At the risk of enraging classical guitarists everywhere, however, I will venture that there are limitations to what you can achieve as a solo acoustic guitarist playing entirely instrumental songs.  Not that his recorded stuff was bad by any means, just that my concentration span didn’t always bear up that well over long periods.  For some reason, what was engrossing live, didn’t have quite as much of a hold on me when recorded.

This, however, for previous fans and new, is the kind of record to approach without any preconceptions, because it is entirely different in flavour from previous work.  The reason is simple: it is an album sprinkled liberally with guest appearances, both vocal and instrumental, which makes it sound almost like an entirely new artist at work.  And given the album is apparently about friends from the last twenty years or so of Hubbert’s life I suppose it makes good sense for it to be recorded in collaboration with others.

Despite the changing voices, the constant presence of the acoustic guitar, plucked as ever with a kind of weighty seriousness, gives the record a very unified feel.  Even when the vocalists change, the sense of unity is maintained.  There is also a surprisingly similar feel to the song performed with Emma Pollock and Rafe Fitzpatrick, Half Light, and that sung by Marion Kenny and Hanna Tuulikki, Sunbeam Melts the Hour.

The latter in particular is absolutely bloody gorgeous, and I think the peculiar character of Tuulikki’s voice in one song seems to mirror the off-kilter scrape of the violin in the other, lending them the similar character I mentioned before. Sunbeam Melts the Hour also brings us what I think is Hubbert’s most arresting guitar performance of the album too, and one that is very different to the rest of the album, and downright oriental in style.

The fact that these guest performances are stitched together with more familiar RM Hubbert instrumentals is also an important factor.  Had he simply presented an entire record of collaborations it would have been in danger of coming across as a compilation, it would have taken the emphasis just a little too much from Hubbert himself, and would (at risk of being a smart-arse here) have risked coming across just a little close too much like a ‘look at my celebrity* friends’ statement, dangerously close to the manner of Elton John.

I know I’m being facetious there, but hopefully it doesn’t mask the point I was genuinely trying to make.  For all the collaborations, Hubbert still needed to make this his album, and beyond the distinctive character of his guitar playing, the regular interspersal of songs entirely his own help give this a framework into which the collaborative songs are assembled, rather than allowing them to overwhelm the whole enterprise.

The other thing I really noticed about this record was the sheer seriousness of it.  Not that it’s no fun to listen to, but the combination of precise notes, and the rolling crescendoes of picked guitar (I am sure there is a technical term for this shit, I just don’t know it) have a similarly portentous feel to some of Josh T. Pearson’s playing.  In fact opener We Radioed is strongly reminiscent of the phenomenal opening track on Pearson’s own record, and whilst clearly no copy, a similar and similarly impressive effect is nonetheless achieved.

I’ve used the term impressive here, and I think I should make it clear how it is meant.  I do not mean in in a condescending ‘oh, jolly well done’ sort of way, more to say that the music makes a really strong impression on you.  Time and again I find myself listening to this album and stopping to just absorb the impact of it, not in a deer in headlights way, just stopping to allow the impressions of the music to be absorbed uninterrupted by anything else.

And if that sounds like a high compliment, it is meant to be.  This is bloody brilliant.

RM Hubbert – Sunbeam Melts the Hour

RM Hubbert – Sandwalks

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Chemikal Underground

*Yes, I know, believe me I use that term in the loosest possible sense.

Anyhow, at the risk of repeating a little bit too much of this week’s podcast, these guys have been described in a few places, somewhat tenuously, as an Edinburgh band.  It’s a nice thought, but while they did indeed emerge, to the best of my knowledge, from the Edinburgh College of Art, I think they’re now based in London and have released their debut album on a French label, so I think it’s a bit of a stretch to refer to them as an Edinburgh band in any meaningful sense.

Add to that the fact their latest tour includes dates in Nottingham and fucking Norwich, but not Edinburgh, and I think we can say pretty conclusively that the band have moved on.  Which is a shame, because they’re very good, and given I had to miss their recent Sneaky Pete’s appearance I would really like to see them live again.

