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…
Nineteen year-old Brightonian Fable has recently teamed up with trip-hop collective Archive and beat-warping brothers Orbital, and has consequently absorbed both parties’ electronic altered states into her entrancing digital dreamworld. The composer’s latest contribution to music, Stranger In My Head, co-written and produced by the aforementioned Archive, plays out like Beth Orton swapping her six string for synthesisers while exploring her darker, more dangerous impulses, resulting in a bit of lyrical masochism: “…stab me before I change”.
Hallucinatory Danish post-punks Shiny Darkly have wired their first musical communique to these shores in the shape of the crusty, intense and misleadingly titled Soft Skin, which bears the sort of rust-coated riffs and nut-crushing drums that sound like they would in fact abrade your epidermis upon listening.
Scottish groove rockers Vukovi are equally as comfortable setting alight dancefloors as firing up a moshpits, as the muscular, body-shifting rock of So Long Gone would bear witness to, with its crafty allusions to the likes of Foals, Incubus, Battles and even Florence Welch.
Danish duo Reptile Youth create modern power ballads that do not require an arched eyebrow to appreciate. Aptly, the structural integrity of the pair’s new single Structures is unshakable, all sky-scraping chorus hollers and piano pounds as solid as iron girders.
Sui generis singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow has shared his new free download When I Leave, a heady expansion of his richly textured last album Post Tropical. Written in transit during numerous festival slots, the song’s dense, introverted R&B throb captures the singer’s adolescent inclination for not being at the centre of attention. Nevertheless, McMorrow points has made it clear here’s a mover and a shaker. “Just because you’re standing in the corner, it doesn’t mean that you don’t love to dance,” he explains. “That’s what When I Leave is about, I guess – dance like no one’s watching.”
