Frightened Rabbit have recorded a new song entitled ‘Last Tango in Brooklyn’ for Australian zine The Lifted Brow. Here is Pitchfork’s take: “It’s a view looking back after a relationship has ended, and what once seemed bright and lovely has now turned cold and lonely. Starting with an acoustic guitar and building to a sad hymnal, fleshed out with chanting and tambourine, ‘Last Tango in Brooklyn’ shows a quieter, less anthemic side of Frightened Rabbit. It’s a desolate ode to something gone, that feeling not so much that the world is over but that things used to be a little more fun.”

Grab the song here!

mp3:> Frightened Rabbit: ‘Last Tango In Brooklyn’

Toronto’s Ten Kens are about to embark on their inaugural UK tour, and to celebrate they have created a brand new animated video for ‘Spanish Fly’, one of the standout tracks on their eponymous debut. Instead of releasing a single, the band is giving away a free download of the song that inspired the video. The video was developed and created independently by close friends of the band, The Blackbelt Kids. It was directed by fellow Toronto native Kareem Thompson and animated by Peter Auld and Louis Norris.

You can download an mp3 version of ‘Spanish Fly’ by clicking here. All they ask is that you sign up to their mailing list.. Not too much to ask, is it now??

We caught up with the guys a few weeks ago. If you happened to miss the interview, you can check it out here.

November
28 - London, The Lexington
29 - Birmingham, Barfly*
30 - Glasgow, Nice N’Sleazys*

December
1 - Edinburgh, Cabaret Voltaire
2 - York, The Duchess
4 - Manchester, The Roadhouse*
5 - Leeds, The Cockpit*
6 - Cardiff , Clwb Ifor Beach*
8 - London, ICA*
9 - London, Blow Up Metro
10 - London, 229**

* supporting A Place To Bury Strangers
**with Stricken City

Wintersleep

Relatively unknown here in Blighty, Candadian five-piece Wintersleep have been causing modest sized waves over in their homeland and the States. This year alone they have won a Juno Award for Best New Group and a Much Music Award for Best Independent Video (check it out here), they have spent most of the year away from their adopted hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, building their growing army of fans touring with fellow Canadians Black Mountain and Wolf Parade, amongst others. Now it’s time for us Brits to get in on the action.. See, this band is something really fucking special. Their album Welcome To The Night Sky has been on regular rotation here at TLOBF Towers ever since they were nominated for Canada’s answer to the Mercury Prize - The Polaris Award, a few months ago.

The album (produced by tony Doogan - Mogwai, Super Furry Animals, Explosions In The Sky) will finally get a UK release in February of next year, and preceeding that the band will play three London dates to whet our appetite.

Stopping off at:
Dec 4th London, Club Fandango @ 229
Dec 5th London, Club NME @ Koko
Dec 16th London, Borderline

You can download the bands brand new single ‘Archaeologists’ for FREE(!) right here. Let us know what you think of it in the comments box below…

No, no. I’m not talking about the legendary Northern Soul club in Manchester. I’m talking about the soon to be legendary (ok, I’m making that bit up) Manchester ‘beat combo’ Twisted Wheel. Yes, if your tastes revolve around classic English R&B a la The Who, Small Faces and The Birds then these guys will be right up your street pop pickers. Ok, I’ll quit it with the Fluff Freeman voice now..

Twisted Wheel release their new single ‘Lucy The Castle’ on November 10th on CD, 7″ vinyl and as a download. The single is the first release from the forthcoming debut album, set for release in early 2009. It follows swiftly in the footsteps of the two previous releases (She’s A Weapon & You Stole The Sun EP) of early rudimentary demos & live tracks both released to critical acclaim and support earlier this year- which picked up records of the week from Zane Lowe at Radio 1 and vinyl of the week in NME along the way amongst other things. You can download their debut single ‘She’s A Weapon’ below..

The lads are also on a brief tour of the UK, check out their myspaz for more details.

mp3:> Twisted Wheel: ‘She’s A Weapon’

Click on the image to download the mixtape

On a day where our American cousins decide on the future of the World at large, or so it seems, we’re your light refreshment. This months Mixtape, cunningly entitled Remember Remember, sees us go a little more left-field than usual. These are some of the greatest new bands we’ve heard in the last month, with a smattering of established favourites (The Wave Pictures), hotly anticipated comebacks (Wilderness) and a new project from an old friend (School of Seven Bells).

So, wrap up warm, it’s cold out there - sit back with a mug of something hot, forget about the disaster of the outside World, and just listen to what we’ve put together.

