guerre aka lavurn lee

‘Bedroom’ artist Guerre (aka Lavurn Lee) has produced a big musical catalogue in the past two years. His music is quietly enticing, like sand immediately after a wave has struck that gently gravitates towards the sea. It’s the after bits that Guerre deals in; the clicks, the slurs, the tiny cuts, to produce delicately emotional results.

Debut EP Darker My Love is available for digital download via new label Yes Please.

disclosure- carnival

We all love that feeling of a limited release, don’t we listeners? Isn’t it a fetish when we rush to buy a song whose production run is in three figures, enjoy the triumph of ring-fencing one of those copies in our little pockets, and then gallop to the nearest listening facility and share it heartily with our friends? I think so.

Well Disclosure, comprising 19 and 16-year-old brothers Guy and Howard Lawrence, have released 'Carnival' in a seriously limited, 300-print run 7” double A-side single (that’s one copy for every member of Bruce Springsteen & The E-Street Band, probably). However, simultaneously, they have been good enough to accommodate the fact that most of us won’t be able to get our mits on one by releasing the song as part of a free 5-track EP in exchange for liking the Disclosure Facebook page. Aw, guys.

If light market whoring seems an effort, then release aside, 'Carnival' is a great song. Its 2-step rhythms bring to mind SBTRKT’s recently successful 'Wildfire', which crossed sparse dubstep and garage, and herald good things for a duo that are so incredibly young. The tight vocal loops and minimal instrumentation that have been popularised by James Blake in the past year help the song build to a crescendo: a lively ball of fidgety pop that is at once familiar and irresistibly danceable.

Disclosure- Carnival

stevie nicks- white winged dove (secret panda society remix)

We don’t know each other very well reader, but if we did, you would know that I love Fleetwood Mac. It corses through my 1980s veins like a splendid glucose my love of the Mac, and provides an energy and sanctity in equal measure unmatched by many other pop bands.

Why do I love the Mac? Well one of the reasons is of course Stevie Nicks. That little ball of a fiery voice box pounds out every darn word of the song she’s singing like every second is a galactic All-Star American Idol that she must, must win.

As for a dubstep version of the Mac, you could do far worse than ditching the rest of them bearded buggers and concentrating on Nicks’ ‘Edge of Seventeen (Just Like the White Winged Dove)’ from Bella Donna, which Secret Panda Society have done. Because it’s so pert, upright and direct, the song works fantastically mashed into a snowball of dubstep breaks and effects.

If Nicks was in a Rocky film, then this is what the soundtrack to the training montage would sound like. If Nicks did dubstep, this would be her b-side remix. All angry and convincing and that. Brrr...get me an earphone.

Stevie Nicks- White Winged Dove (Secret Panda Society Remix)

the vaccines- wreckin bar

Can a review for a song that lasts 82 seconds be written in 82 seconds? The Vaccines’ fast, fast ‘Wreckin Bar’ is making me type very very fast, and shooting endorphins into my brain. But I just don’t think it can be done, because with ‘Wreckin Bar’, you’ve got to allow the thought part of your noggin to take a bit of a battering, and then perhaps take a rest.

For all the criticism that has been piled The Vaccines' way by some critics, whose opposite numbers declared them a heroic third in the BBC’s Sound of 2011 poll in December, ‘Wreckin Bar’ is, surely, their most memorable pile-driver single, and their best musically. Firstly, for any song to achieve in 82 seconds what most take four minutes to do (or don’t do at all), namely jump your heart into eager alertness again, is impressive. Secondly, the song’s spinning Catherine wheel of a chorus speaks only to your heart, and ignores what pointless, silly little thoughts you may be having (who needs thoughts?) to deliver precisely the musical equivalent of a caffeine high. Lastly, ‘Wreckin Bar’ tears to tiny tinkerbells the idea still peddled by men with moustaches, bowler hats and monocles, that good music must be complex, must be clever, or must, in frank, be of itself original and unheard of.

Now, don’t get me wrong- the four London-based Vaccines did pen this with their own minds and such; however, so born out of meat and two veg, unpretentious, punchy rock is ‘Wreckin Bar’ that it may as well be a guidebook for anyone looking to create a thumping rock single with two guitars, a drum kit and a screaming urge to declare to the world 'pick me and you will be thankful!'

The Vaccines- Wreckin Bar

how to remove a festival wristband...

