Tracklist: Mary Hampton - Honey In The Rock

Brightonian Hampton has been around for a few years - in fact her only full-length album, My Mother's Children, was at 43 in our albums of 2008 list - but Rough Trade have picked her up for a one-off 7" out July 4th. It's as sparse and unsettlingly personal as her previous work, a fragile and oddly unnerving work that borrows from a very English coastal folk lineage, constructing its own gothic folk tale ecosystem. Lovingly warm and hairs-on-end cold simultaneously.

A grand day out: Glaston-Ferret

No, it's not a great name, but at least the Mad Ferret pub in Preston has a reason for it - it's the weekend of Glastonbury, see, "set up to combat the varying degrees of impossibility of getting a Glastonbury ticket these days". To commemorate they lay real grass inside the pub, which is surely a health hazard in waiting, as well as hay bales and sales of ice cream and scrumpy. Oh, and bands.

The Victorian English Gentlemens Club
The Saturday night headliners always were a storming live proposition, but warming up for their out this week third album Bag Of Meat the trio seem to be turning it up a notch, both in presentation - Crusaders garb, bakelite telephone receiver as second mike, creepy mannequin at the front of the stage - and in sound, manic and dynamic in equal measure. A right racket, basically.



The Voluntary Butler Scheme
We don't know whether Rob Jones plays with a band these days but it's more fun for everyone but himself if he's alone with his keyboard stand-cum-bureau covered in noisemakers, toys and some very important and overused loop pedals. Second album The Grandad Galaxy, out July 18th, sends his stylistic radar haywire, from hip hop and J-pop to 50s rock and roll.



Race Horses
The Sunday headliners are a good old-fashioned psych-indie outfit of the Gorky's lineage, not unreasonably as they're from Wales too, Aberystwyth to be precise. And like many a good late 90s Welsh band they might start in psych-indie circles but their radar soon weaves all over the place and ends up existing well outside the current state of things.



ALSO: emotive, expansive elegance from Tigers That Talked, twisted melodies from Polytechnic fallout Driver Drive Faster, jangling psych oddness from Hey Sholay, spiky Brightonians We Walk In Straight Lines, The B Of The Bang, The Retrospective Soundtrack Players and a lot of people whose names we don't know.

Calendar: 25th-26th June
Tickets: £5 per day, £8 the weekend

Tracklist Special: Indietracks Compilation 2011

Today's selections are taken from this year's Indietracks compilation, forty tracks from artists playing the festival this year, available on a pay-what-you-like basis but with the caveat that all money goes to the upkeep of the Midland Railway Trust, who keep the centre at which this most excellent of festivals takes place running year after year.

Alongside Edwyn Collins, Jeffrey Lewis (who has an unreleased demo on the album), Jonny, Suburban Kids With Biblical Names and Herman Düne, the Hidden Cameras are one of this year's big draws. The Mild Mannered Army is a new version of 2001's swooningly defiant The International MMA, featuring glorious strings recorded live at Shoreditch Church in 2010.




Pocketbooks have been around and none more jangly for some years on the scene, but if this first taste of second album Carousel, out later in the year, is any guide they've stepped up a gear into the sort of pastoral rheumy-eyed melancholia Camera Obscura wouldn't blanch at.




Haiku Salut are three females from the Peak District and thereabouts, all once of the Deirdres, whose DIY instrumentals with organ, percussion, loops and here accordion are Left Bank baroque meets retro-futurist. Snaffle is borrowed from How We Got Along After the Yarn Bomb, an EP out in August.




It's the indiepop unified scene that makes the festival what it is and Pete Green's been near the forefront of it for ages. His band The Sweet Nothings, making what we think is their recorded debut, provide The Day Of The Popshow, a tribute to these days of our lives.

Tracklist: (STN goes north, runs into) Runaround Kids - No Dreams

As you may know, we were at the inaugural Long Division festival in Wakefield on Saturday (we're aware it technically ran Friday to Sunday, but we have limits). The first thing to say is congratulations to Dean, Chris and everybody else involved in the largely excellent organisation. Yes, there was the odd issue with too big a band in too small a venue (cf Wave Pictures in a pub back room, the queue nearly back to the front door) and we hope what seems from all accounts to be a security overreaction that brought the Wedding Present's it has to be said slightly underpowered headline set to a lengthy pause (in the only venue the festival didn't supply their own people for, according to the organisers) doesn't affect the chances of a licence being granted for next year. That aside, everywhere ran pretty much to time, the venues were approachable and within short distances, there were no other major organisational issues on the day that we saw and it genuinely looked like everyone was in the best of spirits. Even the predicted rain pretty much held off.

