Grizzly Bear – Cheerleader

Normally when an album has been as anticipated as much as Veckatimest has, it inevitably sinks under the weight of expectation. In the case of Grizzly Bear, everything they have done since 2006′s Yellow House has signalled a band nearing their creative peak.

From compilation appearances (David Shrigley’s Worried Noodles) to cover versions (The Crystal’s He Hit Me), internet downloads (Deep Blue Sea) to EPs (Friend), collaborations (Dark Was the Night) to solo projects (Department of Eagles) – the band have been steadily building a reputation as an indie supergroup.

There’s the bassist who doubles as a producer, the drummer who can sing, and distinctively different songwriting talents who were paired against each other like a modern day Lennon and McCartney.

But when two live performances of new material circulated through the blogosphere last summer, Veckatimest rocketed to the top of people’s wishlists for 2009. That it doesn’t disappoint is just one surprise from an album full of them. From the Simon & Garfunkel-like bridge of Southern Point to the understated elegance of closer Foreground, the songs are accessible and structured while still retaining the sprawling prog element of Yellow House, offsetting saccharine pop moments with an otherworldly darkness.

The production’s attention to detail balances neoclassical arrangements, choral harmonies and a guitar sound that’s both gentle and incisive. Together it sounds enormous, delivering a diverse set of songs (despite a thematic thread of strained relationships) that are surprisingly soulful – a sound that led Fleet Foxes lead singer Robin Pecknold to proclaim Veckatimest as the greatest album of the ’00s. There will be no shortage of such hyperbole surrounding this release but if there will be better albums than this in 2009, it will be a great year for music.

Cheerleader can be downloaded for free here.

MySpace

Pre-order

Photo by ahtap, licensed under Creative Commons.

Circlesquare – Hey You Guys

As scruffed electro-pop inspired by comedowns, Songs about Dancing and Drugs simulates that dark Sunday morning tug-of-war between jaded paranoia and the twitching physical urge to keep dancing. This is the third album from Jeremy Shaw, a Canadian living in Berlin, and an outside contender for underground release of the year.

MySpace

Photo by polgaroid, licensed under Creative Commons

Cymbals Eat Guitars – Cold Spring

Why There Are Mountains, the self-released debut from this Staten Island quartet, is an album where every track is a field trip: full of carefully crafted songs that take their time to streamline a post-rock dynamic into something accessible, soothing and gratifying. A pleasant surprise with plenty to absorb.

Buy

MySpace

Photo by darlyfurr, licensed under Creative Commons

John Fairhurst – Obnox Stomp (Remix)

Updating the sound of John Fahey for the 21st century and bringing it to a new audience, Wigan’s John Fairhurst learned to play guitar from an unnamed Indian master, honing his skills in south east Asia for a number of years before bringing his blend of raga and blues back to the UK folk scene. The video for this song (posted below) is well worth checking, if not just for the surrealnes of an ‘I Am Kloot’ poster hanging in the background.

MySpace

Official site

Photo by Miss lu misses LU’s, licensed under Creative Commons

Starfucker – Iaadeedaa

Fun-fuelled dance-pop from Portland’s Badman label: so catchy it had IBM writing a cheque out for use of  “Holly” from their self-titled debut album and so energetic that the group impressed all at SXSW last week. Next month the band will release Jupiter, an EP highlighting their ’80s-inspired live shows, which will contain a cover of Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” (below).

MySpace

Photo by Charlyn W, licensed under Creative Commons

Memory Cassette – Asleep at a Party

Anonymous figure/collective from New Jersey, possibly Philadelphia – all we know is that the listless space pop of Memory Cassette is well worth a place on your playlist, right alongside Ariel Pink, M83 and Ulrich Schnauss. You can download a handful of his/her/their excellent EPs for free here along with a fantastic mixtape of personal favourites.

MySpace

Official blog

Gang Gang Dance interferance…

Emperor X – A Violent Translation of the Concordia Headscarp

Free music! Racing pop songs  sprung from the prolific creativity of a science teacher and reigned in by the touch of some experimental digitisation. This is Chad Matheny, whose collected works (including Blythe Archives Vol II, from which the above track is taken) can be downloaded at his official site.

