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Mini Mansions – Vertigo (ft Alex Turner)
Name: Mini Mansions
Track name: Vertigo (ft Alex Turner)
Hometown: Los Angeles
Who? Queens of the Stone Age’s Michael Shuman, plus Zach Dawes, Tyler Parkford and a cheeky Monkey.
Why now? This track, featuring a little help from the Arctic Monkeys frontman, appears on Mini Mansions new album The Great Pretenders, which came out on Monday (23 March). However Alex Turner didn’t just provide vocal help, he rolled up for the video (below) shoot too. “The night before the shoot we played this strange private party for Saint Laurent with Bleached and Sky Ferreira, where we each played 15 minute sets. So there was plenty of time for debauchery afterward,” recalls Shuman. “Us and Alex managed to stumble onto set for the shoot at 9am with a half dozen naked ladies waiting to partake in the shoot. I’d say it was a pretty ideal setup for the making of this video.”
Hear more: Minimansionsmusic.com
Bitter Ruin
Dark cabaret from Brighton currently wowing musicians and comedians everywhere.
Hometown: Brighton.
The lineup: Ben Richards and Georgia Train.
The background: If those ones to watch lists were based on votes from celebrities, not critics, today’s new band – duo, actually – would rank very highly indeed. Comedians love them. Stephen Fry tweeted about them, saying, «Initially rather disturbing, but ultimately brilliant!» Somewhat improbably, Matt Lucas – who declared, «I’ve never seen anything like it before» – used to co-manage them. Tim Minchin said they were «AH-mazing» – he has a speech impediment – and promptly invited them to support him at his Médicins Sans Frontières gig, which is tonight, in case you’re interested. Lots of musicians are (interested), so it might be worth attending, even if just for the purpose of star-spotting. Which Bitter Ruin musician-fans might be there? Take your pick from Jarboe (ex- Swans), who they toured with. Or Ben Folds, who called them «absolutely unique», or Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls, who said, «That girl can sing!» (the duo comprise a male instrumentalist and a girl who can sing). Or Elton John, who liked them so much he got them into his Rocket Studios to record an EP.
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Bitter Ruin – who have toured with everyone from Ed Sheeran to Melissa Auf Der Maur – don’t just wow famous people. Journalists like them, too. «Not like anything you’ve seen before; weird, unique, highly recommended,» wrote one. «Bitter Ruin burn with an intensity that makes most other bands look like damp squibs. Is it art? Most certainly.» They have been described variously as noir-pop, indie, rock, punk, folk, soul, flamenco, and classical. Wikipedia, meanwhile, files them under «dark cabaret». Richards and Train, both students of music history, formed in Brighton over a shared love of Antony and the Johnsons and St Vincent, with her preferring Björk and Édith Piaf and him loving Jeff Buckley and Queen. They gigged a lot and did some songs courtesy Elton’s Rocket, which sounds a bit kinky but isn’t. They soon earned a devoted following, drawing £20,000 in Kickstarter funding in an impressive 12 hours. They built a studio with the proceeds and set about recording their debut album, Waves.
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The results are… not for us, after all that. We were expecting, from all the fuss, something weirder and wonkier, more arresting and shock-of-the-new. But who cares when so many of the great and good are lining up to sing their praises and praise their singing? Not just the singing – which ranges from cutesy and ickle-gurly to a more womanly warble – but the music, which most seem to agree is fabulous and far-out and the perfect setting for BR’s «soul-baring confessionals and vicious vendettas», as we’ve seen them called. We can’t quite detect in their music the savage intensity that others can – maybe our ears need syringing, but it sounds quite twee – but we can appreciate the air of the theatrical and sense of flamboyance. If some can hear music that is «exquisite and emotional» (S Fry again) and it doesn’t quite tally with our own response, which is to remain thoroughly untouched and unenchanted, and if others’ idea of torrid melodrama doesn’t match ours, then let’s just agree to disagree, shall we, for the sake of the children.
The buzz: «Initially rather disturbing, but ultimately brilliant!» – Stephen Fry.
The truth: Anyone for whimsy?
Most likely to: Make waves.
Least likely to: Drown in a sea of love.
What to buy: The single Diggers is released on January 27, followed by the Rocket Sessions EP and Waves album.
