Releases: Best of the Week

Some fairly long awaited releases out this week, both debut albums and follow ups. Don't forget, if you're going to buy these, support your local independent record store by buying it from them. Like this one in Cardiff. Or this one in Brighton. Or even this one in Manchester. Or if you're not in the vicinity of these cities and want to find out the closest record store to you, head here.

Week starting Monday 7 February:


James Blake - James Blake (Atlas/A&M))

James Blake - Love What Happened Here

The Streets – Computers & Blues (679 Recordings)
Cut Copy – Zonoscope (Modular)
Harrys Gym – What Was Ours Can’t Be Yours (Splendour)
Boxer Rebellion – Cold Still (Absentee Recordings)

Music For Your Plants

It’s not every day you stumble across a new band who are opting for the progressive rock sound. Sure, Mystery Jets started with some heavy prog influences and wrote a few 8 minute songs, but then they went all cheesey 80s pop on us. It’s understandable why lots of bands steer clear of the prog sound or perhaps even why Mystery Jets moved away from it. Given it’s a genre best known for being over-dramatic, pretentious, and boastful, and being eventually ended by the anger and lack of fussing around of the punk movement, it’d take a brave and perhaps foolhardy band to recreate the prog sounds - especially if they had any slight desire to gain a fan-base that doesn’t consist solely of 60 something-year-old long-haired men who simply won’t let go. Music For Your Plants might just be that brave band.

Although the Estonian group are no King Crimson, the experimental and instrumental songs taken from their EP released a few months give more than just a nod to the 70s prog sound; giving it a spruced-up twist that might even get the kids of today listening in, a bit like those children’s cartoons that are secretly teaching the kids how to do their sums. Combining the synonymous with prog drawn-out guitar lines, and the lack of vocals, with twinkling and bubbling electro blips and perhaps more of a self-awareness, Music For Your Plants bring a freshened and turned-hip prog sound, along with modern contemporaries perhaps such as Drum Eyes, to the 2010’s in real style.

It’s about time it made a comeback anyway, right? Listen and download some tracks from their EP below, or grab the whole thing here.

Music For Your Plants - Mr. Huanted


Music For Your Plants - A City In The Sea

MySpace | SoundCloud

Basement Fever

In case anybody was wondering, this blog is named after a song by an American band called Experimental Dental School, or XDS as I think they're currently known. They have the whole album, Forest Field, that the song is taken from for free at their website, here. It's guitar twang-and-shriek, drums rattle, and vocal sometimes-harmonised weird goodness.

It used to be a guy on guitar and a girl on drums. Now it's the same guy on guitar and a new guy, replacing the girl, presumably on drums. They're in the process of making a new album and it'll most likely be good.

Obviously thanks to them, but also thanks to Cardiff-based gig promoters Loose who put on Experimental Dental School almost two years ago at Buffalo Bar that I decided to attend on the off-chance of it being good. (It was good, by the way).

Listen to Basement Fever and Cheap Winer River (I didn't think that was as good a name for a blog) below.


Experimental Dental School - Basement Fever


Experimental Dental School - Cheap Wine River

Colonics

Prepare yourself for a long ride with this one. 10 minutes of instrumental noisey, grungey rock jam from Brighton’s Colonics. They’re not the finished package just yet, but they’ve certainly got me intrigued and looking forward to hearing more.


Colonics - Persephone

MySpace | Bandcamp | Facebook | Blog | Twitter

New Animal

The thing with music blogging is that, quite often, you’ve only known of a band a few weeks and only listened to their stuff a handful of times before writing and posting about their music. It’s fairly obvious why this is the case (you know, the nature of blogging about new music is that the music needs to be new, really), but what it can mean is a lot of positive press and superlatives for bands who make music that immediately grabs you, leaving those bands whose music burns its way slowly into your mind sourly unrepresented.

Take New Animal for instance. I was literally just preparing myself by listening to their self-titled album to put up a blog post praising a track or two from it, whilst also commenting about my disappointment that not the rest of the release could live up to these tracks’ standards – but then it finally hit me, and I finally ‘got’ the record.

15 tracks of worldy sounds from Atlanta’s Kris Hermstad and Derek Burdette, their album is largely made up of harmony-filled psychedelic pop songs through the medium of a range of big vocals, twangs, jingles and buzzes. Other Side has one of the catchiest choruses (and bass-lines, actually) I’ve heard this year (granted, it’s only a month old) which is slowly built towards and finally comes after three minutes of teasing, and much of the album follows catchy pop, alebit sometimes downbeat, suit. its But it also delves into the darker and varied side of things on regular occasions, too; Science seemingly New Animal’s (slightly lighter) take on Nine Inch Nails with a ticking drum-machine and buzzing synth throughout, and the likes of Last Winter, Fires In The Backyard and In The Water At Night sees them delving into the melancholic depths of - perhaps Bon Iver influenced – country and folk.

New Animal isn’t perfect, and some tracks aren’t as good as others. This is no surprise. It’s the case for the vast majority of albums, obviously. But it does offer far, far more in terms of consistency, strength and breadth than I originally gave it credit for. Thank God for doubting myself.

Download some stuff below or grab it in its entirety at bandcamp.


New Animal - Other Side


New Animal - They Don't Know

Bandcamp | Facebook | Twitter