The word ‘minimal’ – what does it mean to you? The word has leant itself as a label to worlds as diverse as visual art, interior design, mathematics and cookery. Anything can be ‘minimal’, in a literal sense. It just means there isn’t very much there. Sonically, the word has been tossed around with feral abandon for decades, treasured as much as it’s the victim of abuse – Chinese water torture, Steve Reich. Harmonia, Hannett and Burial, clock chimes and microwave ovens. Some noises deserve the tag more than others, but that’s to be expected when you’re dealing in amounts. Also implied towards ears is an efficiency. The lean grace of something built to handle business dutifully, without roaring like a Maserati engine or wigging and wringing out, guitar in wrist, grotesquely overblown. Rock star buffoon. Minimal in music means restraint, means elegance, means decency. This is beginning to sound like Italian advertising. Here’s the chocolate.
Oxford quintet Foals’ brand of pop is already more restrained, elegant and decent than spring time in a nunnery. Still, friend and resident Buzzin’ Fly DJ Chris Woodward has spotted some crumbs on ‘Olympic Airwaves’ chin and dabs at them with a moistened tissue. Two mixes here – one ‘dub’, the other ‘vox’. Both gleam like you wouldn’t know.
You would? Foals release ‘Red Sox Pugie’ on the 9th of May.
Pluxus are another band whose craft’s more akin to deck-tied onanism, by which I mean solo and by proxy the lonely, sullen sound of Kompakt’s startling minimal techno template. ‘Kinoton’ is taken from new album Solid State (released on the 19th of May) and stutters awkwardly into life before picking up speed in the slipstream of The Field. Balmy, breathy vocals help ease these comparisons and tenderly tie knots between the avant witchery of Autechre and Cut Copy’s gumball take on minimal tech, delicately plotting a course between the two, tape sounding like it might rip and break whenever too much is happening at once, thoughts of summer nights and open windows to yr skull while u sleep.
Let’s be whistlestop – Booka Shade are the most long-in-our-teeth, two sleuths quietly setting about rotting gums, one left, one right. ‘Mandarine Girl’ hustles along on synths rusted light red, slotted into gaps in the composition that means a simple kick’n’bass is all that’s needed for the gee-up. This old cut – taken from 2006’s Movements - reaches us after the release of new album The Sun & The Neon Light, Walter Merziger and Arno Kammermeier’s third, on Monday (26 May).
A Drownload dragged forth from the archives today as DiS offers up an early dose of Mogwai, a-decade-plus-late, to coincide with the deluxe reissue of the Scottish act’s debut album Young Team.
Post-rock that scowls at the self-caressing instincts of many given to similar sound, Mogwai’s ‘Yes! I am a Long Way From Home’ may drift but it sounds heavy and pluvial with purpose, dropping noise like drizzle, guitars pulled like treetops in the wind.
Let’s click swiftly out of this post-rock-crit haze – the track’s below. No doubt it’ll conjure imagery all of its own for you to gaze longingly into space too. See you out across the moors, boyo.
The inaugural Stag and Dagger festival ran over the last weekend through London's eastern clublands. DrownedinSound presents a three-way of a post featuring some of the acts that helped it stride to success.
Munch Munch’s ‘Wedding’ bounds like a dab-maddened three-legged pony through fields of (in)famous pop, ruining songs by Phil Collins and …Trail of Dead in a brilliant mash. The Bristol quartet manage to sound more epic than they really should in their four-minute squabble, but not in a bad way. They aren’t Embrace, but what they lack in face-raking dreariness they more than make up for in dippy ebullience; students of pop’s chemistry flicking snotballs at sir.
In which A-Trak strip ‘Beeper’ for parts before standing back and laughing uproariously as it teeters about, unhinged and disorientated without its rumbling London bass.
Ed Banger re-imagine Bumblebeez‘Pump Up the Bass’ as a leering, lumbering beast. Drone-y and sedate, this has the turning circle of a tank but when the punches come, they pack. A reversed wash turns the bruising psychedelic.
With ‘Hook and Ladder’ US folk troupe Vetiver craft a slyly sedative folk, summer dozing remembered as band leader Andy Cabic whistles lazily over a pair of idle guitars and bass that lumbers in a way that’s almost comedic, like a tutu-d elephant running through a ballet routine. Yessir – it appears to be summer again, and Vetiver’s the soundtrack you require, along with your bullets, your Halfzware Shag and your tins of beer.
Famous and serial guester Devendra Banhart doesn’t feature here and as such the track perhaps takes on a more solid form than past efforts, sullen, sunkissed bluegrass that’s in no rush to go anywhere, just fine and utterly content. New album Thing of the Past is released through FatCat on the 26th May.
