Dan Carson and George O’Brien ignore temptations to do nothing but sit on the beach all day in the Brighton sunshine and bring us an account of some incredible performances from the first day of this year’s Great Escape Festival.

Chasing Grace

Recent Island signing Chasing Grace kicked our weekend off with an early performance at The Hope. The British four piece conjure-up a light-hearted blend of folk and emotional pop with glimmers of heaviness, that is arguably too shackled. There is no doubt it’s early days in terms of live performance though and they soon warm into their set with tracks like ‘Bullet’ and particular highlight ‘Trust’. A Live Lounge-esque cover of ‘White Noise’ shows intelligence, while the quality of their voices stand them in good stead. They’re not quite ready but undoubtedly a decent future lies ahead. GB

Honeyblood

Photograph by Andrew Novell

The darkness of the Dome Studio played host to some pure punk-pop from Scottish duo Honeyblood, as Brighton was bathed in sun. Their simple setup of crunchy Telecaster power chords and splashing drums sound so much bigger than they appear, while Howling Bells-like vocals help carry the performance. GB

Holy Esque

Photograph by Andrew Novell

More punchy scuzz followed-up, as fellow-Scotts Holy Esque soundtracked our Thursday lunchtime. The quartet deliver controlled angst, with a quivering lead vocal rasping out over the top of some genuinely bone-shaking synth bass and relentless top-end riffs, that at times echo the heavier moments of Editors. The performance feels polished and brilliantly professional, the voice grabbing attention above all else, and the closing track ‘St.’ is desperately brilliant. It’s accessible aggression and very, very watchable. GB

Glass Animals

Photograph by Andrew Novell

A delay to scheduling at Digital seems to leave Oxford four-piece, Glass Animals, feeling somewhat jarred and disjointed initially. It certainly takes them a few minutes to find their groove amidst the shroud of smoke and aqueous atmosphere. Although they’re wedged into an early-ish slot on the bill, their occultish soundscapes – formed of whining samples and softly kissed hi-hats – manage to precipitate a kind of trancelike shuffling amongst the assembled fans. ‘Dust In Your Pocket’ broods and bubbles and threatens to boil over, all flitting synth arpeggios, seedy finger clicking and creeping whispers; it’s the highlight of a set stuffed with primal delights. DC

London Grammar

One of the most anticipated performances of the day came from the fast-rising London Grammar. A wonderfully lavish church provides the ideal setting for their sound, filled with emotion and lead by one of the most striking voices you’re likely to hear.

With the makeshift pews at bursting point, the three young Londoners seize the crowd’s attention; ‘Wasting My Young Years’ feeling completely like the hit single it is. The real drums that kick in when ‘Metal and Dust’ starts, turning a good sounding live track into something genuinely spine-tingling. They can do it live, and that’s what confirms them as one of the UK’s most exciting new bands. GB

Syron

Photograph by Howard Melnyczuk

The clue’s in the name with this London garage diva. A Best Fit favourite, Syron is responsible for some of the most exciting garage-fuelled tracks to surface in the last 12 months. Dominating the Audio stage with her trademark, extravagant appearance, her live set has grown, allowing her to slip seamlessly between songs, with carefully thought-out backing tracks. Her comfort and energy on stage is genuinely eye-catching and with chart-ready hits like ‘Breaking’ and ‘Here’, there’s no doubt she is the absolute complete package. GB

Mac DeMarco

‘We’re from Montreal, welcome to the rock show baby’. Hello indeed Mr. Mac Demarco. Looking like a quartet of roughnecks time-warped in from an 80’s truck stop, he and his band might seem a little marooned front and centre in the cavernous Corn Exchange but that doesn’t hinder them from delivering an essential collection of tuned-down romantic slacker-rock gems.

Surfy up-tempo toms roll with intricately woven bass and impeccable three-way harmonies, Mac blithely jamming away on his guitar, tongue lolling out through the feel-good bridges. ‘Rock n Roll Nightclub’ provides the biggest thrill of the set. Pounding floor toms and swooning leads are punctuated by Mac’s bassist’s frankly mental backing vox. Honest and self-deprecating throughout; even the room’s sternest critics struggle to withhold a slight grin. DC

Merchandise

Photograph by Howard Melnyczuk

The Tampa trio – plus their live drummer – are probably better suited to diners and dive bars where their punchy post-punk rhythms hug the sweat-stained ceiling, rather than flutter away, as in the case of tonight’s somewhat ‘airy’ venue. The Corn Exchange is barely at half capacity but Merchandise perform as if they’re facing a crowd of 10,000. Oozing charisma, vocalist Carson Cox lets rip with his disillusioned croon on ‘Time’. Bruised yet comforting, he wags a cautionary finger between the gristly guitar breaks and thunderous toms and snare. Romance and recklessness entwined; Merchandise are living proof that falling in love will only ever end in tears. DC

Phantom

Hanna Toivonen and Tommi Koskinen aren’t your archetypal Scandi-pop duo. Though they retain that innate command over big, bold hooks; they also wield the power to drop down a key and roll out some wonderfully expansive, elegiac sprawls. Tonight they exercise both capabilities in perfect synch. A hooded Tommi arches over a huge, homemade Midi controller – Hanna dubs it ‘The UFO’ and suggests we check out its Facebook page – laying down the bristling, crunchy beats to which Hanna’s spidery coo attaches.

Bon Iver’s ‘Skinny Love’ is morphed into a rapturous electro-pop call to arms while ‘Kisses’ sounds typically euphoric; Tommi and Hanna’s billowing limbs casting playful shadows on the backdrop of cascading CGI images. Dipping into a host of genres with thick dubby bass drops, haunting post-rock synth swells and tonnes of pop sensitivity, Phantom’s confident little intricacies suggest they’ve got what it takes to mix it with the genre’s heavyweights. DC

Blue Hawaii

Photograph by Andrew Novell

The Brighthelm Centre could easily be mistaken for a temporary disaster relief building. There’s flagging bodies strewn across the floor as Montreal duo Blue Hawaii appear. They promise to ‘take it slow, then speed’ up, giving us a chance to catch our breath after a long day pounding the concrete. Shoulder-to-shoulder, Alex twirls over a switchboard of samplers and synths while Raphaelle trills spookily in the gaps between his echoing beats. Their padding cowbells and prowling bass oscillations prove the ultimate tonic for sore limbs and fuzzy senses.

Come back tomorrow for more coverage from Brighton’s Great Escape Festival.

Lead photograph by Andrew Novell

“Re-Mit is going to absolutely terrify people. It’s quite horrible. The Fall have had enough and we’re coming for you,” announced Mark E. Smith in a recent interview. It was inevitable, of course, that this would provoke the assumption that Re-Mit was going to be a formidable continuation of the widely deplored Ersatz GB. But as the guitar lines of instrumental opener ‘No Respects’ descend into a primitively pummelling groove – it almost sounds like a blithe paradox to the malevolent, disorderly brawl of Ersatz.

In fact, ‘No Respects’ is The Fall reverting back to a time when they were at their most accessible. You almost expect  Brix Smith’s customary yelp to interject the garage-rock stomp that forms its essentially playful core. And just when you thought Smith was being facetious with his emphatic claims, the record promptly abandons its façade and transcends into the chaotic sprawl of ‘Sir William Wray’ with its dominant synth, intertwining guitars and boisterous vocal squall’s. For a second there we thought we’d been duped by post-punk’s undisputed ruler and sole constant, but it was a short-lived sensation.

The Fall’s trajectory has never remained unchanged – but Mark E. Smith’s unyielding pursuit to be anything other than predictable is perpetually present. There’s nothing habitual about any Fall album – except the force of Smith’s famous declamatory bark – his prominent but often detached utterance – infinitely cryptic but sounding more apathetic over time; gradually losing coherency over the course of their discography. Although that doesn’t imply any signs of complacency, because it’s Mark E. Smith’s contrary instinct that has turned The Fall into one of the most prolific, consistently compelling cult acts in British music.

Of course, The Fall do have a ‘Trademark’, and it’s their ability to undergo a myriad of stylistic changes over the years without eschewing that archetypal “Fall sound” – defined by abrasive guitar and frequent use of repetition, continuously underpinned by Smith’s idiosyncratic vocals and esoteric lyricism. And that’s perhaps why Ersatz GB wasn’t particularly triumphant to the majority of critics and fans alike, because the prominence of Smith’s lyrics is distinctly amiss, lost under the cacophony of  brutish instrumentation and Smith’s incomprehensible snarl.

It’s almost surprising just how much more lyrically focused this record is in contrast to its precedent. This is particularly distinct in ‘Jetplane’ in which Elena’s predominant keyboard sound is coupled with an infectious military march rhythm, sustained by Mark’s cantankerous rant about airline queues. Despite the mundane subject matter Smith shows his inherent deftness for depicting banality using shrewd poetic discourse, meanwhile Elena’s keyboard proficiency is evocative of a certain Fall sound that hasn’t quite been interpreted this well since the late ‘80s.  Elsewhere Mark E Smith is a ferocious presence. ‘Hittie Man’ recalls early ’80s Fall with its post-punk growl and ominous bass, while tracks like ‘Victricola Time’ and ‘Noise’ feel  much like redundant fillers that could easily be forgotten.

And that’s why Re-Mit affirms the general perception of recent Fall albums being primarily one on, one off. While Ersatz initially sounds not quite as involved or developed, Re-Mit seems more focused with a vision – it’s what you would expect The Fall to sound like in 2013, 30 albums down the line (having pretty much released one a year since their inaugural studio effort Live At The Witch Trials in 1979). It is fully charged – it’s hard as nails – yet none of this record seems to be in the same brutal vein as Ersatz GB. And while it achieves clearer production and a style that is livelier and more melodically centred, it doesn’t sacrifice its uncompromising and challenging nature. Instead it revisits elements of The Fall’s past while continuing to be innovative.

Re-Mit isn’t exactly going to win over the uninitiated, but for abiding fans this is an album that – while it doesn’t reside amongst the best of their work – certainly deserves to be credited as one of their most ambitious, envelope-pushing albums of the band’s discography. Never have The Fall sounded so brilliantly abstruse or downright weird – maybe at least not since Levitate. It’s an unsettling, incomparable racket of The Fall at their wonderful, frightening best.

Where to begin with Mark Lanegan’s voice? It’s a melted-down chainsaw. Soft beams of light shooting across a bubbling tar pit. A rusted tractor set ablaze amidst heavy downpour. Rich. Ragged. Ridiculous. It’s also one of the most uniquely expressive voices in American music – arguably similar to that of Tom Waits in its ability to extricate a sumptuously soulful croon from the sound of over-zealous vocal cord scrapings. But unlike the perma-hatted veteran, Lanegan never gives into the gnarl. He’s simply a vessel for sorrows that are resigned to their fate: in other words, the blues.

For all the raw feeling summoned by those rattling pipes, Mark has always worked best in collaboration with others. Sure, he’s made stand-out solo records since making his name as the Screaming Trees’ frontman (‘Whiskey For The Holy Ghost’ and ‘Bubblegum’ representing particular career highlights), but sparks have truly flown when rubbing shoulders with the likes of Isobel Campbell and fellow Gutter Twin Greg Dulli. On Black Pudding he’s enlisted the help of multi-instrumentalist Duke Garwood, and the results are often stunning.

The opening title track introduces us to Garwood’s nimble guitar work, which is both delicate and yet subtly powerful, paving the way for the tone of the rest of the album. Basic blues motifs serve as a peg on which to hang his ideas, which make songs feel like meditative explorations of mood rather than linear stories. Nothing is resolved. Instead we find textural experiments like the quick bursts of guitar drone that scorch ‘Mescalito’s arid shuffle, coalescing and gradually evaporating like sunspots in the desert heat.

Then there’s the tumbling, intuitive piano that stumbles dizzily around the drunken lament of ‘Last Rung’, brashly beautiful in its plaintive chaos. In the midst of all this, Lanegan offers thoughtful whispers of lost loves and portents of doom – “Death rides a white horse,” he sombrely intones, “But I ain’t seen him yet.” If that reads like a defiant claim of invulnerability, the song’s fooling no-one. The line is practically shrugged into your speakers, grimly accepting the inevitability of mortality: a spine-tingling moment.

‘Black Pudding’ works best at its most sparse, which is why flute-drenched psych ballad ‘Shade Of The Sun’ is infinitely more arresting than ‘Cold Molly’s loose-limbed, stoned groove. Minor quibbles aside, however, it feels more like the product of two minds in sync than a collection of contrasting ideas thrown at the wall, which tallies up with Lanegan’s admission that Garwood is one of his “all time favourite artists”.

With an over-saturation of pseudo-folkies grabbing acoustics and aiming pointlessly for some intangible sense of ‘authenticity’, it’s easy to feel that there’s an over-saturation of terrible faux-Americana in this day and age. By plunging impassively into their own hearts of darkness, Mark Lanegan and Duke Garwood have demonstrated that there’s still plenty of life lurking in the muddy waters of the blues.

From a creative and personal standpoint, reaching a moment where crawling is the only real way you can move forward typically represents a crushingly low period for an artist. So, by Pure X titling their second record Crawling Up The Stairs, you know damn well going in that it’s going to be a dark, heavy listen.

Yet, within the raw despair and utter anguish that courses through their stirring new batch of songs, the Austin, Texas trio have also layered a subtle optimism and slight hope. For indeed, the title does mention going up the stairs after all, and that promising direction suggests a light awaits after this lingering period of darkness, giving the album some necessary depth and life that prevents these songs from getting dragged down in a hopeless abyss of misery.

Frontman Nate Grace went through plenty of personal turmoil to make it to this point, after suffering a serious leg injury while skateboarding and not having any insurance to cover the necessary surgery, he struggled to reach a point where he could finally walk again. And meanwhile, while Grace was fighting to stand, the rest of the band were caught in a state of creative stasis that kept them immobile in their own way. Crawling Up The Stairs was born out of that wretched sense of unrest and toil, with the group throwing themselves desperately and passionately into their new album simply because that was the only thing left for them to hold tight to at that point.

And while Stairs represents a subdued sonic departure from the guitar drenched hazy atmospherics that permeated Pure X’s stellar debut, Pleasure, these new songs still pack the same textured musical punch, just drawing from a deeper, more vulnerable source. The ethereal title track serves as a hushed introduction to the proceedings, leading into the desolate, somber plea of ‘Someone Else,’ which has you haunted and broken before it even hits the halfway point. But rather than reveal their fragile emotional state so plainly, the band retreats into the psychedelic excursion of ‘Written In The Slime,’ which could be about anything after all, but the grimey title  - and the overall tone of the record itself – suggests aspirations that have been dragged through a foul mire.

The ominous, post-disco pulse of ‘I Fear What I Feel,’ lets bassist Jesse Jenkins and drummer Austin Youngblood lock in and dynamically lead the track into the dark corners of a dance party at the end of the world, with Grace admitting how tired he’s grown from the pain. Heavy, heady stuff, no matter how funky the groove is. The vibe is a bit lighter on ‘Things In My Head,’ even if the subject matter remains rooted in Grace’s fatalistic musings. And things obviously won’t get any brighter on a song named, ‘Shadows And Lies,’ with Pure X heading towards The Downward Spiral in both the slow-burning squall of the song structure and Grace’s vanquished histrionics.

‘I Come From Nowhere’ and ‘Never Alone’ both have a warped, Beatles-like churn to them, sounding like devilish Sgt. Pepper’s outtakes filtered through a harder and heavier drug use that doesn’t have an eventual bright side nor a Ringo to save them. The second half of the record snaps out of its hazy psychedelic muddle with the urgent accusations that lie at the unsettled heart of the raucous ‘How Did You Find Me,’ which is driven along by Grace’s fiery guitar work and his ragged vocals. But the song speaks to the subject getting found at his one of their darkest moments, with a positivity and pop sheen buried within the tempestuous arrangement.

The album winds to a graceful close with a trio of songs that all contain rebirths and new starts, with the hopeful acoustic strum of ‘Thousand Year Old Child’ leading fluidly into the Zeppelin-like interlude, ‘Rain At Dawn,’ before the record closes with the promising electronic swing of ‘All Of The Future (All Of The Past),’ which has a bold, vibrant spirit to it that suggests that better times lie ahead, we just have to make sure we’re there to enjoy it. Dark elements permeate the menacing corners of Crawling Up The Stairs, and while it may have been a long, grueling journey to get through, it seems that by the end of this bumpy road, Pure X have reached a positive creative terrain that suggests their long climb up the from the bottom was worth all the effort and pain it took to get there.

Though her records have previously explored a variety of topics ranging from the overdue birth of a baby dinosaur to the musical powers of the planet Neptune, as the title of her sixth album makes clear, Scout Niblett – or Emma, to her mum – has finally turned her gaze inwards.

The remarkably brazen It’s Up To Emma does a lot to set alight any notion of kookiness that might continue to plague her but Scout Niblett is still better appreciated as a formidable all round oddity than a particularly dazzling musician. Simplicity is too long a word for what’s going on here; her astounding wail of a voice is rarely accompanied by anything other than a guitar or drum, and only quite rarely are both of those instruments playing at once.

Even though they’ve been recorded with a sympathetic grit that ensures the album packs a punch even in its quieter moments, it’s almost as if what’s going on with the instruments is meant to be the last thing on your mind. Proper enjoyment requires a level of submission, an admittance that you’re going to let Scout do her thing, be that whispering, yelling or bellowing, and find out from it what you can.

Singing largely about herself, it’s an album littered with first person pronouns – ‘Can’t Fool Me Now’, ‘My Man’, ‘What Can I Do?’ – but its nine, stark selections of grungy folk rock are far from self indulgent. She inhabits situations that at their best are as gripping as any horror film; varying from mildly harrowing descriptions of love in ‘Woman and Man’ to outright premeditations on murder in the opening ‘Gun’, and though they’re nothing to do with you, you’re captivated by the conviction with which they’re delivered all the same.

In honesty, it’s not the sound of someone who sounds totally OK. It feels poised between angry raging and introspective shyness, often, as on the wildly dynamically varied ‘Could This Possibly Be?’, in the same song. What you’re meant to make of Scout Niblett’s state of mind at the end of it, other than having had your suspicions of her wild talent confirmed, is likely to be different for every listener.

Though It’s Up To Emma contains a few too many numbers unnecessarily stretching over four minutes when three would probably have gotten the point home with more force, there is one such song (‘Can’t Fool Me Now’) that warrants such a running time. A defiantly sprawling number that builds from the most threadbare of guitar-led beginnings into a string laden, choral epic, it finds Niblett sounding surprisingly comfortable with being out on a limb. The feeling of empowerment it provides her translates with majesty to the listener, too. Imbibing such personal performances with a universally relatable humanity is the greatest strength to a record that makes fragility sound pretty devastating.

The gubernatorial surrounds of Islington Assembly Hall seem slightly at odds with the fluorescent schtick of Doseone – he of Themselves, 13 and God and cLOUDDEAD fame. And for about 10 minutes, an air of bemusement envelopes the early revelers; or perhaps they’re simply hypnotised by his garb (neon-pink t-shirt, big-buckled ‘I Love Haters’-adorned belt and flashy old school hip hop jacket).

