Savages

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

Loud, quite, loud.

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Eagulls

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

Raging, council flat hardcore from Leeds (Upset The Rhythm)

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Let’s Wrestle

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

Let’s Wrestle have influences as vast as Black Flag to Buddy Holly or Faust to Edith Piaf, But are ultimatly trying to be as raw as possible and they try to write songs that make your soul crumble aswell as making you smile, sing along and clap your hands. (by Stolen Recordings)

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Gross Magic

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

Born in 1990, the very start of one of the most important musical decades ever, it is not hard to believe that music would become Samuel McGarrigle’s artistic destiny. Having spent years experimenting with visual art, in the form of paintings and film, music has always been an outlet for McGarrigle’s self-expression.

2011 sees the release of the Gross Magic’s first EP. ‘Teen Jamz’ is comprised of five sensational pop hits exploring the highs and lows of entering adult life for the first time ever.

With a lust for adventure and a backing band to rival The Beatles, it is not difficult to imagine Gross Magic quickly becoming a household name.

‘Teen Jamz’ will be released on Fat Possum Records 15th October 2011.

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La Femme

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

French surf kids, making dirty surf noise having blonde non-surf hair.

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Visions of Trees

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

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Gabriel Bruce

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

Gabriel bruce’s first solo single, ‘Sleep paralysis’ is the sound of the ex-loverman vocalist finding a new voice, with that band’s primal energies being recalibrated into an impassioned sweeping synthesizer symphony. The track recalls leonard cohen’s late 80s synth production on ‘i’m your man’, yet is altogether murkier and more foreboding, interested in depth of darkness rather than surface glimmer. B-side ‘no love lost’ draws the cohen connection deeper, primarily through bruce’s deep vocal range, though tonally bruce reaches something smoother and more versatile than cohen did, and the track has shades of nick cave’s possessive obsessions and fascinations in subject matter. (Off Modern Records)

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S.C.U.M

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

S.C.U.M’s debut album, Again Into Eyes is a triumphant arrival. This is a debut which has filtering through the collective unconscious long before its completion, and it already it feels burned into the cortex. Again Into Eyes reels from carnival-esque toughness to a second side that comes close to despair before mainlined redemption in the form of ‘Whitechapel’, a utopian, future-disco monolith, washed in otherworldly Mellotron and Choirs, it’s perhaps the biggest surprise on the record.

Then again, it has been the band’s capacity for reflexive cartwheels – an instinctive disregard and perhaps a faint disgust with what’s expected of them – that has defined their strange and captivating evolution.

When Thomas Cohen (vocal) and Bradley Baker (machines) met in 2008 and called themselves the Society for Cutting Up Men, they demonstrated a deft, offhanded affinity for self-annihilation. This act of effacement found expression with the addition of Melissa Rigby (drums), Huw Webb (bass) and Samuel Kilcoyne (Moog), who whipped their undisciplined, amp-blowing sound into a bass-driven electronic No Wave, engulfed live by acid-test smoke and lights. That, however, was less an incarnation of the group than an isotope, destined to decay and reform itself.

As the front room of their Shoreditch rehearsal space (where Situationist scrawls, lyrics and song ideas were once painted white on black walls) became a gallery, the pub next door was glossed into the 21st Century and luxury destinations for the tasteless sprung-up opposite, the band moved-out to Surrey Quays. As the musical landscape around them seemed to atomize, becoming increasingly light on heroic bands and heavy on Teflon memes, the five-piece consolidated. They learned how to play their instruments, got snapped-up as the first signing of a newly re-independent Mute and set about writing their debut album. ‘If you were to listen to our releases up to this point, they form a complete document of how we’ve developed,’ Bradley Baker reflects.

He’s not wrong. Predating the release single ‘Amber Hands’, the first fromAgain Into Eyes, was their debut on Loog: the instantly sold-out ‘Visions Arise’, a memory of a more detuned and spectral phase produced by Tom Furse. Also in the back-catalogue: the unique Signal series. ‘The beautiful thing about how that came about was that it was completely by accident,’ says Kilcoyne (brain behind the revolutionary Underage Festival before joining the band). ‘It just happened when we were away,’ adds Webb, ‘We booked some gigs in Poland and we had a day off  so we went into a studio and we made this noise. Tom played drums, everything switched round.’

Springing out of the Petri dish that was ‘Warsaw’, the band continued their journey around Europe, adding the dreamscape ‘Berlin’, the piano-led ‘Paris’, and the soon-to-come ‘Athens’ Signal. The tracks show in increments the creative engine of the band finding a maturity and confidence. Drawn out on tour by the intense affection for the band in overlooked pockets of the continent, S.C.U.M were inspired to act as conduits for their surrounds, transplanting them almost unconsciously onto MP3. It’s a path that lies well outside that taken by most groups, just as their purpose and their aesthetic are diametrically opposed to those of schoolboy schlock-rock bands with nothing to say.

Once back in the UK, the band hit pre-production boot camp with legendary drummer and producer Jim Sclavunos (Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Teenage Jesus, Sonic Youth, Grinderman). Kilcoyne is readily appreciative of how formative the experience was: ‘We learned both from listening to other records and from being in a studio. Working with Jim, he really went “There’s no need for you to have that extra bar” and “Maybe if you just shut up for that bit and then came in here…” That blew our fucking minds, like ‘Oh, that’s how music works!’

