We’ve already revealed who sits from positions 50 to 31 of our top 50 albums of 2009 (yes, this year has been Abundant [intentional capitalisaton]), and with the grand reveal of those sitting between 30 and 21, we get ever closer to the all-seeing Top 20. There’ll be proper paeans to every single one of ‘em, by the writer that loves each one the most. Appetite-whetting indeed.

And then you may begin…

30) Mastodon – Crack the Skye: Sprawlingly-majestic prog metal. It’s a sturdy album [Ed - wut? Don't pretend you're not shocked that your indie-types chose this record above 247 others...], an epic libretto – hell, I dont’ know what I’m talking about, I’m going to go give it a listen. *facepalms*

29) Patrick Wolf – The Bachelor: The catharsis of his previous three LPs, Mr. Wolf’s sound became all the more extravagant. An incredibly cohesive cross-genre mix that remained very aware of its preposterous melodrama and embraced it with expansive Baroque arrangements.

28) Passion Pit – Manners: With songs refreshingly devoid of big hooks, Michael Angelakos’ dizzying falsetto was the defining feature. Each track took its time to swell and the by-product was, well, massively fun. Nice chap too.

27) Girls – Album: Full of pissed up maudlin reflections, the least Googleable band/album combo were well received this year. Their comatose, ’50s-evoking laments were deliberately vapid, and quite unlike anything else on the horizon. They’re that side of drunk, and they’re recreating it well.

26) Fight Like Apes – Fight Like Apes AndThe Curse of the Golden Medallion: The finally-relased album from this Dublin lot is the record you’ll wish you’d got into at the time. Sugared-up slapstick, and a fair cop at it too.

25) The Twilight Sad - Forget The Night Ahead: Free of unnecessary filler notes or syllables and drenched in layers of feedback, this second album was a dark and ominous record reflecting the Glaswegians’ teetering between primal fear and macho swagger.

24) Emmy the Great – First Love: An impressive debut from the girl that the boyfriends of the girls who love Adam Green obsess over. It’s an anti-relationships record with no inhibitions, finally revealing the far-more-likeable face behind Emma Lee Moss’ on-stage bravado schtick.

23) Arctic Monkeys – Humbug: A disjointed, reclusive record with big arrangements and in the most part, the substance to back up its departure. Felt like a constant climax to reach the resolve, full of a different frustration but the same discontent as before, only grander.

22) PJ Harvey and John Parish – A Woman A Man Walked By: Violen heartache was on the frontline as Harvey and Parish’s combined disquiet fused into pit-of-gut delivery. More of a must-have than it intended to be.

21) Grammatics – Grammatics: Boldly ambitious in the way it hosted introspective ruminations as much as it did knowingly self-indulgent opuses (see ‘Inkjet Lakes’), it’s one of the lost albums of 2009. Ironic then, that it just missed out on our top 20.

Here is the  40-31 that came before this, and the 50-41 that came before that. Stay tuned for the Top 20, which will run from Monday in blocks of five.

40) Metric – Fantasies: Moody and with more space than the poppier Live It Out, the gloom is given space to breathe. Emily Haines’ songs feel strong, and the echoey new-wave keyboards are pretty darn enticing.

39) Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish I Were An Eagle: Managing warm nostalgia without overwritten lyrics, this album is equally wry and hopeful. A durable and lyrically subtle listen.

38) Various Artists – Dark Was The Night: Featuring new things by the likes of The National and Yeasayer, and a collaboration between Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner; sometimes hasty, mostly worthwhile, it’s an indie-dream come true.

37) Mew – No More Stories…: Majestic and swirling, the Danes’ fifth album hinted at proggier tendencies with back-masks played forwards (!) and the additional of an occasional gamelan ensemble. The overall sound is of an inter-splicing of layers; it’s crystalline.

36) Dananananaykroyd – Hey Everyone: A slightly glossier version of their crowd-pleasing live show, this album’s energy became its defining feature. Boundlessly enthusiastic, it rip-roared through its own self-awareness while with an adorable sense of humour.

