STN Albums Of The Year no.10: The Victorian English Gentlemens Club - Bag Of Meat

Having emerged as art schooled Pixies acolytes, TVEGC are increasingly intent on bringing the whole wiry trio edifice down with them. Unlike most bands who cite Wire as inspirations Bag Of Meat sounds like the processed electric shocks that band's first three albums progressed towards. The bass sounds alone could power small villages, so when coupled with treated, demented guitar sounds that whip from metallic riffage to wobbly precision and Adam and Louise often not so much duetting as holding each other by the collar in manaiacal glee daring the other to give way first, sometimes it sounds positively evil. Recalling a whole heap of post-punk bands who preferred sonic abandon to disco hi-hats (Pere Ubu, the No Wave Scene), it's the disjointedness that makes it spin together, the wholehearted abandon to the forces of the wild-eyed. Also, there's a song about this.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.11: Wild Flag - Wild Flag

The best thing that can be said about Wild Flag is that it's exactly the sort of album you expected a band of their background to make, and more. With apologies to Mary Timony and Rebecca Cole, accomplished both, it's about the Sleater-Kinney connection - Carrie Brownstein tosses off mini-solos of bravado, Janet Weiss thumps seven shades of faeces out of her kit. Not that this is S-K retreads in any way. Taking not only from the music they made at the time but Nuggets garage, mod psychedelia and surf influences, every track flies out of the traps and produces a set of hooks big enough to hold the listener in a submission hold. None of these women have anything to prove, which is key - they're having fun with it, resulting in a set of solar plexus punches that give the vast majority of 2011's trad indie rock a Standard rocket up the backside.

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One new track festive, one not

The Birthday Kiss, Leeds' boxfresh swooning lovelorn indiepop home for ex-Research and Lodger members, have put out a Christmas tune. Sentimental Christmastime illustrates the death of both youthful festive excitement and an adult relationship in something you could waltz to.

Sentimental Christmastime by The Birthday Kiss


It's been a banner year for Grace Petrie, incorporating playing the Glastonbury Leftfield at Billy Bragg's invitation and having him claim she "stole the fucking show", tour supporting Emmy The Great and accompanying Josie Long on her guerrilla Alternative Reality Tour, and tomorrow and Wednesday she's joining in with Robin Ince's Nine Lessons And Carols For Godless People at the Bloomsbury. From all that you can pretty much surmise the content of her fourth album Mark My Words - angry leftie folk with direct love songs smuggled in between. Just the type of songwriter the acoustic legions urgently require, in other words. Love song or protest song? Let's pick out one of each.

STN Albums Of The Year no.12: Dananananaykroyd - There Is A Way

The fight-pop avatars' dissolvement last month may have robbed us of a universally acclaimed spectacular live band, but they could turn that controlled chaos on in the studio just as well. Ross Robinson's production aided a sense that everyone is pulling melodically together more by luck than judgement, as while the razor sharp riffs are more straight ahead and most of the hooks more radio friendly and less likely to imminently come to pieces Calum Gunn and John Baillie Jnr are still bellowing over each other in accents thick enough to sound both friendly and threatening. An assault on the senses at times but their indie-positive hardcore tornado may be unique in execution, taut high wire theatrics charging for the deep run heart of the most exhiliarating spiky post-hardcore people with an eye on a curious idea of pop melody can manage. You'll tell your kids about them one day and they'll be amazed.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.13: Summer Camp - Welcome To Condale

When people refer to Messrs Sankey and Warmsley making songs for fictional John Hughes movies, they don't/shouldn't mean Don't You Forget About Me. In fact they're closest to the use of Yello on Ferris Bueller's Day Off, po-mo synthpop with melodic invention underneath. But that's not half the story either, given Elizabeth's proclivities towards obsessional adoration and its polar opposite. There's far more than a hipster Hurts going on musically too, borrowing overdriven analogue keyboards, bubblegum pop choruses, Ze Records dark disco, pre-Eurohouse club beats and New Wave oddness while working up a teen fiction storyline as the album goes on, not that you necessarily need to listen to it in order or of a piece. Borrowed nostalgia for an unremembered Eighties, sure, but it turns out that's the best approach.


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Catchup session (2)

Bear Cavalry - Roman Summer

Gosport's Bear Cavalry count Nick Grimshaw as a fan, have covered Skrillex with his backing, supported Rizzle Kicks and been remixed by Kissy Sellout. And yet we're still giving them the time of day. That's because this cut from debut EP Maple Trails takes from the Tall Ships playbook of harnessing complex math guitar part interplay, post-punk rhythms, big ol' infectious choruses and a nagging sense that all isn't quite correct.

Roman Summer by Bear Cavalry


Jethro Fox - Before

There's a lot of listening gone into Liverpudlian Fox's work, which somehow resembles a cleaned up and verse-chorus-versed Panda Bear or home studio'd Local Natives, matching sampled rhythms to anthemic chord changes, sinuous guitar parts and simple choruses big on held notes and wordless appellations. This could be going somewhere really quite interesting.

Before by Jethro Fox


Peter Wyeth - Sing To Me

Part of Humming New Time EP, the first release on Tom Morris of Her Name Is Calla's own label Olynka Records. Wyeth has been playing around the Leicester scene (including, full disclosure, an STN gig) for a while creating subtle magic out of acoustic guitar, loop pedals and field recording found sounds. the EP is "a collection of improvisations recorded on an iphone and a handheld recorder", but if that sounds too dry don't worry about that, it's imbued with invention that retains an experimental, questing edge around its self-imposed pastoral sparsity parameters.




Beth Jeans Houghton & The Hooves Of Destiny - Sweet Tooth Bird

Yours Truly, Cellophane Nose is now so close - 6th February, to be exact - you can almost touch it (maybe), but there's just time for another single, a big rousing thing clocking in at just over two minutes (yes, I know what the YouTube timer says) that were it not for the tone of Houghton's voice would bear precious little comparison to the folk regime she arrived in. Warning: contains vomiting scene.




The Cornshed Sisters - Dance At My Wedding

Meanwhile the trad alt-folk (it makes sense to us) revival continues apace with another north-eastern set, a Newcastle female foursome newly signed to Memphis Industries and with an album in April produced by that label/area's high achiever Peter Brewis. It apparently contains "wondrous tales of waterbabies, beekeeping, marriage, soothsayers, men in sequined suits, making pies out of people and the axis of love and bombs"; the debut single incorporates both lyrical heartbreak and a three-part harmony on the line "good job on the gravy".

