2016 Top 10 – #5 Bloom

Moving into the Top Five of our end of year list and we get to Bloom, who released their debut album What Is Life? In October. Bloom rose from the ashes of The Beautiful Word showing a newfound maturity in their sound and songwriting, and triumphing over adversity following Megan’s vocal surgery.

 

Brighton Music Blog 2016 Top Ten 10 – 6

It’s the middle of December! That makes it the time of year when we should be doing some kind of end of year round up, and here’s the first part of it. As always it’s completely unscientific – it’s just what’s floated our boat this year. Artists might have released a single, an EP, a whole album, or maybe just played some gigs that we absolutely loved. The first part is covering number ten through to six, with the top five coming sometime nearer to Christmas.
10. Cold Pumas (Hanging Valley LP)
9. My Life Story (24 Hour Deflower single)
8. Prince Vaseline (On an Island EP)
7. Black Honey (Headspin EP / Hello Today single)
6. Sea Bed (The Art of Living EP)

New Brighton Music

Although we’re managing to be fairly regular with our posts these days we haven’t actually made a new music post since the start of November, so we’ve got a bit of catching up to do. The first track we’re going to write about is very new though – the band’s first release (although both members are very established musicians) and only went online at the weekend. The band in question is called Fröst, and they’re made up of Johanna Bramli, who currently sings with The Larsens, but was also a member of Stereolab offshoot Imitation Electric Piano and The Woo!Worths (who we wrote about in the early days of the blog) and Fujiya & Miyagi’s Steve Lewis. The track’s called Crackling On The Wire, and if you like the sound of their motoric psychedelia their first gig is at the Rose Hill on 2nd December: Continue reading

Gallery : Fujiya & Miyagi and Lost Idol at The Haunt

Last Friday night we headed down to the Haunt to catch Fujiya & Miyagi round off a mini tour to promote their new release EP2. The set covered most of the two new EPs and skipped through a greatest hits of their back catalogue with Ankle Injuries, Uh, Collarbone and Flaws all in the set list. Best of all was the reintroduction of Electro Karaoke, which they always used to close their set with but had been absent for a few years. Support came from Lost Idol who played a set drawn mainly from his recent Chrome Machine Tales album.

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New Brighton Albums

We have two new albums to write about this week – The first is from Broker, whose album Quixota came out on October 22nd on Smalltown America records, although we received the first mail about the record back in August. Sorry guys. Since then the band have been on tour around Europe, but you haven’t missed the local launch yet – The album launch is happening this Saturday at the Prince Albert.

Next other is the new long player from Luo, who also got in touch with us far too long ago. Again, apologies. Their new release is called Sleep Spindles, and is out on local label Small Pond. There’s no big local launch for the record, but Luo are supporting Three Trapped Tigers on Sunday at Patterns, with the equally brilliant Physics House Band also on the bill.

 

New Brighton Music

Here’s this week’s New Music roundup. We’re kicking off with Our Girl whose EP Normally comes out on local label Cannibal Hymns on 18th November. The video for No Big Deal taken from the EP was featured on Vevo this week. Good work Our Girl!

We posted the audio for the new Gang single Dead in our last New Music roundup, but with a track name like that they would have been missing a trick if they didn’t do something to celebrate Halloween earlier this week. Right on cue they sent us the video:

Kudu Blue have a new track out called NGFM. They finally play their first headline shows later this month, in London on 16th November and at the Hope & Ruin on 17th.

It’s been a while since we wrote about The Space Agency, but they’ve just let us know about a double A side single The Devil’s Saddle / Tiger Paw, out now on their own label Tremolo Records and available to buy through their bandcamp page.

The latest band to sign up to the Communion singles club are MarthaGunn, who’ve featured on these pages before. The lead track from their single is Honest, which you can hear below. Look out too for the acoustic video of the track filmed in a church in Wales.

In advance of the release of their album Abstract Figures in the Dark, which comes out a week tomorrow, Tigercub have shared a video for  Memory Boy, made up of footage shot at their gig in October at Patterns:

Rounding up this week is This Party, whose new single Money comes out on Moscow Let’s Go records on 14th November

 

Fujiya & Miyagi Interview

EP2 by Fujiya & Miyagi came out last Friday so we caught up with David Best and chatted about the new EP, his second favourite joke, new band members and collaborations. We kicked off the conversation by asking to be talked through the four tracks on EP2
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David Best : The first track is Outstripping (The Speed of Light). I always wanted a song with brackets and now we have so that’s one to tick off. It’s quite a simple song – some of our songs have many layers on them and some are quite stripped back and minimal and this one has only maybe five or six things going on. I suppose it’s just talking about grasping the moment, just get on with it and don’t put off to tomorrow what you can do today. It’s quite brutal sounding as well – It’s got a proper guitar solo in it which is quite fun. When we first started me and Steve had a ten commandments of things we wouldn’t do and one was “We will not have a guitar solo”. Then a few years ago around the time of Ventriloquizzing we thought “What would happen if we disregarded all these ten commandments?”

Continue reading

New Brighton Music

It’s actually been a few weeks since we’ve done a new music roundup, with a bit of variety getting back into the things we’re posting. Continuing in that vein, with any luck we’ll have an interview coming soon with our first artist this week Fujiya & Miyagi. Their new release EP2 comes out this Friday, and they’ve just shared another track from it. This is the self referential Extended Dance Mix:

Without any warning (to us at least) Sea Bed put out a new EP last Friday. The EP is entitled The Art of Living, and it includes recent single Geneva which we featured in a new music roundup a few weeks ago. Here’s the title track:

We also included Hello Today by Black Honey in one of our recent roundups, but that was before they shared the brilliant video for the track:

Jacko Hooper‘s After The Storm EP came out at the end of September. Here’s the video for the lead track from the release Time Will Tell Us Enough

We don’t know a great deal about Preston Parris who sent us over his EP under the name Preston Outatime, but we do know that we quite like his Enceladus EP of instrumental hip hop:

Gang put out a double A side single out on November 25th. Dead (featured here) will be backed with another new track Enough Nothing. You can catch Gang live at the Hope & Ruin on November 4th.

Last Friday Kanzi put out their new EP “Sketches, Early Summer“. The lead track is called March and is backed with another three tracks of lush electronica:

Last but by no means least is Who You Are by Tim Woodbridge which came out last week, which reminded us a bit of the last C Duncan album, which is no bad thing at all:

 

Sweet Williams album news / gig preview

sweet-williamsTomorrow night sees Sweet Williams play an intimate set at The Quadrant in support of his new release Please Let Me Sleep On Your Tonight. Long term friend of Brighton Music Blog Greg Neate caught up with Sweet Williams’ Tom House to talk about the record and you can read the interview over at Louder Than War.

Please Let Me Sleep On Your Tonight is out now on Faux Discx, who seem to be unable to put a foot wrong with the records that they’re releasing this year, and can be purchased on vinyl at Resident, or on download from the band’s bandcamp site.