Marnie Stern takes the Best Fit Q&A and tells us all about her dreams of flying, fears of being stuck in limbo and who she’d most like to apologise to.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
That’s a tough one!! Sara Silverman?

What would your superpower be and why?
To fly! Isn’t that everyone’s dream?

What’s your idea of heaven?
Nothing to do but rest and relax.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
To go at my own pace and not compare myself to what others are doing.

What song do you wish you’d written?
Who Are You by The Who

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
Don’t worry so much about what’s gonna happen.

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?
That I’ll stop being able to write songs..and be stuck in limbo forever.

What song will they play at your funeral?
That’s Life by Frank Sinatra

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Gilbert Godfried, Bill Maher, Howard Stern (not related), Jerry Seinfeld and Julia Louis Dreyfus. Basically a bunch of loud funny people. It would be a fun dinner party.

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
My dog for taking her with me on tour so much.

Marnie Stern’s latest album The Chronicles of Marnia is out now via Kill Rock Stars. You can catch Marnie Stern live in the UK very soon, check out a full list of dates here.

Before the Internet hype machine became all-encompassing, before album artwork became an incorporeal arrangement of pixels, in the days when people frequently had physical encounters with a record sleeve or a CD case before they’d even heard – or heard of – any of the music contained within, there was a time when album cover art really mattered. When there were still record shops for us to walk in to and physical records for us to chance upon, artwork was an advert, a statement of intent, even a manifesto.

I can still remember the first time, almost ten years ago to the day, that I picked up British Sea Power‘s debut album The Decline of British Sea Power in York’s now sadly defunct Track Records. I can still remember the momentary consternation it caused my tiny 14-year-old mind, with the artwork’s declaration that this new release from a young band was “British Sea Power’s Classic…”; I remember feeling almost affronted by such confidence. That confidence spread, of course, to the album’s title, a title that felt destined to become an ever-more tedious joke as it was rolled out with the advent of every subsequent BSP release. The mysterious quote, “We ourselves may be loved only for a brief time… Even so, that will suffice… There is a land for the living and there is a land for the dead” which sits below the title, attributed to no-one, seems with hindsight to echo the atmosphere and themes of the band’s music (elegiac, enigmatic, harkening back to a mythologised past). At the time though, it was just as enticing and inscrutable as the rest of what I was looking at. This was, defiantly, artwork as an advert, a statement of intent, and a manifesto.

That year I bought two copies of The Decline of British Sea Power, the second after destroying the first by sitting on my Sony Discman with the CD inside, because I took that album everywhere with me, physically and figuratively. It soundtracked the summer and probably most of the winter too, it tapped into my consciousness. When you’re 14 years old, albums come along every other month that change your life, that leave an indelible mark upon you. The Decline of British Sea Power was, undoubtedly, one of those albums. It is hard to believe that I have now lived with it for a decade, that it is ten years since that bizarre openingtrack, forty seconds of Gregorian chanting, made me wonder just what the hell it was I’d bought.

In the present, my tiny 24-year-old mind is trying to deal with the fact that on the other end of the phone line is Martin Noble, one of British Sea Power’s four founding members. “I’m still in Brighton, just at the shop, collecting some supplies,” Noble tells me. “We’re out on tour tomorrow so I’ve got a bit to sort out before then.” I can’t help but laugh at this homely image. The first ten years of British Sea Power have seen festivals at the highest pub in Britain, a live performance from the Great Wall of China, a US stadium tour with The Killers, an attack from a Geordie in a bearsuit wielding a broken bottle strapped to each paw, and drunken motorboating on a Norwegian lake. I imagine their lives as a crazy rock’n'roll sitcom; I don’t picture them pottering down to the shops while taking phonecalls from over-eager journalists.

“We certainly like to live it up, and that dramatic, crazy side of things is part of what we love about being in this band, but as we’ve grown up with it, we’ve kind of been forced to become normal,” Noble says. “The first time we went on tour to the states, I think we were all drunk for three months before we even realised how long it had been. At some point we had to stop that and slow down to an extent, or I don’t think there’d have been a ‘decade of BSP’ article being written about us.”

The rock’n'roll sitcom image was partly gleaned from the band’s portrayal in the excellent semi-biography Do It For You Mum, which was written by Roy Wilkinson, the elder brother of lead songwriters Yan and Hamilton. The book deals candidly with the trio’s youth and their relationships with one another, which is another factor Noble attributes to the band’s stability. “We’ve never really had any major fallings out. Obviously there’s two brothers in the band, so they argue, but the thing about that is they can say what they like to each other but they’re always going to make up. I think that’s sometimes helped diffuse any tensions we might have had, because they end up taking their little frustrations out on each other rather than on the rest of us. We just keep our heads down,” he says with a wry smile.

Anyone who has ever seen British Sea Power perform live will be well inclined to believe Noble about the band’s relative placidity. It’s not that they are placid on stage – far from it – but that few bands look as overwhelmed with happiness at the sheer exhilaration of performing their songs, few bands create such an intimate connection with their audience.

Likewise, few bands celebrate the launch of a new album in quite such style. On a freezing April evening, I crammed onto a boat on the Thames with British Sea Power and about one hundred of their biggest fans, including Gavin and Stacey actor Matthew Horne, to listen to a Bulgarian a cappella band, followed by a “quiz” hosted by 6Music DJ Shaun Keavney (which consisted of him shouting a mixture of real and made-up German words in an incredibly bad accent and BSP member Phil Sumner playing French horn versions of ‘Rebel Rebel’ and ‘The Boys are Back in Town’). We then all shuffled off the boat and onto an old fashioned red London ‘Routemaster’ bus where the ticket inspector was mad performance poet Jock Scot, and the bus’ terminus was the 100 Club on Oxford Street, where we played ping-pong and had a raffle and watched some girls dressed as Julius Caesar dance. Then British Sea Power played a set and were joined on stage by Jehnny Beth from current Best Fit favourite Savages and their customary giant polar bear friend, and then only after the headline act did the support band, Bo Ningen, come on to play. One day in the future I will tell people this story, and they will insist that it was a dream, or that I have gone mad. But it was not a dream, and I have not gone made; British Sea Power made it happen. Like I said, few bands launch their records so brilliantly. The whole night feels like an example par excellence in what has made this band so special across their first decade.

Electro-pop duo MS MR are children of the ’10s (is that the right terminology?), soaked in Tumblr, the Internet and sounds so vogue you’ll be zapped onto the cover of Nylon just by listening to them.

They couldn’t have appeared at a better time. Adorned with boutique threads and neon hair, my MS of the pair, fashionista Lizzy Plapinger is a star in the making – Florence + The Machine had a similar introduction to icon-dom. Max Hershenow, the MR, produces their sound – self-described as ‘Tumblr Glitch Pop, Soul Fuzz, Electroshock’ – giving the act the aural flair to back up bolshy claims and outrageous statements. They’re razor sharp in every department (they probably even smell fantastic), and poised to take the world by storm. And with that natural segue…

“We’re really inspired by impending doom and inclement weather.” Says Max. “2012 was the year shrouded in apocalypse and we got together to write out best songs in bad weather. ‘Hurricane’ is the perfect example of that. It was written in New York City and it couldn’t have been written anywhere else, that environment is unique. We identified a few other things that inspired us. One was media and our relationships with it and the opportunists and limitations of the world. We were very influenced by media and it has changed the way we write music.”

But it’s not just the rain and social networks that give the outfit their frenetic brand of slick synthery. Lizzy is keen to share her love of pop; there’s a wide-eyed eagerness in her voice: “We love all different genres and time periods. Our love of pop music has been proudly embraced. I think it’s such an overarching genre and means both everything and nothing at the same time. You can find pop in anything and it’s very open ended, it’s in country and rock and rap… we didn’t deliberately reference many specific bands while we were writing, but in hindsight we identify how the music we grew up with had an influence on us.”

As we approach the point of no return for MS MR and the release of their first long-player, Secondhand Rapture, there’s a giddy glint emanating from their eyes. “We’re more excited than nervous. Really ready for people to hear,” says Max like a child who’s been fed an espresso. “We are working on a celebration. Definitely working on it and we want to do something… we’re definitely going to do something…” he rambles, before Lizzy cuts across: “I mean it’ll probably be us drinking 40oz beers and eating pizza. That’s all we need!”

As the dust begins to settle after the creation of Secondhand Rapture, they reflect. “It was a very collaborative process, very fifty-fifty. It happened one of two ways: either Max would write something for me to sing over, or I’d do an a cappella track for him to write over. It was ultimately a really shared process that we didn’t want just one person dominating. We wanted to feel like we’ve both put in the same amount,” recalls Lizzy. “It was recorded at Max’s apartment on just keys and laptop and a few mics – that’s all still in the mix. Tom Elmhirst [Adele/Amy Winehouse producer] was in the studio and added more elements to give it some life, so it wasn’t so confined by stringency of home recordings… but we were also proud that it has come from a place like that. I mean the vocals were recorded in a spare bedroom!”

The time they spent crafting sonic art was infinitely valuable. “I think the key ethos is that we need to stay open to experimentation, continue to let the process be our our guide and not over analyse, let the music out and then go back to think about what is our ‘sound’. Nothing was predetermined, it just happened, and we went back and found the connecting pieces of our musical identity. It’s important to maintain a curiosity.” It was as much a soul-search for them as a recording process, but it was something that was memorable nonetheless. “We loved it. It’s what we love doing the most. It was an adjustment from tour life, which we’d been doing for a while, but it’s obviously something we love and embrace, so we were both happy when were in the studio,” says Lizzy, before Max tacks on: “I think that moment when you realise how everything has come together is great. There a high for creating more.”

‘Fantasy’ is arguably the biggest cut from the record – though ‘Hurricane’ is a major contender. “It was an a cappella track. We are drawn to the organ sound, something so dark and sinister. And I loved making an upbeat, dancey pop song using something so heavy. It’s about a relationship that didn’t go exactly to plan. It’s about the reality being harsher than the dream might be.” It’s a whirlwind of menacing synth flourishes and elegant vocal hooks, tribal drums and massive choruses. So enticing is the track, that Kele Okereke of Bloc Party whipped up a house remix. “That was pretty awesome. We’re big fans, and it’s incredible to have his twist. We’re always interested in hearing different interpretations of our music. We’re solid in our identity, and we love different views of our music, but what he did was certainly new!” Max gushes. Lizzy pipes in: “We really appreciate it. Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm was one of my favourite records of all time, so knowing that he just listens to us is insane!”

But MS MR aren’t just about their recorded noises. They’ve built a solid reputation for exuberant, engaging and raucous live shows. “We’re pretty wild. Things get loose, it’s high energy… maybe people would expect chill and electronica, but I think there’s a rockier vibe to us. We have a live drummer and other live musicians with strange instruments, and we loop stuff through pedals to add a warping glitch. We play off one another. It’s really fun to have the freedom in a live setup to just let go.” They have a busy, busy schedule ahead of them, with festival slots around the world. “We love playing festivals. It’s a fun counterbalance to the smaller club shows. My highlights will be Glastonbury, as it’s Lizzy’s favourite festival but I’ve never been before. Also Splendour In The Grass in Australia – it’s supposed to be on a really beautiful beach. I’m excited for Lollapalooza in Chicago too.” Max is more thoughtful, but Lizzy jumps right in: “Governor’s Ball is up there! It has the best line-up, a tonne of our friends are coming from all over the States, it’s going to be such an epic weekend…”

MS MR have heaps of energy – that’s obvious in their music – and they’re open about intentions. It’s refreshing, in the midst of a wave of mysterious producers, to have an act transparent about themselves and their hopes and dreams. However, they are still coy about what we can expect from their shows this summer: “It wouldn’t be a surprise if we told you…”

It’s the song ‘Sea of Love’ that provides the title of The National’s sixth record; during a sudden lull in the music, Matt Berninger rumbles “If I stay here / Trouble will find me” – a classic National-esque line full of worry and dread.

Yet Trouble Will Find Me often comes across as the least worry-heavy album the band’s produced so far. It’d be quite a stretch to say it’s The National reborn as a carefree act full of the joys of spring, but there’s a lightness of touch – lyrically and sonically – and a variety and depth that make it possibly their best work, alongside 2005’s Alligator (my all-time favourite record, probably. Should that sort of thing matter to you). Trouble Will Find Me is a record that mixes the typically gnomic lyrics of Berninger with much more direct and personal writing, and finds the brothers Aaron and Bryce Dessner (along with the other set of brothers, Bryan and Scott Devendorf, the best rhythm section at work in music today) at the height of their musical powers, crafting complex melodies that have both depth and directness across thirteen excellent tracks. It’s the sound of a band, as Aaron Dessner put it, “freewheeling” again.

The Line of Best Fit recently had the opportunity to chat to bassist Scott Devendorf – a man who has been part of The National’s DNA right from the point he and Berninger first formed a band together back in 1991 – about the writing and recording of Trouble Will Find Me, about how the band finds it difficult to part with some songs, and always being tempted to take things that little bit darker.

At the end of the High Violet tour, I saw The National play a show at Edinburgh’s Corn Exchange, a performance that saw the band free of the last of their promotional shackles and delving into some rarely-played tracks from their back catalogue. It looked like they were having fun doing what they wanted to after close to two years of playing the songs from that claustrophobic album. So, it came as no surprise to read that there was no immediate intention to write a follow-up record – but then something changed. Well, not changed exactly; more that The National couldn’t stay away from what they seem to enjoy doing most. Scott explains more: “Basically we wanted to take some time off, because we’d done a lot of touring for two years or so… but we’re also kinda workaholics, I guess.”

“We don’t like sitting around so sometimes our ‘leisure’ is to work on other projects, so Aaron and Bryce are always doing something either with the band or other projects, or producing records so I think Aaron just started writing sketches for Matt…” Many bands might partake in such practices, but it’s often nothing more than throwing ideas around, ideas that might not make it to the demo stage, but for The National, it yielded some surprising results. “Y’know, we weren’t really expecting anything because we know our recording process always takes a long time,” says Scott, “and our writing process longer still! But Aaron was home a lot, he just had a new baby who was born in September 2011, so he was home and up really early, and up all night sometimes, so he was writing but not really expecting anything to happen right away. Then he sent different things to Matt, and Matt started to react and find some good ideas really quickly”. The exchanges between Dessner and Berninger led to the opening track on Trouble Will Find Me: “The first song on the record [‘I Should Live In Salt’, a song about the relationship between Berninger and his brother Tom] came out really quick, and soon as that came together we realised we were right in the process of writing a new record.”

It seems that out of all the inter-band relationships, it’s the connection between the Dessners and Berninger that drives The National forward, and it was the surprising reserves of energy found by the singer post-tour that led to the creation of the new album. “Matt was really just so focused; I think he had a lot of energy,” notes Devendorf. “The end of High Violet touring had given us a fresh perspective – we all felt good about how it ended up. We played six shows in New York and the band was playing really well. Things were going – I mean, we were happy to be done touring – well and we had ended in a good place. The record had done well, Matt was energised and thought about starting on new stuff… and so we did!” Is it the case, then, that with Trouble Will Find Me the band finds itself a little bit ahead of schedule? Scott disagrees. “In the end we’re kind of on the same schedule we’ve always been on, like three years between every record, two years or a year and a half or so of touring. I guess we’re on schedule but I don’t think we expected to be here, we probably thought we’d take another half a year or so off to get ready, but things progressed.”

What stands out most about Trouble…, certainly compared to the dense and sonically similar tracks on High Violet, is the variety on show. There’s never any doubt that you’re listening to The National, but at the same time the record goes places the band’s not really visited in the past; from the finger-picking quasi-folk of ’Fireproof’ to the motorik drive of ‘Don’t Swallow the Cap’, to the piano-and-trumpet woozy waltz of ‘Pink Rabbits’, it’s the sound of The National freeing up and being willing to experiment a little with their trademark sound. I ask Scott if he agrees with this take, and whether or not this was the intention: “Yeah I think that was definitely a conscious-slash-subconscious idea; basically when we write we try and write a lot of songs knowing that probably only a third will make it to the final record.” So how many songs would the band write and then discard before getting to the final track listing? “I think we started with about 30 different ideas or so, and then got it down to 20, then to 15, then to what’s on the record,” says Scott.  “Through that process we’re always really bad about throwing songs away; we get really attached to certain aspects of them… almost to an unhealthy degree sometimes.”

“We try and ‘leave no song behind’ and focus on that whole group of songs in the recording process and sometimes that leaves us with a lot of variety,” Scott continues. ‘There’s really quiet songs like ‘Slipped’, which is basically the demo version of the song, and this time around there were a lot of songs like that, where there was something about the initial idea or initial sound was recorded in such a way that we really liked it and kept that.” Is there any song that particularly stands out for the band and shows how successful the original version was? “The synthesiser sounds on ‘I Should Live In Salt’ that you can hear doing their little dance in the background,” he begins, “that was there in the original recording. It was hard to recapture, so we kept that aspect. So things like that, from our perspective, give some variety but also some lift… or lilt… a quality.”

Following the release of her stunning 2011 album We Sink, Icelandic songstress Sóley Stefánsdóttir takes the Best Fit Q&A and educates us on classical music, scares us with her super power choice and tells us who she’d most like to apologise to.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Johnny Depp!

What would your superpower be and why?
Killing people with my eyes. Don’t ask me why.

What’s your idea of heaven?
Nah, there is no heaven…

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
Be an honest and good person.

What song do you wish you’d written?
‘The Rite of Spring’ by Igor Stravinsky, 4:33 by John Cage and ‘Dreams‘ by Fleetwood Mac.

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
I would tell me to not worry: I will fall in love one day!

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?
That I have a show and it’s about to start and I haven’t plugged anything in and the loopstation doesn’t work. I always have that while touring, haha!

What song will they play at your funeral?
Apparition De L’Église Éternelle by Messiaen. Such a crazy scary piece!

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Vince Noir, Tina Fey, Stravinsky, Edward Gorey and Amélie.

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
My family for not telling them enough how much I love them!

Andrew Wyatt, better known to most as the front man of electro-pop trio Miike Snow, is here today to discuss his first solo project, Descender – described as a “32 minute meditation into the darker side of Andrew Wyatt, not seen on his latest endeavours”.

Along with Christian Karlsson and Pontus Winnberg – the Swedish writing and production team Bloodshy and Avant who’ve penned for the likes of Britney, Madonna and Kylie – Miike Snow’s eponymous 2009 debut long-player became an underground hit earning Andrew and the band a cult following.

Descender is certainly an ambitious solo project for Wyatt, marking the first time he has written, produced and orchestrated an entire album, using the 75-piece Prague Philharmonic. “I basically worked 16 hours a day for about 25 straight days. I would literally get up at 10am and work all day until 2am. Working non-stop and chain smoking.”

Although the record is a far cry from the alt-pop of Miike Snow, working with the production duo significantly changed how Wyatt approached orchestration: “There’s a song on the record called ‘It Won’t Let You Go’. There’s an instrumental melody that comes in the chorus that is first played on flute and violin and then it moves to the trumpet. It’s something that is very Miike Snow – to take a melody and just move it up to a different instrument. It feels unique and contemporary”.

The record has since been granted a seal of approval by his colleagues – “Yeah, they love it”. Don’t expect another Miike Snow album, however. The album is a haunting and romantic series of soundscapes, showcasing a previously unseen vulnerability to Wyatt. “I wanted the orchestration to be beautiful but somehow skewed and cracked. So I would play things in unusual keys – almost like a scribble.”

Describing the intensity of making this album, I ask if it was, in a way, therapeutic, to be so focused on one specific task. “It was very rewarding. But you don’t realise what’s happening at the time. You’re so concerned about the outcome when you’ve already spent all this money. You’re in crisis mode, so you can’t actually enjoy what’s going on around you.” No wonder, then, that Wyatt is pleased that a video was made for VICE documenting the making of the album. It means he can look back and appreciate the experience for what it was.

Ghostpoet takes the Best Fit Q&A and tells us all about life’s simple pleasures, his day-mares and who he’d most like to apologise to and why.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Forest Whittaker.

What would your superpower be and why?
The ability to walk through walls instead of into them when drunk.

What’s your idea of heaven?
A good meal, good conversation plus some sunshine…I’m a simple lad.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
Work hard but don’t forget to enjoy yourself.

What song do you wish you’d written?
Jimi Hendrix – Hey Joe

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
Don’t grow up too quickly.

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?
I don’t have nightmares, now daymares? That’s a different story…

What song will they play at your funeral?
Iggy Pop – The Passenger

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Albert Einstein, Russell Brand, Samuel L Jackson, Liam Gallagher, Patti Smith

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
I have already so no need to bring that up.

Some Say I So I Say Light is out 6 May via PIAS. Ghostpoet is touring in the UK this month.

May
18 – Kasbash, Coventry
21 – East Village Arts Club, Liverpool
22 – Queens Social Club, Sheffield
23 – The Cluny, Newcastle
24 – Broadcast, Glasgow
25 – Electric Circus, Edinburgh
27 – Brudenell Social Club, Leeds
28 – The Winchester, Bournemouth
29 – Gorilla, Manchester
30 – Village Underground, London

June
02 – O2 Academy, Leicester
03 – O2 Academy, Oxford
07 – The Haunt, Brighton
09 – SUB89, Reading
13 – Boiler Room, Guildford
14 – The Pad, Bedford

Photograph by Sophia Spring.

If we were to compile a list of bands whose music doesn’t match their name, the original incarnation of Austin, Texas three-piece Pure X would be quite far up there. The name Pure Ecstasy suggests MDMA-heavy nights of loved-up bliss, maybe some euphoria … but that never fit the sound this lot made. Pure X are the comedown side of any drug experience: a hazy, claustrophobic and often not a lot of fun.

Their 2011 debut Pleasure, while at times a nocturnal, sensual experience, was layered with a fog of isolation and some bad times. The sound of that album was located in the 90s; there was a bit of shoe gaze, some slowcore, loads of reverb, pedal-heavy and astonishingly good guitar work and mumbled vocals, courtesy of de facto front man Nate Grace. It was recorded live in the studio with no production trickery (the product of having no cash) and remains a loud, uncompromising (yet still a bit mellow) listen.

Cycle forward a couple of years and Grace, bassist and co-vocalist Jesse Jenkins and drummer Austin Youngblood are preparing to release their second album Crawling Up the Stairs. Recorded amidst medical and personal issues, and with money problems still dogging the band, this record is more of an uncompromising listen than Pleasure ever was.

Influenced as much by psych rock and shoegaze as it is by heartbreaking country music, Crawling Up the Stairs is Pure X’s dark night of the soul, an honest and raw musical experience and an often agonizing look at Grace and Jenkins’ personal issues. This time around there’s some musical clarity: again, the record sounds great turned up loud, but with a little more time in the studio we can actually hear Grace and Jenkins sing a bit in their cracked-yet-wonderful way, and those guitars – while still draped in a cloak of reverb a lot of the time – have an added crystalline edge. You can hear this confidence in two of the tracks we’ve heard so far: the organ and guitar strum of ‘Things In My Head’ and the wracked and powerful ‘Someone Else’. The rest of the album is just as good, setting it up to be one of the essential listens of 2013.

