Singles Round-Up - W/C 28/2/11 (Single)

And so, it is that time of the week again. The time when we realise to our massive chagrin that the fleeting ecstasy of the weekend is once again fizzling out and in a matter of hours we will be back out into the grey misery of Monday morning for another week of toil and drudge. But fear not! Because although God might take our weekend every Monday with his left hand, at the same time he gives us new singles with his right hand! And butter my arse, there’s some real crackers this week.

Manic Street Preachers
Postcards From a Young Man

I expend on average about a thousand words a year telling Muso’s Guide readers exactly why Manic Street Preachers are the most important band ever, so let me warn you, you shouldn’t expect balance from me on this subject. Postcards is one of the highlights of the album of the same name, and it’s a glorious throwback to the late 1990s when the band shifted records by the shitload. It’s a swaying, swooning slice of enormous guitar pop, on which James Dean Bradfield sounds more energised than he has in years, in spite of (or perhaps because of) the slightly bitter nostalgic bent of the Wire’s lyrics. It’s quite obviously single of the week, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Elbow
Neat Little Rows

Everyone likes Elbow these days don’t they? They’re like a band of Dave Grohls, a bunch of proper decent pub blokes, who also happen to make brilliant records. Neat Little Rows sounds pretty much exactly how you would expect an Elbow lead single to sound. It doesn’t start off like that, though, because for the first minute you’re a bit concerned that they couldn’t come up with their own song and instead have decided to completely plagiarise Zebra by Beach House, but then the piano starts twinkling and Garvey’s whiskied howl cranks up a gear and you’re back in the safe and comforting heartland of classic Elbow. Neat Little Rows may not be in any way surprising, but its predictability takes nothing away from how nice it is to have Elbow back.

Crocodiles
Mirrors

Sleep Forever was, for me, one of 2010’s finest albums but it never quite seemed to get the universal adulation that it deserved. Exactly why Crocodiles feel the need to release opening track Mirrors now eludes me, but screw it, it’s a brilliant song which calls to mind the best moments of The Secret Machines’ early career. It’s about the pinnacle of Crocodiles’ noise-gaze endeavours, easing its way in gently with a hypnotic, snaking melody ushering in the crunching chords which carry off the rest of the song into a sea of beautiful echoey confusion. Massively enjoyable stuff.

Belle and Sebastian
I Want the World to Stop

In exactly the same way that you know exactly what to expect from an Elbow single, B&S have long since ceased to surprise us when they knock out a lovely single. They are are one of indieland’s great comforting constants, and unless you’re made of granite, their deftness with an upbeat melody should be sufficient to lift you out of a miserable Monday mood. Typically, I Want the World to Stop is a beautifully crafted sliver of chirpy pop, which sees Stuart pondering “sheets of milky winter disorder” and a “grey adorable city by the docks”, and still making the whole thing sound utterly idyllic.

Dutch Uncles
Face In

I’ll be honest, this is my first experience of Dutch Uncles. It’s pretty nice, all told. I won’t pretend not to be a smidge disturbed by the chap in the wedding dress in the video, but hey, his guests seem to be enjoying themselves by the end. The song is another bit of sugary indie pop fun, and although this particular week there’s a danger of it being overshadowed by the titans of the genre, the nagging catchiness of the chorus sees it alright. Face In is a great example the type of pop music that is one of the few things we Englishers do better than anybody else in the world.

Those Dancing Days
Can’t Find Entrance

Well, we might as well finish off with more twee pop since that’s the route the singles schedulers seem to be taking us this week. Those Dancing Days have become consummate pros in the field, and I can give you a sneaky exclusive that their new album is excellent. Can’t Find Entrance is pretty representative of the breakneck speed at which the whole thing proceeds, rattling by in a blur of guitar, organ and little-girl lost vocals. In another week, this might have been single of the week, but, well, I’d already given that to the Manics before I’d even seen what other singles were out.

December Singles Round Up

Those of you with a stock pile of back issues of Narc and too much time (or perhaps a worryingly precise memory) will be able to note that the last time I manned the singles column I made an ill-fated crack about how futile the attempts to sabotage Cowell’s dominance of the Christmas singles chart usually are (and subsequently lobbed my crystal ball in the Tyne). Well, I’m in no mood for such folly this time round but I will at least make a not-that-bold guess a that none of the singles I’m highlighting this month are likely to top the charts come Christmas day. Not that it’s a bad month, mind you, it’s a bloody strong one actually considering December’s usual truce between good taste and big bucks.

Unquestionably foremost among December’s 45s is the double A-Side from Vancouver’s Shimmering Stars, a band who appear to have shamelessly lifted the best bits of C86 and The Beach Boys and mashed them together in expert fashion. East Van Girls and its more laid-back cousin I’m Gonna Try are both exemplary chunks of sunny guitar japery, which are as impressively well-crafted as they are exhilarating. You can expect blogging types to be absolutely all over this lot next year.