The music’s fittingly kaleidoscopic too. His high-pitched squall, laid over disjointed, funk-tinged beats, sits somewhere between Prince and Connan Mockasin. The set is unhinged and fragmented but there’s something mesmeric about watching a man swig from a half-bottle of bourbon on stage. “I rap, too,” he helpfully informs the uninitiated before launching into a series of blistering, propeller-tongued rhymes and leaving to a hearty, if slightly befuddled, round of applause.

The contrast with Anticon stable-mates Why?’s performance could hardly be starker. Yoni Wolf has brought his full quintet on tour and the unit is tight, the set polished and slick. Where Dose was tanking drams of whiskey, Wolf sips from a bottle of mineral water (a tickle in his throat sees him reset the band once or twice). And no matter how many times you spin his records, it’s still always something of a surprise to hear the expletives fall from Wolf’s mouth in the flesh. His slight stature, polite, slightly-reserved stage manner and tame interaction with his audience and band is somewhat incongruous with some of his more potty-mouthed, vitriolic lyrical content.

The songs from Elephant Eyelash and Alopecia were always going to be crowd-pleasers – and so it pans out. ‘Waterfalls’ from the former kicks the set off nicely and Yoni holds the mic aloft triumphantly, as the crowd bellows back the chorus of ‘Good Friday’, not a “disinterested bitch” in the house. The stellar ‘January Twenty Something’ from the sometimes forgotten Eskimo Snow acts as something of a bridge, as Why? launch into a series of cuts from last year’s underrated (at least in some, influential quarters) Mumps, Etc.

One of the most interesting elements of the evening is witnessing the deployment of the band’s newest work. It is arguably Yoni Wolf at his most narcissistic – but as with all of his lyrics, you get the feeling that in the Denton, Texas studio in which it was recorded, there was at least one tongue boring a sizeable hole in a Wolf’s cheek. The band chooses well: the one-two-three of ‘Waterlines’, ‘Strawberries’ and ‘Jonathan’s Hope’ are the record’s strongest and are well-received – but by the time they’re finished, the crowd is baying for old blood.

They get it in the form of ‘These Few Presidents’, ‘Yo Yo Bye Bye’ and ‘The Hollows’. The latter in particular shows Why? and Yoni Wolf at their best: the flicked, bassy riff, the ghostly harmonies, the nasally delivered, borderline slapstick lyrics (“I spent the last six months hiding behind a moustache”) and the big, singalong chorus. The song prompts the first and only real surge from the audience – whose slight reservation is perhaps a reflection of that of the band itself. But musically, the evening’s performance can’t be faulted.

Part ’70s art-punk, part garage rock and part ’00s guitar revival-revival, Charlie Boyer & The Voyeurs have clambered to the top of the six-stringer buzz-pile. Leapfrogging Swim Deep and Merchandise (who, given, are still in the midst of crafting their respective debuts), Boyer & Co. have been wowing many a muso with their consistent, nostalgic harking back, not to mention the oodles of fuzzy guitar riffs. Early tracks like ‘I Watch You’ and ‘Things We Be’ were instantly ear-catching, showing the soon-to-be displayed potential of Charlie Boyer and The Voyeurs. Now, with Clarietta - the first full-length from the London quintet – we are finally able to find out if they manage to live up to the fuss that surrounds them.

The title track recalls archaic punk wonders, the kind of old-school disco tracks that creep out of the walls at weddings. At times there’s a splatter of britpop tautness, and occasionally, references to The Strokes or The Libertines (and other bands from back when Pete Doherty wasn’t a joke) rear their heads. For all their ’70s NYC influences, it’s remarkably British. However, cuts like ‘Be Glamorous’ or ‘You Haven’t Got A Chance’, do lean towards the States. The former is swaggering blues-rock with organ riffs and chunky chords; the latter wears hints of Iggy Pop (though Boyer is considerably more restrained, and the guitars much more lethargic).

Clarietta is produced by fabled legend Edwyn Collins, a man of many musical talents, behind records from The Cribs, Vic Godard, who CB&TV have been likened to – as well as The Seeds, Television and The Voidoids. This raw, scratchy brand of modern rock led them to a support slot with one of last years buzz bands, TOY, and the kind exposure that can be measured in Facebook likes and hits on YouTube. They may be unashamedly channeling the sounds of yesteryear, but contemporary rock fanatics and post-punk aficionados are lapping it up like it’s never been done before.

‘A Lion’s Way’ reveals a different side to the group, one that’s steeped in psych-pop warps and ghost-train echoes. It’s sodden with reverb and similar effects – there are moments where you could be forgiven for hearing shoegaze sounds, but on the whole, and especially when the chorus hits, it’s glammy pop with a tie-dyed glaze. ‘Clarinet’ is scummier, with a tangled, throbbing chorus made from slowed-down and distorted axe licks. It’s got a punk vibe, but none of the furore, and none of the belligerent instrumentation. It’s quite happy to be messy, but it’s all very apathetic, which is great.

Charlie Boyer & The Voyeurs have crafted a solid debut. There’s plenty of charm, and though a lot of it has been beaten to death with a revivalist stick before, it’s still a really fun record. Their take on the genre isn’t enough to reinvent the wheel – it’s more like a new coat of paint. The noises are hand-plucked from rock history, dusted off and shown to a new audience. Fortunately, they’ve chosen the best parts to display, and the result is an album that’s thoroughly enjoyable, if a tad on the safe side. No doubt we’ll hear more from the group, and when we do, they’ll be welcomed with open arms.

The function room of the New Oxford pub seems somewhat undersized to host two of the finest contemporary purveyors of traditional American folk on a rare trip to the UK and an even rarer to trek to the North. The cosy confines soon turn out to be a blessing in disguise, however.

M.C. Taylor – the North Carolina-based songwriter operating under the Hiss Golden Messenger banner – has barely made it through a beguiling version of ‘Jesus Shot Me in the Head’ (one of the highpoints of 2011’s Poor Moon, something of a breakthrough album for Taylor following several years of toiling with varying fortunes in the business of making music) to the beyond-packed room when the venue loses electricity. “Does electricity also get a day off on Bank Holiday?” Taylor jests. The answer, unfortunately, appears to be yes. Power is soon restored, only to vanish again minutes later, this time for good, save for enough juice to fire up erstwhile Lambchop (and HGM) guitarist William Tyler’s amp.

Lesser performers would pack up and storm off. In town as part of the Sounds from the Other City festival, which takes place across several venues in in Salford, Taylor and Tyler regroup to produce an improvised performance that’s bound to be unforgettable for the lucky few who have managed to squeeze in to the venue.

Standing precariously on a stool to maximise audibility over the clatter of glasses drifting from the other end of the pub, the lack of amplification seems to bring out the full expressive power of Taylor’s rust-and-honey voice, emphasising the unadorned beauty of his melodies and – most importantly – the compelling depths of the lyrics.

Mysterious, brooding songs like ‘Sufferer (Love Thy Conqueror)’ from career-best, deservedly praised new album Haw (dedicated to Songs:Ohia/Magnolia Electric Co.’s Jason Molina tonight) dodge easy interpretations, yet pack far too much emotive power to slide into meaning-skirting obscurity. Spiritual concerns crop up regularly, much as they do in the classic country music that is one of Taylor’s key influences. The infectious ‘Busted Note’ is introduced as a song about Jesus without a hint of irony but, again, doubt, unease and openness to multiple readings keep comforting certainties at bay.

As potent as Taylor’s timeless country-got-soul songwriting is, this isn’t solely his show. Apart from contributing compelling atmospherics to many of Taylor’s songs (including a stinging lead guitar spot on the raucous ‘Red Rose Nantahala’), Tyler wheels out a number of tracks from much-acclaimed new album Impossible Truth, essaying near-superhuman dexterity on the fretboard – you’d swear there were at least three guitarists on stage – and finely honed, melodically endowed, modernised take on the long line of American folk/blues solo guitar explorations.

It’s a testament to the potency of Taylor and Tyler’s performance that the squeezed room is entirely hushed throughout the set. The crowd’s rapt attention during the very literally unplugged performance isn’t lost on the performers. The phrase ‘we’re all in this together’ sounds horribly hollow when parroted by austerity-peddling politicians. When Taylor liberates a crate of beer from the backroom to hand out as liquid thank you’s to patient listeners, however, it feels as if we’ve been part of a much more communal, boundary-free experience than a standard-issue gig. The brisk traffic at merchandise stall afterwards suggests that the extra effort Taylor and Tyler have made to entertain the crowd tonight hasn’t been wasted.

Last time round, Dirty Beaches was looking out across the states. His breakout record Badlands was a brief 27-minute detour through the dark underbelly of Americana, littered with reference points that suggested someone deeply intimate with the subject.

The title evoked the double-denimed menace of Martin Sheen in the Terrence Malick film of the same name. Taiwanese born, Montreal based man Alex Zhang Hungtai’s hiccuping vocal brought to mind a ghoulish Elvis turned wild by too many thrusting gyrations. ‘Sweet 17’ seemed to draw on the ephebophile passions of Humbert Humbert, a fellow outsider, traveller and observer of America, while even Hungtai’s own pompadoured lone-wolf image made him look like the kind of greaser that might pop up in a dark episode of Happy Days and pull a switchblade on The Fonz. Where most saw a well-manicured lawn and a white picket fence, Dirty Beaches saw the swarming bug’s nest sitting beneath the surface.

On Drifters/Love Is The Devil Hungtai goes bigger and, in the wake of the break-up of a long-term relationship, turns that eye for the darker side of human nature on himself in what feels like his cinematic debut. Dirty Beaches has always been an immediately visual project; the kind that produces records comprised of characters and narratives rather than verses and choruses. Accordingly, just in the last month Hungtai released his third film soundtrack, Water Park, whose serene, under-the-water ambience lends the short film it accompanies (about a shopping mall in Edmonton, Canada — naturally) a celestial awe; as if Hungtai was already imagining something bigger, more widescreen. And so Drifters/Love Is The Devil, a double concept album of sorts that tells ‘the same story but from two different perspectives’, is Hungtai’s shot at creating something cinematic in scope as well as style.

The first half of the diptych, Drifters, is a study in demented self-obliteration; a montage of gaudy jump cuts detailing all kinds of material excess. And for all Hungtai’s cinematic pretensions, it’s this kind of visceral overload and grimy minimalism – building on Badlands’ prototype, pushing two or three elements to 11 until the whole song trembles – that Dirty Beaches still does best. ‘Casino Lisboa’ is a louche, obnoxious lounge crawl punctuated by Hungtai’s wide-eyed yelp and drum machine snare hits that splutter forward like a bad drunk. ‘I Dream In Neon’ deals in overbearing organ and drone textures that sound like something Laura Palmer might have done coke to in the Pink Room. ‘Au Revoir Mon Visage’ places Hungtai – sweaty, panting – in some bad metaphysical dream, accompanied only by a maddening, vaguely tribal drum roll. ‘Mirage’ Hall’ collapses in on itself in an orgy of Harley Davidson revs, with Hungtai screaming, as if waking from a night terror, “It’ll take your head off!”

What ‘it’ is exactly is the issue of Love Is The Devil, which deals with the interior world obscured by Drifters’ blown-out overload and sees Hungtai in his contemplative, ambient soundtrack mode that so irked on Badlands. Here his abilities seem more fully formed and kind to the type of listener who isn’t prepared to connect the dots of his sometimes lean style. ‘Berlin’ and ‘Alone at the Danube’, two seven-minute rainy-day reminiscences built around a frosted, metallic guitar sighing between two or three chords, have Dirty Beaches at its most melodic and wistful.

The latter, ‘Danube’ could even be described as pretty; when a celestial synth tone comes in about half way through, sounding like a sudden ray of sunlight breaking through clouds and shimmering on the waters, it’s a moment that justifies the sometimes unfulfilling cinematic economy that Hungtai can take with his music (of particular note: the undercooked noir of ‘Greyhound At Night’, and’ ‘Woman’, which feels out of place attempting the kind of mad repetition of Drifters in a more ambient voice). Similarly the title track, ‘Love Is The Devil’, a sombre yet melodramatic dirge replete with MIDI orchestration that leaves it sounding like an outtake from Badalamenti’s Twin Peaks soundtrack, is powerfully raw in its dejection.

Like many double albums, Drifters/Love Is The Devil has the feel of an artist trying on new identities and exploring – like one of the homesick and homeless in his songs – beyond the peripheries of their comfort zone. Talking to Pitchfork in 2011, Hungtai spoke passingly of ‘a lot of B-sides that will never seen the light of day’ that ranged from ‘dance songs to hip-hop songs to jazz’. The record isn’t quite the maximalist’s paradise where all those discarded demos and tucked away B-sides finally come to life. Long-time fans will recognize polished up blueprints from earlier records, and even in its prettier, cleaner moments it’s still obviously a record by the man who brought us Badlands; the same guy fascinated by the past, deferential to his elders, who uses worn, black-and-white photobooth snaps of his courting parents on his 7’ covers.

Drifters/Love Is The Devil isn’t always an unqualified success, but more often than not it displays Dirty Beaches as a project increasingly adept at the scattershot of styles, imprinted with Hungtai’s own recognisable mark.

London’s Still Corners go somewhat quietly about their business. They have followed-up their 2010 debut Creatures Of An Hour with another, more intricate, 80s-infused record that feels like the natural progression a good sophomore should.

The duo belong to the ever-impressive Sub Pop family and perhaps deserve more attention than they enjoy, due to their heady mix of cerebral, and at times downright haunting, style.

Marrying Greg Hughes’s intuitive songwriting with the soaring, breathy vocals of Tessa Murray, they have quite effortlessly slipped into more catchy territory with, the suitably titled, Stange Pleasures, and celebrated its release with a string of UK shows before they join CHVRCHES across America.

XOYO provides the home for the London leg of their journey and, following support from the stunning ambience of Woman’s Hour, a flickering projection welcomes the four to the stage, accompanied by loyal cheers of excitement; it’s an eye-catchingly satisfying set from the outset as these visuals flood the back-drop.

They may occupy the dream-pop bracket, but it’s a label that doesn’t tell the whole live story; thundering, massively impressive real drums dominate early songs with intricate, dancing rhythms really showing flashes of their new, more up-tempo style. ‘Berlin Lovers’, with its fuzzy synth bass line, is an early highlight.

Similarly, the whirring organ of tracks like ‘Cuckoo’ and the FX-heavy guitar in the wonderfully euphoric ‘Fireflies’, show their versatility and highlight Murray’s faultless live voice, while glistening keys add brightness to the moments of gloom in older numbers.

The impressive performance is so well thought-out, with the aforementioned visuals and cold blue lights neatly matching the different waves of sound. The set feels entirely professional and, although their genre maybe saturated, they’ve perfectly cornered their market.

In a recent interview in the Guardian, Van Dyke Parks states candidly and reflectively how he realized back in the 60′s that, “Fame could be an inconvenience and time has borne me out.” And the legendary songwriter/composer/lyricist/producer’s decidedly underappreciated career has certainly stayed true to his convictions, as Parks has quietly but convincingly helped shape the direction of modern music, albeit mostly from the safe and subtle distance of the sidelines while gratefully ceding the spotlight to more famous artists.

Whether through his ill-fated attempts at co-writing the Beach Boys‘ Smile with Brian Wilson, to producing albums for Randy Newman, Phil Ochs, and Joanna Newsom (to name just a few), as well as arranging songs for U2, Frank Black, Fiona Apple and Saint Etienne (and many others), in addition to writing and recording his own experimental 1968 solo debut album, Song Cycle, Parks has helped influence and guide not only where music has been heading, but what it can sound like once it gets there, for well over 40 years now.

On Parks’ new collection of material Songs Cycled, the percipiently titled homage to his most famous work, he collects six 7″ singles he has released over the course of the past few years into a soaring, textured album filled with both artistic conviction and bold confidence. The songs have the depth and detail that Parks has been known for throughout his lengthy career, while also reflecting a nuanced vibrancy and insightful social criticism that is lacking in most modern pop music. The attention to detail and pristine production quality found throughout each of these numbers not only gives them a classic tone and tenor, but also luxuriously brings them brazenly into the current musical landscape, making many of the contemporary hits of today sound tinny and slight by comparison.

The grandiose, cafe society romp of ‘Dreaming Of Paris’ vibrantly launches the album, providing a spirited starting point for the record as Parks takes us on a musical journey through both style and time. He revisits his past for the first of many times throughout the record on ‘Hold Back Time,’ which was found originally on Orange Crate Art, his ’95 collaborative album with Brian Wilson. This reworked version removes much of the unnecessary elements of the original, including the directionless percussion, leaving a far more poignant arrangement that soars elegantly now that its freed of the burdensome bloat of the earlier recording.

‘Sassafrass’ has a front porch American South charm to it, with the vocal harmonies bouncing from all corners of the speakers atop a jaunty arrangement that is reminiscent of Parks’ classic work on Disney’s Jungle Book. But he brings us decidedly back into the present with ‘Black Gold,’ a somber, exhaustive take on the environmental devastation done by the Prestige oil spill of 2002, as well as ‘Wall Street,’ and ‘Money Is King,’ which both vehemently take to task those greedy opportunists who took advantage of an unsteady and unsanctioned financial climate left in the dark wake of 9/11 to line their pockets despite the long term harm their careless actions would have on the world markets. That balance of making the old sound new again, while at the same time injecting the modern sound with his sophisticated classic touch, makes these songs rooted in the present as well as the past, while also clearly exemplifying Parks’ polished mastery of the styles of both time periods.

The ominous steel drum-laden instrumental, ‘Aquarium,’ revisits an old Parks’ arrangement from The Carnival of the Animals, and helps usher in the biting social commentary and protest songs that pulse angrily through the album’s middle section. But the the countrified harmonies of the hymn-like ‘The Parting Hand’ move beyond the unsavory, earthly pursuits of man if favor of a higher calling, before giving way to a graceful symphonic coda that includes a wistful vocal take on Anthony Showalter’s old gospel tune, ‘Leaning On The Everlasting Arms.’

‘The All Golden’ is yet another reworked song from Parks’ distinguished past, as he dusts off one of the highlights from Song Cycle, giving the 45-year-old track some modern flourishes while still maintaining the aching, searching quality of the original number. The album closes with a trio of songs that all have a leisurely Southern swing to them, as the bouncy instrumental ‘Wedding In Madagascar,’ the touching ode to what was lost in the aftermath of Katrina (and never to be found again) in ‘Missin’ Missippi,’ and the dignified sobriety of ‘Amazing Graces’ bring the record to a stately close. Songs Cycles certainly doesn’t represent all that Van Dyke Parks has to say about the state of the modern world, but the album does manage to assuredly illuminate Parks’ singular artistic vision and his enduring impact on the music of our times.

As personal information about The Child of Lov, man Cole Williams continues to rise to the surface, we know a couple of things for sure: he’s Dutch, he loves the human voice and he’s created an incredibly ambitious, soulful avant-garde debut. Over the course of his new eponymous LP it’s clear that he finds human vocals to be just as emotive and expressive as any other instrument.

Whether he’s channeling Cee-Lo (as on ‘Heal’) or Prince (as on ‘Warrior’) or surrounding songs with backing vocals, it’s obvious that he wants to be a singer in the most literal sense of the term. Which explains why Lov appears to view vocals as much as a compositional tool as, say, the guitar. For example, ‘Call Me Up’ features fridge-buzzing vocals on either side of the mix, acting as the foundation of the song.

