Memory Cassette Asleep At A Party

There is a song that’s sat quietly but consistently in my music library for perhaps a year now, which I listen to maybe every few days. The act that spawned it has since snowballed into a slightly bigger thing- Memory Tapes- but nonetheless ‘Asleep at a Party’ by Memory Cassette remains, in my view at least, the best output by one relatively quiet Dayve Hawk, the creator of both ‘Memory’ incarnations. Overall, what I love about this song is that it is a dreamily surreal, even tired- in the sense of lethargy- take on an excellent melody. In one of my previous posts, I mentioned that in my view Washed Out created one of the albums of 2010. Their drowsy stupor was hypnotising, and so it is with ‘Asleep at a Party’. Memory Tapes, like Washed Out, since fell under the beguiling but annoyingly termed and media-constructed combination of matter: ‘chillwave’, when Hawk released his first album, Seek Magic. (We have since of course heard the phrase, ‘illwave’- trumpeted I have noticed by The Guardian’s Music blog for the likes of Perfume Genius and HTDW.)

But I digest. I have really found that I can listen to ‘Asleep at a Party’ without ever getting bored. Fuzzy, enigmatic but continually alluring, I hope Dayve Hawk’s brief preceding period as Memory Cassette was part of the reason for blogs such as Gorilla vs Bear, Pitchfork and later even titans of the British print press to pay attention: both blogs posted the song when it went online. More recently, Memory Tapes have posted a new track and announced a second album. You can find their blog here and newbie song here. Or just lower your chin a bit. That’s it.

Memory Tapes- Today is Our Life

Gang Gang Dance Glass Jar

I’ve been wondering about this: the follow-up LP to Gang Gang Dance’s Saint Dymphna. New material has been two and a half years in the making, but finally some new output from Eye Contact (due 9th May) has leaked. Gang Gang Dance were always a band I thought- on gut-instinct- were wilfully inaccessible to radio-listening audiences. Their music appeared to run creative process through a bleakly mechanical avant-garde play-doh machine and inject eccentricity into their sound and writing to just such a perfectly superficial and sufficient extent that the result was in fact balance: a sort of ordered chaos. There was something of a pre-meditated calculation going on, like the pop re-brandings of Madonna, Britney Spears and others that carefully constructed unconventionality.

Saint Dymphna was certainly varied; indeed it seemed to be deliberately as unpredictable as possible. ‘House Jam’ stomped encouragingly with gall and flair, and ‘Princes’, featuring the then breaking Tinchy Stryder was just one of the most surreal collaborations of hip-hop and...something, I ever heard. Other parts though- most parts in my view, fell short: dank, grey and dutifully pretentious. An acquired taste certainly. Even then the LP was less ultra-unconventional than the band’s many preceding EPs.

So ‘Glass Jar’ (or whatever first track that was going to be leaked) was never going to be something you could play your Mum. The track begins with a male voiceover: “I can hear everything. It’s everything time”, which is the cue for a gentle 11-minute journey that begins with ambient synths and the sound of running streams, and builds gradually to encompass electro beats and steel drums. Singer Lizzi Bougatsos (imagine what it might sound like to sing with your mouth permanently in a whistling shape, and that’ll be her) then joins in halfway through.

For a song that’s this long and uses so many psychedelic aural knick-knacks, ‘Glass Jar’ is light and doesn’t gorge on the mawkish toffee apple of experimental flirtation that characterised Saint Dymphna. Nor, to me, does it push any other button, however. So what, exactly, is it? Where Gang Gang Dance will go on the new LP is endlessly fun speculation, but an answer is enigmatic, much like the band. Perhaps the fact that this a massive track that's full of all the bombastic gadgetry that would be necessary to qualify the new record as extremely ambitious, but that it fails to leave an impression, indicates that nothing much has changed.

Mazes Most Days

Fat Cat Records have been one of Britain's most exciting independent labels for a very long time, with a knack of taking on no-frills rockers from around the UK like The Twilight Sad and Frightened Rabbit. With Mazes, they have set another ball running.

Currently touring with the Dum Dum Girls, the band reflect that return to wholesome rock values. Occasional drifts into Beach Boys-esque melodies on their new song 'Most Days' are diced up and over-clocked with driving guitars and drums. If this packed 108 seconds doesn't set your feet off- in short- I question your existence. A real bang for your buck Fat Cat.

Out on April 11th

Mazes - Most Days by FatCat Records

Even New-er James Blake!

Well I'm acutely aware this is being focused on disproportionately but as an example of an album not being everything in this digital world, three unreleased songs from James Blake have surfaced recently.

'Love What Happened Here' featured on a mix by the suitably named Fantastic Mr Fox last year (just to demonstrated the link between these two young UK producers a little more). You can listen to it below, courtesy of The Up Turn. (For more on Fantastic Mr Fox, check out my other posts).

And in other JB news, Some Kind of Awesome have posted 'You Know Your Youth'. This is a scatty b-side that features as a bonus track on the vinyl version of the album, as if hearing the rest of it on the warmth of record wasn't enough. LISTEN BELOW! Post-Dubstep have posted another (!_) vinyl-only bonus track, 'Tep And The Logic', which iiiiiiiss, HERE. What a lovely bunch!

