New Music 2016 - Part 28 - I Am Snow Angel - Fever

I haven't written much about electronic music for a while. This is in part because warm weather seems to prompt me to listen to it and at the moment winter is digging-in its heels for a final show of strength. Spring, and all thoughts of Summer, are therefore on hold. This kind of situation might change dramatically in a matter of days however - I believe in this - and that brings me to this artist whose moniker might ordinarily suggest a winter-time appeal.

I Am Snow Angel is a New York-based electronic pop performer, producer and visual artist and this is the latest release.

Fever - I Am Snow Angel (self-released, 2016).

There is plenty more by I Am Snow Angel out there to find, including the 2014 digital LP 'Crocodile', and there is more to come quite soon. I think that the thing that really caught my ear is that this is not strident electronica; it is pastoral rather than urban, wistful but still restive, and I'm keen to find more that is somewhat like it.
If I want or need to find urban or revolutionary music then I know that there is plenty of that available too.

New Music 2016 - Part 17 - Låpsley - Long Way Home

After a few posts rather defined by their predominantly acoustic outlook here is a change of emphasis. I return to things most decidedly electronic, and also to these shores, with Long Way Home, the first full LP from Låpsley. She hails from Formby, which is a town on the coast of north-west England.
She was the UK Blog Sound 2015 poll winner and, despite a number of short format releases including one that I mentioned then, the wait has seemed a long one. A couple of songs from those releases also appear here but to be fair it was worth it. It should also be borne in mind that the artist behind all of this doesn't turn twenty for almost six months. 

Låpsley - Long Way Home (XL Recordings, 4 March 2016).

I have given the record a couple of plays and I like it. It is much too early to say what I might regard as album highlights, however. It is perhaps at its best on contemplative tracks such as 'Love is Blind'.

There is also a growing body of evidence that indicates Låpsley is an artist I wish to see play live.

New Music 2015 - Part 37 - Gwenno - Y Dydd Olaf

In the recent times of political and even cultural uncertainty in the UK this album just became an obvious choice for what, to me at least, is a difficult post to write. One thing I pride myself on is a willingness to tackle cross-genre music including that in other languages and this is certainly no exception.
I did a quick survey of my collection yesterday evening and just now: most of my music is unsurprisingly in English. Spanish language albums are in third place. In between those and by some margin...

Gwenno - Y Dydd Olaf was released, in a very limited edition, by Peski Records late last year.

It gets a very much deserved full release - vinyl, CD & d/l - by Heavenly Records on 24 July 2015.

Although - aside from a single track (sung in Cornish) - it is all sung in Welsh that is not to say that, lovely though that might be, it is full of plaintive harp and lilting tradition. The title comes from Owain Owain's 1976 novel that depicts an overbearing dystopia controlled by distant, often malign, robots.

Musically it is gently electronic kraut-pop, or at least that's the best description I can muster at this moment. This is the track-list:

1. Chwyldro 5:18 
2. Patriarchaeth 3:29
3. Calon Peiriant 5:08
4. Sisial Y Môr 5:41
5. Dawns Y Blaned Dirion 1:30
6. Golau Arall 3:31
7. Stwff 4:59
8. Y Dydd Olaf 4:15
9. Amser 4:45

It is a political concept album. It won't appeal to all, I fully understand that, but it is a curiously soothing kind of revolution even if you don't actually understand a word of it.

This is the opening track 'Chwyldro' ('revolution', but also 'rotation' and 'orbit' - generally, that which goes around).

GWENNO - Chwyldro (2014) from Peski TV on Vimeo.

As we often share a similar taste in music, and there's nothing wrong with that at all, I'd be very interested to see what De krenten uit de pop makes of this LP and not least because music in a language other than their own is their normal diet.

New Music 2015 - Part 14 - Golden Fable & Purity Ring

My only New Year resolution at the start of 2014 was to listen to more music that was new, or at least new to me, on a sustained basis. I think that it is one that I not only kept but comfortably exceeded on a week-by-week basis and without counting festivals. My intention for 2015 was to keep up the momentum and, as I mentioned recently, my January hibernation has had nothing but a beneficial effect on that. I have also been listening to a lot of stuff, old and new, that I had never really got around to before. This includes a great deal of a capella and other close-harmony music, both traditional and modern-traditional. This post has nothing to do with that at all.

