Gentle gifts from the musical gods are to be loved and treasured, and Birmingham’s shady bard fit in said gift box. Their compelling version of pseudo-orchestral slow-motion indie is as much an anomalous product of their home city’s grey, undistinguishable skyline as you could imagine. Perhaps it takes something as ugly as a desolate Midlands freeway to inspire something as frailly sweet as shady bard.
Following on from their debut From The Ground Up, the quintet have returned to woo further hearts and minds. ‘Long Term Solutions To The Seagull Problem’ is one of those little gems that might be overlooked by the unkeen eye. Languorous and luxurious, it’s propelled along in a manner akin to a paper boat being blown across a lake. Over barely-there synths and single note guitar slices, band leader Lawrence croons mesmerically, akin to an English folk-enthused Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse. The moment where cocoon-like, lush strings and sighing vocals break out is quite the loveliness indeed.
Tomorrow (8 Apr), London: come sway so-slow to the soothing sounds of Shady Bard, and more, at a neat lil’ show at the capital’s Bardens Boudoir venue.
The Birmingham indie-folksters (check out our 9/10 review of their From The Ground Up LP here) feature on a bill of four pieced together with a little assistance from us DiS types (who will be down to lend DJ support on the night); doors open at 8pm and tickets are six of your English pounds on the door.
Enviably brilliant support comes from London alt-(post)-rockers Prego, Kent’s grunge-gone-pop sorts It Hugs Back, and superb singer-songwriter gent from up north Paul Marshall.
Speak to ¡Forward, Russia! these days, and they’ll shake their heads and tell you how they have no idea how they managed to get as far as they did following their first album, Give Me A Wall. The phrase they tend to use is ‘overachieve’. Which is both quite a wonderful thing to hear – a band discussing their success in a grounded and thoughtful manner – and also impossibly amusing. It wasn’t a case of overachieving whatsoever last time round; more a case of a band getting its rare, justified dues for creating a record as extravagantly, feet movingly, head-spin inducingly fantastic as GMAW was.
Last year saw the release of a one-sided etched 10” piece of vinyl entitled ‘Don’t Be A Doctor’ whose seven and a half minutes of multi-part delirious math metal (with a tune, natch) pointed someway towards what could be expected next time around. That summer, the band decamped to Seattle to record their second disc with Matt Bayles, the man behind albums by Blood Brothers, Minus The Bear and many others. Life Processes is in part a departure for the band from their earlier works, but in many more ways a development and continuation. Fuller, harder and more considered a piece of work, it encapsulates all that is progressive and good about ¡Forward, Russia! whilst retaining the key qualities that made them such a fantastic anomaly the first time round.
‘Spanish Triangles’ is the album closer, a mile wide in scope full of keening guitars, building grandeur and glorious explosion. It’s not entirely a summation of the record that will be released in the UK this April and worldwide over the following months, but it gives a fine idea of what the band can and are achieving. Download and marvel.
Returning from a journey into the cobwebbed corners of their innards, Radiohead are back from the uncharted flux of Kid A through Hail to the Thief and approaching the more immediate sounds of their past on new album In Rainbows. It’s doubtful, though, that they’ll ever come full circle, (how could anyone after 'Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors'?), so ‘Just’ looks to remain the closest Thom Yorke will ever get to a pop pout. Surely set to feature on the Greatest Hits currently being compiled by former stable EMI, it’s to other third parties that the task of remixing 'Just' falls, (though the thought of Guy Hands molesting the ones and twos is a brilliantly harrowing one), first to Grammy-winning producer du pomp Mark Ronson and then to The Loving Hand. A remix of a cover version? How very 2.0, and how very (nu-)Radiohead.