After some failed phone calls while the band had no reception on a west-coast tour we finally managed to get a word or two with Nate Grace and Jesse Jenkins to talk us through the creation of Crawling Up the Stairs.

So if Pleasure was the hazy, sexy one, is Crawling Up the Stairs the comedown and the sound of the cold light of day?

Jesse Jenkins:  To me Crawling Up the Stairs is even more of a night time listen than Pleasure. It intentionally has the same arch as a dusk that leads you down into darkness then slowly lets the light pull you back up. I also think it has some sexier moments than the last record. Maybe a different kind of sex though.

Where does the title come from, is it a nod to the troubles leading up to the recording of the album, but also a positive note – about slowly ascending towards something better?

Nate Grace: The album title and song with the same name came from a vision I had. It’s a long story but the short of it is that I was laid up for almost 6 months with a bad leg injury. One night I had a true battle with what Jung called the “shadow self” and what I would call a demon. After it I fell into a dream vision where I was in hell crawling up infinite stairs amidst the worst fear and torment possible.

It’s a very honest record, maybe agonizing and very dark in places – was the album ever likely to sound any different given the personal problems?

JJ: Well the record is a product of a complex series of events and circumstances just like everything else, so in that sense, if one of those minute circumstances was changed in any way, the record could be completely different. Each of our evolving tastes, evolving musicianship, and subconscious minds impacted the sound just as much as any problems we were working through.

How close did it come to not being made, given the issues with injury and medical insurance?

JJ:  There’s never been any doubt. Making records is what we do. Those issues helped us stay locked away and obsessed, possessed even, with/by this record.

How hard was it to write an album, or get the motivation, after the money problems and illness?

JJ:  Money doesn’t motivate people to create; it provides comfort which is the enemy. NOT having money helped us write this record. Money is nothing but paper. Its not even paper anymore, it’s almost completely imaginary.

What was the recording process like compared to the first album? Did you have more time and money to experiment a bit more, given you’ve said the first album was recorded in the way it was due to a lack of funds?

JJ: There was no sense of urgency this time around. We didn’t have any more time or money – we TOOK it. We did not want to go in and make another record the same way we made Pleasure. We won’t make the next record the same way we made CUTS.

Are there any records or musicians that influenced the sound of Crawling Up the Stairs?

JJ:  Desperate country music had a big influence. People like Johnny Paycheck and Gary Stewart that can make you FEEL. Golden era Nashville production aspects were big for us too. Like making acoustic guitars sound like glass knives slicing though your eardrum – in a way that feels good.

The vocals are more upfront this time around; was this conscious due to the personal nature of some of the songs?

JJ: Everything is more up front. This is mostly due to the types of music that we were all listening to at the time. We just wanted to make a really good sounding record and we made production decisions based on what each song told us to do.

How is the song writing divided up between you – how does the band work generally?

JJ:  For this record, we did a lot more collaborative writing in the studio, a lot more experimenting. We both had some fully written songs that we brought in, but several of the songs on the record came out of nowhere in the studio.

You’ve been touring since SXSW – how has the record been received by the crowds? Are you still working out any kinks in the music as you go along?

JJ:  It’s fun to play songs live that no one has heard before. It’s a lot more challenging for us and for the audience. The best response I’ve heard so far is people being like “wow you guys actually sing!” We try at least.

What’s next – is it touring for the foreseeable future? Are you keen to keep writing and get new music out there while you can?

JJ:  Yes definitely a lot of touring, which is great. We’ll always be writing though.

“I never thought I’d make it past thirty, man.” It sounds astonishing, but Bobby Gillespie has fronted Primal Scream for the past thirty-one years. To suggest that he’s enjoyed, during that time, some of the traditional trappings of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle would be an outrageous understatement.

After emerging from Glasgow as one of the earliest members of Alan McGee’s Creation Records stable, Gillespie put an early dalliance with The Jesus and Mary Chain to bed to lead his band through, in order: their acid house heyday on Screamadelica, the infamous, heroin-hampered sessions for Give Out But Don’t Give Up, continued experimentation on Vanishing Point, the politically-fuelled aggression of XTRMNTR and Evil Heat and back-to-basics rock reformation with Riot City Blues and Beautiful Future. So diverse has Gillespie’s musical output been over the course of ten Primal Scream records, the only real constant has been his spectacularly-sharp appetite for hedonism. “I can’t really believe we’re still here.”

More Light is the band’s first album in five years, and is underscored by an adventurousness they’ve seldom displayed since the turn of the century. “I think if you look at any artist’s career, you’re going to see they’ve done all kinds of different stuff. Nobody – not Neil Young, not Miles Davis, nobody made every album great. The genuine artists are always going down different avenues, exploring different routes to try and make something worthwhile. That’s what we’ve been doing from the beginning.”

“We wanted to make a freer, more experimental, more psychedelic record than the last two [Riot City Blues and Beautiful Future], which were both about very straightforward, three-minute pop rock songs that were just verse-chorus-verse-chorus-guitar solo; they were all about traditional songwriting structures. It was fun doing that stuff as well; before that we’d done Evil Heat and XTRMNTR, which were pretty fucking out there, and you reach a point when you’re so far out of the ordinary that you want to do something normalised, something structured. I think the last two records were a reaction to what came before, and now the new one is too; we were ready to do something really free again, something creatively satisfying.”

There’s little timestamps on More Light that reveal it’s been a while in the making – a collaboration with Sun Ra Arkestra came about as far back as 2010, when the Icelandic ash cloud left them stranded in London – but Gillespie’s recollections of the process are already hazy. “I’m at an age now where my sense of time has gotten so stretched out that it’s pretty much non-existent,” he laughs. “But in this band, everything’s a constant process. You’re sort of absorbing by osmosis everything that might inspire you; you’re subconsciously stocking up ideas. We never really stop writing.”

What has ground to a halt, though, is the legendary propensity for debauchery for which Gillespie, and Primal Scream as a whole, were notorious; now six years married and with two young sons, his lifestyle is considerably more settled. The linear nature of those last two albums seemed understandable put into context, with their lack of adventurousness mirrored by Gillespie’s newly-sedate approach to other areas of his life, which makes you wonder how much harder it must be to write as experimentally as he has on More Light.

“It’s a lot fucking easier! The brain’s a lot more sensitive and receptive now; I feel more. I think if I was using I’d be desensitised, disconnected, emotionally cut off – I think that’s the reason you take drugs or drink, to disconnect yourself and cut yourself off from other people, but really all you’re doing is cutting yourself off from yourself, you know. As an artist, you need to feel everything. You can’t cut yourself off from your own creativity. Since I’ve been clean, those walls inside me have disappeared – I’ve got complete access to myself now, and complete access to the outside world. I’m more receptive to new stimuli, new ideas.”

“He seemed like a mysterious, black-clad and unknowable figure to me – a beautiful boy — almost unreal,” recalls Vashti Bunyan when asked about her memories of Nick Drake.

The meeting she speaks of, which took place several decades ago, was brought about by Bunyan and Drake’s mutual producer, Joe Boyd, who had hoped the two artists might come together in the spirit of collaboration. The session proved to be fruitless, Bunyan soon retreated from her career in music, and Drake, tragically, withdrew from the world altogether.

Of course, while their music initially faded into obscurity, it was slowly absorbed into the essential fabric of folk as we now know it, and the reputation of both artists has gradually, steadily blossomed over the decades. By the time Bunyan was finding kindred spirits and eager collaborators in Joanna Newsom, Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart during the mid-2000s, Drake’s status as one of the most hallowed songwriters of his time was already long cemented.

And their legacies are now intertwining in a very tangible way. This is thanks in large part to Boyd, who made his name by producing an almost mythical list of albums from the psychedelic era, including Bunyan’s Just Another Diamond Day and Drake’s first two full-lengths. A longtime champion of Drake’s work, Boyd has envisioned a tribute to the late singer-songwriter that is as organic as the music it is meant to honor. Boyd organized a series of concerts in London and Melbourne, and enlisted an impressive selection of musicians, including Bunyan and Robyn Hitchcock, to cover Drake’s songs in a live setting. Rather than constrain the participating artists in studios, Boyd recorded the performances, spaced out over a period of several years, then edited the results into the newly released album, Way To Blue. Furthering the gravity and authenticity of the affair, Boyd also enlisted Robert Kirby, a string arranger who previously worked with both Bunyan and Drake, to help reimagine a set of originals that have become so deeply ingrained in the minds of listeners.

Though Kirby sadly passed away before Way To Blue was completed, it was his very presence that helped draw Bunyan to the project to cover the majestic ‘Which Will.’ She remembers Kirby as “kind, generous and wonderfully irreverent,” calls his reworking of the Pink Moon classic “beautiful,” and admits that performing the song live after the arranger’s death “had a bitter-sweetness to it.” While her remarks speak to the communal spirit that made Way To Blue possible, it’s strange to contemplate the role that isolation played in the creation of Diamond Day and Nick Drake’s three albums.

These works were born out of an intimacy that, from a modern perspective, is difficult to envision. While it’s unnecessary to recount Drake’s notoriously hermetic qualities, it’s worth noting that Bunyan wrote and recorded her 1970 effort with little knowledge of then-contemporary trends. In fact, she even concedes that at the time Diamond Day was unfolding, she had yet to hear Drake’s albums. “I didn’t know Nick well – mostly just in passing in Joe’s office. Both being shy we hardly spoke a word to each other. At one meeting he turned to the wall rather than speak,“ she explains, adding, “Neither of us knew the other’s music. I had no record player and I had been on the road with no access to radio or music papers or anything for some time — so I had no idea who Nick was when we were both first working with Joe.”

And the same goes for the circle of notables that orbited around Boyd, an in-demand producer who worked with everyone from the Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd of the late-‘60s to the Incredible String Band, the Fairport Convention and Nico. “I had no connection myself to any other musicians at the time and so I don’t really know,” says Bunyan, after being asked about the folk scene of the era that birthed Diamond Day. “I do know a lot of the other people who worked with Joe had enormous respect and liking for Nick – but at the time I myself knew none of them. I was a very solitary musician and sought no others out.”

If this spirit of seclusion and independence potentially informed the work of Bunyan and Drake, it also almost certainly derailed the possibility of a joint effort between them. Boyd may have sensed a sort of affinity between them, and Bunyan herself acknowledges that she and Drake shared “a similar background and maybe a similar musical sensibility in a lot of ways.” The producer arranged for the two to meet, and Bunyan’s recollection of the event does nothing to dispel the aura of mystery that continues to shroud Drake’s life and work.

If anything, her memories of the meeting only support the romantic image of an impenetrable artist: “I remember it very well. Joe asked me to go to Nick’s house where I found him sitting at an upright piano – again quite wordless. I had a tiny baby by then who cried whenever I put him down to pick up my guitar. Nick’s shoulders went higher and higher and it became quite clear that writing together was just not going to happen. And – looking back — we were both too individual to actually work together.”

Undoubtedly, this revelation will provide even more “what if?” scenarios for Drake fans, the sort of questions that always seem to trail artists who disappeared while still in their prime. One can’t help but wonder what might have come from a more bountiful session between these artists – and how Drake might have reacted to the belated success of his work.

In recent years, it has been genuinely touching to see Bunyan graciously welcomed into and applauded by a community of musicians she has deeply influenced, and her palpable joy that came from collaborating with latter-day troubadours is equally moving. Bunyan humbly remarks of the artists she has worked with over the last decade, “they have all been very different in their approach to music – and I have learned a lot from them.”

She even hinted at the tantalizing possibility of a follow-up to her excellent 2005 comeback effort, Lookaftering.“I haven’t played live with my band for a couple of years now – feeling that I need to have something different to go out with again. So I am recording some new songs that I have written over the last five years, recording mostly at home. Hopefully it will all find its way onto an album in the not too distant future,” she tells us.

Heartening as the thought of new music from Bunyan is, it also brings to mind a few more of those lingering questions regarding the ways things might have turned out differently for Drake. Bunyan fondly remarks, “I have so loved being able to work with and know other musicians in the way that I did not do when I was young,” but, had he lived to see his music cherished by succeeding generations, would Nick Drake have sought a similar path? Would he, too, have found enthusiastic young artists to work with? And, perhaps most pressingly, why did it take so long for the world to listen in the first place? “It is interesting to ponder on why this kind of music has at last found an audience and why it didn’t in the first place, but I have no fixed ideas for why – especially Nick’s beautiful music,” concludes Bunyan. “Nick was a genius and I’m sure knew it – and that must have caused so much of his pain.”

As for her own strange and storied history as a musician, Bunyan is able to reflect on it more positively. “It is a wonder to me that Diamond Day has found its way to more people over the years – something I could never have imagined happening,” she marvels after being queried about the ever-expanding legacy of her lone ‘70s album. Fitting that someone who has so eloquently extolled the simple virtues of glow worms, lily ponds and misfit dogs would see this beguiling phenomenon through such a succinctly lovely, awe-struck prism.

A remastered, vinyl edition of Bryter Later and the Joe Boyd directed tribute album Way to Blue are both available now. 

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Me.

What would your superpower be and why?
Immortality.

What’s your idea of heaven?
I see a quiet white space and infinity.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
Simplicity.

What song do you wish you’d written?
None, I don’t know how to write songs :-(

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
Good luck.

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?
I see a big plane getting closer to me.

What song will they play at your funeral?
I’m immortal.

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
David Lynch, Shuki Levy, Steven Spielberg, Edgar Froese and Barack Obama to finally know if Aliens are on earth.

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
I would like to apologise for this interview.

Invada are releasing his debut LP Secret Diary and EP Teenage Color on physical formats for the very first time on 6 May.

Photo by: Andreas Öhlund

Best Fit last spoke to Miranda and Elektra Kilbey back in December. At the time they were called Saint Lou Lou and were riding high on a wave of universal love for their debut single, ‘Maybe You’.

Six months later – it’s all change! A passing-off action from an act with a prior claim to a similar name saw them defending a Cease and Desist and has resulted in the Scandipodean twins (yes, we’re still trying to make ‘Scandipodean’ happen – get involved!) having to go back to the drawing board.

Choosing not to stir too far from the original, the Kilbeys recently resurfaced as Say Lou Lou and accompanied their name-change news with the announcement of a new single, the nothing-short-of-tremendous, ‘Julian’.

The new single and the girls’ forthcoming show for Best Fit at London’s Madame JoJo’s is a good excuse to have another chat with them, so we caught up with the duo for a Skype-rendezvous during their recent visit to Japan. “It’s a good thing we’re not doing video chat”, Elektra says with a giggle. “We’re here in kimonos that we got from our hotel and we’re lying on the bed”. Having arrived in Tokyo only a couple of hours earlier, they are trying to stay up for as long as possible in an attempt to get their body clocks in order. “We’re half-sleeping”, says Miranda. “We’re jet-lagged. We don’t want to fall asleep!”

Although the sisters are used to sharing their time between Sweden and Australia, the burgeoning amount of travel they’re having to take on as their music career takes off poses a bigger challenge to healthy slumber habits. Are they coping ok? “It’s become more normalised so I haven’t reflected on it, really”, says Elektra. Miranda adds: “I think sleep, to us, has become a thing you do whenever you can”. So they seize the moment as and when they can. “If you see that you can have half an hour here and there, you go and do it”. “Go! Go! Go!”, Elektra pipes up. “We try and catch up on it all the time. But it’s also so much fun that I think –“ [here Miranda chimes in:] “It’s never boring – we’re always going somewhere and doing things that we think are so much fun”. “And we’re still so young, Doron!”, Elektra interjects. The use of my name here, coupled with her tone of voice, ensures that if, per chance, I erroneously thought that I was chatting to a pair of old pensioners, I should think again. “We’re so young”, she repeats, “we’re only twenty-one!”

Well, in any event, all this extensive travel must surely be good for their air-miles. “Yeah”, Elektra says with a hint of realisation in her voice. “We hope someone is keeping a tab on our Frequent Flyers”. That should be the primary function of a manager, I suggest. Miranda agrees. “I’m going to ask him, actually, when he gets back”.

So what about this name change, then? “Well, another artist had a similar name and didn’t allow us to keep ours”, Elektra says. I ask whether this came as a big blow to them. They consider this for a moment. “It was the first big difficult thing for us to go through because of all the legal trouble –“ [here Miranda interrupts Elektra – they often complete each other’s sentences, as twins are prone to do] – “we felt that our identity was much more about the music than the name or anything else, I mean obviously we were connected to the name but the blow was more to the time and money and our energy, just because it took so much out of us fighting the lawsuit”. After a small pause Miranda continues: “It was the first big obstacle for us in our career. Yes, it was really hard and really upsetting but changing the name wasn’t as hard as we initially thought. People were, like, “Ok!”. As long as you don’t make it into a big deal it’s not going to be a big deal”.

They kept the ‘Lou Lou’ part of the name out of deference to a formidable great aunt. In interviews, the twins often portray her as a bit of a scary character. “Poor Lou Lou”, Elektra says in mock-pity. “She’s got a bad rep because of us. I was scared our Nana was going to be like, “you’ve crossed the line, girls!”. But, instead, she was like, “yeah, she deserves it”.

Debut single ‘Maybe You’ came out via Parisian label Kitsuné in 2012, but the twins have since set up their own record label, appropriately named à Deux. “When you’re making music, the scariest bit is to give it away to someone”, says Miranda. “It’s like you give birth to a baby and then you have to give it away to someone else to raise it. And you’re sitting by and watching someone else with it and we were scared of giving it away”. Creating their own label gives them the chance to do things their own way. “It allows you to call the shots”, Elektra explains. “It’s going to be really exciting to be creative director of your own career”.

At the time of our first interview last year, it was too early in the recording process for the girls to be able to give us a real indication of its sound. A few weeks ago they released their Sounds of Spring mixtape which brought together haunting mid-tempo cinematic soundscapes and dramatic grooves, featuring the likes of Rhye, Tame Impala, the Cardigans and Kate Bush. I ask them whether the mixtape is reflective of the album’s mood. Elektra is first to reply: “Yeah, I think it is. I don’t think our music is necessarily similar, but I think that’s our inspiration”. Miranda adds: “Our inspiration for the record will be a combination of Swedish harder-pop like The Cardigans – so, Swedish vibes, combined with more quirky, airy Kate Bush sounds. There are definitely vibes in the mixtape that are common to our sound but I can’t say that our record will end up being anything like it”.

The Chapman Family‘s frontman Kingsley takes the Best Fit Q&A and tells us all about why being in KISS is better than having any superpowers, the importance of politeness and who he’d most like to say sorry to.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Nicholas Hoult for the early years, Tom Hardy for the main chunk and Malcolm McDowell for the end.

What would your superpower be and why?
I’m not really concerned as to what superpower I have as long as I get to wear a cool outfit like General Zod in Superman 2. Most superheroes are narcisstic jerks anyway and it’s all because their powers are too much for them or daddy didn’t love them enough as a child. I’m doing alright without lasers firing from my eyes plus my dad has always been pretty cool with me so as long as I get to wear something awesome and sparkly I’ll be happy. A bit like KISS infact – no superpowers whatsoever but they look fantastic.

What’s your idea of heaven?
>Behind the radiator in Eraserhead.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
That manners cost nothing.

What song do you wish you’d written?
David Bowie, ‘Heroes’.

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
Quit that job in the call centre earlier as you’re rubbish at it anyway and get used to the fact that pretty much all of the girls you’ll think are “the one” aren’t “the one”. And don’t buy half the albums you buy during the “New Rock Revolution” of the early 00s as they’re terrible, date really badly and no one wants to buy them on eBay ten years later.

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?
The floor is covered in slugs and the only way out is really far away in the corner then someone comes in and starts to fight you and you try to fight back but even though you want to you can’t as your arms are all sleepy and heavy so you just have to take getting punched for a bit before you wake up.

What song will they play at your funeral?
Aerosmith‘s ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing’ as I’m planning to die by saving the world from a massive meteorite and let Ben Affleck marry my daughter.

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Oscar Wilde, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Vic Reeves, Sylvia Plath and Mark Rothko.

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
I once said some pretty nasty things on the internet about the Ting Tings‘ proposed second album title Kunst in regards to the confusion that their post-modern usage of the German word for art may cause with a far more terrible word more regularly heard in the workplace, rough nightclubs or championship football grounds when someone does something really bad. I’d like to apologise profusely for that and I was in no way implying that the aforesaid band were in fact in any way the aforesaid offensive word in question.

‘This One’s For Love’, the new single by The Chapman Family, is released on 3 June. The band tour England throughout May and June, dates below.

May

3 – Leaf Cafe, Liverpool (Liverpool Sound City)
4 – Friar’s Court, Warrington
5 – Festy @ Spensley’s Emporium, Middlesbrough
11 – Z Fest @ Mad Ferret, Preston
31 – O2 Academy 3, Leicester

June

1 – The Exchange, Bristol
3 – The Garage, London
4 – Roadmender, Northampton
5 – LIttle Civic, Wolverhampton
6 – The Bowery, Sheffield (free entry show)
8 – Long Division Festival, Wakefield

Photograph by Jacob Churchill

Since the inaugural Record Store Day in 2007, the annual celebration of music and local record shops has risen to become a highpoint in the diary of both hardcore vinyl crazies as well as the more sedate music lover.

This year, the event is supported by some incredible live music in the UK capital with the likes of Wire, Smoke Fairies, Matthew E White and Steve Mason lined up to play sets in Soho’s Berwick Street while leathery mod Paul Weller drops into East London’s Rough Trade for an evening set. Up in Scotland, Fence Records’ Girl Canaveral and eagleowl join Honeyblood and Trembling Bells‘ Mike Hastings at Edinburgh’s Vox Box and over in Wales the legendary Cardiff store Spillers has sets from Sweet Baboo and Railroad Bill.

But most will be focused on the real prizes for the day: those silver or black discs of audio pleasure pressed up with the rarest of the rare tracks and released in highly limited numbers. You’ll see them (and us) clutching shopping lists, lined up at an ungodly hour, waiting for the doors to open. With hundreds of incredible releases on offer, it can be difficult to know where to start so we asked our writers and staff what they’d be grabbing from the shelves first…

10. MGMT – Aliens Days

Format: Cassette
Label: Columbia
Release type: RSD Exclusive Release

Limited edition, collectible cassette single of the first music from their upcoming album, comes with a digital download code.

The Connecticut psych-pop duo have been rather quiet of late. After diving headfirst into public consciousness with the disturbingly catchy though inconsistent Oracular Spectacular (tracks even featured on the cultural zeitgeist that was Gossip Girl), Goldwasser and VanWyngarden followed up by embarking on the art-pop anglophile odyssey that was Congratulations, which though the better of the two releases, fell flat in the face of their previous chart admirers.

