Monday Music – 31 August 2010

Posts still sporadic – still getting my act together.  Bear with me.  Here’s my favourite songs this week:

Museum of Bellas Artes – Who Do You Love? (mp3)
Signed to Force Majeure and due at White Heat in a few weeks, this Stockholm trio have put in an early bid for cover of the year via this reprise of The Sapphires’ little-known Motown song from 1964.  Relentless beats, glossy synths and moreish vocals combine to prove summer’s not through with us yet…

Still Corners – Endless Summer (mp3)
…as does this effort from the hotly-tipped Londoners.  Sounding like a witches’ spell for the senses, this is whimsical hallucination-pop designed for empty stares into deep blue skies.

Zola Jesus – Sea Talk (mp3)
Just climb up to a rooftop, stretch your arms out wide, feel the wind, and fly fly fly away…

Freelance Whales – Hannah (mp3)
The FWs specialise in pretty lines about trivial episodes, sung in glorious, folky euphoria.  For example: “Hannah takes the stairs ’cause she can’t tell that it’s a wiiiiiiiiinding spiral-case”.  Magic.

Small Black – Photojournalist (mp3)
I rarely remember my dreams, my journey to that world, but the little scraps I do retain are much like this slice of haunted pop: groggy, discomforting, lonely, and full of subverted, out-of-focus voices prior to a sudden, bereft, awakening.

Dansette Junior

Come back summer, we miss you.  Without your warming rays and muggy days, we’re trapped inside, cold and fretful, as yearnful as the soaring dance/dubstep of Kentish Town trio Dansette Junior.  It’s great stuff – but can’t we save it for September?

Dansette Junior – Paranoid (Blame Remix) (mp3)

Monday Music – 23 August 2010

Hey all – sorry about the silence, my last post ought to explain it.  On with the show…

Sexion D’Assaut – Désolé (mp3)
On this popped in H&M.  Out came my Shazam app.  Did it work?  Did it fuck – the bastard just ‘searched’ for ages, then finally admitted its miserable, pathetic failure.  I swore a lot (hard to believe, I know), sulked, and then typed in a guessed translation of the only lyric I remembered.  And Safari came up trumps where Shazam failed.  Well done Safari.  Go fuck yourself Shazam.  I give you one task…

Keep Shelly in Athens – Cremona Memories (mp3)
Who’s Shelly?  Why does she have to stay in Athens?  Where’s Cremona?  What happened there?  I guess maybe we add our own plot using this alluring soundtrack.

The xx – Heart Skipped A Beat (mp3)
I love The xx more with each listen.  Yes they’re a bit sexy, and yes they’re minimal and all that, but it’s the simple, impossible catchiness of those riffs and vocals that has me gasping.  It doesn’t really matter which song, although this one’s particularly good.

Chad Van Gaalen – Tmnt Mask (mp3)
The lyrics of this have really resonated with me in recent days – sitting by the river, escaping my mind, clarity – we all need a bit of that from time to time.

Isbells – Reunite (mp3)
This may have a whiff of Dawson’s Creek-esque sincerity, but it’s also prettily subdued and perfect for staring out of windows, cheek-to-pane, as the autumnal winds make soggy brown leaves dance in the air.

Don’t make a sound

I’m losing the girl I love.  It feels wretched, and sense-killing, a slowly increasing panic that’s spreading in my head like a bacterial virus I have no control over.  It feels like I’ve actually, physically got a hole in my chest.  I keep checking to make sure I haven’t.  All I want right now are pitch-black bedrooms, nondescript sidestreets, and rain, rain galore, so much rain.  I want to hide, and never try again.  I want to, but of course I won’t. 

Here’s the only possible song, and even a video with cute dogs.

Sunset Rubdown – Shut Up I Am Dreaming Of Places Where Lovers Have Wings (mp3)

David’s Lyre

A song to suit the suddenly chill winds and changing seasons: choruses you can sing along to with fists-clenched, a post-thunderstorm freshness and escapist lyrics.  More info here, and a song for a quieter day below.

David’s Lyre – Heartbeat (mp3)

Fool’s Gold + White Heat = sheer heaven

Last time I left a Fool’s Gold concert at Madame JoJo’s, I said I thought it was the best show I’d ever attended.  Yesterday night, after the band’s return for White Heat‘s 7th birthday, there was no wavering: that was definitely the best gig I’ve witnessed.

With many familiar faces from January’s show back for more, the Californians again played scarcely over half-a-dozen songs during an hour’s stay on stage.  Once more they played their ‘hits’  (Surprise Hotel and Nadine) early.  Once more the chief band members descended into the crowd at the climax, playing on and endlessly, relentlessly, on.  And once more the entire audience bayed and boogied along in total rapture throughout, enjoyment levels turned up to 11.

I think it’s the sheer joy that separates Fool’s Gold from all other bands in a live environment.  If I closed my eyes during their songs, letting the beats was over me, then that was all I felt: joy.  Each of their tunes - be it a Hebrew-inspired dirge, a highlife anthem or an Arabic-style rock slalom – screams of the stuff, and of the heavenly, restorative qualities that music potentially has. 

