W H Lung - Inspiration!/Nothing Is
Here is the sum total of what we can pass on about W H Lung - they're a trio based in Manchester, they release both these songs on a double A side on May 12th via Melodic, and despite no real proof of having played live yet they're already booked to play End Of The Road, Blue Dot Festival at Jodrell Bank, Sea Change and Liverpool International Festival Of Psychedelia. So there's clearly something going on here - we have our suspicions - and while we await further instruction we have the music to go on, two tracks that together reach just short of sixteen minutes, and luckily it's great in all the right psychedelic/motorik ways, replete with lack-of-air-in-lungs yelp, using that length to shapeshift and evolve through cosmic instrumental breakdown/build-up sections and intense climaxes without falling into shoegaze territory. On Nothing Is some darting, pulsing synths come into play, shifting from Philip Glass repetition into a driving, malleable shape for purpose.
Sam Airey - Lacuna
Finally after what certainly seems like far too long, the darkly intricate craft of Leeds-based Airey has been formed into album shape, In Darkened Rooms out 26th May. Inspired by Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, here his cracked, emotionally spent falsetto is close miked amid a spaciously minimalist setting recalling a less wintry For Emma, Forever Ago.
Sneaks - Hair Slick Back
Slicks is Washington DC's Eva Moolchan, signed to Merge who release It’s a Myth the end of this week. She's/it's an intriguing proposition - taut bass and drum-machine led, delivery based on repetition and how language sounds, like ESG having first heard Le Tigre, with the recording of Mary Timony and her Ex Hex bandmate Jonah Takagi drawing strength from minimalism, which is what you can draw strength from if your album is ten tracks in eighteen minutes.
Alimony Hustle - Miss GB
It's been a little while since we've heard something new from the self-examining to a fault duo, who re-emerge with spacious, smartly vaulting guitar pop without succumbing to the usual bluesy/overdriven faults duos land in. Plus it's about Zara Holland, the titular beauty queen winner who was stripped of her title after going on Love Island. More particularly, "sexism, regret, the death of dreams and, ultimately, doing what you want in the face of all of that".
Gorillaz - Andromeda
The best, we reckon, of the four 80s revival bandwagon-flirting tracks revealed at the end of last week from fourth album Humanz, released 28th April, which seems to be a (quite uneven) club record for a darkened world. Indeed this is virtually old-skool house with its spaciousness, synth flashes and twinkles plus basic insistent beat, Damon in soulful, contemplative mood with rapper D.R.A.M. content to fill in the gaps.
BABY! - Home Sweet Home
BABY! is the nom du jangle of Orlando's Kaley Honeycutt, whose offering from forthcoming EP Pick Me is a sub-two minute joyous coast of surf guitar hooks and energetic warmth, invoking personal catharsis through sunny positivity like a lost Crutchfield sister.
Fazerdaze - Lucky Girl
A track that's been around for a few weeks but we only caught up with this week, and another typically swooning eternal summer kind of offering from the revived Flying Nun Records, New Zealander Amelia Murray similarly deals in bedroom-spawned hazy sunlight-dappled pop of breathy, reverbed for extra nostalgic quality vocal and contrasting emotions, the kind that sees joy and melancholy as part of the same package deal. Her album Morninside is due in May.
Caroline Lazar – Trigger
The young Atlantan was originally parsed as one of the latest country singer-songwriter wave, but this from her new Nevermine EP is a lot more, raw and brooding in minimalism even before it starts to slowly bloom, Lazar's huge voice pushing increasingly forward, before bursting into a emotively cathartic, intense coda involving seemingly all the electric instruments available.
Monday, March 27, 2017
Thursday, March 23, 2017
STN recommends: 23/3/17
Perfume Genius - Slip Away
The last time Mike Hadreas had something from a new album to share it was Queen, and it blew most of the year away. Like that song this bursts from a tentative opening into technicolour; unlike it this seems more metallic, less keen on outre sashaying than percussion-driven bold statements of individuality, strength through passion's vulnerability. No Shape is out May 5th.
Saint Etienne - Heather
Bob, Pete'n'Sarah's first album in six years, out June 2nd, is called Home Counties, that most London of bands getting round to considering their shared teenage years in Surrey and Berkshire. From just the (19-strong!) tracklisting business appears to be as unusual. There's a track called Sports Report! And Church Pew Furniture Restorer! And one, presumably in tribute to Earl Brutus' Nick Sanderson, called Train Drivers In Eyeliner! And Bob's finally got a track called Popmaster in! The song features an unexpectedly heavy bassline amid some quite restrained pastorial synth floatiness and Cracknell's lyrical muse stuck in suburbia.
Gallops - Crystal Trap
A third advance cut from Bronze Mystic, out 21st April, starts off in ambient waters and then slowly gains its propulsive steady vertical takeoff by means of 8-bit settings, syncopated rhythms and electronic post-rock floating before a mammoth synth sturm und drang moment. It's quite the adventure, yet again.
H Hawkline - My Mine
Huw Evans' In The Pink Of Condition was one of the sleeper hit albums of 2015, and with Cate le Bon co-producing and playing alongside Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa I Romanticize, out 2nd June, might well give him that extra push. The single is certainly classically further along his trail of shaky, skewed take on harmonic psych-pop.
Thurston Moore - Smoke Of Dreams
Neither the folkishness Moore openly loves nor the noise of yore, Moore's new album Rock n Roll Consciousness, out April 28th, was produced by Paul Epworth, which might explain some of the sheen, and features Steve Shelley and MBV's Debbie Googe, which doesn't. It's quite contemplative and thinking retrospectively of youthful hopes and ghosts, in fact, maybe a side effect of his residing in London these days.
Big Walnuts Yonder - Sponge Bath
Reminder that BWY a) is a bad name and b) are Mike Watt, Nels Cline, Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Tera Melos' Nick Reinhart, and when we first came across the project they were essentially free jazz hardcore. This time around they're up the hypnagogic end of the scale, Reinhart taking vocals on a queasy psych-out lope. There's a track on the self-titled album, out May 5th, called I Got Marty Feldman Eyes.
Ralegh Long - Take Your Mind Back
It's kind of dizzying seeing where Long goes, as he evolved from power pop to orchestral beauty and now into a kind of country rock take on Big Star/Paisley Underground moves, with his honeyed presence to the fore. There's a pre-order/manufacturing crowdfunding going on for Upwards Of Summer, out 9th June.
Mr Jukes - Angels/Your Love
Well, this is unexpected as much for being any good as its origins. A brassy soulful, sax-driven cool groove featuring a looping sax sample from jazz fusionist Jorge Lopez Ruiz plus impassioned vocals from one BJ The Chicago Kid, pitching somewhere between a becalmed Avalanches, a jazzier Gorillaz and the Face-friendly first flowerings of British jazz-funk circa 1982, you'd never guess it was the first solo work of Jack Steadman, formerly of Bombay Bicycle Club. Album God First is out June 9th.
The last time Mike Hadreas had something from a new album to share it was Queen, and it blew most of the year away. Like that song this bursts from a tentative opening into technicolour; unlike it this seems more metallic, less keen on outre sashaying than percussion-driven bold statements of individuality, strength through passion's vulnerability. No Shape is out May 5th.
Saint Etienne - Heather
Bob, Pete'n'Sarah's first album in six years, out June 2nd, is called Home Counties, that most London of bands getting round to considering their shared teenage years in Surrey and Berkshire. From just the (19-strong!) tracklisting business appears to be as unusual. There's a track called Sports Report! And Church Pew Furniture Restorer! And one, presumably in tribute to Earl Brutus' Nick Sanderson, called Train Drivers In Eyeliner! And Bob's finally got a track called Popmaster in! The song features an unexpectedly heavy bassline amid some quite restrained pastorial synth floatiness and Cracknell's lyrical muse stuck in suburbia.
Gallops - Crystal Trap
A third advance cut from Bronze Mystic, out 21st April, starts off in ambient waters and then slowly gains its propulsive steady vertical takeoff by means of 8-bit settings, syncopated rhythms and electronic post-rock floating before a mammoth synth sturm und drang moment. It's quite the adventure, yet again.
H Hawkline - My Mine
Huw Evans' In The Pink Of Condition was one of the sleeper hit albums of 2015, and with Cate le Bon co-producing and playing alongside Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa I Romanticize, out 2nd June, might well give him that extra push. The single is certainly classically further along his trail of shaky, skewed take on harmonic psych-pop.
Thurston Moore - Smoke Of Dreams
Neither the folkishness Moore openly loves nor the noise of yore, Moore's new album Rock n Roll Consciousness, out April 28th, was produced by Paul Epworth, which might explain some of the sheen, and features Steve Shelley and MBV's Debbie Googe, which doesn't. It's quite contemplative and thinking retrospectively of youthful hopes and ghosts, in fact, maybe a side effect of his residing in London these days.
Big Walnuts Yonder - Sponge Bath
Reminder that BWY a) is a bad name and b) are Mike Watt, Nels Cline, Deerhoof's Greg Saunier and Tera Melos' Nick Reinhart, and when we first came across the project they were essentially free jazz hardcore. This time around they're up the hypnagogic end of the scale, Reinhart taking vocals on a queasy psych-out lope. There's a track on the self-titled album, out May 5th, called I Got Marty Feldman Eyes.
Ralegh Long - Take Your Mind Back
It's kind of dizzying seeing where Long goes, as he evolved from power pop to orchestral beauty and now into a kind of country rock take on Big Star/Paisley Underground moves, with his honeyed presence to the fore. There's a pre-order/manufacturing crowdfunding going on for Upwards Of Summer, out 9th June.
Mr Jukes - Angels/Your Love
Well, this is unexpected as much for being any good as its origins. A brassy soulful, sax-driven cool groove featuring a looping sax sample from jazz fusionist Jorge Lopez Ruiz plus impassioned vocals from one BJ The Chicago Kid, pitching somewhere between a becalmed Avalanches, a jazzier Gorillaz and the Face-friendly first flowerings of British jazz-funk circa 1982, you'd never guess it was the first solo work of Jack Steadman, formerly of Bombay Bicycle Club. Album God First is out June 9th.
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
Romance and adventure: a salute to Fortuna Pop!
As of this weekend, an enormous crater opens up in the bedroom-insular, open air-spectacular world of indiepop as the Chance the Gardener of indie majordomo of all he surveyed Sean Price winds up his Fortuna Pop! label with a long London weekend entitled Twenty Years Of Tears - maybe slightly telling, as the label's first release came out in 1996 - starring Simon Love, Two White Cranes and a special headliner on Wednesday; Withered Hand, The Ballet, our recent alldayer headliner Pete Astor and the Would-Be-Goods on Thursday; The Butterflies Of Love, Sodastream, Flowers and Darren Hayman on Friday; Comet Gain, The Proper Ornaments, Evans The Death, the latest Loves final gig, Mammoth Penguins, Milky Wimpshake, the actual Bearsuit final gig, September Girls and Tigercats on Saturday; and then a quite spectacular literal and metaphorical (and only date currently sold out) blowout on Sunday with Martha, Joanna Gruesome, The Spook School and Chorusgirl.
Seemingly increasingly so as the years passed, the F-Pop! accroutrement to a release has regularly proved a badge of quality, and as much as the scene seemingly has a relatively good cushion these days the current roster especially being left homeless is going to leave a hell of a deep crater both in impact and having some great bands floating with no as yet obvious place to go.
Never managed to get Sean to come up to Leicester for the Alldayer despite putting the vast majority of his roster on over the years, though. His loss.
As a fond farewell, this is the playlist we threw together back in August upon Price breaking the news, thirty examples from across the years of what his whims and craft were all about:
The Lucksmiths - A Hiccup In Your Happiness
Comet Gain - You Can Hide Your Love Forever
Airport Girl - The Foolishness That We Create Through Love Is The Closest We Come To Greatness
Sodastream - Blinky
Club 8 - Jesus, Walk With Me
The Ladybug Transistor - Always On The Telephone
Allo Darlin' - The Polaroid Song
Milky Wimpshake - I'm Saving Myself For You
Crystal Stilts - Shake The Shackles
Joanna Gruesome - Sugarcrush
The Spook School - I'll Be Honest
Bearsuit - Itsuko Got Married
The Loves - Xs And Os
Tigercats - Junior Champion
Flowers - Pull My Arm
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Young Adult Friction
Evans The Death - Threads
The Aislers Set - The Red Door
Martha - 1967, I Miss You I'm Lonely
Chorusgirl - No Moon
September Girls - Love No One
Tullycraft - Lost in Light Rotation
Herman Düne - Monument Park
Shrag - Chasing Consummations
Tender Trap - Train From King's Cross Station
Darren Hayman And The Long Parliament - We Are Not Evil
Let's Wrestle - Rain Ruins Revolution
Chain and The Gang - Never Been Properly Loved
Mammoth Penguins - Strength In My Legs
Withered Hand - Heart Heart
Seemingly increasingly so as the years passed, the F-Pop! accroutrement to a release has regularly proved a badge of quality, and as much as the scene seemingly has a relatively good cushion these days the current roster especially being left homeless is going to leave a hell of a deep crater both in impact and having some great bands floating with no as yet obvious place to go.
