NAF: WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS / These Four Walls

I had to buy this album because of the band name. I’ve seen it on gig listings around town for a while, and love it for it’s simple truth. Where’s our future? it says. The one with personal jetpacks and flying cars and cool simple space age stuff, instead of all this complicated, contemporary shit we have to live through instead.

There’s a sense of frustration about the tracks on this album too. There’s a lot of crescendo going on, a jitter of guitars and thrashing of cymbals.  That makes it sound like there’s a lack of sensitivity, and that’s not true, the tracks are cleverly assembled with special attention paid to dynamics and there some moments of real beauty, but it’s just that the crash and slash seems to dominate.

Might be a grower though, so it’ll stay on the MP3 player, and I certainly want to see them in the flesh at some point soon.

NAF: BROKEN RECORDS / Until The Earth Begins To Part

Broken Records are a band I’ve heard snippets of recently and have been looking forward to checking out.  They were on my Hinterland shortlist, but I ended up being somewhere else during their timeslot, and it turns out the played Tut’s just two days ago, so it seems I’ve missed them again. Never mind, to tide me over until the next opportunity comes around I’ve picked up their debut release as this week’s New Album Friday album.

First impressions (and first impressions are what NAF is all about after all): This is a big sound, but then it is a seven piece band. In a manner reminiscent of last week’s NAF band, Grizzly Bear, the strings, brass and piano are used here to sculpt dynamics on an epic scale. There are soaring walls of sound and there are moments of beautiful intimacy too.  Not a band for hooky, catchy songs, rather (and again reminiscent of Grizzly Bear, and also The Decemberists) this is an album intended to be heard as an album. Everything from the concretised typography of the tracklisting to eschewing of intra-track gaps tells you this is constructed musical entity. And it’s a gorgeous, richly textured one.

I hope to catch them live soon, but until then, as an added bonus, I have a free live CD recorded at a session in Avalanche Records to mark Record Store Day.

Yay for proper record stores, and the bands that frequent them!

NAF: GRIZZLY BEAR / Veckatimest

Bloody Nora!  How’d you sum your first impressions of an album like this? It’s just so full of music that I don’t know where to start. In fact, if the vague impetus behind NAF was initially to convey that first-listen feeling of your newly purchased piece of plastic, this particular entry is going to suck. It’s an impossible task (in fact if you want a genuine metaphor for what your first listen of this album does to your head, skip on down to the video below, that’s all you really need to know).

Possibly best begin with what’s not, eh? After hearing single, Two Weeks, on the radio and catching their performance on Later… I was expecting something a bit poppy, left field, sure, maybe a tad on the eccentric side, but – without going anywhere near the kinder-egg encapsulation of something like The Hoosiers – definitely poppy.

It’s not. Or rather Two Weeks is about as pop-song oriented as it gets. Without wishing to denigrate the single – I think it’s a great wee song – the rest of album is simply less interested in melodic hooks, concerning itself instead with exploring what can be done by four guys with some guitars, drums, pianos, strings and, most of all, the human voice.  I could listen to this for the next month (and believe me, I will be) and still not run out of new textures to appreciate, new facets to wonder over. If you’re looking for reference points I’d toss up Fleet Foxes, Brian Wilson, The Decemberists, Bon Iver, but that just reflects my recent listening and doesn’t even scratch how varied, knowledgable, self-confident and adventurous this collection of music is.

And that final song, Foreground, might actually be genius.

Bona Fide.

And incandescent.

Return of The Fist

For reasons that only a few people will understand, but which will take too long to go in to here (next time it’s a dark and stormy night, ask me to tell ye the tale…), I found this discovery by the Vandermeers in their latest expedition in the incredible repository of paperback entertainments, the Chamblin Book Mine in Jacksonville, both extremely amusing and frightening.

Microcosmos

Really, really, REALLY enjoyed Nina Allan’s “Microcosmos” in Interzone#222.  It’s thoughtful and immersive, and builds a complicated family backstory around the young narrator through hints at things unspoken and things that are spoken being not fully understood. Loved it.

This issue of the magazine was one of those quirky, varied issues that just throws stuff at you because, when it feels like it, that’s what Interzone can do. It’s all very subjective, but I also particularly liked Kim Lakin-Smith’s steam-punk T-Birds and Aliette de Bodard’s mythical, drowned city Ys.

On the other hand, while I thought Sean McMullen’s story was extremely well executed, I found the premise silly to point of embarrassing. But then, I’m not the sort of person that thinks that cats are all that. Others will disagree, many of them – for a reason I’ver never been able to fathom – writers. Why is that? Answers on a postcard.