35) Why? – Eskimo Snow: Starkly emotional but sticking to a safer ground than Alopecia and the other three, a newly melancholic Yoni Wolf ditched the hip-hop and moves into new territory sounding more realised than ever before.

34) The Leisure Society – The Sleeper: Nick Hemming’s honeyed tones melted expertly into a combination of pastoral strings, flighty woodwind and sterner thumb piano, songs of intricate craft and beauty. The Willkommen Collective’s poster-boys.

33) The Maccabees – Wall of Arms: Orlando Weeks became Win Butler as his band got bouncier and lost the post-punk. Brass was added, riffs were sieved of non-catchiness and, well, I thought it fairly sterile as a whole but this lot seemed to disagree… <<<WHOOPS>>>

32) The Decemberists – Hazards of Love: A gloriously arranged album with fully-fledged characterisations, gallant wordplay and depraved song structures. That it met its colossal ambition is almost a shocker, in spite of The Decemberists’ impressive track-record.

31) The Big Pink – A Brief History of Love: Aesmeric vocals situated themselves suavely over heavy, pounding drums; it’s a loss to me why you’d choose to listen to this over its forefathers but the writers disagreed… <<<UH OH>>>

If you missed the 50-41 rundown, it’s here. More dissent featured, but arguably more deservedly.

Now stay tuned for the 30-21 tomorrow!

And now, let’s go! Excuse the dissent slipping through…

50) HEALTH – Get Color: This album is the sound of strobes, of a crashing, thrashing apocalypse. I deem it ‘andrgynisco’, a sound that entirely succeeds in its aim to destroy.

49) The Flaming Lips – Embryonic: Wayne Coyne resumes the role of paranoid professor, and his minions follow. A return to form.

48) YACHT – See Mystery Lights: Frenetic, catchy and triangle-obsessed, this lithe and sinewy album stood out from the crowd. Don’t let it slip you by – and it comes from the same ballpark as The Blow.

47) Sonic Youth – The Eternal: Slower-burning than much of their ’00s output, the stop-start stuttering of this album made it a real grower. Special kudos to ‘Sacred Trickster’, the album’s highlight.

46) Atlas Sound – Logos: Featuring Laetitia Sadler and Panda Bear, this album is its own world. Bradford Cox creates human-sounding ambience, wrestling with himself via aid from some damn unusual production.

45) Placebo – Battle for the Sun: Apparently a lot of our writers have nostalgia? I won’t try and explain this. Will I? No, for as I am not their mother, I am not responsible. Read the ruddy disclaimer, yo, and don’t quote this on your billboards, Molko.

44) Slow Club – Yeah So: Back to form, writers! An impressively no-nonsense debut from the duo, full of unique traipses and tales jaunty, anecdotal into the future. Still sounds fresh post-summer, too.

43) Eels – Hombre Lobo: 12 Songs of Desire: Primal, howling. You know the sort. Can you tell that this one’s addition is a bit of an, ahem, surprise? Oh writerlets… I don’t understand. This just meanders. But thankfully I totally stand by the remaining 42 albums. PHEW.

42) The Cribs – Ignore The Ignorant: Johnny Marr passed his induction phase, and The Cribs went colossal on the guitars. More righteous and definitively angrier, it saw them go mainstream.

41) Noah And The Whale – First Days of Spring: Beautiful tears were shed by our writers on this second, heartbroken album from the not-so-stiff upper-lip folk-popsters.


Stay tuned for tomorrow’s countdown from 40 to 31, if you can hold your baited breath for long enough… there’ll be more for me to gush about and none for me to get mouse-trapped by. Thank you, karma.

ARE YOU FREAKED OUT YET?

The Beatles

The coverage and discussion of The Beatles‘ re-issues this September carried with it the associated feeling that it marks the death of the CD-age in the same way the band helped to usher it in. Coupled with the sense that there’s very little that can be written about the greatest and most popular music of the 20th Century in the 21st, we decided to shine a light on a few of the Fab Four’s fabbest moments that don’t typically find their way onto compilations.