Festival wristbands have become silently ubiquitous. Now considered as much a memento of your experience as a sign of admission (and class- don’t forget a sign of class: access all areas, VIP, ordinary joe etc), people increasingly want to keep them, but don’t know how to take them off. How’s how, preserving your wristband for posterity and future outings…

NB. Don't use your wristband to try and sneak others into the venue. It's not cool. Just pay money for the ticket like everyone else.

on the weeknd

Ok, so I should really have written about this ages ago, but I have been pretty busy: The Weeknd. The mixtape ‘House of Balloons’ has been around for about 3 months now, although as eponymous as it is, it feels like a year. Since then, a new track called ‘Rolling Stone’ has been dropped via twitter, and last month, a song called ‘The Birds (Part 1)’.

So, what’s the deal with The Weeknd? Who or what is it, and why the heck is he or she or it so popular? Well the answer to all these questions has been a source of great discussion from almost the first days of ‘House of Balloons’ going online, and a source of great publicity too. We now know that the The Weeknd is Abel Tesfaye. He is from Toronto, and he’s only 20. But that’s about all we know.

This has proved part of the allure in itself. However much we are aware that it is a very clever bit of marketing for an artist to cut himself off just after dropping a great record, (and a record with a musical tone that is itself enigmatic, jaded and disconnected), The Weeknd’s glow continues to mesmerise us like hip little flies. In this media age, that refusal to speak is worth a thousand double-page spreads. To not give anyone an interview when the entrenched presumption is that aural and public exposure rise in tandem, is frankly unheard of. Tesfaye probably knows it, and it is a very, very smart thing to do if you’re planning your career, and its successive releases, gigs and so on, for the long game. Right now in fact, Abel Tesfaye might well be the holy grail of music interviewees. And, others might say that is well above his station.

The British national newspaper The Guardian online published two features in response to the internet attention Tesfaye received. Both were rather cynical….or questioning at least of The Weeknd’s music and cleverly non-existent marketing, particular Alex Macpherson, who acknowledged how many cultural commentators have got carried away. On the Village Voice, he said:

“It probably counts as some sort of triple whammy of music-critic idiocy: a sweeping proclamation about an entire genre, a blundering dismissal of that same genre, and hyping up an unremarkable new act after being taken in by their marketing strategy.”

Macpherson also denounced the music hand-in-hand with the media attention in his article by saying that R&B today has far more to offer than the stripped out, emotionally shallow Weeknd. Now, of course, one’s pronouncements on ‘better’ or ‘worse’ or ‘great’ are subjective. Art is like that, as is music, as are all cultural creations, and I don’t think Macpherson was holding himself up as a beacon of the objectively Correct. However, if The Guardian's great music critic isn't seeing the talent of The Weeknd, then what is it that the rest of the net sees that he doesn't?

The Weeknd are interesting to me personally because they touch on new and old feelings at the same time. On a basic level, their samples are drawn from all over the place chronologically (e.g. Beach House- c. 2008 on 'Loft Music', Siouxsie and the Banshees c. 1980 on 'Glass Table Girls'). However, more importantly, like How to Dress Well, there is a strong theme of old R&B melodies being stripped down to their simple core and built up again around ambiguous, ambient noise, that brings to mind the lo-fi styles of current indie music. Therefore, 'House of Balloons' hits a strange middle ground chronologically, between familiarly rich soul melodies and the newer lo-res production of Tesfaye's contemporaries.

Secondly, the theme of The Weeknd is undoubtedly despondency and indifference. Yet, what is good about R&B for a lot of people is the artist's emotional investment. Whether pining after someone or getting it on, R&B is for the most part optimistic and uplifting. R Kelly either laments something he can’t have or he’s getting down n dirty. The Weeknd have done away with all that. All that remains is a sort of emotional bankruptcy and a void: one that Tesfaye is constantly drawing our attention to. The R Kelly, the TLC, the Aaliyah, Brandy and Bobby Brown that sit somewhere in the backs of our minds form the core of The Weeknd’s music, just as they do with HTDW, and make all the songs initially familiar. However, around it is a bleak description of a drug and sex-fuelled lifestyle that has gone wrong a left the writer empty. There is a malaise. That part, in my view, is what gives ‘House of Balloons’ its exoticism, its confusion and ultimately, its cool.

The Weeknd therefore take on many tenets of mainstream chart R&B and turn them on their head. One artist’s regret of the drugs, sex and material lifestyle may not be new in R&B lyricism, but I think it has never been conveyed through the music like this. 'House of Balloons' actual lyrics are pretty clumsy if you listen to them; however, subverting the positive feelings materialism brings into really cold, hard, lost, negative ones is alone an idea that has artistic traction in my opinion.

I hope that wasn’t too laboured to read reader! What The Weeknd will do next is a really exciting topic, and perhaps an even bigger one, is to whom Tesfaye will give his first interview (including the cynical question: 'why?')