Another Form of Relief

This is something that I’ve been looking forward to for a while now. Art Brut are one of my favourite bands of recent years, and I quite like We Are Scientists, even if I felt they have never lived up to their potential. Anyway, the two bands are touring together in the US at the moment under the banner of ‘The Also-Ran Buzz Bands Tour’. Seeing these two together would be pretty cool in itself, but they have gone a step further and have released a tour only single where they cover a song from the other band, both of which you’ll find below.

(I wouldn’t usually put up both parts of a single like this, but hey, it’s a tour only release, and if you’re going to one of the shows, odds are you’re going to buy it anyway.)

I’m glad that the We Are Scientists song that Art Brut decided to cover was ‘The Great Escape’, largely for the selfish reason that it’s my favourite WAS song. I’m indifferent toward many of their songs, but this thankfully isn’t one of them. Team Brut don’t really change the song in any major way, but obviously adding Eddie Argos’ voice into the mix of any song will give it an entirely different sound. He sings in his usual manic way over the top of surprisingly restrained instrumentation, which paradoxically ends up giving the sound a more urgent sound than the original, particularly when it gets a little solo happy in the last minute.

MP3 Art Brut - The Great Escape (expired)

We Are Scientists on the other hand manage to completely re-invent ‘Bang Bang Rock & Roll’, turning it into something akin to a 70’s dirty rock song. Which while taking some getting used to is actually pretty damn cool. This doesn’t even sound like the kind of thing that WAS usually come up with, so for them to do this with someone else’s song is quite an achievement. I probably wouldn’t even recognise that this was an Art Brut cover without knowing that it was beforehand. Which is no bad thing given how a cover is always far more fun when the bands involved play with the songs a bit rather than just repeat them.

MP3 We Are Scientists - Bang Bang Rock & Roll (expired)

Art Brut: Website || Myspace
We Are Scientists: Website || Myspace

So we’ve had something of a redesign of the site over the past few days. I did it kind of haphazardly, as in I worked on the site while it was live, so if you stopped by and things were broken and the such, I apologise profusely for that. Hopefully you like the new design. It’s not entirely complete yet, but I’m happier with it. It’s cleaner, which was the main thing I wanted to achieve, and it allows easy implementation of new features.

Onto the music, and today we have a treat from the good folks of Math & Physics Club. I wrote about them a few months and read talk of a debut full length album, but I hadn’t given them a great deal of thought of late. That was until this afternoon when the first song from that album suddenly appeared in my inbox. For those unfamiliar, MAPC (as they are known) are a twee indie pop band from Seattle who have seemingly listened to a lot of Belle & Sebastian. Which simplifies things I guess, but it covers the basics.

‘Darling, Please Come Home’ builds on the promise of last year’s two EPs, bringing us a simple tale of a lost love. Nothing here will sound all that different if you’re already familiar with twee pop, but the point here is that MAPC are as good as, if not better, than any other band working in the genre at the moment. It’s percussion is steady, the guitar work gentle and Charles’ vocal manages to somehow be incredibly restrained and while still emotive. If this is an indication of the rest of the album, we could be looking at one of the best of the year.

MP3 Math & Physics Club - Darling, Please Come Home (expired)

‘Darling, Please Come Home’ is taken from Math & Physics Club’s debut self-titled album, which will be released on Matinee Recordings on October 16. That’s a mere week and a half away kids! You can order it here for only $10! Be sure to pick up the first two EPs at only $4 each while you’re there too!

Math & Physics Club: Website

So here we are at the start of October with the usual ‘leftovers’ post for the previous month. I hardly wrote anything in September (and that’ll probably continue a bit into October unfortunately) so you’d think I’d have a lot left, but alas not. Luckily for you though, the ones I do have are all rather great. So great in fact that they deserve their own posts, but I just don’t have the time to get to them right now. Left with a choice between not writing or just doing the little blurb here, we’ll go with the little blurb. You can probably find longer (and better) writings about all of these from some of the other fine bloggers on the right menu, so go and give them some of your time too.

MP3 Bound Stems - Refuse the Refuse (expired)
Bound Stems’ ‘The Logic of Building the Body Plan’ EP was something I picked up on a whim last year, and it turned out to be far better than I expected, even if I don’t play it nearly as often as I’d like. The band had pretty much entirely slipped my mind when I learnt about their first full length album, ‘Appreciation Night’, which was released a couple of weeks ago. I’m a fan of songs that don’t conform to rigid patterns, and so Bound Stems are something of a treat. All of there songs are full of randomness that they can sound like an assault on the ears at first, but it quickly all comes together perfectly. Time changes, key changes and a bunch of other devices keep sending their songs off in different directions and ‘Refuse the Refuse’ is a great example of this. Starting off with something of a manic energy, it jumps about until it calms down, almost exhausted at the end of the song. I can’t wait to discover what tricks they have in store over the course of the full album.

MP3 In Civilian Clothing - Current Therapist (expired)
I don’t know a great deal about In Civilian Clothing beyond what came in the promo email, and even that kind of information all blurs together eventually. They are a four piece from Flint, Michigan making vaguely electronic indie pop, but all you really need to know is that it’s really good indie pop. On a songwriting level they have been compared to both Ben Gibbard and Conor Oberst, and while I wouldn’t go quite that far, I can see where the comparisons come from. The lyrics wouldn’t sound that out of place from Bright Eyes, nor would the instrumentation on a Postal Service song.

MP3 Voxtrot - Trouble
Voxtrot are one of my favourite discoveries from the past year, and one of the most likely to become something huge. It’s already starting: they are selling out places all over the place (even on this side of the Atlantic), are now releasing their third release, a single of ‘Your Biggest Fan’ which will be followed by their first full length album in the spring of next year. ‘Trouble’ is the second song from the upcoming release, and isn’t a great departure from the band. Which is certainly no band thing when you sound like Voxtrot do. I could listen to most of their songs repeatedly and still keep discovering something new in them. ‘Trouble’ is just a perfect example of what this band is capable of: making absolutely wonderful pop songs. ‘Your Biggest Fan’ will be released on November 7 on Beggars Group / Playlouder.

MP3 David Ford - State of the Union
This is something that Janet at Out The Other posted a while back. I didn’t think all that much of it at first, but it grabbed me on the third or fourth listen. Ford is a singer-songwriter from Lewes, a part of the UK not a million miles from me, yet he somehow manages to be the angriest political singer in the US at the same time. I only discovered he was British a few days ago, and it was quite a surprise given I just automatically assumed that angry political must be American, particularly given the title. All of this is irrelevant though, as it doesn’t matter where he’s from. He knows how to write a meaningful song, and the lyrics could be applied to about half of the countries in the world at the moment anyway.