The Strokes- Under Cover of Darkness

The terminal question about The Strokes that is asked repeatedly ever since Room on Fire is whether they are just a band who suffered too much hype, encouraged a resurgence of indie guitar music in the mid 00s nonetheless and then collapsed in a pool of their own image-too-chilled out-to-even-care musical undoing. Every flipping article seems to start with a mighty great pretext and sets The Strokes up for a fall. So I won’t, only so far as mentioning it.

For five years since their last outing, First Impressions of Earth has brought a new day and many new dawns have since passed. The Strokes know that more than anyone, right?

And their new single was officially put online this week. ‘Under Cover Of Darkness’ is a characteristically jangly number, swaggering along with Julian Casablancas’ slurring, an inoffensive solo and catchy rhythm. It will be interesting to see how the band step out from life as solo artists (…well at least for Casablancas and Albert Hammond Jr.) and regain the attitude, character and energy of life as one of the world’s biggest straight indie rock ‘n’ roll groups. An album, Angles, is in the pipeline for March we are told.

James Blake- James Blake LP, The Much Anticipated Debut

When the final moment of James Blake’s meteoric rise to fame took place, newspapers, magazines and websites looked back together on five months in which a 22 year old music student from London went from a virtual unknown- a barely featured artist on the national dubstep scene- to the darling of Radio 1, cleared from the shelves, wonder producer. When playing a set on Zane Lowe's Radio 1 show, Lowe treated him like near-messianic pop royalty, inquiring after the album in such a way as it had already set as a classic. Check your local store for CMYK. You won't find it. Then check Ebay. Try and buy a ticket for his upcoming London shows. Then check Ebay. Appetites gorged on opportunities to see and hear him like the first hour of the Sales. Blake saw, or perhaps more accurately, he was seen, and he conquered, beyond all recognition.

Since shedding the petals of a first bloom, James Blake- the LP- picked up the mantle a few days ago from the 2 EPs that clearly spoke to music lovers for much longer than their 15 minute run times. Here the big posturing, media work and endless London Underground adverts really took over. Atlas, owned by Polydor released it in the UK. An expected immediate entry into the UK top 10. Universal in the US. Tours on both sides of the Atlantic. There really is no overstating the change that took place, nor the intensity and focus of our interest.

To that reception, a quiet animal arises. James Blake is a brooding and discordant record such that one would expect a well-known and already seasoned creative artist to make to compliment their work. This is Neil Young jumping straight to the digi-stuff on Trans without years of classic rock and traditional songsmanship. It is ambitious, does away with CMYK and Klavierwerke to a large extent and forgets what everyone might expect James Blake, a young cool producer, to be and sound like. If you’ve already read a review of this album, you have almost certainly seen a comparison with Bon Iver and that is a view I take too. As incomprehensible as it seems, the minimal dubstep of CMYK and piano/vocal combination of Klavierwerke are smashed together and toned down about three notches on the scale of druggy dance. The result is, oddly enough, down-tempo slow-building laments that stew in a pickle of electronics, clicks and auto-tuned vocals a la Blood Bank more than For Emma, Forever Ago. If that sounds horrible, James Blake’s Feist cover ‘Limit To Your Love’ (which features on this album) showed four months ago that Blake is versatile, adaptable and brimming with ideas. The core of this album is at ‘Lindesfarne I’ and ‘Lindesfarne II’- one song really, but split into the bit that’s almost completely vocal-only (yes, that’s right), and the bit that’s almost completely vocal-only with a few rhythmic flicks of a guitar here and there. Busy it is not. Silent moments on these and other tracks such as ‘I Never Learnt To Share’ (again, very much devoid of instrumentation) and ‘Why Don’t You Call Me’ serve as nervy seconds of reflection to stress and package the real sound that is carefully dotted around. Is it complicated? No, I wouldn’t say so either. The creations are just excellently crafted- like ‘I Mind’, perhaps the closest thing to Blake’s CMYK with its pitch-altering and dizzying sample, rarely places more than a chord and a carefully selected sound effect in any one place, breaking them up intermittently and unexpectedly for a new, sparing but deliberate ration of sound.

The lack of general confusion here, every action seemingly precision-engineered, makes for a focused and seriously engaging record. As though it were a dance of electronic hypnosis, each apparently immaterial singular blip or background chord hits a deeper place than it ought to. This is James Blake’s real crowning achievement. If ‘Limit To Your Love’ was its show piece, there might have been a sense of disappointment among keen followers, asking why a producer with a seemingly natural ear for choreographed minimalism and general creativity would conform to neat song structure or allow an excellent radio smash to take control of the record musically. But ‘Wilhelms Scream’, ‘Lindesfarne’ and seven other tracks do thrust Blake into an excellent direction, and, most promisingly, nothing sounds like it was a labour of pain or self-conscious worry. For a man on top of the world right now, Blake has a lot to be pleased about, and hopefully, a long career to look forward to.

