I promise to be better at this blogging thing this year.

It only seems fitting to start the year with Allo Darlin’, without a doubt my favourite band of the last couple of years.  Watching them come up from tiny indiepop shows to headlining a packed out Scala has been a lovely thing to watch.

The band will release their second album, Europe, in May of this year, and above you’ll find one of the songs from it.  Tallulah is a reasonably old song, previously released on a Hangover Lounge EP, but this is a new recording of it.  I’ve listened to the original so many times that this one is a little jarring, but it’s still a beautiful song.  “I’m wondering if I’ve already met all the people that will mean something” breaks my heart every damn time.

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This is something of an odd choice for me to post today of all days.  I’m someone who has found myself increasingly drifting to the right economically and has watched today’s strikes with bemusement more than sympathy.  Perhaps more shockingly for someone in the indiepop scene, I don’t find Conservatives to be fundamentally reprehensible.  So a song actually called Purge Your Inner Tory probably isn’t the most politically appropriate song for me today.

I really like it though.  It’s everything that I want my indiepop to sound like, and while this won’t necessarily work for everyone, it’s ramshackle and jangly enough for me play on repeat for quite a period at a time.  As for the politics, I’ll certainly take a band that has a position, even if it’s one I find slightly silly, over one that doesn’t have one at all.  Still, looking forward to what they come up with next, and if they aren’t one of the indiepop staple bands of 2012, I’ll be rather surprised.

You can get a sampler CD from the band, featuring four demos in it’s own unique, handmade packaging for a mere £1 from their BigCartel store.

MP3 Colour Me Wednesday – Purge Your Inner Tory

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Few bands are as committed to maintaining their image as Summer Camp.  After managing to keep their identities secret for the best part of a year, Jeremy Warmsley and Elizabeth Sankey are proving that there’s more legs in their project than the original one note idea seemed to suggest.  Summer Camp aren’t really a band that is focused on the present.  California of the 70s and 80s seems to be far more interesting to them, and this style dominates their songs, videos and even their live shows.  There’s absolutely no reason why any of this should work beyond the initial novelty value, but it does, and somehow they are managing to get better.  Better Off Without You is a spectacularly crafted pop song that in the right world would be a massive hit.  It’s just a shame that that world passed by three decades ago.

Welcome to Condale will be released on October 31 via the band’s own Apricot Recording Company and Moshi Moshi Records.  The band will play a string of UK dates in November, including a Kent one at the Farmhouse in Canterbury.

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If Los Campesinos! were ever going to live up the Nosferatu D2 mantra of every band you love letting you down eventually, it seemed as if now would be that point.  After three spectacular albums, the band has undergone a fundamental shift in it’s lineup for fourth album Hello Sadness, with three of the seven members of the band departing and being replaced.  As such, I’ve been a little bit wary about the direction the band would take from this point, so I’m greatly relieved by just how good first single By Your Hand has turned out to be.

Continuing the path into more personal territory that stood out on the last record, the band describe Hello Sadness as “ten songs of love, loss and heartbreak nail-gunned to a back-drop of broken, tangled bodies, creeping, dead-eyed animals, suffocating, looming shadows and World Cup exits. It is an honest, bare bones documentation of breaking up and trying not to break up in the process.”  By Your Hand is the opener, and given that by the time we reached the end of the first verse we’re already hearing about girls vomiting on Gareth’s rental tux, I suspect this is just the tip of a rather painful iceberg.

Hello Sadness will be released on November 14.  The band are offering an advance bundle including the album, a demo CD, a DVD and a t-shirt for £25, or £20 if you’ve got Heat Rash.  Pretty good deal I’d say.  You can get it through their web store.  This was taken rather badly by Avalanche Records.

MP3 Los Campesinos! – By Your Hand

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“Milky Wimpshake join the MTV generation!!! Fuckin sellouts!” – Pete Dale

When it comes to certain bands, there are just some things that you don’t expect from them.  If you’d told me a while ago that I’d be posting a somewhat amusing Milky Wimpshake music video on here, I’d have found the idea quite preposterous.  Yet here we are.  After nearly two decades of churning out songs and becoming legends within the indiepop scene, they’ve finally got around to making a video.  And very good fun it is too, even with it’s wanton destruction of cherry bakewells.

Cherry Pop is taken from My Funny Social Crime, which is available now via Fortuna POP! The band will also be headlining the indoor stage at Indietracks on July 30.

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There’s several reasons to be wary about Raymond & Maria.  Usually if I receive a press release about a platinum-selling, number one record, I’ll tend to recoil in horror.  Granted this is in their native land of Sweden, but it still suggests music perhaps a little too mainstream for an apparent snob such as myself.  I also don’t really like remakes, so recording your Swedish songs into English seems a little silly to me, even if I understand the commercial reasons behind doing so.  Then again, I’ve never heard Raymond & Maria in their Swedish form, so I have no point of comparison here.

