Normally SOIWT is all about London bands, but for Monday Music anything goes. Namely: Rainbow Arabia - Boys & Diamonds After a tantalising but brilliant EP, LA husband/wife duo's Rainbow Arabia's debut album is finally here, courtesy of Kompakt . They sound slightly more intense than Holiday in Congo days , but still brilliantly imaginative, zany, multi-influenced and stupidly capable of nailing a greedy groove. Listen to the whole of Boys & Diamonds on Dummy Mag , watch the video [...]
Normally SOIWT is all about London bands, but for Monday Music anything goes. Namely: Rainbow Arabia - Boys & Diamonds After a tantalising but brilliant EP, LA husband/wife duo's Rainbow Arabia's debut album is finally here, courtesy of Kompakt . They sound slightly more intense than Holiday in Congo days , but still brilliantly imaginative, zany, multi-influenced and stupidly capable of nailing a greedy groove. Listen to the whole of Boys & Diamonds on Dummy Mag , watch the video for [...]
The email began: "Hi there, my name's Tom James Parmiter, I'm from London and I'm a 25 year old composer" ... WHOA WHOA WHOA HOLD ON - A COMPOSER? As in Classic FM? As in that University Challenge round where I always guess Wagner and it's always Lizst or Elgar or Mendelssohn? As in whatever? As in zzzzzzzzzzzz? Well, actually, no. As in bloody brilliant. Because this Tom James Parmiter turns out to be the modern version of a composer: innovative, catchy, edgy, electro and decidedly cool. A "mixture of samples, electronic rhythms and live piano playing", his song Buying Peace is currently my favourite 2011 tune so far. [...]
This week, with an asthmatic chest infection, I spent much of my nights sitting bolt upright in a dark sauna of a room, cursing, aching, baking and coughing my ribs out until I could cough no more. No pill, spray or syrup worked, but perhaps I should have tried Alpines : the new London act produce a heady, soothing stupor of a sound, a dark, lustrous electro pop that strokes your hair and whispers in your ear that tomorrow will be better. Drive is available here ; the Night Drive EP is out 28 March. [There is a video that cannot [...]
120 seconds. The average length of a London Underground 'minute'. My for-a-long-time personal-best when it came (sorry) to intercourse. The time it takes maclethal to rap the entire plot of Dazed & Confused. And longer than new London band Mazes need to assert their brilliance on debut single Most Days, a throat-clearing punkish rabbler, with the same enthusiastic, bass-thick rawness as Wavves, PLUG and others in the current DIY sound movement, plus a laid back, slacker feel that dimly makes me think of surf rock. Debut Album ‘A Thousand Heys’ is out on 11 April via FatCat . [...]
Cough. Splutter. Mutter. Lemsip. Better. Here’s Monday Music, my weekly post that abandons SOIWT’s London focus: Beat Connection - In The Water ( mp3 ) Opening the door doesn't do it. Throwing the windows wide isn't nearly enough. Nope: to get the full, inspirational benefit of this rousing Seattle (via Tender Age ) pop anthem's cobweb-clearing chorus, you'll need to go outside to a wide open space, spread your arms wide, spin, gaze up wide-eyed at the sky, take a breath and then scream your little lungs out. Then collapse to the [...]
This is music for people who walk around to themselves smiling, nodding, humming, skipping, exalting in something you can't see/hear/know, something you desperately want to experience: a dream drug, a perfect combination of words, a confirmation that it'll all end happily. Every one o those people has, almost certainly, listened to the feel-good indie of Oxford guy-group Jonquil - think Vampire Weekend with strawberry jam. Jonquil - Get Up by Jonquil Jonquil - It Never Rains by Jonquil [...]
I love this. Grainy, don't-fucking-look-at-me guitars, bayed vocals, a dishevelled tone and a general, throbbing, maudlin intensity: like a vulnerable kid that you want to cuddle, but know full well will smack you in the face if you so much as move an arm. Welcome to the murky, blues-rock world of Harry Crampton , a new London talent newly shacked up with an electric guitar (previously he dated an acoustic one - and that sounded pretty good too: see Let Her Hair Down, below). It doesn't seem like this new electrical romance is proving at [...]
Her infected eye flickers, almost entirely closed. She can't watch TV, or look at a computer screen. She can't check her phone. She can't focus on a book, and isn't allowed to have the curtains open, just sensing the day by the light that sneaks underneath. She can't go outside without sunglasses - absurd in deepest winter - and probably can't bear to look at anyone. She would scarcely be able to see them anyway. So she paces this room become a cage, and sighs at the pain, and cries at the pain, and waits for it to end, waits to see what permanent [...]
I hope everyone's okay. I've had a great one, but Valentine's Day sure can be a lonely time, I know that well enough. Anyway, here's Monday Music, my weekly post that abandons SOIWT's London focus: The Phantom Band - Everybody Knows It's True A momentous, quite-probably-irresistible pop pilgrimage through hummable harmonies, bouncy bass, samples galore and cascading drums, this latest from the great Scots (geddit?) goes on and one with the happy knack of getting better and better as each second tinkles by. It ends in fully-fledged fervour, and comes decorated [...]
