We’ve been keeping our ears to the ground for new music coming out of our fantastic (if a little litter strewn) city, and here’s what we’ve heard recently.
First up is Gaps whose new video Keep You appeared online today. Keep You is appearing on a double on a double A side single with Cascade (which you can currently hear on the band’s Soundcloud page) on Sexbeat Records on 15th July. Keep You sits somewhere between Folktronica and Dream Pop, and we like it a lot.
Dead Captain‘s debut EP is out next week. We don’t know a great deal about it, other than it’s going to consist of five tracks, and that the video for lead track Maybe Maybe came out yesterday. Take a look here:
There’s big news from the Tiny Dragons camp – their tune Canvas has been remixed by Pact and picked up by Kitsune for their latest mix cd. Kitsuné Soleil Mix 2 is out July 1st and sees Tiny Dragons alongside the likes of Hot Chip and Two Door Cinema Club!
Fragile Creatures eponymous new single Fragile Creatures was posted up to listen to on Soundcloud earlier today. It’s another catchy pop tune from the band, who also recently announced that they’re be curating a series of gigs at the Blind Tiger later this year.
Finally, we’ve got the video for Pure & Apart by Tyrannosaurus Dead, the lead track from their forthcoming EP Pure // Apart due out soon on Odd Box records. We first gave a preview of Sadie which is also on the EP back in January, so we’re pleased that the rest of the tunes finally seeing the light of day.
Earlier this week we pre-empted our regular weekend gig picks by putting up a separate post about Thursday night’s gigs with a choice of Moulettes, AK/DK or The New Union. Here’s the rest of what we recommend this weekend:
Our choice for Friday Night is Clowns, who are headlining at the Prince Albert. Clowns are a real must-see band. If you haven’t seen them, then this should be your Friday night sorted. Support comes from Mum, Dad & The Kids, Little Bird and Downing Street Years.
We haven’t mentioned Tyrannosaurus Dead for a while on the blog, but they’re on the bill on Saturday night at the Green Door Store (headlined by the Bastards of hate). Also on Saturday at The Hope is Rotait, who we’ve been meaning to catch for a while, supported by Simonne & The Dark Stars, Mishkin Fitzgerald from BirdEatsBaby and Paul Diello.
The big gig on Sunday night is Physics House Band, who are guaranteed to blow the roof off at the Green Door Store. Watch out if you’re catching a train out of town! Support comes from Shrine and Ojo de Gringa. We also spotted that over the road at the Prince Albert, Pete Fij & Terry Bickers are launching their new single, with Al Chamberlain also on the bill.
I was thinking that January might be a bit of a quiet month for the blog, but I’ve found myself inundated with new music to share. In this post we’ve got stuff from new bands including Iyes, who have yet to release anything but are causing a bit of a storm with the first demo that they’ve put out there, to bands who’ve been around for a bit longer, like The Go! Team:
Iyes managed to get a mention on The Line of Best Fit on the strength of Lighthouse. A fantastic start which will hopefully translate into bigger things. Here’s the track in question along with a few remixes of it which are doing the rounds. We like this A LOT.
Next up is a new track from Verity Susman, formerly of krautrockers Electrelane, still sticking with the lock grooves, but more synth based and aimed at the dancefloor. It doesn’t sound a million miles away from Ladytron to our ears, and that’s no bad thing at all. There’s no info on a release date for this, but we’ll definitely be keeping you updated.
Then we have Gazelle Twin, covering The Wire’s Heartbeat. It’s a haunting dark ethereal track and it will appear on Gazelle Twin’s new Mammal EP, which is due to hit the shops on 28th January alongside a whole bunch of remixes.
The Go! Team have remixed Justin Velor’s track Galliano Rocks. No embedded Soundcloud available for this unfortunately, but you can give it a listen if you click here. It’s got a great classic Go! Team sound – relentless energy, lo fi guitars and bundles of joy.
Tyrannosaurus Dead are previewing Sadie, from their forthcoming 6 track “Pure // Apart” EP, coming out on Odd Box Records later this year. Keep your eyes on the blog tomorrow night for some more Tyrannosaurus Dead related news.
Finally, here’s Nick Williams with his new EP Anniversaries. If you like the sound of this, his band are headlining the Prince Albert next saturday (19th January)
Tyrannosaurus Dead released their new EP last friday, called Lemonade, after the title track. The band haven’t strayed too far from their lo fi shoegaze sound of their previous releases, but have spent a bit more time working on the production, bringing things closer to the band’s vision of their sound. The EP was recorded at Lightship95 – a studio on a boat in the East End of London earlier this year.
To celebrate the launch the band played a free gig at the Green Door Store, which must almost be a home from home for them these days. Support came from Gum (who were also on the bands recent split-release cassette), Poledo and Ides.
