Left With Pictures - Beyond Our Means (Album)

We’ve always had a special connection to pop music in this country. At the risk of being immodest in a way that is unbecoming to an Englishman, I’d hazard a guess that this is because pop music is something we’ve always been pretty good at. And really, everybody likes pop music in one form or another, be it X-Factor-tainted radio-pop or something more cerebral. A well-constructed and catchy song is one of life’s great immutable pleasures.

This is a fact which is clearly not lost on London band Left With Pictures. Having formed at university and played around with their sound, they now come armed with an array of folk instruments and a mission to restore classicism to pop music. These ingredients, coupled with a dauntingly prodigious ear for melody, have brought about their debut record Beyond Our Means, which is a collection of chamber pop of the most elegant kind. It’s charming, likeable and about as English as it gets.

The record blends breezy pop songs with more hazy, dreamy pieces. Recent singles ‘Every Stitch, Every Line’ and ‘Her Father’s Nose’, hinge on jaunty melodies and playful choruses . Both are wonderful examples of the band’s enviable proficiency with pop‘s holy grail, the ability to create something that is at once memorable, catchy and extremely moreish. The album’s title track is another great success, sounding as it does like a drunken singalong in the politest pub you could ever imagine.

As comfortable as they are with bouncy melodiousness, Left With Pictures are equally adept with a more pensive approach. On ‘Yours, Tom Maclean’ singer Stuart Barter laments that “My song-writing’s over / What could I write here in Leicester?”. The song is structured as a letter to a old friend, and is about as close as this album comes to anything experimental. It is mournful, but at the same time tinged with optimism.

Similar in mood, closing track ‘Ghosts of ‘89’ is a gorgeous elegy for the naive joys of youth, evoking Cider With Rosie type images of summers that seem to unfold without end: “July seemed an acre of time / Stretching out beyond Hadrian‘s Wall”. This is subject matter which is in ideal hands with Left With Pictures, because one of their greatest strengths is the ability to inspire almost child-like feelings of hopefulness with their songs.

You could really pick out any song at random on Beyond Our Means and hold it up as an example of Left With Pictures’ class. The album is a lesson in the art of song craft, and it is presented in such a way that I would find it difficult to imagine anyone not warming to the band on hearing it. Some people might be put off by the shamelessly twee loveliness of the whole thing, or even misconstrue its effortlessness for being lightweight or throwaway. In reality though, this is an album which is deceptively substantial and ambitious. It is paradoxically youthful and world-weary all at one, and is a late contender to be crowned the most heartwarming album of the year.

9/10

Dananananaykroyd - The Cluny - 21/10/09 (Gig)

It faces increasing competition from corporate monsters, state of the art music halls and University dives, but really there will never be a better place to see a band in Newcastle than The Cluny. Not content with just being a lovely pub, it is also the most character-filled gig venue for miles around. Alas, without the right bands to turn a small empty room into a shindig, all this would count for nothing. For the opening night of Dananananaykroyd’s Hugtober tour, the right band and the right venue coalesce in glorious and electric fashion.

Right from the opening notes of ‘Totally Bone’, the band are like cornered mongooses, spilling off the lovably tiny stage into the welcoming arms of the assembled throng. This is another mark in the Cluny’s favour; it is not the sort of place where over-zealous meat-heads crack skulls at any hint of band/crowd interaction, the two are free to mingle with impunity. And really, that’s kind of the point of Dananananaykroyd, a band for whom a gig is less a performance, more a party.

On the face of it, the venue isn’t as heaving as you might expect for a band who have generated the sort of buzz that our lairy Scotch mates have whipped up, but they seem happy enough, pointing out that the turnout is ‘not bad for a Wednesday’. Chuck in the fact that it’s a rotten night, and Jack White’s latest superband are busy claiming a sizeable chunk of Newcastle’s gig-going public across the other side of town, and tonight’s attendance is pretty respectable.

