Glasgow trio Chvrches have announced the details of their anticipated debut album, following their very enjoyable Recover EP from earlier this year. The Bones of What You Believe will be released on September 23 in the U.K. via Virgin/Goodbye Records, and day after in North America via Glassnote. Above you see the artwork, and below you can check out the new kaleidoscopic elfect-laden video for “Gun” which the band have also revealed. If that wasn’t enough Chvrches-related news, they’re also out on tour, and after the video you can check out the dates they’ll be playing.

6-21 Washington, DC — Black Cat
6-22 Dover, DE — Firefly Music Festival
6-23 Philadelphia, PA — Union Transfer
07-06 Arendal, Norway – Hove Festival
07-06 Amsterdam, Netherlands – Pitch Festival
07-14 Balado, Scotland – T in the Park festival
07-16 Nimes, France – Antic Arena*
07-18 Milan, Italy – San Siro*
07-19 Suffolk, England – Latitude Festival
07-20 Berlin, Germany – Melt! Festival
07-21 Castellon, Spain – Benicassim Festival
07-23 Prague, Czech Republic – Synot Tip Arena*
07-25 Warsaw, Poland – National Stadium*
08-02 Sydney, Australia – Oxford Art Factory
08-03 Sydney, Australia – Oxford Art Factory
08-05 Melbourne, Australia – The Corner Hotel
08-10 Tokyo, Japan – Summer Sonic Festival
08-11 Osaka, Japan – Summer Sonic Festival
08-16 Hasselt, Belgium – Pukkelpop Festival
08-17 Biddinghuizen, Netherlands – Lowlands Festival
08-18 Hamburg, Germany – MS Dockville Festival
08-23 Berkshire, England – Reading Festival
08-24 Wetherby, England – Leeds Festival
08-25 Paris, France – Rock en Seine Festival
09-01 County Laois, Ireland – Electric Picnic
09-14 Detroit, MI – Laneway Festival
10-20 Brussels, Belgium – AB Box
10-23 Cologne, Germany – Gebaude 9
10-25 Munich, Germany – Strom
10-26 Berlin, Germany – Postbahnhof
10-29 Copenhagen, Denmark – Vega
10-30 Stockholm, Sweden – Debaser

* = supporting Depeche Mode

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Despite the variety, Clocks still sounds consistent for the most part, apart from a couple of tracks towards the end which really shine. In fact, the second half of the album really sparkles, and it’s here they sound both absorbed and in control of the soundscapes they’re creating. “Train Tracks For Wheezy” is the band working with Derbyshire-trio Haiku Salut, and the version that appears on Clocks doesn’t differ too much from the one that stood out on Tricolore earlier this year. Some of the electronic tinkering is done away with here, and there’s a greater focus on it being an acoustic/live track. The cascading streaks of strings still remain one of the highlights to pick out, as does the moment when they all come together to sound like a carousel that’s perfectly capturing the early sound of múm and the most joyful moments from Sigur Rós’ Takk…. Following this is probably the album’s grandest highlight: “Footprints In Snow” is almost Disney-esque in scope, with Emma Winston singing of a long lost love like something from Brontë novel. It’s her voice that makes it, sounding like that of two people at the same time, gliding smoothly somewhere being Kate Bush and fully operatic while the musically it brings to mind Owen Pallett with its regal playfulness (namedropping Montreal helps, too).

One thing that this display of masterful music does do though is detract something from the tracks that precede it. For the most part, it’s a relative qualm to be cast aside when you take each track as its own piece, capturing its own little world, but Simon Love’s thin vocals on “Treacle, You Should Probably Go To Sleep” wears quickly, bringing to mind something a little too gentle and sweet that The Boy Least Likely To’s Jof Owen might have left on the cutting room floor. Darren Hayman imagines a girl from his past (“I think her name was Julia/ Pretty sure it was Julia/ Let’s say Julia,” he tries to recall, making for a Neil Hannon/Jens Lekman-like moment of pathetic humour), imaging a perfect film on top of that, picking out British film stars from decades past, as the band lull about with him, like drifting through memories that have been unvisited for a while.

It’s the orchestra that make this record, though. There’s something wonderfully homespun about the sound of Clocks that captures both a professional sheen and the sound of musicians recording in a living room. One might say it sounds “British” in the way it evokes images of sun and clouds against rolling hills (“Clocks, Part 2”) and the quietness of a slow-paced village at night (opening track “Clocks, Part 3,” which sounds peaceful at one moment before eluding to the sound of someone – let’s say a clockmaker for the hell of it – working away into the small hours) – but it’s more than that. Clocks is something of a tapestry, bringing together tales from different trains of thoughts and weaving them together to create a single piece. Like a tapestry, it’s got history embedded in it (“Josefina,” which asks “In your one hundred years, what you will see?”), some folklore (Gordon MacIntyre reels of a tale of a community full of characters in his pleasing Scottish drawl on “East Coast”), and something undeniably personal (closing track “Pightle 21,” which arguably stays slightly too long, but is still lovely). It’s the little things that make Clocks a pleasure, and A Little Orchestra prove that the small things in life are just as important and wonderful as everything else.