Never managed to get Sean to come up to Leicester for the Alldayer despite putting the vast majority of his roster on over the years, though. His loss.
As a fond farewell, this is the playlist we threw together back in August upon Price breaking the news, thirty examples from across the years of what his whims and craft were all about:
The Lucksmiths - A Hiccup In Your Happiness
Comet Gain - You Can Hide Your Love Forever
Airport Girl - The Foolishness That We Create Through Love Is The Closest We Come To Greatness
Sodastream - Blinky
Club 8 - Jesus, Walk With Me
The Ladybug Transistor - Always On The Telephone
Allo Darlin' - The Polaroid Song
Milky Wimpshake - I'm Saving Myself For You
Crystal Stilts - Shake The Shackles
Joanna Gruesome - Sugarcrush
The Spook School - I'll Be Honest
Bearsuit - Itsuko Got Married
The Loves - Xs And Os
Tigercats - Junior Champion
Flowers - Pull My Arm
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Young Adult Friction
Evans The Death - Threads
The Aislers Set - The Red Door
Martha - 1967, I Miss You I'm Lonely
Chorusgirl - No Moon
September Girls - Love No One
Tullycraft - Lost in Light Rotation
Herman Düne - Monument Park
Shrag - Chasing Consummations
Tender Trap - Train From King's Cross Station
Darren Hayman And The Long Parliament - We Are Not Evil
Let's Wrestle - Rain Ruins Revolution
Chain and The Gang - Never Been Properly Loved
Mammoth Penguins - Strength In My Legs
Withered Hand - Heart Heart
Monday, March 20, 2017
STN recommends: 20/3/17
The Orielles - Sugar Tastes Like Salt
People who know things have been talking about the Halifax trio for a while, and now signed to Heavenly they've decided to abandon protocol and just go for it off the bat with an eight and a half minute debut single that swings gladly between reference points - scratchy post-punk, doomy psychedelia, frictionless punk-funk, Tarantino soundtracks, early Factory Records groove, dubby breakdown launching back into a sprint - whilst still seeming of a piece. It's a brave and exhilarating way to open, and it'll grab you before long if you make the commitment to run alongside it.
Feist - Pleasure
The title track from Leslie's first album in six years, out April 28th, is intriguingly low-key and swampy, even more so than the deliberate step away from over commerciality that Metals represented. Its single bluesy guitar with minimal backing and late on devolvement into wild-eyed half-shouted statements of intent recall Rid Of Me-era PJ Harvey, with the upfront brazenness mixed back in favour of the title's suggested hope of something basic and, yes, carnal to cling to.
Furore - Eyelid
Furore is Roxy Brennan, of what seems like hundreds of bands but chiefly by herself Two White Cranes. The guitar has been swapped for synths and a machine handclap setting, but even if it's more constrained by the machine beat the sense of turned inwards emotional rawness remains. An EP will be released on Mat Riviere's label Bleak Spring on April 3rd.
H. Grimace - Call It Out
When we first came across H. Grimace a few weeks back they were coiled springs, but if the second track we've heard from Self Architecht, out April 9th, is more restrained until its collapsing climax it's only through trying to push against where it's going, built on a cyclical insistent riff and the pure nervous energy coursing through the driving bassline and Hannah Gledhill's vocals alike.
Guided By Voices - Dr Feelgood Falls Off The Ocean
Robert Pollard feels like he releases fifty albums a month in various permutations, but GBV's August By Cake - a double! - will actually be his hundredth when released on 7th April. One year fewer than it took Billy Childish to get to that mark, by our reckoning. Apart from being driven by a drum machine, you pretty much know what to expect from this if you know your mid-paced slashing slacker end of the GBV template.
Pronto Mama - Double Speak
The percussion-heavy Glaswegian sextet, who release debut album proper Any Joy on 5th May, matches its urgent post-punk capture and release energy struggling to hold onto itself by considering what it is to think you have the world at your beck and call.
People who know things have been talking about the Halifax trio for a while, and now signed to Heavenly they've decided to abandon protocol and just go for it off the bat with an eight and a half minute debut single that swings gladly between reference points - scratchy post-punk, doomy psychedelia, frictionless punk-funk, Tarantino soundtracks, early Factory Records groove, dubby breakdown launching back into a sprint - whilst still seeming of a piece. It's a brave and exhilarating way to open, and it'll grab you before long if you make the commitment to run alongside it.
Feist - Pleasure
The title track from Leslie's first album in six years, out April 28th, is intriguingly low-key and swampy, even more so than the deliberate step away from over commerciality that Metals represented. Its single bluesy guitar with minimal backing and late on devolvement into wild-eyed half-shouted statements of intent recall Rid Of Me-era PJ Harvey, with the upfront brazenness mixed back in favour of the title's suggested hope of something basic and, yes, carnal to cling to.
Furore - Eyelid
Furore is Roxy Brennan, of what seems like hundreds of bands but chiefly by herself Two White Cranes. The guitar has been swapped for synths and a machine handclap setting, but even if it's more constrained by the machine beat the sense of turned inwards emotional rawness remains. An EP will be released on Mat Riviere's label Bleak Spring on April 3rd.
H. Grimace - Call It Out
When we first came across H. Grimace a few weeks back they were coiled springs, but if the second track we've heard from Self Architecht, out April 9th, is more restrained until its collapsing climax it's only through trying to push against where it's going, built on a cyclical insistent riff and the pure nervous energy coursing through the driving bassline and Hannah Gledhill's vocals alike.
Guided By Voices - Dr Feelgood Falls Off The Ocean
Robert Pollard feels like he releases fifty albums a month in various permutations, but GBV's August By Cake - a double! - will actually be his hundredth when released on 7th April. One year fewer than it took Billy Childish to get to that mark, by our reckoning. Apart from being driven by a drum machine, you pretty much know what to expect from this if you know your mid-paced slashing slacker end of the GBV template.
Pronto Mama - Double Speak
The percussion-heavy Glaswegian sextet, who release debut album proper Any Joy on 5th May, matches its urgent post-punk capture and release energy struggling to hold onto itself by considering what it is to think you have the world at your beck and call.
Monday, March 13, 2017
STN recommends: 13/3/17
Napoleon IIIrd - The Scrape
A quick primer, as there's always latecomers - Napoleon IIIrd is James Mabbett and both of his previous albums made number four in their respective years' STN end of year lists. The Great Lake, out 19th May, comes more than six years after Christiania and is a five track literal change of pace, funereal, experimental and abstract in an ambient/Mark Hollis influenced sense, meditating on grief, transcendence and self-destruction. It'll get under your skin.
Public Service Broadcasting - Progress
No news on the subject matter linking PSB's as yet unannounced third album, but we can make an informed judgement from their new single. Or, y'know, just listen to it. Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura takes the chorus vocal amid the restrained whilst still propulsive motorik and samples of research and development both harking back to their debut record, as always retro and futuristic at once.
Fleet Foxes - Third of May/Ōdaigahara
3rd May 2011 was the release date of Helplessness Blues, the last new material from the once ubiquitous nu-folk trailblazers. The near nine minute, several phase first taste of Crack-Up, released June 16th, considers what's changed in that time via the medium of quiet-loud crescendos, self-examining introspection and a great deal of what got them this far, just now in subtly different, more overtly expansive and cinematic clothing before turning into something more acoustic ambient, not far from what Animal Collective used to do circa Sung Tongs. A fascinating return and proof that there's more than one way out of the pastoral impasse.
Soulwax - Missing Wires
The concept behind the Dewaele brothers' new album From Deewee, released March 24th, is they recorded the whole thing in one take in one recording session. It fits too, the pulsing electronics fitting in around the song seeming impulsive, synths dancing across a rutted landscape and shapeshifting effortlessly.
Darren Hayman - Upper Slaughter
Hayman is onto the second volume (out May 26th) of his Thankful Villages project, visiting the 54 UK villages where every soldier returned alive from WW1 and writing a song inspired by the folklore and landscape of each. For his visit to the titular Cotswolds village, halfway between Cheltenham and Chipping Norton, he invited local resident and Fairport Convention's first singer Judy Dyble, who lends autoharp and clearest of folk vocals to a tale of history flowing like the bisecting River Eye.
Sean Rowe - Newton's Cradle
Another track from Rowe's third album New Lore, out August 7th, it feels somehow wrong to hear his familiarly gruff voice against something quite musically upbeat, more appreciably outright Philly-soulful than he's ever been before in fact. Luckily, it fits nigh-on perfectly.
Pip Hall - James
Preston-based sixteen year old Hall created a groundswell of attention towards the end of 2017 with a lush electronically aided commercially leaning soulfulness, the kind of thing that can and often does dip into MOR Remember The Eighties? wash but keeps its head above water here with subtlety and meaningfulness, the song being about Hall coping with the passing of her father.
Year Of Birds - Western Splits (After Lear)
Teeside now-trio Year Of Birds have been around for a few years but the tremendously titled White Death To Power Alan, out this week on Odd Box, is their first album to be approached and written as a full actual album, if that makes sense. Their ragged lo-fi weird garage nods greatly at the Fall but would more willingly fit into the mid-80s scene John Robb described as Death To Trad Rock, and the more bands we have that sound like they could be filed next to A Witness or Bogshed the better these days.
A quick primer, as there's always latecomers - Napoleon IIIrd is James Mabbett and both of his previous albums made number four in their respective years' STN end of year lists. The Great Lake, out 19th May, comes more than six years after Christiania and is a five track literal change of pace, funereal, experimental and abstract in an ambient/Mark Hollis influenced sense, meditating on grief, transcendence and self-destruction. It'll get under your skin.
Public Service Broadcasting - Progress
No news on the subject matter linking PSB's as yet unannounced third album, but we can make an informed judgement from their new single. Or, y'know, just listen to it. Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura takes the chorus vocal amid the restrained whilst still propulsive motorik and samples of research and development both harking back to their debut record, as always retro and futuristic at once.
Fleet Foxes - Third of May/Ōdaigahara
3rd May 2011 was the release date of Helplessness Blues, the last new material from the once ubiquitous nu-folk trailblazers. The near nine minute, several phase first taste of Crack-Up, released June 16th, considers what's changed in that time via the medium of quiet-loud crescendos, self-examining introspection and a great deal of what got them this far, just now in subtly different, more overtly expansive and cinematic clothing before turning into something more acoustic ambient, not far from what Animal Collective used to do circa Sung Tongs. A fascinating return and proof that there's more than one way out of the pastoral impasse.
Soulwax - Missing Wires
The concept behind the Dewaele brothers' new album From Deewee, released March 24th, is they recorded the whole thing in one take in one recording session. It fits too, the pulsing electronics fitting in around the song seeming impulsive, synths dancing across a rutted landscape and shapeshifting effortlessly.
Darren Hayman - Upper Slaughter
Hayman is onto the second volume (out May 26th) of his Thankful Villages project, visiting the 54 UK villages where every soldier returned alive from WW1 and writing a song inspired by the folklore and landscape of each. For his visit to the titular Cotswolds village, halfway between Cheltenham and Chipping Norton, he invited local resident and Fairport Convention's first singer Judy Dyble, who lends autoharp and clearest of folk vocals to a tale of history flowing like the bisecting River Eye.
Sean Rowe - Newton's Cradle
Another track from Rowe's third album New Lore, out August 7th, it feels somehow wrong to hear his familiarly gruff voice against something quite musically upbeat, more appreciably outright Philly-soulful than he's ever been before in fact. Luckily, it fits nigh-on perfectly.
Pip Hall - James
Preston-based sixteen year old Hall created a groundswell of attention towards the end of 2017 with a lush electronically aided commercially leaning soulfulness, the kind of thing that can and often does dip into MOR Remember The Eighties? wash but keeps its head above water here with subtlety and meaningfulness, the song being about Hall coping with the passing of her father.
Year Of Birds - Western Splits (After Lear)
Teeside now-trio Year Of Birds have been around for a few years but the tremendously titled White Death To Power Alan, out this week on Odd Box, is their first album to be approached and written as a full actual album, if that makes sense. Their ragged lo-fi weird garage nods greatly at the Fall but would more willingly fit into the mid-80s scene John Robb described as Death To Trad Rock, and the more bands we have that sound like they could be filed next to A Witness or Bogshed the better these days.