So with Oracular producer David Fridmann back on board, will we see MGMT reconcile with fans of their club friendly hits? This seems uncertain, as live-recordings of Alien Days suggest it wouldn’t feel misplaced on Congratulations, with its slow-burn, cosmic prog-rock tinged foray into spiritualism covered with VanWyngarden’s trademark near-whisper vocals, which helm the song’s spoken-word intro.

If that’s not enough to get excited about, it’s being released on cassette – take that retro vinyl enthusiasts! Well, I’m intrigued to hear the studio version, and provided I can locate my Walkman, I’ll find out early on Saturday when I get to hear what’s likely to be the first track from their forthcoming self-titled LP.

Jason Williamson

9. Music Finland with The Line of Best Fit – The Limited Record Store Day Edition 2013

Format: 10″ Vinyl
Label: Music Finland
Release type: Record Store Day Exclusive Release

Six track vinyl, 1,500 copies only and absolutely free.

It might stink of more than a touch of nepotism to include this in the list but we’re immensely proud of the Best Fit-curated selection of Finnish indie and electro that’s being released on Record Store Day. We’ve worked closely with the people at Music Finland to choose six of the best bands coming out of the Nordic country and 1,500 10″ vinyls will be available from every store in the UK as well as several across the world.

One of The XX‘s favourite bands, Phantom, feature on the release, along with a number of artists we’ve kept a close eye on in the last 18 months – LCMDF, Sin Cos Tan, K-X-P and Husky Rescue. There’s also a track from the incredible Millennium, the new project from Ville Haimala of Helsinki/Berlin based house group Renaissance Man. The best thing of all, of course, is the record’s being given away for free!

Paul Bridgewater

8. Big Star – Nothing Can Hurt Me 

Format: 12″ Vinyl
Label: Omnivore Recordings
Release type: Record Store Day Exclusive Release [Special Pressing]

Limited First-Edition 2-LP 180-Gram on colored vinyl of the soundtrack to the soon-to-be released documentary film (Magnolia Pictures). All previously unissued versions of classic Big Star songs. Download Card Included.

1. O My Soul (1973 Demo)
2. Give Me ANother Chance (Control Room Monitor Mix 1972)
3. In The Street (2012 Movie Mix)
4. Studio Banter (1972)
5. Try Again – Rock City (2012 Movie Mix)
6. My Life Is Right (Alternate 1972 Mix)
7. The Ballad Of El Goodo (Alternate 1972 Mix)
8. Feel (Alternate 1972 Mix)
9. Don’t Lie To Me (Alternate 1972 Mix)
10. Way Out West (Alternate 1973 Mix)
11. Thirteen (Alternate 1972 Mix)
12. You Get What You Deserve (Alternate 1973 Mix)
13. Holocaust (Rough 1974 Mix)
14. Kanga Roo (Rought 1974 Mix)
15. Stroke It Noel (Backwards Intro 1974)
16. Big Black Car (Rough 1974 Mix)
17. Better Save Yourself (2012 Movie Mix)
18. I Am The Cosmos (2012 Movie Mix)
19. All We Ever Got From Them Was Pain (2012 Movie Mix)
20. September Gurls (2012 Movie Mix)

Big Star have done pretty well from the last couple of Record Store Days, with some fine reissues of their three studio albums. Last year’s release of Third stood out in particular – 1 in every 300 copies of contained a 1970s test pressing of the record.

All of the tracks on this compilation are versions that haven’t officially been issued anywhere else. While serious fans of the band will probably own a lot of them via some of the incredible bootlegs that have popped up in the last thirty years, this release promises a level of quality beyond those unofficial CD/vinyl releases and sub-par bitrate mp3 versions.

If the mix of ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’ on this record is in fact the one from the bootleg I own, I’ll be a very happy man…

Paul Bridgewater

Though it might feel as if it’s been around forever, Record Store Day in fact only launched in 2007, a time when physical sales of music were lower than a Leonard Cohen cough.

Its ambassadors were Metallica, who’ve riled against the Internet’s increasing dominance of the musical business ever since the invention of Napster singlehandedly limited their last two records to selling a mere eight million copies, but don’t let that put you off – Record Store Day is brilliant, like Christmas, but with even more records.

Record Store Day’s raison d’être seems to me to be twofold; get people excited about records, and get people excited about record shops. And it works. I fucking love Record Store Day. It’s the only time I get up before midday on a weekend unless there’s a fire, eager to queue with friends outside shops hours before they’ve even opened in the hope that I get to spend lots of money on limited edition runs of things I don’t need. And I don’t even have to feel bad about wasting the cash ‘til like, Sunday, because it really feels like you’re part of something, and part of something good. Once again, the number of shiny things I’m hoping to come to own this year is higher than the number of ambitions I have in my life, and for a little while on Saturday morning will seem infinitely more important too.

Retailers, labels, artists and fans alike seem in agreement that something about the current music business is unsustainable. Those involved in Record Store Day do their bit to address the parts of it they’re able to by putting the excitement back in to record shopping, both in offering products that are once in a lifetime buys and in making the shops more thrilling than any HMV has been in living memory. Gigs, signings, band members working behind the tills – participating shops on Saturday will be a great place to spend a day, regardless of whether you’re picking up any music (but, y’know, do).

Yet even in the friendliest of outlets, buying actual copies of records on any normal day simply isn’t that exciting any longer, which is perhaps why the products themselves are increasingly appealing to shrinking circles of prehistoric geeks. Those who hold physical formats closest to their hearts are often thought of as folks who are “all about the music, man”, but in reality they’re anything but. So much of the charm of record collecting is completely non-musical, and shops would do well to appeal to this side of these curious creatures.

The fun is in collection building, in artwork, in the fetishisation of the alphabet. It’s rummaging around shops; it’s the joy of unwrapping something or taking it out of its box. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the way we live, in the same way there’s nothing immoral about having an erotic fixation on shoes. But shoe fetishists and record collectors have another thing in common – neither calling is first and foremost about music.

Sure, there’s an even smaller group who swear by the idea that music sounds better on vinyl, and they have a point. They also probably have a very expensive turntable, some very nice speakers, and a collection full of the kind of vinyl you can’t easily pick up in the RSPCA shop on North London’s Blackstock Road. I’d argue such folks are vastly outnumbered these days by people browsing the Internet for new MP3s, Soundcloud streams or YouTube clips, and I’d further posit that this newer species are just as much about “the music” as I am, pedalling down to Flashback on my Penny Farthing. One of the things that keeps me excited about music is that there will always be something that scares me, and people younger than me who disagree and want to hear it, regardless of the medium it reaches them in. How do shops, and the music business at large, keep them happy? It’s an important issue to address, as these people are invariably younger than the people who are selling them the music. They’re going to live longer than you, record retailers. Pay them attention, and they might pay you money.

“On Ghost Blonde, all we had was our practice space and some cheap mics. You can hear the Metallica cover band practicing next door on some tracks. Things were different this time.”

Laura Lloyd, guitarist with No Joy, is recalling the recording process for their debut full-length. She’s speaking, via Skype, from the band’s hometown of Montreal; it was a similar Internet platform that served as the breeding ground for No Joy, when geographic distance prevented her from collaborating with bandmate Jasamine White-Gluz in person. “She was living out in LA and I was here, in Montreal. We would send each other really badly recorded MP3s via email and work that way. Ironically, we still do it that way despite living fifteen minutes from each other now.”

Performing live as a four-piece, I suggest I’d found it difficult to find any conclusive evidence on just how many members comprise No Joy. “I’d say we’re a trio. Our drummer, Garland Hastings, has been with us for a while now and he has a lot of input in the songs, and writes some as well. I think at first it was more of a duo thing because we didn’t have any solid members in the band – they couldn’t tour, or were ‘creatively unavailable’, but now that Garland’s been part of the set up consistently, it’s a natural progression that he would write with us as well.”

After signing to Mexican Summer in 2010 – and having immediately been given a tight deadline to turn in Ghost Blonde – the band embarked on an exhaustive touring schedule, with high-profile support slots to Wavves and Best Coast alongside their own shows (Bethany Cosentino having declared them “the best band ever” on Twitter). It was a process, though, that left them creatively wrung-out; an entire record, written and recorded in late 2011 in New York with Sune Rose Wagner of The Raveonettes, was scrapped, with the band going back to the drawing board for Wait to Pleasure.

“I guess we were just sort of burnt out and depressed; we weren’t really in our right minds. We recorded [the aborted LP] after a year of touring for Ghost Blonde. I suppose we sort of felt that we needed to keep going, but after having it mixed and sitting with it, we kind of all agreed that we didn’t really like it. It gave me a feeling of dread thinking that we were going to put it out; knowing that I didn’t put my best work forward, and feeling just totally creatively empty. It wasn’t a good feeling – the songs themselves aren’t terrible, but I can’t really separate them from how I felt at that time. Fortunately, no one pushed us to put it out, so we didn’t. Our label offered us their beautiful studio to start over and that’s exactly what we did.”

The making of the new effort wasn’t any less pain-staking than before, though. “We had two straight weeks at the studio in Brooklyn, which we were in for a minimum of ten hours a day. A lot of the songs on the record only had somewhat loose sketches before entering the studio, so we definitely spent a lot of time forming them there. I never really thought of it as a quick process, considering we spent at least a hundred and sixty hours recording. It was more of a dense process, which I think worked in our favour.”

Having already abandoned material they were unhappy with – and ending up with more time on their hands as a result – I wondered whether the tracks that ended up on Wait to Pleasure came about as the result of an intentional change in direction. “We definitely had some new ideas, but I wouldn’t say I’m one of those people that sets out to deliberately change things up, and I don’t think we did;  we just presented another aspect to our sound that we were probably kind of lightly hinting at before anyway. I think it might be more obvious now because we had access to a full studio with tons of instruments, so where we couldn’t have bongos on our first record, we could on this one. To an extent, you are a product of your environment. That said, I also know that Jas and I were both listening to a lot of Primal Scream and baggy era bands and going into the studio and having a producer was exciting because there were definitely some things we were inspired to try (drum machines, samples etc) but didn’t really have the means or technical expertise to execute before. I think that’s the key difference on Wait to Pleasure.”

No Joy’s signature is their incredibly dense, layered guitar sound, drenched in reverb; Laura recently commented on Twitter that “you could literally listen to [new single] ‘Hare Tarot Lies’ on loop and not know when it starts/ends.” That huge wall of noise, though, has to start somewhere. “It’s usually just a riff or a beat. Jas and I still like to write riffs, record them and send to each other, so a lot of songs are built that way. I think once you have a process it’s kind of hard to change the way you do things. Now that the record is finished and we lived that experience out in the studio, we might have a different approach in future, but that remains to be seen I suppose. I’ve recently purchased a MIDI keyboard and am teaching myself how to use Ableton, but so far I’m only capable of writing R&B so who knows what’s next.”

With the guitar very much at the forefront for No Joy, Jasamine’s vocals are, for all intents and purposes, treated as just another instrument in the mix, distorted and often drowned out. As a result, I suggest, are the often-unintelligible lyrics given less consideration than if the listener was hearing them crystal clear? “She’s very careful with the lyrics she writes, but not too keen on sharing them. The vocals just aren’t the voice or core of our songs; it’s just that, aesthetically, Jasamine and I both prefer songs where you can’t really understand the vocals or hear them all the time. I appreciate the ambiguity of that, and I like it even more when people try to decipher the lyrics and post them online, if only for own personal amusement. They’re always wrong, by the way.”

The foreseeable future is going to see No Joy pretty much permanently on the road, with Laura hoping to reach the UK and “as many new places as possible.” It’s an opportunity for me to pick a bone with the band, with their last show in my native Manchester having been called off at the last minute a couple of years back, with no explanation given. I was hoping for as rock and roll as possible an excuse – maybe they’d set fire to all their instruments in a drug-fuelled craze the night before, or drank so much whisky that they’d passed out and couldn’t play, or just some kind of similar tale of excess and debauchery. “I remember that! That sucked. There was a power failure at the venue, so we ended up going to Wagamama instead.” No joy.

Wait to Pleasure will be available on 23 April via Mexican Summer

Nashville’s William Tyler is an excellent guitar player.

His guitar work is heard on some of the finest American indie records of the past 10 years, he was the sideman for Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Silver Jews and Lambchop. “A lot of the process of doing my own music has been learning how to step away from a sideman mentality, to be comfortable in my own musical skin,” he says, leading to Tyler’s second album, Impossible Truth, an instrumental guitar album that you might actually want to listen to. Joe Satriani this ain’t.

He reflects upon the influence of his contemporaries, the people he has played for in his career, and interweaves them with social and political themes of modern American life. That may sound like a difficult thing to achieve on an instrumental record, but Tyler manages it.

“I guess it’s somewhat presumptuous to say ‘This is an album about the end of the world and the decline of the American empire through the eyes of someone who is simultaneously daydreaming about the end of the 1970s and terrified of the future, with a redemptive love story in there as well’ – and then not provide any lyrics. I think it’s enough to just be explicit with intent, to explain things in interviews like this or to conjure emotions through the titles.”

One song title, ‘Geography of Nowhere’ is also the name of a book by American author and social critic James Kunstler. His books on American suburban history, poorly planned civic areas and peak oil take on great meaning to Tyler. The book itself takes a pretty grim look at a declining landscape. Vacuous malls, hypermarkets, empty buildings, civic spaces declining in function. It becomes part the thematic tapestry of Impossible Truth.

“I knew I wanted it to be essentially about the end of the world, peak oil, vanishing water, dead cities, perhaps even a nuclear cataclysm at the end. And I also wanted it to be reflective, to be about some kind of innocence and cultural clarity we lost at the end of the seventies, not just in politics, but in film and music too.”

“The failure of the film ‘Heaven’s Gate’ had a lot to do with it [a western film starring Jeff Bridges and Christopher Walken that flopped at the box office]. It was released right around the same time that Reagan was elected and John Lennon was shot; 1980 was this huge paradigm shift for America and my parents’ generation, and it happened to be the year I was born.”

How do you write an instrumental song, it must be difficult to formulate structure with no words to guide you? “It’s very difficult and it takes me a while to finish compositions,” Tyler responds. “I guess in some abstract way when I feel all of the colours in the room refract the light the right way, or the story seems to have a proper coda etc, some part of me just knows it’s finished.”

To understand the themes of Impossible Truth doesn’t take much undertaking, but an interest in the great American culture of the 70′s and 80′s is key. The album’s title is a reference to an early Saturday Night Live sketch by comedian Albert Brooks. The influence of Laurel Canyon, the L.A. neighbourhood which housed Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is a huge motif of Tyler’s work. It seems to be Tyler’s bag; unambiguous, (somewhat) universal influences presented in an ambiguous way.

Impossible Truth sounds like a stereotypical Laurel Canyon record, more than a lot of records from the era. Tyler says there was intent behind this, but I suggest that his view of the era is romanticised; “I’m not sure if my view of that era is romanticised per se. There is something undeniably fascinating and compelling about that moment in American musical history. For a long time it seemed so utterly naïve and cynical at the same time. All the drugs and hedonism and this smooth music coming out of this small, insular world.”

Laurel Canyon helped form this record in more than a stylistic sense, as Tyler’s girlfriend was once married to someone from the Canyon scene at the time.

“When she and I met, I was aware of who he [the ex-husband] was and I think I projected a lot into that. I felt as I might be standing in the shadow of this older singer songwriter guy from this bygone era that I had daydreamed about. I think I gave that too much power, as a lot of people do when they feel insecure about new relationships. I channeled that angst into the making of this record.

“A lot of it was a purging, a catharsis. I didn’t want to feel as if I was standing in the shadow of anyone, a past love, a lost era. It gave birth to a phrase that I use to describe a mood in this record, ‘the tyranny of nostalgia’. We shouldn’t let the past, the ghosts steer us too much. They should be acknowledged, honoured even, but they aren’t necessarily relevant to the present. A lot of this album is me laying all these existential ghosts to rest and walking off into the sunset with my lady.”

Impossible Truth will be released on 06 May via Merge Records and William Tyler will be laying the following UK/IE tour dates:

May
03 Brighton, The Palmeira
04 Edinburgh, Red Lecture Hall
05 Manchester, The New Oxford
06 Cork, Crane Lane Theatre
07 Belfast, McHughs
08 Dublin, Whelan’s
09 Cardiff, 10ft Tall
10 Falmouth, Beerfwolf
12 Winchester, The Railway
13 London, Cafe Oto

Mudhoney’s fine recent LP Vanishing Point is a milestone not only for the band, but their label Sub Pop too – it represents the 25th anniversary of a pairing that has yielded some of the best guitar music arguably since punk rock’s first wave fizzled out in the early Eighties (or earlier, depending on how puritanical you’re feeling). 

As this discussion with Mudhoney guitarist Steve Turner proves, neither are showing any signs of slowing down. Turner – the man perhaps most responsible for defining the band’s gritty, visceral sound – explains how he’s never usually a huge fan of their records immediately after completion, yet has this time retained a desire to get straight out on the road and bash the hell out of the new songs. The only thing preferable would be to write and record a bunch of even fresher ones, immediately.  He’s nearly 50.  Here, he discusses everything from the band’s early days as Sub Pop’s flagship band, via their mid Nineties stint on a major label and the deaths of much beloved contemporaries, to what seems to be the most exciting bit – whatever comes next.

It’s been five years since the last Mudhoney record, which is the longest gap in your back catalogue. What took you guys longer this time?

“That’s weird, because it seems like we’ve been doing it [Mudhoney] constantly, with all the shows and stuff. I honestly thought it was four years, which tells you something. Recording for us generally goes quickly. It was basically two weekends last year; one was in April, one in September. Then we finished up overdubbing and putting some fairy dust on it in December. We cut the basic tracks pretty quickly, but this time (singer/guitarist) Mark [Arm] messed around with more things after the fact. I was in Portland, so I skipped some of the overdubbing days where the synthesiser was put on and things like that.  None of us are really particularly engineer minded or too interested in the knob twiddling itself, but of course, we have a pretty good idea of what we want.”

What with having known each other as friends and musicians for so long, do you have to make an effort not to fall in to familiar grooves? Or are they the things that make Mudhoney distinct?

“This one to me was more relaxed, we just let it flow. Especially after The Lucky Ones, which was a definite departure for us in that Mark didn’t play any guitar on it – it stands out to me as a different sounding record because of that. We did it very quickly; it was raw, kind of a punk rock mid life crisis! I love that record though. I was happier with that record than most. There are always songs where I think, “oh, that’s not quite fleshed out all the way”, or songs I just don’t like. I’m never totally pleased with any record. But The Lucky Ones came closer to pleasing me than the ones previous. With Vanishing Point, I tried not to even really value judge it whilst we were doing it, just to let it go.  We kept it pretty loose, but we knew we weren’t just going to make a screaming punk rock record again. Actually, what it kept reminding me of was something that we can all relate to from our youth, which was the SST catalogue, post Black Flag’s My War, where they threw the rulebook out. They were throwing a lot of weird bands at us – some of them didn’t work, some did, but it was all a U.S. underground version of post punk. Husker Du, Minutemen, Black Flag, Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth – the only thing they had in common was that they were coming out of punk rock and searching for other places to go. To me, Vanishing Point sounds like that stuff. In my mind there was that same theme of ‘what do you do after punk rock?’”

How long does it take you to get some distance on a record, to be able to judge it as good or bad, or know where it sits in your catalogue? Can you do that the minute you press ‘stop’?

“I’m never in love with the thing we just recorded. A lot of people just get excited because it’s the newest thing, I’ve never thought that. I defer to friends, and more people across the board people seem to be saying good things about this record, which is interesting.”

What makes Vanishing Point different from The Lucky Ones, or indeed anything you’ve done previously?

“I think we were paying attention to each other more. We didn’t know what we were trying to do, so it seems like we were playing off each other better and with less preconceived ideas. There’s an eleventh song we recorded that didn’t make it on the record. It was just a little too far out there. Mark didn’t think it fit on the record – which is fine, we got ourselves a seven inch – but that was even weirder, the guitar was all flanged and super affected which we don’t usually do.”

The chorus of children coming in really made me laugh.

“We thought that was funny too! That’s a perfect Mudhoney joke to us, it’s a song called ‘I Like It Small’, and there we are just adding more and more crap to the end. We think that’s really funny and clever. It’s pretty obvious though, right? We’re not very subtle! We’re pretty obvious.”

You mentioned a lot of SST bands, and of course it’s Sub Pop’s 25^th anniversary this year too.  It occurred to me that you’re probably the only ones still going from around that time. You’ve even outlived Sonic Youth!

“[Laughs] They’ve got more years on us though, they started earlier than we did! But that’s kinda true I guess, huh.”

Why do you think you survived when your contemporaries are no longer with us for one reason or another?

“It’s our relaxed attitude. If we didn’t want to do it for a while, we didn’t do it for a while. I mean, how many times have people thought we broke up? We never actually said we broke up, but it’s assumed that we broke up when Matt [Lukin, original bassist] quit, or it’s assumed that we broke up when I went back to college in 1990. We always just said, why break up? If we don’t want to do it, we don’t do it. But that said, after Matt quit we took a solid year off, and once we started doing it again we realised we liked doing it. We realised it wasn’t our job anymore, and that we didn’t owe anybody anything with it. It’s harder to schedule in now, but it’s important to us, so whatever we can do, we do. We don’t get on anybody’s back – if one of us can’t do something, we all have to say no.”

With her brand new album The Still Life due out tomorrow via Bella Union, Alessi Laurent–Marke – aka Alessi’s Ark – takes the Best Fit Q&A and tells us all about her nightmares, her fantasy dinner party and who she’d most like to apologies to.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Hayley Mills.

What would your superpower be and why?
To fly. Not only would it be beautiful to see the world from above, but I’d love to deliver the hugs in person that I think about so often. Friends and family are sometimes so far. Physically.

What’s your idea of heaven?
A world wide picnic. Warm weather, lovingly made food and lots of time together, outside.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
If you have your health, you have everything.

What song do you wish you’d written?
Red Sun by Neil Young.

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
Three things ; be patient, don’t worry and you will find a friend.

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?
That I have to return to school to sit an important exam that I’m not prepared for. Or having to sing a Japanese song I cannot get my mind around, in front of all of the students at the secondary school I went to.

What song will they play at your funeral?
I’ll leave it to my family to decide. We like a lot of the same music. Something they can dance to.

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Pina bausch, Jacques Tati, Win Wenders, Werner Herzog and François Truffaut.

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
Anyone I’ve hurt because I didn’t mean to.

Tonight’s UK charts will reveal decisively whether a track from the the 1939 American musical film The Wizard of Oz – which the public are buying to mark the death of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – will be the biggest selling song of the week.

As of yesterday (13 April) ‘Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead’ was in the top position in the iTunes chart with another Thatcher-related track (Not Sensibles ‘I’m In Love With Margaret Thatcher’) close behind.

