Review: Race Horses – Goodbye Falkenberg

Yes, sometimes Race Horses sound a little bit like their Welsh brethren, SFA, alright? Now we’re all seated comfortably atop the elephant in the room, on their debut these Aberystwyth whippersnappers have written one of the most sweetly killer singles ever – ‘Cake’, with its rambunctious 60s pop refrain of “Cake, cake! She wanted cake!”, it’s the kind of thing you can imagine Fanny Cradock boogying around the kitchen to whilst waiting for the vegetable dye to brew. Colliery-band parps, early of Montreal jangle, pastoral melancholy and what sounds like Beirut captaining a pirate ship maintain their standing as purveyors of mighty fine singles until the dreaded twee gets the better of them towards the end. Hopefully such horseplay’s just a phase though.

Download – Cake

7/10

Play together, stay together?

Sidebar comment piece from NME’s cover feature on The xx

Romy’s saying Baria’s departure was “like a divorce” seems the perfect description for the fracturing of a band who have known each other their whole lives – the years spent creating a sound and ethos usique to them ended up driving them apart just when it began to unite others.

The case for and against forming a band with friends is tricky – Bombay Bicycle Club, Phoenix, Radiohead et al have translated teenage bedroom jams into something lasting. Yet, look at John Squire and Ian Brown – they met at senior school in the early 1980s, only for their band and friendship to fracture irreparably 12 years later. Then there’s forming via ads – like the ones in the back pages of this very magazine – which feels as though it should be a surefire way to fail. Just look at Sugababes for evidence. But then Nirvana found Dave Grohl at an audition, achieving a sense of unity and kick-ass awesomeness that bands who shared a womb would envy.

Does the key lie in knowing each other inside out, sharing the same loves and ambitions? Or do bands need strangers’ experiences to stay interesting, to continue challenging themselves, to avoid stagnation? It’s an unpredictable formula as The xx have shown – even a band who seemed to have such a unique chemistry ended up suffering a slight meltdown.

Tracks

As published in NME 27.01.10

Dirty Projectors – Ascending Melody

Much like a synchronised swimming display from a tangle of octopuses in a pool of pimp juice, there’s no way this should work – it’s got way too many tentacles flailing at a hundred different speeds. The DP ladies’ vocals are even more extra-terrestrial than when we last heard them on the ‘Temecula Sunrise’ EP, spraying fountains of nonsensical joy about Dave Longstreth’s bungeeing warble. Deliciously obnoxious, particularly during the indulgent Brooklynite tribal meditation halfway through.

Retribution Gospel Choir – Hide It Away

Fronted by Alan Sparhawk (he of Low fame), Retribution Gospel Choir enlisted the production skills of Matt Beckley, best known for his work with Paris Hilton, post-breakdown Britney and Avril Lavigne for their second record. Luckily though, they’ve clung tight to their powerful riffs and Sparhawk’s bleak condemnations, with a helping of stadium grandiosity for good measure.

Joanna Newsom – Easy

Since ‘Ys’ came along and rewrote everything we thought we knew about music, the hunt for clues about its follow-up has been a holy grail of speculation, until a quirky little doodle entitled ‘Have One On Me’ popped up online depicting Joanna revealing a small boy from beneath her skirts. It’s since transpired that the phrase is the title of A TRIPLE ALBUM out at the end of February, and ‘Easy’ (filmed here at a recent gig in Sydney) is one of the first sneak peeks from it. You can thank us later.

of Montreal – Energy Gene

We’re thoroughly stoked about of Montreal’s newie (tentatively titled ‘False Priest’), apparently featuring the two doyennes of future R&B, Janelle Monáe and Solange, and a song with the hook, “your pussy is a star”. This new clip is a far less bombastic affair than all that – a very hirsute Barnes alone with a piano, ruminating on romantic genetic defects – though by the time the album rolls around, don’t be surprised if it’s jazzed up to the nines with unicorns and prog-tinged jams.

Active Child – Voice Of An Old Friend (Summer Camp Bedford Falls Remix)

Not one, but two of our biggest new crushes have teamed up for this incredible reworking of former Radar love Active Child’s divine new single, making us feel more spoilt than a bratty oik on Christmas morn. Summer Camp blow away AC’s efflorescent harp explosions and use their sweet siren call to drag the original’s languid OMD stylings to the bottom of a lake, adding cute samples and amping up the ’80s kick while they’re down there. More please!

