People Of Water have forced Afrobeat to go all desert-storm, with instrumental precision: an assault of funk and drum, staged on a huge battlefield. (Afrobeat: Flavour of the month down at HipsterVille’s trendy milk-bar.)
With its lo-fi rounded corners and hi-quality instrumentalism, ‘Vale of Aching Hearts’ is far too rich to not be taxed as luxury goods. Seen through fat binoculars, it wouldn’t seem that fast, but the sandstorm churned up behind it betrays kilowatts of energy and a solar rhythm that leaves me gasping for water.
Lightly pawing its way past a busker playing a cheap violin. Everything is probably blurry when you are only one foot tall, especially in this heat. In all of Braids and A Necklace’s initial subtlety and diminutive stature, there is a great big heart that pumps and grows, driving string-led atmospherics that drone, and build; brick by brick, until a pile of rubble becomes a smart wall, and a doorway. You are welcome to walk through, you have 7 minutes to decide.
A weekly round-up of people talking British music isn’t good enough. So instead I’ll do it every time I write a new post.
20 Jazz Funk Greats spoke about Queen of Swords in a rather incredible post: “an excerpt from their 15 minute long pandemonium of horror, gargantuan doom music that intoxicates the puny souls of your 20jazzfunkgreats kids and sends them spinning into the limbo of the damned.”
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Big Stereo shares Sportsday Megaphone’s “Young Lust”: “the perfect song heading into summer for anyone looking to score their first love. Total flashback for anyone else. Something perfect and timeless about this one”
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Four Tet is releasing a new track, showcased here as part of a mix. He has done “techno with an afrobeat/krautrock sensibility” … “These are tracks that make you think of Berlin – Dakar – Detroit - but they could only have been made in London.”
A powerful, stylishly American, night-time imagination of pop; dreaming the same scene every night. Colours are more vibrant, scenery is more specific, and the pace is faster the more tired you are. It’s long, but like in a dream-world there’s exhilaration before exhaustion. Even gliding through clouds of feedback and distortion, above predictable seas, is familiar in a dream: not the least bit startling.
It Hugs Back are now part of the revamped, but still super & hi-quality, 4AD label. Album this summer, very excited.
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The proposed weekly round-up did not materialise on Sunday, I spent a few hours looking for and finding really good new music instead.
Basically, last week Coldplay & Portishead overtook all of the internet, few stood a chance. Also NME magazine decided to work a little bit harder on editorial & planned a revamp. More new bands, and more user interaction! Sounds like the Internet to me. And with the website reaching 30 times as many people as their magazine, this may be their last stand.
“This refresh work will further enhance NME’s credibility” … “The first issue showcasing the new design runs alongside a partnership between indie band Coldplay and NME”. Refresh. Coldplay. Partnership. Credibility.
Psychy-jam sessions get a bit more direction, and get a little more decadent; a dark off-kilter. It’s a spiralling descent of funk and cool, all delivered in a grainy slow motion on the warmest beach by the coldest sea. Samplists, in the most stretched out sense of the word, Quiet Village, might just be the genre-bending stars of summer nights occasionally revealing something incredible.
This is what Quiet Village do, with exquisite… timing and choice. What a way to start May: Exotica born in London, via a few Italian beaches, forgotten towns but most importantly, despite this blogs Anglocentricism, not music that these guys want to be known for it’s origin. Just don’t call it Retro, and it’s more than Italo-disco, as they say in the interview embedded below.
Lots of people have been writing about Quiet Village, it’s just that good. They have been saying the following:
Be transported away to another place and time, from India to a secluded island beach (1), sundown surf tunes, and what sounds like soundtracks to Italian and French movies from the 60s and 70s. (2) Images of muscle cars and moustaches soon fade and the listener is cast into a spooky, swirling, and exotic haze. (3) Half of Quiet Village, Martin is an ex-film editor and music aficionado. (4) We hear their music, and other music of the past resonating in the perfection of their pastel coloured compositions, echoes of memories always palpitating warm, arranged with love-begotten precision. (5) Plays out like a blissful and surreal waking dream. (6)
For all future BEST OFs I’ll be asking a couple of people involved in music blogs to comment on my favourite tracks of the month, keep me in check, and give a wider perspective on things. Shane represents Ireland over at The Torture Garden. Sean, who recently left these shores to return to Canada, writes for Said The Gramophone.
Mike: My favorite track of the month was by Mountain Machine, I said that it was “an instrumental and psychedelic revving up and tuning up…” until… “the throb begins. The journey, landscape and this band’s raw energy rolls out along deserted roads with great speed and engulfs all.”
