Well hello there new song Sufjan! You’re giving us such pleasure. Who needs a proper video, when you can have a great new song and watch the small waves coming in at a stoney shore. This is the Sufjan we all started to love with his first albums. Heartwarming stuff!
Every band should deserve some sort of creative freedom. Every band should be granted the possibility of moving their sound in a different direction. Music is art nevertheless. And it’s an expression of artistic freedom to change the sound. ‘Hyperview’ should not come as a surprise to any fan of Title Fight. But if this is the direction the band is going, then I must admit that it’s not a direction that I will follow.
Five days of only Coldplay but now it’s Mickie Krause
While masses of people run to demonstrations amid fear of a “muslimization” of the western world, politicians took a very long time coming to a consensus, that this behaviour is not acceptable, especially in Germany, with our history of, well, you know what I’m pointing at. There is a sense of lethargy, of ‘we-don’t-really-care-about-anything-else-than-our-private-life’, a growing numbness towards more news stories about war, suffering and pain all around the globe. It takes a horrible terrorist attack in our immediate periphery to be really shocked. But this shock only goes as far as telling your peers how upset you are or changing your facebook profile pic to show your support. But this is not really what people want, it’s just doing what is expected from a politically correct person.
Is there such a thing as falling in love with a voice? Can you have a relationship with a person who you have never spoken to or seen in real life? I mean, can something like this really work? If it would, I’d totally fall for Holly Fletcher! The voice and brains behind Låpsley! Today she released her 4 track ‘Understudy EP’ and heck, it is one brilliant piece of music.
Lead track ‘Falling Short’ has been causing waves in the blogosphere for a couple of months now, and it was inevitable that some hot label would pick her up. It’s a tasteful recap of a breaking heart, completed by subtle piano chords, finger snapping and electronic beat fragments. Above all sits Fletcher’s voice. It’s so intimate that it could break the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. Second song ‘Brownlow’ picks up the same ingredients but adds haunting sounds and a life embracing organ sitting very low in the mix. Then there are added synth horns – if you ask yourself, if they can ever sound not cheesy, then listen to this track! – and swelling bassdrops that remind one of Jamie XX’s post-dubstep. 8896 turns to the darker side again without repeating the recipe of the opener. Dancing is a sad closer about a difficult relationship that slowly ascends into a brooding, almost noisy finale to the best four songs I have heard in the last couple of months.
The recent scouse exports seem to up the notch. I love that about my former home and the city’s music scene deserves a lot more credit and attention. It’s not all about London. What was true for guitar music is now definitely also true for the hip and cool electronic singer-songwriter stuff that keeps bubbling strong in the UK music scene.
There’s something romantically looming and haunting in Låpsley’s sound that manages to set her apart well enough from other peers like Kwabs or her labelmate FKA Twigs to make her unique. It’s the perfect soundtrack for those dark winter days where sunlight seems to be a memory of the distant past and candles, wine and cigarettes are all that can comfort you to sleep.
If this is any indication of what there is still to come, her album should be hotly tipped for this years Mercury Prize. If it doesn’t arrive this year, then I will be heartbroken but I’ll already know what I’ll be looking out for in the year ahead!
Låpsley – Understudy EP is out now via XL/Beggars.
Pick up a copy here (physical) or here (digital)!
*This is not at all aimed at insulting a label or a person. It’s just a strong personal opinion on a record.*
Where should I start on this one? I should probably go right into a direct rant about how much I hate this album. So let’s do it. It’s fucking awful. It’s that plain and simple.
1. The album
66 minutes is a lot of time to ask from your listener these days. While the pop mainstream focuses on releasing single after single (Pitbull, Perry, Jessie J etc) new acts tend to throw out a couple of EPs before they tackle the album (Broods, Ryn Weaver, hell even in punk). Ariel Pink is passed the phase of a newcomer though, so fair play to him. He’s released a shitload of albums, eps and singles. Shitloads of every format.
Continue reading Ariel Pink – pom pom
As kids we used to play in sandboxes, build castles and towers only to destroy them with pure force. Our parents would say that this was just a boy thing. Some way down the line we learned to control this anger or the lust for destruction and channeled it into something else. Nowadays I find myself sitting in a pub on a night out with my friends and a ever growing urge to smash my bottle or glass of beer against the wall or on the floor. I imagine the glass shattering into thousand little pieces. And I picture the smile on my face while doing so.
