Monday, February 27, 2017

STN recommends: 27/2/17

At The Drive-In - Incurably Innocent

They're ba-ack! And Cedric's brought a killer coiling riff with him. While the near seventeen year break between albums - in•ter a•li•a is out May 5th - will never be the extraordinary firecracker of a band they were on Relationship Of Command this is a fair bash, firework guitars and immense nervous energy funnelled into a song Omar describes as being about "sexual abuse and being able to finally speak out".




The Mountain Goats - Andrew Eldritch Is Moving Back To Leeds

So, the new Mountain Goats album. It's called Goths, and is out 19th May. Yes, it does sound like another John Darnielle exploration into a subculture through the prism of personal connections, time passing and solidarity to those clinging on as everything else changes, this song sounding like a paen to returning to returning to where you started after a lifetime of dreaming and moving for better things. The album features no guitars, which is quite the change not just in general but the exact opposite of Darnielle's lo-fi approach of the early albums, so there's as much comfort zone breaking there as there is in the ideals of an Eldritch.




Spoon - Can I Sit Next To You

Hot Thoughts, out March 17th, so far sees Spoon carry on just adjacent to where they left off, but the new track sees the usual scratchy rhythm and Britt Daniel's crossword clue lyrics of devotion joined by a slippery, awkward staccato groove that pretty much qualifies, with its synthetic handclaps and filtered synth glissandos, as future funk.




Idles - Mother

It currently seems like every track from Brutalism, out 10th March, will get a uniquely irate video before it comes out, and Joe Talbot in a pastel coloured suit destroying several charity shops' worth of ornaments rates highly on that scale. Musically? Angry, dissonant, socio-politically charged, the usual.




Sondre Lerche - I Know Something That's Gonna Break Your Heart

The Norwegian singer-songwriter has gleefully dabbled across genres, from joyful beat pop to ornate orchestral, over the years. His tenth album, Pleasure, out next week, continues his adventures into how far a melody can be stretched and painted over while remaining intact, a gloriously melanchoic piece of pulsing, sweeping psych-pop with electronic undercurrents that eventually take over.




The New Pornographers - This Is The World Of The Theater

That seems like a title the Pornos were always going to use some time, and the second taste of Whiteout Conditions, out 7th April, matches it to peppy, reliably sunny (on the surface, anyway) overly harmonic power-pop given the lift Neko Case lead vocals usually gives their songs.




Yellow Creatures - Pressing Buttons

Taken from the Newcastle trio's new EP Spectrum, out today, an intro that sounds quite like it might turn into Tortoise evolves into a kind of pastoral post-rock, subtle electronic beats underpinning layers and washes of synth drones and breathy vocals that between themselves ebb and flow into a journey over a fractal landscape.


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