Another Form of Relief

Great British Hopes features the very best bands that make us party like it’s 2011. Oh yes.

Now this is my cup of tea. You play sceptically through tons and tons of mp3s by bands that don’t do very much, and then one will make you sit up and go ‘wow’. Granted, my standards for that aren’t that high. Sound vaguely like Pavement (or a bunch of other 90s bands) and you’re already halfway there. Sir Yes Sir are far better than one lazy comparison.

This is guitar rock just the way I like it. Sloppy sounding through the verses, laced with distortion through the choruses. It jumps about all over the place, in both time and sound, and it’s all the better for it. A wonderfully punchy two minutes from a band I expect to hear a lot more of this year.

Every now and again, being a music blogger heralds unexpected rewards. About a year and a half ago, I briefly wrote about The Kabeedies on here. I haven’t really kept up with them since then, only really giving them a thought when the iPod would throw up one of their songs. Today I went to the Another Form of Relief Mail Centre (a PO box) to pick up a couple of things I had ordered (the Nosferatu D2 disc and the new Superman Revenge Squad record) as well as whatever the promo companies had sent over. I was slightly surprised to find a promo copy of the debut album from The Kabeedies in that stack. I likely would never have realised they had a record out without it, and that would have been a damn shame.

If there’s one word that comes to mind throughout this album, it’s “joyful”. Everything is so full of glee that it could easily run the risk of being utterly sickly, but it never quite crosses that line. Which is impressive on a record that uses handclaps, jangly guitars and extensive boy-girl harmonies. It’s all rather chaotic too, but if anything, that’s the one thing that holds me back from completely loving it. I like my songs to be chaotic, but here the chaos seems to be rather well thought out. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, and it’s a minor niggle on a superb little album. There’s a great band here though, and one that could go to the top of an already crowded indiepop scene.

Great British Hopes features the very best in new British music. You know, stuff that doesn’t sound like James fucking Blunt.

I’ve spent the last 24 hours trying to decide whether or not Hold Your Horse Is is a good name for a band or a bloody terrible one. I’m still not entirely sure, but the more I think about it, the more it’s growing on me. The band come to us from the mean streets of Hampshire. So mean in fact that they rarely tend to produce decent bands.

Hold Your Horse Is are a very loud, very fast band with more than a little in common with those other unwieldy band name scamps Dananananaykroyd. Perhaps not quite as all over the place as that band, as indeed here each element has a little room to breathe. It’s rough and ready, yet the vocals, guitars and drums all get their chance to shine.

There seems to be a lot of these bands popping up at the moment. The aforementioned Dananananaykroyd seem to be at the forefront of it. The wonderful Pulled Apart by Horses are certainly up there too. It’s a fine line to balance a lot of noise while still sounding good. Hold Your Horse Is fit right into nicely with this lot, and it’s a fine stable (ha, I’m hilarious!) to be a part of.

The Everyone Runs Faster With A Knife EP is out now and available directly from the band for just three of your English pounds.

Pocketbooks have been one of my favourite bands to cover since I started this blog. Watching them rise from a few rough early songs to releasing their first proper album has been a joy to behold. As such, Another Form of Relief is delighted to present a free download of their next single, which also happens to be the opening track to the aforementioned album. It’ll be released on June 15, but you can download it here right now.

Footsteps follows in the, er, tread of those earlier songs, while also representing a natural progression from the band. Regular vocalist takes a step back on the song, allowing Emma a chance to shine, which she has no problems doing. Her calm, precise demeanour allows us to get to know her and take in her story. One of the most appealing parts of Pocketbooks has always been the imagery that they can evoke. Managing to walk a very fine line between the contemporary (“on the top deck of the 23″) through to throwbacks to gentler times and places (“the beaches of a south coast town”), they almost seem to exist in a world of their own. That world is centred around the mundane, the tiny nuances that dictate our lives. Yet somehow Pocketbooks manage to turn that into a magical place that we can only dream of.

Footsteps will be released on June 15. It’s taken from the album Flight Paths, which is released July 17 on How Does It Feel To Be Loved?. Apparently copies are being sent out now though, so there’s no excuse for dithering.

Continuing the seemingly never-ending trend of great bands coming out of Leeds, Tigers That Talked may well be the best of the current crop. Despite being together for a while now, I only discovered them recently, meaning I’ve skipped any early awkwardness the band may have experienced. This meant the band I started listening to was fully formed and almost ready to be the UK’s own Arcade Fire. It’s the obvious comparison to make, but the sound is certainly eerily similar at times.

Which is actually a disservice to Tigers That Talked. You see, if there’s one thing I never really cared for with that band, it was the words. Sure, songs like Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels) were stunning, but most of them were rather too abstract for my own tastes. Tigers That Talked seem to have found the perfect balance. The verses are reasonably vague, but after a few listens you notice that there are grounded meanings in the songs.