Funnily enough, I actually interviewed these guys at Homegame a couple of years ago, but an IT disaster meant that I couldn’t actually publish anything worthy of the name, unfortunately.  They were interesting people to talk to though, very thoughtful and considered, and they seemed remarkably focussed and together for a bunch of musicians.

Since then, when their first two singles made such a splash, they’ve been so very quiet that I have to confess I half wondered if they might have been stuttering a little, but it appears that this is very much not the case, as their debut album was released last week, and it’s bloody ace.

The most obvious comparison to the Djangos’ sound would be The Bees, who were briefly huge about seven or eight years ago, with a similar brand of rhythmic pop music which seemed to draw its influences from all over the place.  Speaking to the band during the Amazing Self-deleting Interview, I remember them referring to this as one of the great things about the internet era – the fact that bands no longer needed to draw their influences from such narrow fields, as absolutely anything and everything was out there waiting to be explored and absorbed.

From all these influences, Django Django make what is indisputably best described in no more a convoluted way than ‘pop music’.  As experimental as some of the sounds are, the result has a relentlessly danceable rhythm, and a sense of energetic playfulness which is impossible to ignore.

Interestingly enough, whilst they’ve included all four songs from their previous double A-side 7″s, all four songs have been relegated to the second half of the album, as if to make the statement that after a year or two of relative quiet, they are not just returning to flog the last gasps of credit from relatively old material, which I think is a good decision.

Having done that, however, I would suggest that they have slightly fallen into the trap of packing the album with pop songs, somewhat at the expense of the feel of the record as a whole. Whilst it’s good to release double A-side singles, rather than implying that really only one of the songs is worthwhile and the other will do, this approach doesn’t work as well on an album.

If I had a criticism of this it would be that every song on it sounds like an A-side, so by the end of the record it becomes a little wearying, and I think it could have done with a couple of more marked changes in pace, be they an instrumental here and there, or something a little more dreamy or melancholic, just to break the atmosphere a little and offset the relentless cheerfulness of the rest of the music.  Recent single Waveforms comes closest to fulfilling this function, but I don’t personally find the change quite significant enough to really break the mood and get me ready for the second half of the album.

Nevertheless, this is a highly enjoyable album of joyful, mischievous pop songs and very welcome return from one of the few bands around who actually make me feel like dancing. Dancing badly, I’ll grant you, but that’s still a significant achievement for a sulky old stick in the mud like myself.

Django Django – Storm

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Rough Trade

This is their third album, and despite a subtle shift evident in their second, represents by far the most decisive move yet away from the walls of squalling guitars which played such a part in the making of their name.

They have adjusted from a devastating combination of heart-rending vocal and relentless crescendoes of giddying racket, to something which you might perhaps describe as being more closely related to the hypnotic thrum of someone like Lower Dens, not that I’d directly compare the two, exactly. With the synths they’ve added to their sound there are actually moments which border on Depeche Mode as well, although I am sure that if I knew more about that kind of music I could make a more appropriate comparison.

Despite the change of pace, if one thing remains the same, it’s the quasi-spiritual feel to the Twilight Sad’s music.  The very first time I ever saw them, back at Bannerman’s of all places, years ago, I remember thinking that singer James Graham seemed to be twitching and howling his way through a particularly disturbing religious vision.  A similar feeling permeates No-one Can Ever Know, but it is more trance-like and a little less like a demonic possession.

Pre-release songs like Kill it in the Morning and the phenomenal Sick still stand out, but the rest of it is still strong, with perhaps my favourite beyond these two being Another Bed, which I chose for this week’s podcast. The fact that this song comes late in the album shows once again that these lads, for all they do write pop songs, still clearly put together whole albums rather than front-loading a couple of crowd-pleasers and making up the rest with whatever else they had lying around, as has been happening a lot recently.

Having seen them recently at the Bongo Club, I must confess that I still find a lot of their most thrilling material comes from their first album.  Since then they’ve released two more records, including this one, and both have contained songs I have loved, and a few to which I have never really warmed, I have to confess.