File next to: Björk, the Mummers, Woodpecker Wooliams, Paloma Faith.
Links: bitterruin.com.
Friday’s new band: Harts
Claire
German music machine whose songs have iconic pop elements.
Hometown: Munich.
The lineup: Josie Claire Burkle (vocals), Florian Kiermaier (guitar), Fidolin Achten (drums), Matthias Hauck (synths), Nepomuk Heller (synths).
The background: Historically when a band has taken a simple christian or surname – the Smiths, James, Raymonde – it has signalled an intention on the part of the musicians to return to indie simplicity and modesty. But Claire, a five-piece from Germany, have mainstream pop ambitions, and they are not strangers to pomp, if not circumstance. There is a degree of bombast in their music, and some majesty. Like many of the best electronic pop groups, they evidently come from leftfield, but they don’t appear to want to stay there. Some can hear a more boisterous xx in their synthesized surges, or a Teutonic Chvrches, but those are albums-bands, really, when we can hear proper hit singles here, Icona Pop-sized ones.
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They’ve just signed to major label Capitol, had praise from Pitchfork, NYLON and the New York Times, played this year’s CMJ and toured with Chvrches and Bastille, which just goes to show how many ones-to-watch didn’t make all the recent Ones to Watch lists. You – or, at least, Londoners – can see for yourselves what the fuss is about in January when they play a couple of dates in the capital. Or you could wait for the February release of their single, Games – their debut in the UK – to hear signs of their pop potential. The video shows a bunch of young friends – Claire, presumably – going to the beach, swimming and generally having summer fun. But the meaningful stares into the middle distance that interrupt the frolics hint at the sadness beneath the surface, and sure enough, despite the perky beat the melody shifts between jubilant and wan as the lyrics capture both transcendence and despair («And you don’t seem to care…»).
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There are a few people doing this sort of thing at the moment under the radar, from Classixx to Class Actress, but there is a stridency here, a confidence, that could make the commercial difference. The track Little Brother has the synth majesty of Simple Minds circa Sparkle in the Rain, although the reference to feeling «the wind on your nose» is a little bathetic. What’s wrong with «face»? There is also a reference to «fade to grey»: they love 1981. But Claire aren’t mere retro fetishists plying machine melancholy like all the rest. There’s a freshness and, more importantly, a boldness propelling their best songs that suggests a life beyond the nostalgia circuit. Invincible in particular edges towards I Love It territory in terms of anthemic playground catchiness, despite the talk in the lyrics of «shattered dreams and broken promises». It even has a drop – file under Eurodance-pop. This should be the next single in the UK, managers and sundry people from Claire’s team. Our consultancy charges, by the way, remain competitive.
The buzz: «Intriguing, unique, hypnotic» – Earmilk.
The truth: Don’t you forget about them.
Most likely to: Care.
Least likely to: Crash.
What to buy: The single Games is released on February 23 by Capitol.
File next to: Propaganda, Icona Pop, Bastille, Chvrches.
Links: claireofficial.com.
Thursday’s new band: Bitter Ruin.
Mutual Benefit
Nomadic American produces album of superbly blurry, lush indie pop about life and love.
Hometown: Brooklyn.
The lineup: Jordan Lee (vocals, instruments), plus assorted musicians including Andrew Morehart, Katie Pierce, Bradley Will, Marc Merza and Samuel Yager.
The background: «Look, this is a bloody great Sunday record,» wrote a Mancunian friend in an email on, funnily enough, Sunday, of the debut long-player by a young American called Jordan Lee who operates as Mutual Benefit. And here we are a full 48 hours later and, despite the fact that we get sent dozens of new artists each day for our consideration, it’s still refusing to budge from our record player. It’s a bloody great Tuesday record. Not that we’re playing the vinyl version, by the way. We’re being metaphorical, like.
As is Lee on that album of his, Love’s Crushing Diamond. There are titles on there such as Advanced Falconry and the record is bookended by Strong River and Strong Swimmer, but songs about water and winged creatures these are not. On Advanced Falconry, over piercing, keening violins, he waxes poetically about the subject of his affections: «The way she moves, always on her own/ And to look into her eyes/ Will make a fool of anyone.» And it’s not the bird from Kes.