A similarly lovely effort is Cambridge brother-sister duo The Cordelier Club’s Don’t Let it Go By, which is a lush example of how good guitar pop needn’t necessarily be particularly complicated, or even all that original. Indeed, both of the aforementioned bands could teach We Are Enfant Terrible that being derivative doesn’t always have to mean being boring. Sure, their double A-Side Wild Child / We Are Flesh n Blood Kids shows them to be perfectly competent handlers of catchy synth-pop, but there’s absolutely fuck all separating them from the dozens of bands making basically exactly the same records. The same thing could also easily be said about Primary 1, whose single Never Know is just as inoffensive a piece of electro pop as WAEF’s, and just as unremarkable.

Speaking of imitators, this month sees the welcome return of Panda Bear, a man who has almost single-handedly initiated a generation of low-fi sonic explorers, which is both a good and a bad thing. Last Night at the Jetty incorporates his usual dreamy ambience, his usual starry-eyed wonderment and his usual blissful sense of disorientation underpinning the song. With new album Tomboy due to land next year, this is an early indication that the record could be pretty special.

The second of this month’s more experimental efforts is Dog Bite’s Machino Machino, which takes its cue from Deerhunter’s recent work, so it’s heavy on echoey vocals and muddy guitars. It’s enjoyable enough, but there’s no denying that it feels a bit lightweight, to the extent that it’s difficult to keep your attention focused on it. A decidedly more engaging piece of music than this is Civil Civic’s Light on a Leash, which is a beautifully laid-out instrumental which veers unexpectedly from an ominous post-punk intro to a barmy synthy meltdown about halfway through. It’s addictive stuff, and in a weaker month would probably be top of the heap.

The only cover in the pile this month is Dirty Projectors’ take on Dylan’s As I Went Out One Morning, which, mystifyingly, turns out to be crushingly non-descript. It’s a shame that a band normally so adroit with a bit of loveable lunacy would bother to toss out a half-arsed effort like this, but at least it’s only a between album space-saver. A much better bit of folky fun comes from Lupen Crook with Dorothy Deserves, which is an exhilarating and enormously likeable bit of quirky stop-start pop which is up there with the best of this month.

Singles Round-Up - W/C 17-5-10 (Single)

It’s been suggested that the single is a dying artform, and although I’m a firm believer in the format, there are some weeks where it is hard to argue its case. Disappointingly for me, embarking on my maiden run at our Singles of the Week column, this week is one of those weeks. Still, there are one or two diamonds buried in the rough, so onward we go...

This week sees releases from more of pop’s luminaries than usual. Firstly, Christina Aguilera is back, and it would appear she has decide to reprise her filth-pop heyday, when she used to go around calling herself X-Tina. Sadly for pop’s yummiest mummy though, ‘Not Myself Tonight’, is a forgettable slice of “If you don’t like it, fuck you” –themed bluster, which sounds a little hollow now that we have far more interesting pop stars like Lady Gaga. A slightly better attempt at urban pop comes from little Alexandra Burke, whose ‘All Night Long’ at least has a more memorable chorus which is likely to go down well with Radio 1 types. She’s definitely one of the more worthwhile of the X Factor ‘artists’, but that contest is a bit like trying to decide what the best type of skin disease is. Completing the trio of pop giants releasing records this week is the wonderfully batshit Shakira, who at least deserves our admiration for gaining such prominence by embracing her lunacy rather than allowing herself to be buffed into radio-friendly generica. Her song ‘Give it Up to Me’, however is no ‘She-Wolf’. It’s a bit too straight, doesn’t really play to her eccentric strengths, and ends up sounding kind of like something Timbaland would have chucked at Nelly Furtado a few years ago.

While we’re on the subject of female pop solo artists, this week also sees the release of Ellie Goulding’s latest effort ‘Guns and Horses’. The song is perfectly pleasant, inoffensive and quite catchy (though not quite ‘Starry-Eyed’ catchy), but it’s difficult to take her seriously. It just feels like she’s been vacuum-packed in the lab which produces BBC Sound of 20xx candidates, with this year’s vintage requiring liberal splashes of baggy checked shirts, leggings and kooky vocal tics. You’d like to think there’s some irony present when she sings “It’s time that we found out who we are”, but there probably isn’t.

A far more enjoyable effort comes from Swanton Bombs (apparently it’s something to do with wrestling). Their single ‘Wasteland’ is a beautifully shambolic chunk of messy guitar pop. It has that fantastic grubby sound of Let’s Wrestle and the energy of Dananananaykroyd, but amid the murkiness, a tune is buried, and a surprisingly catchy one at that. Competing with Swanton Bombs for this week’s best single are Wild Palms. ‘Deep Dive’ is comprised of equal parts ominous portents of doom and driving power-pop, and is an all the more interesting proposition for its identity crisis. The singer might want to tone down the affectations just a touch though.

Also out this week is Camera Obscura’s cover of Richard Hawley’s ‘The Nights Are Cold’, which I would have loved to have told you all about, but as there seems to be an implausibly wide online exclusion zone around it, I’m afraid that’s not possible. The original is a lovely example of gently bouncing acoustic songcraft, so I expect the cover is kind of like that, only a little bit twee-er. They’re a lovely bunch, so you might as well just buy it and let me know what it sounds like.