Of course the wider issue – and one that has dominated the UK media this past week – is whether the track will actually receive airplay at all. The BBC, who broadcasts the UK’s main weekly music charts, is currently committed to playing only a five-second clip from the song, during a news report to provide some context to the track’s sudden rise. The Director-General of the BBC, Tony Hall, approved the corporation’s decision, explaining, “I understand the concerns about this campaign. I personally believe it is distasteful and inappropriate. However I do believe it would be wrong to ban the song outright as free speech is an important principle and a ban would only give it more publicity.”

To those outside the UK who aren’t aware, if you own a television in the UK then you’re legally compelled to also purchase a yearly license to watch it, with the revenue funding the BBC. Thus as a publicly-funded organisation the broadcasting behemoth is theoretically meant to operate in line with both the concerns and interests of the British public. With a long and well documented history of bans – from the Sex Pistols to Serge Gainsbourg – the BBC has taken issue with some of music’s most iconic and beloved songs.

It’s a difficult line to walk and one that rarely keeps the majority of the UK happy. Here are ten tracks which show Auntie‘s changing attitudes to music throughout the last sixty years.

Dropping the F-bomb these days rarely raises an eyebrow and the use of profanity in music is anticipated, with alternate versions of tracks or appropriately pre-censored cuts being released.  Back in 1981, when Californian punks Dead Kennedys released their fourth single ‘Too Drunk To Fuck’, this wasn’t the case.

Jello Biafra‘s dark, nihilistic and hilarious take on alcohol-infused chaos peaked at number 36 in the UK charts during May of that year,  becoming the first song to ever breach the top forty with the F-word in its title.

During the countdown, presenter Tony Blackburn avoided naming it by simple referencing ‘”a record by a group calling themselves The Dead Kennedys”. In stores around the country, stickers were supplied to to obscure the song’s title, stating: “Caution: You are the victim of yet another stodgy retailer afraid to warp your mind by revealing the title of this record so peel slowly and see…”.

Paul Bridgewater

9. Scott Walker – ‘Jackie’ (1967)

The death penalty for sex between two men existed in the UK until 1861, following a ruling in 1533 (during the Henry VIII’s reign) that made sodomy a felony.

Indeed, all male homosexual acts – categorised as ‘gross indecency’ – were outlawed in 1885 by the Labouchere Amendment until 1967 when the Wolfenden Report led sexual acts between of-age males to become legal (bizarrely, only when no more than two people were present in the same room).

In the same year as the law change, the BBC got all hot and bothered about Scott Walker‘s ‘Jackie’. The centrepiece of Walker’s Brel covers, the song’s reference to “authentic queers and phony virgins” was simply too much for senior bosses who forbade the song from airplay. It would take many, many years for them – and other public bodies – to adjust their points of view. Many would say the UK still has a lot of catching up to do in certain areas.

Paul Bridgewater

8. The Beatles – ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ (1967)

Supposedly inspired by a nursery school painting from John Lennon‘s son Julian, the Beeb’s reaction to The Beatles‘ ode to lysergic acid diethylamide was yet another example  of the corporation’s lack to understanding when it came to contemporary youth culture.

The band denied it ever had anything to drugs, naturally, citing the Julian Lennon origin-story until well into the late seventies. The elder Lennon claimed, “I never even thought of it [until someone pointed it out]…I mean, who would ever bother to look at initials of a title? It’s not an acid song.”

Paul McCartney eventually acknowledged the song’s link to the drug. “It’s pretty obvious,” he said in a 2004 interview, “but, you know, it’s easy to overestimate the influence of drugs on the Beatles’ music.”

Paul Bridgewater

7. The Prodigy – ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ (1997)

It was named the most controversial song of all time in a recent survey and only a lyric-free version was allowed on BBC’s flagship station, Radio 1. The Prodigy‘s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’ ran up more bans, controversy and column inches than most songs of recent times – perhaps only the Thatcher/Ding Dong controversy has mobilised a similar shitstorm.

Unlike most BBC bans, many liberal commentators did actually  back the corporation’s decision against the track and its accompanying video, which puported to subvert the songs’s misogyny via the “shock” ending – showing that the (presumably) male point of view that accompanies a night of debauchery, drugs, lapdancing and violence is actually that of a woman.

The BBC referred to the track simply as ‘Smack’ in chart rundowns. MTV eventually relented and showed the video way after the watershed. Fifteen years on, the lyric and visuals remain as potent as ever.

Paul Bridgewater

6. Donna Summer – Love to Love You’ (1976)

One of the highlights of Donna Summer‘s creative partnership with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, 1975′s ‘Love to Love You Baby’ contained the most explicit set of simulated sex noises since Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin‘s ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ from seven years earlier. 23 seconds of faked orgasms were counted in the song, which reached number four in the UK charts.

5. Ricky Valance – ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ (1960)

Many have now forgotten about death rock – that utterly bizarre collection of tracks from the late 1950s and early 60s that dealt with teenage tragedy, sung from the viewpoint of either the griever or the deceased.

Ricky Valance‘s version of ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’ followed Ray Peterson‘s stateside success with the same track earlier in 1960 and tells the story of a boy named Tommy who falls foul to a car crash during a race intended to win him the cash to buy a wedding ring for the eponymous Laura.

Of course the track is overwrought, melodrama at its finest, but Decca Records apparently destroyed thousands of copies of the Peterson version, claiming it was in bad taste and too much “for the English sensibility”. The BBC’s condemnation of Ricky Valance’s version was apparently due to different reasons though – the corporation cited a serious of fatal road accidents as evidence of copycat activity and imposed the ban out of concern for the nation’s youth.

Paul Bridgewater

4. Heaven 17 – ‘(We Don’t Need This) Facist Groove Thang’ (1981)

Very much a track of its time, Heaven 17‘s minor 1981 hit – which references Hitler and Reagan – was released two years into Thatcher’s first term as Prime Minister. The song’s denouncement of facisim and racism was too much for the BBC, who banned it due to concerns of libel against the then US President, with the offending lines “Across that great wide ocean/Reagan’s president elect/Fascist god in motion/Generals tell him what to do”.

Writer Stewart Mason pointed out the absurdity of the ban: “The lyrics put images of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan getting down P-Funk style into the listener’s head, a concept that’s certainly worth a giggle just by itself.”

Paul Bridgewater

Photo by Doug Schwarz

Cameron Neal is a tad outside the box of the contemporary American music scene. Despite being in his early twenties, his mind is stuck somewhere between 1970 and ’72.

He’s got a modern take on life and realises he’s in an indie band in 2013, but musically Jerry Garcia is still alive and Neil Young wasn’t yet the target of ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Best Fit recently held a phone conversation with Neal, the lead singer and guitarist for Oklahoma’s Horse Thief. After all, Best Fit ain’t about today’s American Top 40.

And, as it turns out, Neal isn’t  either. “That’s one of my biggest problems with Top 40 – it’s all about the same thing,” he states. “There’s a way to talk about love and a way to talk about depression and not make it sound cheesy. You can make it sound real where somebody listening to it can actually feel an emotion and feel connected to you in some way. If you’re not writing about emotions, or you’re not writing about something that people can connect to, I don’t understand how people could connect to your music.”

Feeling a connection to music is one of the two keys to understanding Horse Thief. Like any songwriter striving to create some sort of lasting impact, Neal understands having an emotional relationship with songs is why you listen to music in the first place – even if it means having a bond with Taylor Swift. “Music is music,” he says, “and if someone connects to [her] songs, then they should listen to them. I hope people feel the same way about us.”

As to whether Taylor Swift (as a microcosm of commercialized music) is something he’d consider ‘bad music,’ he replies, “My definition of bad music? I mean, I don’t necessarily know if there is. To my taste, there is bad music, but that’s with everyone. But I can appreciate what they’re doing, their hard work, their art. And if there’s an emotional impact that’s being caused by it, then there is true inspiration that’s making them do it. But I don’t think it’s bad music necessarily.” So, while Neal doesn’t exactly find a great source of solace in Billboard-ready composition, he does at least appreciate its value to others. That is to say, at a minimum he’s open to differing interpretations of life.

Which brings us to the other key to understanding Horse Thief: interpretation. Let’s start with the band’s name.  “When we went up to Colorado to write and record [Grow Deep, Grow Wild], we pulled out this big map of all these local hiking trails and we went through all these different names,” recalls Neal. “Horse Thief was one of the names that we saw first, and it kind of just stuck and beat everything else out.” When asked what the name means, he answers, “It kinda puts an image into your head. The name sounds like a country/western band, but I think it’s beyond that as far as the music goes.”

Going beyond expectations (and interpretations) is what seems to make Neal tick. He states early on that he wants Oklahoma to be known for more than the stereotypical image of and cowboy boots and tumbleweeds. Not only that, Neal believes Oklahoma to be the next big music scene: “That’s what’s growing. There aren’t a million bands playing (here), and the bands that are playing are all friends with each other. It doesn’t matter what type of music it is. We’re supporting what everyone is doing as far as art.”

You might notice that when Neal speaks of Oklahoma, it’s almost pure adoration – much like the way you’d talk about a loving mother. Which is noteworthy given that the three original members of Horse Thief aren’t from the Sooner State, but from Texas. Formed under the Tellavators, the band played for three years in the area before deciding to make the move to Oklahoma in order to attend the Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma(ACM@UCO). The band, then a trio, was lucky enough to be able to move together to the same place. When the band left Texas, they also left their name. “We were young when we named ourselves the Tellavators, and I don’t think that’s what we all wanted to stick with,” Neal reflects. Thus, Horse Thief was (re)born – so much so that if you them ask where the band is from, they will respond with Oklahoma. I then ask if Neal considers Oklahoma to be the band’s home now. He replies, “Yes, I think so. At first, when we moved up there, we didn’t know what to expect. In the few years we’ve lived here, Oklahoma’s kind of adopted us.”

Adoption is a good word for the band, not only with regard to their home, but in their sound, as well. The band themselves state that they play “psychedelic folk rock.” The adoption part comes in when you begin to spot influences that aren’t exactly current. The two most obvious influences are Neil Young and American Beauty-era Grateful Dead. Says Neal, “I definitely grew up in a very ‘hippy’ atmosphere. It’s just a natural influence. I mean, I was into that before I was even born, in the womb. So, as my life progressed, I really understood it and latched onto it because it felt like me. And I hope we can bring a modern-day version of that.”

It’s clear from the interview, as well as performance footage, that Neal is speaking about the band beyond the recording studio. In fact, Neal believes HT are truly in their element on stage. “[T]hat’s one of the main things we’re focusing on: trying to capture the way we do it live and get the same emotion people are feeling at our shows,” he offers. “That’s how we all feel – we all just wanna be on the road 250 days of the year. That’s what we’re shooting for right now.”

Photo by Doug Schwarz

But there’s more to it than just enjoying the thrill of being on the road. There’s also a different ambiance live, not only because it’s in-person but also because interpretation of the songs changes slightly. “You make a record and you play that record live – people don’t want to hear it that way,” Neal explains. “They wanna hear something a little bit different, and that’s why they come to see you live. There are so many bands I go see and I’m like, ‘If I wanted to pay $15 to come see you, I woulda just turned your record up louder.’” He chuckles at his own joke for a moment, then continues. “If someone paid $15 for the record and then paid $15 for the show, I wanna give ‘em another experience to take home with them […] The difference is the atmosphere that you’re adding. If you’re not feeling your own music, people can tell that in a live setting. The more you’re willing to put into a live show, the more people are willing to let go.”

This is, of course, to say nothing of the fact that a career-oriented band like Horse Thief needs the road to survive financially – a reality that Neal recognizes all too well. Indeed, he readily acknowledges that Horse Thief won’t make enough money to pay bills from record sales, both because of the current attitude towards rock music in America, and because most indie bands “aren’t making money off records.” Instead, Neal argues that even the biggest indie bands are only “making good money from playing festivals, being on the road and from merchandise.” He believes that Horse Thief face the same situation, but he looks at it with optimism: “We’ll play where anyone wants us to play. We just want to be able to do this as a living. If we have to do it by playing on the road, that’s great.”

After all, it’s that we-belong-on-the-road mentality that landed them a release deal with Bella Union. Bella Union boss Simon Raymonde caught Horse Thief’s set at SXSW last year, took them on the road and then offered them a deal to release their forthcoming EP, as well as a full-length in the future. Landing a deal with the London-based record company is only the beginning for Horse Thief’s European excursions, though. After they release their EP this spring, which is essentially a reworking of Grow Deep, the band plans to tour Europe this coming fall, then put out a full-length early next year and tour Europe again. They might even try to fit a U.S. tour in there, as well.

If you happen to catch Horse Thief live, hopefully they will have better luck with the police in foreign lands than they do at home. In the U.S., Horse Thief have a reputation for being shut down by the cops. “We actually just got shut down twice in Austin [Texas, for SXSW]. It’s so random,” Neal comments. “And when it happens in Oklahoma, it’s always when we’re playing ‘Warrior,’ which is a song about Oklahoma.” If you don’t quite understand how a band that plays ‘70s folk rock could be a target for the authorities, Neal’s right there with you: “I don’t know, maybe it’s the circumstances, maybe it’s the people at the house parties. It just always seems to happen. And I think our live show is a little bit more aggressive than the record is. That’s something that we’re working for the next album – trying to capture the intensity of the live show.”

Grow Deep, Grow Wild is available now through Bella Union.

Kat Rolle muses over why our closest European neighbours are that much less passionate about music than the Brits.

The London 2012 opening ceremony, Glastonbury, the sheer street-cred importance of Prime Ministers’ responses on Desert Island Discs; it’s no secret that the British take music seriously. We download more music per capita than anyone else in the world, and we’ve arguably (certainly?) produced more of the most important bands than anyone else. But why?

A large part of it is simply getting there before others did. Like our long-gone imperial glory, we managed to get the jump on most of the world simply by starting first. Although the Americans can claim the first international popstar in Elvis (in our defence we were pretty occupied with the crippling aftermath of the World War II) once we did get going, boy were we good and since the British Invasion, our music had been a force to be reckoned with abroad. The British continued to chase the next sound, the next scene, the next big thing – often finding it and a supporting network of venues – from the toilet-sized to the stadium – supported it all the way. From glam and punk, grime and dubstep, innovation has poured out of our little island on an unprecedented level. Whilst we can’t claim that everything originated on these shores, there’s no denying that we done good.

Once we built up the momentum, the support network, and the rabid enthusiasm for more and more music, it was always going to be tough for anyone else to stop Britannia ruling the soundwaves.

Spiralling out of decades of successful, incredible bands came a nationwide obsession with music. British teenagers in particular tend to broadcast their musical tastes to the world, whether swathed in baggy plaid, sporting mohicans, trilbies, or snapbacks, or wearing jeans anywhere on the vacuum-tight to circus tent spectrum. Arcade Fire summed it up succinctly: “The music divides us into tribes, you grew your hair so I grew mine” . The myriad scenes become socially divisive and all-consuming, leaving a gang-like story of conflicts, traceable back to the mods and rockers, the punks and new Romantics, through to Oasis and Blur and the chavs v goths.

I’ve lived abroad in both Spain and France, either amongst or working with teenagers, and I’ve been increasingly shocked at their casual attitude to music – which is only amplified in the wider society around them. I recently asked a class aged 17-18  to name all the The Beatles – or any of them. They couldn’t and my shock shocked them. Of course there are exceptions – the odd case of One Direction-mania, the occasional devoted Anglophile who wants to discuss The Smiths or to understand the ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ lyrics; but the majority don’t conform to any scene, don’t care what’s being played in their clubs, and can’t tell you their favourite band. Again, why?

Our closest European neighbours are that much less passionate about sounds, and it’s a particularly southern, Mediterranean issue. While the Germans, Scandinavians and Slavic countries have all embraced music – especially electro, punk, and metal – the Spanish, French, and Italians seem less than enthused. Spurious though it may sound, I think the climate is a big factor. Whilst our Lennon/McCartneys and Morrissey/Marrs were strumming guitars, across the channel, kids were out in the sun, at the beach or in the mountains. The Catholic/Protestant division matters too and the strength of the Catholic influence, particularly in Italy and Spain still manages to keep many from the darkest depths of rock ‘n’roll.

There’s also the question of sport. Despite our prowess in terms of invention, the British performance in world cups, Wimbledon, and elsewhere indicates that the minds of our youths are otherwise engaged. As France, Italy, and Spain churn out sports stars, their majority of their teenagers dress in the tracksuits of their heroes, whilst the British strive to become the musical voice of their generation. Perhaps our recent Olympic successes equate to the current perceived dip in the British rock and indie scenes?

More realistically, I think a major factor in the UK’s prominence is the dominance of English, internationally. English is the world’s most widely spoken second-language, and of course, the main language of the ever-influential US. Of course other countries produce their share of musical geniuses but it’s that much harder to get exposure and fame outside of Eurovision if you’re singing in another language. While everyone else has to accept that to listen to The Beatles it’ll have to be in English, the Anglophones are much less willing to listen to music in other languages – there’s so much in English anyway that we don’t really need to! This goes some way to explaining the widespread success of French electro – innovative, instrumental, and often with artists with Anglicized names, it was able to thrive because we didn’t really have to acknowledge its nationality.

Of course, I’m sure the Americans see the whole thing differently and given the chance – judging by the sheer volume of “Please come to Brazil!” comments on YouTube – it looks like we can expected a the rise of another musically obsessed nation soon. But thanks to our combination of dismal weather, lack of athleticism (sorry Beckham, sorry Team GB) our pre-existing network that churns out so many new artists and our own rampant enthusiasm for the tunes they create. we can continue to revel in our rich musical heritage.

Photo by Gaelle Beri

There are plenty of bands out there playing psych music or garage rock – more than since the heyday of the Sixties you could argue – but there are few as instantly recognisable as the Texan quartet of The Black Angels.

Since 2006’s debut album Passover Alex Maas, Christian Bland, Stephanie Bailey and Kyle Hunt have been providing us with dark, intense psychedelic experiences that rather than being trippy excursions, pack a real garage punch. Whether it’s the politicised viscera of that first record, the controlled, acid-fried stomp of sophomore effort Directions to See a Ghost or the surprisingly clear-headed grooves of Phosphene Dream, there’s a certain aesthetic that marks each down as being quintessentially a Black Angels record. It could be the vocal incantations of singer Maas, the locked-in keyboard drones or the solid, unwavering percussion… it’s probably all of this, but there’s also the clear passion for the genre that really makes it count. While acts like The Warlocks and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club fade from memory, The Black Angels continue to go strong.

The band dropped its fourth album Indigo Meadow this month and it’s probably their best record to date. Lean, mean and focused, recorded as a four-piece following the departure of bassist Nate Ryan, it’s the sound of The Black Angels completely in the zone and sounding better than ever. There’s even a playful tone – heard already on lead single ‘Don’t Play with Guns – that’s maybe not been present before. We were lucky enough to speak to singer Alex Maas about the new record while he was at home in Austin, Texas, and we found a man who, while happy to discuss his band and the new album, was more than willing to expand on his love of psychedelic music.

Given the band are Austin natives, how could I not begin by asking about their SXSW experience in 2013? Maas reveals that they don’t play quite as much as they used to: “Yeah we played a couple of shows… a couple of strategic shows! Six or seven years ago we played like, nine or ten times, so we just cut it down this year, and it was really fun.” And was it a chance to play Indigo Meadow to a home crowd and road test the new tunes? “We played a lot of the new record, kind of trying to cut our teeth a little, and the festival was a great time to do it,” he says. “It was fun; we worked out some kinks and saw how people reacted to the songs for the very first time.”

I suggest that Indigo Meadow is the sound of The Black Angels honed, focused and lean – did this come from stripping down to a four-piece prior to recording? “I dunno, I think it’s just the evolution of the band,” counters Maas. “I mean, it still sounds like The Black Angels but I think ‘focused’ is an appropriate way to put it. You know, it’s like shooting a documentary film – you don’t know how it’s going to turn out until after you get done with all the footage. You get back and you’re like ‘oh, there’s a new story here, what makes sense out of all this, what songs am I gonna pull out?’ So we did that: we documented loads of songs, took all the different perspectives and made a record.” And there also seems to have been a clinical element to the recording, as Maas reveals some stuff didn’t make the cut: “We have songs that didn’t make it; for us, we wanted to keep the record under 44/45 minutes. We didn’t want to lose fidelity, it had to be greater than that – the quality gets squashed [otherwise]”

For this recording, the band returned to Texas after recording Phosphene Dream in Los Angeles with Dave Sardy. This time around, the chose John Congleton as producer, but I want to know if place plays a big part in how a Black Angels record feels? Maas says it does, to some extent: “Yeah, I think it does. Again, I don’t think it’s something you go into realising or thinking. It’s like shooting the documentary, you don’t say ‘oh I think this has a Texas feel to it’ but I definitely think it’s a product of the environment and that comes into the record and the recording process.” Perhaps a bigger influence was the time available to the band. Recorded over the course of a year, Indigo Meadow isn’t an album constructed on the road, and I think that shows in just how good a record it is: “One thing that was interesting about this record was that we had a lot of time to do it,” reveals Maas. “We took a musical alchemist approach: we took all the songs down to the studio and we were able to, like, do whatever we wanted, after we tracked them. We had tons of time to go and explore sounds and that sonic alchemy – it’s good to have the time to do that, and we made a very ‘free’ record.” So is writing on the road something to avoid? “I think a lot of ideas come out on the road, but it’s hard to fully realise them. We’re always writing, all the time, and it’s a total collaboration between the four of us… it’s beautiful.”

From the Breeders and Oasis to the Kinks and First Aid Kit, musical siblings are more common than one would think. And Emily, Camilla and Jessica Staveley-Taylor, otherwise known as The Staves, are the latest family band to join the group.

Hailing from Watford, the acoustic folk trio have been building a growing fan base not only in the UK but also around the world with their debut album Dead & Born & Grown. Their combination of simple yet seamless melodies and honest lyrics has grabbed the attention of critics, as well as the bands that they look up to themselves, such as Bon Iver. But despite the praise they’ve been getting, they admit that the band’s creative process is still something they working on. “We basically don’t know what we’re doing,” Emily Staveley-Taylor reveals with a laugh, “and we’re still trying to figure it out.”

Emily’s light approach to the band’s work ethic mirrors the sisters’ outlook on how the Staves came to fruition. Singing together since they were young, Emily, Camilia and Jessica would participate in weekly open mic nights and perform acapella covers of their favourite songs. Previously referred to collectively by their surname, a late addition to a gig at one of their local pubs pushed them to shorten it to ‘The Staves’. “A friend just wrote it on the chalkboard that night,” Emily admits. “We said that we’d change it one day, but it just never happened.”

Once they had their name set and started to garner a fan base, the sisters started thinking more seriously about pursuing music as a career. However it was not something they originally considered. “I don’t think we ever sat down and said, ‘Right. Let’s be a band. We want to sound like this,’ she says. “I don’t think it was anything we had to sort out. We’ve kind of been singing our way, really.”

