Thursday, February 16, 2017

STN recommends: 16/2/17

Los Campesinos! - The Fall Of Home

A graceful twinkling ballad on dislocation and personal progress, the third track we've heard from Sick Scenes, out February 24th, is described as "an elegy to the home towns left behind". Notably, though, the band's description also states "the lyrics for this song were written at 4am on the 24th June, 2016." So that's a song about feeling out of place in the area where you grew up, written while the album was being recorded in Portugal, at about the time the Brexit vote was being confirmed.




FEWS - La Guardia

It's two minutes of pumping dark shoegaze swirl before the vocals start, and they're not around for long either. That's because everything else in FEWS' first new song since last year's debut album is busy racing for the heart of the sun, taking no prisoners in its wake.




PWR BTTM - Big Beautiful Day

We've never written before about the glam exuberance of the New York queer-punk duo before, but the announcement of a new album, Pageant out May 12th, and its scorching introductory message of exuberant empowerment seems as good a place as any to start.




Deep Throat Choir - Hunter

Their debut album is finally out on Friday, so here's a track that's not on it. Based on a Gertrude Stein poem, it features all the mass harmonising and weaving in and out of each other you've hopefully already come to expect.




Sodastream - Saturday's Ash

They're in London on February 24th as part of Fortuna Pop!'s long farewell, Little By Little is out March 3rd, and before both comes a Simon & Garfunkel-like meditation with what sounds like theremin in the background on the aftermath of the Black Saturday bushfires, a series of fires in February 2009 that destroyed large parts of the state of Victoria.




The Physics House Band - Calypso

The Brighton trio's senses-screwing mathcore spiralling has been around for a while now - mini-album Mercury Fountain, out April 21st, is their first release in four years and finds them in classic form, never keeping still, ping-ponging all round an ascending centrepiece to sci-fi rush effect.




Beach Beach - Scrolling Down

Shame it's so cold and bedraggled at the moment, because had the Barcelona-based band waited until the summer months they'd have been all over the place with something this gorgeously sun-dappled, all Teenage Fanclub (who they've played with) interplay and wistful, secretly wracked lyrics.


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