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He moves around a lot, does Lee, from Ohio to Austin to Boston, and most recently to Brooklyn, where he ran the Kassette Klub label, whose raisons d’être included «collaboration, unabashed self-expression, music as art, kittens, and magic.» He formed Mutual Benefit as something between a solo project and an amorphous collective, equal parts self-expression and collaboration, and created LCD over a period of years using a mix of hi- and lo-fi techniques and a similarly varied instrumental lineup comprising keyboards, guitar, violin and banjo, plus assorted DIY percussion and found sounds.
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It was originally going to be a cassette-only self-release, before some friends offered to start a label and press a limited edition 250 LP run. Then it got posted to Bandcamp and, much glowing recognition later – notably from Pitchfork, who named it their Best New Music, the first time a Bandcamp release had received such an accolade – here it is, being widely disseminated to the extent that people in Manchester are sending excitable emails to people in South Hertfordshire, encouraging them to check it out – on a weekend, no less. And we’re glad we did, because – call us old-fashioned – we love woozy, baroque indie-pop that sounds slightly out of tune and off-kilter and explores the highs and lows of the human condition as it navigates the choppy seas of romance, from heartbreak to elation and back. He oozes vulnerability, does Lee, and the discreet charm of the dumped chump. And all the while he comes across as slightly intoxicated, a sort of seasick sensation that seeps through his singing and the, well, the whole thing, really, from the playing to the production.
Not that his heightened state stops him from focusing on the details, of which LCD is full, from the wind chimes on Strong River – which builds blurrily to an is-this-record-on-the-wrong-speed pace and stays there, like a rustic MBV – to the glockenspiels of CL Rosarian and sweet, sweet violins and playful banjos of Advanced Falconry. That Light That’s Blinding threatens to be subsumed by a celestial sadness, but it’s offset by some dreamy drifting. Strong Swimmer ends the album with Lee channelling his best adult child. But what do those album-bookend titles mean? That love will prevail? That man is more powerful than any force nature can put in his path? And if so, what lesson do we learn from this, and how is it applicable to the vagaries of the human heart? We have no idea. We’re getting paid to find new music we likey, not examine the psyche.
The buzz: «The textures of this record are so pronounced, the colors running in waves so profound, that it’s almost impossible to believe that one man created them.»
The truth: A lovely, lovely record – any day of the week.
Most likely to: Swim.
Least likely to: Sink.
What to buy: Love’s Crushing Diamond will be released by Other Music Recording Company on January 13.
File next to: Grizzly Bear, Therapies Son, High Llamas, Randy California.
Links: enganche.co.uk/mutual-benefit.
Wednesday’s new band: Claire.
Bad Rabbits
Dirty ’80s funk revisited from an outfit much loved by Prince.
Hometown: Boston, MA.
The lineup: Fredua «Dua» Boakye (vocals), Sheel Davé (drums), Salim Akram (guitar), Graham Masser (bass), Santiago Araujo (guitar).
The background: Like that other new-ish soul-dance outfit Quadron, Bad Rabbits have been around for a while but this is being touted as their moment to break out internationally. Actually, they’re also being touted as a black rock band, or a band fusing rock and funk, their co-producer is apparently a tattooed metal kid, and in the video to their track We Can Roll, the grainy black and white footage of them live and direct presents them as an edgy punk or metal band, a latterday Bad Brains (who they’ve supported on tour). In fact, one write-up described them as «like Sly Stone fronting Bad Brains», while we totally overestimated, from the reviews, the guitar/rock quotient and were expecting a new Living Colour or Fishbone.
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Funk-rock, funk-metal, «post-R&B futuristic funk-punk,» as one blog put it – Bad Rabbits are none of these things, really. They just sound like a funk band, mainly an ’80s funk band, albeit a bit raw, like a roughed-up Earth Wind & Fire, or the Dazz Band after a night on the razz. Teddy Riley (http://www.theguardian.com/music/2010/jul/15/unsung-influential-pop-heroes), the architect of swingbeat/New Jack Swing, produced their album American Dream, which we believe is being issued here in 2014, although their press release mentions a follow-up album called American Love, already recorded with the aforementioned illustrated metallurgist. Anyway, you can hear what they’re capable of on Spotify, hear what the fuss is about, find out what made Prince – who showed up to a gig of theirs in LA – go crazy (he also loves Quadron: Prince – he’s the go-to guy for marketable quotes on new R&B bands).