A coldly funky number, ‘Call’ finds Lov affecting a gospel-inspired singing style, and the main vocals being layered over each other as a capstone. In this way, the song forces you to pay attention to the singing purely because there’s so much of it. Lov, it seems, believes how words are sung is as important as the words themselves. That same trick is used on the baroque pop-esque ‘One Day’: ghostly wailing weaves in and out of the song emphasising the sentiment that “One day you gotta die.”

That said, when vocals aren’t the compositional center, Lov is still an engaging songwriter. He paints ‘Owl’ with lazily nervous dub over which DOOM turns in yet another verse of self-contained, Twitter-length philosophy. Elsewhere, Lov plays around with stumbling boom-bap and foggy synths on ‘Go With the Wind,’ and experiments with sweaty ‘70s funk and stabbing guitar during ‘Heal.’ He even tries slot-machine disco as a basis for ‘Fly.’

That song, like much of the record, is about overcoming adversity and freeing yourself to a better life. “I’m gonna rise up,” Lov repeats, before explaining that he needs wings to take flight. In case you’re not in that mindset, though, he offers advice to those who lives might not be on track: “You don’t have to worry anymore,” he coaxes. Instead, he presents another option: “Go with the wind.” The Child of Lov may be shrouded in mystery, but his purpose of self-help is crystal clear: “I am a mountaintop/ I am a child of love/ Look in the mirror, I am warrior.”

In many ways, the three punctuation marks that comprise the moniker of this Sacremento six-piece are a statement of intent, for !!! (pronounced “Chk Chk Chk”) aren’t a band that care much for subtlety.

Exiling themselves to a log cabin, penning delicately crafted ballads about love and loss is certainly not part of their M.O., nor is jettisoning their live band for deep aerobics and diatribes on gender theory. Their sole aim is to make people dance as hard as possible, and in this noble mission they almost succeed, in spite of a sound mix as muggy as the venue on this warm Spring evening.

The core of the !!! live experience is indubitably Nic Offer and his frankly ridiculous dancing. That’s not to diminish the achievements of the rest of the band, who deliver funk-driven basslines and insanely tight percussion with commendable elan, but it’s his gurning, flailing presence that gives the show its infectious personality. He is by no means a suave dude. His alarming, unpredictable gyrations would, under non-gig circumstances, be banned by law, if not by international treaty. But it’s all so enthusiastic, it’s hard not to get caught up in a strange, and potentially ill-advised desire to emulate his uniquely mesmerising shapes.

It’s just a shame the music itself isn’t always as compelling as Offer’s moves are. Their filler/killer ratio has always been slightly out of whack, with too many songs falling into the “workmanlike” category, and tonight’s muffled low end did them no favours. But when they unleash the slick, Daft Punk-worthy space-funk of ‘One Girl /One Boy’ or the filthy, disco-punk brilliance of ‘Yadnus,’ it’s easy to see why they’ve garnered such a cult following. In all, it’s too uneven to be considered a classic performance, but at their best, !!! truly merit all three of their exclamation marks.

Photograph by Siamak Amini. Full Gallery here.

Where’s the drum kit?  Seriously, why hasn’t Zach Hill set up his drum kit?  Is he here? Won’t it… suck a bit, if he’s not here? What’s a Death Grips gig without Zach Hill? Stefan Burnett’s imposing and all, but can he really carry this off? This is a much bigger crowd than the last time they came to London. I really hope Zach starts setting up that drum kit soon.

Musings like that were commonplace as the Forum’s congregation stood awaiting the arrival of Death Grips.  Had I not been party to a bit of insider knowledge (turns out Zach Hill had indeed stayed away from a Glasgow gig a few nights back previously), I’d have been as anxious as the others. Their show at the Electric Ballroom a few months back was astounding for many reasons, but a big one of those was Hill – watching him attack and destroy his miniscule drumkit like a possessed man taking orders from a cult leader was genuinely revelatory. I wanted to see it again, note for note, smack for smack, but at least I was prepared for something different.

Thankfully I’d not only been told that Glasgow weren’t privy to any Hill drumming, but also that it didn’t matter – the reports were just as rapturous. It turns out that Burnett’s way around a stage, (continually contorting his naked, glistening torso as he raps in a manner that has you worried that his throat might tear open to reveal an Alien-style monster), is more than enough of a visual hit to keep one entertained.

Silhouetted against the smoke and strobes, he couldn’t look more imposing. But unsung hero Andy “Flatlander” Morin – the one in Death Grips who nobody ever talks about but tonight is on stage handling everything that isn’t the rapping or dancing like a maniac – has enough technical nous and great tunes at his disposal to ensure that our musical appetites are satiated along with our visual cravings. No need to worry; Death Grips both look and sound amazing.

Live, Hill’s drumming was the most welcome distraction from a decidedly imposing set of tunes, but his absence this evening allows you – in the moments where Burnett isn’t screaming in your face – to focus on what else is going on in the music, of which there’s a baffling amount. Three albums (OK, two and a mixtape) in to their career, their style has developed in to something more diverse than breakthrough number ‘Guillotine’ – given a sound beating tonight – could ever have suggested. Though Burnett’s delivery of them is never at less than full throttle, comparing a song like the slowly revealed peril of ‘No Love’ to a hands in the air party banger like ‘I’ve Seen Footage’ reveals them to be a band with more subtlety than they’re usually given credit for. Whoever’s in Death Grips of any given evening and whatever song they’re chucking at you, they’re always on the attack. But it’s the way in which they vary their angle that really thrills.

Photograph by Howard Melnyczuk with a Lomo. Full gallery here.

“End of an era” is a phrase thrown around far too variably these days, whether it’s in reference to a football coach retiring, or, ahem, boy bands splitting. ATP‘s recent announcement that their UK holiday camp weekenders will cease from the end of the year seems less of an era coming to a close, despite what the marketing of their final shows might suggest, and instead somewhere between the passing of a dream that always did seem a little too good to be true and the curious possibility of what will come next.

For the music fan’s music fan, those single-handedly keeping the music industry afloat, the events – coming roughly quarterly every year since 1999 – combined the leisure of a weekend away while simultaneously cutting the fat off an average festival’s billing. But with well-noted financial troubles and disagreements with their past venues, you’d be forgiven for expecting All Tomorrow’s Parties to scale back a bit. This doesn’t seem to be the case; instead, it seems business as usual.

What bolder a move to show full steam ahead than to announce a festival at a former NATO base in Iceland? And so with fans hopeful, if not slightly confused by recent unfoldings, it’s all eyes on the company’s 2013 edition of their I’ll Be Your Mirror sister-event, fronted by Yeah Yeah Yeahs at London’s Alexandra Palace. And with the Grizzly Bear leg meant to follow on the Sunday postponed at short notice, the day really needed to run smoothly to keep up consumer confidence among the ATP crowd.

Named after the original b-side to ‘All Tomorrows Parties’, a fact not always self-explanatory, I’ll Be Your Mirror tends to follow the same suit as the organisations classic events, in which the headline act curates proceedings and, in doing so, inherently opens ATP up to the fears faced by other festivals – but also does so to a greater extent. What do you do if  a band simply picks a few misses and even fewer hits? There’s not much you can do, really.

But it would be a bit harsh to say that was entirely this case with this May Bank Holiday instalment. Instead, the line-up simply didn’t seem fitting of the setting. Whereas at Camber Sands, and Minehead before it, you could guarantee at least a couple of hundred (maybe hungover, possibly sleepless) onlookers for even the early-bird sets, a city-based event is always going to warrant a later start, with many opting for beers in the nearby Alexandra Park over the opening raucous of New Orleans bounce-hopper Big Freedia, psych-dance duo Prince Rama and the exotic extravagance of King Khan.

More disappointing is the mere handful in attendance of ambient soundscaper, The Field at the main stage, with the low turnout completely robbing the music of any immersive quality. By this point, the highlight of the day is – sadly – witnessing a punter, and complete stranger, raising his beer in the crowd to a Dirty Beaches-watching Karen O, who offers a bashful wry smile in response.

By the time the crowd do make their way in however, with half the bill already packing up and cracking open a beer of their own backstage, things start to peter a bit. Black Lips, whose association with hipster bible VICE has always left them open to accusations of style over substance, sound like a caricature of a garage rock band without half of the excitement. Masked grindcore bizarros The Locust, on the other hand, while wholly enjoyable in theory, have a live half-life much shorter than their 45 minute slot. Likewise, the game of counting how many times Jon Spencer Blues Explosion can shout their own band name at random intervals seems to be keeping more hooked than the actual music itself.

Instead, nearing the 9.30pm mark, the main room bloats out and the night starts to feel like an overpriced Yeah Yeah Yeahs gig rather than an entire all-day event. As the lights dim and expectations heighten, there seems to be a passing of the torch as ATP’s loyal old guard, with feet now understandably a little sore, relocate to the back while the younger sprites push forward towards the stage centre. Lucky for all involved, punters old, new and promoters alike, the band are just as bright and brash as a decade back. Karen O, who’s dressed for the evening either as a nu-rave take on Sgt. Pepper or Elvis Costello going to a New Year’s party, leads the way like a new age ringmaster.

Along with drummer Brian Chase and the never-aging Peter Pan of Goth-Punk, Nick Zinner, the trio run through what would be deemed a Greatest Hits set if their albums didn’t neatly connect the dots behind one another. Even their latest record, Mosquito, doesn’t venture far from the three that came before it. It does, however, bring one of the best highlights of the day though, with opener ‘Sacrilege’ – a riot grrl anthem for the modern age that Pussy Riot themselves must wish they had penned – only able to sound more sublime if there had been an actual choir onstage to sing the gospel intersection at the end. Perfectly executed closer ‘Date With The Night’ gets even the most tiresome moving and subsequently with one fell swoop makes everyone forget that which came before it.

With two of their last Pontins breaks nigh (TV on the Radio this weekend before Deerhunter next month), the day doesn’t completely evoke confidence from those in attendance but through limited fault of ATP’s own. Even though we’re presented with a headline band choosing art-rock density over sheer entertainment stakes, it’s thankfully a single-handed late save for an event that will now surely be the focus of ATP’s events calendar.

Pictures by Jason Williamson. Check out more photos from the festival here.

The last time Yeah Yeah Yeahs played in Manchester, at this same venue back in December 2009, they were on their victory lap for It’s Blitz!: a sharp, glittery pop record suffused with nods to dance and disco. The assuredness with which they pulled off a such a sonic left turn would leave them with little room to surprise when it came to making their next album; they’re one of the few established indie rock bands for whom the release of a lead single that features the abrupt introduction of a gospel choir at its midpoint wouldn’t be immediately considered a worryingly indulgent development.

I imagine the venue – a beautiful old, converted art deco cinema – is far more suited to a live show as theatrical as tonight’s than the academies the band are likely to frequent elsewhere (although it has, tragically, been blighted by the affliction of O2 sponsorship).  ’Sacrilege’ proves a fitting opener; the aforementioned choir are present only in recorded form, contrary to the slew of live TV performances on which they joined the band onstage. Their absence dampens the spectacle a little, sure, but Karen O is such an irresistibly compelling frontwoman that the aesthetic side of a Yeah Yeah Yeahs live show doesn’t really need enhancing in the first place.

The setlist lands firmly in retrospective territory, with cuts from new record Mosquito used for punctuation rather than backbone. Material from debut full-length Fever to Tell remains the band’s most potent in a live setting; ‘Black Tongue’ is O at her sassiest, with menacing guitar work from Nick Zinner simmering away in the background, whilst ‘Y Control’ is their piece-de-resistance, with an improbable, but startlingly effective marriage between atypically restrained, emotive vocals and an urgent, looped riff that blares like an air raid siren for the grunge generation.

Elsewhere, the big-hitting likes of ‘Phenomena’, ‘Gold Lion’ and ‘Zero’ are all present and correct; the question of whether or not they’re the strongest efforts from the releases they’re plucked from fades into irrelevance when you realise that, really, the songs are merely vehicles for the deliverance of O’s stage persona. From Lux Interior-inspired mic-swallowing on vintage cut ‘Art Star’ to treating the Apollo boards as a personal dancefloor at a uniquely debauched disco on ‘Heads Will Roll’, she exudes the kind of irrepressible charisma that remains one of the current alternative scene’s rarest commodities.

The set’s softer moments only serve as confirmation that O is capable of covering all bases; the criminally-underrated ‘Soft Shock’, a It’s Blitz! highlight, is delivered with impressive finesse, whilst ‘Maps’ – presented tonight in its original form, as opposed to the recently-favoured acoustic version – remains this century’s most devastating love song. ‘Subway’ is one of Mosquito‘s finest offerings, but its delicate nature was always likely to fall foul of a talkative crowd, and it sadly isn’t afforded the hush necessary to create a suitable atmosphere.

In fact, the reception for the new tracks tonight proves universally tepid; with the album only two weeks old, it’s difficult to ascertain whether it’s indifference or unfamiliarity that’s responsible – ‘Under the Earth’ is certainly underwhelming, but ‘Despair’, a masterfully crafted slow-burner, is surely destined for live-stapledom. The only unequivocal disappointment is the running time; the band were assigned a ninety-minute slot, but arrive fifteen late and still manage to finish early; the brutal truth is that there’s plenty of artists who charge less for tickets and have fewer songs to play than Yeah Yeah Yeahs that manage longer than an hour and a bit.

Regardless of any issues that the set’s duration might raise, there’s little ground for complaint when it comes to the evening’s entertainment value, especially once they’ve signed off in incendiary fashion with ‘Date with the Night’. Seeing Yeah Yeah Yeahs in 2013 not only involves bearing witness to indie rock’s most engaging performer – it also offers the opportunity to catch a genuinely-challenging rock band at somewhere close to the peak of their creative powers.

Photograph taken by Jason Williamson at I’ll Be Your Mirror.

Love has been inspiring and confounding artists for time eternal. And that elusive search for intimacy and meaning has certainly permeated Mick Harvey‘s fruitful 36-year musical partnership with Nick Cave, as the duo penned numerous indelible numbers together that delved deep into the dark affairs of the heart, as well as the complications that arise from giving or taking away a vulnerable part of yourself from someone you hold dear. Harvey left behind Cave’s Bad Seeds in 2009, but the talented Australian multi-instrumentalist has still boldly continued to explore the raw passion that pulses at the creative heart of any and all meaningful music.

Mick hasn’t slowed down a bit in recent years – playing, producing, writing and recording an impressive array of stirring songs (most notably with longtime collaborator, PJ Harvey) that still resonate with the clarity of vision that infused his earlier work, even while his sound has grown more refined and muted as of late. Harvey’s sixth studio album, Four (Acts Of Love), features a restrained song cycle filled with wistful originals, suggestive covers, as well as a stirring collaboration with Polly Jean on one of her older, unreleased songs.

All the numbers artfully fit the affectionate theme of the title, with the record itself divided into three acts, all named for covers featured in each respective section: ‘Summertime in New York,’ ‘The Story of Love,’ and ‘Wild Hearts (Run Out Of Time).’ And while the mood of each act reflects the collective spirit of the specific song that inspired it, the all-too-brief album is filled with cursory, seemingly unfinished musical sketches – as if there is more to the ongoing, enduring conversation about love that Harvey is merely starting, leaving the listener left to finish themselves.

Whenever Harvey invests more time with the songs, the emotions of the numbers swell and the tracks take on an added weight and significance. But a frustrating majority of the songs are fleeting, two minute excursions that are over before the poignancy of the track can fully sink in, ultimately serving as mere introductions to the grander, more expansive musical statements found on the remainder of the album. The hymn-like exaltation of opener ‘Praise The Earth (Wheels Of Amber And Gold)’ is revisited at the end of the record on ‘Praise The Earth (An Ephemeral Play),’ which reinforces the theme of impermanence that courses through these songs, as well as the transient, elusive power that love holds over us for brief spells before disappearing.

‘Glorious’ is an unreleased PJ Harvey original culled from some old tapes Mick discovered, and Polly’s ominous, Stories From The Sea-era guitar riff blends fluidly with their restrained vocals as the song gradually begins to soar. But even in flight the track remains rooted to these dark times, exuding a mournful quality that is only enhanced by the funereal instrumental that follows it, ‘Midnight On The Ramparts,’ featuring ghostly whistles that are redolent and rich. A Tom Waits-like take on Exuma‘s ‘Summertime In New York’ spiritedly picks up the pace of the record while also capturing the untamed heat of the warmer months in NYC.

‘When There’s Smoke (before)’ comes across as a hasty spoken word piece that announces the end of the first act as well as forming a lyrical bridge to ‘God Made The Hammer,’ which contains echoes of The Final Cut-period Pink Floyd, but the track never quite reaches the significance it is striving for. The gorgeous and moving ‘I Wish That I Were Stone’ fares much better, but again the track is so short (a mere minute-and-a-half) that the sentiments of the song never have a chance to fully settle and solidify, and the fragile emotions expressed remain only partially examined.

A truly haunting, moody version of Van Morrison‘s ‘The Way Young Lovers Do’ is laden with regret and longing, and forms the stirring centerpiece of the record. But it seems that Harvey could have dug even deeper into the heart of the familiar number, as his vocals just trail off as the song comes to an abrupt, plaintive end, leaving the rueful lyrical dialogue somewhat unfinished and the ending of the inconstant relationship fairly uncertain.

‘A Drop, An Ocean’ is an inconsequential, slight diversion, before the second act comes to a glorious end with an impassioned take on the Saints ‘The Story Of Love,’ which maintains the classic appeal of the original while undergoing Harvey’s assured reworking. He brings a fresh spirit to the track, aided by the full band arrangement that stands out boldly from the more understated approaches found throughout the rest of the record.

‘Where There’s Smoke (after)’ ushers in the final act with another minor detour, quickly leading as it does to Harvey’s stunning, dramatic take on Roy Orbison‘s pensive pop gem, ‘Wild Hearts (Run Out Of Time),’ which Mick renames optimistically as ‘Wild Hearts,’ suggesting that there is always more time for us to find a kindred soul in these uncertain times. ‘Fairy Dust’ is another lovely little number in the vein of ‘I Wish That I Were Stone,’ a stirring song that would be better served by being explored a bit more and given more time to express the insightful concepts that Harvey has only a moment to touch on. But there is more than enough genuine, heartfelt emotion and originality coursing through Four (Acts Of Love), with Mick Harvey proving himself yet again to have a tender touch when it comes to the delicate business of affairs of the heart.

Whereas previous Deerhunter records have seen Bradford Cox and his increasingly important associates push boundaries about as far as one can whilst still being recognisably an indie band, Monomania takes a different attitude to innovation. 

In terms of song structure, their sixth album is by far their most straightforward yet. Though the band are often at their best when left to build melodies and squall over long stretches that eventually result in dazzling payoffs, they here deliver a record full of three minute, verse-bridge-chorus tunes that are by and large loathe to take even the slightest of left turns. But within the confines they’ve set themselves, they’re making the most glorious racket of their careers. It’s as if this is a band so bored with pushing boundaries that they’ve decided instead to mock them from within.

The album’s very first lyric, “finding the fluorescence in the junk”, is particularly telling. Opener ‘Neon Junkyard’ exemplifies this idea of twisting and screwing otherwise normal songs in wrists made of noises. With its strummed acoustic guitar working through an uncharacteristically straightforward layout before becoming battered, it’s the sound of Deerhunter setting up confines for themselves and then going crazy within them, smacking their heads against the walls ‘til they start to see the stars. At times, it can be quite pretty – every instrument on the marvellous ‘Dream Captain’ sounds like it’s at its own party, and the penultimate ‘Nitebike’, which sees Cox alone with his guitar emoting more plaintively than perhaps ever before, is disarming in its exquisiteness.

