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.
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.
This week sees the release of Moulettes’ second album The Bear’s Revenge. It’s been nearly two years since their eponymous debut, but it’s worth the wait. The Bear’s Revenge is an album with much wider appeal than than their first, better crafted with a more colourful tapestry of styles.
Without giving Inner World a listen, you could easily be fooled about the sound of the Donna Fullman’s debut album. On her website she describes herself as “Indie Folk” and the scrolling text at the top currently tells you that it’s #4 in Reverbnation’s folk chart, and producer Simon Janes has worked with Mary Hampton. Even on opening track By The Fire, you could still be lulled into thinking that this is a folk album, with it’s acoustic guitar and haunting refrain.
Music’s always been a big deal for me. One of my earliest memories is looking at the cover of my mum’s copy of Sergeant Pepper, slightly baffled by all of the characters on it. Growing up, I always had my walkman with me along with an extra pair of batteries in my pocket just so that I was never left stranded in silence. When I was old enough to have a bit of spare cash, I’d cycle to the record shops of Croydon and Epsom doing my best to fill the gaps in my ever increasing New Order 12″ collection. At uni I got involved with student radio, and then when I went and got a job, Monday lunchtimes would draw to close with a game of “Who?” – the inevitable reaction from my older colleagues as I went through the brand new releases I had gone and bought as early as I possibly could – 7″s by Kenickie, Bis or Comet Gain, Stereolab albums on coloured vinyl, the latest cds on Heavenly or Warp Records. Throughout my twenties, my summer holidays were festivals. Over the years I built up a soundtrack to my life – tunes which can instantly bring back memories of blue skies or broken hearts. So, music is important – If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be writing this, and you wouldn’t be reading it. It’s especially important to Saint Etienne. They’ve been making records for over twenty years now, during which time they’ve also turned their hand to music journalism, DJing, running record labels, writing songs for other people, film-making … You name it, they’ve done it in the music industry, which is how they’ve ended up at the point where Words & Music is the natural album for them to make. Opening track Over The Border will send shivers down the spine for anyone music really matters to, lyrically encapsulating exactly how it feels for music to grow up with you.
The very first thing I read about the album was a comment from someone on Twitter saying that Saint Etienne had made a pop record. Of course it was pop, I thought – they’re a pop band, after all. The gist of next comment I read was that they’d made the record with Xenomania, and it showed. That didn’t concern me either. The lead single, Tonight, reminded me of Action, which the band released ten years ago, and my girlfriend said that reminded it her of He’s on the Phone, from all the way back in 1995. The perception from some quarters seems to be that Saint Etienne should only be allowed to make retro pop, but the truth is that they’ve always had a bit of disco in them – They even worked with Kylie on a version of Nothing Can Stop Us.
While some of the tracks have been sprinkled with a bit of pop magic from Richard X and other Xenomania alumni Nick Coler and Tim Powell, old hand Ian Catt who’s been involved with the production of Saint Etienne records since day one is also on board. Outside of the disco pop of the potential singles, the pastoral folk of I Threw It All Away could be a Vashti Bunyan cover, and the acapella of Record Doctor harks back to Goodnight which closed Tales From Turnpike House seven years ago.
For me, the most interesting tracks are those that hark back to classic St Et but that are informed by all of the new lessons they’ve learned from their new chartbusting friends. Last Days of Disco has radio friendly electric piano verses, but two minutes in has a great breakdown which brings in some shamelessly synth strings. Popular, one of the more upbeat tracks on the album, does some fancy things time stretching vocals. Still Saint Etienne, but still moving forwards, which for a band so far into their career is no mean feat.
While it’s been a good few years since the last Saint Etienne album, the band have been busy being Artists-in-Residence at Royal Festival Hall, celebrating the twentieth anniversary of their seminal debut Foxbase Alpha by playing the album live in it’s entirety and having it remixed by Richard X, reissuing remastered versions of the rest of their back catalogue, remixing a new generation of bands and quietly sneaking out a Christmas album. Here’s hoping there aren’t so many distractions for the band between now and the next album.
Words and Music by Saint Etienne is released on Universal Records on 21st May 2012. And if you’re wondering why I’m writing about Saint Etienne who are so associated with London on Brighton Music Blog, read my interview with Pete Wiggs here.
