Sorting through the week’s new singles and songs that have surfaced online over the last seven days, Jamie Skey (@jamie_skey) presents five songs you need to hear this week…
Similarly to Kendall’s best-loved synth seducers, Wild Beasts, Baltimore experimental folk quartet Lower Dens traded in their more arty idiosyncrasies for a darker yet more accessible approach to song craft. The result is the hauntingly infectious Ondine, a shadowy breeze of dream-projection vocals, elastic bass and taut guitar figures.
The fuzzy tang of grunge seems to have been zinging through the airwaves since the release of the disquieting new Kurt Cobain biopic, Montage Of Heck, a coincidence all-girl power-rock trio The Kut are taking full advantage of with their latest cut Bad Man. There’s a slice of angst-offloading gutter rock that’s a kissing cousin of Hole, but The Kut’s scuzz-covered family tree also stretches further back to the garage rampages of The Stooges.
Synth-shifting supercrew Cotton Claw are one of France’s more sophisticated shippers of blissed-out electro vibes, and Grainy is a first-class delivery of their effervescently fluid grooves.
Much of the shoegaze explosion of the 80s was a reaction to the grandstanding of the era’s stadium hijackers, a la U2. Yet Canadian quintet Slow Down Molasses appease both camps, finding a happy medium as they do between Bono and cos delay-shimmer histrionics and the cinematic haze of Slowdive on Home.
Reporters‘ sub-three-minute rash of thrashed chords, Only Noise, is a gritty and passionate dispatch from music’s frontline.