Monday, March 06, 2017
STN recommends: 6/3/17
Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever - French Press
Another of that growing band of taut, whipsmart young bands, the kind-of-title track from The French Press EP, out 10th March, is expansively melodic surf-pop with bite that lands somewhere between the Dunedin Sound and the nu-slacker Parquet Courts/Real Estate types in its relentless semi-jangle building to a crescendo of a climax. They call their sound "tough pop/soft punk", which does the job better than we could.
Wire - Diamonds In Cups
The second offcut from that difficult fifteenth album Silver/Lead, out 31st March, is them in restrained mood, which in Wire's world means a glam guitar sound and Colin Newman sounding simultaneously equanimous and threatening in a way you can imagine having equally appeared on Chairs Missing or A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck.
Laura Marling - Nothing, Not Nearly
Again, the way things are going we'll have videos for the whole of Semper Femina before it's released, and yes, we're aware that's the end of this week now. Lots of words, bluesy power chords as eight-bar punctuation and a paen to love's imagery and resilience.
Trust Fund - Splitter
We'd not had anything from Ellis and co in 2017 and it's now March so that had to change sharpish. Taken from Put Ears On Yourself, a 7" series from Sligo-based Art For Blind Records, as usual it sounds like it might fall apart if you prodded it just had enough and deals with the notion of companionship, around the notion of using a headphone socket splitter on a coach journey.
Meilyr Jones - Watchers
To tie in with the last dates to support 2013, a chamber orchestral ballad about a man who goes blind looking out to sea at night after his loved one drowns, with the literary hopelessness and grandiosity that all of the above naturally suggests.
yr friends - i got nothing/Magana - To Be the Same
Two tracks now from the latest of Audio Antihero's compilations, Unpresidented Jams raising money for the Southern Poverty Law Center and National Immigration Law Center - Alexei Berrow you'll know from many, many STN points of exposure before, Jeni Magana continues building on her reputation for semi-broken resilience. Elsewhere there's new Fridge Poetry (Junior JoFo), Jeffrey Lewis, Jack Hayter, Benjamin Shaw, Deerful and Cloud among many others.
Overcoats - Nighttime Hunter
At first the New York-based duo resemble First Aid Kit with a laptop, but with Autre Ne Veut and Nicolas Vernhes (Dirty Projectors, Daughter, Deerhunter) co-producing it's bound to turn into something else, and so it proves as the crystalline harmonies, already dipped in self-doubt and vulnerability, are sent through loops and restrained beats to emerge as R&B-tinged spectrality. Album Young is released 21st April.
Big Walnuts Yonder - Raise The Drawbridges?
There's a name. Quite the background too, as they're a coming together of the great and legendary Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE, latter day Stooges), Nels Cline of Wilco and plenty besides, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof and Nick Reinhart of Tera Melos. They have a self-titled album out May 5th, from which the first bolt starts off aiming to filter hardcore through free jazz a la Minutemen themselves, then threatens to turn into Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band instead, before attempting to find common uber-psychedelic ground regardless of sense.
Wavves - Daisy
Hey kids, remember the hazy, crazy days of 2010? Nathan Williams is off a major and on his own Ghost Ramp label for sixth album You're Welcome, due May 19th. That he/they are promoting it by supporting Blink 182 isn't entirely helpful, but the single is the kind of natty, slighty screwy surf-punk cut that made people aware of him in the first place.
Another of that growing band of taut, whipsmart young bands, the kind-of-title track from The French Press EP, out 10th March, is expansively melodic surf-pop with bite that lands somewhere between the Dunedin Sound and the nu-slacker Parquet Courts/Real Estate types in its relentless semi-jangle building to a crescendo of a climax. They call their sound "tough pop/soft punk", which does the job better than we could.
Wire - Diamonds In Cups
The second offcut from that difficult fifteenth album Silver/Lead, out 31st March, is them in restrained mood, which in Wire's world means a glam guitar sound and Colin Newman sounding simultaneously equanimous and threatening in a way you can imagine having equally appeared on Chairs Missing or A Bell Is A Cup Until It Is Struck.
Laura Marling - Nothing, Not Nearly
Again, the way things are going we'll have videos for the whole of Semper Femina before it's released, and yes, we're aware that's the end of this week now. Lots of words, bluesy power chords as eight-bar punctuation and a paen to love's imagery and resilience.
Trust Fund - Splitter
We'd not had anything from Ellis and co in 2017 and it's now March so that had to change sharpish. Taken from Put Ears On Yourself, a 7" series from Sligo-based Art For Blind Records, as usual it sounds like it might fall apart if you prodded it just had enough and deals with the notion of companionship, around the notion of using a headphone socket splitter on a coach journey.
Meilyr Jones - Watchers
To tie in with the last dates to support 2013, a chamber orchestral ballad about a man who goes blind looking out to sea at night after his loved one drowns, with the literary hopelessness and grandiosity that all of the above naturally suggests.
yr friends - i got nothing/Magana - To Be the Same
Two tracks now from the latest of Audio Antihero's compilations, Unpresidented Jams raising money for the Southern Poverty Law Center and National Immigration Law Center - Alexei Berrow you'll know from many, many STN points of exposure before, Jeni Magana continues building on her reputation for semi-broken resilience. Elsewhere there's new Fridge Poetry (Junior JoFo), Jeffrey Lewis, Jack Hayter, Benjamin Shaw, Deerful and Cloud among many others.
Overcoats - Nighttime Hunter
At first the New York-based duo resemble First Aid Kit with a laptop, but with Autre Ne Veut and Nicolas Vernhes (Dirty Projectors, Daughter, Deerhunter) co-producing it's bound to turn into something else, and so it proves as the crystalline harmonies, already dipped in self-doubt and vulnerability, are sent through loops and restrained beats to emerge as R&B-tinged spectrality. Album Young is released 21st April.
Big Walnuts Yonder - Raise The Drawbridges?
There's a name. Quite the background too, as they're a coming together of the great and legendary Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE, latter day Stooges), Nels Cline of Wilco and plenty besides, Greg Saunier of Deerhoof and Nick Reinhart of Tera Melos. They have a self-titled album out May 5th, from which the first bolt starts off aiming to filter hardcore through free jazz a la Minutemen themselves, then threatens to turn into Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band instead, before attempting to find common uber-psychedelic ground regardless of sense.
Wavves - Daisy
Hey kids, remember the hazy, crazy days of 2010? Nathan Williams is off a major and on his own Ghost Ramp label for sixth album You're Welcome, due May 19th. That he/they are promoting it by supporting Blink 182 isn't entirely helpful, but the single is the kind of natty, slighty screwy surf-punk cut that made people aware of him in the first place.
Thursday, March 02, 2017
STN recommends... February 2017
As is now our wont, please find enclosed every new song we've posted this month that's on Spotify and great tracks from our favourite new albums of those 28 days.
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.
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.
Monday, February 20, 2017
STN recommends: 20/2/17
Laura Marling - Next Time
Alright, who decided to leave as a footnote that Marling has called her own label More Alarming? Those are the auspices through which Semper Femina is released on March 10th, which is sounding like her most lucid and intimate work in at least a while, this track in both self-directed visual and lyrical thought dealing with self-entrapment.
Gallops - Pale Force
The second single plus video resembling a malfunctioning Spectrum loading screen from album Bronze Mystic, released 21st April, finds a crushing place between undulating glitchy electronic loops, sub-bass and power chords without falling into murky 'dance-rock' waters.
Maybe Don't - Lightbulbs
When we wrote about the Birmingham trio at the start of the year they were building towards an EP in March; they've just augmented that with a pay-what-you-like double A side, this half of which showcases their scrappy but rattlingly determined, surging sanded down punk-pop.
The Immediate - Light Dimensions
Our friend off the radio Adam Walton passed this one on, which is reasonable given he's in them. Reunited after an initial mid-90s spell of localised following (and supporting the Stereophonics at the gig that go them signed), their angular, harmonic power-pop/new wave/vaguely early 80s mod revival trio dynamics actually seem to fit in better these days. Mold EP, named after their home town and a set of considerations of their shared upbringing, is out 3rd March.
Alright, who decided to leave as a footnote that Marling has called her own label More Alarming? Those are the auspices through which Semper Femina is released on March 10th, which is sounding like her most lucid and intimate work in at least a while, this track in both self-directed visual and lyrical thought dealing with self-entrapment.
Gallops - Pale Force
The second single plus video resembling a malfunctioning Spectrum loading screen from album Bronze Mystic, released 21st April, finds a crushing place between undulating glitchy electronic loops, sub-bass and power chords without falling into murky 'dance-rock' waters.
Maybe Don't - Lightbulbs
When we wrote about the Birmingham trio at the start of the year they were building towards an EP in March; they've just augmented that with a pay-what-you-like double A side, this half of which showcases their scrappy but rattlingly determined, surging sanded down punk-pop.
The Immediate - Light Dimensions
Our friend off the radio Adam Walton passed this one on, which is reasonable given he's in them. Reunited after an initial mid-90s spell of localised following (and supporting the Stereophonics at the gig that go them signed), their angular, harmonic power-pop/new wave/vaguely early 80s mod revival trio dynamics actually seem to fit in better these days. Mold EP, named after their home town and a set of considerations of their shared upbringing, is out 3rd March.
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.
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.
Sunday, February 12, 2017
STN recommends: 12/2/17
Kiran Leonard - Cracked Globe
Because Leonard has too many songs, he follows up last year's typically ambitious Grapefruit album with a cassette-only mini-album, Monarchs Of The Crescent Pail, out next month. And because Leonard has too many ideas, this track was achieved by "lining four (acoustic guitars) up against a wall and tuning each to a big chord. I played the guitars like a big harp and they were awesome and resonant". Conversely, the heartfelt rawness his vocal and the spareness of the sound might be the most straightforward and accessible he's been.
Waking Aida - Shoal
When the Southampton outfit first crossed our path two or three years ago they were a fascinating arrival in the slow burning post-rock picture; now, with new material produced by Matt Calvert of Three Trapped Tigers, they've taken on intially a more hurried math hue before gracefully devolving into floating layered electronic ambience and... vocals! Sparkling and fascinating, we've no idea if this is leading anywhere of greater volume soon but it's a good signpost if they are.
Bill Botting & The Two Drink Minimums - Treating You Right
Allo Darlin' are no more, having come to a triumphant live climax towards the end of 2016 as both frontwoman Elizabeth Morris and excitable bassist Botting are leaving the country. Before he goes, Botting put together an indiepop all-star band (Darren Hayman, Wave Pictures, Tigercats, Owl & Mouse) and releases Better Friends on 10th March, a country flavoured charmer via the classic sunshine Australian indiepop sound that like his old band is ramshackle in a good way and joyful for the love of music.
Spiral Stairs - Dundee Man
Former guitarist with apparent Fall obsessives releases track called (City In Scotland) Man - the first line is even "going to Edinburgh". The second track from Scott Kannberg's upcoming album Dolly & The Daggers is fairly straightforward guitar pop with an echoey riff and an abnormal underside actually not dissimilar to Stephen Malkmus' earliest solo work.
Wolf Girl - Moody
In about four weeks' time Wolf Girl will be amongst those playing STN's stacked sixth annual Leicester Indiepop Alldayer. After that in May they'll be putting out a 7" via the mighty Odd Box Records, a fizzing fuzzpop confection with an infectious hook and typical lyrical sharpness.
Johnny Flynn - Heart Sunk Hank
A more trad singer-songwriter cut from Flynn's upcoming fourth album Sillion, bluesy warpy crackle delivered authentically by being recorded in a 1940s Voice-o-Graph recording booth when one of the only two in the world visited London last year.
Because Leonard has too many songs, he follows up last year's typically ambitious Grapefruit album with a cassette-only mini-album, Monarchs Of The Crescent Pail, out next month. And because Leonard has too many ideas, this track was achieved by "lining four (acoustic guitars) up against a wall and tuning each to a big chord. I played the guitars like a big harp and they were awesome and resonant". Conversely, the heartfelt rawness his vocal and the spareness of the sound might be the most straightforward and accessible he's been.
Waking Aida - Shoal
When the Southampton outfit first crossed our path two or three years ago they were a fascinating arrival in the slow burning post-rock picture; now, with new material produced by Matt Calvert of Three Trapped Tigers, they've taken on intially a more hurried math hue before gracefully devolving into floating layered electronic ambience and... vocals! Sparkling and fascinating, we've no idea if this is leading anywhere of greater volume soon but it's a good signpost if they are.
Bill Botting & The Two Drink Minimums - Treating You Right
Allo Darlin' are no more, having come to a triumphant live climax towards the end of 2016 as both frontwoman Elizabeth Morris and excitable bassist Botting are leaving the country. Before he goes, Botting put together an indiepop all-star band (Darren Hayman, Wave Pictures, Tigercats, Owl & Mouse) and releases Better Friends on 10th March, a country flavoured charmer via the classic sunshine Australian indiepop sound that like his old band is ramshackle in a good way and joyful for the love of music.
