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…
Manchester is commonly known for generating bands that conceive music simultaneously heartbreaking and uplifting, and Dom Thomas’s (founder of the brilliant Finders Keepers and Twisted Nerve labels) Whyte Horses fit snugly into their region’s bittersweet mould. Their next single The Snowfalls overflows with gorgeously woozy melodies, tie-dye textures and 80s-laced jangles, the kind of raw materials that could induce a third summer of love, were it not for the fact autumn’s just round the corner.
Springtime Carnivore (AKA Greta Morgan) is readying herself for the release of her technicoloured, self-titled debut LP, produced by The Black Keys, and The Shins enabler Richard Swift. The first song out of the blocks is the buzzing, giddy Sun Went Black, which is something of a misnomer, since the tune emits dazzlingly multicoloured displays of lush, synthesised pop.
Americana music is a typically roots-oriented sound that draws on the rough-hewn tradition of country, rock ‘n’ roll, folk and blues. Philadelphia’s Restorations, as their name implies, preserve their country’s bent for landscape-evoking sounds, but blue-collared country purists they are not, as on Seperate Songs they take the US’s folkloric musical traditions and shove rockets up their arse, thanks to some amped up guitar pyrotechnics, row-Z reaching choruses and gut-busting drums.
Part of the head spinningly creative Anti-Ghost Moon Ray collective, partly steered by no-wave noise guru Gazelle Twin, jangly soul rockers Great Pagans are the reassuringly melodic yang to their aforementioned label mate’s electronic, macabre yin. Happy Now recalls the London-based avant-pop trio The Invisible, but if they had formed in the 1980s at the height of The Smiths’ hysteria.
Axes is an apt title for these London-based math-rock guitar heroes, who use their instruments as if they were going into some kind of planet-quaking battle. Forthcoming single Junior abounds with the kind of high-speed chops that’d neuter most of their ponderous post-rock contemporaries.