Yet at others, it’s either deliberately grating (‘Leather Jacket II’s confrontational glam rock stomp feels a lot longer than its mere three minutes – it’s a trick they pull off better on the title cut), borderline creepy (the plucked guitar line on ‘Blue Agent’ sounds like it’s tiptoeing around the song, waiting to jump out on its unsuspecting chorus), or rather harrowing. Despite being devoid of the first third of Monomania’s signature fuzz, the tragic tale of an insane kid brother told in ‘T.H.M.’ is made all the more uneasy for being handled with a combination of jauntiness and frantic panting. Lots changes about Deerhunter, but one suspects part of the point of whatever they’re up to is that you’re not actually meant to feel entirely comfortable with it.

Its mood is all over the place, but that suits it – the only two tracks that sound similar to one another are placed side by side, which leads to ‘Sleepwalking’ and ‘Back To The Middle’ coming across as a forgettable, Deerhunter-by-numbers double blip. The scattergun approach to the rest of the record’s aesthetic is actually what makes it so much fun. Lockett Pundt’s sole contribution ‘The Missing’ is the album’s best song, a gloriously rich showcase of just how important he is to holding what might otherwise be a shambles together, whereas on ‘Pensacola’ Cox plays it simpler than ever, both sonically and lyrically (have you ever heard him sing a line like “This town ain’t given me nothin’ but bawlin’ and trouble”?), to deliver a goofball triumph.

If it’s particularly tempting to take certain statements made on Monomania as self referential, state of the union addresses of sorts,  it’s only because that’s how Cox delivers them. “In my head, there’s something rotting” he intones on the title track, “For a month / I was punk” he offers on closer ‘Punk (La Vie Antérieure)’. But though packed with trademark lyrical curiosities, it’s the sound of Monomania that’s its biggest departure. It might be a step towards something more conventional structurally, but it’s anything but a step back – for Deerhunter, any move in the direction of convention is a dip of the toes in to the unknown. It’s no wonder they make normal sound so weird.

One shouldn’t expect a metaphorical walk in the park from a Knife show. The siblings’ approach to the medium of performance has always been accompanied a certain Scandinavian guile and the ‘staging’ of dance music remains a central concern to The Knife as a live proposition.

That conundrum was tackled with a sense of parody and humour by fellow Swedes Air France and The Tough Alliance – the former veered mainly towards DJ sets while the latter resorted to simply playing back their tracks on the venue PA while projections, lip syncing and swinging baseball bats replaced any attempts to recreate their largely synthetic sounds.

So one shouldn’t try and appraise tonight’s show on a musical level although some skill may lie in the creation of toothsome arrangements that push the blister and pop of The Knife’s sound. It’s largely a moot point though considering the audio is delivered via a backing track and largely mimed vocals for the majority of the evening.

They’ve done this before of course and many have come prepared with that knowledge. Of those who don’t know, the surprise either turns to frustration (there are a few walkouts), resignation or joyful glee at the more conceptual elements on stage.

The band promised “a place, a scene, a moment” aligned to the titular intent of marmite long player Shaking the Habitual for the accompanying live experience and this tour comes come loaded with a manifesto that asserts “this is not every day” and a desire to break the audience out of “the habitual dance of the ordinary, the narratives of the normal”.

Thus the 3,00 strong Roundhouse audience is exorcised out of any metropolitan mid-week lethargy by a session of “Death Electro Emo Protest Aerobics” courtesy of an over-enthused instructor. As a prelude to the main event, it’s an entirely tongue-in-cheek gesture that goes some way to dictating the night’s mood. “I think we will show some humor in our live show…it has to be fun,” Dreijer-Anderson told SPIN earlier this year and at least no-one can accuse her of po-faced pretension.

After ‘Cherry on Top’ provides a cacophonous opener – slow burning until a full band of hooded figures line up for ‘Raging Lung ‘- we get Dreijer-Anderson’s voice operating at full power: a beautifully shrill husk in one moment, an enchanted melodic pipe in the next. But it’s the opening beats of ‘Without You My Life Would Be Boring’ that sees her (if indeed it really is the woman herself – no-one is really sure) take commend of the stage; a joyful, percussive-heavy troupe in glitter and face paint. She drops to her knees in front of them and an aerobicised tribalism shakes the Swede and her band all the way to the track’s end.

It’s a dynamic that permeates the rest the set – a selection of tracks heavy on Shaking the Habitual with a few entirely appropriate additions from the duo’s first three records. ‘One Hit’ strikes a lively note with some of the best onstage action of the night. ‘Networking’ finds a return to the stark lights, darkness and backing track motif of earlier Knife shows. ‘Got 2 Let U’, the one Deep Cuts song given an outing, is accompanied by a gilded projection that blurs those gender lines the siblings love to play around with in a way that’s both hilarious and preposterous.

A closing ‘Silent Shout’ goes some way to appeasing the ambivalent among tonight’s audience. Those at the front might be more forgiving of the backing track and stage antics but the cavernous Roundhouse struggles to accommodate the show’s intentions, especially for the further-back crowd. And what remains at the end is all about the subjective: tonight is an experiment of sorts and fans in thrall to the trebly electro-pop of the band’s 2001 self titled debut or Deep Cuts from two years later are visibly disappointed by the set choices and execution. If you were to claim tonight’s show as the worst thing you’d ever seen, that would be a perfectly valid opinion (and at £30 a ticket, many will). But some will claim the opposite, and they’re kind of right too.

Embrace the fun of the show, get lost in the ridiculousness and maybe you’ll be some way to getting it. Whatever it might be. Escape from the mundane? A bit of colour on a Wednesday night? Or just some frighteningly staged am-dram dancing? It’s all that and more. It’s a place where the Swedish duo feel like they were always heading and although the collision of the abstract and sensory struggles to connect at times, it remains on a basic level just very good fun.

Setlist

‘Cherry on Top’
‘Raging Lung’
‘Bird’
‘Without You My Life Would Be Boring’
‘A Tooth For An Eye’
‘One Hit’
‘Networking’
‘Wrap Your Arms Around Me’
‘Got 2 Let U’
‘Ready to Lose’
‘Full of Fire’
‘Stay Out Here’
‘Silent Shout’

Photo by Howard Melnyczuk

More photos of The Knife’s show here.

The big criticism that’s always faced Bibio is that he’s a one-trick pony, an artist with a lot of influences but little personality, a bookish student of navel-gazing music without much in the way of umph. In addressing that perception he scored serious acclaim with Ambivalence Avenue, an album that added a few strings to his bow while still retaining a familiar core. But then in 2011, with the curtain lifted and in the spotlight – a lot of people googled ‘kindle ad song’, after all – he managed to prove his naysayers right for entirely different reasons with the follow-up, the messy and too-far-stretched Mind Bokeh.

To find the exact time of death for Bibio’s critical honeymoon, you could do worse than looking at the four minutes and four seconds of the indulgent rock-star fantasy ‘Take Off Your Shirt’, his bloodless tribute to Thin Lizzy (!), which invites us to imagine him as a lusty rock star but is really only as convincing as a child clomping about in his dad’s shoes, windmilling on a tennis racket, and is just as awful as you can well imagine a Bibio song titled ‘Take Off Your Shirt’ might be.

For sensitive souls, such pratfalls require a change of course and so, as the self-titled-ish name suggests, Silver Wilkinson (like Bibio it’s the name of a fishing lure, and it shares his surname) is something like a reset, a reintroduction for everyone who wasn’t around for the three OK albums of rain-distressed, memory-bent folk he put out on Mush Records that took the unnerving modernism of Boards of Canada and plonked it somewhere out in the home counties. Tracks like the very Bibio-ishly titled ‘The First Daffodils’, ‘Dye the Water Green’, and ‘Sycamore Silhouetting’ make up the bulk of the album, all wandering in the same pleasant-enough territory of intertwining, beatific-yet-melancholy acoustic guitar; pastoral strings, faded field recordings and wan, sun-kissed vocals that bring to mind contextless, perhaps half-invented childhood memories with nary an ill-judged power chord in sight.

And Bibio is very good at mining this kind of shared cultural nostalgia, taking the kitsch of previous generations and imbuing it with a kind of mystical aura. Listening to ‘Raincoats’ it’s hard not to imagine kids ducking for cover during a summer shower in 1978 when Bibio sings “Trees like umbrellas / The rain trickles my soul”. Similarly, some ad executive is probably musing over the ecstatic nursery-rhyme and British summertime vibes of ‘À tout à l’heure‘ –  ”Count in twos / Count in fours / Spin your arms / Spin your eyes” – for their Thompson Holidays account. And, away from folk-y noodlings, album highlight ‘Look at Orion!’ sounds like Crystal Castles as influenced by BBC Radiophonic Workshop soundtracked public information films about space travel. Nonetheless the albums blots always lie outside of that faded folk-ish mode. Tracks like the John Carpenter-esque ‘Business Park’ and ‘You’, the now familiar Dilla/Stones Throw impression, break up the rainy melancholy that dominates but aren’t as convincing, feeling more like conspicuously ill-fitting outfits he’s not quite comfortable in.

Silver Wilkinson is a solid return to (mostly) familiar, territory. Not quite winding the clock back to his 2005 debut, but somewhere closer to it than the eclectic, synth-y territory of Mind Bokeh. Where you stand on that kind of amnesiac approach will depend a whole lot on how you already feel about the guy’s music (and it’s hard to imagine fans of his pastoral brand of hauntology demanding new stuff for the sake of it). Even with the doyens of his style, Boards of Canada, returning in the very immediate future for competition, a narrow, modest auteurship rather than a clear album-to-album progression might be the order of the day for the Bibio project – which is refreshing at a time when schizophrenic reinvention is expected as a standard. Besides, if the yottabytes of information Google have on us means they’re right about the future, we’ll all still be playing Lovers Carvings ten years from now – on Ukuleles.

After a short sharp shock of a set from Say Lou Lou (prior to their Best Fit headliner at Madame JoJo’s a couple of hours later), the launch soirée for Swedish festival, Way Out West, in London sees quirkess, Lune, take to the stage.

Proving that this one-off evening celebrating Gothenburg’s finest summer outing is not all about the Scandinavian canapés and cider, Linnéa Martinsson (for it is she!) is here to remind us why Sweden has such an unquestionably impressive music heritage.

Her demure demeanour is mixed with a knowing edge and a half-smile that betrays confidence cut with vulnerability. She is accompanied on stage by a laptop loaded with pre-recorded music and a hippie-Shaman dude, Mårten Spångberg, who – apart from a bit of acoustic guitar playing on a couple of the quieter tracks – limits his contribution to ambient lighting. This he creates by shining a flashlight on various objects, such as gift-bags and silver mixing bowls. It’s bizarre, it’s distracting, but hey – it’s part of the Lune stage set-up and, you know what? Ultimately, it doesn’t take away from the fact that Martinsson is a captivating performer with a very strong set of songs and you soon learn to ignore the somewhat unnecessary stuff happening around her and focus, instead, on the music.

Lune’s voice, at points, is almost startlingly similar to Bjork‘s and her songs are often characterised by a pulsating electronic beat layered with melodious instrumentation. From set-opener, ‘Falling’, through ‘Boys’n'Roses’ to recent single, ‘Girls With Bangs’, she grows in confidence and the crowd becomes more and more smitten.

‘Lori Grimes’ finds Lune and Spångberg delivering a beautiful guitar ballad, where enough breathing space is given to the vocals, and a languid fade then connects smoothly with the equally-notable, ‘Rain’, before leading to the tempo-rejuvenating, ‘That Day’.

Even if you are not sure what to make of this act at the outset, by the time closing number, ‘Close Dance’, is halfway through its stage time, you can’t help but feel taken in. This performance certainly manages to whet our appetites for Way Out West, where we hope to see and hear more of Martinsson.

Setlist

Based in old London town, Standish/Carlyon are a splinter cell of Australian rock outfit Devastations, formed of members Tom Carlyon and Conrad Standish. However, they’ve been estranged from Oz for a long time now, soaking up the scenes in Berlin and the UK, and using what they’ve picked up along the journey to create something far removed from their days in Devastations. This is futuristic dub-pop, dark, brooding and full of synthesised wizardry that harks back to the soundtracks of ’80s sci-fi flicks and the bedroom producers of South LDN.

They’ve made waves with tracks like ‘Nono/Yoyo’, a blog favourite with deep new wave revival flavours of Wild Nothing and lurid, mutated bass riffs. It has set off signals everywhere, with people falling over themselves to fawn over the pair – and quite rightly. The astral beauty is captivating; it’s a sonic fractal with echoes of echoes reverberating around Standish’s celestial falsetto. Popular cut ‘Subliminally’ follows suit – you’re instantly lost in a labyrinth of effects, and even the metronomic industrial percussion (which bears an odd similarity to ‘Closer‘) can’t drag you back to a safe place. Their sound is all ebbs and flows – in some respects it’s a bit homogenous, everything sort of blends together – and their ideas are presented in terms of structure and dynamics rather than through lyrics or melodies.

What the duo excel at, is being irresistibly sexy. By having a sound that tends to morph lethargically, rather than jerk with reckless abandon, the sound fills whatever space it’s given. It’s very fluid. Like Massive Attack or Portishead, who are adept at moulding sonic lust, the noises are bass heavy, full of ethereal synths and lit by red bulbs. Mostly, Deleted Scenes has got a simple, easy-to-follow (ahem…) rhythm, and a lurid, thick texture which envelops you with ease like a spider capturing a fly in it’s web. The hazy vocals only heighten the sensuality – the lyrics tend to be masked underneath layers of production, so really all you hear is Standish moaning and groaning and making passionate noises.

’2 5 1 1′ is one of the best examples on the LP of their tantric aural ability (pun very much intended). There are sparse, distant handclaps and rumbling bass vibrations. The synths are brooding and John Carpenter-esque, evoking a kind of nervous excitement that leads to fumbly tremors. ‘Gucci Mountain’ has Standish channelling a distorted Bowie. It’s dripping in the pitter-patter of maudlin keys and howling gale samples. Where Daft Punk make a sort of glamorous, frivolous soundtrack for the bedroom, and Ratatat own a drugged-out carnal bliss, Standish/Carlyon weave a more intense, ignore-the-world sort of music.

Whether they’ve intended to indulge in this sort of style deliberately or not isn’t entirely known but it would be quite an impressive accident if they didn’t. Deleted Scenes, regardless of whether the pair’s intentions are pure or not, is a stunning debut foray into the world of electronic noises. There are plenty of standout moments to be discovered here, and save for the fact perhaps it’s a bit too seamless, there’s really not much you can find fault with. With the no-holds-barred sexuality and melange of ’80s nods/electronic effects, this is sure to find a place on many end of year lists.

With the pair being such hot commodities, it’s a surprise that this third instalment surfaced at all. Their upcoming third long-player, snappily entitled Volume 3, perhaps unsurprisingly, follows on seamlessly from Volume 1 and Volume 2. It’s not much of an advancement in terms of theme or style or sound – there’s slightly more of a ’50s/’60s lean, and the production is slightly slicker – but on the whole, it may as well be the third disc of what is essentially one album released over five years. That’s not a bad thing, by the way.

‘I’ve Got Your Number, Son’ is polished ’60s pop, full of doe-eyed sheen and cooing backing singers – it verges on the twee side, but She & Him always have. These are modern love songs, but there’s more eloquence and subtlety (part of the reason it sounds so dated), and not one reference to doing rudeys. It’s all about the tickle-fights, the staring at each other until your eyes shrivel up and all the lovey-dovey things that are great if you’re a participant, but sickening if you’re a spectator. ‘I Could’ve Been Your Girl’ sounds unmistakably like an oldie, with glorious melodies and sweeping string surges. M. Ward’s guitar has a lo-fi, surfy tinge, but on the whole it’s strict smooth pop and a fantastic base for the vocals to launch from.

Everything slots together nicely on the LP. There’s barely anything out of place. Every lump or bump has been ironed out during the production process. Volume 3 Emulates ’50s/’60s pop so well, it’s all too easy to completely forget that this is a record released half a century later; Deschanel’s stunning vocal performance is effervescent and dainty, and she does a brilliant job of articulating quaint passion and that iconic ’50s whimsy. Ward’s contributions are often light, positive indie-pop sounds, and even the more solemn lyrical moments are filled with optimism. The way he strums his six-string compliments the vocals swimmingly.

One of the most notable detractions from the strict mid-20^th Century aura is a cover of both the English and French versions of Blondie‘s ‘Sunday Girl‘ (Deschanel’s impression of Debbie Harry is spot-on, if a little restrained). There’s less New Wave-y/punk-flecked guitars, instead Ward opts for rock’n'roll jangles and twee handclaps; there’s less bite, but a much stronger doo-wop timbre. There’s also a cover of Karen Chandler‘s 1952 hit, ‘Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me‘. It’s a sublime, swooning acoustic ballad of simple love, adorned with grooving bass licks, broad strings and tranquil guitar riffing.

There’ll be plenty of fawning over this album for the sheer fact Deschanel is in it: the indie darling and Internet fodder incites biased joy wherever she treads, partly due to her spearheading the ‘adorkable’ movement. People may be falling over themselves to say that this is a perfect album, which it’s not, but they’re in the right ballpark. It is a good record, brimming with lavish, romantic nostalgipop that will rekindle your love for Grease, neckerchiefs and pomade. Sandra Dee would have this on repeat, that’s a certainty.

Naming livelier bands than Low is easy. It’s… well, it’s pretty much all of them. But lovelier ones? That’s a struggle.

The Duluth, Minnesota three piece are now at a stage in their career where they only play places that befit said loveliness. Their trips to London haven’t included a toilet circuit venue in many a year, with them now a regular feature on bills at places like the Royal Festival Hall, tonight’s home The Barbican, and in all likelihood private audiences with the Queen at Buckingham Palace. Well, they wouldn’t seem out of place.

Despite their increasingly grandiose venue choices, Low’s sound remains as tantalisingly subtle as ever. Alan Sparhawk plays guitar through a miniscule amplifier, Mimi Parker’s drum kit is as sparse as her hitting of it, and their audience is so hushed and attuned to what it is Low do that one wonders if the pair even need to approach a microphone when they sing; us lot would gladly just listen a bit more closely if they chose to ditch them. It’s this delicacy to their playing that makes them such an enticing live prospect – what they create is so fragile that one stares on baffled at how it doesn’t crack apart under the slightest scrutiny.

This isn’t the case with Low on record, or at least not all the time. LPs such as the Dave Fridmann-produced The Great Destroyer and new effort The Invisible Way (helmed by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy) pack a considerable punch, yet when stripped back to just guitar, drums, vocals, bass and occasional piano, they shine in virtue of being comparatively skeletal.  The Great Destroyer provides us with three tunes tonight, a menacing pairing of ‘Monkey’ and ‘Pissing’, and an unplanned encore inclusion for fan-requested beauty ‘When I Go Deaf’, but it’s The Invisible Way that we get to know best. No less than nine tracks, almost half the set list, are brand new Low numbers.

