fatandconfused

Future of the Left – Curses (Too Pure)

It’s fair to say that heavy music rarely does it for me, and when I say heavy I don’t mean heavy in the sense of Let Airplanes Circle Overhead, Russian Circles, Pelican and the like, I adore them, no I mean heavy as in with screaming and intenseness, it’s the combination that I’m not that fussed about. However there will always be exceptions, in the past the main exception happened to be the highly underrated Mclusky and so its no surprise that my new favourite band (for 15 minutes as ever for me) are Future of the Left the new project of former Mclusky front man Andy Falkous and drummer Jimmy Egglestone. This is no nonsense full on aggressive in your face rock, yet for all its no nonsenseness it full on nonsensical lyrics, and melodies that will having you nodding your head and banging your steering wheel as you wait at the lights.

In the tradition of Mclusky amazing song titles are ever present (My Gymnastic Past, Suddenly It's A Folk Song, Adeadenemyalwayssmellsgood) and perhaps less familiar will be the excellent keyboards lines now present used to amazing effect on the fantastic Manchasm, I’ll let you discover this years best outro yourself, needless to say that like Mclusky, Future of the Left are a very special band.

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Future of the Left - The Lord Hates a Coward MP3

Go! Team - Proof of Youth (Memphis Industries)

I’m not ashamed to admit that I really never intended to hear this, planning to avoid it at all costs. I really enjoyed their debut album but was let down with the live performance, it was all very “put yr hands in the air, like you just don’t care” and didn’t do it for me at all and then a series of events, the plan b interview, to quote “I wanna be a cartoon! I wanna be a comic! I wanna be a watch!” why? why would you ever say that? And then the press shot in the latest Plan B, grotesque and utterly repulsive, again why would you let people print such bad pictures of yourself, and yet I eat each and every one of my words, I take back all my misconceptions, my past experience of bands never quite matching the exuberance and quality of their debut, my everything, Proof of Youth is one of the best albums you will hear this year, full to the brim and overflowing with feel good tunes, songs to pick you up, to make you dance, to let you forget about all the crap you have to deal with, I love this album, only a week ago I could never imagine saying such a thing. Its sends a shiver down my spine how good this album is. Taking the best of hip hop and mixing it in with a serious helping of motown, tracks like Doing it Right have no need to beg you to dance for by the time the first bar has kicked in you’re already there on the dance floor, and a series of chants likely to be echoed on a million dance floors “do it do it alright” “extra extra read all about it”.

If you thought Annie’s Chewing Gum was the song to get you in the mood then now you have a whole album, soo good that you’ll be tempted to stay in, it really is that good. I’m having trouble describing just how good, Fake ID is smothered in such northern soul magic where it not for the hip hop twist you’d swear you were down Wigan Casino on a Saturday night.

Don’t let your musical snobbery put you off, Proof of Youth is awesome.

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Go! Team - Grip Like A Vice (Black Affair Remix) MP3

Back when I was a lad, or at least when I when I was first beginning to “properly” get into music, whereby I mean that my record collection no longer consisted of taped music recorded from and occasionally by friends too cautious to “lend” in fear of never seeing their beloved disc again. Instead my hard earned cash gave me the opportunity to fill every possible place I could ram a CD within my (shared) box room…and so I did…and so my findings led me to a pentateuch, so to speak, of bands that I both swore by and adored, bands who could do no wrong in my eyes…a list of which follows

1) Belle & Sebastian

2) Hefner

3) Godspeed You! Black Emperor

4) The Delgados

5) Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci

It is from the final and perhaps weirdest and unpredictable of the bunch that arises my latest obsession, that being the solo project of former front man Euros Childs, going by the alias of…erm, Euros Childs. Gorky’s a their finest where able to produce both noise and melody, hush and chaos and ultimately a song for each occasion, whether that be the loud and chaotic Sweet Johnny, the literally barking mad Poodle Rocking, the sunshine pop of Spanish Dance Troupe, Diamond Dew and Patio Song or the heart melting four tracks that closed 1999 album, Spanish Dance Troupe, who could forget the “Jodie brown eyes” line, one that to do this day I find myself randomly singing.