Spiral Stairs - Dundee Man
Former guitarist with apparent Fall obsessives releases track called (City In Scotland) Man - the first line is even "going to Edinburgh". The second track from Scott Kannberg's upcoming album Dolly & The Daggers is fairly straightforward guitar pop with an echoey riff and an abnormal underside actually not dissimilar to Stephen Malkmus' earliest solo work.
Wolf Girl - Moody
In about four weeks' time Wolf Girl will be amongst those playing STN's stacked sixth annual Leicester Indiepop Alldayer. After that in May they'll be putting out a 7" via the mighty Odd Box Records, a fizzing fuzzpop confection with an infectious hook and typical lyrical sharpness.
Johnny Flynn - Heart Sunk Hank
A more trad singer-songwriter cut from Flynn's upcoming fourth album Sillion, bluesy warpy crackle delivered authentically by being recorded in a 1940s Voice-o-Graph recording booth when one of the only two in the world visited London last year.
Wednesday, February 08, 2017
STN recommends: 8/2/17
Amber Arcades - It Changes
Decidedly more straightforwardly melodic, sounding more mid-90s in a very good way, a new standalone track ahead of Grandaddy support dates.
Warm Digits - End Times
Machine tooled nervy Kraut-disco with Field Music's Peter Brewis on vocals from Newcastle duo newly signed to Memphis Industries.
Jens Lekman - Evening Prayer
It's a fun, lightly funky song about making a 3D print of a tumour. Obviously. (Well, not just about that, this being Lekman, but that makes for the better standfirst)
Unqualified Nurse Band - Death Surf A52
Evil sounding guitars always get us. The driving evil of UNB are from Derby, released an album last year and this is next up on the Too Pure Singles Club. The bit where it appears to turn into a John Lennon song is quite a jolt.
Decidedly more straightforwardly melodic, sounding more mid-90s in a very good way, a new standalone track ahead of Grandaddy support dates.
Warm Digits - End Times
Machine tooled nervy Kraut-disco with Field Music's Peter Brewis on vocals from Newcastle duo newly signed to Memphis Industries.
Jens Lekman - Evening Prayer
It's a fun, lightly funky song about making a 3D print of a tumour. Obviously. (Well, not just about that, this being Lekman, but that makes for the better standfirst)
Unqualified Nurse Band - Death Surf A52
Evil sounding guitars always get us. The driving evil of UNB are from Derby, released an album last year and this is next up on the Too Pure Singles Club. The bit where it appears to turn into a John Lennon song is quite a jolt.
Thursday, February 02, 2017
STN recommends: 3/2/17
Post War Glamour Girls - Chipper
Leeds' existential doom merchants are back with a third album, Swan Songs released 21st April, with something that almost seems like it could have post-punk commercial potential were James Smith not intent on bringing everything to account, his backing almost seeming progressively more monolithic in sympathy.
Sean Rowe - Gas Station Rose
We've been supporters over the last few years of the baritone bittersweet singer-songwriter's output, a run that continues with this first taste of new album New Lore, released 7th April. It doesn't need more than spare guitar, odd strident piano chords, late blooming strings and studio atmospherics to bring an emotional heaviness to Rowe's search for connections and hope for destiny.
H. Grimace - Land/Body
Takes a few moments, this, but there's something of the Savages (and not just in the last words being "I am here") about the way it takes post-punk tropes/Siouxsisms and makes them sound urgent, social critique on standardisation against jarring, surging, frankly vital guitar rushes. What can we tell you about the band? They're based in that London, singer Hannah Gledhill is from Melbourne, and they have an album recorded by Rory Attwell, Self Architecht, out in April.
Leeds' existential doom merchants are back with a third album, Swan Songs released 21st April, with something that almost seems like it could have post-punk commercial potential were James Smith not intent on bringing everything to account, his backing almost seeming progressively more monolithic in sympathy.
Sean Rowe - Gas Station Rose
We've been supporters over the last few years of the baritone bittersweet singer-songwriter's output, a run that continues with this first taste of new album New Lore, released 7th April. It doesn't need more than spare guitar, odd strident piano chords, late blooming strings and studio atmospherics to bring an emotional heaviness to Rowe's search for connections and hope for destiny.
H. Grimace - Land/Body
Takes a few moments, this, but there's something of the Savages (and not just in the last words being "I am here") about the way it takes post-punk tropes/Siouxsisms and makes them sound urgent, social critique on standardisation against jarring, surging, frankly vital guitar rushes. What can we tell you about the band? They're based in that London, singer Hannah Gledhill is from Melbourne, and they have an album recorded by Rory Attwell, Self Architecht, out in April.
Tuesday, January 31, 2017
STN recommends... January 2017
One down, eleven to go. Herein find every new song we've posted this month that's on Spotify, representative tracks from our favourite new albums of January not otherwise covered, and maybe the odd stray.
Monday, January 30, 2017
Tuesday, January 24, 2017
STN recommends: 24/1/17
Meursault - Klopfgeist
Neil Pennycook has got the band (name) back together for a fourth album, I Will Kill Again, out 27th February, and picked up not so much where they left off, as that was the more commercially approached end of his/their sound, but in another place, the uneasy ambience along with Pennycook's familiar heart on sleeve croon suggesting mental desolation and dislocation, dark grace and emotional heft.
Peaness - Same Place
From a very nearly sold out already Odd Box 100 Club 7" that's not technically out until Friday, another glorious instantaneous slab of harmonic power-jangle, glittery on the outside, darkening on the inside. They're playing this year's Leicester Indiepop Alldayer, you know. And they've signed to Alcopop for their next EP!
Wire - Short Elevated Period
It's Wire's fortieth year in showbiz! They are, naturally, celebrating with a new album, Silver/Lead out 31st March, displaying the kind of unyielding, dense-seeming jagged churn that if anything nods at their semi-psychedelic mid-80s first comeback more than the classic opening triptych, but then Wire famously never have been about easy nostalgia.
Mew - Carry Me To Safety
The last few Mew records have been the epitome of hit and miss, so while hopes for Visuals, released 28th April, may not be huge they still hold the capacity to get under the skin. Case in point, the moment when the delicate amble of the verses bursts into technicolour strings and eventually drives everything upwards and into the atmosphere, Jonas Bjerre's porcelain falsetto still setting out the pathway.
Family Friends - I'm Like You
The Melbourne via East London brother-sister duo who are Family Friends sound both heat hazed and dreamily self-confident, which we suppose works within those locations. Slipping somewhere between Throwing Muses and first album Best Coast, it shimmies amongst the reverb and delay on a confident slacker quality.
A Festival, A Parade - People Person
Newcastle's A Festival, A Parade wear their National/Frightened Rabbit/basically any emotive and slightly awkward loud guitar band influences heavy, but do something with them that makes them worth the effort. In this case it's the sense of pushing against something, both in the mental health theme of the lyrics, frontman Joe Allan's distracted paranoia vocal or the constantly aiming, soaring ambitions of the guitars.
Neil Pennycook has got the band (name) back together for a fourth album, I Will Kill Again, out 27th February, and picked up not so much where they left off, as that was the more commercially approached end of his/their sound, but in another place, the uneasy ambience along with Pennycook's familiar heart on sleeve croon suggesting mental desolation and dislocation, dark grace and emotional heft.
Meursault - Klopfgeist from Song, by Toad on Vimeo.
Peaness - Same Place
From a very nearly sold out already Odd Box 100 Club 7" that's not technically out until Friday, another glorious instantaneous slab of harmonic power-jangle, glittery on the outside, darkening on the inside. They're playing this year's Leicester Indiepop Alldayer, you know. And they've signed to Alcopop for their next EP!
Wire - Short Elevated Period
It's Wire's fortieth year in showbiz! They are, naturally, celebrating with a new album, Silver/Lead out 31st March, displaying the kind of unyielding, dense-seeming jagged churn that if anything nods at their semi-psychedelic mid-80s first comeback more than the classic opening triptych, but then Wire famously never have been about easy nostalgia.
Mew - Carry Me To Safety
The last few Mew records have been the epitome of hit and miss, so while hopes for Visuals, released 28th April, may not be huge they still hold the capacity to get under the skin. Case in point, the moment when the delicate amble of the verses bursts into technicolour strings and eventually drives everything upwards and into the atmosphere, Jonas Bjerre's porcelain falsetto still setting out the pathway.
Family Friends - I'm Like You
The Melbourne via East London brother-sister duo who are Family Friends sound both heat hazed and dreamily self-confident, which we suppose works within those locations. Slipping somewhere between Throwing Muses and first album Best Coast, it shimmies amongst the reverb and delay on a confident slacker quality.
A Festival, A Parade - People Person
Newcastle's A Festival, A Parade wear their National/Frightened Rabbit/basically any emotive and slightly awkward loud guitar band influences heavy, but do something with them that makes them worth the effort. In this case it's the sense of pushing against something, both in the mental health theme of the lyrics, frontman Joe Allan's distracted paranoia vocal or the constantly aiming, soaring ambitions of the guitars.
Sunday, January 22, 2017
STN recommends: 22/1/17
Los Campesinos! - 5 Flucloxacillin
It's actually proving quite slippery so far to get a reading on what Sick Scenes, out 24th February, will exactly be like. After the typical charge of I Broke Up In Amarante comes something that almost touches West Coast classic rock, apart from the lyrics about depression, medication and the generation gap.
Mutes - Vanishing
You know when you find out about a new band, resolve to write only the bare minimum of facts so as to promote the music and only then discover they share a member (and producer) with one of the bands you drone on about most of all? In truth I don't know if Junior off JoFo is on this track or just their live drummer, though those rapid fills sound familiar, but putting that to one side (having drawn attention specifically to it, I know) the track itself is a sprawling, thrusting piece of growing intensity that throws surf harmonies into a cascading pit of post-punk guitars that dips into an ambient phase and re-emerges on the charge for the white light at the end of a noise-pop tunnel.
Gallops - Darkjewel
They used to be called "Wrexham's answer to Battles", a sentence nobody ever thought they could surely envisage, but we always admired their propulsive instrumental charges. Now after three years away they've got back together, delved deeper into the noises that their instruments used to work around and seem like they want to destroy on a base level, matching pummelling sub-bass with huge drums and warped electronics to sound like the battle hymn of the demon army. Album Bronze Mystic is out April 21st.
H.Hawkline - Last Thing On Your Mind
As with many of his Welsh odd-indie contemporaries - one of which, Cate Le Bon, contributes here - Huw Evans takes a roundabout approach to faintly straightforward stylings, in this case easygoing pop synth-driven melodic pop decorated with an abtruse guitar part. No word on a new album to follow 2015's tremendous In The Pink Of Condition, but he is supporting Devendra Banhart for most of the next two months across America.
Magana - Pages
Put out for free download ahead of some solo dates in New York and California, Jeni Magana's heartaching DIY guitar-pop is straightened out slightly, especially in the way it broadens out into a middle eight solo, but the haunted but resilient inner strength key to her earlier releases remains.
Bearcubs - Underwaterfall
London producer Jack Ritchie, who's been around for three years or so already, may seem at first like James Blake's ambient glitchscape plus Jamie XX's steel drums patch, but as it develops the air turns foggy and full of paranoid nocturnal disquiet, seemingly varispeeding itself through warped effects, stuttering surges and pitched down soulful vocals.
Froth - Passing Thing
Wichita Recordings' great hopes for 2017 dial up the Kraut-noise-pop on the latest track from new album Outside (briefly), out 20th February, guitar squalls punctuating the kind of languid indie-pop you didn't think bands did any more before a lengthy instrumental patch goes all psych-pop on the basic theme.
It's actually proving quite slippery so far to get a reading on what Sick Scenes, out 24th February, will exactly be like. After the typical charge of I Broke Up In Amarante comes something that almost touches West Coast classic rock, apart from the lyrics about depression, medication and the generation gap.
Mutes - Vanishing
You know when you find out about a new band, resolve to write only the bare minimum of facts so as to promote the music and only then discover they share a member (and producer) with one of the bands you drone on about most of all? In truth I don't know if Junior off JoFo is on this track or just their live drummer, though those rapid fills sound familiar, but putting that to one side (having drawn attention specifically to it, I know) the track itself is a sprawling, thrusting piece of growing intensity that throws surf harmonies into a cascading pit of post-punk guitars that dips into an ambient phase and re-emerges on the charge for the white light at the end of a noise-pop tunnel.
Gallops - Darkjewel
They used to be called "Wrexham's answer to Battles", a sentence nobody ever thought they could surely envisage, but we always admired their propulsive instrumental charges. Now after three years away they've got back together, delved deeper into the noises that their instruments used to work around and seem like they want to destroy on a base level, matching pummelling sub-bass with huge drums and warped electronics to sound like the battle hymn of the demon army. Album Bronze Mystic is out April 21st.