Again in this case, there are a couple of songs here and there which, whilst they are by no means bad, don’t quite thrill me as much as they might.  But then, some of this is just fucking great, and if I recall it was the lure of a handful of favourites which pulled me slowly into their debut album as well, so I will be sure and give this record the time it needs to sink in properly.

The Twilight Sad – Sick

The Twilight Sad – Another Bed

Website | More mp3s | Buy direct from the band

You see, when people get an almighty slagging I automatically end up pulling for them a little even if, as in this case, that kind of means pulling against myself.  And to be fair, Del Rey has received some almighty slaggings both from anyone with any sense at all as well as, a little less enjoyably, from quite a few people with none.  I don’t mind people disliking almost anything about her, or indeed saying so, but some of it has been pretty cruel and delivered in pretty significant quantities.

So there was a part of me who sort of hoped this might end up being really good, just to stick two fingers up to everyone who had been slagging her off.  Yes, including me.

It’s not though, it’s really, really bad.  In fact it looks an awful lot like her label decided to capitalise on her sudden surge in fame and get the damn thing out as soon as possible before it went away.  They have displayed a total lack of confidence in her ability, in other words.  Apart from the timing, what suggests this might be the case is the utterly one-dimensional pop by numbers production applied to most of these tunes.

The singles – the songs which were ready and planned for – have a distinct and well-executed style to them.  The Lana Del Rey Show may have pissed me off, but I will quite happily confess to thinking those are both pretty good pop songs, delivered with character and style.  Listening to the album, they are pretty much the only ones with this kind of fully-developed character to them.

She described herself, I believe, as a gangster Nancy Sinatra, and Blue Jeans and Video Games bear that out quite well.  They manage an odd combination of sultry and vulnerable.  Now, they may also display the rather more worryingly submissive side of her caricature – the side which seems to imply no self-esteem whatsoever – but the retro-fetishist crooner mixed with the pouty sex kitten and obedient, doe-eyed girl next door was a definite and coherent image, both for her and for her music.  It annoyed me personally, but in a crucial way it worked; it was pretty well-developed and people bought into it.

That style has either been abandoned for the rest of the album, or the production team simply didn’t have the time or the courage to work it out properly.  So presumably either through a lack of time, or in a desperate play to capture the absolute maximum proportion of the mainstream market while they had the chance, she and her label have delivered a colossally tedious record of mid-level, by the numbers pop dross of the sort similar dead behind the eyes, scrabbling ingenues sing karaoke alongside on the X-Factor.

National Anthem might be one of the worst songs I’ve subjected myself to in a long time. It’s a bit depressing actually, I kind of like being proved wrong, and I thought she had a chance of doing just that.  But whether she was always a mainstream pop act who accidentally crossed over into something more interesting with a couple of songs, or whether she never really had any talent to begin with, just a desperate craving to be famous, this is still a flaccid travesty of an album.

If they had retained the courage of their convictions and released an album true to the original style of the wounded barroom seductress then this might conceivably have ended up being interesting. It might have even ended with me eating my words.  As it is it is so utterly middle of the road I can’t even hate it – it would seem cruel to hate something this crap.  What it does though is demonstrate decisively that we never need to mention Lana Del Rey ever again and can safely put this tawdry little episode in our collective musical history behind us once and for all.

Lana Del Rey – Blue Jeans

Lana Del Rey – National Anthem

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Amazon

Most bands who use these atmospheric, lo-fi productions methods do so to produce music which is raw and aggressive, daring you to tease the tune out of the static if you have the stamina.  Now Wakes the Sea, on the other hand, for all they have a couple of upbeat guitar pop numbers like the brilliant Seven Apples, use the muffled fuzz of the recording to create a gorgeously intimate feeling around their slow, pained songs.  It feels like a fireside confessional half the time, but the occasional bursts into full band beef and drifts into what borders on whimsy with songs like Subside make sure you don’t just get drowned in swamp of self-examination.

If the barely-structured ambient daze of The Fire on Hold pulls Fluoxetine Morning in one direction, and Seven Apples pulls it in another, what these songs chiefly serve to do is bookend the emotional range of the album.  Fluoxetine is an anti-depressant, and those two songs seem to express the barely-conscious narcotic daze at one end of the spectrum, and the bursts of determination at the other end, but it treats them like struggling insects who will never escape the spider’s web – one still fighting to get out, and the other on the very cusp of giving up altogether.

