[legguitar]

Tropic Harbour - Colour

<<

Tropic Harbour - Colour from Kidpixel on Vimeo.

Tropic Harbour is Mark Berg from Edmonton, Alberta.  Like fellow DIY dream poppers Wild Nothing and Grand Resort, he resides in a cosy, cotton-wool littered world, permanently hanging on the metaphorical beach, in awe of melody.  There's nothing strikingly original about Colour, but Berg seems confident in the strength of the song and in his own delivery and doesn't try to hide behind layers of sound, which is refreshing.

[legguitar]

Charles Howl - Surf Trem

Caught London five-piece Charles Howl supporting Canadian lo-fi crooner Travis Bretzer this week. Live they're studious, lost in the sound they're creating whilst losing none of the energy and maniacal edge of their studio recordings.  Had Bretzer not been on the top of his game, with frequently hilarious, anecdotal between song patter evidently his forte, he would've been blown of the stage.

Surf Trem is available now through Lo Recordings.  Listen to more via the Charles Howl Soundcloud.

[legguitar]

INTERVIEW: Dustin Wong

I interviewed guitar virtuoso Dustin Wong, formerly of Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine, for Snipe London.  Read the interview in full here.

[legguitar]

Underground Man - Bad Vibrations

Underground Man is Brooklyn-based Greg Adams, also of Swimclub.  Bad Vibrations is taken from his forthcoming Landlines EP.

[legguitar]

OX4

‘Shoegaze’ is a term that gets tossed around willy nilly, so we’ve decided to invent a new genre on which to hang the fuzzy guitars and barely there vocals of Jerusalem’s OX4: 'cowabunga yearn-rock'.  The Israeli four-piece have released two EPs to date, OX4 (2012) and this year’s Dana EP, and will be releasing a third this autumn via Benchmark Records.  They’re also touring Europe through most of September and October, though unfortunately that doesn’t include any UK dates.  Click here for an acoustic performance of Dana highlight Say Anything, recorded in a somewhat celestial setting, much to the delight of two unlikely fans.

[legguitar]

Steffaloo + Chrome Sparks - Eyes for You

Los Angeles’ Steph Thompson, aka Steffaloo (pictured), is, like a versatile cheese, something of a collaboration machine, having previously worked with the dreamy likes of Sun Glitters, Teen Daze and Blackbird Blackbird. Her second pairing with producer Chrome Sparks plays the waiting game, but patient souls are richly rewarded around one minute thirty. Suddenly it’s like a switch has been flipped and you’re transported to a heaving (possibly underwater) dancefloor moving as one in rapture to Sparks’ soft, determined beats, making eyes at hot mermaid/merman patrons, sipping squid-ink cocktails.

Eyes For You is taken from Steffaloo’s forthcoming album Heart Beats, out October 29 on Mush.

Read in Snipe

[legguitar]

His Clancyness - Zenith Diamond

We’re rather excited about the debut album proper from His Clancyness, coming as it does three years after the release of his last significant collection of songs, 2010’s Always Mist. As on that introductory set of bedroom recordings it’s Jonathan Clancy’s songwriting that attracts, though on Vicious, out October 7 on Fat Cat, the musical landscape in which his songs reside is significantly grittier and more in yer face. Listening to both records chronologically will be, one imagines, like getting on the tube from London Heathrow after a fortnight in the tropics.

Production duties on Vicious fall to Chris Koltay, who’s previously worked with Liars and Atlas Sound. The latter is of course the solo project of Brandon Cox, and you’ll find more than a hint of Cox’s ‘other’ band Deerhunter in the track streaming below, as well as a bit of Bowie.

Read in Snipe

[legguitar]

Walls - I Can't Give You Anything but Love

This week saw the release of the first new music from UK-based duo Walls (Alessio Natalizia and Sam Willis) since 2012’s Coracle album. It’s their first release on Ecstatic, an imprint (their own, in fact) of the rarely less than superb Cologne techno label Kompakt. I Can’t Give You Anything but Love is seven glorious minutes of attack minded, colliding synth work, with a snare that could strip tooth enamel. It’s a dangerous dog of a record, to be kept muzzled and leashed at all times to stop it tearing the face off some poor unsuspecting raver.

Urals/I Can’t Give You Anything but Love is limited to just 300 copies worldwide. Buy it here.

Read in Snipe

[legguitar]

ARMS - Comfort

This track starts off sounding like The Wave Pictures covering Belle and Sebastian after a night on the tiles, before launching into a big ol’ Broken Social Scene rock chorus with multiple vocals and expensive sounding vintage guitars. ARMS is Todd Goldstein, who was also behind Harlem Shakes (the band, not the Youtube sensation). Comfort is taken from the functional sounding EP2, his first release since 2011 debut Summer Skills, available through Paper Garden Records, September 10.

Read in Snipe

[legguitar]

Fist City - Boring Kids

There have been some curious developments in Canadian city politics over the past couple of years, and it’s not often you get to say that.  Calgary, the Alberta hub, population 1.2 million, a city with a reputation - according to real-live Calgarians before you ask - for ill-informed bigotry, elected its first Muslim mayor, whilst Toronto, its supposedly more cosmopolitan, south westerly cousin, elected a man called Rob Ford to the same office - a man allegedly in possession of some pretty strong views concerning homosexuals and ethnic minorities, and a crack habit (allegedly).

