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…
Though apparently recorded in her bedroom, electronic songstress Zohara‘s second outing Lost trembles like a wind-swept Nordic panorama. This previously unreleased gem, Lost Online, rises and falls with fretful, shivery orchestrations, sounding like Bjork sending smoke signals to Nils Frahm over vast, snowy distances.
While sad-folk fans wait for backwater prince of the dispossessed Bon Iver’s next broken-hearted dispatch, Icelandic singer-songwriter Axel Flovent‘s Forest Fires serves as a poetically-penned picture postcard from the wild-places of the heart, signed and delivered by campfire-lit guitars and snowflake falsetto.
The brand of rock peddled by London duo Panic Island is slick as a Josh Homme quiff and as spangly as The Killers’ pure-Vegas glitz. Their latest single Temples is a well-oiled anthem ready to go shoulder-to-shoulder with rock’n’roll’s high rollers.
Soul-folk magpie Rob Bravery is not afraid of cross-pollinating seemingly disparate styles. On his last single, Knock Out Ginger, the Bristolian blended near-Michael Jackson melodies with fleet-fingered folk filigrees and Massive Attack-like production. Taking us further down his wild, variegated garden path on Me, Myself And The Scurvy Knave, Bravery seems to have spun this particular yarn as if he had the entire Radiohead back-catalogue on one knee, and Where The Wild Things Are on the other.
Currently on tour with Seasick Steve, New Zealand-via-Holland weird-blues trio My Baby serve up acid-fried country stompers that will haunt your dreams for weeks, as on the sleazy, groove-laden Uprising.