And so out of nowhere Euros has given us three albums in the space of sixteen months, Chops (13/2/06) Bore Da (05/03/07) and now The Miracle Inn (25/06/07), a treasure trove of Gorky-like pop. The piano led pop remains, songs like Horse Riding & Ali Day are instant classics, whereas the more ambitious 15 minutes of The Miracle Inn show the ideas and experiments are not running short yet. Costa Rita is a lovely love song told in the normal Euros way, quirky and normally from a distance, the way we all fall in love with that girl that we see on the bus each day, the one who walks past our window at work, the one who works in the florist down the road and yet we’ll probably never ever pluck the courage up to talk to her let alone tell her how we feel. Country Girl shows his fondness for country as previously expressed in the much loved yet little heard Johnny Cash Lawsuit Song.

Euros Childs is a madcap genius who deserves your attention, let him put a little sunshine and romance in your life.

MySpace

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Euros Childs - First Time I Saw You (Acoustic Version) MP3

Euros Childs - Billy and the Sugarloaf Mountain MP3

Euros Childs - Dawnsio Dros Y Môr MP3

Euros Childs - Amsermaemaiyndod MP3

Euros Childs - Y Mwnci Drwg MP3

Euros Childs - Teen Angel MP3

The Yellow Moon Band – Entangled

Mike in Mono – Euro Eccentric

Serafina Steer – Peach Heart (all Static Caravan)

I love Static Caravan right down to the little things they do, those special extras they make me miss the world of seven inch singles I used to be so entangled within, the rainbow design on the oversized centre of the vinyl that makes me go search out the thingy you put in the middle, whatever its called, the free sticker, the horses that run through the rainbow on the cover of The Yellow Moon Bands Entangled, in itself not the strongest release thus far by the excellent label but still worth a few minutes of your time to take in the twin riffing and picture in your mind how this would look live, poodle perms and leather trousers perhaps??...Mike in Mono is a different kettle of fish completely, pumping out 1980’s electro like Printed Circuit used to but mixing it with Kraftwerk-ian vocals all echoey and recollecting images of the numerous other German bands from the time with long fringes and no shortage of inanimate objects on stage to bash with whatever happened to be in their hands at the time. B-side Binary is more playful still, yet ultimately follows the same electro kraut path…there are a number of names that will consistently turn up when almost any female singer songwriter with even the tiniest bit of a quirky voice appears, its too simple really but perhaps Serafina Steer deserves to be mentioned alongside the Joanna’s, the Hanne Hukkelberg’s, The Holly Throsby’s. Peach Heart is a lovely tune, staccato, unusual and as unexpected as the dragonfly that rides a bike on the sleeve of this record, medieval sounds using modern technology, music box twinkles that recall the wonderful Textile Ranch, skipping needles on overplayed records. Mano e Mano is equally as mesmerising, full of weird instruments and gentle sentiments.

www.staticcaravan.org
mikeinmono1@hotmail.co.uk

www.myspace.com/theyellowmoonband
www.myspace.com/monoinmike
www.myspace.com/drumstreetsefa

The Pocketbooks – Cross The Line

Wow! This is the kind of indiepop gem I used to thrive on, fresh and happy and recorded for a fiver in someone’s garage, done for the fun of it and all the better for it. Its like Kicker had they had better singers, the Aislers Set if they weren’t tinged with melancholy and so obsessed with distorted guitars and broken hearts. Young people taking advantage of the simple things “I’d swap some sleep for a fixed emotion/ a g&t and some sun tan lotion/ a bag of chips in a seaside coast town/ an empty seat on the underground/ a basement club where there’s space for dancing/ a conversation that’s life enhancing/ a suddentwist that I’m not expecting/ a novelette with a cryptic ending” etc…flip it over and it gets better still, Every Good Time We Ever Had is one that escaped from Belle & Sebastian, the kind of song that should have graced The Boy… instead of Ease Your Feet Into The Sea or Sleep The Clock Round, the kind of song Aberfeldy always wanted to write, I love the Pocketbooks and so should you.