Photo by  Sweet J (away), licensed under Creative Commons

Virgin Passages – Distance

Shifting from melancholic dissonance to a dreamy, wordless chorus, this six-piece from Staffordshire are as capable of creating short and sweet burst of pop brilliance as they are drifting into unrestrained psyche sequences. Currently touring America, they have a new tour EP, The Is Not The End Of The World Again, which includes a cover of The Beatles’ While My Guitar Gently Weeps.

MySpace

Photo by holgabot, licensed under Creative Commons

Previous posts:

Song of the Day: Au – ‘RR vs. D’

Mix CD: A Divine Proclamation for Finishing the Present Existence

The Best Songs of 2008…So Far

The Phenomenal Handclap Band – Testimony

NewYork’s The Phenomenal Handclap Band (principally Daniel Collás and Sean Marquand) freewheel through half a dozen genres and style on each track while still managing a sultry funk. For their self-titled debut, released in June through Friendly Fire recordings, they’ve drafted in members from bands as diverse as TV on the Radio, The Dap Kings, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Honeycut, making this an act to keep an eye on. HT to The OMCD, who caught their act at SXSW last week.

MySpace

Band blog

Photo by Charlyn W,
licensed under Creative Commons

Yppah – Gumball Machine Weekend

Yppah (‘happy’ backwards) is Joe Corrales Jr, a rock musician turned ambient artist who combines elements of shoegaze, psyche and breakbeats into hypnotic scores that have earned him a spot on the Ninja Tune roster. The above track is from his second album, They Know What Ghost Know, which will be released on 11 May.

MySpace

Pre-order

Photo by Giuntini Jonathan, licensed under Creative Commons

Dressed all in black and padded up like a motorcyclist, MacIntyre
sticks out from anyone else on the near-empty skating rink. Having
lost weight since last year’s A Very British Gangster, a five o’clock
shadow enhances his chiselled features in a way that makes him look
much younger than 42.

He swaggers away from the ice, the blades of his boots boosting his
stature as they clank across the floor. Sweeping into a café that’s
about to shut, he orders two coffees (“It has to be coffee, at all
times of the day and night”) and lands on a seat, his energy barely
contained.

A busy weekend is drawing to a close and MacIntyre is riding the high
of having successfully squeezed in an ice-skating lesson in
preparation for ITV’s new series of Dancing on Ice. He has always been
mad about sports. He boxes, climbs mountains and at one point even
represented Ireland in canoeing. But he balks contemptuously at the
mention of adrenaline.

“That’s just Hollywood-esque pop psychology. Here I am ice skating,
but let me tell you there is no one out there going faster than
they’re capable of than I am and yet there’s no one out there more
fuckin’ padded up than I am. I’ve always had one foot on the brake and
one foot on the accelerator. Whether it’s a war zone or undercover,
it’s a combination of ego, achieving goals, performance, testing
yourself under pressure, and maybe some self-punishment. Certainly
testing, testing, testing myself all the time. I certainly don’t do it
for the adrenaline kick. At all. Not at all. And I never will. Very
few people understand that concept.”

MacIntyre puts this drive down to a mixture of psychosis, attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder, growing up as the middle child, and an
inherited sense of ambition. His father Tom, an Irish writer, walked
out when he was four, leaving his American mother to raise him and his
four siblings in County Kildare. They were a “slightly wacky family”
that stood out in a land where divorce would not be legalised for
another 27 years (“Ireland hadn’t come to terms with even the notion
of family breakdown at that point”). They were a well-read family of
“news junkies”, digesting as many papers as they could and listening
to the BBC World Service every night until two am. This autodidactic
streak led him to grow tired of school. Eventually he gave up
questioning the teachers and just turned up for the exams.