So taken on it’s own merits, No One Notices Your Brand New T-Shirt is absolutely fine.  In fact, it sounds like a hundred other indiepop bands that haven’t had the level of success that Raymond & Maria seem to have had.  It’s upbeat, it’s handclap happy, and of course has the inevitable slightly sweet but also gently accented vocals.  It’s all rather lightweight and straightforward, but then it doesn’t seem to be aspiring to be anything more than what it is, and that’s certainly no bad thing.

The debut English language album from Raymond & Maria, Jobs Where They Don’t Know Our Names, is currently being shopped around for a label.  So you’ll probably be waiting a while to actually hear it.

MP3 Raymond & Maria – No One Notices Your Brand New T-Shirt

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All us real people have record collections. In these collections we have classics and then we have those other records. Not ‘guilty pleasures’ but records we can’t explain or justify – ones you wouldn’t play on the office stereo. Records that your friends just wouldn’t understand…

My Top 5 Records That I’d Recommend To No One

Ciccone Youth – The Whitey Album (Blast First Records, 1988)

Ciccone Youth were Sonic Youth and Mike Watt (Minutemen) plus a bit of Greg Ginn (Black Flag) and J.Mascis (Dinosaur Jr). Why wouldn’t you recommend that muscle to everyone? Because it’s frickin incomprehensible!

This album offers a couple of tracks of silence, some poetry, some ‘skits’ (‘Two Cool Rock Chicks Listening to Neu!”), a few instrumentals, a rap/yelp from Thurston Moore and three cover songs; ”Addicted To Love” (Kim Gordon in a Karaoke Booth) and “Burnin’ Up” and “Into The Groove” by Madonna.

Why did any of this happen? I don’t know.

One of the things on the Audio Antihero “To-Do List” is a re-working of this album featuring the entire AAH roster. As if to say “Dear Sonic Youth, I will see your senseless indulgence and raise you one faintly illegal re-working of your most forgotten album”. Suck on that, Renaldo!

Video: Ciccone Youth – Addicted To Love

Various Artists – Judgement Night Soundtrack (Immortal, 1993)

OH BABY! 1999 and 13 years old! Rap-Metal was my education but for some reason everyone’s a total grinch about it, except for all those ‘people’ who do actually like rap-metal but I wouldn’t want to talk to any of those losers.

Anyway, this was a soundtrack to a film only I liked and an experiment on the genre/money, pairing up rock/metal artists with rappers to create something pretty monolithic. There’s Slayer & Ice-T! Mudhoney & Mr. “I-Like-Big-Butts”! Teenage Fanclub & De La Soul! Helmet & House Of Pain! Pearl Jam & Cypress Hill! Even Therapy? are on here!

My favourite is “Another Body Murdered” by Faith No More & Boo-Yaa Tribe which is terrifyingly O.G. “I KEEP LOOKIN’ AND HUNTIN’ JUST LIKE A LION! LET THE SUCKA KNOW IT’S THEM THAT BE DYIN’!”. Fuuuuuuuuck.

If XOYO or Old Blue Last ever book me to DJ I’ll probably just pump this album on shuffle until hipsters crucify me on an upside down American Apparel ‘A’. I’ll be a Nu-Martyr. Fred Durst will write a rhyme about me. S.O.W.O.R.T.H.I.T.

Video: Faith No More & Boo-Yaa Tribe – Another Body Murdered

Type O Negative – The Origin Of Feces (Roadrunner, 1992)

Oh ‘90s major labels…you truly are the gift that keeps on giving! The sophomore effort from pseudo-goths Type O Negative was a fake live album where the band re-recorded and miss-titled songs from their debut and play intentionally badly whilst argue with a dubbed audience who loathe them. The ‘gig’ even gets interrupted by a bomb scare…It’s nonsense.

But in all the “what?” and “why?” it packs more punch that it ought. Plus, I never expected a song called “I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else” to carry any significance to me…but life has its twists!

RIP Peter Steele.

Video: Type O Negative – I Know You’re Fucking Someone Else

Tomahawk – Anonymous (Ipecac, 2007)

“Original arrangements inspired by Native American material from the late 19th century” from members of Faith No More, Jesus Lizard, Helmet, Battles & The Melvins. Supergroups-are-weird-you-guys!

This rhythmic, spooky and furious music is destined to confuse or irritate most people you know. It somehow found its way into my father’s life and he complained that it was ‘endless’.

I don’t know if I would play it backwards.

