Leeds rockers Blacklisters have unveiled their latest single and, as you can see from the still above, it’s a little on the dark side. Have a watch of it below! Catch the band on tour over the summer. Details here.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh0IJDb3KBY&w=560&h=315]
Toronto “surf-gazers” Odonis Odonis have announced their new single is to be ‘Are We Friends?’ and will be released on 23rd July. Things are currently going swimmingly for the band, with current single ‘Busted Lip’ John Kennedy’s Record Of The Week on XFM. The band are also in the UK over the next couple of weeks to play the Camden Crawl and the Great Escape festival. The band are also giving away a free copy of their track “Mr Smith” which you can download here.
Moltov Jukebox consider themselves to be “London’s wildest troop of nomadic party-starters” and on listening to their rather fine EP ‘Bang’ I’m not about to argue with them. Let me introduce you. You’ll know singer Natalia Tena as Ellie in ‘About a Boy’.
The ‘Bang’ EP is the follow up to their debut ‘Double Dare’ EP, released to great acclaim in 2011, and was recorded Jonathan Quarmby, who has previously worked with David Bowie. How to descibe the sound? It’s a haze of strings and strums, brass and beats with some accordion and vocals thrown over the top. It’s a genre-hopping exercise in musical mayhem. Ska, soul, reggae, blues, pop, latin, soul and a bit of a calypso. Enough?
This is a great record. It’s easy to dismiss it as a record for a bacardi advert (as I did on first listen) but it’s better than that. The summery vibes run through this release but it combines the light with the dark. It’s unmistakably a record to put on at a party though. Put it on, pour some rum and enjoy. Leave the bacardi out of this one!
In April Frost brought you details of Lulu James’ UK tour. As a warm up for this she has announced a special one-off date at the Sebright Arms for this Thursday, 3rd May. Full details of the rest of the Newcastle soul singer’s UK tour can be found here.
Nobody’s ever going to accuse Switzerland of being a hotbed of rock n roll talent (least of all myself, having lived there for 3 years) but that’s not to say we ought to ignore it totally. Everybody knows that the best non-english speaking nation at churning out great rock music is Sweden but think of this as Sweden for dyslexics.
I spent 18 months living in the town that Christopher Christopher hail from, a place called Baden. It’s a sleepy town about 20 minutes outside of Zürich and by local standards the music scene isn’t half bad. Christopher Christopher, the town’s best band, are a bunch of mop haired Beatles fans who formed a band to escape the dull, sanitised life of small-town Switzerland.
This is a most spectacular effort, and one that cannot be accused of lacking ambition. Opener ‘The Castle’s Calling’ is a big chorused, big sounding mash up that sounds like the Flaming Lips wrestling the Magic Numbers. It’s bright and breezy and a blows open the door that is ‘KAWAAM’ (no, me neither) beautifully. ‘Ghosts’ sounds like Embrace and the chorus of “you’ll be alright, you’ll be safe with me tonight” could have come straight from Danny McNamara’s songbook. ‘Firefighter’ is a Bluetones/Shed Seven britpop mash-up.
This EP is enjoyable and the sort of music that is worthy of being played in the weather that is the exact opposite of what we have right now (at the time of writing it has been raining in London for a very biblical 40 days and 40 nights) – some great sunshine. The influences are distinctly 60’s and 70’s (Stones, Beatles, Kinks, Bowie etc) we’re told but it sounds very 90’s and at just five songs it’s over before you know it, leaving you wanting more. But that’s a good thing. I love this band and so should you.
Kawaam is out now via Anker Platten
I’ve never been to Scotland; never felt the need or desire. I watched a documentary called ‘Trainspotting’ when I was a kid and felt I’d seen enough. However, they do produce a disproportionate amount of good music for the 5 or so million population. Not so fresh off the production line are Aberdeen rockers The Xcerts, who, according to their Wikipedia entry at least, formed after meeting in their headmaster’s office at their school. Boys after my own heart.
‘Scatterbrain’ is the band’s 2nd album and one they’ve actually been touring since it’s release in October 2010. If I’m honest I’d ignored the band. I couldn’t stomach the name and, rather incorrectly, assumed they were some sort of electro laptop-band, a genre I loathe. Rather fortunately I’ve just managed to enjoy them before they return to the studio to hibernate.
This is a good record and one that brilliantly occupies the space between twee indie-rock and the sonic noise of alt-rock. Demonstrating their sounds perfectly the track ‘Young’ has two versions on this record, one with their powerpop sound and the other, the album’s closing track, a stripped back acoustic strum-along.
Still only in their early 20’s this record has at times the feel of a band more mature than their years and at others they sound like mid 90’s punk-pop band Midget. At times it’s clever and exciting. Imagine Biffy Clyro back when they didn’t take themselves too seriously. ‘Tear Me Down’ even sounds like it has borrowed a wee bit from Biffy’s ‘Justboy’.
The criticism of the record is that it plunders rather obviously from other bands. It’s a band still finding their feet and developing their sound, which you would be at 23, but it’s an album worth listening to and a band worth taking note of. That they haven’t yet carved their own niche is not necessarily a bad thing. This record shows the band have plenty of potential. Watch this space and buy this record, I can think of few things better to spend £5.99 on right now.
Scatterbrain is out now via Xtra Mile. Catch the band on tour in May.
We’ve had quite a year from Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy. First there was ‘Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy‘ – a book of conversations with longtime collaborator Alan Licht, now the hardest working man in music has announced that he will re-release six classic recordings dated between 1996 and 2004.
To give you an idea of just how hard working this man is, between his first Palace Brothers record, 1993’s ‘There Is No-One What Will Take Care Of You’ and last year’s Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy album ‘Wolfroy Goes To Town‘, Bonny has released no less than seventeen studio albums, twenty-five EPs and five live albums.
It is in the spirit of celebration of an artistic life so remarkable that Domino Records is this year to re-issue these six seminal records on 30th July. The albums will be ‘Arise Therefore’ (1996) and ‘Joya’ (1997), ‘I See A Darkness’ (1999), ‘Ease Down The Road’ (2001), ‘Master And Everyone’ (2003) and ‘Greatest Palace Music’ (2004).
Is that enough? Not for Billy! Most people would happily sit back and enjoy such a handsome array of releases but he’s releasing a new EP, titled ‘Now Here’s My Plan’, which is a collection of old songs newly recorded with Steve Albini. The EP is out on Domino on 24th June.
Enough? It bloody well should be!
Four days ahead of an extensive 25-date UK tour, Aberdeen alt-rock band The Xcerts have announced that this will be their last for a while. Speaking in an email to fans they said that the tour will be “the last full UK tour in support of the album (2010’s ‘Scatterbrain’) before we take some time out to work on new material, hangout with loved ones and lose our social lives to the hands of Netflix”.
The tour begins at the Tunbridge Wells Forum on 4th May and runs through to 25th May at Bristol Cooler, full details here.