Anyhow, most music discovery works through recommendation really, and people whose judgment I trust from both Manchester and Glasgow have been talking about Sacred Paws a fair bit so, well, I was always going to give them a go, really, wasn’t I.

And once again it turns out my friends were right.  All the things on their Bandcamp page are labelled as demos, so I don’t really know how close they sound to the sound in the band’s head, but it’s pretty bloody good as it is.

Tracks like Ride, above, have a nice touch of old-fashioned, disinterested indie about them, but the rest of the stuff veers vaguely in the direction of deranged afrobeat, before just heading off into some sort of frenetic wigout.  Vince, below, probably embodies this more than most, descending into a buzzy mess before its eventual demise.  Whatever it is, though, I really want to hear more.

Slow Down, Molasses are from Saskatoon, which is apparently a thriving town, but to my mind is for some reason just marginally more glamorous than Cumbernauld, but I am open to being corrected by anyone who actually knows.

We’re putting them on at Henry’s in Edinburgh next week, so I really shouldn’t have come to see them here as well, but umm… well, I didn’t have any better plans before my label panel and I happened to meet Tyson from the band the night before in London as well, so why the fuck not.

Anyway, they were excellent, so without wishing to be too much of a used car salesman, I strongly recommend you come to the gig next week.  And if you don’t live in Edinburgh, they’re touring the UK at the moment, so have a look and see if you can go and see them, because I recommend you do.

With three guitarists, two drummers and a keyboard player they can make a right racket when they’re in the mood. For all their songs have a sort of characteristic ‘Canadian alternative music’ vibe (and don’t worry, I honestly don’t know what that means either, but you’ll know what I mean if you see them play) but they build to rather splendidly epic crescendos.  Not all that proggy per se, but is nevertheless quite euphoric in a sense.

As much as the percussion is great, and the drummer and the keyboard player look like they are having The Most Fun Ever, I think the guitars draw me to this band the most.  They interact really well, and alternate between subtle, dreamy effects, and thumping away like bastards as the songs build and build.  Nice.  Sometimes you take a chance putting a band on, not knowing that much about them, and that’s kind of what I did here.  Seems to have been a really rather excellent decision.  Well done me!

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This is big, throbbing, hypnotic guitar music.  That threshold where indie morphed into Britpop is not an area I am all that familiar with, but seems to be a strong source of inspiration here, with bands like Ride perhaps ringing a few bells here and there.  Leeds’ excellent Hookworms seem to be ploughing a broadly similar furrow, and in some senses I am even reminded of the amazing Lift to Experience here and there.

After three self-released EPs, which you can download from their Bandcamp page here, the band now have a split 7″ approaching on Leaning Trees Records.

Their music sounds like they could pretty much be making it up as they go along, as it’s very fluid and sounds like the kind of stuff the band get lost in as much as their audience might.  It is also dark, slightly melodramatic, expansive and epic.  I get the impression they could well be absolutely incredible live – just something about the underlying thrum and the dreamy washes of vocal.

They have plenty of videos on their YouTube page for those of you that way inclined, and their Bandcamp has all sorts of stuff to explore, so I suggest you do so. I have only just come across this lot but I am really impressed with what I’ve heard so far.

Well this is their first formal release, a tape called Shreddin’ on Heaven’s Floor which you can buy here, and I reckon it’s really rather promising.

My frame of reference for this kind of music is really rather limited, I have to confess. The only bands I’ve really listened to much in this kind of territory would be the like of Dubstar (who are more poppy), Stereloab (more weird and guitary) and perhaps the likes of the Cocteau Twins and certain aspects of Saint Etienne.

I’m going to be quite harsh on this EP, I think, but rest assured this is only because I think Magic Eye are a really good band who already have some cracking stuff, and who I think have the potential to do even better in the future.  Put bluntly, though, I would chop this EP precisely in half.

When it’s good, this is really good – ethereal, dreamy pop songs with a beautifully jangly guitar shimmering alongside the gorgeous vocals.  If that description sounds a little clichéd, then I suppose that’s probably fair enough, as for all words like those are overused when describing certain types of music in particular, in this case they are entirely appropriate.