Dance At My Wedding by thecornshedsisters

STN Albums Of The Year no.14: Laura Marling - A Creature I Don't Know

So it turns out Laura didn't already know who she was after all in more than title. Another slight shift along the confessional folk-rock panorama, A Creature I Don't Know is looser than I Speak Because I Can and more openly influenced by Americana, specifically the holy duality of Bob and Joni, jazzier and lyrically more confused about what's happening to her and trying to free herself from pasts and expectations as she ages. There's new sides to her psyche being unravelled - The Beast, say, five and a half minutes of shudderinglt dark maelstrom in electric minor chords - while the songs pared back to acoustic guitar and classically yearning vocal retain a lot more weight. It's not quite cathartic, Marling is still bringing too much on herself quite for that, but there's a wicked glee lurking under its surface.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.15: Fashoda Crisis - Him Make They Learn Read

There's a distinct shortage of compromise about Southend trio Fashoda Crisis. Herein someone is described by articulate berserker in chief Sim Ralph as "a Ralph Steadman illustration of a man" and Vernon Kay's skin is worn while "on my knees wanking like a primate". With a song named, with permission, after a Stewart Lee line and a sound hewn from the full frontal electric shock trio cliff face of Mclusky and Shellac, Him Make They Learn Read (which, by the way, is classed as an album as that's what they call it, despite being seven tracks and 25 minutes long) is made of laser targeted vitriol, discordant riffage that takes as much from sludge rock as from Sonic Youth, cheesewire bass, athletically fierce drumming and the odd unrestrained scream of anger into the cultural void. As all Albini acolytes should, it feels like smashing your skull into a wall.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.16: A Classic Education - Call It Blazing

Setting aside the orchestral pomp of their first releases, Bologna's A Classic Education take on a similar power alt-rock with murky depths ballpark to Modest Mouse or the Shins by way of pastoral XTC. Given a well rounded and filled out production, there's considerably more going on than first listen will willingly give up - the snappy guitars, the satisfied but still ambitious warmth in Jonathan Clancy's voice, the washes of subtle dreampop noise and sharply jangling 60s garage rock that make a good few of these songs with their instantly hookish melodies sound like newly recovered Nuggets garage rock gone askew. An Instragam haze and naturalesque reverb give it a hip touch but it's a more timless, less immediate skin they fully inhabit.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.17: I Break Horses - Hearts

Some have attempted to shoehorn Stockholm duo I Break Horses into the 'nu-gaze' scene on the basis of their electronic washes and sequencers, but that's to underestimate the very human emotion invested into the machines. The layers of processed noise effects pulse and shimmer with a certain degree of heart, swelling with emotion and seductively winding down while somehow still keeping its internal pulse alive. The delicacy with which a track like I Kill Love, Baby! (alright, some of the titles kind of spoil the mood) slowly builds with church-like hymnality that conveys an underlying sadness can't be done by setting up a laptop to full MBV/M83 blast and retreating, after all. It's all in the very basics of feeling that this rises above the cliched norm.

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Christmas wrapping-up

Bet this won't be one in a series of one either, the rate the kids with their Bandcamps go at these days, but this is the best of what's emerged so far...

The Leisure Society - Christmas Mistakes

Musically jolly, lyrically wry and less quite sure, this is Nick Hemming and co's contribution to this year's For Folk's Sake Christmas album, in aid of the Integrated Cancer Centre and also featuring Darren Hayman, Caitlin Rose, Kathryn Williams and Neill MacColl, Devon Sproule and Cocos Lovers.




Oxo Foxo - Snow Days

Having followed her fragile dreamscape demos with a CD of covers of children's songs it's becoming quite tricky to pin Sheffield's Oxo Foxo down. This free download festive song with its self-harmonising loops, snatches of odd instrumentation and ethereal touches hovers around becoming a winter season country cousin to chillwave, via Glasser and Bat For Lashes.

Snow Days by oxo_foxo


Tellison - Good Luck It's Christmas

Great a math-emo (old style) band as they can be, there's something calming about Tellison in their more restrained moments. The notion of Christmas being a time of joy as a point of hope is the pivot for their festive effort, available on a pay what you want basis with all proceeds to CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably).




Also worth a mention: A Special Indiecater Christmas Gift, A Very Cherry Christmas 7, Aidan John Moffat's Oh! What A Not So Silent Night Before Christmas EP

STN Albums Of The Year no.18: Help Stamp Out Loneliness - Help Stamp Out Loneliness

Everyone says D Lucille Campbell sings like Nico, not entirely averted by Cottonopolis + Promises' "won't you let me be your Nico?", but hers is a more versatile, warmer timbre. Much like her band, actually, taking optimistic indiepop ingredients well served and bringing something fresh - quasi-motorik rhythms, glacial synths, dark undertow and a selection of disturbed lyrical preoccupations where the indie disco lingua franca of heartbreak transmutes into obsession, desperate appeal and pining for doomed love on the occasion that the other party knows about it at all. Somehow not flabby at all despite stretching out to 53 minutes or derivative despite the reference points and closing lyrical steal from The First Big Weekend, it's enthusiastically gorgeous, gloriously simple whirling melodies counterbalanced by the pinings of a deeply unsure self having found glamour glinting in the dirt.

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Catchup session (1)

The blogs and magazines may be in Christmas/end of year list mode, but new music doesn't stop just because we're taking the role of time-specific artistic judge. We've got an inbox full of stuff, which we've spilled out onto the floor, examined with a jeweller's eyepiece and picked out a few fresh cuts, in full knowledge we'll have to do this again before the countdown fortnight is out:

Jonquil - It's My Part

At long last, the third Jonquil album! Lions (the second, following the comfortably sub-radar Sunny Casinos) came out in 2007, the EP that signalled a stylistic shift was mid-2009 and half the band have gone off to become Trophy Wife in the meantime, not to mention Hugo Manuel's Chad Valley project becoming the more celebrated. Point Of Go is set for March 5th on the new Blessing Force label and on the evidence of this first taste they've taken plenty from both the leftfield tropical syncopation blossoming around them and from sharing a home base with Foals. If chillwave's beach haze could be re-aligned to encompass hi-life guitars and all that entails it'd be like this and might still be active.

Jonquil - It's My Part by Blessing Force


The Cast Of Cheers - Family

If last year's free download album Chariot, which reputedly ended up being downloaded some 150,000 times, pitched the idea of an even more electric Irish Foals, this first Luke Smith-produced taste of debut album proper takes that framework and stretches and compresses it into something that somehow remains tauter than your average but marks them out as their own electrified intricate post-post-punk men.




†Hymns† - Miracles

'Atheist rock' duo †Hymns†, as covered on here a couple of times before, have finally put out their debut album this week through Big Scary Monsters, Cardinal Sins/Contrary Virtues a double album statement of intent where the more familiar ferociousness is given levity with quieter material such as this that stretches out and considers what it really want to say while still chomping at the bit. Barbed religious references remain littered throughout.




Yeti Lane - Analog Wheel

You need to stick with and trust this one, it only really gets going around the two minute mark, but when it does those ambient synthscapes and glitchy beats turn into a rolling kaleidoscope of digital Krautrock as patterns build and develop, rhythms ebb and flow and the whole thing coasts several feet above the ground leading into shimmering shards of a psychedelic outro. The French duo's second album The Echo Show is out on Sonic Cathedral on March 5th.