January Singles Round-Up

It's now traditional that the music world agrees a ceasefire in December, allowing X-Factor hangers-on free reign to ride roughshod over the charts. A few (usually futile) infiltration attempts aside, most realise it's just easier that way. Let Cowell have his fun, because January sees things return to something resembling normality in terms of singles releases.

Not that considerations of the calendar bother Ash any more, now that they are taking the tag 'singles band' to worryingly literal extremes. Space Shot is the eighth in their 26 single series. It has their typical monster chorus and languid delivery, but really it's a shadow of the band that thrilled me years ago.

Far more endearing is Ben Dalby's impressively crafted Doctor Can. It's an absorbing piece of bass-led songsmithery which is just a little bit 80s although mercifully not in that horribly contrived La Roux way. Arno Cost flies in the face of Dalby's conciseness with his remix of Cicada's One Beat Away. Nicely textured electro it may be, but there's no need whatsoever for it to exceed seven minutes.

A one-two of local singles provides a doubly pleasant surprise. Hartlepool band Runwells’ As You Begin is the purest, simplest type of guitar pop. It‘s easygoing, catchy, and strangely moreish. Revelation number two comes from Longbenton's Nev Clay whose song Tony Robinson's Tears is a breezy, charming exercise in modern folk which recounts the tale of a particularly absorbing episode of Time Team. Nev has the sort of authenticity Paolo Nutini would slay his granny for. I'm sure you don't need me to tell you, but Nutini's 10/10 is a derisory lump of ironically-titled shite which sees him for some inexplicable reason pretending to be Jamaican. Hadouken are equally impossible to take seriously as their faux-everything, Sub-Skins drivel-fest Turn the Lights Out hammers another nail in their coffin. Winter Kiss by Young Guns is no better, as a bunch of rock kids from High Wycombe attempt to disguise their place of birth with generic phony American rawk mewling.

The antithesis to this posey horror comes in the form of Mixtapes and Cellmates' Soon and Victorian English Gentlemen's Club's Bored in Belgium. The former represents that gorgeously melodic and vaguely shoegazey pop the Swedes always do excellently. The latter is a quirky, playful line in yelping indie-pop. Both are excellent, and head and shoulders above much of the rest of January's offerings.

Passion Pit - The Reeling (Single)

This time a year ago, Passion Pit were on very few people’s radars. That altered with the Chunk of Change EP, half an hour of cute, vibrant electro-pop. They even came ready-packaged with their own convenient little piece of indie mythology, that the EP was originally recorded by the band’s mainstay Michael Angelakos as a Valentine’s Day gift for his girlfriend.

After the success of the EP, and the credibility-sapping seals of approval it generated (BBC Sound of 2009, anyone?) the threat of the seemingly inevitable backlash has been drawing ever nearer.

Well, with ‘The Reeling’, the first single off their debut album (Manners, due out here on May 26th), Passion Pit haven’t given the indie community too much cause to sharpen the knives just yet.

It’s a solid effort, and a promising taster for the album. Stylistically, it’s not drastically different to the songs on the EP. All the band’s endearing characteristics are on display. The track shows the inventiveness we saw on the EP, the warm electro textures and Angelakos’ distinctive shrill vocals. It’s driven on by a harder beat than we’ve heard from them before, and the ‘oh no’ hooks create the same sense of euphoria which infuses the EP.

One minor gripe about the song is its production. Chunk of Change is by no means a lo-fi recording, but ‘The Reeling’ is definitely a good deal shinier. This time out they managed to land just the right side of over-produced, but it’s a fine line, and Passion Pit will need to be wary of falling into the trap in future.

For now though, ‘The Reeling’ will hold us just fine. It’s a strong single, which shows signs of progression. It may be a little less urgent than most of Chunk of Change, but it‘s likeability increases with each listen, and it‘s done the job of whetting our appetites for the album.

Pocket Promise - I Burnt the Roller Disco (Single)

In 2008, Northern Irish quartet Pocket Promise released their debut EP Waving at Strangers. This was an introspective, occasionally moody affair, and you’d have been forgiven for thinking that this was heavily foretelling of their future direction.

However, a year or so on, they’ve only gone and served us with a right old curveball in the form of their first single ‘I Burnt the Roller Disco’. Just when we might have been expecting more gorgeously haunting melodies, they’ve slapped us round the face with a slice of the purest guitar pop. In fact, it’s a song which wouldn‘t sound out of place on the first Soulwax record.

Where Waving at Strangers’ five tracks were mostly piano-driven, ‘I Burnt the Roller Disco’ skips along on a playful guitar line. The cheeky melody is an interesting counterpoint to Cormac Fee’s ever-wistful vocals, both of which underpin the none-more-catchy chorus.

When it comes to pop music, brevity is usually a virtue, a point which is clearly not lost on Pocket Promise. Knowing the value of conciseness, the song ends without warning, leaving the listener eager for more.

With their two releases so far, Pocket Promise have shown us they are equally adept with gentle brooding and glitzy rabble-rousing. Consequently, their debut album which is due to land in the summer is a tasty prospect.