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…
Recently a number of blogs have been reverberating with intimate-soul sounds of newly emerging indie-pop misfit Natalie McCool. She peddles meditative musical think-spaces that are informed by the likes of Cocteau Twins or St Vincent and from the outset, Pins quickly buries itself under your skin with its mechanically brushed drums and jazz-inflected pangs of lovesick fragility.
Liverpudlian post-hardcore quartet FOES cultivate steel-wool-scoured riffs as majestic and impressively sculpted as their collection of beards. Pleasingly, as on Rival Thrones, they undercut all the corrosive power chords and prog-ish tangents with delicate pop hooks that equate them with other British thinking-man’s rock bands like the much-missed Manc alt-rockers Oceansize, and Amplifier.
Former frontman of London doom-folk outfit Burning Beard, John Joseph Brill is the kind of crestfallen singer-songwriter that goes toe-to-toe with his inner demons in a similar fashion to The Bad Seeds or The National. Muscle & Bone is a whisky-soaked, stately-paced twilight anthem perfectly calibrated for those long, lonesome journeys home.
Chilean masters of the monochord, Follakzoid, have resurfaced from their psychedelic Andean lair with Electric, the first taste from their forthcoming follow up to 2013’s cosmos-probing epic II, III. Every bit as trance-inducing as their previous material, the 11-minute-plus space sorcery of Electric bewilders as much as it bewitches thanks to its strong gravitational pull of electromagnetic guitars and tribal drum patterns.
Bristol-by-way-of-Mauritius-and-Japan acid-rockers Zun Zun Egui have remerged after a four-year break wielding a much darker, mechanistic sound prompted by frontman Kushal Gaya’s obsession over Depeche Mode’s Violator and Queens Of The Stoneage-shaped riffs. I Want You To Know is a grinding desert trip of atonal guitar grunts and Gaya’s lustily crooned incantations.