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A lot of BR’s press focuses on their live show. It sounds like a scaled-down version of what Janelle Monae does, featuring old-school synchronised dance moves combined with assorted high-energy antics. Their music, as we say, sounds quite live – it’s not as slick or polished as you might expect. Can’t Fool Me introduces Fredua «Dua» Boakye’s raspy vocals, a far more throaty and full-bodied affair than Sly’s. Less snarky, too. The lyrics are straight, unreconstructed sexed-up loverman tropes. On Dirty, for example – which recalls Ray Parker Jr’s Ghostbusters, with a dash of Rick James – he cuts a sleazy figure while on She’s Bad he declares, «I wanna give it to you, baby.» Course he does. Still, for every generic come-on there’s an irresistible groove, the sort of stuff you could imagine hearing on a classic ’80s R&B station or in a budget movie about the decade where the producers couldn’t afford a proper Top 30 hit. We Can Roll is a sweaty showcase for superb musicianship that builds from a sultry keyboard intro into a synthgasmic ballad of purple proportions. American dreamy.
The buzz: «As if Michael Jackson, Pharrell Williams and Prince had some ridiculous three-way band love-child» – LA Music Blog.
The truth: Try and ignore the words – the music is a hoot.
Most likely to: Let it whip.
Least likely to: Fool us.
What to buy: You can hear lots of Bad Rabbits on Spotify.
File next to: Rick James, Dazz Band, Prince, Cameo.
Links: badrabbits.com.
Tuesday’s new band: Amazing Snakeheads.
Andrew Ashong
He’s the psych-soul brother stoned on ethereal jazzy grooves.
Hometown: Forest Hill, London.
The lineup: Andrew Ashong (vocals, music).
The background: Sam Smith is this year’s winner of the BRIT’s Critics’ Choice award, which puts him at the commercial vanguard of a new soul wave. There were, at last count, around two dozen emerging male artists who orbit around R&B, soul and dance. Smith is the new John Newman, singing lustily over populist beats, and his future success is assured. Others are being more experimental, taking more chances. There are a slew of surrogate Weeknds and James Blakes, from Gallant to Gent Mason, artists injecting elements of danger, doubt and despair into the traditional smooth soul croon and disrupting the sensual flow of R&B with glitches and assorted electronic production tricks. There are new paradigms or at least musicians offering unexpected hybrids such as Sampha; then there are those taking the familiar into strange new territories such as «new Michael Jackson» Dornik.
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Even given this varied company, Andrew Ashong stands out. We haven’t had one of these for a while: a hazy, jazzy dreamer of a young soul rebel who in his music references Roy Ayers and Shuggie Otis, Bill Withers and Marvin Gaye flyin’ high in the friendly sky. He’s from South London and apparently now is based in Ghana, where his parents are from. He has worked with Detroit techno/Chicago house man Theo Parrish and his tracks have been played by the progressive likes of Floating Points but it’s his winning of the Track of the Year gong at the Worldwide Awards by listeners to Gilles Peterson’s radio show that offers the biggest clue as to Ashong’s sound and milieu. He’s very Gilles Peterson. He spent his teenage years crate-digging for classic disco, funk and soul vinyl in charity shops, and listening to his older’s brother’s Ayers, Herbie Hancock and Talking Loud Records collection. By the age of 16 he was out DJing those records, while at home he began working up tracks of his own, mesmerised by the chord changes to songs such as Al Green’s Let’s Stay Together.
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«I never wanted to be a singer,» says Ashong, and really, he isn’t. He doesn’t sing so much as allow his stoned murmur to drift listlessly and languorously across the stretched-out, slow and ethereal psych-soul grooves of his music. Special, the title track of his January 2014 EP, is a dazed acoustic reverie, with shades of Shuggie, two jazzy chords over which Ashong extemporises for five minutes and 55 seconds, although you get the impression he could have gone on for 55 minutes or 55 days. Never Dreamed is cosmic R&B, more organic than electronic. «Years ago…» he exhales, as though he’s vaping, over jazzy keyboards. Flowers, the winner of that award, is mellow, mellifluous, heady with the smell of dew and sunshine after the rain, with a wobbly bassline – but bass music this is not. It’s soul music for people who have been dismayed by most of the major developments in soul music of the last two, even three, decades.
