Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin- Tape Club

Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin- Tape Club

(2011, Polyvinyl Records)

For when there’s a lull with nothing to post about, I’ve kept this back in reserve. One of my favourite bands of the last 10 years who create music that occasionally hits me like a truck (‘House Fire’, ‘Some Constellation’) or takes a while to sink in (most of Broom), but always succeeds in wriggling inside my brain-box and building a nest for itself: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin. I wrote about them earlier (see here) and as you may know, they were an "of the moment" band on US-based indie blogs around 2005 when recording Broom, their first album. This was a home-recorded, extremely lo-fi record and had very little to say for itself in the way of production, but stood out promisingly for its tunes. An internet following was born.

Since Polyvinyl picked Broom up and released it, the commercial fortunes of Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin- or SSLYBY for short, arguably waned slightly according to speculation from loyal adherents. Thankfully though, their music and passion didn’t. Two diverse, lively and enjoyable records followed in 2008 and 2010, Pershing and Let it Sway respectively, filled with shamelessly catchy pop tunes. Broom, re-released for Record Store Day in April this year with some new tracks- that first home-recorded record, now sits atop a small number of dreamy indie kids’ post-2000 lists as a cult pop classic. I give mine a listen quite regularly, and often wonder what in those loosely formed arrangements and hushed vocals keeps me coming back. But it does. And regularly.

Their honeyed sound and image isn't for everyone. However, if you’re a fan of good music without pretence; a follower of healthy tunes over fashion, SSLYBY are one of the best bands to draw into your listening arsenal. Cavorting with my ears through train journeys, helping while away 40 minutes in town or sound-tracking an evening with friends before heading out, SSLYBY can be taken anywhere (and will take you anywhere) with their infinite lightness.

I turn to the reason for this post: Tape Club, a 26-song compendium of b-sides that SSLYBY will release in October. How impossible to imagine that a band as lo-fi as SSLYBY would even have b-sides. How much more demo-like could they be, especially the b-sides from Broom?! Well in their seven-year fringe-of-the-public-zeitgeist tenure, and ten years as a band, their production values have wilfully soared and plummeted as much as a kite on the breeze. It makes SSLYBY sound like two different bands, one playing at Will Knauer’s house in a suburb of Springfield, Missouri, and one recording in a high-tech, gee whizz, sound-proofed studio. (In reality, even the uber-polished Pershing was recorded at Knauer’s aunt’s house).

So sound varies wildly. At the end of ‘What We’ll Do’, you can literally hear the tape stop; on ‘Song 1000’, the band just about hold things together while they muck around with (what sound like) kazoos. At the other end of the scale, Let It Sway’s lush mid-range pours out of the speakers on ‘Bended’ and ‘Letter Divine’, a richness and warmth, employed from Pershing onwards, to give singles like ‘Think I Wanna Die’, ‘Glue Girls’, ‘Banned (By The Man)’ and ‘Critical Drain’ their glamour and anthemic charm.

A few songs don’t really fit into either of these two categories and float innocuously between them: ‘Sweet Owl’ is the sort of tune I thought SSLYBY would never record, just because it’s so folksy, and ‘Yellow Missing Signs’ (the first song leaked from Tape Club) adopts an electro edge that makes you wonder what the band were up to when non-rock influences took hold in jamming sessions.

Diamonds in the rough tease themselves out, as is often the case with SSLYBY. Campfire ditty ‘Bigger Than Yr Yard’ could have made it onto Broom to close it with a late-night sing-a-long. Some of the newer, cleaner production stuff also grabs hold of you after a few listens: ‘New Day’ and ‘Coming Through’ are a class act placed by side by side. They’re probably my highlights of the album and shimmer with an innocent, harmonious glow. They're much like the flowering of confidence that seemed to resonate in Pershing: the realisation of the group's creative energy and pop prowess.

It's a great collection. There's no doubting that. I say it as a fan and as an advocate, but also because I think Tape Club shows quite clearly how enjoyable a band can be with a few chords running round their heads spontaneously knocked out on tape. Purveyors of lo-fi fun, nonsense and slivers of brilliance, SSLYBY are pop stalwarts.

Indie-blog praise hasn’t quite lived up to expectation: the objective 'standard' that artists are supposedly aiming for, but that is too crude. Even if ubiquity doesn't come calling, it doesn't need to, for many of us are just happy listening to SSLYBY….and occasionally writing about them.