Stealing photographs of Atlantis, even when you’re scrumping through Google’s laxly patrolled orchards, is not the easiest of tasks. Fortunate for us, then, that we were tipped off by John’s label about his passion for Bulgar women, and found him kicking around somewhere above the streets of Seuthopolis, which can just about pass itself off as sunk for now, until someone comes to dig it up. There’s something of London-based popniks Upset! The Rhythm and the new curiosities it retrieves in that old photo of the submerged city, hanging as it does in constant suspension between the surface and the deep, man-made well that drowned it six decades ago. Pop! Not pop! For you! No, actually, you can't have it; you're not having it. Skewed, awkward tunes course boldly through blood rhythms and, despite his and Seuthopolis’s Jesus complex, John Maus is alive and off on one again.
Yes, Maus’s implorations are heavy, deathly even, but seeing him live reveals the desperate zeal for life of a lonely, strung out city fail, ridiculous stepping and fleeiing arms, but dark caffeine eyes that don’t give passage to the mirth/horror/delight emanating from a bemused audience.
‘My Whole World is Coming Apart ’ is his call to arms, a track that revels in the glee of a life spent rebounding time and again off the barriers of polite society; each rejection sending Maus’s attempts at pop flying off on strange tangents, ploughing furrows head-down ‘til he finds himself alone in a field at the edge of town and, as if that wasn't alarming enough, a full-blown idiosyncratic. Synths flutter like edge of town leaves, but they’re brave and decent like Bowie’s ‘Big Brother ’.
Worryingly, Brighton's The Sticks are something of a fall from grace, their lurching like runts at odds with Maus’s shoulder-pads-in-a-nuclear-bunker strut.
Still, the sense of struggle remains, even if it is more weary and lagged out and bitter, stalking at a distance and out of time, like if the speccy one from Stand By Me fell asleep after a heavy night’s drinking, woke up in 2008 and proceeded to scream in its face until it was finally, finally over. Hear what that might sound like below.
More pastoral climes now, as we lay down with Soiled Mattress and the Springs (ho ho) and get burned to death in a sunflower field (oh no).
Yeah, their sunny pop may sound charming and bright and breezy at first, but there’s more than meets the eye imminent in ‘Tidal Wave’, as the small-time gangsters wringing necks in out-of-season Skegness turn horrified faces towards the killer surf a mile or so offshore. Vengeance, scum. This is the popnotpop revenge of Silent Type and the Spods.
Now that Skeggy’s dead and buried it’s got a real shot at greatness, transformed into a whispered myth, a drowned playground of shit fairground rides and chippies laying in wait for resuscitation. Skegness as new Atlantis, hear a common tragedy in London’s U!TR-patroned dotted outposts, bands that will stay forever submerged, away from the lure of cheap champagne, pink limos and kebabs, sharing the limits of Achilles’ heel with the mythical city and all its Bulgar brethren.
You’ll have heard this already, no doubt, but Randy Randall and Dean Spunt’s skewed pop transcends tragedy, with lyrics that hint at finding a body that’s spent days hanging behind a locked door, shit piling up, “smells like someone died ”. Cut him down? Dig it up cry baby, Atlantis’s only real problem is that for the moment it’s underwater.
The first single from their long-awaited debut album, ‘The Naughtiest Girl Is A Monitor’ (released early March) showcases Oxford five-piece Youthmovies at their excellently eccentric best – a wholly natural-sounding concoction of a dozen movements made single, a progressive piece of ambitious modern rock that shrugs the shackles of typical genre restraints.
Said debut album, Good Nature, will land in record stores in March via the Drowned in Sound label – be sure to keep an eye on the band’s MySpace (link below) for live dates as and when they’re announced. Without going into too many details: we know something you don’t know, and we’re super excited.
Already superbly acclaimed at an underground level, with many a chart-bothering act current citing them as a major influence, Youthmovies seem set to make 2008 their most successful year yet. And everything starts here.
DFA seems to think Hercules and Love Affair capable of big things and when an act has this much strut Drowned in Sound’s reluctant to argue, lest we get bowled over like some pavement strewn spod. The New York City-based quartet are releasing their debut album this spring, see below for the details.
The self-titled debut from H&LA head gent Andrew Butler arrives in conjunction with EMI on the 10th of March; with a single called ‘Blind’ beating that out by a week.