H.Hawkline - Last Thing On Your Mind
As with many of his Welsh odd-indie contemporaries - one of which, Cate Le Bon, contributes here - Huw Evans takes a roundabout approach to faintly straightforward stylings, in this case easygoing pop synth-driven melodic pop decorated with an abtruse guitar part. No word on a new album to follow 2015's tremendous In The Pink Of Condition, but he is supporting Devendra Banhart for most of the next two months across America.
Magana - Pages
Put out for free download ahead of some solo dates in New York and California, Jeni Magana's heartaching DIY guitar-pop is straightened out slightly, especially in the way it broadens out into a middle eight solo, but the haunted but resilient inner strength key to her earlier releases remains.
Bearcubs - Underwaterfall
London producer Jack Ritchie, who's been around for three years or so already, may seem at first like James Blake's ambient glitchscape plus Jamie XX's steel drums patch, but as it develops the air turns foggy and full of paranoid nocturnal disquiet, seemingly varispeeding itself through warped effects, stuttering surges and pitched down soulful vocals.
Froth - Passing Thing
Wichita Recordings' great hopes for 2017 dial up the Kraut-noise-pop on the latest track from new album Outside (briefly), out 20th February, guitar squalls punctuating the kind of languid indie-pop you didn't think bands did any more before a lengthy instrumental patch goes all psych-pop on the basic theme.
Sunday, January 15, 2017
STN recommends: 15/1/17
Grandaddy - Evermore
It's almost too rote to say this again, but the three tracks Grandaddy have so far made public from Last Place, out 3rd March, have recalled their first three proper albums - Way We Won't the barbed summeriness of Under The Western Freeway, A Lost Machine the desolate future of The Sophtware Slump, and now this nods at Sumday's arranged marriage of warping electronics to 70s singer-songwriterisms, a pulsing dystopia based on a looped bassy synth pattern.
Spiral Stairs - Dance (Cry Wolf)
Ooh, there's Jason Lytle again in the video. Spiral Stairs is Pavement's Scott Kannberg, delivering strident, deceptively light guitar-pop with stratospheric licks breaking in every so often. His second album under the monicker, Doris and the Daggers, is out March 24th and featuring guest vocals by Matt Berninger and Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew amongst others.
Cate Le Bon - Rock Pool
"Bins on fire - what's the occasion?" Rock Pool EP, out on the 27th, is four tracks left over from Crab Day, but the beguilingly odd shuffle of the title track doesn't feel like a mere offcut at all, more a continuation of the album's deconstructed melodies and meaningful illogical lyrics. Video directed by Casey Raymond, with all the oversaturated oddness that implies.
Johnny Flynn - Raising The Dead
It did seem for a while like Flynn was concentrating on his acting career - he's about to appear as the young Einstein in a US series directed by Ron Howard - but in the background of that he was getting the Sussex Wit back together for an album, Sillion, out March 24th (featuring Dave Tattersall on lead guitar for one track) The first single feels like a strolling pace callback to A Larum's utilisation of English folk and London singer-songwriter tropes, Flynn's rich timbre carving the path between the two.
Laura Marling - Wild Fire
Speaking of the London alt-folk set of 2007... Marling describes Semper Eadem, out 10th March, as "me looking specifically at women and feeling great empathy towards them and by proxy towards myself". Acting as advice to others on how to be actively better people in the face of the gaze of others, in delivery and lyrical style it's another step towards her Dylanologist side while in how it opens up still recognisable as herself.
Anna Of The North - Oslo
Anna Lotterud, who is from the titular city, and Brady Daniell-Smith, who isn't, have been making waves with their very Scandi chilly synthpop approach for a good while now without ever quite taking the next step up in the way that some fellow travellers have. Whether, at least commercially, this will be that step we can't say but when the hook kicks in it becomes the very model of the frosted winter sunshine of the video.
WHY? - Proactive Evolution
Never let it be said Yoni Wolf doesn't pour everything of himself into Why? recordings - this track samples doctors who treated him during a mid-recording serious health scare. Otherwise it's the kind of uneasy shivering and inability to keep either a straightforward melody or emotional resilience going, Yoni's crooning drawl more existentially resigned than cynical nowadays. Sixth album Moh Lhean is out 3rd March.
Penelope Isles - Cut Your Hair
Welcome back for the new year, Art Is Hard Records' Postcard Club, and welcome in to Brighton via Cornwall's Penelope Isles, who fascinatingly alternate between chiming dreampop and dark ethereality not too far removed from Veckatimest-era Grizzy Bear, exploding at the end into vivid aural colours.
It's almost too rote to say this again, but the three tracks Grandaddy have so far made public from Last Place, out 3rd March, have recalled their first three proper albums - Way We Won't the barbed summeriness of Under The Western Freeway, A Lost Machine the desolate future of The Sophtware Slump, and now this nods at Sumday's arranged marriage of warping electronics to 70s singer-songwriterisms, a pulsing dystopia based on a looped bassy synth pattern.
Spiral Stairs - Dance (Cry Wolf)
Ooh, there's Jason Lytle again in the video. Spiral Stairs is Pavement's Scott Kannberg, delivering strident, deceptively light guitar-pop with stratospheric licks breaking in every so often. His second album under the monicker, Doris and the Daggers, is out March 24th and featuring guest vocals by Matt Berninger and Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew amongst others.
Cate Le Bon - Rock Pool
"Bins on fire - what's the occasion?" Rock Pool EP, out on the 27th, is four tracks left over from Crab Day, but the beguilingly odd shuffle of the title track doesn't feel like a mere offcut at all, more a continuation of the album's deconstructed melodies and meaningful illogical lyrics. Video directed by Casey Raymond, with all the oversaturated oddness that implies.
Johnny Flynn - Raising The Dead
It did seem for a while like Flynn was concentrating on his acting career - he's about to appear as the young Einstein in a US series directed by Ron Howard - but in the background of that he was getting the Sussex Wit back together for an album, Sillion, out March 24th (featuring Dave Tattersall on lead guitar for one track) The first single feels like a strolling pace callback to A Larum's utilisation of English folk and London singer-songwriter tropes, Flynn's rich timbre carving the path between the two.
Laura Marling - Wild Fire
Speaking of the London alt-folk set of 2007... Marling describes Semper Eadem, out 10th March, as "me looking specifically at women and feeling great empathy towards them and by proxy towards myself". Acting as advice to others on how to be actively better people in the face of the gaze of others, in delivery and lyrical style it's another step towards her Dylanologist side while in how it opens up still recognisable as herself.
Anna Of The North - Oslo
Anna Lotterud, who is from the titular city, and Brady Daniell-Smith, who isn't, have been making waves with their very Scandi chilly synthpop approach for a good while now without ever quite taking the next step up in the way that some fellow travellers have. Whether, at least commercially, this will be that step we can't say but when the hook kicks in it becomes the very model of the frosted winter sunshine of the video.
WHY? - Proactive Evolution
Never let it be said Yoni Wolf doesn't pour everything of himself into Why? recordings - this track samples doctors who treated him during a mid-recording serious health scare. Otherwise it's the kind of uneasy shivering and inability to keep either a straightforward melody or emotional resilience going, Yoni's crooning drawl more existentially resigned than cynical nowadays. Sixth album Moh Lhean is out 3rd March.
Penelope Isles - Cut Your Hair
Welcome back for the new year, Art Is Hard Records' Postcard Club, and welcome in to Brighton via Cornwall's Penelope Isles, who fascinatingly alternate between chiming dreampop and dark ethereality not too far removed from Veckatimest-era Grizzy Bear, exploding at the end into vivid aural colours.
Monday, January 09, 2017
STN Recommends: 9/1/17
We really weren't planning to post all the time, but TOO MUCH NEW MUSIC IS HAPPENING.
Sodastream - Three Sins
The Perth (Australia, not Scotland) duo made quite the splash on what we weren't really calling the indiepop scene yet back in the early 00s with their light, articulate post-Belle & Sebastian touch and smart arrangements around standard acoustic pop instrumentation. Understandably, their quiet corner was left with a noticeable hole following the announcement of their split in 2007. But now they're back! Back! Back! With a fifth album heralded by a track that slowly builds from sawing cellos and refined strumming to a glorious crescendo. Great to have them back. Little By Little is released on 3rd March.
AidenKeryn - Sunburn
Aiden is from Swansea, fourteen, our old friend Adam Walton was thoroughly over this on and around his show this weekend, and that's about the size of what's available about her. This first song is definitely something that promises we'll sooner or later know all about her, not dissimilar to a less misty Daughter in the inviting delicacy with a frosty edge to her vocal and the gorgeous, spacious arrangement very much around it. Reminder: FOURTEEN.
Gulp - Search For Your Love
Guto and Lindsey return to send psych-folk into space once more, a one-off 7" out on the 20th trembling and ethereal as it disappears into the atmosphere powered by sunspot pulses and vintage organs.
Ella - While You Are Away
Ella van der Woude is conservatoire trained, was in the continentally mildly successful Houses, records film soundtracks and has latterly been playing keyboards live as part of the Amber Arcades touring band. This track from a self-titled EP out next week brings her into a spotlight it sounds like she might not want to bathe in, the sparse fingerpicking helping bring an headspinning emotional heft towards a hymnal gorgeousness.
Tim's Rice - New Year, New You
This splendidly named project is by the powers combined of Euros Childs and Rosie Smith (Oh Peas!), based as you'd expect from the perssonel on immense amounts of charm and oddball concepts set to cheap keyboards and drum machine. Mixed Ability Pilates EP is out on Friday.
David Bowie - No Plan
This guy sounds good. Wonder if he's done much else.
Sodastream - Three Sins
The Perth (Australia, not Scotland) duo made quite the splash on what we weren't really calling the indiepop scene yet back in the early 00s with their light, articulate post-Belle & Sebastian touch and smart arrangements around standard acoustic pop instrumentation. Understandably, their quiet corner was left with a noticeable hole following the announcement of their split in 2007. But now they're back! Back! Back! With a fifth album heralded by a track that slowly builds from sawing cellos and refined strumming to a glorious crescendo. Great to have them back. Little By Little is released on 3rd March.
AidenKeryn - Sunburn
Aiden is from Swansea, fourteen, our old friend Adam Walton was thoroughly over this on and around his show this weekend, and that's about the size of what's available about her. This first song is definitely something that promises we'll sooner or later know all about her, not dissimilar to a less misty Daughter in the inviting delicacy with a frosty edge to her vocal and the gorgeous, spacious arrangement very much around it. Reminder: FOURTEEN.
Gulp - Search For Your Love
Guto and Lindsey return to send psych-folk into space once more, a one-off 7" out on the 20th trembling and ethereal as it disappears into the atmosphere powered by sunspot pulses and vintage organs.
Ella - While You Are Away
Ella van der Woude is conservatoire trained, was in the continentally mildly successful Houses, records film soundtracks and has latterly been playing keyboards live as part of the Amber Arcades touring band. This track from a self-titled EP out next week brings her into a spotlight it sounds like she might not want to bathe in, the sparse fingerpicking helping bring an headspinning emotional heft towards a hymnal gorgeousness.
Tim's Rice - New Year, New You
This splendidly named project is by the powers combined of Euros Childs and Rosie Smith (Oh Peas!), based as you'd expect from the perssonel on immense amounts of charm and oddball concepts set to cheap keyboards and drum machine. Mixed Ability Pilates EP is out on Friday.
David Bowie - No Plan
This guy sounds good. Wonder if he's done much else.
Sunday, January 08, 2017
STN Recommends: 8/1/17
SOHN - Hard Liquor
Plenty have tried to match a soulful vocal to dark, dramatic beats, plenty have failed. SOHN manages it by falling into it almost backwards. We certainly haven't heard this vocal styling from him before, but how it works is in the way the ethereality of his previous work both informing and hardening the stuttering jittery, unstable to the point of almost glitchy backing that threatens to "go pop" while never getting round to doing so. From his second album Rennen out next week.
British Sea Power - Bad Bohemian
We're never going to get the wild-eyed Decline Of... BSP back, but if they must be more approachable this is a decent way to do it, the classic tropes of post-punk guitars, racing drums and Yan in the throes of bad things making anthemics out of non-anthemic elements in evidence. Let The Dancers Inherit The Party is out 31st March.
Jens Lekman - What's That Perfume That You Wear?
After a year of his ambitious Postcards series some actual quantifiable new material, though an early version was on his 2014 mixtape. And with production aid from Ewan Pearson he's gone samba pop with sampled steel pans and a gospel choir popping by two-thirds of the way through, going back to his old strength of flirting with MOR tropes while turning upbeat music on its head lyrically. Life Will See You Now is out 17th February.