The buzz: «Can you say ‘chune’?»
The truth: It’s 70s psych-soul jazz revisited.
Most likely to: Send a strawberry letter.
Least likely to: Talk loud.
What to buy: The Special EP is released by Which Way on January 20.
File next to: Shuggie Otis, Roy Ayers, Bill Withers, Lewis Taylor.
Links: soundcloud.com/andrew-ashong.
Molly Beanland
Modern-day purveyor of power ballads. Fully expect a semi, if not total, eclipse of the heart.
Hometown: London.
The lineup: Molly Beanland (voice, music).
The background: Last Friday night we stood for several hours in the Electric Ballroom in London as 1,500 people went gaga, not to Lady Gaga, no, to a succession of ’80s power ballads at a night called Ultimate Power. Basically, if you like Foreigner and Journey, Whitesnake and Mister Mister, you were either there or you should have been, punching the air, livin’ on a prayer, enjoying the total eclipse of good taste and self-monitoring decorum.
And here we are, barely a week later, with a new purveyor of the form by the name of Molly Beanland, who used to be in the band Cub Scout. She could be Carol Decker’s niece or daughter or kid sister, you do the math. She writes – and sings, in a «mysterious, moi?» voice – the sort of epic, anthemic ’80s-style power ballads that get swept up in their own sense of drama. They might just draw you in – they may even take your breath away.
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Beanland – whose name suggests Molly Ringwald acting in one of Grimm’s fairy tales – has a debut single out early next year. It is called Night Dreams and it is well T’Pau-esque, even if it’s not quite the full Bonnie Tyler. You can picture the dry ice now and imagine her in the video swathed in black lace, hats and scarves, having raided Kate Bush’s and Stevie Nicks’ wardrobes. The drums are of the gated variety and the chorus is as fulsome as the use of reverb. She describes the track as «the ultimate love-hurts tale» and someone else – perhaps Beanland herself or someone in thrall to her ultimate power – wrote of it: «Obsession and the greediest of lusts, both wonderful and terrible, painful and pleasurable, you know it’s driving you insane but you are hopelessly addicted. If Night Dreams were a movie it would be a thriller. Part-night terror, part-daydream.» That’s the effect she’s having on listeners, seducing with a knowing deployment of icy passion and controlled bombast.
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The buzz: «Get ready to bust some moves in front of the mirror.»
The truth: Deck the halls with boughs of Molly.
Most likely to: Hold on for one more day.
Least likely to: Take these broken wings.
What to buy: Night Dreams is released on January 20, 2014.
File next to: T’Pau, Bonnie Tyler, Eurhythmics, Kate Bush.
Links: mollybeanland.com.
Friday’s new band: Andrew Ashong.
Ry X
Australian falsetto crooner discovers commercial value in aching sadness and wintry desolation.
Hometown: Los Angeles.
The lineup: Ry Cuming (vocals, music).
The background: If you were wondering who the desolate-sounding singer with the Bon Iver-ish falsetto was on the new Sony Bravia TV advert and you couldn’t get SoundHound to work, it’s Ry Cuming. He’s an Australian from the coastal town of Angourie in New South Wales, now living in LA and signed to Infectious, home of alt-J, These New Puritans, Drenge and Local Natives. And that song from the TV advert (for TVs) is the title track of his latest EP, Berlin. It originally came out through Swedish label Dumont Dumont this summer but now that it’s advertising Japanese tech throughout the UK, France and Germany it’s being reissued. Today’s New band of the day is brought to you in conjunction with Google Earth.
Cuming is a busy boy. He’s part of «an electro-project» – a three-piece called the Acid. He also does something called the Howling with a gentleman by the name ofFrank Wiedemann, which doesn’t sound a million miles different to what he’s doing as Ry X. We did notice that pretty much everything he does do has had about half a million YouTube hits, so basically, that’s carte blanche right there to call yourself what you like, Ry old bean (although probs best not to trade as Ry Old Bean).