Yeti Lane 'Analog Wheel' by Sonic Cathedral


Paul Hawkins & The Awkward Silences - You Can't Make Somebody Love You

Due on Audio Antihero next Monday - yes, this is both Hawkins and Jamie Halliday's idea of a jolly Christmas single - one of the older songs from Hawkins' howlingly twisted garage cabaret is given a live dusting down and found to be that muddy anyway. Like an epileptic Stooges. Here he/they are doing it at Latitude 2008. SOMEONE INVITED PAUL HAWKINS TO PLAY LATITUDE.

STN Albums Of The Year no.19: Runaround Kids - Linked Arms

And welcome this year's big entrant into the pantheon, some say clique, of spiky, sparky British bands touting their electrifying American 90s alt-rock records as something to expand upon. Wakefield trio Runaround Kids are in the Johnny Foreigner/Copy Haho compartment, taking their Pavement and Arts & Crafts Records influences and producing something on the grounds of manicured guitar riff noise, semi-hidden pop melodies, obtuse (dual) delivery of barbed lyrics and intricate dynamic interplay based on breakdowns, fuzz-outs and shaggy mini-pyrotechnics. It's been done before often but when got right there's little like it for guitar-bass-drums excitement with its eyes on a prize that has little to do with commercial residual and everything to do with the love of - nay, need to - communicating this stuff.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.20: Maybeshewill - I Was Here For A Moment, Then I Was Gone

Bringing an emotionally intense core to instrumental rock, Maybeshewill's third album sees them refine and refract their slow build into attack mode workings. Shorn of the film samples and glitches of yore, bolstered by the Her Name Is Calla string section and Philip Glass-ian keys motifs but rarely if ever straying into the overlong self-consciously 'epic' no matter how vainglorious soundtrack-like, the metallic gone math riffs seem all the more monolithic, the release more overwhelming. If the sonic field pushes against the red limiter it's more often to do with how much has been structured, layered and interlocked to create flyover music for impassable structures. They do in four or five minutes what fellow travellers need twelve or more for, only with a crushing intensity and belief.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.21: Ace Bushy Striptease - The Words That You Said Are Still Wet In My Head

14 tracks in 23 minutes? Birmingham 'cuddlecore' merchants ABS don't hang around, as they don't see any need to. These tiny nuggets are the work of people with maybe ADHD, certainly a love of elaborate song titles, but definitely record collections that err on the side of the excitably wonky. Slanted And Enchanted has doubtless been worn out, a heap of smart pop-punk records, Waited Up Til It Was Light too, all sellotaped together, crumpled up and compacted up so it's just the most immediate, direct bits. And yet the glorious hooks, the enthralling rushes, the intriguing lyrics and vocal back and forths are all still there and in some way intact with barely a pause for breath.

[Bandcamp]
[buy]

STN Albums Of The Year no.22: Elbow - Build A Rocket Boys!

Once you're arena size, which way to go? Elbow's uncommon answer to becoming a populist success to go alongside their critical love was to dial the commerciality back. There's only one rousing chorus a la One Day Like This, a lot of working back through their late Talk Talk and Peter Gabriel influences and emotive lyrics that instead of taking the usual broad all-encompassing view zero in on little street stories, Guy Garvey's theme being nostalgia for personal development in youth, the forming of affairs of the heart and quiet joy of that which is socially achieved. Melodies and static while lovingly textured keyboard patterns seem to drift in a kind of rationalist spirituality until splitting wide open to let the sunshine through. Even at this size and reach Elbow could never be Snow Patrol, as that would require cynicism and radio straightforwardness.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.23: Fair Ohs - Everything Is Dancing

Everyone does tropical guitar pop based on hi-life chords so there's no way such indie kid cultural tourism could convince any more, right? Well, Eddy Frankel runs the African redistribution label Dream Beach Records and used to be frontman in chaotic electro-grindcore outfit Cutting Pink With Knives, and Fair Ohs started out as the sort of underground London band whose songs rarely last more than a minute. These songs are much longer, clearly, but bring a whole new slant to Afro-post-punk's westernisation. The production is simultaneously minimal in its repetition of killer intricate riffs and small gobbets of phrasing while the rhythm section lock into effortlessly funky shapes and the guitar reverberates and slides up and down the trebly, punchy spectrum so the playing seems both complex and intuitive. It's music precision targeted for unthinking movement and summer joy.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.24: Still Corners - Creatures Of An Hour

In the year that began with the sad loss of Trish Keenan, the influence of Broadcast's exploratory, floating retro-futurism was felt keenly in Still Corners' debut. Equally playing with 60s lounge exotica stylings subsumed into the whirr of slight seconded keyboards, Tessa Murray's voice possesses a haunting quality that keeps afloat the lulls and wafts along the rushes, her soothing vocal melodies drawing the listener towards... well, what? The ominous rumbling of the lower registers, the shafts of reverberating guitar and vintage organ that fall across the melody, the insistent motorik drumming... certainly nothing as calming as hoped, it all suggests that however airy things get there's always something lurking in the margins, not least on the hanging European suspense of Velveteen. An album for the twilight hours.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.25: Three Trapped Tigers - Route One Or Die

If Three Trapped Tigers follow a formula we're used to from another source in synapse melting analogue electronic instrumentals - spectacular drumming, tectonic shift basslines, mightily sequenced synth lines, all in imperfect disharmony - theirs is more techno influenced, taking a lot of hard work pieceing together the individual ferocious parts in such a way as they seem improvised through intuition. Ridiculously proficient moments of skyscraping lie back to back with textured ambient floating, euphoric codas come in off the back of spaced out keyboard drones while Adam Betts crashes like a man posssessed to underpin the whole notionally unstable charabanc. Too organic by half for IDM, too much like a cartoon dustcloud with limbs made of riffs, sequences and the joy of finding some new pattern by instant trial and error sticking out at improbable angles to become in any way useable as background music, it's capture and release overload in circuit board form.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.26: Lykke Li – Wounded Rhymes

Lykke's promise on advance single Get Some that "I'm your prostitute" turned out to be early doors desperation. Wounded Rhymes builds on foundations of heartbreak and the consequent loss of self-composure, spelt out in booming off-centre drums, mighty whirring synths - the first half sounds like the Crystals backed by laptop and percussionist - and a sense Li chooses to put herself at the heart of darkness, more commonly begging out of hope than experience. Grandiose wall of sound statements lie next to and occasionally merge with bleak broken balladry and coexist spendidly, Li often belting it out in defiance of whatever. In youth is pleasure, maybe, but Li knows and exploits the detail from the other side of the mountain.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.27: The Indelicates - David Koresh Superstar

Why does it somehow feel inevitable that the Indelicates would one day make a concept album/musical/rock opera about Waco? We follow Koresh's journey from origins through conversion to standoff to end through just about as many musical landscapes - Broadway mock-oleaginousness, piano ballads, bits that continue the Luke Haines comparisons by moving onto Baader-Meinhof, a mighty cover of John The Revelator to close - and possibly even more internal emotions, spectacular self-belief clashing against paranoia, good and evil failing to find their standpoint. Being the Indelicates it can veer into the blackest of tragi-comedy but they know what roads they've chosen to follow. In the accompanying booklet it's stated they didn't come to any definite conclusions about the situation, and there's an underlying compassion and understanding humanisation of how things came to that place and that ending.