Once upon a time there was a three piece band from Belfast who made rather nice dreamy folk music. Then main protagonist Richard Davis relocated to Brighton, and found that being in a band where your bandmates are on a completely different landmass was a bit tricky. For a while, Richard tried his own thing, putting together layers of sound on his laptop, calling his new project Lumo. He played a few gigs which were mostly improvised, and got approached by Brighton label Precious Metal, who have started putting out releases on cassette.
When Richard agreed his original thought was two put out two longer tracks of about ten minutes each, with one on each side, but things grew and grew. Guitarist Niall Harden had also moved to Brighton, and they couldn’t turn their back on Chris McCorry who was still back in Belfast. The release would be as a new, bolder, more ambitious Heliopause, and instead of two tracks, a whole album’s worth of material was recorded.
The result is the Lumo Tape. It’s recognisable as the old Heliopause, but the songs are bigger, richer and more atmospheric. Guitars are run through numerous pedals making them distorted and fuzzy. Electronica generated on the laptop twinkles and burbles in the background. Layers of reverb are added to the songs making the whole sound much warmer – like Sigur Ros with intelligible lyrics remixed by Kieran Hebden.
The album was launched at an intimate gig at Brighton Electric Studios on Saturday 5th May. Support came from local electronica act Krill, and Before Machines, a post-indie band who are old friends of Heliopause’s from Belfast.
Only fifty cassettes have been produced, which went on general release at the gig. Soon they’ll be taking some to Canada – the band are performing at this year’s NXNE festival in Toronto in June.
The premise of Brighton Music Blog is nice and simple – write about bands from Brighton. So what am I doing interviewing Saint Etienne’s Pete Wiggs? The band have a greatest hits called London Conversations, and London Belongs To Me from Foxbase Alpha came 19th in Time Out’s 100 best London songs last year. Surely I can’t be branching out so soon? Don’t worry. The blog is still dedicated to Brightonians – Pete Wiggs is a Hove resident these days, so I caught up with him over a pint or two at his local to talk about moving away from London, his new album, and making remixes for a new generation of artists.
Saint Etienne on Brighton Beach (photo (c) Elaine Constantine)
It’s funny because even now we still do interviews where people ask me my favourite London haunts. I’ve been down here for four years now. I still feel like a tourist now and again here. We’d always intended to move down here at some point, and now I can sometimes go a couple of weeks without going into London. I suppose it’s easier with internet – you can bat things around. Continue reading →
Amongst The Pigeons have just released their new album Get Amongst It. I caught up with them in their pigeon shed / recording studio to do a track by track walkthrough of the album:
FutureDeadRockStars
With this track, the first 20 seconds was the fadeout sound on the first album. I really like the idea of taking that same sound to open up this album. All the titles came about from things other people have said, seeing things that people were saying on twitter or facebook or just conversations that friends were having. This track came about from my friend Si – we were having a conversation on twitter, and he was saying one of the things that all musicians should aspire to be is a future dead rock star, I think we were talking about the whole age 27 thing, and Kurt Cobain, and everything. This track only works as an opener, because it’s quite a slow song, it builds up, and it’s a bit ploddy for the first couple of minutes but it was one of those songs where I just kept coming back to it again and again, and I couldn’t not have it on the album. It’s a real headphone album – there are little bits that are coming in one ear, and looping over. I get really into just fiddling around with sounds for hours and hours and getting lost in the little bits of what I do. Continue reading →
It’s easy to get bored on holiday. You don’t have all your daily routine to keep you preoccupied. But when most of us get a bit bored when we’re away, we reach for a paperback, or head to the bar. Not Thomas White though. When he was bored on holiday in Egypt (before last year’s Arab Spring), he knocked up a whole new album, just using his guitar, his laptop and the the microphone of his pocket videocamera. He wasn’t even going to release it until he was persuaded by friends that he’d be a fool if he didn’t.
Thomas White - Yalla!
Yalla! is Thomas White’s third solo album, on top of those he’s made with Electric Soft Parade and Brakes (and numerous guest spots with others), and it quite possibly his most personal and accomplished work to date.
The album fades in quietly, opening with All The Fallen Leaves. Nearly a minute passes before the first chord is played. The lyrics tell of a aching for home – Brighton – despite the fact that “the sun beats down on desert ground”, and that home is “cold, wet and brown”. An acoustic guitar plucks away at simple chords, and a haunting close harmony joins in for some of the repeated lyrics which aren’t quite a chorus.