Wiley - Speakerbox
He's referring to himself as 'Eski boy' again, which is good. It's been interesting to see Wiley edge back to where he was when he first broke through while Skepta (that's him topping and tailing the track) ends up at number one and on Christmas Top Of The Pops dressed as a postman. Such rocket fuelled, self-referencing verses and low end rattling production is where he came in when he was challenging us on what we called it. Godfather is out 13th January.
The Bats - No Trace
The Bats have every right to recall the Dunedin Sound given they're from there and were part of it. This track from their ninth album won't reinvent that wheel, but smartly melancholic, gloriously melodic janglepop? That will always do fine. The Deep Set is out in the UK 17th February.
Baked - Midnight Junkie
Not exactly giving nothing away with that name and title combination, and indeed the Brooklyn outfit sound stoner in the hindmost, thick spread slo-mo shoegaze-influenced guitars and lengthy coruscating soloing just like a somnambulent J Mascis. Second album Farnham is out 24th February.
Jesca Hoop - The Lost Sky
Having just inducted a track from her Sam Beam collaboration into our Best Of 2016 playlist it'd be remiss not to mention the first track from the Californian-sometime-via-Mancunian's upcoming album, her fifth original record and first for Sub Pop, a typical mix of quixotic, richly and urgently delivered subject matter and sublime acoustic delicacy. Memories Are Now is out 10th February.
Mega Emotion - OK Maybe OK
Norwich trio Mega Emotion made a splash round these parts around 2013-14 with their post-punk styled electro-disco, and then vanished. They return next Friday after what sounds like two years of giving their synths a heavy thrashing, warping and compressing them against dirty basslines and howling end-of-tether vocals recalling the first wave of DIY electronic adventurers. There's cowbell too.
Maybe Don't - Torridge And Taw
"The Oxford English Dictionary defines a hobby as a small horse or pony. Maybe Don't are a hobby-grade indiepop band from Birmingham. A well-meaning 3 piece, they formed in late 2014 to moderate acclaim. They once had a show planned with The Spook School but it was cancelled the morning before." Excellent biographical work. That's about your level too, playful scrappy indiepop that barely covers its melody under stop-start dynamics and a complete change for the coda. At Owl Mansion 7" EP is out 31st March on Odd Box.
GLOK - Projected Sounds
And now it's time for Motorik Of The Week. North London's GLOK is/are more akin to the propulsion in repetition of a Steve Reich disciple than classic Krautrock intensity build, something akin to an R Seiliog in which the spaces are more apparent, keyboards delivering patterns over each other and the whirring surges underneath.
Plenty have tried to match a soulful vocal to dark, dramatic beats, plenty have failed. SOHN manages it by falling into it almost backwards. We certainly haven't heard this vocal styling from him before, but how it works is in the way the ethereality of his previous work both informing and hardening the stuttering jittery, unstable to the point of almost glitchy backing that threatens to "go pop" while never getting round to doing so. From his second album Rennen out next week.
British Sea Power - Bad Bohemian
We're never going to get the wild-eyed Decline Of... BSP back, but if they must be more approachable this is a decent way to do it, the classic tropes of post-punk guitars, racing drums and Yan in the throes of bad things making anthemics out of non-anthemic elements in evidence. Let The Dancers Inherit The Party is out 31st March.
Jens Lekman - What's That Perfume That You Wear?
After a year of his ambitious Postcards series some actual quantifiable new material, though an early version was on his 2014 mixtape. And with production aid from Ewan Pearson he's gone samba pop with sampled steel pans and a gospel choir popping by two-thirds of the way through, going back to his old strength of flirting with MOR tropes while turning upbeat music on its head lyrically. Life Will See You Now is out 17th February.
Wiley - Speakerbox
He's referring to himself as 'Eski boy' again, which is good. It's been interesting to see Wiley edge back to where he was when he first broke through while Skepta (that's him topping and tailing the track) ends up at number one and on Christmas Top Of The Pops dressed as a postman. Such rocket fuelled, self-referencing verses and low end rattling production is where he came in when he was challenging us on what we called it. Godfather is out 13th January.
The Bats - No Trace
The Bats have every right to recall the Dunedin Sound given they're from there and were part of it. This track from their ninth album won't reinvent that wheel, but smartly melancholic, gloriously melodic janglepop? That will always do fine. The Deep Set is out in the UK 17th February.
Baked - Midnight Junkie
Not exactly giving nothing away with that name and title combination, and indeed the Brooklyn outfit sound stoner in the hindmost, thick spread slo-mo shoegaze-influenced guitars and lengthy coruscating soloing just like a somnambulent J Mascis. Second album Farnham is out 24th February.
Jesca Hoop - The Lost Sky
Having just inducted a track from her Sam Beam collaboration into our Best Of 2016 playlist it'd be remiss not to mention the first track from the Californian-sometime-via-Mancunian's upcoming album, her fifth original record and first for Sub Pop, a typical mix of quixotic, richly and urgently delivered subject matter and sublime acoustic delicacy. Memories Are Now is out 10th February.
Mega Emotion - OK Maybe OK
Norwich trio Mega Emotion made a splash round these parts around 2013-14 with their post-punk styled electro-disco, and then vanished. They return next Friday after what sounds like two years of giving their synths a heavy thrashing, warping and compressing them against dirty basslines and howling end-of-tether vocals recalling the first wave of DIY electronic adventurers. There's cowbell too.
Maybe Don't - Torridge And Taw
"The Oxford English Dictionary defines a hobby as a small horse or pony. Maybe Don't are a hobby-grade indiepop band from Birmingham. A well-meaning 3 piece, they formed in late 2014 to moderate acclaim. They once had a show planned with The Spook School but it was cancelled the morning before." Excellent biographical work. That's about your level too, playful scrappy indiepop that barely covers its melody under stop-start dynamics and a complete change for the coda. At Owl Mansion 7" EP is out 31st March on Odd Box.
GLOK - Projected Sounds
And now it's time for Motorik Of The Week. North London's GLOK is/are more akin to the propulsion in repetition of a Steve Reich disciple than classic Krautrock intensity build, something akin to an R Seiliog in which the spaces are more apparent, keyboards delivering patterns over each other and the whirring surges underneath.
Thursday, January 05, 2017
That was the 2016 that was
So where were we?
Ah, 2016. Something something terrible year something, but there's always interesting music around somewhere, whether glossed over, lost in the rush to get every demo out to someone or right in the centre of the conversation. We did put together an unranked top 50 albums of the year which we meant to expand upon but... didn't (and not just because we've already changed our mind on a couple of them, but we've deleted the master list now so there it is), but tracks are where it's at these days, so here's sixty of them as first heard over that most death-stealing of years.
A Tribe Called Quest - The Space Program
A comeback nobody really expected, and certainly one nobody expected to be as if they'd taken up not where they left of as much as at their peak. Phife Dawg's death and the outcome of "events" both gave its concerns different shading, but even in an unlikely-to-be-achieved vacuum the ease of allegorical flow and smart sampling stand out in a year where so many laid back. Yes, it's the only rap track indie whitey here has picked. Token to the last, that's STN!
Amaroun - Fear
Even given a couple of EPs under her own name in previous years, it's surprising Peckham-via-Northamptonshire's Jay Brown hasn't turned up on Tips For 2017 lists hardly at all despite the quality of 2016's three singles. Her cracked, warmly confessional voice unaffectedly spilling personal anxieties over synth-as-folk textures is worth your investigation.
Amber Arcades - Fading Lines
Annelotte de Graaf seems to have a coasting, coursing version of this whole dreampop thing down pat, chiming and surging where others might drift without letting go of an aiming for new spiritual heights. Glistening in the grit, the same-titled album didn't make half enough end of year lists.
ANOHNI - 4 Degrees
Hopelessness was full of moral gut punches, using queasy, heavy electronic textures from Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never to press home the polemical viewpoint of complicity within ongoing tragedy. Playing devil's advocate for climate change, it flaunts the triumphalism card in the face of ecological horror.
Arc Iris - Kaleidoscope
Quixotic to a fault, Jocie Adams' project tentatively separated itself from its roots Americana moorings and set off for a folkily psychedelic journey decorated with sawing strings, soaring arrangements and off-centre singer-songwriter expressiveness.
BADBADNOTGOOD feat. Samuel T Herring - Time Moves Slow
The Future Islands leader going neo-soul is brave enough a move without layering it against finding the space in the hip-hop influenced jazzers' most restless, slow burning meditative grooves.
Bat For Lashes - Sunday Love
The Bride's central concept actually hung together while making it possible to effectively separate the strands, as here where Natasha Khan's broken desperation against a driving drum loop either depict the titular character running away from disaster or acts as its own existential road movie.
Camera - Affenfaust
It's not surprising the Berlin trio have played with Michael Rother, but while the spectre of Neu! clearly hangs heavy they have their own way of evolving what goes on over the motorik beat, shapeshifting grumbling bass synths, guitars of various dispositions and a tunnel vision determination.
Cate le Bon - Wonderful
If any album of 2016 could be described as wonderfully off-kilter without patronisation it's Crab Day, the fried neo-psych beat being pulled out of line with a melody retained right at the heart even as it throws itself wilfully out of linear shape.
Christine and the Queens - Tilted
Alright, originally released in 2014 and translated in 2015, but it certainly found its metier this year as Heloise Letissier made her way to centre stage in a way you didn't think artistic minds could these days. Tilted sounds like all that hip pop that only people online liked in 2007 finally found its place, wrapped in a message of positivism for those who didn't think they'd fit in.
Colder - Goodbye
No albums in ten years and then three in seven months? Marc Nguyen Tan certainly isn't just offering anything up, luckily, hypnotic loops and an inscrutable message building but never allowing itself to reach release.
David Bowie - Blackstar
Not much more that can be added to the millions of words around the album and its underlying message, only to say that after the disappointing original version of Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) that came out in 2015 it was quite the turnaround that Bowie's expansive ambitions and the jazz musicians he recorded the album with found a natural meeting point after all, within semi-cryptic sci-fi explorations, shifting avant-jazz and that shift from restlessness to eerie serenity.
David Thomas Broughton - Words Of Art
Speaking of eerie serenity... not unreasonably receptiveness was scarce for a triple album, released in three parts on three different labels, of creaky Dadaist folk partly recorded in Pyongyang, especially as here when Broughton's familiar unravelling home truths are being counterpointed by the never knowingly comforting Aidan Moffatt. Their loss.
Emmy The Great - Algorithm
Emmy pretty much left London nu-folk tropes behind in favour of shards of sparse electronic backing and production playfulness, but while still sounding like her unfiltered emotive self like a ProTools torch singer.
Field Music - The Noisy Days Are Over
Came out in October 2015, but the album was 2016 and we didn't put it on the best tracks of 2015 list, so... Prince famously tweeted apparent approval for the song on release, likely admiring the ease with which scratchy funk is absorbed into the familiar harmonies and glorying in not wanting to get over it and act your age.
Floating Points - Kuiper Pt. 1
The single version, if you will, of the eighteen minute EP track, a muscular jam of a motorik journey whose surging synths and pulses make it ideal for soundtracking footage of late night traffic sped up.
Future Of The Left - If AT&T Drank Tea What Would BP Do?
Not the most consistent of Future Of The Left albums, but it's Future Of The Left, ergo it sounds like skyscrapers being bulldozed with a Geordie Sam Kinison as site foreman.
Grandaddy - Way We Won't
Lines like "as if they've never been away" are far too easy, but this sounds like it could have come straight off Under The Western Freeway and the year's other new track A Lost Machine would have fitted right into The Sophtware Slump's contemplative end, so.
GYTS - I Kick Higher Than A Child
Back in 2013 STN longtime favourites The Victorian English Gentlemens Club let it be known they were making an album with Bad Seed Jim Schlavonus. It finally crept out in a new, seemingly one-off guise towards the end of 2016 and sounded like we wanted it to, ie art-rock with a flick-knife in its back pocket.
Hilary Woods - Bathing
Now back under her birth name after recording as The River Cry, Woods deals in slo-mo, almost somnambulent noir brooding, hazy and fragile as can be, that sounds like it was recorded in mist by a lake at 4am.
Hooded Fang - Plastic Love
Venus On Edge was the album where Hooded Fang finally put it all together and made a consistent album out of their whacked-out dirty garage mania by embracing the fuzzy sci-fi electricity that remarkable dissonant guitar sound they achieve always hinted at. Listen to this, it's virtually industrial.
Islet - Cathays Terrors
The return of the most active men and woman in Welsh avant-indie might take time to seep in, but by then the broken parts, intrinsic melody, Emma's seductive vocals and jagged solos that help turn the track on a dime from floating to urgent will have seeped right in.