‘There’s A Place’ from Please Please Me (1963)

It’s well known that final track recorded in the marathon session at Abbey Road on 11th February 1963 was the closer ‘Twist and Shout’, the song leading in to it was the first committed to tape. With the technological limits of the day meaning that there was only so much prominence that bass could have without it causing the stylus to jump this as near as the band and George Martin got to capturing their live rawness with the ramshackle nature of the harmonies, alternating between McCartney dominating and Lennon (who wrote this bold declaration of independence) adding his phlegm drenched vowels to the end of the lines as well the punctuating harmonica found throughout the album.

‘I’ll Be Back’ from A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

One of the songs on the second half of the LP and so not appearing on the film of the same name and at the time one of the more intricate and complex songs Lennon had written. It has a loose Spanish flavour to the acoustic backing and Lennon vocal as naked, personally and passionate as that on ‘Help!’ It doesn’t have a chorus and seems to be compromised solely of middle-eights and bridges which contain some fabulous, unexpected key shifts. Like many of these songs we’ve highlighted it points the way forward to where they were heading.

‘No Reply’ from Beatles For Sale (1964)

Of all the re-masters Beatles For Sale is the one that most benefitted versus the original CD versions, you can finally hear the whooshing crash of Ringo’s cymbals alongside the bossa-nova thump of the rhythm section. The doomy, tucked into the background, piano from George Martin lurks in the shadows much like Lennon. Amongst the almost jazz like air to the track the lyrics seem to come from a rather dark place. The casual snarl that Lennon works into when delivers the ‘That’s a li-i-ie’ line and the crashing doom of the ‘I nearly died’ line.  The glorious hand-claps and wrong footing that section delivers when it sticks the ball through your legs and sprints past you. Not to mention the final, chilling ringing chord of acceptance.

‘Yes It Is’ B-side to ‘Ticket To Ride’ (1965)

Sounding dazed and woozy like it’s been drinking red wine before it starts up it’s a surprisingly romantic turn from Lennon who would go onto write the worryingly misogynistic ‘Run For Your Life’ that same year. Despite the hissing snake sound of Starr’s snare, there’s no suggestion that the women in red is like the disinterested soon to be arson victim of ‘Norwegian Wood’ or ‘prick teaser’ as ‘Day Tripper’ almost had. It’s generally accepted as a paean to Lennon’s late, red-haired mother, Julia and ties in with the creeping nagging sense of death that permeates throughout as Lennon castigates himself for his inability to forget this idolisation in the presence of a woman who could make him happy if he could lose his ideal.  Not to forget gorgeous three way harmonies as good as those lauded on ‘Because’.

‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ from Help! (1965)

You have noticed the lack of McCartney so far in this article. This is mainly as the best of his pre- Rubber Soul material was written ‘eyeball-to-eyeball’ with Lennon or is too well known for this feature. Lennon had provided the more interesting and challenging songs on the previous two LPs as well as the majority of the a-sides around that time. McCartney stepped up his game again with this song which like ‘I’ll Be Back’ was surely good enough to feature in the film the album soundtracks but was recorded slightly too late to make the cut. The thing that I really like about ‘I’ve Just Seen A Face’ is the sheer simplicity of it.  The joy, fate and wonder of falling of love in at first sight captured in the gleeful skipping and cheerful nature of it as it breathlessly sails past us.

‘The Word’ from Rubber Soul (1965)

At this point the band were frankly taking the piss, not content with releasing what dullards think was their first great album they also released one of their best singles, ‘Day Tripper’ / ‘We Can Work It Out’ on the same day! ‘The Word’ could have easily, to my ears, have appeared on Revolver without too much disruption. The lyrics sound like Lennon inventing the hippy anthem before the word phrase had even been coined. Between the comedy piano intro, the stabbing one note guitar bites from Harrison and George Martin’s harmonium at the end we also get one of McCartney’s best wobbling basslines and Starr’s back-to-front drum fills. A song that would point them in the direction explored on ‘Rain’, Taxman’, ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ six months later.