Stream the album HERE courtesy of eminently lovely 'Pretty Much Amazing'

Woody Guthrie: This Land Is Your Land

My interest in Woody Guthrie’s 1944 song ‘This Land Is Your Land’ came at the same time as I was reading Alastair Cooke’s America. A book by the towering figure of British journalism and broadcasting who became this country’s ‘man’ in America for an incredible sixty years, America encapsulated- just as Woody Guthrie’s song did- the land of the free and its interminable contradiction between rugged individualism and wholesome community values. Land- simply, terrain and space- has been central to North America’s history, although we struggle to give it necessary credence today; indeed it was central to the contradiction mentioned above between individual liberty and this ideal new society called America, which for most of the 19th century was what any idealistic and community-minded immigrant would make it. Independence, frontier expansion and the settlement of a vast continent were at once the accomplishments of traders, opportunists and those in search of their fortune as it was those escaping the moral inadequacy of Europe, seeking a new land to call their own or a particular set of values to plant on new ground. These could of course be one and the same. It is a deep and exciting contradiction, and made very famous indeed those cultural figures over America’s time that articulated it best. When Woody Guthrie wrote ‘This Land Is Your Land’ in 1940 in response to Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’, one has to ask how he or anyone alive to hear the song could have imagined how much such a simple tune would bring that fame to Woody Guthrie.

‘This Land Is Your Land’ became one of the most unforgettable and enduring American folk songs in the history of the craft. Although Guthrie, who penned it, was hailed (mainly) posthumously after his early death at the age of 55 in 1967- and as much for his social activism as for his musical talents by the way- his song sparked a long legacy, covered and used every which way like an old folk song (which it is, obviously) that just fell out of copyright and became devoid of heritage. Perhaps, it seems, the man would not have cared too much, or at least objected. Guthrie included this jolly disclaimer in his early recordings:

“This song is Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin’ it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do.”

So we can be happy with what followed. Apart from covers by new(er) heroes of folk, including Bob Dylan, The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary, Bruce Springsteen released a live version on his 1986 album Live/1975-85, recorded at Nassau Coliseum, NY in 1980. The song was also re-worked by Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, a funk/soul revivalist group, which featured on the Up In The Air OST. This version included the two controversial verses which featured on Guthrie’s earliest recording regarding “private property”, lyrics perhaps out of kilt with the positive, can-do verses most people know, but illustrative of Guthrie’s politics.

Perhaps most ceremoniously, Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen sang ‘This Land Is Your Land’ at Barack Obama’s inaugural celebration concert. 750,000 people were there to hear it; an uncertain number of millions tuned in on TV. With the inclusion of Guthrie’s two “private property” verses at Seeger’s request, it was a bold political application of lyrics that survived only on early recordings and not in the typical playing of the song. It was, perhaps, indicative of a timeless folk song however, that its lyrics, use and meaning should change and evolve with time to the individual endeavours one is pursuing and for the simple pride and idealism that the tune represents. Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ has become like any rhyme, fable or cultural piece so repeated by a nation or culture that it's engrained: its existence somehow eternal, as though the dinosaurs could have whistled it. That is greatness.

THE WOMBATS announce Jump Into The Fog and their second album, scheduled for April

The first days of 2011 brought a big, slobbering ‘I’m-over-here’ indie announcement: The Wombats’ second album This Modern Glitch will be released on April 11th. This follows not so hot on the heels of the single ‘Tokyo: Vampires and Wolves’ that came out in September, which will be on the album. ‘Jump Into The Fog’ is the new single, out on January 24th- all a rather prolonged process before April, clearly. If it’s anything like as well received as ‘Tokyo’, should be a great success….which I think it might be.

TeNniS- Marathon and Pigeon

After apparently playing together for the first-time in December 2009, husband and wife duo Tennis attracted blog attention almost immediately after putting their first ever tunes on the net. They’ve been interviewed about all that ‘hype’ stuff: about being ‘tipped’ around the same time that Best Coast were. But that’s not what it’s about. While their mp3s have proliferated like pollen, the pair have kept their feet on the ground. A love of sailing- an idea that spawned the band as a way to remember their eight months sailing the Atlantic- is still at the forefront of their minds:

"Our whole plan—grand scheme or whatever you want to call it—is to take another writing sabbatical. I like calling it that. It sounds really professional. We’ve been working ever since we got back, so we have a little bit of money to afford another small sailing trip."

(-Denver Post, July ‘10)

I wanted to make this post after hearing the track ‘Marathon’ (as in the place Marathon, off the coast of mainland Florida), which I have listened to most days for the past two weeks or so.


Tennis- Marathon

Tennis- Pigeon

Lenny Williams- Cause I Love You

I don’t know most of Lenny Williams’ output but this track 'Cause I Love You' is truly stunning. This, I know. You can’t help but see why: this is over seven minutes of sheer, unadulterated love song, lifting off with smooth soul and strings, hitting an emotional crescendo and tumbling into shamelessly over the top but really, really expressive, unrestrained vocal gymnastics. As though you were to look at an art work, it is an objectively beautiful piece to admire, even if you aren’t feeling so connected with Lenny’s extravagant style of romanticising too.