James Chance and the Contortions - Melt Yourself Down
Chance came out of semi-retirement only a few years ago and resurrecting the Contortions name gave this year's album more of a profile than his last few revivals, but in every respect it absolutely sounds like it's still 1979 and Chance is still in a gold lame jacket, wielding a sax like a weapon and attempting to start fistfights in a New York warehouse space.
Johnny Foreigner - If You Can't Be Honest, Be Awesome
Of course. Ten years in the title meaning of Mono No Aware seems depressingly more on the nose, but as long as they're out there throwing guitar parts and devil drums against each other in the hope, realised by unknown alchemy, that they might make some sense if only Alexei and Kelly can shout the honest odds over them there'll always be an England.
Kiran Leonard - Don't Make Friends With Good People
Odd album, Grapefruit - two extraordinary multi-part epics (the other, Pink Fruit, was in last year's tracks of the year list) and then a lot of filler. Still, Leonard's good at this mercurial stuff when his guitar picking gets into full gear and full bodied explosions can fade into almost ambient passages into something that sounds like an entirely different song while somehow keeping the underlying theme going throughout.
Lambchop - In Care Of 8675309
If you had 22, A Million on your end of year list - hey, we did - you'd better have found room for FLOTUS too, taking a mildly similar approach of feeding folk strands through software that divides it into fractured, electronically enhanced pieces, only with Kurt Wagner's love of southern soul and, even when over-Autotuned/vocodered/whatever, emotive voice remaining somehow intact.
Los Campesinos! - I Broke Up In Amarante
Of course. Where Sick Scenes goes after No Blues' slow emergence from the depths remains to be seen, but the signs are as good as ever - endless hooks piling up, indie-rock racing ahead of itself, lyrically the signature moves o melodrama to shout along to, unflinching bruised honesty and talking about 90s football while half-cut.
The Lucid Dream - Bad Texan
Attempting to overwhelm all in its path by just weight of guitar noise is an honourable pursuit, and few achieved it better than this seemingly never wanting to end bruising drone of motorik hypnosis, psych-garage insistence and when appropriate, just sending everything into the red.
Magana - Golden Tongue
Brooklynite Jeni Magana makes deceptively complex, subtly heartfelt and dramatic bedroom guitar pop that nods at Sharon van Etten and St Vincent without being anything other than her own woman.
Man Of Moon - Sign
They're not the most workaholic of bands, but people are being slow to recognise there's something afoot with the Edinburgh duo, who take after friends the Phantom Band in expanding on a motorik propulsion and picking up pushed along effects and psych-folk structures along the way.
Martha - Curly & Raquel
Nothing is ever that straightforward with Martha as we should be aware by now, but strip away the socio-political subtleties and harmonic intricacies and that's still a hell of a rabble rousing pop-punk hook and chorus.
Meilyr Jones - Featured Artist
2013 was an ambitious work that turned out just as hoped, synthesising regret and joy into a florid chamber pop melange. He should be Jarvis by now.
Meursault - Simple Is Good
Neil Pennycook never actually went away, but the resuscitation of his most famous band guise gave him cause to cut back on their last album's extravagance to the bone-level bitter quick of sparse soul searching that is neither the maximal last guise or the lo-fi electronically aided tearing at self that he emerged with. This year's album will be fascinating.
Minor Victories - Give Up The Ghost
Oppressive, like it's trying to work its way out of your skull by brute force of pushing alone, and proof from people who've been there before - Stuart Braithwaite, Rachel Goswell - that the shoegaze revival doesn't have to float when it can drill.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Jesus Alone
The story behind the album, or some of it (this is one of the tracks recorded before Arthur's death, making its first line far more unnerving) doesn't need raking over again but this track, Warren Ellis (I suspect) deploying every bass frequency he can to weigh it down further, continues Push The Sky Away's fascinating with electronic loops over plangent instruments and sounds like the coming fires.
Nico Mulhy & Teitur - Describe You
Teitur is a fascinating songwriter, Mulhy an inventive arranger, the result literate baroque chamber pop with peculiar charm. Listen to that banjo go!
No Age - Serf To Serf
Bracing two-piece noise just when we needed it. Sounds ready to trash the joint, but with laser focus.
Ohboy! - Carrot And The Stick
Essentially it's music about music, unashamedly indie at that, but the Sonic Youth managed guitar squalls, the classy chorus hook and the lesser heard these days false ending... they've got something, these.
Okkervil River - Call Yourself Renee
Talk that Will Sheff had dropped the rest of his band and mainlined Nilsson for Away was worrying, especially given The Silver Gymnasium's unevenness. The care taken over the shift, here the baroque strings and woodwind decorating the edges of a sprawling pastoral tale of romance and loss, assuaged those fears.
Oliver Coates - Innocent Love
Picking up where Arthur Russell might have left off, classically trained cellist cuts up the sounds made by his instrument into new electronic-influenced shapes that sound like pirate radio output or Matthew Herbert-like cut-up house.
Pavo Pavo - Ran Ran Run
Unfortunately their album didn't quite live up to the promise of its opening track, a stately weightless drift with harmonies and electronic shimmers that took up where 2007 Grizzly Bear left off. Then it turns into faux-80s pop, just because it can.
Peaness - Oh George
Another band not turning up on anything like as many predictions lists as they should, the Chester trio turn in a gloriously summer-infused harmonic surfy power-pop that's actually an anti-love song to George Osborne.
PVT - Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend
Nine minutes of undulating purpose and aggression from the Australian vintage trio, building from ambience to pulsing loops to something from the Holy Fuck school of sending vintage synths into battle. There's a treated vocal effect too, and it works for once.
Radiohead - Ful Stop
It's been a big year for the motorik beat, what can we say. Here it's taken to grander, actively menacing levels, the doom-mongering drones giving way to a clatter, a loping bassline and a swirl of effects before falling into a pit of horror soundtrack atmospherics. Thom meanwhile does what he does.
Rose Elinor Dougall - Stellular
Why be sophisticated indie-psych high priestess or playful electropop strutter when you can be both?
Sam Beam & Jesca Hoop - The Lamb You Lost
It's a wonder nobody thought to put Hoop's light touch strange Americana alongside Beam (Iron & Wine)'s flavoured croak before, especially if the result is like this ambulatory cascading emotional promise.
Savages - T.I.W.Y.G.
Even more than before, Savages aren't planning to take your shit, drilling its way to the earth's core in the rhythm section direction, reaching out with hope to touch the face of something bigger the opposite way.
Shearwater - Filaments
Jonathan Meiburg may have reined in his grandiloquent visions of late, but despite the unusual insistency of the rhythm it's still just about recognisable as his work for the passion and the inventive reach of its shifts and ambitions.
She Drew The Gun - Poem
Provocative in its imagery, slow burning in its restrained aura, this year's entry in the exclusive canon of spoken word verse that actually works when placed into a guitar-based context.
Slow Club - Ancient Rolling Sea
The Memphis soul shadows and unhurried pace gives more than a hint of the involvement of Matthew E White's Spacebomb studio, the countrified strut and sway is entirely band's own now they've grown up and taken responsibilities seriously.
Spectres - New Buildings
Not the noise-rock outfit from Bristol - take a wild guess how we came across this track - but a Vancouver band whose guitar squalls are very slightly more restrained, mining further the dark, messy end of post-punk in charging towards the edge.
T.O.Y.S - Liquorice
Finally a full-length, and even by the lofty standards of their EPs it succeeded in securing that spot on the dancefloor where the whirring psych keyboard meets the dark glam-disco rhythm section, irresistable in a way that's clearly not good for you.
Teenage Fanclub - Thin Air
Here isn't on their top shelf of albums, but as far as their craft of turning Byrdsian harmonies into pure spun gold this track is.
This Becomes Us - Painter Man Is Coming
If only Falco put the Christian Fitness albums on Spotify they'd be three from three. We'll just have to make do with Julia Ruzicka and guest vocalists' project, in this case Black Francis fronting the best Pixies track of 2016.
TRAAMS - A House On Fire
Not a cover of this. Instead, nine minutes of what TRAAMS do best - unstoppable rhythm, bass burrowing its way to the cerebral cortex, fuzzaway guitar attempting to restrain itself from being carried away too far, Stu Hopkins singing like it's the last thing he'll ever do.
Trust Fund - wwsd
We Have Always Lived In The Harolds was the sound of Ellis losing himself in his bedroom daydreaming, or nightmare forming, shambling and attempting in an unfiltered format, vainly to hold itself together just like the recordings with which he made his name so effectively.
TVAM - Total Immersion
Say this for it, it's nominally determinist. Joe Oxley does this whole thing of attempting to introduce broken dark electro to droning shoegaze landscapes far better than the vast majority who've tried can and it's difficult not to get lost in the hypnotic Spacemen 3-ish rotating layers.
Vanishing Twin - Telescope
This year's 'just because Broadcast aren't doing it any more...', the soundtrack for a fictional bachelor pad finds the route between 60s psych-pop and the Radiophonic Workshop's spare cupboard library.
Vienna Ditto - Ticks
Quietly and inhabiting their own headspace, Oxford duo Vienna Ditto put out one of the best, most intriguing EPs of the year of which this was the title track, taking after their self-described 'voodoo sci-fi blues' with a healthy/dirty side order of John Barry spy themes and cabaret flourishes.
Weaves - Candy
As we've already had more than enough far-too-long climaxes, some noise-pop to finish via the explosive Toronto band who seem keen on shaking their songs around until achieving disorientation, the better to attack with the one-two of Jasmyn Burke's threatening delivery and divebombing riffs.
Ah, 2016. Something something terrible year something, but there's always interesting music around somewhere, whether glossed over, lost in the rush to get every demo out to someone or right in the centre of the conversation. We did put together an unranked top 50 albums of the year which we meant to expand upon but... didn't (and not just because we've already changed our mind on a couple of them, but we've deleted the master list now so there it is), but tracks are where it's at these days, so here's sixty of them as first heard over that most death-stealing of years.
A Tribe Called Quest - The Space Program
A comeback nobody really expected, and certainly one nobody expected to be as if they'd taken up not where they left of as much as at their peak. Phife Dawg's death and the outcome of "events" both gave its concerns different shading, but even in an unlikely-to-be-achieved vacuum the ease of allegorical flow and smart sampling stand out in a year where so many laid back. Yes, it's the only rap track indie whitey here has picked. Token to the last, that's STN!
Amaroun - Fear
Even given a couple of EPs under her own name in previous years, it's surprising Peckham-via-Northamptonshire's Jay Brown hasn't turned up on Tips For 2017 lists hardly at all despite the quality of 2016's three singles. Her cracked, warmly confessional voice unaffectedly spilling personal anxieties over synth-as-folk textures is worth your investigation.
Amber Arcades - Fading Lines
Annelotte de Graaf seems to have a coasting, coursing version of this whole dreampop thing down pat, chiming and surging where others might drift without letting go of an aiming for new spiritual heights. Glistening in the grit, the same-titled album didn't make half enough end of year lists.
ANOHNI - 4 Degrees
Hopelessness was full of moral gut punches, using queasy, heavy electronic textures from Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never to press home the polemical viewpoint of complicity within ongoing tragedy. Playing devil's advocate for climate change, it flaunts the triumphalism card in the face of ecological horror.
Arc Iris - Kaleidoscope
Quixotic to a fault, Jocie Adams' project tentatively separated itself from its roots Americana moorings and set off for a folkily psychedelic journey decorated with sawing strings, soaring arrangements and off-centre singer-songwriter expressiveness.
BADBADNOTGOOD feat. Samuel T Herring - Time Moves Slow
The Future Islands leader going neo-soul is brave enough a move without layering it against finding the space in the hip-hop influenced jazzers' most restless, slow burning meditative grooves.
Bat For Lashes - Sunday Love
The Bride's central concept actually hung together while making it possible to effectively separate the strands, as here where Natasha Khan's broken desperation against a driving drum loop either depict the titular character running away from disaster or acts as its own existential road movie.
Camera - Affenfaust
It's not surprising the Berlin trio have played with Michael Rother, but while the spectre of Neu! clearly hangs heavy they have their own way of evolving what goes on over the motorik beat, shapeshifting grumbling bass synths, guitars of various dispositions and a tunnel vision determination.
Cate le Bon - Wonderful
If any album of 2016 could be described as wonderfully off-kilter without patronisation it's Crab Day, the fried neo-psych beat being pulled out of line with a melody retained right at the heart even as it throws itself wilfully out of linear shape.
Christine and the Queens - Tilted
Alright, originally released in 2014 and translated in 2015, but it certainly found its metier this year as Heloise Letissier made her way to centre stage in a way you didn't think artistic minds could these days. Tilted sounds like all that hip pop that only people online liked in 2007 finally found its place, wrapped in a message of positivism for those who didn't think they'd fit in.