‘I’m Only Sleeping’ from Revolver (1966)

As a young boy my first exposure to this song, aged eleven, was when Suggs was let near it in the mid-nineties. Lennon’s original is one of the first real examples of the band throwing aside any inclination of creating something that could possibly be performed live (along with, of course, ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ which was started earlier that same month.) Lennon’s LSD induced apathy with the world of the squares and love of his bed (hinted at in his annoyance of not getting a good night’s sleep in ‘Norwegian Wood’ and brought up again in ‘I’m So Tired’) is luxuriously spread across this atmospheric track helped mainly by Starr’s dopey drumming, McCartney’s stalking bass and Harrison’s acidic and Eastern infused guitar solo, which was re-recorded ‘frontwards’ after he had learnt it backwards. The best moments however are reserved for Lennon drawling the title as ‘I’m only seeping’ and the yawn exactly two minutes in.  Quick fact, every track on the album is at most three minutes and a couple of seconds. That’s how you do it.

‘Getting Better’ from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (1967)

Despite starting with those urgent pulses of guitar, throwaway Beatle humour (’It can’t get any worse’) McCartney’s ‘Getting Better’ might have been considered a lightweight addition to their catalogue Indeed with the cheerfulness and unrelenting chord progression it  might be looked on as an inferior remake of ‘Good Day Sunshine’ and/or ‘Penny Lane’. That is if it wasn’t one of the best examples of the production techniques employed on Sgt. Pepper (aside from dripping the tracks in cellos.) With the droning tambura, Martin hitting a pianette strings with a mallet and congas add yet another element of Indian mysticism to the mix and stomp to the piece. It’s also worth noting the auto-biographical lyrics added by Lennon about beating women and angry youth adding yet more snap.

‘It’s All Too Much’ from Yellow Submarine (1969)

One of Harrison’s more overlooked pieces. Days before the release of Sgt Pepper and without the pressure of touring the band were almost free to pop into EMI studios at Abbey Road on a whim and almost certainly with his brain fogged with LSD Harrison delivered one of the bands longest songs (an 8 minute mono mix is widely bootlegged) and one of the most vividly psychedelic tracks in their oeuvre. Clattering percussion, Hammond organ, trumpets and with that restrained wave of feedback it’s no surprise that it was covered by The House of Love twenty years later.  Like a lot of the English psychedelic music produced around this time despite the mind-altering and consciousness widening property of LSD there is an amount of turning in one oneself that’s also displayed in acid casualty #1 Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd’s writing. The influence of Lewis Carrol’s Alice through the Looking-Glass reflected in the apparent importance of birthday cake and getting home for tea, these were certainly not themes to be found in the lyrics of the Haight-Ashbury hippies.  It found a suitable home in the Yellow Submarine film after not making it on to the Magical Mystery Tour double EP.

‘Dear Prudence’ from The Beatles (1968)

For all the variety on offer on The White Album, there does seem to be a consensus developing that this is the most representative track from the album. Moving from the psychedelic, sonic experimentation to a simpler, acoustic based form of song writing with George Martin used to add studio trickery and effects to complement, not as a vitally important stage in a song’s development. ‘Dear Prudence’, a call for Mia Farrow’s sister to emerge from her chalet in Rishikesh with it’s almost nursery rhyme simplicity, common on many of Lennon’s songs from this period and coloured by the descending finger picking by Lennon and Harrison’s gently playful stings on lead. After Starr’s temporary departure, McCartney does a passing job behind the drum-kit and the climatic fill, aided by handclaps and piano is one of the bands most quietly euphoric.

‘Cry , Baby Cry’ from The Beatles (1968)

The wealth of material written in the spring of 1968 in India and demoed at Harrison’s Esher mansion on their return that would not only feature on The Beatles but Abbey Road and even all three songwriter’s first few solo albums. Most would agree that a good deal of the material on The White Album isn’t amongst the best that the band wrote. However, there is something persuasive about the way that the album is brilliant sequenced and cemented what could a rambling and incoherent mess into a work fondly thought of and in my case my favourite album of all time. Like ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Sexy Sadie’ there’s an chugging descent of chords and piano as well as more of the childlike lyrics with the song not only taking the form of a nursery rhyme but could even pass for one. That is if Lennon hadn’t punctuated with creepy allusion to a séances. Right at the end, leading into ‘Revolution #9′ is a short burst of McCartney singing ‘Can you take me back where I came from.’ One of the glorious little moments tucked away into the vast folds of this intricate album.