So for all these songs, like a lot of things I am enjoying at the moment, are cut from a pretty familiar cloth, strong pop songs are strong pop songs and the first half of this EP glistens with promise.  It is really quite slow, but that works well with this kind of minimal music, allowing every guitar chime and every elusive utterance to flutter to the ground, one at a time, like a scatter of descending feathers.

The side ends (unless I have my track listing wrong, which I may well because the mp3s weren’t very well tagged) with a cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game.  This is a risky strategy for a new band, as covering an established classic can easily overshadow your own songwriting, and make it pale somewhat by comparison, and whilst in this case it doesn’t really darken what went before, it does represent a height nothing subsequent manages to scale.

The second half contains a lot of the same aesthetic elements, but to my ears not quite the same quality of songwriting.  The songs sound nice, but they don’t really grab me all that much, and I find my attention drifting.  At eleven songs long, this could easily be an album though, and personally I think the band might have been better off editing it a little more brutally and just releasing four to six of their very strongest tunes, and leaving the rest for later.

Partly that would have made for a leaner, more concise release, partly they could have tested the waters with their audience without throwing absolutely everything out there, and partly there is never any harm in having extra songs up your sleeve.

Having said that, the first half of this (or the half a dozen or so tracks I might have randomly mistaken as the first half) is really good, and if they can build on that and progress then these guys have the potential to be very interesting indeed.

Magic Eye – Flamin’ Teenage

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The music is that blend of acoustic instruments and low-key electronic beats which tends to be tagged as folktronica. It’s an annoying label, but I suppose it’s appropriate enough, and I’m not sure I can really think of a better one.

To be more precise, this music is a woozy concoction, with lovely, flighty vocals offset by fairly minimal, dreamy and wonderfully atmospheric instrumentation.

I suppose you could pick out elements of the Magnetic Fields here and there, particular when the beats are at their thinnest and most rattly.  The band will probably hate me for the comparison, but you can conjure roughly what to expect by taking the Postal Service’s template, thinning it right down and instead of pushing for the lush and the radio-friendly, aiming for something more plaintive and lost, perhaps a little closer to the more downbeat moments of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone.

The key difference between Brice Woodall and the bands I’ve just mentioned, however, is in the nature of the beat.  Where the other bands are insistent and purposeful, this stuff feels a little more like it’s sinking into the mist, and even the gorgeous guitar jangle on Even the Mice and Snakes can’t lift the song from the quicksand of the insistent pulse in the background.

Nevertheless, despite the fact that the whole EP feels rather like it is losing a battle with its own inner despondency, and drifting slowly into defeated apathy, this is really rather lovely. Maybe it’s the way the vocal feels like it alone is not giving up that does it, but in amongst all the excuses to drift into narcosis that this EP gives us, Some Odd Years feels like it has somehow managed to resist its own temptation.

Brice Woodall – Fables

Sometimes you get things immediately, and sometimes you don’t.  Usually the reasons are frame of mind or something like that, and what brings you round is listening to something with fresh ears a while later when you’re paying more attention or feeling differently, or sometimes once familiarity has allowed you to understand the music a little differently.

In this case the band will probably be pulling their hair out reading this review, because they emailed me ages ago about their stuff, and it ended up getting a bit lost in my inbox, and I can’t remember if I eventually just gave up on it or if I just emailed them apologising and saying I wasn’t into, but whatever it was it wasn’t my finest moment.

So far so mundane, but what’s slightly odd about this is that I was recently emailed by a producer of music videos wanting to advertise his services and what did he choose to showcase his work but a recent video he had made for Hiva Oa – the one at the top of the page in fact.  And for some reason, and believe me I have absolutely no idea what was different this time around – I thought ‘gosh, that’s quite good’.

This is the Edinburgh band’s first EP, and apparently precedes debut album to The Awkward Hello, Handshake, Kiss, which is pencilled in for release in May 2012 on local label Mini50.  Like much of Mini50′s output, the music is slow as hell and based far more around atmosphere than melody, so it does take a bit of listening to, but I do think it’s worth the time.