[iTunes]
[Corporate Records]

STN Albums Of The Year no.28: The Lovely Eggs - Cob Dominos

Nobody makes music like the Lovely Eggs make music. It both is this modish concept of twee and is about as far from it as possible, Holly Ross singing about little things in nursery rhyme rhythmic metre before getting bored, turning up the distortion pedal and shouting in her creamy Lancastrian accent. And then it turns out most of them have an underlying message anyway. Playful melodies turn into detuned hellage riffing at a moment's notice as Ross' play-sing-song voice goes from nursery rhyme to profane at similar switchover. The most sombre, slow, stadium worthy track on the album is called, and liberally and repeatedly choruses with, Fuck It. The whole thing averages out at roughly two minutes per track. It's hilarious and singular and faux-naive to the point of ridiculousness, all while simultaneously being inventive and surreal and idiosyncratic.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.29: tUnE-yArDs - W H O K I L L

Yeah, alright, typography, give it a rest. Merrill Garbus' musical mind is an extraordinary rainbow-coloured whirl, darting with legibility barely aforethought from African rhythms to Diplo-style worldly hip-hop moves to Dirty Projectors-like installation of the obscure and oblique in already pretty fractured grooves. The best bits run on polyphonic cut and paste jobs, off kilter rhythms barely matched to scat-sung syllables and scratchy instrumentation of varying standards of tuning. Even when it doesn't work there's the underlying assumption in the shifting tones that something is about to happen and knock the place silly. At its heights an advert for what sort of controlled mess can be created in the digital age, Garbus singing to her own tunes as things fly wildly overhead and flash like hijacked emergency vehicles.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.30: Battles - Gloss Drop

With Tyondai Braxton gone the remaining Battles trio chose a more playful route than the jazzily obtuse moments that afflicted Mirrored. With John Stanier's precision drumming front and centre, the rhythms push out like unstable pistons while around it dance implausibly intricate guitar sounds and keyboard patterns, the sound of carnival fairgrounds gone haywire. It works like a machine, just one that hasn't worked out mathematical precision but will send sparks everywhere, structures sometimes stretched out into Reich-ambient, sometimes bunched up into rushing busily. The decision to bring in guest singers isn't entirely necessary and not just because of how well previous vocals acted like just another effect - Sweetie & Shag sounds like a more hurried take on singer Kazu Makino's own Blonde Redhead - but because it detracts from the act of instrumental pattern forming as quantum physics.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.31: Sean Rowe - Magic

New Yorker Sean Rowe is in possession of one of those deep baritone, warm while sonorously expressive voices that can never be put to use in light, carefree songwriting. Guesses as to who it's most resonant of range from Bill Callahan to Gil Scott-Heron; whoever, it adds extra emotional heft to the detailed storytelling with soul, blues and Springsteen echoes that he deals in, produced with a same-room aura and recorded rewardingly close to the strings and voice. Like bar piano lizard era Tom Waits he's wordy and expressively creative even when raking over those old love and displacement chestnuts again. Listening in reveals some bleak scenes being set out (and, true, the odd jarring moment), but it's the wider picture that'll really reach in and tear at the soul.

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Blog Sound Of 2012

The blogosphere being as it is you might have seen this laid out today already, but as one of the central triumverate let me elucidate...

When Andy, Robin and myself collectively came up with this idea about a year ago and moved it forward so we had time to get things done for this year, the idea was to see how those who write about this stuff with some knowledge would compare and contrast with the 180 'tastemakers' the BBC send their forms out to every year, seeing as their list (and here's their Sound Of 2012 list) is pretty much a self-fulfilling prophecy (even if this year is interestingly short on Adelealikes and longer than usual on frankly uncommercial acts) and a fait accompli for labels who've planned their Octobers and Novembers around getting on the list. Of course this enterprise is a hugely flawed idea, as we accept - the line between tipping for obvious success and tipping for qualitative greatness is a thin and askew one. However, by providing an alternative we also give a platform for avatars of new music and for introducing a whole new front of artists that exhibit enough to suggest big things ahead in quality rather than quantity.

Oh, and yes, the UK Blogger Albums Of The Year poll is going ahead for this year and will very shortly be creaking into life.

Anyway, here's the 15 strong longlist, the top five to be revealed in the first week of January. Complaints about how white and middle class everyone is should be kept to yourselves:

Alt-J
Not easy classifiable Leeds unit slipping from dark art-rock to slippery grooves to glitchy beats, with bluesy vocal atop

Bastille
Deceptively simple electronic pop from one Dan Smith that pits big soaring hooks against chopped up beats

Beth Jeans Houghton
Already much experienced Geordie songstress taking folk into wildly varying outposts, debut album in February

Daughter
Elena Tonra by name, taking the post-Marling folk singer-songwriter template to sparser, darker areas

French Wives
Joyously deep and mini-epic Glaswegians, from those that brought you Snow Patrol, Belle & Sebastian and Biffy Clyro

Friends
Percussively polyrhythmic summery Brooklynites borrowing from early 80s New York post-punk disco and tropical pop

The Good Natured
Long gestating gothic electro-pop trio fronted by ice maiden in waiting Sarah McIntosh

Houdini Dax
Sharp-suited Cardiff teenagers playing pin-sharp beat revival rock'n'roll with New Wave and Brit psychedelia touches

The Jezabels
From Sydney comes epically emotive gothic romance and melodrama fronted by the huge voice and presence of Hayley Mary

Lianne La Havas
Gorgeously jazz-soulful, heartstring-playing London singer-songwriter loved by the opposing tenets Gary Barlow and Bon Iver

Lucy Rose
Bombay Bicycle Club collaborator with a pure, fragile voice and a straightforwardly sincere writing style

Meursault
With a third album due next year, the Edinburgh collective can switch from cracked acoustic laments to broken beat hugeness

Outfit
Liverpool's most wanted, an idiosyncratic skewed indie-noir recalling Wild Beasts with greater dark pop nous

Theme Park
Livewire alt-funk of Talking Heads plus tropical, percussively syncopated post-punk from new Transgressive signings

Washington
Megan Washington, in fact, a quirkily lovelorn Melbourne singer-songwriter-pianist and Best Female Artist ARIA winner


And those who made the list that way: Breaking More Waves, God Is In the TV, Sweeping The Nation, The Von Pip Musical Express, The Recommender, Faded Glamour, Drunken Werewolf, Flying With Anna, Not Many Experts, Underclassed Idle Ideas, Sonic Masala, Mudkiss, The Pop Cop, The Ring Master, Both Bars On, Music From A Green Window, Dots And Dashes, The Daily Growl, And Everyone's A DJ, Kowolskiy, Just Music That I Like, Cruel Rhythm, The Blue Walrus, Music Fans Mic, Seventeen Seconds, Eaten By Monsters, Seven Sevens, Unpeeled, Nu Rave Brain Wave, Peenko, Music Liberation, Song By Toad.