‘You Never Give Me Your Money’ from Abbey Road (1969)

The founding stone on the so-called Long Melody that closes both this record and pretty much The Beatles as recording entity was one of the first tracks attempted by McCartney after the problematic ‘Get Back’ sessions (That would go on to be Let It Be.) It’s one of the saddest things the band put to tape, anyone that has listened to the band’s songs in a marathon session will feel a pull on the heart strings at this point as McCartney mournfully conveys his sense of sorrow that the band has all but disintegrated and squabbles about money, Allan Klein and so on are the order of the day. Being the Beatles it is also inevitable that this song represents them going all out to wrap things up with a flourish with this mini-suite remind us of why we love them and that as they kiss goodbye to the Sixties,  four lads who did so much to define it both at the time (and to those looking back) had ‘nowhere to go’ as a band anymore. None of them were even thirty years old at the time.

Anya Marina

But when it comes to her music, Anya turns into a bold songstress. With a cover of rapper T.I.’s ‘Whatever You Like’ and a merchandise roster including a tee shirt of a rainbow-peeing unicorn (yes, you read that right), it’s clear that she’s a special breed of singer-songwriter.

Anya’s second full-length album, Slow & Steady Seduction: Phase II (January 2009, Chop Shop Records), is chock full of clever lyrics and milky vocals atop roaring horns. A former radio DJ and aspiring actress, we think she’s found her true calling.

Anya recently finished two separate tours with The Virgins and Jason Mraz, is currently supporting Eric Hutchinson and Chris Isaak on tour, and will be joining Paolo Nutini for some September shows in the States. Her music has also been featured on hit television shows such as Grey’s Anatomy and Gossip Girl.

**Our favourite picks: ‘All The Same To Me’ and ‘Move You’

RedTrack

They appeared on Zane Lowe’s Fresh Meat and on Kerrang! Radio. They supported Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly on tour. Soon they’ll be releasing their debut full-length album. This Southend band might be en route to stardom, but faced a nasty detour on the way.

In March 2007, RedTrack were set to record their first single, ‘Pretty Boy/Inside,’ but Phil Blake (bass) was attacked by two men. A meat-cleaver to the head and forearm and a gunshot to the leg, he lost feeling in two fingers on his left hand (despite surgery and twenty stitches).

Fortunately, they made it back to the studio that August and recorded and released the single in October. And with fresh poppy-punk tracks that elicit comparisons to The Libertines, they’ve even impressed Pete Shelley of The Buzzcocks, whose backing vocals can be heard on the band’s third release, ‘Pole Dancer/Addicted to Lust’.

RedTrack’s songs are filled with insanely catchy and morbidly clever lyrics that make this trio the next band to look out for. We can’t get enough of ‘Pole Dancer’ (“As your bright red nails scratch my chest, I wanna die”, sings Billy Wright, in a track about falling in love with a pole dancer. “You may be half-dressed but I know you’re not stupid.”) And their latest single, ‘Cigarette,’ compares romance to a burnt out cigarette, burning a hole in your pocket while you’re coughing up blood. Bloody brilliant!

Be sure to check out RedTrack at one of their London gigs this summer!

Or download this here track as a little introduction: RedTrack – Cigarette

Slow Club

Muso’s Guide caught up with Slow Club in Aberdeen last month whilst they were supporting Jamie T. Here’s what they had to say on the then forthcoming release of their debut album Yeah, So:

The album is out soon, some of the material has been about for a while now. How did you decide what went on, what stayed off?

Charles Watson:  Most of it is pretty new actually; there are re-recordings of older songs though. It felt like an accurate representation of what we were playing live really and were enthusiastic about. There was no label pressure to leave any song on or off, although a few people made suggestions. It came together over time. I think we finalised the track listing on the last day.

There’s also the special edition isn’t there, with some b-sides / early singles and live tracks from Union Chapel to round things up.

