Another Form of Relief

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.

It’s been all quiet on the Absentee front for quite some time now, to the extent that people seem to think they broken up. Whether or not that would be a good thing when side projects like Wet Paint are kicking the arse of the main band, I don’t know, but still. Bitchstealer is the title track from the band’s new EP, which will arrive in June via those nice folks at Memphis Industries, with a full length (Victory Shorts) following later in the year.

Okay, so I realise that 49 songs is a pretty random number. I don’t entirely know why I chose it. It’s just that 50 seemed rather generic to me. I also know that the ordering on a lot of these songs is slightly absurd. Isn’t #36 really better than #37? I honestly couldn’t tell you as my opinion probably changes from day to day. So take the numbering with a pinch of salt. It’s a rough guide, nothing more. I should also point out that I limited any band to having no more than two songs each in the 49. So much as I would have loved to filled this with Voxtrot, Young Republic or Light Footwork songs, I had to use a little self restraint. So now you know some of my methodology, enjoy the next ten songs.

#39
The Mountain Goats
‘Woke Up New’

Website
Myspace

“This isn’t the John Darnielle that we heard on the last two records. The song tells the story of getting used to being alone after the big breakup and uses wonderfully real examples of getting used to being alone (”the first time I made coffee for just myself, I made too much of it”). It all essentially comes down to a refrain of “oh, what will I do without you?”. It isn’t an angry question though, just accepting that this is how things are now.” – originally posted June 17.

#38
Cansei De Ser Sexy
‘This Month, Day 10′

Website
Myspace

Probably the most cheerful sounding break-up song of the past year. CSS seem to be about an image just as much as the music, and when it sounds/looks this good, who really cares? There’s nothing overly complex in the arrangements here, just a lot of synth and some rather bored sounding vocals. All of which makes it a hell of a lot of funny, even when the lead singer is belting out lines like “if someday we get to meet again / In a car crash, plane wreck or terrorist attack / Or maybe next thursday night / Don’t bother saying hi”.

#37
National Heroes
‘Riot Vans / CS Cans’

Website
Myspace

A glorious assault on the “chav” culture that seems to have almost consumed the UK. I only discovered National Heroes toward the end of the year and don’t know a great deal about them, but they have obviously been listening to a lot of the great British bands. A storming snapshot of modern Britain, covering such lovely topics as teen pregnancy (“Teenage drugs and pregnant mums / Birth control is non-existant”) to the wonderful street racers you encounter on the roads each day (“Boy racers cruising in their financed 205s / Keep touching 90 down the A1205″) all leading to the simple refrain that it’s just “a sign of the times”. Assuming they get noticed, they could be the next big thing for British music in 2007.

#36
Belle & Sebastian
‘Sukie In The Graveyard’

Website
Myspace

Even though most seem to love it, ‘The Life Pursuit’ really doesn’t do very much for me. It’s a reasonable enough album with some solid singles, but on the whole it leaves me pretty cold. I guess I fall into the simplistic early Belle and Sebastian camp rather than the things they come up with now. Oh well, it still has those solid singles, and ‘Sukie In The Graveyard’ is one of them. One of the things I really don’t like about new Belle & Sebastian is how Murdoch constantly plays around with different styles of delivery. Ironically, ‘Sukie’ is one of the songs where he does this, pitching the song with a heavily accented, rapid delivery, and yet it works for it perfectly. The song sounds cheerful enough until you actually listen the words, where it becomes a rather dark tale of a girl kicked out of her house who ends up posing nude to make ends meet. Not that she seems to care of course. Oh Belle and Sebastian, and your wonderful shades of grey.

#35
Royal Treatment Plant
‘You Don’t Need Me’

Website
Myspace

Royal Treatment Plant are a band that I went from hating to really liking within the course of a month. I really disliked them when I saw them live in September, but I got their CD in the mail a few days later and I really liked it. I’m not sure what didn’t click the first time around, but it was this song that largely won me over. It’s full of driving guitars and some fantastic passive-agressive vocals sung with an urgency that doesn’t often seem to crop up from female fronted British bands.

#34
Play Radio Play
‘Juice Box, Paper Hat and a Line of Pixie Stix’

Website
Myspace

If there’s one thing this kid needs, it’s an editor. Which may sound like a harsh way to open, but it’s rather true. Play Radio Play is a 17 year old from Texas who makes simple electronic songs on his computer. A lot of them are pretty awful. But some of the good ones are really good. ‘Juice Box’ is one of them. It’s all pretty whimsical, about escaping from life to a fantasy world where you’re in control, but the delivery and arrangement prove that there is talent here to make Postal Service like electro-pop perfection. He’s just been signed to Island, so hopefully with a little guidance he’ll be able to reign in some of the eccentric elements of his music and come up with something stunning.