STN Albums Of The Year no.32: Gruff Rhys - Hotel Shampoo

Despite the settling into middle age process apparent in both operations, the classic melodies underpinning Gruff's solo material makes it still identifiably different from the outward lounge electronica bounds of Super Furry Animals' recent output. While it takes many a stylistic detour - Beatles psychedelia, surf-scorched tropicalia, Tex-Mex bar band pop, alien planet pastoral - there's a plaintive warmth and even tenderness at its heart, buoyed by a voice that's matured into something that might in another life have a go at Bacharach. As much as he follows his genre wanderlust and off-beam lyrical preoccupations he can't help finding a secretly romantic ground where everything will be OK whatever.

[iTunes]
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STN Albums Of The Year no.33: Fujiya & Miyagi - Ventriloquizzing

Fujiya & Miyagi were always disquieting before, something about the unyielding motorik and the displaced, inscrutable stage whisper of David Best's voice and lyrics. This time around they've pushed the whole thing down a dark alleyway and left it paranoid and shivering. The taut spirit of Neu! is still ever present but the analogue sounds clang and feel their way along with more purpose than just to accompany the beat, switching from spy soundtrack to underground lounge club noise in a heartbeat. Best, still at one pace removed from the music, does his bit by expanding on his ability to read broodingly fathomless fear into non-sequitur aphorisms. In a way they actually seem to mean something, and it's not something heartening.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.34: Trips And Falls - People Have To Be Told

Following the precision eclecticism of He Was Always Such A Quiet Boy was always going to be tricky, especially with a lineup change along the way, but if People Have To Be Told feels more streamlined it's not settled down much. Explosions of quasi-psychedelic guitar noise push against and generally get in the way of the tight woven melodies and folk influenced male/female crosshatched harmonies plus lyrics that can get very dark and dismissive indeed. Very carefully produced so everything gets its own stereo space, they use the form to play around with structure, subtle movements audibly straining at the leash while trying to present an outward face of normality and failing miserably.

[iTunes]
[direct from the label]
[Spotify]

STN Albums Of The Year no.35: Okkervil River - I Am Very Far

For a band who've previously been defined for their subtlety and light touch, the enormous gated snare sound that kicks The Valley's doors in is an earpricking new touch. If the record's small army of musicians is an attempt at harnessing the Big Music now Arcade Fire are winning Grammys it's a peculiarly awkward shot at mass communication, Will Sheff's lyrics still densely allusive, containing more than the RDA of accusation, permeated sickness, bad intentions from both parties and cross-references to the diseased whore of the music business. Somewhere amid the mass of electrified sound, which is somehow never allowed to messily overwhelm, there's still a heart even if it burns or is turning black.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.36: Peggy Sue - Acrobats

So John Parish was involved in more than one stylistic realigning based on reamplifying the basics this year. Yes, Acrobats has hints of a less razor-tipped PJ Harvey, but there's far more than getting the name in as replication. Peggy Sue used to be a sweet-sourly harmonising acoustic duo; now they've gone electric in more than the amped up sense, as electronic whirrs play underneath and Rosa and Katy sense something lurking in the lengthening shadows. Sparky riffing finds a natural resting place with keening harmonies as garage blues influences are newly brought to the fore and when things do slow down keening cello and lyrical matters of the broken bodied ensure we're being kept thoroughly on our toes.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.37: Low - C'Mon

We haven't heard Low attempt to channel inner turmoil quite like this for a while, largely because of Alan Sparhawk's gradual easing up of the volume knobs. That now seems to have been taken into account and found a way to co-exist with a pace that doesn't quite match their earlier slowcore sketching out but boasts a hefty emotive pull and human connection. A certain extra layer of directness has come into their world map, Sparhawk and to a lesser extent Mimi Parker being far more willing to expose their hearts in express terms, so that even the distortion pedal exercises feel weepier. They're channelling intensity in a more focused way than they have for a while.

[iTunes]
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STN Albums Of The Year no.38: Sons And Daughters - Mirror Mirror

S&D's claustrophobic garage-country girl-pop was given a complete once-over on their third album. It starts like a spell, or at least a dire set of threats, and from there works in electronic elements, dark grooves, slashing elasticated rhythmic and synthesized menace. The punch-up in a roots bar element hasn't completely been lost but JD Twitch's production, using atmosphere as the oppressor rather than pedal-aided noise, lends an air of the great lost Argento horror soundtrack, playing in typewriter keys and white noise (see Ink Free) just to ratchet up the dank tension. It's a gothic album, not in the post-Zola Jesus sense but the creepiness, the sense that an indefinite evil lurks among the cinematographised spires and cobwebs.

[iTunes]
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STN Albums Of The Year no.39: Honour Before Glory - This Is Broken Lines

Whiskas, once of ¡Forward, Russia!, almost casually eked this solo record in all but name out in July and has spoken of how a lot of it is driven by working out what studio stuff does. In that case he's on the right track before he knows it, as This Is Broken Lines elegantly sketches a pathway between textural, spidery synth-washed electronics and oppressive maxi-pop with a Canadian tint, where every listen brings out a new quirk. For a beginner's work the sound is impressively opaque, filling out the waveform with dreampop's heavy drift effect before opening wide spaces with subtly effective aereated synths or Low at their loudest-style power chords. It may deviate across the pulsing spectrum but it finds light and shade amid the buzzes and spaces alike.

[only available from Bandcamp]

STN Albums Of The Year no.40: Comet Gain - The Howl Of The Lonely Crowd

Celebratedly unreliable scene-within-a-scene band they may be, but Comet Gain have earned friends in high places (Edwyn Collins and Ryan Jarman produce here) through their give-a-fuck appeals from the edge of polite society. David Feck sings about working class belief, life wasted and ultimate kitchen sink futility like his very soul depends on every statement as his band work their learnings from northern soul, mod soundtracks, Dexys and typically Scottish 1980s indie, as well as some well thumbed art school/Beat Generation hero texts, into a low budget miasma that reflects their co-leader's earnest outsider fists-in-the-pocket belief, and they can pull off a late night what-it-all-means ballad too. Calling a song Some Of Us Don't Want To Be Saved defines and delinates them on the spot.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.41: Sacred Harp - Window's A Fall

Oslo's Sacred Harp don't like to make things too slow. Yes, the pool they largely draw from is the considered ice floe textural somnambulance of Low, Red House Painters and Mew's calmer moments, but theirs is equally a cinematic scope and one which likes to throw the unwary off course. Jessica Sligter's voice is a more straightforwardly emotive Beth Gibbons-like in its spooked out torch song quality while her band know when to throw in a slow burn fanfare of something new - strings, synths, found sounds, a barnstorming Americana guitar riff - and when to turn on the lachrymosity. And then there's Red/Three, an ESG-like dance-post-punk interlude that I'm still not convinced isn't from a different album altogether.

