SEVEN NOISES

Soft Power is a Scottish record shop famously known for the fact they only sell vinyl (as all the record shops should be) that last year also turned into record label with the release of their first reference, an LP by Theoretical Girls. The second reference was finally announced last month and it's going to be a split single by personal favourite Dirty Beaches and Brave Radar's Conor Prendergast. The split single will contain at least three tracks. Dirty Beaches's side will have a Johnny Cash cover of the singer more in the key of Nick Cave's version (well, actually is exactly as Nick Cave's version but as lo-fi as you can expect is going to be a Dirty Beaches track) and also an instrumental track called Gone to Hell Come Friday dedicated to the memory of Broadcast's Trish Keenan.

You can listen / download Dirty Beaches The Singer and Conor's Great To Be Here here:

Dirty Beaches 'The Singer' by Soft Power

Conor Prendergast Great To Be Here by Soft Power

Fort Lowell Records' latest release, already their 5th, is the first physical single from Death Kit, a LA band that includes members of previous FLR collaborators Wet & Reckless. It's also their most dance oriented and upbeat release to date and it also has for the first time a remix as one of the tracks on the record, Death Kit first single I Can Make You Love Me as interpreted by ...music video?.

This single makes me think of FLR as a big family as it not only contains members of a band they released before but also the remix is made by the group they released as a second single and the vinyl comes with two exclusive download only tracks, one being an acoustic cover of the single's second track by Tracy Shedd, who happened to share the split single with Wet & Reckless and the other a cover of the original song Tracy released for them, this time performed by Death Kit.

The single also comes with a two sided leaflet explaining the 9 facts you always wanted to know about Seagulls, a common bird in Tucson with a footnote from The Birdman, a non-lucrative association that provides care and homing for birds and on the other side you can find information about the Tucson Community Darkroom a project carried by Julia DeConcini, who also created the beautiful artwork, and Jasper Ludwig who provide traditional photographic education and darkroom rentals for the Tucson Community.

In other news, Fort Lowell Records will contribute with a single to Record Store Day 2011 with no other than Howe Gelb with two different projects: Sno Angel on Side-A and Melted Wires on Side-B. "Spiral" will be the 'Sno Angel song, which is a live version with the Voices Of Praise Gospel Choir. "Cordoba in Slow Motion" will be the Melted Wires song, which is a collaboration between Giant Sand and Calexico, and has not been release yet. Congratulations!!

Factory Floor have never been in a hurry to conquer the world. Their release periodicity of one single / EP per year (if we don't count the remix series 12s they put out last year after the unnamed EP) hasn't been altered since 2008's Bipolar 7' and this year's fascicle has already been named. In April and via Optimo (Espacio)'s imprint we'll receive R E A L L O V E, a one new track + Optimo remix 12" which will help us through the year while we wait for new stuff and put our hopes up is not for a whole new year again. I haven't heard the original yet (which is produced by Joy Division / New Order's Stephen Morris) but the remix it's an hypnotic song in the key of Lying but with the natural Optimo feeling all over the place.

Factory Floor are also scheduled to perform on one of the two All Tomorrow Parties's Portishead events this Summer at Alexandra Palace.

Although is not the first official single of the sen Cold Cave album and it's not planned for it to have a physical format, The Great Pan is Dead has been chosen by Wesley Eisold himself to be the presentation of his sophomore record and opening track as it also was the first song he composed for the album. If you happened just listen the split EP with Prurient, the Cremations compilation or you saw them live during the last leg of the tour, maybe it will not surprise you as much as if you just heard Love Comes Close. To star with, Wesley's voice has won a lot of confidence and is not afraid anymore of shouting whatever he wants to say. The fact that the band has been playing together for a while has also helped to get a more filling sound, less bedroom produced and more studio full band played. And, as he comments in some interviews this is the sound he was looking for after finishing the stuff that ended up on Cremations but, something closer to pop but still with an experimentation and punk attitude. The record ended up being much more pop than what he was expecting and the beginning so he tried it again for this record that is suppose to follow the pattern of this first song, a breathtaking song about magic, preservation, youth and movement.