Tape Club is in stores on 18^th October and comes in all sorts of formats (see here). The band are currently touring the States, as always. Fingers crossed for European dates. See above to stream the album.

death masks stares

Folk-rock with a slightly baroque feel is what my friend Jonny deftly described as ‘In the woods’ music. Fleet Foxes, Midlake, Woods, Dry The River, all that sort of stuff……basically any band that would play at End of the Road or Green Man festival if you want to be sweeping.

It feels like I haven’t heard something like this in ages. Merseysider Thom Tyrer’s project sounds like a track from Woods’ At Echo Lake from 2010, tumbling with carefree jangling guitars and the weary reflections of autumn.

‘Stares’ is part of a four track cassette tape & free digital EP called I Know A Short Cut that is available on Tyrer’s bandcamp. An LP will be released later this year.

Death Masks- Stares

Neon Indian- Era Extraña

Neon Indian- Era Extraña

(2011, Static Tongues/ Mom+Pop)

Neon Indian: pioneer of 2009/10 phenomenon ‘chillwave’; talented young 23 year old from Texas; man who sellotaped together some random electronic flotsam and jetsam in 2009 and stood back to reveal a completed work called Psychic Chasms that stunned and excited listening hoards in equal measure. Neon Indian’s creator Alan Palomo has been treated kindly by the internet. His music is innovative, bright and colourful; he is also clearly serious about his machines and the way they are used so prominently and consistently in his work, which is I think part of his wide appeal.

For an album title, Era Extrana sounds like it was rejected as a wacky Coldplay concept name. Mixed by the guy who recorded Tame Impala’s Innerspeaker and both MGMT records, it picks up where Psychic Chasms left off. Fizzling with synthetic spark, beats and video game samples, it delves back in to the fun but delicate papier-mâché universe that Psychic Chasms created for itself to indulge in spaceship dreams and psychedelic story-telling.

Best start with the equivalent of the debut’s hit ‘Deadbeat Summer’ and look at ‘Polish Girl’: overall an incredible poppy stunner to rival Deadbeat’s breezy underplayed emotion and playful energy. There’s no doubt this will be a favourite for Neon Indian sets. The video is also representative of what it seems Palomo wanted to achieve: that eccentric Flaming Lips-esque abstraction. A world that wilfully will not be placed in space or time. Posing like the opening video for a Daft Punk gig, a futuristic astronaut-cum-welder DJ is teased away from his twiddly noise boxes by a young woman and goes on a journey to re-connect with her using what seems to be VHS, or Betamax, or some quasi-vintage equipment cobbled together in the year 2050 because all technology is sort of wiped out but we’ve invented this weird hybrid breed. It’s kitsch and textured. Computers rule in Palomo’s world, even in his videos.

The album is divided into three parts: ‘Attack’, ‘Decay’ and ‘Release’ but some bits struggle to find their voice. ‘Blindside Kiss’ (from ‘Attack’, it seems) tries this kind of detached, drug-infused drudgery that just seems a little aloof for my taste and sort of floats off into space. ‘Future Sick’ (mmm, lovely name) and ‘Suns Irrupt’ follow it into the dark-matter abyss. Feedback and hiss on this album threaten to stop Palomo in mid-song at every turn, even though many of them are strong, and drag him into the vacant dreaminess of his artistic universe. His feel for a good melody is in attendance on ‘Hex Girlfriend’ with its catchy backing vocal and ‘Heart: Decay’ is a classic 1980s Sci-Fi throwback, steeped in muffled effects. Indian acquired his chillwave credentials from the dimension of nostalgia that underlines his oddly apathetic party music, and that is clearly not lost. ‘Halogen (I Could Be A Shadow)’s indie pop structure and danceable tendencies are wrapped by echoic effects added to the vocal and the gentle thrum of high-end hiss.

The detachment of the latter half of the album is arguably annoying. It’s the result of Neon Indian’s insistence on delivering woozy futurism very persistently and deliberately. But you can’t begrudge him for that. The electronic, future….mash concept is clearly strong and sounds like Lucky Charms marshmallows might do if they scrapped cereal and did music instead. Sometimes that can be a little too riddled with synthesisers but the good bits make it worth it, (much like Lucky Charms themselves!) Luck Charms and Neon Indian are surely a marketing tie-in made in heaven when you think about it.

What Palomo does for his third album will really be interesting (not to diminish the obviously considerable effort he must have put in to making this one.) I guess when you’ve made an album as mad as this, what do you do next?!

The album is out now so you can buy it, or you can wait till 10th October for one of these deluxe synthesiser bundles that Rough Trade are doing. Up to you really, innit?

a bit of a New Look fiend at present but...

...summary of recent New Look news:

1. New Look will be touring the UK and Europe from October onwards, including two nights in London. See their website for details.

