Glasvegas – Flowers and Football Tops
Thoughts inspired by the tragedy of Kriss Donald, a fifteen year old Glaswegian subjected to senseless kidnap, torture and murder in 2004. The album version ticks out some 7 minutes, manicured and poignant amidst its horrendous human consumption, shimmering guitars vibrating through hospital corridors, orchestral and bleak and luxuriously blanketed in monstrous decay. Drums crash around like a family’s world, bass growling like psychosis from Psychocandy, as James Allen distils an emotionally magnanimously minded Proclaimer accented propulsion, a recluse breaking down walls. This respectful glance in the direction of destruction manages to instil a huge contemporary reflection off the 1957 Mickey & Sylvia title ‘Love is Strange’ (yes, from Dirty Dancing), and sublimely focuses its epic finale blend to ‘You are My Sunshine’, a football anthem that ties an effective tribute to such victims, and their families, tangentially and physically distraughtly.
Howling Bells – Cities Burning Down
How well can a former debut album single b-side position itself as a sophomore release promo? Reworked, blackened, marvellously translated as a connector to the past and a bridge to the future. Beautifully atmospheric; you can smell the smoke, feel the flames. Prisms of sound reflecting like rainbow stars, as crawling beats track like moonlight, and synth swirls that float like mists over lakes of fire. With a Sonic Youth chivalry, a moody eerie darkness is vamped by Juanita Steins climbing vocals. She brings a post sexual liaison comedown, the post coital cigarette while languishing on a forest floor, distant stream bubbling from mountain high spring. Lover gone, vanished or imagined, a smouldering ember of regret, a clung too dream escaped and vanquished.
Emmy the Great – First Love
It’s bursting with memories, your own nostalgia you didn’t even realise you had lived. References to Cohen and cassettes, first times and last times, regret and reliefs. Her stressed syllabic phrasing recalls the breathed tones of Stephen Fretwell, Emmy his female counterpart – duplicitly sensual, darkly romantic, deeply sorrowful, devastatingly emotive. Here we have meeting, seduction, departure; loosely inspired by Beckett , steeped in desire and paranoia, sombre and restful.
Empire of the Sun – Walking on a Dream
The sweet title track from the debut album of the same name, charting the very soul of duo Luke Steele (formerly of alternative outfit The Sleepy Jackson) and Nick Littlemore (producer and dance act Pnau founder). They’ve found a purer psychedelic voice, crowning themselves worthy descendants of MGMT, with meditative and soaring magnificence, an electronic heartsigh that relights your groove with atmospherics soaked in sunbeams. It chases indulgent youth movements (“running for the thrill of it”) with edgy dance floor beats, yet sounds out the future with a soothsayer pop shine.
Eugene McGuinness - Fonz
There’s an appropriate super cool splash across this two minute inspired psychedelic washed release, you can smell the leather and feel the breeze from an upturned collar. Still young (22) and overflowing with ideas (see also last single Moscow State Circus for a full menu of variety), EM creates hooked memorable melodies around lush comic couplets (“we said farewell, and synchronised our watches/arranged for the meeting of our crotches”) and nursery rhyme refrains, to attract an infectious Buzzcock power pop surge of Morrissey falsetto drive. Eyyy! (and click fingers).
The Ting Tings – We Walk
An unexpected piano flourishes, ye gawds; perhaps Mylene Klass was in the studio next door. A 6th single off 10 track 1st album distress signal which ultimately, though, is still a shoddy monstrous mess, like unstyled graffiti sprayed unwittingly upside down over the side of a motorway bridge.