It has to do with two releases, one recent and the other soon to happen, that echo in some way the idea of the coming of Spring. I can tell you that I and seemingly most others are anticipating its arrival with fervour. Both releases are LPs by a male-female duo and both are dreamily electronic pop. They are also both the second full-length from the respective artists. Logic dictates that I start with the one already released at least in the UK (Full Of Joy Records, November 2014).

Golden Fable - Ancient Blue is the follow-up to 2012 début Star Map (mentioned here).

The second LP in this post is released by 4AD on March 2, 2015 in the UK (March 3 2015 in North America).

 'Another Eternity' is the second release by Canadian duo Purity Ring.

The first track to be released from it is 'push pull' and most tracks on the album have names that are less unfathomable than those on 2012 LP Shrines, which I have on vinyl, but still hardly the kind of thing you are likely to find yourself singing along to in the car. That said the above song has been play-listed by BBC Radio1; I almost lost concentration when I heard it whilst driving home from work one day. Here is track 6 - 'begin again'.

While I'm at it, this is the playlist for the LP (capitalized exactly as it isn't):

• heartsigh
• bodyache
• push pull
• repetition
• stranger than earth
• begin again
• dust hymn
• flood on the floor
• seacastle
• stillness in woe

Just to say, that link below the Golden Fable cover also concerns another band - Stealing Sheep. It has a new album, and again its second, in the offing too. It will rate a post all of its own.

UK Blog Sound 2015

I'm delighted to say that, for the second year, I was a tiny part of this project organised and collated by Robin Seamer of Breaking More Waves and few others have the ability to find new music in the way that it offers.

I did think about commenting on the long-list, when it was revealed in early December, but this time it was a conscious decision not to. In order to try and reach a conclusive answer the way the votes were counted was modified this year - this was made quite transparent as are the blogs/bloggers that are invited to tender votes (BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards please take note...).
I thought about it and then decided to take a gamble and wait for the denouement.
In retrospect I'm very glad that I did. There was a clear winner in 2015, one that I didn't nominate incidentally, and that was Låpsley. If that moniker seems slightly Scandinavian, courtesy of the accented vowel, then so be it. It could hardly be more appropriate.


Holly Lapsley Fletcher hails from Formby, Merseyside (formally a part of Lancashire) and Formby is indeed a Scandinavian place name in any case!
Do I reckon that 2015 in music is looking set fair?
Yes.
That is my honest answer. It is in safe hands and sound hearts.

Green Man 2014 - Part 3 - other things and other stages

The rather nebulous title of this post tells a story. I haven't quite decided on the direction of this post really but, with End Of The Road 2014 less than a week away, I feel the need to put keyboard to screen. If it is a bit rambling then I'm not really going to apologise. Festivals are like that anyway. It is part of the charm.
Like some others, Glastonbury most notably, Green Man holds a competition to seek out new talent. It clearly has some traction because this year there were around five-hundred entrants. The prize is an opening slot on the Mountain Stage on Saturday morning. The winners were London based duo Wildest Dreams.

Or they were Wildest Dreams when they won. Last Saturday they announced, during the set, that they were now simply Wyldest. The implication is that the dream had been realised. In accord with my policy concerning opening acts (Wildest) Dreams were right there on my must-see list.
Essentially a dream-pop (not a bad word in my lexicon) duo, this a big stage to fill. I have to say that during sound check Zoe Mead (vocals, synth, loops and occasionally guitar) and Holly Mullineaux (guitar, vocals) looked pretty nervous. They pulled it off perfectly - all the more remarkable when they announced "this is one of our older songs, it was written in June". The band only formed in April 2014.

Until now I have not transported to the tented 'Far Out' stage although it was where I spent all of Thursday evening. This provided, amongst other things, my first chance to see The Waterboys live. When I worked in Bristol in the early 1990s Waterboys cassettes, along with The Levellers (see here), were an integral part of the soundtrack in the lab!

Early on a sunny Sunday afternoon I made a pre-planned visit to the darkness of the Far Out stage. Samaris was the reason - it was like Christmas and Iceland winning Eurovision combined.  This is not as silly as it might seem - I have been aware of Samaris for some time, indeed here, and that was just another addition to the Green Man line-up that convinced me of its virtue. I was aware as a result of the 2011 self-released EP Hljóma Þú.

The three-piece combine total electronica with clarinet and vocals and it works. It simply would not work on an outdoor stage in daylight, however. That, at least in part, is why I think it could take Eurovision to pieces. All the songs are sung in Icelandic, which sounds beautiful incidentally, and means any lyrical concerns are entirely self-limiting.