2. On 7th October during the day they will be playing a special gig at Rough Trade East, London for those who purchased the album. Entry by wristband only: click here for details

3. The self-titled album will be released on 26th September. Click here to check out three of the tracks (Nap on the Bow, You & I and Drive You Home).

4. New Look got mainstream British attention by being The Guardian's New Band of the Day for 14th September. In it, the upcoming record was hailed as "one of the albums of the year."

Wow, all this New Look news in only three days! The internet works in mysterious ways.

Friends- I'm His Girl

Friends- I'm His Girl

(2011, Lucky Number Music)

I noticed on twitter this morning that Friends will be releasing a new 7" single and thought it was worthy of a new blog post. Great song, very catchy and full of effervescent positivity. It is certainly getting better with every listen. The band are sounding like a cleaned up Best Coast; something that could have been on the three-piece's Crazy For You if not for the clearer production and neater presentation of their songs. Indeed if it was, it would have probably been one of its strongest tracks!

The song is a dictated lesson in the nature of a good relationship, which gives 'I'm His Girl' a sense of self-confidence and empowerment as clear and unapologetic as Beyonce's Single Ladies (albeit the message to young women is completely different and is about giving one other space, not marriage!) Samantha Urbani takes cues from her own satisfaction in the one line chorus: "When you see me walking around with him, I'm not just another chick, I'm.....his.....girl." It is masterful in reeling you in, and her cool self-confidence is sexy and finger-tingling. Then, when there's a bridge 2/3 of the way through and all you hear apart from Urbani is a cowbell/wooden block, she takes centre stage to deliver a blunt message in full, off-hand, and almost a little disinterested:

"If you love someone, let them be free. I know I don't want no one suffocating me. Don't settle for ownership, make a team. If you love someone, it should feel good to let them breathe."

It is corny, but in Urbani's deft delivery, 'I'm His Girl' manages to be deadly serious and flirtatious at the same time: a confusing, poker-faced flirt. It's out 31 October via Lucky Number Music (limited to 500 copies). Ooo you filthy dogs- keep your relationship safe.

Check it out above!

just for the hell of it.....

Sweet Female Attitude- Flowers

(2000)

I don't why I'm posting this but to hell with it. (It's not the official video). Sort of coming from all the cool shit New Look reminds me of.

New Look- Janet

New Look- Janet

(September 27th 2011)

New Look- Nap on the Bow

New Look- The Ballad

I’d like to thank a blog called WDPK 83.7 fm, which looks right up my alley according to a cursory viewing for they've revealed to me a band called New Look, who were featured on Jamie xx’s IMMENSE BBC Radio 1 mix broadcast 27^th August. Somehow they passed me by.

Information on New Look proved hard to come by but I got hold of some in the end. An album is due on 26th September via !K7 Records- although I can't find a name- and the band, consisting of married couple Sarah Ruba and Adam Pavao hail from Canada. It won't be their first release. An EP called How's My Hair was out in 2008 (listen to it here).

Anyway, head over to WDPK 83.7 fm to download ‘The Ballad’ and ‘Nap on the Bow’, which show that New Look really have some special vibes, or check them out above. Haunting electro ballads with deep R&B hooks. 'Nap on the Bow' is my favourite. It's an absolute belter.

Their website is http://newlookmusic.com/

Also find Jamie xx mix containing other aural nuggets.

Jamie xx Essential Mix by Young Turks

Friends- Friend Crush

Friends- Friend Crush

(2011, Lucky Number Music)

Friends only formed in spring 2010, yet their debut 7” ‘Friend Crush’ set firm intentions about the sophistication Friends can channel into their jilted dance pop. Signed up by Lucky Number Music for this record (although not for an album), the band share the UK label with Caged Animals, another band practising droning, slurred music oozing listlessness. “That first practice went so incredibly well, we knew we had something going on”, songwriter Samantha Urbani told Stereogum this April. “After that we really threw ourselves into practising almost every day, and playing 2 or 3 shows a week, only because we loved what we were doing so much.”

Hailing from Bushwick, New York and constituting five stylish, good-looking boys and girls, there is a partial gloss of cool about Friends even before you’ve heard the music. However it is tunes driving their appeal. ‘Friend Crush’s 250 print run sold out fast (I bought one on Ebay) and no doubt their debut London show with Caged Animals on 27^th September will be a big draw too.

The song is immediate. It is pressing, anxious and tense, as though always on the precipice of a lick that never comes. Consequently the band have been compared with great new-wave inspired, alternative 80s acts like ESG and Tom Tom Club. Another infectious number ‘Feeling Dank’ is on soundcloud.