Colder - Goodbye
No albums in ten years and then three in seven months? Marc Nguyen Tan certainly isn't just offering anything up, luckily, hypnotic loops and an inscrutable message building but never allowing itself to reach release.
David Bowie - Blackstar
Not much more that can be added to the millions of words around the album and its underlying message, only to say that after the disappointing original version of Sue (Or In A Season Of Crime) that came out in 2015 it was quite the turnaround that Bowie's expansive ambitions and the jazz musicians he recorded the album with found a natural meeting point after all, within semi-cryptic sci-fi explorations, shifting avant-jazz and that shift from restlessness to eerie serenity.
David Thomas Broughton - Words Of Art
Speaking of eerie serenity... not unreasonably receptiveness was scarce for a triple album, released in three parts on three different labels, of creaky Dadaist folk partly recorded in Pyongyang, especially as here when Broughton's familiar unravelling home truths are being counterpointed by the never knowingly comforting Aidan Moffatt. Their loss.
Emmy The Great - Algorithm
Emmy pretty much left London nu-folk tropes behind in favour of shards of sparse electronic backing and production playfulness, but while still sounding like her unfiltered emotive self like a ProTools torch singer.
Field Music - The Noisy Days Are Over
Came out in October 2015, but the album was 2016 and we didn't put it on the best tracks of 2015 list, so... Prince famously tweeted apparent approval for the song on release, likely admiring the ease with which scratchy funk is absorbed into the familiar harmonies and glorying in not wanting to get over it and act your age.
Floating Points - Kuiper Pt. 1
The single version, if you will, of the eighteen minute EP track, a muscular jam of a motorik journey whose surging synths and pulses make it ideal for soundtracking footage of late night traffic sped up.
Future Of The Left - If AT&T Drank Tea What Would BP Do?
Not the most consistent of Future Of The Left albums, but it's Future Of The Left, ergo it sounds like skyscrapers being bulldozed with a Geordie Sam Kinison as site foreman.
Grandaddy - Way We Won't
Lines like "as if they've never been away" are far too easy, but this sounds like it could have come straight off Under The Western Freeway and the year's other new track A Lost Machine would have fitted right into The Sophtware Slump's contemplative end, so.
GYTS - I Kick Higher Than A Child
Back in 2013 STN longtime favourites The Victorian English Gentlemens Club let it be known they were making an album with Bad Seed Jim Schlavonus. It finally crept out in a new, seemingly one-off guise towards the end of 2016 and sounded like we wanted it to, ie art-rock with a flick-knife in its back pocket.
Hilary Woods - Bathing
Now back under her birth name after recording as The River Cry, Woods deals in slo-mo, almost somnambulent noir brooding, hazy and fragile as can be, that sounds like it was recorded in mist by a lake at 4am.
Hooded Fang - Plastic Love
Venus On Edge was the album where Hooded Fang finally put it all together and made a consistent album out of their whacked-out dirty garage mania by embracing the fuzzy sci-fi electricity that remarkable dissonant guitar sound they achieve always hinted at. Listen to this, it's virtually industrial.
Islet - Cathays Terrors
The return of the most active men and woman in Welsh avant-indie might take time to seep in, but by then the broken parts, intrinsic melody, Emma's seductive vocals and jagged solos that help turn the track on a dime from floating to urgent will have seeped right in.
James Chance and the Contortions - Melt Yourself Down
Chance came out of semi-retirement only a few years ago and resurrecting the Contortions name gave this year's album more of a profile than his last few revivals, but in every respect it absolutely sounds like it's still 1979 and Chance is still in a gold lame jacket, wielding a sax like a weapon and attempting to start fistfights in a New York warehouse space.
Johnny Foreigner - If You Can't Be Honest, Be Awesome
Of course. Ten years in the title meaning of Mono No Aware seems depressingly more on the nose, but as long as they're out there throwing guitar parts and devil drums against each other in the hope, realised by unknown alchemy, that they might make some sense if only Alexei and Kelly can shout the honest odds over them there'll always be an England.
Kiran Leonard - Don't Make Friends With Good People
Odd album, Grapefruit - two extraordinary multi-part epics (the other, Pink Fruit, was in last year's tracks of the year list) and then a lot of filler. Still, Leonard's good at this mercurial stuff when his guitar picking gets into full gear and full bodied explosions can fade into almost ambient passages into something that sounds like an entirely different song while somehow keeping the underlying theme going throughout.
Lambchop - In Care Of 8675309
If you had 22, A Million on your end of year list - hey, we did - you'd better have found room for FLOTUS too, taking a mildly similar approach of feeding folk strands through software that divides it into fractured, electronically enhanced pieces, only with Kurt Wagner's love of southern soul and, even when over-Autotuned/vocodered/whatever, emotive voice remaining somehow intact.
Los Campesinos! - I Broke Up In Amarante
Of course. Where Sick Scenes goes after No Blues' slow emergence from the depths remains to be seen, but the signs are as good as ever - endless hooks piling up, indie-rock racing ahead of itself, lyrically the signature moves o melodrama to shout along to, unflinching bruised honesty and talking about 90s football while half-cut.
The Lucid Dream - Bad Texan
Attempting to overwhelm all in its path by just weight of guitar noise is an honourable pursuit, and few achieved it better than this seemingly never wanting to end bruising drone of motorik hypnosis, psych-garage insistence and when appropriate, just sending everything into the red.
Magana - Golden Tongue
Brooklynite Jeni Magana makes deceptively complex, subtly heartfelt and dramatic bedroom guitar pop that nods at Sharon van Etten and St Vincent without being anything other than her own woman.
Man Of Moon - Sign
They're not the most workaholic of bands, but people are being slow to recognise there's something afoot with the Edinburgh duo, who take after friends the Phantom Band in expanding on a motorik propulsion and picking up pushed along effects and psych-folk structures along the way.
Martha - Curly & Raquel
Nothing is ever that straightforward with Martha as we should be aware by now, but strip away the socio-political subtleties and harmonic intricacies and that's still a hell of a rabble rousing pop-punk hook and chorus.
Meilyr Jones - Featured Artist
2013 was an ambitious work that turned out just as hoped, synthesising regret and joy into a florid chamber pop melange. He should be Jarvis by now.
Meursault - Simple Is Good
Neil Pennycook never actually went away, but the resuscitation of his most famous band guise gave him cause to cut back on their last album's extravagance to the bone-level bitter quick of sparse soul searching that is neither the maximal last guise or the lo-fi electronically aided tearing at self that he emerged with. This year's album will be fascinating.
Minor Victories - Give Up The Ghost
Oppressive, like it's trying to work its way out of your skull by brute force of pushing alone, and proof from people who've been there before - Stuart Braithwaite, Rachel Goswell - that the shoegaze revival doesn't have to float when it can drill.
Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Jesus Alone
The story behind the album, or some of it (this is one of the tracks recorded before Arthur's death, making its first line far more unnerving) doesn't need raking over again but this track, Warren Ellis (I suspect) deploying every bass frequency he can to weigh it down further, continues Push The Sky Away's fascinating with electronic loops over plangent instruments and sounds like the coming fires.
Nico Mulhy & Teitur - Describe You
Teitur is a fascinating songwriter, Mulhy an inventive arranger, the result literate baroque chamber pop with peculiar charm. Listen to that banjo go!
No Age - Serf To Serf
Bracing two-piece noise just when we needed it. Sounds ready to trash the joint, but with laser focus.
Ohboy! - Carrot And The Stick
Essentially it's music about music, unashamedly indie at that, but the Sonic Youth managed guitar squalls, the classy chorus hook and the lesser heard these days false ending... they've got something, these.
Okkervil River - Call Yourself Renee
Talk that Will Sheff had dropped the rest of his band and mainlined Nilsson for Away was worrying, especially given The Silver Gymnasium's unevenness. The care taken over the shift, here the baroque strings and woodwind decorating the edges of a sprawling pastoral tale of romance and loss, assuaged those fears.
Oliver Coates - Innocent Love
Picking up where Arthur Russell might have left off, classically trained cellist cuts up the sounds made by his instrument into new electronic-influenced shapes that sound like pirate radio output or Matthew Herbert-like cut-up house.
Pavo Pavo - Ran Ran Run
Unfortunately their album didn't quite live up to the promise of its opening track, a stately weightless drift with harmonies and electronic shimmers that took up where 2007 Grizzly Bear left off. Then it turns into faux-80s pop, just because it can.
Peaness - Oh George
Another band not turning up on anything like as many predictions lists as they should, the Chester trio turn in a gloriously summer-infused harmonic surfy power-pop that's actually an anti-love song to George Osborne.
PVT - Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend
Nine minutes of undulating purpose and aggression from the Australian vintage trio, building from ambience to pulsing loops to something from the Holy Fuck school of sending vintage synths into battle. There's a treated vocal effect too, and it works for once.
Radiohead - Ful Stop
It's been a big year for the motorik beat, what can we say. Here it's taken to grander, actively menacing levels, the doom-mongering drones giving way to a clatter, a loping bassline and a swirl of effects before falling into a pit of horror soundtrack atmospherics. Thom meanwhile does what he does.
Rose Elinor Dougall - Stellular
Why be sophisticated indie-psych high priestess or playful electropop strutter when you can be both?
Sam Beam & Jesca Hoop - The Lamb You Lost
It's a wonder nobody thought to put Hoop's light touch strange Americana alongside Beam (Iron & Wine)'s flavoured croak before, especially if the result is like this ambulatory cascading emotional promise.
Savages - T.I.W.Y.G.
Even more than before, Savages aren't planning to take your shit, drilling its way to the earth's core in the rhythm section direction, reaching out with hope to touch the face of something bigger the opposite way.
Shearwater - Filaments
Jonathan Meiburg may have reined in his grandiloquent visions of late, but despite the unusual insistency of the rhythm it's still just about recognisable as his work for the passion and the inventive reach of its shifts and ambitions.
She Drew The Gun - Poem
Provocative in its imagery, slow burning in its restrained aura, this year's entry in the exclusive canon of spoken word verse that actually works when placed into a guitar-based context.
Slow Club - Ancient Rolling Sea
The Memphis soul shadows and unhurried pace gives more than a hint of the involvement of Matthew E White's Spacebomb studio, the countrified strut and sway is entirely band's own now they've grown up and taken responsibilities seriously.
Spectres - New Buildings
Not the noise-rock outfit from Bristol - take a wild guess how we came across this track - but a Vancouver band whose guitar squalls are very slightly more restrained, mining further the dark, messy end of post-punk in charging towards the edge.
T.O.Y.S - Liquorice
Finally a full-length, and even by the lofty standards of their EPs it succeeded in securing that spot on the dancefloor where the whirring psych keyboard meets the dark glam-disco rhythm section, irresistable in a way that's clearly not good for you.
Teenage Fanclub - Thin Air
Here isn't on their top shelf of albums, but as far as their craft of turning Byrdsian harmonies into pure spun gold this track is.
This Becomes Us - Painter Man Is Coming
If only Falco put the Christian Fitness albums on Spotify they'd be three from three. We'll just have to make do with Julia Ruzicka and guest vocalists' project, in this case Black Francis fronting the best Pixies track of 2016.
TRAAMS - A House On Fire
Not a cover of this. Instead, nine minutes of what TRAAMS do best - unstoppable rhythm, bass burrowing its way to the cerebral cortex, fuzzaway guitar attempting to restrain itself from being carried away too far, Stu Hopkins singing like it's the last thing he'll ever do.
Trust Fund - wwsd
We Have Always Lived In The Harolds was the sound of Ellis losing himself in his bedroom daydreaming, or nightmare forming, shambling and attempting in an unfiltered format, vainly to hold itself together just like the recordings with which he made his name so effectively.
TVAM - Total Immersion
Say this for it, it's nominally determinist. Joe Oxley does this whole thing of attempting to introduce broken dark electro to droning shoegaze landscapes far better than the vast majority who've tried can and it's difficult not to get lost in the hypnotic Spacemen 3-ish rotating layers.
Vanishing Twin - Telescope
This year's 'just because Broadcast aren't doing it any more...', the soundtrack for a fictional bachelor pad finds the route between 60s psych-pop and the Radiophonic Workshop's spare cupboard library.
Vienna Ditto - Ticks
Quietly and inhabiting their own headspace, Oxford duo Vienna Ditto put out one of the best, most intriguing EPs of the year of which this was the title track, taking after their self-described 'voodoo sci-fi blues' with a healthy/dirty side order of John Barry spy themes and cabaret flourishes.
Weaves - Candy
As we've already had more than enough far-too-long climaxes, some noise-pop to finish via the explosive Toronto band who seem keen on shaking their songs around until achieving disorientation, the better to attack with the one-two of Jasmyn Burke's threatening delivery and divebombing riffs.
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