Video: Tomahawk – Song of Victory

Henrietta Collins & The Wife Beating Child Haters – Drive By Shooting EP (Texas Hotel, 1987)

Post-Black Flag, Henry Rollins came to England to start afresh. He recorded the seething “Hot Animal Machine” but all the rage and resentment that flowed couldn’t match the perversely illogical “Drive By Shooting EP” that followed.

It opens with a ‘60s pop parody about going out with “the gang” to embark on a killing spree (“it might be your sister or it might be you!”) but that’s relatively tame compared to what follows. ”Hey Henrietta” shows Rollins having an unnerving conversation with himself about murdering his racist father and raping a policewoman; “Can You Speak To This?” places him as the protagonist in a Sabbath-riffed tale of meeting a woman who produces her husband’s severed head and encourages him to speak to it; then a glimmer of relaxing familiarity comes and goes with “I Have Come To Kill You” a re-working of Queen’s (immeasurably tiresome) “We Will Rock You” in which Rollins offers us freedom and salvation…because he has come to kill us.

Next to the ‘gags’ about raping a policewoman (erk), “Men Are Pigs” is easily the most uncomfortable moment. He encourages women to thank and please their men by using their mouths – and then…

“CUT IT OFF! THE WHOLE THING! DO IT TONIGHT!
PUT IT IN AN ENVELOPE, SEND IT TO ME:
ROLLINS, P.O. BOX 2461 REDONDO BEACH CALIFORNIA 90278 USA!
MEN ARE PIGS, YEAH!
Ladies, no one understands you like I do.”

Video: Henry Rollins – Men Are Pigs

No sir, they don’t make them like this anymore. If you own no records that you’d recommend to no one then I feel sorry for you, son.

Jamie is the one man machine behind the mighty Audio Antihero label.  You know, the place that put out the Nosferatu D2 record I go on and on and on about.  Since then, the label has put out quality releases from Benjamin Shaw, Jack Hayter, Wartgore Hellsnicker and will release the new EP from Paul Hawkins and the Awkward Silences in the near future.  To celebrate this, the label will be putting on a launch gig at the Brixton Windmill on July 1, featuring three of their acts and the lovely David Cronenberg’s Wife.  You should come.

Well this is really bloody excellent.  Evans the Death have been floating around the indiepop scene for a little while now, building themselves a great reputation in the process.  I finally managed to catch them at the Odd Box Weekender last month, where they were one of the highlights of the weekend.  Newly signed to Fortuna POP!, their debut single Threads is loud, fast, and messy, and really, what more could you want from a band?  So good.

Threads will be released on July 4 via the mighty Fortuna POP!

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You ain’t seen nothing yet

We’re gonna get bigger than national debt

So proclaim Tigercats toward the end of their sprawling new single, Banned at the Troxy, and it may just be true.  The evolution of Tigercats has been an odd one.  Forming from the ashes of the mighty Esiotrot, the band has quickly risen through the London indiepop ranks from go-to support band to a band capable of selling out gigs as headliners in their own right.  Their earlier releases were focused more around three minute pop songs, but Banned ups the ante to cross the five minute barrier, and doesn’t even come close to outstaying it’s welcome.  It builds, jangles, builds some more and ends in a controlled chaos of noise, all without ever losing it’s sense of fun.  Which is demonstrated by the wonderfully whimsical video below:

B-side Skydiving (below) is just as interesting in itself.  A much more downtrodden, sullen affair, it manages to run on for nearly four minutes with only two lyrics throughout.  From most bands, I’d find this to be a rather frightful prospect, particularly given how trite those lyrics could have ended up sounding: “Where do you go when you fall apart / Into my arms and into my heart”.  Yet four minutes of this somehow works and ends up being the most mature thing the band have recorded thus far.

MP3 Tigercats – Skydiving

The Banned at the Troxy 7″ picture disc is out now on the lovely WeePOP! Records.  If, like me, vinyl isn’t your thing, it’s also out on download places that aren’t iTunes.  If, like me, that isn’t your bag either, you’re just too damn fussy I suppose.

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It’s only in the last few months that I’ve got properly into Herman Düne, despite being a fan of one or two of their songs for a few years now.  But I’m delighted to have discovered them just as a new album is on the way.  In advance of that, we have this wonderful little video for first single Tell Me Something I Don’t Know.  It’s one of those videos that could easily take away from the song, given you’ve got the band competing with both a cute blue monster and man of the moment Jon Hamm for attention.  The song remains the centre here though, and with a bit of luck, this kind of video will bring a fair bit more attention to the band.

The new Herman Düne album is entitled Strange Moosic, and will be released on June 6 via Fortuna POP!.  By some random crazy happenstance, the band will also play XOYO on that day.  And if it’s not exactly like the gig portrayed in the video above, I’m going to be sorely disappointed.

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