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 I’ve picked up more new music in the last year simply by virtue of having the guys from Milk Maid in the house and by finding the YouTube channel belonging to Manchester band Former Bullies than I have by any other means.  And in the video at the top of the page, the two things rather happily coincide.

Weird Era and Easter are two bands you’ve heard me mention here before, and both are bands I was introduced to by the guys from Milk Maid, back when we recorded their Toad Session last April.  I don’t mention Daily Life as much, but I heard about them at the same time – and in fact Luke from Milk Maid plays in the band as well – but the above video for Alabaster is a fucking pop tune and a half.

Both Waiters and Sex Hands, two bands we have been recording with for a Song, by Toad Records release, have videos on the same channel.  Joe (who happens to play in both of those bands) has also had one of his other projects featured recently as well, in the form of the relatively recent upload Kids Gone Wild by Feel Right.

In fact, this whole channel is better than pretty much any blog I’ve read recently for finding new and interesting stuff.  The flat wail and relentless pace of the brilliant new Float Riverer song is bloody awesome, and despite continual support by the likes of The Gentle Invasion up here in Edinburgh, I am ashamed to say that it is only recently that I find myself starting to get into Glasgow/London band Golden Grrrls.

Music commentators and music journalists may worry about their place in the world these days, but this is pretty clear confirmation that the need for good curators will always exist.

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.

My parents introduced me to The Clash and the Dead Kennedys, but I would nevertheless say that I think they probably hate punk.  They listened to The Pogues play London Calling with Joe Strummer and weren’t happy with the amount of guitar-bothering going on.  The first stuff I used to play in the house which I didn’t get directly from their music collection might have been Pearl Jam, and they really weren’t into that either.

I say this not as a sly means of criticising my parents’ taste in music, because given how many of my favourite bands I owe to them that would be ludicrous, but to question where I developed my love for boisterous, abrasive guitar pop.  Had I been alive in England during the punk era I am sure I would have fucking loved it.  Or, potentially, listened to pleasant pop music because it was less scary and then insisted that I loved punk later on, once I realised it was cool.  But hopefully the former.

The Bat’s Pajamas got in touch quite recently and they seem to very much scratch a particular itch I am feeling at the moment, because despite all sorts of jaded PR victim red flags, I really enjoyed the stuff they sent me through.  A bit too much stylised ‘attitude’? Check.  A pretty girl acting all femme fatale in the video?  Check.  And yet, despite these normally reliable signals, the music was very much Not Shit.  Not shit at all.

It’s funny how YouTube is turning into a playlist as much as a video station these days.  I know full well, from experience, how valuable a decent video is, but when people send me promo videos through I tend to open them in one tab and listen to the audio while I do something else in another.

Anyhow, this is all an entirely unrelated ramble, because the reason for this post is that The Bat’s Pajamas sent me through some stuff, I know nothing about the band, and I thought the two tunes they sent me were bloody brilliant.  Much more old school punk as my parents would recognise, and entirely fail to enjoy, than a lot of the retro-inspired stuff I’ve been listening to recently, but nevertheless some first rate short, sharp pop songs.

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!

There are some notable exceptions of course, but this might be the best one yet.  I think.  I’m not sure.  It sets about Christmas music with such gleeful malice that I doubt you can really get away with calling it Christmas music by the end.  You certainly couldn’t play this at dinner.  Or indeed with other people in the house, most of the time.  But it’s fucking awesome.

Recorded without rehearsal in the space of a few hours, and presented on Bandcamp for the price of a donation to East Anglian Children’s Hospices, this takes a raucous shriek and a sawing violin and beats the living shit out of festive tunes for about half an hour in the best style possible.  I reviewed their recent EP a little while back, and this has a similarly joyously over the top approach.

Some is played with a straight face, however.  A couple of the tracks are actually rather lovely violin renditions of traditional carols which, robbed of their annoyingly religious lyrics, are really bloody lovely. Other tracks, however, like Go Tell it on the Mountain, are torn to such shreds and performed with such gusto that you have to assume they really are having a laugh.