#33
Sparrow House
‘When I Am Gone’

Website
Myspace

Sparrow House is the solo project of Jared Van Fleet, who is a member of the fantastic Voxtrot. The sound of Sparrow House is nothing like that of Voxtrot though. ‘When I Am Gone’ is from his debut EP, ‘Falls’, and is a stunning folk effort that comes across as a latter day Iron & Wine. A gentle, twanging guitar eases up through the song, while Van Fleet sings his heartbreaking lament over the top. It’s almost enough to wonder exactly what we’d be hearing from this guy if he wasn’t a member of Voxtrot. Almost.

#32
Absentee
‘Something To Bang’

Website
Myspace

“This is a band that describes their sound as “Leonard Cohen singing from the trouser backed up with a mix of incompetence and occasional surprise”. So I started to listen to ‘Something To Bang’. It all started normally enough, all garage band guitars and bassline, and then, forty five seconds in, the vocal kicks in. That’s the point where I discovered they really weren’t kidding with the Leonard Cohen thing. Lead singer Dan does have a voice that evokes Cohen, and more importantly, a voice that isn’t usually found in indie rock. Indie rock is often made up of those who can’t really sing but really want to rock out, and the music will disguise that well. The people with the stronger voices seem to go on and do other things. This isn’t exactly a perfect rule, but it fits quite a lot of the time. I guess my point here is that there’s a voice here that you don’t commonly hear. The closest contemporary comparison I can think of is David Berman, and that’s certainly not a bad thing. As the song progresses, more musical flourishes enter. There are keyboards in here, sneaky little riffs and a bunch of other fun stuff. All of this results in an indie-country-rock type sound that you don’t often hear coming from bands on this side of the Atlantic.” – originally posted June 24.

#31
The Bright Lights
‘Closed on Monday’

Website
Myspace

I discovered The Bright Lights entirely by accident when they headlined a Beeches gig that I’d been invited too. Unfortunately I had to leave before their set was over, but a quick rummage around the internet later showed they had a hell of a lot of talent. The songs aren’t all that bold, but by god they are catchy, with the kind of urgent vocal delivery that makes them come to an end seemingly far too quickly. ‘Closed on Monday’ is by far their best effort, a fantastic piece of guitar pop. They are due to release a single (their first I think) in March, so hopefully 2007 will be the year that things start happen for them.

#30
Oh No! Oh My!
‘I Have No Sister’

Website
Myspace

Handclaps! Electronica! Non-sensical lyrics! What’s not to love about Oh No! Oh My!? Their whole album is full of delightful little gems but it’s ‘I Have No Sister’ that stands out the most to me. A gleeful song about feeling better by being with someone, even if it means suggesting that they both “ride bikes into the sea”. The whole thing is darker lyrically than it sounds musically, and things like “if I die then at least you’ll die too” really should be rather morbid, but somehow it manages to seem forever gleeful.

You should know how it works by now. Ten more tomorrow, ten more Friday and the final nine on Saturday.

On sunday, I, along with a couple of friends, attended my first music festival. This may seem pretty strange for someone who writes a music blog, but things like festivals are in short supply in this corner of the country. Earlier on the year, I read about the Electric Gardens Festival. It’s a new event, a two day specialist festival covering dance and electronica on the first day and more traditional indie rock fare on the second day. It shouldn’t take a genius to figure out exactly which day we attended. As such, early on sunday morning, we set off on the short drive to Canterbury in an attempt to find the festival site. A bunch of random country lanes and a ton of dirt tracks that aren’t great for a car of my size later and we’d arrived at the festival.

We got there about an hour before the first performances so we decided to explore the festival site, discovering that there wasn’t a great deal to it. A small area held the second stage and the tiny Myspace tent as well as the overpriced food and drink areas, and a short walk led us to the hill where the main stage was located. Not many people seemed to make it in time for the start of the event, meaning we were able to sit pretty much where we liked to view the main stage, awaiting the opening performance from The Boy Least Likely To.

The Boy Least Likely To played to an initially pretty dead crowd, but as the performance went on, people moved closer to the stage and began to warm to them. They actually seem genuinely happy to be there too (the band, not the crowd), joyfully babbling away between songs and talking about how they don’t really know Kent. This led to one of the band members (Peter) announcing he was actually from a town nearby leading to the band asking if anyone happened to know him, but sadly no one did. They played a few songs I wasn’t familiar with, but also the standards like ‘Be Gentle With Me’ and their now obligatory cover of George Michael’s ‘Faith’.