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Icelandic band múm will return with a brand new album this September, four years after the wishy-washy Sing Along To Songs You Don’t Know. The new album, entitled Smilewound, sees a slight shake up in the band’s ever-changing lineup, this time including the the return of third founding member Gyða Valtýsdóttir. The new album will be released on 17th September on Morr Music, and will feature eleven tracks, the last of which will be the collaborative effort the band made with popstar Kyle Minogue for the 2012 film Jack & Diane.

Recorded in the band’s own studio (an old Baltic farmhouse) and on the kitchen table after dinner, among other places, Smilewound is said to be airier and looser than previous records, and if the new single “Toothwheels” is anything to go by, then the band have returned to an electronic base, and for the first time in recent memory, they sound like they’re deepening their style. You can check out the video for “Toothwheels” below, which is a jigsaw collaboration between múm, Árni Rúnar Hlöðversson & Bruno Granato. Below that you can check out the tracklisting, and above you’ll see the artwork (had you not already guessed). “Toothwheels” is now available as a 7″ and download, via A Number Of Small Things.

Smilewound

1. Toothwheels
2. Underwater Snow
3. When Girls Collide
4. Slow Down
5. Candlestick
6. One Smile
7. Eternity Is The Wait Between Breaths
8. The Colorful Stabwound
9. Sweet Impressions
10. Time To Scream And Shout
11. Whistle (With Kylie)

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About two weeks back we brought you the new single from Australia’s World’s End Press, “To Send Our Love.” Now the band have a video to go with the track, which features the band playing out the song in front of the camera as lights cast shadows on their faces and bodies. Watch it below.

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Natasha Kozaily’s last single, found its way into my memory in such a way that I woke up with it’s chorus playing out in my head, despite not having any encouragement from listening to her the night before, or anything like that. “Who We Be” may well be just as likely to do the same to me, boasting an infectiously sneaky piano riff and a straight-to-your-head chorus with plenty of cooing. Like the single that preceded it, “Who We Be” will feature on Kozaily’s new album Serenading Renegades, due out later this year. Listen below.

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The new album from Sigur Rós looms, much like the cover art (above) kind of does. Kveikur will be released via XL Recordings on June 17th/18th, and below you can watch the new video for the title track, which melds together the band’s live visuals with shots and reels taken from the archives of the British Film Institute. Watch the video for “Kveikur” below.

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The new video from The xx matches the lulling sound of the song it’s putting visuals to. Coexist‘s “Fiction” is given a calmly casual black-and-white clip directed by Young Replicant, which follows band member Oliver Sim around a house before taking to somewhere between a jungle and an open field. Watch the clip – which is full of numerous wonderful shots of the night sky – below.

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Kurt Vile is King, and with such a title he is wheeled around the streets of Philadelphia handing out guitar picks to his surrounding public and taking in a exquisite luncheon of subs and coke (none of which he actually partakes in). This is the world in which Vile inhabits in the new video for his Wakin On A Pretty Daze cut “KV Crimes,” which, come August 28th, might not be far from the truth as the major of Philadelphia has declared it to be Kurt Vile Day. Huzzah! Watch the video below.

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Florida band merchandise took up directing duties for their new video for their track “Totale Nite,” and it shows across the eight-minute film. Instead of your run of the mill video of a band playing in front of the camera, we’re dealt a somewhat distressing layered clip, where lead singer Carson Cox sings to the camera, looking a little like a youthful Josh Homme. As it goes on, it only gets more intense, with city lights dizzying into view before accumulating on a negative looping clip of a spider crawling about. Watch the clip below, which is taken from Totale Nite, released earlier this year.

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The thing is though, when I think of psychedelic, I think of something caught between the rock and jazz genres, playing with grooves and riffs, and dosing them in kaleidoscopic reverb without letting a relentless ferocity tame itself in front of the microphone. Consequently, going by the songs on Secret Colours new album, Peach, I wouldn’t hasten to class them as psychedelic. If anything, it’s a stopping point for them on their musical journey: on “Euphoric Collisions” an acoustic guitar fights off reverb from an electric before it submits to its playful riffage while on “Faust” vocalist Tommy Evans shouts in the distance as guitars start and stop; the latter half of “Blackhole” trembles with the reverb; opening track “Blackbird (Only One)” throws some reverse effects into the mix. Elsewhere they’re sticking to the sidelines of those aforementioned decades and create music that evokes the sounds from those eras.