Musically there was, of course, a great Los Campesinos! set, very much one from a band doing the summer circuit knowing they have a whole new set of songs ready to launch, but little the worse for that. It occurred to us as the floorboards became spring loaded that LC! gigs are, when you stop and think about it, becoming pretty weird. A room full of well lubricated kids, all with arms aloft, at least a couple of whom are trying to crowdsurf, indulging in a collective shoutalong to a heavy treatise on the death of love replete with imagery about being dropped from a plane and "given the option of dying painlessly in peace at 45". Elsewhere what we saw of the Wind-Up Birds confirmed their cynical outsider greatness (new single to be Tracklisted very soon) and that national cult status is overdue, Emma Pollock's command of offbeat melody really needs digging out from the shadow cast by the Delgados' catalogue and at the first gig of asking The Birthday Kiss are showing plenty of promise. Also we have it first hand that Darwin Deez seems to really like Napoleon IIIrd, even if the sound mix on the vocals didn't.

Plus, as press, we got given a lanyard.

And then there was the coming glory of hometown heroes Runaround Kids. They played Reading & Leeds at BBC Introducing's insistence last year and on this occasion they left the 200 capacity The Hop as packed as just about humanly possible, or at least such as it can under fire safety regulations. Even with all the windows and doors open it still felt like the oxygen was being fast sucked out of the room. Their power trio set-up takes its cues from the same well of American college rock fuzziness as Copy Haho and Tubelord (not unreasonably they supported Johnny Foreigner in April in that same place, and we think all of LC! were watching - half of them were standing next to us), slamming riffs and hooks into each other, taking longer time over songs to deviate at quieter hue from the straight ahead punchy path. We are going to have to watch these very closely because they could turn into something enthralling. In the meantime this is their single from last September, No Dreams.

No Dreams by Runaround Kids

Tracklist: Zaza - Your Race

Zaza, of whom the little we can source tells us are from Brooklyn and a trio, came across our radar via Kip Berman of The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, a band who were early supporters but not much of a guide to what their album Sacred Geometry sounds like. Darkly ambient, employing synths that coast along the rattling programmed beats. TV On The Radio are an immediate comparison point, the arrythmic exercises of their earlier releases imbued with a certain bleak soul, added to which is the odd shoegaze wash and electronic pulse. The whole album is $10 via Bandcamp and is worth at least a cursory check.

03 Your Race by zaza

Tracklist: Washed Out - Eyes Be Closed

So we're onto post-chillwave now, are we? Ernest Greene steps out of his bedroom and onto Sub Pop for July's debut album Within And Without, recorded with Ben Allen, who works pretty much with any New Yorker looking for the significant ethereal other. And that's pretty much how Eyes Be Closed goes, more distinct and less outwardly heat-hazed than before but still coasting on spacious layers of cloud sounds. Enveloping, in a word.

Washed Out - Eyes Be Closed by subpop

Tracklist: The Bandana Splits - Sometimes

Po-mo takes on retro girl group tropes are hardly the music world's newest invention - indeed you could argue it was a seam being mined as far back as the Three Degrees, who formed at the time when the Supremes, Shangri-Las and co were on top but didn't go international for nearly another decade. Brooklyn trio The Bandana Splits may have the Andrews Sisters styling dead on but something about their August-due debut wanders beyond those pre-set boundaries with killer harmonies, Northern soul-inflected production and general effervescence, not to mention that hidden away in the trio is Dawn Landes, who released a well worth the effort album in 2008's Fireproof.

Bandana Splits - Sometimes by saltlands

Tracklist: Evans The Death - Threads/I'm So Unclean

Not often, as in not at all before now, we post two tracks on the same post, but as this is a double A-side out 4th July on the mighty Fortuna Pop! we feel justified. Additionally it's a band we're seeing great things in the future for, Clapham/Chelmsford's Evans The Death exhibiting two songs crashing none-shall-pass C86 that roared that total four and a half minutes. The first features a feedback frenzy just under the crust and actually appears to be about the titular nuclear war drama, the second a frantic garage college rock juggernaut that gets a shot of downers before it can go too far into its spasms. All the while, Katherine Whitaker emotes plantively with the best of them.