I think a couple of things make this stand out for me.  Firstly, on a purely technical level, the acoustic guitar, brief glimmers of noise and occasional use of things like drums cut through the fug of the downbeat, muffled body of the instrumentation, meaning this is a long way from just being a depressing dirge of an album, and never feels one-paced.

Then, in terms of emotional connection, there is something about the vocal delivery which is absolutely gorgeous.  It’s slow, barely even a singing voice half the time, and delivered with near perfect ambiguity between confidence and indifference.  It’s not an intimidated, halting delivery, but at the same time it doesn’t seem to presume that you give a shit. The depression hinted at in both the album and the song titles, whilst it seems present throughout the record, doesn’t feel like something which drags it down.

So, treading a lot of very fine lines indeed, this has ended up being an absolutely fantastic record.  For all the noise and ambience employed, it is still an album defined by its songs, and for all the morose themes explored it still feels like an album defined warmth and caring, and by its relationship with others, rather than just itself.

Now Wakes the Sea – Propranolol

Now Wakes the Sea – Seven Apples

Download or buy CD from Bandcamp.

It’s hard to resist the idea that somewhere round the corner from you there exists a collection of talented fuckers making amazing music entirely out of the view of the world’s music chatterati, so despite the fact that this lot are clearly far more from Newcastle than they are from Edinburgh, I will confess I felt just that little bit more curious when opening this email than when opening many others.  Not least it’s unusual to hear about a band from Edinburgh who no-one’s told me about already.  Even if *cough* they’re really from Newcastle.

The other thing this lot have managed, which is really rather funny, is to make a total hypocrisy of my recent post descrying remixes. I know I joke about it, but this is where the local nepotism possibly did come into play after all.  Generally, finding sentences like ‘here is our amazing song and here is a remix of it’ sends me straight to the delete button, but in this case the combination of Shift-Static being a local band, of the email being nicely worded and the remix being attributed to Waskerley Way, who are a band I know and like, meant that I felt I really should listen.

And if they are reading, the poor fuckers in Shift-Static are probably wondering why I’ve got to the fourth paragraph of a writeup of their music without mentioning the slightest thing about it.  I apologise for this, but I suppose I just wanted to give you some sort of impression of what surfing my inbox every day is actually like.  Things get deleted so fast that even I myself am fascinated by what it is that nudges me to listen more closely to something.

Anyhow, now that I have (apologies to the band) finally got round to discussing the music, it’s not a thousand mile away from the LeThug stuff I wrote about last week.  It’s definitely electronic pop music, although there is perhaps a little more shimmering than shoegaze going on here.  In fact, for all Il-1 is glitchy and uncertain, by the time the second song – Thanks, Thugs -  kicks in, we are into the kind of territory which Goldfrapp and The Pet Shop Boys managed to straddle so successfully: that particular kind of electronic music which, whilst I assume it will please its core audience of electronic pop fans, will also thrill conservative and relatively narrow-minded indie kids like myself.

The remix mention came about because the band themselves highlighted both the original version of Sky Burial as well as the aforementioned remix of the same song, both of which take centre stage here as a one-two in the middle of the EP.

I’ll admit that the clean, clear female vocal delivery of the original, for all it is lovely, strays a little too far into the polished pop world for my own personal taste.  Not that far, because I still really like the song, but perhaps a little further than anything I am likely to end up truly loving.

The Waskerley Way remix, however, for all it doesn’t do much, just seems to add both enough haze and enough heft to get me to really love what really is a simple, excellent song.  By this point Saint Etienne are strongly evoked, or possibly even the briefly incredible Dubstar, and I find myself looking back wistfully to that period in the mid-nineties when I first started to explore electronic music.  This has a lot in common with a lot of the things I first took a chance on when trying to expand my listening palette from indie to broader sounds, back when I was a teenager.  Yes, it was that long ago.  Fuck off.