It Peach succeeds at one thing it’s the impressionable feeling of nostalgia you take from it during the first listen. It keeps hold of a feel that producer Brain Deck might be attributed to, but unfortunately at the same time the band are trying their best to shake the shackles of eras past. This is good when they’re merging the past and present, like on “Blackbird (Only One)” which injects some New York punk/rock into the mix, but after more time with Peach, the initial impression begins to wane over the fifty-four minutes. You still hear the influence from times past, but never does it fully dissolve away, nor does the band create something that’s completely their own.

There are some exceptions: “Freak” captures a low-light atmosphere, like you’re hearing the band from the back of seedy bar while aforementioned “Blackbird (Only One)” channels the one-word charm of ’90s Britpop bands and takes it through a hazy pathway.“Blackhole” is the shining moment here, though. With stuttering drum machines, “Clint Eastwood”-inspired melodlica, and deep acoustic guitar sounds, it feels like an exploration of texture and a feel more than anything else. Unfortunately there’s barely any other evidence of similar consideration across Peach. “Me” tries for a similar outcome in a major key, but like tediously overlong title track, it drifts by aimlessly instead of feeling like a journey during its runtime (and with these tracks, the sound of the melodica soon wears thin, especially since it sounds like it’s just exhaling different versions of the same derivative melody).

Occasionally the band even touch on the sound of bands from this age, albeit different versions. Eric Hehr’s clunky bass riff combined with Evans’ enthusiastic yelps on “Lust” makes for something that sounds like Kasabian – if they started as a band ten years earlier. “Who You Gonna Run To” and “My Home Is In Your Soul” could be slowed-down Franz Ferdinand songs via a different era of Spoon in a near-alternative universe, but thankfully the band move away from such cumbersome descriptions and carry the tracks to pleasing, if not unbrilliant conclusions.

With an album cover like it has, Peach was always going to be an exercise in nostalgia in some way or another. There’s nothing wrong with such an aim, but for Peach to be a better success, the band should have decided more clearly if they were coming or going. When they’re moving forwards, they’re great, as evidenced on “Blackhole,” and even when they get into a steady jam, they’re perfectly likeable (see the casual blues swagger of “World Through My Window”), but there’s not enough definition here. They’re good at capturing the ’90s Britpop sound (Evan’s almost English singing voice and the fact that the Chicago band spell the word “colour” in the British way help this case, too) and had the sound of the ’60s been more heavily indented in their sound, then it might have made for more of a contrast, but Peach teeters about too often – so much so that calling it psychedelic doesn’t feel entirely correct.

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Acting as a companion piece to last years Excercies EP, CFCF’s new Music For Objects EP aims to “[present] a lighter side of our relationship with our surroundings.” Inspired by a piece of music composed by Laurent Petitgand for Wim Wenders’ documatary about the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto called ‘Notebook on Cities and Clothes,’ CFCF (aka Michael Silver) seeks to examine how we relate to objects in everyday life, and try to express the inexpressible connections we have with them. Below you can hear “Camera,” a cut from the EP (which is out July 9th on Paper Bag Records) which contrasts immediately to his last work, with Philip Glass like swirling motions of saxophone before Silver comes in with some piano and a drum track. There’s something of the 80′s about it all, and while I can’t say I feel this way about cameras (mainly because i’ve never really owned one), it’s certainly evocative in an almost beguiling way. Listen and/or download “Camera” below, along with checking out the tracklisting.

Music For Objects EP

1. Glass
2. Bowl
3. Turnstile
4. Camera
5. Keys
6. Perfume
7. Lamp
8. Ring

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The release of Lou Doillon’s new album, Places, is around the corner (June 18th; via Verve), and we’ve already cast our ears upon two subtly strong cuts that make the full-length something to be sought after. Here’s another treat for your ears in the form of the title track that sees Doillon reeling off what sounds like some spoken-word word-association poetry that builds that up a dark instrumental passage where Doillon can only repeat the word “places” over and over, like she’s seeing a life lived flash before her eyes. Listen below.

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Matthew Herbert has a new album coming out, and we’ve already been able to treat you to more-than-enough twenty-four minute “Part 1.” Not to give the whole game away (the album, The End of Silence, is one three tracks long), you can listen to an excerpt of “Part 2″ below, which although being under three minutes in length, still displays a lot of what the album has to offer. You’ll hear the contrasting ferocity of the ten-second sampled clip of a bomb being dropped juxtaposing with the birdsong around the barn where Herbert and his bandmates recorded the final product. And just as it fades, it even manges to find a complex grove – enough to want you to get your hands on the final product, which will be released on the 24th July, via Accidental Records. Listen below, and gaze at the newly revealed album artwork, too, which is sitting above these words.

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Following last year’s excellent Galaxy Garden, Lone (aka Matt Cutler) has returned with a new single in tow. On July 9th, R&S will release the Airglow Fires 12″ which will feature the title track as well another new track called “Begin to Begin.” You can have yourself a listen to the six-minute lead track below, which has enough going on to warrant multiple listens. Even come the final seconds, when most would jump out of the energetic fire, Cutler throws in another segment, making it sound like it might be melting into another track. In this instance, though, it doesn’t but that doesn’t make “Airglow Fires” any less wonderful. Listen below.