C: That’s right.

One of my favourite venues, I wasn’t that gig but each time I’ve been there I’ve been blown away. Must be about 600 or so capacity?

C: Yeah, one of the biggest gigs we’d played at the time.

Rebecca Taylor: Something like that, not sure if we filled it out but our parents came and that kind of thing being just before Christmas as well. It’s really lovely.

So with the bonus CD was that because you wanted to put out a package or more to get the live stuff a proper release.

C: That was more the label’s idea, because we had ‘Wild Blue Milk’, ‘Christmas TV’ and ‘Me and You’ as well as those live songs.

Moshi Moshi are usually quite on the ball with that sort of thing, I did get even more of a sense from the Moshi Moshi 10th Anniversary Party {Held at Matter last year} that everything is quite close knit and family like.

Both: Oh yeah.

Charles: It’s a really nice label to be involved with; it’s weird because nearly all the bands we’ve played with are Moshi bands like The Wave Pictures, The Mae Shi and so on.

On the album there are the faster, singalong tracks but also a few slower, more reflective numbers with a fair amount of heartbreak as well.

R [in a country accent]: Aw yeah!

A few that made me go ‘’aw’ on there actually…

R: Which ones?

The opening line of ‘I Was Unconscious, It Was A Dream’: “I let you say ‘I love you’ / When I know I’ll never say it back” With the song-writing, how does that work between the two of you?

C: We don’t really have a set system. We come up with stuff and work on it together, bounce ideas off each other. We don’t spend much time in the practice room; a lot of it is just on acoustic guitars with anything else added later on. We spend a lot of time on the vocal harmonies.

R: We talk a lot about what we want to put out and we’re quite a professional writing partnership.

Have you been writing any new material after the album was finished?

R: No, we’d have liked to do some but there just hasn’t been time. It’s been a little frustrating, we’ve both been writing separately but not together which has been a bit shit. We like to work through it and that’s how a song happens. We’ve just not been able to, hopefully soon.

Are you hoping for another release, maybe an EP, later in the year?

R: We’re throwing the idea around of two EPs.

C: We’ve thought about doing a Christmas EP and a stripped-down one…

R: Sexy music, red wine

C: … with acoustic guitars and closed harmonies.

This is funny because I had a dream last night…

R: About me?

[Rebecca laughs]

…more of a late night vision anyway, about you and acts on your label covering Phil Spector’s ‘A Christmas Wish For You’.

C: We’ve been talking about that today with Andy, who’s driving us at the moment. Just discussing different Christmas songs and we all agreed that’s the best Christmas album. That ‘Silent Night’ on the end, with creepy Spector’s into. Woah.

R:  We’re going to do two EP’s the Christmas one and the chilled one with more of the emotional shit. They’re going to be wicked, can’t wait.

What’s on the Slow Club stereo at the moment?

R: Charles is well into Bhangra pop.

C: There’s a compilation called Sleepwalking Through the Mekong I’ve been playing a lot and stuff like it. It’s more about the vocals, really amazing vocal sounds then the actual songs for me. It’s basically people in the east and Indian sub-continent trying to do Shaft style soundtracks and there’s a real charm in the way that they don’t quite manage to pull it off in their Bollywood style.

R: Also DJ Skrew, who was this guy in Texas, he’s dead now, that used to drink drowsy cough syrup and sit on his porch doing this really lush slowed down, hip-hop and it’s the most lush, horrible hip-hop in the world, I love it. He made hundreds of mix tapes and had a shop he sold them in. It’s great.

Having heard the album… someone gave it to me

R: Was it a man called Mr. Illegal Download Man?

He might have given it to my someone! I didn’t ask. I’m still going to buy it as I really like it, I like the flow on it, way that you each have a solo spot before ‘Our Brilliant Friends’ and ‘Too Much Crunking’

R: It’s actually called ‘Boys On Their Birthdays’

C: We’re not sure where someone’s got that from,

It’s not called that then, just a made up guess at the title.

R: Yeah, make sure you mention that!

