Another Form of Relief

In my head, The Diggs are one of the definitive indie bands. They play the kind of music I’d expect to hear on any indie or alternative radio station. The music is upbeat yet has some dark undertones, none of it’s too flashy and it’s all rather efficient. Of course, it’s inoffensive too, giving it a nice yet throwaway vibe to it all.

The only problem in this theory is that my head doesn’t quite match up with reality. This is a country where the “indie” chart contains Adele, The Last Shadow Puppets and Travis. All this really does is make bands like The Diggs seem far better than they have any right to be. Only in an ideal world would this be average music. In this one, it’s a hell of a lot better than most things we’re subjected to.

We get by on four hours of sleep at night
And we never get tired, only tired of you

The day after I talk about Cardiff being the music capital of the country these days, Los Campesinos! seem to want to cement that fact by throwing out a brand new recording. To be precise, it isn’t exactly new, but it’s the first time we’ve heard it. How I Taught Myself To Scream was recorded for their first album but didn’t make the cut. So with a new album on the horizon, what better time to offer it up?

It’s not that hard to see why it didn’t make the album. There is nothing wrong with it by any means, but it does sound rather similar to a few of the songs that did make it. Had it been chosen over any of those though, it would have felt right at home, and we could be having this conversation about Drop It Doe Eyes or We Are All Accelerated Readers right now.

The second album from Los Campesinos! is called ‘We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed’ and will be released on October 13. They will spend part of October touring the UK with No Age and Times New Viking as part of the ‘Shred Yr Face’ tour.

Exactly when did Cardiff become the music capital of the country? It seems to have slowly crept into that position, but somehow it’s producing band after band of great music. This week’s offering is Joy of Sex, a three-piece who like “short songs, rhythm, repetition, noise”, all things I can appreciate.

December, Month of Plenty starts with slowly, and just when you start to think it isn’t really up to much, it kicks in properly. Distortion is everywhere, the vocals suddenly don’t care and it generally goes all over the place. It doesn’t even come close to troubling the two minute barrier, and when it’s over, you just end up pressing play once again. I’m not going to hail Joy of Sex as the greatest thing ever just yet, but the potential is certainly there.

Joy of Sex’s debut EP, a self-titled affair, will be released on Monday via Robot Architect, and will be available as a free download.

Stephen Malkmus will always be “that guy from Pavement”. There’s simply no getting around it. It’s something that makes appreciating his solo albums somewhat difficult. Once one manages to though, his recent work doesn’t seem quite so bad. Which isn’t to say that everything he’s done is great, but there are usually at least a couple of gems hidden on each album.

Take The Hook from his 2001 self-titled album. First of all, there aren’t enough songs about pirates. That’s something that can be proved with science. So you end with a swashbuckling adventure that is probably more about Malkmus’ time in Pavement than adventures on the high seas. As you can imagine, it’s all rather whimsical, but that’s half of it’s charm.

now

then
‘Twas the summer of 2004, and things were rather different back then. Summers were comfortably warm and sunny for weeks on end. Birds happily sang. Children played merrily in the streets. And the Shins were the soundtrack to it.

Okay, so maybe not all of that is true. But The Shins somehow bring out warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia for a time that probably wasn’t all that great in the first place. No matter though, their album of the time, Chutes Too Narrow, was and remains a wonderful piece of work. Upbeat one minute, miserable the next. Soaring vocals actually singing lyrics that contain meaning. Oh, and some superb novelty artwork.

Bedroom electronica week vaguely continues here at Another Form of Relief, something that was unintentional but I’m happy to go with. Say Hi used to be Say Hi To Your Mom. Perhaps that is too twee or too precious or something these days. Which is kind of a shame as I rather liked the name and Say Hi doesn’t really sound like anything at all.

Whatever the name though, Let’s Talk About Spaceships remains a lovely, if sad, little song. When things are too much, it’s far easier to just switch off and move onto anything else. It’s a position just about anyone will have been in at some point, whether it be personal or something bigger. So let’s not talk about that break up. Let’s not talk about recession. Let’s not talk about Georgia. Let’s talk about spaceships.

Great British Hopes features the rare new British bands that don’t make me want to go deaf.

The mighty Wichita Recordings have recruited another into their already daunting ranks with the signing of Sky Larkin. The Leeds band have been floating around critics’ radars for some time now, but it’s taken until now for them to find a home. This now means that their first full length abum will be arriving sometime in the near future, with it recently being recorded in New York.

Molten, previously a single, is one of the songs on it, and while not their strongest work lyrically, it does give a good sample of the Sky Larkin sound. The guitars are rough, noise drops in and out constantly, and vocals occasionally shout from the background. It’s a hell of a lot of noise for only three people to making really.

Now how about touring again with fellow Wichita band Los Campesinos! to flog both of their albums? Just saying.

I don’t know if Dogs Die in Hot Cars are broken up or whether they are together again. Seeing as it’s a Friday, I’m going to go with back together though. Last I heard they were trying to put together a second album, although it’s been quiet again for a while, so who knows where things currently stand?

The unfortunate thing about the original sudden demise of Dogs Die in Hot Cars was that they left behind a superb album that became destined to be quietly forgotten. Which is a shame as it’s full of excellent XTC-alike pop songs, something which is in short supply these days. While at the time the band never really troubled the charts (this one hit the heady heights of #32!), it isn’t that hard to imagine them in the place of The Maccabees or The Kaiser Chiefs had things gone slightly differently for them.

So there’s a guy who secretly likes another guy but won’t do anything about it because of the pressures of society. Then there’s a girl who secretly likes another girl but won’t act for much the same reason. Then they bump into each other, find they are perfectly suited and fall in love with each other. This is to show us just how fluid sexuality is and how no one should really give a shit about such things.

At least I think that’s what it is trying to get at. The problem with Her Space Holiday brainchild Mark Bianchi is that his ideas are far bigger than his songs. He wants to tackle big issues, which is of course fine, but is largely limited to do so within electronic pop songs. This is no means is a slight to his work, as I’ve enjoyed most of his albums, I just suspect that the big ideas are getting lost in the shuffle. Each one of his albums have shown flashes of brilliance, but he seems unable to pull it all together enough to put out the great album that is floating around his head somewhere.

When you have as many excellent songs as Belle & Sebastian do, it’s easy for ones that aren’t so immediate to slip through the cracks. I tend to centre most of my B&S listening around Tigermilk and If You’re Feeling Sinister, their first two albums. There is a lot of good stuff to be found elsewhere though, particularly in their EP releases. Take Your Carriage Clock and Shove It comes from their 2001 Jonathan David EP and it’s far better than I initially gave it credit for. Sweeping orchestral arrangements, verses that build perfectly, and a pleasant, if slightly sparse, story. While it may not rank amongst their best, a solid Belle & Sebastian is far better than the best songs of most bands.