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…
While Ryley Walker‘s outpourings on social media may at times be laced with an acerbic wit (he recently tweeted: “Why do acoustic guitarists have to play next to a fucking lamp on stage so much?”), his pastoral neo-folk hymnals paint more mellow pictures, like on the sun-through-boughs lilt of Primrose Green, which is bathed in a John Martyn-circa The Tumbler-like glow.
South-Wales mood duo Man Without Country build bridges between the dreamscapes of M83 and Sigur Ros, so appropriately enough their debut album Foe was mixed by Ken Thomas, who has previously worked with both of those bands. The band’s latest transmission, Laws Of Motion, sees the pair ramp up their shoegaze-swathed textures and throbbing, 80s-worship beats to pleasure-centre-flooding effect.
While Russian shoegazers Pinkshinyultrablast ready themselves for the release of their forthcoming LP Everything Else Matters, (released on 26 January), the mathy five-piece have dropped a remix of Holy forest, which in the course of four-and-a-half minutes transforms from a submerged-in-the-womb-like state to a synth-frosted, dance floor-initiating finale.
On his stately new single, Nemesis, a Leonard Cohen-like rumination on an affair that ended with the singer sleeping rough on the Parisian boulevard where his girlfriend once lived, Benjamin Clementine is a bright beacon of redemption and beauty that makes other singer-songwriters seem like pale candles by comparison.
Gothic new wave and post-punk meet in a head-on collision on Viet Cong’s Silhouettes, an angular taster of their highly anticipated self-titled debut album, out this month.