[iTunes]
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STN Albums Of The Year no.42: Colourmusic - My _____ Is Pink

If there's one thing Colourmusic have mastered it's the dark postmodern art of noise and confusion, not to mention the ideal distortion. That is to say, too much. Like a more famous set of Oklahoma psychedelic space rock experimentalists everything heads towards the deeper end of the red for a reason, eschewing the idea of maintaining one idea to gleefully stride across the genres, knocking down puny structuralism on its way. Heavy load, atomically rhythmic acid road trips may be the usual setting but inside that there's glam grooves, hip swinging damaged hooks, airy ambience, droning interludes, vocal choir chants... and songs are always just within touching distance where the streams cross.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.43: TV On The Radio - Nine Types Of Light

Not exactly three number ones in a row, then. It's unfair to say that Nine Types Of Light was where they stopped showing everyone else the way, but having brought digital dance-rock to the edge of reason they've decided the seventh day is for resting after all. It may be that they decided to make a non-raucous, non-politically loaded record precisely before the exact time they should have, but the Prince echoes are more obvious, the funk more smoothed down by digital effect, the tone more tired out by experience than angry. Of course, no band with Dave Sitek, Kyp Malone and the vocals of Tunde Adebimpe pulling in the same direction can ever be bad, and so the love songs are open hearted and open minded, the dips into something actually raucous have a pointed beat and when choosing to remain subdued the production takes it far away from kitsch.

[iTunes]
[Amazon]
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STN Albums Of The Year no.44: Bibio - Mind Bokeh

Stephen Wilkinson has more ideas per album then he really knows what to do with, and this time around he's developed his digital sunshine glitch-pop side into assorted realms. One moment coasting ambient bloops are being warped right out of shape, the next FM yacht rock is being coated by twinkly synths until it turns into Radiophonic Workshop Goes Mediterranean. Another might see overlaid Boards Of Canada-style pastoral textures or tropical pop shapes introduced to analogue machines. The only real link, apart from Wilkinson's vocal, is the warmth of the glitchiness, that something more widely palatable is lurking bit can't be allowed to not be roughed over. Metronomy have pursued a similar path this year but Bibo are willing to push the form that bit further out, making sure things never get too comfortable if there's sonic curveballs to be implanted beneath the melodic skin.

[iTunes]
[Amazon]
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STN Albums Of The Year no.45: Wire - Red Barked Tree

While not exactly 1977-1979, the reactivated Wire have been on a decent run of form for their past three albums because they didn't grow into comfortable middle age. Not that they're still trying to be the people they were in The Roxy - some tracks are more like psychdelia explorations - but this twelth album advances their classily melodic claims while dipping into the ever readily available stock of spite, whether traditionally lyrically (Please Take) or in the serrated guitar sound of a Two Minutes. They sound like they always did under it all, propulsive rhythm section under clipped guitar tone under snarlingly oblique/sarcastic vocal. That is all in all a very good thing.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.46: Wake The President - Zumutung!

Developing on the Orange Juice/Aztec Camera influences of 2009's You Can't Change That Boy, the Sandberg twins' second offering still sounds like Postcard, in fact continuing Scottish post-punk's proud tradition of noise and confusion, but usually isn't as immediate with its hooks. Indeed there's the sort of darker, less authoratitive emotion coming through that their lyrics always hinted at, still literate, little more satisfied but heading down Josef K's scratchier, dystopian pathway, especially apparent in the way it slows to a slower, vacuum-packed pace towards the end, rather than Aztec Camera's commercial potential. It's the kind of situation where from the outside nothing is wrong while heads revolve in turmoil.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.47: The Wave Pictures - Beer In The Breakers

Recorded over one day in Darren Hayman's kitchen... almost sounds like an elaborate gag where a new Wave Pictures album is concerned. While the soul ballads of If You Leave It Alone are subsumed by the Richman-via-Velvets hanging on to each other jangle of earlier works, yet again it's David Tattersall's notebook that takes pride of place, observing the mundane as part of a bigger picture and picking up on the tiny things in terms of basic emotions. While there's still a love of a good guitar solo, things seem smoothed out slightly and it's the slower songs that hold the greatest emotional heft and showcase Tattersall's current strengths.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.48: The Leisure Society - Into The Murky Water

Ivor Novello nominations behind him, Nick Hemming and his sprawling collective put their increased exposure and confidence into a set that expanded their chamber folk-pop sound into greater depth and more interestingly classicist areas of arrangement, the strings pushing along rather than taking over. The best of Into The Murky Water recalled Paul McCartney's timelessly sure touch with melody but without being po-faced at any stage, capable of aiming for the heart's deepest recesses but at other times able to get the muscles involuntarily moving. Moments of dramatic climax lie side by side with moments where the smallest detail has been worked out in aid of making it seem direct and semi-spontaneous.

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STN Albums Of The Year no.49: Remember Remember - The Quickening

From the like pulses rubbing up against each other at outset to the Mobius strip of keyboard patterns and sliding, vaulting guitars, The Quickening is not an easy listen. Like bringing Steve Reich to the Scottish post-rock party, it's mostly concerned with adding layers of maze-like interlocking instrumentation and circuit board noise onto some relatively basic repeated parts. What results is something that lets cracks of light shine through onto a brooding presence without needing to add a word. Music boxes tinkle unwelcomingly, florid strings elongate the creeping dread and even when the rhythmic thrust picks up and makes like it's enjoying itself there's a very apparent undercurrent of small-g gothic.

[iTunes]
[Amazon]
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STN Albums Of The Year no.50: Bill Callahan - Apocalypse

Apocalypse is the best Callahan album since Dongs Of Sevotion because it's his first since then to consistently find a happy medium between sparsely laconic singer-songwriter appeals and luxuriant filmic skewiffery. Given hints of Western wide prairie while remaining heavily on the alt side of country, the arrangements have been pared back while the story songs are allowed to develop over a longer timeframe, thinking nothing of deviating from feedback guitar to minimalist spaciousness in the blink of an eye, or more accurately the switch of a lyrical conceit. Those lyrics remain a Callahan singularity, seeming streams of conscious that added up make for the most noir of fleshed out stories, both observantly fantastical and deeply personal.

[iTunes]
[Amazon]

Set lists

As is traditional, tomorrow STN enters its end of year phase with the long count towards our album of the year. That also means, with the festive season fast approaching, A Very Sweeping Christmas is back online, and for the first time all four volumes are compressed into one downloadable file. Last year's Spotify companion, Sweeping The Pine Needles, is back too.

