You rememberThe Drums: they sound like the world's first teenagers and look like Wham!, they've got songs about surfing and submarines and they hang on the beach with the same cameramen who shot pictures for holiday brochures back in the Eighties. You remember? Good. We'll have more from the Brooklyn band next week, but for now here's a taster - Knight School's take on "Let's Go Surfing" glimmers with the sunlit contentment of someone who hasn't fallen off their board in a decade's worth of squall.
A1 Bassline takes no prisoner. The Londoner's remix of Little Boots' "Remedy" finds the femme actuelle whirring and beleaguered within a maelstrom of Hardcore, Speed Garage, Bassline and Acid House. It sounds like someone in London tuned infinite hi-fis to pirate radio in about 1985 and then wrapped them around the moon, so that when the bow returned you could hear the birth of every UK bass sound of the last 20 years all at the same time. Vicious, twisted, time-compressing club music. Get Friday hype!
"Sofia" is currently at the centre of a bidding war between the RSPCA and Battersea Dogs Home. They want to use it in those adverts they put on daytime TV to get donations out of the unemployed. A Grave With No Name sure dosound like lonely slackers, so help them out! It won't cost you a penny and they'll write to you every month.
Oh Scandinavia, all that metal aside, you never cease to fill our ears with cushy, seren vibes, despite enduring what many would consider the most extended and brutal winter in the world. Norway's Frost, a new wave duo composed of Aggie Peterson and Per Martinsen (aka Mental Overdrive), dropped us a line the other day with these two remixes, one from disco pioneer–and recentFool's Gold artist!–Alexander Robotnick and the other from Norwegian DJ Rune Lindbæk, one half of Meanderthals. If these remixes were friends of ours from college, Robotnick's would be the one to give us drugs and take us out to all-night parties–cruising on 303 arpeggios–while Lindbaek's, in scratchy disco polyester, would play us David Lynch movies and let us fingerpaint on their walls. We love them both equally.
I think Niyi's London's most prominent hipster. I'm not certain about such things, but matey chills with M.I.A., Gareth Pugh and that girl from Cassette Playa, DJs at Punk on Oxford Street and got kicked out of Central Saint Martins a couple of times. He also gave birth to Nu-Rave, allegedly. What a horrible, sloppy mess that must have been; neon tendrils reaching out from the torso of some gurn-faced baby. Anyway - Niyi's plays a bouncy, half-pop, half-rap kind of music and he's playing at the London showcase for new label/club night Awesome next Saturday, July 11th. Details are up there - if you want entry, turn up and say 'RCRD LBL' on the door and those most magic of words should see you in.
Cosmic Danish rockers Mew are currently on tour in Europe with Nine Inch Nails, where Trent Reznor's been tweeting that they are "so good live it kind of pisses me off." Way to make friends, you guys. The band also have a new album, "No More Stories..." (the title is actually a six line poem we aren't going to print) out August 25th on Columbia, with "Repeaterbeater" being the first, albeit brief, piece we've heard. If it's anything to go by, this will be yet another inimitable album of distracted, rapturous pop that half of our friends won't understand and the other half will adore. If Reznor's tweets are anything to go by, it will be a "grower." Our money is on it just being awesome.
Sounds like: Muse, Nine Inch Nails, The Cooper Temple Clause
Five years ago, when "You're A Woman, I'm A Machine" was about to be unleashed and they were in their prime, commercial house didn't seem like a viable option for DFA 1979. But, as the filth and rage continues to morph slowly into sun-fired, clubland content, here we are half a decade later, Jesse F. Keeler calling in John Legend to lend vocals to "Heartbreaker", (presumably because it sounds weird when you Autotune feral grunts and snorts). The track, reworked here by Dutch DJ/Producer Laidback Luke, sounds made for daytime radio, a drive-time victory of post-work delirium and heartbroken lyrics sung by a man who couldn't sound less heartbroken if he tried. I suppose there isn't much to get yourself down about when you're John Legend.
Sounds Like: Daft Punk, Crazy Cousins, Fedde Le Grand
Never ones to pussyfoot, Crystal Castles have taken White Lies' request to remix "Death" as a cue to transform it into one of their own tracks, Harry McVeigh's vocal messed with so that the singer seems sliced at the throat and buried alive beneath shifting synth thrusts and impatient drum muck. The more vigilant among you may remember this track from last year, but this is a new edit, bloodlust revived, shining, fresh meat to stuff in your ears.
So who the hell is Prince Zimboo, the man behind the sunglasses, dashiki, and too many "heh"s? Due to his association with Major Lazer, the dancehall comedian wound up the subject of a recent Slate piece, which called his music "deliriously funny" and classified him as the "African Borat" (a questionable description but worth noting). His "Hold The Line" freestyle–a mild YouTube hit a few weeks ago–just came in from Mad Decent, who are releasing a Zimboo single, "To The Rescue" b/w "Lightswitch", in August. Now if only someone would put out his MySpace gem "Love Diarhea" (sic!).
We are easily wooed by horns. Not all the time, but if there is a little shuffle and some cowbell milling about, throwing a trombone or trumpet or three in as well isn't going to hurt. Which is why this new jam from Brooklyn's Blitz The Ambassador is getting us all excited. It has some dope horns! And they're all played live, not sampled. Does anyone, aside from The Roots, even do that in the studio anymore?
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