Music to drink tea by
Archive for February, 2009
Dan Michaelson is old enough to launch a solo project
02 years ago
in MP3s
Absentee is a band that I have a somewhat bittersweet relationship with. I enjoy their more upbeat sounding numbers, but struggle a little with the more dirge like material. The one thing that always maintains my interest though is the voice of singer Dan Michaelson. Sounding world weary far beyond his years, his vocals add a sense of gravitas to the proceedings that cover up almost any other weaknesses. I suspect I could actually listen to him recite the phone directory and enjoy it.
So I was slightly hesitant to listen to Dan Michaelson & The Coastguards. Solo projects tend to be more personal. More personal tends to be more downbeat. And if this was even more downbeat than the depressing end of Absentee, I’d probably be attempted to throw myself from a window by the end of the song.
Bust starts miserably enough, although it does quickly build to something larger than I expected. The guitar gently strums, and the drums jump around in the background, waiting for their moment. A short while later, that moment comes and the song picks right up. Of course, the instrumentation is all just there is supplement Michaelson’s voice, which is on full display here. Mournful, gravelly and just generally fed up, it’s the kind of voice you’d expect to find populating a bar in the deep south (in the US – not Guildford or something). It doesn’t quite live up the best songs in the Absentee catalogue, but it’s an impressive start for a new project.
Saltwater will be released on March 9 by the good folks at Memphis Industries.
Website / Myspace
The Foster Kids bring 60s guitar pop; pause to namecheck crappy bands
02 years ago
in MP3s
So you have a band from Norfolk that look like that and have an album entitled At Home With The Foo Fighters. It’s a wonder that a gentle indiepop connoisseur such as myself didn’t pass straight by. To say that what I got when I pressed play was unexpected is something of an understatement.
This is 60s-influenced guitar pop, with male-female back and forth vocals, rising guitars and a punchy little melody. The song below, Before You Change My Mind, wouldn’t feel entirely out of place on a Saturday Looks Good To Me album now that I think about it. Lyrically it isn’t the strongest thing I’ve ever heard, but really I’m just splitting hairs. They certainly don’t make them quite like this anymore. Particularly in Norfolk.
All of which leaves us with the lingering question of “Why the Foo Fighters?”, to which the band reply with a far more pertinent question: “The Foo Fighters, why?”.
At Home With The Foo Fighters is out now on digital download via Letterbox Records for £4.99.
Website / Myspace
The City and Horses loves coffee, tea, girls; maybe not in that order
02 years ago
in MP3s
The City and Horses seems to largely be the project of one man, Marc Cantone, who appears to have started a musical career after his girlfriend left him for a Turkish chef. Which is honestly all I would need to know to start listening. Take heed, press release peoples!
Over the years, the band has grown into a five-piece, although it still all sounds delightfully intimate. Despite a slightly shaky lyrical start (“I love coffee and I love tea, I love the girls, the girls love me”), I Love The Girls turns out to be a gentle, joyful little ditty where the lyrics don’t matter quite as much as the way it all sounds.
There hasn’t been a great deal of interesting new jangle pop turning up lately, so this is certainly an enjoyable surprise. For some reason I expected a band called The City and Horses to be rather heavier than this and wouldn’t have paid them much atteniton. Instead, I got one of the most pleasant sounds of the year so far. And all because of a Turkish chef.
I Don’t Want To Dream will be released on March 2 by SVC Records. It’ll cost a mere £3 for digital download (320kbps mp3!) or £4.50 for one of those shiny disc things.
Pelle Carlberg takes Facebook test; triggers mid-life crisis
02 years ago
in MP3s
Took a test on Facebook the other day
Was supposed to show your mental age
When 51,3 opened with those two lines, I was just about ready to turn it off. While I do have a certain fondness for some Pelle Carlberg songs, I’ve never been a huge fan, and anything so self-consciously “down with the kids” enough to immediately cite Facebook was rather off-putting.
Sticking with it though, it’s just setting the scene for an amusing tale of something akin to a mid-life crisis. A sudden realisation of “I’m getting old” echoes through the song, and pondering whether reading broadsheets on the bus really gives you a mental age of 51. Hell, the fact he felt the need to write a song about it suggests it must have bothered him a fair bit.