The reason nobody seems to mind is that their most recent record is one of their best for a while, with songs like the opening ‘Plastic Cup’ (which contains the first of two uses of the word “piss” this evening – really, guys) and utterly majestic ‘So Blue’ sounding like sisters to more time-honoured Low classics such as the ever-beautiful and deceptively sinister ‘In Metal’, despite their being born of quite different bands, decades apart.  The main change has been in personnel, with new member Steve Garrington adding delicate piano flourishes and a muscular bass guitar grounding to songs that would otherwise be in danger of flying away, such is their gentile splendour.

Low seem happy to be playing, which is great, because that can’t be said for all of their shows. Tonight however, they seem in a generous mood, and genuinely touched at our esteem for their performance. Though it’s heavy on new material, when their set makes pit stops in their back catalogue, their selections are expertly picked, and clearly tailored to long term fans (‘Soon’ from Secret Name, ‘Words’ from their debut I Could Live In Hope). These guys seem happy and humbled, despite playing to audiences this reverent as standard now. Smiling suits Low; though their tales of murder and piss are plentiful, when you walk away from one of their gigs, it’s their loveliness that’s most prominently on your mind.

Photograph by Howard Melnyczuk. See full gallery here.

What do we talk about when we talk about Vampire Weekend?

Initially so much of the discussion focused on the band’s effete image and what many saw as that image’s uncomfortable marriage to Afropop. The undeniable quality of Contra, the band’s second album, pushed the distracted talk about signifiers of privilege into the background, and now, save for the vocalising in the chorus of ‘Ya Hey’ and the ‘Graceland’ bounce of rubbery bass and drums on ‘Everlasting Arms,’ the band’s African influences are nowhere to be found either. So what now?

On their new album, Modern Vampires of The City, Vampire Weekend sound like a band in complete control. The band’s performance feels precise, the production is clean, and Ezra Koenig’s phrasing is as crisp and careful as the melodies. But like the Afropop and the phony controversy of rock music made by rich kids, the punk energy rush that gave the first two albums’ their fizz is missing. That lack of wildness makes Modern Vampires of The City, while always thoughtful and often beautiful, the least captivating of their three albums.

The band’s songwriting is still strong. ‘Step,’ the album’s first single, is a gorgeous, light sounding thing that still retains a gravity through Koenig’s slightly downbeat performance. Koenig’s voice carries the melody of the verses over simple drums and bass rhythms, before it’s joined by a pretty harpsichord on the choruses. When the band first leaked ‘Diane Young’ alongside ‘Step,’ it felt like ‘Step’s’ B-side, a throwaway experiment, but it’s a grower and eventually we realise it’s Modern Vampires  of The City’s most out there track – and, on an album lacking fire, eventually becomes a stand-out. Another highlight, the stomping ‘Unbelievers,’ captures the band at its most straightforward.

Some people have compared Koenig’s vocals on the song to an Elvis impersonator, but if there is any truth to that comparison, they must be thinking of the Elvis of ‘A Little Less Conversation.’ To me, it sounds like the band’s modern, twisted take on Springsteen: A honking synth gives the song a propulsion that builds until the drums and guitar threaten to ‘Wipeout,’ while Koenig’s voice gets more modulated and abstracted with each repeated “baby.”

Modern Vampires of The City is not without its sins. It lacks songs that really stick with you, or at least lacks songs that are as catchy as those found on their stellar first two albums. The album is frontloaded and later tracks, like ‘Finger Back’ and ‘Worship You,’ pass by pleasantly but without making a deep impression. ‘Hudson’ is a crawling sinister affair and the album’s only real misstep: Koenig delivers his lines a little archly, as if they were riddles, over a mischievous bassline while drums hammer out a martial rhythm and spooky strings or their synth stand-ins haunt the background.

As ‘I Think Ur a Contra’ closed out Contra on a brief, quiet note, this record concludes with ‘Young Lion.’ After a warped sounding recording of piano opens the song, Koenig sings “You take your time” in multi-tracked harmony before the piano returns. It’s pretty and, just as ‘I Think Ur a Contra’ mirrored Contra’s warmth, ‘Young Lion’ is appropriately uneasy sounding. It just isn’t as indelible as its predecessor.

Koenig’s lyrics are knotty, allusive and often seem cleverly nonsensical at first. Yet, on repeat listens Modern Vampires of The City reveals itself as an agnostic’s attempt to puzzle out meaning in a world where conventions have fallen away or lost their magic. It’s melancholy, nostalgic for the certainty of youth or, rightly or wrongly, the past. Koenig is engaged with the world in a serious way that doesn’t preclude fun or playfulness. And even as the band’s sound has evolved, the music remains immaculately crafted and distinctively its own. Those aren’t easy tricks and, whether it reaches the heights of the band’s previous work or not, they make Modern Vampires of The City a pleasure.

It’s with a rare urgency that post-punk foursome Savages bounded onto the scene, eliciting almost universal applause and a low rumble of fevered whispers. There was barely a shred of sound available online last year, but their name was banded around every which way by those in positions of power and anyone discussing ‘next big things’.

Methodically selecting venues for brutish, barbed performances which piqued nationwide attention, the LDN-ers have been dragged kicking and screaming into 2013 by the hype machine; part of a guitar-based class of acts due to graduate this year, the stakes have never been higher for this wave of musicians. Palma Violets stumbled with a divisive, sloppy first record at the opening hurdles, and before we get the likes of Haim and Deap Vally this summer, Savages line up to be the second of this new breed in front of the judge’s panel. Will they make it to the next round? Damn right they will.

It’s common knowledge that their overall sound isn’t the most forward-thinking – Velvet Undergound, Siouxsie and Joy Division are all blatantly namechecked – though their delivery is flawless. They’ve admitted that you’ve probably heard this all before, but that’s beside the point, as for starters musicians are hard-pressed to be completely unique nowadays (whether it’s even possible is an endless debate), but the more important factor is their message.

They’re a group with a mission, with opinions to communicate and ideals to preach. They stand up for injustice and aim to change perceptions via “Violence, domestic things and having a masculine view on feminine issues.” Perhaps the noises they’ve manufactured, although thoroughly entertaining, are derivative, but the charisma Savages ooze is hypnotising.

Silence Yourself is a collection of no-nonsense, 0% fat post-punk. It’s embellished with snarling yowls of rage, steamroller percussion and despondent guitars, but there’s nothing that seems indulgent or ‘tacked-on’. Even the Opening Night sample intro to ‘Shut Up’ (they’re not subtle about what they want from you) feels necessary, even the saxophone solo on dangerously sensual send-off ‘Marshal Dear’ is vital. The production wondertwins Rodaidh McDonald and Johnny Hostile are no doubt partly responsible for the streamlined result on the record.

Savages compel you to sit and focus on their music when you listen to it – frankly it’s hard not to – but it’s something they hammer home nonetheless, and not just on plastic; they’ve even gone as far as to ban cameras at their live shows. They’re passionate about focus and the value of silence, something evident in their sound. Even amongst distorted flails and rampant bass of tracks like ‘She Will’ or ‘Strife’, it still feels lean and skeletal and distant, made possible largely due to Beth’s reverb-laced howl.

Rerecorded breakthrough cut ‘Husbands’ is still a riveting slab of descending riffs and chugging picked bass. There are paranoid, hushed blurts from Beth: “Oh God, I wanna get rid of it…” through a myriad of shrieking axes, every bit as brutal as their moniker implies. Empowering ode ‘City’s Full’ is full of yelps and steely riffs; raw bass and muted chords captain the sonic voyage as it careens through haunted, bolshy choruses pining for fiery love based on avoiding apparent ‘perfection’: “I love the stretchmarks on your thighs/ I love the wrinkles around your eyes.”

Silence Yourself is hardly a humble effort – from anyone else you’d probably be hearing warning bells as you pick up the record; the cover’s austere poem/manifesto includes the line ‘If the world would shut up/even for a while/perhaps/we would start hearing.’ With anyone else this early in their career, you’d laugh right back to wherever you bought it from with receipt in hand – but Savages own a gravitas, a brooding confidence and effortless cool, that no matter how cynical or wary of pretentiousness you are, will be suck you in. It’s not often a band will hold you hostage with cover art, a list of demands, but you’d be a damned fool not to pay the ransom to Savages.

What sets Little Boots‘ second album, Nocturnes, apart from her debut, Hands, is exactly this point. Hands was actually brilliant and quite unfairly underrated but, with Victoria Hesketh’s former label, Atlantic, arranging for her to work with lots of different people on it, the record was a bit of a hodge-podge of influences and styles and worked more as a collection of singles (it should be noted that there was plenty of material to choose from on that front though).

By comparison, with Nocturnes you get an album that operates on several levels. It has strong singles – oh god, does it have strong singles! – but they also fit into the grander scheme of its disco manifesto and the whole thing flows smoothly and neatly as a singular piece of work, from start to finish.

Producer Tim Goldsworthy is the man responsible for this achievement and his input ensures that Nocturnes‘ ten songs sit more than comfortably alongside one another and achieve the dual feat of sounding old-school and current at the same time.

Opening cut, ‘Motorway‘, combines moody and cinematic undertones with a shy dance sensibility and a cracking chorus. It’s a track that builds and builds and, ultimately, stays in your head insistently. Next up, driven by an Italo-piano and brimming with hooks, ‘Confusion’ finds Little Boots repeating a warning: “Never lie to me again/ never lie to me again/ never lie to me again/ never lie to me again”. It’s as catchy as they come and leads nicely to current single, ‘Broken Record’, which is – again – a song that builds progressively and, in its last minute, injects robotica into the electronica and erupts into a superb finale.

The 2011 single, ‘Shake’, remains as fresh as it sounded when it first came out. Said to have been the blue-print for the direction of Nocturnes, it slots elegantly inbetween ‘Broken Record’ and – what will hopefully be a future single – ‘Beat Beat’. The latter is an instantly memorable highlight and makes a worthy substitute for Little Boots’ recent single, ‘Headphones’, which sadly didn’t make it onto the album.

Other mentionables include ‘Crescendo’, which you’ll be singing along to by the second listen, and quieter number, ‘All For You’. While slowing things down somewhat towards the end of the record, ‘All For You’ nevertheless manages beautifully to hold attention in the lead-up to the dance explosion of album closer, ‘Satellites’.

If there was a real prospect of a proper summer over here this year, there’d be nothing stopping us from predicting Nocturnes as, potentially, the soundtrack to Summer 2013. Either way, it’s a foot-tappingly bundle of disco-pop that is not ashamed of its influences and refuses to bore for even the shortest of moments.

Rilo Kiley‘s split, back when guitarist Blake Sennett finally confirmed it in July 2011, surely didn’t come as a surprise to anyone. His working relationship with Jenny Lewis, perhaps inevitably, had collapsed under the weight of the failure of its romantic counterpart; he cited “deception, disloyalty and greed” as key factors for the band’s demise. If, indeed, he really did feel as bitter as his comments suggested, you could probably understand why; his and Lewis’ post-Kiley careers have certainly followed markedly different trajectories to this point.

I was on a train to Leeds, to see Bright Eyes play, when the news invaded my Twitter feed; as fate would have it, Lewis was supporting them, playing songs from her (excellent) collaboration with her current boyfriend, Johnathan Rice. For me, at least, the spectre of Rilo Kiley hung over their set that night, partly because I’d realised that this was now about as close as I’d ever get to seeing them (Kiley drummer Jason Boesel was part of the Jenny & Johnny backing band) and partly because the blunt nature of Sennett’s statement had left a sour taste in the mouth.

I didn’t think it was possible for a band to go out the way Rilo Kiley had, with what is probably best termed an acrimonious whimper – it was hardly LCD at Madison Square Garden. There was mention of a rarities collection to round things off formally, but given the collaboration that would necessitate between a clearly-opposed Sennett and Lewis, it didn’t seem a realistic prospect.

How wrong I was; RKives’ realisation suggests a thawing of hostilities in more recent months, allowing us to focus once again on the Lewis-Sennett partnership, rather than the Lewis-Sennett relationship. The first six tracks, all original and unreleased previously, provide the major point of discussion. I wasn’t really sure what to expect – how fleshed-out would they be? My heart was hoping for finished material that had been gathering dust, but my head was telling me to expect little more than glorified demos.

It’s pleasing, then, to report that it’s pretty much the former; the tracks are musically diverse, with the band in various guises, but what they all share, and possess in abundance, is polish. After many listens, I genuinely believe ‘It’ll Get You There’ can sit comfortably alongside the very best cuts from the Rilo Kiley catalogue; it apparently came from the sessions for the band’s poppiest, most commercially-viable effort, Under the Blacklight, but certainly wouldn’t have fit on that record – it’s about as heavy as the band have ever been, with stormy guitars underpinned by dramatic vocal work from Lewis. It immediately follows opener ‘Let Me Back In’, which really couldn’t be any more at odds with it: A gorgeous acoustic number, with Lewis on more typical, honeyed form, and there’s a kind of playful innocence in her voice, largely absent from her solo albums, that marks it out as a Rilo Kiley song.

‘Runnin’ Around’ comes over as a nicely-struck compromise; it’s a pop song that wouldn’t have been out of place on Blacklight, but features more traditional Kiley guitar work than most of the other tracks on that record. ‘All the Drugs’ rounds off the collection of Blacklight­-era material, and sounds like a gentler cousin of the band’s biggest hit, ‘Portions for Foxes’ – by no means a bad thing.

The remaining two original efforts aren’t quite as engaging; they definitely don’t sound as if they’ve followed the band’s tried-and-tested formula as closely as those initial four. The country-tinged ‘Bury, Bury, Bury Another’, underscored by slide guitar, sounds more like an offcut from Lewis’ first solo record with the Watson Twins, whilst you can almost hear listeners groaning as Sennett turns in his obligatory lead vocal on ‘Well, You Left’; his voice bears superficial resemblance to Elliott Smith‘s, but lacks much of the subtlety and nuance that made Smith’s so arresting, and the awkward shoehorning-in of American Football-esque trumpets is certainly no help.

Fleshing out RKives is a slew of B-sides, which, typically, are a mixed bag, from the sublime – ‘American Wife’s tale of frustrated-housewifery, ‘Patiently’s dual vocals over messy guitars – to the ridiculous – a remix of Blacklight cut ‘Dejalo’, inexplicably featuring Too $hort. For the most part, though, we’re firmly into fans-only territory here, although the inclusion of the charming ‘The Frug’ to close, the debut single plucked from The Initial Friend EP, is an inspired touch.

Whilst I couldn’t really recommend RKives as an ideal introduction to Rilo Kiley, it nonetheless, intentionally or otherwise, serves as a neat summation of the band’s career. Like so much of their previous output, it’s an incredibly bittersweet listen, but this time it’s less about Lewis’ wistful reflections and more to do with rueing what might have been if they’d continued; those first four cuts hint at a genuinely superb record having been in the works pre-split. Far from providing the closure fans were likely hoping for, RKives raises plenty more ‘whys’ and ‘what-ifs’; for a band who, lyrically, dealt so often with feelings of insecurity and uncertainty, it is, sadly, a fitting epitaph.

Who runs the world? Beyonce. Or at least the world in which her fans live, giving it a population of millions. 

Before she’s even appeared on stage, she’s already been granted three rapturous receptions, via whoops for the advert for her perfume Fever, a Mexican wave approving of her patronage of Pepsi cola, and an appearance in a video for Chime for Change where she makes an impassioned plea for a better future for young girls that has some of her admirers starting to well up. To these people, Beyonce is far more than a singer – she is a woman of otherworldly perfection. The fact that she occasionally sings amazing songs is mere icing on the cake.

This may seem dismissive of her considerable musical talent, but actually, you’ve got to admit that thinking of Beyonce as more than a singer is only accurate. When she emerges on a platform from beneath the stage straight in to ‘Run The World (Girls)’, nobody’s first thought is “I love this song!”.  It’s a shared gasp of recognition, a communal wonder that Beyonce – Beyonce! – is even here. Her stardom is so huge it takes a while to focus on her music, which is fine given how much else there is to distract you – the costume changes, the dancers, the floating video screens, Beyonce’s insistence on accompanying everything she does with a vigorous shake of her barely concealed derriere. It’s impossible not to be entertained, enthralled even, despite the fact that the music at times seems entirely secondary to whatever else it is that’s going on.

Beyonce does ballads and bangers like no other. Her vocal prowess on the former and show-womanship on the latter are unbeatable, but her more mid tempo numbers would be close to forgettable if they weren’t adorned with pyrotechnics, the perpetual choreographed chucking of one another in the air and elongated video interludes that thread the whole Mrs Carter Show World Tour together like a musical production, but only in a West End theatre kind of sense. Even pointing out slight chinks in her armour seems harsh given her talents, but the crowd around me seem to agree – even if they’d never utter the words – that there are a handful too many of these moments, instances where many of us think to ourselves, ‘yes, I will have a little sit down’.  In such times, nobody’s bored, as the visual spectacle is still overwhelming. But neither are they dancing.

OK, when Beyonce’s at her worst, she’s still pretty good. But when she’s at her best?  Holy shit. I’ve heard the ‘this side make some noise/that side make some noise’ thing countless times, but the response has never hurt my ears before. I’ve seen The Flaming Lips on enough occasions to know what a glitter cannon does, but never have one’s contents filled my entire field of vision. I’ve just never seen a woman turn a crowd on, in every sense, to quite these levels.  Through a cheesy but yeah, kinda empowering ‘Halo’ and a brutally forceful ‘Why Don’t You Love Me?’, we’re out of our seats, and then in other people’s seats, and then we’ve all completely lost our seats. And by the time she flies – she actually flies – from one end of the venue to the other for a remarkable ‘Irreplaceable’, gliding back over to the front for a double whammy of ‘Crazy In Love’ and ‘Single Ladies’ so powerful it borders on transcendence, I’m signing myself up to the religion of people who think this woman can do anything.

For me, it’s Beyonce’s best music that makes all the other stuff about her so notable, not vice versa. Few other pop artists ever reach these heights, and they don’t even have to deal with the hassle of having to be bloody Beyonce every day. Michael Jackson did, sure, and at its best this show is probably most reminiscent of the stunning footage I’ve seen of him touring Bad. But look at how that turned out. Beyonce, thankfully, isn’t showing any signs of similar impending insanity. She still seems curiously humble, even when she’s literally looking down on us, suspended in the sky. For all her myriad talents, being able to seem like one of us at the same time as being not of this world is surely amongst her greatest achievements.

Sometimes sparks can fly in the most improbable of places. Tonight, Middlesbrough’s Westgarth Social Club, the not-so-secret gem in the town’s live circuit, is the unlikely host for two of the most in-demand bands of the moment, creating a little pocket of excitement on a drab Wednesday night. Small town inactivity paired with fingers being firmly on the right pulse means the room is packed out while a cautious but palpable anticipation hangs in the air.

Peak District blues punk duo- surely the least feasible start to a sentence ever – Drenge are first to prove their mettle, and they almost manage it. Making up in enthusiasm and ridiculously excellent names – Rory Loveless – what they, in fairness, lack in true originality, the young pups match no frills riffs with fresh faced commitment to sweet, if slightly underwhelming effect. A polite teen rebellion via The Black Keys which doesn’t have to tidy its room and can create a racket when it bloody well wants.