Then followed the writing and recording of the debut album. In ‘the middle of nowhere’, as they put it, they paired-up with producers Ken and Jolyon Thomas (whose credits individually and together include Sigur Ros, M83, David Bowie, Psychic TV). The five’s listening habits in psychedelia, space-rock, avant-garde and ambient soundtracks collide to form a pop trip that neatly balances the innovative with what is rapturously danceable.

With the record set for release in September 2011, the band have been busy honing their skills live, asked on European and UK tours by The Kills and cutting a precocious figure on bills alongside top-draw label mates like Liars, Erasure and The Residents. On stage, the band have never stopped short of devastating audiences. Relying less than before on overwhelming visuals and more upon the weight of their sound, wrapped around frontman Thomas Cohen. With a style suggestive of a Nietzchian Madonna, Cohen is a tall, sardonic-faced art-house shaman contorting himself, finger-fucking the space around him or – at their church shows – blessing crowds with Holy Water.

While his lyrics trade in stacked abstracts and deal with transcendence, escapism and a submission to forces beyond his control, Cohen remains decidedly tied to reality in person, even in the midst of a grueling tour schedule: ‘Touring with The Kills has been really amazing and also takes away from the mysticism of being a band and playing venues like the Roundhouse. There’s so many stories about that place and so many gigs that we’ve seen there, since it’s been reopened, that have been seminal, but then you get there and you get as much space as you would in a pub. I think it’s definitely good at normalizing that experience. However, naivety is what’s created the songs and I think that’s what makes them good. It’s probably quite obvious that I didn’t have a concept of any sort of melody, I saw myself as having a part to play but I didn’t see that in any musical sense at all.’

However modern their sound might be, they are in this manner a very traditional band. Each member makes their own contribution; their trajectory shaped democratically by the different skills of each individual.  Rigby in particular, dragged from the clutches of drum school, has helped reign in the chaos generated by Baker and Kilcoyne’s sound-beds and synth lines. The urge for experimentation though is still very much alive – the band count contemporary artists Matthew Stone, Tim Noble and Sue Webster as frequent collaborators – only this time they want it understood properly. With a record that feels like a ten track modern classic, they are set to expand massively upon their base of cult fans this year.

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Frankie Rose

Tuesday, April 17th, 2012

We were all knocked out by the Frankie Rose and the Outs album from 2010, the effortlessness of its gorgeous girl-pop mantras, the intimate immensity of its Spector-esque walls of reverb, the beauty of a song sung sweetly over the most graceful two-chord vamps. But are you ready for the new Frankie Rose? – her transformation into a wholly other kind of pop, the reverie and revelation ofInterstellar, an album that floats free of its maker’s history – time spent with Vivian Girls, Dum Dum Girls, Crystal Stilts, and creator of one of the most breathlessly compelling girl-pop albums of the past few years – and offers the listener something strangely other, as alien as it is familiar, as compelling as it is enchanting.

Talking with Frankie about the record, it’s clear she was itching for a new start. The first big indication – production by Le Chev, remixer supreme (for Lemonade, Narcisse, Passion Pit, and Frankie’s own “Candy”), an ensemble member of Fischerspooner, etc. “We recorded the record in a private studio dubbed The Thermometer Factory in Park Slope. I wanted this record to be totally different and in so doing I knew I had to work with someone who would lend fresh ideas and know how to make sounds that I wouldn’t know how to make. I wanted to make a particular record and I knew Le Chev would be the one who could help me do it.”

So, out with the reverb of the Frankie Rose and the Outs, and in with something altogether more glam, glittering, shivering. On Interstellar Frankie takes the lessons learned with her debut album – like reverb as the holy route to pop-grandeur, scaling a wall of teenage tears – fully digests, and transfers those skills into the brave new world mapped out by ten new songs. In its place is the confident swagger of a singer and auteur fully aware of how to build the simplest of pop moves into aching, full-blown melodramas, how to grab hold of an emotion and ride its darker waves. “I always have a big picture in mind,” Frankie reflects. “I knew I wanted a HUGE sounding record. Big highs, big lows, and clean. There is no fuzz on this record. I knew I wanted to make a streamlined, spacious record with big choruses that sometimes referenced 80s pop.” But that referencing never swamps the melodies: this record isn’t a retro trip. If anything, it liberates sounds familiar from that decade and gives them new context, breathes life into clay golems of sound that too often become basic, pre-set triggers.

On Interstellar, Frankie Rose goes epic, goes widescreen. “Had We Had It” spins the sweetest sugar from chords that ascend into the firmament, a heavenly, palatial blur. “Gospel/Grace” rumbles with passion, a New Order-esque one-finger guitar figure leading the listener into the choral depths mapped by the chorus. “Apples For The Sun” is breathtaking, with Frankie singing out across a lone piano, before a glorious web of voice and organ pirouettes into the air, an arbor of pleasure connecting the verse with its instrumental shadow, a coda that slowly slips from your view, before making the briefest, most tantalizing of returns. A lot of Interstellar seems to be about disappearing into, or finding and reveling in, this kind of imaginary zone, something Rose confirms: “The whole record is about dreaming of some ‘other’ place.”

And as you drift into the heartbreaking “The Fall,” which floats out to sea on a lunar-aquatic cello riff that’s pure Arthur Russell, you’re ready to conquer those other places, too, to let Frankie Rose guide you out of the album’s spell and land you back in the sensual world, slightly altered, adrift and in awe. How does it feel to feel? With Interstellar, your emotions come out so alive, your only escape is to dive right back in.

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