To be honest though, you get the impression that Dananana would play with just as much fire in their bellies if there had only been three people in the crowd. The secret to their likeability lies in the inexorable fact that they are clearly having the time of their lives up there. There’s a chemistry between the band, in particular their two singers, that can’t be faked. It’s this which inspires the really special moments like crowd singalongs, over-ambitious stage-dives and which at one stage induces a slightly inebriated chap to take the tour’s name to wonderfully literal levels by climbing on stage to give the band cuddles. Less ‘fight pop’, more ‘hug pop’ then.

At times the intensity of their light-speed playing, and screamy vocal interplay almost feels like too much, and it imbues the already impressive songs with an extra dimension of enjoyability. ‘Black Wax’ and ‘The Greater Than Symbol and the Hash’, in particular are chest-throbbingly powerful.

As Dananananaykroyd are a band with a growing live reputation who are now well into the promotional run for a well-received debut record, you would think that most self-respecting indie fans will have seen them at some point. However, if for any reason you haven’t, or even if they haven’t quite clicked for you yet, then for God’s sake get out and see them on this tour because they will make glorious sense. Quite frankly, there isn’t a more exciting and downright fun live band in the country at the moment.

Tickley Feather - Hors d'Oeuvres (Album)

Sometimes music can be a seasonal thing, in that certain artists will be most enjoyable at a particular time of year. The National, for example, are tailor-made for those gloomy rain-soaked nights in November. And I find myself far more inclined to reach for an Ash record during those all too fleeting days of summer we get in this country. With that in mind, it seems quite fitting that in the run-up to Halloween we get a record as eerie and unsettling as Hors d’Oeuvres, the follow-up to last year’s eponymous debut by Tickley Feather (aka Annie Sachs).

When you learn that Tickley Feather is signed to Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks imprint, it should come as no surprise that she specialises in hazy, lo-fi bedroom pop. However, she is able to avoid falling into four-track cliché hell by dint of the genuinely idiosyncratic charm her sound carries.

She takes simple components, and builds something that is more than the mere sum of its parts. Most of the songs hang around a bouncy drumbeat, a simple melody and Sachs’s ghost-child vocal delivery, which is usually submerged deep under a sea of distortion. There are moments on the record, in fact, like ‘Sure Relaxing’ where the haze is so heavy that it’s hard to tell whether we are hearing Sachs’ voice or some other alien instrument.

The murky sound established on Hors d’Oeuvures creates a heady and occasionally oppressive atmosphere, which is at odds with the playful delivery of the words and melodies. The juxtaposition between the haunting and the naive is one of the key things that make the record such a likeable and engaging listen.

That said, at times it can be difficult to escape the nagging feeling that the record occasionally relies a bit too heavily on its sense of wooziness. You can’t help but find yourself wishing that Sachs’ strangely enticing voice wasn’t always so deeply obscured, as you suspect it could tug on the heartstrings a lot more than we experience here. Arguably the only instance of any kind of emotional impact is the simplistic and delicate ‘Roses of Romance’.

The most successful moments on Hors d’Oeuvres are the ones where Tickley really lets herself go. The record hinges on it’s slightly sleazy, groove-driven centre-piece ‘Trashy Boys’ and the brilliant bedroom disco of ‘Club Rhythm 96 and Cell Phone’. As well as this, closing track ‘Tickley Plays Guitar’ is a pulsating pysch guitar instrumental which is a world away from the rest of the album, and lends a splash of variation. These highlights are undoubtedly the enduring things you take away from the album, rather than the occasional frustrating lapse into auto-pilot.

Thanks largely to a keenly developed sense of the perverse which is exhibited in naming her second album Hors d’Oeuvres, Tickley Feather has crafted a mostly successful and enriching half hour of creative and experimental pop. She perhaps needs to surrender herself to the urge to get carried away rather than falling back on the tried and tested. However, there’s a lot to like here, and you get the sense that with every release, she will get better and better.

7/10