It’s an attitude perfectly embodied in his demeanour. MacIntyre is
intelligent and articulate but quickly grows distracted, flitting from
accommodating warmth to frustration at the conversation’s pace. For
someone who has spent the most significant moments of his life being
other people, it’s difficult to see whatever depth of patience he must
have called upon to assume false identities for years at a time. But
to ask about the possibility of a single moment of doubt is to be
rebuffed in near-disdain. “I’m quite compartmentalised in my approach
to the stories… Post-traumatic stress disorder, on the other hand, is
a genuine concern.” Pushing away the voice recorder, he labours
through each answer as if forced to state the obvious, fidgeting with
the Velcro straps of his elbow pads and eyeing the rink in the
distance. “I have to get back out there. I’ll be damned if I’m going
to let an interview get in the way of this.”

MacIntyre pirouettes. ABBA booms out over the sound system as he
practises his finish, his heels swapping places gracefully. Soon the
rink is cleared for the ‘speed round’ and MacIntyre stays put, ready
to blend in with those here just for fun. At one point he almost
tumbles but catches himself and skates away, his composure barely
rippled. His teenage instructor watches on, knowing to keep his
distance.

Half an hour later and it’s time for another coffee. He’s still a
bundle of exhausted energy but there is something deeper and steelier
there. To carry on for so long regardless of bounties and death
threats, there must be.

“A lot of the security is in your head. I mean I do live a slightly
bizarre life but I normalise it, as we all do. There were times when
it did bother me. The first was in Nottingham after an undercover
investigation there. I remember thinking: ‘fuck…fuck…I’ve got to
freeze my sperm’. Suddenly a very biological need to survive and
produce progeny kicked in.”

That fear, too, has faded away. Married to Ameera De La Rosa, they
have a child together, 20-month-old Tiger Willow, and Allegra, De La
Rosa’s daughter from a previous relationship. With little time to
spend at home, he tries to bring them along on his various
investigative assignments – something he admits is rare for a
journalist. “It’s a shared experience. They get to see the historic
sites while I get to see the down and dirty underworld, which seems a
fair trade off. But with a family, you do have to think about the
danger.” He looks over his shoulder, eyes drawn back to the rink. “My
wife would be more nervous about these things. You have to manage for
that. A lot of threats come in which are really insignificant but she
wouldn’t have the judgement and experience to deal with it. So you
have to filter them out. Over time, living in various safe houses, the
threats dissipate and how you handle them improves.”

There was one moment, however, where it became too much. He had spent
three days in Brixton trying to get mugged on film and when it finally
happened, he broke down on screen. Until that point, it hadn’t been a
particularly eventful investigation but, in the end, he achieved the
result he was looking for – so why did it have such an impact?

“All my collective fears were crystallised in that moment. The emotion
I showed then kind of reflected the emotion I had suppressed in other
jobs. When I go undercover and do dangerous things, I’m unseasonably
optimistic. I take every possibility into account, safety wise, but I
never quite believe it’s going to happen. And that means I can swagger
with all the confidence I need. Because if you are nervous that things
are going to happen, then you wouldn’t be able to carry it off. So
there’s an interesting paradox. My bubble had been pricked and, for
that moment, everything was shaken.” He nods back towards the rink,
not needing to excuse himself one last time. “Sometimes it’s good to
have those blowouts. No harm.”

© Cian Traynor

Donal MacIntyre will perform in the final of Dancing On Ice tonight on ITV.

Local Natives – World News

These guys feel like an exciting find – and I fully expect them to catch plenty of attention during their eight shows this week at SXSW. All the right ingredients are there: soaring singalongs, thumping drums and simply great tunes. If their recent Daytrotter session wasn’t enough evidence that they’ve got a great live presence, check out their take on Simon & Garfunkel’s Cecilia in the video below.

Band blog

MySpace

Official site

Photo by moominsean, licensed under Creative Commons.

Mirrors – Look At Me

Pop-noir from Brighton, of all places, cruises along at a tempo just short of dancefloor pace but idea for the melodramatic posturing of ’80s-fixated style martyrs. John Hughes would be proud.For fans of Depeche Mode, New Order and M83.

MySpace

Photo by moominsean, licensed under Creative Commons.