So whether they’re from Newcastle or Edinburgh, whether you’d call them electro-pop (shudder) or alternative-indie-elec.. oh alright, I’ll stop now.  Whatever you reckon this stuff is, it’s very, very good.  When the band got in touch their only sales patter was “I really think its in your ballpark”.  And they were right, it really is.

Shift-Static – Sky Burial (Waskerley Way Remix)

Download for free from Bandcamp

I think he was a little nervous about how people would react to it, and in general I think Shaw's relationship with how people react to his music is a funny one.

However much I enjoyed his performance, there was nothing I could say which would persuade him that he wasn't shit.  And when he introduced 10,000 Sentinels he awkwardly added that it was a 'crowd pleaser' in a way that implied that he had difficulty actually believing people who get excited about his stuff. It's not that I think he wants to be disliked of course, but I do get the impression that if there is one side of the artistic deal with the audience that most discomfits him it is the tacit courting of praise.

Consequently, the noise he mentioned seems more a product of this kind of awkwardness rather than a particular stylistic contrivance, which means that for all there are times when it isn't all that pretty to listen to, it is never as jarring or intrusive as this kind of thing can be.  In fact it fits as naturally and comfortably into the music as the acoustic guitar and piano with which you might more normally associate this kind of internal monologue.

And that seems to be pretty much what this album is: a sort of stumbling, but insistent internal monologue - a sort of stream of consciousness, mixed with a large element of both mea culpa and self-administered pep talk. It's music you have to meet halfway, for sure, and won't just grab you and announce itself unless you yourself make the first steps, but it is an utterly gorgeous record if you pay it some time.

Creaking doors and scraped forks, and self-analytical subject matter could make for something rather uncomfortable, or potentially self-indulgent, but the music is so slow and understated that you feel more lulled into it than forced.  The gentle delivery also diffuses any real sense of self-indulgence, as Shaw seems more weary than angst-ridden, and doesn't sing as if he requires your exculpation. It feels more like a post-catharsis album than one which in and of itself is required to free the singer from anything in particular, and that makes it warm, approachable and a really lovely listen.

Benjamin Shaw - How to Test the Depth of a Well

Website | More mp3s | Buy from Audio Antihero

They tag themselves as drone on their Soundcloud page, and the sound is dominated by a thrumming, rhythmic buzz, but there are strong elements of experimental electronic pop in here as well, a lot of it is heavily dependent on instrumental textures and it’s almost dancey in places.  Almost.

In Your Head Be It, the EP they have up on Soundcloud, starts with Down, full of quite abrasively glitchy clicks and squeaks.  For someone with my particular taste in music – someone who dabbles in this kind of stuff, but isn’t really particularly familiar with or knowledgeable about it – I was wavering a little at the beginning, I have to confess.

Once that song slowly fitted into context as it gave way to the much more shoegazey Lux I settled a little.  ClydeCoastBeachPlace which follows is altogether more dreamy and ambient, and helps mark out the boundaries of what is an impressively varied EP, particularly considering that there is little sign this is anything other than a series of demos.

In some ways this is like a heavier, denser cousin of the Japanese War Effort, more akin to something like Seefeel perhaps.  It’s hard to get an emotional handle on, given that the lyrics are always so buried you really can’t make out a bloody thing.  Musically though, there is a lot, and the emotional pitch of the music itself drifts from comfort to anxiety, with the latter particularly embodied in the relentless paranoia of 3rd Lanark (a song title of which I think the aforementioned Japanese War Effort would approve greatly).

Most of the songs are available for free download from Soundcloud, and presumably also from the widget below, and I strongly recommend getting hold of them.  I know nothing about this band at all, and their introductory email was cursory to say the least, but this is really, really good.

The first of those I’m going to be discussing is Smackvan, who formerly released with the excellent but now sadly defunct Benbecula Records.

I’ve not been particularly prompt about reviewing this album, I have to confess, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm.  It may be downbeat and low key, but even at the first listen I really enjoyed this album.

It sounds very much like a bedroom recording, but then again it’s a bedroom sound delivered in the style of a late night conversation, so the production really.  It does drift intriguingly though, with the lo-fi growly guitars and rattly drums being superseded at times by something smoother.  It’s almost as if the late night conversation I mentioned had moved from sharing a couple of cans in a bedsit to sharing a whisky in a dark Victorian living room. This contrast shows up most noticeably in the development from awkward opener 4am to the lush and lovely Black Eyes.