Perhaps it’s because tracks like Surprise Hotel can truly live on stage (see a former example, below).  In the studio this anthem is trimmed to a sensible, radio-friendly four minutes: it feels constrained and wrong, like a tiger in a zoo pen, or a rebellious rock kid given a tidy haircut.  Played live, Surprise Hotel is unfettered, with epic build-ups, endless reprises, ad-libbed choruses, instrumental solos and a degree of giddy chaos. 

Eventually, Fool’s Gold live sets morph into long, saintly singalongs, a thrilling jam where everyone, band and audience, come together.  For their penultimate track last night, members of supporting acts joined Fool’s Gold on stage to make a 11-strong raucous racket.  When the Fool’s Gold members entered the crowd the sound gradually stripped away until just the rhythm was left, the bare skeleton of the song.  By this stage we were all – Fool’s Gold included – crouching on the floor, with that rhythm and its vocal ingrained on our souls.  We chanted it repeatedly, on and on, wishing it never had to end.  ’Euphoric’ doesn’t begin to cover it.

I’ve never felt so good, so exultant, during a show.  Ordinarily, for example, I can’t dance for toffee: but last night, whether I shook, wriggled, wiggled or jumped, I moved like a dream.  Even the most stolid stand-stillers were looking down to find their hips in flux.  At the start of the gig, a group of noisy black kids in front of me seemed certain to be irritating rude boys; by the end they were heroes who knew every song by heart, and I’d have married them all.  If someone stood on my toe, I got a hugged apology; outside after, everyone swayed, smiled and just gasped in glee.

And eventually I hobbled and wobbled home, still feeling nothing but joy.

Monday Music – 9 August 2010

My five favourite songs of the past week are:

Hard Mix – Memories (mp3)
Filled with distorted samples, Hard Mix’s latest is so groggy and beautiful it could take any pain away.

Laguna Meth – Sugar Shack (mp3)
Two years ago I heard this sweet pop ditty, loved it and tipped Laguna Meth for glory.  Then I lost it, and Laguna Meth didn’t get glory (not because I lost it) (at least I don’t think so) (imagine if it was).  Anyway now I’ve found it again, I love it and I tip Laguna Meth’s imminent second album for glory.

Salem – King Night (mp3)
Heal thy wounds, man, heal thoust with some killer dubstep.  This is so intensely epic it single-handedly put lines on my forehead and decreased my hairline by three inches.

Still Corners - Endless Summer (mp3)
A glassy dreampop song expressly designed for a movie scene where the vulnerable lead character (delete as appropriate): swallows a load of sleeping pills / jumps off a bridge / drives into the sea / leaves the school disco alone.

Future Islands - Tin Man (mp3)
Future Islands’ singer Sam suddenly sounds like Cat Stevens’ estranged older brother, an illicit, disgraced drunk with a gravelly voice and grudging temperament.  It makes for a great, atypical rock.

Slutty Fringe launches NEW! night

If SOIWT was a boy and Slutty Fringe was a girl, SOIWT would act nonchalant for a while, then completely cave in at the school disco and positively beg Slutty Fringe to go out with him.

This is because we share the same hobbies, see.  Slutty Fringe is a blog exclusively promoting new music; to further promote it last year they launched a record label, Hot Pockets, and now their launching quarterly compilation CDs (featuring 10-20 of the best new bands and producers they’ve come across) witha little fanzine, and to launch THAT they are starting a night with said acts performing.  Both the compilation CDs and the night will be called, imaginatively, NEW!

The first NEW! night is next Saturday, 14 August at 93FE.  Slutty Fringe honcho John Power introduces the performing acts thus: 

Silver Columns
A synth pop duo who burst onto the scene earlier this year with the Joe Goddard (Hot Chip) produced slice of falsetto genius Browbeaten. Since then they’ve signed to Moshi Moshi.

 
Kinema
A soulful disco trio from Brighton who’ve been compared to the likes of Phoenix and Hot Chip.  Now being tipped for big things with everyone from The Guardian to Dummy.

 
Danimal Kingdom
Solo project of Dan Murtha – having provided vocals on Kissy Sellout’s debut, he is now making a name for himself with his hotly tipped electro-art-pop.

 
Supplying the sounds between the bands we have DJs from Moshi Moshi Records and young upstart DJ, promoter and blogger thisaintnodisco.  And keeping the beat going all night in the Pink Bar will be in-demand DJs Filthy Dukes, acclaimed production/DJ team Lovers & Gamblers and Slutty Fringe ourselves.

52 Commercial Rd

Today I feel unhappy and terribly lonely, and wish to be left to my dreams.

52 Commercial Road – 27 (mp3)

Echo Lake

Open eyes.  SCREW EYES SHUT.  Ok ok Mr morning, I see you there, all perky and painful.  But you know what?  God sod yourself.  I’m going to shut those curtains tight, pull these covers over my head and bliss out to some Echo Lake: cascades of Jacuzzi-warm dream-electro that soothes my anti-A.M. soul with its eternal guitar jangles and rainbow-climbing vocal soars like Quaaludes.  What was that you said? Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz………………………….

Echo Lake - In Dreams (mp3)