The Optimist - the difficult second album...

I've wondered about this for a long while and the wait turned out to be longer than perhaps anyone intended, as circumstances conspired to make it more difficult than perhaps it might have been.

The thing is that I still love 'Fantastic Playroom' as it has so many memories for me too [see here] and I thought that, without reason and not for lack of talent, its successor could fail to live up to the expectations that I would have of it.

Many circumstances mean that the exuberant pop, and sometimes nu-trance influenced sound of 2007, probably wasn't going to work quite so well in 2010 and for more than a few reasons; not all of them down to the music-buying public.

First single 'Chaos' is just about sufficiently familiar and comforting to remind why NYPC were so impressive the first time out. If you want my reference points on 'Fantastic Playroom' it reminds me slightly of 'The Get Go' or, perhaps more so, 'Talking, Talking', which was the most soul-searching song on the first album.
The bulk of the second album is however more uniformly reflective but also very accomplished in its repositioned mood - and the title mirrors this sentiment - without becoming either maudlin or self-indulgent.

Catching the zeitgeist once may have been just good fortune; to do it twice takes time and patience.

Lots more, it seems... New Music 2010 - Part 2

I'm still working on a list of the live performances that I have enjoyed the most in 2009. They seem to fall in to two fairly distinct categories; on one hand those that I was well aware of from recorded output and thus wanted to hear live and, on the other hand, ones that were essentially an unknown proposition. Many in this latter category were new acts and many of those will be releasing their first full LP in 2010.
This one is released by Wichita Recordings (12" LP, CD, d/l) on January 25, 2010 in the UK.

The Big Black and The Blue is the follow-up to 2009 EP Drunken Trees.

First Aid Kit, while an act that fell in the latter category, are very likely to appear in my 'Best of 2009 - live!' and which I hope to have posted by the end of tomorrow.

Another band releasing an album in 2010, this time their second, is miles away from Swedish acoustic in style and is London's New Young Pony Club. I can't wait and it too has live music connotations: July 2007 saw me at a festival for the first time in the modern era and the first headline act I saw there, on the Friday evening on the Sunrise Stage at Latitude 2007, was NYPC who had just released their début album, Fantastic Playroom. That was probably pretty much the moment that I realized being at a festival was something that I really did want to do and not simply some nostalgia-induced aberration. As yet I do not know the title or release date for this, but the fact that is confirmed is heartening. The last was released by Modular Recordings but I have no confirmation of that for this one.

Next up for review - New Young Pony Club

Now in this case I had heard good things about NYPC but almost nothing of their material (except for the single 'Ice Cream') before Latitude and so, as they were headlining the Sunrise Arena on Friday evening, they were high on my list of "must see acts". In fact I was so confident that I would like it I actually ordered their album Fantastic Playroom, which was released on 9th July on Australian label 'Modular Recordings' even though they are a London band and on vinyl as it is available thus, the evening before departing. It actually arrived the day I returned and it was to prove a "good thing" - it instantly transported me back to the previous Friday evening and reminded me why a few bruised ribs were sustained in a wholly good cause.

The Sunset Arena was a venue too small for them and I can well see them performing on the Uncut Stage, or even the main stage, at this (or other similar events) next summer. I suspect that they might follow a trajectory similar to that which CSS have enjoyed in the last year.
The album Fastastic Playroom isn't as good as I expected it to be - it is, in a surprisingly measured and amazingly controlled sort of way, far better than I imagined it would be; perhaps I find it this way because it was a bit unusual to have heard them live before hearing the album? On the other hand it is very largely by playing live that they have secured their current enviable reputation. Go figure - as yet I can't - but no complaints!
Their live performance, whipped to a frenzy by icon-in-waiting Tahita Bulmer, really was quite special and certainly not rambling or self-indulgent. It was stopped once, fairly early on, when the barrier at the front of the stage collapsed and also terminated five minutes early; in both cases the reason given was "Health & Safety" and for once in this dangerously over-regulated world it actually seemed plausible!

This was the moment they launched the set with single 'Ice Cream'.

Photograpy was by this time getting rather difficult and by the time they performed 'The Bomb' it was impossible at the front of the boisterous crowd; not helped by an extremely uneven surface that, while the crowd was entirely good-natured, threatened to cause everyone to collapse in a huge heap. The Sunset Arena is a tent set up in what is really no more than a clearing in the woods and as such it is rather better suited to more earthy music...