The Lions Constellation
Spanish JAMC/Pixies enthusiasts The Lions Constellation could just have become my favourite sub-genre of the Summer with the arrival of this album. The Barcelona quartet, who feature RJ Sinclair of Tokyo Sex Destruction, sing in flawless English and here release eleven great tunes in the same sonic vein as their obvious influences.
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
May 15, 2009
‘Young Adult Friction’ is, I think, favourite song of the year thus far; in fact, The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart have made the album my dreams are made of. The sorts of things that get me excited (not finitely) include C86 bands (namely The Pastels), Sarah Records, The Cure, Slowdive, cardigans, dual vocals, aesthetic darkness, music to simultaneously dance and think to…
Yes, I realise this is hyperbole, but that’s the way it is. Thus seeing the Brooklynites at their first London gig is a risk indeed – will it turn out that they are in fact just a sum of their parts? Should I just go back home and listen to Souvlaki or pretend that everything in the world is exactly this perfect clash between sugary-sweet and twisted deliberation? Will Kip Berman and Peggy Wang be so cool and aloof that they fail to induce any sort of reaction?
Hold fort, it’s fine. In fact, it’s fucking brilliant (expletive necessary). I feel like I’ve gone back to a state of nature (minus Nietzsche’s wanky overinterpretations) – being born in 1986, I feel a strange connection with the likes of McCarthy, Heavenly, The Field Mice and Talulah Gosh. This is equally wanky as Nietzsche, I do realise, probably to the extent of someone saying “I’m in love with a feeling”. But hell, I can’t help myself. … Continue Reading
The Legends - Over And Over
Let us get one thing out of the way from the off; The Legends is a terrible name for a band. It conjures up images of landfill Britpop revivalists, paunchy 35-year-old blokes down your local, playing Stone Roses covers convinced they are the reincarnation of Saint Gallagher.
But it seems the band’s mainstay Johan Angergård is a very busy chap indeed, serving time in two other bands and having founded Labrador Records, home of many of Sweden’s leading pop luminaries, so perhaps we can forgive him this one. Perhaps he just didn’t have enough time to pick a good name for his band (which is really just Angergård’s own project, in spite of his lurid claims of having eight others in the band). Fortunately for our Johan, his musical talents are far more on the button than his ability to pick out an appropriate moniker.
Having left us in 2006 with Facts and Figures, a highly enjoyable record of dreamy pop laced through with electro touches, he’s back with Over and Over, a very different animal indeed. … Continue Reading
Slowdive - Souvlaki
News just in: the main man in the shoegaze world and one of the pioneers of anti-folk are going on tour together! That’s Neil Halstead and Lach, for those who aren’t on top.
The duo (not performing as a duo, FYI) will be hitting the following places on the following dates:
Sun May 17 MANCHESTER RUBY LOUNGE
Wed May 20 BIRMINGHAM ACADEMY
Thu May 21 OXFORD ACADEMY
Sun May 24 YORK DUCHESS
Mon May 25 LIVERPOOL ACADEMY
Tue May 26 NEWCASTLE ACADEMY
Wed May 27 GLASGOW CAPT REST
Thu May 28 LEEDS FAVERSHAM
… Continue Reading
A Place To Bury Strangers
April 7, 2009
Everyone knows that A Place To Bury Strangers are the loudest band in New York. Who told them that? Were they tested by way of some sort of open audition? Is the statement/award temporally constrained or does it mean, like, ever? Well never mind that, this writer can’t work out whether she’s suffering from tinnitus or whether it’s the sound of her brain recoiling into itself.
A Place To Bury Strangers can be compared to Psychocandy-era JAMC and pretty much everything J. Mascis has spewed out not just in their choice of pedals and amps, but also in the way they grind through sound through Oliver Ackermann’s self-designed and built custom-effects pedals. … Continue Reading
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
Taking in all the twee 80s British indie you can think of (The Vaselines, The Field Mice, Shop Assistants, 14 Iced Bears, etc) and more besides, New York’s The Pains of Being Pure at Heart’s debut full-length is an impressive serving of bedsit indie rock for the 21st century.
As if the band’s name wasn’t an obvious enough pointer as to what to expect, the album is littered with references to its influences – ‘This Love is Fucking Right!’ is a dead ringer for My Bloody Valentine’s ‘Paint a Rainbow’ (albeit in slowed-down form), whilst the song’s title tips its hat in the direction of The Field Mice’s ‘This Love is Not Wrong’. As pleasant as all that sounds, it’s for the best that The Pains of Being Pure at Heart have enough tricks in their locker to ensure they don’t slide aimlessly into retro fanboyism.
Lead singer Kip Berman certainly sounds the part, his studiously British vocal mannerisms falling somewhere between Morrissey and, curiously, The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess, with the odd hint of Ride’s Mark Gardener thrown in. Although he sticks resolutely to the C86 blueprint, his self-consciously fey affectations feel totally at home here, aided and abetted by some (though more would perhaps be welcome) lovely backing vocals from keyboardist Peggy Wang. … Continue Reading
Crystal Stilts
Monday 16 February, 2009
Here’s a couple of takes on the same gig with some overlap, a little disagreement and a stringent and weak (respectively) version of a similarly-focused criticism.
