SEVEN NOISES

Between my busy schedule and the fact that my upload management website stopped working until further notice and I've tried to find a new one to use meanwhile without succeeding I'm not been posting as frequently as I normally do. Let's hope things go back to how the use to and I can continue annoying you with my recommendations.
Anyway, this is a post to celebrate the second single from London's duo Summer Camp, Round the Moon, this time mainly sung by the masculine half. This is also the second single to come out from the recently published Young EP, a collection of 6 songs that also includes their best known track Ghost Train, although the B side, It's Summer, as the first single B side Montgomery Avenue 1984, would remain exclusive to this single, so no excuse for not getting it.

In other news, the band are playing some UK gigs next month which is probably their first ever tour.

Whenever you hear about a band / artist who is stupidly talented and find out they are, for example, two brothers aged 19 and 16 that have been creating and recording music for quite a long time in a studio in Croydon, South London, you just feel tiny and as if you just lost your teen years wondering around losing your time. Disclosure are Guy and Howard Lawrence who come from a musical family and have been growing up surrounded by the sounds of the local electronic music of Skream and Benga, for example, and in general, dubstep, two-step or garage but their music goes further as they introduce any gender possible such as Jazz or IDM with a definite pop and melodic structure.
Their first release, a 7" single to come on the 6th September, is out on Moshi Moshi singles club and includes the songs Offline Dexterity and Streetlight Chronicle, two killer tracks that will definitely have them getting lots of attention surpassing the dance scene into the global media as only artist like Burial, Aphex Twin or Autechre have done before. If not, wait and see.

Summer Camp's Ghost Train single is finally out after being one of the most talk about songs of last year (it even made it to the best songs of the year list of GvsB). Courtesy of the Moshi Moshi's singles club we finally have it on 7" vinyl with the B side Montgomery Avenue 1984. After some doubts if they were seven members or just two and if they were actually from Sweden (rumours they loved to spread) I can say they are just two, Elizabeth Sankey and Jeremy Warmsley, and they are actually from London, which I'm happy to announce as there have not been many London bands on this blog lately.
They just made their first show last week 9the band has actually only existed for 6 months) but they already have a bunch of gigs schedule for the next months, including some Summer festivals.
The song is perfect pop, delightful and optimistic, with an infectious chorus. Really retro and really modern at the same time. Something like the British Cults.

After the overexposure of end of the year (and decade) best of lists, this year for the first time in ages, I've decided not to do one myself. Whoever has spent a bit of time checking this blog during its nearly one year of existence will already know some of the singles I considered worth of checking and buying so you can do the review yourself going through the old posts. Anyway, after checking some of those lists you can just see some are just repetitive and some have nothing in common, looking as if they were from different planets taking into account the source they've been brewing in.
Anyway, If I don't do any kind of review about the last 12 months, it doesn't seem end of the year so I thought I would just comment what's been about in general 2009. And this year, more than the previous years and as it used to be in the nineties, everything's been about the record labels so i thought I would resume 2009 through them.
If there's been a label that has been the protagonist of the year this is Captured Tracks: managed by Blank Dogs, it has brought us not only his own releases but also great singles and EPs by Dum Dum Girls, Woods, Ganglians or Christmas Island. Together with them, the Brooklyn label Woodsist has worked as a parallel label to Captured Tracks. Managed by Woods, every single release they've put out has got the attention of the media, from Fergus and Geronimo, Real Estate or The Mayfair Set to Fresh & Onlys, Ganglians or Woods themselves.
We've seen as well the resurrection of a mythic label which was 20 this year; Slumberland Records, mainly thanks to Pains of Being Pure at Heart, has also brought us great records from Crystal Stilts, Brilliant Colors, Lichtenstein or Frankie Rose.
In the UK, Transparent Records has brought us great limited singles from Washed Out, Small Black or The Smith Westerns, Young Turks discovered us The XX and released singles by Wavves and Tanlines and No Pain in Pop brought us A Grave with No Name, Deep Sht or Trailer Trash Tracy's. Other great labels of the year were Mexican Summer (Washed Out, Weekend, Pearl Harbour), Art Fag (Crocodiles, Best Coast) , Black Iris (Foreign Born, Fool's Gold), Upset the Rhythm (Xiu Xiu, Future Islands) or Moshi Moshi (Kindness, Thecocknbullkid).
We also see how stablished record labels were as good as ever (Sub Pop and its singles Club) or got back on track (Matador releasing Girls, Cold Cave or getting Sonic Youth).
According to sounds this has definitely been the year when Lo-Fi was back in track and popularised again, folk overlooked and electronic music mainly resting. And yes, it was the year when Animal Collective got full coverage in the mainstream world, something that, looking way back, looks like it could never happen so maybe not everything's lost in popular music.

Hype. If you look at the dictionary for the meaning of this word it says "Promotion or advertisement; especially, exaggerated claims". In the music business it's a common thing to exaggerate about the value of a song, and album or a band, even more on the British press and especially in publications like the NME that has become little by little in a music version of a gossip and sensationalist magazine. How many "the best new band, the best record of the century or the best debut of all times" can we possibly have? So well, The Drums are full of hype all around with reviews containing some of the sentences I've mentioned before. And the question is: are all these reviews objective and true? I personally have my objections with this. Let's Go Surfing is an effective pop song that you'll probably get stuck in your mind for the rest of the day after listening to it, but this is not always a good thing. The lyrics are beyond terrible but yes, the melody is good. And I can understand that they can also be quite annoying sometimes.
But you always have to think that a band is not to be blamed for the hype they can get around. So let's just say that this is a good single, not a great one but a good one, but don't expect them to change anything or be the best new something.

Released 28/09/09

The Drums - Let's Go Surfing.mp3

There's not much information about Kindness in the web. I've read it's basically one guy from Germany with a little help from friends who has only played two gigs so far with different band members and has two more programmed in the following days. He's a fan of Arthur Russell which is palpable, if not so much in this forthcoming first single, at least it is in some compositions you can play on his Myspace, which I really recommend you to listen. Most of them are unfinished demos or sketches or finished songs that sound like sketches. Between them you can find two great covers, Neil Young's Tell Me Why and a beautiful rendition to the version Anita Dobson made of the Eastenders tune in 1986, Anyone Can Fall in Love. This single, to be released by Moshi Moshi in two weeks, it's a Replacements cover that sounds like a collaboration between Junior Boys and Talking Heads. It looks like if DFA had something to do with the tune which they hadn't and could open a door to the future sound of the band but something makes me think he will surprise us again in the future, taking into account the variety in styles and approaches he takes in all his songs. The hypnotic result of this song has had me playing this song on repeat for a day and I'm still far from getting tired. I hope it has the same effect on you.

Released 05/10/09

Kindness - Swinging Party.mp3