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If you’re a fan out post-rock tracks emerging from what seems like nowhere, then do consider Mount Fabric’s new single “Salamander.” Beginning like another indie ballad with hazy effects and a falsetto drifting about in the air, the whole thing soon takes a turn for the Muse, and soon the bass is chugging the track along, helping Alex Marczak reach his shouty climax, like something that’s taking superficial elements from Foals and channelling them through numerous guitar pedals.

And then there’s the video, which follows a chequered man as he goes about London before going crazy, which may or may not be due to the game of chess he’s playing by himself, or perhaps a consequence of the numerous stares passer-bys on the street give him (which is worth giving the video a watch fro just alone, I say; one woman in a cafe looks particularly horrified while underground commuters barely bat an eyelid). Watch it below.

Mount Fabric – Salamander – Official Music Video from Mount Fabric on Vimeo.

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In my brief listening relationship with Lana Del Rey, she seemed to aspire to find something of power ballads from the 80′s and 90′s and bring them in her own kind of context. For the most part, though, it’s not entirely successful, mainly because the end production tended to shout about its influence as opposed to let you hear it in between the lines. Vancouver band Sundays seem to want to capture something similar from the past, but thankfully they’re a little more restrained in doing so. Consequently, their new single, “World We Own” has something deep and alluring about it. A almost-brooding synth number that swells quietly, it brushes against power ballads from the aforementioned decades, but give it a modest relocation: hiding underneath the synths and lurking between the notes of the chorus. Have a listen to “World We Own” below, which will feature on the upcoming debut Of Eros And I EP from the band, which is due out later this year.

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Eagle is an accomplished album, and if there ever was evidence needed that Marling has become a master of her trade, then she proves it here. The fifteen tracks here (one’s an interlude) have the same ingredients that the majority of Laura Marling tracks have – guitars and vocals – but here they are the true life and soul. Ethan Johns returns for production duties, and he too is at his best. Instead of tacking on instrumental flourishes and styles, here the additional instruments sound like they’re growing organically from Marling’s voice and guitar. There are a few instances where he ups the ante, but he does so appropriately: “Devil’s Resting Place” splashes into a darker world, submerging the track in a dark afterglow; the Hammond organ on “Where Can I Go?” and “Once” only glimpses at the idea of protruding into the mix, but instead keeps its distance and the pair of tracks feel like a charming ode to the sounds of American easy-listening country. He’s at his best both in both sides of the spectrum: on “Little Love Caster” the cello sounds genuinely sad and hollow while the whole melancholic mood is driven in with distant drums; “Master Hunter” keeps up the tension and attitude with clanking percussion while “Saved These Words” has a healthy dose of strings to drive it’s ambiguously optimistic tone home. Even the string-laden interlude is beautiful, capturing a particular sound that simultaneously makes it akin to a soundtrack from British film of the 40’s and something culled from Soap & Skin’s debut album.

As ever, though, this is Marling’s show, and her presence is as enamouring as ever. The story of the album goes that she recorded her parts in a single take, and the album retains this impressive feat. It can be heard in the lively rhythms and time signatures she chooses (Ethan Johns can often sound like he’s playing catch up with her), but most noticeably it can be heard in her voice. On Eagle it’s more casual and relaxed, like she knows what she wants to sing and how she wants to do so, but hasn’t decided to fuss over the exactitudes of it all. Consequently Marling does go from a deadpan monotone into a beautifully flickering higher range in a moment’s notice, but it keeps the listener on their feet. Getting the details of her performance is hard to pin down, but this is helped by repeated listens – something that is definitely required to appreciate Eagle fully.

Eagle is an hour in length, which is long by Marling’s standards, but it’s an album of two halves. Which side is better will vary across fans of Marling, but the first seven tracks are certainly the more instantly impressionable here, mainly due to the aforementioned four-track medley which begins the album which then leads onto the fiery “Master Hunter” and “Devil’s Resting Place,” putting the delicate “Little Love Caster” between them. It’s a strong run that works because each tracks seeps well into the next – a quality the second half of Eagle doesn’t boast quite as well. The latter eight songs work better as individual songs, but when taken altogether and with the rest of the album, the context can do them well. In terms of being critical, one or two tracks do feel like a bit of a dip in terms of engaging material, if not just slowing the pace down a bit too much, making getting to the end something of a drag. It’s odd: taking in the album as a whole is the way to do so if the best experience is to be gotten from it, but, as said, there’s the always a feeling that something could have been cut towards the end.

