fatandconfused

Bosques De Mi Mente – LoFi

With the first signs of the winter bearing down us, they bring with them a terrible feeling of loneliness and a bleak reminder of the harsh weather set to follow in the steps of what has yet again been a poor summer. Yet the winter also brings with it a tragic beauty, one that can pull you from the deepest of setbacks and sprinkle you with hope.

The music of Bosques De Mi Mente is your perfect partner to such feelings of melancholy and despair, like the scene from Far & Away when Nicole Kidman gets shot and Tom Cruise hands her back to her former lover and takes the slow walk through the snow, brutal and unforgiving it beats against your bare face, its gets in through any means possible and bites at your defenceless skin. Yet against the odds it’s hard to deny the beauty of snow and its icy mischievousness, its ability to hold a moment in time, the way you sometimes feel the need and occasionally elongate a time and period of sadness, finding comfort from your sorrows and wallowing in your misery, its unhealthy yes but sometimes it serves a purpose yet eventually like Tom you just have to let her go, just walk away from the situation. You try not to look back yet when you do all you see is footsteps slowly disappearing in the snow as the fresh snow covers them up and severs all former ties.

Bosques De Mi Mente is the music to soundtrack your latest tragedy, the music that will bring beauty to the most tragic of happening, solo piano has rarely captured such feeling, this was last done so well by Eluvium and if that’s not a recommendation then I don’t know what is.

LoFi - MP3 Album Zip File

MySpace

Serafina Steer – Cheap Demo Bad Science (Static Caravan)

You may have guessed that I have a little more than an appreciation for the female vocal and more than a chip on my shoulder about how highly rated Cat Power is and yet again I find myself stumbling over a stupidly talented female that far exceeds anything that I’ve heard from Chan Marshall.

Serafina Steer will appeal to anyone who has been wowed by the likes of Bat for Lashes, Whistler, The Finches, Meg Baird, Cocorosie or Kate Bush and yes I hate lame comparisons but it’s not just because she owns a harp that I find myself thinking of Joanna Newsom, however it’s not that simple, this is Joanna Newsom gone back in time, a medieval Joanna who at the same time mixes her folk styling’s with modern technology and electronics, as if she’s half stuck in the past and half in the future, maybe the common, poor servant girl who creeps into her mistresses room and jumps grubby handed onto the harp at every opportunity, bashing out beautiful songs that no one will ever hear until now. As creative and original as Cocorosie, as lyrically weird as Sparklehorse, yet as accessible as the girl next door, the girl living on a council estate fighting to hear her harp over the arguments that overpower her playing

Catch now before you regret having to stand at the back of a packed out crowd, next to burger king at next year’s ATP, Serafina is a delightful discovery.

MySpace

Static Caravan

Sadly I can’t find any MP3’s so give her Myspace a try

Cocorosie – The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn (Touch & Go)

To say that Cocorosie are slightly weird would be more than a slight understatement, they are a personification of the whole new weird folk movement yet as many of the bands and individuals that find themselves pigeonholed into the genre they have occasionally suffered from over hype, leaving you a little bit disappointed when their albums aren’t quite as spectacular as originally made out, with new album The Adventures of Ghosthorse and Stillborn they have at least to some extent delivered a work of wonder, something also truly unique. I will however state that of the 12 tracks on offer 5 are fantastic and would’ve made an exceptional EP, yet that’s not to take away from the “weaker tracks” so to speak which have their place just don’t quite stand up to the awesome folk hop of Rainbowarriors, Promise, Werewolf and Animals or the bizarre, best thing since Prozac of Japan, a song sure to make you smile if only momentarily, mixing high pitched cheeky rhymes with operatic breaks, really quite lovely. The four previously mentioned songs catch a certain sound that is so refreshing and clean amongst a genre that so often lets itself down with its determination to make bad language and violence cool, the hip hop beats are accompanied by toy instruments and half spoken lyrics covering allsorts of subjects and feelings, here we have something new and unique, something to hype over yet I hope they stay amongst those in the know, that they won’t start thinking they are Jesus just like Devendra, letting the hippy thing go a bit too much to his head, going over indulgent spoiling the illusion just like Herman Dune, lets hope.
www.myspace.com/cocorosie
www.touchandgorecords.com

A Hawk & A Hacksaw - And The Hun Hangar Ensemble (The Leaf Label)

Its hard to explain and even harder to understand how much I struggled with A Hawk and A Hacksaw, I tried so hard to fall in love with them & The Way The Wind Blows album, the one that so many people raved about, the one that was included in so many end of year polls, and rather highly too, yet it never really struck the chord, just like Beirut whatever everyone else was seeing was passing me by, I was probably staring right at it but couldn’t see for looking. So its comes as quite a surprise that the follow up that has scarcely been mentioned, I’ve yet to see any hype on the forums from the very same people that championed The Way The Wind Blows, has had such an instant appeal to me. Each track warm and inviting like an evening round a fire snowed in in a Hungarian log cabin, accordions and all sorts of weird instruments at the ready, taking in the Amelie soundtrack, the most mariachi parts of Calexico along the way and much beer from silver tankards, overflowing as they clash together in pure ecstasy. Let this soundtrack your next Hungarian disco.
www.myspace.com/ahawkandahacksaw
www.myspace.com/hunhangarensemble
www.myspace.com/theleaflabel

Our Brother The Native – Tooth & Claw (FatCat)

Textile Ranch/ Charles Atlas -  (Static Caravan)

French Teen Idol – Enlightened False Consciousness (Lost Children Net Label)

Three seriously beautiful releases, elegantly textured tapestries of organic prettiness.