NAF: CAMERA OBSCURA / My Maudlin Career

It’s the Friday afternoon before the late May bank holiday. The sun’s shinin’. And we’re in the mood for something light and breezy to while away the last few working hours before the long weekend. Just as well the new Camera Obscura’s new release is on the feature rack in FOPP.

My Maudlin Career carries on where Let’s Get Out Of This Country left off. Sweet songs in an old fashioned vein, lush arrangements and that deep reverb vocal sound that they’ve made iconically their own. There’s the occasional Western Swing, er swing, going on among the Dusty moments and the more contemporary-indie tunes, which make for a very pleasant listen experience all in all. Perfect whiling music in fact. If only we could arrange a pool to dangle our feet in and a supply of cold beers, we’d be sorted.

Also worth checking out is their recent BBC session in which they made Sprinsteen’s Tougher Than The Rest into a genuine thing of beauty.

NAF: ZOEY VAN GOEY / The Cage Was Unlocked All Along

Okay, this week’s New Album Friday album is a bit of a cheat because I’ve had the album in question for almost a week, but it’s simply so good that it deserves to be featured.

The thing about Zoey van Goey, as anyone who has seen their live performances can tell you, is that whatever they attempt they deliver with effortless versatility, a warm likeability and great musicianship. So, when I heard six or seven months ago that they were recording their first album my reaction was not a guarded “Well, good luck“; it was “Bloody great, can’t wait. It’ll be fab!“.

And, of course, it is.

Zoey Van Goey - The Cage Was Unlocked All Along

I like lots of things about The Cage Was Unlocked All Along. I like the variety of song styles, the flow of moods that drifts through the selection like the weather outside a Glasgow tenement window. I love the production, the soft clarity of the interleaved vocals, the gentle tug of the rhythms, the weird background noises that don’t overwhelm, just colour. I adore the speech sample in the awesome, and sad, Nae Wonder, a song that manages to be uplifting and heartbreaking at the same time.

But what I like most about Zoey Van Goey is that they are a band who love to tell stories. Everything about this album reflects that. The album’s title is a last line that demands reverse extrapolation. The gorgeous fold-out artwork is packed with untold tales of youthful adventure, improbable escapes, cargo cults and much more. And the songs, the songs, the songs. Every single one of them a capsule of character, mood and situation. Opener, The Best Treasure Stays Buried, introduces us to a pair of criminal lovers (or is that lover criminals?), hiding their loot and going their separate ways until the heat dies down, only neither seems to be sure that they’ll see the other one – or the money – again. Following up bounces in We Don’t Have That Kind Of Bread, a litany of fanciful fears about what can happen when you leave the house (and no-one wants their loved one to be kidnapped, held in a cage with skeleton bones and held to ransom), but perhaps also a plea from someone in the early days of love to extend your precious time together when outside pressures are forcing you to part, however briefly. And that’s only the start of an album that delivers  tableau after tableau like miniature toys encased glittering coloured beads, all the way to the quiet, perfect jewel at the end, City Is Exploding. These stories have heart. They can tend towards a certain twindie wistfulness, but there’s real humour here too and a healthy sense of the absurd.

Zoey Van Goey are already great authentic songwriters. This is already one of my favourite albums in years. And what’s exciting – what’s really, skin-tingling, fucking exciting – is the anticipation of What Zoey Did Next.

NAF: DREVER, McCUSKER, WOOMBLE / Before The Ruin

No “new” album today, but this one is new to me and comes recommended by Mike Gallagher, a man who knows his contemporary folk/rock crossovery kinda stuff.

Like it a lot. The folk elements shining through in the instrumentation and voicing of the songs bring the album a mellow, chilling with a whisky in front of a peat fire while the locals entertain themselves and anyone else who happens to be listening in feel.

For me it has all the qualities (evenness of tone, lack of catchiness (but in a good way), ungrabby lyrics) that make for a good writing album.

Hinterland

Okay, now I’ve got my brain back I’m going to attempt to summarise what I got up to at Hinterland Festival on Friday. In essence, I pretty much saw everything I planned to, although there was an early evening scare when the printed timetable had Isosceles on at a different time from the pdf I downloaded (went with the pdf and got lucky).