“But it was always that we wanted to sing together,” Emily continues. “So when we started, we were learning covers and stuff. We would sing the guitar solo or the string section of a particular song or kind of try and use our voices instead of the instruments we can play. And that stuck and has stuck for a long time. And I think that whole singer-songwriter, kind of 60s and 70s [style], what we grew up with… you can really have a rich sound with not much instrumentation at all. “

Soon after they started venturing down the music route, Camilla picked up the guitar whilst Jessica learned how to play the ukulele. And once that happened, their album’s title track was written. “Millie was learning how to play guitar, and she could only play two strings so she could play a 2-finger rag before she could play the main bit,” Emily states. “That’s why you hear the [sounds out introduction to ‘Dead Born and Grown’] because she couldn’t play anything else. She just wrote these lyrics, and she could have been 15 or something. I really like that it’s ‘Dead and Born and Grown’ rather than ‘Born and Grown and Dead.’ I like when [songs] make you see something fresh. I love performing that one, especially because it’s just the three of us.“

As was mentioned previously, The Staves are still working on their songwriting process. “When we started [writing], we just started arranging it and then rearranging it,” she says. “Then it would change and become something all of us created. Sometimes songs are written completely individually and then brought to the table almost fully formed. And then it’s a case of sitting around and starting to play, and then realising something sounds really nice… then words start coming. It’s a time when all of us are in the room until the song is done. Some of them take years and some of them take hours.”

With three strong voices, who gets to sing lead? It’s pretty simple. Whoever wrote most of the song gets to lead the vocals – unless there is a sibling who really wants to take the lead. ”The general rule is if someone has particularly written the bulk of the song, they should sing the lead since it feels natural for them to do that,” she says. “Maybe the lyrics are a bit more personal. It’s something they really want to sing. But it can also be someone else [who didn’t write] singing it, and then it sounds different. And it opens up a different flavour and it’s for the good of the song if a particular tone sings it.“

As the return of The Strokes recently reminded us, there’s nothing sadder than a creative lowpoint for a once-loved band. Sustaining a heightened level of quality across a fifteen year career is an impossible feat – few even manage it for three consecutive records.

The history of modern music is strewn with duds from the great and good. The Beatles may have avoided turning in a truly terrible long-player but had they lasted another decade, we’re pretty sure to have seen some overwhelmingly poor choices turning up. Just look at what happened to The Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan arguably hit a wall when he dallied a bit too close with the Christian sentiments for 1978′s Street Legal, a record that’s almost beyond salvation.

The best approach for us fans is to usually to turn a blind eye and imagine the whole sorry mess never happened. Below, Best Fit writers and staff try and place the records they’d choose to erase from the history of their favourite bands.

10. Bright Eyes – Cassadaga (2007)

When Johnny Depp names your record one of his “favourite things” of the year – not “albums” but “things”, you know it’s going to be debatable. This is a man, after all, who has been best friends with both Hunter S. Thompson and Charlie Sheen at various points in his lifetime.

Following up on not one but two pretty stellar albums was never going to be easy for Conor Oberst and Co. I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning from 2005 saw the Bright Eyes man stripping away his previously melodramatic tendencies for a more mature and fluid folk collection that truly lived up to his wide billing as “the next Bob Dylan”. This was accompanied in a dual release by the record’s alter-ego of sorts, the electronically-charged sonic exploration of love, drugs and surrealism that was Digital Ash In A Digital Urn.

With three years passing, how do you top two records that would normally define any artist’s career? Not by bringing out something like Cassadaga, that’s for sure. While showing brief moments of redeeming qualities in ‘Middleman’ or ‘Lime Tree’, the album was doomed from the very beginning. A record born in the aftermath of mainstream success saw Oberst spiral into his own ego, simultaneously trying too hard to live up to – whilst also rejecting – increased expectations. Not as experimentally defiant as follow-up The People’s Key, without the early angst and melancholy that has plagued him with the ‘emo’ tag ever since.

It remains – now that the band leader has seemingly dropped his popular moniker in favour of his birth-given name – a rare miss in a career-to-date of consistant hits.

Luke Morgan Britton

9. Bruce Springsteen – Working on a Dream (2009)

Part of being a true Bruce Springsteen fan is admitting which of his records are just bad.  Both Bruce himself, who has already all but ditched every single track from this abominable recent LP from his marathon live sets, and Boss devotees – who on last year’s Wrecking Ball tour booed the very suggestion that the band roll out the title track – seem in agreement.  It’s hard to think of anyone but folks on the E Street payroll and close family members who’d regard Working On A Dream as anything other than a mistake.

It was all the more disappointing coming as it did off the back of Bruce’s first purple patch in more than a decade. 2002’s The Rising reunited the E Street band in full for the first time since Born In The U.S.A. and really struck a chord (an A major, most likely) in post 9/11 America.  It was followed with the fine introspective acoustic LP Devil’s and Dust and considered Bush Administration critique of full-band effort Magic, which I’d argue is even better – all the wry social commentary of The Rising without the cloying bombast.  That album also saw Springsteen jumping on the campaign trail for a certain Barack Obama, which proved to work out well for the both of ‘em; whilst Obama swept into office, Springsteen found his critical stock higher than it had been since Tunnel of Love, and thus raced back in to the studio, mere months after Magic, to strike whilst the iron was hot.

Yet where the young Springsteen could bash out bohemian folk classics like Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, The Innocent And The E-Street Shuffle within the space of a few months in 1973, the hurried Working On A Dream came across like a bunch of Magic – but far from magical – b-sides.  Everything Springsteen haters dislike about the guy is here in abundance; syrupy, pompous, jingoistic and overcooked rock and roll redeemed only by the more reserved ‘Life Itself’ and Grammy-nominated ‘The Wrestler’ (technically a bonus track anyway).  Elsewhere, it contains inarguably his two worst ever songs – the under-thought ‘Happy Birthday’ re-write ‘Surprise, Surprise’ and ‘Queen of the Supermarket’, in which Bruce tells a tale of falling in love with a shelf stacker in a manner that manages to convince a grand total of nobody at all that he spends any time in supermarkets.

Thankfully, the subsequent Wrecking Ball was actually pretty good.  So let’s never speak of this again.

Tom Hannan

8. The Shins – Port of Morrow (2012)

The Shins, for me, were always the shining Gold Standard of just how good a certain brand of so-called “indie” or, if you must, “indie-pop” music could be. Debut Oh, Inverted World quickly became a favourite on its release in 2001, then along came second album Chutes Too Narrow two years later, and all of a sudden – hey – I had a Favourite Band.

The Shins made music that was more than just a jangle and a transient hit of sugar. These songs had melodies that were at the same time intricately structured and complex – just try whistling or humming along to ‘Young Pilgrims’ or ‘Kissing the Lipless’ for example – yet somehow still insanely beguiling. Every time I listen to one of the first three albums, the resultant earworms can literally run for weeks.

And for anyone who likes an intriguing lyric here, again, is Your Band, from the wonderful relish with which James Mercer delivers polysyllabic words like “malcontent” or “unconscionable” to the faintly disturbing imagery, often at odds with the alluring melodies and musicianship: “those lingering voices are just your ego’s attempt to make it all clean and nice, and make a moron out of you” from ‘Fighting in a Sack’, the faintly vampiric short poem that is Oh, Inverted World’s ‘Weird Divide’, Wincing The Night Away’s ‘Phantom Limb’, full of a kind of nostalgic, uneasy malaise.

After coming wonderfully good again on Album Number Three (2007’s Wincing the Night Away) despite the dauntingly-high expectations raised by 2004 film Garden State (sample quote: “You gotta hear this one song ['New Slang']. It’ll change your life, I swear”), it seemed like this was a band, the band, my band, that was untouchable and perfect.

And then, last year, Port of Morrow came out. Early single ‘Simple Song’ augured well, but it turns out it was the only decent track, the only Shins track, as I would class it, on the album. That I am sitting here struggling to even recall any of the others – all I can remember is a kind of diffuse, generic, bland indie of the stereotypical kind that I always used the band as a counter example to in those kinds of arguments that probably dog any “indie” music fan’s musical discussions – probably says as much as needs to be said. I write this very much more in sorrow than in anger. Like a wonderful TV series that went on just one season too long (oh hai, The Wire?), if the band had stopped in 2007 we would now be left with pretty much the perfect (my perfect) back catalogue. Damn.

Jude Clarke

7. R.E.M. – Around the Sun (2004)

The thing about Around the Sun is that if you held a gun against my head or that of my nearest and dearest and demanded I whistle or sing any of the tracks on the album, I just couldn’t do it. I’d be a goner. Nothing. It’s a huge, terrifying black hole of a record, and don’t let anyone tell you that it’s just average or only pales in comparison to R.E.M.’s sparkling back catalogue – it’s not true, Around the Sun is an embarrassment to the memory of the band.

Released in 2004 it was their thirteenth (clearly unlucky in this case) album and third without drummer Bill Berry. It’s not like the band had been in freefall since Berry left, but they certainly weren’t the same. The first post-Berry release, Up, stands proudly alongside New Adventures in Hi Fi as the sound of R.E.M. pushing themselves somewhere new and interesting but things took a swift dive with the release of the anodyne Reveal, itself a fairly horrible nadir with all the forced sunny-ness as Buck, Mills and Stipe pretended that they still got on okay. But compared to Around the Sun that record sounds like fucking Murmur - heck even Peter Buck couldn’t refer to it by name in interviews.

It’s a crock from start to finish, a clueless meander round half-ideas, woeful attempts at political polemic and you’d think that they would have learned from KRS-One’s appearance on ‘Radio Song’ on Out of Time that there’s no place for rapping on an R.E.M. record. Nope, hang it! Let’s get Q-Tip in for a few rhymes on ‘The Outsiders’ and hope he doesn’t sound like a befuddled old man wondering what he’s walked into (he does). There’s a track on the album called ‘The Worst Joke Ever’, and it contains the lines: “you see there’s this cat burglar who can’t see in the dark / he lays his bets on 8 more lives, walks into a bar / slips on the 8 ball, falls on his knife / says ‘I don’t know what I’ve done but it doesn’t feel right’”. Remember when you couldn’t understand any of Michael Stipe’s lyrics? Was that just a cover for banal shite like this?

Around the Sun is special for the fact it contains R.E.M.’s single worst song, ‘Make It All Okay’, and I long for the time at the start of writing this piece when I couldn’t remember how any of these songs went. Maybe I’d blocked out the awfulness as some kind of psychological defence – now they’re fresh in the memory again. I was asked if there was anything that redeems the album; the answer is no. It is by far the worst R.E.M. album in the canon.

Andrew Hannah

Having released her soulful debut album Sing To The Moon via RCA in March, Laura Mvula artist takes the Best Fit Q&A and tell us all about her love of Robbie Williams and who most deserves a sorry.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Beyonce.

What would your superpower be and why?
To be warm on demand because I am always cold.

What’s your idea of heaven?
Food, Music and Heat.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
Everything in moderation.

What song do you wish you’d written?
Candy by Robbie Williams.

If you could say something to your 15 year old self what would it be?
Eat less.

What’s your reoccurring nightmare?
I don’t have nightmares.

What song will they play at your funeral?
Candy by Robbie Williams.
What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Beyonce. My make up artist Gabriella Ciullo. James Corden. Chris Martin. Will Smith.

Who would you most like to apologise to and why ?
No one really. I’ve been pretty good. Maybe taxi drivers for always asking them to turn the heat up.

Taken from her incredible debut album The Sing To The Moon, ‘That’s Alright’ is available as a single now.

When it comes to bands, the ones that are a bit sheltered often end up coming off as the most genuine. Such is the case with Copenhagen punk band Iceage.

The band have just released their second full-length album You’re Nothing on Matador – an album which does more than just give the finger to authority, it tells a story – a very relatable story. Instead of building a narrative around characters, vocalist Elias Rønnenfelt’s hard pressed lips breathe raspy poems into the microphone with the few audible words that we can make out seeming to be the only words that matter. Guitar progressions spell out the phrases that the record’s listeners so desperately wanted to say, while emotion rips through pensive air, exploring much more ground than just punk rock.

The real beauty of it all lies in the album’s carefully crafted ambiguity. Iceage are a band who leave a lot up to the listener. They make music the way they know how – they don’t ask you to care or understand how they feel, instead they place a very real experience in our hands and let us decide what we want to do with it. It’s probably the most punk rock thing a band can do.

If you’re looking for a revival, or a dawning of a new punk scene, you’ve got Iceage all wrong. Their brilliance lies in their insularity. They embody the ideology more than a style of music made popular in the 80s – they didn’t even know punk was dead, because it never died to them. Best Fit sits down with frontman Elias Rønnenfelt to find out more about the story of the band, as well as how their new album You’re Nothing came to life.

Your first release was in 2009, a 4 song self-titled EP – fast forward to 2013, and you’ve just released your second album, You’re Nothing. What’s changed?

Lots of things have changed. We were four kids playing together, going to school in Copenhagen and hating it. Then we dropped out and started touring and now we are kind of living in our band, if that makes sense.

And going from your 2011 album New Brigade to your latest release – what would you say has marked the biggest change? Do you feel you have grown as a band? 

Well it’s not a radical shift or change in style, but more that we expanded on what we had before. The process of writing is pretty much  the same, but I guess we have gotten better at what we are trying to do. I don’t even know, I just write songs.

One of the aspects that makes Iceage the band that it is – one that continues to produce great music – is that you don’t overcomplicate the process. You have a system of writing and recording that works and you don’t fuck with it. Speaking of, I read you recorded this album on an island off the coast of Denmark. What was that experience like?

We built a studio in this old farm, and it was pretty cheap, so went there and didn’t really know what to expect, but it was nice because we were just pretty much in the middle of nowhere and there was nothing to do but record. Everything became very focused. I think we were done after five days.

You’re Nothing is a mix of woozy, drunk feeling and raw energy. Like you were saying, you’re not trying to make punk music. It feels like there are no rules when it comes to Iceage’s music.

Well the energy is different here because some people expect a hardcore band to think like this too, but it’s about other things.

As much as there are no rules, there is restraint. Can you talk about how you approached the writing and recording of You’re Nothing?

We just try to go with our intuition, we never really say we’re going to write this kind of song, we take a little mix of this and a little mix of that and we just write.

And do you all write together?

We don’t jam together. Mostly we will have a sketch for a song, written by one person, and we all work it out together, what needs to be changed and try to improve it. The lyrics I write mostly, but the music, we all contribute.

How would you describe the music scene that you grew up around in Denmark?

What’s it like? Well us, we have been friends for a long time, even before we started making music. And the scene is based around this warehouse space called Mayhem. Everybody pretty much goes there. I guess it all started when we formed this band, and we met some other guys in bands, and at the time we didn’t really know a lot of other bands making music that we connected with on a personal level.  These bands started becoming friends and aware of each other. Then this new warehouse space, Mayhem appeared, which kind of adopted us, because everyone was doing this industrial and punk music at the time, and from there more and more bands have popped up.

Do you ever sing in Danish at your shows?

No. There is one song in Danish on the album, but that’s it.

How would you describe an Iceage live performance? What does it feel like when you’re on stage performing?

Sometimes it’s horrible and the sound is shitty, and other times we play together really well. Then sometimes it’s a big release and I can kind of lose myself and not really know who I am anymore, it’s a kind of feeling of ecstasy. And sometimes it’s in between those two, it can be a lot of things.

Do you have a favourite venue or festival to play when you’re on the road?

I really like Munoz Gym in Bakersfield, California, which is a boxing ring. I’m not sure if I have any particular favourite venues, but I like smaller venues more.

What do you like to listen to when you’re on tour?

We like all sorts of music. We like a lot of punk but also soul music, classical music and soundtracks, everything. We don’t listen to music in particular genres.

Do you think punk is the same today as it was when bands like The Misfits and Black Flag were playing?

Yeah of course it’s changed. You have different people doing different things all over the world, and a lot of punk bands don’t have anything in common with each other. With Iceage, I don’t particularly try to be a punk band, I just write music and people call it punk.

Iceage’s second album You’re Nothing is out now on Matador. 

The cerebral loop based music of Glasgow based duo Conquering Animal Sound has little to do with the animal world, but is instead fuelled by the tension between human and machine.

On their stunning 2011 Scottish Album of the Year nominated debut Kammerspiel the machines were very much in the driving seat, their clicks and hums forging a path towards some semblance of melody with the gossamer vocals of Anneke Kampman trailing in their wake. With their new record On Floating Bodies there is a marked difference as Kampman and her co-conspirator James Scott wrestle back control of their tools and manipulate them into gorgeous ghostly contortions of very human emotions.

This shift towards a more identifiably human core actually coincides with a less intimate recording process, as their acclaim has led them to take their home spun sounds to join the ranks of Scottish label and indie institution Chemikal Underground (responsible for records from Arab Strap, Mogwai and Aereogramme to name a few). As James says “We had a great time working with Rich at Gizeh, and with Anneke’s solo stuff on his label, we’ve maintained the dialogue. But working with Chemikal has been a step forward, especially getting to mix the new album with Paul Savage in Chem19 studios, which I think has had a major influence on how our recorded sound has evolved from the last record.”

It’s quite clear that the duo were eager to retain this space for focusing ideas whilst being able to push their sound; “It was recorded in the flat we were sharing, but we were keen to record some of it in the studio, and mix it properly as well. I think with the music we make, which takes a lot of time to shape and craft, that we could bankrupt the entire nation recording it all in a studio, but it was good to end it in a studio and improve the overall sound.” Anneke adds, “This was an excellent experience. We have a little bit of hardware in our studio but we don’t have anything like the lovely compressors and distressors that we had access to in Chem19.”

This improved equipment is perhaps clearest from the focus which is now drawn to the looped intricacies of their sounds, even more so than Kammerspiel which itself was hardly made up of broad strokes. That attention to minutia sits comfortably alongside a more polished finish and a far more melodic pop sensibility, especially on the vocal hooks, which Anneke says was not their original intention; “I think we both wanted to make a much more direct and ’3 dimensional’ sounding record this time. Kammerspiel was quite an ambient piece of work and personally I wanted to try and move away from that kind of sound. I don’t really listen to that much ambient music, I listen to Jeff Mills and Erykah Badu and weird world dance music.”

It’s probably not a reference I would have recognised myself but there is something of Badu’s influence in the vocals here, they are now filled with soul and cadence rather than the mechanical syllabics which were present before. James points out that “our intentions were to create something more percussive, more rhythmic, with a more electronic influence. It just happened that on certain songs, that Anneke would come up with a really catchy vocal melody or we’d structure it with a verse-chorus template, but that was how the song came out and we were happy to work with that.”

Sub Pop. Nirvana, right? Grunge, right? Well, right, but that’s just the surface you’re scratching, kiddo.

To celebrate the label’s 25th year, we’ve had a go at compiling a brief history (or introduction, overview, call it what you like) that’s intended as a guide for people who might know Sub Pop for Nirvana, but little else. This, just ten reasons why Sub Pop is rather remarkable, is based on the assumption that if you don’t know Nirvana, there are probably articles you’d rather be reading anyway.

1)       It’s the best university assignment ever

The story of quitting college to follow a rock and roll dream is a familiar one, but Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt went about things in the opposite manner. His label’s name was shortened from that of a radio show that became a zine he authored in the early 1980s called Subterranean Pop, a kindred spirit of Sniffin’ Glue before it and Maximumrockandroll after that focused its attention squarely on the burgeoning post punk, hardcore, noise and proto-grunge music being released by local contemporary DIY labels. Whilst its contents hardly seemed academic, there was a much more bookish purpose to its creation – Pavitt got course credit from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington for every issue. Only a handful of runs in, he’d come across enough amazing sounds to justify releasing accompanying compilation tapes. After nine issues, releasing music rather than commenting on it took precedence. Sub Pop the label was tentatively born with 5,000 pressings of a vinyl-only compilation – the now highly sought-after Sub Pop 100 – in 1986. Its first track was a spoken word (alright, screamed) intro from Steve Albini, with seals of approval not coming much higher.

Steve Albini – Spoken Word Intro Thing:

2)       They made Seattle cool (even before Frasier)

Pavitt worked at a record store called Fallout in the musically thriving Washington city of early 1980s Seattle. He also had a dedicated Sub Pop show on KCMU radio, where he’d meet fellow presenter and subsequent business partner Jonathan Poneman (they both went full time with Sub Pop in 1988, hence this quarter-century anniversary). The city blessed them with flagship bands like Mudhoney and Nirvana – who, though formed in Aberdeen, were regulars on the scene – and they responded in kind. Though its gaze was certainly not narrow, Sub Pop has always been synonymous with alternative rock in Seattle. They were especially supportive in its formative stages, for example flying Melody Maker’s Everett True over all the way from the UK in the hope that he’d whip the British press into a suitable frenzy over the sounds he found in their city. Of course, he duly did. Their support of the locale continues to this day, with one of their finest recent signings, hip hop wizards Shabazz Palaces, also counting themselves Seattle natives. But more on them later. For now, perhaps the defining Seattle grunge song – Mudhoney’s ‘Touch Me I’m Sick’:

I was convinced, when the first set of rumours began swirling in early January, that suggestions of a Postal Service reunion were bound to prove wide of the mark.

Ben Gibbard spent the latter part of 2012 promoting his first solo record, Former Lives – effectively a selection of odds and ends from the past few years in his day job as Death Cab for Cutie frontman – and I’d read a fair few interviews in support of it; every time, the obvious question about The Postal Service was posed, and every time, he let the journalist down gently. I even recall, at one point last year, him responding to a fan on Twitter – who’d pledged to lock themselves away until his side project made more music – with a simple message: ‘very bad idea‘.

He also made pretty clear that a new Death Cab record was his priority for 2013 (fun fact: did you know that this very site is named after a Death Cab song?) and so I continued to disbelieve until I heard it from the horse’s mouth, disregarding mounting evidence that included the band’s long-dormant website whirring back into life. Even when the Coachella lineup announcement served as de facto confirmation, I still wondered if a reunion that had been denied so strenuously for so long was really happening; maybe it was a joke on the part of the festival’s poster designer, like how the guy who makes the Reading ones always used to sneak a Chelsea footballer’s name in there.

The triumphant press release and lengthy summer tour schedule that have followed, however, tell no lies; The Postal Service are most definitely back together – not that they were ever together in the first place, of course, with their west coast, mail-based modus operandi having provided the inspiration for their name. So far, the attention from press and fans alike seems to have been focused mainly on the shows; understandable, especially here in the UK, where their live presence was limited to a solitary appearance in London in 2003 – if memory serves, they were due to support Bright Eyes across the country that summer, but the dates were pulled. There’s been less mention, though, of the reason we’re all talking about the band in the first place – their lone full-length release, Give Up.