New Music 2014 - Part 22 - Sylvan Esso

I'm learning to do things that once I could never do. One of those is recognizing voices that I have heard before when they crop up in unexpected new places. This is an example of that and neither is the artwork of their self-titled LP going to leave you any the wiser.

In 2013 Amelia Meath put her former band, female folk harmony vocal trio Mountain Man, on indefinite hold and teamed up with electronic musician Nick Sanborn as duo Sylvan Esso. This is their début self-titled LP and while the combination might on the face of it seem a little improbable, if not exactly problematic, then the outcome is that both bring their respective strengths to bear and the result  a thing redolent of the dreams of summer. The electronic twists and turns, that at times sound like a xylophone or glockenspiel, never overpower the melody or vocals. Not only have they managed it on the recording, recently released by Partisan Records, but they seem very capable of recreating it live too. Suffice it to say that Sylvan Esso is added to the list of artists that I want to see live.
The lead track, that preceded the LP by months, was the very promising 'Hey Mami' and it turns out not to have been a prelude that flattered to deceive.


This is the penultimate song on the LP, 'Play It Right' recorded live recently.     I can certainly see myself listening to the album many times over the coming months and indeed, because it has made me take notice, you will probably see me mention more from the Partisan roster of artists in the forthcoming weeks.

My current play list...

I'm soon going to attempt to trial something approaching the title of this post. It is the result of a suggestion from the, much appreciated, input of a reader of this blog. That said I'm not exactly sure what it will turn out to be, or indeed quite how to do it yet, but I've decided that it is certainly worth a try. The one thing I can promise is that it will not incorporate downloads.

If there are functional problems with anything I add please let me know and, should it actually work, I'd be pleased to receive any feedback regarding your thoughts on what I have done. I'm not sure quite how long it might take me to do this either; it may happen tomorrow, next week or sometime. I'm planning to give it a good shot but there may well be some trials, tribulations and outright revisions to the plan along the way - you have been warned!
At least I can tell you exactly what I'm listening to right now and it is what I regard as one of the 'Lost Albums of 2007' - and not just despite the fact that was a major label release (Mercury, Universal).

The album artwork may not be very sophisticated but that is part of the charm of this recording. Electro-pop is just meant to be like this and after a few listens the facts of the band's formation seem slightly less strange; Dan (guitar) and Martina (lead vocals) met by chance at a gig in their home city, Toronto, swiftly abandoned their former musical alliances, got married and moved to London in search of their real musical destiny!

The artwork of the promo CD was spartan in the extreme, as was the promotion of it by the label.

Dragonette - Galore --- the artwork of the promotional CD.

What is the logic of signing a band and then apparently failing to make any obvious effort to promote their début album?

My considered verdict is that this album was criminally under-promoted and also vastly under-rated. The other thing is that it is good music for spring; its often postponed release last year did not help either, as it came out late summer, which was I suspect rather symptomatic of perverse major label priorities.
See them live if you can - it is a really stunning show and the lyrics are often amusingly cheeky too. I Get Around, the first single from the album, was quite the part but did not make its presence felt in the UK chart.

Also Mi Reflejo (Christina Aguilera, 2000) - not least because the Spanish Genio Atrapado still seems much better than Genie In A Bottle to me. I'm sorry but I have already admitted to liking much pop and also music in foreign languages and sometimes both happen at once.

There are some things indefatigable and indefeasible.

Say what you want but some things are simply facts of life; Euro trance-pop has for much of the last decade been one of them and, as I've claimed for some time, I don't think we've heard the last of it, indeed perhaps rather the opposite.

In the last couple of years it has, at least in the UK, faded in prominence somewhat but it would be wrong to thus dismiss its continuing existence. The presence of Cascada In the UK album chart for so many weeks should be quite enough to indicate that.

If I have an admission to make it is this. Cascada does not, as it so happens, do much for me mainly because it mostly comprises cover versions but I am however quite taken by some Euro-trance-pop as I find it near perfect 'thoughtless listening'.

'I don't want to say I'm sorry

For I know there's nothing wrong.'

That is not a slight in any way but the lyric is hardly world-changing. This is a feature of the genre and just a take-it-or-leave-it thing. More often than not I'll take it, thank-you!

Letters, Letters... wonderfully weird!