I’ll See Her Again and That Heavy Sunshine Sound are a bit more upbeat, but the undercurrent of yearning is still there – not for Brighton this time, but for a woman. The latter is definitely one of my highlights of the album, with the near perfect stanza “I am a boy / with a crush on a girl / who is out of my league / and is certainly out of this world”, which encapsulates exactly how I felt far too often in my early twenties.
The album continues in it’s psychedelic folk theme – Nick Drake with harmonies by the Beach Boys, with Norwegian Wood by the Beatles playing on the radio in the next room. For a more recent comparison, it occupies the same musical space as Balcony Times, the album put out at the end of last year by Milk & Biscuits (which incidentally, Thomas played on).
The best is saved until last. Album closer The English Sargasso lasts for nearly six and a half minutes, and by this point, Thomas is homesick for his friends and the pubs of Brighton – “We’ll hit the Dorset, and maybe The Hand, and down to Fitzherberts and the Globe after that”. While the last piece clocks in over five minutes, it doesn’t drag, but feels unhurried, moving along at a different, slower pace. The kind of pace that things move at when you’re on holiday with absolutely nothing to do – an incredibly clever trick to nail.
If this is what happens when Mr White goes on holiday, I can’t wait to hear the results of his next trip.
Thomas White playing with Brakes at the Green Door Store 23/1/11
Yalla! by Thomas White is released on Bleeding Heart Recordings on 19th March 2012. The first 50 copies – available through Resident Records in Brighton and Rough Trade in London – come with a bonus five track cd, and there will be a free instore gig at Resident at 6pm on 19th March, where the album will be available for £6.99.
If you were to trace the genealogy of the music I love, you can follow pretty much everything I listen to now back to a cassette I had in my youth back in the early nineties. It had two albums, one on each side, as was the way back when home taping rather than illegal downloading was killing the music industry. If you left the house you didn’t go with an iPod with forty or fifty albums, you went with the tape that was in your walkman. And if you didn’t get around to changing the tape that often, you ended up listening to the same albums over and over, which meant that the music left a very strong impression. On one side of the tape was Happiness by The Beloved, but this review has got nothing to do with that. On the other side was an album of alternative country-folk tinged indie, with clever lyrics, predominantly about breaking hearts and drinking. My first listen to the Sweet Sweet Lies album took me right back.
The passage of time hasn’t been especially kind to The Wonderstuff, whose album Never Loved Elvis (and consequently their other albums too) meant so much then and continues to mean a lot. Thankfully Sweet Sweet Lies have carefully skirted around some of the Wonderstuff’s biggest issues. Lead singer Dominic Von Trapp isn’t an a annoying gobshite like Miles Hunt, and since the nineties are long gone no one in their right mind would dream of dressing like a Grebo (I’ll let you google it) – the band have opted for the complete other end of the spectrum and dress in suits for their stage wear, making them a strong contender for the smartest band in town.
My second visit to The Hare, The Hound & The Tortoise gave me a completely different perspective. I’d had the album on repeat on my iPod and it started up two thirds of the way through. While openers Capital of Iceland and Overrated Girlfriend might have given a first impression of a band of upbeat fiddles and guitars, and Winter of Discontent hints at more flamenco / mariachi direction with it’s trumpet and Spanish guitar, there’s a lot to be gained by sticking around to listen to the rest of the album too, where genres – square pegs trying to fit into round holes at the best of times – drip away to reveal songwriting in the classic style. Tracks like No-one Will Love You (Like I Do) and Too Drunk To Love are more likely to recall The Divine Comedy or Gene, both in their vocal style and intelligent lyrics (in fact, Sweet Sweet Lies supported Martin Rossiter on a recent solo tour). Singing duties are split between the two songwriters Dominic Von Trapp and Michael Hayes, with Dominic’s distinctive style, more crooner than modern pop star, making you truly believe that he would readily drink you under the table then steal your girlfriend.
The high quality of the songwriting as well as the consistency, strength and dark humour in the imagery in the lyrics throughout put Sweet Sweet Lies not just head and shoulders above most other bands in Brighton, but everything else that’s on offer too. This is an incredibly accomplished debut that the band should be truly proud of.
The Hare, The Hound & The Tortoise by Sweet Sweet Lies is out now on Something Nothing Records, and the Brighton launch for the album is at the Jive Monkey on Steine Street on 24th February.
Brighton Music Blog 