The Lemonade EP is available to buy through Tyrannosaurus Dead’s bandcamp page:
If a release has six tracks, three bands and clocks in at less than twenty minutes, does that make it an EP, or a mini-album? Who knows. Guts is a new digital / cassette release on new-ish label Reeks of Effort and is released today.
Living in Brighton is fantastic, because there’s always something happening. Sometimes though, it can feel that there’s not enough hours in the day to do everything you want to, and thursday is one of those nights. There’s three gigs on, at the Pavillion Theatre, at the Green Door Store and at Coalition that I’d like to be at. The one I’ll be going to will be the one I bought a ticket to before finding out about the others!
First of the three is the Source New Music Night at Pavilion Theatre. Sparrow are headlining, and they’re supported by Rain Eater, Arthur and the Irrational and Tyrannosaurus Dead. I normally do my best to get along to the Source Nights, because they’re great for new bands and an absolute bargain at only four pounds. Next month’s – headlined by Sweet Sweet Lies – is already in the calendar.
Then we’ve got The New Union at Green Door Store, who really impressed us supporting Clock Opera a few weeks ago. And that’s even more of a bargain, because it’s free! We’re big fans of the Peter Saville style posters – there are four different varieties each relating to a different band member.
The gig I’ll be at though, will be Best Coast and Fear of Men at Coalition. Here’s the video for their new single Green Sea. Expect a few words and maybe some pictures on the gig later this week.
Hopefully you’ll make it along to one of these, or one of the many other gigs going on all round town. You’re spoiled for choice!
One Inch Badge, who put on the recent Sea Monsters gigs at the Prince Albert, have put out a cd with one track from every band who played at the festival. For now, you can buy it from their web shop here or from Resident or Rounder in town for a mere five pounds. It gets an international release on 9th April. If you want a listen first, here’s the soundcloud widget. But why not just buy it. It’s only a fiver! You can’t go wrong spending a fiver on a cd. That’s less than two pints!
Rather than do a review of the CD, since I reviewed every gig of the festival (and since you can listen for yourself), I decided to catch up with one of the bands to talk about things from their perspective. On a wintry January Saturday lunchtime, I caught up with Billy Lowe and Tom Northam from Tyrannosaurus Dead, who played on tuesday night’s gig and whose track 1992 is on the cd, to talk about Brighton, Gigs, 1992, and not singing in American accents.
Billy Lowe, lead singer of Tyrannosaurus Dead
On the Brighton connection:
BL: I went to Sussex University and had the best time. Tom and I are both from Poole in Dorset, and have known each other since we were about ten or maybe even younger. I lived here for years, I was in different bands, but lack of opportunity for work means I live in London at the moment, but I’ll definitely move back at some point, we play here all the time. Everyone else in the band still lives in Brighton.
TN: Billy set the base up for us all living here. We had all our friends in Poole – Billy moved here to go to university, and then his brother moved down, half of our friends moved here, we made friends with all of Billy’s friends that he made at uni, and I’ve just gone back to uni last year at 25 to study maths at Sussex, and now all of the rest of our friends have followed me, so the whole Poole group has moved to Brighton now.
BL: I think the reason people like coming to Brighton is that it’s like a micro-city – you’ve got venues all close together, you’ve got a really nice fashion scene, really nice art scene, you can walk everywhere, you don’t have to get on a tube, you don’t have to get on a bus – that’s what I love about it – that you can go to Brighton Live, or Fringe Festival, or Great Escape, or anything like that and just walk to all of the different things. The only trouble is that after you’ve lived here for a few years, it’s impossible to walk around and maybe see people that you don’t want to see!
TN: I’m even seeing people now that I’ve known from other past lives – I lived in Southampton for three years and I see people about in Brighton and it’s like “I went to uni with you, I went to that pub with you…”
On gigs:
TN: We’ve been quite lucky, our crowd is getting bigger at the moment. We’ve started seeing in the last couple of gigs people coming along who aren’t just our friends, and people will come up to us after the gig and tell us we were really good. It’s good to get feedback like that because your friends are always going to tell you you’re really great aren’t they?
BL: Yeah, and you don’t necessarily like the same music as your friends. They’re supportive – when you first start out you have to draw on your friends so much to come along otherwise you’d never get off the ground. But it gets to a point where your friends have spent so much on going to gigs and they’re like “I’ve seen that set a couple of times now, I’m gonna leave it” and then of course you need to start getting other people in and luckily we’ve managed to do that.
RO: I guess Sea Monsters was really good for that because people would go because it’s Sea Monsters, or they’ll go because it’s Fear of Men and see you as well…
BL: I’ve seen Fear of Men before in London and I’ve always thought they were really good. But we’ve been really lucky with Sea Monsters, because they really plugged us and that definitely helps. When we came on we had a nice big crowd and I think that was probably because they said 1992 was a really good track.