Once upon a time, not so long ago, letters in the mail were the main form of communication.
Letters, Letters have, on their eponymous début, messed with this perception and all the misunderstandings that words can convey...

The band comes from Montréal (how near inevitable does that seem) but they also have help from Chicago. Amazon.co.uk does not appear to know about this release yet while Amazon.com does, but only on CD. Don't however, even for one moment, think that we in the UK are on the losing end of this particular game. The album is released by 'Type Recordings', as many strange but good things are, and they have released it as a 12" LP on vinyl. This is available only in the UK and limited to just 500 copies; all of them pressed in strawberry-red clear vinyl!
The music on the album is I think, and this is after just three listens to one of the aforementioned vinyl copies, a new take on what I can best describe as dirty low-fi electronica; it has much instrumental variety and merit but also the very interesting addition of both male and female vocals, sometimes both together in the same song. That does not mean something bad, very far from it in fact, but for a 'Type Recordings' release to have any vocals at all is really rather remarkable.
Now you can understand why I'm unwilling, as I mentioned earlier this week, to be tempted into making my 'Best Albums of 2007' selection so early in the year. I'm not saying this album will be in that list but I'm certainly not prepared to exclude new possibilities just because it is the start of November.

I should have, in fact, added another 'Type Recordings' release to my post yesterday that considered music for autumn and winter nights. That is Le Fumeur de Ciel by the Parisian artist Julien Neto, who has released under various other monikers and on assorted labels, which was released in 2005 but is now available on 12" LP for the first time. It is a wonderful concoction of electronica, melded with dusty acoustic samples, and the album is entirely instrumental. France is a real, yet often unrecognised, force when it comes to this and related kinds of ambient music. I have reviewed Colleen et les Boîtes à Musique already and I am rather tempted to buy a copy of the Colleen album The Golden Morning Breaks. (These are both released on the Manchester-based The Leaf Label.)

Ice Cream Is Nice (monsters are not)

For some reason the most wanted items always take the longest time to arrive and never has it been truer than with this CD. It has been several years in the making and then two different Amazon Marketplace sellers let me down on this one (the only two times this has ever happened to me and so I’m not planning to dwell on it). When it finally arrived this morning I hardly dared listen to it. I had high hopes based on the single ‘Tomoko’, (available on vinyl and which I have) but what if it was to prove an overall disappointment after all the waiting and the effort to get it? I can’t tell you what might have been but I can say that it is far better than I dared hope for.
This is an album that proves ‘pop’ is not a dirty word after all and also that the genre is far from exhausted! Better still, but rather unfairly as it deserves a wide audience, you’ll probably have this gem almost to yourself at least for now be that for your own listening or for confounding your friends.

Dirty Paper Cup is an odd name for an album but then its maker is called Hafdis Huld Thrastardottír, though she drops the last name for stage purposes. She is Icelandic, was formerly a singer with the nine-piece-collective Gus Gus, and that is probably all you need know about her back catalogue as this album is totally different. It is basically acoustic/electronic pop with more than the occasional strangely un-pop lyric (her shoes used to be a crocodile - Tomoko) all sung in a voice that ranges from a rather characteristic tuneful loud whisper to a sweet if slightly husky soprano. It is also much more than that for the arrangements are often as sparse as they are beautiful.

The ‘Dirty Paper Cup’ of the title is explained in track 7, in case you were wondering, and the very curious title for this review comes from track 8. I might be suffering from a case of track 6, but it is that kind of album: 13 tracks packed into 42 minutes and only one makes the four-minute mark. Not one even tempts me to make the effort of skipping it, which is the defining moment for a really good album. The final track, the short Sumri Hallar, is sung in Icelandic.

The penultimate track Who Loves The Sun? is indeed a cover of the Lou Reed song, which was the opening track on the 1970 album Loaded, the fourth studio album by the ‘The Velvet Underground’ but never before did it sound like this (this track in particular reminds me of Isobel Campbell's solo stuff) and I haven’t come across a cover of such an old track that really works since Vanessa Carlton covered 'The Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black on her 2002 début album Be Not Nobody but the same song was also covered (in Japanese) by Utada Hikaru on her 1999 album First Love.
That said Nothing Else Matters was ingeniously and quite shamelessly covered by Lucie Silvas and it appears - as a piano ballad - on her 2004 début album Breathe In. Many of her fans didn't even realise that it was a cover of a track originally written and recorded by 'Metallica' and taken from their eponymous first album that was released in 1991.