Across the two sides the tone changes, too. On the first half you’ve got the likes of “Devil’s Resting Place,” which is probably the darkest thing here, while across on the other side there’s the playful, duelling guitars of “Undine.” One good example of the contrast lies with “Little Love Castor” and “Little Bird”: both reach towards six minutes and consist mainly of gentle acoustic moments and delicate vocal melodies. They also both end on flourishes of strings and brass, but “Little Bird” sounds like it’s near enough taking flight into a summer’s sky whereas its counterpart stays in the same shadows it began in.

It’s easy to read most, if not all of Marling’s lyrics as autobiographical (I’ve been far too guilty of that myself in the past), but in terms of understanding and enjoying Eagle, it seems best to consider the words as those of the character mentioned at the start, who is going through life and experiencing love and all that it entails. Lines can be picked out, and they impact aplenty, such as “I think the more I think/ The harder it is for me to breathe” from “When Were You Happy?” but it’s not worth getting carried away with doing this. Sometimes enjoying the story is better than trying to fully understand it.

Eagle is definitely Marling’s most considered work, and most of that comes simply from the fact she’s stripped away a lot of the decoration, and yet ultimately it feels easy for her, if not a little predictable. Her guitar playing isn’t too fussy but still sounds detailed, and she keeps herself at a distance with her words (and the way she sings them, too); we’ve got a clearer picture of Marling but still it doesn’t feel like we know a great deal more about her from Eagle. This kind of doesn’t matter, though, as a Laura Marling song or album isn’t about painting in the details to the person – the details here make up whatever you want them too. Personal or created solely for a character, there’s no denying that Eagle is a great, if not brilliant, album that shows how good Marling is as a musician and a writer. And album like Eagle will only help her soar.

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Thankfully she has spent the years since the release of Hands doing live shows and delving into the DJ scene to find herself a sort of niche, again, all while staying within her pop bubble. Her new album, Nocturnes, much like the title might suggest, is Hesketh aiming for more of a night time feel, trying for an album that fits somewhere between being blasted out in clubs to soundtracking a late-night drive home through the city (possibly on the way home from the aforementioned clubs). As a result, Nocturnes rates better as an album that sounds better with time, as opposed to Hands’ sugar rush appeal. However, it also retains an uneven quality that can make getting through Nocturnes feel like someone trying to drag the party on a little too long.

When it’s good, though, it’s as good as Hesketh gets, if not a step or two up. Tim Goldsworthy takes production credits for most of the tracks here, and consequently Nocturnes doesn’t jump about too much. He keeps things relatively simple, too, turning and fiddling the keys in a way that makes everything blast at the appropriate, if not predictable moments. “Beat Beat” is a sparkly number with a helpful bass track putting it on par with something Kylie Minogue might pull off on a good day while “Crescendo” adds in a few choral effects to help the track reach its (wait for it) crescendo. James Ford of Simian Mobile Disco brings a Galvanize-era Chemical Brothers sound to “Shake” with its robotic voice and itchy guitar work.

Lead single “Broken Record” catches the ear, but it feels somewhat predictable, if not all too similar to “Remedy” once the chorus is about to kick in. While the cut up vocal effects are a nice touch, it’s easy to guess they’d feature just by looking at the song’s title whereas the bells chiming away every eight bars become a grating once you notice them. “Every Night I Say A Prayer,” which was the first track to appear to the world before the album’s release, uncomfortably tries to merge a brooding verse and a peppy chorus of Euro-pop pianos, all combining for a song that sounds like it’s missing the mark. The opening duo of tracks – the hazy, sleep-deprived “Motorway” and the contrastingly caffeinated “Confusion” – aren’t bad additions to Hesketh’s catalogue, but they don’t stand out too much compared to her best work.

Hesketh’s time on the DJ has had some effect on her work, which is apparent during the closing seconds of “Broken Record” and “Strangers” as they seek to stretch further, and it hasn’t been entirely detrimental. She’s more attuned to getting the most out of a few elements, and she’s also not afraid to spread herself out, making for tracks that pass the six minute mark. What hasn’t changed much, though, is her lyrical focus, where she seems stuck on repeat for the most part. She’ll either sing about connecting with someone in a club environment through the music, or how the music is all she needs. This keeps things snappy, but when you take a second to think about what’s she’s singing, it doesn’t bode well for sense-making. I mean, unless you’re Kieran Hebden pumping out the sound of a friend’s baby’s heartbeat, how exactly do you dance to the beat of someone’s heart, let alone “shake until your heart breaks”? On “All For You” she tries to ponder the bigger questions, but has to rest on not knowing (“I dunno why we live to die/ I dunno why we’re never truly satisfied”) before turning it into a saccharine romantic gesture (“In the end of my days/ When they ask what it was all for/ I will say/ It was all for you”).