It’s an odd stylistic shift, and one you don’t see too often, but it works very well.  On an emotional level it seems to imply that the feelings being expressed are well-contained, resigned on some occasions and raw and bitter on others, which seems to fit well with the emotional range of the songs themselves.

For an album like this the challenge always seems to be to retain the attention for the full length of the record, but this is relatively short and the aforementioned shifts in mood, as well as timely interruptions by the likes of the wonderful instrumental song Cello keep my attention comfortably. I know people like me taking ages to review it is partly to blame, but as Scottish releases and Scottish bands go Smackvan and Sound in Space seem to really be quite criminally underrated by the musically inclined population around here.

Smackvan – 4am

Smackvan – Black Eyes

Website | Buy from Norman Records

*Time of writing, not time of release, obviously!

01.Easter – Somethin’ American This might be the first time such an unknown song by such an unknown band has ever been given top spot on any of my end of year lists, but they were absolutely brilliant live when they played up here in September, and this song is just fantastic, as are the other two songs on their Soundcloud page.  It’s less lo-fi than a lot of the DIY stuff I’ve listened to this year, and the squalling solos which tease Easter’s songs to an end evoke loads of old school US indie music.  This gives quite tight pop songs a loose, expressive, emotive finale and when they get going live these bits really are amazing.

02.Crystal Swells – Patent Trolls This is another absolute peach of a song which went straight from a PR email to the very front of my brain for the entire year.  I had this on tape in the van for months, and I go back to it again and again.  This one is probably more menacing, compared to the reckless pace of the rest of the album, but that opening riff and the crescendo to which the song builds are just absolutely fucking blinding.

03.Ringo Deathstarr – Do It Every Time Alright, this is the highest-placed pure pop song on this list.  A simple guitar rhythm and a simple tune, delivered with plenty of pace and energy.  This is one to leap around to, pure and simple, and just about the best one of its kind this year.

04.The Low Anthem – Boeing 737 I played this on the podcast last week and struggled to introduce it then, as I probably will now. Firstly, I have hardly heard anyone sing anything about the twin towers attacks without sounding just a little bit forced and uncomfortable when doing so, but this manages it with some aplomb.  And then to have that kind of subject matter twinned with such and incredibly rousing song is an odd and absolutely brilliant juxtaposition.

05.Earth Girl Helen Brown – Hit After Hit This was one of those ‘what the fuck am I even listening to?’ moments, the first time I heard it. It’s old fashioned music, what I can only really describe in my cultural ignorance as soda-stream pop, and it’s not that unusual exactly, there’s just something weird about it.  It’s a bit unsettling, a bit out of focus somehow, and at the same time absolutely brilliant.

06.Josh T Pearson – Thou Art Loosed The solo album may not hark back to Lift to Experience all that much, but this song, the first on the album, seems to have just enough of that shimmering texture to link the two eras of Josh T. Pearson’s music together.  And that repeated “I’m off to save the world” seems to rather sadly presage the tales of personal failure which make this album so uncomfortably compelling.

08.Weird Era – Garage Honeymoon A muffled, growly mess, but it’s got such momentum and drive that I can’t stop listening to it.  It’s rough, muffled, growly shoegazey guitar stuff with a great riff.

07.Jonnie Common – Photosynth Alright, it’s possible I might have included this when it was a Down the Tiny Steps song, so including it again seems like a bit of a cheat.  Doesn’t matter though, this is pop brilliance.  And the video was shot in our back garden too!

09.Timber Timbre – Woman Is that seriously a sax on there?  Why yes, yes indeed it is, and it’s brilliant.  This is one of the biggest songs on the album and one of the most surprising too, given the relatively extravagant instrumentation.

10.Milk Maid – Back Of Your Knees I am absolutely delighted with the band’s Toad Session recordings, not least because I was so apprehensive about the actual recording process.  This might be my album highlight, as much for its more raucous live incarnation as this excellent version.

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