallic background and fully Dreijer-ed computer-affected vocal

  • Wild Beasts - Hooting And Howling [Myspace] [YouTube] [Spotify]
    See Dirty Projectors. Apart from the bit about Amber Coffman and Rusko, because we'd kill to hear Hayden Thorpe on an electro record, especially if he gets to do the lyrics too

  • The Wind Up Birds - Tyre Fire [Vimeo] [Spotify]
    When we wrote about them before we mentioned the Fall and Animals That Swim. Who else can we mention? Well, this makes us think of Eddie Argos' kitchen sink pathos melded to now defunct art-noise Bristolian eccentrics The Playwrights; mostly it makes us think of some unstable men from Leeds
  • 2 comments:

    Gob Bluth said...

    "British bands always do different things with cool American influences, so while you can tell this Leeds set have been listening hard to Broken Social Scene, Neutral Milk Hotel and Wolf Parade"

    Please don't group two of today's best canadian indie acts as being american (BSS, WP).

    Simon said...

    Um, yes. A good example there of thought overtaking typing ability. North American, then?