This political role-reversal, this ‘Freaky Friday, Jamie Lee Curtis kind-of death switch’ inspired Calgary band Fist City to write Boring Kids, streaming above.  It’s taken from their second LP It’s 1983, Grow-Up, released in the UK for the first time on July 8 through Black Tent Press.  As well as political overtones the song also deals with the cack-handed, temporary abstinence - booze, meat, drugs - of ‘troubled’ friends.  Sonically we’re reminded of Brooklyn’s Fantasmas, or The Pixies at their most shouty.

[legguitar]

Lemuria - Oahu, Hawaii

In a scarily portent June 2008 review of Get Better, the debut long-player from New York’s Lemuria, the writer of said article intuitively predicted an ‘inevitable’ 90s revival in 2011, during which the Buffalo couch rockers would receive their dues.  Well, that revival happened and is, to an extent, still going strong.  Lemuria are now onto their third album, The Distance Is So Big, released June 18 on Big 9 Records.  On Oahu, Hawaii, Sheena Ozella and Alex Kerns remind each other of a piece of sage advice offered by a passerby: ‘Didn’t that guy say stick to the path?’ the dual vocalists ponder - a tidy metaphor for the chirpy alt-rock route they’ve been steadfastly following ever since that first record perhaps?   

[legguitar]

Saa - Your Sword Is Your Silence

Here’s some hotly anticipated new music from the ambient electronic coupling of Asher Levitas (of London-based Old Apparatus) and Norwegian vocalist Linn Carin Dirdal, aka Saa. Following on from a handful of buzz-building Soundcloud teasers earlier in the year, Your Sword Is Your Silence, taken from their eponymous debut EP, out July 8 on Left Blank, sounds like Jessie Ware fronting Cocteau Twins, with Dirdal almost imploring her own falsetto to stop being so damn hysterical on the sort-of chorus, as the sparse mix throbs and rotates. It’s all very stylish and evocative despite not really going anywhere, and is as richly organic and steeped in melancholy as the choppy expanse of North Sea that physically divides the pair. 

Read in Snipe

[legguitar]

Wreckmeister Harmonies - You've Always Meant So Much to Me

The ten or so minutes of deep, atmospheric drone streaming above is but a quarter of a longer piece of music composed by JR Robinson, aka Wrekmeister Harmonies, to accompany a film. It’s a heavy, heavy ride. The film in question ‘was shot in decimated Detroit locations, the desert of Joshua Tree and decaying forests of Tasmania’ and listening to the way this cut shifts shape and focus halfway through with staggering force, you can kind of predict the position of the visual edits. A bygone live performance of the track in its 38-minute entirety, recorded at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2012, and featuring members of Leviathan and Anatomy of Habit, amongst others, sounds like a mouth-watering, if intense proposition.

You’ve Always Meant So Much to Me is out digitally now and available physically June 10 through Thrill Jockey.

Read in Snipe

[legguitar]

Kat Kong - Wolf Baby

The adaptation and softening of the moniker of a tragically misunderstood fictional primate corresponds neatly with the music of new LA four-piece Kat Kong.  Wolf Baby, from their eponymous debut EP, available here, evokes visions of Yeah Yeah Yeahs' very first rehearsal in a cramped and stale New York practice space and has a light and bouncy air; the rest of the EP adheres more closely to the post-punk tag they clearly identify themselves with though they neatly sidestep a lot of the dourness associated with that genre via a very West Coast sense of fun and heaps of cartoonish attitude (which is meant as a compliment by the way).

[legguitar]

Takako Minekawa & Dustin Wong - Party on a Floating Cake

Virtuoso guitarist and former Ponytail and Ecstatic Sunshine man Dustin Wong has just released an album with Japanese artist Takako Minekawa (the latter’s first in 13 years): Toropical Circle is available digitally now, through Plancha.  

Streaming above is a track from the album, a mix of Wong’s trademark clean and intricate guitar lines and effortless rhythms, Minekawa’s ethereal, piercing vocals and some high-pitched synth squelches. It threatens to morph into something else entirely towards the end before cruelly reaching its conclusion, leaving us with a host of unanswered questions.

Read in Snipe

[legguitar]

Coloured Clocks - Maze

Ok so it’s a bit all over the place this record, but peaking out from behind the slightly out of sync instrumentation like glorious sunshine from behind an angry looking raincloud are some real songwriting chops, smothered in a luxurious psychedelic butter.  What we know thus far:  Coloured Clocks is 26 year-old James Wallace from Melbourne.  He’s currently working on his third long-player, tentatively entitled All Is Round.  Maze, streaming below, is taken from his most recent effort, Nectarine (2013), available as a free download here.

[legguitar]

Polytype - Cyclone

Here’s a cool little track from a new five-piece from Utah called Polytype. It’s a case of ‘band name signals content’ – all glitchy and Alt-J like in its stuttering rhythms. There’s a full length due in the summer, entitled Basic//Complex – feel the aesthetic reverberating – and not much more to go on currently, but definitely worth penciling in to the ‘bands to watch out for’ jotter.

Read in Snipe