You know that moment between sleep and being awake, when you're still half-sure that your dreams were real, that you really did just attend the Egyptian riots in a fancy dress outfit? Do you ever wish it could be prolonged: that you could welter permanently in that equivocal, confused inter-world where things aren't one thing or the other; where there's no anarchy, but also no rules, only a nagging suggestion of upcoming clarity? You can with Drugg ; the new London tripsters make shadowy electro mirages: elusive, exotic soundscapes hailing from a land where everything's fluid. [...]
I saw this woman on the Underground recently and she was reading with her face. Gripping the book with two spiny, late-60s hands, and feeling the contents with her chin; line after line, slowly down the page, with an ant-like intensity. Probably the book was in brail, but I prefer to think she was just getting closer to the book, deeper into it, a strange sort of physical and emotional synergy. I watched transfixed, oblivious of everyone else, rudely staring, adrift inside a perfect, puzzling continuum. The beguiling electro spells of new London act Halls , a musical chloroform for the ears, sure helped me get there. [...]
I'm loving the new David's Lyre song In Arms: it's a lustrous ballad-like number with an eye-rolling, sipping-cocktails-on-the-lilo- while-admiring-my-tan quality. This despite needy-sounding verses and even more urgent keys, and perhaps I took much cough medicine before earlier. In Arms by David's Lyre There's a free, and funked-up/tranced-dowm, remix by Bombay Bicycle Club, too: David's Lyre - In Arms (Bombay Bicycle Club remix) ( mp3 )
Two of SOIWT's most-hearted London bands, A.Human and Erlend & The Carnival , have both recently leaked excellent new videos. A.Human's showcases a hilarious dance routine, a film so enjoyable that the insatiable pop-quality of the song, Take Me Home, a split-single with La Shark, is almost a bonus. Meanwhile, Map of an Englishman, the first spill from Erlend's second album Nightingale, sees the carnival heading to darker, but just as catchy, terrain - as reflected here. [There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.] [...]
Playing the Hoxton Pony next week, London act Hares produce a charming, lights-down-low folk pop, one that encourages soft thigh-slapping and bobbing head moments. Guitars are thrummed as vocals heartily sung; in between, quiet moments of reflection allow for the removal of slightly be-sweated fringes. All the while, a retro, homespun feel pervades pleasantly. [There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]
New London act Lonsdale Boys Club 's sound is like a louche, body-ridden musical house-party: a place of heroic drunkenness, lads-mags and guilty, giddy smiles on Sunday night. Infectious enough as it is, their debut song Weekend is even better when given a laser-loving facelift by fellow capital talents Chad Valley - who convert it from classic indie cream to euphoric acid dream. Weekend by Lonsdale Boys Club Weekend (Chad Valley Remix) by Lonsdale Boys Club Log onto LBC's [...]
Monday Music is the weekly wherein SOIWT dispenses with its trademark London focus and goes global. It's the musical equivalent of KFC offering beef burgers and pork chops. Which would be a crap idea. Yes. But this isn't a crap idea. No. Hmm. Good. Let's begin.. Alexander - Truth ( mp3 ) This is no ordinary Alexander, but Alexander Ebert of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeroes fame. And, as one might reasonably expect from such an eccentric, charismatic frontman, this is partly a nuts number: think whistling like when an outsider enters a [...]
Kyla La Grange 's music is perfect for people who go all-in at poker, who declare love on first dates, who stake their entire savings on a potentially hairbrained business venture. For hers is an explosive, intense and romantic pop, an urgent storm of clenched voices and cascading drums, swooping and soaring like a golden eagle on Red Bull. It makes little sense when you hear Kyla grew up in Watford, but computes far better when her Zimbabwean heritage and fondness for forming (and then folding) garage bands is revealed. [There is a video that cannot be displayed [...]
Need to get your weekend off on the right foot? Fancy a pre-beer bedroom boogie? In both cases, consider Boy Mandeville : the Haringey band's sound is ostensibly rock-pop, but this is a rock-pop firmly doused in lazy sunshine, with elements of calypso, afrobeat, tango and all the rest contained amid the chirupping guitars. Better still, the songs rattle along joyfully unconstrained by structure, a jam-style that again recalls fellow tropicana rockers Fool's Gold. All in all, this is more Grenada than Green Lanes and a perfect tonic for cheerless February days. Steel Horse by boymandeville Bad Balance [...]
There's a certain kind of music ideally suited to long car journeys: you sit, ideally in the backseat, staring out of a window as a drizzling country floats by; the sky is the colour of cement, the fields a pastoral copper. Occasionally you catch the eyes of some other windowgazer, but your pupils don't lock because yours have no focus, only ambiguity, dreaminess, nowhereness, emptiness. Seconds become minutes become hours, and though you're bored and cramped, you don't really want this to end, don't want to leave this void. That sort of music - a many-layered, slumberous, stately shoegaze - is the bag [...]
Some Of It Was True!
Listen to Pharrell Williams’ new song “Happy”, off the Despicable Me 2 soundtrack
Listen to an unreleased version of Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” with Arthur Russell on cello
Bass Drum of Death – “Dregs”