In a way it’s fine that Hesketh travels down this path, trying to capture that adolescent lovelorn feeling in one simple chorus that also chants about how great the song they’re hearing is, but if she’s ever going to move on to be something bigger (both as a star and songwriter), she’ll have to seek new grounds. This is 2013 after all, and we now live in a world where Daft Punk can totally shadow every other electronic-pop record by releasing snippets of new songs. Closing track “Satellite” speaks true about Hesketh and her career as Little Boots: “learn to walk before you run” she sings before going on to sounding like she’s burning up in the atmosphere as synths and drums fly past her at speeds that are almost too much for her. It’s perhaps a little harsh to say that she can’t walk, but she needs to at least learn to jog before she starts competing in a marathon. When the song hits its final free-fall moment at the end, Hesketh finishes on the word “evaporating,” with plenty of suggested ellipsis afterwards; if she doesn’t take the aforementioned advice to heart, she may well find herself disappearing from people’s views before she’s even landed.

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Matthew Dear’s 2012 album, Beams, is due a reissue from Ghostly, which will collect together the original album, the tracks from the Headcage EP that preceded it, a whole host of remixes, b-sides from the Her Fantasy 12″, and some unreleased tracks. One such new unheard track is “She’s Just That Way,” which you can listen to below. Complete with major-key staccato piano and the usual cut up effected vocals from Dear, it makes for a track that seems quaintly upbeat and summery, even though it was culled from an album which delved into brighter spaces. Listen to “She’s Just That Way” below, and check out the tracklisting to Beams (Complete Edition) below, which will be released on June 17th.

Beams (Complete Edition)

01 Her Fantasy
02 Earthforms
03 Headcage
04 Fighting Is Futile
05 Up & Out
06 Overtime
07 Get the Rhyme Right
08 Ahead of Myself
09 Do the Right Thing
10 Shake Me
11 Temptation
12 She’s Just That Way
13 Crimewaves
14 In the Middle (I Met You There) [feat. Jonny Pierce]
15 Street Song
16 Around a Fountain
17 Flunker
18 Earthforms (TOBACCO Remix)
19 Earthforms (Jessy Lanza Remix)
20 Earthforms (Michna Remix)
21 Her Fantasy (Poolside Remix)
22 Her Fantasy (Tornado Wallace Remix)
23 Fighting Is Futile (Seth Troxler Remix)
24 Fighting Is Futile (KiNK Remix)
25 Fighting Is Futile (Benoit & Sergio Remix)
26 Fighting Is Futile (Laid Back Remix)
27 Fighting Is Futile (KiNK Extended Dub)

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As the release of Disclosure’s new album, Settle, draws nearer (next week; June 3rd via PMR Records and June 4th in the U.S. via Cherrytree/Interscope), we’re getting more and more of it to listen to. We’ve already had numerous tracks to treat our ears, and we can now help you on your way to hearing another cut called “F For You.” And no need to be wary about the possibility that the “F” in the song’s title might an expletive (it stands for “Fool”); so play this with plenty of your work friends around the speakers and the day might seem that bit better.

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Chvrches continue a winning streak of songs following their Recover EP which was released earlier this year with a new track entitled “Gun.” The track sparkles and pushes forward with synths and lead singer Lauren Mayberry’s vocals are as glorious as ever, all making for a cut that seems like it sticks in your mind like the title track to their aforementioned EP, albeit in a way that seems like a summer memory from years back as opposed to something you just heard on the radio and can’t help but repeat to yourself. The single will be released digitally and on 12″ pink vinyl on July 15 in the UK via Virgin/Goodbye which will feature some remixes. Listen below.

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“Love Delay” is the new single from Australia’s Kirin J Callinan, who will release his debut album Embracism on July 2nd in US, July 1st in UK/Europe, and June 28 in AUS/NZ on Terrible and Siberia Records. The track starts with an itchy guitar riff, like a sketch from a Battles recording session, but it soon builds. Callinan’s voice in particular is a raw one, that combined with the guitar scratching about, makes for a lot of pent-up frustration. Come the two and half minute mark, it unleashes into something even more brutal, allowing itself to relive some of the discomfort – but only for a while. “Love Delay” ends suddenly, like it’s giving after getting nowhere, even though you feel like you’ve been through something. Listen below.

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Melbourne’s World’s End Press have another cut to offer listeners, following the hypnotizing “Deadbeat Sweetheart.” “To Send Our Love” is slightly more anthemtic, but still leans on being krautrock-esque, and with its’ sudden opening, it sounds like a de-contextualized piece of a very good puzzle (read: album). Listen below.

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Like suggested in my review of Heirs & Graces, “Cape Town” can come across like that guy bringing everyone at a party down with his melancholic mood. The video manages to capture this rather well, as lead singer Sebastian Cohen stands about unexcited as others party into the late hours around him. Combine this with repeated flashing images of skulls and upside-down crosses, and you’ve got something that aims for a drugged-up memory of the night before. Watch the video for “Cape Town” below.