Temples, however, are the real reason for the swiftly rising temperatures round here, not least because of some particularly obscenely attractive band members. But since we’re here to talk about the much more disappointingly proper business of music and not shallow aesthetic gratification, we’d better get back to the task in hand. The psychadelia revivalists from Kettering have certainly been causing a stir of late, validated by the likes of Johnny Marr, Noel Gallagher and recent gig buddies, Suede. Racking up quite the roster of indie heavyweights can’t hurt a band in its burgeoning stages and they’re quietly keen- almost too quiet- to show why.

Opener ‘The Golden Throne’ is organ heavy and hook laden while ‘Keep in the Dark’ is a bluesy, stomping number which rolls into a swooning, romantic chorus. Singer, James Bagshaw, holds on to a knowing remoteness throughout, and fosters a mysterious allure, probably by virtue of knowing the value in shutting up. The band go on to play ‘Prisms’ which is a paisley printed daydream while their debut single, ‘Shelter Song’ is pleasingly trippy and an obvious standout track. The songs are hypnotic and unconcerned with urgency, softly seductive and touching on hidden depths.

Faithful in their intentions, the set speaks of a band with understated confidence and ability who know exactly the context they want to fit in and the importance of a cohesive vision. While it’s fuzzily nostalgic and experimental, they clearly want to invoke blotter paper mind-bends and wildly dilated pupils but they might just be too clean around the edges and are probably more of a friendly magic eye picture for now. It may simply be shy inexperience but their cool detachment and reserved delivery leaves the atmosphere lacking somewhat, though they manage to keep the attention of the crowd.

Entering the post-MGMT music scene at a time when the likes of Tame Impala are causing real waves, this is far more grounded stuff but it’s no less valid. Judging by tonight’s performance, Temples are a really good band with the potential to be really great. Not quite a trip, but they well could be.

Photograph taken by Sebastien Dehesdin at The Lexington, 29/04/30. See Full Gallery here.

2011′s Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam was a definitive statement for Obaro Ejimiwe, better known under his Ghostpoet guise. As debut records go, he couldn’t have really had done it better: it was a phenomenal effort combining elements of British grime and hip-hop, as well as the sparse electronica of James Blake or Burial. It scored him a Mercury nod, support slots with the likes of Metronomy and appearances at festivals nationwide. Two years on he returns with his second full-length, Some Say I So I Say Light, ready to succumb to the gaping maw of the hype machine. With such a compelling première outing, will he crumble under the pressure of delivering something that lives up to expectations?

Accompanying Ejimiwe’s unique vocal style, which bears similarities to operatic sprechgesang (it lays upon the border of spoken-word, rap and singing), is an arsenal of talented guest vocalists. On ‘Dial Tones’, one of the standout cuts on the record, a morose, strung-out Lucy Rose offers her brittlest vocals to the fray, contrasting the wired-ness from Ejimiwe. It’s a lonely 4am anthem with desolate synth creaks and other gizmos buzzing like the background noise of a city at night.

Woodpecker Wooliams contributes to ‘Meltdown’, the lead single, for an impeccable chorus ripe for a dancefloor-ready remix. The lyrics tell a tale of the aftermath of a broken relationship, “You and me weren’t meant to be, and someone, somewhere knew it from the start.” It’s brutal in its honest account of torn victims and the unstoppable rifts that occur during the denouement of love. Other top notch guests include Dave Okume, Charles Hayward and Gwilym Gold.

Blurring the lines between genres has always been Ejimiwe’s forte, fusing a chilled-out electronic sound with hip-hop beats and semi-rapped lyrics. It’s a kind of late-night sound he’s nurtured, and on Some Say I So I Say Light, he’s gone even further with experimenting – injecting orchestral flourishes, woodwind waves and ’90s porn-groove guitars. At times, futuristic R&B rears its head, and just as he begins galloping in one direction, he lurches towards somewhere new.

The tone remains pretty consistent throughout, and often the pace is carried over from track to track, but it’s his variety of instrumentation that keeps us interested in spite of the structural/temporal safety. It would’ve been nice to experience some differentiation in terms of overall ‘feel’, but his sharp, poignant lyrics and beautiful noises keep us enthralled nonetheless.

‘Plastic Bag Brain’ is home to earwormy country-rock riffs and ticking hi-hats. The music grinds in the depths as Ejimiwe’s voice floats, almost disconnected, the sounds mimicking his words: “I am here/ Standing by the river/ Head to toe in shivers/ I wonder where you are.”

‘Comatose’ is all muffled percussion, howling wind pads and sacrosanct organ melodies. Breathy, strained vocals gasp over the top, with no effort made to conceal the topic: “I feel like the whole world has turned its back on me”. In the final moments of the album, uplifting conga noises and luscious string washes saunter into the mix, alleviating the hopeless (as in devoid of hope) mood.

Ghostpoet had a genuinely tough task ahead of him at the start of this record. After such a successful debut, it would’ve been all to easy to buckle and bow out, or churn out something overwrought and/or naff. However, considering the enormity of the task ahead, he’s prevailed, crafting a collection of songs that push boundaries and contend as great post-hip-hop. There is plenty to get excited about here – perhaps he could have changed up the tone a tad more, but the only negatives are mere minor gripes. It’s might not quite exceed Peanut Butter Blues…, but it certainly isn’t worse.

This is a pleasant plateau he’s found himself on, and it’s a perfect launching platform for further, more avante-garde endeavours.

Zach Yudin, the main man behind Secretly Canadian signees Cayucas, has bided his time well. The Cayucos, CA native’s surf-inspired debut features songs that first caught waves under his previous recording moniker – Oregon Bike Trails – but have been reworked and reheated with Yudin helming a five-piece band for debut album Bigfoot.

The band wear their influences on short sleeves without subtle gestures or sleights of hand. Bigfoot sounds like sixties surf rock refracted through an indie-pop prism and it isn’t a trick of the light. Alongside vintage vinyl samples, a spectrum of influences from Beach Boys and The Tornadoes to Local Natives and Vampire Weekend bubble under and boil over to varying degrees. Dandy gradations of guitar and drums, layers of twiddled percussion with chimes and chants, oohs and ehs, create a happy-clappy, stutteringly dulcet melee.

At its best, Bigfoot could be the San Luis Obispo County equivalent of Metronomy‘s The English Riviera, transporting the average urbanite to a sunny coastal clime with skipping insouciance. Excepting the lethargic last bars of ‘Will “The Thrill”‘, Cayucas convey the summer sun with heys rather than haze.

That they also avoid the suspicious wash of Instagrammed retro is partly attributable to lyrics that surpass expectations by being both romantic and consciously silly, adding more than a splash of irony to any too cool for surf school attitude. Careless happiness is introduced on the bouncingly energetic opener ‘Cayucos’, while ‘High School Lover’, distilling the band’s essence most effectively, offers “See, ever since I saw you on the back of some guy’s bicycle I’ve been feeling kind of so-so”. Lines like these signal a lack of solemn intent, though they give way to wistful futility soon afterwards. The Beach Boys didn’t sing about being gauche in love; in this setting, the songs suggest the missteps and insecurities of the beautiful people. ‘A Summer Thing’ matches jaunty hooks with lonely sentiments (“Now you’re watching the rain fall by yourself from your bedroom window / I’ll be checking the mailbox for the postcards that you said you’d send”), adding a twist of heartache to what might have been just mucking about in the shallows.

The constancy of the style creates a suspicion about whether – at thirty-one minutes – there are quite enough ideas to support a full album. ‘Deep Sea’ and ‘Ayawa ‘Kya’ suffer from an ebbing of momentum, the fluttering of the former ultimately repetitious to distraction. Notwithstanding the production efforts of latter day Shin Richard Swift, at these points this hooky, kooky album sounds slightly undercooked. The attention wanders a little before the title track, which ends proceedings with more benign beats and breezy chants.

Where unabashed beach hedonism might grate, Cayucas’s slightly awkward optimism imbues a friendly warmth, something humanising that softens the glare and freshens the sultry air. The surfers’ idyll is no mirage; only scenic surroundings for familiar fallibility. Bigfoot is bittersweet; cheerful and charming in small doses, and – as that’s all you get – it’s time well spent.

The problem with not knowing a lot about a band other than their name and what it conjures up – plus a few minor details about what they might sound like – means you’re often living with a self-created musical myth instead of what they actually do sound like. That’s the position I found myself in before finally experiencing the music of Minus the Bear at Glasgow’s King Tut’s on Saturday night. Here’s what I knew/assumed:

1. The name: kind of a rubbish band in-joke, yet it works in a kind of endearing way. That assumption still stands true
2. There’d be a fair amount of “guitar taps” throughout, a technique that looks and sounds irritating in equal measure. I was glad to be proven wrong on that score
3. There’d be a good quota of difficult to follow time signatures and tempo changes, and few choruses. Correct, but that would never had bothered me anyway

The Seattle band can probably be put into the “veterans” bracket of the alt.rock scene given it’s been 12 years since front man and guitarist Jake Snider formed the band, and in that time released five full-length records. They’ve always passed me by, give or take a few songs, so this was an opportunity to finally get to know Minus the Bear as they toured behind their latest album Infinity Overhead.

The songs I heard that were taken from that record appeared to be the sound of a more direct Minus the Bear: driving guitar rhythms backed with subtle electronics (think a rockier Bear in Heaven…..must be a bear thing) and less skipping around the time signatures. So songs like opener ‘Steel and Blood’, ‘Diamond Lightning’ and ‘Toska’ were pleasingly instant hits (the latter especially with its addictive and colourful cyclical riffs), if a little obvious at times – although there’s nothing wrong with obvious if it’s executed extremely well.

The most enjoyable moments for me – and those that were most well-received by a receptive crowd who knew the back catalogue better than I – came when the band played tracks from older albums: ‘The Fix’, from 2005’s Menos el Oso, was a wonderfully scratchy punk-funk bomb, while another older track ‘Knights’ pounded along with math rock intensity and plenty of fun changes in tempo and ‘Spritz!!! Spritz!!!’ from debut album Highly Refined Pirates was probably the best moment of the night; an example of how well the band seem to combine those tricksy math rock tempo changes with a more direct guitar style, that track, plus show closer and all-round anthem ‘Pachuca Sunrise’ would be enough to convince anyone to seek out the band’s back catalogue.

As a first experience of Minus the Bear I have to admit that it’s not made me a complete convert to what they do; I think when they nail that combination of math and alt. it’s very good indeed, but I wonder if when I finally do listen to those records there’ll be a great number of dull moments in-between the attention-grabbers? However, this was damn good fun and if it’s made me want to investigate further, then it’s a definite case of job done.

There seems to be this perennial myth that, if you’re feeling a little low then the best music to pick you up is “happy” music, like it’s some kind of escapist antidote that has the ability to metamorphose reality into an exultant utopia where everything’s fine and dandy. But what happens when the record stops playing? Play it again? Find something else equally immaterial about how carefree the person on the other end is feeling?

Guards’ debut has an adverse effect on me; there’s something depressingly vexatious about listening to an album with such euphoric reverence when you can’t particularly relate to the joyous, beatific clamour permeating your earholes. That’s not to say that musically, the only cure for dejection is Joy Division, but the problem with Guards’ music is – not that it’s too cheerful, too blithely hopeful, too wrapped up in its own insouciant bubble – but that it’s lacking conviction. There’s a difference between evoking that feel-good exuberance you get with so many of Guards’ antecedents, and being overtly optimistic for the sake of it. Even in the moments that are supposed to lament contemplative grief it lacks tender sentience: ‘1&1’ has an underlying introspective that’s enshrouded by clichéd discourse of love gone awry.

Of course, you could argue that perhaps if I was in some halcyon nirvana soaking up the sun with this album on repeat I’d be relishing every second of it. But the (sad) truth is I’m not. And with unfamiliarity often comes an inability to relate, and In Guards We Trust sounds like a gushy, overly-ebullient depiction of a world a million miles away from where I am – and while some music has the ability to transport you to a better place – Guards don’t perpetuate this idea – instead they deliver something that often sounds extraneously effervescent.

That said, In Guards We Trust is nothing if not consistent. From the euphoric opener ‘Nightmare’ to the rapturous ‘Giving Out’ that proceeds it, all twelve tracks nurture scaling bass lines, colossal choruses and hyperactive, washed-out vocals en masse. It’s all seemingly pleasant initially, but as a collective it begins to sound redundant and tedious by the album’s close. It’s not entirely uninspiring though, there’s admirable hints of genre-tinkering: aforementioned opener ‘Nightmare’ is powered by a soul rhythm underpinning Follin’s jovial lilt, dressed up and swathed in hazy, Californian imagery, and ‘Can’t Repair’ is a continuation of Guards’ penchant for exploring elements of Motown.

‘Your Man’ offers a more placid vision of Guards’ competence for melody and nuance and it’s a welcomed juncture. These are the moments where Guards’ ability to make proficient pop songs really begins to shine  and In Guards We Trust breaks from its effusive lavishness. You’ve also got to give it to Richie Follin & co for being masters of those familiar gigantic hooks and aggregated choruses that no-one seems to be using anymore, though it plays a big part in why the album in its entirety sounds a little outmoded in 2013 – and while not remotely original – the unabashed attempt to salvage the last remains of anthemic indie-rock music is admirable in itself.

The last we heard from !!! was three years ago, and in the time that’s passed we’ve seen little mention of them on festival bills, blog headlines or anywhere else, really.  But this comparatively out-of-the-blue return is just as thrilling as  Daft Punk’s perpetual feed of no news, and if the robotic French duo turn in a record as enjoyable as this one, it’ll be a true delight.  Being away from the spotlight has really suited !!!, allowing them to continue their mutation from a rock-influenced dance band in to a full-on funk behemoth, refining their abilities as songwriters at the same time as building their prowess when it comes to creating grooves that cut deeper than valleys.  It won’t be as fawned over as Random Access Memories, an album we can make an educated guess that it’ll bear a fair amount of resemblance to.  But don’t think for a minute that it’s subsequently any less worthy of your time.

The band has survived many changes in lineup and sound, and though the central tenet remains that you should at all times be able to dance to a !!! tune, THR!!!LER is the band’s most accomplished album of “proper” songs as opposed to grooves.  Superbly seductive opener ‘Even When The Water’s Cold’ is a proper verse-bridge-chorus affair that’s amongst the best songs of the year, concise and addictive, yet imbued with a huge sense of joy in performance that stops it becoming at all formulaic.  Even at the record’s most downbeat (the pensive ‘Get That Rhythm Right’, the mechanical funk of ‘Fine Fine Fine’) you’re still left shaking your ass, but – more so than with any other !!! album – also singing along as you dance.

An album with depth though it certainly is, its pleasures are greatest when they’re delivered with the utmost simplicity.  The incredible Chic-like funk of ‘One Boy/One Girl’ positions itself amongst the band’s finest work, whilst latter album highlight ‘Californiyeah’ is as close as we’ve got to a kind of !!! manifesto (“I miss California ‘bout as much as I miss you, but why would I live somewhere where the bars close at two?”).  The album’s more than decent lead single ‘Slyd’ is also its most uncharacteristic song: an admittedly fine slice of samples and loops though it is, THR!!!LER is a significantly more organic record, one where picturing the band having the time of their lives bashing it out in a practice space requires no effort at all.

The only people who’d be annoyed if the new Daft Punk album sounds exactly like THR!!!LER are !!! themselves. Though their return comes with only a fraction of DP’s fanfare, it’s something we should be equally grateful for.  Throwing a party seems like the appropriate course of action.

Effortlessness has become something of a speciality for Swedish indie-poppers Shout Out Louds since they released their hook-laden debut album Howl Howl Gaff Gaff in 2003. While frontman Adam Olenius and his zippy cohorts have been casting their lines at the same pond (a little Belle and Sebastian here, a little New Pornographers there, a lot of The Cure throughout) for four albums now, they have, to a greater or lesser extent, coasted by on warm, all-embracing melodies, intuitive song structures and an undemanding lyrical sense of yearning that’s just subtle enough to avoid complicating their songs’ simple pleasures.

Fourth album Optica is probably Shout Out Louds’ most accomplished work to date. Recorded over 18 months and produced almost entirely by the band themselves, this is an incredibly polished set even by Olenius and co’s standards. They’ve never sounded shabby, but here every sprinkle of guitar or bassy groove shimmers with a high-definition gleam, and the well-judged deployment of strings, horns and woodwind creates space for satisfying expansion when the moment demands it.

It appears that Shout Out Louds have outgrown bum notes, and Optica’s runtime merrily hops from mid-tempo jangle-pop to thoughtful indie ennui and back again like the well-oiled machine that the band have become. Opening tracks ‘Sugar’ and ‘Illusions’ set the pace with irresistible harmonies and rhythms that are immediate without ever feeling hurried. The bucolic flute refrain on ‘Walking In Your Footsteps’, with its cheerful aura of meandering summer walks, serves a dual role as satisfying album centrepiece and all-consuming earworm.

It’s clear that Optica is a showcase for the band’s songwriting skills and pop nous; it’s also, at times, a pretty good example of the downside of “effortless”. With repeated listens, whole sections of the album glide past so effortlessly that they barely make an impression. Tracks like ‘Burn’ and ‘Where You Come In’ are pleasant, and lovingly put together, but in the absence of an emotional pull or any musical surprises, they can tend to lose their shine a little. Olenius’s vocal style, often very reminiscent of The Cure’s Robert Smith, doesn’t always help here. In fact, it’s something of a highlight when keyboardist Bebban Stenborg takes over lead vocals for twitchy stomper ‘Hermila’. Her glassy vocals are no more attention-grabbing, but on an album rather lacking in range and depth, the change is welcome.

Optica was clearly made with fun in mind, and in that sense it succeeds. It’s a first-play kind of album, that will sound best the first time you hear it. For fans of expertly crafted summer toe-tappers, its gifts are ample enough for a summer fling, although perhaps few will be looking for more.

As a certain robotic masked-duo continue to dominate our musical headlines, there is another fiercely cool Parisian outfit that have effortlessly returned from hiatus without causing a social media firestorm.  

It has been four years since Phoenix‘s arguably faultless, Grammy-winning, fourth album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix appeared; an album that thrust the French alt-rock quartet out of the relative shadows of European music, into a deserved international limelight. Singles like ’1901′ and ‘Lisztomania’ proved what a knack they have for writing uplifting and intensely moreish pop songs and, although the new record Bankrupt! promised more experimental sounds, the band really have continued in the same, brilliant vein.   

On the day of this new albums release, Phoenix sold out the iconic Shepherd’s Bush Empire, a venue that may not possess the lavish decor of their hometown palace but nevertheless remains one of the Capital’s finest live music homes. The floor swarms with people as the current single, ‘Entertainment’ and it’s unmistakable Oriental refrain, welcomes them to the stage, accompanied by an excitable furor from the crowd.

It’s a full-on attack on the senses from the outset; blinding strobe lighting, heart-murmuring bass and shuddering percussion – the drummer’s relentless energy and ferocity comparable to The Muppets’ Animal. Two stripped-back renditions of ‘Playground Love’ and ‘Countdown’ provide early moments of respite, as frontman Thomas Mars displays gentle versatility by almost story-telling with the crowd he is in-amongst. He is a frontman in the true sense of the word, bounding around exuding chic charisma throughout.

