Archives : all posts by Sean

Kate Boy - "Northern Lights". I could do without all of Kate Boy's huffing and puffing, but I love the aggressive competition of "Northern Lights"' synths - the way they jostle and shove the more human part. A cybernetic hook, chrome and current; maybe it's a sound borrowed from other acts, but it's still just as virulent.

[website]

SOAK - "Sea Creatures". Plain folksong with all the typical adornments. Bridie Monds-Watson has the sort of scrunched-up voice that has fallen out of fashion, and of course so have glockenspiel and bongos, but SOAK is a young act, and sincere, and sometimes sincere choices shouldn't be faulted. Not when a song's lyrics are grown-up and stricken, scared and undersung, a singer just asking for someone they love to heal, to get better, to last a little longer.

[SOAK's Bridie Monds-Watson is the first signee to CHVRCHES' new label, Goodbye Records. This was released in 2012. Came to me via Milo.]

White Hinterland - "Ring the Bell". "Ring the Bell" is the lead single from White Hinterland's forthcoming Baby. Painterly pop, dazzling as white canvas, or blue canvas or green canvas. An alpine fanfare of dancing groove, nimbler than it has any right to be, filled as it is with overlapping vocals and rampart synths, whole-cloth crests of brass. Lyrically, it is an uncomplicated (though not necessarily romantic) love song - something shout-sung in straight lines across distance. But the breathless arrangement - dashed arcs of harmony and Neal Morgan's lefthanded drum hits - they signal an overwhelming abundance, a vividness that will overtake anyone's dull afternoon. I wrote earlier of canvases: now imagine verdant hills and tall bell-towers, hopes clanging across the valleys, a briskness that's swiss as mountain air, swiss as chocolate, swiss as clocks. That's all-American and itself, prouder than peaks. [pre-order]

(photo by sophie t. lvoff)

of Montreal - "Triumph of Disintegration". Listening to Of Montreal interspersed with the mainlining of Marc Maron's WTF Podcast, so inevitably the two things come together like wrestling sasquatches - blurred and thrashing, lonely and angry, desperately in need of therapy. "Triumph of Disintegration" recalls a stand-up comic's late-night mania, Abbey Road-era Beatles music, and maybe a tryptophan-amplified post-Thanksgiving breakdown. Obviously, it's great. It's weirdly anthemic, often cheerful, spasming across the studio. It's a triumphant mental break, a sunny day in hell, a victory for cowardice or maybe a victory for considered retreat. Maybe it's about ignoring Twitter trolls, maybe it's about leaving your wife - I'm not really sure. But I'll go on happ'ly listening as I go about my day. [buy]

Orouni - "Speedball". Helium balloons lifted and lowered, carnivals inaugurated and called-off, a stop-start of pleasure and fulfillment, one disaster after another, one surprise party after another, a train that takes you to paradise or hell, chugchugchug, and Orouni in a caboose with a backpack full of candy, unsure whether they've made their day or ensured a bellyache. Sometimes a light sky is full of promise and other times it's the most depressing thing in the world, even full of fireworks.

[thank god for persistent and consistent Orouni / official website / Grand Tour is out in February on Sauvage Records]

(image by Hannah Waldron)

Lily Allen - "Air Balloon". The boys gathered by the fence, clawing fingers into the chain-link, watching the circus take shape. Plastic cases lowered from trucks, animal cages checked for sturdiness, horses fed and brushed, the giant big-top slowly, almost eminently, unfurled. The circus people did not seem like the boys' mothers and fathers: the visitors were stocky, big-shouldered, with tufts of thick black hair. They wore dungarees or stripes. They had every colour of eyes. Now and then someone would glance at the boys by the fence, smile, ask them if their parents were going to bring them to see the show. The boys tried to work out which of these stooped, wheezing, hefting persons was Clara The Equine Duchess, which one was Alphonse the Ring-Master, whether those men candying apples were Bozo and Bub. Hand-painted versions of the circus stars stared down at them from the side of the trailer. Mostly the boys tried to peep Lil Peep, the show's dancing acrobat, whose picture showed an incredible beauty of slightly dubious proportions, long-legged and buxom; but they never saw a woman who looked like that, not in all their spying. Just a shorter girl in tiny polka-dots and taffeta, now and then through gaps in canvas sheets, dancing like she was wearing ruby slippers. [album out soon / official website]

The Finks - "Daddy Long Legs". Sunhaze, sundaze, Sundays and sundaes and some days we sum rays, pool them on tabletops or lawns, collect our fortunes in hot light, like thin honey, all these lakes of wet photons, sleek electricity, that cast shadows on branches and fingertips, and another comma, another comma, balled like T-shirts on the floor by the bed, where a cat prowls, and the sound of air moving through a screen-door, like a silent and invisible cat, like a wish fulfilled. [bandcamp]

The Cyrillic Typewriter - "Somewhere". On "Somewhere", Jason Zumpano offers a soundtrack for a glossy, doomed cyber-future. A TRON-like empire of pixel windows, high-def canals, abandoned living-rooms, buffering skies. It's a languorous tracking shot, sinister and portentous, like he's preparing us for someone's grand entrance. Only the entrance never comes: instead, the song ends. And the streets remain empty, Cyrus's podium remains vacant, the battery runs down. [buy/Bandcamp]

(image source)