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The song in question is “Monsters With Misdemeanours,” the centrepiece to the self-titled album from Yellow Red Sparks. At first, it’s not a particularly assuming track, with acoustic jangles and scuffing and brushing drums. But allow it to play on and it opens itself up rather beautifully, with strings, reassuring sighs of brass, and some pleasantly executed backing vocals. As an instrumental it would likely still perk your ears, but with Hanson’s earnest vocals overlaying the mix, it all comes together. The song might not change your life, but it’s hard to come out of it and not agree that it’s astutely put together while retaining an appeal that will extend to a wide audience.

But it’s not all Yellow Red Sparks has to offer. Another competitor for Hanson’s best song follows “Monsters,” in the form of “A Play To End All Plays” which lives up to its title and delivers a theatrical show of its own. Complete with a choir, dramatic violins, and an emotional build constructed around the word “pain,” it’s just as likely to stir an emotion or two within. “A Play To End All Plays” also serves as one of the two examples of the kind of Yellow Red Sparks songs that catch the attention of the listener best: the loud kind. While Hanson’s vocals do occasionally hit on gentleness, they never reduce to something near a whisper; its fortitude acts as the impetus for the songs here. When a storm is brewing in the music, however, Hanson sweeps himself up with it quickly, as evidenced with his coolly deranged performance on “A Play To End All plays” and the fiery “My Machine Gun.”

What the album lacks then is more of these moments; instead we’re left with tracks that aren’t quite as wonderful arranged as “Monsters” or as impacting as “A Play To End All Plays” or “My Machine Gun.” Yellow Red Sparks owes the majority of its runtime to tracks that run off an acoustic jangle and build from there. While it’s hard to accuse any of these tracks here of being bad, some don’t stick in the head as well as others, such “Happiness Comes in A Box” or the emptily brooding “A Buffalo,” while one or two sound awkward similar upon first glance (“Happiness Comes In A Box” and “Sense And Sensibility”).

Hanson’s lyrics don’t always play well either. He directs most of his words to what sounds like past loves and the trails that he’s faced, and while he might weave an earworm or two that will burrow its way in your head (the lazy Sunday melody of “To Love And Loathe,” the eager opening line of “Buy Me Honey”), more often than not he comes off a few steps short of being profound. While love is exceptionally easy to pick up on as theme, there’s a strangely open debasing of religion, which presents itself clearest and most unexpectedly during the final track “Hope On A Rope” where Hanson casually utters, “We’ll walk around for miles exposing those pedophiles/ Throw them back in church where they belong.” It’s his delivery that makes him a likeable narrator during the album, though, as he remains upbeat, even when he’s verging on darker material. His earnestness might be a little overbearing for some, bringing to mind unfortunate memories of Marcus Mumford singing like he’s getting paid for the fullness of his breath, but Hanson manages to stay on the side of pleasing honesty.

While the acclaim “Monsters With Misdemeanours” is likely to get won’t be damaging for the band’s profile (it has resulted in a good few TV appearances for the band), it fortunately shouldn’t distract from the rest of Yellow Red Sparks. Listeners who find the album because of the prize-winning song will find songs just as lovely here (the preceding track “Mr. Wonderful” is a good candidate – and funnily enough is exactly the same length as “Monsters”) if not be caught quicker by those more rambunctious numbers. It’s a good start for the band, and all this publicity of the International Songwriting Competition should put them ahead by a few lengths. The race is theirs for the winning next time round.

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Secret Colours’ new self-titled album arrives into the world this week, and anticipation is high, especially after the great songs we’ve heard so far. Joining “Blackbird (Only One)” and “Blackhole” as cuts that make Secret Colours a worthily sought-after album is “Freak” which sports a dank, late-night feel that soon opens up into a kind of 90′s Britpop fuzz. Have a listen here.

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Wax Fang’s latest single since their 2012 Mirror, Mirror EP has already featured on these pages upon it’s release, but now you can treat yourself to the peculiarly kind of great video for the track. In it, lead singer Scott Carney unleashes his inner drag queen and proceeds to dream about a world full of blonde women (or cuts-out and altered photos of them, at least). Watch it below, and stay until the end for the strangest money shot you’re likely to see this year.

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But don’t be fooled by appearances: The Boy Least Likely To are still the same band. They’re still hitting on the big emotions and problems that affect age groups from ten onwards and using guitars and twinkly instrumentation to sing their songs. Rather, the cover is an example of how the band have come along, and represents one of the strengths The Great Perhaps has to boast – that being thematic consistency. Space and the great sparkly darkness in which we all stare at with fascination is not only good for representing how big the world can seem (or get) for someone growing up, but the awe in which we humans remain of it allows singer Jof Owen to retain his appropriately astounding childish outlook on life. You’re not likely to find anything on par with Descartesian philosophy, but Owen can still wriggle out a surprisingly effective line regularly over the course of an album and still sound like he’s coming from a juvenile viewpoint without sounding tedious. The best example of this is one of the album’s highlights, “Taking Windmills For Giants,” where Owen admits he makes more than he should out a failing relationship, trying to hold on to it because he still wants to feel that first date kind of excitement. Simultaneously it captures the scale of the world from a child’s viewpoint, standing in awe of such a large construction, and how daunting and scary it can be. In both cases Owen grows up and he admits “I don’t take windmills for anything other than windmills anymore.”