Remember, Remember

1. Wilderness - Strand The Test Of Time [download mp3]
2. The Pack A.D. - Making Gestures [download mp3]
3. Frightened Rabbit - Old Old Fashioned (Live) [download mp3]
4. The Wave Pictures - Long Island [download mp3]
5. Sarah Siskind - Lovin’s For Fools [download mp3]
6. Women - Black Rice [download mp3]
7. School Of Seven Bells - Connjur [download mp3]
8. Over The Wall - A Grand Defeat [download mp3]
9. Jay Reatard - See/Saw [download mp3]
10. Slag Rabbit - The Summer Sun [download mp3]
11. Ace Bushy Striptease - Panda Love Unit [download mp3]
12. Popular Workshop - Villains Who Twirl Their Moustaches Are Easy To Spot [download mp3]

[DOWNLOAD ALL TRACKS] - right-click and choose save-as to download complete .zip file

I listened to a lot of music at Airwaves, in some pretty extraordinary circumstances.

In a hired 4×4, cruising around a volcano on a flat lava plain, surrounded by sea and sky… driving over a long land bridge or through a seemingly endless tunnel… waking up in Reykjavik 101 with huge, rolling snow-capped cliffs at the bottom of the street… playing records in Kaffibarrinn, my new favourite bar in the world… or listening to my iPod while strolling down Laugavegur, my head buzzing with excitement and optimism.

This mix is made in response to all of that happy overload of stimuli and circumstance. It’s sprinkled with field recordings from Reykjavik and the Snæfellsjökull volcano - church bells ringing, the tide on the black sand beach, skimmed stones skittering over a frozen lagoon, and a harmony sung in the Songhellir singing cave all feature here too.

Click on the image below to download the podcast.

Look out for an in depth review of this years Airwaves Festival coming to TLOBF this weekend.

Click on the image to download the podcast

This follow-up and/or sequel to 2007’s The Stage Names, sees Will Sheff and co continuing their depiction of the life, loves and general mores of a set of musicians and their adherents and hangers-on that one suspects are not a million miles removed from their actual selves.

This is the kind of detailed and intelligent lyrical fare that you would expect from this band. Leaving aside the three very brief instrumental interludes ‘Stand Ins, One’, ‘Stand Ins, Two’ and ‘Stand Ins, Three’ - largely superfluous although I guess lending a certain cinematic feel to the overall flow of the album - the themes that they pick to sing about are less remarkable than the perspective, depth and intelligence with which they are depicted.

Continue Reading

We at TLOBF have a lot to thank Fireworks Night for. Among their most recent achievements, their label Organ Grinder Records helped bring Left With Pictures to us and Firworks Night themselves played TLOBF’s Ill Fit club night just recently, which I understand was rather good. Their current offering though, is this new EP (or mini-album, if you like 28 minutes and six songs, it’s quite a beefy EP) A Mirror, A Ghost.

First up is “You, Holding.” One of the first things you notice is the curious, half-spoken vocal style which dominates the album. The song is a haunting affair, a slow descent into a yawning abyss, which gradually and patiently grows in intensity before everything is stripped away again - maybe we reached the bottom? Continue Reading

Caught In The Trees is album number eight for the Seattle singer-songwriter Damien Jurado, and his fourth for Secretly Canadian specifically. For this album he got a couple of close friends and musicians to help craft the set of songs, Jenna Conrad has appeared on one of his records before, here she plays cello on many of the songs, shares a writing credit, and duets on one she penned herself. Long-time collaborator, ever since 2002’s I Break Chairs, Eric Fisher also contributed to the writing and recording process, and J. Tillman mixer Kory Kruckenberg is on Engineering duties (there are other contributors, but they are unknown to me). My previous experience with Jurado’s work is limited to two albums from relatively early in his career, Rehearsals For Departure had a loose and poppy feel, often undercut by a melancholy tendency, Ghost Of David was a masterpiece of bare-bones fragility and desperateness. Caught In The Trees is like neither at a glance, but live with it a bit and Jurado’s inherent skill as a songwriter shows through. Continue Reading

Fighting with bouncers, run-ins with the police, exploding vans, drinking til they puke, puking til they drink again - it’s only rock n roll but Blakfish like it. The queens of Midlands-rowdiness have just made two brand new demos available online. The first, ‘Pretty As A Peacock (Fashion)’ can be heard on episode 9 of the Big Scary Monsters podcast. Along with tracks from Pulled Apart By Horses, Shield Your Eyes, Anathallo and more, it can be downloaded from iTunes or as an MP3 from the www.bsmrocks.com multimedia section. The second new demo, ‘Economics’, can be heard at www.myspace.com/blakfish.