On a side note, it was only after I heard this song that I looked up how Pelle Carlberg actually is. Turns out he is 39, which certainly took me by surprise. I had him pegged as being in his late twenties at most, but then I didn’t know he’d been recording since 1992 either. Ah, the joys of Wikipedia.
Still, I suppose songs like this are something we should get used to. I dread to think how many songs will be waxing nostalgic about iTunes, Myspace or Gmail ten years from now.
51,3 is taken from The Lilac Time, which was released back in August via Labrador Records. Pelle Carlberg will also be playing at the London Popfest this coming Thursday at the Brixton Windmill.
Johnny Foreigner sum up the festival experience with riots, tents, free drinks, mud and panic attacks
02 years ago
in MP3s
Oh Johnny Foreigner, the only band to put out a record last year that I enjoyed more than either of the Los Campesinos! records. Quite an impressive feat given there is only three of them when the other lot have seven. Even more impressive given their album, Waited Up Til It Was Late was largely made up of older, re-recorded songs. Nearly two and a half years down the line though, they still sound as fresh as they ever did.
Of course, it’s still lovely to hear some new material, so it was a nice surprise last week when the band threw up a zip file on their Myspace page containing two new songs: Ghost the Festivals and Ohai, Sentinels. The first has been around for a while now, both in live sets and a couple of videos out there in Youtubeland, but it’s nice to have proper recordings. The production may be a little rough around the edges, but I’d expect nothing less.
Ghost the Festivals manages to sum up my own experiences at Reading last year, but I imagine the language is pretty universal. From escaping the site before the riots on the final night to the endless sea of tents to hanging out in the VIP area with free drinks. Although I must have been doing something wrong as my drinks certainly weren’t free. £2.50 for a tiny glass of Coke? Jesus.
There isn’t anything particularly new in these songs. When you hit the perfect formula with your first album, I suppose it makes sense to keep it up. Which is fine with me. So long as the next record is even half as good as the first, it’ll still probably be the best thing released this year.
Johnny Foreigner Is Aces (containing both Ghost the Festivals and Ohai, Sentinels) is available to download from the band’s Myspace page for the next ten days or so. Both songs are also on an exclusive tour EP that the band will be touting during their European tour with the mighty Sky Larkin.
Website / Myspace
The obligatory Los Campesinos! post
02 years ago
in MP3s
I know that I write about Los Campesinos! a lot. So I apologise if you don’t really like them. In my defence, I haven’t had much of a chance to write about their latest album. Once I do though, we can all move on for a while. At least until they put something new out anyway. Which at their current rate will probably be next week.
We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed seemed to be an apt title for a second album following less than a year after their debut. It seemed unlikely that much would be as enjoyable as Hold On Now, Youngster…, and let’s face it, the band always had the feel of having one superb in them before disappearing again.
Despite everything against it though, somehow WABWAD (the best acronym ever) manages to be a superior work, demonstrating far more range. Walls of sound are introduced, abstract instrumentals and Casiotone inspired short, sharp shocks rumble through the record. Thirty minutes later, we’ve covered more musical ground than a lot of bands would in a decade.
That isn’t to the say the pop songs that symbolised the original album are gone. They’ve just evolved. The title track offers exactly what the it promises. Racing through lines about breaking people’s teeth, decaying organs and stale relationships with such exuberance you can’t help but wonder if the master track got mixed up somewhere down the line. It doesn’t matter though. By the time Gareth spits out his ultimate condemnation of society with “we kid ourselves there’s future in the fucking, but there is no fucking future”, you just want to shout it out and roll your eyes in unison.
We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed was released back in October. Even though only 5,000 copies have been put out, with no more to follow, it still seems to be available. What the hell is wrong with you people?
The Young Republic change style completely; remain really bloody good
22 years ago
in MP3s
It hasn’t been this bad since my grandpa was a kid
He made it through – he never told us what he did
Has any line summed up the state of the world currently as much as that?
Of all of the bands I’ve had the pleasure of writing about on here, it’s The Young Republic that have developed the most of a band in that time. If I’m honest, I’d been a little apprehensive about the direction the band had been taking of late. Moving to Nashville from Boston and trading in the gentle indiepop of their earlier releases for a more classic rock, Americana influenced kind of sound was a risky gambit. While the results were largely very good, nothing really blew me away in the way those earliest songs did.