MP3 The Boy Least Likely To – Be Gentle With Me (expired)

During their performance I spotted Kate Nash in the crowd, so once they finished playing, we headed over and had a little chat with her. Annoyingly, she was playing the festival, but she played on the day before, meaning that once again any attempt to see her play had been thwarted. Anyway, she was very polite and apologetic about missing the Beacon Court show a couple of months ago, and even gave us free badges. Which was pretty awesome and the only thing that was free at this festival. Which leads us to the food situation. We were starting to want some food by this stage, so headed up to the food tent, and discovered that each “meal” was £5 (though reduced from £7!). When I say “meal”, in reality I mean a crudely put together burger or some slop in a tray. You could also wash this down with a £2 bottle of Sprite from the Ukraine, or some other foreign country that I couldn’t quite identify. Now this may all be standard for those who regularly attend festivals, but it was a bit of a shock to the system for me.

Following our food we wandered over to the second stage (in reality, a circus tent) to catch the peformance by Absentee. We were a little early so ended up catching the end of a set by Findlay Brown. I hadn’t heard of him or his music before, but I quite enjoyed what I heard, even if he was a little too Ryan Adams at times. It was perfect music to sit and relax to out of the sun though, and enough to make him look in to him a little more. Once he finished, Absentee arrived on stage, and spent an absolute age setting up. This wasn’t their fault, nothing seemed to go right for them, and they eventually ended up starting over halfway into their allotted time. Even when they did, the set was still plagued with technical problems. The vocals were too low, and the bass was so strong that it actually made the ground shake. They tried their best, but combined with a non-responsive crowd, it was hardly the perfect performance.

MP3 Absentee – Something To Bang (expired)

After this, it was time to head back to the main stage to see The Young Knives. Neither me or Joe were familiar with them, but Hiren kept talking about how good they were, so we made our way to the front of what was quite a large crowd to see them. I didn’t know what to think when three guys who looked even dorkier than me hit the stage, but they quickly won me over with a bunch of catchy songs and impromptu joking between the songs. They gave it their all and seemed heartened by the number of people that had turned out to see them. I don’t really keep up with what’s popular these days (I sound so old like this), but I can see these guys becoming another of the current crop of successful British bands very quickly.

MP3 The Young Knives – She’s Attracted To (expired)

Wandering around the site, we then spotted Melinda and (I think) Laurie from Absentee, so we proceeded to harass them as well. They also turned out to be very polite and down to earth, happily chatting about the festival in general, which bands to see and, somehow, university courses. It was after this that everything decided to go a little pearshaped. We headed back to the circus tent to see Adem, although I’m still not entirely sure why. Anyway, I started to feel a little ill a bit into their set and quickly progressed into full blown asthma attack mode, which I guess is the result of a day of sitting on grass, baking to death and being surrounded by smokers. Either way, it meant my festival day was over, meaning we left before we got to see the final run of the Electric Soft Parade, Battle and Brakes in the Myspace tent. Which was incredibly annoying as I particularly wanted to see the last two. I guess if I do though, it’s going to have to be indoors or something.

So what did I learn from this weekend? Mostly, that festivals don’t do me a great deal of good. While seeing a bunch of good bands in one place was awesome, the disorganisation of it, the overpriced and crappy food combined with the fun medical issues outweigh that by a hell of a lot. Which kind of sucks, but it’s something I’ll have to deal with. Looks like it’s back to my once a year indoor show or something now then, yay!

Edit: More Electric Gardens coverage can be found at Delete as Appropriate and Jukebox.

While browsing around looking at some of the bands that will be playing at Electric Gardens in august, I happened upon the page of Absentee. This is a band that describes their sound as “Leonard Cohen singing from the trouser backed up with a mix of incompetence and occasional surprise”. Go on, tell me you wouldn’t be the least bit curious after reading a description like that.

So I started to listen to ‘Something To Bang’. It all started normally enough, all garage band guitars and bassline, and then, forty five seconds in, the vocal kicks in. That’s the point where I discovered they really weren’t kidding with the Leonard Cohen thing. Lead singer Dan does have a voice that evokes Cohen, and more importantly, a voice that isn’t usually found in indie rock. Indie rock is often made up of those who can’t really sing but really want to rock out, and the music will disguise that well. The people with the stronger voices seem to go on and do other things. This isn’t exactly a perfect rule, but it fits quite a lot of the time. I guess my point here is that there’s a voice here that you don’t commonly hear. The closest contemporary comparison I can think of is David Berman, and that’s certainly not a bad thing.

As the song progresses, more musical flourishes enter. There are keyboards in here, sneaky little riffs and a bunch of other fun stuff. All of this results in an indie-country-rock type sound that you don’t often hear coming from bands on this side of the Atlantic.

MP3 Absentee – Something To Bang (expired)

‘Something To Bang’ is taken from ‘Schmotime’, which was released last month on Memphis Industries.

Absentee: Website || Myspace