Although the evening is celebrating a collection of new songs, it feels like a greatest hits show, with early singles like ‘Too Young’ as well as almost the entire Wolfgang… album sounding completely satisfying. The visual emphasis continues, as stripes of scanning white lights accompany the opening to ‘Love Like A Sunset’, before alarming multi-coloured strobing appears alongside ‘Bankrupt!’ which screeches out forming this wonderful medley of interludes.

‘S.O.S In Bel Air’ and ‘Trying To Be Cool’ fulfil the new album excitement and allude to what a solid return it is; ‘Rome’ makes up an encore, before Mars embarks on one of the most impressive crowd-surfs you are likely to see, ascending to the Level One seating to our amazement, and managing to return safely to a reprise of ‘Entertainment’.

The health and safety nightmare of the year brings smiles and old fashioned rock n’ roll to ensure the show had every box ticked and topped off a massively cool return from Phoenix, who remain one of the hottest bands around.

Photograph by Minh Le

He’s perhaps best know as a decade-long sideman for Lambchop, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and The Silver Jews, which gave him limited room to show off his exceptional talent as a guitarist while letting him tour and record with kindred spirits who share his interest in a certain strand of Americana. Since then he’s released his solo debut Behold the Spirit: a discourse in six and twelve string guitars and a look at myths and legends, ostensibly a “folk” record that led to whispered comparisons to the great John Fahey (William, I promise that’s the only reference I’ll make to that artist) but also to current fellow travellers such as Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance. On second album Impossible Truth Tyler looks again to the past for inspiration, but this time the more recent past.

The album finds a post-Carter USA under the microscope. Tyler was born in 1980 as a new America took shape under the Reagan Administration, and alongside those changes a series of books inspired the music found on this record: Barney Hoskyns’ Hotel California and Mike Davis’ The Ecology of Fear (two books about the sunshine state, that take extremely different looks at a disintegrating society), but also Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner, a look at the devastating effects of land and water development policy on western USA, and James Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere which speaks of how the country’s desperation for advancement led to the death of community. It’s a certain brand of nostalgia, sure, and Tyler is certainly fascinated by the late ’70s and early-to-mid 1980s but  focusing on those aforementioned influences means it’s definitely not a romanticised version of the period. You might think it’d be hard to create a song cycle about the decline of the American empire on what’s a purely instrumental (and almost completely guitar-based) record, but over the course of 54 fascinating minutes Tyler takes us completely into that world without any disconnect, on a brilliant journey into the recent past.

Opener ‘Country of Illusion’ is a bluesy beginning, with Tyler operating between intricate finger-picking and short, punchy strumming that goes from British folk to US country music and back again, then the stirring ‘Geography of Nowhere’ has a pattern that echoes ‘Paint It Black’ in its flamenco melodies. ‘Cadillac Desert’ is a beautifully hopeful track that shimmers with pedal steel as it builds and fades across six minutes of inspirational playing; this track and the following ‘We Can’t Go Home Again’ – with its barrelling folk riffs – recalls David Pajo’s work as Papa M on his excellent Live From a Shark Cage record. It shares an urge to reference then deconstruct the past, turning something old into something fresh and new, and it succeeds beyond all expectations. The latter track is joined by ‘A Portrait of Sarah’ in being a solo showcase for Tyler’s stunning virtuoso playing: it’s been a long time since I’ve been so enraptured by solo guitar, and time seems to bend and shift while listening to these passages of music. Six minutes seem like two, and a record that lasts for nearly an hour seems to pass by in the space of an album of ten three-minute pop songs – now that’s full immersion in someone else’s world.

The crowning glory of all this is the ten-minute closing track ‘The World Set Free’. On this, Tyler begins with simple acoustic patterns before building with electric guitar, pedal steel, then brass and some spluttering drums as a melody appears out of the haze. It moves from undoubted gorgeousness to a squalling psych rock conclusion and never once outstays its welcome.

Impossible Truth seems made up of melodies, chords and patterns that have always existed, whether it’s now, the ’70s and ’80s, or even earlier. What William Tyler does is reach back into the past with complete honesty, and by doing so he’s able to create new and exciting sounds from the social, political and geographical changes of a particular period. He’s a towering talent, not just as a guitarist, but as great American storyteller.

Judging by Fain, said soul-charting session must have uncovered a pile of well-worn vinyl by the likes of Fairport Convention, Trees and Bert Jansch in the arts appreciation regions of Sharp’s mind. On their second album, Wolf People amplify the healthy appreciation of English and Scottish folk song traditions (as interpreted by the late ’60s British folk-rock movement) that has bubbled under their prog-fuelled fuzz-rock templates on past releases.

Although the album’s influences are easily tracked, it’s far from a case of meritless mimicry. Much as the masters of vintage British folk-rock took musty inspirations and moulded them in the shape of the times they operated in, the London four-piece mix and match ingredients to create sounds that, whilst respectful of what has gone before, are unmistakably rooted in the here and now. The results are frequently mesmerising.

Recorded during ceaseless rains in an isolated house on the Yorkshire Dales, Fain‘s bleak beauty resembles the surroundings it was created in. Remoteness from modern-day concerns infuses most of these eight songs. Much of the album seems to broadcast from some unspecified imaginary past, a location marked with hardship and ceaseless toiling but also unquenchable thirst for rebellion, a place where unknown beings hide in wait for the sun for 10,000 years (‘Empty Vessels’), revenge for the sufferings of those who work all day with blistering hands pours forth like floodwater (‘Athol’), and notorious highwaymen are caught, paraded in front of the blood-baying public and dragged to the gallows (the remarkable ‘Thief’).

An ability to create a totally convincing alternative universe via beautifully crafted lyrics; British folk-informed compositions; the freely breathing, tight-but-loose execution that accepts few extra ingredients to the sound of a superbly tuned-in band playing together in a room: in many respects, Fain resembles Midlake‘s downbeat masterpiece The Courage of Others. Unlike their flute-wielding kindred spirits, however, Wolf People are plugged in, fully charged and kneeled down at the altar of two guitars-bass-and-drums rock ‘n’ roll orthodoxy. The autumnal tones of the songs are leavened with startling bursts of musical muscle-flexing: the heady guitar interplay frequently brings to mind the likes of Arbouretum and Dead Meadow, whilst the mighty dynamics of ‘Athol’ and ‘NRR’ carry a strong whiff of Black Sabbath’s loose-limbed heaviness.

Elsewhere, the hypnotic instrumental coda that crowns the simultaneously serene and confrontational ‘When the Fire is Dead in the Grate’ bows down to the momentum-building potential of drums and bass, with results that bring to mind Swedish psych-folk rock cult heroes Dungen. The complicated song structures (‘All Returns’ goes through four parts during the 80 seconds before the vocals start, and that’s the single) are informed by vintage prog rock. However, what might initially sound like an overwhelming array of ideas eventually becomes Fain‘s greatest strength, as all those rapidly shifting motifs and riffs unveil their razor-sharp fangs.

There’s no denying that said publisher makes for an interesting focal point, as the protagonist of this record. A rich left-wing political activist, Giangiacomo Feltrinelli had links with both Che Guevara and Fidel Castro and was responsible for the publication of Italy’s best-selling novel of all time, The Leopard, as well the world-famous Doctor Zhivago. Yet, notwithstanding these facts and the reality of his subsequent mysterious death in the early 1970s, it is inevitable that one does, at various points during playback of this album, ponder with bafflement the whys and wherefores of Feltrinelli receiving this particular homage.

You’ll recall that Stainless Style similarly embraced the concept of musical biography, chronicling the life of John DeLorean. With songs that were, on the whole, so strong as to afford the luxury of choosing whether or not to follow the storyline, taking the simple route and enjoying the tunes without attention to the underlying narrative was a viable option. By comparison, while Praxis Makes Perfect does boast some terrific, shimmering, moments, it simultaneously puts hurdles in the way of an easy listen, especially towards the end where it all gets a bit… well, dull.

It’s not all bad news, mind. The shimmering moments I refer to earlier are, each, very much a delight. The album’s title track opens the set with thundering drum-fills, over which actress Asia Argento narrates news headlines of a life clearly crowded with incident. As an introduction, this track very effectively gets you into the mood of the record. It is followed by electro pulse-popper, ‘The Jaguar’, which channels the album’s best chorus and reminds you how much you’ve missed Gruff Rhys’ voice. Yes, you have.

What sounds like it might be the middle-8 breakdown of ‘The Jaguar’ in fact proves to be the next track, ‘Dr Zhivago’. An ’80s-tinged singalong-er, the song is inspired by the manuscript which Feltrinelli risked his life to smuggle out of the USSR and sees Rhys rhyming “Zhivago” with “embargo”. Well, it works.

The song which prevents Praxis Makes Perfect from peaking prematurely with ‘The Jaguar’ is the Sabrina Salerno collaboration, ‘Shopping (I Like To)’. Salerno is the unfairly oft-forgotten Italian pop singer, who gifted ‘Boys (Summertime Love)’ to the world in the late ’80s. How or why Neon Neon managed to get her to sing on this record is unclear but when good things happen, sometimes you just have to be quietly thankful and not get too quizzical, right? Sounding like its direct inspiration was Stacey Q’s ‘Two of Hearts’ (in a word: fantastic!), ‘Shopping’ erupts into a festival of drums and exclamations of “yeah” in the middle section, before veering off into a key-change and a mantra-chant of: “I’ve got the books/You’ve got the looks”. It’s a bit bonkers and a lot brilliant.

Elsewhere, though, the occasional nice sonic touches (such as the typewriter tinkles mixed in with the rhythm-section on ‘The Leopard’) struggle to disguise the fact that, as a suite of songs brought together by a common theme, the record ultimately fails to hold attention. ‘Hoops with Fidel’, said to be based on “infamous photographs of [Feltrinelli] playing basketball with Castro”, is schizophrenic yet forgettable. Meanwhile, initial album-teaser, ‘Mid Century Modern Nightmare’, is catchy enough but comes and goes too fleetingly.

If there was to be a biopic on Feltrinelli’s life, this album would make a highly suitable soundtrack for it. Devoid of such backing, however, Praxis Makes Perfect offers snippets of biographical information that are, essentially, not quite enough to entice the listener to want to learn more. Still, here’s a tip on how you can maximise your enjoyment of these new fruits of Neon Neon’s artistic loins: click over to your download emporium of choice (see our suggested links below) and create your own Neon Neon 4-track EP with ‘The Jaguar’, ‘Dr Zhivago’, ‘Shopping (I Like To)’ and ‘The Leopard’. The rest is, in the main, much of a muchness.

His first exposure to many was in the form of a t-shirt worn by Kurt Cobain bearing the Hi, How Are You? album cover image; many know him from the seemingly endless stream of tribute albums created in his name, more from the documentary film The Devil and Daniel Johnston. That postmodern curiosity aside, there’s  something that sticks in the craw about the way Johnston is received (and nothing at all to do with his work). He’s been famed for, and made notorious by, his twin mental illnesses of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and his frankly brilliant work seems to be treated as something of an afterthought.

Space Ducks is perhaps the best thing Johnston has released since 2004’s The Late Great Daniel Johnston, and, like a small-scale version of that celebrity-packed album, it’s an even split of Johnston performing his own work and loyal fan bands playing the rest. Surprisingly, for something that almost promises to lack cohesion, it really gels – perhaps more by accident than design. What truly shines? Johnston’s astonishingly adaptable songwriting.

On Deer Tick’s version of the title track (entirely different to the Johnston-performed opener) you get a Replacements-like rampage of rock ‘n’ roll that’s sloppy, grinding and strangely reminiscent of some moments from Guns N Roses’ Use Your Illusion 2. Deer Tick, being roundly awful in real life, here manage their best offering to date – Johnston’s writing standing up to a right old hammering;

Eleanor Friedberger’s country-sad take on ‘Come Down’ breathes sexy, life-lusting heat into a pally invitation to shared misery. It’s a great drugs song because it accounts for the whole of the drug experience in equally bleak and alternately positive terms. “Drink apple juice, eat coffee cake when we’re awake/Then at night get high again… I’ll kiss you until you say when” – it’s a simple, memorable beauty.

There’s the Nebraska-era Springsteen of Fruit Bat’s ‘Evil Magic’ with it’s brilliant Boss sign-off “there’s evil magic in every heart”; and Lavender Diamond’s hymnal ‘Moment of Laughter’, a beautiful, sunlit, slow and simple path to Johnston’s genius. You’d never expect one of his ragtag McCartney-inspired compositions to sound this ancient, clear, sonorous, glorious.

That’s where the record doesn’t entirely succeed: with Johnston performing half the songs – he’s not much for performance and, as ever, it shows. While in creating music for interpretation by and with others he’s practically peerless, Johnston sometimes doesn’t cut himself an even break allowing tracks like the clumsy, contrived psych of ‘Sense of Humor’or the clichéd, nearly creepy ‘Mask’ to come off as tired, predictable, and slobberingly indebted to Johnston’s ongoing Beatles obsessions.

However, there are moments of sublime joy here from the Austin, Texas native.

‘Mean Girls Give Pleasure’ is a stoned slink of a song boasting a beguiling rap (you heard) from the man himself including such choice observations as “All of your dreams are probably pretend” and “You’re already dead” that also has a half-asleep guitar line that’ll sweep you off your feet and tuck you up in bed if you give it half a chance.

There’s also the string-led glory of ‘Wanting You’ which boasts the best Teenage Fanclub chorus never written by Norman Blake which soars as high as the superhero it namechecks. You can hear in just one song where Conor Oberst borrowed his faltering falsetto and Jonathan Donahue formed his fake mystic twang. The emotion on show here is true, explicit and celebratory though rather than forced and faux-spritiual.

Perhaps the most wonderful thing here, among an embarrassment  of them, is the opener, Johnston’s ‘Space Ducks’. It’s a cartoon show-great hurdy gurdy stomp through a “war in outer space” via Texas and the ghost of Zappa. That it has spawned a comic book and an app should be of no surprise – a glimpse at the cover of the record will indicate to you just how bizarre and charming an idea it is.

Johnston has made and most importantly shared a very good record here, one that stands as a reminder of his immense talent, of his longevity, of his kindness in spreading the benefit of his skill among younger, adoring fan-bands and yes, if you must, his power to overcome those much discussed mental problems. But the focus should be kept away from such over-personalised scrutiny, kept away from patronisation  – let’s just stand back, look at and listen to an astounding body of work and, on the 30th anniversary of the release of his beloved Hi How Are You?,  just say “What a f*cking awesome contribution this artist has made”.

Since 2002 Akron/Family – Dana Janssen, Seth Olinsky and Miles Seaton – have rocked and rolled their way through five albums (six if you count their release with Angels of Light) of pastoral folk, psych rock, experimentation with found sounds, tribal rhythms, pure harmonies and much, much more. There’s never been a clear trajectory for the band; they’ve been happy to go where the mood takes them yet they’ve managed to maintain a consistent quality throughout their releases: whether it’s the harmony-heavy Love Is Simple or the manic chant unpredictability of Akron/Family II they’ve always been reliably good. So it’s almost boring to report that nothing changes on new album Sub Verses: it’s solid, but brilliantly so.

Inspired by the works of artists Michael Heizer and James Turrell, Akron/Family set out to make a record about the stuff of America; dust and stone, light and space. It’s about the desert and the country that they and countless other musicians have existed in, and Sub Verses is an attempt to recreate that world through song. It’s typically hippy-ish stuff, but the infectious way in which the band tells their tales makes it believable and achievable. And there’s something of the earth about Akron/Family’s music, whether they’re tackling the traditional music of their homeland, or that of the various cultures that permeate their music and nation.

That’s heard immediately on the elemental and stormy opener of ‘No-Room’: crackling guitar riffs clash with rattling drum rolls while Olinsky and Seaton half-sing and half-chant “We held fast/And we held strong”. It’s an uncompromising opening, classic heads-down rock and roll meeting psych experimentation, tectonic plates scraping and shifting against each other to create new landscapes. Second track ‘Way Up’ begins in similar style, but the heavy riffing gives way slightly to stabs of organ, burbling electronics, and Animal Collective-esque harmonies, and then ‘Until the Morning’ returns to the side of Akron/Family that loves peace and melody. It’s a positively 1950s doo-wop moment, almost jarring in its quiet simplicity after what’s come before it but that’s what the trio tend to do best – confound expectations.

Things return to the heavy side with the battering ram of ‘Sand Talk’, a track where they manage to combine the punchier side of the band’s output with sunny harmonies, while ‘Sometimes I’ carries some of Swans’ intensity through creepy synth noise and discordant horns, and there are similar sounds throughout the dark and muttering ‘Holy Boredom’, in which the title is chanted over and over like Akron/Family have been possessed by an evil spirit before it all explodes in a hail of metallic riffing. Following all the powerful noise, there’s a window of respite when the doo-wop sounds return with the sweet and lovely ballad ‘When I Was Young’ before final track ‘Samurai’ floats us out on Hawaiian guitar and crooning worthy of The Walkmen’s Hamilton Leithauser.

Themes and aims aside, Sub Verses is simply an example of Akron/Family’s continued good run of form, and undoubted confidence. They’re one of the few bands who can take on a variety of musical styles and not sound like they’re way out of their comfort zone – if they maintain their willingness to experiment, they’ll always find success.

It’d be inaccurate to dismiss No Joy’s debut full-length, Ghost Blonde, as a lo-fi record. Sure, it was produced on a shoestring budget in the band’s Montreal practice space – in an interview for this website, guitarist Laura Lloyd claimed you could “hear the Metallica covers band practising next door on some tracks” – but it still sounded lush, layer upon layer of reverb-drenched guitar drowning Jasmine White-Gluz’s dreamy vocals to create a record that belied the humble environment in which it was conceived.

Their second release, Wait to Pleasure, is therefore an interesting prospect, given that the band were operating in relative luxury in terms of both time constraints and musical resources.

As opener ‘E’ squeals into life with some feedback, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to a cut from Ghost Blonde, but single ‘Hare Tarot Lies’ is a clear demonstration that the band have tried to push themselves in different directions; it’s the first song they’ve written that’s underpinned entirely by the vocals, and with the guitars dropping in and out of the mix, we’re finally given the opportunity to hear what White-Gluz’s voice sounds like when it isn’t consumed by reverb – for the record, kind of like a particularly-stoned Victoria Legrand.

Live drummer Garland Hastings is now a permanent part of the set up, and the effect of having a consistent presence behind the kit is immediately apparent; the band have stepped away from the relatively-conservative beats of their debut, as evidenced by the choppy ‘Prodigy’ or ‘Blue Neck Riviera’. The latter is one of the record’s more intriguing propositions, pairing a programmed, hip hop beat with a guitar sound lifted straight from DIIV’s Oshin, it’s a nice idea in principle, at least until the jarring, half-spoken vocals on the verses kick in.

There’s mixed results, too, when it comes to experimentation with the guitars; ‘Lunar Phobia’ tries to use them more sparingly, but sounds too sparse as a result; ‘Wrack Attack’ works them in more gradually, more purposefully, over crashing drums, to create one of the record’s highlights. On two-minute interlude ‘Pleasure’, guitars are virtually absent, used only for punctuation over the White-Gluz’s signature distorted vocals; that the band have the confidence to do away with their bread-and-butter on parts of this album in the name of experimentation is encouraging, even if there are missteps along the way. There’s plenty of nods to Ghost Blonde, though – like ‘E’, ‘Slug Night’ could’ve been lifted straight from it, sharing with its predecessors a heavy debt to My Bloody Valentine.

