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…
Garage-crashing young gun Luke Rathborne has been tweaking the antenna of the likes of The Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr and folk-freak Devendra Banhart, and it’s no wonder, as you’ll discover via the fruity, two-minute power-chord outbreak of Why. The track’s hormonal overdrive coupled with Rathborne’s sweetly deranged way with a melody brings to mind Brit 70s art-punk revivalists Charlie Boyeur And The Voyeurs hot-boxing a runaway mustang with Ty Segall.
“Nobody fucking cares”, gargles the icily detached voice of Mickey Church, lead singer of California spooky-pop trio White Arrows, as if already whirling down the great digital plug-hole of indie-rock obscurity. Church penned the existential-crisis-turned-synth-pop-meditation Nobody Cares after reflecting on “living in a self-obsessed society in a world that moves so fast”. In the case of this hauntingly melodic humdinger, Church’s pain is most definitely our gain.
Historically known for its spiked cocktails of sunshine pop and desert-dwelling psychedelia, the west-coast scene has rarely sounded so, well, resolutely British, thanks to ex-frontman of Rooney Taylor Locke‘s stomp-box-sustained salute to The Beatles’ Come Together that is Call Me Kuchu.
Ordinarily, it takes at least three or four people to make sounds as richly intense, inscrutable and hypnotic as the ones that flare up in the near three-minute delirium of Black Window, but Irish noiseniks The Princess do it with just two. By way of their hammering rhythms and catch-a-breath riffs, the duo seem to trip over themselves trying to prove they’re the most intoxicating outfit in rock right now.
Though they’ve been on an extended break of seven years, little has changed in the camp of Icelandic mood rockers Bang Gang, as proven by the pulsating, Joy Division-worshipping Out Of Horizon.