Kicked things off in energetic fashion, pingponging between The Arches and The Classic Grand. Dipping in here for four or five songs, moving on there to sample someone else, always on the move, layering up the festival feeling. After a quick squint at a mysteriously unlisted first act (although rumour suggests We Are The Physics) in The Arches I started with the dependable choice of Y’all Is Fantasy Island who seemed to be in more of a full-on Kings Of Leon mood than I remember them. Good way to get in the mood, but I skipped out before the end to catch Miss The Occupier. MTO, always entertaining, on this occasion were on top form with their cheeky, spiky songs engaging the slowly increasing crowd. But once again, I had to skip out early to get back to The Arches in time to catch the first of my must-sees of the night.

Remember Remember were an act I’d no knowledge of prior to last week’s myspace trawl, and I was keen to see how their intricate, layered, beautiful instrumental compositions would transpose to the live arena. And I wasn’t alone. For what was still early in the evening, a decent turnout had squinched in together to enjoy the way RR’s eclectic sounds wash back and forward along the length of the bricked-in space. Joyous, even if the leave-em-wanting more maxim was taken a little too literally when determining the set length.

Where next? Oh, yeah, back to Classic Grand to catch Juno! Heard good things about them, and liked their poppy energy on their myspace tracks, but in terms of performance I found them frantic, shambolic and overexcited. Maybe it was a bad choice to follow Remember Remember, but I just didn’t click with them at all, so I nipped upstairs to catch some of Prego instead. The larger venue was possibly not appropriate for the number of people that had turned up to see these London rockers, but the crowd grew as their set went on and the band put in a really decent set. I was sorry to have to tear myself away to get back to The Arches again.

Because it was time for Punch And The Apostles. I’ve been getting good words about this band for months, and was determined to see them now I had the opportunity. This was my one real cemented-in fixture on the schedule, and others clearly felt the same. The room was rammed, but I managed to squeeze myself in up the back and settled in for one of the most full-on music experiences I’ve had in years. This was wild, wild music, played with exuberant abandon but kept from falling apart entirely by being played with great skill. The combination of piano and horns in polka rhythms reminded me of Tom Wait’s loudest, brashest, most eye-popping moments, but more so; the control the band exerted time and again to snap themselves back from screaming wall of noise into one of those crazy-catchy Eastern European melodies was possibly the equal of Waits’s live assembly. All in all, an incredible experience.

After that I found it difficult to settle  Nipped in to see some of Ming Ming And The Ching Chings, and liked what I saw enought to want to check them out another time, but even though their sax player was giving it laldy, after the PaTA experience their sound came across a little two-dimensional. Next I opted for Sons And Daughters, a band who somehow I had never seen. They kicked off with Broken Bones followed by Gilt Complex, two crowd favourites, and they rocked along nicely, but – perhaps because of the acoustics of The Arches or perhaps because they’ve become a slick and professional act or perhaps I was still PaTA’d out – whatever the reason, I felt a little disappointed. I wanted rawness and merely got a good rock and roll show. After nine acts of loudness, it was time to take a break.

Pivo Pivo, a few streets away, isn’t a big venue, but it was a decent size for Oh, Atoms. The trio, recently returned from touring Mexico and having begun the trip north in the early hours, were showing signs of fatigue, but their likeable music and personality totally charmed the small but very appreciative audience. Possibly, like me, they were all glad of the chance of a comfy seat, a chance to relax with a nice beer and listen to some lovely songs.

Time to walk up to the Art School to experience This Will Destroy You.  A huge sound that washed over a healthy crowd like the cold Atlantic, a strangely calming experience of the kind that makes good writing music. Bought the CD. And finally, at the end of the night, Isosceles.  No pun intended but they are a very angular band. The songs I’d heard to date, full of hard pop and intrigue, reminded me of Bekerofka. And live they were the same, but more so, putting a whole bunch of energy and humour into their late night set. Bit of a shame that the majority of the audience who’d seen TWDY had slunk away (presumably in the direction of We Were Promised Jetpacks), but Isosceles gave it all for those who remained, and I’ll definitely be watching them again.

So all in all, a grand trawl through the musical hinterland. Discovered a good few new acts that I’ll keep tabs on, and had one pretty unforgettable experience.

Hope to God they do it again next year.

NAF: THE BROKEN FAMILY BAND / Please And Thank You

Not overly acquainted with the BFB, but on first listen this album feels more rocked up than some of their earlier stuff. Not that that’s ever a problem for me, but it took me by surprise. May just be a production thing, but either way it’s good. The songs have a nice grungy quality and interesting arrangements that still leave room for their somewhat sardonic line in lyrics (which is what attracted them to me in the first place in their song about devil worshipping domesticity, “Living In Sin”) to shine…or perhaps ooze through. Check out the video for the new single to see what I mean.