Sean: Oh man, this starts out SO strong - shades of Battles or just a boot against your head. I think it loses the plot around the minute mark, though - too reminiscent of the Doctor Who soundtrack or the opening of a PBS/BBC science-for-kids show. The “quiet” interlude is anemic, dull instead of pretty, and when the noise comes back it doesn’t do so with enough fierceness. I’d like this band better if they sounded more like Ratatat and less like Can - and if their songs were all 2:20 long.
Shane: From the sounds of this, the word ’subtlety’ just isn’t in Mountain Machine’s vocabulary. It’s like what would happen if you looked into the mind of some hyperactive kid watching Saturday morning cartoons, and poured it out in sheet music. There’s fuzz, synth, beautiful strings, someone repeating the word ‘tigers?’, glockenspiel, alarm clocks, choir samples, and a big fat bastard S+M riff that would make Alison Goldfrapp blush. If I thought I understood it properly I’d say it was brilliant, but I’m not sure I do.
Mike: Fierceness does leaves the blocks slower for the second leg, but it’s the return after the breathy and the throb that I enjoy: an indulgence, and the floating sensation in so much pummeling.
Mike: I listened to The Shortwave Set’s track so much that come Autumn that song might just have to be deleted from my computer and the hard-drive ritualistically burnt.
Shane: This is so catchy I want to try and guess the words just so I can sing along. The swinging pose of the verse gives away to a pop chorus so fine it seems to come right up to your ear, promising to tell a secret - but loses its nerve at the last minute, and sways back into that jaunty verse with a smile, brass lines played with tongue firmly in cheek. It’s a little temptation of a song, it promises brilliance, and that’s enough.
Sean: I’ve uh never liked the Shortwave Set. People talk about their resemblance to St Etienne, like that’s a good thing, but I don’t like St Etienne either. I think it’s all connected to how I’m a grouch in the summertime, cowering in the gloom. I hate the heat, hate lounging with a cocktail. If I’m out and about I’m on my bicycle, high-fiving the sun, heart a red balloon in my chest, and music like this feels apathetic, energyless, “chill”. Music for parking lots with vinyl flowers. (Oh - have I mentioned how Danger Mouse is the most overrated producer in the universe? He is.)
Mike: Unlike Sean, I live for summertime, I just never know it until April time. Opinion is divided on this one, but the yays on the right have it 66% to 33%. People always vote for the people with the widest smiles, though they aren’t usually the wisest folks…
Mike: Cat’s in Paris’ cacophony of sound had very excited at the start of April, “Dystopic, spirraling, and about as close as “hardcore / experimental / folk” could get to indie-pop…”
Sean: I’m beginning to get jaded about the kitchen-sink school of indie pop but, well, I’m not there yet. I still love these songs with TOO MANY backing vocals, TOO MANY digressions, part Los Campesinos, part Flaming Lips, part “Mr Blue Sky” and part “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I do wish that these young bands leaned a little heavier on CHORUSES. Does this song need to be a million minutes long? Do they have that many things to say? I like it when there are ten things going on at once but not when a band just noodles prettily around for a minute and a half in the middle of a tune. It’s the “foxes” bit in the 4th minute that’s by far my favourite thing here - the band feels volatile, thrilled, like they’re challenging themselves to see how much cinnamon they can swallow.
Shane: It sounds like you’re in a new town, and all your new friends are bringing you to a party. Their nicely coupled melodies promise dancing, bad lighting, spilled drinks, perfume, and downtown happiness, and the chorus is like the rush of grinning paranoia that comes with all that casual drug-taking you’ve been doing. After that it’s like a dozen flashbacks at once, with great reaching choruses that send you back out onto the streets. But then you’re sober again, or you think you are, holding that weird wide-eyed feeling that comes with the knowledge that you’ve danced till dawn, sore-heeled, a gang of ragged friends chasing one another in the early strains of sunlight that dapple the buildings everywhere. It’s a beautiful feeling.
"...Afrobeat has gone all desert-storm, with instrumental precision: an assault of funk and drum... the sandstorm churned up behind it betrays kilowatts of energy and a solar rhythm" [11th May: more] | [Photo credit]
"Grandiose in a run down country house kind of way. Perhaps a lament to the old hedges carved to take the form of a pride of lions, but now, sadly but a shadow of their former sense... It’s like folk music recovering from the revolution: rejuvination and lost memories of the songs that rallied them."
[12th September 2007: more]