www.atomicbeatrecords.co.uk
www.pocketbooks.org.uk

www.myspace.com/pocketbooks

No Age – Weirdo Rippers (Fatcat)

A compilation of the highlights of the first five releases from LA duo No Age that were interestingly simultaneously released in the same day by five different underground indie labels (UTR, Deleted Art, Teardrops, Youth Attack & PPM) available on CD for the first time. They are a funny bunch, choosing to mix and match, cut and paste and generally make up their own rules. Opening track Every Artist Needs A Tragedy finally emerges into song after 3 minutes if interference and noise, like a tuner finally coming into an area of reception, My Life’s Alright With You & Dead Plane follow the same formula with the former coming in and out like switching between programmes. When they do finally explode into song, especially on Boy Void, perhaps the most straightforward, obvious and my favourite they plough a similar furrow to noise pop experts such as Numbers and Erase Errata yet with less squeal and maybe a touch of Pavement at their most raucous or at times Elfpower such as in Everybody’s Down and the lo-fi My Life’s Alright Without You. On semi-sorted there’s hints a Black Dice, on Sun Spots, Bracken like collages.

No Age are also heavily into the LA art scene and seriously worthy of your attention.

www.fat-cat.co.uk
www.myspace.com/nonoage
www.myspace.com/fatcatrecords

Belle and Sebastian – The Life Pursuit (Rough Trade)

I went and did it, I returned to an old love, I dug out the photos, relived the memories, and now I find myself ten steps back, instead of moving on, instead of dealing with the situation I now find myself back where I started, helplessly & hopelessly in love.

Being the awkward type I am, I only ever half listened to The Life Pursuit as the tendency can be with a downloaded album, no artwork, no song titles, somehow it cheapens the experience (yet its enabled me to hear hundreds of albums I otherwise wouldn’t have) and so the album slipped out of my pile of recently listened to albums, judged to be a betrayal, one step too far towards out and out commercialism…and then for some reason I went out and bought it in all its glory the other day, all green versus monochrome and stuffed full of letters from fans that one day I will sit down and read and guess what? I love it. Yeah its not If You’re Feeling Sinister but then why would we need a repeat album, instead its shiny and poppy and perhaps a little too mainstream for the average fan or should I say the “true fan” though as has been pointed out previously, if you were a “true fan” you would love everything they did, would you not? There’s swearing for swearing sake for sure but overall we have thirteen glorious pop songs that I’d much rather listen to than anything else that charts, perhaps White Collar Boy and The Blues are Still Blue are a little bit too TREX but still they are classic feel good songs in their own rights and who could deny that Funny Little Frog is little less than perfect, snappy major 7^th chords, trumpets “Honey loving you is the greatest thing/ I get to be myself and I get to sing” and a snappy chorus to boot, one to sing along to on sweaty dancefloors as you strut your latest indie pop moves. “I am living my life out as a poet/ I am the jester in the ancient court and you are the funny little frog in my throw-it” We Are The Sleepyheads littered with bah-dah-bas can do nothing less than bring a smile to your face and improve any day no matter how bad it is. To Be Myself Completely perhaps Stevie Jacksons finest moment yet. all motown strums and sixties harmonies, since when has any chart band done anything so rewarding as this? For The Price of a Cup of Tea another upbeat almost gospel like singalng.
Yes Belle and Sebastian have changed but people do, sometimes its better and more rewarding to just get on with it instead of wondering what it could have been like.
www.belleandsebastian.co.uk/