Curxes new single Spectre is out this week, and it’s brilliant. A fantastic slice of dark, soaring electro pop. If you don’t believe me, then click on the soundcloud link below. And then once that’s convinced you, go and buy it on iTunes. It comes with a remix by Strangers which makes it even more industrial and angular.
If you want the record on vinyl, you can buy it through their website or you can pop over to Southsea, where it’s being sold in a Pie shop. Obviously.
Last December, House of Hats released their eponymous “House of Hats” EP, and decided to make a video for the track This Love. The band have made a fantastic animation for it, in collaboration with film maker Finn Hopson, which only got released to the world last month. I caught up with Finn and James, Alex and Rob from the band to find out how it all came about, and why it’s taken so long to appear.
The first version of the video was made at the time of the EP by James, who plays guitar and has also designed of all of the band’s artwork so far. It was shot on an iPhone and everything was hand drawn and captured and assembled using traditional stop motion methods. James tells us “It had a shakey quality to it, which was very charming but it didn’t have a quality that matched the music, really”.
Finn Hopson’s day job is profession filmwork, doing everything from video editing for TV, to making animations for corporate clients. Around the time the orginal video was made, Finn had made a time-lapse video and showed Alex. He was impressed, and showed Finn James’ original iPhone effort and asked if Finn could do anything for them. Finn said “Why not? I’ll take your little things, I’ll move them around, I’ll have it done next week!”. Things took a little bit longer that though.
When Finn asked for the James’ artwork from the original version, he got an envelope stuffed with hundreds of cut out figures, each meticulously labelled, some still with blu-tack on them, and a seventeen page email of notes detailing exactly how everything works! James says “I didn’t know how detailed Finn wanted things, so I told him exactly”. Finn counters “What I said was ‘could you write down roughly where you’d like things to happen?’ and you had it word for word all of the way through all of the lyrics, syllable by syllable!”, to which Rob adds “That’s James through and through!”.
Finn explains “I tried to do it stop motion in my camera originally and try and do it frame by frame with stills, and I got a little way into it and after about a day I realised that you shoot 25 frames a second worth of stuff for a few seconds and suddenly you’ve got hundreds and hundreds of photos all of which need a little bit of fiddling and then exporting and then putting together into a movie and then if it’s wrong you have to go back and start again from scratch. So I did that a few times and realised that I should do it differently.”
The final version starts off with stop motion – the book opening at the beginning is put together shot by shot, but from that point on it becomes scans of the illustrations laid out in a virtual 3d environment, treated and processed and sprinkled with Finn’s magic touch to make it look less synthesised. “Where there are faces it’s often not just one face but a scans of multiple faces blended together digitally” Finn says. “Where the original iPhone version had one tree, I was given free reign to use multiple versions of these to embelish to the world in the video, but everything you see is from James’ original drawings”.
All this leaves us with one unanswered question – why are we only seeing the video now? The reason is that the band’s next single is coming out next month and the PR agency they’ve got working for them asked them to hold it back to help with the push for that. We’ll be writing more about that in a few weeks time. In the meantime, you can buy This Love and the rest of the House of Hats EP from iTunes here.
This isn’t a blog post about Graham Greene’s novel, or either of the films made about it. Nor is it a post about the bar in Kemptown. Brighton Rocks in this case refers to a series of gigs put on by Lout Promotions, featuring exclusively local bands.
In the early days of Lout, they put on all-dayers at the Concorde featuring the likes of British Sea Power, Electric Soft Parade, and Eighties Matchbox B-Line disaster, and now they’re reviving the concept. They’re all going to be on friday or saturday nights – so no moaning about work the following day, and instead of the Concorde, they’ll be at Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar.
One great thing for bands is that Lout are open to the idea of curated nights, so a band could put together their own bill, for a single launch or label showcase.
The first night is next friday (3rd August – Facebook event here), headlined by Run Young Lovers, and there are another half a dozen lined up already. If you want to get involved, drop a mail to info@loutpromotions.co.uk.