Never mind though, this is by far the best Christmas album I have heard.  Fuck Low, this is better.

Sons of Joy – Go Tell it On the Mountain

Generally, music which is inspired by old folk tales (back before Disney, when they were actually worth a pinch of ‘coon shit*) tends towards the apocalyptic hell-stomp of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds at full throttle.  Or perhaps that deranged carnival stomp which merged so comfortably with the passion for Balkan folk which was such a fascination a few years ago.

This, on the other hand, is just spooky.  It’s not threatening or unpleasant at all, but there are times when it really is downright eerie, and it’s a nice take on a familar idea.

Perhaps a little like a lusher, more constructed version of Bon Iver, before he went so utterly shit with his latest album, this has an atmospheric, misty, drowsy feel to it, and soothing vocals which can feel almost like they are singing a lullabye.  Like most lullabies though, that soothing impression can swiftly become a little creepy, as anyone familiar with Ka, the snake from the Jungle Book, will know.

The vocal delivery renders the lyrics somewhat indecipherable, so you are left with impressions – fleeting glimpses of movement and shapes in a fog of questionably benign atmospherics. There are times when that very fog becomes a little all-consuming, and perhaps the atmosphere can dominate at the expense of the actual songs, but for the most part this works really well.

In a Wild Deep – Regarding the Fox and the Wolf

Website | Buy from Bandcamp

*Before anyone gets over-excited, ‘coon shit is an old expression I picked up from my dad, and ‘coon is short for raccoon, not a racist term.  Pull yourselves together, people.

At its best it’s also just… well, reckless, I suppose. The pace, and the deadpan female vocals remind be a little of The Just Joans in some ways, but Joanna Gruesome themselves clatter along like they’re making it up on the spot and fear the whole thing might fall apart if they slow down.  It’s not all like that, but the best bits are!

You can download this whole EP for whatever you choose to pay by going to their Bandcamp page, and I recommend doing so, because it is absolutely full of good bits.  Pantry Girl mightn’t do it for me particularly, but the drumming on Lemonade Grrl is brilliant, the classically-indie riffs of Madison and Candy are terrific.

They seem to be a bit of a fusion between early nineties US indie and mid eighties UK indie actually, with the choruses reminding me of the latter, and the sudden snarls of the guitar the former.  When they slow it down there’s an awful lot of shoegaze in there too, such as the excellent Candy.  It’s a good mix, and delivered in some style.  As introductions to a new, very promising band go, this EP is very much the business.

And if you want to see them play, they’ll be up here with The Black Tambourines and Dolfinz, playing and Ides of Toad gig at Henry’s Cellar Bar on Sunday 18th December.

Joanna Gruesome – Lemonade Grrl

The Quiet Americans are not overly rough or too distorted though and, despite the fuzz, there is a real lightness to this music which just made it instantly accessible for me.  I remember my last real fad, similar to my current one for lo-fi stuff, and it was probably that sort of mental gypsy/carnival folk that was quite big a few years ago.

I think what I liked about it was that there was just a sense of exuberance about the music – a real sense of fun. I listen to depressing music most of the time.  In fact, I love wallowing in rich, deep, sad stuff, playing the slow songs nice and loud and really letting it wash over me.  As such, I suppose I need a counterpoint, and for me at the moment, it is lo-fi garage rock.

The songs on this are pretty simple.  There is a riff, a couple of choruses, a really clear, simple, energetic rhythm and the whole lot is played with an infectiously joyful energy. That’s it.  The riffs and choruses are catchy as hell, the fuzzy guitar and tape wobble give it a really carefree, ramshackle feel, and the occasional use of wailing organ gives it a nice dreamy atmosphere here and there too.

Falling is the only song I thing doesn’t quite fit, with the chorus feeling just a little too close to cliche for me, and never quite igniting that singalong instinct, but the rest of this is just plain brilliant fun. You can buy it on tape or download here, and I strongly recommend it.

The Quiet Americans – Summer House