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…
Icelandic synthscape sculptor Tonik Ensemble has ushered in 2015 with the pleasing news of a forthcoming album (out 10 February), called Snapshots. Lead out single Landscapes arrives on our shores courtesy of gusts of soulful synths and icicle-decorated vocals courtesy of Tricky collaborator Ragnhildur Gisladottir. The results sound like the aforementioned Bristolian trip-hopper holidaying amid the glacier-shaped landscapes of Ensemble’s homeland.
Sydney-based power-pop trio DMA are currently unsigned, but it shouldn’t be long before they’re snapped up due to the salt-of-the-earth delivery of irrepressibly melody on songs like Laced, which marches with a Mancunian swagger amid the antipodean rays of psychedelic sunshine.
Taken from his new album, Teaspoon To The Ocean, In Between is the new single from Jib Kidder, New York-based multi-media artist Sean Schuster-Craig. The track is the acid-country-tinged embodiment of the singer’s strivings to understand our dreamworlds, all laced with the cut-up lyrical style of avant-garde literary great Gertrude Stein and the solo work of Lindsay Buckingham.
Some instrumental rock music has in the past been derided for its po-faced explorations into its own navel, so it’s a breath of fresh air to get acquainted with Axes‘ fun, zesty brand of math-rock, which, as evidenced on The One, can barely contain million-miles-per hour bursts of excitement.
On his latest album You’re Dead!, hip-hop experimentalist Flying Lotus took a deep trip into the great beyond, and came back with an exultant mix of jazz-fusion and nocturnal west coast funk. At the album’s core was the meditative Coronus, The Terminator, which, despite the accompanying video’s depiction of a dying man, is actually life-affirming thanks to its warm, spectral grooves.