While Jana Hunter has put on quarantine her solo efforts after some remarkable releases, she joined a band last year called Lower Dens that put out an album, Twin Hand Movement, and a single, I Get Nervous, that, at least, are comparable with her previous stuff if not even better. They started the new year putting out a new release: the single Batman / Dear Betty Mayo out on Gnomonsong as usual with two brand new songs; the jolly and upbeat Batman and the more dense and introspective B side, a Mayo Thompson cover. Both songs blend together perfectly thanks to Jana's haunting voice although they are quite different.

Sea Pinks is the alias of Girls Names' drummer solo project. With his main band they achieved an international status of recognition thanks to their two EPs, one for Captured Tracks and one for Tough Love, and a split single with Brilliant Colors that are between my last year's personal favourites and they'll soon will release their first album on Slumberland which I can't wait to listen to.
And on his free time he had time to put out a tape that's already some months old but it's still available for you to get here as a download only as the tape is already sold out. On that tape he managed to simplify even more the sound of his main band and give it a more 60s shinny pop sound that sometimes reminds me a lo-fi version of some Kindercore bands like The Masters of the Hemisphere.

You can download for free one of the tracks here.

And now he re-recorded some of the songs of that tape with a full band and released a 4 track 12" white label on the same label that is selling out really quickly. Here you can see the video of the re-recording of the main track, Peripheral Vision

Levek introduces himself like this on his Myspace: I'm a bus driver that makes music. After a long day of elementary schoolers putting gum on my lovely pleather bus seats I enjoy a good space jam while sorting through the Disney VHS collection. .. Just after reading this description you know you have to like his music for the sake of it, only because he deserves it. And then you listen to his music and you realise there's a lot to enjoy to his music. This is his first official release although he previously put up a demo mini-album on his Bandcamp full of big little songs that pay a lot of attention to the arrangements and take a lot of inspiration from classic Disney movies soundtracks like Dumbo or Fantasia. Online, he's even been compared to Sufjan Stevens for the way he arranges the songs, like if they were little orchestrated masterpieces. Although his approach and his compositions are quite different I can understand these comparisons and I can imagine what he could do with more budget. And anyway, the A side of this single sounds like at least he had the opportunity to record in a proper studio and the results are splendid. Look on the Bright Side is a beautifully recorded song that also opens new doors for him, looking for more soulful sounds, taking inspiration from Marvin Gaye and Curtis Mayfield. The most amazing thing of all is that everything comes from the mind of just one person, David Levesque, who should be given the opportunity of recording a whole album with a bit of budget and I'm sure he would get the acknowledgment he deserves.
You can get the 7 inch on Father / Daughter records, a small label which only has three references so far (I've covered the three of them in here) but every single one they put out is a must have.

Lately, good dance music has been flirting with some 90s and 00s stereotypes of popular dance music, giving them a new and more valuable interpretation. From the diva voice sample to the acceleration of beats or the overload garage bass , projects like Kingdom or Teengirl Fantasy give a new vocabulary to these old and overused cliches. Christian Aids (not sure where the name inspiration came from) are a band / project from Manchester with no information at all on their Myspace: just a couple of killer tunes that use those cliches as well but the final result is something as modern and current as Mount Kimbie or James Blake, to name the evident and current glory names of the genre.
Fever starts as an atmospheric and dark beatless tune to explode into a colourful and crazy fast dance song proper of post rave years, everything in less than 3.30 minutes. The song is still a demo so it may change once is out.