Evans the Death - I'm So Unclean (Fortuna Pop!) by Independent Label Market

Tracklist: Zulu Winter - Let's Move Back To Front

Hark, the second of the post-Wild Beasts bands. Musically it's all there - chiming guitars, restless quasi-metronomic drums, everything we wrote about Talkers on Monday except these actually do have a singer who likes a falsetto swoop. Clipped and clean, there's a certain funk element to the way everything tightly meshes in circular staccato while pushing forwards, building (is that brass in the mix?) to an eruption it deliberately never quite reaches. This is their very first public track. They're heading places fast.

Let's Move Back to Front by Zulu Winter

Tracklist: The Rosie Taylor Project - Sleep

It's been a while - early 2009, in fact - since we last heard from the Leeds outfit that prefigured the indie-folk explosion while doing it a lot better than most. The first release from forthcoming second album Twin Beds, produced like their previous material by Wild Beasts' knob twiddler of choice Richard Formby, is full of steadily shuffling melancholia, reflective but never overbearing even if it slides towards maudlin, leaping into action with a trumpet solo and the warmest of harmonies.

Tracklist: Paisley & Charlie - Stone Lions

We've been following Paisley Pattenden and Charlie Darling for a while now, at least since they were trading as Detox Cute & The Beauty Junkies. Not closely enough to notice that this came out a month ago - genuinely, we had this week written down as release date due to an awry PR email - but better late than never and all that. The reason why it's better to write about this single at some stage is that it's a sumptuous, romantic piece of coastal ennui in the morning dew/summer rain that reaches out to Bobby Wratten in Trembling Blue Stars mode, Bob Stanley's arch lounge pop sample collection (and sentimentalism of London) and a nod at the Sundays' Here's Where The Story Ends.

Paisley & Charlie -Stone Lions by StephenHarvey

Tracklist: Talkers - Lido

Hark, the first of the post-Wild Beasts bands. Musically it's all there - vaulting, chiming guitars, restless drums, even a song in their set called All The King's Horses - although the vocals are somewhere in the mid-range (very reminiscent of someone we can't quite place, in fact - anyone?) and the chorus is joined by an arms aloft kind of synth swell. Led by a couple of brothers from south London via Somerset, the song evolves into something quite summery catchy and charmingly off-kilter.

Talkers - Lido by Three New Ideas

Watch the Sunday gang (not) in Harajuku

Your Sunday afternoon viewing, or of whenever you see this link, is a BBC Scotland documentary made in 1999 on Belle & Sebastian. Making a documentary about a band who by and large still wanted to exist in the shadows is something of an undertaking so it ends up quite piecemeal, here a Ray Brooks-voiced, Duglas T Stewart from BMX Bandits-penned cartoon strip of their backstory, there the interviews with whichever members that would come forwards (none of whom are Stuart. Or Isobel. Or Stevie) and associates. Literally, in Alan Rankine's case. Directorial quirks include extreme close-ups of Mark Radcliffe's face. Archive recordings contain Isobel attempting a joke.



And if you've still got time after that, for as long as it's up on iPlayer you must see Friday's BBC4 documentary Bird On The Wireless, Annie Nightingale reflecting on 40 years on Radio 1 and the pop culture that ran parallel.

Tracklist: Ofeliadorme - Naked Evil

Nearly two years ago we wrote about Bologna's Ofeliadorme (possibly Ofelia Dorme, not even they seem entirely sure) as "lilting but not quite lulling anyone into false senses of security". Since then, with February's advent of album All Harm Ends Here, they seem to have developed a sparse, karmic stillness, somewhere between Low's slow motion panic and Blonde Redhead's river of golden dreams, matched to Francesca Bono's Chan Marshall-esque voice.

Tracklist: S.C.U.M - Amber Hands

Groovy, doomy music. It's a great signifier for all sorts of records as long as you don't let on that it was coined by Clive James to describe the BBC Election '74 theme. It suits S.C.U.M., unarguably the best band to feature the brother of one of the Horrors, to a tee. In fact they come on much like the Horrors after too much Jesus & Mary Chain, epic vocals over forceful synth drones and the barely hidden intention of taking us all down with them. You can see the phalanx of onstage flickering strobe lights in your mind's eye.