Take one, by Martin Dickie:
An almost tragic melancholy descends as Crystal Stilts play London’s Lexington. Sadly, it isn’t the doom-laden atmospherics of their music that renders the audience with static boredom. A solid album and plenty of blog gossip give this crowd expectations somewhere near the realm of an early Joy Division gig. And the immediate impression given by the band isn’t far off that mark. … Continue Reading
M83 - Saturdays=Youth
Greetings and salutations; Saturdays=Youth, M83’s 5th album released in April this last year, is 100% a nostalgia trip. From the Duran Duran-esque synth noises, through the warm guitar washes and soft-voiced vocals to the teen movie archetypes on the front cover (including a dead ringer for my biggest teen movie crush ever, who is also name-checked in ‘Graveyard Girl’ in what is perhaps the best lyric of 2008: “She worships Satan like a father but dreams of a sister like Molly Ringwald“), this album evokes the ’80s better than most of the music from that decade.
Now I’m well aware that if you mess with a bull, you’ll get the horns; it’s so easy to retread the same tired paths over and over again without ever bringing anything new or even enjoyable to the musical table, but on Saturdays=Youth, Anthony Gonzales has managed to cherry pick the best bits of the golden age of synth music and construct it intelligently and emotionally without it sounding like the creation of a focus group. Rather, all the different elements feel like they organically came about because they just work well together. Even when second vocalist and Kate Bush voice-doppelganger Morgan Kibby sings “The hounds of love, they bite our heels” it feels like a happy accident rather than a musical in-joke for beard-scratching musos such as myself.
After a preparatory intro, the album really begins with ‘Kim & Jessie’, the lead-off single, which features particularly affecting harmonies and a chorus which feels like being punched in the face by Kevin Shields while you were having a bit of a snog with Nick Rhodes, which is to say momentous, unforgettable and something you want to tell your friends about despite being slightly embarrassed to admit you enjoyed.
The next track, my personal highlight, ‘Skin of the Night’ is huge, stately and icy-cold. If I were writing this review back in the ’80s, I could have described it as glacial – but seeing as that now means “a bit melty”, I’m stuck with the less compact depiction. It also, as I sit at my desk ostensibly doing my “real job”, just made me play air-electronic-drumkit in such an involved way I just knocked half a carton of Capri-Sun over my work. And what’s more, I don’t regret a second of it.
By the time you get to the second half of ‘Graveyard Girl’, it’s a testament to how much the album has won you over that you barely bat an eyelid at the awesome, towering ridiculousness of the spoken word section (”I’m 15 years old and I feel it’s already too late to live, don’t you?”). By then you’ve been caught and you barely notice anything else as you’re swept along in the freezing-cold but strangely comforting flow of the record as it worms its way around your brain poking the buttons you didn’t think still worked anymore.
The album, like Weird Science, is not without its faults. The production techniques that make the album as a whole so distinctive can render some of the tracks slightly indistinguishable, and the last track ‘Midnight Souls Still Remain’ is the rare time you lose a bit of patience with M83 – sure it’s appropriate enough to end the album with a formless, synthy blur, but does it really have to be over 11 minutes long?
But really, you can forgive him his little indulgences. It may be over eight months old now, but there remain a disappointingly large section of the population that haven’t heard this wonderful record. If you enjoy any Kate Bush, Duran Duran or Tears for Fears songs unironically I have two things to say to you. Firstly, congratulations, you are a good person and secondly, whether you’re a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess or a criminal, you should do yourself a favour and get hold of Saturdays=Youth any way you can.
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - Everything With You/The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
Seems to be the time of year for bands with names that need reducing to acronyms … TPOBPAH hail from New York, and ply their trade playing a brand of indie that harks back to the shoegazing of early-Ride, Slowdive etc. Fair took me back to my schooldays, so they did. … Continue Reading
null
The first thing about ‘Me & Mary’ that might surprise those familiar with Asobi Seksu’s brand of Japanese-tinged shoegaze-pop is its immediacy. Unlike previous singles ‘Thursday’ and ‘Strawberries’, there’s no majestic, swirling build-up here – indeed, Yuki Chikudate’s vocal arrives in the very first second of the song. It almost seems like a conscious attempt by the band to write a single, rather than picking tracks from an album to serve that purpose.
That’s not to say that the track is utterly graceless – far from it. Yuki is still beguilingly incomprehensible at times in that obligatory shoegaze vocalist way – and that’s before she start’s singing in Japanese. The way that passages of English and Japanese vocals blend seamlessly into one ethereal siren-song is Asobi Seksu’s most unique aspect, and it truly makes them stand out. Combine this dreamy vocal with shimmering blend of guitars, noise and understatedly intense drumming, and you’ve got a the perfect breathless soundtrack for staring into space, at your shoes, or at whatever inanimate object takes your fancy.
Recent comments