Much like by the limitations restricted, the fewer materials on offer, a vegetarian chef tends to conjure up far more interesting dishes than a traditional chef as he utilizes, improvises and gives new meaning and uses to familiar staples in search of something that will both interest and excite the taste buds of the partaker so Our Brother The Native take the hard route to making music. Imagine pre-electricity electronica, like Four Tet with his laptop taken away, simply left with the sounds that surround him from day to day, kindly captured in a box or in the case of Our Brother The Native perhaps a treasure trove would be more appropriate.

These are songs made from a bundle of sounds, birds singing, water running, hands clapping, pans clashing and a collection of samples, mostly of children’s voices used to a similar fine effect as the Boards of Canada, Isan and The Books. On top of this is a brand of peculiar Cocorosie-esque high pitched vocals, and perhaps along with Animal Collective, Cocorosie are as close a comparison as you will find whilst not wishing to take any credit away from what are a seriously unique and creative band, but for music critic/ pigeon-holing’s sake lets just say that if The Books remixed Cocorosie we may end up with something similar and I’m sure if you have any taste in music you’ll realise that that’s far from a bad thing.

Falconiformes, Tilia Petiolaris (the most straight forward, song based song on the album, a beautiful finger picked twin vocaled affair) and particularly the seven minutes of discontent samples set against at times operatic vocals of Octopodidae standout, though if you are looking for a challenging yet rewarding listen there is little that you will be disappointed with here.

I’ve said it time and again but am yet again here reassured that to quite a large extent you can indeed if not judge a book by its cover certainly you can a CD by its. One look at the excellent artwork that accompanies the Textile Ranch and Charles Atlas split and you know already that the CD contained within is likely to contain something rather special and indeed it doesn’t disappoint.

There is something magical about the cover, two girls on swings mid air, one coming up the other going back down against a 1970’s backdrop in some Austrian or Hungarian town that evokes memories of the Brothers Grimm’s fairytales, the state of innocence and total naivety to the horrible things that go on around us and the responsibilities that come with growing up.

Textile Ranch themselves have a magical sound, like Colleen had she been more mischievous, had her twinkling fairy dust tunes had a more urgent feel about them, had they been laced in mischief rather than melancholy, set to charity shop drum machines, flickering in the light like the facets of a diamond, recalling also the magic of State River Widening and many of the early Static Caravan releases like Fortdax and Little Robot Voice. The four tracks here come highly recommended and remind me of why Static Caravan has received so much praise over the years.

Charles Atlas follows a similar route but takes the long and winding roads, the country roads where it doesn’t matter if you want to take your time, if you wish to pull in from time to time to take in the green fields with their solitary trees and endless acres. At times it treads the same water as some of the more glacial post rock out there, pianos, heavily delayed guitars and electronic drums gently compliment each other in a lovely wash of  esoteric sound.

You may be aware of the Lost Children Net Label, a glorious accumulation of free downloads mainly in the form of post rock or at least “instrumental”, instrumental as in the way Sigur Ros qualify as instrumental even though most their songs contain singing. It’s somehow linked to the Silent Ballet website and forum and a blessing beyond anything your preconceived ideas of free music are.

The latest of such free downloads is French Teen Idols Enlightened False Consciousness a lovely album that is as much electronica as it is post rock, full of samples, doomy and apocalyptic yet hope crammed keys and some lovely skittering beats. Disaster samples conversations from flight United 93, respectfully so, and where some people may feel that the very idea of this is wrong I’d have to strongly disagree. Music is a form of art, and an expression of peoples feelings and emotions and I can’t possibly think of a more emotionally charged situation, the result is spectacular.

Compromise Your (He)art is graced with playground chatter and a closing speech from an Indian philosopher that brings to mind the well selected samples of the much underrated The Books. The Fleeting Beauty of a Butterfly is true to its name in its poetic beauty, all slow waves of synthesis and French spoken word samples.

For the majority of the time the album possesses the same unblemished and natural beauty that Johann Johannsson’s IBM Users Manual album displayed so well, the oneness with nature, the slow motion look at a world that holds so much splendour beneath the things that are so often forced to our attention, the bad things that fill the pages of the newspaper, the natural wonder of a butterfly emerging from a cocoon, tracks such as Memento convey such wonder, much how Johann does but perhaps with more of a proclivity for drums and beats.

This is a truly wondrous album and as its free you really have no excuse not to go and download it immediately.
www.myspace.com/ourbrotherthenative
www.myspace.com/fatcatrecords
www.staticcaravan.org/
www.piano-magic.co.uk/textile_ranch/
www.myspace.com/charlesatlasnyc
www.myspace.com/frenchteenidol
www.archive.org/details/LostChildren023
www.frenchteenidol.com/fti.html