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…
Odd pop composer Auclair’s latest EP Semaphore was apparently influenced by “polyphonic singing, psychedelia, colour, patterns and astronomy” and fittingly the first cut to be launched from it, Mersea Mersea Me, is a delirious reconnaissance mission into the deeper spaces of synth pop music. Micachu and the Shapes drummer Marc Pell dons his production hat on this EP and typically boosts Auclair’s syncopated weirdness thanks to some hypnotic, spiral-arm beat construction.
Despite weathering a few critical knocks over the years, The Drums are back as a duo and seemingly angrier than ever. This new incarnation say they’ve “left the beach searching for higher ground, always searching for hope” and their latest single I Can’t Pretend, while still being chock with hummable hooks, proves a brooding, overcast guitar anthem that co-opts Pixies’ Where Is My Mind into its core.
Gothenburg lo-fi dream-pop exporters School’s new single SoLong sounds like the adolescent yearnings of Beach Fossils hankering for the age when Pete Hook’s huge, plangent basslines still ruled the indie earth.
Aussie multi-instrumentalist El May returns with her sophomore album The Other Person Is You this September and if the understated but propulsive steel-drum infused gem I Played A Role is anything to go by, it’ll certainly get heads turning… and possibly bobbing.
Irish lo-fi folk duo The Lost Brothers have enlisted Bill Ryder-Jones to produce their forthcoming album, New Songs Of Dawn And Dust, a written-on-the-road LP that’ll feature such dusky delights as Gold And Silver, on which you can detect the glowing, benevolent face of John Martyn looking down at the duo from among the stars.