S.C.U.M - Amber Hands by Mute UK

Tracklist: Tom Morris - Golden Hawk Too Far Away

Something spare and downbeat to end this fun warm week, just as it should be in nobody's world but ours. Morris, singer in Her Name Is Calla, has a solo EP An Ocean Is Enough To Love out on 6th June, from which comes this immaculately unoverdubbed, painfully minimal acoustic skin sore rubbing.

Golden Hawk Too Far Away by T E Morris

28 tracks from May, for our money the best of these monthly Spoti-sets we've put together:

STN May 2011

Tracklist: The Miserable Rich - Anything's Possible

The Miserable Rich have been around on the fringes of the chamber folk Wilkommen Collective for quite some time now but October's third album threatens to take them to new cinematic heights. This first taste was written on the night of 30th January after the band learnt of John Barry's death, their resultant recording influenced by both his certain Mediterranean champagne flute clinking glamour and, it says here, his sexual reference points, being about a dead lover attempting to rekindle his relationship with a living ex-partner. Easygoing but with depth.

The Miserable Rich - Anything's Possible by BAM!

A grand day out: Bushstock

The Communion club nights have been operational in London since 2006. Run by Ben Lovett (one of the & Sons) and Kev Jones, the international network has now expanded to nine monthly nights over three continents and a label that has just issued The Flowerpot Sessions, 23 tracks recorded live over a week in the now defunct Kentish Town venue. To celebrate Communion are taking over four Shepherds Bush venues - St Stephen's Church, Shepherds Bar, The Goldhawk and Ginglik - for a Saturday and putting on thirty or so of their favourite people, including...


Guillemots
Having been at the back of quite a long queue outside Nottingham Rescue Rooms on Sunday, we can confirm that Guillemots, for as far as they've drifted from a mainstream that was only ever tentative towards them until Fyfe did that advert cover, are still hugely popular. No wonder, they've always been an inventive live act, the layered opulence and power ripped into by MC Lord Magrao's guitar white noise.



Peggy Sue
As you'd expect from the backgrounds of the people behind Communion there's a pop-folksy tinge to a lot of this bill, full of the sort of people who a couple of years ago were touted to become big by people who didn't really know what pop kids wanted any more. Peggy Sue's album Fossils And Other Phantoms was too fragile for mainstream acceptance, too much excoriation of tangled love. Highly promising, it was, and they break off from preparing a second full-length to join in here.

Marques Toliver
The Toliver backstory, a hugely talented New York busker thrust into the Brooklynite limelight and from there allowed to deliver his classically trained abilities to the world, features some strange and unexplained diversions - Kyp Malone booked him into a studio immediately upon seeing him? He was given the money to move to London by Daisy Lowe? Whatever, it's the music, stupid, and Toliver's richly soulful voice, cracked writing and mastery of the violin and loop pedal make him stand out some distance.



Kill It Kid
Just shy of their second album, Kill It Kid are a heck of a live force. Their delta blues stomp and Chris Turpin's almighty grit-hewn voice are imperious enough on record, but in person the raucous, crashing dramatics take on no end of edge and passion.

Daughter
Things are taking off for Elena Tonra; with support from Lauren Laverne, Steve Lamacq, Huw Stephens and Tom Robinson behind it Landfill, the lead track from her His Young Heart EP, got playlisted by 6 Music and she has a track on the Communion CD on the front of the current Mojo. Seems her emotionally raw and intimately haunting tales are striking all sorts of chords. She's on first in the church at 2pm, far too much down the bill for where she's heading.




ALSO: Australian psych-folk fast risers Cloud Control, odd bod psych-electro-quirk-folkie-MC King Charles, Anglo-American harmonisers Treetop Flyers, Lamacq raves Tom Williams and the Boat, rousing Dananananaykroyd support Flashguns. Is there really a band called Cattle And Cane?


Calendar: 4th June
Tickets: £27.50 from MusicGlue

Tracklist: Tellison - Say Silence (Heaven & Earth)

Let's not pretend there aren't amounts of pre-eyeline emo about Tellison's take on the American underground jaggedness, but the Hamlet-quoting punch of power-pop punk has real bite of its own, especially on the distorted mini-stadium roar of the chorus.