Maybe it’s because the obligatory reissue is fairly underwhelming – Gibbard remains pretty resolute on the idea of new material, with only two unreleased cuts making it onto the tenth-anniversary edition, amongst a slew of B-sides and remixes we’ve heard before. What is on offer, though, is the opportunity to revisit a record that has proved pivotal for Gibbard, his bandmate Jimmy Tamborello and the label that took a chance on it, Sub Pop.

It seems highly unlikely, at this point, that any calendar year will come close to defining Ben Gibbard in the popular imagination quite like 2003, which saw the release of both of his career masterpieces to date; Death Cab’s Transatlanticism, comfortably the band’s opus, dropped that October. It’s difficult to gauge the extent to which Give Up was responsible for the breakthrough that Transatlanticism helped Death Cab make; it’d certainly only be one of a few factors – you can’t use the words ‘Death Cab’ and ‘breakthrough’ without making reference, reluctantly, to The O.C., and just as pertinently to their move to a major label. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to suggest that The Postal Service brought Death Cab to a wider audience, though – that certainly proved the case for me, but if there’s similarities between the two bands, it’s obvious that Give Up also gave Gibbard the chance to flex some different songwriting muscles than he might usually.

Lyrically, we got to see a playful side to him, seldom afforded to us by Death Cab. ‘Clark Gable’ has him drawing hopeless comparisons between himself and the eponymous hero of the cinema’s Golden Age, that always have me in mind, rightly or wrongly, of Woody Allen’s attempts to be Humphrey Bogart in Play It Again, Sam. ‘We Will Become Silhouettes’ takes heavy subject matter – a nuclear holocaust – and deals with it breezily; “that’s when we’ll explode/and it won’t be a pretty sight.” Gibbard was always at his best at his most guarded, cloaking his feelings with clever wordplay and complex metaphor; on Give Up, he was at the height of said powers. ‘Nothing Better’ is fabulously wistful, a song that begins with amusing allegory, with reference to ice hockey and literal broken-heart-repair, but soon descends into more forthright, desperate statements of contrition.

It’s not hard to understand just how overwhelmed Autre Ne Veut appears to be with the reception that his recent album Anxiety has received. Just last year, he was most well known for following up his debut self-titled album with an EP that was notorious mostly for its cover apparently resembling female genitalia.

That it was in fact an oiled-up hand didn’t get in the way of the male tendency to assume that anything fleshy and lubricated is probably the female reproductive organ. In 2013, however, people seem much more willing to talk about his music after the deeply unsettling subject matter of Anxiety resonated with enough people to bring in a smattering of gushing reviews for its unconstrained eccentricity, all nailed in place by a seam of pop stylings.

Its boundary-battering neurosis seemed popular enough that each report of SXSW seemed to have an obligatory report of Autre Ne Veut (real name Arthur Ashin) embedded somewhere, but although Arthur was aware that eyes were on him (“It’s a lot,” as he bluntly puts it), he was grateful to be there at all after past experiences. “I got grounded and wasn’t allowed to go when I was like 13 or 14 and so in my head it’s always associated with not seeing Pavement.” The longer we speak, in fact, the more you get the sense that he’s grateful just to be in the position that he is in, as he energetically races through incredibly detailed answers to any question directed his way. He sums up his approach very neatly by simply expressing that “when your job’s something like this, you don’t have the right to complain.”

Still, that’s not to say that he doesn’t feel uneasy about being thrown into the glare of the media, and suddenly having people dissecting the meanings of his songs and, by extension, Ashin’s own psyche. “Yeah, it’s not my comfort zone at all,” he agrees, “but I have mixed feelings about it. It makes me feel self conscious and weird, but also it’s like a weird combination where the narcissist side of me has its ego stroked, because people care.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise for somebody who wrote an entire album that centred on the concept of anxiety in relation to romance, death and social situations, but the sudden intensity of analysis that him and his music are being subjected to has been tough to deal with. He admits “my baseline has become surreal in the past few months.  I kind of wonder as somebody who’s painfully self aware whether I can handle living in this surreal context for much longer, and also if the surreality ever stops being surreal and starts redefining what reality is.”

It’s exactly the sort of remorseless self-reflection that you’d expect from an ex-psychology student, as Ashin is, and he sums up his position by adding that “it’s definitely more attention than I’ve ever had on me at any time in my entire life, period. I’m the type of person who prefers to be a set of eyes in space, watching the world, so it’s weird to have that sense of people looking back.”

Given his introspective character, I can’t help asking Ashin whether he had any reservations about making such a stark and cathartic record that is the musical approximation of his deepest emotions being ripped from his grasp and being placed under a magnifying glass. But perhaps importantly, he dismisses that idea by explaining that “when I’m writing, I’m alone,” and without any knowledge of his record’s future audience, the self-consciousness didn’t arrive until after Anxiety had been written.

It’s central to Anxiety’s raw appeal that it was written in this honest way. Of course, given that the record was released by Software Recording Co. and Mexican Summer, there were a few people around during recording. But these people were Daniel Lopatin (of Oneohtrix Point Never, who also happens to be Ashin’s ex-roommate) and Joel Ford, who both helped out with all of the technical stuff that you’d expect them to be experts in. As Ashin says, even though he was working with them he wasn’t worried about laying his emotions down completely unedited: “I have the benefit of having really great people that I’m close to who know all my problems anyway working with me in the studio, so they’re not the people that I’m embarrassed around.”

As Easter marks a period of rebirth and re-evaluation, so has the first quarter of the year, with some monumentally significant returns from modern music’s most seminal artists.

The reinvention of an artist following a period of inactivity or – worse – a downturn in profile or creativity occurs so infrequently; thus is the law of diminishing returns that applies as time passes and defining records resonate an unfair advantage, holding up a benchmark for everything that comes after. Sometimes the opposite is true: there are a select few who have bounced back with a surprising response, as if the time away really did do them good or they somehow found their mojo again.

This year, My Bloody Valentine, David Bowie, Suede and The Strokes are among those that have returned with records of varying quality, some of them equalling their best work, others not so much.Given the biblical significance of today, here’s a selection of some of the best albums that not only marked a comeback for their respective creators but added a defining chapter in their artistic development.

10. Elvis Presley – From Elvis to Memphis

At the end of the sixties, Elvis Presley‘s career was hurting from the rapid production-and-release schedule around the 20+ movies he’d made in that decade, each with its own soundtrack album. He hated much of the material he was tasked to sing and by the time of 1967′s Clambake, record label executives finally realised the joke he’d become. The former king of rock ‘n’ roll was simply no longer relevant to anyone but his die-hard fans.

In 1968, a one-off TV show set out to change that. What we now know as the ‘Comeback’ special, the show (simply titled ‘Elvis’) set out to remind the world why they fell in love with the quiffed boy from Tupelo, Mississippi in the first place. Drafting in the two surviving members of Elvis’ original band (Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana) and covering some of his greatest late-’50s tracks, the special pre-figured the format of MTV’s Unplugged series by many years.

During recording, Elvis had remarked that “[I will] never sing another song that I don’t believe in, I’m never going to make another movie that I don’t believe in”.  The next record, From Elvis to Memphis, was released to capitalise on the success of the special and has been described as the one of the greatest white soul records ever made. The album’s only single ‘In The Ghetto’ is as iconic a performance as ‘Jailhouse Rock’ or ‘An American Trilogy’. Rolling Stone awarded the record five stars, noting “his fully engaged, newly energized voice finds its most logical album setting in years.”

9. Morrissey - You Are the Quarry

You Are The Quarry is not the best record by Morrissey but it is the one that pulled the former Smiths man out of a career low and placed him at the centre of an entirely new audience – one that wasn’t necessarily familiar with the hit-and-miss of his post-Smiths career up to the end of the ’90s and largely ignorant of the back-and-forth between the singer and the music industry/press throughout that decade. They knew The Smiths and that was all that mattered.

Dropped by his record label following 1997′s Maladjusted , Morrissey had retreated to the Hollywood Hills, setting up base in a house once owned by Clark Gable. Emerging after a seven year hiatus, he curated London’s annual Meltdown Festival, gave his first full-on TV interview in 17 years (to Jonathan Ross) and even managed to get the New York Dolls to reform.

The musical climate was primed to accept him again – in his absence, an entirely (new) generation had grown up with the likes of The Smiths and Joy Division as musical touchpoints, particularly in America. You Are The Quarry was his most personal record to date too. Lyrically rich, the album’s Tory-baiting lead single ‘Irish Blood, English Heart’ announced the quiffed one’s return and as as statement of intent, it even dropped the double quotes that framed the title of every album he’d released previously.

8. Loretta Lynn - Van Lear Rose

It took Jack White to help channel the core strength of Loretta Lynn – namely her voice – and in the process create a record that recalled a similar success, that of Cash and Rubin’s American Recordings project.

Throughout much of the ’80s and ’90s, Lynn had focused more on touring than releasing music and by the time she hooked up with the former White Stripe in 2004, it had been almost  two decades since she’d even dented the US top 20.

“I’d play tambourine on this record, if that’s it,” White said of Van Lear Rose. “I don’t care. I just want to be in the same room with her and to be able to work on this.” The lyrics used by Lynn were apparently taken from a cupboard filled with half-written material, including one song ‘Have Mercy on Me’ that was originally meant for Elvis.

Van Lear Rose was cut in twelve days on eight tracks and White’s aim was not to overthink the production, simply wanting to capture Lynn’s incredible voice in one take wherever possible. The result was Lynn’s finest long-player to date, the equal of her great singles and simply one the the most kick-ass country albums you’ll ever hear.

Little Boots takes the Best Fit Q&A and tells us all about her nerdy childhood, her time in Bahia and why she wishes she could teleport.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
I know she’s nothing like me but I absolutely love Aubrey Plaza (who plays April in Parks and Recreation). I think we share a similar sense of every day sarcasm, she cracks me up and is gorgeous.

What would your superpower be and why?
Probably to be able to teleport anywhere so I could visit all my friends and family instantly and be able to save about 30 hours a week I spend in airports!

What’s your idea of heaven?
I just spent a couple of weeks in Bahia in north Brazil and it felt pretty close to heaven on earth. That or someone inventing calorie free salted caramel ice cream.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
“Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.”

What song do you wish you’d written?
Abba – The Day Before You Came. It’s a flawless happy sad pop song that I am obsessed with.

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
Don’t worry that you’re a massive nerd who prefers books to boys and can’t figure out if you should be listening to happy hardcore or Celine Dion, it’ll all work out.

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?

When I wake up normally and get out of bed and go about my day then things start getting really trippy and scary then I realise I’m dreaming and wake up all over again. It really freaks me out and makes me wonder what reality we are in and if there’s such a thing as parallell worlds.

What song will they play at your funeral?
I would like ‘And Dream Of Sheep’ by Kate Bush but my friends would probably play something ridiculous like Macarthur Park which would make me smile at least.

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Giorgio Moroder, Benny and Bjorn from Abba, Brian Wilson and maybe Madonna or Debbie Harry, there would be no food they just get an instrument each and I would be secretly recording the whole thing.

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
My ever patient fans for taking so long to make my second album!

In the opening line of his forthcoming record Waking on a Pretty Daze, Kurt Vile sings: “I gotta think about what I wanna say.” I don’t buy it. Over a transatlantic call from London to his home in Philadelphia, Vile seems like a man who knows exactly what he wants to say, and he doesn’t like having words put in his mouth.

“Sometimes I get asked that question, ‘what are your influences’, and I just want to scream, because there’s so much, you know, I’m listening to new stuff all the time and it all influences me. But I mentioned Tusk to someone last year and suddenly it’s all over the Internet: ‘Kurt Vile is writing the new Tusk’, so I don’t wanna say too much about that kind of thing. Everything’s an influence.”

I suddenly feel a bit guilty. Vile assures me that I “asked it well”, but we both know how tedious a line of enquiry it can be. Nevertheless, it seems particularly appropriate here – anyone who has never listened to Vile’s music could be forgiven for assuming they know exactly what he’ll sound like simply through reading the popular press about him. When Vile is mentioned, the names of Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen are rarely far behind. No American musician could feel aggrieved by these comparisons, but they do something of a disservice to the idiosyncrasies of Vile’s work, which is at once both personal and stadium-worthy. This dichotomy is more apparent than ever with Waking on a Pretty Daze.

“Around the time of Smoke Ring [for My Halo, Vile’s 2011 album] I was getting into [Bert] Jansch and those guys, and there is some of that on the new one”, Vile tells me by way of explaining that intimate, personal element. “But I was listening to some really disparate stuff while writing it, like there was this one Gary Numan song, ‘Are “Friends” Electric’, and some other weird early-80s stuff, that I think worked its way in there.”

That electronic influence is not apparent on an initial listen to Pretty Daze. The overriding aesthetic is still undeniably Vile-esque, with his deceptively complex guitar work complementing a laconic approach to lyrics. “I’ve always played around with long songs,” he states. “I think most of my records have had songs around the six-minute mark, but this time I was more willing to let things run. I was more comfortable writing longer songs, and when I was playing them to John [Agnello, Vile’s producer since Smoke Ring] going ‘it’s another seven minute one!’ at first he’d kinda laugh, and then by the end, it was like ‘another one, seriously?!’ I don’t sit down to write a long song, it’s just how long it takes, and I didn’t start this record thinking it was going to be a double album.”

…Pretty Daze is, technically, a double album. At pushing 70 minutes long, it’s 20 minutes longer than Vile’s previous longest record, 2009’s Childish Prodigy, and as he tells me, he “still thinks of anything that comes on two discs as a double.” But it doesn’t flow like a double album, and it certainly doesn’t feel as long as some doubles have the tendency to. “Sure, and when I think of the double albums that I love, you know, Blonde on Blonde, The River, Exile on Main Street… most of them, really, they all divide into two parts, you can stop listening halfway through and come back to it, and I don’t know if you’d do that with mine.” The opening song, ‘Wakin on a Pretty Day,’ works as a microcosm for the whole album – a  time-machine of a nine-minute rocker that flows like a perfect three-minute pop song. “That song follows a pretty familiar structure”, explains Vile. “It starts with that riff, which really is just based on a simple chord structure, and then you’ve got verse, couple of verses, before the chorus, and then that bridgey-bit… It’s not complicated like you sometimes expect longer songs to be.”

The pattern holds for the whole album, which features four tracks that break the seven-minute mark, none of which outstay their welcome. Vile takes a quasi-classical approach to some of the longer compositions, building variations of the same repeating motifs. Though Vile has written longer songs before, they never felt quite so assured as these, nor has he ever come across as such a mature and complex musician.

2012, I remind him, was the first year since 2007 that saw no new Kurt Vile material released. Between releasing albums, EPs, singles, and work with his former band, The War On Drugs, Vile has built up a reputation as one of the most prolific men in rock. This despite being the man behind the lyric “I don’t wanna work, but I don’t wanna sit around all day frowning / I don’t wanna give up but I kinda wanna lie down, but not sleep, just rest.”

“Yeah, that wasn’t really about being lazy toward music, it was just about, you know, not wanting to go to work”, he tells me with a laugh. “I toured the hell out of [Smoke Ring]. I think I went to London three times on the back of that album. I just wanted as many people as possible to hear it. So it wasn’t slowing down, I just didn’t have the time to put anything out last year!” Plus, he has recently become a father for the second time. “Yeah, so that takes up time when I’m here. I have so many different commitments aside from music when I’m here now, and so does everyone else, that it’s hard to not be busy. Like with Adam [Granduciel, lead singer of The War on Drugs and a some-time Violator], he’s one of my really good friends, but we barely see each other, with being on the road and having families. You know, I’m 33 years old now, I’m maybe starting to settle down a bit.”

Nevertheless, Vile seems at ease with his lifestyle. On Smoke Ring, Vile sang of his desire to “hide in my baby’s arms”; the sense of introspection made it easy to picture Vile holing himself up away from the world. …Pretty Daze sounds like a party to which we’re all invited, and has been the perfect antidote to the recent unseasonable cold in London. “The record was written all over the place, on tour, and recorded in different places,” says Vile. “We put some of it down, like that first track, in California, and I think some of that sunny vibe got in there. I wanted to brighten up a bit.”

It also, for the first time, sounds like Violators record as much as a Kurt Vile solo effort. “One day I’d like to make a record that is credited to ‘Kurt Vile and the Violators’, but so far in my career all my albums have felt like solo albums that we then take on tour with the band, but you’re right, on this one I think everyone contributed a bit more. Everyone usually has their say once we’re in the studio anyway,” he says, with what sounds like a wry smile. “And I made sure that it says ‘The Violators’ on the back of the cover art, I did the graffiti for that myself.” The artwork for the album was designed by graffiti artist Steve Powers, who created the vast mural on a wall near Vile’s Philadelphia home. A good reason to buy the LP version, then, to see Vile’s own contribution to the piece? “For sure. Well, obviously I’d tell you buy it on all formats.”

At one stage I find myself quoting Vile’s lyrics back at him to make a point, something for which I apologise, before quickly pointing out that he is fond of quoting himself as well. ‘Runner Ups’ cribbed lyrics from ‘Red Apples’, a cut from his 2009 record God Is Saying This To You, and here he borrows from Smoke Ring stand-out ‘Jesus Fever’. “The thing is all those songs were actually written around the same time, it’s weird, but they’ve been kicking around since 2003, 2004. So it wasn’t really ‘quoting myself’ back then, I just had these lyrics I thought sounded good and used them in different places, and they’ve just stuck.” I find this impressive, given the clear line of development from one Kurt Vile album to the next. Vile, it seems, is equally surprised. “I’m not sure I’ve really changed my approach at all. I don’t really feel like I have. I just keep working like I always have.” Long may it continue.

Walking On A Pretty Daze will be released on 08 April through Matador Records.

As a music fan there can be few experiences more gratifying than witnessing a band blossom from humble beginnings and growing into something you had never anticipated when you first came to love their music. It’s the positive flip-side to the disappointing second album, the stagnating imagination and ‘I preferred their earlier stuff’ snobbery – yet the thrilling return of a band with lots of new ideas is rarely dissected in as much detail.

One of the more recent experiences I’ve had with this delight was Shapeshifting – the third album from Canadian quintet Young Galaxy, released in 2011. I had long been an admirer of their elegant and understated take on shoegaze filtered dream-pop, having properly fallen for a handful of songs from each of their preceding records. This was something different though, as I enthusiastically proclaimed in my review at the time they seemed to be “enamoured by the whole idea of reinvention” and this was really quite exciting to witness an almost real-time evolution. Unlike most, the vagaries of time were taking kindly to the band; having weathered a storm of frustrating critical indifference through their early releases they were now emerging stronger than before, and it was clear to hear from the boldness of their new songs. Gone were the sighing rhythms and melodramatic lyrics of before (beautiful though they often were) and in its place were big booming bass-lines, crystal guitar licks without a hint of distortion and tropical synths, not to mention words filled with optimism and hope rather than heartbreak.

Instrumental to that shift in style was the band’s new-found connection with Swedish producer and one half of influential electronic duo Studio, Dan Lissvik. Thankfully this relationship has been carried over and solidified, along with a refinement of those developments, on the forthcoming fourth record Ultramarine (released worldwide on 23 April). Vocalist Catherine McCandless was kind enough to answer a few questions about the process of their transformation, how vital Lissvik has become and what drives to them continue making music.

In an unusual production technique, for Shapeshifting the band held their Canadian base and recorded all of the songs themselves before emailing the tracks over to Lissvik in Gothenburg and allowing him to dismantle and re-build them in whatever way he saw fit. The results were hypnotically warm but occasionally retained the kind of emotional detachment which you might expect from such a construction process. However the band took a different approach this time, decamping to Gothenburg. As Catherine says, “we were in the room with [him] this time rather than doing it all over the Skype machine, so we could see him move his sexy hips when explaining how to capture the groove of a song. Everything on the record is continuous takes – none of that cut and paste bullshit”.

The fluidity of this studio approach is audible on the new record as well, that sense of aloof detachment has vanished and these resulting songs are alive with a radiance and sense of purpose. There is a deeply ingrained energy which she says is largely due to the input of the producer, “he’s insanely musical and very groovy – he feels music deep within and works extremely hard at it. I think he’s a wonderful producer, because he can articulate his musical perspective in a very intellectual but visceral way”.

It is undeniably a funkier record as well (whether or not the true source of that is the producer’s hips is open to debate), and even more so than the last there is an increased sensuality in these ten songs. Not in some tasteless explicit way, but the lithe rhythmic ways in which the songs evolve – often echoing like a suggestive movement of briefly visible shadows. ‘Out The Gate Backwards’ glides elegantly like a soft caress while ‘What We Want’ shakes like an 80′s disco-pop behemoth, and it’s impossible not to warm to the attitude they eminate. Part of this is certainly down to the switch in vocal duties, which used to be shared between McCandless and her partner and band co-founder Stephen Ramsay but which she has taken over completely now, something which they believe to be a very natural decision as “Stephen has less of an interest in singing generally – he likes to focus on the production and arrangements and I like to focus on the lyrics and vocal parts. It’s very symbiotic, as a couple we naturally fill in the spaces the other creates”.

It definitely doesn’t feel an unnatural switch to have occurred, in fact it’s barely noticeable in the context of the band’s overall sound progression from those earlier records, her smooth vocals a far better fit here. There has been a gradual move away from the fuzzy shoegaze influenced ballads they started with towards a more uplifting optimistic and melodic sound, which prompts me to ask if there was a point when the band decided they wanted to be doing something which moved closer to being pop music than it did rock. “We thought we wanted to be a heavier psychedelic band when we made our first record, but had never played live shows at that point – so it wasn’t until after we had played live that we realized we feed off the kinetic energy of the live environment, which I suppose led us to a more dance-y, pop sound overall. It feels right when we play the material live, which is the most telling thing you can feel as a band”.

In today’s musical landscape,  there is little room for development among the transience of mp3 blogs and hype machines gobbling up most of the opportunities for bands to develop without the pressure to capture an ever moving zeitgeist, and the band are rightly weary of this. Catherine discusses the relative freedom with which they have been able to find themselves as a band; “most people expect bands to know what they want to do when they start doing it, which I think is rarely the case. You have to learn your own musical language, you know? Plus we live in an era of pop music unlike any before it, whereby bands are not given infrastructure to develop, yet are expected to understand themselves immediately. If it doesn’t take off, too bad for you – everyone moves on,” she says, striking on a point which seems frustratingly accurate for most new bands these days. It’s something they were fortunate to avoid, “For us, we were seekers – we’ve always made music that felt right at that moment in time. I wish bands were able to do that more often nowadays. Too much modern music isn’t risky or ambitious, it’s just angling for success – which makes it dull, dull, dull”. It’s a tough sentiment to argue with.

The band are certainly keen to keep things fresh and try new things, and four albums in they’re keenly aware that this is a stage which a lot of bands are never given the opportunity to reach. For them it’s about keeping themselves motivated to continue doing new things; “We simply don’t care about being famous, and we have the nagging suspicion that the longer we do this the better we get, so we are still driven by something essential I’d say…” She goes on to add what that might be, and it’s an admirable sentiment, the kind of which perhaps not enough bands are clear about these days. Paraphrasing Nile Rodgers she says that “one of the greatest motivators is professional jealousy – when you hear a brilliant piece of music, you feel compelled to respond to it, to try to up the ante. That’s why it’s so important to be a fan of music first – you can never forget what a conversation music making is”.