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His early influences were Pearl Jam and Jeff Buckley and he released a couple of records in Australia, where he toured with Maroon 5 and won awards for Best Pop Song and Best New Artist. Berlin is winning accolades if not actual gold statues for its searing sorrow and sepulchral sadness (we’ve just won a gong for most «s»s in a single sentence). With its heavy echo emphasising his isolation it seems to celebrate loss and despair and hovers at the interface between lonely and lovely, to the extent that it would work perfectly as an anti-Christmas anthem. Not that he’s anti-Christian (he might be, we have no idea – he certainly has a long beard that tapers towards the end), just that the song taps into the melancholy of the season. «And I’ll stop waiting by the phone,» he wails. Do people still do that, even with mobiles? Surely there’s no need to stay in one place anymore vis a vis the tardy cellular transmission? Anyway, his voice adroitly captures longing. It’s a bit Art Garfunkel, actually: angelic with a side order of husky (huskies – also big this time of year). Shortline is equally quiet, only with a spaciousness suggestive of implicit electronica, if you catch our (snowy) drift. It’s haunted and haunting, that old chestnut, and it grows and builds to an unexpected noise-out. Vampires is more percussive, oddly enough like a depressed Vampire Weekend: tribal pop if the tribe in question were all on downers, cold and afraid for their future. Ry X, on the other hand, is set to bask in the warm glow of success.
Rey Pila
They’re signed to Julian Casablancas’ label, they’re on tour with Albert Hammond Jr, and they sound like an ’80s synth-rock Strokes.
Hometown: Mexico City.
The lineup: Diego Solorzano, Rodrigo Blanco and Andres Velasco.
The background: Rey Pila means «King Battery» in Spanish. You will learn little about the band Rey Pila from this. They are from Mexico, now based in New York, but sing in English, although they do have a song called Sordo which means «deaf». Not that you’ll want to be (deaf) on hearing their music, because it’s really good. Good despite the fact that, in places, it recalls bad – dodgy, cartoonishly reductive – 80s bands wielding synths. At one point we were reminded of the Thompson Twins. Funnily enough, we didn’t run screaming for the door. No, we thought: how interesting that, wrenched from its original context, a sound can radically improve and lose its signifiers of un-cool. Then we ran screaming for the door.
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Rey Pila was the solo project of one Diego Solorzano but now it’s a band signed to Julian Casablancas’ Cult Records – also on a Strokes tip, they’re currently in the UK on the road with Cult labelmate Albert Hammond, Jr. They have toured with Interpol, Muse, TV on the Radio, and Ariel Pink but really they’d make more sense on one of those Here and Now package jobs. They have just been putting the finishing touches to an album (their second – their first comprised «acid rock and Beatlesesque jams», according to Vice magazine) with producer Chris Coady (Beach House, Smith Westerns, Wavves). They have described it as «a synth-laden, guitar-driven collection of pop gems», but we’ll be the judges of that. The first release from the album is the single Alexander, whose sleeve art was apparently inspired by the poster for movie Halloween III. And do you know what? It is a synth-laden, guitar-driven gem. With that machine pulse and Solorzano’s low grumbling voice, it’s like Billy Idol’s White Wedding given a goth makeover by Sisters of Mercy. It’s new wave synth-rock of the sort that made it big in the States but never quite happened over here, reminiscent of groups (often British) such as Modern English who made more sense to American audiences, sometimes in John Hughes movies. That voice is so mannered and self-preening it comes with its own makeup artist. Imagine the Strokes if they’d recorded an album with Martin Rushent on the back of his worldwide success with Dare, in 1983. The B-side is a cover version of Chris De Burgh’s Lady In Red, recorded at DFA studios. Now, we hate it when people randomly slag off MOR hits just because they’re MOR and were hits, but this really has always been a loathsome song, one deserving of the description «acrid torpor». But in Rey Pila’s hands it’s considerably less abhorrent. It’s an ambient synthscape, like Ultravox’s Vienna only less pompous, with an Autotuned chorus straight out of a Daft Punk ballad. The third track on their SoundCloud is Grenades, which is as tritely addictive – and we’re addicted to a lot of trite music, who isn’t? – as Thompson Twins’ In the Name of Love. Maybe that explains the battery thing – they draw their energy from the banal. Whatever works, as another New Yorker said.
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