What we'd also like to draw your attention to is a set of Spotify collaborative playlist versions of our old Covermount downloads, which you are free to add related tracks to as you see fit:

List songs

Songs that use the Be My Baby drumbeat

Songs about a love of music

Songs about hatred of music

Songs about famous people

Songs about other musicians

Songs about sport

Songs based on talking

Songs about London

Rumour Cubes - The Gove Curve

The slow motion cinematography of Rumour Cubes is coming in album form on 27th February under the name The Narrow State. This is a highly intriguing example of what they're about and where they're developing, as delicately sighing violins eventually get swept into a riptide of guitar and electronics noise before ebbing into something more ragged with added oblique spoken word.

The Gove Curve by Rumour Cubes

Post War Years - All Eyes

It feels like a while since Post War Years last crossed the radar, having been somewhat lost in the great synthpop morass of 2009. This first single from a new James Rutledge-produced album due next year takes a trip down a long, dark rabbit hole and ends up sounding like it's fighting against some force field with only malfunctioning analogue synths as their guide. And just when you least expect it, their guitarist decides he wanted to be in Minus The Bear all along.

All Eyes by Post War Years

Red Kite - Montreal

Since chancing across Daniel Fisher's demos in April we've been eager to see what became of the "nervy composure" shown therein. In fact the first single is more filled out (not unreasonably, there's a full band now) and faster than those tracks suggested but still feels like it could have a mental collapse at any moment. Huge hooks and an enormous rush are willing hallmarks of a band who are far more considered and ungainly patterned in the detail while retaining the radio-happy pace of any number of hyped New Guitar Bands For 2012. (NB. if it all goes horribly wrong and they turn into a Vaccines manque, pretend this never existed)

Red Kite - Montreal by Red Kite_Band

Boy Friend - Egyptian Wrinkle

What the rest of the music blogosphere is to minimalist R&B we are to keyboard drone and ethereal Liz Fraser-inspired vocals. So here's another one. Boy Friend are a duo from Austin, Texas whose floating in space is thick with aereated synths, wordless coos to the heavens and woozily reverberating production atop, while the vocal occasionally makes like a mid-80s emoter trapped in aspic and thrust into an alien environment. An album of the same name is due out 6th February.

BOY FRIEND "Egyptian Wrinkle" by HellYes

Totem Terrors - Empty Parties

Longtime readers may already know of Cardiff duo Totem Terrors from when they were called Joy Of Sex. The name may have changed for tactical reasons but the spitting out of jagged, chipped riffs a la Wire and acutely awkward male/female crosshatched vocals remains. They've currently got four tracks for free download.

Knickers - My Baby's Just A Baby (But I Love Him So)

Perhaps understandably, information about Knickers is immediately hard to come by, though again a little poking around the online recesses reveals it to be the new project of a longstanding indiepop auteur/scion/stray/man about town. The band are a slight return to 2005's glory days when every other band took its lead from 1960s girl group tropes, this one more cleaving to source material than most but like those bands its source aim is towards the feet as much as the synapses.

Athletes - Fall Apart

Information on Athletes is sparse, mostly due to the Googleability of that name - even the knowledge that it's mostly a Dane called Mathias Andersen doesn't help given the number of sportsmen called Mathias Andersen thrown up. In fact a little poking around finds it's the same person as behind the lighter while duskier Georgiaa, as mentioned here back in July. What isn't hidden is the quality of this as a piece of nervy dreampop, like early Radio Dept in the way trembling tremelo guitars and hazy synths open up around heavily reverbed vocals. Free download if you want one.

Fall Apart by Athletes

Fashoda Crisis - The Berry Brown Face Of Robert Kilroy Silk

We really thought we'd blogged this, or something from this album, in August/September as we were listening to it a lot at the time, but it turns out we didn't and release got held back until December 12th anyway. We could have been ahead of the pack for once there! That's not to suggest hanging on has diluted in any way this splenetic, vitriolic post-Falkous (and they've played with FOTL) magnificence from the Southend trio's second album Him Make They Learn Read, driving a steamroller through the youth's popular culture until it splits into millions of unidentifiable pieces, which they then pick up and rearrange into acerbically angry splintered post-hardcore that is entirely dedicated to blasting down the walls.

Fashoda Crisis - The Berry Brown Face Of Robert Kilroy Silk by CogDissRecords

Tell you what, have another track from the album. This is Animals.

Chapter 24 - Spindle

The latest stage of Chapter 24's attempt to sound like a psychedelic UFO-surf Raincoats covering every no wave band at once while on a rollercoaster like some spectral messthetic version of that Jim'll Fix It clip. Slashing away at half a chord while skipping drums vainly attempt to keep up, Claire Smith speaks in tongues as everything spirals inwards on itself until the tightly wound wire gives way. This is half of a double A sided 7" on Odd Box on the 28th.

The Kick Inside - Ever The Optimist

Nothing big or cle...well, no, that's wrong, in construction it's quite clever, but Bristol's The Kick Inside are a connection through the Swedish indiepop machine back to a golden age of guitar-pop swooning, purest Marr-like chiming guitar while the lovelorn poetry nods at Roddy Frame and the like.

Ever the Optimist by The Kick Inside

Bastardgeist - Shift

If you're prepared to sit through thirty introductory sections of African percussion something oddly hypnotic happens in this latest Brainlove-spawned single, half of a double A out on Monday, from Chicago's Joel Midden. Although the synth sounds are dialled further back there's something of last year's Twin Shadow about it as hypnagogic glissandos dance and wash around the falsetto. It's not a song that stays in one place for too long, though, as drones fade in and out and splashes of percussion raise the roof against something that sounds entirely composed even as it switches from minimalist to everything crashing around at once. The other half of the single, Winter Fog, can be found here.

Bastardgeist - Shift by brainlove

Sharks Took The Rest - Rename The Planets

The Newcastle septet we first featured back in January come from a classically English folk background projected into a chamber pop setting. This first proper single pushes that combination further and ends up at the flighty mean point between Thea Gilmore and Beth Jeans Houghton. Beccy Owen's sighingly charismatic voice is front and centre but allows itself to be pushed by the violin patterns and brief outbreak of rock drumming. Despite its internal grandiosity it's all done in around about 2:20.

Butcher The Bar - Alpha Street West

Those who remember MTV2's 120 Minutes will remember the steady influx around 2002-04 of acoustic singer-songwriters who backed themselves up with sympathetic electronic touches. Butcher The Bar is not Tunng. Joel Nicholson, originally of Rotherham, now of Manchester, takes an upbeat Elliott Smith as his starting point and feeds in bits of electric guitar, piano and little bits in the background to heighten the deceptively bouncy mood. Nicholson is supporting Death Cab For Cutie at four UK dates this week, which makes sense.