First listen: Laura Marling – I Speak Because I Can

Originally published on NME.com
The omens are lingering dastardly in the background – all signs point towards Laura Marling’s second album, ‘I Speak Because I Can’ being a work of Thoroughly Serious Business. She’s followed the tried and tested Hollywood method of dying her hair brown to set aside any notions of frivolity, and told NME.com that the record deals with “responsibility, particularly the responsibility of womanhood.” Cripes, and here we were half hoping that she was going to play the Frankee to a certain Charlie Fink’s Eamon…

But fear not – on first listen, although ‘I Speak Because I Can’ marks a much more mature Laura than ‘Alas I Cannot Swim’ (she’s still only a whisker short of 20!) it never dwindles into po-faced female eunuchery, and the rambunctious stylings of Marcus Mumford, Ted Dwayne and Winston Marshall from Mumford & Sons, and Tom Fiddle from Noah & The Whale keep it well and truly out of the doldrums. This ain’t the Laura Marling we used to know…

Review: Charlotte Gainsbourg – IRM

Last time we saw Charlotte Gainsbourg is a bloody memory that comparatively few will care to recall in detail, doubtlessly provoking sharp intakes of breath and much tight knotting of knees. In Lars von Trier’s spectacular Antichrist, Willem Dafoe’s “He” tried to coax Gainsbourg’s “She” to come to terms with the death of their son by making her confront the parasite on her recovery, taking her cripplingly obsessive fear of nature head on through isolation in their woodland cabin. Anyone who’s experienced the film can’t fail to remember quite how brutally the plan failed, but should rest easy that no such loin-girding is required to witness Gainsbourg try a similar approach to a real life trauma with IRM (‘MRI’ in English), her third album.

In 2007, she was hospitalised for a brain haemorrhage triggered by a waterskiing accident, and subject to a course of MRI scans as treatment. She’s spoken openly about the effect it had on her; her insistence on more scans after doctors had given the all clear for fear that they might have missed something, all the while supine becoming ever more attached to the harsh mechanical chomping sound of the MRI machine. Its unmistakable noise crops up in opening track ‘Master’s Hands’, chopping a duel with bleak desert drums, whilst she breathes, “Give me a reason to feel” over percussive rumbles and rhythms as bare as the skeleton she’s trying to reanimate. ‘IRM’ takes ghostly images of the mind as “a glass onion,” intoned in her inimitably bucolic half-sung, half-spoken RP English – she’s killed off the femme fatale coo of 5:55 for a far more disconnected tone – whilst deadened drums build from ritualistic exorcism of the vespers within to a charged nightclub in negative. Her disconnection and scientific curiosity to see what’s inside make the process seem more like the mysterious practices of Eternal Sunshine’s Lacuna Inc than a procedure thousands go through every day – the oddness of having to come to terms with one’s own body again is made startlingly real.

Review: Beach House – Teen Dream

Originally published in NME

Rather than cutting them through the middle and counting the rings, it’s far easier to pinpoint when someone was a teenager by the places where they used to while away the hours – the diner, a roller-disco, a drive-in movie. Of course, living in Blighty, the prospects would have been far less Hollywood-coloured: a splintered park bench and a greying youth centre if you were lucky. But the beach is one youthful haunt both sides of the pond have in common; that timeless archetype of young summers. And my, how it’s changed – from fresh-faced Beach Boys preppiness to the dead-behind-the-eyes comedown of chillwave (or whatever we’re calling it this week) artists such as Washed Out, and Memory Tapes. All that’s consistent with those clean-cut images of yore is the sepia tint of the photographs, borrowed nostalgia for an ideal that never existed in the first place. 

That’s where ‘Teen Dream’ comes in. Far brighter than we’ve previously known Baltimore dreampop duo Beach House to be, the break with the spidery, sparse sound of their first two albums affords them far fewer places to hide. It shares that same nostalgia, but unlike some of their woozy brethren, it manages to paint a tremendously authentic portrait of youth and young love. The vague lyrical code of diary entries designed for no-one else to be able to crack, the topographical details that transport them back to lovelorn landscapes and the sense that Victoria Legrand’s heart could burst with immeasurable longing from her chest at any second – they all ring true to anyone who’s ever felt they might die of lovesickness.