When describing you, a lot of writes mention the White Stripes’ song [Rebecca rolls her eyes and groans] ‘I Can Tell That We Are Going To Be Friends’ Does that annoy you?

R: Yeeah.

C: For me when people say that, it just makes me think they’re an idiot. If you actually listen to that song…

R: Some of our earlier stuff is a bit like that, duets and such. But now it’s just a lazy thing to say.

I think some of it is the boy-girl duo element. It’s not like it’s the sound they are known for. It is their only famous song that is that, hate to use the term, but twee.

R: Yeah, don’t say that.

It strikes me as strange because you wouldn’t say a band sounded like Led Zeppelin if you meant they sounded like their quieter, rustic folk songs.

C: It’s just a bit lazy, likening a band to one song

R: We’d kick ‘em in the tits if they said that

C: Mention that as well; that if you call us twee, we’ll kick you in the tits

R: and in the bollocks. And break your toes with a hammer.

C: Like a painful xylophone

Does this mean you prefer anti-folk instead?

R: Nooooo!

C: We’re not lo-fi at all, we’ve been called punk-folk but shout-folk is probably the closest anyone has come to it. Someone once called us ‘Cutes Manoeuvre’

R: Horrible

C: Good play on words though

R: Yeah, but still horrible. Cute, have you met me? Have you met Charles? Well Charles is quite nice but I’m horrible!  We’re in no way cute.

Finally, Rebecca has a reputation for telling jokes on stage.

R: I have to rely on my comedic skills to get laid.

But recently not so much….the jokes I mean!

R: Ha, I’ve been told to shut up a few times! I don’t feel that funny anymore anyway.

Slow Club’s album Yeah, So is out now on Moshi Moshi. They are playing a few dates across Canada and the USA in August before playing V Festival on the Friday at the Weston Park site. They are expected to tour the UK again in the autumn.

Passion Pit

June 8, 2009

Like Foals, Friendly Fires and The Kooks before them, Passion Pit come into tonight’s OnesToWatch show as the fuel that’s kept the Hype Machine chugging along at full speed during 2009. Undoubtedly the most blog-buzzed band this side of MGMT, the bearded Boston-based five-piece have been planted with every superlative form imaginable since arriving onto the scene, and boy is it easy to see why.

Playing to a packed out audience for the second evening of the five-night Revue, Passion Pit deliver what is without a shadow of a doubt one of 2009’s stand-out pop moments. Kicking off proceedings with the heartfelt rush of ‘Better Things’, it’s clear the bedroom recorded love songs penned for Michael Angelakos’ girlfriend have made a miraculous metamorphosis into a collection of unbridled, overwhelmingly joyous masterpieces.  The crunky opening to ‘Little Secrets’ is entwined with layers of psychedelic swirls and Angelako’s phenomenal falsetto, while the dizzying heights of ‘Make Light’ soars and swoons, showering synth shards over a sweat-soaked crowd so heaving that any furniture to hand gets clambered on in order to gain any sort of vantage point.

Passion Pit at Vibe Bar for Levi's Ones To Watch

That leaves then perhaps the most thrilling finale to a gig you’ll ever likely witness. ‘Sleepyhead’, ‘Moth Wings’ and ‘The Reeling’ all glitter like the anthems that they are, building the overwhelming, endorphin spinning emotions to a heart racing crescendo amongst a now giddy audience. ‘The Reeling’, in particular, taking on a life of it’s own as Angelako emerges from behind his keyboard to interact with a crowd ready to belt back a chorus that will no doubt be etched into your brain all summer long, “Look at me, oh look at me, is this the way I’ll always be, oh nooooo, oh nooooo!” Chest pumping, life affirming, knee quiveringly awesome.

Support for Passion Pit comes in the shape of Hereford heartbreakers Apples, who splice sax and synth-driven funk with playful, bouncing janglebeat riffs, and the elegant and grandiose offerings of Fanfarlo. Taking to the stage with a variety of instruments, including a trumpet, violin and mandolin the London based six-piece played a playful, intelligent set with members swapping instruments and vocal duties as well as a guest appearance by folk troubadour Jeremy Warmsley.