Butcher The Bar - 05 Alpha Steet West by broken horse

Saturday's Kids - Grey On White

From Cardiff (yeah, another one), having recently supported Future Of The Left, comes some woofer-rattlingly monstrous big hardcore riffage bringing Black Flag aggression and Kyuss sludge together as one, out on 7" in late January. They have their more Fugazi-like splintered moments and Sonic Youth noise-freakage but this is as good a demonstration of their determination to smash down such easy noisenik comparatives.

Saturday's Kids - Grey On White by basementfever

The Lovely Eggs - Allergies

So what happens if you pitch Holly and David in with Gruff Rhys as producer? A song apparently about Bob Markley of The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band that seems more streamlined (multitracked harmonies!) and less self-consciously oddball than usual, it's a four minute buzzsaw art-pop cut featuring sitar and mixed in sampled voices that keeps on keepin' completely off somewhere other. It's part of the Too Pure Singles Club, out on December 5th.

The Lovely Eggs - Allergies by Too Pure Singles Club

Dananananaykroyd - I'm Innocent

So. Farewell then
Dananananaykroyd

There Is A Way
That was your album title
But it seems
There isn't
A way of continuing

In your honour
The indie-rock angels
Shall form
A wall of cuddles.


They posted this to Twitter yesterday afternoon with no historical context but regardless it's definitely them, not to mention great.

Abi Wade - Stability

Part of an EP (And Blood and Air, out November 28th) that will be the first release on a new label, Love They Neighbour Records, co-run by Daniel Copeman from Esben & The Witch, Wade is an engagingly intriguing prospect if only for how her only accompaniment is cello, a little piano and foot operated tambourine. The former, played pizzicato, sketches a restless undertow as Wade coos darkly over. For once, there's not a loop pedal in sight.

Abi Wade - Stability by WorkItMedia

Golden Fable - The Chill Pt. 2

Shorn of the vocal histrionics that too often follow skittish, melodic electronic pop these days, Golden Fable, a new more manageably named project by two of Tim And Sam's Tim And The Sam Band With Tim And Sam, come on like what would happen if Karin Dreijer Andersson decided to take Fever Ray in the pastoral direction Goldfrapp briefly touched base with. Rebecca Palin's vocals float across the crystalline airspace as keyboard hums amenably criss-cross under insistent programmed percussiveness.

We Three And The Death Rattle - Split Lips

Yet another demo that's better recorded and more fully formed than most similar bands' proper work, WTATDR continue working that garage-punk oracle of ballsy female wail plus electrifying blues-riff-hurled-at-a-wall guitar, and this time there's a static-like theremin solo on the coda. You don't get that on your hipster lo-fi. Having just supported the Kills on three dates they do likewise for Josh T Pearson in Leicester on the 23rd.

SPLIT LIPS ( DEMO ) by Wethreeandthedeathrattle

Islet - This Fortune

It begins with a lot of frantic percussion, Sister Ray hums and cymbal taps, because that's what Islet do. Then it richochets down the rabbit hole into an endless tunnel of motorik monstrosity where becalmed moments are set adrift in forests of distorted organ and syncopated rimshots. Before we're out the other end there's ghostly, ritualistic vocals, relocation of the offbeat and some severe synapse frazzlement. This is your mighty first taste of Illuminated People, out 23rd January, which can also be downloaded free from here and will also be available on a 7" available on this month's tour, more of which after the embed.

ISLET // This Fortune by TheArtOf...

Last we saw they've trimmed down from two drumkits to one plus some standalone toms, but you're still liable to be in grave danger of marauding band members. Dates:

11th Manchester Deaf Institute
12th Leeds Constellations Festival*
13th Nottingham Bodega**
14th Norwich Arts Centre
15th Brighton Green Door Store
16th London Lexington
17th Cambridge Portland Arms
23rd Cardiff Buffalo

* Which looks ace, though it turns out they clash with Summer Camp
** Ridiculous night for STN-approved Midlands gigs, that, what with Johnny Foreigner vs Birmingham and Standard Fare in Leicester too

The All Golden - Pink Hearts

It's solo identity number three (I think) for international man of mystery Pete Gofton, who's just released a set of demos that (bar the folky instrumental) part tighten up the AM psych-pop of George Washington Brown into even tighter wound concentric circles. With its submerged jangle chops and hints of synthy undercoat it's a Drums you can stand.

Pink Hearts (demo) by The All Golden

Daughter - Medicine

Another track (after Love) from The Wild Youth EP out on the 21st, the spare piano and ghostly background effects make it sound like a night lost in the woods within Elena's mind well before she starts picking over the debris of a relationship. Her voice is beyond her years; the whispering at the end against the pained howling and the ambience behind is from somewhere else entirely. A reminder of three special 'Daughter & Friends' Christmas shows: 6th December Bristol Cube Cinema, 7th London St Giles In The Fields, 8th Manchester Deaf Institute.

Daughter - 'Medicine' (Taken from 'The Wild Youth' EP) by ohDaughter

Cardinal - Love Like Rain

Eric Matthews and Richard Davies have done some interesting stuff on their own - to name one each, the unimpeachable Fanfare for the former, touring with the Flaming Lips as backing band the latter - but they made their name in 1994 as Cardinal, bringing classic and classy orchestral manoevures to college pop-rock in a way few did back then and really few do now. They've reunited for an album, Hymns, out in January. This first taster is definitely from the Davies songbook with its distorted guitar, big beat and obliquely off-centre singing style.

Cardinal - Love Like Rain by FIRE RECORDS

LookiMakeMusic - Lift Yr Emo Fists and Sing

Birmingham's uncontrollably word-spewing indiepop-emo-crossover kids have a new member on cello and a new demo, one with about seven different sections which extends its self-lacerating gaze over doubting yr worth, by way of straight edge versus social drinking. Then it ends with some woah-ohs seeking a punk-pop anthem as opposed to the nervously shifting semi-acoustic night weariness they've accidentally landed in.

Field Music - (I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing

A new Field Music album is a milestone indeed, our biannual meter ensuring there's still an audience for the intelligent hooks market. Plumb is out February 13th; this is typically Brewisian in the Working To Work/Give It Lose It Take It mould.

Field Music - (I Keep Thinking About) A New Thing by memphisindustries

The Early Years - Complicity

In the, ahem, early years of STN The Early Years were one of not all that many keeping the motorik/drone flame heading onwards, but made an underwhelming album and faded out of the picture. But now they're back! Back! Back! With a good home in Sonic Cathedral and their first live show in over three years tomorrow at CAMP Basement, east London, with Echo Lake and Sennen supporting and Andrew Weatherall and Chris Rotter DJing. Taken from a 7" EP this new track is six minutes purest instrumental Krautrock probing, believing in repetition and evolvement as the same beast as its Radiophonic noises head it off into space.

The Early Years 'Complicity' by Sonic Cathedral