Friday, August 3rd, 2012
Run Young Lovers, Alice, The Watermelons & The Querelles
Saturday, August 11th, 2012
MOK, Ubertone, 0:00 & Coco Alice
Friday, August 17th, 2012
Dollface, The Denim, As It Is & Sweet Jonny
Friday, August 24th, 2012
The Beautiful Word, Our Colour Company, Elk & Tarq Bowen
Friday, September 7th, 2012
Emersis, Samurai, The Dead Celebs & In Dynamics
Saturday, September 8th, 2012
Ham Legion, The Creaking Chair, Seadog & Dog Legs
Friday, September 14th, 2012
Tin Palace, Wild Cat Strike, This Modern Life & Black Fire Rising
Bat for Lashes is back with a new single, called Laura:
Laura is the first track to be released from the new album The Haunted Man, which hits the shops on 15th October, and if you pre-order the album on iTunes now you can get it as a free download (or you can buy the track individually for a mere 79p).
According to the link from youtube, the album comes in a multitude of pre-order options. Pre-ordering from iTunes gets you Laura for free, the first 500 pre-ordere from Play get signed, and HMV and Recordstore pre-orders also come with additional material.
The artwork for the album is a photo by American nude photographer Ryan McGinley. I’ll let you click through rather than post up NSFW pics onto the blog.
The phenomenon of playing a whole album live from start to finish isn’t a new one. Things really kicked off when All Tomorrow’s Parties introduced their Don’t Look Back series in the noughties, and the world and his wife have joined in, including Electric Soft Parade who got back together last year to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the release of their debut Holes in the Wall. Thomas White obviously enjoyed the experience because over the next few months he’s revisiting his back catalogue, starting last night with his 2008 solo debut I Dream of Black.
Support came from Red River Dialect, who launched their Americana / Country tinged debut album at the Prince Albert this Monday, and from local folk legend Mary Hampton, who would have been worth the ticket price on her own.
Thomas White and his band came out in their now trademark African gowns and played the album in full as billed, in the dark save for a b-movie* projection onto the wall behind them. There were some familiar faces in the band : his brother Alex on keyboards as well as assorted other people he’s played with in many of his other collaborations. Thomas explained towards the end that he writes his albums to be listened to as a whole, despite seeming a little embarrassed by some of the proggy instrumental interludes, which he attributes to the album being made when he was very stoned. It works as a whole too, thanks to the fact the record takes in a wide variety of styles and has stood the test of time. The band had learned the album and nothing more, so for an encore we just got the one song – a replay of one of the more upbeat tracks.
Thomas White
Thomas White is back on 9th August playing his second album The Maximalist, and again on 22nd September playing his most recent release Yalla.
*knowing my luck, it’ll turn out that it’s a really famous film that I should have spotted
In another world, I’d be writing about Grasscuts tonight – their album came out today, and they played a free instore at Resident to celebrate it’s release. However even though the sensible thing would have been to go to a gig in the dry, I was standing in a damp muddy field in Hove for another Brighton band.
When I picked up the ticket for Catherine Ireton’s second Treasure Tracks gig, and read that the venue would The Signalman, I was a little surprised – the Treasure Tracks gigs were meant to be all about special venues, and surely a gig in a pub isn’t all that, especially in Brighton. But what if the former Railway Hotel was just a stepping stone to a later destination…
It feels like months since we covered one of the Source New Music nights at the Pavilion Theatre. That’s probably because it is – the last one we wrote about was back in March, and that was on the same night as a Juice New Music Night, so I only got to write about half of each. This month had Sweet Sweet Lies headlining though, who I hadn’t seen live since they released their album, so we couldn’t miss that. Continue reading
Byte Me is a new audio visual night which has started at the Blind Tiger Club. The posters for the opening night boasted Boss Kite, Bitbin, Smart Phone Orchestra, The 55th Flotilla, Fiona Geilinger, Marina Tsartsara, Dreamscape 1994 and Paul Prudence – an ambitious and impressive line up, which we couldn’t ignore.
It might have been easy to dismiss Shrag as a shouty indie band early in their career but now, three albums in and signed to Fortuna Pop, it’s time that people started paying a bit more attention. That’s not to say that the band are doing anything different, they’re just doing it better.
Brighton Music Blog 