Much of the atmosphere here is dominated by the whispered singing, minimal acoustic guitar and relatively underemployed cello.  Badger, the first song on the EP and the one from the video which drew me in, has a denser, more layered and rumbling sound, with really nice skittery cymbals.  Thereafter the EP sticks to a more familiar, acoustic guitar-based format, sparingly embellished with strings and the barest of vocal harmonies – at least until the wonderfully sinister second half of 9 minute closing track Morning, that is.

It’s not insistent music, but it’s quite demanding in the sense that inattentive listens really are pointless.  But if you give it your full attention then it really is lovely, and I feel a little bemused that I somehow failed to notice this the first time the band got in touch with me.

Released on PAWS’ Cath Records, this is a sprawling, messy collection of twenty-three songs, few of which are more than a minute or two long.  It feels less like it was an album released with a particular goal or concept in mind, and more like a bunch of songs which were recorded and made available in the hope that the very act of doing so might tell the writer what they are. Maybe even in the hope that if he was able to listen to what it was that he did, he might be able to figure out why he was doing it.

Even the first couple of tracks go from lo-fi indie, to bare-bones synth pop, to a frantic instrumental which borders on computer game music without being bleepy enough to be chiptunes, and then a dreamy acoustic number.  By the end of these songs barely six minutes have elapsed, and you’re still no closer to really understanding quite what it is that you’re listening to.

So it’s a mess, in many ways, and sort of an aimless mess at that, but I still find this album – if that’s what we should be calling it – a really compelling listen.

In some ways the uncertain meandering – Dying in the Garden could almost be a lost demo for Across the Universe, just as another example – makes this a lively, rather baffling listen which constantly has you looking up at the stereo thinking ‘what now?’

And in other ways, I actually quite like the uncertainty of identity.  It’s like Armstrong has been as generous as he can with his inner thought process, accepted that he isn’t sure where he’s going and very kindly invited us to come along on the journey to see if he can figure it out.

And there are enough ideas here that for all it sounds a bit unsure of its own identity, it’s not a record which seems like it has simply been lazily slapped out onto the internet for shits and giggles.  Twenty-three two-minute songs may give the impression of a lot of unfinished ideas, which I suppose you could take for laziness, but that’s not really how it feels to me.

Despite the fact that the songs could be described as sounding unfinished, depending on what you were expecting in the first place, each ninety second package seems to have integrity.  It contains its idea, expresses it in a way that gives it space, but no over-indulgence and then simply moves on.

So you can see how this review was a challenge to write, and why I shied away from it for a while.  I am still not entirely sure what it is I am listening to here, but the songs are varied, generally excellent, and that sense of trying to grasp the ever-elusive essence of the album just seems to make it all the more fascinating.  Odd.  But good. And available for free download over at Cath Records.

Sean Armstrong – Acid Bath

Sean Armstrong – Dying in the Garden

I know most of my garage pop is quite distorted and aggressive, but this isn’t, and it’s bloody great. This is garagey only in the sense that the recording and production are relatively lo-fi, but its pop sensibilities are very much to the fore, and there is no sense whatsoever of tunes being deliberately buried beneath a blanket of fuzz in that ‘let’s see who loves our pop songs now!’ kind of way which a lot of lo-fi bands seem to manage.

Released as a four-song 7″ EP, I really would recommend every last track here, from the upbeat, radio friendly Dig Your Grave to the sauntering instrumental Lazy Bones, and the more contemplative closer Burn All Your Bridges. Each song clocks in at little more than a couple of minutes, so there’s not exactly much to chew on here, but the songs they do give us are packed with goodness, they get to the point, and they fuck off long before they run the risk of outstaying their welcome.

I know nothing at all, really, about their label Kind Turkey, but they seem to have a shitload of garage pop, so very under the radar that I have never heard mention of a single one of their bands.  Nevertheless, poking about the site a little, which I strongly recommend you do, there seems to be one gem after another.

