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.

Caged Animals- Girls On Medication

Do you ever listen to a song for the very first time and think “Yeah, I’ve got it”? A click of connection you make- with the feel of the song, the currents, its rhythms and texture, and you can immediately let it sink into your mind? Like you absorb its message as though not even through your ears but through…well, nothing? Well that is what happened to me with this. That pretty (slash scary) looking lady on the side there may not just make your next two minutes and forty seconds, but your week.

At once fuzzy and upbeat but also sleepy and cathartic, I had to do some research at first because I had no idea who this one man band Vincent Cacchione was. Libraries were consulted, foreign dignitaries, and some people I am not at liberty to name. But, Caged Animals, it turns out, is Cacchione and a bucket load of ideas, driving him forward, sideways or nowhere in whichever direction his computer experiments take him. Now that Lucky Number have signed him, it might be a mighty impressive coup for both man and label. ‘Girls On Medication’ reverberates with all the apathetic charm of The Strokes circa 2001, the lush warmth of a Best Coast-esque melody, some Lemonheads it is true, and even slurry Britpop vocals that create one of the most refreshingly cool songs I’ve heard all year.

‘Girls On Medication’ is out 4^th July on white 7-inch vinyl via Lucky Number (limited to 500 copies).

Caged Animals- Girls On Medication