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…
Apparently a regular of Manchester’s karaoke bars – “I always sing Gangsta’s Paradise and also do a decent Tears In Heaven,” he told The Quietus recently – New Zealand psych imp Connan Mockasin has paid his adopted home’s singing haunts the ultimate tribute setting the video for single Do I Make You Shy? in one of them. Crooning awkwardly to the empty club, Mockasin’s peculiar performance of this Prince-on-morphine earworm brings to mind the shabby world of Peter Kay’s Phoenix Nights.
Along with compatriot author Irvine Welsh, ex-Arab Strap frontman Aidan Moffat has dragged the Scottish oral (and aural) tradition down dark, shockingly funny pathways with his mordant, lyricist-meets-novelist’s eye. Clearly a well-qualified guide to his country’s musical and storytelling traditions, Moffat has collected together songs and tales from across the length and breadth of Scotland for a documentary that will be premiered at the close of this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. A sample of this folkloric excursion comes in the form of warm-hearted march Jock McGraw, a ballad about a wounded soldier.
Courtney Love-supporting fuzz-rock duo White Miles have caused tongues to wag thanks to crazy rehearsal-room parties with pole dancers and loud music. Fittingly, their new tune Can’t Stop is fit to burst with distortion-smeared sleaze, featuring a riff as fat as a line cut by Scarface.
Woodpecker beats and dirty synths dry hump on French duo Erotic Market’s I Want To Be Some Booty, a lo-fi finger jab at the fashion world’s strange appetites. Taken from their insouciantly titled forthcoming album Blahblahrians (out May), rarely does electro music make you dance and feel indignant at the same time.
On the strength of his previous, Conor O’Brien-produced single, Monsoon, elusive Irish one-man band I Have A Tribe was hand-picked by Anna Calvi for support duties on her European tour. Calvi and IHAT are a perfect hook up, as the latter’s latest cut Yellow Raincoats is exquisitely restrained, his close-mic-ed vocals quivering with whisper-in-the-ear intimacy.