The song sits in the first half of The Great Perhaps where Owen surrounds it by tracks that come like life lessons told to an elementary schoolchild, and this continues Owen’s tried and tested formula. “Lonely Alone” presents one of the album’s other themes (loneliness), and explains it with a long-winded chorus that rests calmly on the idea that although life can be lonely, you’re not alone in how lonely you feel. On “I Keep Falling in Love With You Again” he describes the titular emotion in simple terms, but ultimately confesses “love is all that I know,” a sentiment that carries on throughout the album, and indeed threads all of the duo’s albums together.

Come the second half of the album, Owen begins to sound like he’s trying to understand things from a more grown up perspective, if not at the very least, an adolescent one. Sure, on “It Could’ve Been Me” he sounds cute as ever, passing lines back and forth with a girl he had a crush on in high school, but once “Climbing Out Of Love” presents itself, it shows that he’s trying to move on, and the first step is doing what the title says. On “Michael Collins” he combines the two aforementioned themes, imagining how the Apollo 11 astronaut orbiting the moon might have felt, disconnected from everyone on earth while Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked the surface of the moon. But Collins admits he never felt lonely, but rather felt blessed to have the kind of solitude he experienced. Owen turns his lyrics around accordingly, wishing he could have seen what Collins did, concluding and wishing with a bit of a lump in his throat that “we didn’t have to go so far/ to see the world from the stars.” The song finishes with a few lonely bleeps into nothingness, like radio messages lost forever while everyone remains out of reach. Loneliness doesn’t often sound this lovely.

If The Great Perhaps is anything, then it’s the duo’s electronic album. While it might be easy to imagine Owen and bandmate Pete Hobbs being overbearing and over-excitable with their new sound in a way that resembled them going, “Hey guys! New Electronix! Yay!,” like some fanatical children’s show character, the truth is this is not really new territory. There are still acoustic guitars, but the band isn’t shy about using synth arpeggios and drum machines. The album begins with a cheeky Rick Astely-like synthetic drum roll, and from there you’ve got the effervescent “Even Jesus Couldn’t Mend My Broken Heart” and the bouncy piano chords on “Climbing Out Of Love” that sit aside lots of little noises that resemble the sounds a child might think computers on a spaceship might make. “Michael Collins” and “The Dreamer Song” drift by calmly by, like an astronaut in zero gravity as strings brings a coyly regal feel to the former track.

If anything then, The Great Perhaps is well-executed middle ground. It’s not as exciting as The Best Party Ever, but that’s because we know what to expect when it comes to The Boy Least Likely To. But, as said, the album does boast thematic consistency, which brings it close to being something of a concept album – an admirable task for the duo to try and bring together. While they sound like they’re trying to step outside of their box, they can always rely on their excessive charm working wonders, whether it’s just musically (the toy piano and handclaps on “Taking Windmills For Giants”), lyrically (the aforementioned life lesson for a kid, “Lonely Alone”), or both (the cute acoustic closing track “Thank You For Being My Friend,” which nostalgically brings to mind ’90s pop group East 17 and their hit single “Stay Another Day”). And while that cover might be their darkest yet, it’s still peppered with childish drawings of planets, shooting stars, spaceships and a bee (a Doctor Who reference methinks). You can take the child out of the playground, but you can’t take the playground out of the child. To someone young, the world is just another adventure waiting to happen, and if it’s not enough, then they’ll look to stars.

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First things first: don’t try and read along. The video for Seftel’s “Architects” presents a increasingly growing paragraph of text that soon becomes edited and annotated before other windows distract your attention further. But the main reason you shouldn’t try and read along isn’t because of the pace at which the text is written on screen, but rather, trying to keep focus is hard when Larry Seftel (who also directed the video) is singing in his monotone voice over coy, unassuming electronic sounds. The track is taken from Seftel self-titled debut album, which will be released on the 28th of this month of Lo Recordings. Watch the video for “Architects” below.

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“ICU” dates back to last year, to the time when we got our first earful from Lou Doillon, but it’s a calmly sublime track that’s worth revisiting. The track begins her new album, Places, which will be released June 18th on Verve Records, which we’ve already heard the track “Devil or Angel” from. “ICU” is Doillon spelling things out in real time, like she’s writing her problems out in a journal, or quietly relating them to you over tea in cafe. It’s an intimate number that slowly rises with strings and light brass. Listen below.

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