Shift-Static – In Italics
 Hmmm, reading the email I was sent by Shift-Static, there is a definite emphasis on their Edinburgh associations which seems entirely absent from any of their other PR material. So if they were trying to prey upon my nepotistic instincts then they, erm, probably had a point actually.
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)
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