Antony Hegarty (he is a bird now), features on that single, and there are other cameos from NYC arters Kim Ann and Nomi lighting up the silver-eyed pomp of these tracks:
‘Time Will’
‘Hercules Theme’
‘You Belong’
‘Athene’
‘Blind’
‘Iris’
‘Easy’
‘This Is My Love’
‘Raise Me Up’
‘True False/Fake Real’
DFA’s Tim Goldsworthy co-produced the record at Plantain Studios in Manhattan. For now, here’s a sample – ‘Hercules Theme’ is necessarily proud, a ‘xploitation number done without dumbing down, as if PC never existed and slap bass found a way to keep everyone smiling.
This is a trick by the way - you'll be asked to sign up to the band's mailing list. Trust us when we tell you these conmen are worth it, though.
Even in these times of rampant genrelessness, Late of the Pier are an act that stands out as cross-pollinators riding a crystalline wave of musical harlotry. The quartet from Castle Donington revel in mashing together broken shards of hammy, glam-electro with scrabbling post-punk abandon, all the while somehow managing to hang the whole thing together fresh and always danceable.
This remix, courtesy of Brighton’s Metronomy, takes that template and extends it out further; the maximalist approach to sound catching that rarest of nu-rave variables in ‘clownstep’ drum’n’bass. So often neglected in favour of pretty much everything else in the sonic palette, clownstep is an abomination, but here, somehow, it manages to hang whole together, fresh and always danceable.
We hear a lot about literate music these days. So-and-so's band make literate folk pop, like we're supposed to be all, 'ooh look, someone who can spell the word 'melancholy' has decided to make a pop record', or something.
What we really want is someone who can really write the shit out of a song, and that's exactly what we get with The Mountain Goats. 'Sax Rohmer #1' is our breathless window in on the North Carolina-based outfit's fifth long-player in six years on 4AD, Heretic Pride, a song inspired by the English crime novelist and Fu Manchu creator of the same name.
Charged with palm-muted intent, the song is a lover's homecoming dressed as a starkly-lit pursuit, all wonky camera angles and long-looming shadows, and chock-full of images to reel the listener in: "a rabbit gives up somewhere, and a dozen hawks descend / Every moment leads toward its own sad end".
With soil in the fingernails from rooting up morsels, we need some downtown, a familiar face.
A while back Kompakt offered up the delirium-inducing extended mix of Gui Boratto’s ‘Beautiful Life’. With sheets of dusty rain hailing down in London and the São Paulo beatnik due to play his native city tomorrow before embarking on a mammoth worldwide tour, bouts of envy side away long enough to draw any idle minds to Chromophobia and its potent doses of minimal tech.
“Busy and I are ‘hookers’. That’s what Dave Sitek calls us, in that we are totally into making music with sick hooks. We got bored with making drone music and now we are obsessed with making the catchiest fucking music ever.”
Where are Telepathe going? Far from their initial guise, which found central players Busy Gangnes and Melissa Livaudais playfully mimicking the esoteric pursuits of Brooklyn beatniks Gang Gang Dance and Effi Briest on the barren bastard Farewell Forest EP (Social Registry; link).
The glut of inspired avant-garde out in the NYC district has swollen with the addition of Gangnes and Livaudais’s new Telepathe, one that’s comfortable enough to mess around with the girl-group shenanigans of The Shangri-Las as well as wrestle with the heavier weight of Gang Gang; the broken beat of Black Dice.
“The future for us is about making many more records and not getting attached to any certain process of music making. We always want a good challenge. We never want to be locked into any certain genre or whatever.”
With their debut record, Dance Mother, produced by TV On The Radio’s Dave Sitek, waiting in the wings, rarely have such haunted pop frolics seemed so essential. With über-pop baron White Williams’ Prophet ’08 synth admired like a shiny new toy, ‘Chrome’s On It’ is viciously sweet, a totemic flutter of pulses and those Prophet ’08’s artfully jostled into place by Don Caballero’s Eric Emm. ‘Chrome’s On It’ will satisfy, we promise. You do want your pulses to flutter, don’t you?
“We can do the real bang bang, but first you gotta know my name.”
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