Talk Black Heart Blue Eyes. Listen through a couple of times and you think it sounds rather pleasant. Listen a couple more times and you start to notice nice little wordplay like “bigotry’s obligatory round here”. A few more times and you’ve realised you’re listening to a song about something as mundane as the threatening atmosphere for a seaside town. Which is something you’ll be familiar with if you’ve ever visited Margate or a hundred other such places around the country.

Then there’s the video. I’m loathe to post videos usually as I don’t really like the format, but when one captures a song as perfectly as this, it only seems appropriate. Filmed largely at a British Legion club in Blackpool, you get to see the awkwardness of a band and an audience who are completely incompatible. Glimpses of the town punctuate throughout, seguing easily between the tourist glamour and dodgy looking estates. It’d be a remarkable achievement even without the song.

The Black Heart Blue Eyes EP will be released on June 8 via Bad Sneakers Records. Obviously on 7″ and download only because vinyl is far more useful to those who us want a physical copy that a round bit of fucking plastic that’ll play in anything.

Every now and again I’ll run across something that I instantly love. Coming up with new content for here on a daily basis means that I post a lot of stuff that I like, but don’t have that immediate connection with. The ones that do tend to be the bands that end up being part of our Great British Hopes series. Assuming that they are British of course.

The Sailplanes are currently based in Berlin, but luckily for me they formed in London. They make a kind of noisy, messy pop that is difficult to categorise. My first thought was to label them as “Life Without Buildings on ritalin”, but that sounded more insulting than it should. The song structures certainly resemble LWB though, stop/starting and jumping all over the place. Then some of their songs started sounding like “the best thing Nosferatu D2 never recorded”, which is fitting as they seem to have both come from the same scene.

Reading back I can see that I haven’t managed to articulate my excitement for this band at all. They really are the best thing I have encountered in a long time though. Choosing just one song to post was a hard enough battle in itself. Just download Tilted and listen for yourself. Then go to their site and download all the rest.

I was always under the impression that Copy Haho were actually called Copy Halo. I’m not entirely sure why, as that isn’t exactly a more logical name. In fact, I only noticed that it was Haho last week, several months after first listening to them.

Those several months ago, I liked what I heard, and did intend to feature them. Promptly, I forgot all about them, as if often the way. Then I noticed that they are one of the Awesome Pals, and projected them right back into my blog field of vision.

Copy Haho are by far the best thing to ever come out of Stonehaven in Scotland. The fact they are probably the only thing to come out of Stonehaven makes that honor a little unfair though. Hyperbole aside though, Copy Halo have obviously spent much of their youth playing Pavement records and a whole bunch of other 90s American indie to death. Words border on the laconic, melodies gently move around in the background, only occasionally leaping into action.

There is certainly a gap in the current indie scene for this kind of lazy slacker rock. Bands like 4 or 5 Magicians and My Sad Captains often come close to filling this void, but never quite seem to do so. Record labels seem to be wary of this kind of music, and I can’t for the live of me figure out why. Granted, it’s never going to sell out a stadium, but it’ll certainly get the indie kids moving. Or at least gently swaying.

Two Great British Hopes in a row. Both from Glasgow. Both really bloody good.

Every now and then a band I’ve never heard of previously will come out of nowhere that I immediately fall in love with. Usually these bands tend to be ones that play on my nostalgia for the US indie scene of the 90s. Projekt A-ko is no exception to this, drawing from the Pavement, Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jnr playbook.

Marching in as if it’s still 1993, the band instantly assault the ears with lots and lots of noise. The guitar is all over the place and what harmonies there are tend to be drenched in distortion. And what distortion it is. Never really letting up for the whole four minutes, it could so easily be a horrible sounding mess. Instead, it turns out to be something wonderful.

Yoyodyne will be released on April 20 via themselves and is available to pre-order now via their Myspace page.

Talk about your unwieldy band names. Getting the right amount of anananana is bad enough, but then there’s the double header of Aykroyd not being the simplest name to spell either. The funny thing is that the music fits the name. If you’d asked me beforehand what I’d think a band called Dananananaykroyd would sound like, I’d go with loud and fast. And that’s exactly what we have.

The thing that takes one aback about Glasgow’s Dananananaykroyd is just how loud and fast it is. The vocals jump straight in, not sung, but fucking shouted. A dual assault of two drummers quickly follows. None of this is an opening gambit, nor is it limited to the song. This is the sound of desperate for you to hear them. This is the sound of a band that makes even labelmates Johnny Foreigner sound relaxed.

The risk with music like this is whether or not it can work in a full album setting. It’s easy to run dry when you use up this much fuel in just three minutes. A bunch of singles and an EP show they are on the right track. We’ll find out in a month if their ability matches their ambition, but they certainly seem willing to try.

Hey Everyone! will be released on April 8 by Best Before. The band is also participating in new WTFblog Awesome Pals, alongside Los Campesinos!, Sky Larkin, Johnny Foreigner, Favours for Sailors and a bunch of others. In other words, the entire good end of the British music scene.

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.