Austra is the new creature out from the many talents of Katie Stelmanies, a Toronto singer who's been in many projects and released some stuff under her name as well, like the amazing single Believe Me / Crying I reviewed in here a couple of years ago. This week, her new combo, a more electronic and beat oriented version of her solo stuff but still with the spirituality and drama of her previous releases, came to London to perform some shows and present their first release, a 12 inch with three songs that was previously released on Fucked Up's label One Big Science and now is out through Domino in the UK. You can here the three songs on the Domino Soundcloud space in here or get in in one of the many shops Domino gets to.

I've never made a post about a musician passing away before. This blog's purpose is another but Today was a very sad, sad day. Broadcast was one of my favourite bands ever and when I received the news I felt like a friend died. I've heard her voice so many times it became so close to me. It is music I always revisit and go back to. I never get bored to listen to again and again. It was a very sad, sad day.

Manchester was the centre of the universe back in the late 70s with bands like Joy Division, The Fall or The Buzzcocks and then again in the 80s with The Smiths, Stone Roses or Happy Mondays. Everything got a bit quieter afterwards (with exception of Oasis) and nowadays while the city has risen from the post-industrial decadence to a more modern cosmopolitan city its musical influence over the world has been fading to nearly disappeared. If you walk around the city, its record shops and bars, you can see a general nostalgia for those glory days that now look more like a tourist attraction / theme park. But we still have, from time to time, a new band that appears from the small live circuit of bars as it's the case of The Louche F.C.
After growing up from gig to gig / mouth to mouth they will release their first single next month on Sways Records, the double A side Back Bedroom Casualty / Only in a Dream. They define their sound as 60s post-punk / Orbison shoegaze which is obvious on Only in a Dream.
You can pre-order it here .

Anika, a 24 year old German girl settled in the UK and Berlin, released an album at the end of last year that's been massively overlooked (probably because when it appeared all the lists were pre-designed) although it had all the elements to be a candidate to be on the end of the year lists: produced by Geoff Barrow from Portishead and Beak>, mixing experimentalism with a post-punk attitude that makes the whole thing retro, current and timeless and approaching the cover (Bob Dylan's Masters of War, Yoko Ono's Yang Yang or Julie London's popularised End of the World) as a weapon reminding The Flying Lizards crazy covers of the late 70s.
It's impossible to read a review of the record without seeing the name Nico all around, clearly an influence but also the consequence of making the obvious association of German female vocal artist with strong accent singing in English with a love for dark and mysterious melodies, all very European sounding. Anyway, there's more to the record than that as it filters dub "a la Metal Box way", Krautrock, 60s pop or synthwave.
You can catch her live at London's Lexington on the 26th this month or later in France, Belgium, Spain or at the Portishead's All Tomorrow's Parties events next Summer.

Zoo Kid makes us think, we that are far away from our youthful years, that we through away the best years of our lives. How can a 16 year old make songs like this? Has he been making music since he was 2 to get to this level of composition abstraction and sophistication and make it sound natural and innate? (The credits praise written, performed and produced by Archy Marshall)
His song Out Getting Ribs has already been praised around but the B side to the single, Has This Hit, out on House Anxiety Records and probably soon to be sold out (so you better run) is as big as the A side. He sounds as he's been listening to lots of music (he can sound like Ian Curtis without wanting to sound like him in a time everybody wants to sound like him but fail trying) and filtered everything in a way it only ends up sounding as himself. It's definitely a one to follow from really close in the British scene in a time there's not much interesting going on here.

I haven't mentioned Beko for a while now. It's hardly impossible to get track of all what they put up as every Monday you have a new (virtual)free single, compilation, boxset, etc.. and if you get distracted for a while, you've missed some weeks and have lots to catch up. This last Monday though, is obvious that I would mention, taking into account the previous post, the free 11 track compilation they put together on collaboration with La Station Radar. 11 artist that have previously released something for this label hands out a new / unreleased track for our enjoyment, including some personal favourites like Ela Orleans, Dirty Beaches, Jeans Wilder or Archers by the Sea. You can download the whole thing (and many more free great music) here