RO: On Soundcloud, yours is the second most listened to track on there, after the Restlesslist track.
TN: Which is pretty mental really. Restlesslist are the first track on the cd, so everyone’s going to start listening from that point, then you scan down and I think it’s a bit of a snowball thing – people see “oh, they’ve got lots of hits, what’s that one?” and then more people click on us because we’ve got more hits.
BL: When there’s twenty odd tracks, you’re not going to sit and listen to twenty songs, so you look at what draws your eye, and possibly because they mentioned the track in the Source rather than just the band, people might have listened to it. I thought we would be right at the bottom of the cd, but just being next to Fear of Men, getting mentioned alongside them is great. The association we’ve got with Fear of Men is amazing – obviously they’re way ahead of us.
RO: How did you get to be on the bill at Sea Monsters?
TN: We launched our EP down at Fitzherberts – we hired out the top room, we got a couple of local bands, Two Jackals and Hockeysmith to play with us, put it on as a free night, and the One Inch Badge guys happened to be drinking downstairs. We packed it out, you couldn’t get in to the room we had upstairs at one point, and the rest is history.
Tyrannosaurus Dead at Sea Monsters 2
On 1992:
BL: I was maybe nine years old, so I was probably learning maths in 1992…
TN: Same thing that I’m doing now!
RO: So where does 1992 come into things?
BL: When you get a bit older the time of stuff that happens that you like doesn’t quite correlate to where you are in your life, so we really like the Pixies and Nirvana, but when we were 9, we would have found it hard to relate to anything like that. It loses it’s place in time with your life. It’s also a reference to the way the music was changing at that time, not specifically 1992, but in the early 90s. In England, you had a hangover from the late 80s indie scene which had some of my favourite bands, and a little bit into the 90s American music was hitting it’s peak with grunge coming in, whereas in England we lost a lot of bands that I really liked and went into a new phase of Britpop which was after the high point of guitar music in this country. So the song’s saying that the end of something isn’t necessarily the best of it. I think that’s how British music was then, and I don’t think it’s ever truly recovered.
TN: Plus Waynes World was released in 1992!
BL: Years in songs always tend to sound quite good – 1979 by Smashing Pumpkins is one of my favourite songs ever. Melodically it works quite well to add a year into songs, and a year’s an easy thing to relate to because you know where you personally were in that year.
On accents:
BL: When I first started, quite embarrassingly, because I like those American bands, I’d not sing in an American accent, but pronounce things a little bit more American, and it’s the wrong way to go. Belle & Sebastian and other Scottish bands, their delivery is really nice and their accent really comes through, and you can really hear what they’re talking about. Sometimes when an English person sings in an American accent, it’s a bit contrived, and it’s difficult to relate to it because if they’re singing in an American accent, are they really meaning what they’re singing about? So we really made an effort to sing in our own voices and because of that it sounds very English. Eleanor who also does vocals has a very English voice. Singing in your own accent is a lesson you have to learn. When you try and sing in any other way and you listen back, it’s embarrassing.
A quick round up of Day 2 of Sea Monsters 2 then. Where yesterday was folk with a twist, today was very much an indie day.
Proceedings were kicked off by Tyrannosaurus Dead. The blurb in the program said Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth, but my ears heard The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, who in the past few years have done a tremendous job of distilling so many of the great guitar indie bands of the past twenty five years. This is by no means a criticism, and I thoroughly enjoyed their set, even if I was a little distracted by the singers visual similarity to a young Buddy Holly. Or maybe he’s just wearing hipster glasses and I’m now old.
Tyrannosaurus Dead
The second band of the night were Soft Arrows – sonically, they’re a rockier version of shoegaze, but the setup of the band was akin to the White Stripes – just drums and guitar. Either they were trying to be arty, or they hate photographers, because the only light on stage came from a single light bulb at the guitarists feet. They’re going to have to try harder than that for me to not get the shot I want!
Soft Arrows
Then we had kraut rockers Cinemascopes, who were fantastic. There’s not nearly enough krautrock around in my opinion, so it’s good to see another Brighton krautrock band, who aren’t treading the same steps as Fujiya & Miyagi. What elevated them about most groups who pick up guitars and make motorik music was the guy to the left of the stage, who spent most of the set kneeling down doing interesting things with loops and samples who defied the male dress code of the evening (skinny jeans, smart shoes, and either a check shirt or a t-shirt bought from M&S) with his hoody and baggy jeans.
Cinemascopes
Last band of the night were Fear of Men who while they weren’t doing anything especially different to any of the other bands of the night, did so effortlessly and sounding amazing. There was something about the way it all came together – how good the guitar sounded, how much of a better front person Jess was than those leading the other bands, how much more accomplished the songs were, which proved why Fear of Men were the worth headliners of the night.
Brighton Music Blog 