In January Blakfish will pack their bags and jet off to lovely Seattle to record their debut album with Chris Common, drummer with the amazing These Arms Are Snakes. Tentatively set for an early summer release, it promises to be one hell of a record.

Big Scary Monsters Records are also celebrating new releases from This Town Needs Guns, Tubelord, Pulled Apart By Horses and Mimas with a free digital sampler featuring MP3s from these four beauties alongside a bonus one from one of their favourite new bands, Native. Download the sampler from the official BSM website.

Welcome to our brand new monthly feature: ART OF NOISE. It’s a simple concept. We ask bands we love to make us a mixtape and tell us exactly why they picked each track. Thus, you get some free kick ass music AND find out more about some of your favourite artists taste. Everyone literally, is a winner.

Kicking things off this week are the self proclaimed ‘Noise Band From Bletchley’; Action Beat. Freshly signed to Southern Records imprint Truth Cult Records, these guys seriously know how to make a big, loud fucking racket. And we love them. To describe what they sound like is a fairly difficult task so I’ll just refer to their myspace page: “Raping de-tuned guitars. Abusing old drum kits. Molesting golden Basses. Dean Gaffney.” Nice.

Heres Don McLean from the band to guide you through his twelve choices. Download link is at the bottom of the post… Remember to look out next month for a mixtape from FatCat Records’ newest signing..The magnificent Gregory & The Hawk. Enjoy. Continue Reading

For a country that’s five times smaller than Blighty, Sweden’s recent output of pretty-pink pop pickers is remarkable. Escaping the mainstream banality of - the hyperbolically bloated - ABBA, gorgeous tunesmiths like Jens Lekman, The Concretes and  Peter, Bjorn & John have filtered into the hearts of both snot-nosed musos and tune-hugging mainstreamites with their clutterless, pursed lip  melodics.

Continue Reading

The device that changed the music world as we know it turns 7 today…

It’s hard to really get a grip on the affect that rather large (compared with today) device had on not just our ability to listen to music on the go, but also change the face of releasing music to the World.

Of course, this site itself would look very different with out it! Our monthly mixtapes would have to be something physical, and probably wouldn’t exist truth be told, but the fact that most of the artists you read about on this site can give you a taster of what their new material sounds like without having to trawl MTV or Radio 1, is an amazing experience.

Though, as with most “revolutions”, there’s always a negative side… In this case, well, the BPI suddenly found themselves with a lot more to do. Through mp3’s sheer ease of use, coupled with the cheap broadband packages now available to everyone, the ability to “leak” an album and give everyone the chance to hear new releases prior to it being properly sold int he shops, is now, pretty much, common place. No matter how many artists “stream” an album to let people hear it legally, people still want something they can carry around with them, listen to on the bus and not worry about it having access to the internet.

So, whilst Apple may well toast the success of a device which has seen universal take up, there must still be Record Label Executives quietly whispering that they wished, in October 2001, Apple just released a new operating system or laptop instead…

Victoria and Jacob played, as far as I’m aware, at TLOBF’s very first gig at the Portland Arms in Cambridge the other day. I wasn’t there, and listening to this EP, I wonder how they are as a live act - it’s an intriguing thought which I’m sure several TLOBF staffers could now enlighten me on.

V&J’s sound is a twinkling, light, but affecting one - “Clash” is slightly disappointing in a sense that it isn’t about a seminal punk outfit, but satisfies in every other respect. Victoria’s voice soars over a simplistic synthetic beat and a insistent drone, with glockenspiel, odd rattling sounds and acoustic guitar taking turns to add their own contributions. “It’s not about apologies”, we hear, “it’s about understanding.” It seems to be a song about inevitability and sealing yourself off from the world when things get tough, but what the hell do I know? At the end, there’s a sound which makes me think of the death throes of a toy robot, which is nice. Continue Reading