That changed when a couple of songs from the band’s upcoming release Balletesque dropped into my inbox though. The instrumentation on The Wolf suggests a band far larger than it’s current six member lineup. Indeed, the band never sounded this rich even as an eight piece. The real revelation here though is the songwriting of Julian Saporiti. Each verse manages to outdo the previous in both content and wordplay. This is certainly the closest he has come to not just writing like Dylan, but sounding like him too. Sure, it’s a lazy comparison given their Isis cover a while back, but we’re well beyond sounding like Belle and Sebastian at this point.
Balletesque will presumably be released in the nearish future.
Shotgun Jimmie makes ramsackle pop from used parts
02 years ago
in MP3s
What is it about music that doesn’t sound perfect? You can create the most precisely crafted pop song, yet it’ll still sound worse than the one next to it that is slightly off-time, or misses the odd note. Of course none of this can go so far that the music itself actually sounds amateurish, but giving your music that “we don’t really give a shit vibe” does seem to make it cooler.
Which leads me to Shotgun Jimmie. Musically it’s all fine, gently strumming along while rarely becoming adventurous. It’s the vocals that sell me on it though. Random key changes pop up on a whim, lines seem to not end properly. The sound of a man who wants to tell a story, but still needs to get to the bar before it closes. And it’s the latter that usually wins.
Still Jimmie will be released on March 10 via You’ve Changed Records.
Website / Myspace
Great British Hopes: The Joy Formidable
02 years ago
While at Reading back in the summer, I didn’t get much of a chance to see bands playing on the BBC Introducing stage. The lowliest stage of the festival, it was just a small tent with bands you’ve never heard of playing to people passing by on their way to one of the chip vans. I’ve no doubt that a lot of these bands would have been talented, but in the limited time that a festival allows, you tend to head for what you know. So the only band I ended up seeing there was The Joy Formidable. In retrospect, I wish I’d gone to see the car crash of a set by the FF’ers, but that’s a different story.
I went along being vaguely familiar with one of their songs, and if I’m honest, because there was no one better on at the time. It was worthwhile though. They played a good little set to a good little crowd and all was right in the world. Then I didn’t think about them again for another six months. Exploring their website shows that things have seemingly picked up for them. Tours with Howling Bells, album and single releases are all in their recent past.
Which is good because there aren’t a great many bands around that sound like this at the moment. Or maybe there are and I’m unaware of them. But this is noisy, dirty pop, vocals leaping in all over the place even if you can hardly make them out. It feels like something that would be right at home next to My Bloody Valentine, just with a little more melody. Lazy comparisons aside, it works for them, and it seems to be getting them a following. Not bad for a band that was only being introduced by the BBC six months ago.
A Balloon Called Moaning is now available as a free download from the band’s website, or as a CD/poster pack from the same place.
The awesome Cradle single is also available now via Try Harder Records. On 7 fucking inch only.
Aidan Moffat: One hell of a mime
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I haven’t paid much attention to Aidan Moffat since Arab Strap broke up. I kept up with Malcolm Middleton reasonably well, and once you’ve picked one child over the other, it’s hard to go crawling back. In fact, the last I heard about Moffat he was recording under some dodgy name like Psychometric Dildo or something. I might be wrong on that*, but for some reason it feels right.
So I wasn’t exactly excited when an Aidan Moffat & The Best Ofs file dropped into my inbox. Expecting some kind of spoken word dirge, my first thought was something along the lines of “holy shitting hell, this sounds cheerful”. The only problem with that is that Moffat does not have a voice built for cheerful. When your range extends from melancholy to suicidal (not a criticism!), something seems off when you bring the whimsy.
There’s nothing wrong with any of this really. It’s certainly not bad by any stretch of the imagination. It ambles along nicely, barely reaching two minutes, meaning it hardly outstays it’s welcome. But something isn’t quite right. Maybe I’m too nostalgic for the Strap of old, but this doesn’t really do much for me. Which may beg the question of exactly why I’m bothering to post it. Honestly, because the video (found below the jump) is the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.
Aidan Moffat related fun facts!
1. He writes a highly amusing advice column entitled I’m No Expert.
2. I once sold a book to Aidan Moffat. He is unaware of this fact.
How To Get To Heaven From Scotland was released last Saturday via Chemikal Underground Records.
Website / Myspace
* If I am, that’s one hell of a band name right there.
