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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?
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.
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