Interview: Blood Red Shoes

Blood Red Shoes release their anticipated second album Fire Like This on March 1 via V2. Starting from today, the band will be streaming one song a week from the new record as a taster for eager fans – head over to bloodredshoes.co.uk to listen! Laura Snapes recently caught up with Laura-Mary Carter to find out what exactly we can expect from the follow up to 2008’s acclaimed debut Box Of Secrets.

Interview – Oh No Ono

I interviewed Nikolai Koch from the quite wonderful Oh No Ono for The Quietus, which you can read here. Their album’s out on The Leaf Label on 1st February and I sincerely recommend that you buy it.

It’d be all too convenient to be able to liken Oh No Ono’s hypnagogic sound to the fairytales of fellow Dane Hans Christian Andersen. In reality they’re far more Grimm than that, creating terrible Freudian prog dreamlands of watery metaphors where snowy mothers melt away and a shoal of siren ballerinas lure wretched souls down to their depths. Their incredible second album, Eggs, comes out on The Leaf Label this February – it’s a world away from the shiny, Clor-like new wave of their debut, Yes, instead dealing in hauntingly glam Arcade Fire orchestral bombast and the most polarizing falsetto since Joanna Newsom.

Read on.

A FORMERLY MASSIVE WHINGE ABOUT THE BBC SOUND OF 2010 LIST

This was going to be a pompous as fuck rant about the BBC Sound of 2010 list, but then I realised it was all a bit pointless and uppity – anyone who reads this blog is probably going to think the same about it being self-perpetuating without reading a tired whinge about it. So here are ten lovely bands that I would like to hear much more from over the next 12 months. And maybe longer.

SUMMER CAMP – http://www.myspace.com/morganwaves

OH NO ONO - http://www.myspace.com/ohnoono

RACE HORSES – http://www.myspace.com/racehorsesmusic

ACTIVE CHILD – http://www.myspace.com/activechild

DUCKTAILS – http://www.myspace.com/ducktailss

ZUN ZUN EGUI – http://www.myspace.com/zunzunegui

IKONS – http://www.myspace.com/1kon5

JANELLE MONAE – http://www.myspace.com/janellemonae (I know she’s huge in America, but I’ve only ever seen her mentioned in NME over here. Though maybe I’m not looking hard enough.)

jj – http://www.last.fm/music/JJ

Electrelane – http://www.myspace.com/electrelane (come back, come back)

Summer Camp – Round The Moon

Just as we’d filed our albums of the decade list, tucked TLOBF off to bed for 2009 and started circling the Radio Times, one of our favourite bands that we’ve discovered this year, Summer Camp (we gave you their cover of ‘I Only Have Eyes For You’ back in October), go and upload a sparkling new track to their Myspace that we couldn’t possibly wait until January to rhapsodize about.

Like the four existing songs on their Myspace, ‘Round The Moon’ starts with a quote from a 1980s film classic – John Hughes’ ‘Sixteen Candles’, with the haplessly lovely Sam Baker (Molly Ringwald) saying, “I can’t believe I gave my panties to a geek,” but rather than the backseat chorus of dreamy girlish tones that we’ve bordered on obsessing over since they first uploaded ‘Ghost Train’ back in October, there’s a chap on dulcet vocal duties! His rumbling lament is so processed and lo-fi that there’s no telling quite what he’s on about, but it’s got that unruffled nonchalance that intimates that he’s probably a really ace guy who reads The Believer and knows how to treat a girl good. Obviously that’s just speculation – being the mysterious folk that they are, we still only know that:

• There’s more than one of them, boys and girls.
• They probably don’t hail from Sweden like they first claimed to.
• They’re holed up in London recording at the moment.
• They’re playing SXSW! And deservedly so indeed.

There’s been much written recently about “glo-fi” and “chillwave” (which sounds like a L’Oreal product if you ask me) and evoking pink-tinged Super 8 teenage summers that only existed in our grey British dreams. If Washed Out is the comedown from the utopian gauzy beach party, then Summer Camp are the band who played the prom the night before, peppier than their morning after bedfellows (particularly so here, with a hip-popping almost 80s faux-goth bassline and a chorus that shares a certain verve with A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’), their little non-Swedish hearts bursting from their chests with longing and naively bittersweet love songs.

Like we said last time, these guys are a band to treasure. Come January, eschew all those gaudy tastemaker lists of “ones to watch” – the band of 2010 is right here.