No Joy recorded an entire LP’s worth of new material towards the end of 2011 – produced by The Raveonettes’ Sune Rose Wagner in New York, it was pretty much the finished product – but ultimately scrapped it and started anew; it makes you wonder whether they feel they’ve achieved what they were aiming for with Wait to Pleasure. It’s a far more eccentric record than their first effort, stretching past the obvious influences that led to their pigeonholing as a shoegaze band, but loses a little of the unbroken, hypnotic atmosphere as a result. There’s no lack of ambition, though, and where there’s ambition, there’s potential – an uneven listen at times, but a promising one all the same.

If listening to Anxiety, the latest album by Brooklyn based Autre Ne Veut, is likened to that of a private 45 minute self help audiobook, the live experience is a full on public sermon/therapy session with Arthur Ashin a ramped-up minister, spouting out the gospel of heartache and self loathing to a congregation of misfits and hipsters.  

The second of two sold out London shows to coincide with the critically hailed sophomore LP (released by the ever-inspiring Software label) Ashin’s bleak tales are a contradiction in terms. An exorcise (sic) in pleasure and pain, the throbbing audience at Elektrowerkz are exposed to a very public display of unrestrained angst: sung with such an incredible amount of gusto and grace, it’s borderline impossible to compare Ashin to any other vocalist operating within the thriving R&B scene right now. If comparisons must be made then – to the unassuming – witnessing the ANV live show is like watching a rabid version of  How To Dress Well‘s Tom Krell on steroids.

Opening with the divine ‘Play By Play’ and flanked by a live drummer and effortlessly cool female backing singer, Ashin is focused on the task in hand throughout the relatively short set. Intense as hell, the moderately static audience avoids the deep grooves of Anxiety‘s dancier moments in fear of having to take a breath. It was that kind of atmosphere.

As the set progresses, a moment of sheer genius hits during ‘World War’ as – solo at the piano – Ashin splices in the opening verse of Whitney Houston‘s ‘How Will I Know’. Never has the line “there’s a girl, I know, she’s the one I dream of” sounded so tragic. Or indeed, so perfect. It’s that pleasure/pain thing again.

To summarise this brief encounter, and apologies in advance for the rather lurid comparison, witnessing the Autre Ne Veut live show is nothing short of an aural cry-wank. Self-indulgent? Yes. Intense? Massively. Cathartic? You bethcha. But with a massively rewarding, if not a little upsetting (and abrupt) ending.

Crank-wave, anyone?

Photo by Howard Melnyczuk

This is the first time I’ve seen Adam Green play in quite a while. My experience of him as a live performer is limited to a solitary support slot for The Cribs, across town at the Apollo in 2009.

Back then, he didn’t really have any practical reason to be there – his newest record, at the time, was more than eighteen months old – but that certainly didn’t slow him down, as he delivered a performance that was equal parts thrilling and farcical; decked out in a specially-prepared, puntastic t-shirt that read ‘MAN CHEST HAIR’, it probably wouldn’t be remiss for me to suggest that he’d indulged in a little artificial stimulation beforehand.

Tonight, though, he has got a record to promote; a full-length, self-titled collaboration with Californian singer-songwriter and Little Joy frontwoman Binki Shapiro. It’s seems very obvious – and it’s definitely very tempting – to draw immediate comparisons with Green’s tenure as one-half of The Moldy Peaches, but anyone familiar with his solo work, and live presence in support of it, will know that hooking up with Shapiro really represents the first time since his Peaches days that he’s slowed things down a little; the opening slew of tracks tonight, all drawn from January’s joint effort, see him on more subdued form.

On ‘If You Want Me To’ and ‘Casanova’, Shapiro takes the lead; her vocals, honeyed but not saccharine, are drenched in 60s charm, but when they aren’t delivered in tandem with Green’s low drawl – as they are, to impressive effect, on ‘Pleasantries’ and ‘Pity Love’ – they can feel a little flat.

“We’ve had a really weird day. A guy stole a load of gear from our van. We got a picture, but all we know is that he was wearing grey pants.” It’s interesting that this information is relayed to the crowd just before the evening’s midsection, which is largely dominated by Green’s solo material; whatever the grey-trousered culprit managed to make away with – “we just went out for dinner, and every time I saw someone in grey pants, I thought “fuck you!” – he couldn’t have taken Green’s electrifying stage presence out of the equation. “I’m gonna take the mic off the stand here, in classic lead singer fashion,” and he’s a different proposition once he’s done so; an enthrallingly awkward dancer, Green brings a real vitality to choice cuts from his back catalogue, including ‘You Blacken My Stay’ and ‘Friends of Mine’.

Shapiro prefaces her one genuinely ‘solo’ moment, a cover of Little Joy’s  ‘Unattainable’, by gushing about how entertaining it’s been to watch her bandmate perform every night, and it’s difficult to shake the sense that The Adam Green Show has been tonight’s key component. It’s clearly a difficult decision to have to make – the collaborative LP is a perfectly charming pop record, but it’d seem a shame to play only that, with Green restrained throughout, and be on and off within forty-five minutes. The audience certainly get more bang for their buck with the inclusion of the likes of ‘Dance with Me’, from Green’s 2002 debut Garfield, during which he completes an impressively swift crowd-surf lap of the venue, but his antics put Shapiro in the shade.

It’s kind of a shame; ‘What’s the Reward’ recovers well from an intro that sounds uncomfortably close to Snow Patrol’s ‘Chasing Cars’, and ‘Nighttime Stopped Bleeding’ provides a suitably dramatic closer, but to ask Green to dial down his energy would only serve to seriously mitigate the sense of excitement at his live shows; he’s unquestionably tonight’s real star.

Fandango

But let’s be clear about one thing: that a song is longer than, say, six minutes doesn’t mean it’s progressive, or even necessarily a progression. It simply means that the song is longer than standard radio fare. At what point do you look at a 17-minute song not as an artistic statement of patience, but one that tests it?

‘Friendly Society’ may develop effectively enough to be considered progressive, but the song’s evolution throughout isn’t natural enough to justify its length. The first half advances sensibly enough, but by the time it hits the ten-minute mark it devolves, ironically, into a series of under-cooked ideas stitched together in an attempt to create a second half as cohesive as the first. The song is simply the result of a lack of an editor.

Which is odd given the rest of the album. Apart from the closer, everything else in this set constitutes some of the best progressive indie around. ‘Inside Me Dead’, for example, begins as a lavish shoegaze number and gently morphs into a dreamy soundscape with hushed vocals buried beneath a lonely guitar melody. The transition is as well crafted as the two halves themselves. Similarly, ‘Sideways Glance’, the strongest song here, starts out as space rock seen through a post-punk prism, before a fluttering synth gives way to an Afro-pop-centered second act.

Not only is it the best song here musically, but it is also lyrically strong. TPF have always had a gift for novelising descriptions, and this song continues that trend: “Sideways glance, and I wouldn’t rate my chance/So typical of me and typical of you/To turn away from the awful truth/When I’m wearing dancing shoes” – the band managing to make even something as potentially trite as a dancefloor meeting sound convincing.

But the album is sprinkled with short, pop ditties, as well. ‘The Captain’ rides a cloud of synths that spirals into uncertainty as Samuel Scott sings, “Hey dude, don’t be so frightened of your bleeding heart”. ‘Evolution Did’ shuffles along in a straightforward manner, driven by its pulsing bass line. Then there’s ‘Walls’, a song that dances around ‘60s doo-wop vocals backed by a strutting rhythm section.

All of this could only make sense, then, if The Phoenix Foundation had expert control over their sound. And, despite one misstep, they surely do. Historically, progressive rock hasn’t had much of a relationship with indie rock. The former is a hard sell by itself, so combining the two makes an already difficult task even more so. The line between progression and self-indulgence in music is largely a flimsy one. However, The Phoenix Foundation walk it beautifully.

It’s busy in here. Which may be a boring, predictable and fairly pedestrian thing to say about a sold-out gig, but it is. Really busy. Busy enough to suggest there may be an Animal Farm slant to this. Maybe some sold out gigs are more sold out than others. If so, Steve Mason is definitely looking at the higher end of the spectrum.

What’s perhaps more interesting is that there is also a properly joyous feeling in the air. Starting with the musicians up front, then reflected fore and aft through the crowd, even causing some sporadic outbreaks of dancing amongst the soundmen. From the moment Mason enters, with a “ding-dong”, which suggests he’s probably not going to be looking into black suit hire for Wednesday, the word which springs to mind is ebullient.

While it makes for big smiles all around, it does occasionally strikes you as a little bit of a change from where the work was originally cast. The songs from his solo career, from which tonight is completely drawn, are on record a bit more poignant and a bit more subtle than the big bold numbers which appear here. Where the looping beat of Mason’s songs was once a thoughtful trek through suffering towards enlightenment, here it’s more of a shuffle towards victory.

But while it may be different and at the slight expense of some the oddness that Mason has always wrapped himself in, it makes for a great live atmosphere. The opening trio, a mystically tinged ‘Lost and Found’, a gorgeously sunny ‘Oh My Lord’ and a brilliant ‘Seen It All Before’ inflate the occasion with a triumphant buoyancy that never gets released. The crowd applauds Steve, Steve applauds the crowd, and the whole thing becomes a perpetual appreciation machine which can’t help but warm the cockles of your heart.

The baggy ‘All Over You’, retrieved from the vastly under appreciated King Biscuit Time album, with it’s refrain of “Loneliness / Sadness / Joyless / Lifeless” a Latin translation away from being the worst school motto ever, is nagging and insistent. ‘Fight Them Back’, played immediately after he offers heartfelt thanks to those who stopped it going “tits-up” for him seems less like a political rabble rouser and more like a mantra aimed at himself (“You get up and fight them back”).

If the restless melancholy of his records suggested someone who has been fighting for a while, this performance suggests he’s finally winning. An artist who for a variety of reasons has not either had it, or made it, easy finally finding peace. And you’d have to be a cold-hearted bastard to deny him that.

Photograph by Kevin Morosky.

It would be a mistake to focus too much on the songwriting: the fourth HGM studio album is a team effort. By this point, Hiss Golden Messenger is a genuine band, albeit one with loose parameters. The spotlight is shared: erstwhile Lambchop member William Tyler’s twang-fuelled telecaster is the star turn of opener ‘Red Rose Nantahala’, whilst Hirsch contributes the spooked-up instrumental ‘Hat of Rain’. Elsewhere, members of Bowerbirds, Megafaun and Black Twig Pickers also pop in. However, it’s hard to tear your attention away from songs as evocative, imaginative, multi-faceted and uniquely pitched as the stuff Haw is made of.

Haw is in many ways similar to its excellent predecessor, 2011′s Poor Moon. The musical touchstones – mainly the moment in the late ’60s/early ’70s when the country and the city collided, producing a belatedly raved-about style known as country-funk – are still here. This time around, however, the influences are mashed together more thoroughly, creating a uniquely rich stew where country, soul, rock ‘n’ roll, gospel, folk and more exotic influences mingle freely. Lyrically, Poor Moon‘s glimpses of gritty realism – reminiscent of Richmond Fontaine‘s Willy Vlautin – are gone, replaced by mysterious dispatches from unknown locations somewhere between the here-and-now and the distant, imaginary past. As reality becomes submerged by myth, the listener is left to decide what the songs really stand for. There’s no self-conscious obscurantism at play here, though: Taylor’s focus is on storytelling, it’s just that these are stories that don’t lend themselves to easy answers.

On the likes of ‘I’ve Got a Name for the Newborn Child’ and brilliantly named ‘The Serpent is Kind (Compared to Man)’ (both of which interrupt their country-picking proceedings to deliver choruses as lovely and fresh as the first beam of sun breaking through ominous rainclouds),  lives are hard and times are hard, but a belief in basic decency and hope for something better around the corner are made of sturdier stuff than despair. In the former, reasons for faith and resilience are found in new life (“Goodbye blackened abattoir/Hello yellow dawn”); the latter refuses to be disheartened by the beastliness of man: “Let the rain come on… behind it burns the sun”. Next to these remarkable tunes that accept the gloom but won’t bow down to it, the fatalistic surrender of ‘Devotion’ – imagine vintage Van Morrison slowed down to the pace of a teardrop sliding down a cheek – becomes even more startling.

Elsewhere, ‘Sufferer (Love My Conqueror)”s spiritually charged snapshot of oppression and defiance is infused with a near-biblical sternness, deliciously juxtaposed with the track’s robustly skanking, Stax-meets-Studio One country-funky-Kingston hybrid, with a drop of Middle Eastern-hued strings chucked in for added oomph. ‘Busted Note’ – a deceptively simple ode to the ceaseless procession of human misery and the consequent call for solace and salvation - seems to time-hop between the ancient walls of Jericho and the backroom of some bourbon-marinated rock ‘n’ roll dive. It’s startling stuff, but if that sort of analysis of the song’s layers and possibilities doesn’t appeal, you could just groove to the gospel-touched chorus (which, thrillingly, appears to reference roots reggae legends’ The Congos’ seminal ‘Fisherman‘) that the track’s The Band-esque stomp blooms into.

Such air of mystery, malleability to individualised interpretations, and the ability to respect the traditions without bothering to adhere to their predictabilities is where much of Haw‘s power lies. “I know the light… you can’t own the light”, states the would-be folk standard ‘What Will Be (Will Be Enough)’, stark enough to fit right in on 2010′s solo set Bad Debt. If we assume that this light refers to inspiration, Taylor and co. have not only located it but also signed the deed to its brightly burning bulb.

Upon hearing that tonight’s Karin Park support not only hailed from East London, but had commandeered their band name from a relatively obscure Francois Truffault short, my pretention klaxon immediately began blaring with abandon. But Les Mistons turned out to be a real find; ambitious and epic in scope.

With a sound that flitted between M83 anthemics, Oberhofer-esque indie-pop and brooding synth rock, they definitely have the potential to appeal to much wider audiences, and although the three-piece occasionally overreached themselves, it was in all a striking and highly impressive performance.

The prelude to Karin’s set, involving a pig mask wearing, white-cloaked figure chanting over unsettling looped vocals was also striking, albeit in a rather self-indulgent fashion. Thankfully, once Karin Park made her entrance, needless gimmickry was no longer required.

The Swedish songstress cuts a striking figure; raven haired, clad in the sort of attire only a 6ft 3 tall model could get away with, but it’s her voice that deservedly grabs the attention. The immediate comparison is Björk – although Karin’s vocals are smoother, their vocals share the same timbre and power, and when fully unleashed, they inexorably send shivers down your spine.

Initially, her demeanour was as glacially Nordic as her countrywoman Karin Dreijer-Andersson (Fever Ray, The Knife), a perfect fit for the moody electro-pop she specialises in, but resulted in a barrier between herself and the audience. It’s only when the ice-maiden persona melts to reveal her true sultry charm that things truly hit their stride. (Well, the keytar helped too).

Her percussionist brother David, a long haired Thor lookalike, was the only other person on stage, but the “less-is-more” philosophy worked in their favour- it gave the show a greater sense of intimacy. Some of the songs blended into each other, especially in the latter half of the set, but generally her atmospheric, discordant disco (most notably Explosions’) hit the mark and confirmed her as one of the more intriguing rising stars of the Swedish pop scene.

Well, most of us weren’t. On releasing their debut single now ten years ago nobody quite knew what to do with them, initially throwing them in with the NME-championed New Cross Scene comprising Bloc Party and assorted artrock and scrappy indie bands of little future repute.

Thing was, ‘Formed A Band’ didn’t fit in with any prevailing post-Strokes/Franz/Libertines trends, taking self-publicising to new heights of knowing irony thanks to the singular ambition and knowing declamatory style – “yes, this is my singing voice” – of Eddie Argos.

One thing it didn’t sound like was a band who would make four albums, tour America several times or appear on the cover of the German version of Rolling Stone, let alone put out a Best Of compilation a decade later or indeed outlive the show that gave Eddie a community chant. From this distance, that Argos was once punched by Kele Okereke seems mildly absurd given the disparity of paths, as if Ian McCulloch of Echo and the Bunnymen had taken public exception to Nigel Blackwell of Half Man Half Biscuit. ‘Formed A Band’ starts matters as only it should, its bracing mix of idealist comment – “stop buying your albums from the supermarket” – and manifest(o) absurdity – “we’re gonna be the band that writes the song that makes Israel and Palestine get along” – leading in five tracks from the still crackling debut album Bang Bang Rock & Roll, a set of scratchy post-punk not in the Gang Of Four sense, but of those who refined the form into brashly scrappy, naive melodies à la Modern Lovers or Television Personalities with Argos turning high culture and dreaming of girls into semi-sloganeering and slyly honest statement shouting. Something with the unalloyed glee of ‘Modern Art’ can’t be beaten.

The following three albums are represented by four tracks apiece, each managing to develop an approach that while seemingly fully formed might have completely backfired if it deviated from their blueprint of enthusiastic self-deprecation and indie idealism. On announcing this album’s release the band suggested this is their attempt to cement their position as a classic rock band; It’s A Bit Complicated sets out on that path by introducing itself to the hotwired joys of a huge guitar riff while Argos considers the ways of settling down and also, because he can’t help himself, music fandom. On ‘Nag Nag Nag Nag’ – a coming of age escape tale built around “a record collection reduced to a mixtape” – he does both. By 2009 Art Brut found themselves recording with Frank Black in LA (no, ‘Moving To LA’ isn’t here) and streamlined into a rush of post-Weezer geek-rock. Here the observations are that bit sharper, the solos that bit widdlier, Argos a bit more of a straightforward loser without much of the idealism bar the cultural carpet bombing ‘Demons Out!’ suggesting “the record buying public shouldn’t be voting”. Brilliant! Tragic!‘s offering start with the line “this world is fucked and you’re an idiot” from ‘Axl Rose’, whom Argos declares to be “my favourite lead singer”. Fortunate, as this is the album where Argos tried properly singing himself. It turns out this is what Argos might sound like with laryngitis.

It’s quite a relief therefore when the first of two new tracks commences with Argos bellowing “I WAS IN AN EARTHQUAKE!”. ‘Arizona Bay’ is about being caught in an earthquake not as strong as he thinks and sounds like an Art Brut Vs Satan outtake; ‘We Make Pop Music’ (“…for people who don’t like people”) adds another to their storied catalogue of press-aware music about music and similarly sounds like the band as they stand in a nutshell. Then there’s the second disc of B-sides, the original versions of the first two singles, more reined-in versions of songs from It’s A Bit Complicated left over from an aborted session with Pulp‘s Russell Senior, covers (the Beatles, the Cure, We Are Scientists) and assorted offcuts, none of which are essential but which add more layers to Argos’ wracked character and in the case of extended versions of ‘Modern Art’ and ‘Post Soothing Out’ records for posterity, from a Berlin TV recording, the extemporising genius of the Art Brut live show.

So they never did get on Top Of The Pops, or have a hit single (‘Emily Kane’ fell a reputed two sales short of the top 40), or completely revolutionise the pop charts. Then again, neither did Argos grow old gracefully, understand the opposite sex, get over the idea that music doesn’t really matter that much or decide that singing about things that matter with a straight face outdoes declamatory proselytising of smartly funny observations. For that level of ploughing their own furrow greatness we continue to be thankful.