Adam Donen is clearly not given to understatement. A limited edition run of this debut album with the musically multi-skilled The Drought comes inside a 32 page booklet with the lyrics set out as poetry, complete with two pages of acknowledgements and seven of biographical introduction, the story the latter paints seeming to take up the cudgels on behalf of a Samuel Taylor Coleridge or Thomas de Quincey classical writing lineage. In precis: Donen previously led the Alexandria Quartet, whose The Daydreams of Youth EP Rich Hughes gave 80% to on here last December. By this time Donen had suffered a breakdown at which the band “dissolved by accident”, embarking instead on a feverish period of self-medication and prolific automatic writing for what he saw as his epitath. “The line between life and literature is blurred if not entirely nonexistent” the text nonchalantly states, followed soon after by an assertion that in time the lyrics will be seen as “at least as good as any poems produced by our generation”. Continue Reading

As we publish this interview, news reaches TLOBF that Dear John, the long-awaited new album from Swedish singer-songwriter Loney, Dear (Emil Svanängen, as he’s known to his nearest and dearest) is complete. The long, hard slog of home recording is over; countless versions of songs discarded in search of the perfect take. Emil is a self-confessed perfectionist. When we chatted back in July, he talked about the intense pressure he puts himself under when recording music. Svanängen takes the recording process extremely seriously, spending lonely hours crafting perfectly formed pop songs like a patchwork blanket, with little or no help from outsiders. Layers are added, tweaked and removed until the perfect version reveals itself.

In this exclusive interview, Emil chats for the first time about his new record, the recording process and the pressures of releasing an album for the first time under the scrutiny of a much greater critical eye. (His last release, Loney, Noir, was his major label debut but had been self-released the previous year.) Svanängen also hints, in his usual cryptic manner, at what the future has in store for Loney, Dear.

For those of you who are eager to see Loney, Dear return to the live circuit, we are thrilled to announce that Emil will be flying over to play a solo show at our ILL FIT club night at the Old Blue Last in London on December 8. What’s more, entry is totally free. Keep your eyes peeled on the site for more details. Continue Reading

A double whammy ‘Introducing’ feature this week. Monday saw us bring Arrows Of Love to your attention and today sees a very special band indeed get the TLOBF treatment. We already told you how awesome Fireworks Night are back in July when we were lucky enough to catch their live show at the Wireless Festival. We were so impressed with their curious take on folk music in fact, that we even invited them to play at our club night ‘ILL FIT’ which just so happens to be taking place this Monday, 20th October at The Old Blue Last boozer in Shoreditch EC2. Full details and lineup can be found here - but for now we’ll just say that it’s free entry, there WILL be free shots and quite possibly, free love. You should come, really. It’s going to be great.

Fireworks Night are James, Nick, Rhiannon, Neil, Ed and Tim. Some of these questions were answered by James alone at the computer but they were all subjected to group discussion at dinner after an evening rehearsal. You can download an mp3 from their forthcoming EP A Mirror, A Ghost at the bottom of the page. Continue Reading

This album is a hard one to review. Oh yes. Not because it’s bad, its brilliant, and I’m so impressed by That’s The Spirit (Ottawan native Ben Wilson, with some help from a few good friends) that to put into words how much i like this album would take up 3 pages and probably only consist of the word ‘incredible’. And that wouldn’t make a good review. When I do try, whenever I get a good point in my head, I automatically forget it because im too lost in the music. This album feels like an album. It isn’t a collection of songs loosely bundled together. It’s a positive cloud of music, something almost tangible. When Staying Places is playing, an atmosphere is created that is ethereal, almost dream-like and at the same time, a focused concentration of well placed instruments and vocal lines. In fact, if I wasn’t woken up slightly by the vintage piano introduction of ‘It’s Curtains For You’ (a track that drifts across your mental horizon halfway through this release, and then leaves after less than two minutes), Staying Places would have me in a trance from start to finish. Continue Reading

We expect a lot from music, at times. Songs can lift moods, express sympathies, or calm fiery tempers. One my first listen to Gregory and the Hawk, I’d just come home from work and was in a foul mood. (I work with children, enough said really.) The aim was to distract myself rather than get rid of my current agitated mental state. However, I’m please to report that Gregory and the Hawk did exactly that. Despite my complete unfamiliarity with it, Moenie and Kitchi managed to turn my frown right upside down, courtesy of haunting vocals, humble but powerful melodies, and exuding the general feeling you get when you let out a big sigh. Aaaaahhh… Continue Reading

In the lead up to the release of career retrospective ‘Trying Hartz (First Fruits 94-04)’, those good people over at Secretly Canadian are giving away a free download EP of live and session material… So if Daniel Smith and his merry bands celebratory songs and Frank Black-esque yelp is your kind of thing you could do a lot worse than head over to here.

Watch out for a full review of Trying Hartz on TLOBF in the near future.