Band Of The Day #6 - GEORGE PRINGLE "Carte Postale"
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As an A&R person you spend forever searching for ‘it’; flicking through piles of CDs and a phonebook's worth of MySpace Profiles per week - I don’t recommend it, it’s a pretty depressing pastime. You find yourself hearing a grey heap of blandness, listening to people trying to reinvent their rock’n’roll influences like magpies trying to build a nest; or there’re those who attempt to subvert hipster dance but essentially they’re mostly just people making the sort of tuneless twaddle you could have bought in the late seventies. It’s all post-Blondie, post-Pistols, post-Clash, post-Zeppelin... So you spend all this time looking for things that are unique and which you think will inspire something inside of people, either because of what’s being said, how the songs fall together or because of their approach to creating music. What you hope to find is something that’s refreshing and challenges conventions. Yet even when you get excited about something which you feel is truly great, they may not evoke the modern world, least not these over-stimulated yet culturally malnourished days of ours.
Re-imagining herself as the bastard child of James Murphy and Nico, a sick-of-guitars 20-something flicks open her scribbled journals of stories, arranges pages of type-written stream of conscious poetry and places them beside her iBook and decides to learn how to use GarageBand to soundtrack these tales of modern living. Part Bill Hicks and Ab Fab referencing social comment, part Capote versus Ginsberg via Beastie Boys “lit-hop”, backed by a kaleidoscope of soundscapes inspired as much by Nintendo menu music as party comedowns or the hues of classic black’n’white scenes.
Welcome to the enthralling world and music of George Pringle and her debut single ‘Carte Postale’. The NME has already questioned whether it’s “the single of the winter” whilst others have pondered over how the hell to pigeonhole this punkist anyone-could-do-this but few have the imagination to, anti-indie, post-karaoke, super-smart electronica. Comparisons have ranged from Black Box Recorder and New Order to John Cooper Clarke and Lydon’s post-Pistols Public Image Limited and George has offered the tag of 'bleep-beat-poetry' but then anything that’s easy to place is boring and who needs boring genre titles anyway? Feel free to send better suggestions, on a postcard.
So without further ado, here is the semi-manifesto introduction to one of the most genuinely exciting things I’ve stumbled across. On the first Monday of every month until George decides otherwise we’ll be offering a free download from Miss Pringle, which you’ll be able to find collected on limited edition EPs accompanied by some of her photo journals and additional writing, the first of which, entitled Poor EP, Poor EP Without a Name, is out in March. And yes, she does have a disco ball on her bookshelf. Also you can find hand-written versions of the lyrics in her blog.
Drownload: George Pringle - 'Carte Postale'
http://myspace.com/georgepringle
- Sean Adams