Hot Silk Pockets come from Glasgow, Southend, South Wales, Yorkshire and Reading, though it was the latter province where the band formed, half an hour or so’s train ride from London Paddington. Coming together initially to play “parties in their shed”, the quartet slogged hard, graduated to living rooms and here they are now, nestling in on our Drownloads 'blog.
The band take their name from fist-warming camping equipment and were first recommended to me by Wesley Patrick Gonzalez of Stolen Recordings shipmates Let’s Wrestle. ‘What’s the Matter’ is their finest moment to date – you wonder if there isn’t something in the etiquette and blood of this kind of music, which lands a touch closer to C81 than it does to C86, that is able to draw out the one truly great pop song within anyone who dares saunter toward it. If so, theirs is already written, a dual-vocalled effort that reverberates tenderly like if Television Personalities wrote ‘Time After Time’. Other tracks suggest there might be a lot more to come from Hot Silk Pockets though, so for now our toasty fingers remain anxiously x’d.
There's a good chance you've heard this track by now and that chance'll turn to certainty by the time the summer's out - in 'Two Doors Down' west London's Mystery Jets have one of the songs of the year, doubtless; and the type of track that'll add at least another 10,000 or so on to sales of the album from which it's plucked.
Luckily, Twenty One (review) is full of hits like this - colourful, naive takes on the sounds of bands from the 'New Pop' section of Simon Reynolds fastly-becoming-seminal Rip it Up and Start Again, tracks that have been spruced by Erol Alkan's clubland production but still retain the essence of the band heard on debut album Making Dens.
So, if you've heard it, enjoy seeing it and if you've seen it, think of this as something for the archives more than an introduction. Chances are you'll return to it at some point.
Leeds quartet Wintermute draw from a fairly desperate pool of genes – Dan Howard and Dave Hemmings match taut guitars with tortured throats and end up squabbling amid the same starchy textures conjured by the likes of Good Shoes and early Futureheads. But where those bands have always been, or at least have moved towards the observationist, chart-legible end of the musical spectrum, Wintermute’s is a much more oblique pop; calling US luminaries like Thursday and Minus the Bear in to graze tonsils in outbursts of cold glee directed, you feel, at lost girlfriends.
This exclusive download of ‘Shark Vs E-Boat’, courtesy of On The Bone Records, captures everything the band do well in a dark-eyed snapshot, instruments idly amusing themselves with tight-as trapeze, riling the vocalists into unbound knots of pent. Shouts rise up and the simmer back down into cooling guitars that put the walls back up. Wintermute cast themselves as shark in this stunted catharsis, self-destructing with a smile, jabbing guitars a torpedo amid the torpor.
Springtime brings those fickle birds back from across from southern peninsulas to nest back on British shores. And from Swedish climes comes the lesser-spotted birdsong of Wildbirds & Peacedrums and warbling baroness Mariam Wallenti commanding the skies with the strikingly stripped-down larynx-straining chirrup of ‘I Can't Tell in His Eyes’ from the forthcoming Heartcore longplayer.
More quality windfall from the Leaf label - enjoy.
Bands in their own right can be mysterious and murky at times. Bands playing other people’s tracks only add to the intrigue. So, when you have a case of female fronted Leeds, UK trio Sky Larkin offering their own sultry interpretation of a track by femme-macho rock beasts Queens Of The Stone Age, it can only be utterly beguiling. And it pays off; ‘I Was A Teenage Hand Model' has been slowed to porno-sleaze tempo and becomes an insidious breathy ode to temptation. It’s rather brilliant.
The track comes as part of four the up-and-coming band recorded recently for their Swit-Swoo EP which features tracks by Travis Morrison (ex-Dismemberment Plan), Jake Thackray and Patti Smith in addition to Josh Homme and co. Designed to fill the gap between singles and the debut album that the band are preparing to record in Seattle next May, it’s one of those things that a band can do now without suffering the consequences of post-success judgement. Success by the way, seems very likely for Sky Larkin. If you’re intrigued, check out their own songs – they’re just as good. For now though, download and enjoy the fruits of one band gorged by another.
Crashing in on a wave of good will come London’s Gentle Friendly, a dazzling prospect enamoured with the same things we’re enamoured with – LA’s new noise, tracing exotic, Animal Collective and rhythm. David and Daniel (also of Peckham madcaps Buttonhead) stalk Dalston with a winning formula: salvage rusted drum kits and restaurant grade Arabica beans from skips, toss back the beans, bang the drums until joyous resonance is reached.
‘Ride Symbols’ is threaded with scratched noise, beaten into ticklish bruises by fedback shards and dumb-hearted drums; vocals playing cat and mouse in the gaps between. Gentle Friendly skitter and thrash and do all that you’d expect a new London Vigoda to, rhythm parts moving along docey-doe-eyed, melodies tapering up and out in traffic fumed ferris wheels like a more ready Fuck Buttons.
It’s pretty good, is what I’m trying to say. Listen, yeah?
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