This keen sense of what they’re doing is more crucial than ever before for the band as McCandless and Ramsay are now a family as well, and her response is typically pragmatic when I ask if this has made it more difficult to balance day to day life with band life. “Yes, we have a son, Fergus, who’s almost 2 years old… we keep telling ourselves that our choice to follow our dreams will make him happier in the long run, knowing his parents are content in what they do. You have to fight to balance the feeling of being self-indulgent vs. doing what’s best for your child…” Honestly though, the way in which Young Galaxy are going about their craft of late, I can’t help but think that they are set for a higher level of success before  long. Even if they might not know it, as Catherine humbly states “We live in fear of it being taken away at any moment, it is in part what fuels our ambitions… it’s not exactly a stable profession!”

Ultramarine will be released on 29 April via Paper Bag Records.

Photo by Cara Robbins

Heading towards the burning hot Texan sun, Cayucas are armed with their cameras as they make the long, cross country drive down to the world’s most anticipated new music showcase, SXSW.

Of course, blazing heat isn’t anything that’s going to bother this bunch of Californians who are set to unleash their unique and completely irresistible sun-drenched melodies and pop-tinged tendencies upon a very fortunate Texan crowd. We asked Cayucas to document their trip, and to take a few photos to show us SXSW through the eyes of one of the festival’s most hotly tipped bands. And here’s what happened.

“Cayucas Leaving Los Angeles”

“Crossing SoCal Desert”

“Ben reading a magazine to pass the time crossing Arizona”

“Christian believing in the desert”

“Zach hanging outside of Juarez”

“Morning jam in the living room”

“Nap time is over. No show tonight means no holding back.”

“Cayucas minus Casey. Our set got cut short and the promoters are shoveling drinks tickets as an apology.”

“Tom, you’ll be awake in 2 hours. I’m going to be dead for at least 6.”

Some of the greatest rock ’n’ roll stories of all time were created ‘on the road’. Iconic histories of rockstars old and new are frequently heard recounted between music fans, who fawn over the mystique and freedom that life on tour seems to inspire.

Of course, musicians themselves would probably tell a different tale – one of broken vehicles, sleepless nights and bags of dirty washing. Regardless, life on tour has always and will continue to fascinate us music fans, so we decided to ask Communion Records’ Joe Banfi to shed a little light on what life on the road is actually like. Heading out into the wilds of the UK, the Northwich native here reveals his personal insight into his recent tour, featuring home taken snaps of the landscapes, landmarks and wolf-dogs encountered along the way.

Hello, Line Of Best Fit readers.

My name is Joe Banfi and I’m a musician signed to Communion. I released my debut record, the Iron EP, with them in September and followed this with the release of the Nomads EP on 04 March. This past week I’ve been travelling around the UK on my first headline tour. Joining me is my band:

[Me pointing at Annie and Sherman]

On the left is my bassist Annie. In the middle is my drummer Sherman. Also with me is my cellist Rosalind who isn’t in this picture because she was off buying some coffee for us all somewhere.

We had a final monster-long rehearsal last Sunday, and then went back to Sherman’s. We should have got some sleep but listened to Peter Gabriel with beers a lot of the night instead.

We set off for Manchester on Monday morning, got two hours north and then remembered we’d forgotten the drum cymbals.

So four hours later we were back at the same place with the drum cymbals and then we drove on to Manchester and played that night at The Castle Hotel. It’s a cute small room and the ceiling looks like it belongs in a little church. We were all so nervous because it was our firstshow as a full band, and we felt so grateful to the audience for packing out the room and making the whole set feel so easy and fun. “Family” especially went really well that night.

The next day we set off for Sheffield.

[Bending road in the Peaks]

The drive was beautiful and it was warm and sunny, so when we broke down it was actually quite nice.

[Me and Annie in front of the car with bonnet up]

We overcame this obstacle and got to The Harley in Sheffield and had a great sound check. Then the sound desk broke twenty minutes before the doors were due to open! So after Bret the sound guy pulled some of his hair out due to stress, he managed to get hold of another desk and we pulled off another really fun show. Bret was happy and so were we. Iused to study Philosophy at University of Sheffield and saw a lot of old friends from university too which was great.

We had to get to Newcastle early the next day because we had a few sessions to do which included a good long chat with Greg at Amazing Radio. I felt like the interview went really well so thought a pose of victory was appropriate.

[Joe in front of Amazing Radio]

David McCaffrey stormed it in Newcastle at The Head Of Steam. He joined us for the whole tour and was brilliant every night. There he is on the left playing Angry Birds.

[Me, David and Sherman on stage]

A trip to Austin’s infamous South By Southwest festival is not complete without experiencing a set of extreme emotions – from the disappointment of missing a set or not getting into your party of choice, to the joy of catching surprise guest performances, nabbing the free swag you actually want and the IRL hangs with online pals. Of course, it’s also not complete without seeing a mega ton of new music and ultimately that’s what we’re here for. Without a badge around our neck we explore SXSW unofficial style and manage to catch a host of incredible acts, breaking and established. So here are our top picks from last week’s rambling festivities.

Empress Of

For reasons still unknown to modern man, Wednesday’s party itinerary happens to be the most stacked day of SXSW this year. With amazing line-ups and events spanning Austin’s dusty concrete plains, we manage to take in a good mix of it all without feeling like we’ve just run a marathon without proper training (not recommended). While we down as many coconut waters as we can to avoid the impending hangover, we’re treated to a performance by Brooklyn’s Empress Of. Recently signed to Double Demin and having played their first show ever only last October, singer Lorely Rodriguez garners a sweetly earnest performance that’s captivating in such a pleasantly surprising way. Delicate harmonies looped on-the-fly dance across wailing synths and sexy guitar riffs, as the crowd sways along to her words. In any other circumstance this setup might come across as lacklustre but Lorely’s innocent charm and earthly vocals marry all of the pieces of this live set together wonderfully.

Zebra Katz

Part of our week, which was not in the slightest bit planned, includes attendance at more than a few hip-hop shows. With artists ranging from Action Bronson (with special guests Schoolboy Q, Ab-Soul, Danny Brown, Riff Raff and Hit Boys) at the open-bar Viceland Party to the accidental amazing experience that is the Zebra Katz show at House of Blues.

Rapper Ojay Morgan (who has already toured with Azealia Banks) aka Zebra Katz and Njena Reddd Foxxx have an onstage chemistry that makes us feel like we’re on the set of some big budget music video, watching the behind the scenes magic take place. The pair literally transform the daytime, makeshift venue into their own dark and playful world of hip hop: swinging on cables, rolling on the ground, and at one point getting the entire crowd jumping and chanting “I’ma take that bitch to college, I’ma give that bitch some knowledge” from Zebra Katz’ single ‘I’ma Read’. It’s 3pm in the afternoon.

MØ

The Hype Hotel – which has less of a first-year-at-University feel this year – seems more like a modern art gallery space, except the art is the glowing (and free) Tito’s Vodka, Monster Energy drinks and the ability of otherwise self-respecting showgoers to consume aggressive amounts of Taco Bell products in one sitting.

Hype also includes free massages, an interactive photo booth, a massive light, a sound system and of course killer line-ups curated by music sites every day and night of the festival. We catch great performances by St. Lucia, MØ and !!!, all three offering equally polished and extremely magnetic sets that deepen our love affair with them. MØ almost makes us shed a tear (which we didn’t know was still possible) with her sheer uninhibited passion and stage presence.

St. Lucia

New York’s St. Lucia has packed the large venue space for a 2pm show, filling the room with a warm, magnetic energy. South African born singer, Jean-Philip Grobler and his band’s charming, polished mix of percussion shakes, pulsing synths, heartfelt falsettos and slightly worldly feel have garnered all of our attention, and we’re getting nervous; we think we’re falling in love. It’s a giddy kind of polished sound, with a love ballad quality that is just so irresistible. As Jean-Phillip claps his hands together and motions for the crowd to follow, we look around and the entire place is fixated, hands clapping above their heads and taking part in this communal lean towards the stage, just to feel that much closer. It’s a pretty magical moment.

Ryan Hemsworth

Live For The Funk are holding a party that includes free booze and Cashmere Cat, so naturally we make sure we’re there. The Norwegian producer with battle-champion beginnings is an explosive ball of energy, mixing tracks from his debut EP Mirror Miru, with current favourites that drive the crowd absolutely insane.

Ensuring the drops are huge and the vibe continues to build, Cashmere Cat warms up the crowd for a hilarious and charismatic Ryan Hemsworth, who takes the stage next. He drops new edits of his own tracks, unreleased bangers from producers-to-watch, and all kinds of on-the-fly remixes that make it feel like the roof of host venue the Joie de Vive hair salon, might blow off at any minute. Hemsworth proves once again why he’s such a star in the producer game. Names to know in bass music – everyone from LuckyMe Records labelheads, to Dubstep pioneers Skream and Mala – can be seen casually hanging out, just taking it all in.

As awe inspiringly beautiful, euphoric and masterful as their music was, Air France was more of a members club – open to all, 24/7 – than a band. In seven blurry years, two friends – Joel Karlsson and Henrik Markstedt – encountered a world of (accidental) adventure and (often self inflicted) catastrophe that now, 12 months after the group split, is held as dear to the lucky few they touched as the music itself.

It was always so difficult for journalists and fans to understand the concept of the Swedish duo and the world they existed in unless you got to experience it first hand. Their live show was often talked about with as much fervour and anticipation as that of their elusive debut album – two elephants in the same room that became such a domineering topic in interviews during the band’s latter months but ultimately never saw the light of day.

As much of a tribute as a history lesson, the story of Air France is re-told here by Best Fit founder Rich Thane – a die-hard fan and longtime friend of the band – as well as  Joel and Henrik themselves and the handful people who shaped the group’s short lived career.

Henrik and Joel, circa-2007.

Introduction

“Me and Henrik met in 1997″ explains Joel Karlsson – “I was super shy, but tried at the same time to seem cool and urban. Henrik also seemed to struggle a lot with his social interactions with people and we realised that when we were together, we could communicate with people – we filled in where the other left off. When we found out this equation I think people started to believe that we were cool and, we actually became quite popular. We would write magazines and fanzines. Made radio shows… Start political riots in school and play practical jokes on teachers.”

After high school, the pair would drift apart as further education took its hold and Henrik began studying at the University of Uppsala – 50 minutes north of the pairs native Stockholm. It wasn’t until Joel started a fanzine with a close friend that the pair were eventually reunited, with Henrik brought into the fold to illustrate the ‘zine. Shortly after, and months apart, the pair upped roots and fled to Gothenburg where they’d found love with twin sisters Ida and Elin.

“Henrik and I listened to a lot of dance music this during this period and thought it would be cool to have a band with beats but one that didn’t sounded so cold like everything else that was coming out during that time.” Karlsson continues, “Our first song was called ‘Behind Cabin Curtains’. We worked on it every day for six months until one day our computer crashed and we lost everything…”

‘Collapsing At Your Doorstep’

Never a pair to embrace modern technology by the balls, it was almost a miracle that the pair even finished the first EP – No Trade Winds. Yet, the company they were keeping in the small coastal City eventually made waves towards the influential ears of one Eric Berglund – founder of Sincerely Yours and member of Gothenburg underground pop upstarts The Tough Alliance. In an interview with Pitchfork, they explained of their initial reactions to the sudden label interest – “We panicked, turned off our cell phones, and stayed indoors for weeks. We wanted to keep Air France to ourselves and not have to fucking compromise with anyone.”

Before long the pair realised that their slow working ethic and borderline OCD approach to music making was something they had to make peace with – “we’re never going to feel finished. The song ‘Never Content’ was about that feeling of letting go.”

Following the closure of the BBC’s iconic Television Centre this weekend, we thought we’d take a bleary-eyed journey down memory lane and countdown our favourite Later… with Jools Holland performances as the show prepares to move its famous round-room setup to the Maidstone studios in Kent.

10. Cat Power – The Greatest (2006)

For any repeated guest of the show, it must be hard to keep things fresh to audiences already known to you. After all, a large part of the joy of Jools is to discover new acts. But anyone who’s ever seen the constantly-brilliant and frequently-erratic Cat Power will know she has no trouble with this. Delivering a performance somewhere between Chrissie Hynde and Nico, ‘The Greatest’ has been her finest TV moment and remains indeed one of her greatest tracks to date.

9. At The Drive-In – One Armed Scissor (2000)

Relationship of Command was a raw, frantic album. It’s messy urgency speaking to a new generation of alternate music fans more than any other at the turn of the millennium and their performance on Jools Holland in 2000 solidified why. It’s completely chaotic, out of time, out of tune in parts but my god is it incredible to watch Omar Rodriguez and co excitably jump around that stage, as if it was the heart of the song’s sentiment that mattered, wraught with surreal lyrics and high octane thrills. If you weren’t already a fan, this is what made you one.

8. Sigur Ros  - Hoppípolla / Með Blóðnasir (2005)

Iceland’s Sigur Ros must have given Chris Martin and co a right old fright when they took to Jools to showcase tracks from the faultless and flawless 2005 album Takk. Here was a band wholly perfect for the kind of nature programme and movie trailer soundtracking that Coldplay were raking in the big bucks from, without evoking one to want to rip their own ears out. Sigur Ros nowadays, however, aren’t sounding so delicate…

7. Radiohead – The Bends (1995)

Before Thom Yorke learnt he could dance, he clung to microphones and guitars in leather jackets and bleached blond hair, inspiring a shift in the introspective, inwardly focused grunge hang ups of the day. The title track from their third full length album, the first to be engineered by long time producer Nigel Godrich, was abrasive, dynamic and marked a change in the band, one evident in this Late Night performance; York’s angst ridden vocals straining over intensely layered, expertly executed guitar wails. Disillusion never looked so inspirational.

6. Battles – Atlas (2007)

With their time-signatures and song structures so dynamic and complex as to warrant the otherwise ridiculous genre tag of math-rock, it was always going to be an interesting proposition to see how Battles fared live on the box. They didn’t disappoint either, with their instantly recognisable high hi-hat and pitch-bending vocals. As a commenter on Youtube so aptly puts it: “I dont do any drugs and I love this.”

With his brand new, politically charged album Monkey Mind’s In The Devil’s Time out now, we catch up with Steve Mason about his personal nightmares, superpower aspirations and who he’d most like to apologise to.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
Jack Nicholson

What would your superpower be and why?
Flight. Who does not want to soar in the heavens?

What’s your idea of heaven?
I think it would be to have a family. Have kids and take care of them. On my own Island. In the Pacific. With a wife. And a recording studio.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
Never go back to a lit firework.

What song do you wish you’d written?
‘Sooner or Later’ by The Beat

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
Ridicule is nothing to be scared of.

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?
That I live alone forever and never find love.

What song will they play at your funeral?
‘Nothing But A Heartache’ by The Flirtations.

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Bill Hicks, Hugo Chavez, Viv Albertine, Francis Bacon( not the artist, the philosopher) and Christopher Hitchens. ( I am aware all except Viv are dead!)

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
The people of the DRC ( Democratic Republic of Congo ). We all owe them an apology for ignoring what is happening there.

Steve Mason’s new album Monkey Mind’s In The Devil’s Time is out now. Steve Mason will be playing The Village Underground in London on 11 April. For a full list of dates head here.

Photograph by Kevin Morosky.

Admittedly, of all the coffee-brewing establishments London’s Fitzrovia has to offer, taking Swedish singer-songwriter, Beatrice Eli, to Scandinavian Kitchen for our interview is hardly going to win the Genius Decision of the Year Award. After all, you wouldn’t take a visiting Italian out for a pizza, would you?

My ridiculous choice of venue notwithstanding, it does prompt Eli to confirm that the food available at the Nordic emporium indeed looks “like real Swedish food” and with this verbal certification of authenticity, we proceed to shelter from London’s renewed efforts at snowing. Dressed in black, Eli is donning a Croydon facelift, and somehow makes it work and look cool. She is, at all times, smiley, attentive and doesn’t shy away from eye contact. This may have something to do with the fact that she is very excited to be talking about her new music, which is finally seeing the light of day in the UK, following a soft release in her native Sweden.

The EP she is about to unleash here, It’s Over, is a ‘no fillers, no shit’ endeavour, containing four diverse and bravo-worthy tracks. Last year’s buzz maker, ‘The Conqueror’, is on it as well as three new potential greatest hits.

We start off by talking about when she first started making music. “After I quit high school – is it high school here when you’re 19?”, she asks, but we don’t dwell on the intricacies of Sixth Form. “I’d been to music school in Stockholm”, she continues, “and I didn’t have a band or play the guitar or the piano at the time but I wanted to make music. So I just bought this little home studio type of thing and started learning to produce. I just wanted to make my own music so I took some time to work on that and especially work on the beats. The beats are really important to me. I don’t want stuff to pass by unnoticed, I like weird and dramatic sounds”. The next step was putting some of her home recordings up on Myspace. “An A&R guy in the UK found me on Myspace”, she says, “and I started working with EMI in Sweden and with professional producers. I co-produced a lot of the demos”.

At music school Eli mainly studied soul singing. “I learned to play the guitar a bit too but not very well”, she giggles. I ask whether she found music school to be beneficial. She takes a moment to think about this and then shakes her head. “Not really, to be honest,” she says. “After school I realised that the technique I was taught really messed up my voice. I don’t know if I was doing it wrong or something but it really hurt my voice. And I think what got me to sing better and write better and perform better was just me being in the studio all the time and just singing and working on it. But I guess at least I had the chance to do something that I was interested in studying”.

‘The Conqueror’ came to Eli a couple of years ago. “I wrote it on the piano”, she says. “This made it very open in terms of what we could do with the song and, at the time, I just got into the UK sound and I was really inspired by dubstep and grime and all that and I wanted to do my own take on it”. The idea behind ‘The Conqueror’ came from wanting to be that someone special in another person’s life but “it doesn’t have to be about you actually loving that person that much, you know”, she clarifies. “It’s an ego thing. That’s a common theme with me and my friends – like, oh, I don’t like him or her anymore, we’ve broken up and I don’t want to be with that person anymore but I actually still want to have some sort of effect on them. I don’t want to see that person with someone else. This kind of ugly thing within us that a lot of people have and that I’ve experienced myself”.

I put it to her that this admission is rather honest. Does she not mind being so open, especially on her very first release? “That’s the only way for me to write”, she says. “So there are songs on the album that are beyond ‘The Conqueror’ in that respect. I guess it’s a good thing for me to get that one out there first as a taster of what’s coming because it’s going to be a personal experience. Also, I guess you have your own feeling when you write something but then when other people listen to it they might not see it in the same way you did when you were writing it. So, a lot of people thought it was a song about heartache but for me it was about ownership”.

Whilst ‘The Conqueror’ was only intended as an introductory hype-creator and was not, until now, made available for legal procurement over here, Eli made an initial promotional push in the UK last year and enjoyed very favourable blog murmurings. Throughout our conversation you get a real sense of Eli being an anglophile. She mentions her love of London often. “I’d absolutely love to be able to work in the UK”, she says. “It’s very close to home and the culture is quite similar. I adore London and I think the music that comes from here is really, really good. So to be able to have a little space of mine here in the music world would be amazing”. Eli previously lived in London for a month and cherished that experience. “I didn’t wanna go back to Stockholm”, she exclaims. For her it’s all about the vibe and the tempo of the city, she tells me. “It’s just very energetic and for someone who is in the music business, there’s a lot of people to work with, a lot of creative people. Also, I know you guys don’t think the weather here is good but if you compare it to Sweden, trust me – it’s good”, she laughs.

We move on to discuss her new single and the title track of the EP, ‘It’s Over’. Where ‘The Conqueror’ had a ballady essence to it, ‘It’s Over’ swallows a dextrose tablet and instantly turns on the sass. The song was started off by Astma & Rocwell of Swedish band (and Best Fit Recordings family members) NONONO, who also co-wrote and produced ‘The Conqueror’. “I was just like, wow I love this track. I love the vibe of it. I had a couple of lines that I had written on my phone a couple of days before and they just fit perfectly on their track. We recorded it the next day and there it was. It fit. I tend to instinctively go for ballads so it was really refreshing to have something that was much more upbeat”.

Descriptions of Devendra Banhart’s music are likely to include the words ‘freaky folk’. Two words that seem somewhat oxymoronic if you look back at the etymology of them; ‘freaky’ meaning something strange or unusual, and ‘folk’ meaning something widespread and traditional. But through conducting this interview, they have now become two words that have come to very surely describe Devendra Banhart. An embodiment of oxymoron, as sweet-sounding and endearing as he may be.

The interview begins and I first fulfil my customary duties; “how are you?” I ask. “I’m ok – I’m walking around New York. I’m looking for apartments with my fiancée right now in a part of town I’ve never been. So I’m talking to you as I go to look for apartments.” If old reruns of ‘Location, Location, Location’ are anything to go by, the task of house hunting is not something to be done without full concentration. But rather than being concerned about the quality of our encounter, as the interview continues, I’ll be assured that he can juggle the interviewee-househunter dualism with abundant ease.

Should you mention Banhart’s name to a seasoned folk music listener, their response will oscillate between talented musician and bearded, arty neo-hippy. But ask the E! News watcher and he’ll be the former flame of Natalie Portman and since cutting his hair, it’s not surprising that he’s been ushered into the world of glossy-magazine fashion modelling courtesy of Kooples. It’d be difficult to say he wasn’t canon fodder for the ‘sell-out’ brigade with all this considered, but this would an easy and auspicious jab, and one that, as Banhart’s new album Mala shows, is irrelevant when considered alongside his knowledge and work as an artist.

“Mala will be your eighth album, I believe?” I ask, pre-empting a quick affirmative response from Banhart. “Hmm, I don’t know let me think…” The seconds pass… “I think it may be the seventh”. Which is true, if you discount his unofficial 25-track demo The Charles C. Leary released before his official debut album Oh Me, Oh My. Devendra has always treated his art with a meticulous seriousness, a mentality that seems insoluble with his glossy-mag alter ego, but is there with a potent force nonetheless.

Still, this kind of awareness of one’s own work can be intimidating as a third party attempting to attain more understanding on things that appear so obvious to the artist. Three years on since the last release of a Banhart LP, I ask what has changed in the space of this time that has perhaps affected the record, “far too much to discuss right now, and far too little that would be of interest.” Was it difficult to keep the album focused, with regards to the amount of influences that would have appeared in those three years? “I don’t know…” he responds, “what do you think?” What I think is that Mala is indeed a more focused album, in very literal sense. His shortest album to date clocking at 14 songs, it manages to successfully draw upon disparate influences but produce a full sounding, structured body of work, while still managing to sound effortless. But the original question would never receive a response; instead the conversation is transported to a cyber-galactic parallel universe. Attempting to engage in oblique responses is made much more difficult with an oblique telephone line. “Um, it’s so strange I keep hearing something…” he says, “are you saying Neptune or Neptunes…? I’m hearing something about mythology… Neptune.” I assure him that Neptune isn’t being discussed and, as the phrase goes, move swiftly on.