You could call it immature. And maybe you even find this a little disturbing. But I reassure you that I’m or never was a violent one. I’m hardly ever angry at someone for more than five minutes. My fuse is very long and very hard to ignite. But I feel this urge for destruction is kind of human. It’s part of us, embedded in our dna and we are always looking for an outlet.
Winter is approaching quite relentlessly these days. And while the days have more or less become nights the city is becoming increasingly bleak. I was talking to a friend the other day and he was saying that winter depression hasn’t hit him yet. For my part, I’m trying to comfort myself at home more than I would during summer. And I’m naturally adjusting my listening habits. Courtesy Drop have just arrived in time for this change! Their new EP Stabilize is just what you will need, when the cold and dark nights are coming your way!
The last few months must have been pretty horrific for Atlas At Last. Compared to the DC trios selftitled debut EP from 2013, A Composition of Functions is a big leap into darker territories. Sonically the four songs are noisy, raw and brutal, to say the least. While its predecessor wasn’t necessarily a happy affair per se, it managed to pair walls of distorted guitars with great melodies and harmonies. This time, the melodies haven’t disappeared, they are just buried a lot deeper in the mix.
When I was about 16 and had gotten really deep into hardcore, I was listening to a lot of bands that sounded like Miles & Feet. American new-school hardcore, with mosh-break downs, metal dual “At the Gates”-metal riffing and this angry voice spitting emotional lyrics. I would have killed to play in a band like that. But living in a small place, all I could muster was a band sounding more metal and with guys that didn’t have the same musical background. It was still lots of fun. Then I got older and somehow the wave of bands coming over from the US were just meager copies of what I learned to love a lot. So I walked away from that sound.
A couple years down the road and hardcore got me back. The fresh sound from bands such as Touché Amoré, La Dispute and Pianos Become the Teeth brought back my love. But this year, all of a sudden these bands decide to grow up. While on the one hand I can fully understand that development and it definitely springs as no surprise. But who will cure my need for emotionally fucked up vocals? Yes, the answer comes from Leipzig, Germany!
Four songs, plus an intro and interlude is all it takes to make a pretty clear statement for this young band. Miles&Feet play positive emotional hardcore at its best. The metal riffing reminds me a bit of a more melodic version of With Resistance. The thick and bass heavy production of Killswitch Engage. But then there’s this angry voice, full of razorblade sharp distortion. Tom is not a vocalist, he’s a singing distorted guitar!
It’s damn nice to see a band like that coming from Germany! They are so worth checking out!
There are obviously a lot of songs that you listen to throughout your whole life. The question is what sticks to your mind? What do you actually hang on to? And what do you really remember several years down the line. I hate facebook chain mails and I hate how Buzzfeed et al tend to accumulate lists and sell them as journalism. What I liked about this particular idea though is that taking your time to think about this lays out a map of who you are. So this list is quite a personal one but I’m sure everyone out there can relate to some parts. Maybe you’ll even start thinking about your own list. 10 songs is not an awful lot but it narrows down the possibilities and forces you to make decisions. It’s like going back to the Beatles who only had 4-tracks to record some of the best pop music written. I’m not saying this is the grand list of pop, but it’s mine. It’s a big part of the soundtrack to my life so far.
1. Spider Murphy Gang – Schickeria
My love for Bayern Munich is no secret to most of my friends. But this song has nothing to do with the fanclub but with one of my earliest music memories. I can recall sitting on my dads leather chair as a small kid, singing along and miming playing the guitar to this. ‘Schickeria’ is the opening song of the bands 1981 album ‘Dolce Vita’, an album that spent 91(!) weeks in the German charts. It’s not the biggest hit, that was reserved for ‘Skandal im Sperrbezirk’, a song about a callgirl in Munich. It was the first record I owned, after my parents handed me down the album on tape. It was a worn out, nicotine yellow and when I revisited the song recently, I have to admit, it’s not a song written for a young kid. I didn’t understand it back then, when Günther Sigl sang about people doing cocaine now rather than smoking weed. It’s a perfect time-capsule for the start of the 1980s, when hippies made way to the yuppi generation. When people became more concerned about their own wealth and well being than taking the streets against war or equal rights. And unfortunately we still see and feel the remainders of that time today, I would argue.
2. The Offspring – Self Esteem
Continue reading Facebook Chain Mails. Or: Name 10 songs that have influenced you.
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