Spend money, people, with music like this your enjoyment level per pound spent is going to be very, very high indeed.

The Pharmacy – Dig Your Grave

Buy on coloured 7″ from Kind Turkey here.

I think I’ve heard the name mentioned before, but apart from that I knew not a thing about the New Fabian Society until they got in touch asking if I would like to hear their new EP.  They’ve made it available to listen to on Bandcamp, but I have to confess I am not entirely sure how to buy it just yet.  Which is a shame, because it is very much worth it.

The music is chimey, echoey and dark – so epic in fact that the band kindly included two rather shorter radio edits of a couple of songs on the Bandcamp page, in the probably sensible assumption that for all six and seven minute songs might be great to listen to, they aren’t likely to find themselves being spun on drivetime by DJs accustomed to straightforward three minute pop songs.

These tracks, if they remind of a recent band, probably call to mind Leeds’ brilliant Hookworms, if I was to pull any name out of the hat in particular, although the fantastic opening song Lost in Berlin has more than a little of Interpol to it as well. You get the message though: slow but forceful guitar songs, full of foreboding, which build and build to a grand crescendo and leave the listener somewhat exhausted, but satisfied nevertheless. The surprisingly brief and far more frenetic closer Devious Minds is an exception though, its extra pace seemingly causing it to blow itself out a little sooner, but a sort of aggressive, barely suppressed grandiosity is still one of the defining characteristics of this music.

It’s the kind of stuff which I secretly suspect might be absolutely blinding live, although I’ve never seen them perform, so that’s no more than speculation.  But if they can pull off that kind of thunderous, ear-crushing euphoria this kind of music can create when played live then it really should be something to behold.

There’s not much you can tell, generally, about a band with only three songs to their name, beyond the tantalising sense of promise, but these don’t sound like rookie recordings, they sound like a band who are pretty well-formed considering this is their first release.

Although really, I know those three minute radio edits are really sensible, but if people like this music they should like it for all of its epic, self-indulgent seven minutes.  Balls to radio edits!

It really wrong-footed me as well, in terms of the expectations I didn’t realise I had for the band and their next release.  The last time I saw these guys play was actually at an Ides of Toad gig at the Electric Circus last August, and they had a couple of strings players, a three-piece brass section and a big, rounded glossy pop sound.

I was also kind of surprised to see this release on Peenko Records, given that Mr. Peenko already has another independent label to be getting on with, namely Olive Grove.  And I was incredibly surprised to hear such a lo-fi, informal-sounding album.

Apparently this is more of a home-recording project by Adam, the band’s frontman, with relatively infrequent appearances by the rest of the band.  A couple of the songs are even the barest of bare-bones session recordings made for our local university radio station Fresh Air.

There are bigger, glossier releases on the way, but having heard this I don’t know if this style doesn’t suit their music better. It’s entirely possible I’ll change my mind when I hear the full band stuff, but for now I find this kind of unpolished approach, although it’ll presumably never make them famous, feels entirely consonant with the peculiar charm of the songs.

Adam Ross may be just about my favourite lyricist in Scotland in the moment, with a knack for staying exactly the right side of the line which divides witty from novelty.  He also has a habit of slipping suddenly from the cheekily amusing (going as far as to occasionally prompt the ‘he didn’t just sing that did he?’ reaction) to the touchingly poignant.  It doesn’t happen all that often, but the change of gear is such that the impact of those moments of pathos is greatly enhanced.

All in all, though, the impression left is of a person, not a band.  I have no idea how much Ross sings in persona but the picture painted is of someone with a sharp, mischievous sense of humour and yet also prone to moments of vulnerability.  The album feels, as such, unguarded and honest, but instead of taking that as an excuse to wallow, as most do in such situations, this is playful and amusing without ever feeling frivolous or silly.  I don’t know what their more polished releases are going to be like, but they’ll struggle to match this for emotional accessibility, for hummability rising above its lo-fi aesthetic, and just for sheer likability.

Randolph’s Leap – I Can’t Dance to This Music Anymore

Randolph’s Leap – Bile

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