“I’ve been a visual artist for the same amount of time that I’ve been a musician,” he replies when asked about his creative methodology, “it’s been parallel with my musical career. Literally to a T – the first solo show I had in New York was the same month as the first record came out. I divide my time between those two disciplines. For the last three years, I haven’t been writing this record. I wrote it a month before recording. The times prior to that I was working on visual art – and those are the two things that I do.” For a moment, the interview is, as suspected it would be at some stage, relegated to second position as Banhart graciously thanks someone who I imagine to be a landlord for their ‘understanding’, before expertly refocussing on the question. “So that’s it, my process changes all the time – it’s one of pain and trauma [laughs] but it’s all right…”

“I’ve just had an interview request from Farming Today on Radio 4. That’s a new one.” Billy Bragg, it seems, is prepared to go down some pretty unorthodox routes to promote his new record. “It’s on at five in the morning,” he groans. “They want me to talk about the Agricultural Wages Board. It’s all in a day’s work for me, I suppose. I’m actually talking to Zoo magazine tomorrow.” I respond with an unintelligible squeal that’s equal parts shock and indignation. “Nah, fuck off. I wouldn’t touch that lot with a bargepole.”

It’s a pretty neat summation of the Billy Bragg we’ve gotten to know in the years since his last original studio album Mr. Love and Justice was released back in 2007. Since then, he’s spent far more time in the spotlight for political reasons than for his music, campaigning against the rise of the BNP, getting involved in the student protests and, now, writing to his MP to complain about plans to abolish the minimum wage for farmers. Even the handful of songs he’s released on his website in that period have been topically-driven; ‘Never Buy the Sun’ and ‘Last Flight to Abu Dhabi’ serve as examples. Tooth and Nail represents a long-overdue return to the studio; in a YouTube preview, he admits that he’s spent the past few years “keeping the record industry at arm’s length.”

“I think they’ve probably been keeping me at arm’s length,” he laughs. “I have been putting material out there. I put a compilation of free downloads out in 2011 called Fight Songs, and last year I put out the complete Mermaid Avenue sessions, so I’ve not been rejecting it, but I don’t really know if there’s a place for Billy Bragg in the record industry at the moment. We’ll find out when Tooth and Nail comes out.”

The main problem, it seems, has been one of financial concern. “If I really wanted to do things without the industry, I’d have to self-fund the record. I make my living playing gigs, and the last thing I’d want would be to get to the end of a long campaign travelling round the world only to find that I’d painted myself into a corner financially, because the album had been so expensive to make. I was just reading an interview with Emmylou Harris in The Guardian, talking about when she used to play with the Hot Band. She said she’d worked with the most amazing musicians, and ended up a quarter of a million pounds in debt at the end of it all. There’s a lot of practical things like that to consider – that’s what I meant by keeping the industry at arm’s length.”

The impetus to finally throw himself back into the writing and recording process was provided by the death of his mother two years ago. “When you lose someone close to you, it’s bound to make you think about what you’re doing with your own life,” he says. “Suddenly, I realised I was the oldest member of my family left, and I won’t pretend there wasn’t a void I needed to fill. I’d been putting off making a proper record for a while, and I had an offer on the table from my friend, Joe Henry, to make an album in five days.”

It was an offer he ended up accepting, despite the fact that such a swift recording process was anything but the norm on past efforts. “Put it this way; on Mr. Love and Justice I did two songs in six weeks, than we had a break for six months, then another six songs in two weeks. After that, half the tracks still didn’t have lyrics. By the time I was finished, I ended up with a record on which I’d spent far too much for far too few copies sold. I couldn’t afford to go down that path again. It was my money on the line again, and I had to make this quick process work, otherwise I might’ve ended up with the most expensive demos I’d ever made.”

You’d be forgiven for assuming, then, that the songs were all finished and ready to go before day one of five began. Not so, says Billy. “I wrote the lyrics for ‘Handyman Blues’ in the taxi on the way to the airport, and I didn’t write ‘January Song’ til the last day of recording. I had a few others that were very much still in the flatpack, as it were, that needed assembling when I got there.”

Sonically, Tooth and Nail is tinged with the kind of Americana that Bragg has clearly been fascinated with for a while now; a number of his past works have focused on folk hero Woody Guthrie, including the aforementioned Mermaid Avenue sessions, which saw him team up with Wilco to set Guthrie’s lyrics to their own new compositions. “Those sessions opened me up to a lot of new people; the younger audience that Wilco brought me, and then Woody’s older fans, too. The influence of American roots music has always been there to some degree, but I never followed it up after Mermaid Avenue. It wasn’t until I was working on stuff for Woody’s centenary last year that I really reconnected with that. It’s always been there, as far back as an old B-side from the eighties called ‘There Is Power in a Union’, that was just an acoustic guitar and a banjo. Pre-Mumford banjo, I should add.”

In a strikingly austere modernist theatre in the Mitte district of Berlin, Yoann Lemoine stands triumphant onstage, arms outstretched messianicaly, egging on the adulations of a mid-week crowd. There’s near-hysteria in the auditorium for the man better known as Woodkid and it’s not difficult to see why.

Lemoine has earned acclaim and gongs (including a Cannes Lion) for his work with the likes of Lana Del Rey, Drake, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift but tonight finds the hirsute Frenchman fully transformed into a musical prodigy with a body of songs the equal of his video work and a show that transcends the everyday without ever becoming obtuse.

The child of advertising creatives, Lemoine was born in Lyon thirty years ago. After an education that took him from his native France to London – and covered everything from stop-motion animation to photography, collage and film – he followed his parents into the world of ads for a time before finding his feet as an in-demand videographer with style that immediately set him apart. In 2011, he stepped out from behind the camera to showcase his musical talent with the arresting ‘Iron‘, which introduced a sound that clashes baroque, anthemic orchestrals against a heavy beat-driven punch referencing warehouse raves and film soundtracks as much concert halls.

We’re in Berlin to talk with Lemoine about The Golden Age, his debut long-player which drops via Island this week. Three years in the making, it’s a magnificent multi-sensory opus with a coming-of-age concept that spreads beyond just the music – there’s an illustrated novella and massive live visuals that all carry a unifying poetic. The project is centred on the movement from adolescence to adulthood and the concept of that hallowed time when innocence reigns and we’re shielded from the war, corruption and horrors of the adult world.

Lemoine’s an ambitious soul. If he were ten years younger, the confidence and intellectual gusto that accompanies our conversation might seem arrogant or misplaced but there’s little doubt of the workmanlike skill that underlies his efforts across so many different mediums (not to mention their subsequent success). The Golden Age simply couldn’t have been made by someone in their late teens or early twenties; it’s a mature debut with emotional heft.

The Golden Age is an incredibly bold statement and I was wondering how you managed to work across several different mediums and still retain a sense of thematic unity.

I work in very instinctive way. It’s like I do internal archaeology somehow, I dig for fragments of visions, sound textures, lyrical elements, moods, scenes and I stick them together like a puzzle. Sometimes I come up with ideas that are too influenced so I kill those fragments. I only keep the very honest ones. When I did ‘Iron‘ I had this aggression in me that was very genuine that I translated into this massive horn hook, half digital/half organic. Then I translated that back into a visual and then I found this texture of a meteorite, of black smoke that was a good translation of that horn sound. I don’t come up into a treatment on paper for the whole project, for every song.

It’s constantly evolving but the more I advance in the project, the more I know where I’m going. I now know what the next video is going to be about, I know how everything will fit together, I’ve known that since the ‘Run Boy Run‘ video but when I did ‘Iron’ I was still discovering the story as I was making it.

It’s a good process, it’s almost like psychoanalysis and I answered a lot of questions about my emotions and what I wanted to do in my life as an artist. It’s the opposite of screen-writing something and sticking to it.

From the Led Zepplin man’s reunion with his former groupie, to Kanye West‘s antithesis performance and near collapsing bridges, as the events of this year’s SXSW come to a close we reminisce about the riots, reunions and random events that have made Austin’s most famous music festival what it is.

10. Robert Plant and Pamela Des Barres reunite, 2005

Following his Keynote Speech, Led Zepplin man was giving a press conference when a voice from the back piped up “So, do you still have groupies?” before Robert Plant recognised his old friend and jumped down from the podium to give “Miss Pamela” a hug.

9. Alex Chilton Memorial Tribute Show, 2010

On the first day of SXSW 2010, just three days before he was set to make a rare live appearance with 70s icons Big Star, Alex Chilton sadly passed away. A memorial concert was swiftly arranged in it’s place and performances from The Watson Twins, M.Ward, Evan Dando and R.E.M‘s Mike Mills succeeded to do justice to the man’s legacy.

8. No Age and F-cked Up party on Lamar Pedestrian Bridge, 2008

“Yo! If anyone dies tonight, don’t tell the cops. No body. No Crime.”

Chaos at a punk music fuelled after-party? Well we never! No Age and Fucked Up brought the guerilla spirit to 2008′s event with a performance that, according to legend, almost collapsed Lamar Pedestrian bridge.

7. Kanye West’s ‘Surprise’ show at Vevo Powerstation, 2011

In a way it represented everything people lament when discussing the commercialisation of SXSW, in another way, it was a completely unforgettable performance.

6. Prince performs at Samsung’s Closing party, 2013

So this only happened yesterday, but we know Prince’s performance to 250 fans will go down in SXSW history, a) because it’s Prince and b) because his Samsung sponsored show is a leap forward in terms of the festival’s scale, ambition and attitude.

John Grant takes the Best Fit Q&A and tells us why he wants laser beams eyes, his nightmares and who he’d most like to apologise to.

Who would play you in the movie of your life?
The greatest actor in the world of course John Hurt. Young AND old John Hurt.

What would your superpower be and why?
Shooting deadly laser beams from my eyes because then I could annihilate all the inconsiderate c-nts who do things like steal parking spaces, cutting in line and don’t have “inside voices”.

What’s your idea of heaven?

Giacomo photographed by Mustafa Sabbagh.

What one thing have you learnt from your parents?
That I would regret many of the mistakes I’ve made.

What song do you wish you’d written?
Animal by Jenny & Johnny

If you could say something to your 15 year old self, what would it be?
Don’t waste your time giving a sh-t what other people think or trying to please them.

What’s your re-occurring nightmare?
The love of my life going about his life without me.

What song will they play at your funeral?
Time Out for Fun by DEVO

What five people would you invite to your fantasy dinner party?
Cheri Oteri, Madeline Kahn, Alison Janney, Laura Dern and Cloris Leachman

Who would you most like to apologise to and why?
My mother because I was such a selfish asshole when she was alive, she was amazing and I took her for granted.

Pale Green Ghosts is out now via Bella Union. 

“It’s just kind of happened. I know it’s twenty years, but it doesn’t feel that way.” Low’s Mimi Parker is looking back on twenty years as one third of America’s favourite miserabilists. This month’s The Invisible Way is their tenth full-length release amidst a discography that also includes a slew of EPs and a couple of live records, each a milestone along a career trajectory marked with intrigue.

“You know, it’s just like life, really. There’s milestones along the way, obviously, and you remember them, but for the most part you’re just getting on with it and watching it go by.” Equating the band’s career with the natural progression of life is an obvious touchstone for Parker, something that she brings up throughout our conversation. “Obviously we still love making music, but the truth is, at this point, this band is our living. If the records still sound like they have some sense of urgency, it’s because this is what we do day to day to pay the bills and take care of ourselves. We don’t have an office to go to or a computer to sit in front of all day, and this is what we do instead; the band is still our life.”

The new record comes a little less than two years after the release of their last effort, C’mon, and marks a return to prolific output for the band; there was a four-year gap between C’mon and 2007′s Drums and Guns. “I guess we’ve been slowed down in the past by things outside of the music;  obviously Alan [Sparhawk, singer-guitarist and Parker's husband] had some issues and we struggled to work on music for a while.” She’s referring, of course, to Sparhawk’s well-documented nervous breakdown back in 2005. “But I think it’s mainly that we’ve become much more efficient songwriters recently, I think we’ve become a little bit more methodical.”

This new focus allowed the band to finally make good on something they’d wanted to do for a while; work on new music with Wilco‘s Jeff Tweedy, who produced The Invisible Way. “We had this very gradual introduction to Jeff, and Wilco in general; we worked with [Wilco guitarist] Nels Cline for the first time four or five years ago, and then he played with us on C’mon. It seems like he really got those guys into what we do, so we’d been waiting for a while for our schedules to align so that we could work on something, whatever it turned out to be.”

With Tweedy himself a veteran of nine Wilco records on the musician’s side of the recording desk, you’d surely be forgiven for wondering how easy he found the transition to the role of producer. “Going into the studio, he’d already heard the demos we’d sent him, which were pretty fleshed-out; it was like he knew the record better than we did,” laughs Parker. “I think he just kind of wanted to hold us true to that original vision for the songs; he didn’t try to second guess us too much. He was an incredible listener. He really wanted all of the focus to be on us.”

Part of Tweedy’s plan for the album involved recording it at breakneck speed, at least by previous Low standards. “The whole thing was tracked in five days – straight in and out,” says Parker. Again, she brings the practical considerations of everyday life sharply back into the discussion; “if nothing else, you’ve gotta think about how much everything’s costing you. Studios are expensive. If you go in knowing you can get everything done in a certain space of time, then that’s a big plus financially. We put the work in early and took these nearly-finished demos into the studio – I guess that’s the Minnesota work ethic coming out.”

C’mon and Drums and Guns had marked a period of sonic expansion for a band previously best known for their signature minimalist style. The Invisible Way, though, sees Low retreating into more familiar, less bombastic territory. “We worked with Matt Beckley on C’mon; he’s an LA guy, so I guess that record was always going to sound bigger, and lusher,” says Parker. “I think we’d grown a little bit tired of the restraint that we’d had in our sound for so long. It’s not really that we’ve gone back to that on The Invisible Way; it’s just that Alan doesn’t want to repeat himself. We’ve brought in acoustic guitars and we’ve never really focused on the piano like we have on this record, so we’re still experimenting.

Twenty years on, Low are still endeavouring to make their live sets as career-spanning as possible, but with those two decades encompassing marriage, births and lineup changes, surely the passage of time has changed the nature of the band’s relationship with their older material? “We think of songs like we think of friends; some you hold dear and never fall out of touch with, and others you drift away from over time,” says Parker, again bringing the band-as-life metaphor back into play. “Some of those older songs, we’d have to go back and re-learn the lyrics and how to play them again; others, we’ve never really stopped playing. I don’t think there’s anything we’ve done that we feel truly disconnected from now.”

Lyrically, Parker hasn’t strayed too far from her time-honed approach on The Invisible Way. “Lyrics are so weird; I think I’ve learned to stop worrying about them by now. I think my best lyrics have been very much stream of consciousness; that way, whatever’s on your mind is gonna make its way out, whether you know it or not. You shouldn’t have to try too hard, I don’t think.”

It’s difficult, of course, to speak with Low and not touch upon the spiritual aspect of their lives; Sparhawk and Parker’s devotion to their Mormon faith is well-documented, although it’s not something that typically seems to emerge in a particularly obvious fashion  in their songs. “I think it probably pops up every now and again. It’s very personal to us, but we’ve never wanted to really put it out there in the music; maybe on some level, we worried people might think we were trying to force it on them, I don’t know.”

The Invisible Way is the fourth release on Sub Pop since they signed with the legendary Seattle label back in 2004, although it might be their last on this imprint; “our contract’s up now, so we’re not sure what’s coming next,” Parker says, with a nervous laughter that’s refreshingly self-effacing. “I’d like to think they’ll want to keep us on. You can’t take anything for granted.”

Whether they’re on Sub Pop or not, Low have a relatively clear view of what the future holds. “I think we’ll always make records and we’ll always want to experiment. The core of this band is Alan and I doing what we love; singing and playing. I don’t think that’s ever gonna change.”

The Invisible Way is out on March 18 via Sub Pop.

The Mary Onettes

Music is, more often than not, a family affair. It’s a craft which places artists within circles of like minded souls, and provides a way of creating links between people that may not have stumbled upon each other otherwise. From bands and collectives through to festivals and labels, connections are forged based upon a shared passion, and at Sweden’s Labrador Records, these connections are often more apparent than elsewhere.

Featuring a roster of wide eyed new artists alongside the talents of more established musicians, Labrador Records is one of the most engaging labels to be heard in Sweden at the moment. To understand their family vibe a bit better, we got two of the label’s artists to sit down and discuss each other’s opinion on questions that they find interesting. So, in the week that they release their third album Hit The Waves, we asked The Mary Onettes to catch up with Gothenburg natives and Labrador label mates Sambassadeur. Here’s what happened.

Sambassadeur vs. Philip of The Mary Onettes:

Sambassadeur: Philip, when did you first start playing music?

Philip: I was 11 years old. It was old school hard rock like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple and Metallica, The name of the band was Young Boyz. I was really into Cliff Burton in Metallica.

Your older brother Henrik is in The Mary Onettes with you, have you always played together?

Philip: I started playing with Henrik when I was 12 years old. He had a punk band called The Beerbellys and I got to play with them. I really looked up to my brother. When he was not around I ran into his room and listened to his records, I never forget listening to Nevermind by Nirvana for the first time, it was amazing. Every band I listened to then came from him.

How is it to be in the same band as your brother?

Philip: It can be hard and somewhat complicated. We’re brothers and get into fights and say unnecessary things to each other, I imagine that it could be tiresome for the other guys sometimes. For the most part it’s amazing being on tour. We laugh a lot and do silly things. I think a lot of people have this preconceived notion about us being very serious and melancholic, they should see us on tour!

We’re not only labelmates, we also share a somewhat skeptical attitude towards travelling by plane. How has this flight anxiety affected your band? Touring etc.

Philip: Not so much really. We had a couple of tours cancelled due to this, but I try to go by plane if I can. I try to read a lot about flying, different planes and engines, statistics, everything! Understanding how flying and airplanes work really helps… Alcohol helps as well!

I used to watch plane crashes on YouTube before a flight, which is extremely unhelpful, that never happens to you?

Philip: Of course I’ve done that. I even listened to the black box recordings that you find on the Internet. That was a huge mistake, I was miserable for weeks after that.

On our latest tour to Brazil, our father decided to come with us, which is strange since he is very afraid of flying. It was so much fun watching him on the plane, all quiet, drinking vodka and coke, starring into the seat in front of him!

Do you like playing live?

Philip: Absolutely, we love playing live and consider ourselves as a live band. There’s no better feeling than after a really good show.

And in the studio recording songs?

Philip: I’m quite stubborn when it comes to recording songs and I know exactly how I want us to sound so it can be quite hard working with a producer, especially if the producer is as determined as we are.

I don’t think working with well known producers is the best option for a band. It’s easy to be disappointed due to high expectations and so on. I think working with a unknown producer is more exciting. My favourite producers often made their best albums early in their careers, when they weren’t as famous and well respected.

Insofar as the oft-daunting world of “post-classical” music is concerned, it’s not unreasonable to claim few contemporary solo artists possess an improvisational or compositional knack as downright resourceful or inspired as Hauschka, the alias of Düsseldorf-based musician Volker Bertelmann.

Having released a steady stream of increasingly ingenuous “prepared piano” records over the last few years, last May he delivered Silfra, an entirely improvised, altogether inspired collaborative effort with American violinist Hilary Hahn. Ahead of his imminent London performance on 15 March at the Bishopsgate Institute, we learn how the forty-seven year old went about breaking yet more ground on his latest release.

Prior to embarking on his latest exploration, quite a few people were already of the opinion that Hauschka effortlessly commanded a defiantly singular approach, one altogether unrestrained by self-enforced limitations or prospective self-doubt. His grasp of improvisational fluctuations in solo performance equally exuded an air of the academic and the frivolous; a deep-rooted mischievousness underpinned by an utterly fascinating flair in the ever-broadened realms of the John Cage-coined act of ‘prepared piano’, i.e. altering the tonality and timbre of solo piano performance by placing objects (otherwise known as “preparations”) between or on top of the piano’s strings, dampers or hammers, thereby yielding endless permutations of sound.

How did originally teaming up with Hahn, an established concert violinist otherwise schooled in Bach and Tchaikovsky, come about? “Hilary and I met the first time in Dusseldorf after one of her concerts,” recalls Bertelmann. “We got introduced by [fellow Fat Cat Records artist] Tom Brosseau and it was the first time that I heard a concert of hers. Then we played on the same show in San Francisco, a show also featuring Brosseau. Hilary and I decided that she could improvise with the string quartet and I at the end of the performance and it proved to be a lot of fun. Then we decided to move onwards and meet frequently to rehearse and find out what kind of music we could do together. After two years we decided to do our recordings [for Silfra] in Iceland.”

Seeking out the multi-talented Valgeir Sigurðsson – an accomplished musician in his own right and producer of the likes of Björk – Bertlemann and Hahn set about excavating what would eventually result in twelve tracks of instinctive musicality gushing urgency, playfulness and charming intelligence. “It was a lot of fun,” recalls Bertlemann. “Valgeir is a very laid back person and it was a pleasure to discuss things with him. He also added some electronic sounds to it, which was great.” This allowance for Sigurðsson himself to contribute to the project’s overall presence and “scope” reflects, just as much as anything else, the wonderfully open-ended nature of the project in itself.

Straddling the flux and form of the avant-garde and electronic music, Bertelmann’s forays into the limits of prepared piano down the years have lead to some hugely entertaining results. Even in terms of titular classification of its varying, dozen pieces, Silfra was no exception: “During the recording process we already started making long lists of words, names and phrases that came in our mind as titles,” reveals Bertelmann. “It was like a game to find out the strongest words and pair them with the strongest compositions. We had a lot of fun doing this.” Indeed, rather than bestowing upon his works an almost half-expected air of intellect, it would seem that “fun” is very much irremovable from how Bertelmann’s seeks to express himself musically.

For a record so cunningly accomplished – from the initial ruptures of ‘Stillness’ to the concluding grandiosity of ‘Rift’ – one wonders to what extent premeditation or discussion played a part in the record’s making. “We mainly discussed feelings and tempos we want to start with and also remembered references from our rehearsals,” says Bertelmann. “The discussion process started after we recorded many improvised pieces as we had to decide which are the strongest pieces. “The only pre-conceived idea was the piece ‘Krakow’, where the piano recording is from the very first session Hilary and me did at my house. We used the piano part and Hilary recorded a new violin part to it.” And what about experimenting with new objects/techniques during the recording? “I actually mainly used the objects that I often use but I prepared parts of the piano more specifically,” Bertelmann says, obliquely.